by Paul Farmer
Roadmaps such as Vision 2020 are a dime a dozen (the Corail-Cesselesse charrette, for example); implementing them effectively is another matter. The transitional government knew it needed new resources to reinvigorate public institutions. It quickly set about collecting taxes—one of the more thankless tasks facing post-disaster administrations—and sought, fitfully at first, to fight corruption.8 The contours of this effort had sharp edges. Many bureaucrats and local officials found themselves in trouble when asked for transparent accounting and reporting. Zealous protagonists of transparency waged a high-stakes public relations battle well before the infrastructure of transparency—electricity, computers, accountants, et cetera—was widely available, even in Kigali. The authorities also sought to settle disputed land claims in a manner that might encourage private investment and the return of more of the diaspora. Investment was a widely recognized prerequisite to growth among economic policy advisors; repatriation, however complicated a process, was indispensable because many of the Rwandans who had fled during the civil war and the preceding decades of ethnic tension were highly educated, internationally connected professionals.
The ungainly coalition of rebuilders had no shortage of external detractors, including some within the governments of Belgium and France—the colonial and neocolonial powers in Rwanda, respectively. Most supporters of the pregenocide Rwandan government pitted themselves against the interim government.9 Surviving architects of the genocide were scattered around Africa and beyond; most were fleeing justice, but some managed to infiltrate various international organizations, as Gourevitch and others reported. However, there were many untainted critics among the “expert” ranks of human rights lawyers and humanitarian groups purveying basic services to refugees.
Resettlement of refugees was a key issue. Today, many Africans displaced by conflict have languished in refugee camps for well over a decade.10 To avoid condemning its diaspora and returnees to a similar fate, the interim government of Rwanda hatched an audacious repatriation and resettlement strategy, building thousands of small settlements called imidugudu. These hastily confected villages distributed the influx of repatriated Rwandans throughout the country to avoid fueling urban slums such as the ones marring cityscapes across Africa (and Haiti). By all accounts an ambitious plan, it was showered with scorn by some refugee and shelter experts (they were already in existence by then) and lauded by others.11 In the months immediately after the genocide, the interim government negotiated the return of fifty thousand Hutu refugees from Burundi. Denouncing this scheme as forced repatriation, humanitarians and human rights lawyers predicted violence and misery. But the plan went over without major problems.12
The interim government needed a bolder strategy to repatriate the millions of Rwandans still in the Congo, many of whom were openly hostile to the fledgling government in Kigali. The entrenched humanitarian enterprise—aided in a sense by Mobutu’s dictatorship, which had also sent troops in support of the génocidaire régime13—was also complicit, as studies later showed, by feeding and housing and caring for génocidaires in their midst. Well fed and confident of their return, these génocidaires were clearly the biggest threat to the interim government and to security across Rwanda. For almost two years, the leadership in Kigali, facing a complex public-relations battle they often lost, demanded that the camps be dismantled and the refugees repatriated. With each cross-border raid from the Congo, Kigali continued to warn the UN and humanitarians that they would invade to shut down the camps if the attacks continued.
In mid-1996, Kagame launched a wildly improbable mission. His armies dismantled the refugee camps on the border, then pressed through the Congo—ninety-four times the size of Rwanda and as large as Western Europe—to Kinshasa, toppling Mobutu and his thirty-year stranglehold over the country. Much to the world’s surprise, the plan seemed to meet its objectives, although it was widely denounced as forced repatriation or worse.
Public-relations battles aside, what did this massive repatriation, forced or unforced, mean for overcrowded Rwanda? Stephen Kinzer describes what must have been a shock to the system: “Like a single organism, this huge mass of people left the squalor of refugee life and trudged toward an uncertain future at home . . . During those weeks in the autumn of 1996, more than a million people returned to Rwanda along the same roads they had used to flee two and a half years earlier.”14 The imidugudu absorbed many of the returnees, countering the low expectations of the international community and shelter experts.15 There were snags—overcrowding, joblessness, discord—but the interim government persisted, pushing development partners to build schools and health centers around the settlements. Little by little, over the years, that’s what came to pass.
Within Rwanda, reconciliation would take more than providing cheap housing, building schools, and strengthening the health sector. Stiff competition for scarce resources remained. The sheer number of competing land claims was a recipe for ongoing strife. 16 A means of adjudicating such claims was needed, as was a means of meting out justice to those who had participated in the genocide and again lived in close proximity to the survivors and relatives of the victims.17
To address competing claims on land and other property, including businesses, the interim government held a number of town-hall meetings in which a plan for resolving property disputes was discussed. This went on for months and finally led to the creation of regional offices with the authority to settle disputes and to disburse funds for reimbursements in the event that previous administrations had seized private property.18 Many plots were returned to their former owners; some were given to the displaced; some were added to the holdings of other homesteads.19 It was a messy formula but seemed to work better than predicted.
What to do with the guilty and accused was an even greater challenge. A few architects of the genocide were put on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, in neighboring Tanzania, and still others in official courts in Kigali. But these processes were lengthy, costly, and required an impartial legal system with an adequate and trained staff. Such legal infrastructure did not exist in Rwanda. The prisons were crammed with tens of thousands of accused génocidaires, and few resources were available to pursue the sort of truth and reconciliation process followed in South Africa.20 Even in 2005, when Partners In Health arrived in southeastern Rwanda to rebuild medical infrastructure, Rwandan prisons remained full of the accused and untried.
Rwanda needed an alternate legal mechanism to reach justice after the crimes of the 1990s, and it found one in tradition: the gacaca courts, long used for settling village disputes. Gacaca literally means “short grass” because in precolonial times such hearings took place in open areas where entire villages could convene. The interim government adapted the gacaca system after the genocide: “We took this concept [of gacaca courts] and developed it because it would reach people, and they would see themselves in it,” explained Kagame. “It’s the way our culture traditionally resolved problems. We have picked it and developed it to deal with present-day problems.”21 Tribunals would occur in public and near the scenes of the alleged crimes; both victims and witnesses had a chance to speak; sentences were limited to thirty years (half the time was spent on parole). Ultimately, about 80 percent of defendants were freed by the gacaca tribunals, not because they were guiltless but because there was strong pressure for self-incrimination. Confessions were met with shorter sentences, many of them deemed to have been served already.22
The gacaca courts did not fail, as some predicted, and by 2007 they had cleared out the prisons through alternative sentences, including community service. The processes seemed to allow some semblance of social recovery to occur. Although the painful process of genuine reconciliation might take generations, physicians working in the prisons (as we did) saw the reduced number of inmates diminished the likelihood of epidemics within such institutions.
For foreigners like me, it wasn’t clear who was Hutu and who Tutsi, and we were not invited to inquire.
“Ethnic divisionism” was banned in Rwanda, making it increasingly different from its former twin, Burundi, where we’ve also worked and where people are more open about their so-called ethnicity. In his book The Antelope’s Strategy: Living in Rwanda After the Genocide, intrepid researcher Jean Hatzfeld cites one Rwandan’s testament to this uneasy comity:I joined two agricultural cooperatives with the sugarcane planters along the Nyabarongo River: that’s eighty-three Hutu and Tutsi farmers in all and, with the farmers growing foodstuffs, one hundred and thirty growers. We organize raffles to help with purchases, we stand one another to drinks, we talk together quite properly. But speaking in friendship, that’s another matter. The state played its role to keep revenge from overtaking reconciliation. One cannot erase vengefulness completely from the minds of survivors. I know I have been forgiven not by them but by the state. The survivors, even if they do their share, they don’t feel safe next to the killers, they’re scared of being pushed around again. Trust has been driven out of Rwanda. It will wait behind many generations.“23
As a physician working in the public sector, or as a foreigner living in Rwanda, it was hard not to give thanks for the gacaca process and the imposed prevention of revenge. Just as it was hard to claim that the gacaca courts had failed, so too was it hard, within a decade of the genocide, to argue that the rebuilding of the civil service had failed. Rwanda was, by then, almost the mirror opposite of a “failed state,” to use the term favored by experts and echoed in the popular press. The country was able to draw on its diaspora (sizeable, if smaller than Haiti’s) to rebuild. Other technicians of various nationalities were drawn into government ministries to help build Rwandan capacity. The state also made great strides in promoting gender equity among its civil service, recently passing Sweden as the country with the highest proportion of female representation in the world.24
The machinery of humanitarian aid and reconstruction was welcomed into Rwanda post-genocide but with more substantial strictures than in Haiti (or in the Congo). The policy was clear: NGOs and aid institutions were welcome if they squared their plans with the reconstruction priorities of the government. Some NGOs left, protesting that the Rwandan government was heavy-handed, controlling, and antidemocratic. (Such critiques were not often heard in the years before the genocide, as Peter Uvin’s work attests,25 when aid groups were given a carte blanche to work in Rwanda.) The post-genocide government did not mourn their departure because it regarded some of the NGOs, and much of the humanitarian machine, as part of the problem. The feeling was mutual, often enough.
Debates about these issues continue to this day, but their urgency is lessened by both security and continued economic growth. Mass violence has not recurred in Rwanda, and the GDP has trebled over the past decade. This year, the summer before elections would formally grant Kagame a second and final term, a number of articles appeared in the international press arguing that his was an authoritarian government with slender commitment to democratic rule. But critical re-readings of the evidence will require a careful evaluation of the views of the many polities and organizations committed to self-exculpation regarding the genocide and its echoes in the eastern Congo. For example, the recent United Nations draft report was damning to Rwanda. The official Rwandan response, published simultaneously, wrote the same history along very different lines.26 One thing is sure: mutually contradictory claims of causality and assessments of blame will continue to be advanced with great confidence for years to come.
One thing that isn’t open to much debate: Rwanda in 2010 is a far cry not only from Rwanda in 1995 but also from Rwanda in the years just before the genocide. In Aiding Violence, Uvin explained how he and others in development circles failed to note the rise of genocidal ideology because of their exclusive focus on certain indicators: GDP per capita, inflation, corruption indices, and demographic trends. In effect, Uvin argues that he and his colleagues were blind to the palpable frictions erupting around them because their attention was fixed narrowly on the “development model.”27 The risk of making a similar mistake remains today. But armed with cautionary tales from Uvin, Polman, Terry, and Dambisa Moyo (indeed, the entire “groaning bookshelf” of critiques), it would be a shame to shirk the hard tasks of analysis and discernment, whether the topic at hand is central Africa after war and genocide or Haiti after coups and storms and the quake of 2010.
One thing Haiti could use right now is analysis informed by discernment and a pinch of optimism about rebuilding. Facing a challenge of this magnitude, taking the side of critique (and, sometimes, despair) is certainly easier. Many in Haiti (and some outside) appear content to forecast failure unendingly. But as Michèle Montas and others contributing to this book show, cynicism about reconstruction is less common among the Haitian poor—the majority of the country’s population—than might be expected. Many Haitians interviewed after the earthquake or during the interminable wait for rebuilding to begin still believe that Ayiti p’ap peri—“Haiti will never be finished.” Many believe that Haiti can change, in spite of the fact that they themselves have, so far, been given little role in helping to rebuild their own civic institutions and infrastructure.
Haitian history is rife with examples of exclusion and its constant counterpart: resistance. The country was born through violent resistance to an oppressive social and economic system, the “peculiar institution” of slavery.28 In the years following independence, many Haitians voted with their feet, removing themselves from ruined plantations to small plots of land and rejecting, when possible, any and all systems of coerced labor. As steep mountainsides were cultivated, population growth and ecological decline (due to deforestation and erosion) set the stage for the late-twentieth-century collapse that itself set the stage for both urban migration and increasing vulnerability to storms and other disasters.
The collapse has been ecological, economic, and political. The war of independence, the forced popular movement that created a nation in 1804, had no triumphant follow-up. Instead, the country divided into north and south, and the bulk of the state’s effort focused on self-perpetuation. Coup followed coup, as politicians either conscripted the remnants of the revolutionary army or created their own militias to seize power. This was, as the anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot has observed, a case of “state against nation.”29 By the late nineteenth century, Haiti had become a predatory state, like Rwanda pre-genocide: weak and unable to meet the basic needs of its people but strong enough to prey on them. The Duvalier régime (1957–1986) was less an aberration than the ultimate expression of a predatory state based on patronage and violence.
This was all supposed to change in 1990, when Latin America’s oldest republic held its first free elections. The Haitian people, previously excluded from the political process, participated in great numbers, electing a representative of the renascent and unforced popular movement. That government lasted only seven months before it too was unseated by a military coup in September, 1991. But the participatory impulse was too strong, and the military régime too violent, to return Haiti to the status quo ante. Since the 1986 fall of the Duvalier dictatorship, no unelected régime has lasted long, and each elected government (there have been, really, only four) has emerged from the popular movement. Only two people have ever been elected to Haiti’s highest offices in democratic elections: Aristide and his former prime minister, René Préval. Their original platform, laid out hastily in the troubled interregnum that followed the end of the dictatorship, was to promote basic social and economic rights and to allow wider civic participation in governance.
This movement, too, has fallen prey to the fissioning tendencies of Haitian politics. By the time this book is published, another election cycle will have taken place. Haiti’s many misfortunes and persistent poverty, which together have dashed some of the hopes shared after the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship, and exclusion of the political party identified with Aristide will mean less participation in the electoral process. But a strong government requires stro
ng civic support and not only from the vocal members of “civil society”—code, as noted, for the non-poor. The non-poor are a minority in Haiti, a tiny economic élite and small middle class. A book about Haiti after the earthquake is perhaps not the place in which to reflect on theories about human rights, but struggles about voting rights and subsistence rights are intimately related to debates about development and humanitarian assistance. These debates have been playing themselves out in Haiti for decades.
Now, as cholera spreads rapidly through rural Haiti and menaces the camps and slums in urban areas, Haitians like the ones I’ve had the privilege to serve as a doctor continue to press for a stronger and more competent government; they continue to question mainstream views of both development and human rights. Like many Rwandans, most of the Haitians interviewed for the Voices of the Voiceless project want to live in a country no longer dependent on foreign aid. They want to live in a country with food sovereignty and basic services. They want decent jobs and to participate fully in the reconstruction of their country. The events of the past year have thrown the alternatives manifested by these debates, and the problems underlying them, into stark relief.