Rwanda's long road back
Posted: Tuesday, February 19, 2008 3:11 PM by Barbara Raab
By Martin Fletcher, NBC News correspondent
Editor's note: Due to political coverage, some areas of the country did not see Martin Fletcher's full report. Click here to watch the entire segment.
Could these be new laws in tiny Singapore? Plastic bags in the entire country are illegal, as part of the fight to save the environment. Use leads to a fine equal to 10 U.S. dollars. Same fine for smoking or spitting in public. Civil guards in red uniforms carry rifles to enforce the laws. On the last Saturday of each month, every citizen, including cabinet ministers and the President, must go outside and clean the streets. Each day, shopkeepers must sweep the sidewalk in front of their store. Paved streets in towns as well as dusty alleys in poor villages, and the highways in between, are spotless. A cigarette butt or old newspapers or abandoned coke cans on the ground are so rare as to be remarkable.
Bikes and walking are encouraged over cars and buses. In the center of the capital, traffic flows easily even at peak times. A car blowing black exhaust fumes risks being impounded on the spot.
OK, here’s the punchline: It isn't Singapore, it’s Rwanda. But on an African continent of desperately congested and polluted cities, why this startling emphasis on cleanliness here, in a country with so many other problems?
Fourteen years after the genocide, when Hutus killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 100 days, Rwanda is still coming to terms with its months of madness. Local courts still try killers, who apologize and finger other killers still at large. But parallel to this ongoing purging of the psyche of an entire nation, is a cleansing of the physical world as well as of the inner one.
It isn’t only B.G. (Rwandans refer to life as B.G. and A.G. – Before the Genocide and After the Genocide.) Street cleaning was also mandatory B.G. But we sometimes forget that the 1994 Genocide was not the first, but the third, assault by the Hutus on the Tutsis in thirty-five years, so the physical purging element may still somehow be related to mass murders, only earlier ones.
It’s hard to assess in a brief visit how superficial or deep this purging is. Once a week, more than a million of Rwanda’s 7 to 8 million citizens attend a Gacaca session, traditional courts that try suspected killers. Hundreds of thousands of Hutu killers and alleged killers have been tried, have apologized, have identified where they buried bodies, as well as fingered other killers, and have then been pardoned and returned to normal life, living alongside their Tutsi victims.
But have the Hutus really repented? Have the Tutsis really forgiven them? Officially, and for the most part, it seems the answer is yes, for the simple reason that nobody has much choice. It’s a small country, smaller than the state of Maryland, and Hutus and Tutsis are condemned to live together; although today officially the distinction is mute. B.G. identity cards bore the words Hutu or Tutsis, making it easy for Hutus to know who to kill. Today, all ID cards bear the same label: Rwandan.
But at a Gacaca court, where prisoners wear pink uniforms to humiliate them, one onlooker sidled up to me and with a sidelong glance, volunteered “Don’t believe all this, we have hatred in our hearts.” I was startled at such an unsolicited confession, and he continued: “They say my brother killed Tutsis.” He nodded at one of the three men in pink. “He wasn’t in the country then. Me, I was in prison for eight years, and I did nothing.” He introduced me to two other men who had repented in the Gacaca sessions, but now claimed to have been framed by jealous neighbors.
Another man told me that in the capital Kigali, where there are many Tutsis, the Gacaca courts work well. But in distant villages, where there are only one or two Tutsi families among many Hutus (in Rwanda, less than ten per cent of the population are Tutsis, almost all the rest Hutu), the Hutus still threaten the lives of the Tutsis, who are too scared to point out who killed their families.
Today the Tutsis have the upper hand, morally and politically, and the cleansing operation, on all levels, mostly proceeds well. But one worried man, sitting next to me on a bench as I observed activities at a health center, suddenly tapped me on the arm and confided that he had lost his wife and six brothers, all murdered in the genocide.
“Yes, I have forgiven them,” he answered me, “Anyway, nothing will bring my wife back. Yes, the Gacaca are good, they help us come to terms with the past, and they protect us too.” But then he added, “When the government changes, what will happen in the future? The Hutus will win elections. What then?”
An African proverb, along the lines of “You can clean the street but you can’t change its direction” may be appropriate. If it doesn’t exist, somebody should invent it for Rwanda.
