May 04 2009
The Rwanda Article
Read the Rwanda article in the NYkr. It is a painful read.
Basically, the reporter told the stories of national reconciliation (of some sort) undergoing in that country 15 years after the genocide took place.
The reason it is painful is because it is challenging the universal concept of “justice” (i.e. the perpetrators hold accountable and the victims compensated). Normally, after massacres like such took place, a few people would be punished. However symbolic the trials of those a few maybe, they do serve as the stopping stone against which a nation can move forward again.
In Rwanda, the difficulty is the crime was perpetrated collectively. An entire people should be on trial (in fact, hundreds of thousands of Hutu were thrown into jails after the order was restored). Even worse, the perpetrators and the victims have been long living amongst each other for ages, so much so that it is impossible to cleanly divide the country.
Furthermore, the country lives on foreign aid (50% of the national budget) and reconciliation is the precondition. As a result, the victims have to live next to their killer neighbors again, with the memory and pains of the killing still fresh, knowing full well that their neighbors’ “repentance” is too stylized to be trusted.
This painful reality can be best summarized by the country’s President’s words, “I wish there were a way of winding time and making it run faster”, meaning that the current tentative peace could solidify and the pain and suffering will dissipate sooner.
When most people would rather rewind time to live their past again, this sentiment just tells how painful it is to be a victorious survivor in Rwanda today.