Alison Des Forges (1942 – 2009)

Reading about genocide these days, a subject that has been intermittently on my mind since I became aware of the extend of the violence in Darfur in the fall of 2006. At the time the conflict had been raging since 2003, but whether because of the poor media coverage, or slow fermentation of my sociopolitical awareness of the world, somehow it had escaped my attention until then. That summer I had been discovering the work of Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, who had showed me that it was possible to work with art from one’s moral conscience, from a feeling of obligation and solidarity towards the world, without compromising aesthetic integrity or a poetic powerfulness. Jaar worked for on a six-year project to represent the 1994 Rwandan genocide, creating a series of works which he believed all failed in representing the genocide to the public. Today I’ve probably lost faith in most of those values of integrity, certainly departed from responsibility towards the art world, but at the time art school discourse was still having a heavy influence on me. When the reality of the conflict began to dawn on me, I saw that it was following the same pattern as the historical events in Rwanda that I was introduced to through the work of Alfredo Jaar. I tried to do art projects that dealt with the Darfur conflict, but it would be a shame to say that it went very well. It didn’t go well at all, but I’ll recognize it as a point of departure into the process that has let me to where I am now.

Today I came across the obituary of Alison Des Forges, historian and influential human rights activist with Human Rights Watch (HRW) for almost twenty years, and a forefront expert on the Rwandan genocide. Des Forges died on February 12 in a plane crash along with the 48 other passengers of a flight from Newark to Buffalo in upstate New York. Des Forges ‘dedicated her life to working on Rwanda and was the world’s leading expert on the 1994 Rwanda genocide and its aftermath’, and HRW characterized her as ‘the epitome of the human rights activist — principled, dispassionate, committed to the truth and,’ (this especially resonates with me) ‘to using that truth to protect ordinary people.’ I haven’t read any of her work – she authored the book ‘Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda’ (the title alone says something about the scale of conflict) – but here is a video commemorating the anniversary of the Rwandan genocide in 2004, from the HRW home page.

“Alison’s loss is a devastating blow not only to Human Rights Watch but also to the people of Rwanda and the Great Lakes region. [...] She was among the first to highlight the ethnic tensions that led to the genocide, and when it happened and the world stood by and watched, Alison did everything humanly possible to save people. [...] She never forgot about the crimes committed by the Rwandan government’s forces, and that was unpopular, especially in the United States and in Britain,” [...] “She was really a thorn in everyone’s side, and that’s a testament to her integrity and sense of principle and commitment to the truth.”

- Kenneth Roth, exec. dir. of HRW

Since I came to Guatemala for the first time, this world of grave human rights violations has become very present and real; although I live a very priviledged life of a westerner here, the hard reality and sad history of Guatemala is evident in the testimonies of people I meet, who lost their friend and family to the civil war, and in the faces of people I meet on the street. The unmistakable prevailing poverty of a majority of the Mayan population reflects the century-long discrimination of the indigenous peoples, an issue that have been hardly dealt with since the peace accords in 1996, when for the first time in history the Mayan population was even recognized by the constitution, as peoples in their own right. Close to half the population, they’ve always been brutally victimized and discriminated against; during the worst years of the Civil War (roughly 1978-85), they were directly targeted by the military governments, and under the presidencies of Lucas García and Efraín Rios Montt, over 200,000 Mayans were very brutally  killed, and tens of thousands disappeared. Although it was claimed to be an attempt to ‘pull up from the roots’ the support for oppostition resistance guerillas, you’d have to add four hundred years of racial discrimination to the causes of what was essentially the worst genocide of the Americas since colonial times.

There’s so much more to tell, and I will return in future posts to the subject. Night has fallen and I’m about to turn in, to the simple words of William Carlos Williams:

it is difficult
to get the news
from poems
yet men die miserably
every day
for lack
of what is found
there

.

Update Monday 16: a long feature on Alison Des Forges and Human Rights Watch on today’s show of Democracy Now. Amy Goodman interviews Kenneth Roth about Alison Des Forges, about Rwanda, genocide, and the Israeli/Palestine situation. If the link ceases to work, this should be a direct link to the show.

“… the legacy of the Rwandan genocide: It’s as if you took a picture of a family, and ripped it down the middle. And then tried to fit the halves back together again. Even with the best glue in the world, it’s never gonna be the same. People betrayed their deepest values in order to kill (…). Whether you look at it from the point of view of the victims or the point of view of the perpetrator, these are not things that can ever be forgotten.”

- Alison Des Forges