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Opinion L.A.

Opinion: Genocide Memorial: Encountering the dead

By Sue Horton
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Sue Horton, Op-Ed and Sunday Opinion editor of The Times, is in Rwanda on a two-week Gatekeeper Editor fact-finding trip organized by the International Reporting Project. She is chronicling her trip on the Opinion L.A. blog.

Wednesday, Nov. 9: ‘The country smelled of the stench of death … Rwanda was dead.’

Those words are from a display at Kigali’s Genocide Memorial, and they describe the country’s state after 100 days of carnage in 1994.

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Outside the memorial, in 14 mass graves more than 20 feet deep, thousands of people killed in the genocide are buried. Inside, the story is told in a series of displays. Most chilling is how much warning there was, and how it was ignored. As the so-called Hutu power movement was building, there were half a dozen sporadic outbreaks of killing, starting in 1990. But the world ignored them.

Then, in 1994, the airplane of Rwanda’s then-president, Juvenal Habyarimana, was shot down, and within an hour the genocide began. Hutus involved in the massacres set up roadblocks and butchered Tutsis who stopped. They went door to door, killing their neighbors and friends.

Reading about what happened is overwhelming. Then, at the end of the circular memorial, is a room filled with pictures of the dead. Today, we are told by a health official, more than a quarter of Rwandans have post-traumatic stress syndrome.

PREVIOUSLY:

Sunday, Nov. 6: Journey to Rwanda

Sunday, Nov. 6/Monday, Nov. 7: Two views of President Kagame

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Monday night, Nov. 7: First impressions

Tuesday, Nov. 8: Law of the land in Kigali

Tuesday, Nov. 8: Capital growth, for good and ill

Wednesday, Nov. 9: The master plan in action

--Sue Horton

Photos, top to bottom: The faces of the dead at the Kigali Genocide Memorial; mass graves contain the bodies of thousands of people killed in the genocide.

Opinion L.A.
Sue Horton

Sue Horton returned to the Los Angeles Times as Op-Ed and Sunday Opinion editor in December 2018, then moved to a senior editor role before leaving the newsroom in July 2021. For four years before that, she was a Top News editor and West Coast bureau chief at Reuters. She held a variety of editing jobs at the Los Angeles Times between 2001 and 2014, including Op-Ed and Sunday Opinion editor and deputy California editor. Before her first stint at The Times, she was editor-in-chief of the L.A. Weekly for six years. Prior to that, she was a journalism professor at the University of Southern California. Horton started her journalism career working for Community Information Project, an investigative reporting nonprofit that did stories on contract with public television, “60 Minutes,” and a variety of newspapers and magazines. She is the author of a nonfiction book, “The Billionaire Boys Club,” which was the basis for an NBC miniseries. Horton has a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Redlands and a master’s in journalism from USC.

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