Muraho, Bonjour, Hello

At first glance, you would not believe the horror stories that took place in Rwanda fifteen years ago. Under the (recent) blanket of security that the government, under the leadership of Paul Kagame, provides, investments and development are under way. The capital, Kigali, boasts a new 24/7 Western-style supermarket (except on the mornings of the last Saturday of every month, where all businesses close so that everyone is free to participate in communal work day) and several Starbucks-eque coffee shops; the government has even initiated a project installing high-speed fiber optic internet cables across the country. Even the small town where George and I live is experiencing the growth; a new hotel, whose construction had just barely begun upon our arrival, is set to open this week. As if the fiber optics wasn't enough, the government, eager to jump into the 21st century, has recently proclaimed English an official state language even though the uneducated masses speak Kinyarwandan while the elites speak French.

Yet the horrors of the 1994 genocide are constantly lurking beneath the surface. Amputees—those fortunate to survive the machete blows of the interhamwe—commonly beg on the streets. Many Rwandans who I have met, in exchanging pleasantries, have proceeded to ask if both (or any) of my parents are alive. The vast majority of the students at the Institute of Legal Practice and Development (ILPD) who I have spoken with told me that they returned to Rwanda in 1994 from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Uganda, or elsewhere, only after the RPF (the rebel forces who had been locked in a several-year struggle against the genocidal regime) had taken control of the country and ended the genocide. On the national scale, the genocide and its aftermath are constantly both at the forefront of the national consciousness and forcibly suppressed. The government has allotted specific times of the year to both mourn the victims of the genocide and celebrate the victory of the RPF (such as Liberation Day, July 4). Every town has a genocide memorial, visible from a distance in its purple and white shawl. Yet the government has also forbidden using the ethnically divisive terms “Hutu” and “Tutsi” in teaching about the genocide, out of fear that the terms themselves will unleash a new round of killings.

This tension – between security, out of a fear of the past, and democratic freedoms, out of concern for the future – predominates much of the discourse in Rwandan society. Many people have told me that freedoms are meaningless without security (they, of course, support the government) while others have alleged that the talk of the threat of yesterday combined with the militias lurking in neighboring Congo are just a ploy to allow the government to control the opposition.

Our work at the ILPD is very much part Rwanda’s national process of rebuilding its institutions in order to promote both security and freedom for the future. Since the vast majority of the Rwandan judiciary was killed during the genocide, most of the judges and prosecutors here have very little legal training and experience. Further, in an effort to re-orient itself from francophone Central Africa to anglophone East Africa, Rwanda is in the process of transforming its legal system from the Continental civil system to the Anglo-American common law system. The ILPD therefore serves to train practicing judges and prosecutors in the practicalities of the law, from sensitivity trainings to judicial opinion-writing seminars. In our capacity, George and I are busy researching and writing a benchbook on gender-based violence, (hopefully) to be used by Rwandan judges as a guideline.

I hope I do not paint too depressing a picture with all of this heavy discussion of genocide and politics. We are having a great time in this fascinating country. We trekked the mountain gorillas by the border with the DRC and just this weekend took a trip to neighboring Burundi. George will write more about our zany adventures and share his light-hearted insights soon. So stay posted.