The child sat on a rock and smiled. The smile spread across his little face, dusted with the grey volcanic ash that coated everything in his desperate African playground.
Captivated by any hint of joy in that miserable place, I drew the smiling boy to the attention of my colleague, photographer Steven Siewert. At that moment, the child’s eyes rolled skywards. He toppled forward and lay inert in the dust.
Children in a refugee camp in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1994 at the time of the Rwandan genocide.Credit: Steven Siewert
Siewert called for help and a harried aid worker, an Irish-Australian nurse, came running.
“Dehydration. Starvation. Broken,” the nurse explained wearily as the child was carted off to a makeshift hospital in a tent, crowded with other children hovering between life and death.
Siewert’s photo of the smiling boy fallen in the dust has never been published. It seemed too terribly intimate. The smile had not been a smile at all. It was a contortion of the facial muscles, the sort of rictus that precedes a surrender of the spirit.
The child was among 30,000 children who had lost their parents, or become separated from them, as hundreds of thousands of Rwandans fled their tortured country across the border to what was then Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in the last days of Rwanda’s genocide of 1994.
Young Rwandans take part in a vigil on the first of 100 days of remembrance of the genocide on April 7, 2024, in Kigali. Credit: Getty Images
The memory crept back as history reminded us this week the genocide began 30 years ago, on April 7, 1994.
A picture of a lost and fallen child on a pitiless border at the tail-end of a killing binge wouldn’t have changed anything, of course.
Suffer the little children. It is ever the way, from Rwanda to Gaza
8
24
12.04.2024
The child sat on a rock and smiled. The smile spread across his little face, dusted with the grey volcanic ash that coated everything in his desperate African playground.
Captivated by any hint of joy in that miserable place, I drew the smiling boy to the attention of my colleague, photographer Steven Siewert. At that moment, the child’s eyes rolled skywards. He toppled forward and lay inert in the dust.
Children in a refugee camp in........
© The Sydney Morning Herald
visit website
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Andrew Mitrovica
Mort Laitner
Rami G Khouri
Ali Fathollah-Nejad
Nikkei Editorial
