MONTREAL — Rwandan genocide survivor Rupert Bazambanza, left, went home last week for the first time since coming to Canada 12 years ago.

But his homeland of Rwanda is far removed from the country where a genocide took place in 1994.

The soft-spoken 34-year-old artist continues to bear witness to the 100-day slaughter, in which almost one million Tutsis were killed, with his artwork.

It was in 1994 that Bazambanza, then age 22, literally overnight, saw lifelong friends wield machetes against neighbours they had known all their lives, producing a horrifying bloodbath.

One of the victims was Bazambanza’s father, Pierre, himself a witness to a previous genocide against Rwanda’s Tutsis perpetrated in 1959, although his five siblings and his mother, Agnès, all miraculously survived.

Bazambanza returned last week to the Rwandan capital, Kigali, to participate in a Gathering of Forgiveness conference, which aims to foster reconciliation and healing. The conference was organized by Rwandan entertainer Jean-Paul Samputu and MIZERO – which means “hope” in the Rwandan language – and was timed to coincide with the 15th anniversary of the genocide.

Bazambanza’s trip was sponsored by the Ruth and Alex Dworkin Foundation of Canadian Jewish Congress, Quebec region (CJC), which, with Bazambanza, has found common cause in fighting the intolerance, hate and dehumanization of the other that have so often lead to mass slaughter.

CJC first came into contact with Bazambanza at a conference on genocide five years ago years at the Old Port.

The foundation has also helped fund an art tour that Bazambanza made through Quebec last year to promote tolerance and to show his widely hailed book, Sourire Malgré Tout.

The book, recently translated into English as Smile Through the Tears, chronicles in stark, comic-book fashion the story of a six-member family, the Rwangas, who were close friends and neighbours of the Bazambanzas in Rwanda. The Rwanga family’s mother, Rose, was the sole survivor of the genocide.

For Bazambanza, creating his book  served as an important personal and emotional catharsis, a form of salvation that liberated him psychologically to embrace life again and bear witness. Other Rwandans he knows – three friends who came to Canada with him – have gone mad from the memories, he said.

“I also say ‘never again’ – plus jamais,” he said in a French-language interview before he left for Rwanda. “The Jewish community has been a community that has understood me. They understood what it is like to be victims.”

Bazambanza was at once thrilled to be returning to his homeland, where a sibling still resides, but also fully aware of how emotional such a return would be, as he treads the very same terrain once soaked with so much blood.

Yet he bears no actual hate or feelings of revenge toward the perpetrators, whom he refers to as “les génocideurs,” since it was not, as many believe, solely the Hutus who murdered.

“What happened is that after the genocide, victims and perpetrators still lived together,” he said. “In a sense, it is important to punish those responsible, but in another sense, it is impossible to punish, because they will never be identified.”

In returning to Rwanda, Bazambanza anticipated “seeing things that remind me [of the genocide],” a prospect that disconcerted him because in Canada, at least, he was geographically distant from the haunting memories.

“Those are the only things that frighten me right now,” he said.

But at the same time, he hoped to “rediscover” the homeland he has not seen for so long. It was on this very land that he and his family searched and found the mass grave containing his father, disinterred him, and buried him with a proper service.

For Bazambanza, one of the great ironies of the Rwanda tragedy was that United Nations forces, under the control of Lt.-Gen. Roméo Dallaire, inadvertently facilitated the genocide by housing the Tutsis together in camps where they could easily be found.

“Before that, there were no ghettos like there were in the Holocaust,” Bazambanza said. Unwittingly, the United Nations “helped the task of the killers.”

He remembers that the true emotional trauma for him personally did not actually begin until the threat to his life subsided. “That’s when you realized what really happened,” he said.

Bazambanza, who has been drawing since the age of four, said that as an illustrator, he has found that the Rwanda tragedy has served as a continuing source for his art and activism. One depiction he rendered shows a ship called the Tutsianic – like the Titanic – foundering in the ocean.

Bazambanza is now working on a second book, also in comic-book form, tentatively titled Trauma, focusing on the psychological toll of Rwanda’s genocide survivors.

“Canada accepted us, but there is no real therapy to follow [for us],” Bazambanza said, adding that he is hoping to launch a foundation – called Sous la Même étoile (Under the Same Star) – to support Rwandan genocide survivors in Canada.

“It is because whatever happens on the ground, the stars do not change,” he said. “It’s so they can see the stars.”