LEFT: A woman sifts through the rubble and destruction of her collapsed home,
searching for her belongings in the wake of Hurricane Katrina
RIGHT: Deceased Tutsi families have been memorialized in this pile of clothing
at the Murambi Memorial Center in Murambi, Rwanda
DISASTERS
By Tyler James Greene
Directing Resident
An examination of disasters on the human body, both natural and man-made, through the lens of the Hurricane Katrina and the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda.
HURRICANE KATRINA
"In the end, the real power of a hurricane isn't found in its wind speed. It's in what it leaves behind - the lives lost, the lives changed, the memories obliterated in a gust of wind."
- Anderson Cooper, Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival.
On Aug. 23, 2005, a moderate tropical storm began to form over the Bahamas. As it crossed into southern Florida on the morning of Aug. 24, the National Weather Service instantly upgraded the storm to hurricane status and assigned it the name Katrina.
For the next three days, Hurricane Katrina rapidly grew in strength. It landed first in Florida and moved southwesterly across the state, bringing with it trees and power lines and significantly damaging homes and businesses.
The storm intensified in the Gulf of Mexico and, on the morning of Aug. 29, made its second landfall in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana.
After a nine-day period of natural destruction, Hurricane Katrina made history and became one of the five deadliest storms to ever hit the United States.
For these nine days, the Eastern seaboard struggled with 140-mile-per-hour winds, 43 recorded tornadoes and storm surges looming over 30 feet. The cost in both human life and financial damage was devastating. At least 1,836 people perished and over $81.2 billion in damages were recorded.
The city of New Orleans encountered the largest death toll and evidence of destruction. The tumultuous rise and fall of the water associated with the storm forced 53 levees in the city to collapse. Without the support of these levee systems, nearly 80% of New Orleans promptly found itself submerged in water.
Families waited inside their crumbling homes for rescue, while bodies floated down flooded streets. Residents sought shelter anywhere they could get it; some found solace in the local bars or bus stations and thousands of others crowded the Superdome and Convention Center.
New Orleans quickly crumbled and its residents struggled for months to survive.
RWANDAN GENOCIDE
"Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda."
- Philip Gourevitch, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda.
Approximately nine years before Katrina, a disaster of an entirely different sort struck a small land-locked country in east-central Africa.
In April 1994, the Rwandan government ordered all members of the Hutu majority to eliminate the Tutsi minority living in Rwanda. From April 6 through mid-July of 1994, Hutu extremist militia groups carried out this mass killing, murdering an estimated 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutu sympathizers.
This deliberate and systematic "decimation" is now commonly called the Rwandan Genocide.
In his journalistic account of the disaster, Philip Gourevitch states "It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
The Hutu majority successfully implanted their radical ideology into the minds of ordinary citizens and peasants, which drastically increased this "efficiency."
These "innocent murderers" or "victim-killers," along with the governmental military regimes, left no stone unturned. They infiltrated college campus' looking for sympathizing intellectuals and students. They honed in on doctors and religious leaders seeking safety in hospitals and churches.
Neighbors betrayed friends who had lived next to them for decades and parents were ordered to kill their own children. Anyone discovered without the proper identification at frequently placed roadblocks were immediately killed.
The last breath of life for the "one-million dead" was often experienced as the long and painful agony of a machete killing, forced sexual abuse, meticulous body mutilation and, in some rare cases, a gunshot to the head.
The bodies piled up at an exponential rate, nearly three times the rate of the Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It took a mere 100 days to eradicate nearly 11% of the Rwandan population.
Gourevitch visited one of the aforementioned churches and, in the first chapter of his novel, recounts the atrocity of walking through nearly fifty decomposed cadavers covering the sacred floor.
In his account of this visit, he illuminates one slice of the many bodies that were left dormant in the hills, buried in mass graves or left to rot in the sweltering sun.
He notes, "The dead looked like pictures of the dead. They did not smell. They did not buzz with flies. They had been killed thirteen months earlier, and they hadn't been moved. Skin stuck here and there over the bones, many of which lay scattered away from the bodies, dismembered by the killers, or by scavengers - birds, dogs, bugs."
Works Cited
- Through the Eye of Katrina: Social Justice in the United States by Kristin Bates
- Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival, by Anderson Cooper
- We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda, by Philip Gourevitch
- The Rwandan Crisis by Gerard Prunier
