Benjamin Sehene, Rwandan writer, author of Le piège ethnique (Dagorno publishers, Paris, 1999)
A Rwandan boy in a Catholic church which is now a memorial to the genocide. In 1994, thousands of Tutsis were massacred in the church’s grounds.
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Bringing the truth to light is already a start, as a victory for justice and a form of relief for the victims. Robert Badinter, French lawyer and politician (1928- ) |
The country lived for 35 years in a state of growing amnesia, dominated by the law of silence, of the unspoken, of memories collectively repressed
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Timeline 1959: Hutus carry out a “social revolution”,
killing members of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority and overthrowing the Tutsi monarchy. Many
Tutsis flee the country. Formerly German colonies, Rwanda and Burundi have been administered
by Belgium since 1924. |
Christianity
tried to destroy the collective memory of Rwandans. After independence, ethnicity
became the yardstick of identity and the Tutsis were demonized. Then came the horrors
of genocide.
OIn Kigali,
they are known as bafuye bahagaze—the living dead. They are the hundreds of thousands
of survivors of genocide who have psychological problems. In September 1994, I met
one of them—a little girl called Élise, the only member of her family who
had survived. She was just under five years old, the same age as the civil war in
Rwanda, which went on from 1990 to 1994.
Élise suffered from loss of memory and had a very low attention span. She
could never remember my first name. She had no recollection of anything that had
happened more than 20 minutes before—it was as if she was trying to protect herself.
One evening I found a way of getting her to remember my name. She wore oversized
pyjamas and I said, “Think of the word ‘pyjama’ every time you see me—pyjama-Benjamin.”
Whenever she saw me after that, she would happily shout: “Hey, wait, it’s pyjama-Benjamin!”
Like that little girl clinging to an image, Rwandans should perhaps look for a common
symbol which could unite them around their lost memory.
For centuries, Rwandan civilization rested on a pyramidal power structure which was
rooted in myths. It shaped the economy and conditioned social relations. It built
(and still builds) a tyranny based on hierarchy, but a hierarchy imbued with a sense
of restraint. In an atmosphere of self-censorship and silence, things are left unsaid—between
parents and children, husbands and wives, shebujas (bosses) and their bagaragu (servants)
and between Tutsis, with their sense of superiority, and Hutus, who feel inferior.
Severing
links with the past
But the establishment
of Christianity, which began with the arrival of missionaries in 1900, destroyed
Rwanda’s collective memory. In 1931, the Church deposed Musinga, the Tutsis’ last
divine-right monarch, when he refused to be converted. Conversion to Christianity
would have undermined his legitimacy and destroyed the meaning of the magical and
religious functions of the monarchy, the pillar of Rwandan society. All the traditions
which made up the country’s social and spiritual fabric were dubbed pagan rites and
banned, despite the fact that they fostered social cohesion by bringing together
the three ethnic groups—Hutus, Tutsis and Twas.
The abolition of the Abirus, the royal committee of wise men that was the official
guardian of the society’s collective memory and its esoteric rites, marked the end
of the only high-level institution that acted as a counterweight because it was made
up mostly of Hutus. A proverb in the Kinyarwanda language was coined to describe
this break with the esoteric past: Kerezia ya kuyeho kizira (the Church has forbidden
the forbidden).
After independence in 1962, the new republic of Rwanda tried to overturn the traditional
pyramid-shaped power structure, destroyed even more of the traditional sense of national
identity and wiped out the nation’s collective memory. The republic defined its identity
by abolishing the old order, which it regarded as being too strongly marked by centuries
of Tutsi monarchs, and by basing its legitimacy on the majority ethnic group, the
Hutus.
Everything with a Tutsi connotation was banned. Thousands of words rooted in Rwanda’s
history and social organization were struck out of the language. The ethnicization
of the state, supposedly to create a “social balance”, led to a quota system which
limited the proportion of Tutsis in higher education and the civil service to nine
per cent. It was based solely on numbers. People’s ethnic affiliation could be checked
from their identity documents. The new rulers said they were redressing the social
balance after centuries of feudal domination.
In the vacuum left by the collapse of the traditional collective memory, ethnicity
became the only point of reference. This eventually led to the demonization of the
Tutsis in order to justify their exclusion from society. The Tutsis were dehumanized
and dubbed inyenzi (cockroaches), just as the Nazis had called German Jews “vermin”.
Many terms of abuse were used to indicate they were unwanted parasites. It is easier
to crush a cockroach underfoot than to kill a person.
The “social revolution” which gave birth to the new Rwandan republic began in 1959
with a bloody revolt by the Hutus, involving the terrible massacre of 20,000 Tutsis
and the flight of thousands of others into Burundi and Uganda. This irreparable act
was the first step towards the descent into amnesia. But a past that is forgotten
is bound to repeat itself because forgetting involves a refusal to admit wrongdoing.
In Rwanda, amnesia led to successive pogroms against the Tutsis which began in the
1960s and ended in the genocide. The country lived for 35 years in a state of growing
amnesia, dominated by the law of silence, of the unspoken, of memories collectively
repressed. Silence inevitably gave rise to impunity and impunity made amnesia acceptable.
I had a hard job interviewing Tutsi survivors in 1994 because the genocide divided
Rwandans into two camps—Hutus and Tutsis, the perpetrators of genocide and the rest.
In Rwanda today, you are forced to be on one side or the other; there is no halfway
house. Just after the genocide, the Tutsis who returned were suspicious of Tutsis
who had escaped, presuming they had collaborated with the enemy to save their skins.
If you were a Hutu, you were automatically guilty of genocide, just as the Tutsis
were from 1959 to 1994 considered guilty just because they happened to be Tutsi.
The genocide was a crime committed between neighbours; killers and survivors of the
atrocities still live side by side today. The extermination of a million people in
100 days with crude weapons like machetes, clubs, axes and hoes, could not have taken
place without the participation of a massive number of people. A third of all Hutus
are thought to have participated in one way or another.
Fear
of reprisals
About 135,000 people
suspected of involvement in genocide are languishing in overcrowded jails, and the
legal system, which was destroyed in the provinces, is finding it hard to get the
trials underway. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (the Arusha Tribunal),
which has scant resources, is not getting very far either. All this is keeping Rwandans
from the task of remembering their past, especially since state-endorsed ethnic attitudes
still condition the Hutu killers to think they killed their historic neighbours to
ensure the survival of their own ethnic group. Today, the guilty flatly deny there
was any genocide.
So in one of Africa’s most densely populated countries, the survivors see their tormentors
returning to live peacefully on the hillsides because there is not enough evidence
to bring charges against them. In the first months after the genocide witnesses spoke
freely, but they have become tight-lipped since a number of survivors have been murdered
by unknown killers. “What’s the use of giving evidence?” one victim asked me. “They’re
not being punished anyway.” All Rwandans live in an atmosphere of ethnic mistrust.
Fear of reprisals is still rife.
The new Rwandan authorities may want to curb individual score-settling and encourage
national reconciliation, but the ragtag soldiers who carried out the 1994 massacres
are still lurking in the forests of neighbouring Congo and have not given up their
plans to exterminate the Tutsis. As long as the threat of a new genocide hangs over
Rwanda, the present regime’s priority will be to defend national frontiers, as shown
by the on-going war in Congo.
The present is still barring the way to memory.