WINNIPEG — In the Nazi worldview, it was a crime, punishable by death, to be Jewish. In the 1994 Rwandan genocide, being a Tutsi was a death sentence.

However, some Tutsis survived because of their short stature. The Hutu militia often determined if someone was a Tutsi, who tend to be tall, by his or her height.

“Twelve times, my mother was taken to the site of a mass grave to be murdered,” said Eloge Christian Butera, a Tutsi who spoke to a full house at Winnipeg’s Asper Jewish Community Campus on Jan. 8.

“Each time, she was spared because the murderers thought that she was too short to be a Tutsi.”

Butera is one of the lucky ones. Not only did he survive the Rwandan genocide in 1994, which claimed close to one million, mainly Tutsi victims, but most of his immediate family, with the exception of his father, also survived.

The McGill University second-year law student was the keynote speaker at “Voices of Victims, Generations of Genocide,” a program presented by the Jewish Students’ Association/Hillel and National Jewish Campus Life, as well as several other university student associations and anti-genocide groups.

The evening began with the performance of a song written by Winnipeg composer Zane Zalis for his new Holocaust oratorio, which the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra is set to première in March. The song was sung by students from Miles Macdonell Collegiate.

The audience watched a moving interview with Gen. Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of the UN Mission in Rwanda during the 100-day mass slaughter of Tutsi and moderate Hutu citizens. Dallaire, who is now a senator, said his small force received little support from the United Nations, adding that every United Nations member country approached for help would not do so.

Butera said that it was good to be in Winnipeg, where he first lived and attended university after coming to Canada in 2002.

“My purpose in sharing my personal, painful experiences is to try to strengthen your resolve to speak out against genocide and human rights abuses wherever they occur and not let them go unnoticed,” he told his audience of largely university students.

Butera, originally from a small town in northeastern Rwanda, said his father was a doctor and his mother was a public servant.

“Because we were Tutsi, my father was not allowed to have tenure in the hospitals where he worked,” he recalled. “You had to be of the right ethnic background. Therefore, we had to move every couple of years.”

As a child, unaware of the situation,  Butera thought that moving frequently was fun. The discrimination against Tutsis hit home for him in Grade 2, when a teacher demanded that he and four other Tutsis in his class stand up and then proceeded to berate them for all the ills in Rwanda. This became a regular occurrence throughout his school years.

April 7, 1994, is a day that Butera will always remember. He and his family were woken by their servant, who told them that family members had been murdered nearby and the killers were coming for them. They had 15 minutes to flee into the bush.

“The killers couldn’t find us, so they killed our dog,” Butera recalled.

The Butera family joined hundreds of other Tutsis fleeing south. The mass of refugees was stopped at a roadblock. His father was murdered. Most of the rest of the Tutsis fled into a school, but only 12 survived the subsequent attack on the school. Butera and his younger brother froze when they saw their father being killed and didn’t go into the school. Instead, they ended up finding shelter in the home of a Hutu family, who had been friends of his parents.

Then Butera’s mother decided to take her chances and go home. She left her young daughter with a friendly neighbour. Butera’s mother managed to survive in hiding until the orgy of killing was brought to an end by an invading Tutsi army.

“Genocide doesn’t end when the killing stops,” Butera said. “For the survivors, there is trauma, painful memories and disease. And thousands of Tutsi women were raped.”

He said that after the killings, his mother established a charity in Rwanda dedicated to helping other female survivors of the genocide who lost family and/or were raped.

“My mother is an inspiration to me,” he said.

Half the money raised during the evening was donated to the charity.

“When children are being murdered on the other side of the world, what is our responsibility?” he asked. “It is hard to believe that men can commit genocide. Often, we have tried to fool ourselves into believing that it can’t be happening.”

He called on the members of his audience to “name and shame” the killers in the Congo (where, he reported, 600 people have been murdered since Christmas), the enablers of Darfur, the occupiers of Tibet and murderous tyrants everywhere.

Despite his experiences and what he sees going on around the world, Butera said that he remains hopeful – and especially hopeful that Barack Obama’s election as president of the United States heralds a positive new beginning for the world.