Rwanda and the process of reconciliation

[the_future_modernes]

WARINING: Descriptions of thoroughly disturbing rape and torture in some paragraphs. Living with the enemy

Applying the ideas of Holocaust survivor Jean Améry to present day Rwanda, our author argues that reconciliation after genocide is just another form of torture.

“Reconciliation” has become a darling of political theorists, journalists, and human-rights activists, especially as it pertains to the rebuilding of postwar and post-genocidal nations. Nowhere is this more so than in the case of Rwanda. Numerous books and articles on the topic—some, though not all, inspired by Christian teachings—pour forth. It can plausibly be argued, of course, that in Rwanda—and in other places, like Sierra Leone and the Balkans, where victims and perpetrators must live more or less together—reconciliation is a political necessity. Reconciliation has a moral resonance, too; certainly it is far better than endless, corpse-strewn cycles of revanchism and revenge. Yet there is sometimes a disturbing glibness when outsiders tout the wonders of reconciliation, as if they are leading the barbarians from darkness into light. Even worse, the phenomenological realities—the human truths—of the victims’ experiences are often ignored or, at best, treated as pathologies that should be “worked through” until the promised land of forgiveness is reached. This is not just a mistake but a dangerous one; for it is doubtful that any sustainable peace, and any sustainable politics, can be built without a better, which is to say a tragic, understanding of those truths.

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Rwanda—tiny and densely populated—faces a problem that no other country has or does: the Hutu murderers and Tutsi survivors of the 1994 genocide live, side-by-side, in unprecedented intimacy; however monstrous this may seem, Rwanda’s history clearly shows that all other options are worse. The government is dominated by formerly exiled Tutsis of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (imagine if Jews had ruled Germany after World War II); for reasons that are practical and perhaps moral, this government has mandated, from above, an official policy of national reconciliation, however subjectively grueling that may be. As Philip Gourevitch wrote in The New Yorker last year, Rwanda’s political requirements are “emotionally incomprehensible.”

Several years ago, in response to bulging jails and an overwhelmed, dysfunctional justice system, the government made two decisions. In 2003, it released forty thousand imprisoned génocidaires and sent them back to their villages. And it has reinstated the gacaca courts, community-based forums in which perpetrators and victims face each other and are judged by their neighbors; more than a million cases have been heard. These confrontations have been the subject of an enormous amount of international interest, and disputation, from journalists, anthropologists, NGOs, legal scholars, religious activists, and human-rights organizations; the gacaca trials have been praised as an “authentic” form of African justice and derided as kangaroo courts that elide modern legal procedures regarding rights and evidence.

What becomes clear—especially in the remarkable trilogy of books on post-genocide Rwanda by the French journalist Jean Hatzfeld—is that forgiveness and reconciliation are of far less interest to the victims than they are to perpetrators.


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Comments

[thejeopardymaze]

I'm starting to believe part of this is due to the fact that victims of injustice are often viewed as suspect, which in itself is ridiculous. I haven't seen many calls for an eye for eye vengeance, they're too busy recovering or if they talk about, are more concerned with helping something like it never happen again and/or putting the perps to justice. Yet the focus is still on victim, and how they'll supposedly go 'too far' if they don't forgive.

I've come to that conclusion after reading the first sample chapter of Resentment's Virtue. It's about demonizing victims.

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Hell, I also think it's another form of snake oil. People in the medical community never make a hundred percent guarantees about therapy and prevention when it comes to safety and recovery, at least if they want to avoid getting sued. Why say the same about any form of therapy in counseling, psychiatry, and psychology? And sadly, the Forgiveness Hypothesis is often pushed on patients. After reading some threads in cult-awareness communities, it does, at least to me, make the claims about forgiveness very suspect. Claiming your thoughts are the cause of your suffering, not the trauma-very newage, and something cult leaders love to claim.