Where were you when the killings started?
I was outside the country. It was surreal (following the events at home), you find it very difficult to see your family disappearing at the speed of light. Every day you learnt of how so many have perished. You are confused, it’s hard to believe that this is happening to your land and it was hard to believe that in one hundred days we would lose more than one million people. So you can imagine the speed at which this was happening. This was state machinery at it’s highest efficiency.
How did the genocide affect the country?
Genocide affected all Rwandans because if you belonged to the family of a perpetrator, you cannot disengage. You have to face it. If you are survivor, it is worse because you are living with the scars. Your refuge becomes your family. If you looked at women raped during the genocide, mothers lost their children and husbands. You have children born out of rape who are twenty years old today. These children were victims themselves, meaning you will never know the ties of your father, yet the family of your mother is having a very difficult time with you. So what we did is that we established traditional courts that have tried close to a million people.
What makes up a traditional court?
It is composed of elderly respected men in the districts who have had a past with that place so they have a history and can give an account of what happened during the genocide. And they are respected in the community. So then you would have on one side the survivors who come and say this man killed my family, my sister or my brother. Let him come forward and acknowledge that. Acknowledgement comes with an apology and that comes with closure because they would take you to where they buried the bodies. It is an extremely difficult process. But it has resolved quite some issues. Confession is a very powerful tool in at least closing one aspect of a long killing period.
Do you think there are lessons for Kenya given what the country went through with the post-election violence?
Indicting of three suspects does not resolve the underlying problem, it does not help heal the population and it does not give ownership to Kenyans to say that if we failed in 2007 how do we avoid failing again? Because you cannot look at resolving those deep-rooted issues that created the violence…I think the lesson here is to say homegrown. Homegrown solutions. You only resolve those issues if you look internally, and say what really can work for Kenyans? That is what Rwanda did. We asked them (international community), so what is your remedy? How do we move forward? They told us we don’t know but we don’t like what you are doing (traditional courts). So you reject what we have managed to create but then you have no other remedy? So what do we do? Do we sit and wait for you to provide a solution or we at the end of the day say, these is our issue? It is Rwanda’s issue and it is only fair that we own up to this and create our own measures to suit the survivors. Only healing could help us develop and move forward. That’s a lesson for Kenya and for other countries. You have to say this happened to us and we have to own it. We need to find the right mechanism to move forward as one nation and stop seeing your neighbour as belonging to one tribe. The international community was pushing for everyone to be identified as Rwandan, but your tribe –whether Tutsi or Hutu - is also your right. But a right comes with obligation…so we don’t have one’s ethnicity displayed on the identity card. Before 1994 this was the case, that was scrapped.
What can Kenya borrow from the Rwandan experience?
You cannot just go to the West and say let’s establish a criminal court and that will resolve the issue. How do you move thousands and thousands of perpetrators outside the country (to stand trial)? What eventually happens in situations like that is there are five or six people that are then tried outside. But have you resolved the issue internally? Millions of other people are left out.
Rwanda has joined the commonwealth, was this a reaction to falling out with France over the genocide?
We joined the commonwealth to join other groups to further our goals. Rwanda considers itself both Francophone and Anglophone. But we joined one, because of our location. We belong to the East African community, which is all English speaking apart from Burundi. (Joining the commonwealth) for us was to further the vision of the country. Having said that, France has played a role in the genocide against the Tutsi and those are being discussed at the various forums, but it is not something we stand to deny. We have facts…the facts have been presented. But it is now an issue between two states but we still have a working relationship.
How would you describe your relationship with France today?
We have good diplomatic relations with France. When there is such a heavy past, it complicates things. So we move with that. It’s a burden you carry as you move forward.
What is the glue that has helped hold Rwanda together after all that?
ANSWER: The leadership made conscious decision to unite the country. The leadership under President Paul Kagame really did the hardest thing, which is to say, we have no choice but to look at this country as one belonging to all of us here. The leadership created the vision that allowed Rwandans to say; you know what, this cake belongs to all of us. It is one cake that we all have to bake together, put the ingredients together. It could have taken the wrong leadership and Rwanda would probably be worse than Somalia today.
What are your reflections looking back 20 years ago?
I think Rwanda has been blessed by the fact that we owned this issues, the process of reconciliation. We created homegrown solutions in resolving and moving our country forward. And then this thing called patriotism, it something ingrained in Rwandans today. It will take us quite far, in the sense of saying that once you are dignified and you love and cherish your land, there is only so much one can lie to you to destroy what you have achieved.
