National unity and reconciliation in Rwanda: A flawed approach?

Abstract

This article examines the Rwandan government's national unity and reconciliation policy and one of its key elements, the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (NURC). It contends that while the NURC potentially represents an innovative model that other post-conflict societies could adapt and use, the central premise on which both the commission and the government's broader national unity and reconciliation policy are based is critically flawed. The unity that they are endeavouring to achieve, as a vehicle for reconciliation, relies upon a negation of ethnicity – a core component of the 1994 genocide – and hence does not allow for an open and honest engagement with the past. The problem is further compounded by the government's attitude towards the prosecution of crimes committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which not only demonstrates that ethnicity remains highly significant but also underscores the incomplete and partial way in which the past is being addressed.

Keywords:

• Rwanda
• NURC
• reconciliation
• ethnicity
• identity
• RPF

Notes

1. One commentator observes that ‘Rwanda at times came to resemble a laboratory for justice, a fertile testing ground for divergent legal responses to unspeakable agony, many of which had hardly been tested before’ (Oomen 2005, 899).

2. One possible reason for this lack of research on the commission is that it has not done enough to communicate and publicise its work. According to the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (2005), the NURC ‘needs to improve and standardise the quality of its reporting, and it definitely needs to work out and implement a communications strategy to disseminate its work and to raise its profile internationally’ (54). Another possible explanation is that the commission has not kept an adequate database of its work. For example, ‘quantitative information about the commission's work (i.e. number of people trained, age and gender spread, etc.) is not readily available’ (Institute for Justice and Reconciliation 2005, 54).

3. This article does, however, draw upon the author's fieldwork in Bosnia-Hercegovina and in Serbia.

4. In addition to delivering justice and deterring further crimes, the third component of the ICTY's mandate is to contribute to the restoration and maintenance of peace (UN Security Council Resolution 827 (25 May 1993). While this arguably encompasses reconciliation, the latter is not an official aim of the tribunal.

5. This commission was created, funded and sponsored by four international non-governmental organisations (in Burkino Faso, Canada, France and the United States) and, like the NURC, had its roots in an agreement signed between President Habyarimana and the RPF as part of the 1993 Arusha Accords. The 10 commissioners, representing eight different nationalities, conducted their investigations in 1993 and issued their report in March of that year. The government did not welcome the commission, and the day after it left Rwanda 300 to 500 people were killed by government forces. Nevertheless, the commission's report ‘had a powerful impact on the policies of France and Belgium – both countries had been enmeshed in the Rwandan conflict, strongly in support of the government … Two hours after the commission report was released, Belgium recalled its ambassador for consultation’ (Hayner 1994, 631). Before the commission could realise its plans to make a second visit to Rwanda, the genocide began.

6. Upon his release from prison in 2003, one génocidaire who attended a solidarity camp in the Bicumbi region told the journalist Jean Hatzfield, ‘They taught us how to conduct ourselves around the families who had suffered – to behave humbly, to appear timid in confrontations, to avoid provocation when facing distraught survivors. To avoid as well the disorders of AIDs and suchlike illnesses. To learn how to bake bricks for grieving widows or abandoned children’ (cited in Hatzfield 2009, 13). This very practical sort of social work with perpetrators is extremely important and necessary, in order to facilitate their reintegration into society.

7. http://www.nurc.gov.rw/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=50&Itemid=12.

8. The Organic Law for the Creation of Gacaca Jurisdictions was adopted by Rwanda's parliament in February 2001. The gacaca courts began operating in March 2005.

9. According to Weinstein and Stover, ‘Reconciliation, we suggest, is a murky concept with multiple meanings’ (Weinstein and Stover 2004, 5).

10. In BiH, there is a similar lack of consensus as to what exactly ‘reconciliation’ means. During the author's fieldwork in the country in the summer of 2008, interviewees – including victims and survivors – typically defined reconciliation in very ‘thin’, minimalist terms. The fact that people were no longer fighting, killing and threatening each other – this, they claimed, was reconciliation. Interestingly, while frequently insisting that ‘mi smo pomirili’ (we have reconciled), when further probed the majority of interviewees revealed that they did not trust other ethnic groups. Some interviewees, however, expressed scepticism that reconciliation can ever be achieved, maintaining that it will take generations for people to be able to trust each other again and to rebuild relationships. For their part, some Bosnian Muslim interviewees objected to the use of the word ‘reconciliation’, opining that it was not appropriate since it suggested that wrongs had been committed on all sides. Yet their ethnic group, they stressed, had been simply the victim of Croat and in particular Serb aggression (Clark 2009d).

11. For Chapman ‘the nature of truth is itself a complex and elusive concept, especially in a deeply divided society’ (Chapman 2009, 96).

12. According to Cherry, for example, ‘Especially in localised conflicts, where people in a close-knit community have had to learn to live together again, the truth may be seen as divisive and threatening’ (Cherry 2009, 250). Similarly, Minow argues ‘It remains an open question whether through taking testimony and publishing reports, a truth commission can also help to reconcile groups that have been warring or otherwise engaged in deep animosities. Even a minimal form of reconciliation would require capacities for constructive co-operation between those most victimised and those who committed, ordered or countenanced their victimisation’ (Minow 1998, 79).

13. The colonial powers in Rwanda were strongly influenced by the so-called Hamitic thesis, according to which ‘the Hamites, a race of people who included the Egyptians, had spread through parts of Africa, carrying with them their greater sophistication than the Negroid races of equatorial Africa’ (Jones 2001, 170). Regarding the Tutsis as Hamites, the colonialists thereby favoured them over the Hutus. In 1959, however, the Belgians switched allegiance from the Tutsis to the Hutus, thus provoking wide-scale ethnic violence in Rwanda.

14. According to Wolff, ethnicity in itself does not cause conflict; ‘Rather, the stakes in ethnic conflicts are extremely diverse, ranging from legitimate political, social, cultural and economic grievances’ (Wolff 2006, 5).

15. Since 1973, President Juvénal Habyarimana's political party, the Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement (MRND), had been the only legal party in existence. However, in response to strong pressure from France and the conclusion of a Franco-African summit at La Baule in July 1990, Habyarimana announced the introduction of a multiparty system in Rwanda. Thus, by March 1992, five main opposition parties existed: the Mouvement Démocratique Républicain (MDR), the Parti Social Démocrate (PSD), the Parti Libéral (PL), the Parti Démocratique Chrétien (PDC) and the Comité pour la Défense de la République (CDR). Prunier, however, notes that democratisation was very difficult in Rwanda, due to ‘the conjunction of two forces: the obdurate resistance of the power structure to any type of genuine democratisation and the selfish greed of a large part of the opposition leadership’ (Prunier 1995, 268).

16. Regarding this ethnic violence, Bertrand Russell claims that it was the ‘most horrible and systematic human massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis’ (cited in Keane 1996, 19).

17. In BiH, for example, people have Bosniac, Serb and Croat ethnic identities but they also have a civic Bosnian identity.

18. Fujii makes the excellent point that, ‘Viewing state-sponsored ethnicity as a script for violence, not a cause, alters our expectations of how ethnicity operates during genocide. If ethnicity operates as a script, we would expect actors’ performances to vary. We would expect performances to vary between actors such that some actors adhere to the text more faithfully than others … The result of this creative process is not a single performance or outcome but a welter of diverse performances' (Fujii 2009, 13). Fujii's social interactionist approach thus helps to account for the fact that the génocidaires did not act as a homogenous and monolithic group. Some embraced violence far more willingly than others. Bhavnani, for example, identifies a category of ‘reluctant Hutus’ who opposed the genocide but who nevertheless ‘killed in the hundreds and thousands because they were left with no other choice: “kill or be killed”’ (Bhavnani 2006, 652).

19. This term ‘unresolved past’ is borrowed from Parin (1994, 37).

20. According to Butcher, ‘The Tutsi/non-Tutsi divide is one of central Africa's greatest social divisions’ (Butcher 2008, 56).

21. In Rwanda, truth is not only contested. What emerges from research by Hatzfield, for example, is the notion of ‘filtered truths’, whereby perpetrators feel unable to expose the whole abhorrent truth of what occurred. According to one génocidaire, ‘Telling how we lived it so zestfully, how hot we were – no … Saying that everyone joined in except for a few old guys, ladies and their tiny children – that's another truth that must be filtered’ (cited in Hatzfield 2009, 80–1). Survivors, on the other hand, may be too ashamed or embarrassed to reveal their truths. In the words of one survivor, ‘The more you tell of your survival, the more you run yourself down in other's eyes. Many fear losing the esteem of their colleagues, because the survivor did everything possible to survive, not to live’ (cited in Hatzfield 2009, 89). Hence, notwithstanding the work of the ICTR, national courts in Rwanda and the gacaca trials, the full truth of the Rwandan genocide may always remain elusive. As one génocidaire explained, ‘The truth of the genocide is in the mouths of the killers, who manipulate and conceal it, and the dead, who have carried it away with them’ (cited in Hatzfield 2009, 112).

22. This ethnicisation of memory and truth can be similarly observed in post-war BiH, where Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats alike all have their own ‘truths’, according to which their particular ethnic group was the principal victim and was simply defending itself (Clark 2009c; 2009d). For Lambourne, therefore, ‘The word “truth” is…misleading, as it is often interpreted as the finding of a single truth of what happened, who was responsible and why’ (Lambourne 2009, 39).

23. Waldorf notes that, ‘it is difficult to erase perceptions of ethnic differences that were inevitably re-inscribed by the genocide’ (Waldorf 2008, 424).

24. According to Buckley-Zistel, for example, ‘Tutsi survivors emphasise that they were killed because they were Tutsi and that to remove their ethnic identity negates this horrific event’ (Buckley-Zistel 2006, 112).

25. In her recent autobiography, Carla Del Ponte, the former ICTR (and ICTY) chief prosecutor, maintains that Rwanda's government has consistently obstructed the tribunal's investigation of RPF crimes. In her words, ‘The Tutsi-dominated Rwandan government was effectively blackmailing the tribunal, sabotaging its trials of accused Hutu génocidaires in order to halt the office of the Prosecutor's Special Investigation of crimes allegedly committed by the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)’ (Del Ponte 2008, 224).

26. Rwigyema led the RPF's attack on Rwanda on 1 October 1990. Just two days later, he was killed by one of his close associates, Commander Peter Banyingana. Prunier, however, implies that Kagame may have been indirectly involved. Admitting that there is no concrete proof of this, he nevertheless maintains that, ‘many are the former members of the RPF who remain persuaded that Rwigyema's murder was a carefully contrived plot to eliminate a brilliant man whose combination of royal legitimacy [a reference to his membership of the Nyiginya dynasty] and revolutionary charisma made him a probable future national leader’ (Prunier 2009, 14).

27. In a similar vein, Waldorf argues that ‘the government's declarations of reconciliation are undercut by its instrumentalisation of the genocide to bolster its political legitimacy and to attack political opponents’ (Waldorf 2008, 424; see also Mgbako 2005, 220).

28. In the former Yugoslavia, Serbs have often accused the ICTY, a creation of the United Nations Security Council, of dispensing ‘victor's justice’, pointing to the fact that two of the Security Council's permanent members (the United States and the United Kingdom) led the NATO bombing of Serbia and Kosovo in 1999. That the tribunal has chosen not to prosecute NATO war crimes – including the bombing of Radio Television Serbia (RTS) on 22 April 1999 which killed 16 civilians, and the attack on the south Serbian city of Niš on 7 May 1999 which resulted in the deaths of 15 people – has further fuelled Serb allegations of bias and victor's justice (Clark 2008a, 338–9). According to Graham Blewitt, the former ICTY deputy prosecutor, no investigation into NATO war crimes was undertaken because ‘it did not appear that it would result in indictments against any high level person or for that matter against low level persons who had committed particularly heinous acts’ (Blewitt 2006, 149). The real explanation, however, arguably lies in the fact that the ICTY was never conceived as a court that would judge Western defendants and their crimes. As the late Robin Cook, speaking as British Foreign Secretary, once remarked, ‘this is not a court set up to bring to book the prime ministers of the United Kingdom or presidents of the United States’ (cited in Chandler 2002, 145).

29. Prunier argues that Robert Gersony, a freelance consultant from the US, ‘ended up having to face a terrible reality: the RPF was carrying out a massive campaign of killings, which could not be considered simply as uncontrolled revenge killings even if some of the murders belonged to that category’ (Prunier 2009, 15–16). According to the Gersony Report, the RPF killed between 25,000 and 45,000 people – including Tutsis – in the five months between April and September 1994.

30. Estimates of the number of perpetrators involved in Rwanda's genocide range from ‘tens of thousands’ (Jones 2001, 41) to ‘hundreds of thousands’ (Des Forges 1999, 2; Mamdani 2001, 7). The Rwandan government, however, has claimed that three million Hutus took part in the genocide (Straus 2008, 175).

31. This pragmatism is similarly prevalent among victims and survivors in BiH. Despite losing loved ones, being sent to concentration camps, being subjected to rape, and so on, interviewees frequently insisted that život ide dalje (life goes on).

32. Such pragmatism strongly emerges from Hatzfield's research with genocide survivors. According to one, ‘We must simply take up life again, since life has so decided. Thornbushes must not invade the farms; teachers must return to their school blackboards; doctors must care for the sick in the health clinics. There must be strong new cattle, fabrics of all kinds, sacks of beans in the markets. In that case, many Hutus are necessary’ (cited in Hatzfield 2006, 42). In a similar vein, another survivor explained, ‘But drawing closer to the Hutus is vital. The fact is, the Tutsis don't want a country all to themselves. They couldn't survive in a nation without Hutus. The Hutus wielded the machete against the Tutsis, but they wield it as well against nature. The Hutus are farming stock, and I know they are necessary to Tutsi prosperity’ (cited in Hatzfield 2009, 210–11).