Citation
Richters, et al.
Reconciliation in the aftermath
f
off
violent conflict in Rwanda
Annemiek Richters, Cora Dekker & Klaas de Jonge
Reconciliation in the aftermath of the history of violent conflict in Rwanda is approached as part of a
set of deeply interrelated issues, such as individual
and social suffering, justice, remembering and forgetting, truth-telling, accountability, forgiveness,
trauma therapy, socio-therapy, human rights, and
development. The article is based on literature
study, conversations with people of all walks of life
in Rwanda, and six years of research experience in
this country of one of the authors. A major challenge
addressed is if, and to what extent, internationally
oriented concepts and programs and cultural specific approaches in the field of reconciliation are in conflict with each other or whether they have the potential to reinforce each other.
Key words: Rwanda, violent conflict, reconciliation, justice, memory, therapy
Introduction
A major characteristic of modern violent
conflicts are the massive traumatic events
that affect people as much on the physical
and mental, as well as, on the social and cultural level. Valued institutions and a way of
life of whole populations are under attack.
States of terror are created to penetrate and
undermine the entire fabric of grassroots
social relations and subjective mental life as
a means of social control. Social bonds are
ruptured, group identities destroyed, the
sense of community undermined, and cultural orientation is disrupted. Communities
are turned against communities, neighbours against neighbours, friends against
friends, and kinsmen against kinsmen,
resulting in a social fabric that is frayed by
distrust and betrayal. Violent confrontations between persons and groups who
have some degree of prior social familiarity
are associated with appalling physical brutality and indignity – involving mutilation,
cannibalism, sexual abuse, and violence
against civilian spaces and whole populations (Appadurai, 1999; Robben & SuárezOrozco, 2000; Stover & Weinstein, 2004).
While massive war traumas leave entire
communities and groups socially and emotionally stunned and defenceless, their
social and cultural worlds still embody the
capacity to somehow manage the sufferingg
of survivor populations. Damaged communities have remained resilient and, in one
way or the other, adapt and recover on a
collective basis. How do they do it? How
can survivors coexist with those who killed
their most beloved kin? How can trust be
restored in a community tainted by betrayal? How can the social fabric that once held
a society together be reconstructed? How
can the wounds to the social body and its
cultural frame be healed? How does a
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society succeed in coming to terms with its
violent past? How do people re-form prior
connections, both instrumental and affective, across the lines drawn by the warring
parties? In other words, how does a society
reconcile with its past and how do people
reconcile with each other? While approaching the latter question as the main question
in this article, we will look at reconciliation
as part of a set of deeply interrelated issues
– such as individual and social suffering,
remembering and forgetting, truth-telling,
witnessing, accountability, forgiveness, justice, trauma, healing, human rights and
development. For the purpose of this article
we use Kriesberg’s (2001) definition of the
concept of reconciliation as ‘the process by
which parties that have experienced an
oppressive relationship, or a destructive
conflict, with each other move to attain or
to restore a relationship that they believe to
be minimally acceptable’. We will explore
various aspects of reconciliation processes
as they take place in post-conflict Rwanda.
Rwanda is unique in the sense that a state
orchestrated campaign for reconciliation is
being implemented that attempts to be
grounded in local traditions and practices,
while at the same time the population is
simultaneously finding its own ways to reconcile. Outside support is being welcomed
to heal individuals and society from trauma
generated by violence experiences and
mediates in reconciliation. This raises the
question if and how internationally oriented programmes and cultural specific
approaches can reinforce each other in
processes working towards reconciliation
and the prevention of further violence. For
us, this question has gained in relevance
since, as the result of a study visit to
Rwanda in July 2004; the first two authors
became involved in a socio-therapy project.
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The project started in September 2005 in
one of Rwanda’s provinces and is introduced towards the end of this article.
A major goal of the 2004 study visit to
Rwanda was to try to understand, by beingg
there, the way recovery processes were taking hold in a severely war traumatized society and what we could learn from them.
Meetings with numerous people assisted us
in putting into perspective our readings on
Rwanda. Klaas de Jonge who at the time
had lived and worked in Rwanda for six
years accommodated the visit. The last few
of those years he coordinated the international NGO Penal Reform International
(PRI) research on gacaca, the local
Rwandan tribunals. (See www.penalreform.org for the various research reports
written by de Jonge and his team). The dataa
on Rwanda we present in this article are
partly based on this research. We made
selective use of other literature on Rwanda,
our main aim being to address developments in post-war Rwanda from a reconciliation perspective. Our approach to this
highly complex subject is coloured by our
respectively short- and long-term experiences in Rwanda. Interspersed in the text we
make reference to what people from all
walks of life told the first two authors in
2004, always within informal conversations.
The Rwandan genocide of 1994
Between April and July of 1994, during a
period of 100 days, genocidal violence
swept over Rwanda targeting primarily the
Tutsis (a minority people who composed 10
- 15 % of the population of Rwanda), butt
also Hutu political opponents and civil society activists. A history of ethnic killings preceded this genocide. Massacres of Tutsis
began in 1959 with the transfer of power in
favour of the Hutu elite through political
violence. This was followed by repression
Richters, et al.
and massacres of Tutsis in 1963-64 and
1973, reaching their pinnacle in 1994
(Prunier, 1995).
The start of the invasion by the Rwandan
Patriotic Front (RPF), an anti-government
armed movement initially composed largely
of Tutsis who had lived in exile for a generation from Uganda into Rwanda began on
the first of October 1990. It was a power
struggle began in the context of a civil war
that the President Habyarimana regime was
losing. In order to stay in power and to redirect the growing dissatisfaction among the
population against them, the former government managed with great skill to devalue the minority group, making the Tutsis
the ‘out-group’, or scapegoat par excellence.
When the plane of President Habyarimana
was shot down on the sixth of April 1994, it
triggered the genocide. Eventually, the RPF
gained a victory over the previous government and its army, ended the genocide, and
established a new RPF-led regime.
Estimates of people who were brutally murdered during the 1994 genocide range from
half a million up to one million. Over two
million people were forced into exile, and
hundreds of thousands of people were internally displaced inside the country. Rwanda
was left with thousands of people who survived sexual violence and mutilation,
orphans, and the detention of more than
100 000 individuals suspected of participation in the violence. The infrastructure was
destroyed and social links were severed.
A major goal of the genocide aimed at the
Tutsis, and those somehow associated with
them, was cutting them out of the national
collectivity and destroying them as a group.
A substantial proportion of the Hutu population was mobilized for what came to be
called a ‘programme of civilian self-defence’.
In the process, many foundations of
Rwandan culture and morality were
destroyed. Destroying the fundamental values of the Rwandese people, such as those
linked to family life and cultural reproduction, proved an efficient way of performingg
genocide. Children were killed by their
teachers, other children saw their teachers
kill the pupils they were supposed to protectt
and guide. The same can be said of mayors,
Church leaders and even parents. Victims
were denied any humanity by being forced
to commit non-human acts assimilated with
cannibalistic incest: disembowelled pregnant women were forced to eat parts off
their foetus before dying, fathers to eat their
own progeny. Bodies were cut into pieces in
a culture where connectedness is both the
paradigm of a human body and of a
healthy society (African Rights, 1995).
Rwandan concepts of the body were frequently structured in terms of a roott
metaphor or (orderly) flow and (disorderly)
blockage. Health and wellbeing depend
upon proper bodily flow. In a variety off
other domains blockage signified the
antithesis of order, an obstruction that had
to be removed to ensure personal and communal wellbeing. Hutu perpetrators displayed a tendency to carry out their brutal
deeds in terms of this cultural idiom. These
deeds included marking Tutsis as blocked
beings by, for example; severing Achilles
tendons, genital mutilation and breast ablations, impalement from anus or vagina to
mouth, compelling Tutsis to rape and
forced incest. Corpses were denied their
humanity by throwing them into pit latrines
or abandoning them to the dogs.
Thousands of ‘obstructing’ Tutsis were
dumped into rivers - signifiers of flow in
Rwandan cosmology - and thereby acting as
the body politics’ organs of elimination, in
a sense ‘excreting’ its hated external other
(Taylor, 2002).
Both before and during the genocide,
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complex sexual politics interacted with ethnic politics to demarcate social boundaries
and achieve the racial purity that was seen
as a necessary component of Hutu identity.
Tutsi wives of Hutu men were considered
‘limuloid beings’, capable of undermining
the categories of ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ altogether. They had to be eliminated. This fate
also awaited a selection of Hutu women
and girls; in particular, those who physically looked like Tutsi (Taylor, 1999). Again
bodies were targeted in culturally specific
ways. Sometimes assailants mutilated and
chopped off body parts deemed characteristic of Tutsi women, such as thin fingers or
long noses (Amnesty International, 2004).
Killings and abuse by all parties involved in
the conflict continued after the genocide,
with the motive for Tutsis often being
revenge. The collective result of all these
horrendous deeds over the years could only
be mistrust in all human ties, which make
life meaningful, affecting all groups and
leaving a society in disarray.
The Rwandan government policy of
unity and reconciliation
Since the end of 1994, the new Rwandan
government has made the promotion of
national reconciliation central to its political
program. This vast enterprise has included
both judicial responses and non-judicial
strategies.
With the help of the international community three judicial responses were implemented: the International Criminal Tribunal for
Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, national-level
domestic genocide trials, and local-level gacaca courts. A general amnesty was not seen as
a solution. It was broadly accepted by the
new Government, the people of Rwanda,
and the international community that there
should be accountability for the violence in
order to eradicate the culture of impunity
206
and to reinforce respect for the rule of law
and the principle of ‘due process’.
The non-judicial strategies are the creation
of a Government of National Unity and a
National Commission for Unity and
Reconciliation, the public condemnation off
the genocide, the promotion of a democratic culture, the creation of a socially responsible citizenry, the maintenance of memorial sites, the promotion of national rituals off
commemoration, new national symbols to
shape the collective memory of Rwandan
history, an annual national Day of Heroes
highlighting individuals who have fought
ethnic division, the suppression of the mention of ethnicity on identity cards, school
programs, re-education camps and the stimulation of trauma healing programs.
At the same time that the government is
seeking to force the population to come to
terms with the 1994 genocide however, it
has dismissed accusations of its own
engagement in war crimes and human
rights abuses. This double standard has created political tensions and further divides
the country.
In the following sections we single out two
of the government approaches towards reconciliation for discussion: the judicial
response in the form of gacaca and memoralization strategies. Although are both
meant to contribute to reconciliation, they
also have the potential to generate or increase
health problems that may thwart reconciliation. Trauma counselling and socio-therapy
will have to deal with these problems and
where possible help to prevent them. This
adds to the role these interventions have to
play in the reconciliation process.
In order to understand the specificities off
the Rwanda case better, we first briefly
explore what is happening in terms of reconciliation, justice and memory in a few
African countries.
Richters, et al.
Justice, memory, healing and reconciliation in various African countries
Over the past decade, the international
community has in particular highlighted the
close connection between justice and reconciliation, resulting in support on a grand
scale for war crime tribunals and truth and
reconciliation committees. A specific rhetoric about healing has accompanied many
commissions’ work, with the significant
claim that truth heals the individual and
social body (Hayner, 2001; Wilson, 2001;
Hastrup, 2003; Ross, 2003). South Africa
provides a powerful example of the use of
metaphors of illness and healing in describing the work of the Truth and
Reconciliation
Commission
(TRC).
Commissioners and social commentators
frequently compared, for instance, truthtelling and memorizing with the opening
and cleansing of unhealed wounds caused
by gross violations of human rights. Words
like ‘wound’, ‘fester, ‘cleanse’ and ‘operation’ were used to describe aspects of the
Commission’s work (Ross, 2003). But, as
critiques argue, the very idea that individuals and nations can heal and ultimately
recover from violence falls prey to inappropriate and impoverished medical and psychological metaphors; metaphors based on
the assumption that after cleansing daily life
and nation, building could begin afresh.
The history of human violence teaches us,
however, that there are few happy endings
(Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois, 2004).
Another frequently made criticism of the
work of the Commission is that talk of reconciliation and of restorative justice has
sidetracked the legitimate demand for retributive, punitive justice (Wilson, 2001).
According to the South African Archbishop
Desmond Tutu, however, ‘Retributive justice is largely Western. The African understanding is far more restorative – not so
much to punish as to redress or restore a
balance that has been knocked askew. The
justice we hope for is restorative of the dignity of the people’ (Minow. 1998).
Meanwhile, a basic forceful critique of the
rise of human rights as the main universal
standard against which to judge violence
and suffering has been formulated. Hastrup
(2003), for instance, argues that rightsbased conceptions of justice distort our
understanding of suffering and pare down
social and moral narratives. Legal language
cuts out the symbolic and expressive
dimensions of violence. Instead of givingg
voice to people, victims of violence are
often silenced by truth commissions. In her
study of the South African TRC, Ross
(2003) demonstrates the paucity of mechanisms the commission had available to give
voice to suffering and receive acknowledgment for it. Another language of social suffering than that of the legal one, she argues,
would be needed to permit the expression off
the full range of experiences, admit the integrity of silence, and recognize the fragmented
and unfinished nature of social recovery; a
language that does not presume closure.
While public discursive spaces in the form
of truth commissions and war crimes tribunals for healing have been created in
many post-conflict countries around the
world, governments in other such countries
have shifted hurt out of the public domain.
In post-war Nigeria, for instance, the underlying premise was that healing of post-war
trauma can be done socially, and that the
practice of such healing takes place at the
level of the community (Last, 1999).
Nigeria did not have a war crime tribunal
and court records. The truth of the Biafran
civilians, the defeated party, is the ‘truth off
the creative imagination in oral history and
literature, which mostly are where the war
experiences are being revisited and record207
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ed’ (Adamiume, 2000). At the end of the
Biafran War, Nigeria was generally believed
to have achieved a remarkable reconciliation. Thirty years later, however, that
assumption is being challenged, as memories of Biafra are again central to questions
of social justice and national security.
Also in the Mozambican case, the deafening
silence of the state has rendered inter-subjective healing through public dialogues
about a painful past exceedingly difficult
(Hayner, 2001; West, 2003). People and
communities are left to reconcile amongst
themselves. Perhaps this is more effective
than a reliance on international and national law and its institutions, because the latter
are not designed to focus on the social and
psychological processes that guide how people form attachments in groups and communities. One could argue that for the
remaking of these attachments, justice has to
be grounded in local traditions and practices
and preferably be working in consort with
other processes of social reconstruction.
Igreja (2003) describes how in the
Gorongosa district of central Mozambique
traditional healers contribute to healing and
justice on a community level. In healing ceremonies it is the spirit who decides how justice and reparation can be best achieved in
order to restore the health of patients and
their family. This spirit-led type of justice
follows socio-cultural and historical norms
and practices. It is informed by a belief that
in the case of an innocents’ death, the spirit
of the deceased person is capable of returning to the realm of the living to make justice. Therefore, existence of different forms
of local justice is not the result of the failure
of a secular system of justice, as suggested
by Perera for Sri Lanka (2001). According
to the Gorongosa perspectives on justice,
the effectiveness of the secular justice system does not impair the spirits of the
208
innocent dead victims to pursue justice on
their own terms (personal communication
with Igreja). On the contrary, the various
community sources available for the
restoration of justice and healing interact
with each other.
Gacaca and reconciliation
The Rwandan government, while recognizing the importance of justice for the rebuilding of society, came to the conclusion thatt
the regular secular judicial system could
never answer all the justice problems facingg
Rwanda. The Rwandan legal system was
basically destroyed during the genocide. Off
approximately 785 judges practicing before
the genocide, only 20 survived (Borland,
2003). After extensive national-level discussions over the country’s future, in the late
1990s, the proposal was put forward by the
government of a unique Rwandan solution:
an adapted form of state justice in the form
of gacaca tribunals. These tribunals were to
function in addition to and in conjunction
with the other justice mechanisms available.
Gacaca has been implemented gradually. It
refers to a reinvented traditional way of
participatory justice, which involves gathering information from the community
and participatory judgment and punishment. It was proposed as a means to bring
forth the truth about what happened, and
to create a climate propitious for coexistence in Rwanda. As the Minister of
Defence commented at the time; ‘the problem of justice is not a simple problem of
texts and courts. It concerns finding an
intermediary way between classical justice,
the reconstitution of the social fabric, and
the prevention of another tragedy, another
genocide’ (Karekezi, et al., 2004).
However, even gacaca, which is being promoted as a community-based initiative that
will support reconciliation more effectively
Richters, et al.
than classical justice, remains one-sided
and closely controlled by the government.
Many Hutus feel frustrated because the
system only deals with human rights abuses committed as part of the 1994 genocide
against Tutsis and moderate Hutus, and
not with all murders, rapes and other
atrocities committed in Rwanda during the
civil war, throughout the genocide and
afterwards. According to Rombouts (2004)
massacred Tutsis and moderate Hutus are
regarded as victims of genocide, but the
Rwandan government denies victim status
to RPF victims and politicises such status.
Because crimes against humanity and war
crimes committed by RPF soldiers or by
some Tutsi survivors against Hutu civilians are not dealt with in the gacaca courts,
many Hutus do not consider the gacaca as
a model of fair justice. Furthermore,
although they know that they can press
charges in the ordinary courts, they are
generally afraid to take this step since they
consider the justice system to be dominated
by members of the ethnic group implicated
or by the members of the party in power.
Critics have also called on the government
to incorporate more human rights protections into the gacaca system itself. Some
witnesses are afraid they will be attacked if
they speak the truth. No clear security system has been established to protect community witnesses who testify. In Rwanda
we visited various groups of widows. The
women of one group told us that after the
genocide they had no place to go. They
lost husbands, children and possessions. ‘I
had seven children and have three left’,
said one of the women. Another continued; ‘we were all raped and we told our
stories during a gacaca meeting. We don’t
have much trust in the outcome of the
gacaca process because the perpetrators
who caused us so much suffering are
unknown. We are still afraid for rapes and
retributions. Other people disappeared
after testifying or were murdered. Our testimonies are threatening to others, therefore we take turns in patrolling at night’.
We are not sure to which cases of disappearance or killing the women referred.
Three gacaca witnesses were indeed murdered in the previous year; two of them
after they had said that they would testify
in the gacaca courts (www.internews.org.rw). Even though it is uncertain
whether the killings were indeed related to
gacaca instead of being the result of personal animosity between individuals, they
raised a lot of fear among witnesses.
It is generally acknowledged that the gacaca tribunals may open up further abuses off
human rights as well as re-traumatization.
The latter is also illustrated by the followingg
story told to us. A man accused of various
war crimes stated before the gacaca courtt
that he had raped a woman whom he mentioned by name. She was present in the
audience. After the genocide she had married, but concealed the rape to her husband.
The result of the gacaca trial was not only
that she relived the rape experience, but
that she from then on had to live with the
stigma commonly attached by Rwandan
society to women who have been raped.
Another problematic aspect of gacaca is its
hybrid character in terms of the kind of justice it represents. By design it is neither
restorative justice nor retributive justice but
a mixture of both (Borland, 2003; Karekezi,
et al., 2004). Restorative justice focuses on
healing the broader community through a
restorative process. Community justice can
be thought of as one possible type off
restorative justice process, focusing on
improving the quality of life of the community. The current system is not a form off
restorative community justice, because it is
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not focused on the root causes of the conflict (such as the issue of land distribution),
nor on building the capacity of the community (Borland, 2003). Gacaca does not follow the classical retributive mode of justice
either. This kind of justice is characterized
by punishment of the guilty, representation
of the community by the state, a secondary
role for victims, and an adversarial
approach in trials. Paradoxically, according
to Karekezi, et al. (2004), the removal of the
state from the gacaca process risks compromising the motivation for popular participation. In contrast, some observers worry that
gacaca puts too much emphasis on punishing people within the local community and
does not sufficiently address the needs of
the communities for reconciliation. Besides,
‘there is no punishment that could express
the proper scale of outrage’ (Minow, 1998).
Despite its possible shortcomings, however,
gacaca may have some potential to promote
peace and reconciliation. It may do so
through its truth-telling or testimonial component. Borland (2003) quotes a Rwandan
official who states; ‘the central issue here is
truth, more than punishment. It is a cleansing mechanism. We will move the genocide
from our subconscious to the conscious,
and hopefully, at the end we will allow
bygones to be bygones’. The problem with
this statement, however, is that state officials only want a particular truth to come
out, the truth from the perspective of the
Tutsis, the party victimized by the genocide.
In other words, what is at issue is whose
stories are (allowed to be) told and whose
are not? We raised this issue above when
reflecting on the functioning of the TRC in
South Africa. Also in that case, the critical
question was, which stories are going to be
part of the public record and which are not?
And should there also be space for silence?
Furthermore, how much memory can an
210
individual or a community take withoutt
getting overwhelmed again by traumaticc
stress reactions?
Memory and reconciliation
The Rwandan government has not only
chosen against amnesty for perpetrators but
also against amnesia of events that have
occurred. Memorials at massacre sites and
annual commemorations are used to preserve the memory of the genocide and to
show the dangerous results of ethnic divisions (Longman & Rutagengwa, 2004).
According to the historical interpretation
promoted by the government, it was colonial rule that transformed the Rwandan
population into ethnic identities by dividingg
the people in Hutu, Tutsi and Twa. In the
official government narrative, the ethnicc
divisions imposed on Rwanda by colonial
rule are presented as the root cause of the
1994 genocide. Given this interpretation off
Rwandan history and the sources of genocide, the current Rwandan government
argues that reconciliation can only take
place once the country recovers the national unity that existed in pre-colonial
Rwanda. Since 1994, the government has
introduced a variety of social programs to
promote these ideas. Solidarity camps have
been established for the ‘re-education’ off
politicians, entering university students,
returned refugees, and released prisoners,
among others, who have been required to
attend for one to three months (Longman &
Rutagengwa, 2004).
The case of Rwanda indicates that a government can effectively dominate the discourse on memory and reconciliation,
thereby politicizing and instrumentalizing it.
It remains yet to be seen, however, whether
this domination can create a generally
accepted collective memory or bring about
reconciliation. A related question is how
Richters, et al.
much memory a society can take without
loosing itself in too much. As Borland
(2003) has observed, societies that have suffered mass violence such as genocide must
find ways to confront past atrocities in
order to ‘strike a balance between burying
the gruesome past and burying themselves
in the memory of it’ (Shriver, 2001, quoted
by Borland, 2003). In other words, the challenge is to find a route between too much
memory and too much forgetting (Minow,
1998).
Longman and Rutagengwa (2004) conducted case studies in three local communities
in Rwanda to get some insight in people’s
view on issues related to memorials. They
found a widespread familiarity with the
government’s narrative about the genocide
as having deep roots in Rwandan history.
Study participants, however, were more
likely to blame the genocide on immediate
causes, such as bad politicians and greed. In
the survey conducted, 49.2 percent of
respondents agreed or strongly agreed with
the statement ‘Whoever is in power
rewrites Rwandan history to serve their
own interests’.
Study participants were deeply divided over
the role that memorials and commemoration play in reconciliation. Many agreed
with their function of keeping alive the
memory of violence Rwanda had experienced. Others, however, expressed objections. Some felt that memorials were divisive, filling survivors (the term used in
Rwanda for the Tutsi victims of the genocide) with anger and Hutu with fear and
shame. There was also concern that constantly reminding people of what happened
keeps injuries fresh and prevents victims
and society at large from moving on. One
woman, for example, claimed; ‘the commemoration done each year could damage
the process [of reconciliation]. Hearts
remain injured with this repeated commemoration’.
We listened in 2004 to a young woman who
told us about the gathering at the Amahoro
(‘peace’ in kinyarwanda) Football Stadium
in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, on 6 April
2004 for a day of reflection on the horrors
and pain of the genocide. This day started
the hundred days of commemoration of the
hundred days of genocide ten years previously. ‘On both sides wounds have been
opened carelessly through the program.
Not only victims, but also repentant perpetrators were asked to speak to a multitudinous public. Especially the vivid story off
one perpetrator was too much for the people’. According to a few other respondents
about fifty people had such terrible flashbacks that they had to be carried away on a
stretcher. A trauma counsellor added to this
observation, ‘Commemorations are positive if care and after-care is provided. But
that care is not available. The commemorations this year have again released too
many feelings without any good guidance
in the form of, for instance, counselling.
That is bad and risky’. Some respondents
expressed their anger that people had been
forced to participate in the gathering in the
stadium on 6 April; ‘it was all orchestrated’.
Also those that did not participate could nott
escape the commemoration. ‘Throughout
these hundred days the media have
thrashed people daily with the pain of the
genocide. Every night on television one
could see these heads chopped off. Every
night that stadium. Every night the reburials’, another respondent stated.
A European nun working in Rwanda told
us that as a result of the commemorations,
a class of fifty secondary school students
got ‘completely out of control’.
The teachers could not handle this and sent
the whole class to the trauma office of the
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nearby hospital. ‘There is only one nurse
trained in trauma care. She cannot do much
more than prescribe tranquillizers. That is
what happened’. From various sides we
heard that whole schools were closed during the commemorations because students
were not able to concentrate (Olij, 2005).
Also people did not go to work for days on
end.
Despite the negative effects, large memorial
events in the Amahora stadium continue to
be held. In the Rwandan newspaper The
Times (28-30 January 2005),
James
Munyaneze describes such an event under
the title ‘Tears flow in stadium as genocide
film is unveiled’. He writes that an estimated 5 000 people from all over Rwanda
thronged to Amahoro National Stadium in
Kigali to see the movie ‘Sometimes in April’
which centred on the genocide and was
shown for the first time. ‘The two-hour
long film screened only under moonlight
drew waves of tears and screams across the
stadium, with some dozens of trauma cases
… Before the screening, organisers
deployed several trauma councillors in various positions in the stadium who later
struggled to avert grave trauma incidents
facing the viewers. There were a few serious traumas during the show, but reports
indicated that more traumas hit a number
of genocide survivors in their homes after.
… Local people say the film does have
short-term negative consequences to the
viewers, particularly survivors, but they
hope it will in the long-run heal the wounds
as survivors feel that, through the movie,
they will have been able to share their tragic experiences with the world’. The above
quote indicates that trauma counselling
gained ground in Rwanda and is recognized
by the Government as something to support. We will return to this issue shortly.
212
More voices from below on reconciliation, loss of culture, and fear
The word for reconciliation in Kinyarwanda is ubwiyunge. It comes from the
same root used to describe setting a broken
bone. This Rwandan concept of bringingg
together people whose relations have been
ruptured was widely shared among the people interviewed for the study by Longman
and Rutagengwa (2004); a study introduced in the previous section. In one of the
focus groups conducted as part of the study
people said that ‘reconciliation is the factt
that those who did wrong ask forgiveness
from those whom they offended and thus
the two parties renew their social relations
as before’. The vast majority of participants
in the study wanted to avoid future ethnicc
conflict. Many felt that the population, iff
left to its own devices, would be able to
achieve reconciliation and maintain peace.
An older man stated; ‘we folks in the countryside, we have already achieved our reconciliation. The survivors and the others
share everything together and have even
started marrying one another again. But at
the same time, we see problems at the top
…’. The majority of respondents to the survey that was part of the study (76.7 %)
agreed or strongly agreed with the statement; ‘If Rwandan leaders would leave the
population to themselves, there would be
no more ethnic problems’.
While nearly all participants in the
Longman and Rutagengwa study said that
Rwanda needed reconciliation, they disagreed sharply on how it could be achieved.
An older man, for instance, did not agree
with the government policy when he said:
‘Reconciliation is part of Rwandan culture.
It is for forgetting the wrong committed or
suffered. Without this, Rwandans will
arrive at nothing’. Also the attitudes toward
gacaca were overall quite positive.
Richters, et al.
The same was found in a few other studies
(Gabisirege & Babalola, 2001; Institute of
Research and Dialogue for Peace, 2002;
Longman, et al., 2004). Respondents
believed that gacaca would make a substantial contribution to reconciliation.
People, however, were not united in their
response to details and many expressed
concerns about gacaca as proposed. Some
of those concerns have been addressed
above.
In a nation wide study conduced by the
Institute of Research and Dialogue for
Peace (IRDP, 2004), some respondents
believed as the old man quoted above that
today there is harmony in interpersonal
relationships. For others, however, it is
only a front. In early Rwandan society, it
was held that culture was a shield against
evil. The question nowadays is if there still
is a culture that defines the taboos that protect the fundamental values of society. In
pro-colonial Rwanda, it was the ancestors
who had the power to protect or curse their
descendants still living on earth. For example, society considered it a sin to kill a vulnerable person. The ancestors punished
anyone who broke this rule. The rules
guiding protection, however, no longer
exist. Today, Rwandan society needs to
find a balance between the values
enshrined in a modern culture based largely on Christianity (constituting behaviour
with reference to the next world) and those
of traditional Rwandan society (constituting behaviour with reference to the world
of the ancestors). Rwandans from all sectors of society told the interviewers in the
IRDP study that in the years since independence, successive governments gave little importance to the question of culture.
The population suggested during debates
on the issue that it might be a good idea to
look to Rwandan culture for positive
values that could be used to build a more
human, harmonious and peaceful society.
One of these values is umuganda, as
Mugarura (2005) argues. In ‘the good old
days’ the Rwandan community would
derive a sense of unity and togetherness
from the voluntary community work umu-ganda refers to. This seems not to be the
case anymore. While, as Gasamagera, ett
al., (2005) present it, the government does
try to pay attention to traditional values in
a number of institutional and policy measures, for the people on the ground these
may be too enforced.
Fear and mistrust still pervade Rwandan
society preventing the types of togetherness that forged social bonds known from
former times. As someone in the Longman
and Rutagengwa (2004) study said; ‘we
can’t speak freely, only in whispers. It is
this fear that stays in people’s heart. They
are afraid that if they speak about ethnicity, they may be accused of supporting hostilities’. We regularly encountered this fear
in the conversations we had in Rwanda.
Some men, for instance, told us that government representatives continually watch
them. ‘There is again oppression in
Rwanda and we are being monitored. We
have a pseudo-democracy. The full stadiums were all organized. We have a successful potato crop. It is thwarted however. Do
you know how things fit together here?’
One of the men took a piece of paper, and
explained, without saying a word, the political relations. He wrote the names and percentages of the three ethnic groups down.
‘It is not allowed to address this issue. If we
do address it, we can be imprisoned tomorrow’. At the end of our meeting the man
carefully cut the paper into pieces and told
us that he would burn the shreds at home.
‘That is how things are here’.
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Re-humanization, forgiveness and reconciliation
Since interethnic violence in Rwanda was
frequently intimate and relational, repair
must (also) function on that level. In that
sense, it is the interpersonal destruction that
poses the greatest challenge for rebuilding
society. Halpern & Weinstein (2004),
among others, argue that what needs to
take place is a genuine re-humanization of
former enemies. Central to this normative
ideal is becoming interested in another’s
distinct subjective perspective and to develop some form of empathy; meaning that
one has to learn to see the world from the
complex perspective of another person.
This perspective of reconciliation does not
necessarily entail forgiveness. The latter is
often promoted, in particular, by people
from diverse religious traditions as a key
aspect of reconciliation. We tend to agree
with Halpern & Weinstein (2004) that to
equate emotional reconciliation with sympathy, and accompanying attitudes like forgiveness, idealizes personal relationships
too much with possibly devastating consequences for the health and wellbeing of
communities. However, this latter point of
view may also be too ethnocentric and
underestimate the potential for forgiveness
in African societies. Lately, a growing body
of literature has emerged addressing this
issue. For some authors, reconciliation is
not a matter of a confession and subsequent
forgiveness once and for all, but rather the
building of relationships through everyday
life. This perspective is supported by, for
instance, Victor Igreja, based on his fieldwork in post-war central Mozambique (personal communication).
In Rwanda, the ideal of forgiveness leading
to reconciliation is constructed as a key element in the gacaca process. The idea is that
the confession by the perpetrator must lead
214
to an apology from the person confessingg
and asking the victim for forgiveness. This
then should lead to reconciliation. The
empirical research done by PRI, however,
reveals that the forgiveness requested is
often artificial and without true expression
of remorse, jeopardizing reconciliation.
According to Hamber (2003), apologies, iff
they are sincere, can contribute to individual and community healing. If, however,
they are ‘not linked with the delivery off
truth, justice and social change, they run
the danger of being seen as a strategy to
“buy off” the survivors’ and will not lead to
reconciliation.
The majority of genocide survivors in
Rwanda perceive the confessions, made
either in prison or before a gacaca court, as
either insincere or incomplete. Consequently, they hesitate to forgive. They are
often confronted with very strong social
and political pressure to ‘reconcile’ with
released prisoners who ask for it, in spite off
everything. Under these circumstances, forgiveness is experienced as an obligation for
the survivor and, in the same way that the
sincerity of the confession is questionable
the sincerity of the forgiveness accorded
must also be questioned (de Jonge, 2004).
There is no doubt that the perception,
shared by many survivors, of being obliged
by the government to forgive while no real
justice is being done, hampers reconciliation between the different groups.
However, there are always exceptions.
Sometimes, the contributions of the inmates
and those released, in terms of confessions,
are appreciated. A priest gave us the following example of forgiveness in practice; ‘we
know a man who killed a number of people. He confessed and asked for forgiveness. The woman whose family members
were among the people killed, believed that
the man had acted involuntarily. If the
Richters, et al.
pressure of the genocide had not been
there, he would never even have thought of
killing her kin. The woman concerned now
supports the man in going through hard
times’. The answer to our question to a
community leader about what happens
when people who caused each other so
much suffering meet during gacaca meetings, explains the underlying reasoning for
forgiveness. ‘Most of the time the violence
did not come from the people themselves.
Much happened top down. People were
forced’.
The problem however, remains that the verification of confessions, a requirement for
seeking the truth, is lacking in the gacaca
process; a process that is first and foremost
a legal one. It can only contribute to healing
and as such, to reconciliation when the sincerity of confessions and their verification
are part of the process (de Jonge, 2004).
Out of fear that the mass introduction of
gacaca could cause new psychological damage and a dangerous re-ignition of violence
instead of reconciliation, programs were
started in Rwanda to set the emotional
groundwork for gacaca. One hopes that
they will contribute to countering the
potential negative side effects, which may
be related to the introduction of gacaca.
One such program is the Rwanda
Reconciliation Communications Project
developed and implemented by the NGO
La Benevolencija. It consists of an ongoing
radio drama series that covers trauma healing, reconciliation and violence prevention,
and secondly, participatory communications activities through a nationwide network of existing local organisations and
community workers. The latter activities
are aimed at reinforcing the information
conveyed through the radio programmes
(www.labenevolencija.org).
The La Benevolencija project is supported
by the National Unity and Reconciliation
Committee, set by the government, and
builds on the work of Ervin Staub and
Laurie Pearlman who conducted trainingg
programs on healing, forgiveness, and reconciliation in Rwanda for NGO staff working with groups of people in the community. Staub and Pearlman (2003) see healing,
forgiveness and reconciliation as deeply
interrelated processes. Progress in one
realm fosters progress in the other.
Forgiving may be difficult but paves the
way to reconciliation and furthers healing.
The training had psycho-educational and
experiential components. The result of both
was that Tutsi survivors appeared more
open to perpetrators whose actions, however horrible, seemed at least somewhat comprehensible, rather than simply evil.
Trauma counselling and socio-therapy
Data from Rwanda indicate that the openness to reconciliation is related to multiple
personal and environmental factors, traumaa
being one of those factors. In a study by
Longman, et al., (2004) it was found thatt
those people who met the post traumaticc
stress disorder (PTSD) symptom criteriaa
were less likely to support the Rwandan
domestic responses (particularly gacaca) to
the genocide, to believe in community, and
to demonstrate interdependence with other
ethnic groups.
The mental trauma concept (guhahamuka) is
gaining ground in Rwanda. It is likely that
it has been introduced from outside the
country after the genocide and that people
in Rwanda, through education and counselling activities by NGOs, have learned to
list all perceived mental and emotional
effects of the genocide under the category
guhahamuka and not under the traditionally
used category of agahinda for mental problems (Bolton, 2001). Most, perhaps all,
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the trauma-counselling organisations currently operating in Rwanda have their
headquarters in Kigali. They mainly operate within this city, having a minimum of
outreach programs. However, spread over
the country one can find a number of individuals providing counselling services.
Most of the counsellors received their education abroad or were trained by international NGOs within Rwanda.
Following are statements from some of
these counsellors, although the names used
have been assigned and are not their real
names.
Catherine, a member of one of the larger
churches in Rwanda described to us how
she, like so many others, struggled with the
‘why question’. After she had shared her
struggles with a few others, she took the initiative to start, shortly after the genocide, a
reconciliation initiative. However, ‘it did not
work at all’. ‘The scales fell from my eyes
when I participated in a one year trauma
course. If traumas are not recognized and
tactfully approached, there is nothing to reconcile. I did not get much support from the
church. Churches are unwieldy organizations. I therefore took the initiative myself
to start trauma care on biblical foundation.
I have full groups. There is much more
need for help than we can offer. Many people don’t know what the problem is with
them. There are no words for the overwhelming experiences. And if people do
have the words, they do not know the way.
What has happened is beyond any imagination. Nobody could stop it’. To regain
people’s trust one should be very careful,
Catherine explained. In her trainings she
uses symbols people can understand, such
as the symbol of the snail. ‘If someone
comes too close to the feelers of a snail, the
feelers and the snail itself will withdraw in
the shell’.
216
Beatrice, who is a medical doctor, went in
1996 with 30 others to Montréal for a twoyear trauma training, also points to the specific cultural context in which she now practices trauma counselling and treatment.
‘The culture in Montréal was very different
from the one here. There we were taught to
ask many questions, while here one does
not ask questions. People here are used to itt
that they have to suppress feelings of anxiety, sadness and anger’. She continued; ‘the
scale and various dimensions of the traumaa
problem are grossly underestimated in this
country. Many people believe that traumaa
is like malaria. People come to me for treatment a few times, and that is it. An additional reason for this lack of compliance is
the transport costs people cannot afford.
There is not much interest in my work from
the side of the hospital, nor from the side off
the church. People with trauma symptoms
believe that they are mad and madness stigmatizes. That is another reason that people
don’t dare to see me, or stop seeing me’.
Margaretha, another female trauma counsellor trained by the Irish organization
Troicar, told us that she tries to break
through the silence of people. Her method
is ‘active listening, without early interruptions’. If her clients - mainly female Tutsi
survivors - are seriously traumatised,
Margaretha first has a series of individual
talks with the people at their home. Havingg
learned from the trauma training herselff
what a painful confrontation with past and
present difficulties can bring in terms off
healing effects, Margaretha slowly encourages her clients, all women, to speak about
their suffering. When the women are ready,
they are invited to join group meetings and
to share their suffering with others. The
main symptoms the women suffer from are
nightmares and flashbacks. Margarethaa
advises the women to pray or sing after
Richters, et al.
they wake up from their nightmares. The
aim of the group sessions is to motivate
women to care for themselves again, to
regain dignity and social justice, even if
they have lost their whole family. ‘Life goes
on’.
Getrude, a female trauma counsellor of a
social, financial, medical and psychological
support project for widows, first told us that
she gives support through counselling.
After some time however, in response to
our questions, she started to speak about
the traditional ways people use to rebuild
their lives and overcome their suffering.
‘People start buying a cow again. Ritual
meetings are held. This year there are many
reburials because perpetrators increasingly
confess what happened and who was
buried where. The relatives who survived
built a small house on the spot where their
dead loved ones are reburied. They also
brought food, drinks, flowers and the cow
to this place. That helps people to work
through their pain’. Getrude accepts what
people do, but explains meanwhile that the
flashbacks people experience are not caused
by visits of the spirits but are a consequence
of the genocide horrors. Here we touch on
an issue of general importance: to what
extent should ‘traditional culture’ be merely tolerated, left to flourish, officially supported, or actively integrated (in theory and
practice) in trauma programs exported
from abroad. A society-wide discussion like
the one that led to the ‘reinvention of tradition’ in the form of gacaca, has not taken
place in Rwanda with regards to the healing
of associated mental problems resulting
from the violence, at least not (yet) on a
wide scale.
How can these various programs provide
safety for the Rwandan people so that they
can slowly regain some trust and selfrespect, start to care for themselves again,
and are able to start to connect to each
other again? The first two authors discussed this question with a small group off
people actively involved in community
activities run by the Church in one of the
Dioceses in Rwanda. Our discussion resulted in a request by the Diocese for help in
the form of training of volunteers in sociotherapy as practiced by Cora Dekker
among traumatized refugees in the
Netherlands. Before, the Diocese had
approached a number of the trauma counselling organizations working in Rwanda,
but received the reply that they could nott
handle more work. Also, the government
had been asked for help. The governmentt
however, had already encouraged churches
in Rwanda to find their own sources for
trauma counselling. The sources that are
available for this work cannot meet the
apparently countrywide need.
In comparison to trauma counselling, sociotherapy pays less attention to the terrible
memories of the past, and focuses primarily
on the here-and-now situation. The past
however, will not be neglected when people
voluntarily bring it up. In these cases, the
therapist will assist people in limiting the
time spent on speaking about or turningg
back to the past. The main goal of sociotherapy is increasing safety and trust within
a group, which should contribute to social
cohesion and finding meaning in life again.
The therapy makes use of daily events in
participants’ lives in order to achieve awareness raising, enhancement and re-socialisation with respect to social and personal
functioning. It encourages participation and
taking responsibility, using methods such as
the implementation of democratic principles in the group, the stimulation of group
interaction, the playing of games, and the
provision of education. Regarding, for
instance, democratization specific attention
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is being paid to the way in which group participants used to make decisions in families,
groups and communities. Questions discussed with group members are whether
traditional ways of decision-making are still
working, can be reintroduced, or should be
replaced by alternatives that have to be
developed. In all these and other activities,
the past and present socio-cultural context
(including animosities between groups in
case the trainees themselves bring this issue
in) is very much taken into account.
In meeting the request by the Diocese to
contribute to the quest for meaning in life of
the province in which the Diocese works
through socio-therapy, we feel challenged to
adapt the socio-therapy as practiced among
refugees in the Netherlands, who fled from
situations of danger such as exist(ed) in
Rwanda, to the local context of Rwanda as
described in this article, and within Rwanda
to the specific problems and circumstances
in the province in question.
Concluding remarks
In this article we approached reconciliation
as part of a set of deeply interrelated issues.
To some of these issues we paid more attention than to others. The issues we highlighted were: justice, insecurity, memoralization, culture, trauma counselling and
socio-therapy. What did not get the attention it deserves is religion, which plays such
a central role in Rwandan life. Also, traditional healing remained in the background.
Furthermore, we did not discuss in detail
the relation between democracy and economic prosperity to reconciliation. In various ways, however, we pointed to the current government’s repressive tactics, which
undermine attempts to democratize
Rwanda’s political culture and thus to reconcile. Economic problems people face is
another key factor that weakens support for
218
opposition to violence and reconciliation. In
a study of the perception by two Rwandan
rural communities of the main problems
caused by the genocide in 1994, poverty and
lack of food were identified as the two priority problems. The mental and emotional
effects of the genocide ranked number five
on the list of problems (Bolton, 2001).
When preparing the requested socio-therapy project, we asked our contact persons
how they would prioritize the project they
had asked for – a project they previously
referred to as a trauma healing project - in
relation to social and economic development projects. Their first answer was that
one should realize that all interventions take
place in a post-conflict situation.
‘Development activities can help to reduce
mental health problems due to the war. On
the other hand, trauma healing can help to
strengthen people to contribute to development. It is difficult to see these issues in
terms of cause and effect. Trauma healingg
should be an integral part of many activities
in society’. On second thought, the answer
was somewhat different. ‘The first thing is
to help someone to come out. The goal is to
remove the curtain hanging over someone’s
thinking, to get someone out of the confusion of life. Secondly, biological needs (eating, drinking, dressing) need to be
addressed. It is on the third level that development comes in, that the need of resource
support is to be met’. Later again it was stated that ‘it is not certain at what stages development comes in’. To paraphrase our discussion partners, what is needed is a kind off
ecological approach (see, for instance,
Fletcher & Weinstein, 2002), of which trauma healing is one of the elements.
The Kinyarwanda word for reconciliation,
ubwiyunge, as we wrote above, refers to
bringing people together whose relationships have been ruptured. This definition off
Richters, et al.
reconciliation corresponds with the one we
used as a starting point in our introduction.
What has to happen is the lifting of the disorderly blockages on an individual and
social level, and a restoration of bodily,
mental and social flows. One way to work
towards this goal may be helping to overcome psychosocial problems or blockages
by trauma counselling and socio-therapy,
which are somehow adapted to ‘Rwandan
culture’ and the specific problems people
suffer from in the aftermath of the political
conflict in Rwanda.
The ecological approach emphasizes that
change in one part of the societal system
causes reactions throughout. According to
this approach, the best results would be
achieved if every piecemeal approach
towards reconciliation becomes part of an
overall and coordinated strategy that is
based on an ecological analysis of post-war
Rwandan society. Under an ecological
framework, the synergistic effects of interventions at multiple points in a system will
lead to reconciliation as an intrinsic element
of social reconstruction. Anchored to this
ecological model, social reconstruction
should consist of programs that promote
justice, human rights, democracy, and economic prosperity. What we tried to argue in
this article is that these programs should
not merely be developed top down, but that
there should be ample space for ‘voices
from the people’, and that on the ground
‘unplanned’ reconciliation practices should
be recognized.
In post-conflict Rwanda a very specific
mosaic of planned and unplanned reconciliation activities can be distinguished. All of
them have implications, whether positive or
negative, for ‘mental health, psychosocial
work and counselling’. We pointed out that
certain interventions, such as the government-led politicized and instrumentalized
memorials, and the lack of others, such as
the lack of security policies, have the potential to undermine the development of a synergy of effective interventions leadingg
towards reconciliation. This brings us to the
conclusion that trauma healing and sociotherapy as one of the possible interventions
which may contribute to reconciliation in
Rwanda, should not only be implemented
on an individual and community level, butt
also on other levels in the society. One off
the challenges we are facing in the sociotherapy project we introduced is the study
of the impact of such a project on all these
various levels. Reconciliation will be one off
the issues of the intended impact research.
The results of this research and possibly
new insights on the issues presented in this
article based on learning experiences with
the socio-therapy project, we hope to reportt
in the near future.
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Annemiek Richters is professor of culture,
health and illness at Leiden University
Medical Center, the Netherlands. Cora
Dekker works as a socio-therapist at
Equator, treatment programme for traumatized refugees at AMC/de Meren,
Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Klaas de
Jonge worked as an anthropologist for many
years in Africa. He now lives in the
Netherlands.
Email
addresses:
j.m.richters@lumc.nl;
cedekker@amc.uva.nl; kenno@xs4all.nl.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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