Government repression in Rwanda
Morrill, Constance
TWELVE YEARS AGO this summer, over a period of a hundred days, between five hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand Rwandans—mostly Tutsi—were slaughtered with a brutality that shocked...
...Faustin Twagiramungu, a former leader of the MDR, living in Belgium since his resignation as prime 6 DISSENT / Summer 2006 minister, chose to run as an independent candidate against Kagame, who won with 95 percent of the vote...
...CONSTANCE MORRILL is an independent researcher and freelance interpreter in New York City...
...I was a little older...
...The man had approached several Hutu neighbors, but Eugene was the only one who dared to respond...
...Like thousands of other Hutu returnees, he was accused of genocide, but never had a case file...
...This fear is nicely revealed by some of the recent changes in the country's Gacaca Law, which governs the domestic prosecution of genocide and crimes against humanity (see, "When the Killers Go Home" by Phil Clark, Dissent, Summer 2005...
...But don't think for a second that the RPF is innocent...
...Nkubito died suspiciously in Rwanda in February 1997...
...All I recognize is that there were huge massacres between Rwandans...
...4 As one Rwandan human rights activist told me, the politics of the Rwandan regime is nothing but "show business," in which the historical fact of the 1994 genocide is manipulated for political advantage...
...Ethnicity is still determined patrilineally in both countries, but in Rwanda it is discussed only when describing ethnic relations in the past...
...I DISSENT / Summer 2006 15 am not saying that the genocide was not an odious crime—it was, there is no question about that, and I am not exonerating the previous regime...
...Itsembatsemba—this concerns everyone...
...This occurs only in the Kinyarwanda version of the law, which, in 2001, used the phrase "itsembabwoko n'itsembatsemba" to describe what the English and French versions have always referred to as "genocide...
...I can sit here and tell you my truth . . . that the RPF raped Hutu women, especially after the victory [in July 1994], but these truths may never see the light of day under the current regime...
...THE EDITORS 20 DISSENT / Summer 2006...
...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate page...
...She is currently working on a book about her interviews with imprisoned Rwandan youth...
...The truth will set you free," they say in big letters, alongside the words Ukuri, Ubutabere, Ubwiyunge—Truth, Justice, Reconciliation...
...Itsembabwoko is a combination of the verb gutsemba (to exterminate) and the noun ubwoko (ethnic group, race, or tribe) and was invented to capture the reality of what happened...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...They singled out one man near me who was too sick to walk, and they said, 'Why haven't you taken him to a health center...
...We tried to carry him, but we were too weak— I weighed less than fifty kilos at that point as a new returnee—and when they saw that we couldn't do it, they made us put him down...
...We don't have ethnic identity here...
...We'll help you take him there.' There were fourteen of us, and they asked us how old we were, and told us to separate into groups according to our ages, up to forty...
...Acknowledging that there was a genocide campaign," he says, "why not also acknowledge all the other atrocities as well, especially if the overall goal of Gacaca is really to bring about reconciliation...
...When I asked if there had been a reason for his arrest, he said "There was one—genocide, of course—but it was false...
...That's a violation of international law...
...While publicly maintaining that "reconciliation" between genocide survivors and perpetrators is one of its primary goals, the present government has actively obstructed the discovery of the truth about those years, which is indispensable to long-term politico-ethnic reconciliation...
...And please remember that we can't consider articles unless they're accompanied by a cover letter and stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...Noel Twagiramungu, a human rights activist and Harvard fellow, concurred: "By deciding now to talk exclusively about `jenoside' . . . the government is [assuming] that what happened in Rwanda was strictly a genocide, as . . . defined by the 1948 Convention, i.e., a killing that targeted a specific group, in this case the Tutsi people...
...Many prisoners expressed bitterness at the substitution of the word "jenoside" in the Kinyarwandan version and noted that itsembabwoko was understood to refer to the genocide of the Tutsi and itsembatsemba to the massacres of Hutu who were opposed to the ideology of the previous regime...
...Why is it all right for them to say it, but not for me...
...He and his wife were staying in a regroupment camp there when RPF soldiers entered and pretended to be concerned about some of the sick...
...The only remaining jurisdiction competent to try such crimes is the ICTR in Arusha, but Kagame and the RPF have exercised such political pressure on this body that it is unlikely that investigations will be pursued to their judicial ends.' The voiceless masses in Rwanda have been acutely aware of this political manipulation of ethnicity for years, and have suffered in their own right from what has become a dangerous game of hide and seek with regard to the "truth" about what happened before, during, and after the genocide...
...Memory in Rwanda," unpublished essay (forthcoming), on file with author...
...Then, with a slightly cynical look and rhetorical tone, she asked, "Do you have ethnicities in the USA...
...He took the man through his backyard and down a road leading to the parish where other Tutsis had taken refuge...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...CM: What does itsembabwoko mean, in your mind ? JK: It means nothing for me...
...DES FORGES makes an important point about the loss of rights imposed in the past in Rwanda, and raises a concern that the Gacaca system might run the risk of creating a new problem in the form of a large disenfranchised group: Under the electoral law of 2003, people who were detained and not yet tried were deprived of their voting rights...
...Although such an acknowledgment is warranted, it is clear that the Gacaca jurisdictions are disproportionately biased toward the prosecution of genocide perpetrators (as opposed to perpetrators of other crimes against humanity, such as war crimes...
...Whether it was a conscious decision or not, and I think it may well have been, the point is that the perception will be that this is an attempt to limit the focus . . . to killings only of Tutsi...
...He was released in November of 2000...
...Yet the scale of human rights abuses and illegal exploitation of minerals by the RPA in Congo was documented by a UN Panel of experts in 2002 and 2003...
...Billboards all over the country advertise the Inkiko-Gacaca, as the tribunals are known...
...Even Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian lieutenant general who decried the international community's failure to intervene and whose own efforts to stop the genocide were thwarted by the UN's refusal to supply him with enough troops, acknowledged in his memoir that " . . . the deaths of Rwandans can also be laid at the door of . . . Paul Kagame, who did not speed up his campaign when the scale of the genocide became clear and even talked candidly with me at several points about the price his fellow Tutsis might have to pay for the cause...
...Three weeks after their return to Rwanda in 1997, The name has been changed...
...On April 15, one week after the genocide began, he and his wife fled the capital as it descended into chaos...
...The former (post-genocide) president of Rwanda, Pasteur Bizimungu, and former minister of public works, Charles Ntakirutinka, have been sitting in prison—isolated from each other and other detainees—since May 2002, as punishment for forming the Party for Democracy and Renewal (PDR- Ubuyanja, "renewal") in April of 2001...
...Des Forges recalled the words of a Rwandan man who posed the ultimate rhetorical question, "I know the authorities have said that their soldiers committed these crimes...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc.—they're the author's responsibility...
...But not like here...
...Hence, "Hutu moderate" is a contemporary term imbued with retroactive meaning...
...A few days before, he had tried to help a Tutsi neighbor in need of safe escort to a nearby parish...
...5. All Rwandan laws are published in the country's three official languages: Kinyarwanda, French, and (since 1994) English...
...Little more than a year after the genocide, on August 28, 1995, several "politically moderate" Hutu ministers, opponents of the genocide but also critics of the extrajudicial killings and human rights violations of the RPA, resigned from the new "coalition" government...
...But this is too simplistic a summary of why and how the 1994 Rwandan genocide happened...
...One twenty-five-year-old man (arrested in 2003 and released in late 2005) at Kigali Central Prison said that the two words "are not the same thing...
...Especially when I think that in my family there were people who were killed, when they were not Tutsi . . . . I had two uncles killed by the RPF, many neighbors killed and thrown into swamps...
...However, in the Rwandan case, in the past, people convicted of serious crimes were sometimes deprived of the complete panoply of their civil and political rights, which meant not just the right to vote or stand for office—it meant the right to own a business, be a journalist, be a teacher, a doctor, a lawyer, a nurse, have a passport, have a governmental position, etc...
...And it was perpetrated by Hutus—the interahamwe...
...Not long afterward, Eugene was threatened by the interahamwe, and out of fear for their own lives, he and his wife fled to the former Zaire...
...Among other changes, both substantive and subtle, there is an important linguistic modification...
...Rwanda, so the story goes, has a culture of obedience: those who were told to kill simply obeyed...
...The Gacaca [community-based genocide courts] might be a good way to help us out of the current impasse, but you mustn't believe that the whole `truth' will come out in these courts...
...In Leave None to Tell the Story, Des Forges writes that "while professing a policy of openness and commitment to human rights, the RPF hindered [in early 1993] the investigation of the International Commission [of Investigation on Human Rights Violations in Rwanda] and made it impossible for its members to speak freely and privately with potential witnesses in areas under RPF control...
...RPF deception is not obvious to Western observers who don't know the country well and is certainly not very visible in the occasional updates that trickle through mainstream U.S...
...Eugene was then transferred to the cachot communal (jail), built to hold about twenty people, but crammed with over a hundred...
...You can't leave a sick man like that...
...I think it was a political choice...
...news media...
...A twenty-eight-year-old man in Gitarama prison (arrested in 1995) said, "I don't know how to explain if there is a difference or not, it's not clear to me...
...and February 28, 2005, www.state.gov/g/drl/r1s/hrrpt/2004/41621.htm 3. René Lemarchand...
...Then [the soldiers] cuffed us together, and that's when they first beat me...
...And the most useful studies suggest that what happened in Rwanda more than a decade ago was not as simple as "Tutsi victim, Hutu perpetrator...
...2. U.S...
...All had fallen prey to the genocidal political ideology of Hutu Power, which reached the population via the airwaves with anti-Tutsi refrains of "The graves are not yet full...
...So, if you are looking at three-quarters of a million people accused, and if a substantial number of those people are in fact convicted, and this . . . loss of rights is imposed, you will end up with an extremely important segment of the population deprived of these rights [to livelihood...
...The RPF has also used its "genocide credit," as Belgian scholar Filip Reyntjens calls it, to justify its military presence in neighboring Congo, where it claims to be guarding against attacks from the ex-FAR (Forces Armees Rwandaises, of the previous regime) and interahamwe...
...The term, writes Eltringham in Accounting for Horror: Post - Genocide Debates in Rwanda, seems mainly to denote the more "visible" Hutu who were killed in 1994 as a result of their active disagreement with the genocidal campaign, as opposed to the numerous ordinary "invisible" Hutu citizens who hid and saved Tutsis at great risk to their own lives...
...Eugene left Rwanda not long after our last meeting and remains in exile...
...If you are submitting to Dissent electronically, our e-mail address is submissions@dissentmagazine.org . Please include a postal address and phone number...
...For obvious reasons, the genocidal killing and raping that took place under the former regime in Rwanda has been much easier to document than the war crimes committed by the RPF during the civil war, in 1994 or afterward...
...None have had legal representation since their arrests...
...It was so tight we could not even sit down...
...In Burundi, the Tutsi have been the historical oppressors since independence, and ethnicity is out in the open, even politically...
...At the time, independent political parties were legal according to a 1991 law, but in practice, the law is what the RPF says it is...
...When I pressed her, suggesting that the word surely meant something if it was in the law at one point, she said that it "referred to those who were targeted during the genocide and who were considered to be, in quotation marks, the Tutsi...
...Yet under the actual penal laws dealing with genocide and Gacaca, there is no indication of any kind that people accused will be deprived of their voting rights...
...The MDR, in existence since 1962 but known to have been a political ally of the RPF since 1992 and to have opposed the genocide, was dissolved after being accused of promoting "divisionist ideas...
...The thinness of the RPF government's facade of righteousness is suggested by its fear of criticism, a fear that is hidden behind an arsenal of defenses...
...But it is becoming clearer that Kagame's activities were driven by something more complex than an altruistic regard 14 DISSENT / Summer 2006 for human rights...
...Ethnicity: Now You See It, Now You Don't The RPF's political rhetoric is inculcated into every member of the party, such that "sensitive" questions trigger stock answers...
...Yes, I think there was a genocide against the Tutsi, but they shouldn't exclude the Hutu in this genocide because they were killed at the same time as the Tutsi...
...were killed in acts of revenge," but claims that they were victims of "persons acting in individual capacities...
...6. All three of these detainees have maintained their innocence, and two have testified to what they saw...
...The resignations were immediately followed by a statement from the government, saying that they had been fired.' All but Nkubito fled the country, and Sendashonga, who escaped to Kenya later in November, was assassinated in Nairobi on May 16, 1998, because he was cooperating with prosecutors from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on the issue of witness manipulation, among others...
...7. For a more complete discussion of this situation, see Filip Reyntjens, "La Transition Politique au Rwanda," Dialogue, No...
...Who Are the "Moderate" Hutu...
...This occurred in 2003, just prior to the not-so-transparent presidential elections of that same year...
...Before the genocide, he had worked for a financial institution in Kigali...
...Rene Lemarchand, a political scientist and scholar on Rwanda and Burundi, writes, "What is being thwarted through the ban on ethnic identities is the memory of atrocities endured by Hutu and Tutsi, where ethnicity, though singularly unhelpful for discriminating between victims and perpetrators, is crucially important for addressing the roots of the injuries suffered by each community...
...But evidence of its own gross human rights violations—perpetrated by the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), the military branch of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), since it invaded Rwanda on October 1, 1990— is actively suppressed and denied...
...Kagame and his army are credited with stopping the genocide, and that is true enough...
...Department of State country report on human rights practices, February 25, 2004...
...6 When I told Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch, a longtime Rwanda expert, what detainees' perceptions of the change in language had been, she said, "It wouldn't surprise me that it would be perceived that way...
...The more visible resisters who were killed by political extremists of the same ethnicity included several Hutu politicians, like the former prime minister and member of the Mouvement Democratique Republicain (MDR) Agathe Uwilingiyimana, the minister of agriculture and president of the Parti Social -Democrate (PSD) Frederic Nzamurambaho (both killed by the Presidential Guard on April 7, along with many other politicians), and many Hutu journalists and human rights activists (although many were also Tutsi) who were killed for criticizing the genocidal propaganda machine...
...Indeed, there is mounting evidence that Paul Kagame, commander of the RPA and current president of Rwanda, gave the order to shoot down the plane carrying former president Juvenal Habyarimana and his Burundian counterpart on April 6, 1994—the event that triggered the genocidal campaign...
...Although Tutsis were the main targets of this genocidal killing, Hutus who opposed the extermination campaign were also massacred...
...For the current government, whose most powerful members are Tutsis who grew up in exile in Uganda, the genocide narrative is convenient...
...I said, "Yes, in fact we have a lot of them...
...CM: So, if ethnic identity doesn't exist, and was only "mobilized" during the genocide, why is there a law against "ethnicism" ? 18 DISSENT / Summer 2006 JK: It is so that it [ethnicity] does not become an asset used by certain people . . . to advance themselves politically and economically...
...they [the authorities] added itsembatsemba because of Hutus who were killed for their ideas, and the state does not want to put them in the same basket with the Tutsis...
...Evidence of this cynical strategy abounds, although the U.S...
...Evidence that tens of thousands of Hutu civilians were killed by the RPF in the northern province of Byumba alone, to "make room" for the RPF "safe zone" in the area, is ignored by the current regime...
...The ban is heavyhanded —both psychologically and practically —and could well backfire...
...3)Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...Rwanda remains a country in which stories of living citizens cannot safely be attached to names, especially when such stories implicate the current regime...
...Kagame has publicly acknowledged that "people...
...I had never, never even met this woman," he told me...
...After a month in the cachot, he was transferred to another, and then finally to one of Kibuye's two central prisons...
...This acknowledgment has often been parlayed into an excuse by government officials, who, when questioned about the reality of RPF crimes, lament the fact that "their boys" were so traumatized when they found members of their family killed that they "lost their minds" and went on vengeful rampages...
...Then they ordered us to sit down and suddenly started to handcuff everyone, except me and another fellow...
...But temporary insanity cannot account for the systematic killing and disappearances that took place at the hands of the RPF in 1994 and afterward...
...In fact, many thoughtful analyses of the genocide have emerged over the last twelve years, in different languages, about the complex origins and international dimensions of this politicoethnic conflict...
...Being accused of divisionism is tantamount to being accused of perpetuating the "genocidal ideology...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...When I asked if he did not think there was a genocide directed against the Tutsi, he said, "When I hear that, I think it's the egotism of the Tutsi...
...But not all of the evidence is available, and the full story of what happened in Rwanda between 1990 and 1994 has yet to emerge...
...We will not consider manuscripts submitted simultaneously to several publications...
...But what reigns in Rwanda now is nothing but hypocrisy...
...When I interviewed Judith Kanakuze, an RPF and Tutsi member of parliament, she carefully avoided my questions about the meaning of words in Kinyarwanda and the language changes in the Gacaca Law: CM: Why was the phrase itsembabwoko n'itsembatsemba replaced by the Kinyarwandized word "jenoside" ? JK: My opinion is that people had a tendency to confuse the war and the genocide, and crimes against humanity and the genocide...
...CM: So where did this idea of ethnicity come from ? JK: It was an ideology mobilized [vehicule] by the genocide...
...The RPF's strategies to maintain power have created a very oppressive political culture in Rwanda—one that could threaten another round of large-scale violence in the near future...
...Only by denying their collective identity as Tutsi can they legitimately claim that there is no real discrimination between Hutu and Tutsi . . . Many Hutu believe that the current regime minimizes the deaths of both the visible Hutu who died because of their opposition to the genocidal campaign and the less visible, "ordinary" Hutu who risked their lives trying to save Tutsi...
...1. For more information see www.internews.org/activities/ ICTR_reports/ICTRnews Dec 00.html#1218b (last viewed, October 21, 2005...
...many have fled the country...
...The irony in this last statement is overwhelming, but such official denial of ethnicity is not a new phenomenon in the part of the Great Lakes region inhabited by Hutu and Tutsi...
...along with two hundred thousand others who had spent the intervening years in miserable Congo refugee camps, Eugene was arrested "mischievously" in Kibuye, a province bordering Lake Kivu...
...238, January-February 2005 (forthcoming at www.gralac.org...
...and "Remember to kill the little rats as well as the big rats," and "Leave none to tell the story...
...TWELVE YEARS AGO this summer, over a period of a hundred days, between five hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand Rwandans—mostly Tutsi—were slaughtered with a brutality that shocked the world into paralysis...
...In 2005, I interviewed a variety of individuDISSENT / Summer 2006 17 als inside and outside Rwanda—prisoners, government officials, nongovernmental organization representatives, human rights advocates, and scholars—about this seemingly subtle change in language, and the responses were enlightening...
...Divisionism is defined as any "speech, written statement or action that causes conflict . . . " In practice, this law is less a tool to fight ethnic division than a political weapon designed to suppress dissent...
...So far, numbers of Rwandan journalists and other civilians have been accused of inciting divisionism, arrested, interrogated, and otherwise threatened...
...Eugene's alternative truth is not revealed in movies like Hotel Rwanda or in the first popular book-length account of the genocide in English, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, by Philip Gourevitch, published in 1998...
...The killers ranged from the Presidential Guard to many members of the former army to the interahamwe militias, propelled by extremist elements within the thenruling regime: friends and neighbors of the people they murdered...
...RWANDAN POLITICAL culture under the RPF is defined by the familiar Orwellian dynamic in which the state is the arbiter of historical truth...
...sirrING IN A dark bar in Kigali, just down the hill from the Hotel des Milles Collines, Eugene told me his truth...
...Noel Twagiramungu remarks that if the overall goal of the Gacaca, as marketed to the Rwandan population, is to bring about reconciliation, why is it that not every Rwandan voice is allowed to be heard in the process...
...Unless those disenfranchised laborers begin to DISSENT / Summer 2006 19 mobilize...
...While "Hutu" refers to an ethnic group that makes up approximately 84 percent of the population of both Rwanda and Burundi, with Tutsi making up 15 percent, and the Twa, 1 percent, the political context of one country is the inverse of the other...
...Trying to hide my astonishment, I merely raised my eyebrows in response...
...A twenty-seven-year-old woman (arrested in 1996) said, "For me genocide means itsembabwoko...
...Writing in 1994 on Burundi, Rene Lemarchand observed, "Ironically, it is among Tutsi intellectuals that ethnicity performs a vanishing act in the name of instrumental rationality...
...The Gacaca Law, originally promulgated in 2001, was amended in 2004 in some very interesting ways...
...They instructed the two of us to pick up the sick man and carry him to the health center...
...That cause was bringing the RPF to power, not stopping the genocide...
...government, one of Rwanda's chief sources of aid, diplomatically characterizes the country as "a republic dominated by a strong presidency...
...Among these ministers were Seth Sendashonga (minister of the interior, Hutu), Faustin Twagiramungu (prime minister, Hutu, who had been targeted during the genocide), J. Baptiste Nkuliyingoma (minister of information, Hutu), and Alphonse-Marie Nkubito (minister of justice and founder of Rwanda's first human rights organization, also a Hutu...
...In the 2004 law, this entire phrase was curiously replaced, for the first time, by a single, borrowed Kinyarwandized word: "jenoside...
...He learned the name of the woman he was accused of attempting to kill with a bludgeon only when he was interrogated and beaten...
...Please use inclusive language so that we don't have to make adjustments during editing...
...In the summer of 2001, seven years after the genocide, a gray-haired educated Hutu named Eugene,* with trauma in his eyes, told me something that those who know Rwanda know to be true: "There was a genocide in Rwanda," he said...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...This was true, but not the entire story...
...This] would end up essentially creating a disenfranchised group, many of whom would be the former intelligentsia, and who would be consigned to the life of a laborer...
...When we last spoke via telephone, in October of 2005, he explained why he thought it important to tell me that story when he did: "I know that most Westerners were so overwhelmed by the magnitude of the genocide that they could not see anything else, and I have to understand that...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...But if we say that, we risk being accused of having the genocide ideology...
...Itsembatsemba means "massacres," but does not contain an ethnic reference...
...Because they have uruvugiro (the right or space to speak...
...The RPF's own "regime of truth," to use Foucault's term, has consisted of shrinking political space to avoid criticism and maintain power, and of "instrumentalizing" the genocide in its relations with the international community, while denying crimes committed by its own military wing against Rwandan Hutu civilians in 1994 and in the northwest in 1997-1998...
...Political space is constrained by a 2002 law that makes incitement to irondakoko ("ethnicism" or discrimination) and amacakubiri ("divisionism") crimes that carry prison sentences of up to five years and a two-millionfranc fine for government or political party officials who are found guilty...
...A few suggestions: (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your manuscript...
...The advent of the Gacaca tribunals has not changed this basic attitude of the RPF government...
...Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, however, have documented these developments for years, and many academic experts are well aware of the dangers of continuing to support this increasingly totalitarian regime...
...The government's relations with international donors depend largely on the legitimacy it derives from its military role in stopping the killing...
...She conceded only slightly, "Ah yes, not like here...
...To add insult to injury, any reference to the Geneva Convention has been deleted from the 2004 Gacaca Law—a legal edit that bolsters RPF immunity for crimes committed in Rwanda against civilians between October 1, 1990 and December 31, 1994...
...According to anthropologist Nigel Eltringham, the term "Hutu moderate" in the Rwandan context is a "contemporary" one that is "ubiquitous and undefined...
...4. See UN Security Council, Final Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, S/2002/1 146, 16 October 2002, §65-96...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
Vol. 53 • July 2006 • No. 3
