Kigali and the Genocide; Rwanda

When one applies for a Fulbright ETA grant, one has to select which country to apply to. There are a lot of options. Originally I thought about applying for Luxemburg. It was an interesting place and in the heart of Europe where I would find myself in a very comfortable and probably not very challenging environment. Eventually, however, I learned more about the program there and decided late in my college days to apply for a place less traveled, somewhere where I would find excitement, mystery, and challenges. Somewhere in Africa. I looked around and decided to apply to the one African country I had always wanted to visit and which had always fascinated me, Rwanda. Mind you, the Fulbright program did not select me to go to Rwanda but instead asked me to go to Madagascar where they were expanding the program. I wouldn’t have had it any other way having lived here for a year and a half. Needless to say, you can probably guess that I was pretty excited at my opportunity to visit Rwanda, the country they are calling “the Singapore of Africa.”

Singapore is a far stretch for a nickname. It’s true that Rwanda is by far the cleanest and most organized country I have been to in Africa. Unlike Senegal and Madagascar which are both pretty dirty and have low sanitation levels, Rwanda is meticulously, almost suspiciously clean. And a lot of this has to do with a single, controversial man, President Paul Kagame.

Paul Kagame’s story is inseparable from that of the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda. And as I told you in the blog about Gorée island, from this point on, there will be horrific details about the genocide of 1994. The reason for Kagame’s intertwined destiny with the genocide started when he and his family were forced to flee the country and its violence in the 1950s and 60s, just the beginning of what would eventually culminate into the coordinated effort of what we know as the Rwanda Genocide today. As a young boy, he was raised in nearby Uganda and eventually became a military officer and head of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group that fought the Rwandan government but was based in neighboring Uganda. Now put Kagame’s story on hold and let me explain to you the long and tragic history that led to the genocide in the first place.

Rwanda had been an independent, albeit small, kingdom for a long time. In the late 19th century, the German empire invaded Rwanda and neighboring Burundi. Nonetheless, the Germans soon lost the territory to the Belgians to administer after WWI. Before the arrival of the Belgians and Germans, there was already division amongst the people, although the divide was not ethnic. Tutsi was the name given to the ruling class whereas Hutu was given to the lower class. There is no ethnical difference between the two tribes. In fact, the official "ethnic" difference was invented by the Belgians in the 40s when they decided that anyone who had more than 13 cows was a Tutsi and anyone with less than 13 cows was a Hutu. There is no better way, I say sarcastically, to fabricate a race division between people of the exact same race than to divide it amongst the arbitrary line of cattle proprietorship. The Belgians were truly genius, and this idea of race division is only surpassed by the brilliancy of the Belgians cutting of the hands of underproducing workers in the Congo with the expectation of better results. Those Belgians are something special.

This arbitrary division meant that the Tutsi, who were the rich minority, were given special governing privileges over the poor Hutu majority. The Tutsi at this time were rather oppressive, and the genocide memorial in Kigali does not shy away from the fact that during the colonial period, the Tutsi were tyrannical in the way they treated the Hutu. Regardless, this was the origin of the tensions between the two “ethnic groups.”

Eventually the Belgians and their supreme governing wisdom left Rwanda, and when they did, they installed an elected Hutu majority government in its place. The result was a spiteful and vicious retaliation of Hutus against Tutsi where racially driven violence was common throughout various parts of the country. This culminated in a civil war which saw many Rwandan rebel groups, like Kagame’s RPF, fighting the Hutu majority government which was quickly becoming a Hutu-only government.

The Hutu government and army, which was the officially recognized government of the country, began cleansing the government and army of any Tutsi and even funded anti-Tutsi propaganda. Rules for Hutu were released, a Ten Commandments of Hutus. Included in these were:

1. Every Hutu should know that a Tutsi woman, whoever she is, works for the interest of her Tutsi ethnic group. As a result, we shall consider a traitor any Hutu who…

a. Marries a Tutsi woman.

b. Employs a Tutsi woman as a concubine.

c. Employs a Tutsi woman as a secretary or takes her under protection.

2. Every Hutu should know that our Hutu daughters are more suitable and conscientious in their role as woman, wife, and mother of the family. Are they not beautiful, good secretaries and more honest?

3. Hutu women, be vigilant and try to bring your husbands, brothers, and sons back to reason.

4. Every Hutu should know that every Tutsi is dishonest in business. His only aim is the supremacy of his ethnic group. As a result, any Hutu who does the following is a traitor:

a. Makes a partnership with Tutsi in business.

b. Invests his money or the government’s money in a Tutsi enterprise.

c. Lend or borrows money from Tutsi.

d. Gives favors to Tutsi in business.

5. All strategic positions, political, administrative, economic, military, and security should be entrusted only to Hutu.

6. The education sector must be majority Hutu.

7. The Rwandan Armed Forces should be exclusively Hutu.

8. The Hutu should stop having mercy on the Tutsi.

9. The Hutu, wherever they are, must have unity and be concerned with the fate of their Hutu brothers.

10. The Social Revolution of the 1959, the Referendum of 1961, and the Hutu ideology must be taught to every Hutu at every level. Every Hutu must spread this ideology widely. Any Hutu who persecutes his brother Hutu for having read, spread, and taught this ideology is a traitor.

This ideology was pushed, as it is said, at every level. Children were taught it in schools. People heard the same things on the radio all day. Newspapers and comics. No place was safe from the Hutu propaganda that presented the Tutsi as “cockroaches”.

At some point, the Hutu-led government was forced into a ceasefire. Following the ceasefire, a UN administered process of establishing a newly elected government began. The Hutu government didn’t want the transition to succeed because it would be seen as a defeat and would reverse the years of hatred towards the Tutsi which they had propagated. Despite the decades of racially driven attacks and mass murders leading up to the 1994 genocide, the official genocide began its planning in January of 1994. The Hutu government began collecting the names and locations of all Tutsis in the country. They organized a plan to kill literally thousands within hours of a given command. In fact, there are reports from the committers of the genocide that they could have 20,000 Tutsi killed every hour within the first 24 hours of the command. A promise they delivered.

At this point it is important to go into detail what can mildly be described as horrible negligence and incompetency of the United Nations. Despite the UN having been in Rwanda for a while in order to coordinate the ceasefire, the UN did nothing to prevent the genocide or stop it once it had began. Hutu hatred of the Belgians was also high, and the UN peacekeepers, most of which were Belgian became targets of the Hutu militia and the Rwandan army after the genocide began. In fact, there were 10 Belgian commandos murdered in a small building after holding out for several hours while trying to protect the then prime minister and her husband. They were all massacred while UN command told them to hold position as they were “assessing the situation”. The photo of this blog is the one I took of the building where they were murdered.

Indeed, the UN’s failure to prevent the genocide was evident in the fact that the UN security council had details of the planned genocide months before it even began. They had names of leaders, plots, protocols, and even a timeline. They knew the Hutu militias and the Rwandan army were going to set up roadblocks, conduct house searches, and, most importantly, incite neighbors, family, and friends to turn on each other. However, the UN did nothing. And once the genocide began, the UN pulled all of its forces out. Not a single foreigner remained with the exception of one freelance American journalist.

With the ceasefire falling apart and tensions rising, the final straw was the assassination of the Rwandan and Burundian presidents. Sometime early on April 7th, 1994, their plane was shot down as it was preparing to land in Kigali. The actual perpetrators are unknown. Nonetheless, it is suspected that it was members of the Rwandan military. The Rwandan army, however, blamed the Belgian UN peacekeeper forces, a lie which their wrathful followers were quick to believe. Within hours of the president’s assassination, thousands of roadblocks were set up throughout Kigali, and Hutu militias were rallied before beginning raids on neighborhoods where there were known Tutsi residences.

In addition to the militias and army, the Hutu-led genocide also coerced normal people to kill their neighbors. People were armed with whatever weapons were available. In fact, the genocide memorial claims that blunt force weapons like machetes, hammers, shovels, pickaxes, hoes, knives, bats, and the like were the weapons of choice because they inflicted the most pain and, in the cases where people would survive attacks, leave brutal scars and deformations on skulls and other parts of the body. In the genocide memorial, there are 6 cases with the heads of several hundred victims. As I walked through the room in silence where two little school children were consoling their crying friend in the corner, I could see how so many of the skills were broken and battered. I’m no forensic scientist, but I can tell when a skull has been bludgeoned with something hard and dull or where a bullet has entered and exited. In fact, the genocide memorial is the final resting place of an estimated 250,000 human remains. Their mass graves are slated over with enormous stone blocks and surrounded by rose bushes. Within days of the outset of the genocide, tens of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus were brutally murdered, rapped, tortured, and mutilated by Hutu militia, the Rwandan army, and local people, often neighbors and friends.

One survivor remembers playing with her friends next door the week before the genocide. The following week, she watched her friend’s father murder her own before being turned over to the Hutu militia by the same friend. Children betrayed their parents who were hiding Tutsis. Friends and neighbors broke into each other’s homes and massacred each other with knives and tools. Needless to say, many of the survivors report having perpetual trust issues, believing that they will never really be able to trust anyone ever again. It’s not hard to see why.

Entire populations were rallied into churches and stadiums where they were killed en mass with grenades and rifles before the perpetrators switched to the blunt force weapons to save on ammunition and to inflict more pain on their "cockroach" victims. One survivor talks about how people tried fighting back but eventually stopped. They submitted to the reality that they would simply die regardless of what they did. There ceased to be any trace of hope. This boy, now a man, saw his mother held in a mesmerized state while his father screamed at him to run. He ran. Now he is the only member of his family, that moment being the last time he saw his family alive. This transpired in an instance where 30,000 Tutsi were massacred in a stadium within a period of an hour and a half. In another instance, a church where I actually went to mass in, thousands of Tutsi were sold out by the priests. The priests were Hutu and afraid of being killed themselves. All this time, the UN had pulled its forces out of the country and refused to send more peacekeepers. They were still “assessing the evolving situation.”

The total estimated loss of life during the official genocide, which does not include the thousands killed in the decades before and in the border provinces after, is near 1 million. 1 million people in 100 days, which averages to 10,000 every day, although the deadliest days where those first three weeks. The gravity and sheer intensity of the genocide’s brutality rocked the immediate surrounding countries. For some it meant rising to arms against the Hutu militia and the Rwandan army. For others, like a group of ethnic Hutus from Burundi, it meant crossing the border into Rwanda to join in the slaughter. By April 21st, Paul Kagame, who was general of the RPF in Uganda, made the bold and decisive decision to launch a full invasion of Rwanda, which at this point would be a totally blind leap into completely occupied enemy territory where they had no grasp of the full scope of the genocide. He and his army of barely armed soldiers engaged the Rwandan army and the Hutu militia. In doing so, they found the rumors of the genocide to be true.

In all honesty, the genocide was probably the only way Paul Kagame’s army could have won the Rwandan civil war. Distracted by the systematic murder of more than a tenth of its own civilian population, the Rwandan army and the Hutu militias were in no position to fight a conventional war against highly motivated rebels. The Rwanda genocide, in a way, was the ultimate hubris of one of the most heinous atrocities of the century. Kagame’s RPF quickly overwhelmed the country and liberated the suffering people, forcing the Hutu militia and strains of the Rwandan army to flee into the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, where there still exist some remnants of the genocide’s perpetrators to this day. Had Kagame and RPF not invaded the country, the genocide would have lasted much longer than its horrible 100 days.

After ending the genocide, Paul Kagame organized a transitional government. He refused to be president following the immediate liberation of the country. However, after the first president was removed on corruption charges, Paul Kagame was elected president in 2000. Since then, he has won every election and rules Rwanda, more or less, with an iron yet benevolent fist. For example, Kagame won the 2017 election with 97% of the vote, a suspicious number to be sure, but when you see the progress that has been made in Rwanda since the genocide, the payoffs compared to the costs seem to be pretty wide. Indeed, pre-genocide, Rwanda had about 78% of its population living in extreme poverty compared to the rate today of about 16%, albeit 39% of the total population is still under the poverty line. That kind of difference, one deemed unthinkable and unimaginable in development economics, especially because of the genocide in which nearly a tenth of country’s current population was lost, is remarkable and borderline unbelievable. And most of this change has come from Kagame’s iron will in promoting a society of free markets, rule of law, and foreign policy that benefits Rwanda in the long run rather than prioritizing short term investment from the likes of China or taking cash with string attached from likes of the United States and France, who had its own role in supplying and training the Rwandan army that orchestrated the genocide. In short, Paul Kagame has given life to his once dead homeland, a land he cherishes above even his own life.

Today there are still rebel groups, former genocide perpetrators and their followers, who exist in the DRC, Uganda, and Burundi. Unfortunately for us in the West, most of our knowledge of the genocide comes from the, albeit well done, Hollywood movie “Hotel Rwanda” whose protagonist Paul Rusesabagina is the hotel manager of the famous Milles Collines hotel in downtown Kigali where he prevented Hutu militia and the army from killing hundreds of guests. I actually made it a point to swing by the hotel while I was there. Although the gist of the story is true, it fails to explain that Rusesabagina forced the refugees to pay him money for each day they spent in the hotel’s protection. He used this money to pay off the militia and army, but also pocketed a significant amount of it for himself. Afterwards, he moved to Belgium and later the United States where he gave writers and directors the embellished version of Hotel Rwanda. More or less, he got rich off the genocide, both directly and indirectly.

Mind you, he’s also been accused of financing current rebel groups responsible for the deaths of nearly 50 people in Rwanda. Sometime a few years ago, he got on a plane headed for Burundi. However, when he got off the plane, he soon realized that he was in Rwanda and that Rwandan special forces had tricked him and brought him to Rwanda where he was arrested and held in prison for 2 years. The US government protested because he is a hero in our eyes. The Rwandan government wanted him to serve his justified prison time for the crime of financing terrorism in northern Rwanda. Somehow, Qatar and the United States convinced the Rwandan government to send him back to the United States, most likely with a large sum of money.

To give you an idea of how controversial Kagame is, when the Western nations were up in arms about his arrest of Rusesabagina, Kagame made the comment that if the same operation had been done by any American, French, or British special forces, they would be congratulating each other. But when an African nation pulls off a successful operation for an African nation’s interest, the West protests. There is a double standard, he pointed out, and he was not afraid to make known to the world that his interest is that of his country’s, not our Western ideologies to which many African nations are coerced into accepting with large amounts of foreign aid. Rwanda, Kagame made clear, could not be bribed. Now that’s a strongman.

The one takeaway I would like you to grasp from this horrible and tragic event of the Rwanda genocide is the way Kagame pushed the country forward and against racism and atrocity with one very complex idea; reconciliation and mercy.

Reconciliation is something we, often Christians, like to talk about but aren’t really good at doing. “To err is human, to forgive is divine,” as the saying goes. But it’s a famous saying for a reason, mainly being that it’s true. To put into perspective, there were over 280,000 people accused of committing acts of genocide in Rwanda. The UN, who as you know by now has a flawless record when it comes to enforcing international law and justice, could not possibly handle that many cases. Kagame organized local courts whose mission was not to punish, but to learn the truth of the genocide and to restore order and harmony, which obviously included punishment, but with a twist of mercy. In short, the goal of Kagame was reconciliation.

Perpetrators of the genocide who confessed to their crimes, provided the truth of what happened, and gave the locations of mass graves were given reduced sentences that were subsidized with many years of public service and works. In this way, people still received justice for the atrocities while restraining the, rightfully, vengeful side of their nature which threatened to spark a counter genocide against the Hutu people. Indeed, many Hutus who were not directly involved in the genocide but still did little to stop it or hinder it fled Rwanda in fear that the RPF and the surviving Tutsi would come after them and commit a counter-genocide against them. In a society where you’re raised to fear and hate the other so much, it makes logical sense that they would do to you what you had done to them. An eye for and eye. A tooth for a tooth. A genocide for a genocide. Yet Kagame pushed for reconciliation and mercy to save not only the lives of Rwanda, but the nation's immortal soul. As one Rwandan woman is quoted as saying after working with Aegis, a Rwandan company dedicated to uplifting the living conditions of the people while teaching redemptive mercy, “Thank you for saving my life… and the lives of those I was going to kill in revenge.”

Unsurprisingly, decades and generations of perceived racial hatred is hard to dismantle. One way Kagame dealt with the racism between the “tribes” was to destroy the concept of tribal distinction altogether. No one really knows whether they’re descendants of Tutsi or Hutu these days. They did away with the terms and declared themselves all Rwandan. Several years after the genocide, a group of rebels hiding in the DRC made its way into Rwanda where they attacked a school. They ordered the children to divide themselves into Hutus and Tutsis. The children refused saying, “We are all Rwandans.” The rebels didn’t know what to do. So they threw grenades into the classroom killing 6 of the children and injuring 26 others. That act of bravery and commitment to the ideal of peace is something more noteworthy than what many Americans can call patriotism, unity, diversity, or courage today.

On the other hand, this policy of reconciliation and mercy played a major role in reintegrating those who committed the genocide. Indeed, many of the perpetrators are reintegrated into Rwandan society as normal people. Some people know about it, some people don’t. The genocide memorial is very honest about the feelings of guilt, shame, dishonor, and depression that these, mostly men, have because of their participation in the atrocities. For many of them, they felt betrayed by their leaders who lied to them. For others, they can’t explain what happened to them, it all seems like a nightmare. The adrenaline you receive from killing another person is pervasive and potent. During the genocide, it was not just one person, but rather one after the other, after the other, after the other. Within hours of the genocide beginning, it was not truly a coordinated effort, just a directed torrent of berserked and frenzied chaos and violence.

When you throw all of these things into the mix, Rwanda becomes a very strange place. Many people are traumatized forever by what they saw and did during the genocide. It haunts them every day and every night. Any time you see someone over the age of 45, you know they have seen things that they cannot unsee or have done things which cannot be undone. It’s a thick space for sure in many ways.

One of the questions that I struggle with often, and believe that others do too, is that of true mercy and reconciliation. That is, can man truly be redeemed? Can man truly be reconciled? The natural instinct, if you’re Christian, is yes, of course! Christ redeemed all of mankind. He reconciled the world to Himself. But like Atticus once said, “do you really believe that?”

Let me ask you again, do you really believe that man can be redeemed? That a man who has committed horrible sins and crimes and be transformed into a new man and be considered, not forgiven, but reconciled? Not forgiven, but reconciled.

Your answer to this question must bear with it all the subsequent things that must be true. If you say yes, then you must accept that even the most horrible of criminals and dictators are capable of becoming new men, redeemed and reconciled men. Dare I say, saints. If you say no, then you must accept that there is no redemption for you or anything you have done.

There is no middle ground. There is no option to say that some people are redeemable and others are not. To try and claim this imaginary border between the two answers is nothing but an illusion, a muddling of words and concepts in an attempt to justify your own redemption and transformation while satisfying your need to condemn those you find repulsive and evil.

Granted, there is no redemption for the unrepentant. That much is true always. However, if man is truly contrite for the sins he has committed and is willing to confess them and stand trial to receive the just punishment and be prescribed the proper atonement, whatever that may be, can he truly be reconciled, regardless of how horrible the crimes?

To struggle with this isn’t to lack faith. Faith isn’t real if we don’t wrestle with our beliefs. “You can’t believe something you know for certain,” the old saying goes. And so this question of whether man can truly be redeemed, and I don’t mean forgiven or absolved, I mean truly redeemed, reconciled, and transformed, to have one’s inmost being renewed and to put on the new man, sticks with us often. And in a world where everything is permitted and nothing is forgivable, it makes me wonder all the more whether it’s true.

Thankfully for us we have examples of men and women who have proven this redemptive love of Christ. St. Paul is really the only one I need point to. A man who dedicated his life to the active murder of Christians who then becomes the author of the majority of that religion’s base text (the New Testament) through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit? And yet we struggle with the question of true redemption because of the horrible people in this world? Wild.

However it may be, my time in Rwanda was interesting for sure. The country itself is immensely beautiful. It is called the land of a thousand hills for a reason. The volcanic north makes the never-ending series of hills and mountains throughout the country green and bustling with life. The highways are woven between the hills and there is never a dull moment of scenery in the whole place. Sometimes it makes you forget what exactly happened there. On the other hand, maybe that’s the whole point, to throw off the old self and to put on the new.

As always, know that you are in my prayers each morning. All I ask is that you do the same for me.

May God be praised.