Is Forgiveness Possible in Rwanda?
34 min read
Hussein Longolongo killed seven people during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda; he oversaw the killing of nearly 200 others.
He told me this on a warm March day in a courtyard in central Kigali, almost exactly 30 years later. I had come to Rwanda because I wanted to understand how the genocide is remembered—through the country’s official memorials as well as in the minds of victims. And I wanted to know how people like Longolongo look back on what they did.
Longolongo was born in Kigali in the mid-1970s. As a teenager in the late 1980s, he didn’t feel any personal hatred toward Tutsi. He had friends who were Tutsi; his own mother was Tutsi. But by the early 1990s, extremist Hutu propaganda had started to spread in newspapers and on the radio, radicalizing Rwandans. Longolongo’s older brother tried to get him to join a far-right Hutu political party, but Longolongo wasn’t interested in politics. He just wanted to continue his studies.
On April 6, 1994, Longolongo attended a funeral for a Tutsi man. At about 8:30 p.m., in the midst of the funeral rituals, the sky erupted in red fire and black smoke. The news traveled fast: A plane carrying the Rwandan president, Juvénal Habyarimana, and the Burundian president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, had been shot down over Kigali. No one survived.
Responsibility for the attack has never been conclusively determined. Some have speculated that Hutu extremists shot down the plane; others have blamed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi military group that had been fighting Hutu government forces near the Ugandan border. Whoever was behind it, the event gave Hutu militants a pretext for the massacre of Tutsi. The killing started that night.
Almost as if they had been waiting for the signal, Hutu militia members showed up in Longolongo’s neighborhood. One group arrived at his home and called for his brother. When he came to the door, they gave his brother a gun and three grenades and told him to come with them.
Within a few days, most of the neighborhood’s Hutu men had been ordered to join the effort. “The instructions were clear: ‘Rwanda was attacked by the RPF, and all the Tutsi are accomplices. And to defeat the RPF, we have to fight them, but also kill all the Tutsi in the neighborhoods,’ ” Longolongo told me. Any Hutu found hiding a Tutsi would be considered an accomplice and could be killed.
The pace of lethality was extraordinary. Although approximations of the death toll vary, many estimate that, over the course of just 100 days that spring and summer, about 800,000 Rwandans, primarily Tutsi, were killed.
Longolongo believed that he had no choice but to join the Hutu militants. They taught him how to kill, and how to kill quickly. He was told that the Tutsi had enslaved the Hutu for more than 400 years and that if they got the chance, they would do it again. He was told that it was a patriotic act to defend his country against the “cockroaches.” He began to believe, he said, that killing the Tutsi was genuinely the right thing to do. Soon, he was placed in charge of other militia members.
For Longolongo, the fact that his mother was Tutsi and that he’d had Tutsi friends became a justification for his actions; he felt he had to make a public spectacle of his executions, to avoid suspicions that he was overly sympathetic toward the enemy. He feared that if he didn’t demonstrate his commitment to the Hutu-power cause, his family would be slaughtered. And so he kept killing. He killed his neighbors. He killed his mother’s friend. He killed the children of his sister’s godmother. All while he was hiding eight Tutsi in his mother’s house. Such contradictions were not uncommon in Rwanda.
As Longolongo told me his story, we were sitting with Serge Rwigamba, who works at the Kigali Genocide Memorial. Longolongo doesn’t speak English well, so Rwigamba served as our translator. We kept our distance from others in the courtyard, unsure who might overhear what we were discussing or how they might react to it.
On April 22, 1994, Longolongo recounted, he and an armed group of men entered a chapel where dozens of Tutsi were hiding. “We killed about 70 people,” he said, his gaze fixed directly ahead. “I felt like it was my duty, my responsibility … I had no pity.” He put his fingertips to the sides of his head. “I was brainwashed.”
After Longolongo got up to leave, I turned to Rwigamba. He had been visibly uncomfortable at points during the conversation—looking down at the ground, his fingers stretching and contracting across the arms of his chair as if searching for something to hold on to. Rwigamba is a Tutsi survivor, and dozens of his relatives were murdered in the genocide.
The two men, roughly the same age, had never met before. But as Longolongo was speaking, Rwigamba told me, he’d realized that he recognized one of the scenes being described.
It was the chapel. He knew that chapel. Rwigamba himself had been hiding there when Longolongo and his men attacked. His father and brother had been killed that day. Rwigamba had barely escaped. Now he leaned back in his chair, covered his face with his hands, and took a deep breath. We sat in silence for a few moments.
Rwigamba doesn’t deny that propaganda played an enormous role in persuading Hutu to do what they did. But looking at Longolongo’s empty chair, Rwigamba lamented that he had seemed to push responsibility for his actions onto others rather than holding himself accountable. Rwigamba wants perpetrators like Longolongo to acknowledge that they made a choice. They weren’t zombies. They were people who chose to pick up weapons; they were people who chose to kill.
Thirty years have passed since 100 days of violence ravaged Rwanda. Thirty years since machetes slashed, since grenades exploded, since bodies rotted, since homes burned, since churches became slaughterhouses and the soil became swollen with blood. Rwandans are still living with the scars of those terrible days. They are still learning how to calibrate their memories of all that happened.
In my conversations with dozens of Rwandans this year, I saw how profoundly the genocide continues to shape the lives of the people who lived through it. There are people who protected their neighbors and people who brought machetes down on their neighbors’ heads. There are people who hid family in their homes and people who handed family over to the militia. There are people who killed some so they could protect others. Survivors’ recollections of those horrifying days are at once fresh and fading. Questions of whom and how to forgive—of whether to forgive at all—still weigh heavily.
Over the past decade, I have traveled to dozens of sites throughout America and around the world to explore how crimes against humanity are memorialized. Rwanda has some of the most graphic sites of memory I have ever seen, places where the gruesome reality of what occurred is on display in sometimes shocking detail. And it is different from other sites I’ve visited in another crucial respect: In most of those places, few, if any, survivors are left. Here, hundreds of thousands of people who survived the genocide are still alive to tell the story, and Tutsi and Hutu live alongside one another as neighbors. I wanted to understand what public memory of an atrocity looks like when the perpetrator and the victim continue to walk past each other every day. I wanted to understand whether true forgiveness is even possible.
A few days before we met Longolongo, Rwigamba had shown me around the Kigali Genocide Memorial, which opened in 2004. The memorial sits on a hill that is said to hold the remains of 250,000 people, buried in columns of caskets that descend deep into the earth. Some caskets contain the remains of an entire family. The skull of a mother might be sitting alongside the rib cage of her husband, the tibia of her daughter, and the femur of her firstborn son. The graves are covered by massive rectangular blocks of concrete, ornamented in garlands of pink and red roses placed by visitors.
Rwigamba works as a guide and coordinator at the memorial, and also serves as vice president of the Kigali chapter of Ibuka, a civic organization that works to ensure that survivors of the genocide receive social, political, and economic support. Throughout my trip, he served as my translator and guide. He was 15 years old in 1994. He lost more than 50 members of his family, some of whom are buried at the memorial site. After the genocide, he recalled, his trauma felt suffocating. Every day, he woke up after another cycle of nightmares and thought about his family. He missed them intensely. “Working here was one of my ways to get close to them,” he told me.
We walked around the museum at the center of the memorial, which outlines the history that preceded the genocide and highlights photographs and stories of people who were killed. The goal is to demonstrate who they were in life, not to simply show them as corpses. But what stayed with me was the omnipresent sense of death. One room displays rows of skulls of people who were murdered.
We heard wailing, and Rwigamba went to see what was happening. When he returned, he explained that a survivor was visiting the memorial to see her father’s resting place. When she walked through the room of skulls, she broke down. Members of the museum’s staff went to comfort her. Rwigamba told me that this kind of thing happens often. As we walked back outside, the sound of the woman’s screams echoed through the halls.
Rwigamba said that in the 16 years since he started working at the memorial, he has learned more about the way Hutu extremists used propaganda before and during the genocide. It made him wonder. “I kept on thinking about what could have happened if I was born a Hutu. What would have happened to me?”
Anti-Tutsi propaganda was everywhere in the early 1990s, deepening Hutu’s suspicions of their Tutsi neighbors. In December 1990, an extremist Hutu newspaper had published the “Hutu Ten Commandments,” which called for Hutu political solidarity and stated that the Tutsi were the common enemy.
The roots of this antipathy went back a long time. Before Germany and later Belgium colonized Rwanda, those who owned and herded cows were generally considered Tutsi, and those who farmed the land Hutu. Under colonialism, however, these permeable class boundaries became fixed, racialized markers of identity, and much of the majority-Hutu population (along with the Twa, a group that made up 1 percent of the population) lived in relative poverty, under the control of an elite Tutsi political class. This inequality opened deep fissures: The anthropologist Natacha Nsabimana has written that “the violence in 1994 must be understood as part of a longer history that begins with the racial violence of modernity and European colonialism.”
As animosity toward the Tutsi grew in the mid-20th century, Belgian colonial powers started to place members of the Hutu population in charge. In the years before and after Rwanda gained independence, in 1962, Hutu government forces killed thousands of Tutsi. Hundreds of thousands more Tutsi fled the country.
Tutsi exiles intermittently attacked Rwanda’s Hutu throughout the 1960s. In the late ’80s, thousands of exiles joined the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which invaded Rwanda from Uganda in 1990, setting off a civil war. In 1992, under international pressure, President Habyarimana and the RPF negotiated a cease-fire, and the two sides began working out a peace agreement. Hutu extremists, who saw the agreement as a betrayal, doubled down on promoting anti-Tutsi lies.
Rwigamba gazed out over the memorial’s courtyard, recalling the messages that Hutu received from the government and the media in those years. “What if I would have been approached with so much pressure—from society and from my education? Hatred is an ideology and is taught at all levels of the society and all levels of community. So it was so hard for a child of my age to do something different.” Rwigamba paused. He looked like someone who had missed a turn and was trying to see if they could back up. “I don’t want to give an excuse for the people who committed the genocide,” he said, “because they have killed my family. But I could actually try to learn some sort of, you know, like, empathy, which enables you to think about the possibility of forgiveness.”
Still, Rwigamba told me, identifying with the killers in any way, even as a thought exercise, can feel shameful. Another part of him believes I don’t have to put myself in the shoes of perpetrators. I am a victim! That, he says, is “the easiest way to cope with your wounds”—but perhaps not the right one.
After the genocide, Rwigamba went to school with the daughter of one of the commanders who oversaw killings in his neighborhood; they sat in the same classroom. He knew that it wasn’t her fault, that she herself had not held the machetes. But, he wondered, did she carry the same beliefs as her father? Did she listen to his stories with admiration? Did she dream of finishing his work? For a long time, Rwigamba said, his classmate’s presence was a reminder of all that he had lost, and all that could be lost if history were to repeat itself.
Years later, however, after Rwigamba encountered his former classmate at church, he chose to put these thoughts out of his head. He told himself that she was not there to torment him, and he moved on. The scholar Susanne Buckley-Zistel refers to this phenomenon as “chosen amnesia,” describing it as a way for members of a community to coexist despite having had fundamentally different experiences during the genocide. All over Rwanda, every day, for 30 years, many people have chosen amnesia.
The facade of Sainte-Famille Church in Kigali is adorned with vermilion-colored bricks and white-tile pillars that form the shape of a cross. On the day Rwigamba and I visited, a priest dressed in white held a microphone, his voice swelling in a wave of Kinyarwanda as the congregation nodded at his sermon. We sat down in a mahogany pew at the back of the church, and Rwigamba pointed a few rows ahead of us. “I hid under that bench for two months.”
After the genocide began, Hutu militiamen showed up at Rwigamba’s home and told his family that they were going to kill them. They told them to kneel down on the ground. Everyone did as they were told, except for Rwigamba, who was so afraid, he couldn’t move. His father began praying; his mother cried. The men cocked their guns and pointed them at his family. “Then, suddenly, they stopped,” Rwigamba said. The men told them that they would let them live, for now, if the family paid them. So Rwigamba’s parents scrounged together all they could. “They left us, but with the promise of coming back and finishing us off,” Rwigamba said. No one waited around to find out if they were telling the truth.
As the days wore on, Rwigamba and his family moved from place to place, often at a moment’s notice. Eventually, they hid in the chapel that Longolongo and his crew attacked. Soon after that, Rwigamba and his sister and mother found themselves in another part of town, at Sainte-Famille Church, which housed thousands of Tutsi during the genocide.
Churches were a popular hiding place: More than 90 percent of all Rwandans were Christian, and many people hoped that the militia would not attack spaces that were sacred to both Hutu and Tutsi alike. Some Hutu who had been caught in the crossfire between Hutu forces and the RPF also sought refuge in churches. As a result, at Sainte-Famille, Rwigamba and his family sheltered side by side with the families of the people trying to kill them.
Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, a priest at Sainte-Famille, would soon become infamous. He traded his clerical robe for a flak jacket, carried a pistol, and, according to multiple witness accounts, personally handed over Tutsi to the Hutu militia. Day after day, the militia showed up with a list of names of Tutsi who were believed to be seeking refuge in the church. Rwigamba recognized many of the killers from his neighborhood—boys and young men he had gone to school with. Every day he watched people get killed, certain that he would be next. The carnage went on for more than two months. Hundreds of Tutsi were killed; many women were raped. (The United Nations estimates that up to 250,000 women were raped in the genocide; another estimate puts the number even higher.)
During a pause in the church service, Rwigamba and I slid out of our seats and stepped outside, into a light rain. About 50 yards away was a black-marble wall with rows of names inscribed on each side. Rwigamba bent down and pointed to the bold white letters of two names: Emmanuel Rwigamba and Charles Rwigamba. His elder brother and his father, who were murdered by Hutu militia members, then thrown into a mass grave nearby.
“This was littered with corpses of people who had been killed and left here,” Rwigamba said, gesturing toward Sainte-Famille’s parking lot.
He pointed to another spot, to the left of the church, where he remembers watching the Hutu militia force a man to dig his own grave before they shot him and threw him into it.
“I feel so lucky to have survived,” Rwigamba said. “When we were moving around those skulls and bones at the museum, I often felt like I could have been one of them.”
He looked back at the church entrance as people began filing out. “Maybe the people that we were seeing in the museum—maybe they were the same people that were with me here.”
at the Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre, I smelled the dead before I saw them.
Dozens of embalmed bodies were laid out across two rows of tables on either side of the room. I walked toward the back of the room and stopped in front of a body whose right arm dangled over the edge of the table. The woman’s head was turned to the side. Her mouth was ajar, revealing half a row of uneven teeth on the bottom. Her skin, swathed in powdered lime that had turned it a haunting white, was sunken in between her ribs. Her toes were curled and her left hand had been placed above her head, as if she were attempting to protect herself from something above. There was a rosary around her neck, the crucifix at rest near her chin. A black patch of hair was still present on the back of her head. Beneath it, a hole in her skull from where a machete had cracked it open.
The Murambi memorial sits on the site of a former technical school. In April 1994, a group of local leaders convinced the Tutsi in the area that they could find protection here; the Centre estimates that, within two weeks, 50,000 Tutsi had gathered. But it was a trap.
Soon the school and the hill it sat atop were surrounded by several hundred men. They threw grenades and shot bullets into the crowd, then attacked those who were still alive with clubs and machetes. Thousands were killed (the exact number remains contested). The victims were tossed into mass graves, but some were later exhumed and put on display as part of the memorial. Today, these mass graves are covered with grass, and the school’s two dozen classrooms serve as the centerpiece of the memorial.
Leon Muberuka, a Tutsi survivor who works as a guide here, accompanied me through each classroom. Muberuka was 11 when the genocide happened. He remembers everything: the bodies on the ground, the stench of death. He still finds it difficult to spend time in these classrooms. I did too.
When we stepped outside, Muberuka saw me rubbing my nose, attempting to expel the lingering scent of the bodies from my nostrils. “This place, in the morning, the smell is very, very, very hard,” he said. “We close the door at night, and when we open it—” He widened his eyes, held his nose, and exhaled through his mouth.
We walked to a building at the far end of the compound. As I crossed the threshold, I paused. In front of us, inside cylindrical glass tubes, I saw about 20 corpses that were better preserved than the ones I had just seen. Many of these bodies were brown rather than white. Their skin looked closer to what it might have looked like in life. I walked toward the back of the room. In a single encasement were two small children. I looked down at a placard and read the first two sentences:
The young boy died because of a massive attack to the head. The skull lies open and shows the still preserved brain.
The child, who appeared to have been about 5, wore a light-blue shirt with a pink elephant on the front. His mummified eyes were still visible, though sunken into his head. I stepped to the left and looked down at the hole in his skull. I leaned forward, and I saw the child’s brain.
I went outside to collect myself. Seeing this made the horror of the genocide more real; it left me feeling a mix of shock, despair, and rage—both deeply moved and profoundly unsettled. I thought about other memorial sites I’ve visited. After the Holocaust, Allied soldiers found thousands of bodies in barracks, gas chambers, crematoria, and train cars. What if some of those bodies had been preserved and put in a museum? What if I’d walked into Dachau and seen the bodies of Jewish people who had been murdered on display inside gas chambers? Would that not compromise the dignity of the dead? Or was putting the full, gruesome reality on display like this a way to ensure that people would continue to respect its gravity? When I traveled to Germany a few years ago, one man I interviewed, the child of Holocaust survivors, described his repugnance at the fact that, these days, people take selfies at places like Auschwitz and Dachau. Surely, given what was being shown here, no one would dare do the same?
Outside, a yellow-orange sun set behind the surrounding hills. On the three-hour drive north to Murambi, I had marveled at the beauty of these rolling hills, covered in the thick leaves of banana trees. I’d passed women in the valleys below bending over rice paddies, dipping their hands into the shallow water; men sweating as they walked bikes uphill, jugs of water strapped to the seat; children in flip-flops chasing soccer balls in front of shops where the smell of sweet potatoes hung in the air.
Seeing the bodies helped me picture the roads that wrap around these hills blocked by machete-wielding men, the land full of the dead and dying. Instead of smelling sweet potatoes when you rolled down your window, I realized, you might have smelled corpses rotting beneath the sun.
To Muberuka, the vividness is exactly the purpose of a memorial like this one, as uncomfortable as it may be. “This is our past, and everyone needs to know this,” he said.
“Sometimes people can say the genocide did not happen in Rwanda,” Muberuka added, his brow wrinkling in indignation, alluding to those who claim that the violence was not a genocide but a manifestation of long-standing, two-sided ethnic and tribal conflict. “Through this evidence, it’s real,” he said. “So that’s why, for me, it’s important to preserve this memorial and some physical evidence.”
Muberuka’s parents and sister were killed in the genocide. Or at least he thinks they were—he never found their bodies. “I don’t know where they have been buried,” he said. He paused and looked down. “I don’t know if they are buried or not.” A gust of wind whistled between us. “When you bury someone … you know he’s dead. But if you don’t know—” He looked at me, then up at the sky. “Even now, we are still waiting. Maybe we will see them.”
Rumors swirled around his community. People told Muberuka that they had seen his sister, who was a baby at the time of the genocide. What if she had been picked up by a family and brought across the border to Uganda? Maybe she was in Kenya.
I asked if he thought she might still be alive.
“I don’t think so,” he said softly. “Thirty years, it’s just …” His voice trailed off.
For decades, Muberuka had held on to hope. But it was a torturous existence. He saw this hope torture those around him as well. He knew people who—15, 20, 25 years after the genocide—would walk up to a stranger in the market and grab their face, thinking they might be a long-lost sibling, daughter, or son.
He decided that he had to let go, or he could never move forward. Here, again, was this idea of chosen amnesia. It was everywhere. Today, though he works at the memorial, Muberuka and his surviving siblings do not discuss the genocide with one another; he says it’s easier that way.
Another reading of the Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre and similarly graphic sites is that they are an outgrowth of the Rwandan government’s desire to reinforce its power and control. Paul Kagame, formerly the Tutsi military leader of the RPF, became president of Rwanda in 2000, and he continues to occupy that office today. In some respects, he has been an enormously successful leader. Many of the Rwandans I spoke with praised him as a singular figure who has, through his insistence on reconciliation, managed to prevent another genocide.
But the country’s relative stability during his time in power has not been without costs. International observers have labeled Kagame an authoritarian. His tenure has been marked by allegations of human-rights abuses against political opponents, journalists, and activists. In 2015, the United States government urged Kagame to step down to allow a new generation of Rwandans to lead the country. Freedom House, a watchdog group based in the U.S., said in a 2022 report that Rwanda is “not free.” The government, it said, had been “banning and repressing any opposition group that could mount a serious challenge to its leadership.” In July of this year, Kagame was reelected to a fourth term. Rwanda’s National Electoral Commission said that he received 99.2 percent of the vote.
The political scientist Timothy Longman argues that sites like Murambi serve as a warning to Rwandans from the Kagame regime: This is what we put an end to, and this is what could happen again if we are not careful—if we are not in charge. Longman is a professor at Boston University and the author of Memory and Justice in Post-genocide Rwanda. He spent years living in the country as both a scholar and a field researcher for Human Rights Watch. He understands the impulse to create memorials that force visitors to confront what happened, he told me, and he shares the view of many Rwandans that the bodies serve as a reminder to the world of how profoundly it failed to come to Rwanda’s aid. Still, he finds the display shocking and horrific—a calculated attempt on the part of the Kagame regime to maximize visitors’ distress at the expense of the victims’ dignity. Using the bodies to provoke a reaction, he believes, compromises the site’s ability to meaningfully honor the dead.
“If the survivors had designed these sites, there wouldn’t be bodies,” Longman said. In his book, he writes about a conversation he had with a nun who had survived the genocide: “It is not good to leave the bodies like that,” she said. “They need to find the means to bury them.” But Longman also writes about the perspective of another nun whose sentiments echoed what I heard from Muberuka. “It has another role,” she said. “It helps to show those who said that there was no genocide what happened. It acts as a proof to the international community.”
When Longman and I spoke, I told him how moved I had been by the stories that the survivors shared with me at the various sites I’d visited, even as I was cognizant of the fact that the memorials were ultimately accountable to the state. Longman considered my point. “For the survivors at these sites, it’s their job,” he replied carefully. “They’re not telling a stock story, but on the other hand, they’re telling their story every day. I don’t think there is insincerity, but people know on some level what they are supposed to say, and in particular they know what they can’t say. It doesn’t mean it’s untrue, but as with anything in Rwanda, conversation is always constrained because you’re in an authoritarian context, and there are consequences if you say the wrong thing.”
On July 4, 1994, after nearly three months of violence, RPF forces took control of Kigali, forcing the Hutu militia out of the city. As the RPF moved through Rwanda, nearly 2 million Hutu fled to neighboring countries. In the months and years to come, the transition government faced a question: How to achieve justice for victims while also advancing the goal of reconciliation?
Eventually, more than 120,000 Hutu were arrested on charges of participating in the genocide. Rwandan prisons were overcrowded and teeming with disease. One of the tens of thousands of Hutu prisoners was Hussein Longolongo. In prison, he was forced to take part in a government-sanctioned reeducation program. He initially dismissed much of what he heard in the program as Tutsi propaganda. “But as time went on, I became convinced that what I did was not right,” he told me.
Longolongo also participated in more than 100 of what were known as gacaca trials. Gacaca—which roughly translates to “justice on the grass”—had historically been used in Rwandan villages and communities to settle interpersonal and intercommunal conflicts. Now the government transformed the role of the gacaca court to handle allegations of genocide.
Witnesses would present an account of an alleged crime to community-elected judges, who would assess its severity and determine the appropriate consequences. Because 85 percent of Rwandans were Hutu, the judges were overwhelmingly Hutu. “A lot of gacaca was actually about the Hutu community themselves trying to come to terms with what Hutu had done,” Phil Clark, a political scientist who has written a book about the gacaca courts, told me. “It was Hutu judges, Hutu suspects, and often Hutu witnesses doing most of the talking. And genocide survivors sometimes were a bit reluctant to get overly involved for that reason.”
The courts convened for a decade, from 2002 to 2012. There were many delays, but for years at a time, all community members were required to attend weekly trials. By 2012, more than 12,000 gacaca courts, involving 170,000 judges, had tried more than 1 million people. Nothing like this had ever been done on such a large scale anywhere else in the world.
The legacy of the trials is mixed. “The courts have helped Rwandans better understand what happened in 1994, but in many cases flawed trials have led to miscarriages of justice,” Daniel Bekele, then the Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said in 2011 when the group released a report on the gacaca process. If the trials helped some survivors find a sense of closure, they reopened wounds for others. They were sometimes used to settle scores. In some cases, Tutsi survivors, wanting to exact vengeance on Hutu as a group, made false accusations. Although the public setting of the trials was intended to ensure transparency, it also made some potential witnesses unwilling to testify. And many people stayed silent even when they believed that a defendant was innocent, afraid of the backlash that might come from standing up for an accused perpetrator.
Some observers objected to the fact that only crimes against Tutsi victims were brought in front of the courts, while crimes against Hutu were overlooked. “The genocide was terrible; it was serious, and justice absolutely had to be done,” Longman told me. “But it doesn’t mean that war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the RPF should be completely ignored.”
Rwigamba told me that he did not think the process was perfect. But he saw it as the most practical and efficient way to achieve a semblance of justice on a reasonable timeline. He also appreciated that it drew on traditions and practices that were created by Rwandans rather than relying on judicial mandates imposed by outsiders. “Gacaca taught us that our traditions are rich and our values are strong,” he said.
Longolongo, for his part, found meaning in the opportunity to come face-to-face with the families of those he had helped kill—to admit to his crimes, and to apologize. I asked him if his conscience is now clear. “I feel so relieved,” he said. He told me that he became friends with many of the surviving family members of Tutsi he had killed after he showed them where the bodies of their loved ones had been discarded. “I feel like I fulfilled my mission,” he said.
This revelation took me aback. “You mean you are now friends with some of the people whose loved ones you killed?”
Longolongo nodded and smiled. “After realizing that I was genuine and telling the truth, I’ve got so many friends.”
I wondered if friends was the word that these Tutsi would use to describe the relationship. I thought of a comment made by a genocide and rape survivor in the 2011 Human Rights Watch report: “This is government-enforced reconciliation. The government forced people to ask for and give forgiveness. No one does it willingly … The government pardoned the killers, not us.”
On the way back to my hotel in Kigali one evening, I spoke with my driver, Eric (given the sensitive nature of his comments, I am using only his first name). Eric is Rwandan, but he was born in Burundi. His family, like many other Tutsi at the time, left Rwanda in 1959 to escape violence at the hands of Hutu extremists. They returned in 1995, after the genocide ended.
I had read that, after the genocide, the RPF—now the ruling political party in Rwanda—officially eradicated the categories of Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa on the grounds that they were false differences imposed on Rwandans by colonial powers, categories that had only led to conflict and bloodshed. There were no more ethnic categories, the government said, only Rwandans. I was curious how Rwandans identify today, regardless of the government’s directive, and I asked Eric about this.
“Some of them still identify. You can’t stop that. Some people still have that ideology. But also, it’s not something that is official.” He paused and began to speak again, then stopped abruptly. “It’s not allowed.” As he talked, I realized that, privately, Eric still seemed to think in terms of Tutsi and Hutu.
“I live together with someone who was in jail for 18 years. Someone who killed people. I know him,” Eric said. “He’s my neighbor.” Eric told me he doesn’t feel angry at this man—he has even hired him to do construction work on his house, and has had the man’s children do small tasks for him.
But as Eric went on, I noticed that he seemed to see this as a gesture of generosity, and a way of showing the Hutu that Tutsi are superior—that despite what the Hutu did to the Tutsi, the Tutsi were still willing to help them. That they would never do to the Hutu what the Hutu did to them, because they are more evolved.
Would you say that you’ve forgiven him? I asked.
“Yeah. I have forgiven him,” Eric said, nodding. But then he reconsidered. “You know, you can’t say that you have forgiven him 100 percent, but you have to move on,” he said. “We are not like them.”
I was struck by the texture of Eric’s voice when he said “them.” It was laced with a bitterness I had not yet encountered during my time in Rwanda. “Naturally, Tutsi and Hutu are not the same in their hearts,” he continued. “You will see. We are not the same. They have something bad in their hearts. They are naturally doing bad. That’s how they are.
“We leave them alone,” Eric said. “We give them what we’re supposed to give them. We try to live—to survive, to live with them. That’s it. That’s all. Still, we have to be careful, because we are not sure if their hearts have changed.
“Thirty years is not enough to trust them,” he continued. “We work together. We live together. But we don’t trust them.”
Albert Rutikanga was 17 when President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down. He heard the news on the radio and ran to tell his father. “We will be killed,” his father said.
The next day, Hutu began burning Tutsi homes in his village, Rukara. His family quickly fled to the local church, where he and I now stood. On April 8, 1994, Rutikanga told me, militia members arrived, screaming, with guns and machetes in hand. They surrounded the church. They threw grenades and shot bullets through the open windows. Waves of attacks continued for days.
Rutikanga pointed to a pew on our right. “My dad was sitting here and he was reading a Bible; that’s how he was killed.” His mother died in the attacks as well. Rutikanga was struck by shrapnel from the grenades thrown into the church. He lifted his pant leg to reveal a large cavity in the flesh of his thigh.
Soon, the RPF arrived in the village and the Hutu militia fled, leaving behind hundreds of dead Tutsi. Rutikanga didn’t step foot in the church again for 15 years.
Eventually he became a high-school teacher. He often brought his students on day trips to the genocide memorial in Kigali. They were moved by the memorial, but he came to suspect that they didn’t fully understand what had happened in 1994. There had been so many years of silence. The students’ parents, Rutikanga realized, were not having honest conversations about the genocide with one another or with their children. He decided that he would try to recruit survivors to engage in direct discussions with perpetrators.
Many survivors were initially reluctant. “They would say, ‘Are you foolish? How can you forgive those people when they killed our family?’ ” Rutikanga told them that these conversations weren’t something they should do for the perpetrators. “Forgiveness is a choice of healing yourself,” he would say. “You cannot keep the anger and bitterness inside, because it will destroy you.” Forgiveness, he said, is the choice of surviving again.
Rutikanga found it just as difficult to recruit perpetrators. “They did not trust me,” he said. In 2016, he approached Nasson Karenzi, who, at 30, had been part of the militia that attacked the church where Rutikanga and his family were hiding. Later, while in prison, Karenzi confessed to his crimes in a letter he handed to the authorities. He was eventually released.
Karenzi was skeptical at first. What if the conversations caused even deeper rifts? But he shared Rutikanga’s sense that something needed to be done to foster deeper trust and reconciliation within the community, and he agreed to talk with other former perpetrators about participating. Once they had about 20 people, perpetrators and survivors alike, Peace Education Initiative Rwanda was born.
During the group’s first meetings, facilitated by an outside mediator, everyone treaded carefully. People were wary of revealing too much, of opening old wounds when the person who was responsible for creating those wounds—or the person who had been forced to carry them—might be sitting directly across from them. But slowly, the discussions became more vulnerable.
People began to tell their friends and family about the organization, now called PeacEdu, and more joined. Today, 1,400 adults in the village have participated in PeacEdu workshops, and the group has reached 3,500 young Rwandans through its school-based programming.
PeacEdu’s office is a small concrete building with yellow walls and French doors that open onto a garden courtyard. There, I met with four participants in the program. The two women, Francoise Muhongayire and Clementine Uwineza, were survivors of the genocide. The two men, Karenzi and Francois Rukwaya, had participated in it.
Rukwaya had a bald head that caught the light from above; he wore a checkered green oxford shirt that seemed a size too big. The first thing he told me was that he had killed eight people in one attack, early on in the genocide. He was 27 in 1994, and was later imprisoned. He, too, wrote a confession, and was later released. (Kagame has freed thousands of prisoners en masse on several occasions.)
Muhongayire wore a green-and-gold dress, with frills that bloomed from the shoulder. She had a large Afro and spoke in long sentences that rose and fell like the hills around us. She recounted running from the militia and hiding in a swamp the day the genocide began. When she returned to search for her family, she found her parents and eight of her siblings dead. She and a group of other Tutsi hid in a house where they thought they might be safe. But the militia found them, poured gasoline on the house, and set it on fire. The home was engulfed in flames and almost everyone inside died. Muhongayire barely escaped. She still carries scars from the burns.
“I lived a miserable life after,” she said. “I had no one. I was living with so much depression. Until I saw Karenzi, who came toward my house. And when I saw him, I immediately ran away and tried to hide because that triggered me and made me think that he was coming to attack us.”
Karenzi came back again and again, each time asking for forgiveness. At one point, Muhongayire told him that she forgave him just so he would stop bothering her. But she didn’t mean it.
Not long after, Rutikanga approached her about joining his new initiative. Muhongayire wanted no part in it. These people had killed her entire family. How could she look them in the eye? Forgive them? No chance. Finally, Rutikanga persuaded her to give it a try. She could always get up and leave if it became too difficult.
Yet as she listened to Karenzi and others explain what had led them to commit violence and listened to them apologize, genuinely, for all they had done, Muhongayire could feel something changing inside her. At the time, she had a heart condition that doctors could not accurately diagnose or treat. Her heart was weak, and she felt like her body was beginning to fail. But she told me that after she was comfortable enough to share her own story in the PeacEdu sessions—to look at Karenzi and the other Hutu sitting alongside him and tell them about all they had taken away from her—she started to feel lighter and stronger. As she kept going to sessions, she said, her mental and physical health began to improve. She no longer wanted to die. She had a chance to live again.
Uwineza was 18 when the genocide began, and she was raped multiple times by Hutu soldiers. She contracted HIV from the assaults. Like Muhongayire, Uwineza was reluctant to join Rutikanga’s initiative, but when she learned that other women who had lost their families and survived sexual violence were participating, she decided to try it. Over time, alongside the other survivors, she began to experience a shift. “I was able to recover,” she said, holding her thumb and index finger together and slowly pulling them apart, “a little bit.”
Karenzi said that he’d had to learn to set aside his own guilt. It was not easy, he said, but it was the only way to demonstrate to survivors that he was not motivated by selfish reasons, that he truly wanted to help them find closure.
The results changed the realities of daily life in the village. “When I feel like I want to go to her house,” Karenzi said, nodding toward Muhongayire, “I am free to go there, and vice versa. We have built a very deep trust, and we live together as a community.” Muhongayire leaned over and said something in Karenzi’s ear while placing her hand on his shoulder. They both laughed.
Discussion groups like these are still rare in Rwanda. In other villages where Hutu and Tutsi live together, Muhongayire said, people may act politely in public, but they are not fully healed. Small interpersonal conflicts bring out deep-seated fear and prejudice. “Inside of those Hutu, they have a feeling: The Tutsi are still bad. And on the other side, the survivors also feel the same way toward the Hutu,” Karenzi said.
I asked the group if, 30 years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, they could have ever conceived that they would sit together like this one day. They all looked at one another and shook their heads, smiling. “We could have never imagined it,” Muhongayire said.
Twenty miles outside Kigali, at a church in Nyamata that is now a memorial site, the clothes that were worn by thousands of victims are laid across dozens of wooden pews. The piles are so high that at first glance, I thought that they were covering bodies. But they were only clothes. A white sweater with a single pink flower on the collar, a yellow dress with blue polka dots, a small pair of jeans full of holes from shrapnel—a kaleidoscope of muted colors.
The guide at the site, a woman named Rachel, took me around the church turned memorial and told me her story. Both of her parents were killed in the genocide, as were her eight siblings. She found refuge with a family who took her across the border to what was then Zaire. After the killing ended, she returned to Rwanda, this time alone.
Rachel has no photographs of her family, because the militia set them on fire. She still remembers their faces, but they have become blurrier. Now, when she tries to recall them, she does not know what is real and what she has conjured in her imagination.
“After the genocide, I felt angry,” she said. “But nowadays, no. Because if you refuse to forgive someone, you have a kind of burden, and it is very difficult to move forward.”
I thought about a little girl’s dress I saw in the church, with red roses embroidered along its sleeves and blood stains streaking across its hem. “So forgiving is not something you did for them, as much as something you did for yourself?” I asked.
“Yes,” Rachel said. “For protection.”
This, in so many ways, is the story of Rwanda 30 years later: a story of protection. A country attempting to protect itself from another genocide, sometimes through deliberate forgetting. At the same time, memorials protecting the bones and bodies of those who were killed in an attempt to make forgetting impossible. Perpetrators, some who have tried to protect themselves from prison and some who have tried to protect themselves from the poison of guilt that threatens to corrode their conscience. Survivors protecting the memories of their loved ones, but also their own stability. The contradictions are innumerable.
As survivor after survivor told me, 30 years is not that long ago. The scars are still on the land, and still on their bodies. It is impossible to truly forget. It is a decision to forgive. It is a constant struggle to move on.
This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “Is Forgiveness Possible?”
