Read Bonnie Toews

In 1994, I was sent on a magazine assignment to report on the logistics of the largest humanitarian relief effort ever organized following the Rwandan genocide. The West finally felt guilty about ignoring this modern Holocaust. Because the gruesome slaughter occurred in Central Africa, it was largely ignored by the Clinton Administration. Only the Canadian UN force commander, Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, brought attention by disobeying UN orders, along with his Canadian and African contingency of UN peacekeepers, to abandon the victims.

In my interview notes, I rediscovered one of my first introductions to what happened. After Canadian air traffic controllers discovered an orphanage where the Hutus had hacked off the feet and hands of Tutsi children so they could not grow up to retaliate against them, they asked me, "How can we teach peace to children like these, who have every reason to grow up to hate those who crippled them?"

I did not physically go into the refugee camps set up in Goma, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), which bordered the north part of Rwanda on Lake Kivu. But I ended up listening to the horrors many of our Canadian peacekeepers witnessed. Sometimes I hugged them as they cried and wept with them for their pain. I saw the elegance, innocence and resilience of spirit that engaged Dallaire and those who refused to leave the victims to their fate. I also saw incredible leadership in the rebel leader, Paul Kagame, who drove the extremist Hutus out of Rwanda with minimal fighters and, in fact, saved the UN mission from total defeat and decimation. His rebel forces recaptured the Kigali International Airport so that UN reinforcements and humanitarian relief could be flown into the country. Today he has achieved the unthinkable. He has stitched together the country between those who inflicted death and the survivors and relatives of those who were murdered by issuing a proclamation that puts them side by side farming the land. In the aftermath, he has guided the Rwandans to independence and self-sufficiency. He has taught them to embrace forgiveness so they can live as a free nation. That is a feat the world needs to recognize.

Because of my experience in Rwanda, the plight of children in war circumstances will always play a part in my intrigue and suspense novels. Children are the powerless victims of an adult world gone mad. There is no justification for the slaughter and maiming of children. They are not responsible for the deeds of their parents or governments.

I hope you will bookmark my web sites below and follow along as each novel finds a publisher who believes in the story and me:
http://www.bonnietoews.com
http://bonnie-toews.blogspot.com