The Salt of the Earth Page #5

de India, Vietnam, Filipinas,

South America, Palestine, Iraq

and many other places.

But Sebastiao returned again and again to the continent

I had captivated his imagination for some time already.

A frica.

I was doing my project on population movements

in 1994, when the Rwandan president's plane

He was killed.

It all started with a great movement of population to Tanzania

due to the brutal repression against the Tutsis in Rwanda.

And I was one of the first to arrive.

It was a catastrophe.

People who fled to Burundi,

al Congo, a Uganda...

They fled to everywhere.

The streets were full of people.

People resting on the side of the road,

he carried all their belongings on bicycles ...

People who fled with what they could.

We follow the path in the opposite direction.

We went to the border.

There was no security, no nothing.

I came to Rwanda and that was frightening.

The death toll I met on these roads.

It had broken Granada.

Those who were not killed by the Granada were killed with machetes.

I understood the magnitude

the catastrophe he was seeing.

Genocide was committed in that country.

Were about 150 kilometers to the outskirts of Kigali,

and 150 kilometers of dead.

I returned because my story was about you people.

He was writing a book on refugees, on the exodus.

I went into these camps

and I began to see

the number of people who left Rwanda.

Hell settled in this paradise.

It was frightening

see how in such a beautiful savanna

He had formed a megacity.

Within days, there were almost a million people there.

Amid all this anguish, something touched me very much.

It was seeing this mother with her little,

and little confidence in her mother.

Violence

and brutality

they are not a monopoly

of distant countries.

It is here, in Europe, in the former Yugoslavia.

It's very shocking.

On a bus coming from Krajina, Croatia across ...

One person was killed through that hole.

Croats killed many people to leave Krajina.

Violence is widespread.

What I dislike most

It is to see how much hatred is contagious.

These people have seen violence.

Entire families.

All Krajina Serb population was expelled.

From time to time they were driven from their homes

looking for a place where to go.

They had their neighbors in front and shooting at them.

This is a refugee camp near Tuzla,

en la Bosnia central.

They are families fleeing the enclave of Zepa,

where Serbs killed thousands of young people.

We were there at the right time. Just as families arrived

in a state of high anxiety.

There were only women, elderly

and children.

The young men had been detained or killed.

It is rare that this happens in Europe,

the late twentieth century.

But here, the cars,

we can see that those people with a standard of living

a European standard of living,

with a European intellectual level.

A European infrastructure.

And who lost everything.

Hundreds of kilometers filled with people and cars.

We are a very fierce animal.

We are a terrible animal, we humans.

It is here in Europe, whether in Africa, Latin America, wherever.

Our violence is extreme.

Our history is a history of wars.

It is a story without end,

a history of repression,

crazy story.

The situation in Rwanda continued to evolve.

The Hutu army, which had the power, was defeated.

And he retired to the Congo and the region of Goma.

First, the Tutsis had fled the barbarity of the Hutus.

Then they were Hutus

those fleeing Tutsi occupation.

So they all fled.

In several days,

in the month of July 1994

Goma region

He welcomed more than two million people.

And there catastrophe was installed,

diseases such as cholera began to spread

and people started dropping like flies.

There were at least 12,000 or 15,000 deaths a day.

I took pictures of piles of dead like this.

I saw that father approached with his child,

and throw it there.

He was chatting with fellow like that.

We did not give supply to bury people.

Machine brought a French army

and caught galore, dozens,

They threw them on the ground

and covered with soil.

Everyone should see these images,

to see how terrible it is our species.

These orphans, I found them on the road ...

Of these three children

the two with the most lively eyes will survive.

The eyes of the morbid, he was dying.

When I left there, I was sick.

Very sick. My body was sick.

It was not an infectious disease,

my soul was sick.

I went to Rwanda a year after the disaster

for the return of Hutus, who were in the Congo

and they had nowhere to go.

The United Nations began to force them to return.

We felt that the whole planet was covered in refugee tents.

After working there,

Tutsi authorities proposed visit me

several places, scenes of repression.

People took refuge in a church thinking that could be saved.

All were killed.

This was at a school,

You can still see the blackboard with written when passing through.

it was scary.

Of people who left Rwanda, some two million people,

some returned to Rwanda,

but the other feared a possible crackdown.

A group of 250,000 people left the city of Goma

and he went into the Congo forest.

We lost.

Everyone knew they were lost 250,000 people.

We did not know where they were.

Six months later,

They began to appear Kisangani in central Congo.

They were in the forest for six months.

And here, the UN High Commissioner was taking me right there.

There was a train and rode me.

The train, after leaving the food, he should return.

I spent three days with these people kept coming.

Groups and groups of people coming.

But when you think about 250,000 people left,

and 40,000 returnees ...

210,000 people were missing.

And in parallel, life continued.

Men who cut hair.

And this Congolese here,

with his calculator

dollars trying to collect people,

currencies, and it was there trying to change them.

In the middle of nowhere! Amid a forest isolated from everything.

At one point,

that the guerrillas Kisangani, which was protutsi,

and he began to cast these people.

To send them back.

They had to walk another six months to return to Rwanda.

They began to kill some.

There, I met people who could not more.

They had begun to rave,

They had lost his mind.

They had gone mad.

In fact, this people who were expelled,

We have not heard anything.

I'm sure they were all killed.

This was my last trip, this sad adventure in Rwanda.

I went there.

He does not believe in anything. He did not believe in the salvation of the human race.

We could not survive that.

We did not deserve to live anymore.

No one deserved to live.

How many times I threw the camera down to mourn for what he saw?

Sebastiao had peered into the heart of darkness

and he questioned his work as a social photographer

and witness to the human condition.

What remained to be done after Rwanda?

At that time, my grandfather's health worsened.

My parents had to return to Brazil to take over the farm.

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