A light in the darkness
This story was published last week, but I didn't have time to write about it then.
I remember learning about the genocide in Rwanda in my tenth grade history class. I didn't really understand the differences that divided the Hutus and the Tutsis, but I understood that they were deep and seemingly insurmountable. Nowadays, "Darfur" and, to a lesser extent, "Northern Uganda" have replaced "Rwanda" as keywords in the American news mainstream, a seemingly seamless transition from one African crisis to another.
I myself had not thought about Rwanda in quite a while, until I read the article linked above. The always-excellent Christiane Amanpour reports:
Iphigenia Mukantabana, a master weaver, sits in front of her house in Gitarama -- an hour from the capital, Kigali -- making beautiful baskets with her friend Epiphania Mukanyndwi.
In 1994, Mukantabana's husband and five of her children were hacked and clubbed to death by marauding Hutu militias. Among her family's killers was Jean-Bosco Bizimana, Mukanyndwi's husband.
"In my heart, the dead are dead, and they cannot come back again," Mukantabana said of those she lost. "So I have to get on with the others and forget what has happened."
Forgetting and forgiving everything she lost, everything she witnessed.
"Women and girls were raped, and I saw it all," she told CNN. "The men and boys were beaten and then slaughtered. They told others to dig a hole, get in, then they piled earth on top of them, while they were still alive."
Yet today, Mukantabana shares her future and her family meals with Bizimana, the killer she knew, and his wife, her friend Mukanyndwi.
Talk about your lambs lying with lions. How is such a thing possible? In 2002 the new Rwandan government, faced with the task of prosecuting and penalizing effectively half of its citizenry, came up with a plan so backwards and antiquated that it became mind-bogglingly novel: to have the perpetrators apologize to the survivors of their victims (the master planners of the genocide received harsher and more formal punishments) in traditional gacaca courts:
Mukantabana admits that it was difficult to forgive. She said she did not speak to Bizimana or his wife for four years after the killings. What put her on the road to healing, she said, was the gacaca process.
"It has not just helped me, it has helped all Rwandans because someone comes and accepts what he did and he asks for forgiveness from the whole community, from all Rwandans," she said.
Bizimana said he did just that.
"You go in front of the people like we are standing here and ask for forgiveness," he said.
But despite his confession and apology, Mukantabana said, reconciliation would not have happened unless she had decided to open her heart and accept his pleas.
"I am a Christian, and I pray a lot," she said, the pain etched in the lines on her face and around her sad eyes.
Incredible. Amanpour's story actually downplays the role of personal faith a bit, but I cannot help but see the outcome of Rwanda as anything less than a miracle, about as absolute a manifestation of love and redemption as we can find on earth.
Now no one talks about Hutus or Tutsis, [Rwandan President Paul Kagame] explained. "There is Rwanda, there are Rwandans, and the common interest we have for a better future for this country is more important than any other interest."
In Gitarama, Bizimana said, "It hurts my heart to see that I did something wrong to friends of my family, to people who we even shared meals with," he said. "I am still asking for forgiveness from the people I hurt."
Amazingly, many seem to have forgiven.
I know it still sounds naive for me to hope for anything approaching this kind of outcome (much less any kind of resolution at all) for the Sunnis and Shiites, or the Janjaweed and Lord's Resistance Army and their respective civilian victims. But I think if you asked someone back in 1994 if they could possibly read a story like the above in his or her lifetime, you would have been met with the same kind of disbelief and skepticism. I guess the moral of Rwanda's story -- all of it -- is never to underestimate the power of forgiveness, and never to give up the fight for peace.