Remembering Rwanda’s genocide
When a million people are murdered, however carefully the criminals cover their tracks to extinguish even the memory of their …
When a million people are murdered, however carefully the criminals cover their tracks to extinguish even the memory of their victims, the logistics of the atrocity are so great that a vast amount of evidence is left behind.
Rwanda’s leaders are developing a plan to ensure evidence does not disappear nearly 20 years after genocide tore the country apart.
The government of Rwanda initially asked the Aegis Trust to help develop and run the Kigali Genocide Memorial, which opened on the 10th commemoration of the genocide in 2004. More than 250,000 victims of the genocide are buried under the site.
The museum’s 70,000 annual visitors include many schoolchildren and survivors of the genocide. The United Nations Security Council, UN secretary-general, David Cameron and many heads of state have also visited.
“This museum is a warning for world leaders about what happens when they fail to protect civilians,” says Freddy Mutanguha, Aegis’s country director in Rwanda.
As the 20th anniversary approaches, there has been a request to establish a world-class genocide documentation centre at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, which can also be accessed online.
Aegis was established at the UK’s national Holocaust Centre, in Nottinghamshire, to apply lessons from history in order to prevent genocide.
It is no small task. There are dozens of private and governmental archives. There are testimonies to collect — millions of unrecorded memories and hundreds of killing sites. In Kigali, a rapidly developing city, that landscape is changing daily.
Most significant is the collection from village courts known as “gacaca”. Two million cases, ranging from murder and rape to looting, resulted in 60 million pages of notes being handwritten by judges elected as “people of integrity”.
“Gacaca has given us one of the largest archive challenges and we hope the Aegis Trust will play an instrumental role in this,” said Rwanda’s minister of sports and culture, Protais Mitali.
Collective institutional firepower is needed to preserve, digitise and provide access to so much information. To do this, a multi-organisation partnership is being coordinated and run by Aegis in collaboration with Rwanda’s National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide.
The project is using the expertise of the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation, which has 52,000 testimonies from survivors of the Holocaust, and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the Netherlands.
In October, a two-day workshop at King’s College London, which is also joining the partnership, brought together specialists from Rwanda, the UK, the Netherlands and the US.
The archive is set to form a hub linking research institutes around the world. This research should inform policies and practice helping protect against violence, including education that could stem ideologies leading to genocide.
It is too early to tell whether a theory of social change at a memorial museum can have a preventative impact. But the memorial museum’s peace education programme offers hopeful signs that preserving memory and presenting stories
in the right way can bring people together and strengthen responsibility.
One young Tutsi man attending a peace education workshop lost his entire family in the genocide. A small boy at the time, he grew up with an understandable sense of loss and hatred.
At the end of the workshop, he stated: “After I finished school, I planned to join the army to acquire a gun. I intended to kill those responsible for murdering my family. But today, I have given up that plan.”
James Smith is the chief executive of the Aegis Trust
Rwanda’s leaders are developing a plan to ensure evidence does not disappear nearly 20 years after genocide tore the country apart.
The government of Rwanda initially asked the Aegis Trust to help develop and run the Kigali Genocide Memorial, which opened on the 10th commemoration of the genocide in 2004. More than 250,000 victims of the genocide are buried under the site.
The museum’s 70,000 annual visitors include many schoolchildren and survivors of the genocide. The United Nations Security Council, UN secretary-general, David Cameron and many heads of state have also visited.
“This museum is a warning for world leaders about what happens when they fail to protect civilians,” says Freddy Mutanguha, Aegis’s country director in Rwanda.
As the 20th anniversary approaches, there has been a request to establish a world-class genocide documentation centre at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, which can also be accessed online.
Aegis was established at the UK’s national Holocaust Centre, in Nottinghamshire, to apply lessons from history in order to prevent genocide.
It is no small task. There are dozens of private and governmental archives. There are testimonies to collect — millions of unrecorded memories and hundreds of killing sites. In Kigali, a rapidly developing city, that landscape is changing daily.
Most significant is the collection from village courts known as “gacaca”. Two million cases, ranging from murder and rape to looting, resulted in 60 million pages of notes being handwritten by judges elected as “people of integrity”.
“Gacaca has given us one of the largest archive challenges and we hope the Aegis Trust will play an instrumental role in this,” said Rwanda’s minister of sports and culture, Protais Mitali.
Collective institutional firepower is needed to preserve, digitise and provide access to so much information. To do this, a multi-organisation partnership is being coordinated and run by Aegis in collaboration with Rwanda’s National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide.
The project is using the expertise of the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation, which has 52,000 testimonies from survivors of the Holocaust, and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the Netherlands.
In October, a two-day workshop at King’s College London, which is also joining the partnership, brought together specialists from Rwanda, the UK, the Netherlands and the US.
The archive is set to form a hub linking research institutes around the world. This research should inform policies and practice helping protect against violence, including education that could stem ideologies leading to genocide.
It is too early to tell whether a theory of social change at a memorial museum can have a preventative impact. But the memorial museum’s peace education programme offers hopeful signs that preserving memory and presenting stories
in the right way can bring people together and strengthen responsibility.
One young Tutsi man attending a peace education workshop lost his entire family in the genocide. A small boy at the time, he grew up with an understandable sense of loss and hatred.
At the end of the workshop, he stated: “After I finished school, I planned to join the army to acquire a gun. I intended to kill those responsible for murdering my family. But today, I have given up that plan.”
James Smith is the chief executive of the Aegis Trust