Update on Rwanda
Now 12 years since the genocide that started on broke out on 6 April 1994 – the worst planned ethnic killing since the Holocaust sixty years earlier – Rwanda is struggling to overcome its dark history of thirty-two years of state division, years of economic collapse and 100 days of genocide that killed 1,000,000 people. In 1994, the country was in ruins and most, if not all, the infrastructure was destroyed. Nearly 3 million people fled the country in exile.
The genocide had long reaching socio-economic consequences that have are working against Rwanda in rebuilding itself. Regional instability, political and social fragility, a high population density, severe skills shortage and limited market and trade links, combined with an emerging HIV/AIDS epidemic and extreme poverty (60% of the population living below poverty line) are all presenting major hurdles in the reconstruction process.
Yet since those dark days of 1994, tremendous efforts have been made by the government of Rwanda and other organisations, to tackle the complex problems facing Rwanda. There has been great progress in national reconstruction since 1994.
The legacy of death and destruction, however, is a generation of survivors who have not only been traumatised by their experiences during the genocide. These survivors have to cope with the lasting consequences of bereavement, poverty, rape-induced HIV infection and other evils. But like many atrocities before it, this genocide has become forgotten. When the men with the machetes were finally stopped in July 2004, the story of genocide was assumed to have ended.
But Rwanda's legacy of genocide is far from over. The estimated 25,000 women who were raped and deliberately infected by HIV positive men in 1994 die a slow death from HIV/AIDS. Many of these women have testified that almost all the rapes occurred after they had been forced to watch their entire families murdered. "You alone are being allowed to live," they were frequently told by rapists, "so that you will die of sadness."
The world failed Rwanda in 1994. Its subsequent attempts to bring justice for genocide have been slow and costly. Now a lack of funds to access antiretroviral drugs threatens a second 'genocide' for those now infected with HIV/AIDS during the systemic rape campaign.
Never again?
After the Nazi Holocaust had been exposed and its perpetrators condemned, the international community declared 'Never again'. Yet tragically, deliberate attempts to exterminate entire races of people have not been confined to the history books of the early twentieth century. Genocide has since occurred in Bosnia and Rwanda, to name but two places, and most recently Darfur in Sudan. Whatever the lessons learnt, survivors of genocide remain forgotten, and vulnerable groups cannot feel assured that 'never again' really means never again.