A week in Rwanda

An afternoon by a pool in Kigali, reflecting on recent events.


No grenades flung into bus stops this week, none for several weeks, but the local editor of an opposition paper shot dead on the streets, gunshots ringing out in the night. The chief editor, out of the country, insists that this fellow was shot because he was investigating the attempted murder of an Lt/Col who fled to South Africa believing he was being targeted for his opposition to the government. The government denies involvement in either of these events.

This week President Paul Kagame has been appointed as co-chair – along with the current president of the EU - of a high level UN committee aimed at ensuring the continuing implementation of the millennium development goals (MDG). Some other members of this committee are Bill Gates, Michelle Batchelet (former president of Chile), Jeffrey Sachs, and the fellow who won the Nobel Prize for his micro-economic work in Bangladesh.

The makeover of Kigali proceeded at the usual hectic pace this week in the rush to a clean and safe modern city attractive to investors and tourists. More roads torn up for paving and widening, bringing mystery to my morning commute. Which route will the mini-bus take? How far will I have to walk? How much red dust will drift into my hair and cover my feet?

This week I was told that people make up genocide survivor status when it is convenient or to their advantage. We’d already met one of the these deceivers, a fellow calling himself Billy who claimed survivor status and who proclaimed a desperate need to immediately take a bus to the countryside where early in the morning the gacaca (community courts) were dispensing with the property of the perpetrator who killed his family and so Billy and his four sisters must leave now. Billy’s story falls down on the reality that it is already dusk and there are no night buses.

In a US paper online I read about a woman arrested in the United States for false entry into that country some years ago. She claimed genocide survivor status but apparently she was a member of the party that organized the genocide and spoke at rallies. According to the newspaper, she beat a Tutsi child to death with a club and facilitated the sexual assault of Tutsi women, which she then watched.

Peter Ehrlinder, arrested in Kigali on charges of genocide denial is released this week from his Rwandan jail cell and returns home to Minnesota. He goes for a walk near his home and is held up at gunpoint by a teenager demanding money.

How life goes on, poolside tables of brochettes and fries and sodas, small children splashing down a small slide, swim lessons and water games. How life goes on until it does not. Then, roadblocks and genocide and the swimming pool at the Hotel Milles Collines becoming the water source for the terrified people crowded into every bedroom. Now, an assassin’s bullet, a homemade grenade. And yet, walking home close to midnight from dinner with friends, we feel perhaps safer than we would on a late night stroll through Vancouver. The soldiers on the street corners seem more reassuring than threatening.

Poolside, a feeling of well-being, warm breeze drifting into the shade where I sit, thinking how easy it is to believe in nothing more than this pleasant moment, to turn away from painful histories and mounting storm clouds, to forget the transient nature of all phenomenon. And yet,  it is this state of quiet relaxation that allows an opening to a wider seeing.

It can wear one down, this country, especially if one is working in the area of contested memory. I’m tired some days of the sorrow and the bones that are carefully dug up after a perpetrator confesses and are brought to the memorial centre for burial. That happened this week too.

And I’m fearful sometimes, not for myself but for this country that for the moment is my home. Fearful of the consequences of narrowing of democratic space, yet fearful also of the rhetoric of democracy that is being used to gain sympathy for unsympathetic causes, fearful of the forces that will mobilize into any widening of public discourse.

It’s good to sit by the pool for a while.

This week I read articles about how human rights NGO's say “that the government and the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) have become increasingly intolerant of dissent and criticism in the run-up to the vote, which President Paul Kagame is widely expected to win.” ((Christian Science Monitor). They point to the refusal of the government to grant a visa to a British Human Rights Watch researcher.

The Christian Science Monitor  also reported that opposition parties say they need U.S. assistance in opening up politics, changing anti-genocide legislation and guaranteeing that security forces remain outside politics. They say the ballot should be postponed.

President Paul Kagame and his government say that it is not possible to allow 'divisionist' media, that the country is too fragile, the peace too new. Kagame says that human rights groups are too focused on the rights of the individual, not on the rights and needs of a society to be free of mass violence, to be free from hunger.

There is no argument, however, about who will win the August 9th presidential election, although there will be no consensus on the nature of that victory. All agree that Paul Kagame will be returned as president for the 2nd seven-year term allowed him by the constitution.

Interestingly, an independent  report on social trends conducted by international organizations reports that 92% of the population felt it was necessary to limit freedom of association and the right to form political parties because of the need to fight ‘divisionism’. This statement was also agreed to by 92% of survivors and 81% of perpetrators. The research was conducted in September of 2007. I wonder if those results would be the same today.

Life goes on. This week we shared meals with friends, hosted a young Canadian visitor, walked to the market and bought fabric to cover the door windows where the sun blasts through every afternoon. We took a bus to Nyamata (forty minutes by bus) and went for a walk in the countryside with a friend and we did not visit the genocide memorial there. We bought sheets for the new mattress that VSO has generously provided us and enjoy deeper sleep.

It’s good to sit by the pool for a while.