Background
You can still see the skulls
How to rebuild a state based on the rule of law in a country where people murdered their neighbours in broad daylight and without warning? Twenty years after the Rwandan genocide, legal sociologist Nick Huls is helping to educate legal specialists.
Vincent Bongers
Friday 24 January 2014
“In 1994, the priest in Nyamata said to the desperate Tutsis: ‘Come into the church, you’ll be safe there.’ The building was absolutely packed when the Hutus arrived and slaughtered them.” © Hollandse Hoogte

 “The horrendous past can suddenly come back and hit you unexpectedly’, remarks Nick Huls (1949), a professor of socio-legal studies at Leiden University and Erasmus University in Rotterdam. For the past two and a half years, he trained legal specialists in Rwanda, a former Belgian colony in Central Africa.

“My wife and I were talking to our landlady in Butare when her eldest daughter came to visit. When we said: ‘It must be lovely to see her’, our landlady burst into tears. ‘This is my third daughter’, she explained, ‘the two eldest were murdered and so was my husband.’”

In 1994, within the space of one hundred days, approximately one million Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutus, Rwanda’s ethnic majority. The massacre, which left deep scars, is remembered each year in April.

“Then there are times when you pass places where great numbers of people were killed. The church in Nyamata is well-known because that’s where thousands of Tutsis were butchered – you can still see the skulls. In 1994, the priest said to the desperate Tutsis: ‘Come into the church, you’ll be safe there.’ The building was absolutely packed when the Hutus arrived and slaughtered them.”

The genocide’s legacy is a struggle for the survivors, says Huls. “How can you cope with the fact that people killed their neighbours in broad daylight?” Nonetheless, he did not find a defeated population when he arrived in the town of Nyanza in 2011. “In some ways, this country has made a miraculous recovery from the genocide: it’s safe and that’s a huge achievement in this region. It’s clean and there aren’t any potholes in the main roads. This country is developing at a rapid pace, even though the greater majority of the population are destitute. The Rwandans are convinced that they can solve the most impossible problems. Peace reigns now and that’s something almost nobody thought possible in 1994.”

In Nyanza, Huls worked for the Institute of Legal Practice and Development. “I was there mainly for the academic aspects, like supervising dissertations. They need to raise the standards of legal practitioners. In 1994, the state was no longer based on justice, but started to revive gradually after the massacre. The Minister of Justice even appointed a dancer as a judge. The legal system must progress towards a professional organisation.”

Little is said about the genocide, Huls noticed: “My students did not speak in terms of Hutus and Tutsis. Obviously, they know each other’s background, but they are too afraid to speak of the past.”

However, some victims have an active part in the reconciliation process. “I attended a reconciliation meeting in a prison where a Tutsi woman, Mama Lambert, forgave the murderers of her husband and children. Five of her eight children had been killed and despite that, she supervises reconciliation processes for others; she believes in honest expressions of regret and forgiveness. The men were called and sat opposite the woman. They admitted to killing her husband and children. However, they also said they had protected the woman’s family during previous bouts of violence but in 1994 there was no stopping it. They explained: ‘I’m not a hero and I didn’t refuse to murder my neighbour in broad daylight. I regret that but there were members of the militia behind me with a gun and machetes. They forced me to kill. If I hadn’t killed the Tutsis, I would have been killed.’”

“We can’t imagine what those widows must have been through. Women were raped twenty times and infected with HIV while their families were murdered. Then, after ten years, the rapist is released and returns to his home on the opposite side of the street. How do you deal with that? These women are strong and say: ‘We have to carry on. We can’t get caught up in hatred.’ It’s hard to understand for anyone who wasn’t involved.”

A Hutu government was in place prior to the genocide; now there is a Tutsi regime and many Hutus have fled to camps outside Rwanda. “There are still tens of thousands in the camps. From the start, President Paul Kagame said that he runs a government based on national unity. But there is only one large party: Kagame’s Front Patriotique Rwandais (FPR) which attracts three quarters of the voters. They call it a ‘managed democracy’. There are elections and other parties are represented in the government but there isn’t a real opposition party. No one can play the tribal card as there is a prohibition on ‘divisionism’, an explosive mix – they are terrified of a new eruption of violence.”

No one ever mentions the crimes perpetrated by the Rwandan army against the Hutus after the massacre. “Children who lost their parents want to know what happened in the refugee camps in Congo, the next country. UN reports reveal that Tutsis went on the rampage in the camps and it’s possible that the parents of those young people were killed by the Rwandan army. But any surviving relatives who want to press charges against the perpetrators can’t openly institute proceedings. It’s a real issue and almost no one talks about it. It will be some time before there is any open debate on this matter. You could compare it to the Dutch actions in Indonesia during the ‘police actions’: the FPR won’t tolerate dissent.”

“Victoire Ingabire, who was living in the Netherlands at the time of the genocide but who returned to Rwanda in 2010, took on Kagame with her party, endeavouring to give Hutus the chance to have their say. The party has a Hutu majority – around 85 per cent of supporters are Hutus, the remainder are Tutsis. Ingabire was marked as a danger to the state, arrested and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. That’s no way to treat a presidential candidate.”

He illustrates his point with another example of Kagame’s power: “A president may only serve two terms, but Kagame is considering amending the constitution to allow him to serve a third term. When the Minister of Justice opposed the idea, he was immediately dismissed due to incompetence.”

Nevertheless, Huls assures me it’s not all doom and gloom. “To the Kagame government’s credit, all children can attend school. Basic healthcare is available everywhere. It’s a safe country, although no one is at liberty to criticise the president.”

As a legal sociologist, Huls is interested in how the Rwandans attempted to make a clean sweep of things. “In 1994, the gaols were overcrowded; there hundreds of thousands of suspects suffering in abominable conditions. Everyone who was accused of something was locked up. Then they set up people’s tribunals, the gacaca, and very rapidly, lay judges were trained and appointed. However, it’s hard to tell who is a culprit and who is a victim. Confessing meant a lower penalty. Even innocent people confessed, choosing an unfair but milder punishment, because if you didn’t confess, you could receive a very severe sentence indeed. Around two million cases were settled that way, by village people on their own ground.”

The gacaca finished two years ago. “Their merits are questionable, and human rights organisations did not really approve of them. Some people were jailed unfairly while others walked free after committing the most horrendous crimes. What can you do, in either case? Scholars must unearth the truth. One of my projects is to encourage Rwandans to obtain their doctorates on the people’s tribunals. I want to start an academic debate, but that’s not easy as they don’t appreciate anyone criticising the gacaca. Nonetheless, it’s important that a new generation of Rwandan legal experts search for the truth.”

The Rwandans are not particularly happy with the international Rwanda tribunal in Tanzania: “Fifteen people have been sentenced in fifteen years – it’s a money-making machine for lawyers. The Rwandans would have preferred to spend that money on trying the thousands of suspects in their own country. The tribunal is not hearing any more new cases and is to be discontinued. “Rwanda will try suspects from now on. The tribunal has a list of nine suspects who are on the run. If they are found and extradited, they will be brought to trial in Rwanda. That will really put the independence of the country’s judicial system to the test.”