Guest Post: Responsibility in Rwanda
Searching for justice after a genocide
On August 9th this year Rwandans will take to the polls to elect their president. This election will be the second since the horrifying events of 1994, when the death of President Juvénal Habyarimana triggered a frenzy of mass murder commonly referred to nowadays as the Rwandan Genocide. It is believed that 800,000 people, three quarters of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority were killed by members of the Hutu majority, most of the atrocities taking place in as short a period as three weeks.
The occasion promises to be a lot more than a routine political rendez-vous in eastern-central Africa: it raises some of the most fascinating problems politics has to deal with. One of them is the question of justice and responsibility.
Many commentators in the Western press lament the lack of justice being carried out in Rwanda today; one such complaint was made recently by USA Today’s Andrew Wallis, consternated that the defendants in Rwanda’s post-genocide trials are allegedly receiving better treatment than the families of victims, and infuriated by the perceived lack of severity of the penalties handed out to those found guilty.
But this is to underestimate the difficulty of the situation. In the past, one way of trying to enforce justice in the aftermath of genocide was to select a few emblematic figures and make them carry the bulk of the responsibility for the atrocities. A paradigmatic case would be that of the Nuremberg Trials, in which leading personalities of the Third Reich were judged for their role in the Holocaust.
The problem with genocide is that it is a very unusual type of crime. For one thing, it demands a capacity for concerted violence on an unimaginably wide scale. And while the nexus of the Final Solution was the diabolically effective network of concentration and extermination camps – an industry of murder ranging from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Bergen-Belsen and Treblinka – the Rwandan genocide appears to have been far less organized.
There was no central, charismatic figure at the helm of the ship, and nor is there any compelling evidence that the killings were part of a carefully designed master plan on the part of a handful of madmen. Instead, it appears – terrible as this may sound – that the genocide was largely the result of spontaneous acts within the population. Hence the haunting question on so many people’s lips: why did so many ordinary Rwandans engage in bloodshed?
These considerations help to explain why carrying out justice in Rwanda has been tortuous at every turn. So many individuals are responsible, to one degree or another, that the logistics of carrying out justice are impossibly problematic. And the issue of retribution is inevitably entangled with that of reconciliation: can a country move forward if the perpetrators of as horrible a crime as this one are not properly punished? But equally, mustn’t it be capable of leaving aside the nightmares of the past if it is to survive into the future?
-Daniel
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