After the Great Fall

 This is a somewhat rambling post on the political situation in Rwanda. Outside of the usual scope, I guess, but this is my main (only?) writing outlet these days. And it's still about Rwanda.

Driving around Kigali, it is possible to forget the genocide, to forget the civil war of 16 years ago. The city is relatively prosperous and growing. People smile and volunteer friendly conversations more than a shell-shocked or closed populace would. While there are many organizations, governmental or otherwise, who are headquartered in the center of the city and whose focus is on preventing genocide, aiding survivors, or other related issues, there is not a noticeable survivor presence in the city.

In some ways, the government and the people would like the genocide to be put past them. The country is seeking to gain a reputation as a tourist destination, and they are seeking to grow a modern service economy, and they are seeking to do both these things in part by shedding the main word association publics in the west have with Rwanda, genocide. It is not that the country seeks to forget, of course; many argue that the continuing legitimacy for the Kagame regime is tied as much to the fact that he led the forces that ended the genocide as to the fact that he has rebuilt the country thoroughly since that time. Many in Rwanda would like to remind others that there's more to the country than genocide history, is all.

The memorialization of the genocide is in an interesting transitional period. Many of the sites we visited were preserved monuments to brutality as much as anything else; skulls, bones, clothes, and even in one place full skeletons remained intact and on display as a testament to what happened. This on the one hand is an effort to display the very real effect of the 1994 genocide and to ensure its memory endures; on the other hand, there is not a great amount of respect for the bodies of those who died.

So the memorialization is changing, in part. Our guides hinted to us that sites such as Murambi, Ntarama, and Nyamata (I'll go more into them in the next post) may be radically different in 4-5 years, with the bones finally buried and the focus of the exhibit shifted in some way. The Kigali Memorial Center, whose exhibit was furnished by a company that also organized our tour of the country, is a model for what's to come in many ways: a very informative museum-exhibit combined with mass graves, a wall of names, several symbolic gardens or statues, and a heavy dose of witness testimony. It's a very fine exhibit, as far as that goes, and if the genocide sites can be shifted from bare bones evidence of the genocide, literally, to informative and testimonial based sites that still capture some of the experience of the history, that would be a good thing for the memorialization process. Then again, if they do indeed follow through on their plans to do things like transform the former President Juvenal Habyarimana's (his plane was shot down on 6 April, 1994, triggering the genocide which would start the next day; he had long been aligned with genocidal forces, though his signing of a peace accord may have been the final straw in leading him to sacrifical lamb status) house into a national museum and party site - our visit came during preparations for a wedding later that day - perhaps the memory will not be as well preserved.

But let's go back to the history itself, and the impact it has on the country to this day. Without giving a footnoted, academically cited, and overly detailed summary of Rwanda's history, I hope to not reduce it too much. I also hope not to mess up too much.

In essence, Rwanda was part of a kingdom with Burundi before the arrival of German and, after World War I, Belgian colonizers. The colonizers solidified the vague racial categories of Tutsi and Hutu by formalizing people's identity via identity cards, backing up the categories with pseudo scientific (eugenic) theories on the differences between the two groups, and placing the smaller Tutsi group in power, leading to newly emphasized tensions between the two groups. Towards the end of their colonial reign, the Belgian leaders decided to give up on the Tutsis and backed Hutus for power. Hutu leaders, sensing the opportunity to take advantage of their people's anger over being subservient to Tutsi interests, built their power on racial grounds, and when the Belgians left, they initiated several cycles of violence against Tutsis.

These cycles continued until 1990, when the Rwandan Patriotic Front, a largely Tutsi-exile army, and the Rwandan national army fought a civil war. The RPF, co-led by current Rwandan President Paul Kagame, was a better organized army and gained ground and leverage. The Rwandan government was also constrained by economic struggles (there was a great drop in coffee prices, an export crop Rwanda relied on) and donor nations eager to see Rwanda make peace, leading to a peace accords. The Arusha Peace Accords didn't include all necessary powers and provided for a shaky power-sharing government, but at least was sensed to be a path forward.

Instead, the President Habyarimana was killed when his plane was shot down on April 6th, 1994. It is still a hot topic of dispute as to who killed the president; Rwanda and its allies, as well as more experts, believe that the Hutu Power movement surrounding the president (who was a Hutu and a hard-liner, at least before conceding to the peace process) killed him as a way to launch a genocidal campaign and consolidate power - they felt that using a scapegoat of the minority Tutsi group (15% of the country's population) would rally the majority behind the government and keep them in control. Many in France (a strong supporter of the genocidal regime) and a few others believe the RPF was behind the assassination. Most circumstantial evidence points to the Hutu Power group being responsible, and I have a hard time seeing why the RPF would have done it, for what it's worth.

Either way, the genocide began the next day, April 7th, 1994. For 100 days, Hutu militias and government military forces killed between 500,000 and 1.2. million (the most common estimate is 800,000) Rwandans, mostly Tutsis, though also moderate Hutu political figures and Hutus who stood in the way. The genocidaires had studied their history well, and used tricks from the Holocaust to Somalia to carry out their genocide and disengage the international community. This was a classic case of the world standing by and watching, at times even doing less than helping - when the UN finally "sent" in a mission, it was a French led army in the Southwest that did nothing more than provide an escape route for the genocidaires fleeing from the RPF forces who had relaunched their fighting in response to the genocide. The genocide only stopped when the RPF won the war and assumed control and power of the country.

The Rwandan genocide was renowned for its brutality. Rwanda is a small country (population between 8 and 11 million over the last fifteen years), and to carry out such a genocide required participation from many people in the country, including ordinary people, neighbors hunting or snitching on their Tutsi neighbors. Families with mixed marriages were torn apart. Major tools for carrying out the genocide included machetes and a local weapon that was basically a wooden stick with a nail on it.

The only other thing I'll say about the genocide before moving to firsthand observations is that it is still unclear how true and how constructed the racial identities are. One popular belief was that Tutsis came from Ethiopia, and so many Hutus "sent them back" to Ethiopia via rivers. Common stereotypes say that Tutsis are taller and more beautiful, while Hutus shorter, stockier, and thinner. Others say that there is, or was, no real distinction between the two groups, and that the term Tutsi was affixed to anybody who had ten or more cattle; as such, Tutsi/Hutu was a class distinction. At this point, or at least at the genocide's point, the distinctions became hardnosed facts, but it should be remembered that there was no primordial, inherent reason for the population in Rwanda to bifurcate into two major groups (there is a third, the Twa, which makes up 1% of the population and is usually considered incidental to the racial politics of the country).

This history also has to be remembered when considering the current political condition of Rwanda. President Kagame has strong control of Rwanda, having recently won re-election with a 93% vote, a number most people consider not to be doctored. But there were a few numerous high-profile disqualifications of opposition politicians from the race, and so 93% isn't a wholly safe number to throw out either; in general, whenever somebody is elected with 93%, there is cause for suspicion.

It is hard to find people who will dispute the notion that Kagame and his team have a strong grasp on the political space in Rwanda. The dispute begins in assessing the implications of that control. On the one hand, Kagame is undoubtedly popular, especially in Kigali - you can't go far without seeing Kagame t-shirts sold or worn, and signs of his campaign hung ubiquitously even a month after the election. Rwanda has grown, Kigali is booming for an African city, and the country appears to be much safer and stabler than most societies would be 16 years after a wrenching social trauma on any scale, never mind one that wipes out an eighth of the population.

At the same time, as my German friend on the trip pointed out, one should get uneasy whenever one man has so much power. Even if the government's intentions are good, it is not healthy in the long term to have such focused control. For example, the government has led a very positive idea of reeducating the people to believe in "banyarwanda", or the people of Rwanda. As in, "we are all Rwandans, not Tutsis or Hutus." A great idea that hopefully will set in to eradicate any racial reasons for Rwandans to discriminate against each other (or for outsiders to encourage dissension and divide and conquer, as was the source of all these problems). But if most people still know who's a member of which group, as we were often told, or if most people perceive the political beneficiaries of the current system, i.e. the people in power currently, to be Tutsis, this system and concept of a new Rwanda hits a blurry border with older systems of privileged people and groups.

For all this, I would like to return to the history and to the bias of Americans and the West. It's easy for us, feeling ourselves to be in an open, democratic society where the political space is far wider (whatever our problems), to criticize a country like Rwanda (similar issues affect westerners' views on Israel, but this is not the space for that). We did not have a tortuous genocide rip asunder our nation within the past two decades; World War II tore apart Europe and led to change, but the main perpetrators were convicted and the general population (i.e. Germans) atoned for their grievous faults, while many of the victims left (Jews, most obviously). America's genocide happened hundreds of years before and was swept under the rug; the country has survived just fine despite the treatment of Native Americans, thanks.

We should consider, then, what would happen had there not been a strong control of the political space. Everything I heard suggested that there are still people in Rwanda who are eager to stir up racial divisiveness. Without getting on the slippery slope too quickly, we can see that racial divisiveness is the foundation for genocidal ideology. This is the government's justification for the disqualifications from the previous election and other political crackdowns that strike us as overmuch. We could be right in thinking this, but can only reach a fair conclusion if we consider the full context.

Two more points about that context, and here I will draw parallels to the situation in Israel. Interestingly enough, there are many parallels between the two countries, if not quite as much as Rwandans especially would like there to be. But the history, the international position, the internal development, the emphasis on security and independence, the controversial issues hovering around, the kindness and defensiveness of the people, and the beauty of the land are just a few of the similarities that these two countries share. What follows could be said about either.

Rwanda has achieved a lot since the genocide of 1994. Undoubtedly aid has helped, and similarly undoubtedly I haven't actually been to any other African countries to compare Rwanda to. But from all I heard and saw, Kigali especially and Rwanda as a whole has grown substantially in the past 15 years and has surpassed its neighbors in many ways. I never really felt in danger in Rwanda (well, not counting the drive through the mountains of west Rwanda in thundering rain at dusk; I felt fairly in danger then), though the presence of armed personnel around the city and the country was a little alarming. All to say that while it is not unambiguously so, Rwanda is a growing country that has done well, and that has ambitions to do better - Kagame has gone on the record in many places about his desire to outgrow the need for aid. This is commendable, and should at least be weighed against the costs of certain political limits, for the time being. In Israel, this growth is at a far more advanced level, but also should be considered when looking at the country as part of the Middle East and as part of its political issues.

The other point is that when external pressures encourage Kagame and Rwanda to open up, or Israel to achieve peace and make sacrifices towards achieving that peace, for example, they are not just doing it to waste their breath or punish the nation in question. In Rwanda's case, true political freedom and a sense of real unity forged under the label of "banyarwanda", where neither former racial group is benefiting more than the other, would be the true sign of recovery from the genocide and emergence as a modern and rising African nation-state. That is not as easy as it sounds in the sentence above, of course, and outsiders need to be cognizant of the challenges facing Rwanda. That doesn't mean they can't help and prod Rwanda to keep moving forward.

We were in Rwanda for the release of the UN Congo report, a report detailing the many abuses that occurred in the Democratic Republic of Congo over a decade of fighting. Rwanda was implicated in this report, and the wording suggested that Rwanda could be accused of genocide against Hutu forces in the east Congo.

This naturally infuriated just about everybody we met in Rwanda. The report has been accused, justifiably, of poor sourcing and lack of context, and generally appears to be a shoddy effort, for the UN or otherwise. Rwanda's Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a sharp 30-page document refuting the UN report (which ran 566 pages), and they had every right and justification to refute it (we actually befriended one of the authors of the report during our time there). It should also be noted that just about every other African nation implicated in this report also refuted the findings, and that only Rwanda's role in the report and their reaction has been covered to a significant degree in the international media.

But even in this clearly flawed report and justified response, there are gray shades to consider. Rwanda's ire emerges most from the term "genocide" - the report accuses them of killing tens of thousands of people, whereas the Rwandan genocide saw, as I said, 500,000-1.2 million die. Any equivalency of this even on the report's terms would be foolish, and Rwandans fear that were the term genocide to be slapped on the Congo, the international community's opinion would slide back to a "cycle of violence, they are all bad" mode, which would tarnish the Rwandan government's legitimacy and more significantly the nature of the trauma Rwanda suffered. Then when you consider the limited validity of the report, or the many missing contextual factors - for example, the Rwandan report (which I would link, but their site is struggling right now) points out how many Hutus the Rwandans repatriated to their country, and their goal of bringing all Rwandans back to Rwanda, which doesn't easily fit in with genocide. Accusing Rwanda of supporting genocide on any grounds is a wholly dangerous and arguably existential threat to the country and its safety, as Rwandans see it. They are wholly right on this.

At the same time, I have a hard time doubting that atrocities were committed in the Congo, and that Rwanda's troops just like so many others had a hand in committing them. Some transparency is needed in dealing with this problem. As with many situations in Israel (the Goldstone report being the most obvious recent one), just because the report itself was wholly flawed and shoddy doesn't mean it didn't reveal serious issues that need to be dealt with. Israel has dealt with it to some degree; Rwanda needs to figure out if they are ready to as well.

Rwanda has done tremendously in recovering from their genocide, growing their country, and dealing with their internal issues over the past 16 years. Our thrilling and successful visit showed me nothing less. That said, the government still needs to open up and solidify its emerging democracy as a truly free and open place. That doesn't happen in a day; it will be very interesting to see how far along the country gets in the next 7 years before Kagame's term ends and, under constitutional law, he has to step down from the presidency. It will be an important test for the country, to say the least. And progress will go a long way towards breaking any last remnants of the cycle of violence that did lead to the genocide.