Former sports journalist Jules Karangwa has revealed that he carries "a wound that will probably never heal" as long as his family still struggles to find the remains of his father who was killed during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi so he can be granted decent burial.
Genocide happened when Karangwa was one-year old. He, his two brothers and his mother were lucky to survive but his father Theoneste Karangwa was killed on April 7, 1994 when the Genocide started in their home town of Kamembe in former Cyangugu prefecture, now in Rusizi District.
A top businessman in Cyangugu at the time, Karangwa Sr was always busy with his business, which required him to travel so often. He rarely stayed at home, his son recalled.
But the Genocide started when he was at home although he knew that he was one of the Tutsis in the area who had long been identified as early targets the moment killings began.
He had been incarcerated on charges of being a ringleader of alleged RPF accomplices in the area.
Some people had alerted him that he was being hunted and offered to help him flee to neighbouring DR Congo (then Zaire) but he refused saying he couldn't leave his family behind.
One morning of April 7, a neighbour went to their house and convinced Karangwa Sr to go and hide at the former's home because he was on the list of people identified for murder. That was the last time Jules and his family saw him.
"The idea was to trick him to have him killed by the people who were waiting for him at the neighbour’s house,” Karangwa said in an interview with local YouTube channel Isimbi TV.
After the death of his father, Jules and his family fled to Huye, then to Kigali before they returned to their home town in Kamembe after the Genocide.
His mother, who became a widow at a young age, chose not to marry another man and focused on raising Jules and his two siblings.
The father of one is the Head of Competition and Legal Advisor at local football governing body Ferwafa, having previously worked as a sports journalist with Radio Salus and Radio TV 10.
The 30-year-old said he has done everything he could to overcome what he and his family went through during the Genocide and move on.
But the one thing that still breaks his heart is that he couldn’t find the remains of his father so the family could accord him a decent burial.
"I said to myself ‘okay, fine, he was killed during the Genocide, he was killed because he was Tutsi...actually I’ve got to know the history [of what we went through]. But where is his body so that we at least bury it?” he said.
"As a child who was aged just one year when he was killed, I would feel like I met him if I had a chance to bury his remains,” he said.
Karangwa has a photo of his father hanging in his living room and his family holds a ceremony to remember him every April 7.
He said it hurts him when his three-year-old son asks him about a father he has never known.
"When a kid asks you such a question that you don’t even have an answer to, you really cry inside but you have to hide it,” he said.
"He’s asking you who his grandfather is yet you don’t even know him...and you have to answer his question because you can’t say that you don’t know him,” he added.
Jules said he and his family are still searching for the remains of his father which they sometimes suspect could be one of the bodies of the Tutsi that the Interahamwe militia threw into Lake Kivu after killing them.