by Susan Kuklin
Abu Omar’s wife gave me back my grandmother’s ring, and they took me to their house. They carried me to the third floor of their big house. My stitches opened, and I felt excruciating pain in my back and stomach. I thought I was about to die.
One day, a very tall man armed with weapons came to the house. The first thing he did was step on my legs. Then they put me in a wheelchair and took me back down to the ground floor. A black truck, with windows covered with black glass, arrived at Abu Omar’s house. They put me in the truck and covered me with a blanket. I was suffering severe pain due to the surgery.
By now I understood them, these ISIS drivers, when they talked on their walkie-talkies. I heard them say that they had to change their directions because there were land mines on the main road that could blow us up. We arrived back in Tal Afar. Haji Mehdi, Abu Ali, and the judge were no longer there. A new judge was in charge. He decided to release me. He wrote my name on a piece of paper and signed it.
The drivers took me to a place with many buses. About two hundred Yazidis were there. (I recognized them by their clothes.) All of them were old or disabled or had diseases. They — we — were no longer a benefit for ISIS. They couldn’t sell us as sex slaves.
The buses took us to Hawija, which is near Kirkuk city. There, Kurdish Peshmerga forces received us and brought us to Erbil city. From Erbil, they took us to Lalish, our holiest temple. My brothers Kurdo and Qahtan came running toward the bus. They were crying as they helped me out of the bus and onto a wheelchair. Even then I did not speak, because I was not sure that we were rid of ISIS. When we reached the temple, I kissed the hand of our spiritual leader, Baba Sheikh, as an act of respect, and I spoke. “Please try to do something for other Yazidis who are still in ISIS captivity.”
After I was released, I hoped that my family was saved too. My sisters Sahera and Khefshe had already escaped, and we were reunited.
Sahera had been sent to Rabia, a city one mile from the Syrian border, where Arabs from the Shammar tribe live. Another Yazidi girl, who was abducted with my sister, was with her. They had decided to escape captivity. They took some clothes and ran from the house to another house. They were not sure if the family in one of the houses would help them. But one did. In the house, a man contacted our family and asked if they would pay him for Sahera’s release. My family did not have money with them, but my brother Qahtan took out loans from friends and neighbors who had brought money with them. Sahera and the other girl were taken to Syria — that’s where the Kurds were, the PKK [the Kurdistan Workers’ Party]. The PKK transferred them safely to our family.
Khefshe told me that she and another Yazidi girl were put in a house they knew well because it had once belonged to an Iraqi parliament member. They were treated very badly. They were beaten and forced to cook and clean for their captors. When they were about to be moved, the other abducted girl ran away. My sister remained in captivity.
Khefshe said that she was so frightened when her friend escaped. When the ISIS militants asked about the other girl, she told them, “I don’t know where she went.” It was nighttime, and the ISIS militants started to look for her. While they were busy looking, Khefshe ran from the house. She hid between buildings and rocks, anything to keep away from ISIS eyes. She told me that the ISIS fighters had flashlights and were close to where she was hiding. She was afraid a dog would bark at her and reveal her hiding place. When they looked someplace else, she ran, taking the same road where we were when we were captured. This time she made it. She reached Yazidi fighters and was saved.
My three-year-old nephew Delhat stayed in captivity for three years. He was finally ransomed through PKK. The PKK returned some ISIS members for Delhat, along with six other members of my family, including my sister Nerges and her four kids.
I moved to a refugee camp called Bajed Kandala. A member of the Yazda Center in Nebraska visited the camp to give psychological support to us survivors. I helped cook for the Yazda employees who were helping us. After about a year, the Yazda Center arranged a visa for me to come to America.
In July 2017, Mosul was liberated. We were so happy because we expected the remaining captured Yazidis would come back. But there are very few in number. Thousands of Yazidis had been killed. Thousands of them were kidnapped. Hundreds of thousands are displaced. Dozens of mass graves are everywhere. I personally know a woman from Kocho village whose three kids were poisoned by ISIS. While all this was happening, no one tried to help us. No one did anything to stop them. No one is ready to protect our mass graves.
I would like to live in my homeland, but I can’t. The people who lived beside us as neighbors became ISIS. They were the first to attack us, to hurt us. And now they are living safely in Kurdistan, under KRG [Kurdistan regional government] protection. No one talks of them or gives an account of what they did to us. Nobody wants to go to court to ask why they did this to us. Many Muslim people around Sinjar joined ISIS and committed atrocities against Yazidis. My cousin saw one of his college friends with ISIS. My brother saw his teacher with ISIS. This is the reason why I don’t want to go back to Iraq. In Iraq, we lost everything. In Iraq, our family members are still missing. In Iraq, I would see the people who did this to us every day. I would have to deal with them every day. I can’t do this.
Much has been reported about the 1994 massacre of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda, but few know much about the one in neighboring Burundi, where Hutus went house to house with spears, knives, guns, and machetes, killing Tutsis. Burundi, an impoverished, landlocked country in East-Central Africa, has experienced numerous conflicts between the two ethnic groups, even though the Hutu and Tutsi generally share the same religious beliefs (Christianity), culture, and language (Kirundi, Swahili, and French).
On July 1, 1962, Burundi won its independence from Belgium. Although the majority of the population was Hutu, the Tutsi held most of the power. This led to unending Hutu rebellions and brutal Tutsi retaliations. The cycle of war and peace (mostly war) between the two groups continues.
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In 1989, Dieudonné was born to a Tutsi mother and a Hutu father. He is the youngest of five children, two boys and three girls. Three siblings — Veronica, Balthazar, and Dieudonné — live in Nebraska; Virginia and Suazis are still in a refugee camp in Africa.
Dieudonné says, “I was four years old when the 1993 genocide of my people began. I remember all of it, every detail of that horrible day when it all began. Every. Single. Detail. It hurt me so much, I can’t forget. I will never forget. Maybe it hurt so much just for the purpose to tell this story.”
It was early in the morning, and my mom was in the backyard, working in her vegetable garden. We lived by a village called Mayanza, in Ruyigi Province, Burundi, where big-time farmers like my dad grew everything we ever wanted. We had uncountable fruit trees. We had cattle. The only things we bought in the store were clothes. Everything else we grew or raised.
In our culture, the eldest male child inherits the land from the father. My dad was the only son in his family, and all his family’s land went to him. Our house was one of the most beautiful homes in the area, with large glass windows and French doors. My dad had recently built it, and we had just moved in.
That morning, we kids were in our bedrooms when we heard a loud banging at the door. We ran to the window to see who was there so early in the morning. Some men who lived in the village were standing at the door covered in blood, holding machetes.
My dad calmly went to the door and greeted the men. “You need to take care of your wife,” they said. Those men could have easily rushed into the house and killed my mom, but because my father was Hutu and highly respected, they did not. Instead they said, “You need to kill your wife. Otherwise we will come back and kill your whole family.” We kids were at the window, listening, watching the entire thing.
With incredible composure, my dad said, “Yeah, for sure. I’ll take care of it.” And the men left to hunt for — to kill — more.
My dad closed
the door, turned back inside the house, grabbed me — I was the baby, four years old — and ran to the backyard. He pulled my mom out of the garden, and we started running. We did not even look back at the house. In a split second, my dad had decided that the most endangered people were my mom and me, the little one. Because they were older, my father believed that my brother and sisters would be okay. They hid in the house, and we ran, and ran, and ran. Our destination was the border of Tanzania, about thirty-five miles away. My father knew that if we could cross to Tanzania, we’d be safe. We didn’t have a car. We lived by a village, in the countryside; we didn’t need cars. The trip to the border took longer than usual because we couldn’t take a straight route. We zigzagged through the jungle in order to avoid where my dad thought the killers might be.
Throughout the day, we saw many people dead or dying. The rivers that we crossed, rivers that were once crystal-clear water, were now flowing red with blood. We were totally alone, terrified, thinking someone could catch us at any time. It was horrific.
Towards the end of the day, we made it to the border. There’s a big, deep river that divides Tanzania and Burundi. People at the river who had carved traditional canoes from the trunks of trees helped us cross. Once we crossed the river, we searched for a hiding spot. Monkeys were everywhere. It seemed as if they were following us. When we stopped at a pond to drink water, the monkeys in the trees threw things at us.
There was one moment I will never forget. We were walking in the bush and came face-to-face with a whole family of gorillas. My dad said that gorillas disrespected women. If they find a woman, they will either beat her or chase her away. They feared men, though. And then my father proved it. With his machete in his hand he called to them — ngoo, ngoo. Ngoo means “come.” The gorillas didn’t come. My father handed the machete to my mom and called again, ngoo, ngoo. They started coming closer and closer. They weren’t threatened by my mom. My father grabbed the machete and they ran away. That was crazy.
Soon thereafter, my father found a hiding place behind some bushes. There were a few other people hiding there as well. He left us and walked back home to get the rest of my siblings. By the end of the second day, we were all together again.
There was no food, no clean water, no beds, no bathrooms, and we still were not safe. There were rumors that the killers were following people even to the Tanzania side.
After a week or so, some of the people who were hiding with us got sick. We were afraid to come out to seek help. My mom became one of those people. To this day we don’t know what made her sick, because there was no doctor to diagnose anything. . . . Give me a minute. . . . That’s the moment that hits me the most. . . . I mean . . . I mean, it was bad . . . it was hard. I’m sorry. Growing up, I wasn’t as emotional about it as I am now. I was so young, I didn’t understand. Now I understand the loss better, and I know for sure the pain she must have been in. Though I was only four years old, I could see that she was not well. Ten minutes before she died, she assured me that she would be okay. I remember that conversation clearly. One minute she was talking to me, then ten minutes later she was gone. Yeah. We buried her in an unmarked grave nearby.
So many people lost their loved ones that day to that no-name illness. I wasn’t the only one. I lost my mom, and some people lost ten, five family members.
Once the U.N. discovered what happened in Burundi, they started searching for survivors. That’s how we were found. Out of nowhere, U.N. trucks arrived and began picking up survivors in the forest. We were saved. We were driven far, far away, hours and hours away; it seemed like hundreds of miles from Burundi, to a protected area in Tanzania that was set up by the U.N. The name of the camp was Mtendeli, Mtendeli Refugee Camp Tanzania.
In one word, the refugee camp sucked. It was brand-new, and new refugee camps suck. People think of new things as being good, but when it comes to a refugee camp, no. Not good. The U.N. had just taken charge of the area, and there was little time to break it in. There were no roads, no running water, no left, no right. We were brought to this nothing place in the middle of the jungle and given tents. Whole families, large families, lived in one tent. There were over seventy thousand families at this camp. Seventy thousand families, not people.
In the beginning, we just got the necessities, blankets and stuff like that. After one year, we had streets. A year after that, we had a hospital. Two years after that, we had schools. In three years, we had markets where people could exchange and buy things. Tanzanians came to the camp to exchange goods. The area had taken shape. We were organized. There was a sense of harmony. Five years after we arrived, churches were built. By that point, we were living in brick houses. We had youth centers where we kids could go and play games. Foreigners from Europe and the United States visited. They taught us new games. We were like a village.
Many people who lived in the camp had prior professions. Some had been teachers. Others, like my sister Veronica and her husband, Justin, had been doctors. The U.N. hired them to work in the refugee camp.
Veronica was twenty-seven at that time. She and Justin had just started their medical careers at a big, beautiful hospital in Burundi run by Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors Without Borders]. The camp hired both of them as doctors for the huge sum of eighteen dollars a month. And with that money, in that refugee camp, they could easily support us all.
The U.N. gave us food: rice, flour, beans, corn. We cooked at home. While my sister and her husband worked in the hospital, we took care of the house. Boys would do the physical things mostly. My brother Balthazar and I would go out in the bushes and gather firewood. We would gather water, drinking water and cooking water. The girls mostly would do the household chores and stuff.
A child is a child no matter where he lives. We lived in Block A, Second Street. In the evenings, the kids played tag and ran around, just like any other kids.
Two years after we moved into the camp, my dad was not doing well. He was still mourning his wife, our mom. Once he was this big-time farmer who could get anything he wanted, get any food he wanted. In the refugee camp, we ate the same food Monday through Sunday — morning, afternoon, and night. There were no options in a refugee camp; there was no future, and my dad was used to being his own man.
One day he told us, “I’m going back to Burundi. You kids stay here. It will be easier for me to dodge bullets and hide alone. I’m going to Burundi and live on my farm.” He knew that he would not be bothered, because he was Hutu. We kids could still be in danger because, remember, we are mixed Hutu and Tutsi.
When my dad left the camp, Veronica and Justin became like our parents. They saved the money they got working as camp doctors and were able to build a house with a roof and everything. The soil at the back of our tent was clay, so we made bricks to build the house. We put a large tent over the house for waterproofing, and we put palm leaves on the roof to cool it down. There were chairs — no sofas, obviously — but we made beds from branches and stuff. Every three or four years, the U.N. gave us new bedding.
We didn’t have a TV, but we knew about it. There were movie theaters in the community centers, but nothing that you can imagine. It was just a twenty-seven-inch TV in a room. Entertainment was an expensive luxury, and our family didn’t have the money to see these shows. When I was ten years old, my friends and I decided to make our own TV show. We built a little hut, put plastic on the window, added a candle behind the plastic, and played shadows for the other kids on the block. That was amazing. We began collecting payments, candies and things. The kids had a great time. We had a great time. We made up plays and designed characters. The most famous characters were the fighting heroes, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and those iconic Chinese kung fu movies that we saw at the community center. We would carve their pictures from empty cartons, put them on sticks, and play them like puppets.
We lived this life for thirteen years. I started first grade in that camp. Schools followed the Rwandan education system: primary school was from first to six
th grade, and secondary school was from seventh to twelfth grade. After twelfth grade, well, obviously we didn’t have universities there, but there was a kind of technical school. Although we were in Tanzania, we followed our own cultural heritage and were taught in French.
When I was in the fifth grade, groups from countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia started coming to the camp, looking for people to be resettled. We signed up for the U.S. and started the immigration process soon thereafter.
It was a long, long process. It took about five years to be vetted. First, they interviewed us individually, and then as a family; that is, everyone living in our house. We had to make a case about why we couldn’t go back to our birth country. “What happened to you? Why do you fear going back?” We had a strong case. It probably helped that we were of mixed heritage and that my sister and brother-in-law were doctors. We waited. And we waited.
In Burundi, secondary school is a big deal. It’s almost like a college degree. Not many people in my country get to go to college or university, so secondary school is important. We all take a special test the same day, same time. This is to avoid cheating or any other discrepancies. Probably this compared to the ACT [American College Testing] or SAT [Scholastic Aptitude Test] for high schools here.
When I reached sixth grade, I took the special test. I passed it with the highest score in the whole camp. (I guess I used to be smart.) I was so excited. I decided to go back to Burundi to tell my father that I was going to secondary school. I wanted him to know what I had accomplished. My friends helped me contact professional smugglers who would walk me to Burundi. It would take all night and all day to reach the border. Then it would be another six or seven hours to reach my town.
The Tanzanians had this bad habit of robbing the refugees who went outside the refugee camp. Once someone was away from the protected area, they became fair game. If you are caught outside the camp, they could do anything to you, including kill you. Even a kid five years old can stop you and say, like, “What’s your name? Where you from? Where are you going?” We heard about people burned alive. We had no voice in Tanzania. No power. You must be fearless or crazy to cross on foot to the area that leads to Burundi.