{"id":10203,"date":"2017-08-10T13:34:22","date_gmt":"2017-08-10T17:34:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/?p=10203"},"modified":"2018-01-08T10:57:26","modified_gmt":"2018-01-08T15:57:26","slug":"peace-clubs-rwandas-post-genocide-search-for-renewal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/?p=10203","title":{"rendered":"Peace Clubs: Rwanda\u2019s post-genocide search for renewal"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

… . HUMAN RIGHTS … . <\/p>\n

An article by Valerie Hopkins, reprinted by the Global Campaign for Peace Education<\/a><\/p>\n

Felix Kanamugire was a killer during the\u00a0Rwandan genocide, when between 800,000 and one million people, primarily Tutsis, were killed over the course of three months in 1994.<\/p>\n

For his crimes, he was among the 120,000 men and women imprisoned in the aftermath of the slaughter. Once released in 2011, he returned to his village in southern\u00a0Rwanda, near the border with\u00a0Burundi, and tried to keep a low profile.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nIrene Mukaruziga, second from right, a genocide survivor whose husband was killed by her Hutu neighbour says forgiveness was a hard path for her (Photo: Valerie Hopkins \/ Al Jazeera)<\/center><\/p>\n

For his crimes, he was among the 120,000 men and women imprisoned in the aftermath of the slaughter. Once released in 2011, he returned to his village in southern\u00a0Rwanda, near the border with\u00a0Burundi, and tried to keep a low profile.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I came out of jail and I reached home, I knew there were relatives of a lot of people I killed and property I looted. It was too much fear. How could I approach these people?\u201d<\/p>\n

Kanamugire, who is now 57, was worried about running into one neighbour, in particular, Irene Mukaruziga, because he had killed her husband and destroyed her house.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would hide or take a longer route so as not to see her,\u201d says Kanamugire.<\/p>\n

From truth to reconciliation<\/strong><\/p>\n

One day, his friend told him that he could discuss these things in a group, known as a Peace Club, that met once a week near the village of Muganza, close to his home, where perpetrators could discuss their guilt and move forward.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was good teachings in how to ask for forgiveness,\u201d he says.
\n\u201cInitially, we sat in separate groups, but we have to take a step. They told us, \u2018Don\u2019t fear them [the survivors], you know what you did\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eventually, he says, he went to seek forgiveness from Mukaruziga, who had sought monetary compensation for her destroyed property during a community trial known as \u201cgacaca\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI decided one morning to go to her. I went to her neighbour and asked him to escort me. I looked for 10,000 Rwandan Francs [about $12]. She gave us a place to sit. It was like coming from heaven. I said, \u2018I\u2019m here to ask for forgiveness.\u2019 My heart was pounding. They said, give me 10,000 Francs. I felt someone was removing my burden when she said \u2018OK.’\u201d<\/p>\n

Mukaruziga says forgiveness was a hard path for her.<\/p>\n

\u201cI lost almost everyone in the genocide,\u201d she says. \u201cMy neighbour did a lot of bad things \u2013 destroyed my house, took everything. He went to jail, but his wife stayed at their house. All the time, I couldn\u2019t bear to see his wife and kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

Slowly, she says, after sitting together in the same discussion group, she started to feel ready to forgive Kanamugire.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore, I would never step into his house. Even if it were raining, I would never dare,\u201d says Mukaruziga. \u201cWe only started to speak because of the club. Because of those teachings, things came into my heart. Now, we have a lot in common. The teaching and the counselling has been helpful. They teach us how to identify hate and indicators of when things are going wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kanamugire says that through these meetings, \u201cI have uprooted that hatred that was inside of me\u201d.<\/p>\n

But, despite his transformation, he says the Monday unity exercises remain one of the most important parts of his week.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t pretend to think it is done. This has to be a continuous process.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fractured classrooms<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Peace Club attended by Kanamugire and Mukaruziga is supported by the London-based NGO\u00a0International Alert. Hundreds of such clubs have sprung up across the country to bring together survivors and perpetrators of the genocide \u2013 with a special focus on those who were born in its aftermath.<\/p>\n

In Rwanda, which today has a population of 11.6 million, more than 60 percent of the population is under 24 years old, too young to personally remember the genocide.<\/p>\n

Since the end of the genocide, the government, led for 17 years by\u00a0Paul Kagame, has pursued an official policy of unity and reconciliation, which emphasises Rwandan-ness rather than an affiliation as Hutu or Tutsi \u2013 categories imposed by Belgian colonial rulers that were arbitrarily based on a combination of factors including an individual\u2019s wealth, skin tone, and nose size.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Belgian colonisers\u00a0had favoured Tutsis, and when they left in 1962, the Hutu-led government began persecuting the Tutsi minority. In seeking to close the circle, the government has made nationwide de-ethnicisation a priority and imposed strong restrictions on how the genocide can be discussed.<\/p>\n

(Article continued in right column)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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 <\/p>\n

Question related to this article:<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n

\n

Truth Commissions, Do they improve human rights?<\/a> <\/em> <\/strong><\/p>\n

(Article continued from left column)<\/p>\n

However, bullying based on a pupil\u2019s family background is present in schools, where learning is especially difficult for orphans, the children of survivors, and those who have a parent in prison.<\/p>\n

While survivors and the children of survivors often receive material support, sometimes the children of parents who are or were incarcerated do not receive assistance, which causes rifts between pupils, explains Evariste Shumbushuya, 24, whose father was in prison while he was in high school.<\/p>\n

\u201cOften, when you feel bad, you blame the kids [of survivors] for putting your parents in jail,\u201d he says. But this changed when he joined a Peace Club in his second year of high school.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore I joined the club, there are a lot of things I had no idea about,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI realised they were getting this assistance because they had no parents. Most conflict you could see at school, it was because of these kinds of differences. It was tension that was not very open, but it was there. Some kids fought in the classrooms; there were bitter exchanges, like \u2018Your parents killed my parents\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lack of critical thinking<\/strong><\/p>\n

Shumbushuya now runs the club, called Urumuri Amahoro, which means \u201cLight of Peace\u201d. Its 71 members, who are between the ages of 15 and 25, assemble every Friday afternoon and share poems or act out plays that explore the themes of conflict and reconciliation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are all kinds of narratives we get from our parents, some true and some not true. And this is the source of conflict between us. As we continued, we became aware how parents are poisoning their children,\u201d\u00a0Shumbushuya says.<\/p>\n

He hopes to further bind his club\u2019s members to one another through small cooperative projects, like pooling money to buy a goat that produces milk and cheese and will eventually bear offspring that they can share.<\/p>\n

They also do farming and community service for the parents of impoverished members of their group.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we can change a child, their parents will also change.\u201d
\nSilas Sebatware, who teaches history and geography at the village school, runs another Peace Club. In his club, like in so many others, they use scenarios, cartoons, and plays to discuss discrimination, prejudice, stereotypes and domestic violence.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a group, we interpret images which are not always straightforward to understand,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is important because it builds critical thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sebatware says they also pay special attention to those who broke the mould of violence in genocide and rescued people, to teach students not to be bystanders.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe clubs are also designed to provide information to younger generations who do not know the history of colonialism and the genocide,\u201d says Jean Nepo Ndahimana, a former teacher who runs a training programme for educators with Aegis Trust, the organisation that runs the\u00a0Kigali Genocide Memorial.<\/p>\n

However, building societal change is tremendously difficult after generations of colonial rule and governments who privileged the majority Hutus over the Tutsis.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur parents were educated about violence by the government since the colonial period,\u201d he says. \u201cFrom 1962 until the genocide, the government emphasised discrimination and our curricula were designed to divide us. The government was doing what Trump is doing now in America \u2013 I mean, who is not an immigrant in America today?\u201d<\/p>\n

He says discrimination and hatred were incorporated into every subject. \u201cAn instructor in mathematics once put a question on a test: \u2018If you have five Tutsis and you kill two, how many are left?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, he says, \u201cefforts are being made in Rwanda to make people believe we do not have a different culture. We are trying to dig deep and find our roots.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before his organisation started training teachers in peace education in 2009, some teachers were apprehensive about discussing the genocide in the classroom, which left students reliant on their parents for information, which can be transmitted with bias.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn an assessment developed in 2012, some teachers are scared to discuss the genocide, so sometimes they just skip it,\u201d he says. As a result, when he would organise workshops for young people, he says, \u201cstudents were not aware of what had happened\u201d.<\/p>\n

Since then, he and his colleagues have trained more than 940 teachers, each of whom has started a Peace Club in their schools. Moreover, in 2015, the Rwandan government overhauled its curriculum to include\u00a0peace education\u00a0in every subject, including mathematics and language classes.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the factors that made the genocide possible was a lack of critical thinking skills,\u201d explains\u00a0Ndahimana.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cPerpetrators say they committed crimes because \u2018the government told us to kill\u2019. But someone with critical thinking skills can ask themselves, ‘Why?\u2019<\/p>\n

The reporting of this story was made possible by a fellowship from the\u00a0International Women\u2019s Media Foundation (IWMF).<\/p>\n

(Thank you to Janet Hudgins, the CPNN reporter for this article)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… . HUMAN RIGHTS … . An article by Valerie Hopkins, reprinted by the Global Campaign for Peace Education Felix Kanamugire was a killer during the\u00a0Rwandan genocide, when between 800,000 and one million people, primarily Tutsis, were killed over the course of three months in 1994. For his crimes, he was among the 120,000 men … Continue reading Peace Clubs: Rwanda\u2019s post-genocide search for renewal<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[92,13],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-10203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-human-rights","tag-africa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.cpnn-world.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}