and remains of bodies scattered all over the country. This was one of the strategies to heal the wounds of the genocide survivors and to organize the post-genocide society generally. Given the positive outcomes from the initiatives of honouring people who perished during the genocide, similar initiatives emerged from the local communities around the country. Some parts of the country organized the burial rites as they used to do in their cultural customs.
In the beginning, some people could identify the bodies or remains of their beloved ones, and managed to bury them in the family yard. Others opted to bury several bodies in the same tomb – in the pubic cemetery. Please bear in mind that the first initiative, which inspired other local communities to do the same, started in the community of Mwurire. However, even though this initiative was noble, there were some controversies within the community about the right way to perform such a good deed. Thereafter, the Government took over those initiatives and transformed them into a national project (Bazubagira 2008: 37). Since it was a government project, the national and provincial authorities became active in the process and the civil society (including churches) and different NGOs followed (Office of the Prime Minister, Official Gazette 23 March 2009).
110 From this short background, it can be said that the initiative of genocide memorials was started by the community and was later hijacked by the government. This means that there is no official law that legislated the genocide memorials before their construction; it is very recently that a policy on genocide memorials was initiated; it is still in the process of being finalized.
However, although different authors concur on the definition of ‗memory‘, divergences arise when it comes to the symbol of memory and its functions. One tendency considers memorials as representing political propaganda and affirmation of political ideas, instead of emphasizing the event to be remembered (Merridale 1999: 62, King 1998: 6, Roth 2001:69). This consideration underlines the power of the State to manipulate these symbols. As a matter of fact, the genocide memorials have been designed deliberately. The Rwandan Government has tried ‗to put into those chosen symbols all the meanings they should have‘ (King 1998: 3) and there is a proposed, defined way of reading them. According to the complex situation that generated the symbols, manifest functions are undermined. The implication of each one to admit these expected functions is not automatic, because they include different constraints related to Rwandan history.
Some would transform those manifest functions into latent ones, others into dysfunctional or non-functional.
It is from this unholistic approach, adopted by the government in building and defining genocide memorials, that conflicts and divisions in the community were inherent in the post-genocide 1994 Rwandan society. Indeed, these conflicts and divisions affected the decision to construct genocide memorials and shaped the manner in which the memorials were perceived by the various sections of the population. In view of the above we can briefly say that in the beginning, the genocide memorial construction had two functions: to heal the wounds for those who lost their relatives and whose bodies were not yet buried, and to fulfil the cultural obligations of burying the dead. But on the other side, for the government the intended function of constructing the genocide memorials was, officially, to support community initiatives, but step by step the government turned the community-based initiative into a political tool.
111 However, the use of memorials as a political tool can be found in many other countries. This chapter only mentions the two cases of Russia and South Africa. As revealed by Merridale (2002) ―Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia‖, particularly fascinating is the way in which Stalin chose to play down commemoration, because he feared a resurgence of religious belief in the wake of a general mood combining thanksgiving for victory and mourning for the dead. As an alternative, the population was exhorted to believe in the socialist utopian future and focus on heroism rather than personal or collective mourning. For many this strategy worked and served a political agenda. In fact, socialist propaganda was stepped up, and in 1949 even the folktale was submitted to scrutiny by a committee determined to weed out its ―backward‖ features (Merridale, 2002: 250).
Merridale highlights that the post-Stalinist thaw period witnessed attempts to escape the stultifying socialist rhetoric about the present and future and perhaps seek answers in religious belief. The official response, as far as death was concerned, was to redouble efforts to promote socialist funerary rituals, and make another (failed) attempt to institute cremation. Though the habit of silence had been partially broken, the tradition died hard, as veterans and families of the dead from the Afghan war realized as their attempts to talk about and deal with the realities were stamped on.
Another example is from Marschall‘s: Commemorative Monuments, Memorials and Public Statuary in Post-apartheid South-Africa, wherein she indicates that under the aegis of the post- apartheid government, much focus has been placed on the transformation and democratization of the heritage sector in South Africa since 1994. The emergent new landscape of memory relies heavily on commemorative monuments, memorials and statues aimed at reconciliation, nation- building and the creation of a shared public history. But not everyone identifies with these new symbolic markers and their associated interpretation of the past. Drawing on a number of theoretical perspectives, this book critically investigates the flourishing monument phenomenon in South Africa, the political discourses that fuel it; its impact on identity formation, its potential
112 benefits, and most importantly its ambivalences and contradictions (Marschall 1994). Even if the cases of South Africa and Russia are not exactly similar to the case of the Rwandan genocide, all the cases show how memorials can be used for a political agenda.
However, in this research, the use of functionalist theory is not for confirming or confronting its different postulates. It is rather for reflecting and opening a room for accepting different definitions and meanings of the messages of genocide memorials as perceived by the community. The meaning of these physical localities is firstly highlighted by the official definition by pre-defining their role. They are symbols that materialize what has happened, a sign of memory, a tool for fighting genocide ideology, and teaching materials. These manifest functions are the objectives that are carried out by the official determination to build these places of memory.