THIS month, in a somewhat secretive ceremony, three Diggers were called to the Chief of Army’s office to be presented with a unique award. It was a statue of a soldier carrying a wounded boy. The award recognises acts of compassion and was being given for the first time.
For reasons best known to itself, the Army kept this event private. No media releases were issued, reporter inquiries were politely batted away.
What I can tell you is that the award was made in the presence of Owen Church and the statue is of his son, SAS Trooper Jon Church. Jon Church’s sister Sarah had also flown in from New Zealand. The boy Jon Church was carrying was one of many he saved, under gunfire, during one of the most appalling episodes ever endured by Australian soldiers.
Twenty years ago this month, a small group of Australian troops — initially, just 32 of them — witnessed the massacre of thousands of civilians on a hillside in Rwanda. The place was Kibeho. Unlike Gallipoli, there will be no stirring words reflecting on what happened. No bugles will play. No children will labour through school projects. Kibeho will remain unknown by the Australian community despite its unique horrors and the courage displayed by those who were there.
In the four days of the massacre, the tiny band of Australians acted with such courage four of them were later awarded the Medal for Gallantry, a bravery award second only to the Victoria Cross.
Among the recipients was Dr Carol Vaughn-Evans, the head of a medical team which saved hundreds of lives. That we know so little of these events is partly due to the horrors that make description almost impossible.
It is also partly due to the official cover-up of what took place.
So here goes. In 1994, soldiers, militias and criminal gangs aligned with the majority Hutu population of Rwanda unleashed a genocide against the Tutsi minority. On some estimates, up to one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed. By early 1995, a Tutsi army, the RPA, had successfully retaken the country. Many Hutu refugees, including those complicit in the genocide, had fled across Rwanda’s many borders or were sheltering in camps under UN oversight.
The UN chief in Rwanda described the Australians as “heroic … superb”
The largest of these camps was at Kibeho. In April 1995, the RPA moved to clear the camp, crowded with at least 100,000 people. Hutu militiamen, fearing they would be exposed if the camp was cleared, began slaughtering their own people to discourage the survivors from leaving.
Added to that carnage, from April 19, the RPA began shooting indiscriminately into the crowd.
The Australian troops were barred by the UN Rules of Engagement from using their weapons to defend the men, women and children being slaughtered.
So they did what they could to save the wounded. Repeatedly they ventured out, with gunfire all around them, to bring in those still living.
On one of those missions, the war artist George Gittoes took the photograph of Jon Church carrying in the wounded boy.
There were many acts of courage.
Gittoes said Australian troops repeatedly put themselves between RPA soldiers and people they were trying to kill, saving them from certain death.
In 1995 the Australian Army was effectively a peacetime force.
As Trooper Church’s SAS colleague Paul Jordan noted “most of the infantry had never seen a dead person before”.
Now they were wading through slaughtered children, and trying, with scant resources, to save people with appalling wounds.
Jordan remembers one woman whose face and lower jaw, from the bridge of the nose down, had been sliced away.
“She just sat there and looked at us with desperate eyes,” he said.
In the aftermath of the massacre, Australian troops strode out with pace-counters in their hands, counting bodies. They reached 4000 and believe they covered less than half the killing field. The Rwandan government, embarrassed, insisted only 300 had died, and they at the hands of the Hutu militiamen or in panicked stampedes.
The UN chief in Rwanda, Shahryar Khan, described the Australians as “heroic … superb’’.
But he also assisted in the cover-up. Australian troops were forced to amend their casualty numbers down to 2000. The UN insisted it was lower. Jon Church died the following year in an SAS Black Hawk helicopter crash during training near Townsville.
Most of the rest of the Australian witnesses to Kibeho are still alive. Many suffered deep psychological impacts from that experience.
In this month, when we rightly commemorate the valour of men long dead at Gallipoli, let us also remember those still with us, still suffering from their service amid the deceptive green hills of a small African nation ... Rwanda.