Rwanda and the NY Times: On those images by Pieter Hugo pairing
perpetrators and victims of the 1994 Genocide
Posted by Suchitra Vijayan
"Portraits of Reconciliation,"-the photo-essay commemorating the 20th
anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide-published recently in the New York
Times, is a deeply disturbing piece of journalism. Profoundly banal,
the subtitle states, "20 years after the genocide in Rwanda,
reconciliation still happens one encounter at a time." Repetitive and
reductive, the narrative reduces violence to a set of meaningless
outbursts, while it simultaneously fashions forgiveness in the
Christian vision of redemption. A self-assured narrative of
reconciliation, forgiveness and transformation, the photo-essay
depicts a world organized around binary preoccupation: Hutu and Tutsi,
Good and Evil, Victim and Perpetrator, and Redemption and Liberation.
It's impulse locates core Rwandan identity in the archetypal biblical
figures of a forgiving-victim and a perpetrator in search of
redemption. There is one "overarching identity" that gathers all the
fractured identities into some narrative thread. In its most sinister
form, this documentary drive serves to enforce dominant power
structures in society.
How could the trauma be spoken of through one photograph, one voice?
How can a range of contradictory and irreconcilable emotions of loss
be explained through one narrative, one self? While photography is
capable of opening up questions about power and authority, which are
silenced, this essay adheres to frequently circulated and
authoritative discursive practices. There is no critical enquiry of
the premise that demands and dictates reconciliation; instead it
de-facto buys into the assumptions.
Without language, pictures get handcuffed in what Walter Benjamin
famously called "the approximate." The approximate is a liability, at
times even intellectually incomplete and has to be remedied by means
of language and thought. While the entire piece provokes momentary
horror and an illusion of human resilience, it largely leaves the
spectator ignorant. The text similarly refuses to venture into areas
of moral ambiguities where victim become perpetrators, or critique the
political demands placed on the survivors of genocide by the Rwandan
State. Consequently it fails to grapple with the problem of the
political.
Since Marx's critique of Hegel, reconciliation is seen as a concept
that always casts social conflict in the service of the state. It
immediately dilutes the fundamental contradictions at the heart of
conflict, the consciousness of which would radically call into
question the very basis of the State and automatically denies the
possibility of living with irresolvable conflicts. As an ideology,
reconciliation immediately becomes complicit in the exercise of
various forms of structural violence in its appeal to an idea of
commonality to legitimate a social hierarchy.
Thus reconciliation is not just a personal act, it has come to
function as an organizing category that disciplines conflict and
renders subjects disagreement resolvable in terms agreeable with the
new post-genocide state. But more crucially it is conditioning the way
in which Rwanda's history is being rewritten as the history of
violence (victim's history) and a history of Hutu guilt, rather than
one of exploitation, power, resistance and the unthinkable violence,
whose genealogy is deeply intertwined with the history of
colonization. .
Rwanda is a living museum of genocide. Signs with the word "Jenoside'
is plastered throughout the country. These signs mark the sites of
massacres and mass graves. Other larger signs repeatedly proclaimed,
"Never Again." Ntarama and Nyamata Churches locatednsouth of Kigali
are horrifying reminders of violence that took place during the
genocide are now genocide memorial sites. The floor of the Church at
Ntarama, bloodstains, bones, blood soaked clothing, shoes, and
personal artifacts from the massacre remain scattered on the floor. At
Murambi genocide memorial site, mummified bodily remains of men, women
and infants are displayed. Seeing these bodies, frozen in the
positions in which they met their gruesome fates, one can hear an
"extraordinary scream pass through nature".
These corpses are a testimony to the genocide. A physical
manifestation of Tito Rutaremara's proclamation that, "the genocide
must live on." A constant physical reminder is still deemed imperative
to fight against any future "genocidal tendencies". These artifacts of
political violence, shrines and memorials perform another function,
they are a constant affirmation of Hutu atrocity and guilt.
When you refuse to bury the dead, when the memory of violence lingers
in every street corner, when does mourning end, and where does
forgiveness begins? What are the Rwandans to reconcile themselves to?
No one can say with certainty how many were killed in those 100 days
of terror. The estimates vary between ten and fifty thousand Hutu,
and close to a million Tutsi. Hutu's were killed due to political
opposition, others for refusing to partake in the violence. Both men
and women participated. Some women played prominent political roles,
while others killed. Some assisted killers by preparing the meals,
delivering food to check posts and others even cheered them on. On the
streets, these women became informants calling out hiding spots,
refusing to hide their Tutsi neighbors and stealing from the dead.
Women partook, because many genuinely believed that Tutsi's need to be
killed. In one remarkable story, a Tutsi woman wore military uniform
on during the genocide, to get through the roadblocks to save her
Tutsi niece who had been attacked. When subsequently caught by the
Interahamwe trying to hide the girl, she offered herself as a sex
slave (femme de viol) to the local Interahamwe leader in order to
protect the girl, and others, from rape. Later she used her
"rape-husbands" help to travel to Butare in search of her other
family, all the while witnessing her "husbands" atrocities. There
remains a reluctance to acknowledge the complex realities of women's
lives during the genocide, beyond the gendered imagery.
The unsettling reality is that everybody participated. The Genocide
then, was not merely the State project of annihilation; it was social
and populist, with "popular" agency. It was carried out by hundreds of
thousands of men and women. The Photo-essay remains oblivious to the
other kind of history, the Rwandan state's persistent refusal to
prosecute alleged war crimes committed by the (then rebel) Rwandan
Patriotic Army (RPA) before and during the genocide, reprisal killings
by RPA soldiers and other individuals during and after the genocide,
and the massacre of thousands of Hutu perpetrated by the RPA - for
instance, the attack on the Kibeho camp for Internally Displaced
Persons in 1995 and in eastern Zaire/Democratic Republic of Congo.
Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, writing in May 1994, stated that Rwanda
is clinically dead as a nation. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)
under President Kagame used nothing short of brute force and war, and
a new foundational myth to breathe life back to the Rwandan State.
Once in government, Mr Kagame, who first served as Rwanda's defence
minister and vice-president, backed the rebellion in neighbouring
Democratic Republic of Congo to overthrow President Mobutu Seso Seko's
regime, that started the First Congo War.
Similarly, the genocide gave birth to Tutsi Power in Rwanda. Rwandan
political power remains in the hands of a few men, who grew up as
refugees in Uganda, and are former RPF officers. This process of
accumulation of power in the hands of a small inner circle is masked
by the government enforced 'version' of history. A history constantly
validated by stories of reconciliation. The memory of the genocide is
instrumentalized to stifle dissent and international criticism. The
act of reconciliation, predominantly through gacaca courts, although
sometimes genuinely participatory, has been manipulated to intimidate
Kagame's political opponents and consolidate power.
Rwandan identity today, is inexplicably shaped as the identity of
surviving the genocide. As the Genocide lives on, there are living
breathing bodies, who closely escaped annihilation, who live amongst
men and women who perpetrated and made these deaths possible.
Everyday, they encounter the memory of violence, death and loss. It is
these lives from whom we demand forgiveness and extract
reconciliation, for the sake of the State. The reconciliation process
can achieve nothing because it does not promise justice and there can
be no justice without a reorganization of power.
The photographs by Pieter Hugo perpetuate a different kind of
violence. First, it silences and misrepresents the history of the
survivors, both Tutsis and Hutus. Second, it re-enforces the
collective stigmatization of all Hutu as génocidaires. Despite
periodic chastising of President Kagame and his government, the
general admiration for him and a consistent refusal to demand a
prosecution of RPA for its war crimes remain a standard Western
practise. Rwandan government's consistent use of illegitimate force
outside the border of its own state, progressive march towards
authoritarianism, misuse of the judicial process of reconciliation to
consolidate power, and even the simple recognition that Kagame went
into [DR] Congo with American support and started two wars to
consolidate the Rwandan state authority, remains written out of these
narratives.
If this is the status quo, these stories and storytellers, then, act
as useful idiots in the service of the Rwandan state, and reaffirm the
broader western consensus. Our quiet encouragement and support in
perpetuating this narrative makes us complicit bystanders to the
perpetrators of yesterday.
http://africasacountry.com/rwanda-the-genocide-must-live-on/
--
SIBOMANA Jean Bosco
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