Rwanda: 30 Years On
One hundred days. One hundred days of a maelstrom of carnage swallowing up your country, your city, your block. One hundred days of neighbor turning on neighbor, of family turning on family, of people you know transforming overnight—some into the hunted, some into hunters. One hundred days of the rest of the world sanctimoniously wagging its finger while your country slaughters itself.
This was Rwanda’s situation 30 years ago. After President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down near Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, the Hutu-dominated government launched a preplanned genocide against the Tutsi people. In the hundred days between April 7 and July 15, 1994, hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, Twa and moderate Hutus lost their lives in medieval butchery. How many died is disputed. Scholars estimate the total to be between 500,000 and 800,000. The Rwandan government and the United Nations place the figure at over a million.
April 7 marks the 30-year anniversary of the conflict. What are its lasting impacts? How far has Rwanda come?
An Overnight Holocaust
Even compared to other tragedies in Africa, what happened in Rwanda was horrific. Being caught with a Tutsi identification card was enough for police to execute a person. But the authorities didn’t do all the work; radio broadcasts encouraged Hutu civilians to hunt down their Tutsi neighbors and slay them. Assailants used machetes and other handheld tools to hack people to death. Men with hiv/aids raped women to infect them intentionally.
Adeline, a survivor who gave her testimony to the UN, recounted one episode in June 1994. She and her sister were taken hostage by Hutu “husbands” who were treating them as sex slaves. Militias were combing every last village to snuff out every last Tutsi. Adeline’s mother-in-law helped her escape. Her sister, however, didn’t make it. Distraught, Adeline turned herself over to the Interahamwe, one of the most notorious death squads, to be killed.
“Instead of killing me,” she recounted, “another [member of the] Interahamwe took me to a disused house and raped me. He showed me his grenades and bullets and asked me to choose which death I would prefer. I picked up a grenade and threw it on the ground hoping it would blow me up, but it didn’t explode. He then called in his friends to punish me.” They abused her for days on end.
Hundreds of thousands of individuals went through ordeals like Adeline’s.
When crises like this happen, people often call on the UN to send in a peacekeeping force, or at least do something. Rwanda was a special case. The UN already had a presence of 2,500 peacekeepers to monitor a peace agreement signed the year before between the Rwandan government and Tutsi rebels. Once the mass slaughter started, the UN jumped into action—but not to save Tutsis. No, they scrambled to get out of the country. Per UN regulations, the peacekeepers could use force only in self-defense or to evacuate foreigners. In early April, the Rwandan government massacred 10 Belgian peacekeepers, prompting Belgium to evacuate its forces. Other countries contributing to the UN mission soon followed suit. The UN presence shrank from 2,500 troops to 270.
In one notorious example, on the first day of the genocide, roughly 2,000 Tutsis tried to find refuge at the École Technique Officielle, a Catholic secondary school on the outskirts of Kigali. Hutu extremists tracked them down and would have slaughtered them immediately, if it weren’t for the Belgian UN troops guarding the building. But when Belgium ordered its soldiers back home on April 11, the soldiers complied. Extremists came soon after and slaughtered almost everybody.
“I remember one of us asking them [the UN troops] to give us a few guns so [we] could protect ourselves,” Venuste, a survivor, recalled. “But they still refused.”
Aftermath
The genocide ended when the Rwandan Patriotic Front (rpf), a rebel group, overthrew the government in July. The new regime, surveying the bloody rubble left behind, brought some stability. But as could be expected, that didn’t mean the wounds healed immediately.
As the rpf advanced, thousands of Hutus, including many responsible for genocide, moved across the border to Zaire (today the Democratic Republic of Congo, or drc), fearing reprisals. In 1996, the new government under Paul Kagame invaded Zaire to deal with the vestiges of the former regime. In what became known as the First Congo War (1996–1997), the rpf killed what human rights groups estimate were as many as 200,000 Hutus in Zaire.
The war ended when Zaire’s dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, fled the country. His successor, Laurent Kabila, obtained power through Rwandan sponsorship. But wary of Rwanda’s new influence in the country, he ordered foreign troops out of the country and started sponsoring Interahamwe remnants. Rwanda responded by going to war on Kabila’s government. This led to the Second Congo War (1998–2003), also known as Africa’s World War. This involved the drc, Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Sudan, Chad, Zimbabwe and myriads of militias, costing an estimated 5.4 million lives. Most of these were killed by disease and malnutrition associated with the conflict. Even still, the Second Congo War was man’s deadliest conflict since World War ii.
All this stemmed from those fateful 100 days in 1994.
Recovery within Rwanda itself was much less violent. But a genocide with so many participants meant a large number of incarcerations. By 2001, Rwanda’s justice system had some 115,000 cases pending trial. To alleviate some of the pressure on the justice system, the government established gacaca (grass) courts, localized courts presided by prominent individuals in communities. The fairness and impartiality of the gacaca courts varied. By 2010, roughly 1.5 million cases went through the gacaca system.
Reconciliation
This history is not all doom and gloom. Rwanda has made genuine attempts to reconcile its population within its borders and move on from catastrophe. With such a large population complicit in genocide, Kagame’s government couldn’t put everybody behind bars. The government gave mass amnesty to prisoners who confessed to acts of genocide and publicly asked for forgiveness. In March 2004 alone, 30,000 people received pardons that way.
The government also worked to foster a new national identity to erase the divisions that led to the horrors of 1994. This included abolishing the ethnic classification system through ethnic identification cards. This system was a relic of Belgian colonial rule. Some say there is not much difference between Hutus and Tutsis to begin with; they speak the same language, live in the same general areas, and keep the same religion. The government abolished this colonial-era caste system, making each citizen a Rwandan first and foremost. Rwanda’s 12 prefectures were replaced with five larger provinces, each containing a larger intercommunal mix.
One of the most visible ways Rwandan society has moved forward is through the establishment of many genocide memorials. The memorial in Kigali, which opened in 2004, became the final home of the remains of roughly 250,000 genocide victims. Since then, the educational services the memorials produce have become a core component in the education of about 2.5 million Rwandan students each year. The memorial now houses the Genocide Archives. The memorial’s outreach programs assist neighboring countries like Kenya and South Sudan in dealing with their domestic issues. Perhaps most significantly, the memorial provides a place where survivors and perpetrators can meet each other in a safe environment and begin the healing process.
“It’s a home to the survivors, but again, it’s a place for perpetrators,” Dieudonné Nagiriwubuntu, the Kigali Genocide Memorial’s manager, told the Trumpet. “So it applies where the whole family of Rwandans come and see the reality of what happened, but also see the home-grown solutions initiated by the good leadership to restore peace and reconciliation in Rwanda.”
This kind of work has produced some positive fruits within Rwanda. In a 2020 survey cosponsored by the UN and the Rwandan government, 73.1 percent of respondents stated they feel the wounds of the genocide have healed; 94.8 percent agreed that “Today Rwandans can leave their children in any family within their neighborhoods”; 97.4 percent stated they’d be comfortable marrying somebody from another ethnic group.
Rwanda’s example is not perfect. Since the genocide, Rwanda has effectively been under a one-party dictatorship that has used its strict genocide denial laws to go after opponents. Like every endeavor of man’s, peace always comes with a caveat.
This is because real peace can ultimately only come from God. In summing up mankind’s experiments to bring peace on Earth, the Bible states, “The way of peace they know not …” (Isaiah 59:8; see also Romans 3:17). The Bible prophesies that real peace won’t happen until God establishes His direct rule over all the Earth (Isaiah 9:6-7; Micah 4:1-4). Even then, this peace won’t occur until people realize that peace goes hand in hand with embracing His purpose for making man in the first place. “[This world] has failed utterly to reveal to the world the purpose of human life or explain its true meaning,” Herbert W. Armstrong wrote in The Wonderful World Tomorrow—What It Will Be Like. “It remains ignorant of the true values. It does not know the way to peace!” Mr. Armstrong said that “the way to peace” is “made possible only through the Holy Spirit, providing spiritual comprehension.”
The Bible is also a book about laws of cause and effect. Its message can be summed up in Deuteronomy 30:19: “… I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”
There is a law of peace—a way of peace. The closer Rwanda and other nations follow that law, the more peace they will have.
One aspect of the law of peace is forgiveness. Jesus Christ set the example for this. As He was being crucified, Jesus said regarding His murderers: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
“People want to hate other people, and kill other people,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry wrote. “They killed the Son of God—and He forgave them. Without forgiveness, not one of us would have an opportunity to receive eternal life” (Trumpet, September 2015). Mr. Flurry wrote that in the wake of the 2015 mass shooting at a historical African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina. He was commenting on how some expected Charleston to erupt in race riots; instead the survivors, even those who had lost family members, publicly forgave the murderer, Dylann Roof. Mr. Flurry pointed to Charleston as an example of how to solve America’s divisions.
Of course, division and hatred are widespread across our planet. The Apostle John wrote that “the whole world lieth in wickedness” (1 John 5:19). And God wants the whole world to learn what it means to have true peace.
“In His Sermon on the Mount,” Mr. Flurry wrote, “Christ said, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God’ (Matthew 5:9). This is part of the Beatitudes—the beautiful attitudes Christ gave, which are at the heart of Christianity. He said blessed are the people who make peace! They shall be called the children of God” (ibid).
Rwanda still has its fair share of problems, but its program of forgiveness and reconciliation is bearing visible fruits.
“It is not an easy thing to talk about reconciliation, to talk about forgiveness,” Nagiriwubuntu stated. “But it is a possible thing. It is a possible journey. So I may say that in Rwanda, it’s working and it is on a very good track. But it is still an ongoing process.”
Real peace ultimately points to the God of peace—because God’s work on Earth today is ultimately about bringing real peace to every man who has ever lived. Isaiah 9:6 calls Jesus “The Prince of Peace.” Verse 7 says God’s ambition is that “of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end.”
“There is a way that leads to peace,” Mr. Flurry wrote. “Whether we realize it or not, this is the only spirit that will ever solve our race relations” (ibid).
Forgiving one’s enemies—learning to love them—has everything to do with this way of peace. God reveals this way of peace in His written Word. It is up to us to apply it.