CHAPTER 4: AFTER THE GENOCIDE: 1994-1999
4.2. The narrative of the ‘new’ Rwanda
Immediately after genocide, Special Representative of UNAMIR Shahrya Khan, described Rwanda’s capital as being ‘macabre, surrealistic and utterly gruesome’
(2000, 14). After a hundred days in which over 800 000 people had been killed and some two million fled to neighbouring countries, it is not surprising that he describes Kigali after genocide as seeming to have been hit by a ‘neutron bomb’
(2000, 297).
“There was no sign of life. The buildings were mostly wrecked, pock- marked by mortar and machine gun fire. Every shop, every house, had been looted … The market place was destroyed and deserted. There was not a kiosk in the entire ghost city that sold a Coke or a box of matches … There were corpses and skeletons lying about picked bare by dogs and vultures” (Khan, 2000, 14).
Prunier describes Rwandans as being like the ‘living dead’.
“Psychologically, many people were in various states of shock and many women who had been raped were now pregnant with unwanted children.
Most of the infrastructure had been brutally looted, as though a horde of human locusts had fallen on the country. Door and window frames had been removed, electric switches had been pried off from the walls and there were practically no vehicles left in running order except RPF military
ones. There was no running water and electricity in the towns, and on the hills there was no one to harvest the ripe crops” (2000, 297).
It was this that the RPF army was left with in July, 1994; a country devastated of people and resources. Khan describes that within only a few months, Kigali started to take steps towards revival, as people began to trickle out of their hiding places and large numbers of Burundian Tutsi “could be seen driving around in their swanky cars” (2000, 29). While the press and humanitarian aid organizations concentrated their attention and resources on the millions of refugees outside of the country, little aid or assistance was being offered to those within.
Khan describes month by month, the development of Rwanda from a horrific country of the dead, to a living, active, and fast-growing nation. Markets, shops and cafes started to open, farmhouses were reoccupied and ambassadors returned to their posts (2000, 47). By November, a mere six months after the end of the genocide, towns and communes were alive again, with houses being rebuilt and schools reopened (2000, 81).
However, it was near impossible for the government to make much headway.
When the RPF took over governance, almost all offices, communications, electricity, water and roads had been damaged and destroyed. The previous government had walked out with all state money, resources and administrative systems (Khan, 2000, 55). Apart from this, the entire judicial system had been destroyed. “There were no judges, prosecutors, magistrates, court officials, gendarmes or police. There were no prison officials to guard the growing number of prisoners. Nor were there buildings that could serve as courts” (Khan, 2000, 56).
Under these circumstances, the international community placed enormous demands on the new government to fulfill certain standards in order to receive funding, including certain political conditions. Yet, there was no funding in order to satisfy these demands (Prunier, 1995; Khan, 2000). Tensions increased between the new government and the international community. Apart from this, the RPF now in power saw the international community as partially responsible for what had happened (Khan, 2000, 60).
From the start, the new government was presented as a return to the Arusha Accords of 1993, which included shared governance. They called this the
Government of National Unity. But they veered from these Accords by giving the seats that were appointed for the former reigning party, the MRND, to the RPF.
Further, they created the post of vice-president, giving this position to the RPF leader, Paul Kagame. Pasteur Bizimungu, both a Hutu and a member of the RPF, was appointed president (Prunier, 1995, 328, 9). The new government, according to Khan, saw themselves as holding the moral high ground for having stopped genocide and, when in power, sticking to the Arusha Accords. Further, they saw themselves as standing alone in rebuilding a devastated country, and wanting to do it their way, not the way of the international community, understandably, after having been largely abandoned by the international community during the genocide.
From the start, the new government adopted an ideology of national unity. This ideology insisted on the idea that there was no longer Hutu, Tutsi or Twa but only Rwandans (Des Forges, 1999, 851). This was politically necessary in a country where the RPF found themselves in the minority, and where hundreds of
thousands of old case-load refugees were streaming into the country. (The term
‘old case load’ refugee is commonly used in the literature to refer to Tutsis who became refugees prior to 1994 (in 1959, 1972 and 1973, for example). ‘New case- load’ refugee refers to Hutus who became refugees shortly after the genocide, in July, 1994). Further, it was in line with RPF ideology from the early RANU days where ‘Rwanda for all Rwandans’ was a foundational philosophy.
Apart from the fact that some 150 000 mostly Tutsi homes had been destroyed, hundreds of thousands of old case-load refugees were seeking a place to live in a country already over-populated. In this situation, it was not uncommon that the homes of either the fleeing Hutu refugees or deceased Tutsi were ‘taken’ by these newcomers and survivors (Prunier, 1995, 324, 5). Prunier describes how some 400 000 old case-load refugees had entered Rwanda by November, 1994, entering a country devastated of resources and infrastructure (1995, 325). Each group of refugees came from different countries, the vast majority never having lived in Rwanda at all, and brought with them their unique cultures and styles
(Prunier, 1995, 325). Prunier describes the Zairians as the ones with the least money, the Ugandans as the ones who planned their entry to Rwanda the best, and the Burundians as the most aggressive and arrogant (Prunier, 1995, 126).
Writes Dallaire,
“Increasingly, we could see the immaculate cars of Burundian returnees or the oxcarts of the Ugandan Tutsi refugees in the streets of Kigali, as
members of the scattered diaspora took up residence throughout the better parts of the capital, sometimes even throwing out legitimate owners who had survived the war and genocide” (2003, 476).
Thus, added to the tensions between fleeing Hutu refugees who were being encouraged to return, survivors of genocide who were desperately trying to piece their lives back together, and Hutus who had chosen to remain in Rwanda, there were hundreds of thousands of people new to Rwanda, who nevertheless felt they had a strong claim to its land and resources. Yet the new government was
welcoming people back, inviting all Rwandans to help rebuild their country. The message they were sending was one of national unity, of all Rwandans standing together for a common cause.
In the new Rwanda, a new history, a new story was needed to counter that of the extremist Hutu Power. As Pottier describes, the RPF walked into a country which they could reinvent (2002, 109). The primary focus of the new government was to reinvent a Rwanda without ethnic categories. The presiding message of the new government was and still is, “There is no Hutu and Tutsi, there are only
Rwandans” (Des Forges, 1999). This reinvention of Rwandan identity would need to be built on a retelling of history. Where Hutu extremists had painted a picture of Tutsi masters subjugating the Hutu masses, the new government developed their history on the foundations of a harmonic, idyllic pre-colonial Rwanda (Des Forges, 1999; Pottier, 2002, 111). This picture of Rwanda, as described in chapter two, would allow the government to encourage Rwandans to return to the Rwanda of before colonialism. It would also allow them to place most of the blame for ethnic division squarely on the shoulders of the colonialists and colonial policy (Des
Forges, 1999, 855). The following section will examine some of the narratives that were silenced to make room for this new dominant narrative.