If there is one thing that sparks serious disagreements about the genocide and war crimes that took place in Rwanda is the correct version of history. This entails coming to a common understanding of who did what and to what degree. Most Rwandan officials tend to assign the status of perpetrators to the majority Hutu; and that of victims to the Tutsi, thus ignoring the considerable number of Hutu killed by other Hutu during the genocide, Hutus who were killed to create a climate of terror in the country, Hutus who risked their lives to save helpless Tutsis and Tutsis who killed their fellow Tutsis.

Nelson Mandela the father of a nation

Kagame

More importantly, Hutus who were killed by the RPA during the war happen to have no historical reference. ”The experience of others has taught us that nations that do not deal with their past are haunted by it for generations”, remarked Nelson Mandela, in “After Such Crimes, What Forgiveness?”. Mandela’s reasoning finds an echo in Valérie Rosoux’s observation on ”the work of memory” as a central aspect of post-conflict strategies: ”The question raised in the aftermath of conflict is not only ‘how are we going to handle the future?’, but ‘how are we going to handle the past?”.

She notes three possible options – one can either emphasize the memory of past conflict, conceal it, or, engage in the work of memory. The attitude of Rwandan officials is perhaps best described as a combination of the first two, but with the first looming decidedly larger: there is, on the one hand, a conscious effort to obliterate the past by erasing ethnic identities, while at the same time leaving no doubt that the roles of perpetrators and victims are assigned respectively to Hutu and Tutsi, and are by no means interchangeable.

At another level, concealing one’s feelings about past conflict is sometimes seen as a rational option. Such is the price Rwandans have to pay in order to live in peace with each other. Since the memory of the genocide is not a unifying factor, as disagreement prevails over the clear demarcation of victim and perpetrator, majority of the majority Hutus choose to forget their feelings. The cumulative pressures of government coercion, fear of the other, pragmatism combine to make amnesia the preferred option.

Pretending peace has become the norm. At the center of the problem is that the exclusion of Hutu memory for the sake of a dictated unifying official memory can never bring the people of Rwanda any closer to national reconciliation, or, at the very least, peaceful co-habitation.
The imposition of an official memory, purged of ethnic references, institutionalizes a mode of thought control profoundly antithetical to any kind of inter-ethnic dialogue aimed at recognition and forgiveness. This is hardly the way to bring Hutu and Tutsi closer together in a common understanding of their tragic past, and as Nelson Mandela argued, this is a ticking time bomb.