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?
MUTOBO, RWANDA—Ezekiel Nzamwita fidgets awkwardly in a ratty T-shirt and baggy jacket. The onetime primary-school teacher is still getting used to civilian garb after spending a decade in prison-issue pink jumpsuits. "Ten years is a long time," he says, "but things have become better." A confessed killer, Nzamwita is one of about 8,000 genocide suspects released in February from Rwanda's overcrowded prisons as part of a national reconciliation effort after the 1994 bloodletting that claimed a million lives. The 51-year-old Hutu admitted being part of a group that killed a Tutsi man and stole his cows. Nzamwita won his freedom after asking the victim's brother for forgiveness.
He has spent the past few weeks at a "solidarity camp" run by the government. The camp is part of a massive effort to help reintegrate former prisoners, returning rebel soldiers, and longtime refugees into the new Rwanda. Before being released, Nzamwita must sit through a month of lectures on subjects ranging from Rwandan history and the government's political philosophy to the current banking system and new national health insurance scheme. "I think Rwanda will be a correct society now," Nzamwita says, only days away from his full release. "Even in prison, people regret that they were involved in the genocide."
Walking around the capital of Kigali, it is possible, at least for a moment, to forget that only 13 years ago, this tidy city was littered with corpses from one of the most brutal genocides the world has seen. Now, the same streets are scrubbed clean and the gutters are painstakingly weeded. "What's surprising here," says U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda Michael Arietti, "is that this place works at all." Indeed, it is, by some measures, thriving. Modern office buildings and gleaming shopping malls now dominate the center of town. New prosperous suburban developments look distinctly European, with their red-tile roofs and bountiful gardens. (Not everything works-the city's 10 traffic lights have been dark for months.) In fact, Kigali has now become one of the safest, most functional cities in Africa-particularly in comparison with its troubled neighbors, whether it's lawless Congo to the west or the crime-infested Kenyan capital of Nairobi to the east.
While Rwanda might not yet be the Switzerland of East Africa, its government has charted a surprisingly ambitious course for this tiny and startlingly green country known as the Land of a Thousand Hills. The goal is to become a regional stronghold for communications and computing, a place where ethnic divisions like Hutu and Tutsi are a thing of the past. Fiber-optic cable is being laid throughout the country, and Rwanda soon will have perhaps the most advanced broadband wireless Internet network on the continent. "We will be the nervous system for the region," says Romain Murenzi, the country's minister for science and technology. While it still has a very long way to go, Rwanda's broad-based government is winning praise from foreign governments and aid groups alike for its good intentions and surprising lack of corruption. It has doubled primary-school enrollment in the past decade and has established a national health insurance system. "They are," says Arietti, "doing all the right things."
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.
Other Rwandans have found it even more difficult. One Tutsi man lost both of his parents and seven of his nine brothers and sisters. Recently, he confronted one of his father's killers in prison, asking how he could have killed the man who helped pay his children's school fees. The prisoner replied only, "Because he was a Tutsi." There was no apology or regret. Now, he struggles with how to answer when his children ask why they don't have any grandparents. They need to know the truth, he says, but "I don't want them to feel hatred for Hutus."
Still, apart from the isolated incidents of violence, the Rwandan government has largely kept a lid on tension, mainly by exercising tight control over the nation's dialogue. One Rwandan journalist terms the regime of President Paul Kagame "a progressive dictatorship." The aim is an idealistic one-creating a single nation without ethnic splits. "We think the way to heal the divide and heal Rwanda is to promote Rwandan identity above other identities," explains Fatuma Ndangiza, who heads the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission. "We're saying Rwanda first, Hutu and Tutsi later." While Rwanda is technically a multiparty state, politics are still regulated. The ruling party cannot hold more than half of the cabinet posts, but all political parties must be members of the unity government, and decisions are made by consensus. Politicians debate almost exclusively behind closed doors, meaning there is little discussion in public. "We have a society that is deeply divided," says Tito Rutaremara, the government's ombudsman. "Is it good to create a democracy based on division or a democracy based on consensus? The people told us politicians to reconcile ourselves before coming to them."
But growing numbers of Rwandans are complaining about the government's occasional heavy-handedness. Open discussion of ethnic differences is punished, and many independent journalists report having violent run-ins with the authorities. "If someone talks about Hutu or Tutsi, he is branded a divider," says Didas Gasana, editor of Newsline, an independent English-language weekly newspaper. "But this is something we have to face up to ... . When you try to suppress people's feelings and opinions, the time will come when there will be an explosion." Some Rwandan officials concede that they will have to gradually loosen the reins but say it's a difficult balancing act.
The healing process is understandably painful and slow-and aggravated by the glacial pace of justice. With nearly 90,000 genocide suspects in jail, many without trials, Rwanda's damaged courts (and even the United Nations war- crimes tribunal) are simply incapable of handling the workload. In all, more than 750,000 cases (ranging from looting to murder) have yet to be tried anywhere. The country's answer has been to adapt a form of traditional justice, called gacaca, to handle genocide cases. Judges are appointed by each local community, and attendance is mandatory for the entire village. While imperfect, the gacaca process has allowed some measure of truth-telling for survivors to learn what happened to their relatives. "For some, it's really the first time they have talked about it since 1994," says Hugo Jombwe Moudiki, a Cameroonian who until last month ran the Rwanda office of Avocats Sans FrontiÃÂères, an international legal group that monitors the gacaca process. "But victims often think they don't get the whole truth, and the accused think it's rigged against them." The process is scheduled to wrap up at the end of this year, an impossible feat given that only 60,000 cases have been tried. The pace has picked up in recent months, but there is pressure to move even faster. "It's taking too much time," says Rutaremara, the ombudsman. "We need to focus on other problems."
In a recent daylong gacaca session under a hot sun in the village of Nyamiyaga, the judges struggle to get through a dozen different cases, all involving murder charges. The entire village has turned out, gathering under a small cluster of trees. The easiest cases are the full confessions, such as the one by Jean Nzabanita, who admits being part of a group that killed neighbors and stuffed their corpses into septic tanks. "We buried them like dogs," he tells the rapt audience. "During the genocide, we became like mad animals, and we lost our humanity. I think often that we would have been capable of anything." Relatives of his victims take their turn to stand up and confront him, demanding the truth. Under questioning from his neighbors, he reluctantly admits to attending meetings to plan who, exactly, would be killed.
Tangled cases. But most cases are far more complicated for these amateur courts. Louis Ngaruriye, a former mayor of the village, is pleading guilty to murder charges, but at the same time he denies participating in the genocide. "I didn't kill myself, but I was in the group of killers, and I didn't protect anyone," he says, prompting scornful laughs from villagers. Several witnesses come forward to testify that Ngaruriye was in charge of village security during the genocide and ran the roadblocks erected around the village to search for Tutsis. He continues to deny the accusations, but the judges still find him guilty. His case now awaits an appeal, but villagers were dissatisfied by the outcome. "During the genocide, they killed people with pleasure," scoffs one observer. "Now, they try to make themselves out to be angels."
If reconciliation is the biggest obstacle facing Rwanda, almost as serious is Rwanda's deep poverty. Nearly 90 percent of Rwandans live off subsistence farming, and the country's rural areas remain largely untouched by development. The bulk of people are subsistence farmers, cultivating every possible tiny plot of land in one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Annual per capita income is a paltry $230, well below the poverty level. "With the people we work with at CARE, I don't feel like I see a change in their purchasing power and economic situation," says Delphine Pinault, a health adviser in Rwanda for the international aid group. "There is no money circulating in the rural areas."
There are some encouraging exceptions, particularly in the coffee sector, Rwanda's most important export. "You could not create a more perfect environment for producing high-quality coffee," says Timothy Schilling, an agronomist from Texas A&M University who runs SPREAD, a project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development to improve coffee cultivation and other crops. "Rwanda offers more attention and TLC per coffee plant than anyone else in the world." The average farmer cares for as few as 150 trees, compared with thousands in coffee powerhouses like Nicaragua. Despite its fertile soil, plentiful sunshine, and high-altitude climate, Rwanda was not a player in the high-end coffee world until very recently. In his seven years in Rwanda, Schilling has helped some 60,000 farms join the gourmet coffee market, taking sales from nothing in 2001 to nearly $4 million last year, in large part by standardizing the processing of the raw coffee cherries. Customers today include Starbucks and a variety of smaller U.S. roasters. Now the government hopes to do the same for the country's well-regarded but antiquated tea industry. Rwanda is also eyeing the market for essential oils for perfumes and aromatherapy.
The other bright spot has been tourism and Rwanda's famous mountain gorillas. More than 12,000 tourists (including nearly 4,000 Americans) made the trek last year to see the endangered primates. But there is limited room for growth. The number of visits is sharply restricted for conservation purposes (only eight visitors per day for each of the seven gorilla families). Instead, Rwanda is trying to bill itself as a luxury destination to attract tourists willing to spend $200 a day for a weeklong stay. The government is working now to market its other attractions, including Africa's last high-altitude national forest.
And then there's the high-tech sector. For now, Rwanda has focused on getting the basic infrastructure in place, including miles of fiber-optic cable. By the end of June, Rwanda will have broadband wireless Internet access nationwide, thanks to Terracom, an American-led company. Christopher Lundh, an American who is the company's recently arrived CEO, says Rwanda is very different from other African countries. "The one thing I have not run into here, at all, is corruption." Yet Rwanda can still be a frustrating environment for companies, as well as aid groups, to operate in. While the national leadership is well stocked with experienced technocrats, local leaders are more of a mixed bag. "Are there enough capable managers in this country to make things happen?" asks Josh Ruxin, a health expert at Columbia University who runs a development project in eastern Rwanda. "That will remain one of the top challenges in this country for some time to come."
The landlocked country has also never had much of an industrial base, and it has not yet been able to persuade major foreign investors to plunge into the Rwandan market. In part because of its ugly past, Rwanda has no shortage of high-profile visitors, from Microsoft's Bill Gates to Google executives. But that has not yet translated into an economic vote of confidence. "You haven't really had a major investment in Rwanda," says Arietti, the U.S. ambassador, "and that's what you need-a demonstration that there is the possibility of a big commercial success here."
Unfortunately, any progress could easily be overwhelmed by Rwanda's runaway population growth. The traditionally Roman Catholic country has been slow to face up to the need to reduce its family size. "Rwanda won't get anywhere with a birthrate of 6.1 [children] per woman," says Christophe Tocco, the acting director for the USAID mission in Rwanda. President Kagame has started talking about the problem in public, but solutions have been slow.
Still, Rwanda does get high marks for its investment in the next generation. One of the largest and most modern buildings in the country is the new Kigali Institute of Science and Technology, which aims to enlarge Rwanda's nascent science and engineering community. About one quarter of Rwandans are currently enrolled in primary or secondary schools. Rwanda has signed up for a program that promises to deliver one $100 laptop computer per child in the next five years, while most secondary schools already have at least 10 computers and Internet connectivity. Murenzi, the science and technology minister, says the key for the future is to develop the skills for critical thinking among Rwanda's youth. "During the genocide, critical thinking was absent," he says. "With access to the Internet, these kids will develop critical thinking. You bet on those who will be your workforce in 2020."
Rwanda's government also has been surprisingly successful at freeing the schools and government hiring practices from discrimination and preferential treatment, both hallmarks of pre-genocide Rwanda. But changing the perception among the people is more difficult, particularly with the government's enforced culture of silence about ethnicity. One Hutu aid worker talks about his struggle to register a new nonprofit group. His friends in exile warned him that the Tutsi-led government would never give him the correct permits. And indeed, his application was denied. "My first reaction could have been that they rejected me because I am a Hutu," he says. "But I talked to a Tutsi who had the same problems." While he says he now blames the cumbersome and frequently inept bureaucracy, "other Hutus might see this as discrimination." The government refuses to divulge any statistics on ethnicity, making it even more difficult to refute any suspicions among the Hutu majority.
New generation. There is still hope, of course, for the next generation. About 45 percent of Rwandans have been born since the genocide. But Yvonne Kayiteshonga, who runs the mental health department at the health ministry, worries that this generation is already being scarred by the past. Her counselors have seen it in school, as well as in the psychiatric clinics. "Children as young as 8 cannot follow their studies," she says. "The trauma of the parents is being passed on to their children. We see it every day." The toughest time for everybody is the month of April, during the annual commemoration of the genocide.
Some young Rwandans are banding together. Marguerite Mukasine is a 22-year-old coffee farmer in the village of Nyakizu in southern Rwanda. She belongs to a local group called Jyambere Rubyirnko, or Lift Up Youth, along with 29 other young men and women. The group jointly contributes to a bank account, which is available for loans when a member needs help. A genocide survivor, Mukasine lost two brothers and a sister in 1994. One of the killers came to her parents to ask for forgiveness, which they granted. "So I think it's normal to accept," she says. "For others, I don't know." In her youth group, they meet once a month to discuss everything from AIDS to reconciliation. The members, who include both survivors and children of parents in prison for genocide crimes, also discuss their stories from the genocide. "Nobody," she says, "has a happy story." Still, she brims with hope for the future. "It will not happen again," she says. "We are stopping the mistakes of our parents."
This story appears in the April 23, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.