RWANDA: Rehabilitating Rwanda’s Genocide Survivors

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

LONDON, Apr 7 1997 (IPS) - Few would envy Annanciata Nyiratamba’s job. She is one of the hundreds of army of local social workers who are trying to piece together the shattered lives of Rwanda’s widows, whose husbands were slaughtered during the 1994 genocide .

Nyiratamba, herself a survival of the pogrom, is running a project, called the ‘Association of Widows of the Genocide’, in the Rwandan capital, Kigali.

Her work includes raising funds to build houses for the widows and healing the scars of wounds inflicted by the violence in which up to a million people were murdered by Hutu extremists three years ago.

The widows, who are estimated to number over 300,000, meet regularly for counselling.

“We get together to cry because we didn’t cry before… we get together to comfort each other because we hadn’t been comforted before…and we get together and form one family because we don’t have a family of our own anymore,” Nyiratamba told a one-da y conference here over the weekend, marking the third anniversary of the genocide.

Nyiratamba, one of three survivors who travelled to London to speak about the pogrom, said the majority of Rwandan women hacked to death by machetes had not been buried.

“Some were eaten by dogs. Some saw their children thrown into pit latrines. And some were forced to be raped by their own children before they were slaughtered,” she said.

Ernest Sagaga, who is the chairman of the London-based Anglo- Rwandan Cultural Association (ARCA), urged the international community to help the widows and the estimated 120,000 orphans in Rwanda to overcome their distress.

“These people need every help that they can get. More importantly, they request that we understand what they went through so that we may join hands in advocating for them,” he said.

Sagaga, whose organisation co-sponsored the conference together with the University of London, urged the international community to put pressure on countries hosting those who participated in organising the genocide to be brought to face justice either i n Rwanda or in Arusha, Tanzania, where the United Nations has set up a tribunal.

According to human rights organisations, more than 90,000 suspects are crammed in jails across the tiny central African nation, awaiting trial. Of the total, 11 have already been handed down death sentences by Rwandan courts.

But the U.N. tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha has yet to decide on a single case.

Oliver Furley, a researcher at Coventry University in the United Kingdom, said the slow process of justice is likely to breed revenge killings in Rwanda.

“There is a lot of revenge killings in Rwanda. This is a problem which is unlikely to end very soon,” he said.

But Rwanda’s ambassador to Britain, Zak Nsenga, said the government in Kigali is tough on those who think they can take the law into their hands.

He said “a number of soldiers” had been executed in Rwanda since 1994 to deter revenge killings.

According to the ambassador, over 2.5 million refugees have returned to Rwanda from neighbouring Zaire, Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania and Kenya since the government of Juvenal Habyarimana was toppled in 1994. “And since then, human rights have also improved tremendously,” he said.

Supporting him, Kalisa Karimera of ARCA said no person in Rwanda had cast a stone at the over 800,000 refugees who returned to Rwanda from Zaire late last year. “And to show the government’s seriousness about the ongoing reconciliation, the refugees wer e received at the point of entry by Rwandan officials,” he said.

Contributing to the debate, Nyiratamba, who was wearing a traditional Rwandan attire and spoke in the Kinyarwanda language, said Rwanda’s widows prefer justice to take its course.

“Nobody is seeking revenge. Taking revenge would mean behaving the same way as the genocide perpetrators did in 1994,” she said.

The ethnic crisis in Rwanda heightened in 1990 after Tutsi- dominated rebels invaded the country from bases in neighbouring Uganda. The Hutus — who make up about 85 percent of Rwanda’s population — reacted by resisting Tutsis’ demand for powersharing.

The situation spiralled out of control in April 1994 following the death of Habyarimana in a plane crash. The result was the death of between 500,000 and a million people, mostly Tutsis and moderate Hutus, murdered by the Hutu militias dubbed the ‘Intera hamwe’ (‘Those who fight together’ in Kinyarwanda).