In less than one month, I will be heading to Uganda and Rwanda. I'm very excited, but also a bit dazed. I've wanted to go to Uganda for many years now, ever since I first watched the documentary Invisible Children, and it's an unreal feeling to realize that your dream is going to be realized. Rwanda is also a place I've been interested in, after learning about the genocide and the country itself. While I'm in Uganda and Rwanda, I'll be studying post-conflict transformation, both in northern Uganda and Rwanda. To get myself prepared, I'm reading some books that give insight into the genocide that took place in Rwanda.
One of the books I read was God Sleeps in Rwanda by Joseph Sebarenzi. Written by the former head of the Rwandan parliament (in the late 1990s), this book goes through Sebarenzi's life as a child in Rwanda to his eventual move to the United States. Sebarenzi was imprisoned during massacres in the early 1990s and had family members killed during the Rwandan Genocide, but managed to forgive the people who made his life miserable. Though his tale of forgiveness is fascinating in and of itself, Sebarenzi's tale becomes even more intriguing after he goes on to become the head of parliament. He recounts his experiences with the transitional government that was put in place after the genocide- the same government that is in charge now and how many politicians, like him, who disagreed with the leading party, were blacklisted, fired and sometimes killed.
This contrasts greatly with the popular view of Rwanda reinventing itself after a tragedy. After all, we hope that the new government is better than the old, that the conditions that led to genocide wouldn't be in place anymore. Of course, the new government is much less violent and ethnically focused than the old, but it is disturbing to see some of the same tendencies. As I go to Rwanda, I want to learn more about how its citizens view their government. Do most people agree with Sebarenzi, or are they more in line with Philip Gourevitch's book We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, which praises the new government?
I just saw this article in the New York Times on the Rwandan election results:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/11/world/africa/11rwanda.html?_r=1&hpw
It was a resounding victory for Paul Kagame, the current president; the result was something like 95% for Kagame, which is ridiculously high and invokes images of fixed elections in the old Communist world. The article also reinforces what you found so far in your book review that although Kagame is popular, there are brutal signs of Kagame or his supporters suppressing dissent. And although Gourevitch gives us insights through interviews with Kagame, his take on Kagame seems more and more naive to me, or unable to square the return of peace and progress with near dictatorship-like suppression of dissent. Keep writing and keep reporting as you go - good luck!