Hungry for Truth, Peace and Justice

The genocide in Rwanda: The difficulty of trying to stop it happening ever again

From The Economist print edition

Fifteen years on, the country is praised for salving the wounds of genocide. Yet that comes at the price of diminishing freedom. And now the economy is faltering

EVEN today, it is almost impossible to imagine how so many Rwandans could have turned into coldblooded butchers. The memorials to the slain that now grace many of the towns and villages in the country provide only small glimpses into the collective insanity that gripped a whole country in April 1994, when the Hutu killers turned on their Tutsi fellow citizens and Hutu sympathisers, leaving over 800,000 dead in three months.

Take the memorial at the National University of Rwanda in Butare, a couple of hours’ drive south-west of the capital, Kigali. Under a corrugated iron roof a long board displays the photographs of about 60 students who were killed. In fact, most of the staff and students at the university, over 500 in all, were slaughtered in just two weeks or so; only a few escaped across the nearby borders to Congo or Burundi. Many of the students were killed by their own teachers, specifically the dean of agriculture and vice-dean of political science. The former not only personally killed students but organised the campus massacre as well. What could have been running through their minds in the weeks leading up to the killings, as these highly educated people calculated how best they could hack or shoot their own students to death?

These awful questions haunt Rwanda to this day. It is only a mixed comfort to the genocide’s few survivors at the university that those two former academics responsible for many of their friends’ deaths are still in prison, just down the road. Some think they should have had a worse fate. But one of Rwanda’s main problems, in terms of justice and retribution, has been that so many Hutus, hundreds of thousands of them, became génocidaires; it was always going to be impossible to impose the harshest sentences on all of them. Only the ringleaders have been tried by an international court sitting in neighbouring Tanzania. Thousands of others in Rwanda have been sentenced to prison by local traditional courts known as gacaga. Gangs of them can be seen in their distinctive overalls, doing hard labour, digging irrigation ditches and so on, all over Rwanda.

They are a constant visual reminder of the crimes of 15 years ago. Indeed, in some ways Rwanda is facing as difficult a struggle today with the legacy of the genocide as at any time since 1994. For it is only now that thousands of former génocidaires who have been fighting for many years from bases in the jungles of eastern Congo against the current Tutsi-dominated government are at last returning to Rwanda.

That they are returning at all is a victory for the long-term strategy of President Paul Kagame’s government to bring back the country’s previously hostile Hutus from the near abroad. Most of them were put to flight by Mr Kagame’s own then-rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), that forced an end to the genocide in 1994. They are being re-educated in special camps in the hope that they can be peacefully reintegrated into Rwandan society.

But even if the policy works, it will come at a high price for the Tutsi survivors of the genocide. Freddy Mutanguha, who manages the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, is used to dealing with the genocide’s consequences. Yet even he found it “too difficult” when two of the returning génocidaires moved into his home village of Kibuye a couple of months ago after they came back from Congo. So now his neighbours are two known killers “being fed and protected by the Rwandan government”. Mr Mutanguha, understandably, did not want to return to his own home to see them.

Courage and even generosity of spirit in dealing with an awful situation has earned Mr Kagame’s government high marks in the West and in Africa as a whole. After all, Rwanda is the only genocide case where the victims, the Tutsi, have chosen to reintegrate their killers into the country and to live as neighbours again—a uniquely hard task, especially in Africa’s most densely populated country. In other genocide cases, the victims have left altogether, sometimes to help found a new state of their own, such as Israel, or have been marginalised in their own country, as were the Herero in South-West Africa, now Namibia. To encourage reconciliation, Rwanda has embarked on an experiment to change completely the way a new generation thinks about itself. Now, officially, no one is a Hutu or Tutsi; there are only Rwandans. Ethnicity, the genocide’s alleged cause, is being outlawed.

The use and abuse of anti-genocide law
For sure, the government’s policy has contributed to a new era of peace; Rwanda, it is generally agreed, is now one of Africa’s most law-abiding countries. Yet the reach and ferocity of new laws encouraging reconciliation are making Western donors and many Rwandans queasy. Is the country paying too high a price for its policy?

Critics fear that any challenge to an already authoritarian government is gradually being outlawed under a pretext of criminalising the promotion of so-called “genocide ideology”. There were already stiff penalties for “divisionism”, an acknowledgment of differences between Hutu and Tutsi. But last year a new and even fiercer law was passed, carrying heavy penalties. Its criminalisation of genocide ideology is so broadly drawn that it could be used to prosecute people for any number of utterances.

Clause three, for instance, states that the crime of promoting genocide ideology is characterised by “dehumanising a person or group with the same characteristics”, and that this can be done by “marginalising, laughing at one’s misfortune, defaming, mocking, boasting, despising, degrading, creating confusion aimed at negating the genocide which occurred, stirring up ill feelings”.

About 1,300 cases involving genocide ideology were initiated in Rwanda’s courts in the 2007-08 judicial year, even before the latest law was passed. Human-rights critics say these ill-defined laws are being abused by the government, enabling it to prosecute anyone, including young children, who say anything the government dislikes or who draw attention to the role of Mr Kagame’s own RPF in the massacres of 1994. For many, justice has been too partial in post-genocide Rwanda; many of Mr Kagame’s men, estimated by the UN to have killed up to 45,000 people between April and August 1994, have got off lightly.

These draconian laws chime with the government’s general dislike of dissent. Some foreign critics are now banned from entering the country, however sympathetic they may have been to Rwanda in the past. Alison des Forges was probably the greatest foreign expert on Rwanda until her death in a plane crash in February. She had been the most sensitive and thorough chronicler of the genocide but, as an increasingly vocal critic of Mr Kagame’s human-rights record, she was banned last year, her death barely marked in Kigali. Open political opposition is declining. At elections the formal opposition parties largely mimic the government line and then join the government afterwards. There is little real choice.

Worries about Rwanda’s record on human and political rights are now compounded by worries about its economic record. Indeed, they are related. The economic recovery after the genocide, when Hutu militias looted the country before fleeing into Congo, had been remarkable, if largely funded by the diaspora and by foreign aid. But in the past few years it has stalled. The number of Rwandans living in extreme poverty is reckoned to have declined from over 75% in 1994 to 57% in 2006. But the figure has barely moved since then. Because of a rapid increase in population, the absolute number of people in poverty has probably risen.

Rwanda now needs a vigorous private sector to keep the economy moving in the right direction, especially if the country is to meet its lofty goal of becoming east Africa’s service hub. The government talks up its eagerness for free enterprise, endearing it to the West, but entrepreneurs, especially from abroad, often feel hamstrung in what they are allowed to do—and so leave. A controlling government will hurt Rwanda’s economic prospects as well as its wider freedoms; the two are indivisible.

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posted by Mamadou Kouyate @ 11:37 PM