EFFECTS OF RWANDA GENOCIDE

Effects of Rwanda Genocide

Abstract

National reconciliation is a vague and 'messy' process. In post-genocide Rwanda, it presents special adversities that arise from the specific environment of the Rwandan crisis and the popular participation that distinuished the Rwandan atrocities. This item summaries the major approaches being utilised in Rwanda to achieve reconciliation, highlighting some of the foremost obstacles faced by these institutions. It then goes on to argue that certain 'Silences' are being enforced on the reconciliation method, including the malfunction to prosecute alleged RPA misdeeds, the need of argument on, and the instrumentalization of, Rwanda's 'histories', the collective stigmatization of all Hutu as génocidaires, and the papering over of societal cleavages through the 'outlawing' of 'divisionism'. The function financial development can play in the reconciliation process is furthermore discussed. Given the Government of Rwanda's centered role in the reconciliation method and its progressive drift towards authoritarianism, the item ends with a reflection on the worrisome parallels between the pre and post-genocide socio-political contexts.

Effects of Rwanda Genocide

INTRODUCTION

In the wake violence on a societal scale, finding the right balance between justice and healing, retribution and forgiveness, tribunals and truth commissions, remembering and 'moving on' is a messy if not impossible goal. As Martha Minow points out, “no response can ever be adequate when your son has been killed by police ordered to shoot at a crowd of children, when you have been dragged out of your home, interrogated, and raped in a wave of “ethnic cleansing”; or when your brother who struggled against a repressive government has disappeared and left only a secret police file, bearing no clue to his final resting place.”( Minow, 1998, 5) If anything, this is all the more true in cases of genocide, where one has to factor in the “terrifying existential crisis faced by survivors of genocide”, their brush with the attempted annihilation of “not only your self, but also everything that constitutes your world, everything that makes your life worth living - your work, your family, your children - all that was on the point of being wiped out, too.” (Prunier, 2002, 16)

Reconciliation is a vague concept. In the wake of mass violence, there is no goal post past which 'reconciliation' has been achieved. My premise is that legal (prosecutorial) instruments, striking political compromises, publicly acknowledging the wrongs inflicted on victims, and other measures, as 'messy' as they may be, are all more acceptable than doing nothing. I label 'doing nothing' unacceptable first because of its “shocking implication that the perpetrators in fact succeeded”. Indeed, silence makes us complicit bystanders to the perpetrators of yesterday. Secondly, inaction is unacceptable because it leaves grievances, fears of reprisals, and cultures of impunity to fester, encouraging cyclical outburst of violence by the perpetrators of tomorrow. Sadly, this is an accurate description of the periodic violent crises in Burundi and Rwanda. 'Reconciliation', the umbrella term I will use to refer to this series of messy compromises, though it may be inconceivable or offensive to some, is thus the ...