We met a woman I’ll call Sarah in the lounge of the Kampala airport, as we were waiting for our Rwanda flight. Luckily for us, we met her again in Kigali, the capital. She works for the Justice Ministry and is the daughter of Rwandan refugees who were in Uganda during the genocide and returned once the rebels, known as the RPF, were in control of the capital. Her father was “an environmentalist,” she told me, but also an RPF soldier.
Sarah’s generation – the twenty-somethings who either survived the genocide, lost family members to it (Betty lost her grandmother) or are busy rebuilding the country – have an impossible job. Yet they face it with hope and humility – or, as Sarah phrased it, “faith.” We talked after touring the Genocide Memorial in Kigali, a museum dedicated to preserving the memory of what happened here and linking it to other 20th century genocides.
Sarah is already working hard at building Rwanda’s justice system, and is a fervent supporter of the gacaca courts and reconciliation. Yet she is also torn by the legacy the past has left her. After touring the museum – with its step by step recounting of how the genocide was conceived and prepared, the terrible human cost and the aftermath, in French après la genocide – she spoke with passion about how hard she is working on building the new Rwanda. “If I could do more, I would,” she said.
She lost an aunt and grandmother to the genocide. Until she was 13, she also lost her country. As a Tutsi, she and her family lived in exile in Uganda. Even though her father is among the “victors,” his experiences, she said, have permanently harmed him and he is mentally ill.
So even as she faces the challenges of the present, she is surrounded by the devastation of the past. She was one of the few people who talked about the ethnic categories that lay at the root of the 1994 genocide. For instance, she talked about still being able to tell the difference between Hutu and Tutsi, a real no-no in President Paul Kagame’s Rwanda. Tellingly, she said that while her parents could easily tell the difference, she “shouldn’t” be looking for difference. The new credo in Rwanda is “Rwandese,” not the categories imposed by the Belgian colonizers.
I sympathize with that view, given the terrible cost that ethnic war has caused the world. At the same time, I’m skeptical at how successfully a government can legislate the recognition of difference. In Turkey, for instance, Ataturk tried to erase ethnic difference (as well as religion as a governmental policy). In large part, it worked – yet it has also caused Turkey a great deal of grief, as Kurdish rebels have killed thousands in a quest for independence and Turkey’s entrance into the European Union has been complicated by opposition from ethnic Armenians in France, who demand an apology for the 1915 genocide.
Interestingly, that genocide, considered the first of the 20th century, figures prominently in Rwanda’s Genocide Memorial. The first floor is dedicated to what happened in Rwanda while the second floor had examples of other genocides: Armenian Turks, the Jews, Roma and homosexuals during World War II, Cambodia and the Balkans.
One of the guides told me that Turkey’s ambassador to the United Nations complained about the use of the word “genocide” in relation to 1915 and requests that the exhibit be removed (this is also what Turkey successfully did to the commemoration of the Rwandan genocide at United Nations headquarters in New York earlier in the year). But so far, in Kigali, they have resisted.
The guide was quite matter-of-fact about this. When I asked if it was hard to work at the museum, he told me that he had spent a lot of time there even before being hired. After all, his brothers and sisters were among the 259,000 people buried there. “Now, I get to spend more time with them,” he said.
In Rwanda, the past is not forgotten. To paraphrase William Faulkner, it is not even past.