42" x 48"

R2: Rwanda

I was equally appalled and fixated as I read about the genocide in Rwanda in 1994-95 that claimed 800,000 to a million lives. This is a portrait of Monique Mujawamariya, a prominent human rights activist and a targeted figure when the genocide first began. She escaped capture by hiding in the rafters of her house. Later, she went to the U.S. where she unsuccessfully lobbied the United Nations, the White House and the State Department to intervene; Rwanda, and its problems, was judged to be outside America's national interests. 

She gave an interview at the Hague in 2014, at which time she said the following:

"I realized someone who comes from a poor country has no rights from the point of view of humanity, of society, of the international community, because all the interventions, all the hopes of aid were based on (national) interests, not on human compassion. As human beings, we (Rwandans) are not worth much, because we have under our soil no great wealth that the great powers covet, so we do not have commercial value. Human compassion has been replaced by commercial value and Rwanda was abandoned because the country had no commercial value."

A detail: her face is disfigured by scars from an automobile accident she claimed had been an attempt on her life.