The lessons and legacy of Rwanda’s genocide

I have not been to the Centre Christus for 30 years, but I remember it clearly. It is a simple whitewashed compound on a verdant hill in the Rwandan capital Kigali. It was there that I stayed in late July 1994 to report on the aftermath of the genocide.

Rwanda’s extremist government, which had overseen the killing of more than three-quarters of a million of its people in just 100 days, had recently fled into exile. Soldiers from the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), now a political party that still rules over the central African country, were in charge. They were impressively disciplined — not to say authoritarian — but that seemed essential given the recent apocalypse.

In the sunlight, the Centre Christus, a Jesuit mission, had a peaceful aura. It was fringed with bougainvillea. There was a banana grove at the end of its garden. It was only in the flickering of candlelight one evening that I saw bloody handprints on one of the walls.

The following morning, I was shown Room 28. The ceiling was spattered with blood. There was a pile of blood-soaked blankets in a corner. On the very first morning of the genocide, April 7, soldiers had come to the centre, I was told, had singled out 17 priests and novices of the minority Tutsi ethnic grouping, taken them to Room 28 and shot or macheted them. Their bodies had been buried in a shallow grave in the banana grove.

No nation would provide us with the resources to stop the bloodbath . . . Indifference had sealed Rwanda’s fate long before we tried to save it

In those July days the sickly sweet smell of decay pervaded the entire city. Many of the surviving residents wore makeshift face masks as the ghastly clean-up operation began. On the back wall of Room 28 was an icon with an inscription: “God please don’t let us waste the world’s beauty and joy.”

How do genocides happen? The psychology of mass murder can be hard to fathom. But, as Rwanda learnt in 1994, its mechanics can be chillingly simple. Primed by the hate-filled broadcasts of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines in the spring and early summer of 1994, the genocidaires from the majority Hutu ethnic grouping acted with vertiginous speed. They had no need of industrialised machinery or sophisticated weapons. In just over three months, they slaughtered more than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, mainly with machetes, clubs or small arms — as in Room 28 of the Centre Christus, on day one.

Now, 30 years on, Kigali is commemorating the fallen. There will be moving ceremonies. International figures will bow their heads — and rightly so. Genocides are all the easier when world powers avert their gaze, as they did in 1994.

From April 7 to mid-July 1994, Rwanda suffered the most sustained, rapid and focused mass murder since the Holocaust. More people died in Cambodia’s genocide in the 1970s — but that lasted several years. In Rwanda the slaughter was more ruthlessly targeted. Even as the massacres gathered pace, western politicians wriggled out of using the word “genocide”, fearing that this would lead to pressure to intervene.

The touchpaper was lit when a plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and neighbouring Burundi was shot down on the night of April 6, killing them both, as it was coming in to land at Kigali airport. Within hours, civilian massacres were under way.

When the first reports of mass murder emerged, international backers of Rwanda’s extremist Hutu government suggested the victims had been caught up in its three-year-old civil war with the RPF. But that was wrong. The killings in Room 28 and elsewhere were not collateral: they were part of a master plan to eliminate Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Unfortunately, world leaders did not want to hear this — even though they soon knew exactly what was happening.

In the early 1990s, after the end of the cold war, there had been a flowering of optimism in the west about how the world could be run. This was reinforced by a swift victory over Saddam Hussein in early 1991 after his invasion of Kuwait.

But by April 1994, the age-old values-versus-interests foreign policy debate had tilted in favour of the latter. Tiny Rwanda, with its agrarian economy, was deemed to have no strategic value. The peacekeeping debacle in Somalia in 1993, when 18 US Rangers had been killed in a single incident known as “Black Hawk Down” had sated American appetite for overseas interventions. As Kofi Annan, then the UN’s head of peacekeeping, told me years later: the western powers turned a blind eye. “It was an issue of policy, not of lack of knowledge.”

The only senior western official to emerge with credit was Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of a minuscule UN peacekeeping force in Kigali. He is still incandescent about the west’s record. Given that many of the killers were civilians with machetes, a few thousand professional soldiers could have turned the tide, Dallaire argues. “But no nation wanted to provide us with the resources to stop the bloodbath,” he wrote on X, just ahead of the anniversary. “Indifference had sealed Rwanda’s fate long before we tried to save it.”

Rwanda only really hit global headlines after the genocide, when in July the RPF routed the regime and several million Hutu refugees fled into exile in neighbouring Zaire. The exodus dominated news bulletins for days, as then did a cholera outbreak in the refugees’ camps. The closest America came to intervention was when US Air Force planes dropped pallets of Meals Ready to Eat to the camps hosting the genocidaires.

So could the world avert its gaze again? When Annan took over at the UN as secretary-general in 1997, he was determined that “Rwanda” would never be repeated. He sought to challenge UN member states on the fundamental notion that sovereignty could be a shield to hide behind if you commit abuses. This led to the doctrine of the “Responsibility to Protect” and the idea of humanitarian interventionism.

But then came 9/11, the 2003 Iraq war, the decline of the UN’s influence, and the shift from a unipolar into a more competitive world order. When was the latest war in Sudan last on the lips of a western policymaker or prominently in the news?

For the RPF, the lesson of 1994 was that the west had forfeited all credibility when it came to strictures on how to rule. They would run things their own way.

Founding a new state out of the charnel house that was Rwanda was never going to be easy. In late July 1994, I went to a threadbare office in Kigali furnished with just a table and chair to interview Rwanda’s first post-genocide prime minister, Faustin Twagiramungu. He presented an uplifting vision. “We want a normal democracy,” he told me. “We are here for reconciliation, unity and stability and we will succeed.”

As a Hutu in a Tutsi-dominated regime, Twagiramungu was an inspiring symbol of a putative new Rwanda. But his career was to reflect a more troubling reality: the difficulties of challenging what was in effect a one-party state. As premier he became concerned about human rights abuses by the RPF itself. He resigned a few months after a notorious massacre of Hutus by the RPF in April 1995, ended up under house arrest and lived out much of his life in exile. He returned in 2003 to run for the presidency but after coming second with 3.62 per cent of the vote, he left again soon after.

Everything we have built over the last 30 years has to be protected. We don’t need the international community’s permission to protect ourselves

Twagiramungu’s experience was echoed more recently by Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, who ran against President Paul Kagame in 2010 and ended up serving eight years of a 15-year prison sentence on charges of terrorism and threatening national security. She has recently been banned from running again in July. This is a state that does not like criticism. Last October, Human Rights Watch, which published so many important statements during the genocide, issued a report accusing Kigali of an extraterritorial campaign of repression against opponents and critics.

This record of intolerance encapsulates the dilemma for Kagame’s many admirers in the west: how to weigh human rights against his achievements in refashioning the state? He has created a humming economy. He has built an envied and feared military power, which has intervened both on invitation and out of self-interest in several countries across the continent. In the aftermath of the genocide, Kagame was hailed as one of a new generation of model African leaders. But the sheen is wearing off. If he wins July’s presidential elections, he will in effect have been in power for 30 years. At the last election in 2017 he won 98.7 per cent of the vote.

When I suggested to Kagame’s close aide Yolande Makolo that Rwanda did not have a “competitive democracy”, she replied: “Does it have to be?” She went on to say: “It is a democracy that works for all Rwandans within our context.”

So will Rwanda’s democracy open up in time? “It’s been 30 years from total apocalypse to what we have now,” she says when I put to her Annan’s thesis that ultimately states are only stable under a competitive democracy. “We’ll see what happens. We are taking it step by step.”

“What we have is a government, a ruling party that is quite strong, very popular because of its achievements. Anyone else who feels that they have a different way to govern this country will have to show that they can, but governed by the rules that we all have to abide by.”

In a bid to unify Rwandans, Kigali has officially dropped the use of Tutsi and Hutu labels. Before the genocide, Rwandans had had to state their ethnicity on their identity papers, a practice that had been introduced by Belgian colonists. They had favoured the Tutsis to rule, a preferment that fuelled resentment when the Hutu majority took over the government at independence in 1962. The ethnic labelling on IDs made the targeting of Tutsis all the easier 30 years ago.

In the popular mind genocide means massacres . . . turning it into a genocide conviction means proving intent

Makolo argues that Rwanda has made more progress on reconciliation than ever thought possible. That of course, as she says, is hard to assess. But what is clear is that unfortunately for Rwanda, the past is not another country.

Since the exodus of many genocidaires into what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo in July 1994, Rwanda has repeatedly intervened across the border and been embroiled in brutal warfare. In the late 1990s, fighting in the Congo claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Now it has flared up again in the border area. Makolo does not deny that Rwanda is supporting the M23, a Tutsi-dominated rebel group, against the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, whose ranks include Hutu fighters. The FDLR, Makolo says, is backed by the DRC.

“What we are doing is ensuring that that conflict does not cross over into Rwanda,” Makolo said. “We have a lot to lose. Everything we have built over the last 30 years has to be protected. We don’t need the international community’s permission to protect ourselves.”

An irritation with lectures by the west is understandable after its record in 1994. But not for the first time a liberating group is facing a difficult question: for how long can a terrible past, even a genocide, justify authoritarian rule?

On September 2 1998 Jean-Paul Akayesu, former mayor of the small Rwandan commune of Taba, made legal history when the International Criminal Tribunal of Rwanda convicted him of genocide.

For war crimes lawyers, it marked a breakthrough in a 50-year campaign to hold genocidaires to account. In 1948 the UN had established the Genocide Convention, a treaty obliging signatories to prevent and punish this terrible crime. But it had minimal impact. Indeed the man behind its founding, a Polish-Jewish lawyer called Raphael Lemkin, who had coined the word genocide, died a broken man in 1959, convinced that his life’s work had failed.

“It was a coming of age,” Philippe Sands, professor of law at University College London, says of the Akayesu conviction. “It was 50 years since the convention and it was the first time that an international tribunal had convicted a person for genocide.”

The tribunal ended up convicting 61 war criminals before it was wound down at the end of 2015. Under the circumstances this was an impressive tally. The court was chronically underfunded. It had to share a chief prosecutor with the war crimes court for the former Yugoslavia. It also had to grapple with the fact that the convention had set the bar very high for securing a conviction for genocide. The challenge for prosecutors is not proving responsibility for a particular massacre or atrocity, but rather proving the purpose of the perpetrators. 

“Lawyers don’t like the genocide charge,” says Chris Stephen, author of the newly published The Future of War Crimes Justice. “It’s the equivalent of a hate crime. It’s not the crime that’s on trial. It’s the intention behind the harm. In the popular mind genocide means massacres, but a massacre on its own is a crime against humanity. Turning it into a genocide conviction means proving intent. For Rwanda that intent could be proved, but lots of other times prosecutors struggle.”

In the past two years, the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza have both led to accusations of genocide. President Joe Biden used the term after the 2022 atrocities by Russian soldiers in the Ukrainian town of Bucha. South Africa last year petitioned the International Court of Justice to say that Israel, in its assault on Gaza, has been violating the Genocide Convention — a case that Israel rejected “with disgust”.

Sands, who acts for Palestinians in a separate case before the ICJ on the legality of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, says the gap between the public perception of genocide and its legal definition is widening. “A mass atrocity is a mass atrocity. Who cares what label you put on it? But if you speak to prosecutors, they say that survivors of an atrocity want it known as genocide.” Pinning a genocide charge on a state rather on an individual, he adds, is especially hard. “Proving it before the ICJ is tough, tough, tough.”

Next week government lawyers meet in New York to decide whether to start formal intergovernmental negotiations on a UN convention on crimes against humanity, to supplement the Genocide Convention.

On Tuesday November 18 2003, the victims of Room 28 finally had their day in court. A Jesuit priest who had been at the Christus Centre on that terrible morning was testifying — anonymously — before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. After separating the Tutsis, soldiers ordered non-Tutsis to lock themselves in rooms on the other side of the compound from Room 28, he told the court. Moments later they heard shooting. Hours later, they emerged and found the bodies.

The testimony was in the trial of Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, the man dubbed the architect of the genocide. Nearly five years later he was convicted of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in 2021 in prison. 

Sometimes the mills of justice do grind fine.

Alec Russell is the FT’s foreign editor and a former southern Africa correspondent

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