Source : the age
By Elizabeth Fortescue
Thirty years ago this week, a young African preacher in Rwanda’s Kibeho refugee camp read aloud from the Bible to reassure his flock in the midst of one of the worst and most brutal massacres of modern times.
Into the oasis of calm created by the man’s charisma and faith stepped an Australian cameraman in army fatigues who introduced himself as George Gittoes.
George Gittoes with his painting of a preacher during the Rwandan massacre that has gone on display at the National Gallery.Credit: National Gallery of Australia
Gittoes, a civilian war artist, had learnt of the rapidly deteriorating situation in the squalid, nine-square-hectare Kibeho camp.
Corralled in the camp were an estimated 100,000 internally displaced people (IDP) forced from their own homes by the Rwandan civil war.
The war had begun in 1990 and climaxed in 1994 when Hutu extremists committed genocide against 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
A page from George Gittoes’ diary where he wrote about the Kibeho massacre and drew the preacher who became the subject of two portraits.Credit: George Gittoes
A year later, Gittoes was choppered into the unrest and terror of the Kibeho camp to record whatever was about to happen.
It wasn’t long before chaos broke out in Kibeho. Within a couple of days of Gittoes’ arrival on April 20, the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front – suspecting the Kibeho camp was harbouring Hutus responsible for the 1994 genocide – launched a systematic massacre of men, women and children that waxed and waned across several days.
People literally died in Gittoes’ arms, and he witnessed the frantic pace at which Australian Army doctors and peacekeepers were trying to save whoever they could.
Camp inhabitants hid from machetes, bullets and grenades however they could. Some stood all night in the liquid filth of underground latrines. Others dug themselves into the mud created by heavy rain.
But the preacher, when Gittoes saw him, was a beacon of peace.
“He was sitting on a grain sack, very exposed to gunfire, but all those around him were calm,” Gittoes wrote in his field diary.
“The preacher’s courage had given them back their dignity.”
Gittoes introduced himself to the extraordinary figure who held so firm in the storm of violence. He asked the preacher if he should stay, his presence perhaps deterring the killers. But the preacher declined.
“Pointing to my camera, he said: ‘They are probably more interested in killing you’.”
It was true. A Rwandan Patriotic Front commander had already threatened to kill Gittoes if he took any more pictures. (In the end, Gittoes’ photographs brought the Kibeho atrocity to the eyes of the world.)
A photo taken by George Gittoes of the preacher calming parishioners during the massacre.Credit: George Gittoes
Instead of asking him to stay, the preacher asked Gittoes to take two boys to safety. They had been orphaned in the previous night’s massacre and the preacher had been protecting them.
Gittoes took the boys, and the Rwandan Patriotic Front “miraculously” allowed them through its checkpoint where it was identifying anyone involved in the 1994 genocide and leading them away.
Gittoes hid the boys under a UN vehicle near the Australian Army medical team that was at Kibeho as part of a peacekeeping effort. The boys were later trucked to an orphanage in Kigali.
Hours after getting the boys out, Gittoes returned to the place where the preacher had exerted his unearthly calm. But there was nothing there.
“The area was flattened and silent,” Gittoes wrote in his diary.
“All were dead – their bodies partly covered by their meagre possessions.”
Gittoes searched through dead bodies and piles of debris, but never discovered the fate of the preacher in his distinctive yellow coat.
Returning to his then-home of Bundeena in Sydney later that year, Gittoes poured the trauma of his experience into a painting that won that year’s Blake Prize.
He made a second painting that was “deeper and more psychological” than the first. Titled The Preacher, it was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia in 2016.
The gallery is now displaying The Preacher for the first time to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Kibeho massacre.
Last week, Gittoes with his wife and collaborator Hellen Rose travelled from their home in Werri Beach to view the painting in Canberra. Gittoes said he hoped the painting did justice to the spirit of the preacher, who was able to reassure and bring peace to his followers in the face of their imminent violent death.
“To be honest, it was very hard to hold back the emotion,” Gittoes told this masthead when he saw The Preacher again. “In my whole life I have never seen someone as inspiring as him.”
Of the two orphans Gittoes helped to get out of Kibeho, he knows nothing.
But Gittoes does know that many of the children saved from the massacre were adopted by families in Italy and France, eventually returning to Rwanda as professionals such as doctors and lawyers.
The Preacher is on display at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.
