Rwanda Reborn
From the horrors of genocide, this tiny nation is emerging as a surprise success story in Africa. But can it truly overcome its past?
Fear. But the painful memories of the three-month frenzy of mass killing-one that swept up almost the entire nation as either victims or killers, witnesses or collaborators-lurk everywhere just below the nation's placid surface. And it is not at all clear that Rwanda can truly escape that legacy of genocide. Survivors have been brutally assaulted-many fatally-in a series of isolated but steady attacks in recent years. Privately, many Tutsis admit that they cannot shake the feeling that it is only the government's sometimes-suffocating control over dialogue and events in the country that prevents Hutu extremists from killing again. "I fear that, inside, they are not satisfied," whispers one Tutsi.
This was a particularly ugly slice of history. The Hutu government of the time orchestrated and incited the attacks on the minority Tutsi. But they were carried out largely by the people themselves. The killing was intensely personal; the machete was the weapon of choice. Farmers killed their neighbors. Doctors killed other doctors. Students killed their fellow students. Even some priests helped to kill large swaths of their congregations. Later, there were reprisal killings. Rwanda is now struggling to answer a very tough question: Is reconciliation truly possible in the wake of such barbarity?
Imakulata Mukankundiye is emblematic of both Rwanda's past and its future. The 50-year-old widow's tiny farm in southern Rwanda produces some of the finest coffee in the world. As part of the Maraba Coffee Cooperative, she has been at the vanguard of Rwanda's entry into the gourmet coffee market, where her beans command high prices from roasters in America and Britain. Even with only 250 coffee trees, she makes enough to live on these days. The mud walls of her cramped, dirt-floored home are painted white, and a radio in the yard runs off a small solar-powered battery.
Before the genocide, she worked on her farm with her husband and six children. One Friday morning in the spring of 1994, several of her neighbors stormed onto her farm, pulled the family out into the yard, and burned down her house. After cutting the throats of her cows, they dragged away her Tutsi husband and four of her children. Being Hutu, she was spared, along with her two daughters. The males were taken to a Roman Catholic church, where they remained for several days with little food or water. "We knew they would be killed," she says. On the fourth day, the Hutu militia men threw grenades into the church and finished off the survivors with machetes and spears. In all, she lost 17 family members that day.
Today, her older daughter works as a tailor, and the younger one is in school. Several of the men who came to her farm that fateful morning confessed to their crimes and live again in the village freely. "No one came to me directly and apologized," she says. "Never." Yet some of them have since returned to her farm, this time seeking work. "I lost the rest of my family, so I have to hire them," she says. "Inside me, I am not comfortable, but the government asked us for reconciliation and to forgive them. I don't have a choice." After all, someone has to bring in the harvest.
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