When Tim Longman attended a commemoration at a place called Murambi in 1996

 When Tim Longman attended a commemoration at a place called Murambi in 1996

, two years after the genocide, he was shocked by what he witnessed.  Murambi was a school, still under construction at the time of the genocide.  Drawn to the site by the false promise of shelter and protection, as many as 5,000 Tutsis were murdered at Murambi.  As director of the Human Rights Watch office in Rwanda, Tim was one of many dignitaries from around the globe to attend the commemoration.  What he witnessed were the remains of bodies, covered in lime to prevent their decomposition, carefully placed on display around the school.  Some rooms featured skulls, other rooms featured the bones of children, there was even the remains of a women with a stick placed between her legs to convey how women were subjected to rape. 

What shocked Tim was how the bodies at Murambi, in complete disregard for the wishes of the victims’ families or traditional Rwandan burial practices, were used to shock visitors with the violence of the genocide.  The bodies Tim witnessed were eventually burried in a mass memorial grave at the site but other bodies found in the region were brought to the site where they still remain.  Tim notes that in 1996 the commemoration at Murambi was still an early stage in the politics of memory in Rwanda.  In the years since, this use of bodies at other genocide commemoration sites around the country has become a more standardized means of anchoring the memory of the horror of the genocide, the victimization of the Tutsi minority, the responsibility of the Hutu majority, the failure of the international community to react, and the savior role of the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) which ended the genocide.