Lindsey Hilsum recalls taking woman and children’s last words in Rwanda genocide
Journalist Lindsey Hilsum has recalled taking down the last words of a woman and her children who knew “they were going to die” in the Rwanda genocide in 1994.
The 66-year-old said she had received calls from friends in the African country, where she had been living and working for two months previously, asking if she could save them, while speaking to Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.
She said: “I knew that it would be bad, and I knew that there would be killings, and I understood that it would not be a good idea to drive out by myself through the dark, and in fact, I didn’t go out for a couple of days.
“My phone never stopped ringing because, of course, I’d been living there for two months, and so I knew quite a lot of Rwandans, and they started to ring me to tell me that they were going to be killed, and could I come and save them?
“It was very difficult because I couldn’t, and so I took down Monica’s last words, her husband Marcel was away, and she wanted me to give them to him and to her children, her four children.
“In fact, Monica survived, but the four children were killed, so those were very difficult days.”
The genocide took place between April 7 and July 19 that year, and saw about 800,000 people killed by Hutu militias.
Hilsum, who is international editor of Channel 4 News, went on to say that when she eventually did leave her home she impersonated a Red Cross worker to see what was happening, something she called “a war crime”.
On the show, the journalist picked Bob Dylan’s Hurricane, which she said told the story of boxer Rubin Carter’s false imprisonment “better than (journalists) ever could”, Big Brother And The Holding Company’s Piece Of My Heart, and Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing In The Dark.
When asked by Laverne if she had ever seen Springsteen live, Hilsum replied: “I’ve seen him a couple of times, and once I missed a coup in Egypt because I had tickets for Springsteen and you know what, it was the right decision.”
As a reporter Hilsum has covered major conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Kosovo, Rwanda and Ukraine, and wrote the books Sandstorm: Libya In The Time Of Revolution (2012) and In Extremis: The Life And Death Of The War Correspondent Marie Colvin (2018).
