World Affairs
World view - Michela Wrong warns that Tutsis haven't forgotten
Published 29 March 2004
We can expect a flood of criticism of Rwanda's leadership since the genocide, and there is much to condemn. But we must recognise why the Tutsis are slow to forgive and forget
In less than a fortnight, Rwanda will mark the tenth anniversary of its genocide. Already, the outpouring has started, and we can expect it to crescendo in coming days. An outpouring not of grief for Rwanda's one million dead - although there will be some of that - but of international criticism of the Tutsi-dominated government that has run the country since putting to flight the Hutu regime that organised the slaughter.
Some will be offensive. I would place in that category the carefully timed leaking of a French police report accusing Paul Kagame, Rwanda's current president, of ordering the 1994 rocket attack on his predecessor's jet, the event Hutu executioners used as the signal to start their meticulously planned extermination programme. The implication of the report - that the Tutsi leadership has only itself to blame for the horrors visited upon its community - is as illogical as it is distasteful.
Most of the criticism will be of the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger variety. Human rights workers, academics and journalists will remind us of last year's flawed elections, slam the Tutsi elite for maintaining its vice-like grip on state power and denounce Rwanda's shameful human rights record in neighbouring Congo and its pillaging of Congolese resources.
There is much to condemn. But when I hear my peers railing against Kagame's regime, I am struck by the strange lack of emotional imagination they expose. It's not what they include in their critiques that baffles me, it's what they leave out. Missing from their accounts is one simple element, the ingredient that holds the key to Rwanda's past and future: fear.
A genocide changes everything. It warps minds, poisons trust and is passed on to future generations like a genetic disease. "It's been ten years," say the critics, "but the Tutsis still use the genocide to justify whatever they do." Still? Sixty years after the Holocaust, most of us at least recognise the extent to which Israel's brutality in the occupied territories can be traced back to the Nazi concentration camps. Are Africans supposed to have shorter memories?
"The Tutsis are a minority, but they're not letting the Hutus have any real power." The Tutsis know what happened the last time they went along with majority rule. They will not stage free elections until they feel sure Hutus casting their ballots would not prefer to see them dead. Holding elections so soon after the massacres - something the international community nagged them to do - was pointless; that they should be rigged by a nervous leadership, inevitable.
"They've invaded Congo, killed tens of thousands. This a ruthless, militaristic regime and it is destabilising Central Africa." However cynical Rwanda's presence in eastern Congo later became, its soldiers initially crossed the border to disperse the guerrilla army the Hutu extremists had assembled. Having watched UN peacekeepers head for the airport as the genocide got under way and seen how the UN then fed and watered the genocidaires in Congo's refugee camps, the Tutsis were never going to entrust their security to outsiders or pay more than lip-service to international law. And soldiers who have lost every living relative tend to be ruthless: they have nothing to lose.
I'm not suggesting the genocide has somehow elevated the Rwandan government above criticism. But we must engage with Rwanda as it is - a society scarred and traumatised like no other - not the confident, magnanimous nation that western commentators would like to dream into existence.
Whenever I read a critique of the Rwandan government, I remember the handprints I saw on the inside walls of Rwanda's churches in 1994. They looked, at first glance, like the finger paintings you see in primary schools. But these were paintings in blood, the last imprints left by terrified Tutsi men, women and children scrabbling to escape as their executioners hurled grenades into their midst.
If we don't recognise the role played by fear, then we will have nothing to add to the debate over Rwanda's future. So let's praise the Rwandans for preaching ethnic reconciliation from every church pulpit, respect them for welcoming back Hutu foot soldiers emerging from Congo's forests, and hail them for raising a new generation of children to believe they are not "Tutsi" or "Hutu", but "Rwandan".
Let's recognise the courage behind the gacaca system of justice, under which tens of thousands of penitent killers and rapists are moving back to the villages where they perpetrated their terrible deeds. Let's keep pushing the Tutsi elite to open up the political field. And let's give them hell over their role in the Congo.
Michela Wrong, who has been writing about Africa for the past decade, is the author of In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: living on the brink of disaster in the Congo (Fourth Estate). She will be writing a fortnightly column for the NS
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