Holocaust Memorial Day

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Thursday 25th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

What an honour and privilege it is to follow the right hon. and gallant Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart). I know he takes this opportunity every year to remind us that the kind of barbarity he saw is ever present in our world and that the only thing to do is to try to bring attention to it and to stop it from happening again. I am truly grateful to him for his personal testimony. I also thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge). What a privilege it was to listen to her speech, too. I am so grateful to her for talking to us about her experiences and the lessons that she and we must draw from them. There was so much she said that was absolutely spot on, and she is absolutely spot on that the language we use today truly matters.

I join colleagues in expressing my gratitude to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Holocaust Educational Trust for the amazing, extraordinary and dedicated work they do. At a time when hatred and mistrust are surging, this work is more important than ever. When I reflect on the holocaust, I simply marvel with horror at how ordinary people could herd children, toddlers, babes in arms, women, elderly people and the infirm into a gas chamber to kill them: the industrial slaughter of human beings. They were vulnerable human beings, including tots, who, in the normal course of the world, we would do our utmost to protect, whether they were ours or not. I just fail to comprehend what made ordinary people act in that way, and I fail to comprehend the scale and depravity of the holocaust.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, so if hon. Members will allow, I shall give a voice to the testimony of Daphrosa, one of the survivors of that atrocity, and put it on the parliamentary record. Before the genocide, Daphrosa lived with her husband and five children. Her husband had a good job as a customs officer, and she had opened her own business, running a bar from the side of their home. They were happy. Her husband would always come home with presents for the children, and they would go out together to the lake—they had fun. They weren’t rich, but they were happy.

For years before the genocide, though, hatred and suspicion—words—had been growing, fuelled by divisive politicians and media incitement. Daphrosa heard the rumours being spread and rumours that her husband was a supporter of the rebels. Discrimination and segregation started to take hold, with shops refusing to serve Tutsis and even some churches refusing to offer the Eucharist to Tutsis. Her husband was scared, but even when trouble was being stirred up in the years before 1994, Daphrosa felt protected. Her Hutu neighbours sometimes drank at her bar, ate her praised chicken and called her grandma. Daphrosa’s Hutu housekeeper promised to protect her. But prejudice against Tutsi people was strong, and the dehumanising bile spread over the radio was powerful enough to turn those same neighbours into killers, rapists and torturers.

When the genocide began, Daphrosa tried to continue with her normal life. On the third day of the genocide, she and her children fled, but her husband was captured and beaten, and she was forced to return home. Her injured husband was sat in a chair in the living room. Daphrosa and her daughters were forced to take off their clothes. The housekeeper who had promised to protect them was the first to take part in their rape.

Daphrosa’s eldest son was called Allan. She remembers him as the model child, clever, with a great future in front of him. Allan tried to stop the rape, but the men beat and slashed him until he died and then threw him behind the chair. They raped Daphrosa and then her daughters. They slashed her breast and they mutilated her. Her husband was forced to watch the nightmare, terribly injured from blows with hammers and nailed clubs. He did not die until the next day.

On the third day of their torment, the militia brought a community officer with them. She took away the children, supposedly for protection, but Daphrosa heard the men joking that the girls would soon become their wives. Daphrosa was left in a home that had become a living hell, with the corpses of her husband and her son. Neighbours coming to the house to loot it simply ignored her plight, stepping over her and even stepping on her.

Miraculously, Daphrosa’s four younger children survived. The two youngest, Innocente and Eric, were taken in and hidden by a neighbour after being removed from the house. The older girls, Aline and Tina, were found alive in the capital Kigali after the war. However, as we know, survival does not mean an end to suffering. Daphrosa, Aline and Tina all fell pregnant as a result of the rape they were subjected to, and they were infected with HIV at a time when medicine was extremely scarce.

Aline’s own testimony tells how she was raped countless times after being taken away from her mother and their home. Not only that, but, after their return, as the only surviving Tutsis from their village, Aline endured further torment from the taunts of neighbours, who spread rumours about how she had been infected. At the time of the genocide, Aline was 14 years old. When she told her story years later, at the age of 25, she was living in despair while her rapists now lived happily with families and children. In her words:

“I have no future. I have no life...”

To be honest, I struggle to imagine how anybody could endure such trauma, and cope with the mental and physical scars of that ordeal. As we know, so many others endured these same terrible experiences, and as many as 1 million Rwandans were murdered in less than 100 days. The scale is truly shocking.

There are many appalling echoes of the holocaust in what was done to Daphrosa, her family and the hundreds of thousands of others. Of course there are differences, but, like the holocaust, the Rwandan genocide was built on decades of institutionalised racism. Like the holocaust, it was fuelled by dehumanising propaganda. Like the holocaust, it was organised and systematic in its brutality and, like the holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda was perpetrated, collaborated with—and resisted by—ordinary people: ordinary people such as Daphrosa’s neighbours who saw what was happening and made horrifying choices about how to respond.

Unlike the holocaust, the Rwandan genocide happened in most of our lifetimes, just 30 years ago. “Never again” rang hollow in 1994. In truth, I fear it rings hollow again today.