Reclutamiento

The above enumeration might suggest that the Rwandan government has a well- defined idea of what reconciliation is and has developed a balanced strategy to achieve it. However, it is difficult to grasp what the official government vision and strategy entails. The frequency in which the term reconciliation is employed cannot cover up the elusiveness of the manner in which it is done. In public gatherings, it is always explained that Rwanda needs reconciliation, but exactly what this means and what efforts must be made are left unclear. The main solution that is offered to the population is participation in gacaca, because that will automatically bring reconciliation. This lack of explanation can either mean that the authorities maintain a high level of trust in Rwanda’s population being able to understand a concept like reconciliation and deal with it, or it could mean that the government itself lacks a clear outline of the concept. Considering the fact that in no written document can one discover a definite picture of the authority’s views on reconciliation, one must fear the latter.

On the basis of incoherent information from official documents, discourse by local and provincial authorities during public gatherings and interviews with figures of authority, an attempt is made here to extract what the government considers as necessary actions in order to achieve reconciliation.117 One clearly visible point of governmental thinking is that to arrive at reconciliation, one must do the exact opposite of previous regimes. There is a strong and, for the greater part, rightful tendency to put the blame for the genocide on the policies of the colonial power and the governments that ruled after independence. It is felt that

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Dorothea Hilhorst and Mathijs van Leeuwen, Imidugudu, villagisation in Rwanda. A case of emergency development? (Wageningen, 1999) 2 and Pottier, Re-imagining Rwanda, 194.

117 _{For official documents see NURC, Report on the national summit of unity and reconciliation, Kigali,}

18 – 20 October 2000, 43-44, 47; NURC, Annual report February 1999 – June 2000, 14,19; and Republic of Rwanda, Report of the reflection meetings, 12-13, 39-41. The official discourse was however mainly met during the fieldwork in public gatherings where the authorities sensitised the population (see Section 3.4 of this thesis). I attended these meetings in Gitarama on 31 October 2002; Gasarenda on 4 December 2002; Gasave, Gikongoro Province on 10 December; Gasarenda on 17 December 2002; Gasarenda on 19 December; Gasarenda on 23 January 2003; and Kigali on 14 February 2003.

in this period ethnicity was created and changed into a disintegrating and disrupting factor in Rwandan society. This was combined with “bad governments” that executed strategies of discrimination, sectarianism and impunity for ethnic violence, which together caused the genocide.

The present government is keen to show its citizens, as well as the international (donor) community, that it forms a “good government”. Their way will solve the problems caused by the genocide and bring reconciliation to the Rwandan hills. The new leaders are fighting ethnic divisions by, on the one hand, abandoning ethnicity and forbidding any organisation on an ethnic basis and, on the other hand, educating people that all Rwandans are equal and that ethnic violence is inappropriate with the much longer history of harmony between the different groups. One important element here is the rewriting of Rwanda’s past and the constant education of the population in the new vision of history and ethnicity through media and public meetings.118 In addition, the culture of impunity that characterised previous periods has been done away with by the reinforcement of justice. It is believed that by not punishing those responsible for the ethnic massacres since the late 1950s, people were encouraged to repeat ethnically based atrocities. This created a cycle of violence that eventually led to the genocide. The new leaders aim to brake this culture of impunity by not only punishing those who are responsible for organising the genocide, as happened for example after the Second World War in Germany, but also by holding accountable everybody who participated in it. Although this led to an enormous overpopulation of the prisons and an overload of the total judicial system, the government believes that with gacaca it has found the solution.

Besides doing the opposite of earlier regimes, the present government recognises a couple of additional necessary policies for reconciliation. As with the fight of impunity, these are all strongly linked to gacaca in the way that gacaca is presented as the solution. For reconciliation, it is argued, the population must tell the truth about the genocide, perpetrators should confess but must still be punished for their crimes and, finally, the Rwandan people must regain self- respect by showing that they can solve their problems themselves. All this will happen in gacaca, which has almost reached a mythical status of being capable of making all Rwandan problems disappear. As an example of this official attitude, I would like to quote the mayor of Gikongoro District who, while addressing the people who had gathered for the first gacaca meeting in their village, stated:

“Rwanda has great confidence in gacaca because it will solve our problems and bring us reconciliation. It is you, the population, who has to do it. It is you who must participate. In the first place, you must come here and tell the truth about what happened back in 1994. If you lie, hate will remain, but if the truth is spoken, we will have reconciliation. In the second

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place, those who participated in the genocide must be punished. However, it is better that the guilty confess because then their penalty will be reduced. (…) If you participate well in gacaca, we will arrive at reconciliation. We must solve our problems so that our small children grow up in a country without problems, a country of which the children can be proud. You see that Muzungu? [white man. The mayor points at the author.] He has come here to study how we solve our problems. You must work well in gacaca, so that he returns to his country and tells the other bazungu [white men] that the Rwandans are very capable of solving their problems themselves.”119

So gacaca is the key to reconciliation. Hence, it is of great importance that this programme becomes a success. For this to happen, the government has employed a number of strategies that aim to bring closer reconciliation and facilitate the success of gacaca at the same time. The following sections will deal with these exponents of the government’s reconciliatory policy that are, as such, linked to gacaca.