Rwanda has put the genocide behind it to become East Africa’s trailblazer

An ambitious recovery programme has seen Rwanda make major economic, political, and social strides in the past 15 years. Nation Correspondent KEZIO-MUSOKE DAVID reports from KIGALI

Although the official week of mourning to remember those who perished in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda has ended, there country will commemorate the event for 100 days.

During that period, which ends in June, Rwandans will reflect on the events that took place over a three-month period, during which close to a million people were murdered in a calculated move by a group of Hutu extremists to wipe out the country’s Tutsi population. Also killed were moderate fellow Hutus.

The victims were shot, hacked with machetes, bludgeoned on the streets, smashed against brick walls and in some cases, even blown to pieces with grenades in churches.

Speaking to the international media in the capital, Kigali, on Monday last week, President Paul Kagame said that, although there is still a deliberate attempt to downplay the number of casualties, official estimates after several expert counts put the figure at about 1.2 million. This means that on average, some 12,000 people were killed every day, which works out to 500 people every hour, and about eight every minute.

Today, survivors are taking stock of the indiscriminate slaughter, which was carried out by highly organised forces.

The attacks were planned by some Hutu politicians and carried out by the Interahamwe militia.

Last week, many Rwandans heard a survivor recall the horror of his experience on TV. “The killers had orders to take the identity cards of those they had killed, which were used to determine the number of people who had been killed,” said the man, who seemed remarkably composed.

“They would return after a day of killing and hand the victims’ IDs to their commander, saying their mission had been accomplished” he added.  

Identity cards

The identity cards, known as indangamuntu in Kinyarwanda and carte d’identité’ in French, were introduced in 1933 by the Belgian colonial government, mainly to distinguish the Tutsi from the Hutu. And as it turned out during the genocide, they facilitated the killings since the Interahamwe were able to identify their victims easily.  

By the end of June 1994, the genocide had been largely brought under control, thanks to the military intervention of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel group founded by Rwandan exiles, with Kagame as commander. The RPF is widely acknowledged to have stopped the genocide with no external support whatsoever, not even from the UN peacekeeping mission, which had a presence in Kigali at that time.  

In 1996, two years after the genocide, the young but promising RPF government banned the use of the indangamuntu in an attempt to promote unity and reconciliation and also to bury the demons that have haunted Rwanda since the 1950s. The government also began a policy of downplaying the differences between the country’s two major ethnic groups.

Economic recovery

Since then, Rwanda has undergone a radical transformation, having embarked on an ambitious programme of social and economic recovery, even as it seeks to establish national unity. In fact, many former militia fighters who had fled to neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have returned to join reintegration camps. By 1998 the country was still reeling from the effects of the genocide, which had left 95,000 children orphaned. By 2004, there were 613,000 orphans aged 14 years and below.  

The years before the genocide, when Juvenal Habyarimana was president, Rwanda was in a bad state, with its economy in a shambles. Besides, then president Habyarimana had not created any credible institution of governance.