In 1994 almost a million Rwandans were slaughtered – by their own people. Can a nation recover from such a trauma? On the eve of the tenth anniversary, Developments’ Editors Martin Wroe and Malcolm Doney report from Rwanda. Photographs Karen Kessi-Williams.

Rwanda: The background, DFID in Rwanda, Story of a genocide survivor.

Inside the low red brick Catholic church of Ntamara, 35 miles east of Kigali, nothing has changed in 10 years. The bones of the dead lie strewn between the benches, covered in dust, mingling with the melancholy detritus of final human possessions: broken combs, coloured necklaces, bundled rags which were once someone’s shirt or dress. A human skull sits on the altar staring out into the ruined church where no-one comes to worship anymore, they come only to remember. This place has been designated a memorial to an awful day on 14th April 1994.

The visitor, entering at the back of the church, is greeted with a sight which immediately burns itself on the memory. The length of one wall is piled three and four deep with rows of human skulls, almost 500 of them. Most carry visible fractures from machetes, one has a rusty spear head still protruding from it, another has a clear bullet hole. A sad line of smaller skulls reminds us that children were killed here too. It is a dreadful witness to the day when the Rwandan genocide came to Ntamara.

As many as 5,000 Rwandan Tutsi had gravitated to this church, convinced that here they would find safety from the warring Hutu hordes. If the church had provided sanctuary in previous episodes of inter-tribal violence, this time it was not to be.

“ They broke a hole in through the wall and threw grenades in,” remembers Dancilla Nyirabazungu. “People fell to the floor, someone fell on me, then another.”

Almost everyone died. Today their bones are stacked like so much firewood next to the skulls. Sack-loads more, gathered from the surrounding hills, sit against another wall. But Dancilla, eight months pregnant, was buried so deep beneath the sea of dead and wounded people that as the soldiers used their machetes to dispatch those still alive, no-one noticed her breathing. After they had left, she crawled out. She found her two children and father dead and ran into the bush where she lived in terror for a month.

Today Dancilla has a ten year old son Eric, who is featured on the cover, and, as one of the custodians of this memorial site, she explains to visitors what happened on that day. Rwanda, she says, has moved on in many ways but no-one should be allowed to forget what happened in the spring of 1994. In the coming months, the church will be developed as an ongoing memorial site and a centre to co-ordinate literacy projects with children.

‘ Many people do not accept that what happened really did,’ she says. ‘But when you see this, you cannot deny it. ‘It makes me happy that people can come here and learn what happened, or that people far away can know about this place. For the sake of the future we must keep this memory alive.’

It was at 8.30pm on 6 April 1994, when two rockets shot down the plane of Rwandan President Habyarimana. The attack was the signal for a small group of nationalists among Rwanda’s Hutu elite to launch genocide against the country’s Tutsi minority (see box for history). Barely 100 days later, up to one million Tutsis lay dead, alongside thousands of moderate Hutu, killed for their opposition to the extremists. Virtually all were civilians, unarmed and defenceless. Women and children were specifically targeted – raped, tortured, maimed, murdered – to ensure the final elimination of all Tutsi.

All Hutu were commanded to participate in a war of ethnic cleansing to rid the country of these “inyenzi” (cockroaches). The dehumanising message and the call to murder was never more successful than through radio station RTLMC. In a poor country like Rwanda, hampered by illiteracy, radio broadcast this compelling message of hate to every village, turning neighbour on neighbour.
Those international players who might have been able to stop or at least reduce the bloodshed – for one reason or another – did not intervene. It took a military campaign by the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) to overcome the perpetrators of the genocide.

By the end of the civil war on 18th July1994, the country was wrecked. Of seven million inhabitants before the genocide, about three-quarters had been killed, displaced, or fled. Up to 15 percent of the population was dead, two million were internally displaced, and another two million become refugees. An entire nation was traumatized. How would it ever recover?

Given its recent history it is remarkable to see the progress Rwanda has made towards reversing the economic and social consequences of the genocide in such a short period of time. A decade on, many in Rwanda believe that the country is on the comeback trail.

In the summer of 2003, the post-genocide government held presidential and parliamentary elections, won by the RPF; members of both main ethnic groups are represented. That said, the RPF has been criticized by some for manipulating the elections and remaining the preserve of an elite of former Rwandan refugees, characterised by its President Paul Kagame.

There has been rapid progress at increasing access at all levels of the education system – basic education is free and compulsory according to the new constitution. More than 80 per cent of primary children are now enrolled in school, with the Government announcing plans to expand basic education to nine years and remove fees for lower secondary schooling – a huge achievement given that so many teachers were killed or fled. There is still a way to go – drop out rates are high and only five per cent of the very poorest children are getting schooling. The country has also made strides in achieving gender equity in access to schooling – yet boys remain better off in terms of secondary education.

This is ironic since women are playing a particularly significant role in rebuilding the country – in the new Parliament, 39 of the 80-member Chamber of Deputies are women – a proportion which beats every other country in the world. Coffee, the main export, is selling on the world market again, albeit at the lowest price in decades. And the tourists are coming back, principally to see Rwanda’s unique community of wild mountain gorillas.

“ People are now beginning to feel that security is returning,” explains Yvette Mujwaneza, who works with Asoferwa – Association de Solidarite des Femmes Rwandaises – an organization which helps women and children traumatized by the genocide. “It is a slow transformation, but it is happening, the feeling that perhaps this will not happen again.”

But for this to succeed, she adds, people need work to have money to pay for things – they do not want to depend on others – and they have to be prepared to be reconciled to old enemies. She is a living witness to this.

“ I met the man who had killed members of my family, he accepted that he had killed them and said how he had done it. In our country you may be in a conversation with someone who has killed your loved ones, you may not be their friend but you can be in the same society and live peacefully. ”

There is little doubt that Rwanda’s historic lack of education was a key factor in the Hutu elite’s ability to persuade thousands of ordinary people to unquestioningly massacre their Tutsi neighbours. One way of reducing the potential for a repeat is in a rapid expansion of education.

“ Our biggest success has been in training so many new teachers,” explains Eric Karimba, Director of primary schooling at the Ministry of Education. Once children have received an education, he says, “They cannot so easily be persuaded to do bad things”.

Rwanda’s next challenge is to ensure that the quality of teaching and educational resources goes up commensurately. Ten years ago, adds Balthazar Nsenjeyumva (the principal) at Groupe de la Sale teacher training college, education was “only for the privileged class”. Today, education is “becoming something for everyone.”

His school lost scores of teachers during the genocide, either killed or fleeing the country, but today staff numbers are high again – and students who once feared and distrusted each other, now get on well.

And education is about so much more than learning, explains Sister Annunciet, headteacher of Groupe Scolaire de Notre Dame de Bon Conceil: for example, young girls who were traditionally “suppressed” in Rwanda, now have a much clearer idea of what their rights are. The country’s predominantly spring and rain-fed rural agriculture-based economy supports a social fabric in which the woman’s primary role has been defined in the private sphere of the household – traditionally girls lose out in education to boys, staying at home to help with the family.

“Now women are better organized and the country is realizing that educating girls is vital – when you teach a girl about good diet in school, she goes home and teaches her mother in the village.” And, says Hope Tumakunde Women’s District Officer for the Kigali rural area, given even a rudimentary education women will grasp opportunities to take a decisive role in public life. “Women often say to me that if they’d been in charge, the genocide would never have happened. The government have provided the guidelines for women’s participation and now they are saying ‘why not?”

But neither education nor gender equity can transform Rwanda by itself, says Pascal Rwayitare, Director of Education for the Myumbe Province – the country’s economy has to take off, agriculture and industry have to develop, tourists have to see more than genocide and gorillas. Certainly, there is no denying that the country faces unique problems – not least about how to handle justice for survivors, and the thousands imprisoned on charges of involvement in the war.

“ I will go and see the relatives of the families I have killed,” explains Léon, standing in the baking sun in the yard of the prison. “I will say that I was caused to do it by the political leadership, that I was told to do it.” And then he adds, “And I will say sorry to them”.

It may not seem much, but at least Léon admits to his horrific crimes – other prisoners we spoke to do not. Driving through this swooping green country of dramatic hills and valleys the landscape is regularly dotted with the bright pink uniforms of prison work parties. Some 120,000 men and women accused of genocide pack the jails. Their cases must be heard if reconciliation is to take place. The United Nations Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which sits in Arusha in neighbouring Tanzania, is responsible for trying major genocide suspects but is not designed or equiped to deal with vast numbers of cases. If it is laudable that the judiciary has been reconstituted so quickly, no legal system could process 120,000 trials in any reasonable timescale. Perhaps the traditional, local “gacaca” courts, (see page 13) will resolve this. But for the moment, closure for both for victims and alleged perpetrators of these crimes is no nearer.

Léon, for one, is optimistic that once he has served his sentence, he can become a useful member of society again: “I hope that once I have confessed I will be able to live peacefully with my enemies.”

The legacy of the genocide means that Rwanda faces far greater challenges than simply those of any other poor country with scarce land and growing population. Enormous funding and resource needs spring directly from the genocide – assistance to survivors, orphans, traumatized children, children-headed households, violated women with HIV-AIDS, the heavy costs of the justice system and resettling millions of refugees and internally displaced persons. And yet, given what they have endured, the people of this country are making real progress. Healing the traditional enmities is at the heart of it. The government is providing a lead. As Hope Tumukunde says, “We now have leadership which doesn’t first ask who you are, but asks what your capacity is.”

“ Today in Rwanda”, says Pacifique Rutaganda, another custodian of the memorial site at Ntamara who saw his family decimated, “We are becoming one people – Rwandans – not Hutu or Tutsi. It is when you divide people that you have a war ”.

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