how were the victims of the rwanda genocide attacked
From the Rwandan genocide to the Guatemalan police, UT's libraries are digitally securing fragile records for research, advocacy around the world
Jan. 30, 2012
VIDEO
Shortly before Vice Provost Fred Heath made his first trip to Rwandas Kigali Genocide Memorial in 2008 to support a fledgling program at the University of Texas Libraries, a guard at the monument to the 1994 genocide was killed in a grenade attack on the facility.
The memorial is a symbol for those whose lives were ravaged by the human tragedy in Rwanda. But it also serves as the physical archive of survivor testimonies and a repository of evidence in the prosecutions against perpetrators of crimes against humanity.
Photos of victims of the Rwandan genocide from the Kigali Genocide Memorial.Photo: Amy Hamilton
An attack on the memorial is more than a symbolic gesture; it can partially erase a dark chapter in human history, effectively silencing the victims and absolving the guilty preventing generations from learning from the failures of the past.
Against that backdrop, Heath visited Rwanda with a vision and access to the resources that could provide a modern solution to an age-old problem. He was there to spearhead an effort to digitize the countrys audiovisual, documentary and photographic archives related to the genocide. The project was intended to preserve survivor testimonies and other evidence, all of which would be made available to the world as a digital collection at the university and distributed through a website.
The Rwandan effort has since evolved into the Libraries broader Human Rights Documentation Initiative (HRDI), which has helped digitize and disseminate records of human rights crises across the globe, most recently Guatemala.
It could be that things like the Kigali Genocide Memorial and its archives and other documentation centers could disappear in the future, says Heath, but it makes less sense for them to disappear if digital instantiations of that documentation exist elsewhere.
The initial collaboration in Rwanda was developed among the University of Texas Libraries; the Bridgeway Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to human rights; Bridgeway partner Aegis Trust (UK); and the Rwandan government. It was facilitated in part by Libraries advisory council member Ed Nawotka and funded in part with a $1.2 million grant from the Bridgeway Foundation.
By creating a replicative archive of the documents in digital form, the Libraries and its partners set out to ensure they survive if the original record residing in its home country of Rwanda was somehow lost or destroyed.
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