Haiti After the Earthquake (38 page)

In many ways, post-genocide Rwanda looked much like Haiti: a mountainous and densely populated country with high birth rates, intransigent poverty and consequent health problems, a history of post-colonial social strife (albeit shorter than Haiti's), weak or discredited
public institutions, low levels of literacy, and scant formal employment. The parallels should not be taken too far, however, because in other ways the countries diverge. No significant ethnic division haunts Haiti (although some remnants of European racial hierarchies are alive there to this day); Haiti is not packed with
génocidaires
and the families of their victims. Nonetheless, the similarities warrant a closer look.

Over the five or so years after the genocide, the transitional government of Rwanda—led by Paul Kagame, the former leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front whose military campaign is widely credited with ending the violence in 1994, at least within Rwandan borders—honed a development plan, later named Vision 2020.
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The plan called for investments in agriculture, infrastructure, and private enterprise; it laid out targets for the health and education systems, and for decentralization and coordination of development assistance. Vision 2020 also called for an end to dependence on foreign assistance by that year. The plan did not reject such aid—two decades is a long time for a proposed divorce—but rather stressed sovereignty as a precondition to long-term reconstruction and growth. But rebuilding the country's institutions could not start in earnest until the massive numbers of repatriated refugees were resettled, even as the guilty among them were brought to justice. And each of these steps to recovery required a modicum of security in the broadest sense of the word.

Roadmaps such as Vision 2020 are a dime a dozen (the Corail-Cesselesse charrette, for example); implementing them effectively is another matter. The transitional government knew it needed new resources to reinvigorate public institutions. It quickly set about collecting taxes—one of the more thankless tasks facing post-disaster administrations—and sought, fitfully at first, to fight corruption.
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The contours of this effort had sharp edges. Many bureaucrats and local officials found themselves in trouble when asked for transparent accounting and reporting. Zealous protagonists of transparency waged a high-stakes public relations battle well before the infrastructure of transparency—electricity, computers, accountants, et cetera—was widely available, even in Kigali. The authorities also
sought to settle disputed land claims in a manner that might encourage private investment and the return of more of the diaspora. Investment was a widely recognized prerequisite to growth among economic policy advisors; repatriation, however complicated a process, was indispensable because many of the Rwandans who had fled during the civil war and the preceding decades of ethnic tension were highly educated, internationally connected professionals.

The ungainly coalition of rebuilders had no shortage of external detractors, including some within the governments of Belgium and France—the colonial and neocolonial powers in Rwanda, respectively. Most supporters of the pregenocide Rwandan government pitted themselves against the interim government.
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Surviving architects of the genocide were scattered around Africa and beyond; most were fleeing justice, but some managed to infiltrate various international organizations, as Gourevitch and others reported. However, there were many untainted critics among the “expert” ranks of human rights lawyers and humanitarian groups purveying basic services to refugees.

Resettlement of refugees was a key issue. Today, many Africans displaced by conflict have languished in refugee camps for well over a decade.
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To avoid condemning its diaspora and returnees to a similar fate, the interim government of Rwanda hatched an audacious repatriation and resettlement strategy, building thousands of small settlements called
imidugudu.
These hastily confected villages distributed the influx of repatriated Rwandans throughout the country to avoid fueling urban slums such as the ones marring cityscapes across Africa (and Haiti). By all accounts an ambitious plan, it was showered with scorn by some refugee and shelter experts (they were already in existence by then) and lauded by others.
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In the months immediately after the genocide, the interim government negotiated the return of fifty thousand Hutu refugees from Burundi. Denouncing this scheme as forced repatriation, humanitarians and human rights lawyers predicted violence and misery. But the plan went over without major problems.
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The interim government needed a bolder strategy to repatriate the millions of Rwandans still in the Congo, many of whom were
openly hostile to the fledgling government in Kigali. The entrenched humanitarian enterprise—aided in a sense by Mobutu's dictatorship, which had also sent troops in support of the
génocidaire
régime
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—was also complicit, as studies later showed, by feeding and housing and caring for
génocidaires
in their midst. Well fed and confident of their return, these
génocidaires
were clearly the biggest threat to the interim government and to security across Rwanda. For almost two years, the leadership in Kigali, facing a complex public-relations battle they often lost, demanded that the camps be dismantled and the refugees repatriated. With each cross-border raid from the Congo, Kigali continued to warn the UN and humanitarians that they would invade to shut down the camps if the attacks continued.

In mid-1996, Kagame launched a wildly improbable mission. His armies dismantled the refugee camps on the border, then pressed through the Congo—ninety-four times the size of Rwanda and as large as Western Europe—to Kinshasa, toppling Mobutu and his thirty-year stranglehold over the country. Much to the world's surprise, the plan seemed to meet its objectives, although it was widely denounced as forced repatriation or worse.

Public-relations battles aside, what did this massive repatriation, forced or unforced, mean for overcrowded Rwanda? Stephen Kinzer describes what must have been a shock to the system: “Like a single organism, this huge mass of people left the squalor of refugee life and trudged toward an uncertain future at home . . . During those weeks in the autumn of 1996, more than a million people returned to Rwanda along the same roads they had used to flee two and a half years earlier.”
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The
imidugudu
absorbed many of the returnees, countering the low expectations of the international community and shelter experts.
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There were snags—overcrowding, joblessness, discord—but the interim government persisted, pushing development partners to build schools and health centers around the settlements. Little by little, over the years, that's what came to pass.

Within Rwanda, reconciliation would take more than providing cheap housing, building schools, and strengthening the health sector. Stiff competition for scarce resources remained. The sheer number of competing land claims was a recipe for ongoing strife.
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A
means of adjudicating such claims was needed, as was a means of meting out justice to those who had participated in the genocide and again lived in close proximity to the survivors and relatives of the victims.
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To address competing claims on land and other property, including businesses, the interim government held a number of town-hall meetings in which a plan for resolving property disputes was discussed. This went on for months and finally led to the creation of regional offices with the authority to settle disputes and to disburse funds for reimbursements in the event that previous administrations had seized private property.
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Many plots were returned to their former owners; some were given to the displaced; some were added to the holdings of other homesteads.
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It was a messy formula but seemed to work better than predicted.

What to do with the guilty and accused was an even greater challenge. A few architects of the genocide were put on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in neighboring Tanzania, and still others in official courts in Kigali. But these processes were lengthy, costly, and required an impartial legal system with an adequate and trained staff. Such legal infrastructure did not exist in Rwanda. The prisons were crammed with tens of thousands of accused
génocidaires,
and few resources were available to pursue the sort of truth and reconciliation process followed in South Africa.
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Even in 2005, when Partners In Health arrived in southeastern Rwanda to rebuild medical infrastructure, Rwandan prisons remained full of the accused and untried.

Rwanda needed an alternate legal mechanism to reach justice after the crimes of the 1990s, and it found one in tradition: the
gacaca
courts, long used for settling village disputes.
Gacaca
literally means “short grass” because in precolonial times such hearings took place in open areas where entire villages could convene. The interim government adapted the
gacaca
system after the genocide: “We took this concept [of
gacaca
courts] and developed it because it would reach people, and they would see themselves in it,” explained Kagame. “It's the way our culture traditionally resolved problems. We have
picked it and developed it to deal with present-day problems.”
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Tribunals would occur in public and near the scenes of the alleged crimes; both victims and witnesses had a chance to speak; sentences were limited to thirty years (half the time was spent on parole). Ultimately, about 80 percent of defendants were freed by the
gacaca
tribunals, not because they were guiltless but because there was strong pressure for self-incrimination. Confessions were met with shorter sentences, many of them deemed to have been served already.
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The
gacaca
courts did not fail, as some predicted, and by 2007 they had cleared out the prisons through alternative sentences, including community service. The processes seemed to allow some semblance of social recovery to occur. Although the painful process of genuine reconciliation might take generations, physicians working in the prisons (as we did) saw the reduced number of inmates diminished the likelihood of epidemics within such institutions.

For foreigners like me, it wasn't clear who was Hutu and who Tutsi, and we were not invited to inquire. “Ethnic divisionism” was banned in Rwanda, making it increasingly different from its former twin, Burundi, where we've also worked and where people are more open about their so-called ethnicity. In his book
The Antelope's Strategy: Living in Rwanda After the Genocide
, intrepid researcher Jean Hatzfeld cites one Rwandan's testament to this uneasy comity:

As a physician working in the public sector, or as a foreigner living in Rwanda, it was hard not to give thanks for the
gacaca
process and the imposed prevention of revenge. Just as it was hard to claim that the
gacaca
courts had failed, so too was it hard, within a decade of the genocide, to argue that the rebuilding of the civil service had failed. Rwanda was, by then, almost the mirror opposite of a “failed state,” to use the term favored by experts and echoed in the popular press. The country was able to draw on its diaspora (sizeable, if smaller than Haiti's) to rebuild. Other technicians of various nationalities were drawn into government ministries to help build Rwandan capacity. The state also made great strides in promoting gender equity among its civil service, recently passing Sweden as the country with the highest proportion of female representation in the world.
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The machinery of humanitarian aid and reconstruction was welcomed into Rwanda post-genocide but with more substantial strictures than in Haiti (or in the Congo). The policy was clear: NGOs and aid institutions were welcome if they squared their plans with the reconstruction priorities of the government. Some NGOs left, protesting that the Rwandan government was heavy-handed, controlling, and antidemocratic. (Such critiques were not often heard in the years before the genocide, as Peter Uvin's work attests,
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when aid groups were given a carte blanche to work in Rwanda.) The post-genocide government did not mourn their departure because it regarded some of the NGOs, and much of the humanitarian machine, as part of the problem. The feeling was mutual, often enough.

Debates about these issues continue to this day, but their urgency is lessened by both security and continued economic growth. Mass violence has not recurred in Rwanda, and the GDP has trebled over the past decade. This year, the summer before elections would formally grant Kagame a second and final term, a number of articles appeared in the international press arguing that his was an authoritarian government with slender commitment to democratic rule. But critical re-readings of the evidence will require a careful evaluation of the views of the many polities and organizations committed to self-exculpation regarding the genocide and its echoes in
the eastern Congo. For example, the recent United Nations draft report was damning to Rwanda. The official Rwandan response, published simultaneously, wrote the same history along very different lines.
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One thing is sure: mutually contradictory claims of causality and assessments of blame will continue to be advanced with great confidence for years to come.