The "international community" learned the wrong lessons from Rwanda's Genocide against the Tutsi
The #Kwibuka30 commemorations underscored the hollowness of the international gaze that descends on Rwanda every year
Over the past ten days, Rwandans have commemorated the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. Many international media have carved out time and space to reflect on the horrors of that period and take stock of life in Rwanda since then. Governments, international organizations, NGOs and humanitarian agencies have sent condolence messages professing their “solidarity” with Rwanda and echoing the popular refrain to “never again” stand by and do nothing in the face of such a tragedy. The prevailing consensus is that “the world” let Rwanda down in 1994 and must not only atone for its inaction then but ensure that a similar tragedy does not happen in the future.
So far, not so good. Genocides, war crimes, crimes against humanity and other atrocities continue to be committed around the globe including in African countries like Sudan, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Mali, Mozambique and Libya. Then and now, the warning signs and the deep-rooted issues that foreshadowed atrocities were easily detectable. Recent days have seen many similar anniversary-style memorials of the ongoing war in Sudan and the 2014 kidnapping of the Chibok girls in Nigeria. If “Never Again” is supposed to mean something, then the way the “international community” responds to and memorializes tragedies must change beginning with the annual commemoration of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.
Rwanda commemorates #Kwibuka30
On April 7, dignitaries from around the world gathered in Kigali, Rwanda to mark the beginning of Kwibuka 30, the 30th commemoration of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.
Current and former world leaders including South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan, Czech President Petr Pavel and former U.S. President Bill Clinton attended commemoration events on April 7. Rwandan President Paul Kagame led the commemoration by laying wreaths and lighting the frame of remembrance at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, where the remains of more than 250,000 victims of the genocide are interred. After that, a national commemoration ceremony was held at the BK Arena, officially marking the beginning of the 30th anniversary remembrance.
Every year, Rwanda observes 100 days of mourning that begins on April 7, the date when the 1994 genocide started, and concludes with Liberation Day on July 4. The first week features national commemoration programs during a period known as Icyunamo meaning “mourning” in Kinyarwanda, Rwanda’s national language. This year, four memorials to the genocide recently inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites were lit every night during the week of commemoration. As a demonstration of international solidarity, iconic monuments in cities around the world were lit in the colors of the Rwandan flag as part of a joint Rwanda-UNESCO initiative. Rwandan diasporas across the globe also participated in memorials and other public events intended to honor the victims, comfort survivors and reflect on Rwanda’s journey of recovery, reconciliation and resilience.
What happened in Rwanda from April to July 1994?
The Rwandan genocide was one of the most horrific atrocities of the 20th century, by some measures the worst since the Holocaust. The mass slaughter was orchestrated by Hutu militias like the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi against the Tutsi minority and also targeted Twa and Hutu deemed by the extremist militias to be disloyal. Its catalyst was the assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana, an ethnic Hutu whose plane was shot down over Kigali on April 6, 1994 in murky circumstances that remain unresolved to this day. Within hours of Habyarimana’s death, a campaign of retribution began in Kigali and spread across the country over a period of 100 days. In Kigali, Rwanda’s presidential guard quickly executed high-profile Tutsi and moderate Hutu military and political leaders who could have assumed control in the ensuing power vacuum, including Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana.
In urban areas across the country, checkpoints and barricades were set up to screen national ID cards, which contained ethnic classifications that allowed soldiers and militias to systematically identify and kill Tutsis. In the rural areas, militias, soldiers and government authorities instructed ordinary Hutu to identify their Tutsi neighbors, take up arms against them and destroy or steal their property. Many religious clerics participated in the genocide including by luring fleeing Tutsi to churches and directing Hutu militias to kill them.
The “international community” abandoned Rwanda during the genocide. The United Nations drastically scaled back the peacekeeping mission it deployed to the country the previous year to assist in the implementation of a peace agreement between government troops and rebels from the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Western civilians were evacuated out of the country under the protection of heavily armed European troops even as some Rwandan employees of humanitarian agencies were killed in front of their “expatriate” colleagues. French and Belgian troops separated Rwandan spouses and children of “expatriate” workers from their loved ones while Rwandans who tried to board evacuation vehicles were forced off at military-run checkpoints in Kigali, leaving them to their likely death at the hands of security forces and the Hutu militias.
While the exact number of people who were killed in the genocide is disputed and may never be known, it is commonly put between 500,000 and 1 million. Estimates of the number of individuals raped during the genocide range from 250,000 to 500,000. The RPF, an anti-government rebel force led by Kagame that consisted primarily of Rwandan Tutsi exiled in neighboring Uganda and was embroiled in a war with government troops until the signing of the so-called Arusha Accords in 1993, resumed fighting when the killings started. It eventually captured all government territory by July 1994, ending the genocide and forcing its perpetrators and the remnants of Habyarimana’s regime to escape from Rwanda. A large number fled to Zaire (now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo) while many more moved elsewhere across the continent and the world more broadly.
The tentacles of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide reached far and wide
The 1994 genocide became a consequential flashpoint in contemporary global affairs, and not solely because of the sheer scale of the tragedy. It led to the creation of an International Criminal Tribunal and community-based “gacaca” courts to adjudicate people charged of crimes connected to the genocide. Interventionist norms like the Responsibility to Protect gained currency due to discontent among Western liberals about their governments’ failure to act in crises like Rwanda. By the same token, the tragedy contributed to the institutionalization of the “African solutions to African problems” mantra that led to the creation of the African Union in 2002. The 1994 genocide had enormous consequence for Africa’s Great Lakes region. It led to a massive exodus of refugees from Rwanda — Tutsi and Hutu alike — to neighboring countries like Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi and Zaire, thus expanding the crisis from a local one to a regional affair.
That development gave way to decades of regional volatility that included two Congo Wars that claimed nearly six million lives and displaced another six million people according to some estimates. Over time, the RPF-led Rwandan state has become as much a cause of that instability as it has been a victim of it, by launching reprisal attacks against Hutus inside and outside the country’s borders and backing deadly rebel groups like the M23 movement.
Intergenerational trauma is a corollary of the 1994 genocide
Having been unable to attend this year’s #Kwibuka30 commemorations in Kigali, I took part in events scheduled closer to me and settled for observing from afar ones held in Rwanda during the week of Icyunamo. In observing conversations among Rwandans, one thing that becomes abundantly clear is the intergenerational trauma their society still bears, much of it stemming from events that took place well before the 1994 genocide.
An April 6 interview Kagame conducted with the South African Broadcasting Corporation is instructive in this regard. In it, Kagame framed the 1994 genocide as “a replay to the extreme” of the turbulence of the late 1950s and 1960s — what he called “the starting of the story of what we saw in 1994” — when the country’s transition from a Tutsi monarchy under indirect Belgian rule to a nominally independent Hutu-dominated republic coincided with large-scale violence against Tutsi. The killings and purges of the period led to a mass exodus of Tutsi like Kagame and his family to neighboring countries. Many of these exiles lost loved ones during the genocide, adding another layer to the traumas they have had to live with their entire lives.
“The world” might have abandoned Rwanda in 1994, but Africa(ns) did not
It has come to be an article of faith that “the world” stood by as hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were bludgeoned to death by their fellow citizens. The “international community,” in this telling, was guilty of negligent inaction at best and callous indifference at worst as a country believed to hold little geopolitical significance was allowed to experience hell on earth while powerful international actors did nothing.
As always, the devil is in the details.
To be clear, those who say these things are almost always referring to Western countries and the global institutions they dominate when they talk about what “the world” and “the international community” did or didn’t do. To the extent that there is a proportionate share of blame to go around for the collective response to the 1994 genocide, African countries and their citizens — particularly Rwanda’s neighbors — lent a helping hand to Rwanda when few others did. The Organization of African Unity deployed a Nigeria-led Neutral Military Observation Group to Rwanda between September 1992 and October 1993 to enforce a cease-fire agreed to between government troops and the RPF. This OAU mission was later integrated into the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda in November 1993. In 2000, the OAU released its findings from an investigation into the 1994 genocide, in which the report’s authors made pointed, uncompromising criticisms of the U.N. Security Council as well as France, Belgium and the U.S. for their respective roles in the events that led up to the genocide and failing to prevent it. The report went on to call for reparations to be paid by those actors which failed to stop the genocide.
It is commonly said that up to 2 million Rwandans fled the country after the genocide. The overwhelming majority of them went to nearby countries like Burundi, Zaire, Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya. A sizable number of Rwandans were taken in as refugees in southern African countries like Malawi, Botswana, Zambia, Angola and South Africa, which today hosts one of the most vibrant Rwandan diasporas on the continent. A much smaller number of Rwandans moved west to countries like Cameroon and Ghana. And undoubtedly, a significant number of Rwandans fled to Europe and North America. But there can be no doubt that African nations absorbed the overwhelming majority of Rwandan refugees.
In his remarks at the national commemoration ceremony on April 7, Kagame recognized the contributions Africans made in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide that “helped us to stand where we are now:”
… The leadership and the people of Ethiopia and Eritrea helped us in starting to rebuild at that time. In fact, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who is here, even served as a young peacekeeper in the immediate aftermath of the genocide.
Kenya, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo hosted large numbers of Rwandan refugees, and gave them a home.
Tanzania did as well, and also played a unique role at many critical points, including hosting and facilitating the Arusha peace process. And here I must single out the late President Julius Nyerere who embodied the spirit which laid that foundation.
The Republic of Congo has been a productive partner in rebuilding, and more.
Many of the countries represented here today also sent their sons and daughters to serve as peacekeepers in Rwanda. Those soldiers did not fail Rwanda; it was the international community which failed all of us, whether from contempt or cowardice.
Among those here with us today, I salute the widow and daughter of the late Captain Mbaye Diagne of Senegal, who died a hero as he rescued many Rwandans from death.
At the United Nations Security Council in 1994, moral clarity came from Nigeria, the Czech Republic, and even as far away as New Zealand
[…]
A notable example of solidarity came to us from South Africa, one among many. Indeed, the entire arc of our continent’s hopes and agonies could be seen in those few months of 1994. As South Africa ended apartheid and elected Nelson Mandela president, in Rwanda the last genocide of the 20th century was being carried out.
The new South Africa paid for Cuban doctors to help rebuild our shattered health system, and opened up its universities to Rwandan students, paying only local fees.
Among the hundreds of students who benefitted from South Africa’s generosity, some were orphaned survivors; others were the children of perpetrators; and many were neither.
To prevent ‘Rwanda’ from happening again, memorializing tragedy must mean more than assuaging Western guilt
Kwibuka means “remembrance” in Kinyarwanda.
The word has come to be an umbrella concept used to commemorate the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. It recounts the tragedy and the remarkable journey Rwandans have taken to heal and rebuild after the most tragic event in their country’s history.
While the intention behind the concept was noble, the annual commemoration of the 1994 genocide has since given way to a international spectacle that obscures the spirit of reflection, reconciliation and peacebuilding it was meant to represent to Rwandans. Amid the flurry of articles, documentaries, broadcasts, events, speeches, condolence messages and pledges from a coterie of journalists, political figures and international institutions, the lingering pain and distress of Rwandans is consumed and exploited by an “international community” that has failed to absorb any real lessons from a tragedy it vows to never let happen again.
The 1994 genocide created celebrities of many Western journalists, scholars, peacekeepers, international law experts and activists who have gone on to build large chunks of their career around the tragedy that befell Rwandans, a great majority of whose names will never be known by most people outside their families. In addition, it set the pace for an endless stream of viral campaigns and pop culture depictions of African crises ranging from Hotel Rwanda and Machine Gun Preacher to Kony 2012, as a recent article in Foreign Policy pointed out. Many statesmen like Bill Clinton, who was the U.S. president during the 1994 genocide and expressed regret for failing to take steps to halt the genocide, have since turned to philanthropy as a means of making amends for their indifference in 1994. European powers like Belgium — Rwanda’s former colonial ruler — and France, which backed Habyarimana’s regime for several decades and evacuated Habyarimana’s wife and other Hutu extremist elites during the genocide, continue to evade accountability for the role they played in creating the circumstances that ended in a genocide. Other Western governments have chosen to overcorrect for previous policy missteps by downplaying or ignoring Kagame’s excesses, including his government's repression of dissent, vast human rights abuses and destabilizing actions in the Great Lakes region.
It is difficult to square the ‘Never Again’ pledges to avoid a repeat of ‘Rwanda’ with the realization that several atrocities are taking place across Africa as you read this. The war in Ethiopia’s Tigray region may have claimed as many as 600,000 lives while crises in Amhara and Oromia get worse by the day. Monday marked the one-year anniversary of the war in Sudan that has claimed at least 13,000 lives and displaced 8 million people. Humanitarian crises in Congo, South Sudan, Mali and Nigeria are among the worst in the world. All of these scenarios are different to Rwanda in 1994 but they share some similarities including the marginal place they occupy in the attention economy of global affairs relative to the strategic priorities of great powers. Eventually, survivors of these crises will have to settle for memorials, solidarity pledges, monuments, the odd international day and the assortment of Western journalists, politicians and activists seeking absolution for a range of self-prescribed missteps.
If there ought to be a lesson from Rwanda’s 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, it ought to be working toward a world where there are fewer Kwibuka-style commemorations and not more.