Ashley Judd's Rwanda Diaries Part Two: Skulls, Femurs and Flowers

A very good chronicle of catastrophe and beauty.

Ashley - I feel that anything I can say in response to your writing is inadequate. I have tears streaming down my face. But mostly what I feel is guilt. Where was I when this slaughter was taking place? Where were we all? Wherever those thousands of souls of the slaughtered innocents are now, I hope they can forgive us. Thank you for the rawness and honesty and beauty of your writing. Thank you for what you are doing now. My heart thanks you.

I can’t even respond, it makes me so heartsick…

Ashley, you go girl, everytime a woman speaks her truth from a place of heart this empowers, not only her but all women. Keep speaking your truth, for you are a gift to us all!

My Goodness, Ashley, what can one say? You are there for each of us. None of us can be everywhere. I’m here in Honolulu today. I’ll render a needed service to a challenged individual or houseless or homeless person and think of you and your work as I do.
Your heart is brave; my your trip back to us be a safe and meaningful one. I hope to meet you one day and hold your hand for a moment as I try to express my gratitude for children or our God such as yourself. Mike

It’s great Ashley is keeping the issue of poverty in
Africa on the front burner. It seems there is no end, Somalia is
and Uganda are going through the same thing. The way the
economy in this country is going because of the high price of
oil, there are many more people here in the US going hungary as well. Those that can provide have a lot of work to do.

Solving the problems of Africa are so daunting its overwhelming.
One is aware that most of the money poured into that continent to various countries, has ended up in the hands of ruthless leaders who use it to arm themselves and wage the kind of things on civilian populations as described by Ms. Judd.
The UN seems powerless to do anything much except to issue statements which nobody pays any attention to. Or at least it isn’t obvious that the UN is having much of an effect overall.

Until the people of Africa get some better leaders and enough of a following to give lots of support to leaders with integrity, things won’t get better. They are so tribal in their focus that its self defeating. This is very sad but it will take a lot more than just money alone to have much of an impact on these problems.

Ashley, Beautiful writing —thank you. Leopold: Conrad write The Heart of Darkness about the Congo and I’d bet he had Leopold’s soul in mind as he wrote. Why we , the US, stood by and did nothing, as basically we’re doing in Darfur, enraged me then and still does. I’ve tried to do something about it through Amnesty International and other organizations including the US Congress. Your reportage is amazing and I look forward to more from your pen and heart over the days to come and the months and years—your voice needs to be heard everywhere. Thank you again.

How does one respond to this except with horror and outrage. And since atrocities are still going on in many parts of Africa one wonders how this sad, but beautiful country continues to encounter all this carnage and evil year after year and still somehow manages to persevere. Read Samantha Powers’ book on the Rwanda massacre. Aid workers have run into so many problems: In southern Africa you see the very sensible efforts of aid groups to get people to grow sorghum rather than corn, because it is hardier and more nutritious. But the local people aren’t used to eating sorghum. So aid workers introduce it by giving it out as relief food to the poor––––and then sorghum becomes stigmatized as the poor man’s food, and no one wants anything to do with it. At an AIDS clinic there, one can see the efforts to save babies by using cheap medicines to block mother-to-child transmission of HIV during pregnancy. Then the clinic gives the women infant formula to take home, so they won’t infect babies during breastfeeding. A hundred yards down the road you see piles of abandoned formula, where the women have dumped it. Any woman feeding her baby formula rather than nursing directly, is presumed to have tested for HIV, and no woman wants that stigma. This information is from someone I know who is part of an aid organization, but it is a year old. Perhaps Ashley can bring us better results by now.

ashley, i am amazed you got through the reliving of the horrors, and the first living was so unnecessary! may we find a way to help these peoples through their hard times before our own strike! let the government we elect in november pay attention.

The US president, Clinton, was receiving daily reports of the genocide, and chose to be passive; and 800,000 mothers, fathers, grandparents and children, died. He later had the gaul to apologize.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” (Edmund Burke)

Meanwhile, in Iraq, Saddam was slaughtering 180,000 kurds by bussing them into the desert to pre-dug graves, 10-12 feet deep, with frontloaders parked nearby.

In one grave 98 children were found without bullet wounds having been buried alive, under 10 feet of sand, with their dead and dying mothers clutching them in their arms. Pregnant women were among those in the mass graves. Some of the women had sewn their ID in secret pockets suspecting what would happen. The children held toys, pacifiers and bottles. The older children held little bags of personal effects.

Michael K. Trimble, US forensic anthropologist said he’d never seen anything like the killing fields of Iraq, where he found 18 mass graves in one location. So far more than 350 mass graves have been identified, and they expect there are hundreds more graves.

Saddam outdid Hitler when he decided to have a “Gas chamber al fresco,” killing 5000 Iraqi’s in one town in one day, leaving 15,000 with burns both external and internal to suffer, and some to die later.

How people like Ashley Judd, who I believe is well intentioned, can condemn one genocide while refusing to eliminate Saddam, the enabler of an epic genocide, is impossible to understand.

Mr. Trimble found one little girl who had been forced to kneel along with the rest of the group, along with the edge of a mass grave. She has bullet would on the underside of her arm as she raised her arm to defend herself and tried to turn away.

Saddam, Pres. Bush, realized, was evil incarnate. We pled with Saddam, we threatened Saddam, we bribed Saddam to go into exile, and he laughed in the faces of our diplomats.

Saddam, a purvey of ethnic genocide, was evil incarnate, most rational people would agree. Pres. Bush chose to take action.

Thank God.

http://law.case.edu/saddamtrial/entry.asp?entry_id=149