April 7, 1994. Rwanda, Africa.
Armed terrorist Hutus began the mass slaughter of Tutsis, and more moderate Hutu and Twa members.
The history leading up to the massacres is a familiar cycle among conflicts worldwide.
A Tutsi rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front or RFP, had invaded Rwanda from its base in neighboring Uganda in 1990. After nearly three years of fighting for control of territory and power, the sides reached a peace agreement in 1993. But the agreement wasn’t based on the human component. Just how to distribute power.
Then on April 6, 1994, extremist Tutsis assassinated the peace agreement’s architect.
The very next day came the self-described “retaliation” by the Hutus. It’s the term always used by terrorists to justify their disgusting barbarism, though these extremist Hutus had planned their genocide long before. They used propaganda and media to brainwash so many into believing anyone who opposed them were evil.
Hutus across parts of Rwanda began killing their Tutsi neighbors in what can only be described as some of the worst brutality known to humankind.
Hutu gangs searched for Tutsis and others in homes, schools and churches, using machetes in many cases to chop people to pieces. Somewhere between 500,000 and a million people killed. Infrastructure completely decimated. As many as 250,000 and 500,000 women raped by Hutu terrorists.
I visited the Rwandan Genocide Memorial in Kigali, which displays the forever-blood-stained clothing. I had to walk outside to breathe it was so chilling and disturbing.
Who could perpetrate such crimes? Somewhere between 100,000 to 200,000 people participated in the massacres.
I was in my second year of law school when the genocide took place, and the thing I remember almost as much as scenes of people killing with machetes was the world’s silent response.
The U.S. wouldn’t even issue a strong condemnation. No country stepped in to end the violence. Nobody typically speaks up when Black Africans are in peril, though the world had no problem stepping in to stop the slaughter in Bosnia a year later in 1995.
The aftermath of the genocide was more war. More military action. Over 200,000 Hutu refugees killed by the Tutsi RFP.
Before I visited Rwanda in 2019, I was curious how a nation torn by such trauma could ever recover from the sheer brutality, let alone make peace. It’s how most of us feel when we watch other conflicts around the world. Where rapes, massacres, beheadings, mass scale bombings, starvation and other violence reigns. It feels like the cycle won’t ever end.
But Rwandans figured out a way. To balance the healing pillars of justice, peace and reconciliation.
On the justice front, there were three tiers.
One was an international court of justice, where 92 of the most egregious participants and leaders in the genocide were tried. Another was Rwanda’s national court system, which tried numerous cases of genocide, resulting in prison and the death penalty punishment (Rwanda abolished the death penalty in 2007).
But the biggest venues for justice were community-level tribunals used to hold genocide trials.
The way they worked was different than the regular court systems. The community tribunals allowed people who lost loved ones to speak and tell their truth in front of their smaller community. The tribunals provided an opportunity for perpetrators to confess their crimes, and to speak so families could learn about the truth of their lost loved ones. And finally, there was a process for the perpetrators to ask for forgiveness from the victims and community.
It was a painful but productive process to start the healing.
Even with the success of the tribunal system, most of the post-genocide efforts were spent on how the future would look. How to build a society where hate would no longer have a safe home. To create a peace that would stand the test of time.
Rwanda established the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission to, in its own words, “promote unity, reconciliation, and social cohesion among Rwandans and build a country in which everyone has equal rights and contributes to good governance.”
The commission’s responsibilities included setting up national programs aimed at promoting reconciliation, educating the population on reconciliation, disseminating ideas and producing publications promoting peace and unity, creating programs designed to eradicate division, and denouncing actions and words that in any way promote division, intolerance or hatred.
The commission put in place monitoring and reporting mechanisms to ensure that the government, leaders, public institutions and the population in general complies with all of this.
The goal wasn’t to erase tragedy but to create the framework to build a better, more peaceful society.
It’s worked.
Today Rwanda is one of the safest, most peaceful places in the world. It’s also clean because people work together make it clean. People of all backgrounds get along. Kindness and community are everywhere. There’s a monthly national cleanup day the entire country participates in.
I found it particularly interesting that every Rwandan I encountered across several regions, from coffee shops to stores to restaurants to the streets, were proud to be part of a united nation.
A decade-plus of education, focus on reconciliation and promotion of peace paid dividends and then some.
Part of the Rwandan secret sauce of course was because of brave leaders. Part was the unique style of community justice tribunals.
But the main reason Rwandan reconciliation worked so well was because of the overwhelming focus on peace between neighbors.
Rwanda made it cornerstone of every part of society to teach respect for each other. To promote the value of every Rwandan, regardless of ethnic background or feelings about territory and power. When children grow up with a foundation of love and validation of the other, it’s a lot harder to make room for hate of the other.
Let’s for a second imagine if we employed this type of paradigm to other conflicts, including some of the 110 armed ones taking place in 2024.
In the Middle East, in Ethiopia, The Philippines and Columbia.
Think for a moment how we’d be able to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with such an approach, instead of Israel invalidating Palestinians and Palestinians invalidating Israel and the Jews.
Let us imagine how we might employ such a paradigm here in America.
How we might be able to once and for all overcome our centuries-long obsession with racism if we devoted ourselves to truth, justice and reconciliation.
Dream of a world where leaders put their foot down on hatred and division and instead joined together for justice, changed outdated unfair systems and invested deeply in reconciliation?
What if we taught and showed our children through action that white babies and Black babies were equally valuable. What if Jews and Palestinians started teaching that Jewish and Palestinian babies each deserve a life of independence and peace.
Rwanda, while it’s not without problems, should be our guiding light on how to fix our broken world.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: maxime niyomwungeri on Unsplash