Back Issues

Approaching the heart of a raging fire

Firoze Manji, Fahamu

2004-04-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/highlights/21200

This 150th issue of Pambazuka News is dedicated to the international mobilisation on Remembering Rwanda. This marks the 10th anniversary of a human catastrophe of gigantic proportions that led to the massacre of nearly a million people in Rwanda in the space of a few months. It was an event that was made all the more shameful for the criminal negligence of the international community, in Africa and beyond, to intervene - despite their full knowledge of what was happening. 1994 marked a tragedy that unfolded in Rwanda whose repercussions continue to be felt throughout the Great Lakes Region.

The focus on Rwanda is important not only as an act of solidarity with the survivors of the genocide. It should also be a reminder of the unfolding tragedy in the Great Lakes, particularly in the DRC, when many millions more have been and are being massacred.

Rwanda has been, as Mahmood Mamdani says in 'When Victims Become Killers', the “epicentre of the wider crisis in the African Great Lakes. Tied together by the thread of a common colonial legacy - one that politicized indigeneity as a basis for rights - the region has little choice but to address the Rwandan dilemma, if only to address its own dilemma. ... [This] will require a regional approach through a regional agenda that approaches the centre as firefighters would approach the heart of a raging fire, from outside in.”

With the recent establishment of the Pan African Parliament there exists the potential mechanism for fighting the raging fires that consume both DRC and Burundi. But will there be a sufficient political will to engage?

This issue of Pambazuka News takes a different format from usual. We have a series of editorials from a number of international experts and activists, and provide resource materials for those wishing to learn more about Rwanda and what is being done for the anniversary of the genocide being commemorated this month.

Editorial Contents List

2004-04-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/highlights/21164

1. WHY WE MUST NEVER FORGET THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE

Why should the world bother to remember the Rwandan genocide? Isn't it something we should rather seek to forget? GERALD CAPLAN outlines the powerful case for why the genocide should not be forgotten at any cost, looking at the collective responsibility of humanity and the complicity of the West in turning a blind eye to the 100 days of massacre that took place in 1994.

http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=21165

2. TOWARDS JUSTICE AND RECONCILIATION IN RWANDA: TAKING STOCK

“How can I forgive, when my livelihood was destroyed and I cannot even pay for the schooling of my children,” asks a widowed Rwandan woman taking part in a reconciliation workshop. EUGENIA ZORBAS looks at the progress towards reconciliation in Rwanda, examining the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, gacaca courts, issues of collective memory and the dangers of victor’s justice.

http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=21166

3. SAFE SANCTUARY?: THE ROLE OF THE CHURCH IN GENOCIDE

Traditionally seen as places of sanctuary during times of turmoil, churches became the scene of some of the most haunting massacres of the Rwandan genocide. CAMILLE KARANGWA charts the complicity of the church in the time period up to and including the 100 days of killings in 1994 and concludes that it would be foolish not to acknowledge serious failings.

http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=21192

4. CHILDREN OF RWANDA: THE LEGACY OF GENOCIDE, THE FUTURE OF RWANDA

In the language and logic of genocide, exterminating the “big rats” also meant exterminating the “little rats”. SARA RAKITA examines the legacy of the genocide for Rwanda’s children and concludes that more can and must be done to help them.

http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=21167

5. A SEAT IN THE GRASS

LULEKA MANGQUKU, a South African woman, catches a bus through Rwanda, attends a gacaca trial and contemplates the aftermath of genocide. Drawing parallels with South Africa’s 10 years of democracy celebrations, she asks the question: “Will confessions and finger-pointing in open-air tribunals enable Rwandans, the most Roman Catholic of Africans, to forgive ‘until seventy times seven?’”

http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=21168

6. WHY? HOW? SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS IN THE DIASPORA

Watching the genocide from their TV sets in the West, members of the African Diaspora demanded answers to the why and the how of what was taking place. But there can be no answers to this unspeakable horror, says VINCENT GASANA, and the best that can be done is to understand the circumstances surrounding the genocide.

http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=21169

7. WHY DOES GENOCIDE ‘HAPPEN’?

The immediate terror of genocide gives the impression that it is an inexplicable mass crime of passion sparked by a single event, such as the shooting down of the plane that killed the Rwandan head of state in 1994. Nothing could be further from the truth, states ROTIMI SANKORE. Genocide has clear economic, social and political indicators that are identifiable long before the killing starts. The challenge is therefore to rid the world of the injustices on which genocide is built.

http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=21207

8. MIRRORING RWANDA’S CHALLENGES: THE REFUGEE STORY

Millions of people scattered across the African continent and the world in the aftermath of the genocide. Meeting the needs of those returning has been a huge challenge that is not yet resolved. SARAH ERLICHMAN explains how the welfare of Rwanda’s refugees is integrally linked to the political and social-economic future of the country.

http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=21170

9. FIVE DECADES OF FLEEING AND RETURNING PEOPLE

A decade after the genocide, the problem of Rwanda’s refugees persists. But while refugees may remain reluctant to return home because of apprehension about unity and reconciliation, economic problems and scarce land, the construction of a healthy society in the country of a thousand hills will depend on a resolution of the refugee crisis, writes VOLKER SCHIMMEL.

http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=21171

10. NEUTRALISING THE VOICES OF HATE: BROADCASTING AND GENOCIDE

Silencing the voices of hate does not involve draconian hate speech laws or international military action. Rather, argues RICHARD CARVER, the Rwandan experience shows that the solution to hate speech is to entrench freedom of expression.

http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=21172

11. TEN LESSONS TO PREVENT GENOCIDE

In the ten years since the Rwandan genocide leaders of national governments and international institutions have acknowledged the shame of having failed to stop the slaughter of the Tutsi population. At the 2004 Stockholm International Forum, “Preventing Genocide: Threats and Responsibilities,” many renewed their commitment to halting any future genocide. Honouring that pledge will require not just greater political will than seen in the past but also developing a strategy built on the lessons of 1994. ALISON DES FORGES provides ten lessons for preventing genocide.

http://www.pambazuka.org/index.php?id=21173

* PLEASE SEND YOUR COMMENTS ON ANY OF THESE EDITORIALS TO EDITOR@PAMBAZUKA.ORG

* Edited by Firoze Manji and Patrick Burnett. We would like to extend our thanks to the contributors, who have freely given of their time and energy.

* FEEL FREE TO FORWARD WIDELY! FEEL FREE TO FORWARD WIDELY! FEEL FREE TO FORWARD WIDELY! FEEL FREE TO FORWARD WIDELY!

1. Why we must never forget the Rwandan Genocide

Gerald Caplan

2004-04-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/21165

Those of us who are preoccupied, even obsessed, with commemorating in 2004 the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide are often taken aback when we’re asked what all the fuss is about. After all, just today I received from the Holocaust Centre of Toronto an invitation to join in commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary. Not the entire Holocaust, just the terrible Hungarian chapter. Yet memorializing the genocide in Rwanda is never taken for granted in the same way.

Isn’t it already ancient history? Aren’t there all kinds of human catastrophes that no one much bothers with? Didn’t it take place in faraway Africa, in an obscure country few people could find on a map. Wasn’t it just another case of Africans killing Africans? What does it have to do with us, anyway?

These questions deserve answers, not least because some are entirely legitimate. Above all, it is fundamentally true that there would have been no genocide had some Rwandans not decided for their own selfish reasons to exterminate many other Rwandans. But once this truth is acknowledged, a powerful case for remembering Rwanda remains, and needs to be made.

The responsibility to remember:

First, Rwanda was not just another ugly event in human history. Virtually all students of the subject agree that what happened over 100 days from April to July 1994 constituted one of the purest manifestations of genocide in our time, meeting all the criteria set down in the 1948 Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Genocide experts debate whether Cambodia or Srebrenica or Burundi were “authentic” genocides; like the Holocaust and (except for the Turkish government and its apologists) the Armenian genocide of 1915, no one disagrees about Rwanda. And since genocide is universally seen as the crime of crimes, an attack not just on the actual victims but on all humanity, by definition it needs to be remembered and memorialized.

Second, it wasn’t just another case of Africans killing Africans, or, as some clueless reporters enjoyed writing, of Hutu killing Tutsi and Tutsi killing Hutu (or Hutsi and Tutu, for all they knew or cared). The Rwandan genocide was a deliberate conspiratorial operation planned, organized and executed by a small, sophisticated, highly organized group of greedy Hutu extremists who believed their self-interest would be enhanced if every one of Rwanda’s 1 million Tutsi were annihilated. They came frighteningly close to total success.

Third, the west has played a central role in Rwanda over the past century. Just as no person is an island and there’s no such thing as a self-made man, so every nation is the synthesis of internal and external influences. This is particularly true of nations that have been colonies, where imperial forces have played a defining role. To its everlasting misfortune, Rwanda is the quintessential example of this reality. The central dynamic of Rwandan history for the past 80 years, the characteristic that allowed the genocide to be carried out, was the bitter division between Hutu and Tutsi. Yet this division was largely an artifact created by the Roman Catholic Church and the Belgian colonizers.

Instead of trying to unite all the people they found in Rwanda 100 years ago, Catholic missionaries invented an entire phony pedigree that irreconcilably divided Rwandans into superior Tutsi and inferior Hutu. When the Belgians were given control of the country following World War 1, this contrived hierarchy served their interests well, and they proceeded to institutionalize what amounted to a racist ideology. At independence in the early 1960s, this pyramid was turned on its head, and for the next 40 years Rwanda was run as a racist Hutu dictatorship. None of this would have happened without the Church and the Belgians.

The Culprits:

Last, but hardly least, the 1994 genocide could have been prevented in whole or in part by some of the same external forces that shaped the country’s tragic destiny. But without exception, every outside agency with the capacity to intervene failed to do so. My own list of culprits, in order of responsibility, is as follows:

-the government of France
-the Roman Catholic Church
-the government of the United States
-the government of Belgium
-the government of Britain
-the UN Secretariat.

I name the French and the Church first since they both had the influence to deter the genocide plotters from launching the genocide in the first place. Rwanda was the most Christianized country in Africa and the Roman Catholics were far and away the largest Christian denomination. Catholicism was virtually the official state religion. Catholic officials had enormous influence at both the elite and the grassroots level, which they consistently failed to use to protest against the government’s overtly racist policies and practices. Indeed, the Church gave the government moral authority. Once the genocide began, Catholic leaders in the main refused to condemn the government, never used the word genocide, and many individual priests and nuns actually aided the genocidaires.

Rwanda was a French-speaking country, and France replaced Belgium as the key foreign presence. When the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group of English-speaking Tutsi refugees from Uganda, invaded Rwanda in 1990, the French military flew in to save the day for the Hutu government. For the following several years, right to the very moment the genocide began, French officials had enormous influence with both the Rwandan government and army. They failed completely to use that leverage to insist that the government curtail its racist policies and propaganda, stop the increasing massacres, end the widespread human rights abuses, and disband the death squads and death lists.

Two months after the genocide began, a French intervention force created a safe haven in the south-west of the country through which they allowed genocidaires leaders and killers, fleeing from the advancing RPF, to escape across the border into Zaire. From Zaire they began an insurgency back into Rwanda with the purpose of “finishing the job”. Eventually this led to the Rwandans invading Zaire/Congo to suppress the insurgency, which in turn soon led to the vicious wars in the Congo and the subsequent appalling cost in human lives throughout eastern Congo.

Once the genocide was launched after April 6, 1994, the American government, steadfastly backed by the British government, were primarily responsible for the failure of the UN Security Council to reinforce its puny mission to Rwanda. Under no circumstances were these governments prepared to budge. The Commander of the UN force - UNAMIR - repeatedly pleaded for reinforcements, and was repeatedly turned down.

Two weeks into the genocide, the Security Council voted to reduce UNAMIR from 2500 to 270 men - an act almost impossible to believe 10 years later. Six weeks into the genocide, as credible reports of hundreds of thousands of deaths became commonplace and the reality of a full-blown genocide became undeniable, the Security Council voted finally to send some 4500 troops to Rwanda. Several contingents of African troops were put on standby, but deliberate stalling tactics by the USA and Britain meant that by the end of the genocide, when the Tutsi-led rebels were sworn in as the new government on July 19, not a single reinforcement of soldiers or material ever reached Rwanda. This was one of the darkest moments in the history of the United Nations.

As for Belgium, notwithstanding the racist attitudes and colonial behaviour of its soldiers, their contingent was the backbone of UNAMIR. When 10 Belgian soldiers were murdered by Rwandan government troops on the very first morning of the genocide, the Brussels government immediately decided to withdraw the remainder of its forces and to lobby the Security Council to suspend the entire Rwandan mission. Its motive was simple: They did not want to be seen as the sole party undermining UNAMIR. At the Security Council, of course, it found eager allies.

The role of the UN Secretariat is somewhat ambiguous. To a large extent, its failure to support the pleas of its own UNAMIR Force Commander reflected its lack of capacity to cope with yet another crisis combined with its understanding that the US and Britain would not alter their intransigent positions. Still, there were many occasions when the Secretariat failed to convey to the full Security Council the dire situation in Rwanda, and many opportunities when it failed to speak up publicly in the hope of influencing world opinion.

A multitude of betrayals:

It is not far-fetched to say that the world has betrayed Rwanda countless times since its first confrontation with Europeans in the mid-1890s. This previous account has presented several of these betrayals before and during the genocide: by the Catholic Church, by the Belgian colonial power, by the French neo-colonial power, by the international community.

To exacerbate further this shameful record, we need to look at the past decade. First, the concept that the world owed serious reparations to a devastated Rwanda for its failure to prevent the genocide has been a total non-starter.

Second, there has been precious little accountability by the international community for its failure to prevent. The French government and the Roman Catholic Church have to this moment refused to acknowledge the slightest responsibility for their roles or to apologize for any of their gross errors of commission or omission. President Bill Clinton and Secretary-General Koki Annan have both apologized for their failure to offer protection, but have both falsely blamed insufficient information; in fact what was lacking was not knowledge - the situation was universally understood - but political will and sufficient national interest. No one has ever quit their jobs in protest against their government’s or their organisation’s failure to intervene to save close to one million innocent civilian lives.

Those we must not forget:

Finally, the very existence of the genocide has largely disappeared from the public and media’s consciousness. This is the latest betrayal. Marginalized during the genocide, Rwanda’s calamity is now largely forgotten except for Rwandans themselves and small clusters of non-Rwandans who have had some connection with the country or specialize in genocide prevention. That’s why I founded the Remembering Rwanda movement in July of 2001. I had four targets for remembering: the innocent victims; the survivors, many of whom live in deplorable conditions with few resources to tend to their physical or psychological needs; the perpetrators, most of whom remain free and unrepentant scattered around Africa, Europe and parts of North America; and the so-called “bystanders”, the unholy sextet named earlier. Rather than being passive witnesses, as the word “bystander” implies, all were active in their failure to intervene to stop the massacres, and all remain unaccountable to this day. It is time the Rwandan genocide is treated with the concern and attention it so grievously earned.

* Gerald Caplan is the author of Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide (2000), the report of the International Panel of Eminent Personalities appointed by the Organization of African Unity to investigate the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and the founder of "Remembering Rwanda: The Rwanda Genocide 10th Anniversary Memorial Project".

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, www.pambazuka.org" Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.
Those of us who are preoccupied, even obsessed, with commemorating in 2004 the 10th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide are often taken aback when we’re asked what all the fuss is about. After all, just today I received from the Holocaust Centre of Toronto an invitation to join in commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary. Not the entire Holocaust, just the terrible Hungarian chapter. Yet memorializing the genocide in Rwanda is never taken for granted in the same way.

Isn’t it already ancient history? Aren’t there all kinds of human catastrophes that no one much bothers with? Didn’t it take place in faraway Africa, in an obscure country few people could find on a map. Wasn’t it just another case of Africans killing Africans? What does it have to do with us, anyway?

These questions deserve answers, not least because some are entirely legitimate. Above all, it is fundamentally true that there would have been no genocide had some Rwandans not decided for their own selfish reasons to exterminate many other Rwandans. But once this truth is acknowledged, a powerful case for remembering Rwanda remains, and needs to be made.

The responsibility to remember:

First, Rwanda was not just another ugly event in human history. Virtually all students of the subject agree that what happened over 100 days from April to July 1994 constituted one of the purest manifestations of genocide in our time, meeting all the criteria set down in the 1948 Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Genocide experts debate whether Cambodia or Srebrenica or Burundi were “authentic” genocides; like the Holocaust and (except for the Turkish government and its apologists) the Armenian genocide of 1915, no one disagrees about Rwanda. And since genocide is universally seen as the crime of crimes, an attack not just on the actual victims but on all humanity, by definition it needs to be remembered and memorialized.

Second, it wasn’t just another case of Africans killing Africans, or, as some clueless reporters enjoyed writing, of Hutu killing Tutsi and Tutsi killing Hutu (or Hutsi and Tutu, for all they knew or cared). The Rwandan genocide was a deliberate conspiratorial operation planned, organized and executed by a small, sophisticated, highly organized group of greedy Hutu extremists who believed their self-interest would be enhanced if every one of Rwanda’s 1 million Tutsi were annihilated. They came frighteningly close to total success.

Third, the west has played a central role in Rwanda over the past century. Just as no person is an island and there’s no such thing as a self-made man, so every nation is the synthesis of internal and external influences. This is particularly true of nations that have been colonies, where imperial forces have played a defining role. To its everlasting misfortune, Rwanda is the quintessential example of this reality. The central dynamic of Rwandan history for the past 80 years, the characteristic that allowed the genocide to be carried out, was the bitter division between Hutu and Tutsi. Yet this division was largely an artifact created by the Roman Catholic Church and the Belgian colonizers.

Instead of trying to unite all the people they found in Rwanda 100 years ago, Catholic missionaries invented an entire phony pedigree that irreconcilably divided Rwandans into superior Tutsi and inferior Hutu. When the Belgians were given control of the country following World War 1, this contrived hierarchy served their interests well, and they proceeded to institutionalize what amounted to a racist ideology. At independence in the early 1960s, this pyramid was turned on its head, and for the next 40 years Rwanda was run as a racist Hutu dictatorship. None of this would have happened without the Church and the Belgians.

The Culprits:

Last, but hardly least, the 1994 genocide could have been prevented in whole or in part by some of the same external forces that shaped the country’s tragic destiny. But without exception, every outside agency with the capacity to intervene failed to do so. My own list of culprits, in order of responsibility, is as follows:

-the government of France
-the Roman Catholic Church
-the government of the United States
-the government of Belgium
-the government of Britain
-the UN Secretariat.

I name the French and the Church first since they both had the influence to deter the genocide plotters from launching the genocide in the first place. Rwanda was the most Christianized country in Africa and the Roman Catholics were far and away the largest Christian denomination. Catholicism was virtually the official state religion. Catholic officials had enormous influence at both the elite and the grassroots level, which they consistently failed to use to protest against the government’s overtly racist policies and practices. Indeed, the Church gave the government moral authority. Once the genocide began, Catholic leaders in the main refused to condemn the government, never used the word genocide, and many individual priests and nuns actually aided the genocidaires.

Rwanda was a French-speaking country, and France replaced Belgium as the key foreign presence. When the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group of English-speaking Tutsi refugees from Uganda, invaded Rwanda in 1990, the French military flew in to save the day for the Hutu government. For the following several years, right to the very moment the genocide began, French officials had enormous influence with both the Rwandan government and army. They failed completely to use that leverage to insist that the government curtail its racist policies and propaganda, stop the increasing massacres, end the widespread human rights abuses, and disband the death squads and death lists.

Two months after the genocide began, a French intervention force created a safe haven in the south-west of the country through which they allowed genocidaires leaders and killers, fleeing from the advancing RPF, to escape across the border into Zaire. From Zaire they began an insurgency back into Rwanda with the purpose of “finishing the job”. Eventually this led to the Rwandans invading Zaire/Congo to suppress the insurgency, which in turn soon led to the vicious wars in the Congo and the subsequent appalling cost in human lives throughout eastern Congo.

Once the genocide was launched after April 6, 1994, the American government, steadfastly backed by the British government, were primarily responsible for the failure of the UN Security Council to reinforce its puny mission to Rwanda. Under no circumstances were these governments prepared to budge. The Commander of the UN force - UNAMIR - repeatedly pleaded for reinforcements, and was repeatedly turned down.

Two weeks into the genocide, the Security Council voted to reduce UNAMIR from 2500 to 270 men - an act almost impossible to believe 10 years later. Six weeks into the genocide, as credible reports of hundreds of thousands of deaths became commonplace and the reality of a full-blown genocide became undeniable, the Security Council voted finally to send some 4500 troops to Rwanda. Several contingents of African troops were put on standby, but deliberate stalling tactics by the USA and Britain meant that by the end of the genocide, when the Tutsi-led rebels were sworn in as the new government on July 19, not a single reinforcement of soldiers or material ever reached Rwanda. This was one of the darkest moments in the history of the United Nations.

As for Belgium, notwithstanding the racist attitudes and colonial behaviour of its soldiers, their contingent was the backbone of UNAMIR. When 10 Belgian soldiers were murdered by Rwandan government troops on the very first morning of the genocide, the Brussels government immediately decided to withdraw the remainder of its forces and to lobby the Security Council to suspend the entire Rwandan mission. Its motive was simple: They did not want to be seen as the sole party undermining UNAMIR. At the Security Council, of course, it found eager allies.

The role of the UN Secretariat is somewhat ambiguous. To a large extent, its failure to support the pleas of its own UNAMIR Force Commander reflected its lack of capacity to cope with yet another crisis combined with its understanding that the US and Britain would not alter their intransigent positions. Still, there were many occasions when the Secretariat failed to convey to the full Security Council the dire situation in Rwanda, and many opportunities when it failed to speak up publicly in the hope of influencing world opinion.

A multitude of betrayals:

It is not far-fetched to say that the world has betrayed Rwanda countless times since its first confrontation with Europeans in the mid-1890s. This previous account has presented several of these betrayals before and during the genocide: by the Catholic Church, by the Belgian colonial power, by the French neo-colonial power, by the international community.

To exacerbate further this shameful record, we need to look at the past decade. First, the concept that the world owed serious reparations to a devastated Rwanda for its failure to prevent the genocide has been a total non-starter.

Second, there has been precious little accountability by the international community for its failure to prevent. The French government and the Roman Catholic Church have to this moment refused to acknowledge the slightest responsibility for their roles or to apologize for any of their gross errors of commission or omission. President Bill Clinton and Secretary-General Koki Annan have both apologized for their failure to offer protection, but have both falsely blamed insufficient information; in fact what was lacking was not knowledge - the situation was universally understood - but political will and sufficient national interest. No one has ever quit their jobs in protest against their government’s or their organisation’s failure to intervene to save close to one million innocent civilian lives.

Those we must not forget:

Finally, the very existence of the genocide has largely disappeared from the public and media’s consciousness. This is the latest betrayal. Marginalized during the genocide, Rwanda’s calamity is now largely forgotten except for Rwandans themselves and small clusters of non-Rwandans who have had some connection with the country or specialize in genocide prevention. That’s why I founded the Remembering Rwanda movement in July of 2001. I had four targets for remembering: the innocent victims; the survivors, many of whom live in deplorable conditions with few resources to tend to their physical or psychological needs; the perpetrators, most of whom remain free and unrepentant scattered around Africa, Europe and parts of North America; and the so-called “bystanders”, the unholy sextet named earlier. Rather than being passive witnesses, as the word “bystander” implies, all were active in their failure to intervene to stop the massacres, and all remain unaccountable to this day. It is time the Rwandan genocide is treated with the concern and attention it so grievously earned.

* Gerald Caplan is the author of Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide (2000), the report of the International Panel of Eminent Personalities appointed by the Organisation of African Unity to investigate the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and the founder of "Remembering Rwanda: The Rwanda Genocide 10th Anniversary Memorial Project".

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, www.pambazuka.org" Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

2. Towards Justice and Reconciliation in Rwanda: Taking stock

Eugenia Zorbas

2004-04-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/21166

Justice and reconciliation are concepts difficult to define, let alone achieve. What may seem 'just' for a community or a country, may be very unjust for the individual victim. There seems to be a tension between reconciliation, implying a kind of moral compromise, and justice in the strict, Western, prosecutorial sense it is usually used.

In the wake of violence on a societal scale, finding the right balance between justice and reconciliation, or between retribution and forgiveness, is an extremely delicate process and this is all the more so in cases of genocide. In the Great Lakes region, where today's oppressors tend to perceive themselves as yesterday's victims, justice and reconciliation become even more subjective and difficult goals.

In Rwanda, the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) dominated Government of National Unity is prioritising, as its name implies, the reconciliation of its citizens chiefly through a prosecutorial (trial-based) approach. However, since 1998 there has been a recognition among the highest Government echelons that working with a penal and legal system that is completely overstretched - at the beginning of 2003, there were an estimated 115,000 prisoners in Rwandan jails and communal lockups (cachots) - will require some innovative thinking and a move away from the 'white man's' standards of justice. This is why the much talked about gacaca traditional conflict resolution mechanism was adapted and revived.

Moves Towards Justice - Arrests, Courts, Trials and the legacy of genocide:

Despite the opening of a press office in Rwanda and the establishing of some important precedents in international criminal law, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda's (ICTR) contribution to justice and reconciliation within the country is very limited.

Domestically, the ICTR's work remains virtually unknown and when it is, the Tribunal's reputation may have been irreparably damaged by early scandals regarding endemic corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency.

The Tribunal's relationship with the Government itself has been a tormented one; the ICTR's mandate covers the period of January to December 1994, during which RPF soldiers allegedly carried out several massacres. The ICTR's insistence that these crimes should be investigated led to moral outrage from the RPF leadership, accusing the Court of putting the RPF on the same level as the génocidaires.

Rwanda's national courts operate in parallel with the ICTR. From having a rumoured 10 lawyers left in the country, no equipment, damaged buildings and no money to pay their staff in 1994, the national courts had by early 2004 tried upwards of 5,500 individuals. Though many of the early trials were severely flawed, the national legal system's performance arguably did more to restore some kind of confidence that (some) perpetrators were being brought to trial - by comparison, the ICTR and its hundreds of staff and multi-million dollar annual budgets had at the beginning of 2004 completed 18 cases and arrested 66 individuals.

Even at this accelerated pace, it was thought that the Rwandan formal judicial system would require more than a century to process the hundred thousand plus detainees. The adaptation of a traditional, grass roots conflict resolution mechanism - the gacaca tribunals - represents an affordable and expedient alternative. After a pilot phase, deemed a success by the Government, gacaca courts are due to open across the country in 2004.

Innovative Thinking - Justice and Reconciliation combined through the gacaca courts:

The goal of gacaca is to promote reconciliation through providing a platform for victims to express themselves, encouraging acknowledgements and apologies from the perpetrators, facilitating the coming together of both victims and perpetrators every week on the grass. Gacaca courts are also empowered to hand down sentences that include community work schemes that can directly benefit the most destitute families of victims. While gacaca is a potential source of 'truth' on how the genocide was implemented, its provisions for confessions and guilt pleas represent one of gacaca's most cited shortcomings.

Under these provisions, if someone confesses before being denounced, he or she is liable for a substantial decrease in the length of the sentence. Importantly, confessions are only acceptable if they include the incrimination of one's co-conspirators.

Some argue that this system of confessions creates rife conditions for vendetta-settling. Others estimate that an additional 200,000 people could see themselves imprisoned for genocide-related crimes. Others still say that intimidation of potential witnesses is widespread in the countryside in particular, where perpetrators presumably far outnumber survivors. Lastly, participation in gacaca is mandatory, implying that subsistence farmers and petty traders must give up a day of labour per week (on average) with no compensation in cash or kind; this mandatory character has fomented some resentment about gacaca.

Despite what may seem like insurmountable problems, gacaca represents the only workable solution for bringing those responsible for atrocities to trial promptly. It is difficult to judge the public perception of the gacaca tribunals. Presumably, Rwanda's tens of thousands of prisoners would favour a system that would help speed up their hearings. Also presumably, survivors would want to see perpetrators punished, and in the spirit of 'restorative' justice, may welcome replacing long prison sentences with more useful community work schemes. Having said that, the genocide survivor organisations remain extremely apprehensive of gacaca.

The real test will be when the tribunals begin working nationwide this year. If judges are incompetent or biased, if communities conspire to silence a witness, or if gacaca is used as a means to settle scores, neither justice nor reconciliation will be served.

Other Measures promoting Reconciliation: The National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (NURC)

Since its inception in 1999, the NURC has organised conferences and workshops on the theme of unity and reconciliation, culminating in two national summits, where Rwandans from all levels of society were represented. The NURC has also held workshops for segments of the population attending 'civic re-education' or 'solidarity' camps (ingandos) - such as provisionally released prisoners and demobilised soldiers (from the national army as well as from ex-FAR and interahamwe combatants repatriated from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)). Despite the NURC's all-encompassing mandate, it is still perceived as being an instrument of the central authorities and as being too 'vertical' in its activities, not doing enough grass roots work on 'the hills'.

Collective Memory:

Monuments and memorials are institutional embodiments of collective memory and as such, part of the reconciliation process. In Rwanda, genocide memorials pepper the country and new ones continue to be created. Often memorials are housed in churches - sites of many group massacres. Another institution created to foster collective memory is the national day of mourning for the victims of the genocide. The month of April more generally is considered to be a month of mourning and parties or celebrations of any kind are discouraged.

It is insightful to reflect on how different groups interpret these memorials and annual mourning periods. Some Rwandans consider the national day of mourning in particular as an obstacle to unity perhaps implicitly taking the view that forgetting the past is the best way to 'move on'. But if those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, then memory may be the best safeguard against a recurrence of violence. Others see the annual periods of mourning as a 'Tutsi affair', claiming that the commemorations are only for Tutsi victims, the moderate Hutu who perished in 1994 having been forgotten. They touch upon an important issue, to which we now turn.

The Challenges Victor's justice? Are the Hutu being collectively stigmatised?

There is a real danger that the RPF are, or will come to be, perceived as a party run by, and for, les Ougandais - an inner circle of Anglophone Tutsi refugees born in Uganda. In light of this, and despite the official party line that all citizens of Rwanda are Banyarwanda ('not Tutsi, nor Hutu, nor Twa') and therefore equal before the law, many Hutu may feel that the justice being meted out is a form of victor's justice.

The official refusal to recognise alleged (Hutu) victims of RPF atrocities in Rwanda and Eastern DRC in particular buttress such feelings. And because the national courts, and presumably this will hold true for the gacaca tribunals and the ICTR as well, are focusing 'punishment' on the Hutu, the judiciary's impartiality is also called into question. (Similar accusations of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia being a form of victors' justice ring true to the ears of an important proportion of Serb public opinion.)

This resentment of 'Tutsi impunity' is visible in, for example, the joke that the ICTR, whose French acronym is the TPIR, should be renamed the TPIH - le tribunal pénal international des Hutus. By leaving these allegations unresolved, the RPF leaves itself open to the possibility that political opponents will inflate the size and nature of RPF abuses.

Lastly, the unspoken assumption that all Hutu who opposed the genocide were killed in 1994, and thus that the Hutu who were in the country during those months and alive today are morally, if not legally, responsible also undermines justice and national reconciliation: can such a project succeed on the basis of such distrust?

Poverty:

In 2002, Rwanda's GDP grew by 9.7%, ranking it among the top three performers in sub-Saharan Africa for that year. Yet according to Government figures, approximately 60% of Rwandans live on less than US$1 per day and the United Nations Development Programme ranked Rwanda 162nd out of 173 countries in its 2002 Human Development Index.

It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of poverty in Rwanda. In a country where 94% of the population live in rural areas, there is also a 'mental' distance between the urban elite in Kigali and the peasants 'on the hills'.

Rural Rwanda has not been actively engaged in justice and reconciliation debates - though this may change with the gacaca tribunals. As in South Africa, where victims of apartheid are calling for reparations for the legacy of 'economic apartheid', the most destitute genocide widows and orphans - for whom the legacy of 1994 is also, in a very immediate sense, socio-economic - have been benefiting from the Fond National pour l'Assistance aux Rescapés du Génocide (the FARG) created in 1998.

Importantly, this assistance goes only to Tutsi, as the genocide was against the Tutsi and so they are the only ones to qualify as survivors (rescapés). This helps reinforce the perception of victors' justice, mentioned earlier, among Hutu families that may have also lost family members or had property confiscated or destroyed.

A direct economic consequence of gacaca, if it is successful in alleviating the burden on the penal system, will be that thousands of (Hutu) families will no longer have to struggle to feed potentially productive members of their family that have been in jail for up to ten years, with an unknown proportion of them having been falsely accused to begin with.

If grinding poverty contributed to the ease with which the peasant masses where mobilised for the genocidal project, then ensuring that rural Rwanda is not excluded from the benefits of economic growth will not only serve the obvious purpose of improving the quality of life of millions, it will also help prevent the despair, humiliation and feelings of exclusion that contribute to the cycles of violence in the Great Lakes region and to the dynamics of genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

Debating Rwanda's Histories:

A telling indicator for how much Rwanda has moved towards national reconciliation is the fact that since 1994, no history lessons have been taught in Rwandan schools. There has thus been no debate in the public domain about why the 1994 genocide happened. This is important because one cannot say much about the prospects of reconciliation without first reflecting on exactly what it is that gives rise to demands for it. What motivated such large parts of the population to participate? If some were coerced into killing, why were some others such zealous, innovative and cruel killers?

The Government of National Unity's project of creating an all-inclusive Rwandan nationalism around the 'Banyarwanda' label relies on achieving a broad-based consensus among Rwandans that justice has been served. Can this be achieved without a reconciliation with history?

Conclusion:

Rwandans have come a long way since 1994. Above and beyond their individual struggles with their very personal experiences of genocide, Rwandans have had to contend with periods of renewed insecurity in the North-West of the country, worrying escalations of violence in Burundi (the Rwandan 'Siamese twin'), a war in neighbouring DRC, severe deterioration of relations with Uganda, the repatriation of some 2 million refugees since 1994, and a general loss of interest in the international media and the international community.

Perhaps of more immediate relevance for the 94% of Rwandans who live in rural areas, pockets of droughts and food insecurity have been periodic and the very real daily struggle for survival continues unabated. In this context of grinding poverty, 'justice and reconciliation' perversely become a luxury. Projects to foster unity need to become more relevant to rural Rwandans in order to become more effective. Only then can Rwandans afford to start thinking about justice and reconciliation. The government also needs to recognise that a vibrant and independent civil society and media is not a potential threat but a sustainable, countervailing force should there be attempts to foment a new cycle of violence, for which the Great Lakes region is tragically infamous.

* Eugenia Zorbas worked in Rwanda for one year in 2002/3 and has since returned to academia as a PhD student in the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science, with a research focus on post-genocide reconciliation debates in Rwanda.

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, www.pambazuka.org" Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.
Justice and reconciliation are concepts difficult to define, let alone achieve. What may seem 'just' for a community or a country, may be very unjust for the individual victim. There seems to be a tension between reconciliation, implying a kind of moral compromise, and justice in the strict, Western, prosecutorial sense it is usually used.

In the wake of violence on a societal scale, finding the right balance between justice and reconciliation, or between retribution and forgiveness, is an extremely delicate process and this is all the more so in cases of genocide. In the Great Lakes region, where today's oppressors tend to perceive themselves as yesterday's victims, justice and reconciliation become even more subjective and difficult goals.

In Rwanda, the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) dominated Government of National Unity is prioritising, as its name implies, the reconciliation of its citizens chiefly through a prosecutorial (trial-based) approach. However, since 1998 there has been a recognition among the highest Government echelons that working with a penal and legal system that is completely overstretched - at the beginning of 2003, there were an estimated 115,000 prisoners in Rwandan jails and communal lockups (cachots) - will require some innovative thinking and a move away from the 'white man's' standards of justice. This is why the much talked about gacaca traditional conflict resolution mechanism was adapted and revived.

Moves Towards Justice - Arrests, Courts, Trials and the legacy of genocide:

Despite the opening of a press office in Rwanda and the establishing of some important precedents in international criminal law, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda's (ICTR) contribution to justice and reconciliation within the country is very limited.

Domestically, the ICTR's work remains virtually unknown and when it is, the Tribunal's reputation may have been irreparably damaged by early scandals regarding endemic corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency.

The Tribunal's relationship with the Government itself has been a tormented one; the ICTR's mandate covers the period of January to December 1994, during which RPF soldiers allegedly carried out several massacres. The ICTR's insistence that these crimes should be investigated led to moral outrage from the RPF leadership, accusing the Court of putting the RPF on the same level as the génocidaires.

Rwanda's national courts operate in parallel with the ICTR. From having a rumoured 10 lawyers left in the country, no equipment, damaged buildings and no money to pay their staff in 1994, the national courts had by early 2004 tried upwards of 5,500 individuals. Though many of the early trials were severely flawed, the national legal system's performance arguably did more to restore some kind of confidence that (some) perpetrators were being brought to trial - by comparison, the ICTR and its hundreds of staff and multi-million dollar annual budgets had at the beginning of 2004 completed 18 cases and arrested 66 individuals.

Even at this accelerated pace, it was thought that the Rwandan formal judicial system would require more than a century to process the hundred thousand plus detainees. The adaptation of a traditional, grass roots conflict resolution mechanism - the gacaca tribunals - represents an affordable and expedient alternative. After a pilot phase, deemed a success by the Government, gacaca courts are due to open across the country in 2004.

Innovative Thinking - Justice and Reconciliation combined through the gacaca courts:

The goal of gacaca is to promote reconciliation through providing a platform for victims to express themselves, encouraging acknowledgements and apologies from the perpetrators, facilitating the coming together of both victims and perpetrators every week on the grass. Gacaca courts are also empowered to hand down sentences that include community work schemes that can directly benefit the most destitute families of victims. While gacaca is a potential source of 'truth' on how the genocide was implemented, its provisions for confessions and guilt pleas represent one of gacaca's most cited shortcomings.

Under these provisions, if someone confesses before being denounced, he or she is liable for a substantial decrease in the length of the sentence. Importantly, confessions are only acceptable if they include the incrimination of one's co-conspirators.

Some argue that this system of confessions creates rife conditions for vendetta-settling. Others estimate that an additional 200,000 people could see themselves imprisoned for genocide-related crimes. Others still say that intimidation of potential witnesses is widespread in the countryside in particular, where perpetrators presumably far outnumber survivors. Lastly, participation in gacaca is mandatory, implying that subsistence farmers and petty traders must give up a day of labour per week (on average) with no compensation in cash or kind; this mandatory character has fomented some resentment about gacaca.

Despite what may seem like insurmountable problems, gacaca represents the only workable solution for bringing those responsible for atrocities to trial promptly. It is difficult to judge the public perception of the gacaca tribunals. Presumably, Rwanda's tens of thousands of prisoners would favour a system that would help speed up their hearings. Also presumably, survivors would want to see perpetrators punished, and in the spirit of 'restorative' justice, may welcome replacing long prison sentences with more useful community work schemes. Having said that, the genocide survivor organisations remain extremely apprehensive of gacaca.

The real test will be when the tribunals begin working nationwide this year. If judges are incompetent or biased, if communities conspire to silence a witness, or if gacaca is used as a means to settle scores, neither justice nor reconciliation will be served.

Other Measures promoting Reconciliation: The National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (NURC)

Since its inception in 1999, the NURC has organised conferences and workshops on the theme of unity and reconciliation, culminating in two national summits, where Rwandans from all levels of society were represented. The NURC has also held workshops for segments of the population attending 'civic re-education' or 'solidarity' camps (ingandos) - such as provisionally released prisoners and demobilised soldiers (from the national army as well as from ex-FAR and interahamwe combatants repatriated from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)). Despite the NURC's all-encompassing mandate, it is still perceived as being an instrument of the central authorities and as being too 'vertical' in its activities, not doing enough grass roots work on 'the hills'.

Collective Memory:

Monuments and memorials are institutional embodiments of collective memory and as such, part of the reconciliation process. In Rwanda, genocide memorials pepper the country and new ones continue to be created. Often memorials are housed in churches - sites of many group massacres. Another institution created to foster collective memory is the national day of mourning for the victims of the genocide. The month of April more generally is considered to be a month of mourning and parties or celebrations of any kind are discouraged.

It is insightful to reflect on how different groups interpret these memorials and annual mourning periods. Some Rwandans consider the national day of mourning in particular as an obstacle to unity perhaps implicitly taking the view that forgetting the past is the best way to 'move on'. But if those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, then memory may be the best safeguard against a recurrence of violence. Others see the annual periods of mourning as a 'Tutsi affair', claiming that the commemorations are only for Tutsi victims, the moderate Hutu who perished in 1994 having been forgotten. They touch upon an important issue, to which we now turn.

The Challenges Victor's justice? Are the Hutu being collectively stigmatised?

There is a real danger that the RPF are, or will come to be, perceived as a party run by, and for, les Ougandais - an inner circle of Anglophone Tutsi refugees born in Uganda. In light of this, and despite the official party line that all citizens of Rwanda are Banyarwanda ('not Tutsi, nor Hutu, nor Twa') and therefore equal before the law, many Hutu may feel that the justice being meted out is a form of victor's justice.

The official refusal to recognise alleged (Hutu) victims of RPF atrocities in Rwanda and Eastern DRC in particular buttress such feelings. And because the national courts, and presumably this will hold true for the gacaca tribunals and the ICTR as well, are focusing 'punishment' on the Hutu, the judiciary's impartiality is also called into question. (Similar accusations of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia being a form of victors' justice ring true to the ears of an important proportion of Serb public opinion.)

This resentment of 'Tutsi impunity' is visible in, for example, the joke that the ICTR, whose French acronym is the TPIR, should be renamed the TPIH - le tribunal pénal international des Hutus. By leaving these allegations unresolved, the RPF leaves itself open to the possibility that political opponents will inflate the size and nature of RPF abuses.

Lastly, the unspoken assumption that all Hutu who opposed the genocide were killed in 1994, and thus that the Hutu who were in the country during those months and alive today are morally, if not legally, responsible also undermines justice and national reconciliation: can such a project succeed on the basis of such distrust?

Poverty:

In 2002, Rwanda's GDP grew by 9.7%, ranking it among the top three performers in sub-Saharan Africa for that year. Yet according to Government figures, approximately 60% of Rwandans live on less than US$1 per day and the United Nations Development Programme ranked Rwanda 162nd out of 173 countries in its 2002 Human Development Index.

It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of poverty in Rwanda. In a country where 94% of the population live in rural areas, there is also a 'mental' distance between the urban elite in Kigali and the peasants 'on the hills'.

Rural Rwanda has not been actively engaged in justice and reconciliation debates - though this may change with the gacaca tribunals. As in South Africa, where victims of apartheid are calling for reparations for the legacy of 'economic apartheid', the most destitute genocide widows and orphans - for whom the legacy of 1994 is also, in a very immediate sense, socio-economic - have been benefiting from the Fond National pour l'Assistance aux Rescapés du Génocide (the FARG) created in 1998.

Importantly, this assistance goes only to Tutsi, as the genocide was against the Tutsi and so they are the only ones to qualify as survivors (rescapés). This helps reinforce the perception of victors' justice, mentioned earlier, among Hutu families that may have also lost family members or had property confiscated or destroyed.

A direct economic consequence of gacaca, if it is successful in alleviating the burden on the penal system, will be that thousands of (Hutu) families will no longer have to struggle to feed potentially productive members of their family that have been in jail for up to ten years, with an unknown proportion of them having been falsely accused to begin with.

If grinding poverty contributed to the ease with which the peasant masses where mobilised for the genocidal project, then ensuring that rural Rwanda is not excluded from the benefits of economic growth will not only serve the obvious purpose of improving the quality of life of millions, it will also help prevent the despair, humiliation and feelings of exclusion that contribute to the cycles of violence in the Great Lakes region and to the dynamics of genocide in Rwanda in 1994.

Debating Rwanda's Histories:

A telling indicator for how much Rwanda has moved towards national reconciliation is the fact that since 1994, no history lessons have been taught in Rwandan schools. There has thus been no debate in the public domain about why the 1994 genocide happened. This is important because one cannot say much about the prospects of reconciliation without first reflecting on exactly what it is that gives rise to demands for it. What motivated such large parts of the population to participate? If some were coerced into killing, why were some others such zealous, innovative and cruel killers?

The Government of National Unity's project of creating an all-inclusive Rwandan nationalism around the 'Banyarwanda' label relies on achieving a broad-based consensus among Rwandans that justice has been served. Can this be achieved without a reconciliation with history?

Conclusion:

Rwandans have come a long way since 1994. Above and beyond their individual struggles with their very personal experiences of genocide, Rwandans have had to contend with periods of renewed insecurity in the North-West of the country, worrying escalations of violence in Burundi (the Rwandan 'Siamese twin'), a war in neighbouring DRC, severe deterioration of relations with Uganda, the repatriation of some 2 million refugees since 1994, and a general loss of interest in the international media and the international community.

Perhaps of more immediate relevance for the 94% of Rwandans who live in rural areas, pockets of droughts and food insecurity have been periodic and the very real daily struggle for survival continues unabated. In this context of grinding poverty, 'justice and reconciliation' perversely become a luxury. Projects to foster unity need to become more relevant to rural Rwandans in order to become more effective. Only then can Rwandans afford to start thinking about justice and reconciliation. The government also needs to recognise that a vibrant and independent civil society and media is not a potential threat but a sustainable, countervailing force should there be attempts to foment a new cycle of violence, for which the Great Lakes region is tragically infamous.

* Eugenia Zorbas worked in Rwanda for one year in 2002/3 and has since returned to academia as a PhD student in the Development Studies Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science, with a research focus on post-genocide reconciliation debates in Rwanda.

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, www.pambazuka.org" Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

3. Safe Sanctuary?: The role of the church in genocide

Camille Karangwa

2004-04-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/21192

1994 was the most tragic year in the history of Rwanda as the country experienced a genocide that swept away more than a million Tutsi. This was a carefully conceived, planned and carried out genocide, as proven by its record death toll. The world was shocked.

To this day, people still wonder what the causes of this slaughter were. Some even point at the church of Rwanda, in this instance the Catholic Church, which was then the most representative and the most influential in the country. Indeed, it represents more than 60% of the population and had for a long time boasted the moral high ground, which could have been used to curb this disaster.

The question is then to know whether the church really tried to make use of its influence or if it rather failed to fulfill its duties, as several analyses seem to confirm. At the moment when we commemorate the tenth anniversary of those tragic events, it is necessary to sort the events out and draw out the responsibilities of the parties. This contribution is based on personal experience as well as various investigations in this field.

As soon as they arrived in Rwanda in the 1900s, the first settlers and white missionaries found a well-structured country ruled by the Mwami. Even though the power was concentrated in the hands of the Tutsi minority, the missionaries did not deign to protest against this situation.

They even found it natural and went as far as asserting that the Tutsi were intellectually superior to the Hutus and were the only ones able to rule the country. They invented the Hamite myth that said the Tutsi were actually white men with a black skin. They developed typologies that were probably influenced by the evolutionist theories that were fashionable in those days.

The schools they opened were almost exclusively reserved for Tutsi children. They also made an obvious effort to convert to their religion numerous children from the aristocracy.

For decades, both the Belgian colonial power therefore relied on the Tutsi, stockbreeders more akin to a cast than to an ethnic group, to rule the country and dominate the Hutu farmers, by far the largest group in the country.

But in the late 1950's, when the Tutsi elite started to wave claims of independence and the Mwami contemplated appealing to the United Nations, both Belgium and the Church decided to defend the democratic rights of the Hutu majority, embodied by Grégoire Kayibanda, former secretary of the bishop of Kabgayi and founder of the Party for the Promotion of the Hutu People (ParmeHutu).

The Catholic Church actively involved itself with the first Hutu revolutionaries, often former pupils of its schools, and denounced the social injustice it had once promoted. A letter of Mgr André Perraudin, then bishop of Kabgayi, that was published at the occasion of the Lent of 1959, agrees in many aspects with the broad outlines of the Hutu manifesto launched on the 24th of March 1959.

In this pastoral letter entitled ‘Super Omnia Caritas’, the prelate declared that the resources as well as the political and even judicial powers were in truly considerable proportion within the hands of people of one race only. He predicted imminent bloodshed if the situation was to remain unchanged.

After a referendum, carefully guided by the Belgian colonial power and the church, had installed a republic, thus exiling the last king, the Tutsi were stripped from their power, evicted from their lands and physically threatened. Hundred of thousands of them sought refuge in neighbouring countries, notably Uganda.

Throughout the three following decades, the Church was perfectly aware of human rights violations but did not lift a finger. It gave its blessing to the abuses of power of the young republic and got further involved in social activities. This conniving silence was indubitably interpreted by the rulers as a sign of support.

Grégoire Kayibanda, the first president, was close to catholic circles and had clergymen among his counsellors, specifically his grace André Perraudin, who was seen as his spiritual father. The first republic displayed notorious intransigence towards the exiles and exercised undisputed power under cover of majority democracy. Instead of grasping this opportunity to reassure the royalists and the Tutsi in general, the government was driven by feelings of revenge.

Every time an attack was launched by the exiles, the Tutsi paid for it with their blood. This was the case in the years 1961/1962. The president himself declared in his speeches that such actions by the exiles endangered the lives of their brothers who stayed in the country. The Catholic Church, present out in the field all across the country, did nothing to stop the mass killings and went on working hand in hand with the government until it collapsed.

Major-General Juvénal Habyarimana, then staff officer of the army, seized power in 1973. The Church ignored the circumstances in which this power was taken and gave full support to the new regime. When the MRND, the party of the president and future grassroots of the infamous interahamwe, was founded in 1975, some religious leaders became active members. A system of ethnically based quotas introduced by the government was also applied in some religious schools. The same racial discrimination was carried out in the choice of bishops.

At no point did the Church raise its voice to denounce the dictatorship of the MRND and its policy of exclusion. Those who dared to criticize it, such as Mrs Félicula Nyiramutarambirwa and father Silvio Sindambiwe, have paid dearly for their views.

The Church also took an active part in party propaganda. Certain homilies often sounded like popular meetings. After the attack of the FPR rebels in 1990, the government did a mock attack on Kigali and arbitrarily arrested thousands of Tutsi. The Church again missed the opportunity to distance itself from the government.

Mass killings like those in Bugesera and Bigogwe, which were aimed at Tutsi, did not change anything. When it was time to contribute to the war effort, the Church was more than eager. This connivance from the Church and the state would carry on until the genocide and even its eruption in April 1994 did not change the position of the Church. The first massacres of the morning of the 7th of April took place in Kigali at Remera Christus Centre where priests, seminarians on holiday and other visitors were killed.

The behaviour of these men of God in those crucial moments is revolting to say the least; some of them even handed over their own colleagues to the executioners; others refused to shelter in their parishes the refugees flocking there; and others offered to hide them only to fetch the interahamwe afterwards.

This was the case of the two Benedictine nuns, Consolate Mukangango and Julienne Mukabutera, who used to run the convent in Sovu and collaborated with the killers to the point where they provided them with the petrol that was to set ablaze the building where 500 Tutsi were hiding. They have recently been sentenced by a Brussels court to 15 and 12 years respectively.

The case of minister Elizaphan Ntakirutimana should not be ignored either. At more than 70 years of age, he was the minister of the Adventist Church of the Seventh Day in Mugonero, Kibuye. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda recently sentenced him to 10 years in jail. Instead of answering to the cries for help of his Tutsi colleagues who relied on his influence in the area and begged him to intervene, he sent them militia men while he was himself driving killers to different massacre sites in his own vehicle.

These are only a few examples among thousands. Indeed, other religious people are still held prisoners or are wanted by justice. Churches, once seen as sanctuaries, were turned into slaughterhouses. The churches of Nyarubuye, Cyahinda, Karama, and Kibeho have become remnants of this sad episode. Men of God, who once were seen as role models and enjoyed an indisputable moral authority, did not know how to use it in order to save lives of innocents. Their silence and their participation in those fatal moments brought a sort of “acknowledgement and legitimacy” to the ignoble acts in the eyes of the killers.

The priest and the minister have always been considered upright, wise and even saintly. It is therefore quite obvious that their attitude mattered enormously for their congregation. The highest hierarchy, doubtlessly closer to the government, did not use its influence to bring political officials to their senses. Five weeks after the genocide had started, four Catholic bishops and a few ministers of the Protestant Church published a document, which was, to say the least, half-hearted, in which they called on both parties, the then government and the RPF troops, to stop the massacres. The word genocide was not even suggested.

When the government fled the fights and settled in the centre of the country, the bishops abandoned their dioceses to follow it. They later did the same thing when, after the defeat, they scattered into Zaire, Tanzania, Cameroon etc.

The attitude of the Church at the end of the genocide was not one of great courage. Some of its members went into revisionism, others tried to cover the crimes of their colleagues. To this day, the Church as an institution has never apologized for this very serious failure.

From the Vatican to the Episcopal council of Rwanda, there is contentment with saying that the crimes of some of theirs have nothing to do with the Church as a whole, thus seeming to ignore that they have been educated, ordained and appointed by the Church.

Furthermore, those who ran towards them did so because they saw in them a representative of the Church. Without playing down its part in the economic and social field of the country, the Church failed seriously. Whether one admits it or not, it has played an active part in the misery that has befallen on Rwanda and has lost some of its credibility. Not to acknowledge it would be foolish.

* Camille Karangwa survived the genocide in Rwanda and now lives in Pretoria, South Africa, where he works for the African Association of Political Science. He has just published at the ‘Editions du jour’ a book entitled ‘Le chapelet et la machette : Sur les traces du génocide rwandais’. He can be contacted at the following address: camijour@yahoo.com

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, www.pambazuka.org" Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.
1994 was the most tragic year in the history of Rwanda as the country experienced a genocide that swept away more than a million Tutsi. This was a carefully conceived, planned and carried out genocide, as proven by its record death toll. The world was shocked.

To this day, people still wonder what the causes of this slaughter were. Some even point at the church of Rwanda, in this instance the Catholic Church, which was then the most representative and the most influential in the country. Indeed, it represents more than 60% of the population and had for a long time boasted the moral high ground, which could have been used to curb this disaster.

The question is then to know whether the church really tried to make use of its influence or if it rather failed to fulfill its duties, as several analyses seem to confirm. At the moment when we commemorate the tenth anniversary of those tragic events, it is necessary to sort the events out and draw out the responsibilities of the parties. This contribution is based on personal experience as well as various investigations in this field.

As soon as they arrived in Rwanda in the 1900s, the first settlers and white missionaries found a well-structured country ruled by the Mwami. Even though the power was concentrated in the hands of the Tutsi minority, the missionaries did not deign to protest against this situation.

They even found it natural and went as far as asserting that the Tutsi were intellectually superior to the Hutus and were the only ones able to rule the country. They invented the Hamite myth that said the Tutsi were actually white men with a black skin. They developed typologies that were probably influenced by the evolutionist theories that were fashionable in those days.

The schools they opened were almost exclusively reserved for Tutsi children. They also made an obvious effort to convert to their religion numerous children from the aristocracy.

For decades, both the Belgian colonial power therefore relied on the Tutsi, stockbreeders more akin to a cast than to an ethnic group, to rule the country and dominate the Hutu farmers, by far the largest group in the country.

But in the late 1950's, when the Tutsi elite started to wave claims of independence and the Mwami contemplated appealing to the United Nations, both Belgium and the Church decided to defend the democratic rights of the Hutu majority, embodied by Grégoire Kayibanda, former secretary of the bishop of Kabgayi and founder of the Party for the Promotion of the Hutu People (ParmeHutu).

The Catholic Church actively involved itself with the first Hutu revolutionaries, often former pupils of its schools, and denounced the social injustice it had once promoted. A letter of Mgr André Perraudin, then bishop of Kabgayi, that was published at the occasion of the Lent of 1959, agrees in many aspects with the broad outlines of the Hutu manifesto launched on the 24th of March 1959.

In this pastoral letter entitled ‘Super Omnia Caritas’, the prelate declared that the resources as well as the political and even judicial powers were in truly considerable proportion within the hands of people of one race only. He predicted imminent bloodshed if the situation was to remain unchanged.

After a referendum, carefully guided by the Belgian colonial power and the church, had installed a republic, thus exiling the last king, the Tutsi were stripped from their power, evicted from their lands and physically threatened. Hundred of thousands of them sought refuge in neighbouring countries, notably Uganda.

Throughout the three following decades, the Church was perfectly aware of human rights violations but did not lift a finger. It gave its blessing to the abuses of power of the young republic and got further involved in social activities. This conniving silence was indubitably interpreted by the rulers as a sign of support.

Grégoire Kayibanda, the first president, was close to catholic circles and had clergymen among his counsellors, specifically his grace André Perraudin, who was seen as his spiritual father. The first republic displayed notorious intransigence towards the exiles and exercised undisputed power under cover of majority democracy. Instead of grasping this opportunity to reassure the royalists and the Tutsi in general, the government was driven by feelings of revenge.

Every time an attack was launched by the exiles, the Tutsi paid for it with their blood. This was the case in the years 1961/1962. The president himself declared in his speeches that such actions by the exiles endangered the lives of their brothers who stayed in the country. The Catholic Church, present out in the field all across the country, did nothing to stop the mass killings and went on working hand in hand with the government until it collapsed.

Major-General Juvénal Habyarimana, then staff officer of the army, seized power in 1973. The Church ignored the circumstances in which this power was taken and gave full support to the new regime. When the MRND, the party of the president and future grassroots of the infamous interahamwe, was founded in 1975, some religious leaders became active members. A system of ethnically based quotas introduced by the government was also applied in some religious schools. The same racial discrimination was carried out in the choice of bishops.

At no point did the Church raise its voice to denounce the dictatorship of the MRND and its policy of exclusion. Those who dared to criticize it, such as Mrs Félicula Nyiramutarambirwa and father Silvio Sindambiwe, have paid dearly for their views.

The Church also took an active part in party propaganda. Certain homilies often sounded like popular meetings. After the attack of the FPR rebels in 1990, the government did a mock attack on Kigali and arbitrarily arrested thousands of Tutsi. The Church again missed the opportunity to distance itself from the government.

Mass killings like those in Bugesera and Bigogwe, which were aimed at Tutsi, did not change anything. When it was time to contribute to the war effort, the Church was more than eager. This connivance from the Church and the state would carry on until the genocide and even its eruption in April 1994 did not change the position of the Church. The first massacres of the morning of the 7th of April took place in Kigali at Remera Christus Centre where priests, seminarians on holiday and other visitors were killed.

The behaviour of these men of God in those crucial moments is revolting to say the least; some of them even handed over their own colleagues to the executioners; others refused to shelter in their parishes the refugees flocking there; and others offered to hide them only to fetch the interahamwe afterwards.

This was the case of the two Benedictine nuns, Consolate Mukangango and Julienne Mukabutera, who used to run the convent in Sovu and collaborated with the killers to the point where they provided them with the petrol that was to set ablaze the building where 500 Tutsi were hiding. They have recently been sentenced by a Brussels court to 15 and 12 years respectively.

The case of minister Elizaphan Ntakirutimana should not be ignored either. At more than 70 years of age, he was the minister of the Adventist Church of the Seventh Day in Mugonero, Kibuye. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda recently sentenced him to 10 years in jail. Instead of answering to the cries for help of his Tutsi colleagues who relied on his influence in the area and begged him to intervene, he sent them militia men while he was himself driving killers to different massacre sites in his own vehicle.

These are only a few examples among thousands. Indeed, other religious people are still held prisoners or are wanted by justice. Churches, once seen as sanctuaries, were turned into slaughterhouses. The churches of Nyarubuye, Cyahinda, Karama, and Kibeho have become remnants of this sad episode. Men of God, who once were seen as role models and enjoyed an indisputable moral authority, did not know how to use it in order to save lives of innocents. Their silence and their participation in those fatal moments brought a sort of “acknowledgement and legitimacy” to the ignoble acts in the eyes of the killers.

The priest and the minister have always been considered upright, wise and even saintly. It is therefore quite obvious that their attitude mattered enormously for their congregation. The highest hierarchy, doubtlessly closer to the government, did not use its influence to bring political officials to their senses. Five weeks after the genocide had started, four Catholic bishops and a few ministers of the Protestant Church published a document, which was, to say the least, half-hearted, in which they called on both parties, the then government and the RPF troops, to stop the massacres. The word genocide was not even suggested.

When the government fled the fights and settled in the centre of the country, the bishops abandoned their dioceses to follow it. They later did the same thing when, after the defeat, they scattered into Zaire, Tanzania, Cameroon etc.

The attitude of the Church at the end of the genocide was not one of great courage. Some of its members went into revisionism, others tried to cover the crimes of their colleagues. To this day, the Church as an institution has never apologized for this very serious failure.

From the Vatican to the Episcopal council of Rwanda, there is contentment with saying that the crimes of some of theirs have nothing to do with the Church as a whole, thus seeming to ignore that they have been educated, ordained and appointed by the Church.

Furthermore, those who ran towards them did so because they saw in them a representative of the Church. Without playing down its part in the economic and social field of the country, the Church failed seriously. Whether one admits it or not, it has played an active part in the misery that has befallen on Rwanda and has lost some of its credibility. Not to acknowledge it would be foolish.

* Camille Karangwa survived the genocide in Rwanda and now lives in Pretoria, South Africa, where he works for the African Association of Political Science. He has just published at the ‘Editions du jour’ a book entitled ‘Le chapelet et la machette : Sur les traces du génocide rwandais’. He can be contacted at the following address: camijour@yahoo.com

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, www.pambazuka.org" Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

4. Children of Rwanda: Legacy of the Genocide, The Future of Rwanda

Sara Rakita

2004-04-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/21167

Rwanda's children have seen the worst of humanity. Ten years after a group of politicians set in motion a genocide in an attempt to retain power, the devastating consequences for those who were left behind are unmistakable.

Traditional protective structures for children including family networks, the judicial system, and the education system were decimated. As a result, children – many of whom survived unspeakable atrocities – are still the victims of systematic human rights violations day in and day out.

Thousands have been arbitrarily arrested and denied prompt access to justice. Hundreds of thousands more living around the country have been abused, exploited for their labour, exploited for their property, or denied the right to education. Thousands have migrated to city streets in an effort to escape these abuses only to find themselves in even more precarious conditions. In the face of the daunting challenge of rebuilding a society devastated by war, poverty, and AIDS, protecting their rights has been sidelined. But this does not do Rwanda's children justice.

Those who planned and executed the genocide of 1994 violated children's rights on an unprecedented scale. Children were raped, tortured, and slaughtered along with adults in massacre after massacre around the country. Carrying their genocidal logic to its absurd conclusion, they even targeted children for killing – to exterminate the "big rats," they said, one must also kill the "little rats."

Countless thousands of children were murdered in the genocide and war. Many of those who managed to escape death had feared for their own lives, surviving rape or torture, witnessing the killing of family members, hiding under corpses, or seeing children killing other children. Some of these children – now adolescents – say they do not care whether they live or die.

Perhaps the most devastating legacy of the genocide and war is the sheer number of children left on their own, who live in precarious conditions and are extremely vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. On Rwanda's green hills, up to 400,000 children – 10 percent of Rwandan children – struggle to survive without one or both parents.

Children who were orphaned in the genocide or in war, children orphaned by AIDS, and children whose parents are in prison on charges of genocide, alike, are in desperate need of protection. Many Rwandans have exhibited enormous generosity in caring for orphans or other needy children.

Yet, because so many Rwandans are living in extreme poverty themselves, to some, vulnerable children are worth only their labour and their property. Foster families have taken needy children in, but some have also exploited them as domestic servants, denied them education, and unscrupulously taken over their family's land.

These children, often suffering the effects of trauma, have nowhere to turn and they know no other fate. Traditional societal networks – severely eroded by poverty, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and, not least, the consequences of the genocide and war – have failed them.

Thousands of children – many of whom had been exploited for their labour or their property and denied the right to education at home – have migrated to city streets to fend for themselves. There, they live in abysmal conditions, suffer poor health and hygiene, and face a near constant risk of harassment by law enforcement officials and arbitrary arrest.

As recently as February 2004, municipal authorities continued to brutally round children up by force in an effort to "clean the streets" before heads of state came to attend the historic New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) summit. It seems the presence of unkempt street children is inconsistent with the image of the city with the newest Intercontinental hotel. Girls living on the streets are frequently raped, sometimes even by law enforcement officials, yet few of those responsible have been prosecuted.

Although they garner less sympathy, children who took part in the genocide are also victims. Some five thousand people were arrested on charges they committed crimes of genocide before they reached the age of eighteen. Their rights were first violated when adults recruited, manipulated, or incited them to participate in atrocities, and have been violated again by the Rwandan justice system.

One boy who confessed and was convicted of genocide said he had been given a choice of killing his sister's children or being killed himself. He was sixteen years old at the time. Large numbers of these children were in fact arrested unjustly.

Another boy, arrested at age thirteen after the genocide, confessed to having killed in order to escape torture, although he now maintains that his confession was false. He had just witnessed other detainees being tortured at the hands of Rwandan government soldiers. His father, among others, had died as a result of torture the night before. He and a thousand others who were younger than fourteen in 1994, and thus too young to be held criminally responsible under Rwandan law, were freed after being transferred from detention facilities to reeducation camps in 2000 and 2001. The government had been promising to release them since 1995.

As many as four thousand children who were between fourteen and eighteen years old during the genocide continued to languish in overcrowded prisons until last year, and some may still be detained. Their adolescence is gone. Despite repeated, hollow promises to give their cases priority within the over-burdened justice system, they have been subjected to the worst of a bad situation.

Juvenile defendants have been tried at an even slower rate than adults. Few have enjoyed the right to adequate legal counsel and other due process protections guaranteed under Rwandan and international law. A few hundred, for whom prosecutors had not conducted investigations or made case files during their years of imprisonment, were provisionally released in 2001 after their neighbours cleared them of wrongdoing in public meetings.

Ironically, now that the government has finally made some progress in dealing with the massive failures of the justice system – including organizing gacaca courts to deal with the bulk of genocide cases and releasing most of those who had been below the age of criminal responsibility and those who confessed – it has become even harder to draw attention to the plight of young adults who remain in detention for crimes they allegedly committed as children, especially those who proclaim their innocence. "We feel that justice has left us," one of them said.

The international community has provided billions of dollars to assist in the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Rwanda and continues to donate tens of millions of dollars each year. Yet inadequate resources have been devoted to address the desperate needs of child protection. And there have been insufficient efforts to ensure that money earmarked for the protection of children is actually used for that purpose.

The majority of Rwandan children have been victims of armed conflict. Thousands have been arbitrarily arrested and denied prompt access to justice. Hundreds of thousands more living around the country have been abused, exploited for their labour, exploited for their property, or denied the right to education. Thousands have migrated to city streets in an effort to escape these abuses only to find themselves even worse off.

Rwanda can and must do more to protect their rights. The government has embraced international standards on children’s rights and has passed a strong law on child protection. But words are not enough. Ten years of promises to protect their rights has meant little for vulnerable children in practice. We must not remain complacent while so many children continue to suffer. The future of Rwanda depends on it.

* This article is based on “Lasting Wounds: Consequences of Genocide and War for Rwanda’s Children,” written by Sara Rakita and published by Human Rights Watch in 2003.
Rwanda's children have seen the worst of humanity. Ten years after a group of politicians set in motion a genocide in an attempt to retain power, the devastating consequences for those who were left behind are unmistakable.

Traditional protective structures for children including family networks, the judicial system, and the education system were decimated. As a result, children – many of whom survived unspeakable atrocities – are still the victims of systematic human rights violations day in and day out.

Thousands have been arbitrarily arrested and denied prompt access to justice. Hundreds of thousands more living around the country have been abused, exploited for their labour, exploited for their property, or denied the right to education. Thousands have migrated to city streets in an effort to escape these abuses only to find themselves in even more precarious conditions. In the face of the daunting challenge of rebuilding a society devastated by war, poverty, and AIDS, protecting their rights has been sidelined. But this does not do Rwanda's children justice.

Those who planned and executed the genocide of 1994 violated children's rights on an unprecedented scale. Children were raped, tortured, and slaughtered along with adults in massacre after massacre around the country. Carrying their genocidal logic to its absurd conclusion, they even targeted children for killing – to exterminate the "big rats," they said, one must also kill the "little rats."

Countless thousands of children were murdered in the genocide and war. Many of those who managed to escape death had feared for their own lives, surviving rape or torture, witnessing the killing of family members, hiding under corpses, or seeing children killing other children. Some of these children – now adolescents – say they do not care whether they live or die.

Perhaps the most devastating legacy of the genocide and war is the sheer number of children left on their own, who live in precarious conditions and are extremely vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. On Rwanda's green hills, up to 400,000 children – 10 percent of Rwandan children – struggle to survive without one or both parents.

Children who were orphaned in the genocide or in war, children orphaned by AIDS, and children whose parents are in prison on charges of genocide, alike, are in desperate need of protection. Many Rwandans have exhibited enormous generosity in caring for orphans or other needy children.

Yet, because so many Rwandans are living in extreme poverty themselves, to some, vulnerable children are worth only their labour and their property. Foster families have taken needy children in, but some have also exploited them as domestic servants, denied them education, and unscrupulously taken over their family's land.

These children, often suffering the effects of trauma, have nowhere to turn and they know no other fate. Traditional societal networks – severely eroded by poverty, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and, not least, the consequences of the genocide and war – have failed them.

Thousands of children – many of whom had been exploited for their labour or their property and denied the right to education at home – have migrated to city streets to fend for themselves. There, they live in abysmal conditions, suffer poor health and hygiene, and face a near constant risk of harassment by law enforcement officials and arbitrary arrest.

As recently as February 2004, municipal authorities continued to brutally round children up by force in an effort to "clean the streets" before heads of state came to attend the historic New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) summit. It seems the presence of unkempt street children is inconsistent with the image of the city with the newest Intercontinental hotel. Girls living on the streets are frequently raped, sometimes even by law enforcement officials, yet few of those responsible have been prosecuted.

Although they garner less sympathy, children who took part in the genocide are also victims. Some five thousand people were arrested on charges they committed crimes of genocide before they reached the age of eighteen. Their rights were first violated when adults recruited, manipulated, or incited them to participate in atrocities, and have been violated again by the Rwandan justice system.

One boy who confessed and was convicted of genocide said he had been given a choice of killing his sister's children or being killed himself. He was sixteen years old at the time. Large numbers of these children were in fact arrested unjustly.

Another boy, arrested at age thirteen after the genocide, confessed to having killed in order to escape torture, although he now maintains that his confession was false. He had just witnessed other detainees being tortured at the hands of Rwandan government soldiers. His father, among others, had died as a result of torture the night before. He and a thousand others who were younger than fourteen in 1994, and thus too young to be held criminally responsible under Rwandan law, were freed after being transferred from detention facilities to reeducation camps in 2000 and 2001. The government had been promising to release them since 1995.

As many as four thousand children who were between fourteen and eighteen years old during the genocide continued to languish in overcrowded prisons until last year, and some may still be detained. Their adolescence is gone. Despite repeated, hollow promises to give their cases priority within the over-burdened justice system, they have been subjected to the worst of a bad situation.

Juvenile defendants have been tried at an even slower rate than adults. Few have enjoyed the right to adequate legal counsel and other due process protections guaranteed under Rwandan and international law. A few hundred, for whom prosecutors had not conducted investigations or made case files during their years of imprisonment, were provisionally released in 2001 after their neighbours cleared them of wrongdoing in public meetings.

Ironically, now that the government has finally made some progress in dealing with the massive failures of the justice system – including organizing gacaca courts to deal with the bulk of genocide cases and releasing most of those who had been below the age of criminal responsibility and those who confessed – it has become even harder to draw attention to the plight of young adults who remain in detention for crimes they allegedly committed as children, especially those who proclaim their innocence. "We feel that justice has left us," one of them said.

The international community has provided billions of dollars to assist in the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Rwanda and continues to donate tens of millions of dollars each year. Yet inadequate resources have been devoted to address the desperate needs of child protection. And there have been insufficient efforts to ensure that money earmarked for the protection of children is actually used for that purpose.

The majority of Rwandan children have been victims of armed conflict. Thousands have been arbitrarily arrested and denied prompt access to justice. Hundreds of thousands more living around the country have been abused, exploited for their labour, exploited for their property, or denied the right to education. Thousands have migrated to city streets in an effort to escape these abuses only to find themselves even worse off.

Rwanda can and must do more to protect their rights. The government has embraced international standards on children’s rights and has passed a strong law on child protection. But words are not enough. Ten years of promises to protect their rights has meant little for vulnerable children in practice. We must not remain complacent while so many children continue to suffer. The future of Rwanda depends on it.

* This article is based on “Lasting Wounds: Consequences of Genocide and War for Rwanda’s Children,” written by Sara Rakita and published by Human Rights Watch in 2003.

5. A seat in the grass

Luleka Mangquku

2004-04-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/21168

The mountains are beguiling. Volcanic and tropical, they teem with life: bearded colobus, a hundred kinds of butterflies and twice as many tree species all in a space scarcely larger than Wales. Banana groves slide off the slopes into valleys deeply rutted by brick cutters and potato mounds. As the hills slip by it is tempting to forget the secrets they hold. But in Rwanda, forgetting is impossible.

This was my first trip in 'Africa,' as we from South Africa like to call the rest of our continent. I started in Kenya, confronting what my country tried for 350 years to separate itself from: the African experience. For years I had Kenyan and Ugandan acquaintances who made me feel guilty for the xenophobic tendencies of my countrymen. They reminded me constantly of the contributions and sacrifices their countries made to assist our struggle against apartheid. They said I should be grateful for their black governments. They made me, a black South African woman, feel as if I owed them something. Maybe I do.

Kenya and Uganda were moveable feasts: vibrant, sensuous, crumbling. Their bustling cities and broken roads played to the lighter emotions - curiosity, bemusement and, to a degree, affinity. But Rwanda was different. Against the chaos of Kenya and Uganda, there is a calm to Rwanda. Traffic moves at a seemingly different pace. The roads are smoother. Perhaps it is the eeriness of confronting a horrific past that is immediately, palpably present, but Rwanda feels more contemplative.

At any rate, certain parallels with my own country's experience are inescapable. Rwanda is about to commemorate 10 years since its previous government incited a frenzy of ethnic genocide that consumed an estimated 800,000 people. At that very horrible moment, thousands of kilometres to the south, we were counting down the final tense days to our first democratic election.

While we were dancing in the streets, Rwandans were hunting down their neighbours, their brothers, their own wives and children in the maize. While we held the world in rapture, the brave and powerful turned their gaze away from Rwanda.

On my first ride through Rwanda's countryside, celebrating a decade of democracy felt like desecrating the memory of the dead. Somehow, the hundreds of years of being described as sub-human, discriminated against, despised and abused that my people suffered paled in significance to the 100 days of horror that Rwandans experienced.

Sitting on the bus, I felt I had intruded on a private affair. I could never pretend to understand the pain of those in the seats next to me. I am fortunate. The closest I ever came to the atrocities of the apartheid era was when people came forward at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to recount their stories of loss and suffering.

After a decade of democracy, we in South Africa are shielded by a veil - a strong and encompassing constitution that makes it slightly easier to pretend that apartheid is dead and buried. But in Rwanda that veil does not exist. It is no longer official policy in Rwanda to label people Hutu or Tutsi, to force them to carry identification cards the way the apartheid governments made us carry passes. But there is nothing to soothe the fears of ordinary Rwandans.

The drive from Katuna border post to Kigali took about an hour, and in that time I tried to concentrate on the present - the amazing slopes, the cool mountain air. But the past kept filtering through. I couldn't help wondering what secrets lived in the hills. As we neared the capital, one of my travel companions asked me what I would like to see in his city. I couldn't say what I wanted to: the genocide memorials. I wasn't sure if I could say the 'g-word' out loud in a bus loaded with Rwandans, so I just smiled and looked out the window.

As the road made a final descent into Kigali, my other companion, also Rwandan, tugged at my sleeve and said: 'Genocide.' For a horrible second I thought we had stumbled upon a fresh outbreak of violence. His half-smile told me otherwise. Off to the right stood a genocide memorial. That simple gesture broke the ice for me. I understood that I could satisfy my curiosity openly without inciting anyone.

On my second day in the country, we drove south from Kigali to Gitarama province where some of the worst of the killing occurred. Our first stop was a memorial in the district of Kibagali, where human skulls and bones were neatly stacked on glass shelves - the silent, faceless remnants of husbands, wives and children.

Later that day, we attended a preliminary hearing of a gacaca, a traditional court where perpetrators and victims resolve their differences before the community and a panel of eminent persons. Rwanda has revived gacacas - the word literally means 'in the grass' - in a national experiment in social healing and reconciliation.

About 60 residents congregated under a few trees in an open patch of ground next to some houses. Sixteen people sat in judgment. As my companions and I found comfortable spots in the field, the chairman of the panel called out a name of a victim. He asked if anyone gathered there knew how the man had died. Silence. No hand went up. Finally, one of the panellists stood up in anger and said it was impossible that no one had witnessed the killing. She knew, she said, specific people present at the sitting who should have seen the incident.

Provoked by further silence, she gave her own chilling account of how dogs were set on the victim, chasing him through the village until he finally lost the fight for his life. She then pointed out an elderly man sitting under one of the trees as having witnessed the chase. She accused the elderly man, describing how he continued harvesting beans as the horrific drama unfolded nearby.

Dispassionately, the old man acknowledged that he had been tending his garden at the time in question, but said he did not see anything. I was stunned. Such passivity is incomprehensible, even when you come from a country where crowds once gathered to watch gruesome killings perpetrated in the guise of mob justice.

Across Rwanda, billboards promoting gacaca proclaim: 'The truth heals. Let's tell what we saw, let's confess to what we did. This will heal us.' I wonder. The success of the gacaca system heavily relies on people volunteering information, being honest about what they did and what they saw.

It was the same in South Africa. We offered amnesty - immunity from prosecution - in exchange for the truth. By trading stories - what we did, or what we endured - we hoped to find reconciliation. Who can yet say if it has worked? Our society is still fragile and fragmented. Who can say if it will work in Rwanda?

The reality of this country is that many ordinary people were incited by the government to kill and there is not enough time to try them all or space to imprison them. But how do you learn to trust a man who picks beans while his neighbours are slaughtered? How do you greet him in the marketplace? Will confessions and finger-pointing in open-air tribunals enable Rwandans, the most Roman Catholic of Africans, to forgive 'until seventy times seven?'

A few days later, once again at the Katuna border, I crossed back into Uganda riding on a boda boda, a bicycle taxi, whizzing past travellers who had left me in the immigration queue. As the cyclist picked his way through the clog of people and cars, trying his best to avoid the bumps and potholes on the road, I thought of Rwanda's own uncertain road to recovery. The obstacles they face are revenge and resentment. Ten years after the killing, the country's name is still synonymous with genocide.

Perhaps, though, if Rwandans steer their course as we in South Africa did ours, the hills of their homeland may in time reveal a new story: a tale of hope.

* This article first appeared in the March 2004 issue of eAfrica: The Electronic Journal of Governance and Innovation, an online monthly journal published by the South African Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg. eAfrica can be found on www.wits.ac.za/saiia/online.htm
The mountains are beguiling. Volcanic and tropical, they teem with life: bearded colobus, a hundred kinds of butterflies and twice as many tree species all in a space scarcely larger than Wales. Banana groves slide off the slopes into valleys deeply rutted by brick cutters and potato mounds. As the hills slip by it is tempting to forget the secrets they hold. But in Rwanda, forgetting is impossible.

This was my first trip in 'Africa,' as we from South Africa like to call the rest of our continent. I started in Kenya, confronting what my country tried for 350 years to separate itself from: the African experience. For years I had Kenyan and Ugandan acquaintances who made me feel guilty for the xenophobic tendencies of my countrymen. They reminded me constantly of the contributions and sacrifices their countries made to assist our struggle against apartheid. They said I should be grateful for their black governments. They made me, a black South African woman, feel as if I owed them something. Maybe I do.

Kenya and Uganda were moveable feasts: vibrant, sensuous, crumbling. Their bustling cities and broken roads played to the lighter emotions - curiosity, bemusement and, to a degree, affinity. But Rwanda was different. Against the chaos of Kenya and Uganda, there is a calm to Rwanda. Traffic moves at a seemingly different pace. The roads are smoother. Perhaps it is the eeriness of confronting a horrific past that is immediately, palpably present, but Rwanda feels more contemplative.

At any rate, certain parallels with my own country's experience are inescapable. Rwanda is about to commemorate 10 years since its previous government incited a frenzy of ethnic genocide that consumed an estimated 800,000 people. At that very horrible moment, thousands of kilometres to the south, we were counting down the final tense days to our first democratic election.

While we were dancing in the streets, Rwandans were hunting down their neighbours, their brothers, their own wives and children in the maize. While we held the world in rapture, the brave and powerful turned their gaze away from Rwanda.

On my first ride through Rwanda's countryside, celebrating a decade of democracy felt like desecrating the memory of the dead. Somehow, the hundreds of years of being described as sub-human, discriminated against, despised and abused that my people suffered paled in significance to the 100 days of horror that Rwandans experienced.

Sitting on the bus, I felt I had intruded on a private affair. I could never pretend to understand the pain of those in the seats next to me. I am fortunate. The closest I ever came to the atrocities of the apartheid era was when people came forward at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to recount their stories of loss and suffering.

After a decade of democracy, we in South Africa are shielded by a veil - a strong and encompassing constitution that makes it slightly easier to pretend that apartheid is dead and buried. But in Rwanda that veil does not exist. It is no longer official policy in Rwanda to label people Hutu or Tutsi, to force them to carry identification cards the way the apartheid governments made us carry passes. But there is nothing to soothe the fears of ordinary Rwandans.

The drive from Katuna border post to Kigali took about an hour, and in that time I tried to concentrate on the present - the amazing slopes, the cool mountain air. But the past kept filtering through. I couldn't help wondering what secrets lived in the hills. As we neared the capital, one of my travel companions asked me what I would like to see in his city. I couldn't say what I wanted to: the genocide memorials. I wasn't sure if I could say the 'g-word' out loud in a bus loaded with Rwandans, so I just smiled and looked out the window.

As the road made a final descent into Kigali, my other companion, also Rwandan, tugged at my sleeve and said: 'Genocide.' For a horrible second I thought we had stumbled upon a fresh outbreak of violence. His half-smile told me otherwise. Off to the right stood a genocide memorial. That simple gesture broke the ice for me. I understood that I could satisfy my curiosity openly without inciting anyone.

On my second day in the country, we drove south from Kigali to Gitarama province where some of the worst of the killing occurred. Our first stop was a memorial in the district of Kibagali, where human skulls and bones were neatly stacked on glass shelves - the silent, faceless remnants of husbands, wives and children.

Later that day, we attended a preliminary hearing of a gacaca, a traditional court where perpetrators and victims resolve their differences before the community and a panel of eminent persons. Rwanda has revived gacacas - the word literally means 'in the grass' - in a national experiment in social healing and reconciliation.

About 60 residents congregated under a few trees in an open patch of ground next to some houses. Sixteen people sat in judgment. As my companions and I found comfortable spots in the field, the chairman of the panel called out a name of a victim. He asked if anyone gathered there knew how the man had died. Silence. No hand went up. Finally, one of the panellists stood up in anger and said it was impossible that no one had witnessed the killing. She knew, she said, specific people present at the sitting who should have seen the incident.

Provoked by further silence, she gave her own chilling account of how dogs were set on the victim, chasing him through the village until he finally lost the fight for his life. She then pointed out an elderly man sitting under one of the trees as having witnessed the chase. She accused the elderly man, describing how he continued harvesting beans as the horrific drama unfolded nearby.

Dispassionately, the old man acknowledged that he had been tending his garden at the time in question, but said he did not see anything. I was stunned. Such passivity is incomprehensible, even when you come from a country where crowds once gathered to watch gruesome killings perpetrated in the guise of mob justice.

Across Rwanda, billboards promoting gacaca proclaim: 'The truth heals. Let's tell what we saw, let's confess to what we did. This will heal us.' I wonder. The success of the gacaca system heavily relies on people volunteering information, being honest about what they did and what they saw.

It was the same in South Africa. We offered amnesty - immunity from prosecution - in exchange for the truth. By trading stories - what we did, or what we endured - we hoped to find reconciliation. Who can yet say if it has worked? Our society is still fragile and fragmented. Who can say if it will work in Rwanda?

The reality of this country is that many ordinary people were incited by the government to kill and there is not enough time to try them all or space to imprison them. But how do you learn to trust a man who picks beans while his neighbours are slaughtered? How do you greet him in the marketplace? Will confessions and finger-pointing in open-air tribunals enable Rwandans, the most Roman Catholic of Africans, to forgive 'until seventy times seven?'

A few days later, once again at the Katuna border, I crossed back into Uganda riding on a boda boda, a bicycle taxi, whizzing past travellers who had left me in the immigration queue. As the cyclist picked his way through the clog of people and cars, trying his best to avoid the bumps and potholes on the road, I thought of Rwanda's own uncertain road to recovery. The obstacles they face are revenge and resentment. Ten years after the killing, the country's name is still synonymous with genocide.

Perhaps, though, if Rwandans steer their course as we in South Africa did ours, the hills of their homeland may in time reveal a new story: a tale of hope.

* This article first appeared in the March 2004 issue of eAfrica: The Electronic Journal of Governance and Innovation, an online monthly journal published by the South African Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg. eAfrica can be found on www.wits.ac.za/saiia/online.htm

6. Why? How? Searching for answers in the Diaspora

Vincent Gasana

2004-04-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/21169

April marks the tenth year since the genocide that left a million dead in Rwanda. There will be many acts of remembrance, public and private. Many will be intensely personal. There will be those who wish that we would all forget, that the whole thing would just go away. Many of these will be in prisons in Rwanda, Tanzania or hiding out in capitals around the world. The feelings and reactions about the date will be as varied as the individuals who dared not look away.

Much more complex is the reaction of Africans in the Diaspora. For them as for many others around the world, there was what to make of the scarcely believable horror that forced itself on their lives through television sets. The shock of what was taking place before the world’s eyes froze most people’s analytical faculties. In some sense, the whole world participated in the genocide in Rwanda. Thanks to the miracle of television, we all went along as spectators. Unwilling, reluctant spectators, horrified and yet gripped by the terrifying depths to which human souls could sink. As people watched helplessly, representative governments, chiefly Great Britain, the United States and of course France, worked overtime to ensure that what was happening in Rwanda was not called genocide, because then they would have been obliged to intervene. For them this technicality was all-important.

And so a more convenient, comforting description gained currency in newsrooms. The world was informed that what was taking place in Rwanda was ‘tribal killings’. It was an Old Faithful that never fails to satisfy the questions what and why whenever a conflict in Africa degenerates to such an appalling extent that it forces itself on the attention of a wider world that would rather focus its attentions elsewhere. For most people watching, this line provided some comfort in that it at least provided a context into which they could put the abominable crimes they were being forced to witness.

The line provided a way in which they could distance themselves from what was being done. Such savagery could have nothing to do with them. It could only be done by that ‘other’, the ‘other’ that did not have their sensibilities.

The irony is almost chilling; this is how the organisers of the genocide spoke of their eventual victims. The Batutsi were “snakes” (Rwandans’ horror of snakes should be understood in a biblical sense: an insidious and perfidious killer) that not only could but should be mercilessly destroyed. They were not to be thought of like other people, they were different, they were the other. Upwards of 300,000 children were killed in the genocide, although ‘kill’ is too kind and innocuous a word for how their young lives were ended before they had hardly begun. The leaders of the genocide simply put the rhetorical question to the Bahutu population, “when you hunt for a snake, do you spare its young?” Such reasoning was designed to make even infanticide acceptable.

For Africans in the Diaspora, there could be no such easy comforts. The people committing such unspeakable crimes were no aliens that could be disowned, they were just like them. Diaspora Africans could not distance themselves from the perpetrators of the genocide by seeing them as the other. The other that were not like them, the other that were capable of such inhumanity that they themselves found so abhorrent. They had to endure that terrible unease that must come with witnessing a human being just like you descend into such depths of inhumanity that one would not have even dared to imagine.

The dictionary description of the word empathy, is the power to enter into the feeling and spirit of others. The trouble with empathy is that while it leads one to identify and wish to protect and comfort the victim, it cannot protect itself from the horror of the knowledge that the perpetrator is a human being just like oneself. How could the minds and hearts that could just as easily be theirs, not only perpetrate, or even contemplate such an abomination? How could the eyes that could easily be theirs bear to look upon such evil?

As it should have done, the Rwandan genocide challenged the assumptions for the basis of our own humanity. If a general observation can be made about how Africans in the Diaspora responded to this most profound and personal of challenges, it is that above and beyond the abhorrence that gripped every decent human being, they felt it incumbent upon them to help in some way. And many did. In Britain, a number of organisations both large and small collected money and material for Rwanda, long before the call to respond to the crisis begun to be heard commonly in the mainstream.

A number of individuals organised fund raising events. This was particularly true of those in the media. A number of well known professionals exploited their celebrity status and managed to bring together a number of pop stars and other entertainers for fundraising events. The speed with which this was done was surprisingly impressive and for the few Rwandans then living in the United Kingdom (UK) profoundly touching.

The Diaspora community in the UK is relatively small, powerless and lacks any real organised unity. It was for instance notable that while they were organising events for Rwanda, holding meetings, talks and seminars about Rwanda, neither the individuals nor the organisations involved had any awareness that there existed a Rwandan community in their midst.

While they talked of the need to show support and solidarity with their Rwandan brethren, they had no idea that they could share these feelings and deliver these messages, face to face in the same city. Conversely, the tiny Rwandan community in the UK stoically continued to plough a lonely furrow, doing all it could to support people back home. The community never realised that less than three-quarters of an hour’s drive away, people who thought of them as brothers and sisters were almost desperate for an opportunity to help. With this state of affairs it was therefore most impressive that so many were galvanised into action so quickly and so effectively.

There was however another side to this general picture. In Britain, after the initial shock of the first images from Rwanda, one of the determining factors in black people’s response to the harrowing events in Rwanda, was the extent of their identification with Africans in Africa and Africa itself. This identification or lack of it is in turn influenced by their respective backgrounds. The majority of people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere are descendants of Africans that were forcibly removed from Africa during the slave trade.

From the moment of capture, these Africans were no longer treated as human beings. Once in the Americas or the Caribbean, those that survived the slave ships were soon deprived of everything that any human being takes for granted. They were stripped of their identity, even their names were take away and replaced with those of the slave owners. “Forget you are African, remember you are black” was drummed into their beings, often with whips. To be African was to be a person with a heritage, a family, a name. It was to belong. To be black was to be a subspecies, a beast of burden. For good measure, the idea of Africa was depicted as a dark primitive place from which the slaves should be grateful to have been delivered.

Over centuries, this notion has been burned into the psyche of many people of African descent. It has lain dormant ready to be triggered by any occurrence or happening that might lead to self-awareness or self-analysis. It is an enduring intellectual and psychological war in which many Diaspora African scholars and activists have been engaged for centuries. For many black people whose view of Africa and Africans have been shaped by this outlook, the Rwandan genocide, like other conflicts in Africa, are no more than the expected atavistic struggles in a modern age. This was a view held by a large minority within the African Diaspora.

It is a view that has been termed “the internalisation of racism” by informed opinion within the African Diaspora. Such thinking, or perhaps more accurately, such feelings were by no means restricted to Diaspora Africans whose ancestors had gone through the slave trade. While they are burdened by what has been called a “slave mentality”, many Africans still on the continent or who have relatively recently become part of the African Diaspora, can be said to be burdened with a similar mentality, which we may term a “colonial mentality.”

And this too came to the fore during the genocide. A veteran journalist of Camerounian origin, whom it might be unfair to name, was interviewed by one of the major television news networks and his responses were revealing. He was offended by events in Rwanda and Burundi, he said, because they were responsible for perpetuating Africa’s image in the West as savage and uncivilised. He irritably opined that these countries should refrain from making the rest of the continent look bad.

A million people had been killed in ways that would defy the most depraved imagination and yet for this senior African journalist, the deepest injury was to the image of Africa, the deepest worry, withdrawal of approval from the West. His was by no means a minority view. The former Secretary General to the United Nations Boutros Ghali was clearly of the same mind, when he visited Rwanda and complained of the smell from the dead. It is a view shared by Africans of a certain generation for whom the West’s view of itself as the arbiter of civilisation has become a deeply ingrained belief. For them Africa is indeed the ‘Dark Continent’.

Small Pan-African groups on the fringe in London had anticipated these feelings and had begun to rail against them long before they had been expressed in response to the genocide. For them the genocide was just another battleground against the colonial and slave mentalities. They automatically spoke of the Rwandan conflict as a colonial legacy, anxious to pre-empt and counter feelings of African insecurity and inferiority. They were more right than they imagined. Ethnic divide in Rwanda is a recent political construction that grew from the seeds sown by German and later Belgian authorities. True as this may be however, one is still faced with the fact that it was Rwandans who first accepted alien views of themselves, abandoned their own civilisations and massacred over a million of their compatriots.

When the first European arrivals from Germany arrived in Rwanda and espoused such fantasist ideas that the Batutsi were a different, finer race from the Bahutu, many from the two main ethnic groups did not challenge this view. Instead a number of earlier Batutsi and Bahutu intellectuals took up these ideas. It was these ideas that were repeated in the first massacres against the Batutsi in the 50s and 60s, during which hundreds of thousands died. It is these same ideas that were heard again in 1994.

There can be no rational explanation for the Rwandan genocide or any other genocide for that matter. None the less, when human beings are visited by such overwhelming disasters, they try to seek comfort in asking why and how. From within the African Diaspora, there was and continues to be a collective chorus of why and how. They need, want and demand an explanation.

However there is no explanation for genocide. Why did the Nazis murder six million Jewish souls? Could even the Nazis say why? The best that can be done for Africans in the Diaspora, who ask why, is to explain the circumstances and conditions surrounding the genocide. As for why they were committed, it is for every human being to answer that. Information may help and much needs to be done to provide it. A black American acquaintance asked me where I came from and when I said Rwanda, he asked me whether it was in South America. Most people know more about Rwanda now of course, but not much more.

Many Diaspora Africans have done and are doing much to increase understanding. Programme makers, journalists and writers like Jack Mapanji from Malawi - who offered a poem in response to what he witnessed - and many others. Rwandan communities in the Diaspora can offer information but none of us can answer the question why.

* Vincent Gasana is a Rwandan who lives and works as a broadcast journalist in London.

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, www.pambazuka.org" Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.
April marks the tenth year since the genocide that left a million dead in Rwanda. There will be many acts of remembrance, public and private. Many will be intensely personal. There will be those who wish that we would all forget, that the whole thing would just go away. Many of these will be in prisons in Rwanda, Tanzania or hiding out in capitals around the world. The feelings and reactions about the date will be as varied as the individuals who dared not look away.

Much more complex is the reaction of Africans in the Diaspora. For them as for many others around the world, there was what to make of the scarcely believable horror that forced itself on their lives through television sets. The shock of what was taking place before the world’s eyes froze most people’s analytical faculties. In some sense, the whole world participated in the genocide in Rwanda. Thanks to the miracle of television, we all went along as spectators. Unwilling, reluctant spectators, horrified and yet gripped by the terrifying depths to which human souls could sink. As people watched helplessly, representative governments, chiefly Great Britain, the United States and of course France, worked overtime to ensure that what was happening in Rwanda was not called genocide, because then they would have been obliged to intervene. For them this technicality was all-important.

And so a more convenient, comforting description gained currency in newsrooms. The world was informed that what was taking place in Rwanda was ‘tribal killings’. It was an Old Faithful that never fails to satisfy the questions what and why whenever a conflict in Africa degenerates to such an appalling extent that it forces itself on the attention of a wider world that would rather focus its attentions elsewhere. For most people watching, this line provided some comfort in that it at least provided a context into which they could put the abominable crimes they were being forced to witness.

The line provided a way in which they could distance themselves from what was being done. Such savagery could have nothing to do with them. It could only be done by that ‘other’, the ‘other’ that did not have their sensibilities.

The irony is almost chilling; this is how the organisers of the genocide spoke of their eventual victims. The Batutsi were “snakes” (Rwandans’ horror of snakes should be understood in a biblical sense: an insidious and perfidious killer) that not only could but should be mercilessly destroyed. They were not to be thought of like other people, they were different, they were the other. Upwards of 300,000 children were killed in the genocide, although ‘kill’ is too kind and innocuous a word for how their young lives were ended before they had hardly begun. The leaders of the genocide simply put the rhetorical question to the Bahutu population, “when you hunt for a snake, do you spare its young?” Such reasoning was designed to make even infanticide acceptable.

For Africans in the Diaspora, there could be no such easy comforts. The people committing such unspeakable crimes were no aliens that could be disowned, they were just like them. Diaspora Africans could not distance themselves from the perpetrators of the genocide by seeing them as the other. The other that were not like them, the other that were capable of such inhumanity that they themselves found so abhorrent. They had to endure that terrible unease that must come with witnessing a human being just like you descend into such depths of inhumanity that one would not have even dared to imagine.

The dictionary description of the word empathy, is the power to enter into the feeling and spirit of others. The trouble with empathy is that while it leads one to identify and wish to protect and comfort the victim, it cannot protect itself from the horror of the knowledge that the perpetrator is a human being just like oneself. How could the minds and hearts that could just as easily be theirs, not only perpetrate, or even contemplate such an abomination? How could the eyes that could easily be theirs bear to look upon such evil?

As it should have done, the Rwandan genocide challenged the assumptions for the basis of our own humanity. If a general observation can be made about how Africans in the Diaspora responded to this most profound and personal of challenges, it is that above and beyond the abhorrence that gripped every decent human being, they felt it incumbent upon them to help in some way. And many did. In Britain, a number of organisations both large and small collected money and material for Rwanda, long before the call to respond to the crisis begun to be heard commonly in the mainstream.

A number of individuals organised fund raising events. This was particularly true of those in the media. A number of well known professionals exploited their celebrity status and managed to bring together a number of pop stars and other entertainers for fundraising events. The speed with which this was done was surprisingly impressive and for the few Rwandans then living in the United Kingdom (UK) profoundly touching.

The Diaspora community in the UK is relatively small, powerless and lacks any real organised unity. It was for instance notable that while they were organising events for Rwanda, holding meetings, talks and seminars about Rwanda, neither the individuals nor the organisations involved had any awareness that there existed a Rwandan community in their midst.

While they talked of the need to show support and solidarity with their Rwandan brethren, they had no idea that they could share these feelings and deliver these messages, face to face in the same city. Conversely, the tiny Rwandan community in the UK stoically continued to plough a lonely furrow, doing all it could to support people back home. The community never realised that less than three-quarters of an hour’s drive away, people who thought of them as brothers and sisters were almost desperate for an opportunity to help. With this state of affairs it was therefore most impressive that so many were galvanised into action so quickly and so effectively.

There was however another side to this general picture. In Britain, after the initial shock of the first images from Rwanda, one of the determining factors in black people’s response to the harrowing events in Rwanda, was the extent of their identification with Africans in Africa and Africa itself. This identification or lack of it is in turn influenced by their respective backgrounds. The majority of people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere are descendants of Africans that were forcibly removed from Africa during the slave trade.

From the moment of capture, these Africans were no longer treated as human beings. Once in the Americas or the Caribbean, those that survived the slave ships were soon deprived of everything that any human being takes for granted. They were stripped of their identity, even their names were take away and replaced with those of the slave owners. “Forget you are African, remember you are black” was drummed into their beings, often with whips. To be African was to be a person with a heritage, a family, a name. It was to belong. To be black was to be a subspecies, a beast of burden. For good measure, the idea of Africa was depicted as a dark primitive place from which the slaves should be grateful to have been delivered.

Over centuries, this notion has been burned into the psyche of many people of African descent. It has lain dormant ready to be triggered by any occurrence or happening that might lead to self-awareness or self-analysis. It is an enduring intellectual and psychological war in which many Diaspora African scholars and activists have been engaged for centuries. For many black people whose view of Africa and Africans have been shaped by this outlook, the Rwandan genocide, like other conflicts in Africa, are no more than the expected atavistic struggles in a modern age. This was a view held by a large minority within the African Diaspora.

It is a view that has been termed “the internalisation of racism” by informed opinion within the African Diaspora. Such thinking, or perhaps more accurately, such feelings were by no means restricted to Diaspora Africans whose ancestors had gone through the slave trade. While they are burdened by what has been called a “slave mentality”, many Africans still on the continent or who have relatively recently become part of the African Diaspora, can be said to be burdened with a similar mentality, which we may term a “colonial mentality.”

And this too came to the fore during the genocide. A veteran journalist of Camerounian origin, whom it might be unfair to name, was interviewed by one of the major television news networks and his responses were revealing. He was offended by events in Rwanda and Burundi, he said, because they were responsible for perpetuating Africa’s image in the West as savage and uncivilised. He irritably opined that these countries should refrain from making the rest of the continent look bad.

A million people had been killed in ways that would defy the most depraved imagination and yet for this senior African journalist, the deepest injury was to the image of Africa, the deepest worry, withdrawal of approval from the West. His was by no means a minority view. The former Secretary General to the United Nations Boutros Ghali was clearly of the same mind, when he visited Rwanda and complained of the smell from the dead. It is a view shared by Africans of a certain generation for whom the West’s view of itself as the arbiter of civilisation has become a deeply ingrained belief. For them Africa is indeed the ‘Dark Continent’.

Small Pan-African groups on the fringe in London had anticipated these feelings and had begun to rail against them long before they had been expressed in response to the genocide. For them the genocide was just another battleground against the colonial and slave mentalities. They automatically spoke of the Rwandan conflict as a colonial legacy, anxious to pre-empt and counter feelings of African insecurity and inferiority. They were more right than they imagined. Ethnic divide in Rwanda is a recent political construction that grew from the seeds sown by German and later Belgian authorities. True as this may be however, one is still faced with the fact that it was Rwandans who first accepted alien views of themselves, abandoned their own civilisations and massacred over a million of their compatriots.

When the first European arrivals from Germany arrived in Rwanda and espoused such fantasist ideas that the Batutsi were a different, finer race from the Bahutu, many from the two main ethnic groups did not challenge this view. Instead a number of earlier Batutsi and Bahutu intellectuals took up these ideas. It was these ideas that were repeated in the first massacres against the Batutsi in the 50s and 60s, during which hundreds of thousands died. It is these same ideas that were heard again in 1994.

There can be no rational explanation for the Rwandan genocide or any other genocide for that matter. None the less, when human beings are visited by such overwhelming disasters, they try to seek comfort in asking why and how. From within the African Diaspora, there was and continues to be a collective chorus of why and how. They need, want and demand an explanation.

However there is no explanation for genocide. Why did the Nazis murder six million Jewish souls? Could even the Nazis say why? The best that can be done for Africans in the Diaspora, who ask why, is to explain the circumstances and conditions surrounding the genocide. As for why they were committed, it is for every human being to answer that. Information may help and much needs to be done to provide it. A black American acquaintance asked me where I came from and when I said Rwanda, he asked me whether it was in South America. Most people know more about Rwanda now of course, but not much more.

Many Diaspora Africans have done and are doing much to increase understanding. Programme makers, journalists and writers like Jack Mapanji from Malawi - who offered a poem in response to what he witnessed - and many others. Rwandan communities in the Diaspora can offer information but none of us can answer the question why.

* Vincent Gasana is a Rwandan who lives and works as a broadcast journalist in London.

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, www.pambazuka.org" Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

7. Why does genocide 'happen'?

Rotimi Sankore

2004-04-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/21207

The genocide in Rwanda in April 1994 must not distract from the fact that genocide is a global phenomenon that knows no racial or geographical boundaries. In its modern form, genocide was perfected by the fascist Nazi regime led by Adolph Hitler in Germany from 1933 to 1945. The Khmer Rouge also demonstrated in the killing fields of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 that genocide could be carried out as efficiently in a different social and political context.

In more recent times the world watched live on satellite television in the 1990’s while genocide was perpetuated in the heart of Europe as Serbia, Croatia and Kosovo became household names for the grimmest reasons known to history. Going back even further, the transatlantic slave trade has been described as genocidal, though the mass murder of millions of Africans over 400 years was more a by product of plunder, exploitation and repression rather than the specific goal of slave dealers and the states that backed the slave trade.

But why does genocide happen? Why do human beings, the so-called most civilised and intelligent of the species that inhabit the planet, turn to mass murder?

In answering this question, the most important point to make is that genocide does not just happen. It is prepared for, consciously executed and is based on reasonably identifiable social, political and economic conditions. What differs is the extent to which these conditions apply or exist, and the degree of preparation by the perpetrators.

The second most important point to make is that genocide is not ‘triggered’ by a single event that pushes the perpetrators over the brink. On the contrary, the so-called ‘trigger events’ are excuses for setting in motion the logical end to a process prepared for well in advance.

Only when the world appreciates the fact of these processes can we collectively identify the signs or beginnings of what is likely to end in genocide and douse the fire before it becomes an all-consuming flame.

In the case of Rwanda, it is a popularly held myth that the shooting down of the plane carrying the then Head of State Juvenal Habyarimana and the Burundian President Cyprien Ntayamira on 6th April 1994 triggered the genocide that followed over the next 12 weeks and left well over 700,000 dead (nearly 10% of the country’s population of over 8 million). Nothing can be further from the truth.

Before the shooting down of the airplane by yet unidentified persons, the social and political conditions had been prepared by various factors. One key factor was the dictatorship established following the seizure of power by General Juvenal Habyarimana in 1973.

Habyarimana ruled in the name of the “majority” and imposed a dictatorship on the entire country. In addition, the official discrimination against the Tutsi minority was so much that within two decades, half a million had fled the country.

The government estimated Tutsis at 9% of the population and restricted them to 9% of jobs and educational opportunities. (Many of the exiles later joined the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front, RPF). In order to consolidate the hold on power, Tutsi’s were painted as the enemy within (and without), and anyone that did not treat them as such was a sympathiser of the enemy, deemed to be “no better than them” and likely to face the same fate.

This is a classic manoeuvre used by a variety of regimes throughout history to divide society, promote a climate of fear and insecurity, encourage racism, xenophobia or ethnic hatred and mobilise their supporters to systematically suppress and eradicate the so called enemy. The Nazis in Germany used this strategy to near perfection over the period of their rule.

Official discrimination on its own is not enough to involve a significant percentage of the population in mass murder. Hate speech (using crude or sophisticated propaganda) must be deployed on a mass scale, and organised armed bodies of men infused into society to provide the ‘back bone’ and direction for mass murder. Where the prerequisite social conditions do not exist, or hate speech does not achieve the desired effect of involving significant numbers of everyday citizens in mass murder, it still facilitates their acquiescence to genocide carried out by smaller organised units of killers.

But even hate speech must have a clearly identifiable target to lead to genocide. This means that the ‘targets’ must be isolated and identified as systematically as possible. This is achieved by obvious means such as clearly marked or distinct clothing, less obvious means such as identity cards, or crude social stereotyping using race, ethnicity, language or physical appearance etc.

In the case of Rwanda, this had already been pre-facilitated by the Belgian colonialists through the issuance of identity cards based on ethnicity and the classic colonial strategy of creating an artificial elite through which colonial powers rule in countries where colonialists are vastly outnumbered.

During colonial rule, the artificial classification and imposition of a minority elite created the basis for long lasting resentment seized upon after independence by Hutu extremists to build a power base. Similar creation of artificial borders, cynical divisions of ethnic nationalities, imposition of artificial elites and so forth by colonial powers have provided the basis for many conflicts in Africa.

Simply put, genocide has become the method though which organised groups within society, whether based on ideology, race, nationality, ethnicity, religion or language, consciously pursue a strategy of achieving or consolidating power, through manipulating economic, social or political conditions and insecurities to unite significant sections of society behind them and against a real or artificially created enemy whose extermination or repression is promoted as vital to the “survival of the species.”

The main tools are hate speech, use of mass propaganda to spread lies, insecurity and create myths promoting a climate of simultaneous fear and dehumanisation of the intended targets; and the organisation of armed bodies of men in preparation for, or to actually direct, instigate or carry out violence and mass murder. All of these factors and those mentioned earlier are clearly identifiable and if left unchallenged build up to make genocide almost inevitable.

But how can genocide be tackled?

General education and enlightenment, an understanding of social, political and economic issues and of individual and mass psychology will all help to make people less susceptible to manipulation of their fears and insecurities.

However, while sharp economic, social and political inequalities remain a characteristic of human society there will always be a possibility that people will be open to manipulation by those that see such cynical manipulation as their path to power and the trappings that go with it. Interventions by United Nations forces or others may stop specific cases of genocide from playing out, but this cannot be a permanent solution.

In Africa, the legacy of colonialism, serious economic problems, deepening inequalities and ongoing conflicts mean that there is a possibility that an increasing number of incumbent governments or powerful groups could promote religious, racial, ethnic or social differences and conflict as a way of acquiring or consolidating their hold on power rather than addressing the root causes of desperation. History shows that once set in motion conflicts are difficult to stop. How civil society and pro democratic forces tackle the issues is crucial to the future of Africa.

Overall, there is no doubt that the central challenge facing humanity today on all continents is to resolve the inequalities and injustices on which genocide can be built.

* Sankore is on the editorial board of Pambazuka and is Coordinator of CREDO for Freedom of Expression and Associated Rights which focuses on rights issues in Africa.

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, www.pambazuka.org" Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.
The genocide in Rwanda in April 1994 must not distract from the fact that genocide is a global phenomenon that knows no racial or geographical boundaries. In its modern form, genocide was perfected by the fascist Nazi regime led by Adolph Hitler in Germany from 1933 to 1945. The Khmer Rouge also demonstrated in the killing fields of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 that genocide could be carried out as efficiently in a different social and political context.

In more recent times the world watched live on satellite television in the 1990’s while genocide was perpetuated in the heart of Europe as Serbia, Croatia and Kosovo became household names for the grimmest reasons known to history. Going back even further, the transatlantic slave trade has been described as genocidal, though the mass murder of millions of Africans over 400 years was more a by product of plunder, exploitation and repression rather than the specific goal of slave dealers and the states that backed the slave trade.

But why does genocide happen? Why do human beings, the so-called most civilised and intelligent of the species that inhabit the planet, turn to mass murder?

In answering this question, the most important point to make is that genocide does not just happen. It is prepared for, consciously executed and is based on reasonably identifiable social, political and economic conditions. What differs is the extent to which these conditions apply or exist, and the degree of preparation by the perpetrators.

The second most important point to make is that genocide is not ‘triggered’ by a single event that pushes the perpetrators over the brink. On the contrary, the so-called ‘trigger events’ are excuses for setting in motion the logical end to a process prepared for well in advance.

Only when the world appreciates the fact of these processes can we collectively identify the signs or beginnings of what is likely to end in genocide and douse the fire before it becomes an all-consuming flame.

In the case of Rwanda, it is a popularly held myth that the shooting down of the plane carrying the then Head of State Juvenal Habyarimana and the Burundian President Cyprien Ntayamira on 6th April 1994 triggered the genocide that followed over the next 12 weeks and left well over 700,000 dead (nearly 10% of the country’s population of over 8 million). Nothing can be further from the truth.

Before the shooting down of the airplane by yet unidentified persons, the social and political conditions had been prepared by various factors. One key factor was the dictatorship established following the seizure of power by General Juvenal Habyarimana in 1973.

Habyarimana ruled in the name of the “majority” and imposed a dictatorship on the entire country. In addition, the official discrimination against the Tutsi minority was so much that within two decades, half a million had fled the country.

The government estimated Tutsis at 9% of the population and restricted them to 9% of jobs and educational opportunities. (Many of the exiles later joined the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front, RPF). In order to consolidate the hold on power, Tutsi’s were painted as the enemy within (and without), and anyone that did not treat them as such was a sympathiser of the enemy, deemed to be “no better than them” and likely to face the same fate.

This is a classic manoeuvre used by a variety of regimes throughout history to divide society, promote a climate of fear and insecurity, encourage racism, xenophobia or ethnic hatred and mobilise their supporters to systematically suppress and eradicate the so called enemy. The Nazis in Germany used this strategy to near perfection over the period of their rule.

Official discrimination on its own is not enough to involve a significant percentage of the population in mass murder. Hate speech (using crude or sophisticated propaganda) must be deployed on a mass scale, and organised armed bodies of men infused into society to provide the ‘back bone’ and direction for mass murder. Where the prerequisite social conditions do not exist, or hate speech does not achieve the desired effect of involving significant numbers of everyday citizens in mass murder, it still facilitates their acquiescence to genocide carried out by smaller organised units of killers.

But even hate speech must have a clearly identifiable target to lead to genocide. This means that the ‘targets’ must be isolated and identified as systematically as possible. This is achieved by obvious means such as clearly marked or distinct clothing, less obvious means such as identity cards, or crude social stereotyping using race, ethnicity, language or physical appearance etc.

In the case of Rwanda, this had already been pre-facilitated by the Belgian colonialists through the issuance of identity cards based on ethnicity and the classic colonial strategy of creating an artificial elite through which colonial powers rule in countries where colonialists are vastly outnumbered.

During colonial rule, the artificial classification and imposition of a minority elite created the basis for long lasting resentment seized upon after independence by Hutu extremists to build a power base. Similar creation of artificial borders, cynical divisions of ethnic nationalities, imposition of artificial elites and so forth by colonial powers have provided the basis for many conflicts in Africa.

Simply put, genocide has become the method though which organised groups within society, whether based on ideology, race, nationality, ethnicity, religion or language, consciously pursue a strategy of achieving or consolidating power, through manipulating economic, social or political conditions and insecurities to unite significant sections of society behind them and against a real or artificially created enemy whose extermination or repression is promoted as vital to the “survival of the species.”

The main tools are hate speech, use of mass propaganda to spread lies, insecurity and create myths promoting a climate of simultaneous fear and dehumanisation of the intended targets; and the organisation of armed bodies of men in preparation for, or to actually direct, instigate or carry out violence and mass murder. All of these factors and those mentioned earlier are clearly identifiable and if left unchallenged build up to make genocide almost inevitable.

But how can genocide be tackled?

General education and enlightenment, an understanding of social, political and economic issues and of individual and mass psychology will all help to make people less susceptible to manipulation of their fears and insecurities.

However, while sharp economic, social and political inequalities remain a characteristic of human society there will always be a possibility that people will be open to manipulation by those that see such cynical manipulation as their path to power and the trappings that go with it. Interventions by United Nations forces or others may stop specific cases of genocide from playing out, but this cannot be a permanent solution.

In Africa, the legacy of colonialism, serious economic problems, deepening inequalities and ongoing conflicts mean that there is a possibility that an increasing number of incumbent governments or powerful groups could promote religious, racial, ethnic or social differences and conflict as a way of acquiring or consolidating their hold on power rather than addressing the root causes of desperation. History shows that once set in motion conflicts are difficult to stop. How civil society and pro democratic forces tackle the issues is crucial to the future of Africa.

Overall, there is no doubt that the central challenge facing humanity today on all continents is to resolve the inequalities and injustices on which genocide can be built.

* Sankore is on the editorial board of Pambazuka and is Coordinator of CREDO for Freedom of Expression and Associated Rights which focuses on rights issues in Africa.

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, www.pambazuka.org" Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

8. Mirroring Rwanda's Challenges: The refugee story

Sarah Erlichman

2004-04-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/21170

The Rwandan genocide sparked massive population shifts in the country and across the Great Lakes region. Millions of uprooted people scattered and regrouped. In the wake of devastating death and displacement, the landscape of human settlement was completely altered.

The return of diverse groups of Rwandan refugees over the course of ten years since the genocide has shaped the country's current political, physical, social, and economic environments. Rwandan refugees' experiences in exile and in return differ according to their histories, their ethnicity and class. They are rural and urban, well-educated and illiterate. Many were raised in Rwanda, others in neighbouring African countries, in Europe, and beyond.

Some, having been born in exile, have come to Rwanda for the first time after 1994. Yet all have returned in the hope of rebuilding lives and livelihoods in the country they have always called home. The refugees have returned with a vast wealth of knowledge, experience, assets and skills to the most densely populated country in Africa, where the struggling economy is dominated by agriculture.

The socio-economic integration of returnees remains a massive challenge to Rwanda. Productive agricultural land, and even basic shelter, health care, and education, remain inaccessible to many. Sharing community resources is perhaps the greatest challenge to peaceful resettlement and reintegration of returned Rwandan refugees.

A brief history of Rwandan refugees:

Beginning in 1959, as Belgian colonists began to withdraw from power, the politicisation of ethnicity lead to the transfer of power to the majority ethnic Hutu in Rwanda. Targeted attacks on ethnic Tutsi began. Estimates indicate that during the period between 1959 and 1967, 20,000 Tutsi died, and another 300,000 fled Rwanda as refugees with a small number of elite Hutus and Twa into neighbouring countries.

In 1964, estimates of Rwandan refugees in asylum countries were 40,000 in Burundi, 60,000 in Zaire (former DRC), 35,000 in Uganda, and 15,000 in Tanzania. Political crises and refugee flows from neighbouring countries have contributed to the complexities of Rwanda's refugees. In Burundi in 1972, anti-Hutu violence and killings by the Tutsi government forced thousands of Burundian Hutu refugees to flee into Rwanda. These refugees contributed to further anti-Tutsi attacks in Rwanda in 1973 and thousands more Tutsi fled Rwanda. Refugees who fled Rwanda between 1959-1973 are generally referred to as "old-caseload refugees".

Land and property left behind by refugees from Rwanda was subsequently occupied by others who remained or entered the country. This became a political issue. By the 1980s, the Habyarimana regime claimed that repatriation of Rwandan refugees was impossible due to land scarcity. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Rwandan refugee communities created secret political and military alliances in exile. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was formed from such groups.

New directions of displacement began with the RPF invasion of Rwanda from Uganda in October 1990. Internally displaced people (IDPs) within Rwanda, mainly Hutu fleeing RPF attacks, regrouped into camps of hundreds of thousands surviving in miserable conditions throughout the ensuing war.

As the genocide began in April 1994, RPF soldiers began to advance from the northern border area. Behind the troops over 600,000 "Old Caseload Refugees" followed, some of them entering Rwanda after more than 30 years of exile in Uganda. Ahead of the advancing RPF fled the mainly Hutu "New Caseload Refugees".

In April, an estimated 500,000 fled to Tanzania. In 24 hours alone, 250,000 crossed the Rusumo bridge between Rwanda and Tanzania over April 28-29. By May, about 200,000 mainly ethnic Hutus from Butare, Kibungo, and Kigali-Rural had fled to northern Burundi. As the RPF took control of Kigali in July, the French military launched Opération Turquoise, creating a safe zone beyond RPF control in south-west Rwanda to protect fleeing Hutu, including leaders of the military and government responsible for the genocide as well as ordinary civilians.

300,000 fled to Bukavu, Zaire in July and August, as the French Operation Turquoise pulled out. Another 300,000 were grouped into IDP camps in the region. In north-west Rwanda, the home of the elite of the Habyarimana regime, 1 million refugees fled to Goma, Zaire during four days in mid-July.

The refugee crisis in eastern Zaire attracted the assistance of the international community on a scale leagues beyond what had been provided in Rwanda during the genocide, or even after. Among the refugee population, Hutu Power extremists controlled the camps and the aid. They continued to mobilise and arm themselves against the new RPF regime. Political violence was pervasive in the camps.

Despite the relief aid that sustained the refugees, a deadly cholera epidemic killed 50,000 refugees in Goma. During late July and August, 200,000 refugees returned from Goma to Rwanda. By the end of 1994, two million Rwandans had fled the RPF advance, being forced to run by Hutu extremist leaders, or fearing retribution for the genocide. Over 500,000 of these were in Tanzania, 250,000 in Burundi, and more than 1.2 million in Zaire. Among the refugees were Burundians who had fled to Rwanda in 1972. By the end of 1995, 225,778 Rwandan refugees (80,000 new caseload) had returned to Rwanda. 1,707,032 Rwandans remained in 50 refugee camps.

Return and Reintegration of refugee returnees:

Between 1994-1996, approximately 800,000 (mainly old-case refugees) had followed the call of the new Government of National Unity to return home to Rwanda. Still, massive forced population shifts continued throughout the region during the second half of the 1990s.

The Rwandan camps in Zaire continued to threaten the RPF regime and Tutsi of Rwandan origin living in the Kivus of Zaire. In October and November 1996, Rwandan and Ugandan supported Alliance de Forces Democratique de Liberation attacked all of the camps in eastern Zaire and pursued ex-FAR and Interhamwe deeper into Zaire's interior.

An estimated 600,000 refugees repatriated to Rwanda over 6 days, forming a line 260km long. By early 1997, the number had risen to 720,000. Other refugees fled in the direction of the militias towards the interior of Zaire, Angola, and Zambia. Concurrently, conflict has forced 15,000 Congolese and 5,000 Burundians to seek refugee in Rwanda. In December, 500,000 Rwandans were forcibly repatriated by Tanzanian authorities.

Internal displacement remained a serious concern within Rwanda, especially as ex-FAR and Interhamwe launched attacks on north-west Rwanda from their bases in Zaire in mid-1997. In 1998, following the fall of Mobutu and the rise of Laurent Kabila, the second Congo war forced tens of thousands of Congolese refugees into western Rwanda. These were eventually accommodated in refugee camps which remain today.

As the old-caseload refugees returned, the only available properties were those that had been abandoned by the new-caseload refugees. As the new-caseload refugees began to return, the pressure for new housing became imminent.

The solution that had been foreseen in the 1993 Arusha Accords to accommodate refugee return and prevent conflicts over land was a villagization scheme where services would be centralised and modern agricultural technology accessible. According to the Arusha Accords, refugees returning after more than 10 years were not to seek to reclaim previous properties that had been occupied by others, but were to be resettled on unoccupied land with government assistance.

In the aftermath of the genocide, new caseload refugees were entitled to reclaim the land and property they had recently abandoned. The villagization or imidugudu scheme was adopted as a means to create shelter for old and new caseload refugees, and others in need of shelter, such as displaced genocide survivors, and young people seeking new homes.

The imidugudu scheme was criticized by the international community for forcing resettlement to villages in poor sites, for inadequate provision of services, and insufficient compensation to the previous occupants of resettlement land.

Still, the government's scheme received sufficient support from the international community for massive construction of shelter, and social infrastructure such as schools and health centres. UNHCR alone supported the construction of nearly 100,000 houses for 500,000 people between 1995-1999.

Despite the political and financial support which fuelled imidugudu development, the reality is that meeting the land and housing needs of returned refugees has been an enormous challenge and is not yet resolved. As the flow of returns has slowed in recent years, so has donor support to resettlement. In 1999, the Brookings Initiative estimated that 370,000 households were living in inadequate shelter. Donor support and the initiatives of private individuals to construct their own homes reduced this figure to 192,000 in November 2001.

Another estimate by the US Committee for Refugees, found 150,000 Internally Displaced People were living without permanent shelter or basic social services in 2001. More recently, the Norwegian Refugee Council estimated the number of IDPs at nearly 200,000 in need of shelter and social services in July 2003.

UNHCR studies have found that a large number of returnees have never received any land. Moreover, many returnees are among the poorest in their communities, without access to health care, education for their children, or basic shelter needs. Among returnees are many individuals and families in need of special psycho-social support: children orphaned or separated from their parents; spouses separated from their partners by death or war; survivors of physical and sexual violence.

The needs of such returnees are in large part provided for by local government structures who tend to keep registers of returnees and "vulnerable" families. Returnees themselves resist being considered as a separate category in their communities. The supports they request, such as health care "mutuelle" associations, school supply packages, shelter construction supplies, and agricultural tools are linked to community development and poverty alleviation plans. Still, as more returnees return with few resources, pressure on their Rwandan communities increases.

The majority of both old caseload and new caseload refugees planning to return to Rwanda have already done so. Between 60,000-80,000 Rwandan refugees are estimated to be still living in Uganda, DRC, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and elsewhere.

The majority are expected to repatriate through state-sponsored, UN-assisted programmes over the next 2 years. As the stable political situation in Rwanda continues, those who choose not to return will be considered to have integrated into the countries where they are and will no longer be considered refugees requiring international protection. In addition to civilian refugees, demobilised soldiers are also returning to Rwanda and undergoing re-education, resettlement, and reintegration. It is expected that 81,462 combatants of ex-FAR, interhamwe, and other militia groups, will have demobilised and returned to Rwanda from DRC by the end of the period 2001-2005. In November 2003, the Rwandan government welcomed the return of ex-military leader of the Forces Démocratiques de la Libération du Rwanda followed by approximately 100 ex-rebel soldiers.

The Future of Rwanda's Refugees:

Rwandan refugees are as diverse as Rwanda's population and play an integral role in reconciliation and development efforts in the post-genocide context. Many who gained higher education and skills in exile returned to strengthen the urban middle and upper classes. Rural returnees contribute to the agricultural sector which remains the backbone of the Rwandan economy. Returned refugees face the economic realities that make livelihoods a struggle for most Rwandans.

Distinctions remain between communities of returnees accustomed to the culture of their country of exile, and in the nature of their exile - some suffered in dismal refugee camps, others survived comfortably in cities. Not least of the distinctions between returned refugees is their ethnicity and the reasons for their flight. Political consciousness developed during exile fuel Rwandan politics. Refugees are a crucial element of Rwandan reconciliation, and socio-economic development. The challenges ahead for Rwandan refugees mirror those for the country as a whole.

* Sarah Erlichman is the UNHCR Community Services Officer in Kigali. The opinions expressed in this article are entirely her own, and not those of UNHCR.

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, www.pambazuka.org" Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.
The Rwandan genocide sparked massive population shifts in the country and across the Great Lakes region. Millions of uprooted people scattered and regrouped. In the wake of devastating death and displacement, the landscape of human settlement was completely altered.

The return of diverse groups of Rwandan refugees over the course of ten years since the genocide has shaped the country's current political, physical, social, and economic environments. Rwandan refugees' experiences in exile and in return differ according to their histories, their ethnicity and class. They are rural and urban, well-educated and illiterate. Many were raised in Rwanda, others in neighbouring African countries, in Europe, and beyond.

Some, having been born in exile, have come to Rwanda for the first time after 1994. Yet all have returned in the hope of rebuilding lives and livelihoods in the country they have always called home. The refugees have returned with a vast wealth of knowledge, experience, assets and skills to the most densely populated country in Africa, where the struggling economy is dominated by agriculture.

The socio-economic integration of returnees remains a massive challenge to Rwanda. Productive agricultural land, and even basic shelter, health care, and education, remain inaccessible to many. Sharing community resources is perhaps the greatest challenge to peaceful resettlement and reintegration of returned Rwandan refugees.

A brief history of Rwandan refugees:

Beginning in 1959, as Belgian colonists began to withdraw from power, the politicisation of ethnicity lead to the transfer of power to the majority ethnic Hutu in Rwanda. Targeted attacks on ethnic Tutsi began. Estimates indicate that during the period between 1959 and 1967, 20,000 Tutsi died, and another 300,000 fled Rwanda as refugees with a small number of elite Hutus and Twa into neighbouring countries.

In 1964, estimates of Rwandan refugees in asylum countries were 40,000 in Burundi, 60,000 in Zaire (former DRC), 35,000 in Uganda, and 15,000 in Tanzania. Political crises and refugee flows from neighbouring countries have contributed to the complexities of Rwanda's refugees. In Burundi in 1972, anti-Hutu violence and killings by the Tutsi government forced thousands of Burundian Hutu refugees to flee into Rwanda. These refugees contributed to further anti-Tutsi attacks in Rwanda in 1973 and thousands more Tutsi fled Rwanda. Refugees who fled Rwanda between 1959-1973 are generally referred to as "old-caseload refugees".

Land and property left behind by refugees from Rwanda was subsequently occupied by others who remained or entered the country. This became a political issue. By the 1980s, the Habyarimana regime claimed that repatriation of Rwandan refugees was impossible due to land scarcity. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Rwandan refugee communities created secret political and military alliances in exile. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was formed from such groups.

New directions of displacement began with the RPF invasion of Rwanda from Uganda in October 1990. Internally displaced people (IDPs) within Rwanda, mainly Hutu fleeing RPF attacks, regrouped into camps of hundreds of thousands surviving in miserable conditions throughout the ensuing war.

As the genocide began in April 1994, RPF soldiers began to advance from the northern border area. Behind the troops over 600,000 "Old Caseload Refugees" followed, some of them entering Rwanda after more than 30 years of exile in Uganda. Ahead of the advancing RPF fled the mainly Hutu "New Caseload Refugees".

In April, an estimated 500,000 fled to Tanzania. In 24 hours alone, 250,000 crossed the Rusumo bridge between Rwanda and Tanzania over April 28-29. By May, about 200,000 mainly ethnic Hutus from Butare, Kibungo, and Kigali-Rural had fled to northern Burundi. As the RPF took control of Kigali in July, the French military launched Opération Turquoise, creating a safe zone beyond RPF control in south-west Rwanda to protect fleeing Hutu, including leaders of the military and government responsible for the genocide as well as ordinary civilians.

300,000 fled to Bukavu, Zaire in July and August, as the French Operation Turquoise pulled out. Another 300,000 were grouped into IDP camps in the region. In north-west Rwanda, the home of the elite of the Habyarimana regime, 1 million refugees fled to Goma, Zaire during four days in mid-July.

The refugee crisis in eastern Zaire attracted the assistance of the international community on a scale leagues beyond what had been provided in Rwanda during the genocide, or even after. Among the refugee population, Hutu Power extremists controlled the camps and the aid. They continued to mobilise and arm themselves against the new RPF regime. Political violence was pervasive in the camps.

Despite the relief aid that sustained the refugees, a deadly cholera epidemic killed 50,000 refugees in Goma. During late July and August, 200,000 refugees returned from Goma to Rwanda. By the end of 1994, two million Rwandans had fled the RPF advance, being forced to run by Hutu extremist leaders, or fearing retribution for the genocide. Over 500,000 of these were in Tanzania, 250,000 in Burundi, and more than 1.2 million in Zaire. Among the refugees were Burundians who had fled to Rwanda in 1972. By the end of 1995, 225,778 Rwandan refugees (80,000 new caseload) had returned to Rwanda. 1,707,032 Rwandans remained in 50 refugee camps.

Return and Reintegration of refugee returnees:

Between 1994-1996, approximately 800,000 (mainly old-case refugees) had followed the call of the new Government of National Unity to return home to Rwanda. Still, massive forced population shifts continued throughout the region during the second half of the 1990s.

The Rwandan camps in Zaire continued to threaten the RPF regime and Tutsi of Rwandan origin living in the Kivus of Zaire. In October and November 1996, Rwandan and Ugandan supported Alliance de Forces Democratique de Liberation attacked all of the camps in eastern Zaire and pursued ex-FAR and Interhamwe deeper into Zaire's interior.

An estimated 600,000 refugees repatriated to Rwanda over 6 days, forming a line 260km long. By early 1997, the number had risen to 720,000. Other refugees fled in the direction of the militias towards the interior of Zaire, Angola, and Zambia. Concurrently, conflict has forced 15,000 Congolese and 5,000 Burundians to seek refugee in Rwanda. In December, 500,000 Rwandans were forcibly repatriated by Tanzanian authorities.

Internal displacement remained a serious concern within Rwanda, especially as ex-FAR and Interhamwe launched attacks on north-west Rwanda from their bases in Zaire in mid-1997. In 1998, following the fall of Mobutu and the rise of Laurent Kabila, the second Congo war forced tens of thousands of Congolese refugees into western Rwanda. These were eventually accommodated in refugee camps which remain today.

As the old-caseload refugees returned, the only available properties were those that had been abandoned by the new-caseload refugees. As the new-caseload refugees began to return, the pressure for new housing became imminent.

The solution that had been foreseen in the 1993 Arusha Accords to accommodate refugee return and prevent conflicts over land was a villagization scheme where services would be centralised and modern agricultural technology accessible. According to the Arusha Accords, refugees returning after more than 10 years were not to seek to reclaim previous properties that had been occupied by others, but were to be resettled on unoccupied land with government assistance.

In the aftermath of the genocide, new caseload refugees were entitled to reclaim the land and property they had recently abandoned. The villagization or imidugudu scheme was adopted as a means to create shelter for old and new caseload refugees, and others in need of shelter, such as displaced genocide survivors, and young people seeking new homes.

The imidugudu scheme was criticized by the international community for forcing resettlement to villages in poor sites, for inadequate provision of services, and insufficient compensation to the previous occupants of resettlement land.

Still, the government's scheme received sufficient support from the international community for massive construction of shelter, and social infrastructure such as schools and health centres. UNHCR alone supported the construction of nearly 100,000 houses for 500,000 people between 1995-1999.

Despite the political and financial support which fuelled imidugudu development, the reality is that meeting the land and housing needs of returned refugees has been an enormous challenge and is not yet resolved. As the flow of returns has slowed in recent years, so has donor support to resettlement. In 1999, the Brookings Initiative estimated that 370,000 households were living in inadequate shelter. Donor support and the initiatives of private individuals to construct their own homes reduced this figure to 192,000 in November 2001.

Another estimate by the US Committee for Refugees, found 150,000 Internally Displaced People were living without permanent shelter or basic social services in 2001. More recently, the Norwegian Refugee Council estimated the number of IDPs at nearly 200,000 in need of shelter and social services in July 2003.

UNHCR studies have found that a large number of returnees have never received any land. Moreover, many returnees are among the poorest in their communities, without access to health care, education for their children, or basic shelter needs. Among returnees are many individuals and families in need of special psycho-social support: children orphaned or separated from their parents; spouses separated from their partners by death or war; survivors of physical and sexual violence.

The needs of such returnees are in large part provided for by local government structures who tend to keep registers of returnees and "vulnerable" families. Returnees themselves resist being considered as a separate category in their communities. The supports they request, such as health care "mutuelle" associations, school supply packages, shelter construction supplies, and agricultural tools are linked to community development and poverty alleviation plans. Still, as more returnees return with few resources, pressure on their Rwandan communities increases.

The majority of both old caseload and new caseload refugees planning to return to Rwanda have already done so. Between 60,000-80,000 Rwandan refugees are estimated to be still living in Uganda, DRC, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and elsewhere.

The majority are expected to repatriate through state-sponsored, UN-assisted programmes over the next 2 years. As the stable political situation in Rwanda continues, those who choose not to return will be considered to have integrated into the countries where they are and will no longer be considered refugees requiring international protection. In addition to civilian refugees, demobilised soldiers are also returning to Rwanda and undergoing re-education, resettlement, and reintegration. It is expected that 81,462 combatants of ex-FAR, interhamwe, and other militia groups, will have demobilised and returned to Rwanda from DRC by the end of the period 2001-2005. In November 2003, the Rwandan government welcomed the return of ex-military leader of the Forces Démocratiques de la Libération du Rwanda followed by approximately 100 ex-rebel soldiers.

The Future of Rwanda's Refugees:

Rwandan refugees are as diverse as Rwanda's population and play an integral role in reconciliation and development efforts in the post-genocide context. Many who gained higher education and skills in exile returned to strengthen the urban middle and upper classes. Rural returnees contribute to the agricultural sector which remains the backbone of the Rwandan economy. Returned refugees face the economic realities that make livelihoods a struggle for most Rwandans.

Distinctions remain between communities of returnees accustomed to the culture of their country of exile, and in the nature of their exile - some suffered in dismal refugee camps, others survived comfortably in cities. Not least of the distinctions between returned refugees is their ethnicity and the reasons for their flight. Political consciousness developed during exile fuel Rwandan politics. Refugees are a crucial element of Rwandan reconciliation, and socio-economic development. The challenges ahead for Rwandan refugees mirror those for the country as a whole.

* Sarah Erlichman is the UNHCR Community Services Officer in Kigali. The opinions expressed in this article are entirely her own, and not those of UNHCR.

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, www.pambazuka.org" Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

9. Five Decades of Fleeing and Returning People

Volker Schimmel

2004-04-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/21171

Rwandan refugees rose to prominence in 1994 when their mass exodus to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo - DRC), Tanzania and Uganda was broadcasted globally. At the same time a less well-known group of Rwandan refugees who had been in Uganda since 1959 returned to their country on the heels of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), which itself was made up of 1959 refugees. Moreover, the majority of those Rwandans who did not cross the border in 1994, thereby not being counted as refugees, were in one way or another uprooted and at least temporarily internally displaced. The history of this small country of the thousand hills is also a history of refugees.

Now, ten years after the war and the genocide, the complexities of Rwandan refugees persist and possibly even deepen. The two main trajectories along which the complexity of Rwandan refugees should be conceptualised are firstly, their different backgrounds and secondly, the intricacy of bringing them back home.

About 80,000 Rwandans still remain refugees in mostly African countries and they hardly represent a coherent lot. This is to say that there are qualitatively different Rwandan refugee populations. A way of shedding light onto this complexity is to compare the big remaining groups in DRC, Uganda and Tanzania. The second form of complexity with regard to Rwandan refugees has a more long term orientation and will only matter upon repatriation. It is the complexity of bringing them home in a sustainable and thus responsible way.

When the RPF started making advances inside Rwanda, Hutus started crossing the borders first and foremost into Zaire, Tanzania and Uganda. In Zaire, a large group of extremist Hutus, i.e. perpetrators of the genocide, were able to hide out in the Kivu hinterland - protected by the infamous “Operation Turquoise”. The dilemma of those extremists residing in camps or elsewhere in the Kivus has been a source for international debates about humanitarian assistance. To this day, it is the reason why the current government of Rwanda has a highly critical view of UNHCR. The presence of those extremists has not only provided a pretext for continued intervention by the government of Rwanda in Zaire and later DRC, but also poses a big challenge today when it comes to repatriation.

As such, radical Hutu elements barricaded areas in the Kivus in early 2004 to prevent moderate elements from demobilising under UN auspices and thus from returning to Rwanda. In the long run, it will be this group that will be pivotal in deciding whether Rwanda as a united nation has a future or not. Will they follow one of their former rebel leaders General Paul Rwarakabije and return voluntarily to Rwanda (as the former did in November 2003) or will they only stop fighting once the government in Kigali is overthrown?

The group of Rwandan refugees in Uganda does not compare to the group hiding in the Kivus. For starters, it is highly unlikely that the group contains high level perpetrators of the genocide, as they moved into the territory of the government that was a supporter, an ally as well as a mentor for the RPF in the 1980s. The Rwandans in Uganda fled the atrocities in their homeland and managed to create veritable settlements including their own livestock. They are everything but hiding. If anything they have built respectable homes for themselves, which now requires a rather high incentive to lure them back to Rwanda. Studies and research in the Ourchinga and Nakivale settlements have highlighted this tendency as well as capacity for economic development.

The group of Rwandan refugees that still resides in Tanzania today is different yet again in composition and origin. Those 500,000 who fled in April 1994 (250,000 crossed Rusumo bridge on 28 April alone) did certainly contain extremist elements similar to those in the Kivus. But the display of Rwandan decisiveness in Eastern Congo in 1996 and limited funding for those refugees led to a full-scale repatriation exercise.

The residual group of refugees today is qualitatively different from the ones in DRC (ex-Zaire) and Uganda. The situation in Tanzania prior to 1994 was yet a different one, and new arrivals in after the genocide mixed with Rwandans that had already been there for years if not decades. Under Nyerere and his pan-African ideology all refugees were embraced and welcomed to Tanzania, not only Rwandans. Some came prior to Rwandan independence in 1962, others settled spontaneously, and some fled atrocities in 1959 and 1994. Most of those Rwandans never registered as refugees or even applied for citizenship; they were able to live their lives in the Kagera region.

The enormous number of refugees and the swelling camps, however, presented a burden to Tanzania that the country was not willing to shoulder any longer. Through UNHCR facilitated repatriation almost all Rwandan refugees from 1994 returned home, leaving behind a group of compatriots that did not necessarily want to return, but was also denied local integration in Tanzania.

The generation of leaders following Nyerere were less sympathetic to what they see as aliens on their soil. It is a general trend in Africa, whereby local integration as a durable solution has become less and less of an option.

Hence, now those old Rwandan refugees and at times migrants are effectively stateless. There might be solution in bringing them back to Rwanda, but this is a marginalized group of ethnic Banyarwandans that have no links with their country of origin any longer. It should also be noted that while repatriation from Tanzania was ongoing some Rwandan refugees moved across the border into Uganda to avoid repatriation. This is unlikely to be connected to the fear of prosecution for crimes against humanity, but rather it is a harbinger of the second level of complexity regarding Rwandan refugees - the complexity of repatriation.

The different backgrounds highlight that there is not one repatriation policy that will fit all. Whereas genocide perpetrators actively resist the idea of returning to a state run by the RPF and want to overthrow the current government of Rwanda still, many refugees in Uganda and Tanzania have concrete economic and security concerns that are diametrically opposed to those still in DRC.

There are three main reasons why Rwandan refugees are reluctant to return home. The first is the problematic process of unity and reconciliation; secondly, refugees might have little to strive for economically in a land that ranks 158 on the 2003 UNDP Human Development Index and which has a long way to go in terms of development and poverty reduction; lastly Rwanda is densely populated and fertile land is scarce, which some Malthusian scholars have attributed the origin of the genocide in the first place.

Unity and reconciliation is the explicit policy of the current Rwandan government and it is often juxtaposed with the South African model of truth and reconciliation. In Rwanda, amnesty is taboo and the government is adamant in fighting what it calls a “culture of impunity”. However, this process of justice is skewed in that it excludes RPA war crimes committed between 1990 and 1994. Thus only genocide is considered crime, which leads to a collective accusation of Hutus as a group and the victimisation of Tutsis as a whole. This precludes a genuine reconciliation effort. The same issue, namely that of RPA war crimes was what chased Carla Del Ponte from her position as chief prosecutor at the International War Crimes Tribunal (ICTR) in Arusha. This renders the process of bringing Rwandans back home more complex, as it is difficult to see how this represents a sustainable situation.

The problem of development is a serious one, in a country that has next to no natural resources, depleted land and no access to ports or main waterways. The donor presence in Kigali is impressive and many strategies are being devised, most recently the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Strategy Plan with distinct country ownership. However, the focus remains on a limited amount of clusters like coffee, tea and tourism. Evidently, those clusters are volatile and dependent on many factors that are largely beyond the reach of any Rwandan government.

In an economic situation like this, it is highly difficult to bring ever more Rwandans back not knowing how and where to fit them in. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of Rwandans are subsistence farmers. For some it could simply be more attractive to keep their livestock and stay put in places like Uganda and Tanzania.

Lastly, there is the issue of land, and anybody who has ever driven across the thousand hills of Rwanda cannot be but startled that wherever you look you will find houses or settlements. The population density with 323 persons/km2 ranks among the highest in the world. The lack of land need not be the cause for another conflict, but it makes life upon return to Rwanda significantly more difficult. The double pressure of land degradation and growing population density has been pointed to repeatedly as a main impediment for development. Additionally, one has to take into account the population growth. According to UNFPA estimates, given the current birth rate, Rwanda will count roughly twice of today's population by 2050. This does not yet include the Rwandans that are due to return soon. The question any observer who knows Rwanda will have to wonder, “Where will they all live”? This prospect or absence thereof in terms of development contributes to the complexity of Rwandan refugees who are ultimately to become returnees.

In conclusion, Rwanda history is a history of fleeing and returning populations. Many different refugee groups have emerged over the course of the last five decades and continue to coexist and overlap. Rwandan refugees do not represent a coherent whole, but rather a sum of contradictory and at times antagonistic parts.

This complexity of the multi-facetted Rwandan refugee “community” is exacerbated by the future they will face. Should the UNHCR Executive Committee at some point vote in favour of the cessation clause, thereby withdrawing prima facie refugee status, the only real foreseeable option for the vast majority is indeed to return home. This is when the heterogeneous group of Rwandan refugees will face yet more complexities in trying to reconstruct and rebuild a nation. To overcome enormous developmental challenges such as reconciliation, development and access to land will be a highly complex process. But given Rwanda's history of in- and outflows of entire groups it is legitimate to ask where the “re” in “reconstruction” actually comes from. Ultimately, the construction of a Rwandan society without precedent in the land of the thousand hills is the consequence and combination of this two-fold complexity of Rwandan refugees.

* Volker Schimmel is UNHCR Reports Officer in Rwanda. The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of UNHCR.

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, www.pambazuka.org" Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.
Rwandan refugees rose to prominence in 1994 when their mass exodus to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo - DRC), Tanzania and Uganda was broadcasted globally. At the same time a less well-known group of Rwandan refugees who had been in Uganda since 1959 returned to their country on the heels of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), which itself was made up of 1959 refugees. Moreover, the majority of those Rwandans who did not cross the border in 1994, thereby not being counted as refugees, were in one way or another uprooted and at least temporarily internally displaced. The history of this small country of the thousand hills is also a history of refugees.

Now, ten years after the war and the genocide, the complexities of Rwandan refugees persist and possibly even deepen. The two main trajectories along which the complexity of Rwandan refugees should be conceptualised are firstly, their different backgrounds and secondly, the intricacy of bringing them back home.

About 80,000 Rwandans still remain refugees in mostly African countries and they hardly represent a coherent lot. This is to say that there are qualitatively different Rwandan refugee populations. A way of shedding light onto this complexity is to compare the big remaining groups in DRC, Uganda and Tanzania. The second form of complexity with regard to Rwandan refugees has a more long term orientation and will only matter upon repatriation. It is the complexity of bringing them home in a sustainable and thus responsible way.

When the RPF started making advances inside Rwanda, Hutus started crossing the borders first and foremost into Zaire, Tanzania and Uganda. In Zaire, a large group of extremist Hutus, i.e. perpetrators of the genocide, were able to hide out in the Kivu hinterland - protected by the infamous “Operation Turquoise”. The dilemma of those extremists residing in camps or elsewhere in the Kivus has been a source for international debates about humanitarian assistance. To this day, it is the reason why the current government of Rwanda has a highly critical view of UNHCR. The presence of those extremists has not only provided a pretext for continued intervention by the government of Rwanda in Zaire and later DRC, but also poses a big challenge today when it comes to repatriation.

As such, radical Hutu elements barricaded areas in the Kivus in early 2004 to prevent moderate elements from demobilising under UN auspices and thus from returning to Rwanda. In the long run, it will be this group that will be pivotal in deciding whether Rwanda as a united nation has a future or not. Will they follow one of their former rebel leaders General Paul Rwarakabije and return voluntarily to Rwanda (as the former did in November 2003) or will they only stop fighting once the government in Kigali is overthrown?

The group of Rwandan refugees in Uganda does not compare to the group hiding in the Kivus. For starters, it is highly unlikely that the group contains high level perpetrators of the genocide, as they moved into the territory of the government that was a supporter, an ally as well as a mentor for the RPF in the 1980s. The Rwandans in Uganda fled the atrocities in their homeland and managed to create veritable settlements including their own livestock. They are everything but hiding. If anything they have built respectable homes for themselves, which now requires a rather high incentive to lure them back to Rwanda. Studies and research in the Ourchinga and Nakivale settlements have highlighted this tendency as well as capacity for economic development.

The group of Rwandan refugees that still resides in Tanzania today is different yet again in composition and origin. Those 500,000 who fled in April 1994 (250,000 crossed Rusumo bridge on 28 April alone) did certainly contain extremist elements similar to those in the Kivus. But the display of Rwandan decisiveness in Eastern Congo in 1996 and limited funding for those refugees led to a full-scale repatriation exercise.

The residual group of refugees today is qualitatively different from the ones in DRC (ex-Zaire) and Uganda. The situation in Tanzania prior to 1994 was yet a different one, and new arrivals in after the genocide mixed with Rwandans that had already been there for years if not decades. Under Nyerere and his pan-African ideology all refugees were embraced and welcomed to Tanzania, not only Rwandans. Some came prior to Rwandan independence in 1962, others settled spontaneously, and some fled atrocities in 1959 and 1994. Most of those Rwandans never registered as refugees or even applied for citizenship; they were able to live their lives in the Kagera region.

The enormous number of refugees and the swelling camps, however, presented a burden to Tanzania that the country was not willing to shoulder any longer. Through UNHCR facilitated repatriation almost all Rwandan refugees from 1994 returned home, leaving behind a group of compatriots that did not necessarily want to return, but was also denied local integration in Tanzania.

The generation of leaders following Nyerere were less sympathetic to what they see as aliens on their soil. It is a general trend in Africa, whereby local integration as a durable solution has become less and less of an option.

Hence, now those old Rwandan refugees and at times migrants are effectively stateless. There might be solution in bringing them back to Rwanda, but this is a marginalized group of ethnic Banyarwandans that have no links with their country of origin any longer. It should also be noted that while repatriation from Tanzania was ongoing some Rwandan refugees moved across the border into Uganda to avoid repatriation. This is unlikely to be connected to the fear of prosecution for crimes against humanity, but rather it is a harbinger of the second level of complexity regarding Rwandan refugees - the complexity of repatriation.

The different backgrounds highlight that there is not one repatriation policy that will fit all. Whereas genocide perpetrators actively resist the idea of returning to a state run by the RPF and want to overthrow the current government of Rwanda still, many refugees in Uganda and Tanzania have concrete economic and security concerns that are diametrically opposed to those still in DRC.

There are three main reasons why Rwandan refugees are reluctant to return home. The first is the problematic process of unity and reconciliation; secondly, refugees might have little to strive for economically in a land that ranks 158 on the 2003 UNDP Human Development Index and which has a long way to go in terms of development and poverty reduction; lastly Rwanda is densely populated and fertile land is scarce, which some Malthusian scholars have attributed the origin of the genocide in the first place.

Unity and reconciliation is the explicit policy of the current Rwandan government and it is often juxtaposed with the South African model of truth and reconciliation. In Rwanda, amnesty is taboo and the government is adamant in fighting what it calls a “culture of impunity”. However, this process of justice is skewed in that it excludes RPA war crimes committed between 1990 and 1994. Thus only genocide is considered crime, which leads to a collective accusation of Hutus as a group and the victimisation of Tutsis as a whole. This precludes a genuine reconciliation effort. The same issue, namely that of RPA war crimes was what chased Carla Del Ponte from her position as chief prosecutor at the International War Crimes Tribunal (ICTR) in Arusha. This renders the process of bringing Rwandans back home more complex, as it is difficult to see how this represents a sustainable situation.

The problem of development is a serious one, in a country that has next to no natural resources, depleted land and no access to ports or main waterways. The donor presence in Kigali is impressive and many strategies are being devised, most recently the World Bank's Poverty Reduction Strategy Plan with distinct country ownership. However, the focus remains on a limited amount of clusters like coffee, tea and tourism. Evidently, those clusters are volatile and dependent on many factors that are largely beyond the reach of any Rwandan government.

In an economic situation like this, it is highly difficult to bring ever more Rwandans back not knowing how and where to fit them in. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of Rwandans are subsistence farmers. For some it could simply be more attractive to keep their livestock and stay put in places like Uganda and Tanzania.

Lastly, there is the issue of land, and anybody who has ever driven across the thousand hills of Rwanda cannot be but startled that wherever you look you will find houses or settlements. The population density with 323 persons/km2 ranks among the highest in the world. The lack of land need not be the cause for another conflict, but it makes life upon return to Rwanda significantly more difficult. The double pressure of land degradation and growing population density has been pointed to repeatedly as a main impediment for development. Additionally, one has to take into account the population growth. According to UNFPA estimates, given the current birth rate, Rwanda will count roughly twice of today's population by 2050. This does not yet include the Rwandans that are due to return soon. The question any observer who knows Rwanda will have to wonder, “Where will they all live”? This prospect or absence thereof in terms of development contributes to the complexity of Rwandan refugees who are ultimately to become returnees.

In conclusion, Rwanda history is a history of fleeing and returning populations. Many different refugee groups have emerged over the course of the last five decades and continue to coexist and overlap. Rwandan refugees do not represent a coherent whole, but rather a sum of contradictory and at times antagonistic parts.

This complexity of the multi-facetted Rwandan refugee “community” is exacerbated by the future they will face. Should the UNHCR Executive Committee at some point vote in favour of the cessation clause, thereby withdrawing prima facie refugee status, the only real foreseeable option for the vast majority is indeed to return home. This is when the heterogeneous group of Rwandan refugees will face yet more complexities in trying to reconstruct and rebuild a nation. To overcome enormous developmental challenges such as reconciliation, development and access to land will be a highly complex process. But given Rwanda's history of in- and outflows of entire groups it is legitimate to ask where the “re” in “reconstruction” actually comes from. Ultimately, the construction of a Rwandan society without precedent in the land of the thousand hills is the consequence and combination of this two-fold complexity of Rwandan refugees.

* Volker Schimmel is UNHCR Reports Officer in Rwanda. The views expressed in this article are not necessarily those of UNHCR.

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, www.pambazuka.org" Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

Neutralising the voices of hate: Broadcasting and genocide

Richard Carver

2004-04-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/21172

Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) was almost the first thing that outside observers noticed about the Rwanda genocide:

"Hutus could be seen listening attentively to every broadcast…. They held their cheap radios in one hand and machetes in the other, ready to start killing once the order had been given."

Or this:

"Much of the responsibility for the genocide in Rwanda can be blamed on the media. Many people have heard of Radio des Mille Collines, which began broadcasting a steady stream of racist, anti-Tutsi invective in September 1993."

Hence it was hardly surprising (if rather belated) when, in 2003, three Rwandan journalists, two of them from RTLM, were found guilty by the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda of participating in the genocide through their broadcasts.

The verdict of the Arusha tribunal seemed to close that chapter and it would be easy to accept that those found guilty deserved their fate and leave it at that. But what, in reality, was the role of RTLM in the genocide? And what lessons can usefully be learned from it?

The prominence of RTLM in Western media accounts of the genocide can be easily explained. Journalists and editors always love media stories for essentially narcissistic reasons. They are taken with the idea that they have an enormous influence on public behaviour – for good or bad. Here was an example of the immense power of the media.

Yet many of the accounts of RTLM’s role do not stand up to a moment’s scrutiny. Take the example already quoted: did Hutu really stand clutching radios in one hand and machetes in the other, waiting to be “incited”? Which Hutu do we mean (presumably not those who fell victim to the génocidaires)? And if they were so disposed towards genocide, why did they need to wait for the radio to tell them to carry it out?

This version of events rested upon a particular interpretation of why the genocide took place. It assumes that primitive and primordial “tribal” hatreds only had to be unlocked for Hutu to begin slaughtering Tutsi. Yet every serious account of the genocide stresses its highly planned and organised nature. That RTLM and its owners were part of the plot to commit genocide cannot be disputed. However, the assumption that RTLM was a necessary precondition for genocide is unproven and unprovable.

The influence of media content on public behaviour has been a subject for endless and inconclusive academic study over decades. We cannot say with any certainty whether, for example, violent television programmes will predispose children to behave violently. Yet many serious commentators have concluded with certainty that the RTLM broadcasts incited genocide. There were indeed contemporary accounts in the Western media of génocidaires “confessing” that they had committed their crimes because the radio had told them to. Such testimony was plainly self-serving yet was usually taken at face value.

The point here is not to exonerate RTLM from responsibility. However, without examining precisely the nature of RTLM’s crimes we cannot hope to draw any useful lessons.

Even 10 years on, the weakness of most accounts of RTLM’s role remains a lack of concrete analysis of either the content of the RTLM broadcasts or their impact on their audience. The latter is more excusable than the former: it remains almost impossible to conduct any scientific study of how RTLM affected people’s behaviour.

Yet it is possible to analyse RTLM’s output. To some extent this work has been done, although the findings are still often ignored. (In 1996, Linda Kirschke wrote a detailed account of RTLM’s broadcasts based upon tapes and transcripts. I base my observations on RTLM’s output on her research. ) The generally accepted understanding of RTLM remains that cited above: that it broadcast “a steady stream of racist, anti-Tutsi invective”. In fact, the story is more complicated.

RTLM’s role in the genocide can only be understood in terms of a strict distinction between what was broadcast before and after 6 April 1994. After that date it would be an understatement to accuse RTLM of incitement. The radio station did not try to persuade people towards genocide; it organised them to carry it out. RTLM broadcast the names and vehicle registration numbers of the targeted victims. This was purely a way of communicating intelligence to the militias carrying out the killing, giving them the information they needed to stop the victims at roadblocks.

RTLM’s role during this phase was only secondarily one of propaganda. Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, any external power with the means to do so had not only the right to jam RTLM broadcasts, but the obligation to do so.

RTLM’s output before 6 April 1994 poses questions that are more complex. The ethnic propaganda that RTLM broadcast was much more subtle than most accounts would suggest. RTLM was a slick and youthful station playing popular music. It was apparently the favoured listening of the rebels of the Rwanda Patriotic Front – the very targets of its “anti-Tutsi invective”. The meaning of RTLM’s often elliptical ethnic references would have been well understood by a Rwandan audience. But it was conveyed with a sophistication and wit that contrasted with earlier broadcasts from radio Rwanda, which, unlike, RTLM, was under direct and formal government control.

Retrospectively it is clear that RTLM’s broadcasts between its launch in September 1993 and 6 April 1994 provided evidence of its owners’ complicity in planning the genocide. They may also have helped to create a popular mood more favourable to genocide.

So far, this article has focused on what was exceptional and unique about the Rwandan situation, as most discussions of RTLM tend to. Yet it is also important to note how RTLM emerged in a way that was completely typical of failed democratic transitions in Africa.

In 1989 President Juvenal Habyarimana was edged into a reluctant transition to a multi-party system. Yet this was accompanied by no thorough reform of public institutions in Rwanda, including the broadcasting system. The publicly funded broadcaster, Radio Rwanda, remained under strict government control. There was no transparent and accountable system to licence private broadcasters. Indeed, the only private station eventually to be licensed was RTLM, owned by a group of extremist Hutu allied to a faction within the government.

This scenario – lack of democratic control over broadcasting in a period of political transition – has been played out in countless countries in Africa and elsewhere. While the consequences have seldom been as disastrous as in Rwanda, the practical lessons should by now be well understood. There needs to be an institutional reform of broadcasting that involves mechanisms for genuine public control over public broadcasting, an open and accountable system for issuing private broadcasting licences and space for the emergence of community media.

Rwanda was neither the first nor last time that the media have participated in massive human rights violations or crimes against humanity. The role of Nazi anti-semitic media in the European genocide in the 1940s was addressed in the Nuremberg trials (which provided some precedents for the Arusha tribunal on Rwanda). In the years immediately before the Rwanda genocide, sections of the media in former Yugoslavia had been actively fomenting ethnic crimes. Since 1994, media have tried to incite violence in Burundi, Congo/Zaire and Zimbabwe, among others.

The last of these examples is instructive. The Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe has drawn explicit parallels between RTLM and the role of the state media in inciting violence against the Zimbabwean opposition. Although the scale of the violence is much less, the institutional framework is very reminiscent of Rwanda. The propaganda and misinformation of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation is so potent precisely because there is no alternative. As in Rwanda, the public broadcaster is under tight government control and there is no space for independent private radio.

The Zimbabwe example is also relevant because MMPZ have tried to explain what is the significance and impact of the hate messages in the government media. They have concluded – unlike the simplistic initial analyses of the Rwanda genocide – that the extreme language and baroque, fictitious conspiracies in the official media are not aimed at convincing the general public that the opposition are a tool of Zimbabwe’s imperialist enemies. Rather they are intended to fire up the relatively small numbers of members of ruling party militias and security forces actually engaged in carrying out human rights violations. Most ordinary Zimbabweans know from their own experience that the ZBC talks lies; a small band of ruling party loyalists uses these propaganda messages to reinforce them in the correctness of their own brutal measures.

Such a thesis is very difficult to prove without conducting a type of sociological research that would be impossible in present-day Zimbabwe (or Rwanda). But it may also provide a useful understanding of how RTLM functioned in preparing the genocide. On this hypothesis, RTLM was not primarily concerned with convincing ordinary people to participate in genocide; it reinforced the conviction of those who were already part of the conspiracy to commit genocide.

Aside from the conclusion that a proper political transition should include democratisation of the media, the practical conclusions to be drawn from the RTLM experience are equally tentative. The criminal prosecution and conviction of the RTLM journalists was immensely important. It establishes the principle of the accountability of journalists for the consequences of what they broadcast. It does not, however, show what steps should be taken to prevent such material from being broadcast in the first place.

Freedom of expression advocates have always been rightly wary of any suggestion of prohibiting “hate speech”, however obnoxious it might be. They argue that violent and intolerant views should be combated by allowing tolerant and pacific opinions to compete. In practical terms that is saying that a plural media environment is the best way of neutralising RTLM and its kin.

Any call to prohibit “hate speech” must be treated with the utmost care. To whom is such a call addressed? In the case of Rwanda it might have been directed to the very government that was promoting and encouraging “hate speech”. Anti-hate speech laws notoriously have the opposite effect from that intended. The African state with the most extensive battery of laws prohibiting “incitement to racial hatred” was none other than apartheid South Africa. The laws were used, of course, against opponents of the apartheid system.

Or perhaps the call was directed to the “international community”. I have already suggested that RTLM’s broadcasts after 6 April should have been jammed. At that stage the radio station was being used to organise the genocide. The fact that these orders were being issued over public airwaves gave them no privilege. This was not, by then, a freedom of expression issue.

But we should be very careful not to predate such a call to cover RTLM before 6 April. Giving powerful governments a general mandate to shut down broadcasting stations is an extremely dangerous precedent. An outcry over the role of Serb broadcasting in the former Yugoslavia effectively legitimised NATO’s bombing of the official Belgrade broadcasting station in 1999. This was done to further NATO war aims in Kosovo. It was a war crime. We should beware of what we wish for in case the wish is granted.

Neither “hate speech” laws nor international military action are the answer. The practical lessons from the RTLM experience are more prosaic. Pluralistic and accountable broadcasting is an indispensable part of building democracy and the voices of hate can only be neutralised if they are confronted with a variety of alternative points of view.

* Richard Carver is director of Oxford Media Research. He wrote “Broadcasting and political transition: Rwanda and beyond” in Richard Fardon and Graham Furniss (eds), African Broadcast Cultures: Radio in Transition, James Currey, 2000.

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, www.pambazuka.org" Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.
Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) was almost the first thing that outside observers noticed about the Rwanda genocide:

"Hutus could be seen listening attentively to every broadcast…. They held their cheap radios in one hand and machetes in the other, ready to start killing once the order had been given."

Or this:

"Much of the responsibility for the genocide in Rwanda can be blamed on the media. Many people have heard of Radio des Mille Collines, which began broadcasting a steady stream of racist, anti-Tutsi invective in September 1993."

Hence it was hardly surprising (if rather belated) when, in 2003, three Rwandan journalists, two of them from RTLM, were found guilty by the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda of participating in the genocide through their broadcasts.

The verdict of the Arusha tribunal seemed to close that chapter and it would be easy to accept that those found guilty deserved their fate and leave it at that. But what, in reality, was the role of RTLM in the genocide? And what lessons can usefully be learned from it?

The prominence of RTLM in Western media accounts of the genocide can be easily explained. Journalists and editors always love media stories for essentially narcissistic reasons. They are taken with the idea that they have an enormous influence on public behaviour – for good or bad. Here was an example of the immense power of the media.

Yet many of the accounts of RTLM’s role do not stand up to a moment’s scrutiny. Take the example already quoted: did Hutu really stand clutching radios in one hand and machetes in the other, waiting to be “incited”? Which Hutu do we mean (presumably not those who fell victim to the génocidaires)? And if they were so disposed towards genocide, why did they need to wait for the radio to tell them to carry it out?

This version of events rested upon a particular interpretation of why the genocide took place. It assumes that primitive and primordial “tribal” hatreds only had to be unlocked for Hutu to begin slaughtering Tutsi. Yet every serious account of the genocide stresses its highly planned and organised nature. That RTLM and its owners were part of the plot to commit genocide cannot be disputed. However, the assumption that RTLM was a necessary precondition for genocide is unproven and unprovable.

The influence of media content on public behaviour has been a subject for endless and inconclusive academic study over decades. We cannot say with any certainty whether, for example, violent television programmes will predispose children to behave violently. Yet many serious commentators have concluded with certainty that the RTLM broadcasts incited genocide. There were indeed contemporary accounts in the Western media of génocidaires “confessing” that they had committed their crimes because the radio had told them to. Such testimony was plainly self-serving yet was usually taken at face value.

The point here is not to exonerate RTLM from responsibility. However, without examining precisely the nature of RTLM’s crimes we cannot hope to draw any useful lessons.

Even 10 years on, the weakness of most accounts of RTLM’s role remains a lack of concrete analysis of either the content of the RTLM broadcasts or their impact on their audience. The latter is more excusable than the former: it remains almost impossible to conduct any scientific study of how RTLM affected people’s behaviour.

Yet it is possible to analyse RTLM’s output. To some extent this work has been done, although the findings are still often ignored. (In 1996, Linda Kirschke wrote a detailed account of RTLM’s broadcasts based upon tapes and transcripts. I base my observations on RTLM’s output on her research. ) The generally accepted understanding of RTLM remains that cited above: that it broadcast “a steady stream of racist, anti-Tutsi invective”. In fact, the story is more complicated.

RTLM’s role in the genocide can only be understood in terms of a strict distinction between what was broadcast before and after 6 April 1994. After that date it would be an understatement to accuse RTLM of incitement. The radio station did not try to persuade people towards genocide; it organised them to carry it out. RTLM broadcast the names and vehicle registration numbers of the targeted victims. This was purely a way of communicating intelligence to the militias carrying out the killing, giving them the information they needed to stop the victims at roadblocks.

RTLM’s role during this phase was only secondarily one of propaganda. Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, any external power with the means to do so had not only the right to jam RTLM broadcasts, but the obligation to do so.

RTLM’s output before 6 April 1994 poses questions that are more complex. The ethnic propaganda that RTLM broadcast was much more subtle than most accounts would suggest. RTLM was a slick and youthful station playing popular music. It was apparently the favoured listening of the rebels of the Rwanda Patriotic Front – the very targets of its “anti-Tutsi invective”. The meaning of RTLM’s often elliptical ethnic references would have been well understood by a Rwandan audience. But it was conveyed with a sophistication and wit that contrasted with earlier broadcasts from radio Rwanda, which, unlike, RTLM, was under direct and formal government control.

Retrospectively it is clear that RTLM’s broadcasts between its launch in September 1993 and 6 April 1994 provided evidence of its owners’ complicity in planning the genocide. They may also have helped to create a popular mood more favourable to genocide.

So far, this article has focused on what was exceptional and unique about the Rwandan situation, as most discussions of RTLM tend to. Yet it is also important to note how RTLM emerged in a way that was completely typical of failed democratic transitions in Africa.

In 1989 President Juvenal Habyarimana was edged into a reluctant transition to a multi-party system. Yet this was accompanied by no thorough reform of public institutions in Rwanda, including the broadcasting system. The publicly funded broadcaster, Radio Rwanda, remained under strict government control. There was no transparent and accountable system to licence private broadcasters. Indeed, the only private station eventually to be licensed was RTLM, owned by a group of extremist Hutu allied to a faction within the government.

This scenario – lack of democratic control over broadcasting in a period of political transition – has been played out in countless countries in Africa and elsewhere. While the consequences have seldom been as disastrous as in Rwanda, the practical lessons should by now be well understood. There needs to be an institutional reform of broadcasting that involves mechanisms for genuine public control over public broadcasting, an open and accountable system for issuing private broadcasting licences and space for the emergence of community media.

Rwanda was neither the first nor last time that the media have participated in massive human rights violations or crimes against humanity. The role of Nazi anti-semitic media in the European genocide in the 1940s was addressed in the Nuremberg trials (which provided some precedents for the Arusha tribunal on Rwanda). In the years immediately before the Rwanda genocide, sections of the media in former Yugoslavia had been actively fomenting ethnic crimes. Since 1994, media have tried to incite violence in Burundi, Congo/Zaire and Zimbabwe, among others.

The last of these examples is instructive. The Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe has drawn explicit parallels between RTLM and the role of the state media in inciting violence against the Zimbabwean opposition. Although the scale of the violence is much less, the institutional framework is very reminiscent of Rwanda. The propaganda and misinformation of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation is so potent precisely because there is no alternative. As in Rwanda, the public broadcaster is under tight government control and there is no space for independent private radio.

The Zimbabwe example is also relevant because MMPZ have tried to explain what is the significance and impact of the hate messages in the government media. They have concluded – unlike the simplistic initial analyses of the Rwanda genocide – that the extreme language and baroque, fictitious conspiracies in the official media are not aimed at convincing the general public that the opposition are a tool of Zimbabwe’s imperialist enemies. Rather they are intended to fire up the relatively small numbers of members of ruling party militias and security forces actually engaged in carrying out human rights violations. Most ordinary Zimbabweans know from their own experience that the ZBC talks lies; a small band of ruling party loyalists uses these propaganda messages to reinforce them in the correctness of their own brutal measures.

Such a thesis is very difficult to prove without conducting a type of sociological research that would be impossible in present-day Zimbabwe (or Rwanda). But it may also provide a useful understanding of how RTLM functioned in preparing the genocide. On this hypothesis, RTLM was not primarily concerned with convincing ordinary people to participate in genocide; it reinforced the conviction of those who were already part of the conspiracy to commit genocide.

Aside from the conclusion that a proper political transition should include democratisation of the media, the practical conclusions to be drawn from the RTLM experience are equally tentative. The criminal prosecution and conviction of the RTLM journalists was immensely important. It establishes the principle of the accountability of journalists for the consequences of what they broadcast. It does not, however, show what steps should be taken to prevent such material from being broadcast in the first place.

Freedom of expression advocates have always been rightly wary of any suggestion of prohibiting “hate speech”, however obnoxious it might be. They argue that violent and intolerant views should be combated by allowing tolerant and pacific opinions to compete. In practical terms that is saying that a plural media environment is the best way of neutralising RTLM and its kin.

Any call to prohibit “hate speech” must be treated with the utmost care. To whom is such a call addressed? In the case of Rwanda it might have been directed to the very government that was promoting and encouraging “hate speech”. Anti-hate speech laws notoriously have the opposite effect from that intended. The African state with the most extensive battery of laws prohibiting “incitement to racial hatred” was none other than apartheid South Africa. The laws were used, of course, against opponents of the apartheid system.

Or perhaps the call was directed to the “international community”. I have already suggested that RTLM’s broadcasts after 6 April should have been jammed. At that stage the radio station was being used to organise the genocide. The fact that these orders were being issued over public airwaves gave them no privilege. This was not, by then, a freedom of expression issue.

But we should be very careful not to predate such a call to cover RTLM before 6 April. Giving powerful governments a general mandate to shut down broadcasting stations is an extremely dangerous precedent. An outcry over the role of Serb broadcasting in the former Yugoslavia effectively legitimised NATO’s bombing of the official Belgrade broadcasting station in 1999. This was done to further NATO war aims in Kosovo. It was a war crime. We should beware of what we wish for in case the wish is granted.

Neither “hate speech” laws nor international military action are the answer. The practical lessons from the RTLM experience are more prosaic. Pluralistic and accountable broadcasting is an indispensable part of building democracy and the voices of hate can only be neutralised if they are confronted with a variety of alternative points of view.

* Richard Carver is director of Oxford Media Research. He wrote “Broadcasting and political transition: Rwanda and beyond” in Richard Fardon and Graham Furniss (eds), African Broadcast Cultures: Radio in Transition, James Currey, 2000.

* NOTE FOR EDITORS: Please note that this editorial was commissioned from the author for Pambazuka News. If you would like to use this article for your publication, please do so with the following credit: "This article first appeared in Pambazuka News, an electronic newsletter for social justice in Africa, www.pambazuka.org" Editors are also encouraged to make a donation.

Ten Lessons to prevent genocide

Alison Des Forges

2004-04-01

http://www.hrw.org/

In the ten years since the Rwandan genocide leaders of national governments and international institutions have acknowledged the shame of having failed to stop the slaughter of the Tutsi population. At the 2004 Stockholm International Forum, “Preventing Genocide: Threats and Responsibilities,” many renewed their commitment to halting any future genocide. Honouring that pledge will require not just greater political will than seen in the past but also developing a strategy built on the lessons of 1994.

Lesson One: Stop the genocide before it becomes a genocide

The genocide in Rwanda began suddenly after the killing of the president, but the attitudes and practices that made it possible developed over a period of years.

For decades the government had practiced discrimination against Tutsi, the people who would be targeted during the genocide. The post-independence government categorized citizens by ethnicity and, continuing a practice of the Belgian colonial regime, required all adults to carry documents identifying their ethnic group. These identity documents were used to select Tutsi for slaughter during the genocide.

During the three years before the 1994 genocide, government officials, soldiers, national police, and leaders of political parties incited and directed sixteen massacres of Tutsi, each of which killed hundreds of unarmed civilians. The army also killed hundreds of Hima, a people related to Tutsi, during a military operation in 1990. In addition, authorities permitted and in some cases encouraged violence against supporters of rival political parties.

Killers and other assailants went unpunished if their victims were Tutsi or members of parties opposed to the authorities.

The international community, including national and multinational donors, occasionally expressed concern about the human rights situation but failed to press effectively for an end to abuses or for punishment of the guilty. Even the slaughter of hundreds drew little or at most short-lived criticism.

Lesson Two: React promptly and firmly to preparations for massive slaughter of civilians

Many Rwandans, diplomats in Rwanda, and United Nations (UN) officials knew that militia were being recruited and trained to kill, but even when an informant told UN peacekeepers that the militia were meant to attack Tutsi civilians, there was no effective intervention to halt militia activities. During the genocide, the militia mobilized and led the general population in killing Tutsi, often carrying out orders given them by soldiers and national policemen.

The distribution of arms to the civilian population was widely known and elicited no effective international reaction.

Lesson Three: Pay close attention to media in situations of potential ethnic, religious, or racial conflict. In cases of impending genocide, be prepared to silence broadcasts that incite or provide directions for violence

For three years before the genocide, newspapers like Kangura had identified Tutsi as “enemies of the nation,” to be scorned and feared. A private radio, supported by many influential government, military, and political figures, broadcast the same message with increasing virulence and effect in the nine months before the genocide was launched. The media went so far as to name individuals to be eliminated, including the prime minister.

Beginning the year before the genocide, leading Rwandans and international observers all deplored the media campaign against Tutsi and members of opposition parties but no one intervened to actually stop the calls to hatred or to promote the broadcast of countervailing messages of tolerance.

Having had months to build a listening audience, the private radio station was well-placed to contribute to the killing campaign once it began. The radio incited listeners to violence against Tutsi and others opposed to the genocide, and gave specific orders on how to carry out the killing, including identifying individuals to be attacked and specifying where they could be found.

Silencing the radio broadcasts would not only have ended this particularly effective form of incitement and the delivery of specific orders; it would have showed that the international community rejected the legitimacy of the genocidal message and those who were delivering it. The United States considered jamming the broadcasts from an airplane, but found the cost of about $8,000 an hour too high.

Lesson Four: Be alert to impact of negative models in nearby regions

In late 1993 and early 1994 tens of thousands of Hutu and Tutsi were slain in neighbouring Burundi, a country demographically similar to Rwanda. These killings, skilfully exploited by Rwandan propagandists, significantly increased tensions in Rwanda. Both the slaughter and the absence of international reaction to it encouraged the planners of genocide to proceed with the attempt to eliminate Tutsi in Rwanda. Propagandists frequently talked of the Burundian example on the radio, enhancing the impact of this negative model on Rwandans.

Lesson Five: Ensure accurate information of what is happening on the ground

In 1994 the governments most involved in Rwanda -France, Belgium, and the United States - had substantial information about the situation on the ground but they shared this information with only a few others. Non-permanent members of the Security Council - with the exception of Rwanda, itself a non-permanent member in 1994 - depended for information on the UN secretariat.

From the field, the head of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, General Romeo Dallaire, and the representative of the Secretary-General, Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, sent very different descriptions of events to the secretariat in New York. In preparing briefings for the Security Council, the secretariat favoured Booh-Booh's interpretation, which gave no sense of the systematic and ethnically based nature of the killing. Relying initially on this information, the non-permanent members agreed to withdrawal of most of the peacekeepers. But when they later learned of the extent and genocidal nature of the slaughter from Human Rights Watch and others, they pushed the Security Council to send a second and stronger UN force to Rwanda. Their efforts produced results, although not in time to influence the course of the genocide.

Accurate, impartial, and analytical reporting of the Rwandan genocide could have helped build a public demand for more forceful government action in halting the slaughter. But press coverage was limited, superficial, and often sensationalistic. Journalists usually portrayed the killing as the result of ancient, tribal hatreds rather than as a state-directed attempt to exterminate the Tutsi. Major media outlets gave more attention to the problems of sports stars O.J. Simpson and Tonya Harding than to the deliberate slaughter of more than half a million people.

Lesson Six: Identify and support opponents of the genocide

At the start a vast number of Rwandans opposed the genocide. When potential leaders of resistance, including military officers, appealed for foreign support in the first days of the killings, they were refused. The people of central and southern Rwanda nonetheless continued opposing the genocide for ten days to two weeks. Instead of supporting these resisters, the Security Council undermined them by reducing the already inadequate number of peacekeepers. The organizers of the genocide then gained in confidence and decided to push the killing campaign into the regions that had thus far remained relatively peaceful. They stepped up pressure on the resisters by sending in militia from other areas where the killing was well advanced, by mocking them on the radio, and by removing key local officials who opposed the killing. Faced with this overwhelming pressure and feeling abandoned by the international community, the resisters either went into hiding or became active participants in the genocide.

Lesson Seven: Call the genocide by its rightful name and vigorously condemn it. Commit to permanently opposing any government involved in genocide, including by refusing it assistance in the future

Rwandan government officials, military officers, and political leaders who directed the genocide claimed to be legitimate authorities giving appropriate orders for the self-defense of the population. This pretext of legitimacy made it easier for them to persuade people to violate usual moral and legal prohibitions. By remaining silent during the first part of the genocide and by taking no effective action to stop the killing throughout the period, the international community appeared to acquiesce in these claims to legitimacy. The government exploited every apparent demonstration of international acceptance - every time Rwandan government representatives were received abroad, the event was fully publicized on the radio.

Rwandan officials and political leaders understood how dependent their government was on international assistance: they knew that no government could operate for long without such support. Even ordinary Rwandans who lived out on the hills knew the importance of international aid since they or their families benefited from schools or clinics supported by partnerships with foreign communities.

States and other international actors must send clear condemnations of the genocidal government combined with the announcement that direct foreign assistance would forever be denied to the government. This would have called into question not just the legitimacy of the government but also its long-term viability. Rwandans might have well have been less inclined to follow the directives of a government that had little chance of continuing to hold power.

Lesson Eight: Impose an arms embargo on the genocidal government

Many killers used machetes or homemade weapons, but soldiers, national police, and thousands of militia used firearms in launching attacks on churches, schools, hospitals and other sites where thousands of Tutsi had gathered. A first wave of assailants, relatively few in number, killed thousands of civilians by using small arms, grenades, and mortars. They left the survivors of such attacks terrorized, vulnerable to assault by a second wave of killers wielding machetes and homemade weapons.

The U.N. Security Council established an arms embargo, but only late in the genocide. Had the embargo been imposed earlier, the killers would have had fewer arms at their disposal and would have been less effective in their attacks.

Lesson Nine: Press any government seeming to support the genocidal government to change its policy

Some governments, particularly France and several African governments, continued to support the Rwandan government throughout the genocide. This limited the impact of condemnation by those other governments that did finally take a stand against the slaughter. As official documents show, at least some French officials were concerned that continuing support for Rwanda was damaging their own international standing, but other governments with potential influence on France, like the United States and the United Kingdom, failed to press the French effectively enough to produce a change in policy.

Lesson Ten: Be prepared to intervene with armed force

The organizers of the Rwandan genocide were relatively few in number but they controlled three elite military units. Backed by these forces, they were able to assert control first over other units of the army and national police and then over the administrative system.

When the crisis began, the UN peacekeepers had neither the mandate nor the numbers needed for effective action, but had their mandate been broadened to allow offensive action and had they received support from the elite French, Belgian, and Italian troops sent in to evacuate their own citizens, the combined force could have blocked the effort of the genocidal organizers to extend their control to other parts of the armed forces and administration. Intervention later would have required a larger force and would have saved fewer lives, but intervention at any point would have limited the number of civilians killed.

French troops sent some ten weeks after the start of the genocide saved at least ten thousand lives. Although meant to serve political as well as humanitarian objectives - they intended to support the faltering Rwandan army as well as to save lives - they did end up protecting Tutsi at risk of imminent slaughter.

Genocides are complex phenomena, each with its own peculiar configuration and dynamics. These ten lessons will not provide the full answer to stopping the next genocide, but they provide a starting point for those who are determined to act in defence of our common humanity.

* This article has been reproduced with the kind permission of Human Rights Watch. (c) 2004 Human Rights Watch

In the ten years since the Rwandan genocide leaders of national governments and international institutions have acknowledged the shame of having failed to stop the slaughter of the Tutsi population. At the 2004 Stockholm International Forum, “Preventing Genocide: Threats and Responsibilities,” many renewed their commitment to halting any future genocide. Honouring that pledge will require not just greater political will than seen in the past but also developing a strategy built on the lessons of 1994.

Lesson One: Stop the genocide before it becomes a genocide

The genocide in Rwanda began suddenly after the killing of the president, but the attitudes and practices that made it possible developed over a period of years.

For decades the government had practiced discrimination against Tutsi, the people who would be targeted during the genocide. The post-independence government categorized citizens by ethnicity and, continuing a practice of the Belgian colonial regime, required all adults to carry documents identifying their ethnic group. These identity documents were used to select Tutsi for slaughter during the genocide.

During the three years before the 1994 genocide, government officials, soldiers, national police, and leaders of political parties incited and directed sixteen massacres of Tutsi, each of which killed hundreds of unarmed civilians. The army also killed hundreds of Hima, a people related to Tutsi, during a military operation in 1990. In addition, authorities permitted and in some cases encouraged violence against supporters of rival political parties.

Killers and other assailants went unpunished if their victims were Tutsi or members of parties opposed to the authorities.

The international community, including national and multinational donors, occasionally expressed concern about the human rights situation but failed to press effectively for an end to abuses or for punishment of the guilty. Even the slaughter of hundreds drew little or at most short-lived criticism.

Lesson Two: React promptly and firmly to preparations for massive slaughter of civilians

Many Rwandans, diplomats in Rwanda, and United Nations (UN) officials knew that militia were being recruited and trained to kill, but even when an informant told UN peacekeepers that the militia were meant to attack Tutsi civilians, there was no effective intervention to halt militia activities. During the genocide, the militia mobilized and led the general population in killing Tutsi, often carrying out orders given them by soldiers and national policemen.

The distribution of arms to the civilian population was widely known and elicited no effective international reaction.

Lesson Three: Pay close attention to media in situations of potential ethnic, religious, or racial conflict. In cases of impending genocide, be prepared to silence broadcasts that incite or provide directions for violence

For three years before the genocide, newspapers like Kangura had identified Tutsi as “enemies of the nation,” to be scorned and feared. A private radio, supported by many influential government, military, and political figures, broadcast the same message with increasing virulence and effect in the nine months before the genocide was launched. The media went so far as to name individuals to be eliminated, including the prime minister.

Beginning the year before the genocide, leading Rwandans and international observers all deplored the media campaign against Tutsi and members of opposition parties but no one intervened to actually stop the calls to hatred or to promote the broadcast of countervailing messages of tolerance.

Having had months to build a listening audience, the private radio station was well-placed to contribute to the killing campaign once it began. The radio incited listeners to violence against Tutsi and others opposed to the genocide, and gave specific orders on how to carry out the killing, including identifying individuals to be attacked and specifying where they could be found.

Silencing the radio broadcasts would not only have ended this particularly effective form of incitement and the delivery of specific orders; it would have showed that the international community rejected the legitimacy of the genocidal message and those who were delivering it. The United States considered jamming the broadcasts from an airplane, but found the cost of about $8,000 an hour too high.

Lesson Four: Be alert to impact of negative models in nearby regions

In late 1993 and early 1994 tens of thousands of Hutu and Tutsi were slain in neighbouring Burundi, a country demographically similar to Rwanda. These killings, skilfully exploited by Rwandan propagandists, significantly increased tensions in Rwanda. Both the slaughter and the absence of international reaction to it encouraged the planners of genocide to proceed with the attempt to eliminate Tutsi in Rwanda. Propagandists frequently talked of the Burundian example on the radio, enhancing the impact of this negative model on Rwandans.

Lesson Five: Ensure accurate information of what is happening on the ground

In 1994 the governments most involved in Rwanda -France, Belgium, and the United States - had substantial information about the situation on the ground but they shared this information with only a few others. Non-permanent members of the Security Council - with the exception of Rwanda, itself a non-permanent member in 1994 - depended for information on the UN secretariat.

From the field, the head of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, General Romeo Dallaire, and the representative of the Secretary-General, Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, sent very different descriptions of events to the secretariat in New York. In preparing briefings for the Security Council, the secretariat favoured Booh-Booh's interpretation, which gave no sense of the systematic and ethnically based nature of the killing. Relying initially on this information, the non-permanent members agreed to withdrawal of most of the peacekeepers. But when they later learned of the extent and genocidal nature of the slaughter from Human Rights Watch and others, they pushed the Security Council to send a second and stronger UN force to Rwanda. Their efforts produced results, although not in time to influence the course of the genocide.

Accurate, impartial, and analytical reporting of the Rwandan genocide could have helped build a public demand for more forceful government action in halting the slaughter. But press coverage was limited, superficial, and often sensationalistic. Journalists usually portrayed the killing as the result of ancient, tribal hatreds rather than as a state-directed attempt to exterminate the Tutsi. Major media outlets gave more attention to the problems of sports stars O.J. Simpson and Tonya Harding than to the deliberate slaughter of more than half a million people.

Lesson Six: Identify and support opponents of the genocide

At the start a vast number of Rwandans opposed the genocide. When potential leaders of resistance, including military officers, appealed for foreign support in the first days of the killings, they were refused. The people of central and southern Rwanda nonetheless continued opposing the genocide for ten days to two weeks. Instead of supporting these resisters, the Security Council undermined them by reducing the already inadequate number of peacekeepers. The organizers of the genocide then gained in confidence and decided to push the killing campaign into the regions that had thus far remained relatively peaceful. They stepped up pressure on the resisters by sending in militia from other areas where the killing was well advanced, by mocking them on the radio, and by removing key local officials who opposed the killing. Faced with this overwhelming pressure and feeling abandoned by the international community, the resisters either went into hiding or became active participants in the genocide.

Lesson Seven: Call the genocide by its rightful name and vigorously condemn it. Commit to permanently opposing any government involved in genocide, including by refusing it assistance in the future

Rwandan government officials, military officers, and political leaders who directed the genocide claimed to be legitimate authorities giving appropriate orders for the self-defense of the population. This pretext of legitimacy made it easier for them to persuade people to violate usual moral and legal prohibitions. By remaining silent during the first part of the genocide and by taking no effective action to stop the killing throughout the period, the international community appeared to acquiesce in these claims to legitimacy. The government exploited every apparent demonstration of international acceptance - every time Rwandan government representatives were received abroad, the event was fully publicized on the radio.

Rwandan officials and political leaders understood how dependent their government was on international assistance: they knew that no government could operate for long without such support. Even ordinary Rwandans who lived out on the hills knew the importance of international aid since they or their families benefited from schools or clinics supported by partnerships with foreign communities.

States and other international actors must send clear condemnations of the genocidal government combined with the announcement that direct foreign assistance would forever be denied to the government. This would have called into question not just the legitimacy of the government but also its long-term viability. Rwandans might have well have been less inclined to follow the directives of a government that had little chance of continuing to hold power.

Lesson Eight: Impose an arms embargo on the genocidal government

Many killers used machetes or homemade weapons, but soldiers, national police, and thousands of militia used firearms in launching attacks on churches, schools, hospitals and other sites where thousands of Tutsi had gathered. A first wave of assailants, relatively few in number, killed thousands of civilians by using small arms, grenades, and mortars. They left the survivors of such attacks terrorized, vulnerable to assault by a second wave of killers wielding machetes and homemade weapons.

The U.N. Security Council established an arms embargo, but only late in the genocide. Had the embargo been imposed earlier, the killers would have had fewer arms at their disposal and would have been less effective in their attacks.

Lesson Nine: Press any government seeming to support the genocidal government to change its policy

Some governments, particularly France and several African governments, continued to support the Rwandan government throughout the genocide. This limited the impact of condemnation by those other governments that did finally take a stand against the slaughter. As official documents show, at least some French officials were concerned that continuing support for Rwanda was damaging their own international standing, but other governments with potential influence on France, like the United States and the United Kingdom, failed to press the French effectively enough to produce a change in policy.

Lesson Ten: Be prepared to intervene with armed force

The organizers of the Rwandan genocide were relatively few in number but they controlled three elite military units. Backed by these forces, they were able to assert control first over other units of the army and national police and then over the administrative system.

When the crisis began, the UN peacekeepers had neither the mandate nor the numbers needed for effective action, but had their mandate been broadened to allow offensive action and had they received support from the elite French, Belgian, and Italian troops sent in to evacuate their own citizens, the combined force could have blocked the effort of the genocidal organizers to extend their control to other parts of the armed forces and administration. Intervention later would have required a larger force and would have saved fewer lives, but intervention at any point would have limited the number of civilians killed.

French troops sent some ten weeks after the start of the genocide saved at least ten thousand lives. Although meant to serve political as well as humanitarian objectives - they intended to support the faltering Rwandan army as well as to save lives - they did end up protecting Tutsi at risk of imminent slaughter.

Genocides are complex phenomena, each with its own peculiar configuration and dynamics. These ten lessons will not provide the full answer to stopping the next genocide, but they provide a starting point for those who are determined to act in defence of our common humanity.

* This article has been reproduced with the kind permission of Human Rights Watch. (c) 2004 Human Rights Watch

Annan admits U.N. blame over Rwanda

2004-04-01

http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=483909&section=news

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has accepted institutional and personal blame for the slaughter of 800,000 civilians in the 1994 Rwanda genocide that was initially ignored by world leaders. "The international community is guilty of sins of omission," said Annan, who was head of the United Nations peacekeeping agency at the time and had asked countries to provide troops. "I believed at the time that I was doing my best. But I realised after the genocide that there was more that I could and should have done to sound the alarm and rally support," Annan said in a speech on Friday to open the "Memorial Conference on the Rwanda Genocide" to mark 10 years since the massacre.

Books written about the genocide

2004-04-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rwanda/21176

1. African Rights. (1995). Rwanda: Death, Despair, and Defiance. Revised edition. London.
- (2003) Tribute to Courage.

2. Barnett, Michael. (2003) Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda. Cornell University Press.

3. Bill Berkeley. (2001). The Graves are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa. New York: Basic Books.

4. Dallaire, Romeo. (2003). Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Toronto: Random House.

5. De Mucyo, Jean. (2001) “Gacaca Courts and Genocide.” In Rwanda and South Africa in Dialogue: Addressing the Legacies of Genocide and a Crime Against Humanity, edited by Charles Villa-Vicencio and Tyrone Savage. Cape Town: IJR.

6. Des Forges, Alison L. (1999). Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. New York: Human Rights Watch and Paris: Fédération Internationale des Ligues des Droits de l'Homme.

7. De Saint-Exupery, Patrick. (2004). "L'Inavouable, la France au Rwanda" (Unspeakable: France in Rwanda).

8. Drumtra, Jeff. “Life after Death: Suspicion and Reintegration in Post-Genocide Rwanda.” Available at http://129.41.41.28/world/articles/rwanda_wrs98.htm

9. Eltringham, Nigel. (2004). Accounting for Horror: Post-Genocide Debates in Rwanda. Pluto Press (UK).

10. Gourevitch, Philip. (1998). We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux.

11. Keane, Fergal. (1997). Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey. Penguin Books.

12. Khan, Shaharyar, M. (2001). The Shallow Graves of Rwanda. I. B. Tauris & Company.

13. Kuperman, Alan, J. (2001). The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda. http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=1-0815700857-0 Brookings Institution Press.

14. Longman, Timothy. (2004). “Placing Genocide in Context: Research Priorities for the Rwandan Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Studies.

15. Lungu, Theresa. (2003). Twilight in the Morning. iUniverse, Inc.

16. Mamdani, Mahmood (2001) When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
- (1996). Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Hate Colonialism. Princton: Princton University Press.

17. Melvern, Linda. (2000). A People Betrayed: The role of the West in Rwanda's genocide, London and New York, Zed Books.
- (2004) Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwanda Genocide and the International Community. Verso Books.

18. Neuffer, Elizabeth. (2002). The Key to My Neighbour's House: Seeking Justice in Bosnia and Rwanda. Picador USA.

19. Polman, Linda. (2004). We did Nothing. Penguin Books.

20. Power, Samantha. "A Problem from Hell:" America and the Age of Genocide. New York: Basic Books.

21. Prunier, Gerard. (1995). The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. New York: Columbia University Press.

22. Reyntjens, Flip. (1995). “Rwanda: Background to a Genocide.” Bulletin des Seances de l'Academie Royale d'Outre-Mer 41: 281-92.

23. Sarkin, Jeremy. (1999). “The Necessity and Challenges of Establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Rwanda.” Human Rights Quarterly 21: 667-823.

- (2000). “Promoting Justice, Truth and Reconciliation in Transitional Societies: Evaluating Rwanda's Approach in the New Millennium of Using Community Based Gacaca Tribunals to Deal with the Past.” International Law Forum 2: 112-21.
- (2001). “Gacaca Courts and Genocide.” In Rwanda and South Africa Dialogue: Addressing the Legacies of Genocide and a Crime Against Humanity, edited by Charles Villa-Viccencio and Tyrone Savage. Cape Town: IJR.

24. Uvin, Peter. (1998). Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda. West Hartford: Kumarian Press.
- (1996). Violence, Aid and Conflict: Reflections from the Case of Rwanda. Helsinki: United Nations University and World Institute of Development Economics Research.

Christian Aid warns it is time for Rwanda to 'open up'

2004-04-01

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/fromthefield/108073098831.htm

On the 10th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, Christian Aid has called for the UK government to review its support to the Rwandan government. A new report, 'It's time to open up', says the UK should be a more 'critical friend' to Rwanda and concentrate on helping it to establish strong democratic roots and a legitimacy which will provide long term stability for all Rwandans and succeeding governments.

Government, Politics and Economy

2004-04-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rwanda/21174

GENERAL:

Official Name: Republic of Rwanda
Capital City: Kigali (est. pop. 800,000)
Other Cities: Gitarama, Butare, Ruhengeri, Gisenyi
Religions: Roman Catholic/Traditional
Languages: English/KinyaRwanda/French/Swahili
Land Area: 26 340 square kilometres
Population: 8.2 million (August 2002)
Education: Six years compulsory. 75% attendance. 64% literacy.
Health: Infant mortality rate: 107/1,000. Life expectancy: 40 years.
Work force: Agriculture: 92%. Industry and commerce, services, and government: 8%.

GOVERNMENT:

Independence: July 1, 1962.
Branches:
1. Executive: president (chief of state), prime minister (head of government). Broad-based government of national unity formed after the 1994 civil war. Elections in 2003 elected a president, 80-seat Chamber of Deputies and 26-member Senate.
2. Legislative: Chamber of Deputies; Senate.
3. Judicial: Supreme Court, Constitutional Court, Council of State, Court of Appeals.
Administrative subdivisions: 12 provinces; 106 districts; 1,545 sectors; 9,165 cells.
Political parties: Eight parties comprise the government.
Central government budget (2000 est.): 31.7 billions of Rwandan francs ($29 million) Revenues: $28 million. Expenditures: $29 million.

ECONOMY:

GDP (1999 est.): $1.9 billion.
Real GDP growth rate (2002 est.): 9%.
Per capita income (1999 est.): $250.
Average inflation rate (2000 est.): 3.9%.
Agriculture (2001 est.): 47% of GDP.
Industry (1999 est.): 20% of GDP
Trade (1996 est.): Exports: $69.4 million:
Major markets: Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Pakistan.
Imports: $221 million.
Major suppliers: Belgium, U.S., Tanzania, Kenya, France.

SOURCES:

- Official Website of the Government of Rwanda
http://www.rwanda1.com/government/rwandalaunchie.html
- US Department of State Background Notes
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2861.htm

No Rwanda flight recorder link

2004-04-01

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3522598.stm

The UN says tests on a flight recorder found last week suggest that it is not from the plane that crashed in Rwanda, triggering the country's 1994 genocide. But spokesman Fred Eckhard said more tests were needed on the device which had been locked in a UN filing cabinet for a decade. Both Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira were killed in the attack. The flight recorder was found after the French daily Le Monde published details of a police report which says that the UN had been sent the device a few months after the crash.

Personel stories from Rwanda

2004-04-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rwanda/21208

* Names have been omitted because of the nature of the interviews. One of the subjects is a protected witness.

STORY ONE

"The Genocide was something overwhelming. In the first place, it is impossible to find an explanation for it. You cannot understand how a friend, a long time neighbour, comes to your house to kill you; that because you are a Tutsi you must die. You cannot understand why everyone let it happen, and you are completely left alone, you have nothing, no family...nothing. And that as a result you have to beg for someone to come to your help. I lost all my family and it means I am now responsible for many things, things I was not prepared for. I have to take care of the remaining surviving members of my family as the one who is working. You know there are those who weren't living here when the genocide broke who ask how I survived. How do you answer a question like that! They are implying that I was an accomplice. I met a soldier who asked me why I hadn't gone to fight with them, and if I had I may not have lost my family. That is an insult to an injury!

I lost five members of my family, and until now I cannot get them properly buried. They are in a septic tank where their bodies were thrown. Sometimes I want to open it and look inside but then I get scared and wonder if I can deal with the reality of seeing them in there. If I die now, my family name will be gone. Who will raise my children? I often feel a heat on the top of my head.

I am responsible for educating five children who are not my own. You can imagine my first born is five and a half years old but because of circumstances I am a parent to a 20 year old. My mother has heart problems because of the loss of her children. I have to find the medication and the money to pay for it all. And in all this I am supposed to live my own life too.

How do I cope? One must be very, very strong. If you are weak, if you show a sign of weakness then you are dead. I think we survivors are living dead. Sometimes I ask myself why I am not mad. I cry many evenings, I feel abandoned but in the morning I must get up and go about supporting what is left of my family.

I saw my family members being shot. I was hiding among the bushes. I could hear people crying out for water, crying for help and the next day you would hear they were killed. My younger sister was thrown alive into the latrines. She was begging for water and was caught, but I could not help her because if I came out from the bushes I would surely die. If I was in Europe I would be able to get some psychological help but here, one must help oneself.

Gacaca has people who defend themselves well, with their family members backing them. When you testify, they mock you. They ask you to remember, to testify and then they tell you they will release the suspects because they have accepted killing! And you are obliged to grant them pardon. The person who threw my sister in the latrine continues to live in my sector. In fact I said hello to him one day before someone who had witnessed his deeds told me who he was.

At Gacaca a prisoner will give a memorised testimony and the people there applaud when he speaks. There is a man who shot at my brother three times. I was there. I took him to the police station and they said I needed five witnesses before they could do anything.

So to me reconciliation is really for politicians. Survivors, especially in the countryside, can't do anything - they must collaborate. They are resigned and have no choice. Reconciliation is not for this generation. There are many things people don't dare say, the internal suffering they endure. People can't do anything palpable to come to the aid of those who underwent the horrors of the genocide."

STORY TWO

"As a survivor, the genocide weighs heavy on us. It is impossible to separate ourselves from the past. One is always attached to the horror one went through, and it is always present. The criminals are still free while the victims continue living a life in misery. There are very few who are concerned about the worries of the survivors. This greatly hurts us. But what we would really like is healing; someone to listen to us, empathise with our misery, understand our suffering, soothe us and to give us support.

Ten years on, there has been no compensation and the criminals are free to do what they want, no-one stops them. It is discouraging. People seem more concerned with prisoners and returning refugees. There are widows, young girls who were raped and are now HIV positive, who will soon leave their children behind. The international community that was there at the time should get involved in getting treatment for them."

STORY THREE

"The Genocide changed my way of life completely. I was a devout Catholic; I had attended a Catholic secondary school and then went on to a seminary. Since secondary school I knew I was heading towards being a priest. In October 1994 I left the seminary as a result of the genocide, the extreme racism I saw. Many colleagues who had participated in the killings were not interested in confessing and changing their views. It was terribly shocking for me to see them take part in the genocide. I am now somewhat isolated. Those with whom I could share my thoughts are either dead or were participants in the genocide. Living outside of the church is a change for me, something I had never thought of, and so I feel I am not settled. I try to overcome some of this by working with widows and orphans but there is always the problem of lack of means.

As I travel around the country frequently, I find that most of the people don't believe in the Genocide. There is a fear in acknowledging their crimes. In a way, to speak of unity and reconciliation is to erase traces of genocide for the accused. Reconciliation is also seen in different views. For some it means the liberation of everyone, to them that is justice being served. These opposing ideas of the genocide creates a rift between the survivors and the prisoners. It is a society that frightens me. Unity and reconciliation is always being touted but it is not the reality. There are those who don't approach the survivors during the commemoration and say it is a preoccupation of the government and the survivors. This is a worrying trend.

With the approach of the 10th anniversary, I also worry about the alienation of the youth. They are not involved in the preparations and are in a sense abandoned. It is worrying for the future. The youth change their ideas all the time so I ask myself where we will be in another 10 years.

I am now accused of being a "RPF politician", an accomplice because it is known I assisted some people to safety. Since 1994, I am always accused of having been 'bought' by the survivors. The problem is that there are a lot of prejudices here. People think if they speak out they will be considered as killers and they don't see it as shedding a light on things. I am taken to be the enemy in my home area. I think of Gacaca going on without my testimony but to give it would mean insecurity for me and my family members.

I saw many who participated in the genocide; many have been liberated and many have not been imprisoned to date. There are also those who played a part in the organisation of the genocide who haven't as yet been accused. It was traumatising to see. For instance, there was a woman who left the parish where we were to return to her home. I went after her but it was too late and I saw her being killed with a machete by several teachers, who are still teaching in my home province. And when I talk about what I saw, I am accused of wanting to destroy unity and reconciliation. That disturbs me. I accuse my society - we are living in lies. There will always be victims. It reflects what is happening all over the country to survivors, it shows how they are viewed.

I try and manage by living with others who have been through similar experiences and we share our feelings. It gives me the morale to continue with life. I ask myself how things stand between Hutus and Tutsis. There are some good people who try to understand things and nurture a different society. They offer a platform for support, a stable base and give a good image to the country. They don't generalise the situation.

With regard to the commemoration, what is missing is a criticism of the population. In the countryside they ignore what happens. They must be prepared and included in the activities until they take them on and participate. They tend to be frightened and don't want to be associated. These events shouldn't be foreign and they should be involved alongside the survivors and the authorities. People should be slowly helped to understand that the dead are like their brothers, their kin and in that way they may slowly start recognising it and talking the truth of what happened."

STORY FOUR

"I was 14 at the time of the genocide. For me, it was people following orders. There were lots of meetings and preparations for the killing, including the purchasing of machetes. There were those who attempted to help out Tutsis and failed. Mainly people were killing so as to get their hands on property. People were dying like snakes, it became a normal sight. I didn't think anything of it, other than people obeying orders that were being given by the authorities and church leaders. I was young at the time. Now, my opinions have changed - we have good leadership.

Everyone is seen as equal, as a human being. You can live where you want and education is open to all. I myself don't have a job at the moment but even so I live relatively well. I decided to testify about what I had witnessed because the new leadership told us that we should speak so the truth of what happened be known, so that those who were guilty could be brought to justice and that those who may be wrongly accused could be set free.

So I decided to speak out because I had witnessed a lot. At the time I didn't know it would lead to any trouble. I ended up receiving threats and people wanted me dead, even my family. It was difficult and it bothered me because they chased me from home and they wanted me to die. They would have helped anyone wanting me dead. They would say that I should let the Tutsis handle things themselves, that I should not involve myself or we would all end up being killed. There is a man who refuses to give me work because I gave testimony implicating his younger brother. But I am saying what I saw, I am speaking the truth and I would do it again even knowing now what I face. The truth is the truth. If it means I die then so be it. When my family disowned me I felt alone, and life is hard. I have no work and I am in the same clothes day after day...

All this has meant that I am constantly on the move, worrying for my life but in telling the truth my heart is at peace. I had thought that if I spoke out, being the youngest among those I was with, the others would testify too but that hasn't been the case. They are at home not saying anything."

* Many thanks to Elizabeth Onyango in Rwanda, who conducted these interviews for Pambazuka News.

Rwanda to Free 30,000 Genocide Suspects

2004-04-01

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-3909832,00.html

Rwanda plans to release at least 30,000 suspects who have confessed to participating in the 1994 genocide, letting them be tried in community courts rather than by the country's overburdened judicial system, an official said Saturday. The suspects will be released by the end of June - cutting by a third the 90,000 suspects being held on charges of taking part in the slaughter of at least 500,000 people, mostly minority Tutsis, said Johnston Busingye, the secretary general of the justice ministry.

Rwanda: 1918-1924

2004-04-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rwanda/21175

SOURCE: Edited from a chronology of events on the website http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/rwanda/etc/cron.html, which was compiled from Fergal Keane's Season of Blood and Alain Destexhe's Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century.

1918: Treaty of Versailles makes the former German colony of Rwanda-Urundi a U.N. protectorate to be governed by Belgium.

1926: Ethnic identity cards differentiating Hutus from Tutsis introduced by Belgium.

1957: Party for the Emancipation of the Hutus is formed.

1959: Hutus rebel against the Belgian colonial power and the Tutsi elite. 150,000 Tutsis flee to Burundi.

1961-62: Belgians withdraw. Gregoire Kayibanda installed as president. Fighting continues.

1963: Attack by exiled Tutsis results in massacre and further Tutsis flee. This is followed by further massacres in 1967.

1973: General Juvenal Habyarimana takes power and sets up a one-party state. Tutsis are restricted to nine percent of available jobs. Pattern of exclusion continues through the 1970’s and 1980’s.

1975: Habyarimana's political party, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (Mouvement Revolutionnaire National pour le Developpement, or MRND) is formed.

1986: Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army takes power in Uganda, with the help of Rwandan exiles, who then form the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi-dominated organisation.

1990: RPF guerrillas invade Rwanda from Uganda. Fierce fighting ends in a cease-fire on March 29, 1991.

1990/91: The Rwandan army begins to train and arm civilian militias known as interahamwe ("Those who stand together")

February 1993: RPF launches a fresh offensive and reach the outskirts of Kigali.

August 1993: Habyarimana and the RPF sign a peace accord that allows for the return of refugees and a coalition Hutu-RPF government. 2,500 U.N. troops are deployed in Kigali.

Sept.1993-Mar.1994: President Habyarimana stalls on setting up of power-sharing government. Training of militias intensifies. Extremist radio station, Radio Mille Collines, begins broadcasting exhortations to attack the Tutsis.

April 6, 1994: President Habyarimana and the president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, are killed when Habyarimana’s plane is shot down near Kigali Airport, sparking the beginning of the genocide.

April 7, 1994: The Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) and the interahamwe set up roadblocks and go from house to house killing Tutsis and moderate Hutu politicians. U.N. forces cannot intervene as they have only a monitoring mandate. The U.N. soon cuts its forces to 250 after ten Belgian soldiers are murdered.

April 30, 1994: The U.N. Security Council spends eight hours discussing the Rwandan crisis. The resolution condemning the killing omits the word “genocide”. Had the term been used, the U.N. would have been legally obliged to act to “prevent and punish” the perpetrators. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of refugees flee into Tanzania, Burundi and Zaire. In one day 250,000 Rwandans, mainly Hutus fleeing the advance of the RPF, cross the border into Tanzania.

May 17, 1994: As the slaughter of the Tutsis continues the U.N. agrees to send 6,800 troops and policemen to Rwanda with powers to defend civilians. A Security Council resolution says “acts of genocide may have been committed.” Deployment of the mainly African U.N. forces is delayed because of arguments over who will pay the bill.

July 1994: The RPF captures Kigali and sets up an interim government of national unity in Kigali.

November 1994: U.N. Security Council establishes an international tribunal that will oversee prosecution of suspects involved in genocide.

The U.S. and genocide

2004-04-01

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB117/index.htm

A new and extensive collection of declassified official documents concerning the genocide in Rwanda has been published by the United States National Security Archive. Click on the link below to access the material.

US chose to ignore Rwandan genocide

2004-04-01

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1182431,00.html

President Bill Clinton's administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, according to classified documents made available for the first time. Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene. Intelligence reports obtained using the US Freedom of Information Act show the cabinet and almost certainly the president had been told of a planned "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis" before the slaughter reached its peak.

Fahamu