Rwanda Genocide

Rwanda Genocide

When the war and the genocide ended on 18 July 1994, the situation in Rwanda was almost indescribably grim. Rarely had a people anywhere had to face so many seemingly insuperable obstacles with so few resources. Their physical and psychological scars were likely to linger for decades.

The country was wrecked - a wasteland. Of seven million inhabitants before the genocide, as many as 15 per cent were dead, two million were internally displaced and another two million had become refugees. Many of those who remained had suffered horribly. Large numbers had been tortured and wounded. Many women had been raped, tortured and humiliated, some becoming infected with AIDS. Of the children who survived, 90 per cent had witnessed bloodshed or worse. An entire nation was brutalized and traumatized. They were, in their own phrase, 'the walking dead'. Yet killers and survivors had no alternative but to resume living side-by-side on Rwanda's hills.

This was the situation a new inexperienced government had to face. Its challenges were monumental and its strategies not always convincing. Although it has always called itself a government of national unity and included prominent Hutu in high-profile offices, most observers believe that real power in the land - political and military - has been exercised by a small group of the original 'RPF Tutsi', the English-speakers from Uganda. Paul Kagame, leader of the RFP forces during the civil war and genocide, and vice-president and minister of defence until he became president in 2000, has universally been seen as the government's indispensable man.

Some saw it as a government that was not trusted by its people and a people not trusted by its government. Under the circumstances, neither was surprising. A major insurgency by genocidaires based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) into northwestern Rwanda caused havoc through the late 1990s. The government, suspicious of all Hutu, responded with brute force, frequently failing to distinguish between genocidaires and ordinary peasants. The latter, in turn, were reinforced in their belief that the RPF government was not theirs.

Nor, for very compelling reasons, did the new government trust the international community, although it immediately found itself overwhelmingly dependent on Western nations and international agencies and financial institutions to begin reconstruction. Given its past record, the world's response to Rwanda's needs ranged from modest to disappointing to downright scandalous. Although the government eventually began to find favour among various Western countries, notably the US and United Kingdom, which led to somewhat more generous aid packages, nothing like restitution or the cancellation of the odious debts incurred by the Habyarimana regime has ever been contemplated.

To make matters worse, only months after the genocide ended, many of the foreigners who had come to 'help' the country began to argue that Rwandans ought to get on with the task of rebuilding their society. 'Quit dwelling on the past and concentrate on rebuilding for the future,' they were advised. Within six months of the end of the genocide, relief workers were already telling a ...