Home  >>  Analysis  >>  November 27, 2008, The courage to forgive and to bring hope

TOOLS PRINT E-MAIL NOVEMBER 27, 2008, THE COURAGE TO FORGIVE AND TO BRING HOPE BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: This is Bridget Conley-Zilkic. Welcome to this week’s Voices on Genocide Prevention. With me this week is Rose Mapendo, and her colleague, Sasha Chanoff, Together, they work at Mapendo International. Thank you both for joining me. SASHA CHANOFF: Thank you, Bridget. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Rose, can you start out and tell us where you were born? ROSE MAPENDO: First of all, my name is Rose Mapendo, and I was born in the Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, and my village is Mulenge and my city is Bukavu. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: You are a Tutsi but from Congo, or at the time, Zaire. Why are there Tutsi in Zaire, and what is the background of that group’s existence in Zaire? ROSE MAPENDO: The group of Tutsi are very few people. We are not too much people. We are minority people who live in the Congo. SASHA CHANOFF: Yeah, can I-- BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Sure. SASHA CHANOFF: Here are some of my thoughts on that as well. When borders were drawn up in Africa after 1885, when borders were drawn up in Africa, Tutsi people were in Rwanda, in Congo, in Burundi as well. In Congo, Rose belongs to a tribe called the Banyamulenge Tutsi, who actually trace their origins back to that region many centuries ago. And since 1964, other Tutsis have been fleeing into Congo from Rwanda since violence kind of escalated in Rwanda and things became more polarized there. So there are different Tutsis who have been in Congo, but Rose’s tribe, the Banyamulenge, have been there for centuries. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And Rose, war came to Congo then Zaire in 1996, when Rwanda supported a rebellion against the Zairian leader, Mobutu, and helped bring Laurent Kabila to power. That coalition fell apart in 1998, and a second war began, as you well know, that pitted Rwanda against Kabila and eventually drew in at least seven different countries onto Congo battling each other. And it was marked by an acute increase in inflammatory speech against ethnic groups, particularly Banyamulenge and also violence. What happened to your family when the violence began? ROSE MAPENDO: In 1998, when the war started, we saw on the TV that the government, the president, was on the camera talking about genocide because the people were beginning to fighting again. We did not know this was happening in Rwanda before. We never thought something can be happen in Congo. And for that, after the TV, when the president said everyone who has a knife, everyone who has a gun, if you have anything you -- those of Banyamulenge, people called as the Tutsi -- stand up as the Congolese fighting the enemy. Even though I did not think I was the enemy, I was the part of somebody who can be arrested. And after that, the government called me to his office asking me if I have ask a TV. And I ask, I say, did you saw what the president said? He ask me if I can give him the money, and I said, I was willing to give him the money in order to save my life and my children. My husband was hiding for two weeks. All of us, we were in the house. No one can be outside. And end of that, my husband, he came back to the family. The day we was arrested, my husband was inside the house. I put my husband under the bed in the kitchen, told them, I said my husband was not home. My husband went to buy the merchandise. And my husband, he left in the house, and three days when we were in the prison. My husband, he give up. Because I was [indecipherable] not kill the women and children, but my husband he said he cannot keep in the house, stay in the house hiding as a man. He wants to die before his family. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And Rose, at this point, how many children did you have? ROSE MAPENDO: That time, I have seven children. I had seven children with me that time. And I was pregnant for twins. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: How old was the oldest? ROSE MAPENDO: Oldest, she was 16. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And the youngest? ROSE MAPENDO: The youngest was 10 months. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And Rose, what was your husband’s name? ROSE MAPENDO: My husband’s name, his name is Maurice. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: So he decided that rather than save his own life that he would come and join you in this prison. What happened there? And you can just speak in generalities. I think our audience should know that Rose suffered quite a bit in prison. And you don’t need to go into the details here. For people who want to learn more about your story, they can also look on the website of Mapendo International, and there are several videos out that talk about you and your life? ROSE MAPENDO: Yeah. When we were in the prison for three days, and the one of my neighbors, she came. She told me my husband, he give up. He want to come. And in a few minutes he show up with the soldier [indecipherable] He came to the prison, and immediately when he came, they took all the clothes out. They came to the prison asking me, who’s Maurice’s wife? And they took me, they say anything you want to talk to your husband? It was so hard for me. Just I saw him how they took everything out, begin beating him. It was so hard for me. And they join other men as well. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And they eventually killed him. ROSE MAPENDO: They killed all the men of Banyamulenge. It was very easy, was very quickly. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And after the loss of your husband, while you were in prison, you gave birth to twins. ROSE MAPENDO: Yes. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Two little boys? ROSE MAPENDO: Yes. After my husband, after that they send us to the different region called Kananda. The place was unbelievable thing to explain to the other people, and I was pregnant. At the time I found out I was pregnant after my husband…. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: How did you eventually get out of the prison? ROSE MAPENDO: You know, in prison I was so angry. I was so angry against God. I was normal like other people who created me, who I am. I was angry how people they can kill us, put us-- when they were saw kids who are not-- have anything and no one they brought even a little bit piece of cloth the kids can lie on it. The place the kids was use the restroom was same place they would sleep, without give us anything. And I was pregnant. I had the sores in my body. I was asking to God, why, why God? And after that, I was so angry. When I think it was the end of my life, I think I will die, I ask God to forgive me. And I ask God to forgive my enemy, because I said God, I don’t want to die angry. I want to die free. And I say, God, forgive me. And forgive those enemies, whatever they did for us. Just put my life in your hands. I want to die in your hands. And after that is the day I survived. When I say just God forgive them, I feel peace in my heart, and I begin again. That day, I begin in courage again. I feel I will not give up. I said it is time for me to stand up for my kids, to the other prison. Actually, the women their husbands killed the same day. No one survived. All of the women, they died in prison, only me to survive after that time. But I was in courage, but it was very sad to see how kids was dead in my eyes, to see how kids-- SASHA CHANOFF: People in this prison, Rose, told me before, were dying around them. And there was one three-month-old baby whose parents were taken and killed, and Rose and the others there watched slowly as this baby became more malnourished and sick and died. And that was the sort of thing they were facing there. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: What I think is extraordinary; I’ve heard stories of incredible forgiveness after violence has ended, where people find the strength to face their former perpetrators. But something that is astounding with what you’re saying is you found that strength even while you were under their control. ROSE MAPENDO: You know, I grow up in the Christian house. My dad always was teach us if you don’t forgive somebody, God cannot forgive you. And as a Christian, after that time I remember even I was in a bad situation, even I thought I was going to die, I said it’s better for me to be free, and my kids can be free also. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Rose, how did you get out of that prison and eventually come to the United States? ROSE MAPENDO: In the prison, after I give birth to the twins, I named my twins after the commander. And the commander was so confused. How you can do that? Because I knew the secret to the Congolese, when you name somebody, it means you love that person. No one can say you can name your child after your enemy. And after that, then when the order came to kill us, the commander, one he show up. He accepted the name. He come with one piece of cloth. He gave to his wife and bread and tea. She told me, thank you so much for giving my husband honor and named your child after him, and thank you so much. The people in the military camp, they knew she accepted their names. And when there was a decision to be killed, they say no, we send them to a different region. They sent us to the capital, to Kinshasa. That is the place where we met Sasha and other people who come to rescue us there too. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: So Sasha, let me turn to you now. Do you remember when you first met Rose in Kinshasa? SASHA CHANOFF: I remember the moment I met Rose. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Tell us about it. SASHA CHANOFF: So I was part of a three-person U.S. rescue team that was sent into the Congo to evacuate Tutsis who were being massacred there. These massacres and attacks had started in August 2, 1998. That’s, I believe, when Rose was taken and put in prison. The international community in Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, had created a safe haven. Tutsis who had survived these massacres were being brought to this safe haven. I was part of the last rescue team that went in there. We had a list of people that we were supposed to take out that had been created from a previous evacuation. We walked into this safe haven, and I remember walking into this tent and seeing Rose. I didn’t know her name at that point, but I remember seeing Rose and seven of her children and these two little bundles in each of her arms. They all looked really emaciated and kind of hollow eyes and traumatized. They were sitting in this tent. We asked who this family was. There were a number of other widows and children with Rose. We were told that they had just come into this safe haven a few days earlier, and they were not on our evacuation list. When we called our headquarters and explained that there were some additional families, including this woman, Rose, and her family that we had to take out. The response was, no, you can’t take them out. We’d tried to include additional people on these evacuations on previous ones, and it hadn’t worked. If you try to take them out, you could jeopardize the whole evacuation and not bring anybody out. Forget about them, and make sure you get the people out who are on your list. So we were kind of faced with this moral dilemma; do we leave Rose and her family there and just get everybody else out? Or do we try to take them out and potentially jeopardize the evacuation? We decided that we were on the ground; we had to make decisions in front of us and we needed to try to get them out. We did manage to get them out, and we brought Rose and her family and about 156 people in total out to a refugee camp in Cameroon. Then I spent a lot of time with Rose in the camp in Cameroon. Then she resettled to Phoenix, Arizona. When she arrived in Phoenix, I kept in close touch with her. She struck me for a number of reasons. One was that among everybody her story stood out. Other refugees in the refugee camp would go and visit her and cry, listening to what she had been through and what she had survived. Yet, she had this incredible kind of air of hope around her and even back then was a very inspiring person, having just come through all this trauma and hardship. So when she came to the U.S., I kept in close touch with her. A few years later, we started Mapendo International. So that’s how I met Rose initially. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: At Mapendo International, I believe part of your mandate is that you focus on at-risk or forgotten refugees. I wonder if you could help us understand, how is this particular group of refugees different from refugees in general who, by definition, have a well-founded fear of persecution. How do you focus your work? SASHA CHANOFF: Well, there are about close to 3 million refugees in Africa, and we started Mapendo for very explicit kind of reasons and with very explicit goals. One of those goals was to help to find refugees who are in danger and who cannot return home and who cannot stay safely in their country of first asylum and work with governments to get them resettled to the U.S. and other countries where they can rebuild their lives safely, like Rose. Our U.S. government has a refugee resettlement program, a robust humanitarian effort to save people’s lives that, in the ‘80s, was bringing in the largest year up to 200,000 refugees. This year, the ceiling is 80,000 refugees. But every year, tens of thousands of resettlement slots go unfilled. So Mapendo, we founded Mapendo to identify refugees who are in danger and work to help fill these slots. And we work closely with the UN refugee agency to do this. In addition, we found that other refugees who fall through the cracks of humanitarian assistance are people who have fled their homes, end up in a refugee camp in a country of asylum, but are then attacked in that refugee camp and often flee the camp. And once they flee that camp, they go off of everybody’s radar screens. And so we found in Nairobi and in many urban areas that there are refugees living unseen and forgotten in urban areas, and they’re in danger. They’re desperate. They have no access to services. So in our hub in Nairobi, in our kind of operational hub, we started a medical clinic and protection effort to find women and children who have fled refugee camps or who have decided not to go there because of dangers there and to help protect them and keep them alive. So these two efforts have intertwined to identify refugees who fled refugee camps but also to look across Africa, in camps and outside of camps, to find people for whom resettlement is the only solution and the only thing that will keep them safe and then work to get more refugees resettled. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And Rose, in addition to working with Mapendo International on this larger scale, identifying refugees across the continent, you have also returned recently to your own home country of Congo. And you’ve joined efforts there to try to build a peace, or to re-stitch together a peace that has fallen apart several times over. Can you talk about what it was like to return there? ROSE MAPENDO: Yeah. First of all, I miss my country so much, because in my life I never thought I can left my country. Now in my country, my people there, my family, my brother and my sisters. And it was a very different experience to go back to my country to meet all the people. And hopefully I was wish, you know, they can make a decision to have peace. And I talk to many people, some people -- even people that are powerful, there are thousands people that are suffering. And I believe the people, they are tired for there’s violence every day, fighting every day. Their kids, they are outside. It was a very good experience to talk to people. Most of my message was to encourage people and say no matter what, don’t give up. SASHA CHANOFF: One thing that Rose did not mention is she was elected by the refugee community here as the spokesperson to return to these peace talks in the Congo. And I spoke to Rose when she returned from the Congo, and she said on the first day things were very, very tense. There was the government and about 22 armed groups and factions who had come together to talk about peace. And Rose said there mostly men there, not that many women, and things were very tense. And when Rose stood up and talked about her story and talked about forgiveness, tension eased. And it helped to pave the way for more discussions. And that’s why Rose’s community elected her to go back, because she has this message of reconciliation and peace and forgiveness that is critical right now. In fact, she even told me that when she met with Congo’s President Kabila, he had such praise for her ability to forgive and to help reconcile people. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Rose, your message is, of course, even more critical today when that peace agreement that were a cease fire that was agreed to in January has broken down. And we have today’s situation where there’s fighting again in the East in Congo. So I hope your words can find their way across the ocean and across the continent to hear your fellow Congolese. ROSE MAPENDO: I believe something. Every day, like step by step, I believe the people we have to keep stand up and keep talking. Finally, one day something will happen. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Rose, Sasha, thank you both so much for speaking with me today. SASHA CHANOFF: Bridget, there’s one additional thing that Rose didn’t talk about that I just wanted to mention briefly, because it’s such a powerful part of Rose’s life. Rose was a professional singer in Congo and a very powerful woman there before she became a refugee and came to the U.S. And she’s rebuilt her life here, but song and music has played a profound role in Rose’s life. She sang all the time. Rose told me that when she went into prison, she was so angry with God that she stopped singing. And it was only when she was able to forgive in prison that she began singing again. And now Rose sings all the time, and her family sings all the time. ROSE MAPENDO: First of all, I can sing. I just thank you for all of you. I thank you for Sasha. What you have done in my life, and I’m very thankful for Mapendo International. One who are like emergency for hopeless people, people who have forget. And let me sing a little song. The one I would sing in the death camp. The song, it means, everyone who was born from a woman, he have a short time. And he born when they look like flower, because when you have the baby, it’s very beautiful. You say look like new flower. But it pass very fast; it die fast. And his day count like a step of a finger, and if he have like the end. That’s the song I will sing from my prison, because I would sing for my people who left me, my loved ones, my husband, and old friends. [Singing]. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Rose, thank you. SASHA CHANOFF: That was beautiful, Rose. BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Thank you. It’s the greatest honor of this work to be able to meet people like you, so thank you very much. ROSE MAPENDO: Thank you. God bless you, and thank you all. NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/conscience. There you'll also find the Voices on Genocide Prevention weblog.