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III. Official Responsibilities, Fear, and Revenge

Preventing and punishing attacks on citizens constitute fundamental duties of the state, basic to the rule of law. Rwandan officials face special difficulties in executing these duties because the country has so recently known the violence of genocide and because the survivors and perpetrators — or accused perpetrators – of that violence live in close proximity to one another.

All observers agree that a number of genocide survivors and others involved in the gacaca process as judges or witnesses have suffered harassment and, some of them, injury or death. Estimates of the number of victims vary considerably, in part because many cases involve differing possible interpretations of motives for the abuse.³² Asked by a journalist to comment on an estimate of 160 survivors killed since 2000, National Police Commissioner General Andrew Rwigamba, speaking on a live radio broadcast on December 3, 2006, at first confirmed the figure, then moments later corrected himself to say that to his knowledge, this figure was not accurate. In the same radio broadcast, Minister of Internal Security Cheikh Moussa Fazil Harerimana stated that according to official statistics there had been 35 attempts on the lives of genocide survivors in 2006 but that only 7 survivors had been killed, a figure considerably below the number of 16 then being used in the press.³³

The Rwandan government has responded to attacks, threats, and harassment of survivors and others involved in the gacaca process by repeatedly warning that persons guilty of such crimes will be harshly punished.³⁴ In several cases, suspects have been arrested, tried and convicted. In mid-2006 the government also established an office of witness protection. According to a deputy prosecutor general, the office had registered 26 complaints of threats or hostile actions against witnesses by October and had “resolved” 10 of them.  Work has been hampered by the office being centralized in Kigali, a problem that the service expects to address by establishing a free telephone line.³⁵  

Survivors’ organizations demand still greater protection, insisting through statements and in the press that their security is not assured.³⁶ As one genocide survivor from Rukumberi told government officials in a recent call-in radio broadcast, survivors were no longer going to “stick out their necks to have them hacked.” He continued, “It’s no longer a question of waiting for people to be slaughtered day after day.”³⁷ Elsewhere in Rwanda survivors are also said to have decided to act in their own defense, including by taking revenge on those thought guilty of abusing survivors.³⁸

In addition to protecting genocide survivors, the government must also assure order and equitably enforce the law for all Rwandans. After the Rukumberi killings, authorities sent soldiers to restore calm and held meetings themselves with local residents. These measures seem to have reassured survivors and the residents of Mugwata.

However, some residents of Mugwata did not perceive the steps taken by the police to identify and arrest persons alleged to be responsible for the reprisal killings and other violence as similarly effective and impartial. Neither were residents of Mwulire reassured by the police reaction to the alleged extrajudicial executions.

Police officers must investigate all those accused of having participated in killings. In addition, the national police authorities must permit an impartial and independent investigation into the deaths of the three suspects who died in police custody some hours after being apprehended. Fair trials, according to international due process standards, must take place for all those against whom there exists serious evidence of guilt.

Ensuring that the rule of law is enforced in incidents like those at Rukumberi and Mwulire is critical, but it does not represent the full extent of official responsibility for ensuring the security of Rwandans. Government officials also bear responsibility for policies and practices they institute that affect the environment in which citizens act. Thus official interpretation of threats to survivors and others involved in the gacaca process color the perceptions and may influence the actions both of those who feel at risk of attack and those who believe they are unjustly seen as possible perpetrators of such attacks.

Beginning in 2004, government officials often claimed that attacks on survivors and others involved in the gacaca process were motivated by “genocidal ideology.”³⁹ Even before the “genocidal ideology” explanation acquired prominence in official discourse, some survivors expressed fears about a possible recurrence of the genocide. With repeated official statements that such ideas must still be feared, survivors are more afraid, continually reminded that their very existence as members of the Tutsi ethnic group may suffice to expose them again to injury and death.⁴⁰ 

The assumption that genocidal ideas underlie attacks on survivors and others involved in the gacaca process – an assumption often made in the absence of objective evidence established through police investigations – also increases fears among Rwandans of Hutu ethnicity. Since perpetrators of genocide were Hutu (with a few exceptions), it is Rwandans of this group who fear being unfairly charged with any current crimes said to be motivated by genocidal ideas or by the desire to escape justice for genocidal crimes of the past.  The reprisal killings at Rukumberi and the perception that police have not thoroughly investigated these crimes nor the killing of suspects in police custody reinforce Hutu fears that they may not receive justice when crimes are committed against them and even that they may be accused of and punished for crimes they have not committed.⁴¹

Statements about the continued existence of “genocidal ideology” appear to contradict another official theme –  that Rwanda is well on the way to reconciliation, which presumably implies that genocidal ideas are on the wane.

Following the killings in Rukumberi and Mwulire, however, some officials seemed to moderate the insistence that “genocidal ideology” lay behind attacks on survivors. In the December 3 radio broadcast mentioned above, National Police Commissioner General Rwigamba said that survivors sometimes exaggerate the number of their fellows killed for reasons related to the genocide, remarking that genocide survivors could also be killed for other reasons, such as business disputes or conflicts over land or cattle. He commented that survivors could even be killed in the course of committing a crime. He said, “They are Rwandans like others. Just because they are survivors of the genocide does not mean that there are no bad elements among them.”⁴²

In the same broadcast, Minister of Internal Security Cheikh Moussa again mentioned “genocidal ideology” as the motive that led Habinshuti to kill the survivor Murasira, but he then warned listeners against taking the law into their own hands, a warning in which National Police Commissioner Rwigamba joined. Minister Harerimana specified that a person in danger had the right to defend himself but that revenge killings were unacceptable and illegal.⁴³

In another radio broadcast some two weeks later, Executive Secretary of the National Service of Gacaca Courts Domitille Mukantaganzwa stressed that the killings of the genocide survivor and the gacaca judge were complex cases and could well have resulted from a number of motives, including bad relations within a family and bad relations between villages, as well as from reasons related to gacaca proceedings. Tempering statements by other officials that Habinshuti acted from “genocidal ideology”, Mukantaganzwa said that he had been successfully integrated into the community since his release and had even attempted to facilitate the work of the gacaca jurisdiction.⁴⁴

However, in late December these more nuanced appreciations of relations between survivors and other Rwandans were overshadowed by restatements of the importance of “genocidal ideology” at the annual “National Dialogue” meeting of national and local political and administrative authorities. In a discussion of attacks on survivors and others involved in the gacaca process, the governor of northern province, Boniface Rucagu, spoke of the need to eradicate “bad” ideology.  President Kagame said that planned or imminent attacks such as those on survivors, would inevitably be known to a circle of persons other than the perpetrator and likely included community leaders and neighbors. Participants in the meeting called for local leaders, neighbors of perpetrators, and witnesses to be held responsible for attacks on survivors in their communities.⁴⁵

Given the fears and suspicions aroused by the recent killings, it is of greatest importance that government officials enforce the law fully and impartially and that they not assume motivations for attacks, particularly where that would result in necessarily attributing the abuses to one group. In addition, any steps taken to hold persons other than direct perpetrators of crimes responsible under the law must comply fully with the principles and limits of Rwandan and international human rights law.