We are two nations living in one land. who doesnot understand each other

Right in the middle of a lovely hilly city of Kigali in a land locked African country, lies the white building, built to remember the killing of millions. It was my second trip to this country which is also called a country of thousand hills, and i always felt good about the tranquility of the place, but after visiting this white building i was silent and this silence was not a satisfying one. It was the silence asking all of us on to what level of madness we humans can go.

The building starts with the pictures and history about the divisions of hutu and tutsi tribe by the Belgians; as per the principle, anyone having more then 10 cows was termed as tutsi, and then comes the hatred of the hutu calling tutsi people as Inyenzi” cockroaches” and subsequent killing of millions. the UN and foreign troops trying to secure the white people only, and the dilemma of the UN captain who is ordered not to shoot any one and who asks if he can shoot the dogs eating the dead people….the good people within this madness who felt themselves judged by the tears of the cockroaches obliged to give them a refuge… the big halls full of skulls and photos of the dead ones….. was it not too much to make any one silent and feel embarrassed about his/her own human existence.

In the start one of the rebel leader was shouting ” We are two nations living in one land who does not know each other ” sounded very familiar to me…. for some reason the whole history of india and Pakistan was playing like a movie in parallel inside my head. May be it was my humanist belief which tends to see more common things in people living in both sides of the border, but somehow i felt I was reading through the history of partition of india , seeing the same movie but in different color… the Britishers dividing us brown men to the extent that we managed to kill millions and draw the lines in blood…..and then the good people being judged by their conscience helping the distressed ones…….
I finally was able to decipher the silent flowery smile of my rwandan driver carrying all the smells of sadness , trying to say so much, but was just silent like a sad flower blossoming in between the thorns which was also a part of there existence…….. the last words in the museum ended with a message from the people of Rwanda.. “This was the sad part of our lives but our children should know where we ended and where we began our journey to a better future, so this should not be repeated”