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Approaching the heart of a raging fire

Firoze Manji, Fahamu

2004-04-01

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

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

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.

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2. Towards Justice and Reconciliation in Rwanda: Taking stock

Eugenia Zorbas

2004-04-01

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.

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

Camille Karangwa

2004-04-01

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.

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

Sara Rakita

2004-04-01

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.

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5. A seat in the grass

Luleka Mangquku

2004-04-01

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