Artículos Destacados

Diciembre 2007

A View on Rwanda: An Interview with Eugenia Zorbas

Eugenia Zorbas, a doctoral candidate at the Development Studies Institute of the London School of Economics, wrote her thesis on transitional justice issues in post-genocide Rwanda. She worked in Rwanda for UNHCR in 2002-03 before returning to conduct fieldwork there in 2005. Zorbas will take up a position with MONUC (UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo) in the political affairs division in December 2007. She recently sat down with the ICTJ to share her observations about Rwanda.

Q: Do you think Rwanda provides any general lessons that can be applied to its neighbors? How have they handled the aftermath of the genocide politically? Can we draw any lessons from the dynamics that helped create that crisis?

Eugenia Zorbas: You can't make very big generalizations. It is distinct, totally different from Burundi or the Congo. Some of the things the government is attempting are quite novel and forward-looking. They might work, except that they are always hijacked by the fact that the government is extremely authoritarian. There is only one version of events that the government, usually described as Tutsi-controlled, can consider without totally undermining its own legitimacy: It hides the role the then-rebels played in the civil war that culminated in the 1994 genocide. They also perpetrated human rights abuses in Rwanda and Congo before, during, and after the genocide. So, many people see the leaders of the present government in Kigali as war criminals themselves.

Q: Are they teaching history now, or only events in the present tense?

EZ: A lot of people say history is not taught in Rwandan schools. I went to Rwandan schools and communities many times and interviewed some of the teachers; they do teach history. There is no state-endorsed history textbook, but rather a history curriculum. I have a copy of it. It's about 25 pages long, very general, not very helpful if you are a teacher and trying to develop a class day-to-day. So they improvise, they pull things off the Internet or do the best they can with old books.

Q: Did you get a sense of the role religion is playing in forgiveness and reconciliation?

EZ: I asked all my respondents what religion they were and whether they were practicing it. I met one Muslim and many Christians. Most are Catholic, and many of them are devout. The only references to God I found in the responses were actually perversely reinforcing the whole theme of imposition. A couple of people were saying, "We are obliged to forgive, the state tells us to forgive, God tells us to forgive, what do you want us to do?"

Q: Had it not been compulsory, would people have come to the Gacacas, or would they still come if the government had said, "You can do whatever you want to talk about truth and the past and reconciling or at least coexisting?"

EZ: Right now, my opinion is that the truth tends not to be uncovered in Gacacas-or more specifically, only certain truths tend to be uncovered. This is because the participants in Gacaca-the communities all over the country-are only allowed to talk about half the problem. I believe the reason it is compulsory is that the government is embarrassed to have no one turn up. Passive resistance is going on because the interests of many in the local communities are not being served in the Gacaca. It is fundamentally flawed because they can't talk about the Hutu that died, only about the victims of genocide, who were overwhelmingly Tutsi. The Hutu dead are the ones that died as a result of the actions of the (Tutsi) rebels now in government. These dead- tens of thousands, if not more-cannot be acknowledged because this would mean acknowledging the human rights abuses and war crimes of those in power. It is commonly said that 85 percent of Rwanda's inhabitants are Hutu, and they want to know who killed their husbands, wives, children, and parents as much as the Tutsi do. But they are never going to know that, so why bother wasting their time at Gacaca when they have a plot to farm?

Q: So what kinds of alternative scenarios could you envision in terms of truth-telling and accountability? Are there things that you think could work, or is it an impossible situation that would be complicated no matter what was proposed?

EZ: If we limit ourselves to truth-telling, roll back our expectations, stop talking about reconciliation and all the inflated claims that are counterproductive if not dangerous, and just seek very mundanely to have as accurate a historical record as possible, I think that would be helpful. But that is not going to happen in Rwanda. There is nothing much to be done given the government we have now. However, I want to stress what it has done: It has consolidated security within its national borders, especially since 1999-2000, something its regional counterparts have not managed to do. Every respondent I interviewed singled that out as a very important achievement. The government also puts a lot of effort into economic development, although here the record is mixed and there are problems relating to the rise of inequality, particularly in rural settings.

Q: You said people did not ask for reparations at the grassroots level. What did they ask for?

EZ: Across the board they asked for justice-not just the grassroots respondents but also the Rwandan opinion leaders. And they had a very sophisticated understanding of degrees of guilt, which roughly matched the categories in the 1996 genocide law, incidentally. However, here again we come up against the fact that only "Hutu crimes" are to be considered.
Also, although I hadn't foreseen spending so much time discussing forgiveness, my grassroots respondents devoted a lot of time to clarifying what forgiveness means, when it is earned, how it is manifested. When I reached the district of Maraba, where I did fieldwork in two rural communities, by coincidence waves of people, tens of thousands across the country, had just been provisionally released under a presidential decree issued in 2003 and devised to decongest the overburdened penal system. As they returned from the government-run "civic reeducation camps," people were actually seeing them for the first time; some had been in jail for over 10 years. If I hadn't been asking questions that month-if I had come a year later or a year before-I wonder if forgiveness would have been as important.

It quickly became apparent that the recently released prisoners seemed to think they had been forgiven now and could go back to the quite challenging life they have to rebuild. They were also acting aloof, at least partly because they were given instructions in the civic reeducation camp. The directive was, do not go to a survivor's house by yourself, you will only traumatize them. If you feel strongly you must go, organize it through a local authority or meet in a public place. Some three months after the return to their communities, it was clear that the local authorities weren't taking the time to set up these kinds of meetings between released perpetrators and surviving victims. As a result the released prisoners were behaving in a way the survivors perceived as disrespectful. So I have the impression that that is why forgiveness was at the forefront of their minds. It was very much on the tip of their tongues to ask who the legitimate bestowers of forgiveness really are: themselves or the state?

Q: You were talking about the institutionalization of forgiveness.

EZ: One clear illustration of this top-down approach, or "institutionalization of forgiveness," as I call it, is the way the guilty plea procedure in the genocide law of 1996 and the Gacaca law of 2001 (which has since been amended several times) has been designed. Basically, in your guilty plea you confess and ask forgiveness of the state, which grants or refuses it. The victims are then faced with a fait accompli.

Q: Did anyone talk to you about how they felt about the ICTR or any other formal judicial processes, or even the state of the judiciary in Rwanda? Did people talk about that as a legitimate option, or is there still the sense that all the good lawyers are dead, that there is no recourse to the law? Was anyone expressing opinions about formal legal procedures?

EZ: I had a whole array of questions on the ICTR, the national courts, and the Gacaca courts. I asked my grassroots respondents if they knew of the ICTR. If they answered yes, I asked if they could name a case that had been tried there. And some important cases had been tried. Maybe one person could name a case there, and a few more could correctly identify the ICTR. It is just not part of their reality. The Gacaca courts are so full of promise because the people are sitting in front of their own, talking about their problems.

Q: But certain cases are not allowed to go before Gacaca; isn't rape one of them?

EZ: The original Gacaca law did state that, but subsequent revisions undid it. It used to be that category 1 crimes (the most severe) were not to be charged in front of Gacaca, but the backlog was too great. The Gacaca courts were supposed to decongest the legal and penal systems. But this has not happened, and indeed I'm told that the exact opposite effect is being noted. The Gacaca courts have registered even more accusations against people who were not accused previously. As we move into the trial phase of Gacaca, it has also been noted that the most severe penalties tend to be handed down. For example, a recently released prisoner will be sent back to jail for 30 years. I'm told that the prisoner population is not declining very significantly and might even have edged up.

Q: Isn't it good to recognize the victims?

EZ: They definitely are recognized. They call themselves survivors; les rescapés is the term frequently used. Some of them are extremely worthy of assistance and certainly worthy of some form of recognition, maybe material, maybe not. Whatever is in place now is imperfect, and a survivor fund run by the government (the Fonds d'assistance des rescapés du génocide or FARG) has some serious problems. The annual official mourning ceremony every April is also problematic. It is not something all the survivors I spoke to welcomed. So the survivors are recognized, including or especially by their own government, but to what end? It can be argued that the government is using the survivors to maintain high levels of guilt among international actors for their actions, or lack thereof, in 1994. This emphasis on the victims gets the government various privileges including, in the early years in particular, substantial levels of financial assistance from donor countries. But what is being done for the survivors themselves, particularly the relatively voiceless ones in the remote rural communities? They may justifiably be feel they are being used and turned into a kind of commodity.

Q: Did you notice anything worth mentioning in terms of the media and the state of journalism and outreach? Is it state-controlled, to what extent does the media deal with these issues, is there any sort of public critique, or a slant that legitimately questions the way things are happening?

EZ: Unsurprisingly there is very little independent media. Because Kigali is a small community, I knew some of the handful of journalists who stick their necks out once in a while. In particular one publication is known as an independent newspaper, the source where one could potentially find some criticism of the government, and that paper has been shut down repeatedly. Like clockwork its editors have fled into self-imposed exile, and some of them have been in prison. But other than this paper, I think it would be fair to say there is no free Rwandan press (excluding the BBC, the VOA, and Deutsche Welle radio services). It is all government-controlled and of varying quality. Some of it does deal with reconciliation issues-they will go out to a community and do a report-but it is not very insightful.

Q: The same for radio and TV?

EZ: I believe two Rwandan TV channels exist, and there was nothing but state-controlled radio until about two years ago, when the first license was awarded to private radio again. That is very touchy because of the role radio played in the genocide. So this private station plays nothing but pop music and entertainment content. It is being watched like a hawk. I should add that the infamous radio during the genocide, RTLM, was also entertainment, talk-radio, and it played nothing but popular music. It is still a powerful medium, but right now it is tightly controlled.