KIGALI, 6 April 2004 — Wearing a white dress and an uncertain smile, Irene Mutoni gazes from her cot, a two-year-old girl in a fading photograph. Her favorite food, says the caption, was banana and rice. Her favorite toy was a stuffed dog. Her first word was daddy. Her method of death was drowning in boiling water.
Tacked to the wall are dozens of photographs of other murdered children with the same basic information, just one segment of a new memorial center in Kigali which will open tomorrow for the 10th anniversary of Rwanda’s genocide.
Politicians and ordinary Rwandans, Tutsi and Hutu, are due to attend the ceremony. There will be a plaque, speeches, a moment of silence for the victims, and then life will go on. Survivors, perpetrators and their relatives will return to homes and workplaces, as if this were a normal country.
In a way it is. Rwanda is peaceful and stable, even staid. Kigali is one of Africa’s safest cities. A decade after Hutu extremists slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 100 days, there is a Tutsi-led elected government preaching unity and reconciliation. The peace is solid. To have reached this stage after just 10 years is a remarkable accomplishment.
But Rwanda is an abnormal, traumatized society. Tolerance between mistrustful neighbors reflects not a miracle of forgiveness but the will of an authoritarian regime.
“It’s too early for real reconciliation. That’s for future generations,” said Rakiya Omar, a Rwanda expert with African Rights, a human rights watchdog. “People are coexisting because they have no choice. Where would they go?”
Few claim to know the hearts and minds of Central Africa’s most undemonstrative people, and more than one Western diplomat confessed to not “getting” how Hutus and Tutsis still share such a tiny, crowded country.
One obvious reason is that President Paul Kagame insists they do. Leader of the Tutsi rebels who ousted the genocidal Hutu regime, he now wears civilian clothes but rules like a general and squashes opponents as “divisionists” who stoke ethnic rivalry.
Since Tutsis make up less than 15 percent of the population, Kagame needs Hutu support to stay in power, so promoting “unity” is a political imperative. Officialdom frowns on using the terms Hutu and Tutsi.
Rwanda is about to get its first private radio stations since the genocide and newspapers have started exposing government corruption, but Human Rights Watch, among others, worries the lid on dissent is too tight, allowing resentment to build.
After intimidating opponents, Kagame won 95 percent of the vote in last year’s presidential election and his coalition won three-quarters of parliamentary seats, disappointing observers who hoped for freer, fairer ballots. “It’s easy for outsiders to criticize but if we open political space who do you think is going to fill it?” said Musare Faustin, a presidential adviser. The genocide’s masterminds are in jail or in hiding, but the grievances and prejudices they exploited endure. It would not take much to whip up resentment. Rwanda’s economy has grown spectacularly in the past five years. New buildings pop up like toast on Kigali’s skyline, tourists are trickling back to gorilla parks and foreign donors are content since Rwanda stopped openly stoking Congo’s civil war.
But outside the capital it is the old story of too many peasants with too little land, the claustrophobia aggravated by property disputes between growing families and returning refugees. There was no inevitability, no ancient enmity, about 1994. It was Belgian colonialists who turned ethnic rivalry deadly by selecting taller, lighter-skinned Tutsis to rule over the shorter, darker Hutus. Periodic massacres after independence emboldened Hutu extremists to wipe out the uppity minority.
The hate ideology is gone but homicidal impulses may linger. “You hear people say that if Kagame is killed we will eat the Tutsis’ cows — a euphemism for killing the owners,” said Ms. Omar, though she considers the atmosphere more relaxed than at any time in the past decade.
In Murambi, three hours’ drive south of Kigali, Emmanuel Murangira is still waiting for an apology for the death of 49 relatives, including his wife and three children, who were among the estimated 40,000 Tutsis killed in the local school.
Shot in the head and left for dead, Murangira was one of a handful to escape. Today the 48-year-old guards the classrooms where hundreds of skeletons preserved in lime are stacked on desks. “Some of those who did it are still here but they haven’t come to ask for forgiveness,” he said. Tending maize and sorghum in the hills above, Venuste Karera, 47, admitted helping the interahamwe militia to round up Murangira and other Tutsi neighbors but, like most of the accused, denied murdering anyone.
In traditional village courts known as gacaca, some killers confess when confronted by eyewitnesses, but usually the accused deny or minimize their guilt. Four genocide suspects interviewed (by this reporter) in Kigali’s central prison all proclaimed innocence. Thus they had no reason to ask forgiveness.
