Security wise things are a little edgy at the moment. 30,000 genocide perpetrators have been released, having confessed, ‘repented’ and served nearly 10 years in prison; most have returned to the communities in which they used to live and where they committed their atrocities. The bodies from some of the many mass graves have been excavated and reburied individually, stirring up communities.
The Gacaca (traditional village court system where the accused meets the witnesses and together they relive the experience) has got underway in earnest in an attempt to deal with the huge outstanding numbers of untried alleged perpetrators. The head of the neighbouring Gikongoro region has named almost the entire elite of Gikonogoro as genocide perpetrators or as receiving bribes from perpetrators to remain silent.
The borders are insecure with interhamwe (the trained killers who after the genocide fled to Congo) amassing on the borders. The Rwandan army, contrary to the Congo’s peace agreement, have gone back into Congo in an attempt to track them down. The Rwandan army allegedly surrounded a UN MONUC team (Congo peace keeping mission) and forced them out of one area where they were fighting the interhamwe.
Interhamwe are also on the border with Burundi just down the road from me, complicated further by the fact the Burundian rebel group which refused to sign up to the recent power sharing agreement in Burundi are still launching attacks into Burundi from Rwanda’s Nygungwe Forest down the road from me. Other groups of interhamwe have surrendered and placed in rehabilitation camps, intended to reintegrate them into society.
Congo has stepped up their attempts to rid the country of the interhamwe since they have been colluding with some of the Congolese rebels and fuelling the conflict there which has killed 3 ½ million people since 1998. There are been reports of several massacres in a village in the north west and two villages half an hour up the road from Save. Last Friday everything shut, across the entire country, for community security meetings.
Then this week there were security meetings for the students and we now have police posted permanently at the entrances to the school. We have several students in trauma over the memories, but the school has isolated them in a bid to limit the spread since a neighbouring school has had to shut down because, as my Principal says, ‘it is a social disease which spreads quickly’. Another of our students committed suicide during the Genocide Memorial holiday which has shaken the students up further.
A memorial sign at my school, with the names of the 100+ students and teachers who were killed...
At the same time, the government is denying anything is happening. Meanwhile, in Kigali there are conferences after conferences about the genocide where the government and its propaganda machine hurl blame at the international community and NGOs and the government continue the questionable and unofficial practice of ‘selling’ the genocide to attract more aid.
But still people are quiet. We are living in an authoritarian police state, with a culture of distrust, prejudice, suspicion and rivalry driven by dire poverty. The security issues have just boosted the government’s case for security measures. You don’t question. You certainly don’t oppose. That’s why last month’s village memorial was so interesting and peculiar. People talked openly at least. Survivors, widows, people who’d lost their children, organisers, killers. And many of them expressed emotion openly. Some see that there is peace, in the sense that there aren’t the massacres and genocides that have plagued Rwanda’s history since Belgium left. They don’t want to rock the boat. It’s a logic with merit but you can’t build a future on suppression. The people who suffered most are now being expected to suffer further as the killers return to live as their neighbours… This is the most densely populated country in Africa – there’s nowhere to escape your memories. I can’t even begin to comprehend how an individual deals with that.
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