Citation
Registration Number: 110134264
Never Again, Again: Remembering Genocide
in Rwanda
Supervisor: Dr. Andrew Cohen
A dissertation submitted in part-fulfilment of the requirements for
the degree of MA in International History, University of Sheffield,
September 2012.
Registration Number: 110134264
Word Count: 15,743
Never Again, Again: Remembering Genocide in
Rwanda
Contents
Introduction
p. 2
Remembering the Holocaust
p. 7
Kubarara ~ Suffering
p. 14
Ubutabera ~ Justice
p. 25
Kubabarira ~ Forgiveness
p. 36
Conclusion
p. 47
Bibliography
p. 52
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Registration Number: 110134264
Never Again, Again: Remembering Genocide in Rwanda
We have been refugees for more than three decades. This
is the first time I'm traveling through the country. I feel I'm
part of the country. I've never felt that feeling before.
Wherever I was, I was a refugee. It's certainly a very good
experience to feel you have an identity.1
In 1990 Paul Kagame returned to Rwanda as the military leader of
the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) after decades in exile in
Uganda. After leading the RPF in a successful civil war by 1994, he
became the sixth president of the small, landlocked African country
in 2000. The period since 1994 has been one of major personal
success for Kagame, in which Rwanda has been transformed on the
international stage to a country synonymous with progress,
development and stability – a rarity in post-colonial Africa. 2
Kagame’s attitude upon arriving in Rwanda, demonstrated in this
interview while the civil war was taking place, shows the transition
of negative memories of the past into a positive outlook for the
future, and the motive behind my research is to explore such
developments in the memories of ordinary Rwandans since the
genocide of 1994.
1 Paul Kagame, in ‘Rwanda Rebels: Army of Exiles Fights for a Home’, New York
Times, 9 June 1994.
2 ‘Rwanda, Past and Present’, New York Times, 15 June 2007.
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International opinion of Rwanda has changed markedly since 1994,
a year which saw the worst case of mass violence since the Second
World War. After decades under the dictatorship of Hutu president
Juvenal Habyarimana, at the expense of the minority Tutsi
ethnicity, Rwanda had descended into a state of violence and
paranoia. Since 1990 the RPF had been fighting a civil war with
government forces to gain control of Rwanda, and when the
president’s plane was shot down over Kigali on 6 April 1994, the
country finally reached breaking point. Habyarimana’s death was
used to justify a campaign to exterminate all Tutsi, with the Hutu
military, former government ministers, and state-controlled media
immediately using the Tutsi as a scapegoat for the president’s
death. In 100 days, approximately 800,000 people were killed, not
by the state directly, but by fellow Rwandan citizens. The genocide
has brought natural comparisons to the Holocaust, with the
journalist Linda Melvern describing it as ‘the first attempted
extermination since the Second World War to be genuinely
comparable’.3 Historians have also discussed the ideological
similarities between the instigators of the two genocides: Nazis and
Hutu Power extremists.4
3 L. Melvern, The Past is Prologue: Planning the 1994 Rwandan Genocide’ in P.
Clark, and Z. Kaufman, (eds) After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post-Conflict
Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond (London, 2008), p. 22.
4 C. Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (Oxford, 1999),
p. 102.
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While the motives for senior Hutu politicians to incite genocidal
violence – such as the fear of losing their power and the need for a
scapegoat – cannot be doubted, the reasons why Hutu citizens
followed the violent rhetoric are more ambiguous. Since the
genocide, historians and political scientists have debated why so
many ordinary Rwandan Hutu were so willing to participate in the
mass murder of not only strangers, but neighbours, friends and
relatives. One popular argument suggests that memories of precolonial and colonial Tutsi dominance, and the continuing threat of
Tutsi exiles in the post-colonial era, were still prevalent in the
minds of many of the Hutu who participated in the 1994 genocide.
These memories were easily provoked and spread by the popular
media.5 The way in which those who held political power in 1994
could evoke the memories of the Hutu people, manipulate them and
transform them into vessels of fear and hatred cannot be
underestimated. A number of Rwandans have emphasised the
importance of memory and the ability to control history in their
country’s culture. An exiled former government minister argued in
1999 that in Rwanda ‘power is history and history is power. If you
are in a position of telling your history you are in a position of
power. The structure of power is constructed on the structure of
history’.6
5 A. Des Forges, ‘Call to Genocide: Radio in Rwanda, 1994’, in A. Thompson,
(ed.) The Media and the Rwandan Genocide (London, 2007), p. 45.
6 Former government minister in exile, in N. Eltringham, Accounting for Horror:
Post-Genocide Debates in Rwanda (London, 2004), p. 148.
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In this research the idea of memory will be of paramount
importance, as it reflects on another issue within Rwanda’s culture
of memory - how Rwandans have remembered the genocide since
1994. Given the impact of memory culture in creating the
conditions for genocide, it is surprising that there has been little
research into how Rwandans remember the genocide itself. To date
what little analysis there has been of Rwanda’s memory culture has
applied simplistic and static categories to those involved, as studies
of the genocide itself have done.7 As the history of the genocide
requires the need to focus on the dynamism of actors, the history of
genocide memory requires the need to focus on the dynamism of
memory.8 The purpose of my research is therefore to analyse the
shifts in emphasis and direction within Rwandan accounts of the
genocide
since
1994,
situating
them
within
the
conceptual
frameworks of memory theory and also against the backdrop of the
popular narratives of the time.
Since the RPF seized power July 1994, Rwandan society has built
itself around the concept of remembering. The organisation Ibuka,
established in 1995, takes its name from the kinyarwanda word for
‘remember’,
and
promotes
itself
as
the
nation’s
umbrella
organisation for genocide survivors. Genocide commemorations
take place annually, centred around the Amahoro (Peace) Stadium
7 L. A. Fujii, Killing Neighbours: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (London, 2009), p.
8.
8 Ibid., p. 11.
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in Kigali. For the tenth anniversary of the genocide in 2004,
Rwanda branded its commemorations with the phrase ‘Never
Again’, a slogan used by the international community after the
Holocaust.9 All of these examples point to the fact that memory has
taken on a primary and central role in post-genocide Rwanda, and
that an analysis of Rwandans’ ways of remembering is crucial in
determining the shape of its contemporary, and future, society.
The main body of this dissertation will focus on different stages of
memory and how they are reflected in Rwandan accounts, many of
which tie in to the main themes of Ibuka. Within each stage I will
assess the different narratives involved and, where relevant, how
these narratives have evolved within Rwandan memories. This
dissertation identifies three stages of memory that will be
discussed
in
depth;
suffering,
justice,
and
forgiveness
and
reconciliation. The first stage is the idea of suffering through
memory – how the subject equates their memories and their
inability to forget what happened to subsequent problems they
have experienced. The second stage is that of justice – where the
subject
has
channelled
their
memories
into
appealing
for
perpetrators to be held accountable, or anger at the lack of such a
process. The third stage is forgiveness and reconciliation – where
the subject openly talks about whether or not they can forgive
those who committed crimes against them and their families, and
9 R. Lemarchand, ‘The Politics of Memory in Post-Genocide Rwanda’ in Clark and
Kaufman, After Genocide, p. 65.
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whether wider-level reconciliation can be achieved in society. I will
conclude by bringing these components of memory together and
assessing where they are situated within Rwandan society today,
predicting how forms of remembering could and should develop,
and offering avenues for further research. In looking at these
stages of memory my research owes a lot to those who have
already taken the initiative in talking to Rwandans about their
experiences
and
preserving
their
accounts,
with
particular
reference to the journalists Jean Hatzfeld and Philip Gourevitch and
the political scientist Phil Clark, who extensively covered Rwanda’s
gacaca courts between 2003 and 2010. This research also uses the
archives of the Daily Express, Daily Mirror and New York Times
newspapers.
One key area of Rwanda’s history I have deliberately excluded from
my
research
is
how
Rwandans
have
made
reference
to
international actors in their accounts. While the failure of the
international community in 1994 has been of prime importance in
the historiography of the genocide, for Rwandans issues internal to
their country are equally important. For this reason, the Rwandan
sources used in this research will be focused on the elements of
remembering particular to the country itself, both at the local and
national level, to create a cohesive picture of memory culture
specific to Rwanda. To include complete narratives of memory in
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relation to both international and national issues would be too wide
in scope for a piece of research of this size.
Prior to in-depth analysis of Rwandan accounts, this research will
be situated within the existing literature surrounding memory
studies. To do this I will follow the lead of Melvern and others, and
compare
discussing
the
Rwandan
Genocide
historiographical
to
debates
the
Holocaust,
surrounding
briefly
Holocaust
memory. The way in which the Holocaust has been remembered
offers a valuable insight into what we can expect to learn from
Rwandan accounts, and offers a crucial starting point to my
research.
Remembering the Holocaust
Searching for a memory indeed attests to one of the major
finalities of the act of remembering, namely, struggling
against forgetting, wresting a few scraps of memory from
the ‘rapacity’ of time, from ‘sinking’ into ‘oblivion’.10
10 P. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (London, 2006), p. 30.
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In contemporary Western society, it is hard to imagine a world that
does not actively remember the Holocaust. Public memorials across
Europe
are
complimented
by
International
Holocaust
Remembrance Day, which takes place on 27 January each year. The
popularity of memorials, such as Berlin’s Memorial to the
Murdered Jews of Europe, amongst tourists, and the media
coverage
given
to
Holocaust
and
Second
World
War
commemorations each year, suggests a timelessness of memory.
According to Dan Diner, the Holocaust has assumed ‘an evidently
irrevocable salience for universal historical consciousness and
moral yardsticks after 1989’.11 While the first aspect of this
argument is undoubtedly true – as evidenced by the many
comparisons of the Rwandan Genocide to the Holocaust from Linda
Melvern and others – the second aspect, that Holocaust memory
has only become salient since 1989, suggests a previous, less
common, stage of commemoration that seems incomprehensible
today.
In Germany, the fall of the Berlin Wall signified a considerable
change in Holocaust memory. The reunification of East and West in
1990 meant that citizens had to accept a common past, one of
horror and atrocity. However when Germany was divided the
Holocaust could be seen as something more distant. As Bill Niven
11 D. Diner, ‘The Irreconcilability of an Event: Integrating the Holocaust into the
Narrative of the Century’ in D. Michman, (ed.) Remembering the Holocaust in
Germany, 1945-2000: German Strategies and Jewish Responses (Oxford, 2002) p.
95.
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has argued, ‘as long as Germany was divided, many Germans could
nurture a feeling of being victims. After unification, this is not
possible to the same degree’.12 In both East and West Germany, the
suffering of Jews in the Nazi era was not the salient memory,
instead it was the suffering of the majority of the German
population at the hands of the Nazis that dominated narratives of
the Second World War.
This sense of victimhood translated itself into forms of Holocaust
memory
in
a
multitude
of
ways.
As
the
truth
about
the
extermination camps came out, in West Germany the willingness to
face up to what had happened was limited, owing in part to an
early conflict between the need for justice and the need for
democratisation.13 German historians of the Holocaust largely
ignored the part played by the general population. In an attempt to
absolve the population of any blame, the perpetrators were
considered an ‘Other’, a small number of leading Nazi figures, and
German Holocaust historiography laid the blame firmly with this
group.14 It has only recently been acknowledged that the level of
participation of ordinary people in the Holocaust was far greater
than originally assumed.
12 B. Niven, Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third
Reich (London, 2003), p. 3.
13 J. Herf, ‘The Holocaust and the Competition of Memories in Germany, 19451999’ in Michman, Remembering the Holocaust in Germany, 1945-2000, p. 14.
14 C-C. Szejnmann, ‘Perpetrators of the Holocaust: a History’ in O. Jensen, and
Szejnmann (eds.)) Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in
Comparative Perspectives (London, 2008) p. 30.
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In the 1950s and 1960s there was an attempt to equate the
suffering of German citizens and soldiers during the war with the
suffering of Jews and others persecuted by Nazism. Early ways of
remembering commemorated not the victims of Nazism but the
tragic heroism of German soldiers and civilians. By this logic, the
crimes of Germany’s enemies, particularly Soviet soldiers, were
compared to Nazi atrocities. The actions of the Allies were also
used to downplay German crimes. For example, on the tenth
anniversary of the Dresden air raid, Mayor Walter Waidauer
‘defined the Allied attack as a war crime and called the Western
allies the “executioners of Dresden”’, in so doing comparing the
Allies to the Nazis and Dresden to Auschwitz. 15 Such narratives
furthered a view amongst the general population that they were
victims as much as those who were deliberately targeted by the
Nazis. In their work on Holocaust denial, Michael Shermer and
Alex Grobman contest that deniers ‘argue that what the Nazis did
to the Jews is really no different from what other nations do to their
perceived enemies’.16 Using this definition, Waidauer could be seen
as a genocide denier, and his speech in 1955 as popularising a
memory of denial.
Since 1990 there has been considerable growth in the public
commemoration of the Holocaust in Germany, in terms of both time
15 G. Margalit, ‘Divided Memory? Expressions of a United German Memory’ in
Michman, Remembering the Holocaust in Germany, 1945-2000, p. 35.
16 M. Shermer, and A. Grobman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust
Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (London, 2009), p. 103.
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and space devoted to its memory. James Young has highlighted how
unusual it is for a nation to openly remember crimes it committed,
as Germany has done in the past two decades.17 Memorials have
become deliberate projections that attempt to make the observer
connect
Jewish
suffering
to
German
responsibility. 18
The
reunification of Germany and the common need to commemorate
Nazi atrocities has seen the nation’s leaders take on responsibility
for
public
memory
of
the
Holocaust,
as
Niven
argues,
‘commemoration is delegated to the political establishment’.19 By
taking charge of national commemoration, the state centralises the
act of public memory, and people’s consciences become stimulated,
rather than autonomous. In addition, memorials have become
idealised
and
over-symbolic,
reflecting
more
the
‘need’
to
remember rather than what is actually being remembered.
While memorials and commemoration are more in the public eye
than they were before 1989, Young interestingly points to the
contradictory dilemmas over the impulse to memorialise and the
desire to forget.20 Public commemorations and memorials are
limited to specific times and spaces, becoming contained and
detached from people’s day-to-day lives. The Holocaust is thus not
something we feel the need to remember unless it is actively
17 J. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (London,
1993), p. 21.
18 Niven, Facing the Nazi Past, p. 207.
19 Ibid., p. 176.
20 Young, The Texture of Memory, p. 5.
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stimulated by a commemoration or memorial. While this may be
true for those who lived through the event and thus have their own
accounts and memories of it, the case may be different for those
born after the Holocaust. For younger generations who did not
experience the event directly, the memorial becomes a memory in
itself.21 The memorial can thus help shape the method and content
of remembering even more for younger observers. In summary,
historians have expressed negative views of post-1989 forms of
remembering; in terms of political involvement, their symbolism,
and detachment. Caroline Wiedmer highlights the dangers this has
on an individual’s capacity to remember independently, arguing
that ‘when mourning is actually replaced by the discourse
surrounding it, memory becomes merely a political tool, and
symbolic poses stand in for political action’.22
Despite the lack of public representation of Holocaust memory
prior to 1989, there were a significant number of visual and written
accounts of experiences beginning immediately post-war. The
Holocaust marked the beginning of documenting horror, and
photographs taken at the extermination camps by their liberators
captured the public imagination.23 Although the initial prominence
of Holocaust images waned in the 1950s, they have, according to
21 C. Wiedmer, The Claims of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in
Contemporary Germany and France (London, 1999), p. 166.
22 Ibid., p. 207.
23 B. Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s
Eye (London, 1998), p. 12.
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Barbie Zelizer, recaptured the public attention. There is a case to
be put forward that the widespread use of Holocaust imagery, when
compared to more modern atrocities such as those in Rwanda and
Bosnia, has left the observer desensitised to atrocity and horror.
Zelizer is wary of the familiarity too many atrocity images can
bring, that the ‘recycling of photos from the past not only dulls our
response to them but potentially undermines the immediacy and
depth of our response to contemporary instances of brutality,
discounting them as somehow already known to us’.24 The fact that
journalists such as Melvern regularly compare the Rwandan
Genocide to the Holocaust shows that not only has this become a
convenient way for writers to express modern atrocity, it is also a
means through which the reader can understand events by. It can
also be said that this salience of memory, where the need to
remember is provoked at every opportunity, means that the act of
remembering is seen to be an adequate substitute for real action.25
The written Holocaust memoir has also assumed an important role.
Initially, the memoir was an important vehicle for survivors to
restore and promote their pre-war identities, and an opportunity to
show that they were active resistors, and not merely survivors. 26
The importance of preserving your memories of the atrocity cannot
be doubted, for the post-structuralist sociologist Jean Baudrillard
24 Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, p. 15.
25 Ibid., p. 239.
26 Z. Waxman, Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation
(Oxford, 2006), p. 31.
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‘forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself’. 27
Bearing witness to atrocity becomes important for survivors
because so many of the victims are unable to bear witness. 28
Through these post-event accounts there is a clash between deep
memory, the simple retelling of the events, and common memory, in
which pre- and post-event memories are restored to offer a more
detached view benefitting from hindsight.29
Indeed, memoirs and testimonies are subject to many external
factors that shape the way they are written. Holocaust testimony
has a history, and in turn Holocaust testimony is affected by this
history.30 Such an argument is applicable to the testimonies of
survivors after any atrocity. When writing a testimony after the
event, the survivor is expected to write an objective account that
may be beyond their capacity and their subjective experiences.
Testimonies are also dominated by the author’s present and future
concerns. Yet despite this, testimonies have come to be ‘treated
almost reverentially, unaffected by the social, economic, and
political circumstances in which they were written’.31 This is in no
doubt part due to the integration of testimony into the collective
memory. Collective memory demands that survivors’ experiences
27 J. Baudrillard, in Young, The Texture of Memory, p. 1.
28 A. Wieviorka, ‘From Survivor to Witness: Voices of the Shoah’ in J. Winter, and
E. Sivan (eds.)) War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge
1999), p. 128.
29 L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (London, 1991), p.
xiii.
30 Waxman, Writing the Holocaust, pp. 1-2.
31 Ibid., pp. 7-8.
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are homogenised and universalised, to conform to the accepted
concept of the Holocaust.32 As a result the Holocaust testimony has
generally become more confined in terms of content and scope,
with unusual experiences marginalised or neglected.
In addition, those who commentate on the Holocaust cling to the
notions of heroism and martyrdom, often salvaging these scraps of
hope from an otherwise bleak outlook of atrocity. An example of
this, as Lawrence Langer explains, is Martin Gilbert’s ‘The
Holocaust’, a chronicle of survivors’ testimonies. Despite negative
testimonies far outweighing positive ones, Gilbert concludes his
work by reflecting on the survivors’ defiance, courage, and spirit,
thus ‘building a monument of hope on a rubble of decay’.33 Another
example of such heroism is the story of Anne Frank. While her
diary highlights her resistance against oppression, her later life in
the extermination camps is neglected in popular memory. Langer
argues that ‘the pretense that from the wreckage of mass murder
we can salvage a tribute to the victory of the human spirit is a
version of Holocaust reality more necessary than true’. 34 The
necessity in finding positive stories amidst narratives of horror and
atrocity is not just down to the well being of the individual, it is also
vital to collective memory. For a society that wants to build itself on
a collective memory, the salience of positive experiences is vital;
32 Ibid., p. 158.
33 Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 165.
34 Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 165.
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they ‘infuse the members of the society with pride and educate the
younger generations toward… positive goals’.35
In the near-seven decades since the Holocaust, we can see how
Holocaust
memories
have
evolved,
how
memorials
and
commemorations have been shaped, how individual testimonies
have been drawn into the collective memory, and why all of this has
been important to memory as a whole. Although there has been
considerably less time to reflect on the Rwandan Genocide, these
interpretations of forms of remembering are still evident. As
Rwanda prepares to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the
genocide in 2014, the rest of this piece will assess how individuals
have remembered the genocide, how these individual accounts tie
in to theories of memory, and whether Rwandans are forming a
more collective memory of the events that conforms to the official
line of the Rwandan government, as has happed in postreunification Germany.
Kubarara ~ Suffering
35 Michman, ‘Introduction’ in Michman, Remembering the Holocaust in
Germany, 1945-2000, p.1.
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Our memory alters over time. We forget the details,
confuse the dates, mix up the attacks, make mistakes over
names, and as to how such a man or woman or other
acquaintance died, we are not in agreement. Nevertheless,
we still remember all the terrible moments we personally
lived through, as though they happened only last year.36
Suffering is central to any account of atrocity. Borne out of the brief
demand for Holocaust victims to retell their stories, survivors’
testimonies have since emphasised their own tragic experiences in
order to promote the author’s identity and hold perpetrators to
account. Accounts of the Rwandan Genocide are no exception.
While the simple retelling of experiences suffered is a natural way
of remembering, the link between memory and suffering takes on
another form in Rwandan accounts. Such accounts fit into a form of
memory that Lawrence Langer describes as ‘anguished memory’, in
which survivors fashion ‘a consecutive chronicle’ and ‘unavoidably
introduce some kind of teleology’, imprisoning their consciousness
and causing continued suffering.37 The trauma of war ‘disrupts
equilibria and requires an effort to restore them. That effort….
contributes to processes of remembrance’.38 Many Rwandans link
their memories of the genocide to suffering they have experienced
subsequently in this way, and it is this form of remembering that
this chapter will explore.
36 Jeanette Ayinkamiye, in J. Hatzfeld, Into the Quick of Life: The Rwandan
Genocide, the Survivors Speak (London, 2008), p. 16.
37 Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 40.
38 J. Winter and E. Sivan, ‘Setting the Framework’, in Winter and Sivan, War and
Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, p. 30.
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As the RPF won the civil war, many Rwandans were driven out of
the country. After the genocide ended in July 1994, the new
Rwandan government encouraged these refugees to return to their
communities. Despite attempting to rebuild their lives, there were
visible signs of past suffering. Piles of bodies and ransacked homes
dominated early accounts of Rwandans returning to their ravaged
communities.39 While these scars could be healed through cleaning
and rebuilding, others were more lasting. Later another tangible
legacy of the genocide took on a particular significance for female
survivors. Women who had been raped and impregnated during the
genocide had to live with a visible reminder of their suffering - their
children. Accounts from survivors such as Godence and Chantal
show the effect these unwanted children had:
It's a big problem for me because everyone knows I had a
child from the interahamwe.40 They say I'm a wife of the
interahamwe.41
This child for me is a problem. The family doesn't want the
child because it's a child of a militiaman... My head doesn't
work very well. I am depressed, and it is difficult to take
care of the baby.42
For these mothers, the genocide created a lasting form of suffering,
one which reminds them not only of their torment through being
39 Bonaventure Nyibizi, in P. Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow
We Will be Killed With Our Families (London, 1999), pp. 227-228.
40 The Interahamwe (kinyarwanda: ‘those who work together’) were the
paramilitary wing of the ruling Hutu party.
41 Godence, in ‘Legacy of Rwanda Violence: The Thousands Born of Rape’, New
York Times, 23 September 1996.
42 Chantal, in ‘Legacy of Rwanda Violence’, New York Times, 23 September
1996.
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raped, but also of the continued anguish through being made
outcasts by what happened. For Godence, ‘they’ refers to the
community she had been a part of and still wants to live in. Chantal
identifies her own family as being the cause of her current
suffering. In these cases suffering becomes almost timeless, with
the memories of the initial suffering connected to the suffering this
has caused in the subjects’ present lives. The willingness of Tutsi
rape victims to discuss what happened to them is in stark contrast
to the experience of other victims of rape after similar atrocities.
For example, Hutu women who were raped at the hands of the RPF
are not allowed to talk about their experiences. 43 This draws an
interesting comparison to the suffering of East German women at
the hands of Soviet forces at the end of the Second World War. In
East Germany, the need to promote a positive image of liberation
by communist forces meant Soviet crimes were downplayed. Here
the collective memory of the nation did not fit with individual
memories of the victims, and it would not be acceptable for female
victims to reveal Soviet crimes until after reunification. 44 In the
Rwandan case, a Tutsi woman retelling her suffering at the hands
of genocidaires is seen as normal, but a Hutu woman doing so is
strictly forbidden. Perhaps seeking to overcome the suffering this
provokes,
many
women
have
abandoned
children
conceived
through rape.45
43 Alphonse, in P. Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and
Reconciliation in Rwanda: Justice Without Lawyers (Cambridge, 2011), p. 123.
44 Niven, Facing the Nazi Past, pp. 114-115.
45 Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror, p. 141.
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It is perhaps unsurprising that of all the Rwandan accounts relating
to the concept of suffering through memory, it is the fear these
memories provoke that occupies a significant proportion of these
accounts. For example, Godence and Chantal fear that the presence
of their children, conceived through rape, will lead to further
suffering. Since independence, successive Rwandan governments
and dictators have used oppression and scapegoating to keep a hold
on power. As a result, fear has become entrenched in the nation’s
culture
and
society
throughout
history.46
Despite
the
RPF
government’s inclusive rhetoric under Paul Kagame, some survivors
are clearly still fearful of a repeat of the 1994 violence. An early
example of this comes from 1998, in which Francine highlights her
continued fear of repercussions for being a Tutsi, stemming from
the genocide:
I do not think this will ever be over for me, to be so
despised for having Tutsi blood. I think of my parents who
had always felt hunted in Ruhengeri. 47 I feel a sort of
shame to have to spend a lifetime feeling hunted, simply
for being what I am. The very moment my eyelids close
shut on all this, I weep inside, out of grief and
humiliation.48
Francine’s account shows what Langer describes as humiliated
memory. In it the subject ‘recalls an utter distress that shatters all
molds (sic) designed to contain a unified and irreproachable image
46 Laurent Nkongoli, in Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You…, p. 22.
47 Ruhengeri is a city in the Rwanda’s Northern Province.
48 Francine Niyitegeka, in Hatzfeld, Into the Quick of Life, p. 28.
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of the self’.49 The suffering provoked by such memories is difficult to
overcome over time. While attempts are made to ignore humiliated
memory in public posterity through the homogenisation of a
collective memory, its discourse runs contrary to the hope of a
heroic grander narrative.50 Suffering through memory becomes
eternal and can take over the survivors’ life, such as in this 2001
account from Jeanette, a survivor who was raped and contracted
Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).
I wanted to die. After the war I had hate – I felt like killing
myself whenever I saw a Hutu. I tried to jump into the
river but I saw my child holding my hand and I couldn’t.51
Examples such as Jeanette’s show that even after seven years,
memories of suffering have not healed. Studies conducted in 1996
and 2000 showed high levels of trauma and suffering were still
present in Rwanda’s post-genocide society.52 Some survivors, such
as Cecille and Angelique, have offered ambiguous views on their
ability to deal with their memories, and whether they truly want to
get over them:
49 Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 77.
50 Ibid., p. 110.
51 Jeannette, in ‘How Your Money Really Can Buy Hope’, Daily Express, 21
February 2001.
52 J. Steward, ‘Only Healing Heals: Concepts and Methods of Psycho-Social
Healing in Post-Genocide Rwanda’, in Clark and Kaufman, After Genocide, p.
172.
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I try to forget what happened in 1994… I would go mad if I
didn't try to forget. But I can't ever forget. It's not over yet
for me. I'm still suffering.53
I saw many people cut down beside me, and all this time I
have battled a tenacious fear, truly overwhelming terror. I
have overcome it, but I cannot say it has let go of me for
good.54
Angelique’s account suggests the possibility of overcoming the
turmoil of memories, and other Rwandans have also pointed to the
lightening of the burden of memory over time, particularly among
those who were only young children in 1994 and who may not
remember the events in such vivid detail.55 As with Holocaust
memory, survivors often say that the ability to retell their stories
allows them a certain level of closure to move on from their
suffering. When survivors do not get the opportunity to tell their
stories, it becomes more difficult to see survival as a victory, and
suffering continues.56 Silence becomes the ‘perpetuation of their
trauma’.57 As such it is seen as a vital step for Rwandan survivors to
move beyond their suffering, even if this means the unappealing
ideas of forgetting events or forgiving perpetrators. Motivations for
the survivor to overcome suffering through memory can include an
individualistic desire to forget what happened or, conversely, a
53 Cécille Mukampabuka, in ‘Women's Voices Rise as Rwanda Reinvents Itself’,
New York Times, 26 February 2005.
54 Angelique Mukamanzi, in J. Hatzfeld, A Time for Machetes: The Rwandan
Genocide, The Killers Speak (London, 2005), p. 177.
55 Sylvie Umubyeyi, in Hatzfeld, Into the Quick of Life, p. 161.
56 Waxman, Writing the Holocaust, p. 120.
57 Alexandre Dauge-Roth, in Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice
and Reconciliation in Rwanda, p. 202.
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collective
aim
to
reconcile
and
improve
society
for
future
generations.
In contrast to the positive collective hopes of reconciliation to
overcome suffering, there is also a negative collectivisation of
memory within Rwandan narratives of genocide and suffering.
Barbie Zelizer has identified how the authority of collective memory,
unlike
its
individual
counterpart,
strengthens
over
time
as
memories become homogenous and universal.58 This strengthens a
survivor’s bond or connection to a wider group. As a result, a
collective memory allows the individual the opportunity to suffer as
part of a group. Despite the continued suffering this entails, it can
offer a reprieve for the survivor. Sylvie’s account from 2003 shows
how the fear provoked by genocide memories has become a
collective activity:
There are those who fear the very hills where they should
be working their lands. There are those who fear
encountering Hutus on the road. There are Hutus who
saved Tutsis but who no longer dare go home to their
villages, for fear that no one will believe them. There are
people who fear visitors, or the night. There are innocent
faces that frighten others, as if they were criminals. There
is the fear of threats, the panic of memories.59
Collective memory does not simply evolve through an individual’s
desire to be attached to a group. An external and centralised force
can also actively promote it in the minds of the people. In this
58 Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, p. 3.
59 Sylvie, in Hatzfeld, A Time for Machetes, p. 116.
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case, the Rwandan government plays a key role in evoking group
memory amongst survivors of the genocide. Commemorations have
taken place annually since 1995, and there are now numerous
landmarks acknowledging genocide victims spread across the
country. While the memorials were created with good intentions,
they offer problems for elements of Rwandan society. One such
group is those survivors still suffering through memory, for whom
the memorials have had a significant adverse effect. In Rwanda,
centralised collective memory has taken the form of memorials
that remind people of the suffering of 1994, including mass graves,
collections of skulls and photographs of victims. In 1998, Claudine,
a survivor, described her feelings when she visits the church in
Ntarama, described at the time of the genocide as Rwanda’s
Auschwitz:60
When I walk past the Memorial church, I do not like to
look at these nameless bones. But I do sometimes
accompany foreign visitors who have erred on the road,
and then I cannot help but stare at the skulls. I am made
uncomfortable by the feeling these hollowed-out eye
sockets convey, of people who are perhaps not at rest,
after what they suffered, and who cannot bury their
humiliation beneath the earth.61
Claudine’s account suggests that Rwanda’s genocide memorials,
unlike those commemorating the Holocaust across Europe, actively
invoke remembering rather than allowing it to become contained
and detached from a person’s day-to-day life. In Jay Winter’s
60 Zelizer, Remembering to Forget, p. 205.
61 Claudine Kayitesi, in Hatzfeld, Into the Quick of Life, p. 148.
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analysis of war memorials in Europe, he suggests that memorials
are merely aids to remembering, and that it is only through people’s
use that these memorials can evoke remembrance. 62 It is clear that
in Rwanda there is regular use of memory aids. The difference may
be in the immediacy of the establishing of memorials in the
Rwandan case, in comparison to the period of half a century in
which Holocaust memorials were largely absent in Germany. With
over 200 memorials across the country, it has become almost
impossible to escape Rwanda’s network of memory. 63 It remains to
be seen whether over time, as the genocide gets more distant and
its
generation
of
survivors
pass
away,
the
way
Rwandans
contextualise the memorials within their own memories will change.
Children born after the genocide may grow to have a more positive
view, treating the memorials as the memory itself as recent
European generations have treated Holocaust tributes. However to
date, many Rwandans still situate their opinions of the memorials
within
grander
narratives
of
suffering
through
memory,
as
epitomised by the journalist Thomas Kamilindi, who said a decade
after the genocide that:
It is very difficult to put my life experiences behind me and
to forget. My wife and I live with it all the time. It is part of
me. Sometimes I shut myself in a room and cry when I
think about my little girl. It’s difficult when you know you
could have been killed and you survived, but your child
62 Winter and Sivan, ‘Setting the Framework’, in Winter and Sivan, War and
Remembrance in the Twentieth Century, p. 16.
63 N. Mirzoeff, ‘Invisible Again: Rwanda and Representation after the Genocide’,
African Arts 38 (2005), p. 89.
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was killed. Every time I go to the memorial sites and see
the skulls, I can’t help myself. When I look at them, I cry
because I remember my daughter. Maybe her skull is
somewhere, but I don’t know where.64
Kamilindi’s account shows the prominence of Rwanda’s memorials
for those who suffer through their memories. Through displaying
such obvious signs of the suffering that took place, the Rwandan
government has established a means by which Rwandans will
perhaps never be able to overcome their suffering. The memorial is
not distant and detached, but an ever-present reminder. However
the public displays of skulls and bones are not only a visible
demonstration of atrocity and suffering, but also a visible absence
of closure. For survivors, the mass of anonymous bones can
highlight an absence of closure on what happened to their families,
which can often be difficult to overcome.65
Suffering does not only take form within memory due to the
presence of memorials or the absence of closure. For some, their
mere survival is enough to provoke continued suffering through
memory, and makes the survivor question why so many others died
when they survived. This idea is known as the concept of ‘survivor
guilt’. Survivor guilt has featured prominently in survivor accounts
in past incidents of atrocity, for example, Holocaust survivors who
64 Thomas Kamilindi, ‘Journalism in a Time of Hate Media’ in Thompson, The
Media and the Rwandan Genocide, p. 141.
65 Patience, in Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and
Reconciliation in Rwanda, p. 265.
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witnessed their relatives being taken to concentration camps. 66
Although there has recently been a dismissal of the notion of
survivor guilt, it has been replaced by the idea of shame. 67 The
shame of survival can be seen in many Rwandan accounts. Suffering
does not come explicitly from a specific memory of the survivor, but
the simple fact that they survived and others perished. The main
source of anguish after the event is through shame. The subject
does not suffer through any form of turmoil they have experienced,
but instead through the ‘fortune’ that they survived the genocide:
There are… people who constantly change the details of a
fateful day because they believe that, on that day, their life
snatched away the luck from another life that was just as
worthy. Still, in spite of these zigzags, a person’s memories
don’t go away… People choose certain memories,
depending on their character, and they relive them as if
they had happened just last year and will go on for another
hundred years.68
Angelique also suggests that such shame is a reason for survivors to
adapt their stories, and prioritise certain memories over others, to
emphasise the fortune in their survival and the misfortune of those
who died. Such adapting and prioritising of memories in the
survivor’s mind can fall into what Paul Ricoeur describes as the
‘fragility of identity’ within manipulated memory. The three causes
of this fragility are the difficult relationship between identity and
time, the confrontation of one identity with others, and identity’s
66 Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 32.
67 R. Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton, 2009), p. 7.
68 Angelique, in Hatzfeld, A Time for Machetes, pp. 142-3.
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heritage in founding violence.69 Evidence of all of these aspects is
present
in
Rwandan
culture,
and
particularly
methods
of
remembering. The first cause Ricoeur uses, the difficult relationship
between identity and time, is the most pertinent here. Ricoeur
describes memory in this case as the ‘temporal component of
identity’.70 Angelique’s argument shows how Rwandans have
situated their memories of the genocide within the context of later
suffering at different periods, forming an identity dependent on
memory. The need to form an identity is thus inherent to the
emphasis on suffering through memory, and can allow the
opportunity for memories to be manipulated, intentionally or
otherwise.
Public memorials and national days of commemoration are not the
only methods with which the Rwandan government participates in
state-sponsored remembrance. Another key component in the
development of collective memory has been the restoration of the
gacaca courts, a form of local community justice. Gacaca was
implemented to help the devastated Rwandan legal system process
the vast numbers of criminal cases that stemmed out of the
genocide, while also attempting to promote forgiveness and
reconciliation.
The
system’s
seemingly
conflicting
goals
and
inherent flaws have been assessed and critiqued by organisations
69 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, pp. 81-82.
70 Ibid., p. 81.
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such as Amnesty International and experts such as Phil Clark. 71 The
impact the grass courts have had on the forms of remembering
within Rwanda, while mixed, are of great significance.
Within the Rwandan government, the focus is on gacaca as a
provider of justice and a level of closure and reconciliation.
However the courts, like the memorials and commemorations, can
provide an untimely reminder for survivors who are called to bear
witness. They could perhaps hear genocidaires deny their crimes, or
finally discover what happened to their relatives.72 As such, a
common outcome of gacaca for the survivors of the genocide is the
strengthening or re-emergence of suffering. In this example Clark
recounts the story of a trial he attended in 2003.
The two tarpaulins were opened at the gacaca hearing of 6
April to display a pile of rotten clothes in one and a heap of
cracked and decayed bones, evidently those of children, in
the other. On seeing the remains, the general assembly
showed signs of distress. Women and children began
crying. Several men shouted angrily at the president for
allowing such traumatising evidence to be displayed at an
already-fraught gacaca hearing, where the general
assembly was constructing a list of people who had died in
the cell during the genocide.73
This example of a gacaca trial highlights how the desire to retell,
the need for justice, and the unwillingness to forget can lead to the
71 Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in
Rwanda, p. 93.
72 Augustin, in Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and
Reconciliation in Rwanda, p. 318.
73 Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in
Rwanda, p. 85.
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failure to move on, and the persistence of suffering through
memory. Clark has highlighted how most justice systems in postconflict societies exclude the people, owing to the suffering and
trauma that might be resurrected.74 In demanding ‘Never Again’,
Rwanda promotes remembering at the centre of its culture. For
some survivors, this collectivisation of memory, particularly in the
form of compulsory attendance of gacaca, has enshrined the link
between remembering and suffering and made it harder to
overcome the burden of 1994. In the next chapter the presence of
gacaca takes on a truly salient role, as survivors look beyond their
suffering into demands for justice for the crimes committed against
them.
74 Ibid., p. 133.
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Ubutabera ~ Justice
In Arusha the big fish are there. 75 The victims travel there
but in gacaca everyone is already here: survivors,
perpetrators, judges. They are all here in the community.
That is the difference. If we want prisoners to come, they
come, they tell the truth, they apologise and ask for
forgiveness. We can see if they are touched, if they are
sincere. But in Arusha it isn’t possible for survivors to
experience this. They can’t tell whether the accused are
sincere. Those in Arusha haven’t asked for forgiveness.
Those in Arusha have committed many crimes here, they
should face us, the Rwandan family, but they avoid us by
being taken there.76
Justice is a key aspect of survivor statements after any instance of
atrocity. Unlike the notions of suffering, which looks to the past, and
75 Arusha, Tanzania, is where the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
has been seated since 1995.
76 Fidele, in Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation
in Rwanda, pp. 166-167.
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forgiveness and reconciliation, which look to the future, demands
for justice blend across both time frames. Justice is both a form of
dealing with suffering, and a way to forge a path to reconciliation. It
is in this uncomfortable position that post-conflict legal institutions
across the world, and especially in Rwanda, reside. 77 When
recollecting the Rwandan Genocide, survivors unsurprisingly place
significant emphasis on justice. Simple accounts of events are often
couched within grander narratives of punishment for perpetrators
or compensation for the victim. In this case, memory becomes the
memory of otherness; its duty is ‘to do justice, through memories, to
an other than the self’.78 The prevalence of justice within
remembering
has
fluctuated
over
time,
depending
on
both
individual and collective factors, and it is this form of remembering
that will be discussed in this chapter.
Bringing perpetrators to account has had an impact on ways of
remembering ever since the Holocaust. Olaf Jensen and ClausChristian Szejnmann have argued that the Nuremberg Trials
‘shaped… the discourses on perpetrators and memory in West
Germany in the post-war period’.79 In Rwanda, one of the most
important distinctions to be drawn when it comes to justice is
between the country’s own internal justice system, gacaca, and the
77 Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in
Rwanda, p. 37.
78 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 89.
79 Szejnmann, ‘Perpetrators of the Holocaust’ in Jensen and Szejnmann,
Ordinary People as Mass Murderers, p. 28.
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external court of jurisdiction, the International Criminal Tribunal
for Rwanda (ICTR), seated in Arusha, Tanzania. As Fidele’s account
above demonstrates, the two forms of trial have offered different
opportunities for perpetrators and different forms of justice for
survivors. The ICTR has been met with mixed reviews. It has
successfully punished many of the genocide’s political, military and
media leaders, and ‘clarified the historical truth’ of the genocide. 80
For
example,
when
leading
genocidaire
Theoneste
Bagosora
received the heaviest sentence possible in 2008, genocide survivors
expressed their relief.81 Despite this support, the ICTR has also
been criticised by Rwanda’s current government, with Paul Kagame
suggesting that the ICTR money would be better spent on
rebuilding Rwanda.82 For ordinary Rwandans however, perhaps due
to its immediacy and close proximity, it is gacaca that dominates
talk of justice, and will form the basis for this chapter.
Rwanda’s elites are keen to emphasise the strength of the gacaca
system. Fidele, a gacaca judge, sees the court’s insistence on
putting perpetrators and survivors face-to-face as a key strength it
has over the ICTR. However gacaca’s strengths are also its key
weaknesses. This research has already highlighted how attending a
trial can result in the re-emergence of memory and suffering for
victims. But there are other flaws in the system that mean
80 W. Schabas, ‘Post-Genocide Justice in Rwanda: A Spectrum of Options’ in
Clark and Kaufman, After Genocide, p. 211.
81 ‘Jailed for Life… The Butcher of Rwanda’, Daily Mirror, 19 December 2008.
82 P. Kagame, ‘Preface’ in Clark and Kaufman, After Genocide, p. xxv.
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remembering can often be superseded by criticism of the apparent
lack of justice – from both sides. Interestingly, a significant
proportion of these stories come from genocidaires or people
associated with them. Accounts of genocidaires are something this
dissertation has yet to touch on. They play a largely insignificant
role when it comes to suffering through memory, as it is very
difficult for a genocidaire to equate any form of suffering to the
memory of the genocide. However when it comes to associating
memory with justice, perpetrators’ views are as influential as
victims’. For example, Fulgence describes the situation for women
charged with genocide crimes:
The Hutu women imprisoned at Rilima are more fragile
than the men, because they are never visited by their
husbands or their brothers.83 Many of them were
denounced by envious people, to get the possessions of
their dead husbands. They know themselves to be rejected
by the past and the present. Which is why they are more
reluctant to admit their crimes. When they have done what
they have done, they keep silent.84
Perpetrators’ grievances reflect what they perceive as injustice
towards them, as the Rwandan government tries to get through a
significant number of cases in a short period of time. The lack of
officials and experts in gacaca, along with evidence that often
amounts to little more than hearsay, has meant gacaca has failed to
83 Rilima is the location of a prison for genocidaires in Rwanda’s Eastern
Province.
84 Fulgence Bunani, in Hatzfeld, A Time for Machetes, p. 104.
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meet the international minimum standards of a fair trial. 85
Fulgence’s account suggests that one of the groups persecuted
against by gacaca are female relatives of genocidaires, who are
excessively punished due to their inability to defend themselves.
This narrative is also notable for the way Fulgence relates the
injustice women suffer to the role of their male relatives. By
reducing women’s involvement in the genocide in this way, it
reflects the arguments put forward by German women after the
Second World War. In this era, ‘accused women exploited their
gender status’ and argued that they were ‘helpless assistants in a
regime that was led by men’.86 In the 1970s, as women’s
involvement in the Holocaust was analysed for the first time, they
were still given a role on the sidelines, their support being put down
to their need to conform to men’s racism.87
On a deeper level, Fulgence’s account highlights the many conflicts
of memory of a female prisoner of genocide. A connection is again
made between past and present, in the form of the justice of their
imprisonment and subsequent rejection from their families.
This
leads in turn to them keeping silent about their crimes, stifling their
memories in an attempt to avoid retribution. For criminals of the
genocide, gacaca offers some justification for remembering and
85 Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in
Rwanda, p. 93.
86 Szejnmann, ‘Perpetrators of the Holocaust’ in Jensen and Szejnmann,
Ordinary People as Mass Murderers, p. 29.
87 C. Herkommer, ‘Women Under National Socialism: Women’s Scope for Action
and the Issue of Gender’ in Jensen and Szejnmann, Ordinary People as Mass
Murderers, p. 103.
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recollecting. Its plea bargaining system means that a confession
results in a sentence being roughly halved, with life imprisonment
cut to between twenty and thirty years.88
Perpetrators also show anger towards the government for what they
believe is unfair bias towards survivor groups. According to
Alphonse, a genocidaire, survivors are given benefits from the
government, and are admonished of any crimes they may have
committed regardless of whether they have conformed to Rwanda’s
reconciliation program. The belief amongst some genocidaires that
they are being treated differently to war criminals on the side of the
RPF is damaging to government hopes of reconciliation, as this
dissertation will analyse later. It also creates a form of collective
memory based around the theme of justice that categorises
Rwandans
into
two
groups:
survivors
of
the
genocide
and
perpetrators of the genocide, ignoring the blurring of these
boundaries. This collectivisation has been actively promoted by Paul
Kagame.89
Many of them (survivors) live together now in new houses
because the government has built these houses for
survivors… Some survivors have been seeking revenge.
Some of them have killed our families and we don’t know
why those perpetrators haven’t been sent to jail… I know
some of these survivors don’t want Hutu on the hills… The
88 Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in
Rwanda, p. 78.
89 Kagame, ‘Preface’ in Clark and Kaufman, After Genocide, p. xxi.
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government helps the survivors but not other ethnic
groups.90
By discussing the government’s treatment of members of Rwandan
society in this way, Alphonse too falls inadvertently into making the
same distinctions between the groups involved. Having banned talk
of
ethnicity, the RPF government has
instead created new
categories based around their apparent role in the genocide. 91 By
‘survivors’, Alphonse is referring to Tutsi survivors of the 1994
genocide, whereas Hutu who have been the subject of violence
themselves are not treated to this term. Hutu who risked their lives
to protect Tutsi friends are ignored in Rwanda’s official memory. As
Nigel Eltringham has argued, the term ‘Hutu moderate’ has been
consigned to the past, suggesting that all Hutu present in Rwanda
today were supporters of the genocide.92 Another interesting
development in the language of remembering genocide is the word
used to describe the events. When Lee Ann Fujii interviewed
Rwandans, the most common word used to describe the genocide
was intambara, the kinyarwanda word for ‘war’.93 Not only does this
suggest
the
apparent
interconnectedness
between
war
and
genocide, but also that Rwandans who use the term saw themselves
as victims of war, and saw themselves in a group against an
identifiable opposition group. Yet officially, only one group is
90 Alphonse, in Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and
Reconciliation in Rwanda, p. 119.
91 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, pp. 266-267.
92 Eltringham, Accounting for Horror, p. 98.
93 Fujii, Killing Neighbours, pp. 14-15.
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acknowledged as having committed violence, and only one is
acknowledged as having been the victim. Rwanda’s official week of
mourning
therefore
excludes
Hutu
mourning.94
As
Rene
Lemarchand has argued, Rwanda needs to give proper recognition
to the fact that ‘Hutu and Tutsi were victims of calamity, for which
responsibility is shared by elements of both communities’, and not
allow the growth of a victim-centred collective memory. 95 Yet many
Rwandans, perpetrators and survivors alike, focus on their own
victimhood. For example, genocidaires such as Alphonse talk of how
survivors are overcompensated for their losses:
The judges have been asking many people to pay
compensation for the property they stole in 1994. But then
many survivors start asking for ten times as much
property as they had then… Some people lost their house
during the genocide and now they ask for 2 million francs.
Two million! Or they claim they should receive five goats
when everyone knows they only had one... But people here
are very poor. The prisoners come home and their families
have nothing, so how can they give compensation?96
Here Alphonse restores pre-genocide and post-genocide memories,
without talking about the actual events of the genocide. This
suggests the triumph of ‘common memory’, a detached view in
hindsight of subsequent events, over ‘deep memory’. 97 The crimes
committed against a victim are given insignificant attention in
94 Eltringham, Accounting for Horror, p. 71.
95 Lemarchand, ‘The Politics of Memory in Post-Genocide Rwanda’ in Clark and
Kaufman, After Genocide, p. 70.
96 Alphonse, in Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and
Reconciliation in Rwanda, p. 126.
97 Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. xiii.
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comparison to what they had before and what they have demanded
since. As with many of those who were not subject to genocidal
violence, Alphonse talks about the genocide as merely a part of the
wider picture.98 By accusing survivors of lying about the severity of
their losses, such analysis could be said to verge dangerously close
to genocide denial, a popular talking point in contemporary
Rwanda. Tom Ndahiro, a Rwandan journalist and human rights
activist, has argued that survivors remain victims even in the postgenocide era, accusing perpetrators of an ‘ongoing preoccupation…
to alter or erase the world’s memory of the genocide’. 99 He believes
that there should be justice and accountability not just for
genocidaires, but also for genocide deniers.100
It is not only perpetrators who talk of injustice in post-genocide
Rwandan society. Survivors of the genocide have often shown anger
or
bewilderment
at
gacaca’s
methods
for
achieving
justice.
Instances such as the sudden announcement that some prisoners
would be released early, due to prison overcrowding, and the
banning of the main opposition party, the Mouvement Démocratique
Républicain (MDR), have both triggered fears of renewed violence
amongst survivors.101 Survivors also have concerns about the ease
98 Fujii, Killing Neighbours, p. 81.
99 Tom Ndahiro, ‘Genocide-Laundering: Historical Revisionism, Genocide Denial
and the Rassemblement Republicain pour la Democratie au Rwanda’ in Clark
and Kaufman, After Genocide, p. 101.
100 Ibid., p. 102.
101 P. Clark, ‘The Rules (and Politics) of Engagement: The Gacaca Courts and
Post-Genocide Justice, Healing and Reconciliation in Rwanda’ in Clark and
Kaufman, After Genocide, p. 318.
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with which genocidaires can lie about what they did. For example in
May 2003, Solomon, who lost his family during the genocide,
explained how suspects at gacaca often denied their crimes:
It is very hard to talk to the killers because they usually lie
about what they have done… They tell me all kinds of lies
to try and make us believe they are innocent – ‘I was sick
at the time (of the genocide)’, ‘I was in a different
community’, ‘I didn’t kill’. The truth may come one day but
we will have to wait.102
Solomon’s account paints an interesting picture of the thorny
relationship between justice, individual memory and collective
memory in post-genocide Rwanda. By arguing that the killers
‘usually’ lie, Solomon falls into a form of remembering that has
remained
consistent
and
persisted
throughout
post-genocide
Rwandan society, and which is integral to the idea of justice. By
invoking collective memory, the Rwandan government has promoted
the collectivisation of people into categories of criminals and
victims. The previous accounts show evidence of this coming from
both perpetrators and survivors. Political scientists have accused
the government of promoting division between Rwanda’s groups
through invoking collective memory; for example, the RPF’s account
of the genocide suggests that all Hutu benefited or stood to benefit
from the violence.103 Such criticisms are starting to be raised by
102 Solomon, in Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and
Reconciliation in Rwanda, p. 314.
103 H. Hintjens, ‘Reconstructing Political Identities in Rwanda’ in Clark and
Kaufman, After Genocide, p. 87.
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Rwandans, as this account from an exiled Rwandan academic
indicates:
There is a globalisation of guilt for Hutu, when not all of
them are guilty. The international community has never
globalised guilt, but emphasised the principle of personal
guilt and that each person should go before the ICTR
depending on their individual responsibility.104
By
deliberately
promoting
collective
memory,
the
Rwandan
government has participated in this globalisation of guilt of
Rwanda’s majority ethnic group, the Hutu. And through this,
ordinary Rwandan Tutsi have also applied such categories to the
population. Such identities have been promoted since the early
stages of the RPF government. For example, on the first anniversary
of the genocide in July 1995, a political commissar with the army
identified Rwanda’s ‘criminal population’ of genocidaires.105 The
commissar’s view shows the ability to manipulate facts in the
formation of collective memory. The view of the RPF, who entered
Rwanda from exile in Uganda in 1990 to reclaim the country, would
suggest that every Rwandan citizen they encountered was either a
survivor of genocide or a perpetrator of genocide.
Statistics and common sense have disproved this argument. Taking
the established estimate of 800,000 deaths in the genocide, this
would equate to at most 800,000 killers. But given the number of
104 Rwandan academic in exile, in Eltringham, Accounting for Horror, p. 72.
105 Political commissar, in M. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers
(Princeton, 2002), p. 7.
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genocidaires who have confessed to multiple killings, this figure will
be significantly smaller. Even if for every death there were a
different killer, the number of killers would only come to 12% of the
Hutu population.106 Both genocidaires and Tutsi survivors are
therefore in a minority compared to the significant majority of those
Rwandans who did not participate in the genocide. However
collective memory ignores this group, focusing on and exaggerating
the perpetrator and survivor groups. The example of contemporary
Rwanda draws interesting comparisons to post-Holocaust Europe,
in which Poles and Jews saw themselves as the primary survivor
group,
constructing
a
national
memory
of
victimhood
and
destruction.107 The establishment of a survivor group, contrasted
directly to a perpetrator group – denied by Germany at the time –
can be seen to equate to the growth within Rwanda of a collective
identity of victims built around the subject of justice for genocide
crimes.
Collective memory has proliferated the individual memories of
ordinary
Rwandan
citizens
to
manipulate
the
facts
and
exaggerate the figures. Despite having no way of knowing just
how many Rwandan Hutu were involved in the genocide, in
December 1995 a survivor named Mectilde said that just 10% of
Hutu had helped Tutsi in the genocide, in contrast to the other
90%
who
had
killed
either
under
106 Eltringham, Accounting for Horror, p. 69.
107 Young, The Texture of Memory, p. 115.
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enthusiastically.108 Accounts such as this show how a survivor can
move beyond their own individual memory of single events to
conform to a grander narrative, popularised by an exterior force
such as the government. While it could be argued that accounts
from 1995 are too proximate to the event to allow the survivor a
greater degree of perspective, views such as Mectilde’s have
continued to be popular, even becoming more concrete. For
example, by 1998 survivors such as Marie Louise were treating
all Hutu with suspicion:
Sometimes, Hutu women come back to me asking for work
on the plots. I talk to them, try to ask them why they
wanted to kill us without ever having complained of
anything before. But they do not want to know about it.
They keep saying that they did nothing… They say it was
the interahamwe who forced neighbours to cut, otherwise
they would have been themselves killed, and they seem
happy enough with this as an answer.109
Here
Marie
Louise
shows
how
far
the
collective
memory
interpreting all Hutu as killers had developed after the genocide.
Individual Hutu women are asked why they themselves participated
in the genocide, and when they respond, Marie Louise is sceptical
about their answer. The implication is that the women should
assume a collective responsibility for the actions of other members
of their ethnicity. Even those Rwandan Tutsi who seek to look
beyond ethnic difference, as the state has advocated since the turn
of the century, equate Tutsi to survivors and victims and Hutu as
108 Mectilde, in Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p. 224.
109 Marie Louise Kagoyire, in Hatzfeld, Into the Quick of Life, pp. 93-94.
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perpetrators and killers. The popularity of the Rwandan ‘liberation’,
when the RPF successfully forced the genocidaires into exile and
seized power, can be compared to the East German emphasis on the
triumph of the Red Army in May 1945. While this led to the
marginalisation of Holocaust memory, it created a common bond
between survivors, German communists, that excluded others,
German Jews, in much the same way as Rwandan Genocide memory
defines Tutsi as survivors and Hutu as not. 110 The result, in both
cases, is a form of collective memory in which one group of
survivors is not integrated into the grander narrative.
This chapter has shown how when it comes to remembering
through forms of justice, perpetrators have been critical of what
they perceive as government biases in favour of the survivor group.
It has also shown how the government has promoted group identity,
popularising a collective memory that espouses the Hutu ethnicity
as the cause of genocide. These two forms of remembering have
aligned when it comes to criticism of the RPF’s role in the genocide.
The RPF’s refusal to acknowledge its own crimes in the civil war
between 1990 and 1994, which are not punishable through gacaca,
has led to criticism, as these accounts demonstrate:
110 Herf, ‘The Holocaust and the Competition of Memories in Germany, 19451999’ in Michman, Remembering the Holocaust in Germany, 1945-2000, pp. 2324.
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Why was there no condemnation of the Byumba massacres
of 1990?111 112
Why when Tutsis are killed that is recognised as genocide,
but if 200,000 Hutu refugees are killed in Zaire that is not
genocide?113
What about Hutu being killed? Why were Hutu being
killed?114
These accounts show that, despite the government’s emphasis on
the atrocities committed by Hutu against Tutsi, the memory of RPF
atrocity against Hutu has remained strong. Memories of the
violence have persisted despite RPF oppression and international
neglect, and are now beginning to grow as the international
community begins to put pressure on the Rwandan government. 115
Failure to acknowledge RPF crimes has played a significant role in
connecting memory and justice in the minds of Rwanda’s Hutu
population. In the next chapter such government biases in the way
it constructs collective memory will again take on an important role,
as Rwandans attempt to look beyond their own suffering and
demands for justice to broader hopes of reconciliation between
perpetrators and survivors.
111 Byumba is the capital of Rwanda’s Northern District, and one of the first
major cities encountered by the RPF as it invaded in 1990.
112 Former Rwandan minister in exile, in Eltringham, Accounting for Horror, p.
101.
113 Rwandan NGO worker in exile, in Eltringham, Accounting for Horror, p. 118.
114 Theogene Munyanshogoza, in ‘Hutu and Tutsi Ask: Is a Unified Rwanda
Possible?’, New York Times, 6 April 1999.
115 F. Reyntjens, ‘Rwanda Ten Years On: From Genocide to Dictatorship’, African
Affairs 103 (2004), p. 210.
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Kubabarira ~ Forgiveness
The former government is making incursions. The prisons
are overcrowded. We must make the country secure. We
must have reconciliation. We must not think of Hutus and
Tutsis. We must think as one nation.116
At the end of all incidents of atrocity, the need for reconciliation is
often a key talking point. After an event such as civil war or
genocide, the way in which a nation and its victims can move
beyond their memories of suffering to attempt to forge an attitude
of forgiveness and reconciliation is vital. Many outside observers
tend to prioritise the need for reconciliation after such an event,
however for those who experienced it, memories of suffering and
demands for justice can often be barriers in the way of its
achievement. In contrast to suffering, which has its roots in the
past, and justice, which connects both past and future, the link
between memory and forgiveness is firmly based in hopes for the
future. In the Rwandan case, reconciliation and forgiveness have
been seen as a key part of society since the immediate aftermath of
the genocide, as emphasised by the former Prime Minister Faustin
Twagiramungu’s statement above, made in March 1995. It is the
extent to which ordinary Rwandan citizens have conformed to this
demand to forgive that will form the basis of this chapter.
116 Faustin Twagiramungu, in ‘A Prayer Before Dying’, Daily Mirror, 31 March
1995.
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As with suffering and justice, reconciliation and forgiveness can be
promoted through collective memory. Significantly, the presence of
reconciliation as a prominent part of Rwanda’s memory of genocide
has grown continuously throughout the post-genocide period.
Largely absent from original accounts, talk of reconciliation and
forgiveness made within a collective framework appears in greater
quantity around the turn of the century. They often talk of a ‘need’
or ‘must’ to forgive and reconcile, as if this form of remembering
was being promoted from above. An example of this comes from a
survivor, Nsabiyera, in 2003:
Holding grudges blocks better thinking… We (as survivors)
must separate out and clarify our emotions so that we
realise that forgiveness at gacaca can be a process of
healing. First we must forgive ourselves for not forgiving
others in the past. Then we will be ready to forgive others
and to experience healing.117
Nsabiyera here highlights one of the government-led agencies that
actively invokes collective memory with an intention to reconcile.
The introduction of gacaca was aimed not just to alleviate suffering
and instigate justice, as has already been discussed, but also to
promote
reconciliation.118
The
RPF
government’s
rhetoric
of
reconciliation draws comparisons to the circumstances in both West
and East Germany after the Second World War. The new leaders had
117 Nsabiyera, in Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and
Reconciliation in Rwanda, p. 295.
118 Clark, ‘The Rules (and Politics) of Engagement’ in Clark and Kaufman, After
Genocide, p. 300.
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come from unpopular minority groups, and therefore needed to
form an inclusive memory that united their populations. 119 In the
case of Rwanda, the RPF were originally formed from an exiled
group, absent for over three decades, and therefore needed to
identify themselves with the Rwandan population. In his account,
Nsabiyera repeats many of the official arguments used by the RPF.
Reconciliation is also all-encompassing. Forgiveness is not just
directed at the perpetrators, but at the self. For Nsabiyera it is not
only the genocidaire who has to be held accountable and then
forgiven, but also the victim. Having failed to forgive in the past,
the victim has also wronged, and they must learn to forgive
themselves before forgiving others. This narrative demonstrates a
rare willingness to accept a common, universal blame, virtually
unparalleled in other accounts of atrocity.
By revealing the need to forgive the self before forgiving others,
Nsabiyera alludes to a wider narrative in Rwandan society crucial to
the issue of reconciliation and forgiveness. This is the ‘culture of
impunity’, a culture fostered in the late colonial era that meant
criminals were not held accountable for violence. 120 Here the
memories of justice and reconciliation are inter-linked. As the
Rwandan journalist Jean Baptiste Kayigamba argues, ‘survivors are
encouraged to forgive and forget the crimes committed against
119 Margalit, ‘Divided Memory?’ in Michman, Remembering the Holocaust in
Germany, 1945-2000, p. 31.
120 Schabas, ‘Post-Genocide Justice in Rwanda’ in Clark and Kaufman, After
Genocide, p. 207.
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them’, while the government is ‘not administering full justice to
those found guilty of genocide crimes’.121 Ending impunity cannot
just come through finding people guilty, as Nigel Eltringham argues,
but through a coherent effort to deal with all allegations in a
transparent way.122 With the ICTR’s jurisdiction not extending to
cover the 1990 to 1994 civil war period, and the RPF government
clearly unwilling to discuss such issues, impunity is still a major
issue in post-genocide Rwanda, and it is unsurprising that many
Rwandans demand justice before forgiveness.
With justice encountering practical and political issues, forgiveness
has become the main path Rwanda’s authorities seek to forge in
building reconciliation. While government-invoked references to
justice have been based around groups, Eltringham has highlighted
how forgiveness is only possible if individuals are held to account,
otherwise the perpetrator would seem elusive. 123 One core method
for this comes from gacaca. Since 2008 the subject of forgiveness
has been officially adopted in Rwanda’s Gacaca Law.124 Gacaca’s
own judges have expressed its purpose of promoting reconciliation,
even going as far as encouraging perpetrators to retell memories of
their crimes in order to begin the path to forgiveness, as this judge
explains:
121 Jean Baptiste Kayigamba, ‘Without Justice, No Reconciliation: A Survivor’s
Experience of Genocide’ in Clark and Kaufman, After Genocide, p. 40.
122 Eltringham, Accounting for Horror, p. 146.
123 Ibid., p. 75.
124 Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in
Rwanda, p. 279.
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Truth is the liberator and we must help detainees to
confess their crimes… We won’t hurt them with lies and
we will welcome them home, ready to forgive them, so
they will tell the truth about what they have done.125
Here the main emphasis is not to get perpetrators to confess in
order to punish them, but in order to forgive them. This ties in
with
what Susanne Buckley-Zistel
describes
as
a
‘chosen
amnesia’ present in the minds of Rwandans since the genocide. 126
While Buckley-Zistel applies chosen amnesia, the deliberate
blocking of memories, to pre-genocide instances of violence, it
can also be applied to the system of gacaca. By prioritising
forgiveness and reconciliation, this judge downplays the crimes
that were actually committed and the effects they had, bringing
to mind a chosen amnesia that ‘constitutes a deliberate social
coping mechanism to deal with the disruptive experiences of the
past’.127 The subject makes a conscious effort to not draw on a
specific memory, although it is still stored in the mind, in order to
reconcile.
In some cases, Rwandan survivors talk of a higher power even
than the government as a reason for putting their memories of
suffering
and
justice
behind
them
and
moving
towards
125 A local pastor, in Clark, ‘The Rules (and Politics) of Engagement’ in Clark
and Kaufman, After Genocide, p. 306.
126 S. Buckley-Zistel, ‘We are Pretending Peace: Local Memory and the Absence
of Social Transformation and Reconciliation in Rwanda’ in Clark and Kaufman,
After Genocide, p. 128.
127 Ibid., p. 136.
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reconciliation. Rwanda’s churches have joined the government in
promoting a philosophy of reconciliation.128 Having declined in
significance in the late colonial and immediate post-colonial era,
religion has become increasingly important since the genocide. 129
Many Rwandans now highlight the importance of Christian values
in forging the country’s post-genocide future, and forgiveness is a
key part of this. For example, Marie-Claire says that it is only the
word of God that tells her to forgive, while Jean Baptiste
emphasises the ‘duty’ to forgive:
I have already forgiven the killers. God forgives, therefore
we must forgive… There is no one pressuring me to
forgive the people who killed my family. It is only the word
of God that tells me to forgive.130
We must forgive because God forgives… It is our Christian
duty and if we do not forgive then we ourselves become
the sinners.131
Jean Baptiste’s account is another example of how Rwandans have
evoked a collective and external influence in their memories. It also
highlights one crucial aspect of forgiveness – that the failure to
forgive and move on from the past is as bad as what the killers had
done. His argument is similar to Nsabiyera’s, which implied that
failing to forgive in the past had had a negative effect and needed to
128 Clark, ‘The Rules (and Politics) of Engagement’ in Clark and Kaufman, After
Genocide, p. 337.
129 Marie-Chantal, in Hatzfeld, A Time for Machetes, p. 138.
130 Marie-Claire, in Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and
Reconciliation in Rwanda, p. 320.
131 Jean Baptiste, in Clark, ‘The Rules (and Politics) of Engagement’ in Clark and
Kaufman, After Genocide, p. 306.
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be forgiven itself. Here, while it is the genocidaires who committed
atrocities in the past, the onus is now on survivors to forgive in
order to help society progress. Truth-telling amongst perpetrators
and punishment from the government are not salient in terms of
reconciliation, instead, it is the role of individual victims to lead the
way to reconciliation. By putting reconciliation in the hands of
survivors, Jean Baptiste gives an individual agency to the act of
remembering and forgiving, albeit using a collective framework,
Christianity, to do so.
In spite of the Rwandan government’s inclusive and conciliatory
rhetoric, a line of memory present throughout the nation’s postgenocide era has criticised the attempt to collectivise forgiveness
and deny the individual memories that block reconciliation. Since
1994, Rwandan accounts emphasising the failure of reconciliation
have diverged to critique a multitude of problems that have
impacted upon individuals’ agencies in forgiving and reconciling.
Recently, such narratives have become increasingly popular as
opponents of the RPF government raise issues with the regime. For
example in May 2010, Victoire Ingabire, the leader of the main
opposition Unified Democratic Forces (UDF) coalition, argued that
the RPF government has prevented the people from talking openly
about the genocide.132 In forcing reconciliation from above, the
government has stifled individual agency of remembering and
132 Victoire Ingabire, in ‘Rwanda's Mix: Order, Tension, Repressiveness’, New
York Times, 1 May 2010.
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forgiving. Indeed, RPF foreign minister Louise Mushikiwabo has
openly stated that not a single individual would be allowed to
‘tamper’ with the nation’s program of reconciliation.133 In October
2010, Ingabire was arrested on six counts of terrorism and genocide
denial, and has been criticised by the state-sponsored national press
as a ‘divisionist’.
As a result, Rwandan accounts often show signs of a refusal to talk
about memories of atrocity, not because of an individual desire to
forget, but because of the RPF government’s collective pressure to
reconcile. This could be best equated to the ‘obligation’ of some
Holocaust survivors ‘to stay silent about certain aspects of their
experiences for fear that they do not belong to the history of the
Holocaust’.134 Evidence of Rwandans keeping silent about memories
in order to strengthen reconciliation is evident as early as 1998, in
this account from Innocent, a survivor:
I see today that there is still embarrassment in talking of
the survivors, even amongst Rwandans, even amongst
Tutsis. I think that everyone wishes, in certain ways, that
the survivors would move aside from genocide. As if they
wished to leave to other people, who had not directly run
the risk of being cut by machete chops, the task of taking
care of it. As if we were now in the way.135
This account demonstrates one of the key factors in looking at
memory and reconciliation in Rwanda – the incompatibility of the
133 Louise Mushikiwabo, in ‘Rwanda's Mix’, New York Times, 1 May 2010.
134 Waxman, Writing the Holocaust, p. 138.
135 Innocent Rwililiza in Hatzfeld, Into the Quick of Life, p. 79.
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two. At its heart, the decision to make reconciliation the primary
focus of Rwandan society since the genocide has been detrimental
to Rwandan memory. The individual’s need to remember, and the
desire to take grief and forgiveness at their own pace, has been
obscured by a collective demand to reconcile. Critics have argued
that forgiveness following mass atrocity actually means enforced
forgetting.136 The collective good overtakes an individual’s agency in
remembering. Yet in another sense, forgiveness may promote
remembering, as it involves the need for both the perpetrator and
the victim to acknowledge what took place.137
The gacaca process and its limitations provide a natural hinge
around which Rwandans have discussed reconciliation in the early
twenty-first century. As this chapter has already demonstrated,
officials
have seen
gacaca
as
providing
an
opportunity
for
reconciliation from above, as survivors and perpetrators face each
other and the latter confess to their crimes. However the courts
also provide negative experiences that can hold the act of forgiving
back – for example, reminders of suffering or the accused lying
about their crimes. When Rwandans talk of gacaca’s effect on
reconciliation, it generally refers to how little effect it has actually
had:
136 Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in
Rwanda, p. 42.
137 Ibid.,, p. 298.
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Reconciliation will never happen in Rwanda because we
can’t forget what happened in the past. Gacaca won’t
change any of this. People are still too hurt and people are
still too angry.138
There is no reconciliation here. There is no more violence
but there isn’t reconciliation. Even in church, Hutu sit on
one side and Tutsi on the other… When we go to gacaca,
the Hutu families sit there and the Tutsi families sit
here.139
The failure of gacaca in forging a path to reconciliation could be
down to a strong individual agency present in the decision over
whether to forgive. Here ‘I’ replaces ‘we’, and Rwandans neglect
the collective, government-provoked need to reconcile in favour of
their own personal memories and desires. As a result, such
accounts often discuss the impossibility or unwillingness to forgive.
Before the creation of gacaca and the government-led downplaying
of ethnicity, forgiveness was less popular. Instead, accounts such as
Edmond’s, whose brother was killed in the genocide, talked of the
need for permanent punishment. The Rwandan example shows links
to Holocaust testimony in the immediate aftermath of the Second
World War, where survivor accounts gave prominence to revenge
far more than reconciliation than they did later. 140 In this account
from the mid-1990s, Edmond says that if he had the opportunity to
talk to his brother’s killer, he would use it to remind the perpetrator
of the atrocities he had committed:
138 Augustin, in Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and
Reconciliation in Rwanda, p. 312.
139 Chantal, in Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and
Reconciliation in Rwanda, p. 124.
140 Waxman, Writing the Holocaust, p. 108.
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I’d like to talk to him. I want him to explain to me what
this thing was, how he could do this thing. My surviving
sister said, ‘Let’s denounce him.’ I saw what was
happening – a wave of arrests all at once – and I said,
‘What good is prison, if he doesn’t feel what I feel? Let him
live in fear.’ When the time is right, I want to make him
understand that I’m not asking for his arrest, but for him
to live forever with what he has done. I’m asking for him to
think about it for the rest of his life. It’s a kind of
psychological torture.141
For some, the inability or unwillingness to forgive has not changed
even as the genocide becomes more distant, and the government
increasingly promotes reconciliation. Individual agency in Rwandan
memory has persisted in spite of collectivist goals. In the postHolocaust era, the Jewish world questioned why German Jews ‘who
barely escaped death remain in the midst of their potential
murderers’, arguing they had refused to ‘recognize the lessons of
history’.142 While for Rwandan survivors the option of not living with
perpetrators may not be possible, some individuals do at least
refuse to forgive. By the early twenty-first century some, such as
Agnes, said they could never forgive. Others such as Romain offered
the possibility of forgiveness in the future, but they were unsure
when:
I can never forgive that man… When I go to gacaca, I will
tell the judges who this man is because I know him and I
141 Edmond Mrugamba in Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You…, p. 240.
142 M. Brenner, ‘The Changing Role of the Holocaust in the German-Jewish
Public Voice’ in Michman, Remembering the Holocaust in Germany, 1945-2000,
p. 112.
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saw with my own eyes what he did. I will never be able to
forgive him.143
I am able to forgive those who killed my brother and best
friend but not now. I am too angry… When I forget what
happened, I will be able to forgive. Forgetting though will
take a very long time.144
Agnes and Romain offer different interpretations of the finality of
forgiveness. In contrast to the anonymous judge quoted earlier in
this chapter, for Agnes gacaca will be used to punish. There is no
hope of reconciliation. In contrast, Romain unusually places
forgiving with forgetting, and argues that for him, forgetting must
come first. In a sense Romain’s account shows the intrusiveness of
collective memory, whereby he will not be able to forgive until he
forgets, and the act of forgetting is blocked by Rwanda’s centralised
culture of memory. However in another sense Romain demonstrates
the strength of individual agency – that until he can forget, it will be
impossible for him to participate in the process of forgiveness. As
Phil Clark argues, for individuals who witnessed the genocide first
hand, forgetting is neither possible nor desirable.145
Despite individual moves against forgiveness, Rwanda’s unique
circumstances make it difficult for its citizens to block such
progress. As this dissertation has already shown, post-genocide
143 Agnes, in Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and
Reconciliation in Rwanda, pp. 281-282.
144 Romain, in Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and
Reconciliation in Rwanda, p. 283.
145 Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in
Rwanda, p. 291.
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Rwanda has seen killers and survivors re-united within their
communities, and this has had a significant impact on the way
Rwandans remember in terms of both suffering and justice. It has
also effected how Rwandans talk of the possibility of forgiveness. As
Yvette’s
account
suggests,
the
presence
of
genocidaires
in
communities can also encourage victims to forgive:
I met the man who killed members of my family. He
accepted that he had killed them and said how he done it…
In our country you may be in a conversation with someone
who has killed your loved ones. You may not be their friend
but you can be in the same society and live peacefully.146
Yvette shows the possibility for individual and collective desires to
conform, and the possibility that a survivor can live peacefully
alongside a genocidaire who harmed them or their family. For
others such as Francine, the collective requirement to forget has
clashed with individual desires. Her account suggests an ‘incognito
of forgiveness’, hidden behind ‘the figure of a public exercise of
political reconciliation’.147 She offers the possibility of something
new – reconciliation without forgiveness.
We must simply go back to living, since life has so
decided… We shall return to drawing water together, to
exchanging neighbourly words, to selling grain to one
another. In twenty years, fifty years, there will perhaps be
boys and girls who will learn about the genocide in books.
For us, though, it is impossible to forgive.148
146 Yvette Mujwaneza, in ‘My Country Has Made Astonishing Progress’, Sunday
Express, 4 April 2004.
147 Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 485.
148 Francine, in Hatzfeld, A Time for Machetes, p. 185.
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Francine expresses the overarching themes of memory through
forgiveness present in Rwandan society in the post-genocide era. In
a sense, she has moved on from her memories of the genocide and
allowed the community to build again. However there are limits to
the process of reconciliation. Again, it is impossible to forgive on an
individual level. For those who lived through the genocide, their
individual
agency
actively
provokes
memory,
blocking
the
government’s desire to forgive. The job of learning about the
genocide,
and
therefore
allowing
the
true
opportunity
for
reconciliation and forgiveness, falls not to the current generation
but to future ones. And finally, Francine again refers to the ‘must’ of
reconciliation, and not the ‘want’. By referring to this demand in the
collective sense, she again attests to the submission of individual
desires to the collective.
The past three chapters have shown how Rwandans remember the
genocide in relation to three key themes – suffering, justice and
forgiveness. They have analysed the various tangents these themes
have taken in relation to individual and collective memories, postgenocide events and popular central narratives. They have explored
the development of each of these tangents and compared them to
Rwanda’s political science and Holocaust memory studies. This
dissertation will conclude by bringing these themes together,
determining the place genocide memory holds in Rwanda today and
60
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where it might go in the future, and offering avenues for further
research.
Conclusion
By refusing to remain silent or silenced, survivors aim not
only to keep the memory of those who died alive, but also
to gain social recognition and legitimacy within the
ongoing dialogues through which social memory and
belonging are shaped. Their testimony, then, aims not only
to represent the past as it has been witnessed, but at the
same time symbolises a social performance of the
survivors’ agency within their community… The
testimonial impulse… signals a desire for connectedness
that requires survivors to forge the social recognition of
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their disconnection so that their alterity does not amount
to their exclusion.149
In July 1994, Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Front swept
aside the genocidal forces of the Rwandan government, pushing
them into exile and achieving political power for themselves. Ever
since, 4 July has been celebrated as Rwanda’s Liberation Day, a day
in which the nation remembers the victims of the genocide.
Liberation Day is the focal point of Rwanda’s culture of memory,
around which its memorials of skulls and the ‘remembering’ society
Ibuka form lasting, 365-days-a-year reminders. And, since 2004, the
commemorations have adopted the post-Holocaust slogan ‘Never
Again’, suggesting that through remembering Rwanda will never
again descend into ethnic violence.
My research has explored contemporary Rwanda’s ‘culture of
memory’ from three avenues – suffering, justice and forgiveness. In
so doing, I have demonstrated the complexities the centralisation
and collectivisation of memory have brought to Rwandan citizens.
In a sense, the inherent problem is that each contradicts the others.
On an individual level, by suffering through their memories a
survivor is less likely to forgive those who committed crimes against
him. Collectively, by suffering and remembering as a group,
Rwanda’s survivors separate themselves from the rest of society,
lessening prospects of forgiveness. By connecting memory to
149 Dauge-Roth, in Clark, The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and
Reconciliation in Rwanda, p. 273.
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justice, Rwandan individuals again demand punishment over
forgiveness. And through gacaca, the group identities of survivors
and perpetrators are again strengthened, with each accusing the
other of lying, thus making reconciliation difficult.
Like in West Germany after the Second World War, in Rwanda the
key dilemma is now to build ‘a democracy that can incorporate a
guilty majority alongside an aggrieved and fearful minority’. 150 By
maintaining memories of suffering alongside demands for justice
and reconciliation, as we have seen, the Rwandan government has
seemingly created an infeasible situation in democracy-building.
While some Rwandans are willing to talk about forgiveness, we have
seen that they mainly refer to a ‘must’ or ‘need’ to, rather than a
want or desire. The top-down approach of Rwanda’s forgiveness
and reconciliation program is clearly evident throughout the postgenocide period. In contrast, suffering through memory and justice
through memory, while also invoked collectively, have persisted
through individual agency across survivor society. The result is a
collective
and
centralised
focus
on
reconciliation
opposing
individual suffering, which may never go away, and individual
justice, which can only be resolved through collective action.
As well as demonstrating the immense complexities between the
three themes identified, my research has also shown that within
150 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p. 266.
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each there is a clash between individual and collective memory.
Collective memory has grown ever since the genocide, as it does
after any account of atrocity. There are two lines of collective
memory in Rwanda; the first seeks to forge a national unity above
ethnic divisions, the second does the opposite, formulating groups
into two, survivors and perpetrators. Both go against the memories
of the individual, which seek to maintain their own agency.
Individual memories may not be attached to a ‘national’ group, nor
a wider survivor group that distinguishes itself from perpetrators.
Individual memory seeks to promote the many different agents
present in Rwandan society, while collective memory groups
Rwandans into one or two categories.
This piece of research has its limitations. It has sought to use a
broad range of sources, from Rwandan government officials, gacaca
officials, survivors and perpetrators to explain Rwandan memories
of
the
genocide.
Through
this
wealth
of
sources,
it
has
demonstrated the vast, deep-rooted complexities in Rwanda’s
culture of memory. However further research is needed to pinpoint
with more precision just how Rwanda’s genocide memory is
developing as it nears its twentieth anniversary. This research has
used all available Rwandan accounts connected to memory, yet in
most cases these quotes were provided to interviewers with
different purposes than the intentions of this research. While this
provides
a
useful
array
of
detached
64
sources,
it
would
be
Registration Number: 110134264
complimented by a more concerted collection of sources, one this
piece of research lacked the time and scope to provide.
Yet there can be little doubt that analysis of contemporary Rwandan
politics and its link to genocide memory is crucial to historians and
political scientists who seek to determine the future of one of
Africa’s most outwardly promising countries. Rwanda’s apparent
unity, built on successive election victories for Paul Kagame and the
RPF, has meant the nation’s memory project has been deemed a
success. However in recent years international criticism has
increased. Political scientists have argued that Rwanda’s political
elite, like Israel’s since the Holocaust, have received ‘genocide
credit’, ensuring that they are seen in a positive light and allowing
the government a free rein.151 As a result, many follow the RPF’s
history of Rwanda and the genocide, including the important
distinction they draw between the crimes committed against Tutsi
and ‘Hutu moderates’. They are accused of labelling the former as
genocide and the latter as simply political violence, creating a form
of moral hierarchy that implies the murders of Tutsi were worse
than those of Hutu.152 By doing this they suppress the voices of
Hutu who have themselves been the subject of violence, thwarting
the memory of a key part of Rwandan society.153
151 Reyntjens, ‘Rwanda Ten Years On’, p. 199.
152 J. Pottier, Re-Imagining Rwanda: Conflict, Survival and Disinformation in the
Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2002), p. 126.
153 Lemarchand, ‘The Politics of Memory in Post-Genocide Rwanda’ in Clark and
Kaufman, After Genocide, p. 69.
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While these arguments have serious merit, they would gain
credence in the international political arena with further research
of Rwandan views at the communal level. Too many international
actors assume the RPF government’s position on the subject of the
genocide. The simultaneous presence of a powerful elite willing to
shape history and an uncritical audience willing to accept it has
already been demonstrably damaging in Rwanda’s history. In so
doing, they neglect the ordinary Rwandan citizens, who express a
far wider range of different positions than offered by the
government. A more critical analysis would cover a broad spectrum
of Rwandans and offer a greater insight into their memories of the
genocide, leading to the establishment of a more coherent
narrative.
Has Rwanda’s memory culture, the championing of Ibuka and the
commemoration of fallen (Tutsi) Rwandans led ‘Never Again’ closer
to reality, or has it simply masked the nation’s problems behind
empty rhetoric? Through promoting justice and reconciliation, the
RPF government appears to be taking the right steps, however,
reconciliation has often come at the expense of justice, and this in
turn has made reconciliation superfluous. The true outcome may
not be known until some time after both gacaca and the ICTR have
finished their work, and their legacy has been established. However
to date, the centralised memory propagated by the RPF has yet to
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overawe individual survivors who still speak of their experiences
independently of any collective narratives. Alexandre Dauge-Roth
has demonstrated the position of the Rwandan Genocide survivor in
the history of survivor memoirs. While for the observer it might be
most comforting for the victim to remain silent, for the victim
themselves, their memory persists regardless. 154 Through their
testimonial impulse and refusal to be silenced, they create a
common bond between all those who have survived atrocity since
the Holocaust.155 Rwandan accounts of the genocide go far beyond
suggesting a universal story of the genocide, and to adopt such an
approach would be to deny many survivors their voices and
memories.
154 Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 50.
155 Waxman, Writing the Holocaust, p. 49.
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(London, 2004)
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(Washington, 2001)
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(London, 2000)
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Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2002)
Prunier, G., The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, Hurst (London, 1997)
Straus, S., The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (New York,
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Taylor, C., Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (Oxford, 1999)
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Wolff, S., Ethnic Conflict: A Global Perspective (Oxford, 2006)
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