Well, I don’t know the story. But I suspect that a bunch of thugs came to the nunnery and similar places, surrounded it, and simply took everyone away. In other words, not much the nuns could do. Too late to hide anyone.
That’s just speculation, but it’s awfully easy for someone sitting in a comfortable civilized armchair to criticize people who are suddenly confronted with this sort of barbarity.
I guess the nun could have volunteered to die with the girls, but that wouldn’t have done them much good.
And of course it’s always possible that there were a few bad apples who really did betray their charges, who otherwise would have escaped. But I doubt it was common.
I recommend Romeo Dallaire’s book “Shake Hands with the Devil”.
Most of us here have little respect for the UN to begin with, but even so I was shocked at the UN’s utter fecklessness in the face of the massacre. Dallaire believes in the UN and its mission, and seeing the UN’s uselessness through his naive eyes just makes it even more shocking.
There is plenty of shame to go around. The French provide training and weapons including machetes to the Hutu milia. After the genocide burned itself out the French troops intervened to cover the hutu retreat.
Belgian troops at one point abandoned 2000 refugees under their protection to the mob. The refugees were dead within minutes of the Belgian withdrawal.
Mobs went into churches, orphanages, schools, and killed everyone there. Hutu clergymen in several famous cases joined the mobs but other foreign clergy stayed through the madness and did what they could. Tutsi clergy were killed instantly just like every other tutsi.
In the end it wasn’t the UN that did anthing at all to solve the problem, it was the Tutsi guerrilla army that drove the Hutus out of the country... despite French intervention to cover their retreat. Shameful. There were no troops to spare to help Dallaire stop the killing, but there were troops available to save the killers from retribution. In the end it was an armed citizenry that ended the hutu slaughter. The UN, the foreign troops did little other than be witnesses to it. And, in the case of the French, actively help the baddies.