Very long post, sorry. Not in a maudlin mood, just something I've been thinking about for a while. Might be upsetting for people.

Recently went down south to a place called Murambi just beyond Butare (actually, the figures are considered to be closer to 50,000).

It's a technical school in the hills - was going to be the most advanced of its kind.

When the genocide began the local authorities gathered all the Tutsis together and told them they'd be safe there - sent them there to be protected by French troops inside the now infamous Turquoise zone (the French troops decided instead to play basketball on what would become one of the largest mass graves in Rwanda).

The reason for sending them there was simple - it's easier to kill people when you know where they are. So, over a period of two days, the Interahamwe slaughtered them - guns and machetes against terrified people with stones.

Now all of those school buildings remain silent, each room filled with the limed bodies of people who have remained there for the past fourteen years.

So, I knew of it, another vol used to live down that way, but I wasn't sure about going. When my family came out I wanted to show them the full range of this extreme country - from the very best (the beautiful mountain gorillas in the Virunga mountains) to, well, the very worst. The contrast of what this country is. I also knew the chances of me ever having control of a chauffeur-driven 4x4 again were pretty slim and it's a very long journey.

So, we went.

About three hours after leaving Kigali, we arrived.

Our English-speaking guide guided us around and translated from Kinyarwanda for us as the lady systematically opened door after clanking metal door and ushered us inside until we said that we didn't want to see any more.

Graphic to the point where I can recount specific snapshots that remain with me:

A man reaching out with an arm that ends just past his elbow.

A little boy who died with his shorts down around his ankles.

A person who died covering her face with her hands.

A tall man, still with most of his black hair against white skin.

And the overriding smell of lime which sticks the back of your throat and smells just like Ugali, a type of dough you eat with beans and rice - which I can no longer stomach to eat.

Then the rooms of bones: skulls and femurs all neatly stacked in piles.

In the school hall there are shelves of clothes. The 'poor clothes', the ones not worth stealing.

Imagine that; if everything that you ever amounted to in your life was not even worth taking by the people who killed you.

I find that very hard to come to terms with.

I had already written about Gisozi and about memorial day. Both were difficult events - and again, despite all I saw around me it was the clothes more than anything else that hit me. Skulls and bones, and even bodies - when they're emaciated, mummified and white as bone - don't really look like people. But clothes - clothes are more human than bodies after so many years.

So now I've painted the picture. The horror of humanity laid out for all to see. Not a word was spoken on the drive back to Butare - through, I shall add, fields of rice being tended by dozens of convict on a government scheme all wearing the pink uniform of convicted genocidiers.

But since then I've been thinking. The contrast to the horror was that the sun was out and shining, the hills around are incredibly beautiful and a group of little children were sitting in the grass nearby being children - as alive as the people inside were dead.

Around 5-6 years back I did a summer placement in North Germany with the army, up in Fallingbostel which is so close to Belson that the naffy/shop is actually Hitler's Round House.

Of course, whilst I was there, I visited the camp. I saw the mass graves (same as here - I've never understood why mass graves should be ugly lumps of concrete...) and read the stories - such as the two inmates without family who were seconded to burn the bodies at the crematorium and were taken out and shot the day before liberation to hide the evidence. They'd kept a diary. I'd read the scrolls of victims' names down the paths as I walked.

Everyone says about Belson and places where such horrors have occurred that birds never sing.

This isn't true. It was grey, overcast and spitting - but I heard a bird sing.

Which brings me - eventually - to the questions I'd like to ask.

I've seen apparitions and ghosts in my life - even some in Kigali that have fair turned me pale. But never have I felt of seen such horrors at places of mass death and destruction. In the places you'd expect to feel such things.

Both at Belson and at Murambi I simply felt a deep sense of calm. I didn't feel the dead were still there.

I remember something a family friend said whilst visiting the grave of his son. He said 'I know he is not there, that isn't him'. It's commonly said that graves are for the living. Somewhere to go to remember, not somewhere the dead actually remain. Although, in grave yards I have met people/spirits, some very clearly who have still wanted to talk.

My ponderings about Murambi and Belson go something to the effect:

1) Is it just too overwhelming - am I be blocking everything out? (I wore my red shawl whilst walking around and shook it out after - superstition I suppose).

2) Is it - as I suspect - simply that they are not there anymore? Have they all left?

3) Can the land heal itself after such things have happened there? Is what happened there important to the land, or does it pass in the blink of an eye? Would I know anything had happened there if I didn't know already - how many places have I passed over in England where hundreds have died and I did not know?

4) Why is it important to look for some resonance with such places? Why do I, as a living white woman, look for a connection to the mass African dead of over a decade ago? Am I looking to reaffirm in my mind that something remains after death? Why is it important to me to see such things?

One of the greatest debates we eventually had when we finally started talking again was whether it was right that those people should never be interred. Is it right that, year after year, the doors clank open and shut to the ever increasing chimes of tourism - that a little boy should forever be caught with his pants down, or a man smile at stranger with crooked teeth where his lip has been removed?

Immediate answer was 'no' - let them have peace.

But I believe they already have peace. I feel nothing of them still there.

My later response became 'yes' - because you can listen to the facts and figures all you like: how many died here, what atrocities were committed, how many men, women and children were slaughtered - but unless you see it, unless you actually see that - I don't think you truly believe it.

The memorial centres exist because people here want the outside world to know - to see what happened, to see what was allowed to happen. They don't want it to be forgotten; or to happen again.

So I don't know.

Is there peace in numbers?

Have people been to see the camps in Europe? Or the memorials in Cambodia? Was there anybody there? Was it peaceful? Did anything remain?

I've been to various battlefields and never really got an inkling - the exception was Glencoe, but Glencoe is such a bloody amazing and terrifying place, you would expect that.

By contrast, individual places like Anne Frank's House in Amsterdam, you can feel a presence. Whether it's a real presence or one conjured up by the expectations of the multitudes is another question.

If there are ghosts - and I'm not sure what exactly they are, if they exist at all - they seem to be apparitions of the desires of the departed. In places like Murambi, where people had no reason to be there other than as targets, they would have no natural desire to stay.

In places like Anne Frank's House, one might have an attachment from habit, even if you hated the place. And in Glencoe - well, you could just fall in love with the landscape.

Them's my tuppence-worth.

I went to Pompeii a few years ago. It's peaceful but the painful, terrifying death of so many people hangs heavy there, at least it did for me. The suddeness of the end, amphoras lying around like they were just put down a minute ago, murals on the wall painted by people who thought their world would last forever. The casts - dogs and pigs and people all frozen in the moment of their last choking breath. I don't think there is anything of the people lingering there, but I think the emotions of their last moments remain.

Not the same I know, not quite but sometimes when death comes so harshly and cruelly on people, the peace comes from that horror not being forgotten. I wonder what the atmosphere around there was like before the site was discovered, if it was less peaceful.

Really interesting replies guys, thanks:



Now that's something to ponder. Think you might be on to something there.

I think that Fred-in-the-green has a very good point. Those people didn't want to be there/had no attachment to places like Belsen and Murambi in life, why would they in death? I would imagine that if there is anything to be felt there, it's only psychic imprints.

Like Fred, I have been to battlefields (nothing like Belsen or Murambi) and not really felt anything. At one of the D-Day landing points I felt a huge sense of despair but you would expect that from soldiers that were sent up a near vertical rock face with german machine gunners waiting at the top. On the other side of things, I have been to french churches that still bear the scars of bullet holes from where people were machine gunned to death en masse and sensed it before seeing the holes. But a community invests emotionally and spiritually in a church, churches in some places are a focal point for a community. Only the church held a sense of presence. As did the german watch point on the coast near where I lived that still had blood stains.

Another thing to take into account (at least according to TC Lethbridge) when it comes to how strong these psychic imprints may come across is the presence of water. Experiments conducted by Lethbridge (not exactly scientific ones lol) seem to show that more spooky stuff happens around water (the bathroom is a hotbed for that stuff - typical )

I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau about 10 years ago.

Auschwitz was peaceful, calm-no real sense of anything having lingered and as such was a slightly surreal experience. It was hard to reconcile the horror of what had happened there with the peaceful atmosphere.
Birkenau I did find a bit more eerie-there the stillness did feel decidedly creepy.

I think you're right that these places exist as a reminder to the living-it's hard to process numbers involved in genocide but when you see piles of human shoes and a mattress stuffed with human hair, it really hits home.

I also have the feeling that those people aren't there any more. I haven't reallysorted out the afterlife thing yet, but no matter what happens, my feeling is that those who have suffered so terribly in life have some kind of free pass as it were. They're no longer tied to the physical world but are free to go where they can't suffer any more.
I can't coomprehend any of this really. Murder on such a scale. I think you're very brave Thin.
BM
xx

[quote=Fred-in-the-Green,Oct 10 2008, 05:45 PM]



If there are ghosts - and I'm not sure what exactly they are, if they exist at all - they seem to be apparitions of the desires of the departed.

I think that is beautifully worded Fred

MM08

[quote=moonmothling08,Oct 10 2008, 07:01 PM]
[quote=Fred-in-the-Green,Oct 10 2008, 05:45 PM]



If there are ghosts - and I'm not sure what exactly they are, if they exist at all - they seem to be apparitions of the desires of the departed.

I think that is beautifully worded Fred

MM08

[/quote]
I can't think of a better way of expressing my feelings about ghosts than Fred's words and can only echo the appreciation shown by MM08.

Thanks for your account Thinair. It did upset me, but I'm glad I read it.

I think as well in cases of deliberate mass murder by people (as opposed to Pompei, which I as a child found quite disturbing) the places should be kept as they are for the living. For generations to see and remember what happened there. I think we owe that to the dead.

We had a Jewish man come and talk about his life in a concentration camp when I was at Uni. It was an incredibly powerful experience. Although his tone was quite matter of fact almost everyone there cried. I think this is another way that the memories of the dead are honoured. By people who act as witnesses and tell their story. Of course when they are gone too only the places remain.

I think we in the West tend to think that such things no longer happen because as you say we watch the news over our dinner and move onto the programme afterwards without batting an eye. Even the war we're engaged in at the moment is distanced and sanitized. We can't imagine famine or martial law or genocide knocking on our door. I think we need to remember the past and be more aware of the present.

Won't go into this much as I've just got in and extremely tired, but I freaked out here the first time I swam in Lake Muhazi. I love swimming under water - love it - but I swam out on my own and came straight back in. I was in the middle of the lake and I panicked. All I could imagine were hands underneath the water - bodies - like something out of a Hollywood Film (What Lies Beneath) and I wanted out of the water. I was okay once my friends swam out to join me - but I really freaked myself.

My dad had a similar experience when we swam together in Lake Kivu. He couldn't help thinking about it.

You can't separate the knowledge that that was where they dumped the bodies - thousands upon thousands of people.

There's an amazing book I saw before I came out with a painting of bodies floating down the river and a crock's tail in the corner. Lots of crocks were killed, as were dogs and cats, because they were eating the bodies. The captions read: "The crocodiles had every right to be in the water, it was the bodies that should never have been there."

My boyfriend is Ugandan and remembers there being a huge shortage of fish because people kept finding pieces of finger and body parts in the tilapia.

Water certainly has something to do with things. And fish. It was after I had eaten fish I had the headless woman apparition. The strongest of all of the visitations.

I love swimming, I really do, but in the Lakes I have to try not to think about it and I don't like swimming under water here. Just thinking about all those people underneath you.

Surely the water is not good to swim in then? With the decaying dead under there there must be some risk of disease??

I don't know but I couldn't swim in water that I knew there to be dead bodies in.

I bet the tilapia made a few people queasy for a while...

My OH has shut down on all his sensitivity because all he picks up is stuff to do with wars. He reckons it's the result of having grown up in London during the Blitz. He told me he was once skiing well off piste in Europe and felt a massive dread which had nothing to do with his capacity to get down the black run. Later, when he'd reached his destination, he asked about the spot and was told it was the scene of a war crime.

On a visit to Eastern Europe in recent years he has made a point of visiting another such scene, which is now a tidy memorial, but he says the people who died there are still there, with their feelings. Perhaps the memorial is too tidy for them.

The last time he tried to open himself, in the New Forests in Hampshire, all he received was an RAF aerodrome, with young pilots lazing on the grass or playing games, waiting for the next scramble. When I did the research the whole coast of Hampshire was full of such aerodromes, the nearest being 8 km from us at that time. Since then, he refuses to even try. He's tired of death; he saw enough of it as a ware correspondent in NI and many other places in the world. He's still personally haunted by covering Aberfan.

I know it doesn't answer your question, Thin, but the idea that seems to be coming out of this thread for me is that, where we have properly recognised what has happened and seek to speak for the dead, the dead can rest content. Where we don't, or where we wish only to have a sanitised memorial, or none at all, they cannot rest, for their horror is left without suitable expression.