INTERVIEW | Prevent Killing by Getting to Know ‘The Other’
May 2011 | Archive | Carl Wilkens, interviewed by Daniel J. Gerstle, edited by Sue Rissberger
Image: MONUC peacekeepers secure an area. Marie Frechon | United Nations Photo.
Humanitarian Bazaar Magazine (formerly HELO)
HELO just caught up with the unstoppable Carl Wilkens as he waits to board a plane in Minnesota. Carl was one of the only expatriate witnesses to the Rwandan genocide while he was there doing aid work for the Adventist Development and Relief Agency in 1994. Since then he co-founded WorldOutsideMyShoes.org, which works to encourage the public to get to know people across cultural boundaries as a means of building peace. This interview is a transcipt from HELO’s new audio-podcast show, The Crisis Zone Cafe [not currently avalailable].
HELO: Thank you, Carl, for joining HELO Magazine.
Carl Wilkens: Hi, it’s good to be with you.
HELO: Sounds like you’re in an airport on your national tour.
CW: I’m just here in Minnesota right now, Minneapolis. I do spend a lot of time in airports. But more time in the classroom and on college campuses.
HELO: Can you talk about WorldOutsideMyShoes.org and what you’re aiming to achieve?
CW: After the Rwandan genocide, I came back. My wife and I, we spent a year and a half in Rwanda. After the genocide we moved back to the states with our children and I wasn’t really involved in activism for quite a few years until 2003 when I had the opportunity to work with Greg Barker and the documentary, Ghosts of Rwanda. It was aired on PBS and school teachers, when the documentary came out, just started randomly emailing me, searching on the web and finding me and asking me if I would talk to their students.
I was really drawn into this work by school teachers for whom I have tons of respect. I really feel like they are the ones who probably have the largest impact in our country in terms of helping to shape and direct and open the doors of opportunity for young activists to get involved not only in preventing genocide but in building peace, as well.
Since 2004, I’ve been traveling around the country. But since 2008, I’ve been traveling full-time to high schools and universities sharing the stories of the Rwandan genocide. We’ve got to know about what’s happening and it’s just amazing how many people still don’t know about these tragedies that’ve happened during our lifetime.
But it’s more than simply informing people. Once we’re informed we’ve got to find a way to respond. Otherwise, I often say I’ve left someone worse than when I’ve found them if I’ve just simply informed them and I haven’t given them tools to be able to respond to that very hard information.
I had the opportunity last January to make a brief visit to the Congo. I visited a fancy hospital where they’re working so hard to try to literally, repair the women, who had been attacked. I’m sure many people understand a little bit. Well, understand probably isn’t a good word but at least I’ve been informed on how the women are being targeted in the Congo with the whole world just ravenous for the minerals of the Congo for our cell phones and laptops and other electronics.
It’s not just the ripping of the materials out of that country but it’s leaving ravaged lives behind, especially the women being targeted. It’s like in order to keep it chaotic, and to keep it accessible to the exploitation and to not have to leave anything behind for the people.
The Congo should be full of teaching hospitals and agricultural research stations and all kinds of wonderful things, if they were just able to have a fraction of what’s being pulled out of their country and if they could have just a little bit of security. And with the women being especially targeted many of them taken into slavery and don’t survive but the very few who do actually escape and don’t get recaptured die a slow death.
A few are so damaged internally from the way they have been ravaged, raped, and violated that they’re now leaking urine and so this fancy hospital we’re visiting is not only about the physical repair of these ladies but also the emotional repair and the social repair.
Stories of Rwanda and stories from the Congo, it obviously grabs us. It grabs our heart, it grabs our mind. And the question then is, how do we respond? For me, the first tool I always present and hope that I can leave with people in terms of how to respond is about building relationships. We often focus on responding in terms of fundraising which is really important and in terms of advocating which is also hugely important on a political level as well as around our own community level.
But in addition to the fundraising and the advocating and the awareness raising, we’re taking advantage of the opportunity to build relationships with people who are different from us. And often that can take the form of refugees who have moved into our community but even more than that anyone we perceive as different from ourselves. Because I think, to really end genocide we’ve got to attack this insider/outsider mentality.
For me, genocide is all about identity. And one identity feeling more superior or more entitled than another identity, and for us to really understand how much we share in common with all the different groups however we might define them, we’ve got to build relationships. We’ve got to become friends.
We’ve got to work together with people who we consider different from us and not always just racially or religiously or economically. There’s just so many different ways we divide people. I hope after a presentation and story telling, that people will be inspired. If we’re going to end genocide it’s got to come with building relationships.
HELO: Many of our audience are actually humanitarian aid workers or rights advocates who have worked in the field or are working in the field. There are also a lot of people who are war journalists or grad students or just concerned global citizens.
But for the people who have had frontline experience in crisis zones it sounds refreshing to know that you were already living in Rwanda and working with the Adventist Development and Relief Agency when you were learning about the realities of how mass killings happen, and that informs how you recommend what tools people can use.
But a lot of us who got into this kind of work, see the reality on the ground, about how this incredible movement of humanity, thousands, tens of thousands of people caring about Darfur for example, or Congo, and yet so little of that energy makes it to the frontline areas – to the local community that’s affected.
It’s not so easy through activism to change the person on the frontline who is about to join a militia, for example. It’s easy to build solidarity with people who are alreadypeace-minded like teachers and pacifists. But to woo someone who’s trying to join a militia, or part of a militia, or leading a militia, is a completely different thing.
CW: A lot of times in this kind of work, we want immediate results. I think we’ve got to lobby and push for that. But like what happened in Ivory Coast, and what was happening in Libya, I think we’ve also got to have local support for what we’re looking for. And there was some of that with the Ivory Coast eventually, and even with the League of Arab Nations, talking about how we can partner and get involved.
For me, I really don’t have much experience and knowledge in terms of that kind of, bringing in immediate military response. I’d be happy to talk with you about the false sense of security that the military provided through the UN. Or the UN provided that false sense of security and how it actually made things worse for the people of Rwanda, and how it helped the planners of the genocide but I’m not sure that’s within the scope of this discussion.
But what I would like to mention, when we do have people come together, by the hundreds or by the thousands, in a rally, there is that level of excitement. You know, we’re going to end this. We obviously have to understand that there are no quick solutions.
Hopefully there can be quick band aids in terms of stopping the immediate killing. But if all of our activism is only about band aide stuff, I’m sure as many of your readers and listeners understand, we get really fatigued with the band aid approach.
What I believe though is we kind of have to keep in the mix there is that even though at times it looks like a band aid approach is a big rally and there’s not a lot of help coming to the ground, that the people who are involved in that are on a journey and hopefully that journey is helping them in the long-term to learn and to look for longer term solutions.
So I’m not just looking, but I’m hoping for immediate solutions on the ground, obviously, because we’ve got to stop the suffering, but I’ve also got to step back.
We had a thousand people gathered together and it looks like we had very little result immediately after that, but hopefully those people who are involved with that, they’ll not only find more effective ways, but they’ll understand that when we do something like a rally, or we make a phone call to Washington D.C. we use this 1-800-genocide number and we call our representative or our separate senator, it’s more than just that phone call, it’s about developing within ourselves, a habit of responding.
I guess I could say that it’s not only important to make that phone call, to push for that initiative in Congress but it’s also important to just simply respond. Obviously we’re not just going to blind respond, or keep responding in the same way and getting bad results, but developing an attitude, a consciousness, a culture of responding, I think is something that’s really, really important.
HELO: Debra Scranton, along with her producing partner, Reed Carolin, just premiered a documentary about Rwanda which totally hits on all these topics. It’s called, Earth Made of Glass. They found a man who lost his whole family in the Rwandan genocide and he really had his mindset on finding out what happened to his father. So they brought their cameras and they followed him and his life as he kept returning to the area where he believed his father was killed trying to find out who it was who had done it, or who had seen how it had happened.
He brings his son along so he doesn’t do it in a way of trying to seek revenge but in a way of just trying to find truth. The amazing thing about it is that on his own, he couldn’t get any information. People were nice to him because they just didn’t want to talk about it. Eventually, some kids, maybe who didn’t have the same type of defense mechanisms, shared with him what they overheard at the Gacaca Community hearings set up for truth-seeking in the absence of justice.
They had overheard people talking about how the roadblock nearby had played a role in the killings. They’d overheard someone talking about the specific person killed, and that led the man, and the camera crew, to one of the accomplices. It’s really incredible they caught it on film. In one way, it reinforces what you’re saying about building relationships. Someone can’t do it on their own.
CW: Exactly.
HELO: Do you want to share a little bit about the book that’s coming out?
CW: Sure. During the genocide I was fortunate enough to have radio conversations with my wife every single day. She’s incredible and her story just amazes me. Her strength and her support I can never fully communicate. Not only how much it meant to me but how much it meant to our children, but the difference she made all around in this.
People usually focus on me, the person who stayed in Rwanda, but she took the kids first to Burundi and then because of instability had to go to Nairobi, which she just wouldn’t go any further than she had to. But in addition to talking to her on the radio, I made cassette tapes to her and the children because I didn’t know if I would live and survive this ordeal.
Each time I recorded the cassette tape I would write the address in Spokane, Washington, in hopes that if I didn’t survive and the house was looted that some kind person would pick up the tapes and send them to their destination. Fortunately, I did survive and I’m very excited to have finally gotten this book finished in May and am actually printing up the first copies from the printer here in Buffalo.
My goal with the book is not to really tell the story of the Rwandan genocide because obviously no book or documentary could ever adequately do that but all each one of us can do, especially those who were there is simply tell the stories from the angle, from the perspective that we saw them from.
And so the book is full of stories of people who stood up against the genocide and people who sometimes sacrifice their life, people who didn’t always have to sacrifice their life but took risks to stand up for others and even some information about people who were taking lives, and some colonel I worked closely with during the genocide who was eventually convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity.
HELO: Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking time off during your busy travels.
CW: Good to talk with you.