Letter from Rwanda
by Victoria Brittain
The Nation magazine, September
1/8, 2003
The main road out of Kigali winds past
steep slopes packed with small wooden shacks, a reminder of how
overcrowded this tiny country is. Once outside the capital and
into Gitarama province it is a different picture-high hills stretch
into the distance, and the villages on the hilltops are widely
spaced, disappearing in the mist that hangs over them. The tarmac
soon turns into a red dirt road pitted with huge potholes. It
rises fast, through banana groves, past barefoot children minding
cattle with great curving white horns, and outside wattle huts
with straw roofs smaller children play. A very occasional motorbike
or battered truck passes, but otherwise the only sound is birdsong.
This is the-rural Africa of no running
water or electricity, no hint of the modern world of instant communications,
computers and mobile phones. In a scene so quiet, it is impossible
to imagine the terror that gripped this place nearly a decade
ago, when up to a million people were butchered, many with the
machetes used for farming, in three months of organized genocide
against the Tutsi minority.
The government that trained, armed and
ordered men and women from the majority Hutu tribe to kill all
Tutsis (whom they called "cockroaches") took this extreme
step to subvert a power-sharing agreement brokered in neighboring
Tanzania with me armed rebels of the Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic
Front (RPF), led by the current president, Paul Kagame. In 1994
the country was ripped apart, with the vast majority participating
in killings, rape, mutilation, looting and burning of property.
Justice, not only for survivors but also
to enable the whole country to live again, is widely recognized
as key to the future. The United Nations Criminal Tribunal for
Rwanda, which sits in Arusha in neighboring Tanzania, is trying
major genocide suspects but has been plagued by internal bickering
and inefficiency. It has completed only fifteen cases, and acknowledges
that it will be unable to complete the trials of the forty-nine
suspects now under arrest before it ends in 2008. Its squandered
budget of $180 million a year could have helped Rwanda apply its
own solutions to many problems, and not just in the justice area.
In Rwanda around 120,000 men, women and
some children packed the jails beginning soon after the genocide
and have been fed and supervised by the International Committee
of the Red Cross. Sometimes, rounding one of the hairpin bends
on the main roads, you see a work-party of men in pink uniforms
mending the road or building a house. The broken judiciary, rebuilt
at record speed, has begun trials, but it could never complete
anywhere near 100,000 in this generation. Recently 23,000 of these
suspects were released because they were very old, sick or young,
or were among those who had already confessed to crimes and seen
their probable sentence commuted to half, which they had already
served.
An ambitious attempt to close the chapter
of the 1994 genocide is now being played out on hilltops with
traditional local courts, called gacaca, sitting to judge what
their families and neighbors did in the terrible months of violence
from October 1990 to December 1994. Each community elects nineteen
judges-respected in the community and not necessarily literate-and
the whole community sits as a general assembly to hear confessions
and accusations. Each assembly will sit seven times, establish
who was there during the genocide, who was killed, who lost their
property, who was responsible. The lowest court, at village level,
will sentence only property crimes-category while more serious
crimes-categories 3 and 2-will be tried at sector and district
gacaca courts. Only those accused of ordering killings, or of
rape category 1 cases-will be tried in a conventional court.
Earlier this summer, under a big tree,
a row of wooden benches and stools was set out for the nineteen
elected judges in the village of Kigese, and in front of them,
the villagers sat in rows on the grass, women and babies in front,
men behind. People arrived in ones and twos, suddenly emerging
from the head-high maize stalks from all directions. Each one
would greet every person along the line with a handshake, or the
Rwandan customary restrained embrace, hands on the other's shoulders,
before sitting down. This is a society where politeness and rituals
are all-important, and in a small community like this everyone
knows everyone, and everything about them.
Sixteen of the nineteen elected judges
were present on this day, and before the session opened they were
studying rule books, some making notes. One hundred people are
a quorum, and by 10:30, 120 residents of Kigese were present.
The deputy chairman, an elderly man with the gnarled skin of peasant
work, dressed in dark trousers and battered shoes, asked everyone
to rise for a moment's silence and reflection on the events that
had brought them there. Then he read the rules, reminding people
that there could be no interrupting of witnesses, courtesy must
be maintained, the truth must be told. He then invited those with
written confessions to bring them forward.
Two men rose from among the audience,
one young, in a khaki suit with short trousers, the other older,
with a white shirt. They gave folded sheets of paper to the secretary,
a young woman with a mobile, intelligent face, wearing a worn
red T-shirt and rubber sandals. As they turned to go back to their
places, another two men, and then another two, came forward and
handed over papers. The confession of one was read out in Kinyarwanda,
and the man stood at the front while people questioned him: "Why
is this story different from what you said last time?" Through
a long morning, another four men, brought in from police cells,
rose from their place sitting among their peers and came to the
front for questioning.
Over years of interviewing genocide suspects
in prison in Rwanda, I have found that all the people I have spoken
to, both men and women, have always denied their guilt, each blaming
another as the organizer of their group. Kigese was ~ at first
seemingly little different. But then the confident body language
of the suspects began to change, sometimes as a number of women
witnesses rose to speak of the day and the moment when they had
seen a suspect searching for a particular victim, or coming home
and taking the property of someone just killed. One woman, looking
straight ahead and not at the man being cross-questioned, said
to him, "You killed my son." After a rambling denial
from him, she spoke again, calm and determined: "You killed
my son." The chairman told her gently that her case would
not be discussed immediately, but would be heard another day.
As the hours went on, contradictory stories
were told, and witnesses and defendants went off on irrelevant
stories. Many times someone in the general assembly rose to ask
the chairman to keep the witnesses to the point. But no one shouted
or showed anger, no one wandered away or chatted with his or her
neighbor. Gacaca is certainly a scene of considerable confusion,
and one that cannot bring precise justice, but it is a dignified
process, and the village confronts experiences of terror, deep
sorrow and collective guilt in a unique and promising way.
The Minister of Justice, Jean de Dieu
Mucyo, wears a dark suit and speaks rapid-fire French. In this
former Belgian colony French was the prevailing European language,
but today Anglophone ministers are more common because so many
in the Tutsi diaspora were educated in English-speaking Tanzania
or Uganda, where the RPF was started among young Rwandans serving
in Uganda's army. The minister's busy modern office in Kigali
seems remote from a place like Kigese, but he has been speaking
in such villages for months. "Gacaca is not perfect, but
it is much better than conventional justice;.and with time, patience,
this very long process we have started will give us what we must
know, we must know what happened," he says. He tells two
stories, which illustrate both the drama of the process for individuals
and the shrewd calculation that makes many of yesterday's killers
a continuing threat. The first is about a man who confessed to
participating in the genocide, and when he was then freed, died
of shock. The second is of how prisoners abruptly stopped confessing
when there was a spate of incursions from the Democratic Republic
of Congo (DRC), formerly Zaire, and rumors ran around the prisons
that the tide had turned, the present government would be overthrown,
the 1994 genocide would become considered just another episode
of violence and the Hutu majority would be back in power.
The end of the culture of impunity in
Rwanda, which saw successive massacres and dispossession of Tutsis
in 1959,1960,1961, 1963, 1964 and 1972-making them in their diaspora
the Palestinians of Africa-is at the center of this government's
goals. The public execution of twenty-two genocidaires in the
early days of the new regime, led by then-General Paul Kagame,
showed Rwandans just how seriously the new authorities took this
question. The rejection of the pleas to halt the executions-from
the Pope, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, then-UN High Commissioner
for Human Rights Mary Robinson and others-was an early indication
that the outside world could not impose conventional solutions
to problems here.
Like many of Rwanda's original home-grown
solutions to political and security problems, so overwhelming
that outsiders find them almost impossible to grasp, gacaca has
come in for harsh criticism as unworkable from some sections of
the donor community. How can untrained and mainly illiterate peasants
be trusted with the judgment of tangled tales often involving
their own relations? Where is the administrative capacity to process
100,000 dossiers, or more? What will happen to the approximately
half a million new suspects, now at large, named already in suspects'
confessions during the gacaca process of the past few months?
What does the election as judges of some people known to have
been active participants in the genocide say about the fairness
of the trials?
With gacaca the government has calculated
that enough guilty people "will want a second chance to live
a decent life," as the president put it, and will therefore
confess. Gacaca, with its emphasis on collective truth-telling
as a means toward reconciliation rather than summary justice and
punishment, has more elements in common with South Africa's traveling
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the 1990s than with, say,
Latin American versions following dictatorships, such as Peru's.
Typically, it is home-grown to meet the unique and overwhelming
problem of majority participation in the genocide. Foreign lawyers
and organizations such as Penal Reform International and African
Rights are conducting careful studies of the process.
"I have wanted to be original about
my own thinking, especially in regard to my own situation here,"
Kagame told New Yorker journalist Philip Gourevitch some years
ago, when his reputation was as a military intelligence chief,
a Wlliant military strategist who won a guerrilla war against
all odds. Later he became Rwanda's president, and that uncompromising
determination to go with his own original way of doing things
has brought some misunderstandings, and some dangerous enemies.
Gacacais the centerpiece of an ambitious
set of reforms this year that has already seen the writing of
a new constitution, overwhelmingly passed by a referendum in May,
and will see presidential elections this August and parliamentary
elections in September. With the elections the current leadership
has calculated that Rwandans will buck the trend of ethnic voting
in Africa and instead vote for a party (the RPF) and a president
who have proved they can bring stability, offer reintegration
to old enemies and begin to revive an economy at rock bottom.
The RPF currently leads a transitional government of eight parties,
and the prime minister is from a prominent political family identified
with Hutu-power politics in a previous period, and from a party
now banned because of its divisiveness on ethnic issues. This
ban is sharply criticized by the donors as antidemocratic, though
given what the last "democratically elected" government
did here in 1994, this seems shortsighted.
With a few individual exceptions, the
donor community and Western nongovernmental organizations have
rather strained relations with the government, which they criticize
as inward-looking, paranoid and controlling, and which they accuse
of stoking the war in the eastern part of the DRC. This perception
of reality is in total contrast to how the Rwandan government
and military leadership experience nine years of bringing Rwanda
back from the abyss of hate and destruction of 1994. Generous
outreach to exiles not personally responsible for the genocide
is an ongoing policy, while the reintegration of many former soldiers
recently returned from the DRC, in their villages, augurs well
for gacaca.
The influential New York-based Human Rights
Watch has set the harshest critical tone, with Amnesty International
and the Brussels-based International Crisis Group using similar
language. A much-quoted UN report blamed Rwanda (among others)
for looting the DRC's wealth, though it has been little noticed
that the report had to be rewritten twice because of errors, and
even some of those close to it say that none of the assertions
against Rwanda were supported with evidence.
President Kagame is typically cool about
the criticisms: "It is because again we want to do things
our own way-they want to give lessons.... This hysteria always
mounts when there is a big event: the constitution, the elections.
They forecast disaster. We just have to go on with our own business
of changing lives here."
Not surprisingly, among the most vociferous
critics are the French, who have never forgiven the RPF for winning
the war against the French-backed regime responsible for the genocide,
and for thwarting the French military's Operation Turquoise, which
occupied a swath of western Rwanda in 1994 as part of an effort
to preserve its clients. Then, in 1996, the Rwandan military attacked
and closed the refugee camps in eastern Zaire controlled by the
genocidaires of 1994, where active military training and resupply
for another genocide carried out under the noses of the international
organizations feeding and caring for 2 million refugees was under
way. More than a million peasants then walked home and were resettled,
with the help of the UN's High Commissioner for Refugees, in an
extraordinary feat of organization.
However, around 370,000 soldiers and militia
of the former regime fled west through Zaire and regrouped in
Zambia, the Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, Cameroon
and Angola, with leaders also in Benin, Togo and Kenya. In one
of the astonishing twists of regional politics that have bedeviled
the Great Lakes in recent years, genocidaires were taken from
their refugee camps across the region into Kinshasa's army. They
believed, as prisoners and deserters have testified, that they
would return to Rwanda and complete the genocide. Today 15,000
of them are still military players for the Kinshasa government
in the DRC's intense power struggle. Rwanda's security, and its
moves toward normality after decades of state-sponsored ethnic
hatred, harassment and destruction, are thus still threatened
by the leadership flaws in the DRC.
But up on hills like Kigese, a very different
world of peace may be built by gacaca. The mass participation
of these peasants, the confessions and the apologies are the most
hopeful sign that Rwanda can become synonymous not with genocide
but with an extraordinary reconciliation. Then there will not
be another generation of people like Venuste, a middle-aged survivor
of the genocide, whose right arm is a stump that still twitches
painfully when he writes with his left hand, and who talked to
me last month in Kigali of survivors' feelings of "loneliness,
unbearable loneliness," through the years since 1994.
Victoria Brittain, a research associate
at the London School of Economics in the Crisis States Program,
was formerly associate foreign editor of The Guardian.
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