By Prof Paul Conway
Political Science Department
SUNY College at Oneonta
[In Remembering War, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations: Oral History, New Media and the Arts, November 5-8, 2009, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec].
Reconciliation occurs one person at a time and is normally a long and laborious process.
- Cate Malek
Given the impossible odds, it is not surprising that the women, men and children who gave their testimonies attribute their survival to sheer luck. . . For Collette and many others, luck included the kindness of Hutu friends and acquaintances.
- Rakiya Omaar
Some people (Hutus) did help us during the genocide – yet we weren’t friends. I can’t tell why . . . the people we never expected to help us were the ones who did...
- Marcel Ruhurambuga
Synopsis
One of presumably many efforts to gather stories of Hutu rescuers was initiated in the spring of 2007. After conducting dozens of interviews and documenting rescue stories the author posted the stories on two blogsites, neither of which resulted in many responses within Rwanda. During July and August of 2009 there was a modestly successful effort to share and disseminate stories that had previously been gathered. That effort generated several impressions about the reconciliation process in Rwanda as well as conclusions that may be of interest to genocide scholars. The purpose of this paper is to share the essence of some of the rescue stories and the difficulties posed in disseminating them to a mass audience in Rwanda. The slowly growing number of Hutu rescue stories now emerging is ground for very cautious optimism about the country’s future.
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Volume 58, Issue 189, Pages 491 - 499
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