a most interesting week of interviews with ‘Rwandans’ of all walks of life. they ranged in age from 18 to 56 years old. two were cultivators, considering themselves unemployed; another sold newspapers; one fellow works as a taxi-moto driver; my sole woman works as a cake decorator at a local restaurant. the last of my participants was a young woman, 20 years old, a secondary school student. who claims to be born during the genocide. but that doesn’t add up. the 1994 genocide was 12 years ago. her sense of memory, and her sense of belonging — of being a rwandan citizen — are clearly conflicted.
many commonalities emerged all of them were in Rwanda when the genocide started. some of them were caught off guard by its arrival, and its intensity as several of them lived on hills with no tutsi individuals. neighbours and friends were all from the bahutu ethnic group according to this group, and so the local authorities were not ’sensitising’ these populations to do the work of genocide. many of them fled the country after the war, when the former regime pushed individuals out of the country, towards Tanzania. this struck me as unusual since Congo is closer, and Burundi is even closer. the common line was this: t”he RPF was in Butare town, and we were outside. instead of passing through town because we saw so many dead ‘brothers’ that had been killed in revenge by the RPF, we decided to go to Tanzania.” so many walked straight through the hills to Tanzania, avoiding larger villages, towns and Kigali city, as they avoided reprisals undertaken by the RPF in the post-genocide period. ao they feared the RPF; this is also contrary to what the RPF reports in its speeches and policy document. Rwanda was peaceful from the moment they formed government on 1 July 1994.
one of my participants was on the other side of Butare town so decided to walk to Bukavu, Congo. he got tired, he had too many people that he was caring for as they fled. they were walking towards Cyangugu, the Rwandan border town with Bukavu. they stopped at Kibeho, yes the famous Kibeho as written about by both Human Rights Watch and African Rights. the French were to protect them, he said. and they did, because he and his people are Bahutu. the Batutsis and the Bahutus were separated into two groups. i heard a similar story from Tutsi survivors who were not pushed to flee the country once the RPF took power. instead, these individuals went to a French-protected camp near Gikongoro. they too were separated by French troops into groups of Batutsi and Bahutu. that the French assisted the previous government to continue the policy of genocide is widely known. Bahutu, according to my participants, were shipped by truck home to their hills under French supervision. the Batutsi were to remain behind. what happened when the RPF got wind of this is well known (refer to African Rights for their version of events, which is pretty well done).
all this made me think of Marc Lepine, the disgruntled Canadian engineering student who walked into the University of Montreal on December6 1989. he put the male students in one corner and the female students in another. Lepine shot dead all of those women because he believed they were stealing his opportunities for work as an engineer. but there are two differences with the Lepine story. first, Lepine was an isolated incident; an individual that had taken matters into his own hands in a bid to regain some sense of personal power. the Bahutu i spoke to found themselves in flight and eventually in camps because of the political situation within Rwanda at the time; they were in many ways without personal power, but that did not mean they lacked agency. they made life-and-death decisions based on information passed through informal networks, and they survived the genocide. more importantly, they also avoided prison. because of the choices made, the Bahutu i spoke to last week were not swept up by the RPF and put in jail, accused of acts of genocide. the RPF, according to both Bahutu and Batutsi participants, put all Rwandans into camps after the genocide ‘ended’ in July 1994. the difference in rwanda is that almost all of my participants had no clue that they were this ethnic group or that ethnic group. they report that before the war, they were Bahutu, now, as the radio says, they are Rwandans.
all of these Rwandans, whether former Bahutu or Batutsi, have no economic opportunities, just as they had none before the war. most Rwandans live on less than 50USD a month. cultivators are ‘lucky’ if they see the equivalent of 10USD pass through their households in a month. ordinary Rwandans are desperately poor and their poverty is exacerbated by the reconciliation and reconstruction programme of the government.
No comments:
Post a Comment