Rwanda Revisited

Rwanda
Gacaca Trial.
Photo by Scott Chacon. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

It has been twenty years since the Rwandan genocide in which 800,000 people were killed in 90 days and thousands more wounded or displaced. This genocide should be remembered not just for the carnage that took place, not just for the failure of the world to provide General Romeo Dallaire, Force Commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) in 1993-1994, with the support he pleaded for (portrayed in “Shake hands with the devil”) and not just for the heroism of groups such as the Benebikira Sisters who refused to capitulate to the genocidal violence; it should also be remembered for the subsequent push for reconciliation led by the nation’s leader Paul Kagame.

To commemorate this genocide, the Co-Exist Learning Project Team created a documentary film that was shown on PBS the evening of April 16, 2014. This film addresses “Rwanda’s unprecedented social experiment in government-mandated reconciliation, through the stories of survivors. Can reconciliation and forgiveness be legislated?  The Coexist webpage has links for the New York Times review of the documentary and some useful teaching materials.

Another site, Insight on Conflict, has a brief but inspiring discussion of peace activities being conducted for the 20th anniversary of the genocide.

Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center,  suggests that Americans have a lot to learn from the Rwandan social experiment.

What do you think?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology