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From Never Again

Marian Hodgkin and Poppy Sebag Montefiore

During two and a half weeks in Rwanda, working with young Rwandans, two history students from the UK became aware of history's importance for issues as seemingly distinct as friendship and global politics, and the importance of friendship and politics for history. On their return to the UK the two students, the writers of this essay, conceived and designed the Rwanda Forum which took place on the 27th March 2004 at the Imperial War Museum. A one day conference, the Rwanda Forum was the major UK event to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. Giving an account of the genesis of the Forum and exploring the themes which emerged during the day this essay explains the emotional and intellectual backdrop to the event.

The Rwanda Forum was an act of protest. An act inspired by experience, empathy and a critical approach to the past. The Forum protested against the lack of international response to the genocide and the often silent and narrow focus of historical debate. The day reacted against irresponsibility in international politics and the lack of global thinking in our societies. The essay examines how and why the Forum attempted to create a wider history according to an inclusive sense of the world and of humanity. The Forum avoided battles about causes and consequences of the genocide which culminated in conclusion. Instead the Forum provided a space for the participants to make links between our differing personal histories and broaden our perspectives of our own histories.

The essay discusses the problems of defining and responding to genocide, both in terms of international prevention and, after the event, through commemoration. Including brief extracts of testimonies and analysis from the day, the essay illustrates how the commemoration aimed to create shared memory while challenging myth, breaking silence and exposing the discrepancy between values held by the international community and the way that the world reacted to the genocide. The paper concludes by demonstrating how history, memory and commemoration can be used to ensure ‘never again’.

Two days before the Rwanda Forum, Poppy received a call on her mobile. There was a problem. The photograph that we had chosen for the front cover of the delegate packs was unacceptable. Worse, it was offensive and likely to wound those who had already experienced unimaginable pain. The call was from a Rwandan, an influential diplomat and a friend and advisor to our organization. She explained that the photo was ambiguous. It showed a Rwandan woman refugee walking across the Rwandan border into her country carrying her possessions on her back and with a look of determination on her face. The image is powerful, but the photograph does not tell her history. She could be a genocide survivor bravely returning home. But she could be a perpetrator who participated in the killing and fled justice only now to venture back to the scene of the crime. Or perhaps she is one of the many Rwandans who were in exile before, during and after the genocide, and who are only now reclaiming their country. Our friend could not tell us what this photograph represented, but the vague possibility that the photograph depicted a perpetrator would, in her opinion, insult both survivors and the memory of those who had died. She demanded that it should not appear. The expensive colour images had already been printed and paid for; it had appeared on most of our publicity material.

We tried not to panic. We examined the photograph again. We wondered if our Rwandan friend could see past the woman's strong face and judge her character. As we studied the image we reminded ourselves why we had selected it. It represents Rwanda today: a country made up of survivors and perpetrators, witnesses and returnees, suffering and evil, hope and resolve. Whatever this woman's role in history, she is part of the future of the country and the world should ask for her story.

As two final-year history students we knew we were taking a risk when we decided to organize the Rwanda Forum, a one-day international conference to be held at the Imperial War Museum in London to mark the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. We knew there would be moments of crisis and complex issues to be negotiated. We needed to strike a balance between history, commemoration and activism and learn how to treat a past that still has a visceral immediacy for those who were involved. The Forum aimed to remember the 800,000 to a million Tutsi and moderate Hutu murdered in just three months in a genocide orchestrated by the extremist Hutu in government and carried out by the army, trained militia and ordinary Rwandans. Three months of brutally-efficient killing that the international community made no effort to halt, the media misrepresented and the public generally ignored. This lack of response to the most extreme of all crimes against humanity, genocide, means the Rwandan tragedy remains a global concern. And so the Forum was designed to draw together an international cast of speakers to share their experiences of the genocide and contribute their views on why it occurred and how future genocides can be prevented. We invited survivors, UN peacekeepers, African and European politicians, former and current ambassadors and civil servants, historians, academics, journalists, authors, representatives of NGOs, poets, dancers and musicians. Our aim was to attract an audience of participants that would mirror the diversity of our speakers. We hoped that the Rwanda Forum would provide a space for collaboration and the creation of a range of alliances, an ‘open conspiracy’, which could motivate real change and ensure ‘Never Again’.

We have adopted this phrase. It evokes powerful sentiments; it appeals to our collective memory of the holocaust and recalls the international commitment to the prevention of genocide expressed at the end of the Second World War. However, it has become a rhetorical sound-bite rather than a call to action. Its historical reference has dulled its relevance to the present and it has come to mean ‘Never Again will Germans be allowed to kill Jews in the 1940s’. As Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire forcefully argued at the Rwanda Forum, the ‘concept of "Never Again" ... proved to be a dismal failure in the case of Rwanda. It just didn't work. It didn't sell and it didn't advance’. This dislocation of past from present experience is underlined brilliantly by the PBS documentary Triumph of Evil (1999), which juxtaposes scenes from Vice-President Al Gore's speech marking a year since the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington with footage of the first hours of the Rwandan genocide. Gore spoke about the meaning of the Holocaust museum for all Americans, claiming that ‘The Holocaust is not an event to be remembered just by those who survived ... Its memorial should continue to be part of the American experience for everyone. And there is no better place for it than Washington, to remind those who make the agonizing decisions of foreign policy of the consequences of those decisions.’ On the very same day, 6 April 1994, Rwanda's presidential aeroplane was shot out of the sky, triggering 100 days of mass murder. This example shows how, at times, the past can obscure the present: while we were remembering the holocaust, current events in Rwanda were being voluntarily forgotten. We have called our network ‘Never Again’ because we aim to put its sentiment into action. Central to this is the need to learn and to raise awareness about past conflicts in order to provoke ideas and action for peace. We need to remember the history encapsulated in the phrase ‘Never Again’, but we need it ‘for the sake of life and action, not so as to turn away from life and action’.

The Rwanda Project 2002

Our ideas of what ‘Never Again’ should represent evolved during our first project, a trip that allowed Never Again's international members to visit Rwanda and work with our Rwandan members. This project was itself the genesis of the Rwanda Forum. The premise of the trip was perhaps naïve – we wanted to work together with our Rwandan hosts, investigating the causes and effects of genocide, recording our research in order to share our findings when we returned home. Each international visitor was paired with a Rwandan student and each focused on a topic – Education, Justice, Perpetrators, Children and Youth, Reconciliation. Our Rwandan members organized our itinerary – fifteen days of intense activity. We quickly discovered that the academic framework, which we had imagined would structure our visit and give it purpose, was neither appropriate nor realistic. We established links with AVEGA, an organization working with the widows and orphans of the genocide. Survivors came to talk to us; they were keen to tell us their stories. One woman described how

Almost immediately after the shooting down of the plane of the former president Habyarimana, my neighbours and I were chased from our homes by members of the Interahamwe militia. The extremists caught me and cut my private parts into two pieces. They raped me using sticks and poles. I was rescued by RPF soldiers before I was going to be killed.

We visited Murambi, a genocide site where 50-60,000 people were killed in April 1994. Before the genocide, Murambi was a technical school thirty kilometres from the National University of Rwanda. As the killing spread, families in fear for their lives and in the hope of safety gathered together in the classrooms of the school. Almost everyone who sheltered in Murambi was massacred. Today 20,000 bodies have been exhumed from the mass graves and are laid on trestle tables in the classrooms. They are deliberately preserved there as a reminder and a memorial to those killed. Only four people survived. We spoke to one of the survivors; he has a death-defying bullet-shaped hole in his head. He returns to the site of the massacre in order to feel close to his wife and five children who were all killed. Speaking to this man and walking into classrooms full of bodies, smelling preservative and human flesh, seeing children's bodies, scraps of hair and clothing is not something that can be understood. We could not comprehend the suffering of the people we spoke to: compassion was the only response.

We travelled to Rwanda as students of history, law, human rights, language, development. We were British, Japanese, Israeli, Americans and Rwandans working together. During one conversation around the breakfast table an emotive discussion developed. One member of the group explained how being a British person of Tibetan descent, with a family history of political opposition, gave her a very direct emotional connection with those Rwandans in our group who had lived in exile before the genocide. Several of the Rwandans were taken by surprise; they had not considered that westerners, from developed countries, might have difficult and painful histories too. An Israeli participant was closely questioned about the Israel/Palestine situation. These were important moments, highlighting the reciprocal nature of our learning. There was a strong sense of shared experience and empathy. Our personal histories were as important to the trip as national history and the history of international relations. Some of our group activities were also new experiences for the Rwandans. Most of them had never been to Murambi. None of them had visited a prison, or spoken to, looked in the eye, and shaken hands with confessed genocide perpetrators. The international participants were able to ask questions that the Rwandans might not have asked; the Rwandans brought layers of personal experience and insight, explaining what we were seeing from their perspectives. At this stage we did not digest our experiences intellectually or academically. The project became an emotional journey for all of the participants. We put our trust in the judgement of our Rwandan hosts and looked to them for guidance and support. We even let them take us to the Democratic Republic of Congo against Foreign Office advice, but that's another story. We relied on emotional empathy rather than concerning ourselves with research methods. We moved away from our original academic focus and found ourselves concentrating on building bonds within the group.

As a result, although we listened to a great deal of testimony, this visit was not a fact-finding mission to gather evidence and attempt to interpret it, as professional historians might have done. We did not try to examine the causes and effects of genocide nor engage in ‘straight’ historical research. Regina Ingabire, founding member and Chairperson of Never Again Rwanda, had invited us to Rwanda. As our host she prepared a very full programme of visits and interviews for us; though inevitably the picture was incomplete and partial, as all such pictures must be. Apart from the direct testimony of those caught up in the genocide, we were interested in the experiences of Rwandans today living with the aftermath as well as in government responses and its approach to reconciliation and rebuilding. Our aim was not, therefore, to establish ‘the truth’ of the genocide or its causes, but rather to get a sense of Rwandans’ responses to what they saw as the truth of their – and their country's – experience.

As students of history we were very much aware of issues of bias, partial perspectives and the presence of government propaganda. The current government is, in effect, the ‘winning side’ of the war which ended the genocide. President Paul Kagame is committed to making his party (the Rwandan Patriotic Front) inclusive and not ethnically defined. The government espouse a reconciliation-based approach, establishing the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission. It is inevitable however, especially given the delicate stability of a country with a long history of ethnic violence, that other points of view do not get much exposure. It is now almost taboo to talk in terms of Hutu and Tutsi – the aim is a population that identifies itself by nationality and not by ethnicity. We spoke to survivors and perpetrators, government ministers and NGOs and, without exception, none of them so much as hinted at the existence of ethnic hatred or ethnic bias in a contemporary context. Reconciliation, argues the government, is the only feasible approach, and we heard from no dissenters.

The government representatives we spoke to did discuss the practical difficulties of reconciliation. We met Callixte Kayesire, the Director of Tertiary Education in the Ministry of Education; he argued that long-term indoctrination must now be countered with equally long-term teaching of reconciliation. He reasoned that the role of government is to give a vision of a united country, but that reconciliation cannot be imposed by the government. It must come from living together.

The Minister of Justice and Institutional Relations, Jean de Dieu Mucyo, a very impressive, elegant Rwandan, also spoke of some of the problems of reconciliation. ‘There are cases of parents killing their children. In these special cases, who is to reconcile with whom?’ The government insists that for Rwandans themselves to see that justice is done is an integral part of the reconciliation process but to try over 100,000 prisoners is a bureaucratic impossibility. The government's solution is the re-establishment of a traditional pre-colonial form of justice called ‘Gacaca’, meaning ‘on the grass’. This is a participatory system: the whole community is involved and the judges and administrators are also members of the local population. The Gacaca process is more than a system of justice: it is oral history ‘in action’. The courts require the communities to come to an agreed version of the facts, and the oral testimonies given in the Gacaca courts will allow a history of the genocide to emerge at village level.

The perpetrators we spoke to on our visit to Gikondo prison in Kigali were all willing participants in Gacaca. They had all confessed to crimes and hoped to be tried in their community's Gacaca courts. One prisoner told us:

I was imprisoned on 2nd September 1994. We’ve spent five years being desensitised in order to ask for forgiveness. The government first sent us booklets which encouraged us to confess and say what happened. We got training from the government to confess. On 28th January 2000 I decided to confess. I gained peace of mind the day I confessed. I was paralysed sitting thinking of what I had done. At first the prisoners confessed to the general prosecutor through writing and asking for forgiveness. But then we were told that Gacaca would come. Now we confess to our local residential area ... I feel very ready to get out of this place to ask for forgiveness from those whom I committed acts of genocide against.

All the prisoners we spoke to were, in terms of government policy, model prisoners. They had all confessed to their crimes, and wanted to ask for forgiveness. However, not all of them were taking responsibility for their actions: ‘I killed, but I was forced to kill them ... As each one of my group had looted something, I thought I should too, so I took the iron sheets from the roof and picked up a goat’. One prisoner openly said that his motivation for participating in Gacaca was the hope of a reduced prison sentence or perhaps a community-service order.

Whether we were talking to survivors, prisoners or returnees, we heard that forgiveness should be sought and given in order to foster a united, reconciled nation. From speaking to representatives of the ministries of education and justice to sports and culture, it is clear that much government time and money is being channelled into orchestrating this national response to the genocide. As history students we were troubled by the silence of any opposition to the government line; there must be Hutu who still adhere to the sentiments expressed in the hate propaganda of the previous regime, just as there must be Tutsi survivors who crave revenge. We did ask these questions of our hosts, but we did not pursue the issue.

It was perhaps our inability to behave like investigative journalists or academically-objective historians which has resulted in an organization with a future. The connections we formed as a group have provided long-term motivation, sustained our commitment and helped the development of our network. The international participants were impressed and moved by how articulate the Rwandan students were in talking about both personal concerns such as forgiveness and reconciliation, and national and international issues. We were inspired by the Rwandan students’ determination to think analytically about their personal and national histories and to work at moving away from the darkness of their past. As a group we were unified by a desire to think critically about the history and current situations of our respective societies. The Rwandan students were concerned about the lack of independent, critical thinking amongst the youth of their country. The international participants were aware of a common failure to think critically about our own past (in)actions. The vast majority of people in our societies are in the twilight between knowing and not knowing about the genocide.

On returning to London we tried hard to convey what we had experienced. It soon became clear that a more effective way for us to do this and to address some of the questions raised by the Rwandan genocide was to arrange for the Rwandan members of Never Again to come to London and speak for themselves. We hoped to allow a wide audience the chance to establish some of the emotional and intellectual connections we had found so motivational. We wanted to create a space that asked people to think about the genocide, not as an event in Rwanda's history, but as a moment in the history of the world.

Response and Responsibility

If the international community had acted promptly and with determination, it could have stopped most of the killing.

Why didn't it? This was the question we wanted to ask our speakers and the participants in the Rwanda Forum. If Rwanda was a predictable and preventable genocide, why was it allowed to continue for 100 days? Why was it left to a rebel army to halt the killing? Why was the Genocide Convention not utilized? Why were innocent civilians allowed to die in their hundreds of thousands? In the case of some human tragedies, asking ‘why?’ is a rhetorical cry of despair. But in the case of the Rwandan genocide, within the complex answers to this question there are simple but hard lessons to be learnt and difficult realities to face (both for Rwandans, and for the entire international community). Much of the Forum programme was dedicated to hearing the testimonies of those who were present in Rwanda at the time of the genocide: what happened, why they thought it had happened and what they felt about the future. However, we also heard from those directly involved in the decision-making at national and international levels. There were several key points that emerged during the day that began to answer the question ‘why?’

Many of the speakers reiterated the point that there were ‘gathering signs of disaster’ in the weeks, months and even years leading up to the outbreak of genocide on 7 April 1994. There were plenty of early warning signs. Stefan Stec, a Polish UN Peacekeeper in Rwanda as part of the UNAMIR force, described how ‘genocide hung in the air’. A local newspaper in Rwanda ran a story some weeks beforehand about a ‘final solution’ that was planned. On 11 January Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire received details from a Hutu informant who described the planned genocide, who knew where the extremists’ arms-caches were, and who told of their plan to kill Belgian troops in order to provoke Belgian withdrawal from Rwanda. That day Dallaire sent a now infamous cable to Kofi Annan, then head of the UN Department for Peacekeeping Operations, asking permission to take action and raid the arms-caches. Kofi Annan replied that Dallaire should take no such action. Three months later all the informant's predictions were realized. Even five days into the genocide, Dallaire writes,

the Security Council and the office of the secretary-general were obviously at a loss as to what to do. I continued to receive demands to supply them with more information before they would take any concrete action. What more could I possibly tell them that I hadn't already described in horrific detail? ... Despite our verbal and written reports of the worsening scenario ... reinforcement wasn't being discussed in New York.

Thus early warning signs and even early reports of the beginnings of the massacres were not enough to prevent genocide. As Greg Stanton, president of Genocide Watch, told the Forum: ‘the warnings must reach people who can act on them, people who make public policy, and those people must be politically compelled to act.’

Kofi Annan's opening address to the Rwanda Forum stated plainly that ‘the political will [to end the killing] was not there’. Simply translated, ‘lack of political will’ means ‘we didn't want to’. Those states with the capacity to prevent genocide did not want to. The Rwandan genocide gave the world a test case: if there were no economic or geopolitical gain to be made from intervention, would the world act? We did not. The international community did not fail to act, it chose not to; and in that, it succeeded absolutely. Several explanations were presented. The Forum's keynote speaker Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire argued that the international community based its actions (or lack thereof) on national interest and the prioritization of internal political demands. The international community ‘simply did not perceive that the destruction of black Africans in central Africa actually had a reverberation in their lives, in their societies and in their countries ... The Rwandans simply were not worthy of casualties, worthy of risks, of political failure in the countries that had the capability of doing something’.

Lillian Wong supported Dallaire's condemnation of the lack of political risk taking. Wong described how there was an ‘excess of caution’ amongst policy-makers in Whitehall: ‘It seemed to me that New York [meaning the British delegation at the UN] was making the decisions rather than the Foreign Office in London’. Wong argued that the British government at the time was over-reliant on other countries taking the lead and explaining the implications of what was happening in Rwanda. However, these countries had their own agenda and ‘were hardly being neutral in their analysis ... of course I’m talking about the United States, I’m talking about Belgium and I’m talking about France’.

Stanton and Dallaire both argued that the lack of international intervention was due in part to racism. Stanton explicitly blamed our inability to accord value to the lives of black Africans:

African lives are still outside the circle of our moral concern when the cost to protect them may be the lives of our own sons and daughters. And I do not say that lightly, because my own son is a US Marine.

Dallaire reminded us of the concurrent operation taking place in the former Yugoslavia:

... we were pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars of materials and resources and tens of thousands of troops into Yugoslavia. In Yugoslavia, during the six years of war, there were fewer people that were killed, injured, internally displaced and refugeed than in a hundred days in Rwanda. Yet we could not convince, we could not shame the international community into considering the destruction of human beings in Rwanda to be on a par, even of interest.

Comparison with Yugoslavia also reveals a more indirect kind of racism in our society; violence in Africa is ‘normal’, even ‘expected’. The violence in Yugoslavia involved people who look and sound like ‘us’, who had greater access to mobile phones and the Internet, and who didn't live in a remote part of the globe. The violence in Yugoslavia was closer to home, both geographically and psychologically, and therefore it was seen as much more threatening to our society. It should, however, be remembered that the West has also been fiercely criticized for failing to prevent many massacres in Yugoslavia – even when the international community does decide to act, prevention is by no means easy.

History – To Act or Not to Act

The Western states’ perception of national interest is built up from both the immediate past and longer-term historical realities. Arguably the US government's lack of interest in three months of genocide in Rwanda was due in part to its unwillingness to risk the politically-damaging possibility of casualties incurred in a country most Americans were not interested in, for a cause they did not understand. No doubt the domestic impact of recent examples of failed intervention was a contributing factor, and in particular the events in Somalia in October 1993 during which the Americans lost eighteen soldiers, American TV screens showed American soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, and the US pulled out of Somalia leaving things no better than before. The intervention in Somalia was a deep embarrassment and the Clinton administration had no motivation to risk another failure and further loss of American life on African soil.

The British response to Rwanda was also affected by historical circumstance; in this case the effects of long-term historical patterns of influence. London deferred to France and Belgium on the issue of UN intervention because, Wong argued,

The UK has never had any historic links with Rwanda, no interests in Rwanda. Rwanda was part of the Francophone world, it was not a member of the Commonwealth, it was seen as a part of the Franco-Belgian sphere of influence, if I can put it like that, and there had never ever been a British embassy in Rwanda. So we knew little or nothing about it. We didn't understand the social or political dynamics ... Rwanda would get a visit from a British diplomat, if they were lucky, once every one or two years.

Britain was thus prepared to let the Francophone European States take the lead, from a sense of deference to their historical ties, the absence of a long-term British interest and a lack of direct sources of information.

This negative example of the impact of the history of international relations on current politics was counterbalanced somewhat when Karel Kovanda, former Czech representative to the United Nations, explained in personal terms his role in the attempt to convince the Security Council to take action in Rwanda.

Mine is a small country, as I mentioned, and in 1938 we were described by a certain Western prominent politician as ‘a small unknown country in central Europe’ – why should the country of this politician lose any lives protecting it? And so we were surrendered to Hitler, as it were. And frankly I had the same feeling [about Rwanda], here's a small country in the centre of Africa which nobody knows much about, and the historical parallel was there, loud and clear, we just couldn't afford not to speak up if we knew, to the extent that we knew, what was happening. We did our best to spread the word, spread the information that we were getting constantly from the Non-Governmental Organisations ... we [the Czech delegation] drafted a presidential statement [i.e. a statement from the president of the Security Council] toward the end of April ... which would have used for the first time the word genocide.

Kovanda made this draft presidential statement public for the first time at the Forum. The draft statement rehearses the definition of genocide and reiterates that ‘genocide cannot be condoned or tolerated, let alone justified, under any circumstance: not by civil war, not by the death of a leader, whatever suspicions surround it, not by past history’. However, the Security Council did not accept this draft, and the final version, issued on 30 April 1994, was in many ways weaker than the draft. It did not use the word genocide.

The G Word

Political will or no, the signatories of the 1948 Genocide Convention committed themselves to a simple pledge: if genocide occurs they are duty-bound to intervene. The Convention settled on a definition of genocide as ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’, including killing members of the group, causing them mental or bodily harm, preventing them from producing children or forcibly removing their children. International law, with its respect for state sovereignty, as a general rule limits intervention in another state to cases of self-defence. However, the Genocide Convention was accepted as an exception to the rule; under certain circumstances states no longer have the legal right to be left alone and interference in a genocidal nation's affairs is not merely authorized, but a requirement of the Convention. As William Schabas clarified: ‘The Genocide Convention doesn't create rights for states; you don't get rights by ratifying the Genocide Convention, you get duties ... there's a duty to intervene and it's an onerous one, let's be clear.’ The member states of the United Nations, especially the Security Council members, failed to rise to this duty. The genocide in Rwanda brings out starkly the discrepancies between the vision of a world governed by international law and the reality of the way the world acts when these commitments are actually invoked.

The Genocide Convention clearly states that action must be taken if genocide is occurring. The catch-22, as the Rwandan case clearly demonstrates, is that there has to be a political will to use ‘the G word’ in the first place. Those members of the UN Security Council with the power to act, particularly the United States, avoided the necessity of dealing with the Rwandan genocide by simply calling it by another name (or names: ‘tribal conflict’, ‘civil war’, ‘ethnic violence’, or even ‘genocidal acts’). When a US State department spokesperson, Christine Shelly, was asked how many genocidal acts it takes to make genocide, she answered, ‘that's just not a question I’m in a position to answer’.

As Kovanda explained, the situation in Rwanda was complex, and many of his colleagues at the UN found it ‘conceptually difficult to understand that in Rwanda there were two types of conflicts going on in parallel and that they could not be confused and mixed up’. One was the civil war between the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and the Rwandan government forces, the other was ‘wholesale slaughter’. Much of the Security Council's time was spent looking at the failure of the Arusha Peace Agreement – the cease-fire of 1993 that attempted to stop the civil war – rather than focusing on evidence of the genocide which broke out as the cease-fire ended. Stanton said: ‘Diplomats always want peace processes. Even when, like the Arusha peace process for Rwanda in 1993 and 1994, they become side-shows that distract attention from the preparations for genocide or ethnic cleansing that are going on in the main tent.’ He argued that genocide prevention is not the same as conflict prevention.

This comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of genocide. Because, you see, genocide is not conflict. It is one-sided, mass murder. The Jews had no conflict with the Nazis. Armenians posed no threat to Turks. Ukrainian farmers did not fight Stalin's Communist cadres. Bengalis did not try to massacre Pakistanis. Hutu intellectuals did not rise up against the Tutsi army in Burundi in 1972. Nor did Tutsis advocate mass murder of Hutus in Rwanda in 1994. Yet all of these groups were victims of genocide.

Kovanda argued that the inhuman, exceptional nature of genocide contributed to the unwillingness to react:

Genocide, for your average reader of the newspaper headlines, indeed for your average diplomat, is something so far out on the curve of experience that we have that it is really difficult to get to the point of saying yes, this is genocide, this is not a humanitarian catastrophe, this is not a few civilian victims of a civil war or of street battles. This actually is organized extermination of one group of people.

However, witnesses in Rwanda not only identified genocide as it happened, they recognized the warning signs. Both before and during the genocide they struggled to make their voices heard, and were simply ignored. As well as Dallaire's numerous attempts to alert the UN, in the media and humanitarian missions there were those who tried to raise the alarm. Jean Baptiste Kayagamba, a reporter in Rwanda in 1994, told the Forum how his news reports detailing plans for genocide were binned by his editors in Nairobi as he was a Tutsi and was therefore considered an unreliable source. The international community must be prepared to accept the facts presented to them by those on the ground, but that is not enough. They must also be convinced (or be willing to be convinced) that these reports amount to genocide, within the legal meaning of the Convention. Perhaps for this reason, genocide seemed by many of those outside Rwanda easier to identify in retrospect, a fact which throws into question the practical utility of the Genocide Convention. After the event, when the determination of genocide carries no immediate duty of intervention, governments are more ready to use the word. The Convention, therefore, is a tool but is only useful if the international community is willing to use it.

History of the Present

The Rwanda Forum did not attempt a Rwandan history. We did not try to unravel the causal web of factors that culminated in Rwandans turning on their neighbours and friends. The Forum was not a battleground of competing histories of the genocide that would detract from the broader questions raised by the macro-political issues of international responsibility for Rwanda. As the contributions above demonstrate, our historical focus was primarily on the international response, or lack of it. The Forum programme thus created a ‘history of the present’: we were working in the territory between history, journalism and politics. Politics, because we began with a politically loaded premise – the world should have acted – and then proceeded to ask ‘why didn’t it?’ History, because we attempted to answer this question through the presentation and examination of evidence from those who were there, first-hand eyewitness accounts, public records and the decision makers themselves. Journalism, because the events we examined are still ‘current affairs’ and required some of the techniques of an investigative journalist to establish the facts and to bring a level of realism and immediacy that is sometimes missing from purely historical accounts. However, a ‘history of the present’ is not enough. Our primary concern was not to throw new light on what happened in Rwanda and the international response, or to reveal an alternative interpretation of events. Our interest was how one uses this history.

Unlike the genocides of the mid-twentieth century, which were focused on the creation of a ‘better’ future, of a ‘new man’, the genocide in Rwanda was one perpetrated in the name of the past. In Rwanda (as in Yugoslavia), the past, the narrative of ancient grievances and longstanding ethnic competition and hatred, was used to create ‘imagined communities’ that excluded and destroyed those outside their construction. During the Forum we used the history of the international response to the Rwandan genocide to create a different kind of "imagined community", one based on inclusion rather than exclusion. We hoped our speakers would evoke in the audience a sense of shared humanity. In this way the Rwanda Forum was not just about listening to and believing the experiences of eyewitnesses (although it did allow that), it was an attempt to create some kind of collective memory of the genocide and the world’s complicity in it, a memory of those who lived through the conflict, both Rwandan and non-Rwandan, and those who did not. Not in order to induce guilt or remorse, but rather because we imagine a collective future, one that includes all humanity, and it is this that confers ethical value on the collective past. The relevance and use of the actual collective past depends on our willingness to identify with an imagined collective future.

The bases of this collective future is the recognition of a common humanity. Ultimately, legal Conventions and obligations will not help if we do not identify with our fellow humans. Dallaire emphasised the link between institutional, State-level responsibility and the personal response of the individual.

In Rwanda, humanity was forgotten, humanity was abandoned. It wasn't worth the risk. The international community has as a fundamental fault: the inability to rise above self-interest and to achieve the level of humanity that considers every human, human...If we don't … rise to the concept of humanity in its total, we will continue to treat the 80% of humanity that is in the mud, the blood and the suffering, as simply a residual, as simply an apanage, an appendage. And never will humanity be able to say … that humanity is advancing. Because humanity means that the whole of humanity lives in dignity, in hope, with aspirations for the next generations.

Cultural responses help to build collective memory while also illustrating how a personal response to genocide can be a powerful expression of protest. Véronique Tadjo explained that for her, the role of a writer goes beyond politics, figures and facts: ‘what we were interested in as writers was to, in a way, resurrect the dead, render the full human dimension of what had happened in Rwanda so people could understand it at an ordinary level…I was starting from a particular premise: what had happened there concerned us all. It was not just one nation lost in the dark heart of Africa that was affected. To forget Rwanda after the sound and the fury was like being blind in one eye, voiceless, handicapped. It was to walk in darkness, feeling your way with outstretched arms to avoid colliding with the future.’

She went on to read an extract from her book The Shadow of Imana , Imana being the name given to God in Kenya and Rwanda:

For one day we must stop in our tracks to look ourselves in the face, set off in search of our own fears buried beneath apparent serenity. May my eyes see, may my ears hear, may my mouth speak. I am not afraid of knowing. But may my mind never lose sight of what must grow within us: hope and the respect for life…

A lot of time is needed to accept that trees planted in this land of sorrows have been able to bear fruit. Traces of the war are rare in the town[Kigali], but people's memories are teeming with poisoned images. The vast majority of people carry their pain silently in their souls and find the unbelievable strength to live daily life as it begins again. …The truth is revealed in people's eyes. Words have so little value, you need to get under people's skins and see what is inside. Evil changes its tactics and chooses different battlefields. It emerges wherever we have lowered our guard.

The Rwanda Forum was a commemoration. Survivors of the genocide strongly feel that they were abandoned by the world in their time of need, and we wanted the Forum to recognise this and show solidarity with them in their grief. We were unsure how testimony and history would sit side by side. How would a survivor feel to hear his memories, his story, his history, re-told or un-told by a foreign academic? Yet how would the Forum work without the authority of someone more removed? We used testimonies and histories from both inside and outside Rwanda that focused on the direct connections between what was happening in Rwanda, the international response and individual reactions.

Historian Alison Des Forges highlighted the connections between the discussions in the UN Security Council and the actions of the genocidal government. Through an ‘accident of history’ Rwanda was a non-permanent member of the Security Council that year and therefore privy to all the debate over appropriate response to the killing. The Rwandan delegation ‘was never asked to leave the room. It was never asked to leave the council. It continued to function, accepted by the other members of the council, throughout the genocide.’ Des Forges emphasised the impact international reaction had on the ability for the Rwandan government to legitimate itself and its genocidal orders:

The authorities said to the people, “you see, we are legitimate, we are your government, we know what is best for you,” and no one contradicted them. No one inside, no one outside, because they continued to sit on the Security Council, because they were received by the Organisation of African Unity, because they were received in Paris and Cairo, and in that way they were able to continue the pretext of legitimate authority and the legitimacy of their orders. So instead of screaming "no, this is wrong!" the world acquiesced.

Des Forges underlined the "connection between what happened at the hill level, the very most local level, and the international level". It was "remarkably direct and immediate. We have found records in the commune of Kakira, in the Western part of Rwanda, a fairly distant place, where people debated at the local community security meetings [where the local planning of genocide occurred] what was being said on Voice Of America and the BBC, and the fact that there was no response was a very important force."

Emmanuel Uwurukundo, a translator for Dallaire in 1993 and 1994, spoke of his and his family’s survival and the variety of responses of individual UN representatives in Rwanda to their plight:

Myself, on the 7th April '94 I bought my life and one of my family for an amount of Rwandan Francs equivalent to 400 US dollars, which I paid to soldiers who came to my house. The following day, myself and all those who had the chance to enter the UNAMIR headquarters were sent to Amahoro Stadium where UNAMIR promised to give us food and water. I will tell you that we never got either food or water...Around the 17th April 1994, UNAMIR registered those displaced people who held foreign travel documents. I approached one Bangladeshi officer whom I had worked with and implored him to evacuate my family with the others. He harshly replied to me that the war was ours, that we could kill each other as we liked, and he asked me to go away… During this time of suffering, however, I will not forget the gesture that was done by the humanitarian assistants, their officers Majors Stefan Stec and Marek Pazik, who brought me back to the UNAMIR HQ on the 22nd April. I will not forget the compassion of General Dallaire, especially for my young son whose cries were unbearable for the expatriate. He fought for me to stay in UNAMIR headquarters.

Emmanuel, a member of Never Again and a survivor, emphasised his need to recognize the humanity of those who killed. He introduced himself: "My name is Emmanuel Mugiraneza, I am a survivor of genocide. I am commonly called Ruhara; this was the name of my father who was killed in Rwanda in 1994. I took and socialized that name as a way of remembering him as well as my entire family and all those decimated in 1994. I was born in 1973 in Kibeho in Gikongoro southern province, where more than 30,000 people including my family were killed in Kibeho church in the genocide." While the Rwanda Forum was a commemoration, Emmanuel chose not to speak of the past, but to focus on forgiveness and his future:

As a survivor of the genocide, personally I'd like to tell you that after the genocide it is not easy to forgive. However, I think that it is not impossible …quoting the South African Reverend, we think that there are some evils far too big for law ever to deal with. There are some evils that can only be dealt with by grace. This is one of the races you can run if you come to Rwanda. We survivors think that forgiveness is important for a better future. In a way, I have personally forgiven to restore relationships, because without relationships with my neighbours, having their people in prison, I really feel that there is something missing and sometimes I feel I'm nothing.

The use that commemoration makes of the past can be problematic. We only have to think of the commemoration of ancient battles in Northern Ireland or Serbia, for example, to know what harm it can perpetuate, simplifying the past, and turning past victims into future perpetrators. Where history makes the past more complicated, commemoration tends to supply us with stories with a happy or tragic ending, ‘with heroes to worship or with enemies to detest.’ This kind of commemoration can in some contexts be extremely negative; the past becomes ‘sanitized and sanctified’ so that any challenge or deviation is met with outrage. Todorov, a scholar who has written about memory and preservation of the past, explains this negative aspect of commemoration. He argues that commemoration, rather than attempting to ‘grasp the truth of the past,’ adapts the past to the needs of the present. In planning the Rwanda Forum we were inevitably guilty of a degree of selectivity and probably some simplification. The constraints of time and context meant that some topics were excluded. We actively tried to ensure that the politics of Rwanda today did not dominate discussion, by discouraging debate about RPF killings during the genocide or the current government’s relations with its neighbours. We wanted the focus on this occasion to remain firmly on the lessons to be learnt by the international community and ourselves as individuals and global citizens.

Although containing much insight, Todorov’s depiction of commemoration is somewhat narrow. The celebration - or bemoaning - of one’s history may certainly be self-indulgent and backward looking. However we would argue that it is possible to make sense of the past, whether through history or commemoration, with reference both to our present situation and to our aspirations for the future. The commemoration we engaged in was not an end in itself. Our commemoration was designed to inspire thinking for the future, ultimately it would be counter-productive to ignore or gloss over the complexities of the past. Commemoration’s value comes not from ‘adapting’ the past, but from remembering the past and attempting to ‘adapt’ the future. The events in Rwanda will not be forgotten, and their immediacy compels a certain reticence and discretion, but constructive, healthy commemoration should be able to adapt and change; it should not attempt to retain or preserve the present sensitivity. In the same way, the treatment of Rwanda’s history will evolve, a process which will require creativity and courage.

Facing the Furture

Government policy regarding the role of history in Rwanda, appears to be primarily driven by a commitment to a unified future; when faces in a crowd will not be divided by ethnicity and history, but simply considered Rwandan. The government admirably seems to be working against the temptation to create a ‘victors history’ as so often occurs in countries that are trapped in cycles of violence. It also clearly recognises the difficulties and complexities of teaching history in a situation where history was used as a weapon of propaganda so recently, and where those still involved in education, both teachers and students, have such immediate experience of the country’s violent past. The government’s current solution to these problems is a tactic of suspension: most of the defining moments in Rwanda’s modern history are not taught in schools or university at all. The current history curriculum consists of international history and a limited range of Rwandan historical periods. Episodes that are included, such as the period of colonial rule, where the villains are foreign, or the pre-colonial period, which is depicted as a fairly idyllic era of Rwandans of all ethnicities living in harmony together, are taught because they are considered suitably non-controversial and constructively unifying.

The government is presently focusing much of its resources on identity building: creating a grand narrative that aims to establish a kind of uniform "Rwandan" identity. The schools were on vacation when we visited Rwanda in 2002, but the use of Rwanda’s history as a mechanism for unity was particularly evident when we visited a Solidarity Camp. Solidarity Camps are three-month residential projects designed to bring school-leaving age students of all ethnicities together. Emmanuel Ruhara explained how the participants are lined up at the beginning of their stay and split into pairs, mixing Hutu and Tutsi: ‘All university students have been to a solidarity camp. At the solidarity camp they sleep together, they eat the same food, they have the same lessons, they share the same rooms so as to discover the humanity which is someone else. Together they are given lectures, so as to discover that being a Hutu or a Tutsi – it has no importance.’ The camps are for both boys and girls and have a military flavour; the youth carry wooden batons, representing guns, with them at all times, and perform military-style exercises. We were welcomed into the camp by over 500 youth singing and dancing. We were told that they were singing songs of unity. During their stay the youth are lectured about various aspects of unity and reconciliation, including those points of Rwandan history that reinforce the message of banyarwanda – one people.

The government’s construction of a "usable" history became strikingly clear to us when we read entries submitted to Never Again’s National History Essay, Poetry and Song Writing Competition. The project was conceived and implemented by our Rwandan members who hoped to stimulate debate about the youth’s role in the past, present and future of their country. The competition was nation-wide, advertised on the radio and television and invited secondary and tertiary students to address this topic: ‘Based on the history of Rwanda, what can we the youth do so that genocide should never happen again?’ We received over 3,000 responses. Every piece of writing was structured and argued alike. The participants each gave a narrative summary of Rwandan history and then listed action and ideals for youth to strive towards in order to prevent a further genocide. The narrative history is divided into pre-colonialism, colonialism and post-colonialism: "When the white men arrived in Rwanda, they found a land that was under the rule of the king, sharing unity and patriotism." Then, "after the arrival of the white men, the situation changed - the youth were taught segregation based on ethnicity, regions and other ideologies." One essay comments:

The RPF set up a government of national unity so that it can help to give back the image of Rwanda that existed before the arrival of the white men, and treat the hearts of the Rwandans which were damaged during the genocide and to show all Rwandans wherever they may be the role they should play and their rights in the development of their country so that they may be proud to be called Rwandans.

There was remarkable similarity of content, sentiment and ideals expressed in the essays; the same vision of hope for the future and the potentially positive and powerful role for the youth in the country’s peaceful development. When one considers that the authors are all young people who have grown up in a post genocide society, it is perhaps not surprising that they are internalizing a constructed history which is non-divisive and based on a vision of the ‘true’ pre-colonial Rwanda.

However, the government is not ignoring potentially divisive moments in Rwanda’s history. Outside the classrooms and camps, the government is addressing those areas of Rwandan history that are considered controversial. They have identified twenty points of contestation including the ‘formation’ of ethnicity, the order of arrival into the country of various ethnic groups, the ‘so called revolution of 1959’ and the genocide of 1994. How the government will tackle these contested topics remains to be seen. Judging by its treatment of the less controversial parts of the national history, one suspects that the aim will be to somehow formulate a single, stabilising, redemptive, fair and true history of the country. Given the orchestrated nature of other forms of national response to the genocide, it is likely that the history that emerges through government research and policy will be similarly dictated and lacking in space for discussion, disagreement and challenge.

The motives of the Rwandan government appear to be positive, and one can understand their concern that the country should reach a level of stability and social cohesion before it can accommodate challenges from critical sections of the community who may hold to an alternative history. Eventually, however, there will need to be a shift in this approach to their national history: an acceptance that, although Rwanda may have one past, there are multiple histories. Rwandan society – indeed any society – is multi-layered; a sense of togetherness will best be reached through the creation of a Habermasian, shared, open space for interaction and discussion, rather than the unquestioning receipt of common lessons.

The pedagogy adopted thus far by the government as regards history teaching is potentially counter-productive in the longer term. The construction of one, unchallenged history, which the population has received from above, rather than participated in creating, allows no capacity for critical thinking and independent analysis on the part of those being educated. Many Rwandans argue that it was the lack of these very same skills that allowed the genocidal ideology to take such strong hold in so many parts of the country; many people did not analyse orders to exterminate all Tutsi ‘cockroaches’, they did not question the authority of those in power. They obediently picked up weapons or tools and began to kill. Visiting the Solidarity Camp one feels that any kind of history which is not multi-faceted, analytic and inclusive of all opinion, and arrived at through challenging myths and critically deconstructing received truths, could easily mutate into an absolutist history, of the kind that motivated and perpetuated past violence. We must not underestimate the courage and hope of individual Rwandans, who every day are choosing not to seek revenge. Everyday without revenge is a victory. As Regina put it so eloquently in her opening address to the Rwanda Forum: ‘Rwanda is trying to do something which is almost impossible: build a new society with Rwandans living together after the genocide. But through reconciliation and justice we are making it possible. With determination and courage we are forging ahead to build a new Rwanda where people live in harmony together. We are trying to build a brighter future for our children so they do not live with the hearts we have to live with.’ Current government policy is supportive of this, but it is only with the development of a critical curriculum, allowing a truly inclusive education, that Rwanda will have a freely chosen future.

For these reasons we feel that Never Again’s next international event should take place in Rwanda. Together with our Rwandan partners we are planning a conference that will tackle some of the issues omitted from the Rwanda Forum 2004, as well as addressing emerging topics and debates. We hope Forum 2006 will engage international and Rwandan participants in discussion of the current situation in Rwanda and Rwandan visions for the future. We are particularly keen that there will be a strong regional representation at the next Forum, as many of the issues faced by Rwanda are relevant to its neighbours. Never Again is also planning to launch Rwanda’s first ever national student newspaper later this year, as a direct means to encourage critical thinking and debate amongst Rwandan youth. We hope to establish links with other international student newspapers as a way of extending the reciprocal relationship of mutual education, which was activated on a small but powerful scale during our first collective experience in Rwanda.

Our organisation is built on the connections that we established in two brief weeks in August 2002. However, the creation of multiple connections is not only our foundation, it has become our methodology and our aim. The connectivity between people that we are seeking to build is not the false ‘togetherness’ that can swamp individuality, that discourages dissent and that is the product of an attempt to construct a monolithic unity. A unity which may be both a cause and effect of the self-indulgent, backward-looking commemoration condemned by Todorov. A fruitful connectivity emerges when an individual, out of a self-reflective sense of identity, recognises and welcomes the difference in others: ‘the recognition of differences – the mutual recognition of the other for his alterity – can also become the mark of a common identity.’ Connectivity in this sense should be the foundation of all conflict prevention: ‘Negative conflict arises when there is a lack of connectivity, of feedback, of use of information and of willingness to benefit from diversity.’

The success of the Rwanda Forum rested on the way in which the Rwandan participants generated a sense of connectivity at both an individual and a global level. Rather than constructing causal explanations and narratives of the genocide, other speakers exposed further connections: between the international response and the events on the ground in Rwanda; between the world media and world apathy; between historian’s accounts and eyewitness testimonies; between past and future; between ourselves and Rwandans, as human beings first and foremost. The Forum began with a conclusion, the condemnation of international inaction before and during the genocide: we did not aim to make any groundbreaking discoveries or reach concrete recommendations. We avoided the danger of engaging in a futile hand-wringing exercise because the construction of multiple connections created a strong sense of hope; not empty or transient, but hope that is persistent, active and dynamic.

We chose to use the photograph of the returning Rwandan. The debate its use precipitated between us and our Rwandan partners brought into sharp focus the fact that Rwandans are faced with just such unknown faces everyday. Walking down a street in Kigali, one looks into faces and wonders about their history, their involvement, their grief or guilt. Rwanda today is full of the guilty and the grief-stricken, those who were involved, and those who were not: they are living side-by- side and we are facing a future together.