(Article published on One Mission Matters, magazine of the Methodist Church missionary section; here in its entirety, as we have more space!)
Rwanda, “the land of a thousand
hills”, the country of the Mountain Gorillas… sure, but who isn’t thinking of
the genocide first?
Yet, that was 1994 and since
then the country has been peaceful, rebuilding and reconciling, so in 2015 it’s
hard to see a direct impact of those 100 hellish days on modern Rwanda: the
orphans are now in their 20s, at least; what was destroyed has been rebuilt or
replaced; trials are mostly ended; the following wars, fought outside the
country, are basically over and ethnicity is no longer mentioned. Moreover, as cynical
as it might seem, in actual fact the genocide has had some very positive
consequences: from the guilt and compassion of the West a huge stream of aid
has been flowing for 21 years to this very small country, allowing it to grow
much more than others, so that it now boasts tarmac main roads, a great number
of schools and health centres, very good access to ARVs, political stability, high-ranking
levels of security and an economy that keeps receiving praises for its GDP
growth.
All good, then?
Unfortunately not: if the typical
problems of poor countries might be slightly less crippling here due to the
aforementioned development, they are all still present, at times made harder to
tackle by peculiarities clearly arising from 1994.
First of all, the genocide was
part of a war and in every war, especially civil and ethnic ones, the first
casualty is truth: the historical truth about those events has not been fully revealed
yet (watch the BBC documentary issued in October 2015), which prevents the
country from achieving real reconciliation, despite many wonderful examples of
forgiveness, and it may well be that even Rwandans’ terrible (and admitted) habit
of lying to protect or pursue their interests is a consequence of how the
country dealt, from top to bottom, with that dark page of its recent past,
where so many people had something to hide. As anyone can imagine, to work in
such a context of constant lies, where you cannot trust anyone, is extremely
stressful.
Secondly, inequality in
developing countries is quite common and astonishingly higher than in the West,
but here it is even more painful to see, not only because with all that aid
publicly available this “unified” society should have grown more evenly, but
also because inequality works partly along those same ethnic lines which have
now “disappeared” (only because the topic is banned): one portion of the
population has clearly benefitted much more from some forms of aid, as only the
victims-victors were entitled to receive it, and still are.
Thirdly, as in most
post-disaster countries, the enormous influx of money has created a culture of
“milk the white man” and a tendency to rely on external sources which permeate
all society, church included, making it difficult not to feel like a
wallet-on-legs and hard to instill any sense of responsibility and ownership in
projects.
Last, but not least, the current
leadership, in order to maintain its iron grip of power, has turned freedom of
expression into “something for western countries”, as we’ve been bluntly told
(“to protect us”) by a religious figure who, like too many people, justifies
the dictatorial regime with the excuse that “Rwanda went through the genocide”;
therefore, discussing policies or showing any form of dissent is out of the
question, which is not only soul-destroying for human rights lovers and
defenders, but, more importantly, absolutely incompatible with a healthy and
just society.
