by Jan Herman
Tonight’s “Frontline” PBS documentary about the 1994 Rwandan genocide, “Ghosts of Rwanda,” will remind viewers of the world’s failure to halt the slaughter of a civilian population which “occurred at a rate of three to four times that of the Holocaust.” It put to flight “two million internally displaced persons and two million refugees,” according to The Rwanda Project.
Numbers alone cannot not tell the story. To quantify the enormous toll of the genocide in which the majority Hutu tribe butchered the minority Tutsi tribe by the hundreds of thousands is merely to circumscribe the meaning of what happened. But it is worth noting that more than 800,000 people were killed, nearly 80 percent of Rwanda’s children “lost at least one family member” and more than 60 percent of the children interviewed by UNICEF in the aftermath of the genocide “said they did not care whether they grew up.”
The Rwanda Project notes — as will be evident tnight on “Ghosts” — that “images continue to play a key part in our memory of the injustices” and have “served as a major strategy for documenting” the atrocities. But photography has also been used as “a way to reunite children with their families” by putting “the power of the camera” into the hands of those affected most.
The project’s “Through the Eyes of Children” does just that. Coinciding with tonight’s “Frontline” report, photos from the project are on display in a special exhibit at the United Nations to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the genocide. April 7 has been designated by the U.N. General Assembly an International Day of Reflection.
I’ve touted “Through the Eyes of Children” many times before as a stunning nexus of art, politics, guilt and trauma, with an emphasis on innocence, beauty, justice and redemption. It is “the culmination of four years of photographic workshops for the children living at the Imbabazi Orphanage in Gisenyi, Rwanda.” Many of them, both Hutu and Tutsi, were injured and orphaned by the 1994 genocide.
The Imbabazi Orphanage in Gisenyi is on the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo and was once the main crossing for both the exodus and re-entry of Rwandans during and after the genocide. David Jiranek, an amateur photographer who recently died, came upon the orphanage in his travels and in 2000 started a photographic workshop there. He was inspired by the children’s perspective and experience. Jiranek gave them disposable cameras, and they began photographing themselves and their community.
The pictures were developed locally at first, displayed on the orphanage walls and put into photo albums by the children. A year later, the children were invited by the U.S. Embassy to exhibit and sell their work in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, with all proceeds going towards their education. A photograph by 8-year-old Jacqueline, entitled “Gadi,” won “First Prize — Portraiture” in the 2001 Camera Arts Magazine Photo Contest (in the adult category) and Honorable Mention in an international competition featuring professional and non-professional photographers.
The children’s work is to continue traveling around the U.S. and abroad. The U.N. special exhibition will run through April 15, with a private reception and commemoration on April 7. The reception, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., is by invitation only. Those interested in attending the reception should contact The Rwanda Project via e-mail at info@rwandaproject.org by Sunday, April 4.
The exhibition — sponsored, curated and produced by “Through the Eyes of Children” and PixelPress — is open to the public daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the lobby of the United Nations, at East 46th Street and First Avenue in New York.