Rwanda: Past and Present

By Lauren Sampson

On October 6th 2009, BBC News reported that Idelphonse Nizeyimana had been arrested in Uganda and was facing trial before a UN-backed tribunal for allegedly organizing the killing of thousands of Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide. [1] Nizeyimana is one of forty people who have been arrested in connection with the events that transpired between April and July of 1994, events that represented both the culmination of colonial ethnic practices and Western apathy. [2]

In the fifteen years since the genocide, Rwanda has made significant strides in rebuilding and restabilising their economic infrastructure and political system. But the legacies of those three months, of those policies of ethnic cleansing, remain entrenched both in Rwanda’s self-concept and international image. Such an entrenchment was inevitable, given how far the roots of Tutsi-Hutu ideology extend back into history and beyond the borders of Rwanda itself.

The Graves Are Not Yet Full

For centuries, Rwanda’s 10 million inhabitants viewed themselves as one people. In 1916, the country was colonized by Belgium and the minority Tutsis were separated from the majority Hutus and given preference with regards to education, jobs and political authority. Resentment among the Hutus increased, exploding in a series of riots in 1959. Over 20,000 Tutsis were killed, and thousands more escaped to the bordering countries. [3]

When the Belgians relinquished power and granted Rwanda independence in 1962, the Hutus replaced them, assuming majority political power. Throughout later decades, the Tutsis were deeply distrusted and marked as scapegoats. In 1993, a Tutsi-led, multinational militia called the Rwandan Patriotic Front (led by Paul Kagame) invaded from Uganda. French troops interceded. The incursion ended when both sides signed a peace treaty that same year, a treaty the UN peacekeeping forces (headed by General Romeo Dallaire) were sent to protect. [2]

However, in early April 1994, Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down, killing him, the Burundian president and many high-ranking government members. The assassins’ identity has never been discovered. Nevertheless, the repercussions were cataclysmic. [4]

In Kigali, the capital city, the presidential guard instantly began a campaign of reprisals. Leaders of the political opposition were murdered, and a widespread slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus began. Within a day, civilian recruits were ordered all over the country to carry out waves of massacres. An unofficial militia group, the Interahamwe, was marshalled, with 30,000 members at its peak. No one was spared. [2]

Dallaire’s pleas to the UN for more troops or for intelligence assistance were turned down on the grounds that they were contrary to peacekeeping policy and to Dallaire’s specific mandate. Ordered not to intervene, to evacuate the country, Dallaire refused but there was little he or his ill-equipped and poorly trained peacekeepers could do. The international media did not notice Rwanda’s holocaust, the international political community did not care. [2]

Finally, the RPF captured Kigali in July, collapsing the government and inciting a mass exodus of two million Hutus across the border to the modern Democratic Republic of the Congo occurred. [2] Kagame declared the civil war over and swore in a government of national unity with a new Hutu president, Pasteur Bizimungu and Kagame as vice-president. But the pair eventually quarreled and Bizimungu was jailed on charges of inciting ethnic violence, leading to Kagame’s ascension to Rwanda’s highest office. [3]

The level of devastation wrought by the genocide was near incomprehensible. Three quarters of the Tutsi population, some 800,000 people, had been slaughtered in 100 days – the most amount of people ever killed in the fasted amount of time in recorded history. [2] The entire country had been laid to waste: empty treasuries, collapsed public utilities, cash crops lost, bodies and refugees strewn about the landscape. The genocide left Rwanda the poorest, most shattered country on earth. [2]

The Ghosts Are Not Yet Buried 
Fifteen years have passed since those three months in 1994. But the ghosts of the country’s dead and forgotten, those who have been lost in international platitudes or forgotten in the face of economic restructuring, linger.

In South Africa, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was assembled after the abolition of apartheid to allow victims to describe their experiences and permit perpetrators of violence to give testimony and express remorse. It proved successful in drawing out the truth of what had happened during apartheid and in giving the suffering a voice. [3] But no such commission exists in Rwanda; the genocide’s leaders have never apologized and have no comparable voluntary venue in which they can be cross-examined and made to account for their actions.  

Western guilt has encouraged the practicing of “belated atonement” as a policy towards Rwanda, championing Kagame’s regime and denouncing criticism or even scrutiny of its behaviour. Human rights campaigners, like the late Alison Des Forges, have discovered this first hand. Des Forges spent years chronicling the shrinking political space, increasing authoritarian bent and systematic human rights abuses occurring in the name of political normalization in post-civil war Rwanda and suggested that American and European foreign officials were aware of and compliant with the situation. She was labelled a “genocide sympathizer” by Kagame’s regime and her findings were virtually ignored for several years. [6]

It would be remiss to disregard all of the strides Rwanda has made in the past fifteen years, particularly with regards to economic development. The country has made considerable progress in stabilizing and revitalizing its economy to pre-genocide levels. GDP has recovered and inflation has been curtailed. Investment and trade agreements have been established with Belgium and China to assist in the cultivation of international markets for agricultural products. In 2008, Rwanda became the first country in human history to vote in a Parliament where women comprised the majority (law states that at least one-third of the legislative representation must be female). [7] Progress has been made. Stability has been (somewhat) achieved.

But at what cost? The Western world is more interested in Rwanda as a didactic example than as a state struggling to heal its population. The current regime has prohibited any utterance of the words “Tutsi” or “Hutu”, a seemingly necessary measure than in actuality inhibits meaningful discussion of ethnic relations. [6] A set of ideological blinkers has been imposed on the country; its people teeter on a shaky platform of terrified conformity, believing that if they challenge government practices, the whole system will come crashing down. Again.

The impetus in Rwanda is to forget and forge ahead. But an unwillingness to contend with racial grievances and simmering discontent occurred before in the country’s history and erupted in a holocaust. Rwanda must not only listen to its ghosts; it must learn.