Author: Flora Drury / Source: BBC News
A quarter of a century after the Rwandan genocide, some orphans are still desperately searching for any clues about their lost pasts.
Oswald knows nothing about his life before the moment a young woman picked him out of the pile of bodies in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, as he tried to suckle a dead woman’s breast.
It is thought he was about two or three months old, but no one knows for sure.
What is certain is that he is one of many children robbed of their name, birthday, and history during the 100 days of violence which engulfed Rwanda, beginning on 7 April 25 years ago.
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And as the country marks the anniversary, Oswald and other young men and women just like him – found alone, too young to remember their lives before – will be scanning the crowds, wondering if their families may actually be standing among the survivors, instead of buried alongside the 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus slaughtered by ethnic Hutu extremists.
“Fifty per cent I think my parents are dead, 50% I think I can still find them,” Oswald says, displaying a hope which many may find surprising after all these years.
Oswald is among an estimated 95,000 children believed to have been orphaned during the genocide, which began hours after a plane carrying then-President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down, killing everyone on board.
Something missing
The Hutu woman who found him, Josephine, lost her husband during the genocide. He was killed by the extremists for trying to help Tutsis.
She, meanwhile, was raped by the Interhamwe soldiers – the militia who carried out many of the killings – and infected her with HIV.
Despite this, she found room not only for Oswald, but also other children, raising them as her own.
But as Oswald grew up, he began to feel something missing.
“I could see other children with fathers, and I started thinking about my own parents,” he told the BBC.
Trying to find out who you are when you have so little to go…
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