reaction to ghosts of rwanda

I feel like my whole life has been censored and controlled. I knew of things like the Jewish holocaust and the American civil war, but I wasn’t truly aware of the bloodshed and gore behind those events. Throughout my life, I never once heard of the Rwandan genocide and the horrors it contained. To see some of the images in the video made my perception of the world falter and have to reshape some of itself. I didn’t know such bad things could be done by good people. I wonder how they committed such awful acts. Were they just unable to think and were blindly following their companion’s orders? Or where they completely aware of the pain they were inflicting but couldn’t suppress their actions behind a wall of thoughts anymore.

One of the most disturbing images was a shot of video that depicted a line of bodies, shot bleeding and very dead, but still with their colorful cloths on, and various possessions and valuables in their hands. All the dead faces were hidden under cloths, or by arms thrown up to stop deadly bullets that were never slowed by things like flesh and bone. Among the group of people were several children, one with a doll in its hand. Beside the child with the doll was a scarf, covered in mud and dropped by some fleeing victim. The images haunted me and gave my nightmares, and my perception will never be as ignorant and innocent as before I saw the video. Rwanda experienced an awful genocide that should never have happened, and when it did, every measure possible should have been taken to stop it.

This documentary depicts a startling image of the life of a child soldier and his victims.

The boy they interviewed, Sherieff  Koroma, weaves stories of how he had been drugged with cocaine, and when he was high, he would do whatever he was told. “If we were heavily drugged with cocaine, we would spare no one” He explained. He still has scars from where his superiors rubbed drugs into his skin and says. He says he still has urges to kill. He isn’t even a teenager yet, and he has been turned into a recovering drug addict and a murderer, who maimed people and shattered their lives, and he will have to survive through his guilt for the rest of his life.

Another interview the journalists managed to conduct was with one of the leaders of the rebel group, Foday Sankoh. Sankoh seemed very proud of what he had done, and denied that he has caused much abusing of children. He said the children worked out of their own free will and knew what they were doing. I was appalled as I watched this man talk. He seemed happy and proud that he had ruined millions of lives, and turned innocent children into slaughtering machines. He represents a very dark and evil side of the human race to my eyes.