Kigali, Rwanda
The church in Ntarama, a 4five-minute drive south of Rwanda’s capital Kigali, is a red brick building about 20 meters long and five meters wide. Inside are visual elements of Catholic churches around the world: pews for members of the congregation, an altar, stained glass windows, and a cross decorating the entrance. Then there are the scars of the unimaginable: piles of blood-stained clothing hanging along walls and demonstration instances containing more than 260 human skulls, many of them fractured or broken, some with rusty weapons still penetrating. Nearby, crudely carved sticks and clubs are propped up in front of the altar.
Ntarama is the site of one of the many massacres that occurred during the 1994 genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda, one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. Beginning on April 7 of that year, in 100 days of horrific violence, members of the ethnic Hutu organization systematically killed some 800,000 Tutsis, more than a million, according to the Rwandan government and other sources. The killers ranged from militias to ordinary citizens, and neighbors turned on their neighbors. Many moderate Hutus and some members of the Twa minority were also killed.
More than 5,000 Tutsis were killed in Ntarama, in addition to babies, young people and pregnant women, many of whom were raped before being killed, said Evode Ngombwa, site manager of the Ntarama Genocide Memorial, one of six sites in Rwanda commemorating the atrocity. “People bribed the culprits with cash so they could eliminate them. Instead of killing them with machetes, they just shot them dead,” Ngombwa says as he shows me around the church. More and more bodies are being discovered. Every year, about 6,000 more people are buried there in mass graves.
This month, Rwanda and the world begin commemorations to mark 30 years since the start of this atrocity. The genocide is now one of the most studied of its kind. Researchers ranging from social and political scientists to fitness specialists, geneticists and neuroscientists, have studied the occasion and its consequences with tactics that had not been imagined in the case of past atrocities.
This work is vital today in light of violent crises in various parts of the world, including Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. While there is some debate as to whether these conflicts meet the definition of genocide, some percentages of similar characteristics. Research conducted on atrocities such as the genocide in Rwanda may indicate longer-term responses and curative approaches.
Despite the difficulties of those studies, researchers say they are trying to expand a theory of genocide and situations that spur mass violence. They provide guidance to first responders as well as those involved in peacebuilding and assist survivors of other systematic killings and war. Some of its approaches have been used in other conflicts. And Rwanda Studies lectures on how scholars can study similar events.
“Genocide studies are important,” says Phil Clark, a foreign policy researcher at SOAS, a component of the University of London, who has studied Rwanda for more than two decades. “If we can begin to understand why and how genocides occur, and especially if we can compare genocides around the world, we will preferably be able to build a general theory about how such terrible events are possible. “
One of the classes that emerges from Rwanda is the importance of engaging – and supporting – local researchers, whose paintings, language skills, and access to traumatized communities can be key to understanding the roots of violence and the most productive techniques for reconciliation. It can be complicated, in the case of Rwanda, because the genocide wiped out almost its entire educational community. Now, thanks to systems to magnify the voices of local educators, their paintings are nonetheless gaining a wider audience.
Prior to 1994, the field of genocide studies was ruled by the Holocaust: the systematic slaughter of six million Jews during World War II by Nazi Germany. “It’s only in the last 20 years that other genocides have entered the debate,” Clark says. But studies on Rwanda didn’t start right away. ” It may not have been until 10 or 15 years after the genocide that scholars began to question what drove thousands of ordinary civilians to engage in mass violence. “
Experts say it is vital not to establish the close link between genocide and colonialism in Rwanda. In the early 20th century, Belgian colonizers began to officially divide the Rwandan people into social classes: Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa. -scientific ideas, adding phrenology and arbitrary observations, such as how many farm animals a user owned. Ethnic tensions between Hutus and Tutsis have intensified over the decades, with several massacres of Tutsis taking place in the pre-1994 era. It paves the way for a trend toward genocide, a legal term explained by the perpetration of certain crimes aimed at destroying a specific organization and is codified in the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention.
Every genocide is unique, says Timothy Longman, a political scientist at Boston University in Massachusetts, who first visited Rwanda in 1992 and returned in 1995 as a researcher for Human Rights Watch, a foreign nongovernmental organization that was one of the first to investigate the event. But there are no unusual patterns either,” he says. Researchers can learn a lot by reading cases like Rwanda, the Holocaust and other genocides, he says. “This helps you prevent violence from falling elsewhere. “
So far, one of the major clinical contributions of the studies lies in the wisdom of intellectual fitness researchers, many of whom were in the box immediately after. Over the ensuing three decades, they have documented the initial trauma of an entire country and the slow recovery of survivors and their children, many of whom are vulnerable to re-traumatization. With few resources available, Rwanda has had to draw on its intellectual fitness facilities and has gained the unique expertise of responding to the consequences of atrocities.
At the Rwanda Biomedical Center (RBC) in Kigali, the country’s leading fitness organization, Jean Damascene Iyamuremye recalls his experience in 1994. “I’ve witnessed everything that happened. Iyamuremye was 28 years old and educated as a doctor. He was a handant, but the genocide prompted him to specialize in intellectual aptitude. He was one of the first medical workers to help survivors. “We were like firefighters,” says Iyamuremye, who is now director of RBC’s psychiatric unit. Division of Intellectual Aptitude, which oversees at the national level.
First aid came most often from the outside. Non-governmental organizations provided mental interventions, such as counselling, to survivors, most of whom had suffered physical violence and emotional trauma as a result of the massacres they had witnessed. After the genocide, 96% of Rwandans suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). ) due to excessive violence. 1
It has taken time for the country to expand its own intellectual fitness resources. In 1994, Rwanda had only one psychiatrist, Naasson Munyandamutsa, who was living in Switzerland at the time and lost most of his circle of relatives to the violence. Munyandamutsa soon returned to Rwanda and worked in the country’s only psychiatric hospital, where he began training intellectually fit staff and psychiatrists.
While Munyandamutsa, who died in 2016, was leading the education of practitioners in Rwanda, many Rwandans went in search of education, but almost a portion did not return, Iyamuremye says.
It wasn’t until 2014 that Rwanda established its own school of psychiatry at the University of Rwanda in Kigali. Even today, the country has only 16 psychiatrists, thirteen of whom are graduates of this institution, to serve a developing population of thirteen. 5 million. .
Evidence-based interventions for survivors, such as counseling, cognitive behavioral treatment, and medication, have continued; however, other people still bear significant intellectual scars from their reports (see “Complex Consequences”). In the most comprehensive survey of intellectual fitness ever conducted in Rwanda, conducted through the RBC in 2018, about 28% of genocide survivors reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, compared to 3. 6% of the general population (see “The Shadow of Trauma”).
The long term is important for survivors, as many would possibly re-traumatize. For example, media reports about violence in neighboring regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo can bring back memories, Iyamuremye says. And the annual commemorations held from April to July, known as kwibuka in the national language, Kinyarwanda, pose challenges. “You’ll see other people fall, fret and cry” because what they’re experiencing triggers a memory, Iyamuremye says.
For this year’s commemorations, RBC and other organizations trained 5,000 first responders across Rwanda to help those in need. But Iyamuremye and her colleagues have learned that commemorations themselves can be therapeutic: They give other people a chance to communicate about their trauma and about others. .
And researchers have found that even other people who didn’t live through the genocide are suffering. “Intergenerational trauma is a challenge and a truth in Rwanda. It needs to be addressed with strong and forceful interventions,” says Iyamuremye.
At Rwanda’s military hospital on the outskirts of Kigali, Léon Mutesa, a doctor and long the country’s only geneticist, cares for mothers and young children in his paediatric clinic. Mutesa, who directs the Center for Human Genetics at the University of Rwanda, was the first to explore the effects of trauma on Rwandans at the genetic level. In the early 2000s, Mutesa found that young people born to pregnant women in 1994 also exhibited symptoms of trauma. During the commemorations, young people expressed symptoms such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, and hallucinations due to an occasion they had not experienced.
Inspired by studies of Holocaust survivors,2 Mutesa designed a small study to determine whether the trauma of the genocide had left epigenetic marks on people’s DNA by adding methyl groups in certain regions.
In this study3, conducted in 2012, Mutesa’s team took blood samples from pregnant women in 1994 and their children, as well as from participants who had not been exposed to genocide. The team uncovered evidence that genocide survivors and their children had similar epigenetics. marks on certain sections of DNA.
Hoping to publish a larger study, Mutesa collaborated with Stefan Jansen, a Belgian neuroscientist who had been working at the University of Rwanda since 2011. In 2017, the two men, along with U. S. partners, secured investment from the U. S. National Institutes of Health. He has joined the U. S. Department of Homeland Security to expand his research.
“We found that the exposed mothers had about 24 differentially methylated regions, which is very high compared to the control group,” says Clarisse Musanabaganwa, a medical studies analyst at RBC who was part of Mutesa and Jansen’s team. The team found that many of the methylated regions were the same in mothers and girls who were pregnant during the genocide. 4,5 The research questions how trauma can go beyond at least one generation, and scholars recommend that lasting effects can be passed down from generation to generation through a mechanism of epigenetic inheritance.
But the concept of multigenerational epigenetic inheritance is controversial. Many scientists are skeptical about the possibility of inheriting methylation marks in human DNA.
“I don’t know of any convincing case where transgenerational inheritance (the inheritance of methylation patterns) has been demonstrated,” says Timothy Bestor, a molecular biologist from Gaylordsville, Connecticut, who holds a prominent position at Columbia University in New York.
But Mutesa and Jansen see some practical benefits in their work. When the scientists spoke to study participants about how their trauma might affect their children, they saw their resilience increase. For example, if the children of survivors were doing poorly in school, the parents now saw a conceivable reason. Researchers can help young people through psychotherapy. “Now they can understand why this happens to their children,” Mutesa says.
Biological studies also have a broader meaning, Jansen says. “We need to make it history: that’s what happened. The evidence is helping to combat Holocaust denial,” he says.
Beyond epigenetic analyses, Jansen and colleagues have strengthened methodological approaches to the intellectual fitness of networks in Rwanda. These studies have informed studies of conflicts elsewhere, such as in Iraq, Jansen says.
Much of the study of genocide in Rwanda has focused on the social sciences and humanities, addressing topics ranging from reconciliation, peacebuilding and justice to the role of ethnic designations in a post-conflict society. For example, neighboring Burundi, which experienced ethnic violence in a decade-long civil war that began in 1993, chose to recognize ethnicities, while Rwanda’s government eliminated formal ethnic distinctions after the genocide. In a global study6 comparing countries that followed one technique or another after the war, those that chose to recognize that ethnic teams performed higher on social markers such as peace, democracy, and economics.
The growing literature on genocide shows that it has huge ramifications that extend beyond the borders of the countries where it occurs, the researchers say.
“In terms of the scale of violence, the scale of disruption, the scale of suffering, those are incredible events,” says Scott Straus, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
The studies were conducted almost exclusively through Western scholars; This is starting to change. Over the next decade, as discussions about decolonization studies began in academia, Clark began collaborating with the UK-based Aegis Trust, which manages the Kigali Genocide Memorial. through Clark and colleagues from 12 applicable journals showed that from 1994 to 2019, only 3. 3% of studies on post-genocide Rwanda had been conducted through academics in the country (see go. nature. com/3qapae7). In 2014, with investment from Swedish and British progression agencies, Aegis Trust, they launched the Research, Policy and Higher Education (RPHE) programme, an effort to invite Rwandan academics to submit study proposals.
“There are cultural nuances that need to be told through the people themselves who are going through those experiences,” says Sandra Shenge, Aegis Trust programme director at the Kigali Genocide Memorial and former director of the RPHE. The grants were modest: just £2,500 (USD 3,150) each. But the reaction to the program has been surprising, Shenge says. The first call received more than 500 applications.
The aim was for Rwandan academics to share their stories and for external researchers to provide recommendations on methodology, publication, and the most productive way to disseminate the results. These studies are compiled in a resource called the Genocide Research Hub.
“The RPHE was the most productive thing that has ever happened to Rwandan scholars,” says Munyurangabo Benda, a philosopher of faith at the Queen’s Foundation, an ecumenical school in Birmingham, UK. “This is the only area where Rwandan studies have begun to have and will have an effect on policy. “
Benda’s research,7,8 supported by the RPHE, has already influenced policy. Their work piloted a statewide program on reconciliation, which is the result of a grassroots effort. Enjoy your young nephew in Denmark, whose father is Hutu. One day, his nephew’s family reading about the genocide in Rwanda and his companions asked him, “Was your family a murderer or a survivor?His nephew was traumatized.
The studies have helped the systems that the Rwandan government offers to scholars of other ages, Benda says.
The RPHE curriculum also includes classes to make the wider educational network more inclusive. According to Clark, “the challenge lies with journal editors and peer reviewers,” who dismiss paintings from Rwanda and other countries because of preconceived notions about quality based on where they were made. was produced.
Another whose work has been published through the Genocide Research Hub is sociologist Assumpta Mugiraneza9. From his office on a hilltop overlooking Kigali, Mugiraneza runs an organization called the IRIBA Centre for Multimedia Heritage. Iriba means “source” in Kinyarwanda and the centre collects audio-visual archives of testimonies of genocide and life before 1994.
Mugiraneza says he started these paintings to capture Rwanda’s heritage, which is in danger of disappearing. The country’s ancient oral traditions have been eroded by colonization, which has imposed reading and writing. As a result, Rwanda’s history is being written without this richer heritage, Mugiraneza says. Let’s go back to what we have in common: sound and image. “
The center, he says, is designed “for the procedure of recovering the past. “To think about genocide, “we will have to dare to look for humanity where humanity has been denied. “
IRIBA’s paintings are extraordinary, says Zoe Norridge, who studies African literature and culture at King’s College London. “These are the kinds of paintings that Rwandan scholars can do in depth, in a way that I think foreigners will never achieve. “
Researchers agree that interpreting the atrocities is a complicated task. “Research is about talking to survivors who have suffered horrors and putting yourself in a position to listen, listen and empathize,” says David Simon, director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
Still, researchers say that, through those studies, they are getting to a broader point by identifying similarities between other genocides. These include what happened in Rwanda and the Holocaust, as well as the genocide of the Armenians in 1915 and that of the Herro. and Nama other people in present-day Namibia, beginning in 1904.
All of them shared common ingredients, according to the researchers. The first is to racialize members of society and identify an “inferior” segment of the population that needs to be eliminated. Other points come with the elaboration of plans for organized massacres and the dissemination of an ideology in a society. The final detail is the involvement of the state and its establishments, such as religious establishments and schools, as participants in the massacres, says historian Vincent Duclert, one of the leading scholars of the 1994 genocide in France.
The studies in Rwanda helped solidify the theory, Duclert says. This trend was reinforced by the genocide of the Tutsis. “
According to the researchers, another lesson learned from Rwanda’s experience is the need to seek multiple narratives, from people inside and outside the region, perpetrators and survivors. “In 1994, and in the years that followed, there was a very undeniable narrative that the Rwandan genocide was motivated by long-standing tribal hatreds, and it’s almost self-explanatory,” says Elisabeth King, who studies peace, conflict, and schooling in New York. These explanations, in turn, can help researchers and others understand why other people commit atrocities and can ultimately help broaden approaches to preventing them.
Straus also examines causal points that are not unusual in other genocides and why some conflicts involving the ingredients of genocide escalate into genocide: violence in Mali in the 1990s and in Côte d’Ivoire in the early 2010s are two examples. 10
Some scholars argue that the study of genocides can bring many benefits, but that preventing them from taking place is ultimately a political issue between foreign countries and agencies.
Haggai Shyaka Mugabe, acting director of the Centre for Conflict Management at the University of Rwanda, is pessimistic about the extent to which the study of genocide can end it. “What we publish informs public policy,” says Mugabe, who studies transitional justice and peacebuilding. 11 But that doesn’t translate into anything that other ordinary people can understand, he adds.
Some have also expressed fear that it could be difficult for Rwandan scholars to freely examine issues related to the genocide, due to government pressure to stick to a safe narrative on politically sensitive topics. But Mugabe rejects the idea that studies in Rwanda are useless because of perceived political tension. “Some of my articles have a critical facet,” he says. No cop is trying to tell me what to write or not to write. “
Researchers note that less attention has been paid to making survivors’ voices heard, as judicial investigations have focused on the perpetrators of the crimes.
Jean Pierre Sagahutu is one of the survivors. ” I can’t tell you everything that happened in 1994 because it’s too hard,” he says. “I don’t forget everything like it was yesterday,” he says. It’s like I’m seeing Him now. “Sagahutu survived hiding in a septic tank for more than two months. At that time, his father and mother were murdered. Sagahutu, an accountant by training, started driving taxis after the genocide and worked as a “repairman” for other people visiting the country. for projects, interrogating genocidal, perpetrators of violence against Tutsis. ” Sometimes my ears hurt, but it made me understand what other people had really done. And eventually, it turned into therapy.
In 2019, he met with Duclert, whom French President Emmanuel Macron had tasked with examining France’s role in the genocide, thanking the French government for the Hutu government of Rwanda before the genocide. In 2021, Duclert presented his 1,000-page report,12 which concluded that the French government had noticed evidence of an impending genocide as early as 1990, but had not taken enough steps to prevent it.
Sagahutu draws positives from Duclert’s report, but says investigators still have work to do: “I would like investigators to dig deeper, dig deeper, and find out what the real reasons for the genocide were,” he says. The genocide was not a game of chance, it was something that had been well prepared for a long time. “
One of the most important tools for researchers is the recording of survivors’ testimonies, says Yolande Mukagasana, author of the first comprehensive account of genocide through survivors, published in French in 199713. Mukagasana, now 69, remains an editor and activist. And we are determined to keep alive the memory of the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsis. In his work, he has spoken to survivors of other genocides and massacres and sees similarities in those events, regardless of where in the world they occurred. “The ideology of hate is the same,” he said, adding that survivors go through “exactly the same suffering. “
By 1994, Mukagasana was a nurse and a successful Tutsi woman running her own clinic. When the killings began, Mukagasana and her husband separated, hoping that their three children would be safer with him. During the months of the genocide, she was protected by the Hutu people, and began to write her testimony on pieces of paper, such as cigarette packets.
Mukagasana’s husband and children were killed. When she turned to the protection of the Hotel des Mille Collines, featured in the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda, one of the first things she sought was a pen and paper to record what had happened.
At IRIBA, Mugiraneza knows the importance of documenting the events of 1994. But he also strives to gather evidence from the previous life. “Weddings. Love songs. The buildings, the sayings, the stories, all those things that are so beautiful but insignificant. .
“People are negotiating a space for reflection, for the donation of life, which will allow us to better understand what extermination and death are. “
Nature 628, 250-254 (2024)
It’s me: https://doi. org/10. 1038/d41586-024-00997-7
Additional information and logistics from Aimable Twahirwa, a freelance science journalist in Kigali.
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