DENVER — Alain Habimana was 5 years old when the neighbors he used to see at his house began to kill each other on the streets.
Now 20, Habimana said what stunned him during his childhood in Kigali, Rwanda, was how quickly friendships stopped: “I don’t care if you’re my friend,” he described the thinking at the time. “As long as you’re not my ethnicity, I gotta do my job.”
Half a world away but with the nightmarish violence fresh in his mind, Habimana recounted some of his experiences in the Rwandan genocide to fellow students last week at Metropolitan State College of Denver. Habimana and four other Rwandan student refugees spoke during a week-long conference marking the 15th year since the genocide.
More than 500,000 people were killed in Rwanda as Hutu militias attacked the Tutsi minority and Hutu moderates. The killings began April 6, 1994, after a plane carrying Rwanda President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down. His death triggered months of violence: people hacked to death with machetes and hoes; women raped and tortured; victims dismembered.
The genocide ended after rebels, led by now-President Paul Kagame, ousted the extremist Hutu government that orchestrated the slaughter.
Habimana, a freshman, is one of about 20 students from Rwanda attending Metro State, said Hadidja Nyiransekuye, a visiting assistant professor and organizer of the conference that concluded Saturday.
Habimana said his parents never told him whether he was Hutu or Tutsi because they wanted to protect him. But he remembers his mother’s urgency when she told him and his twin sister to take everything they could carry to flee Kigali, the capital.
Fleeing Rwanda, Habimana lived in Ghana with his sister and his aunt before coming to Colorado as refugees and settling in suburban Aurora in 2007.
His father died after getting sick during the genocide, and his mother died in 2001, also after an illness.
Colorado is home to about 80 Rwandan refugees, said state Refugee Services Program coordinator Paul Stein. That doesn’t include non-refugees.
Nyiransekuye said she wants people to understand how it came to be that citizens of a country got to the point of killing one another.
The student panel fielded questions most people never have to ponder.
What is it like to live next to people who you know killed your friends or family? Would you ever return to the place where you witnessed such atrocities? Their answers advocated forgiveness and acceptance. They didn’t hold grudges.
Without hesitation, all said they want to return to Rwanda. “It’s still our homeland, and we love our homeland,” Habimana said.
Habimana, who is studying health care management, talked about his big plans when he graduates: building a hospital and an orphanage in his homeland, probably in Kigali.
