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“[T]he perpetrator still has a life to live. The victim is also being told to continue living, but the circumstances under which they are living are totally different. One has a family, the other one doesn’t have a family. You see? You are telling them to reconcile, but the amenities, the resources, are not the same….To me this one is a very big challenge. You are not reconciling equal parties.”
--Innocent Mugisha, Rwandan educator and researcher
"The key dilemma [in Rwanda] is how to build a democracy that can incorporate a guilty majority alongside an aggrieved and fearful minority in a single political community…While the minority demands justice, the majority calls for democracy. The two demands appear as irreconcilable, for the minority sees democracy as an agenda for completing the genocide, and the majority sees justice as a self-serving mask for fortifying minority power." 1
--Mahmood Mamdani
"To seek a path between vengeance and forgiveness is also to seek a route between too much memory and too much forgetting."2
--Martha Minow, Harvard Law Professor
It has been more than a decade since the genocide that devastated Rwanda. Over 100 days, between April and July 1994, Hutu extremists murdered between 800,000-1,000,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates. (For a brief overview, see the BBC News article, Rwanda: How the Genocide Happened.) In one of the most violent episodes in human history, neighbor turned against neighbor. In some cases, even family members killed their own. One of the tragic lessons learned from the Rwandan genocide was that the world community, despite having proclaimed “never again” fifty years earlier in the aftermath of the Holocaust, would in fact allow genocide to happen again.
Rwanda was torn apart by the 1994 genocide and the simultaneous civil war. The country's infrastructure was completely destroyed. The bodies of victims filled the roadways, churches, schools and open areas. Survivors, murderers and bystanders alike were seeking shelter inside the country and in neighboring Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Disease was rampant, international aid was slow in coming if it came at all, and the people of the country were exhausted mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Justice, reconciliation, rebuilding; these were all impossible to imagine in July 1994 when the genocide ended, but that is when the processes for each began.
In this section of the module, we will explore the many paths Rwanda is taking toward healing and prevention, including the creation of a new government with new symbols and a new constitution; of an international criminal tribunal; of a new history curriculum and a new approach to teaching and the development of local justice, called gacaca. These efforts have struggled alongside discussions of memorials and museums; individual efforts to remember; films and novels focused on telling survivor’s stories; and government efforts at reconciliation. It is not just Rwanda, however, that has had to reflect on 1994, the conditions that led up to the genocide, and the international failure to respond. This catastrophic failure of the international moral imagination has inspired books, films, the development of organizations, and formal apologies. Significantly, nearly every one of the elements listed above has been attached to the phrase “never again!” As the following resources will illustrate, each of these paths carries with it the hopes and challenges for preventing future genocides.
We would encourage you to research the history of Rwanda and the 1994 Rwandan genocide on your own. Some Facing History and Ourselves web resources, and other relevant websites we would suggest as you begin your research include:
1 When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda by Mahmood Mamdani (Princeton University, Princeton & David Philip Publishers, Cape Town), 2001, pp. 266, 274.
2 Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence by Martha Minow (Beacon Press, Boston), 1998, p. 118.
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