When the spring rains came and caught us outside, we used to run to the ancient cemetery that marked the edge of our village and crouch beneath the memorial beside the slate wall. While we laughed and shivered and dripped, I would silently greet each of the tombstones surrounding the memorial. Hallo, Herr Silbereisen. Grüss Gott, Frau Stein. Guten Tag, Herr Brombacher. The same names were on the sandstone memorial, only instead of Friedl, Günter, instead of Rolf, Hans, instead of Gisela, Roland—sons, husbands, and brothers. Fifty-four names in all were carved onto the memorial, commemorating fallen German soldiers, functionaries of the most famous genocide of the modern age. Nazi murderers—Günter, Hans, Roland, men from a quiet village of vineyards, apple orchards and five hundred people.
When the spring rains came to Rwanda, a tall Tutsi couple, Chantal and Laurent Mbanda, told us stories of standing in the lobbies of government buildings in Washington DC, of begging day after day for the United States to intervene in Rwanda, and of being sent away unheard or ignored every night. We spent our nights at the Mbanda house and our days in Chantal’s New Hope children’s home. All of the home’s workers were widowed in the genocide. I remember standing downtown Kigali outside the Hotel des Milles Collines, waiting for the van and watching a man roll his wheelchair down the sidewalk across the road, pants knotted around the stumps of his legs, limbs taken from him by the Hutus. As I watched him, a truckload of men in pink jumpsuits holding brooms filed onto the curb and began to sweep the sidewalk around him—Hutus forgiven by the families of their victims and therefore allowed community service rather than a full jail sentence. Later, at the genocide memorial, I stood in a room filled with hundred of bones and thought about the men in pink and their families, so many of them refugees in the Congo after fleeing the forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Hutu killers, Tutsi guerillas— forgiven street sweepers and freedom fighters.
When spring came to Kosovo six years ago, NATO troops shot at my father as he ran through the streets one March night. A horde of riot police and a mob armed with Molotov cocktails, shouting and torching a Serbian orthodox church, stood between him and our house where two men looting homes during the pogrom were holding my mother and brother at gunpoint. The floorboards of our house were already pockmarked with the cleat-marks of Serbian soldiers during the 1999 Kosovo genocide, our walls already had bullet holes in them, our street already had tank treads graven into the concrete, and Bill Clinton Boulevard already boasted a fifty-foot banner of the president beaming a hero’s smile down on the street below. Walking through the streets of Prishtinë in April after my family escaped the March violence unharmed, I saw the rows of photographs of missing Albanians, four years after the genocide, still hanging on the fence outside the parliament building. Uptown, the scorched Serbian Orthodox church stood empty on my street, its walls blackened and its windows dark. On the same block, apartment buildings remained abandoned, walls missing and entire floors bombed and burned during the 1999 NATO air strike. Serbian murderers, Albanian looters, lynchers, and mobs, NATO and UNMIK bombers and snipers—soldiers fighting to keep their country in one piece, men and women avenging their families, foreigners attempting to bring peace, equality, and justice to a place torn apart by violence.
I don’t know exactly what these instances, these memories, have in common, other than that they involve people killing one another in places far away from New York and the United Nations headquarters. And that they leave me feeling sick and impassioned and determined and protective—not only of the victims, oddly enough, but of the killers as well.
Even the smoothest of peacekeeping operations, even the most justifiable military interventions met with open arms, has moments of failure, whether that failure comes in the form of relapse, riot, resistance, or death. All attempts to make peace will inevitably result in some violence. But these attempts to make peace must not weaken in the face of difficulty. My elementary school roommate, Naomi, lived in Mostar, Bosnia, where the East Bank, the Muslim half of the city, had been completely leveled in the Serbs’ attempts to exterminate the Bosnians. One of my high school roommates, Alyssa, left her birthplace, the Congo, with the emergency evacuation helicopters that came during the civil war and has never returned. My friend Johann sat through junior prom knowing only that his parents’ village in Darfur had been attacked and overrun, and that his entire family was most likely dead. Genocide and violence cannot continue to pervade the lives of innocents around the world. And no matter the cost, those in power cannot continue to ignore the responsibility they have, not only to keep peace, but to make peace.
Ibrahim Mehmeti, a man working in Skopje with refugees from the Kosovo genocide, remarked about international community’s criticism of NATO’s violent intervention: “I know that the pacifist opposition to the bombing was strong. Pacifism is a nice thing. I am the biggest pacifist. But this is not pacifism, to stand by when people are being killed. That is like when a man is drowning, and you will not jump in the lake to save him, because your shoes are dirty and you are an environmentalist.”
