April 7 Commemorates Start of 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda

April 7 is the International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda. The day of remembrance marks the start of the 100-day genocidal campaign in which an estimated 800,000 Rwandans—mainly Tutsis and moderate Hutus—were killed by well-organized mobs of Hutu extremists.

Edith Umugiraneza, a survivor of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda who now works for USC Shoah Foundation, says false information and manipulated facts helped ignite and sustain the violence, and even today threaten to distort our understanding of events.

“Misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda led directly to the mass killings that occurred from 1990-1994,” Umugiraneza said. “They were used to dehumanize the Tutsi, legitimize their extermination, and then as part of ongoing attempts to propagate an alternate history.”

To commemorate April 7, we sat down with another survivor, Omar Ndizeye, to discuss how grotesque stereotypes, distorted information and compliant state-sponsored media helped fuel one of the worst genocides of the last century. A graduate student at the University of Binghampton in New York, Ndizeye is a globally known genocide scholar, writer, lecturer on mass atrocities, and author of the memoir Life and Death in Nyamata.

What role did misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda play in the lead-up to and during the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda?

From what I remember from the time, spreading disinformation about the Tutsis was a way of mobilizing the population to join the killing program and the dehumanizing language used to describe them made it easier for the perpetrators to kill.

The disinformation and dehumanization had a specific format and used known words. For instance, state-sponsored media routinely referred to Tutsis as “snakes” and “cockroaches." And then there was the music, the songs that were played on the radio to mobilize the Interahamwe Hutu killers. I remember one that began airing before the genocide that was called Tail and it said of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA): “These are not soldiers, these are people with long ears and tails.” Another song was simply called Tubatsembatsembe (“Exterminate Them”). I was ten years old at the time and these were the songs that were being sung in the community, by children of my own age. The songs were part of this huge propaganda machine that radicalized and mobilized the Hutu population while at the same time portraying Tutsis as an evil to be exterminated.

After the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda there have been repeated efforts to distort or deny what happened. How does it feel as a survivor to hear these misrepresentations?

Of course, the distortion of the history of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda comes as part of the whole landscape of knowledge production. On the one hand, there is a deliberate willingness to distort the story. And for survivors like me, this distortion means a continuation, a concentration, a perpetuation of the pain we feel because there is a continued need to explain what happened to us so that the world will understand. So, I would describe the feeling that you ask about as pain. But at the same time, it’s the experience of those feelings that makes us survivors want to continue to advocate.

On the other hand, there is also limited knowledge about some of the atrocities that took place in the rural areas, especially in the villages far from the capital, Kigali. In Rwandan society, writing has not traditionally been a part of our culture, which means there’s a lot of missing information and a lot of lost memories from up in the hills and down in the marshes.

Tell us about your current research in Rwanda

Since 2016, together with three other researchers, I have been co-working on a research project entitled “Journey through Rwandan Memorials.” After observing the importance that survivors attribute to the sites where their beloved ones were killed, I decided to collect and map them for future memory work by different actors. So far I’ve collected 344 killing sites, or what French historian Pierre Nora calls “sites of memory.” In our research, we discovered that the Interahamwe set up roadblocks that were supposed to be at every major junction in the country. And as the population increased in the post-genocide era, there’s been corresponding economic and infrastructure development, which means that many “sites of memory” have been altered or have disappeared. So my project of documenting and mapping them was to keep the memory of how the extermination took place. The documentation of what happened at those sites and the search for lost memories is important because unless they are done, the memories are lost.

Moving forward, what can be done to ensure that people understand what happened in 1994?

For nine years after I graduated from university in Rwanda, I worked for civil society organizations including the Genocide Survivors Student Association and Never Again Rwanda. As part of my work at Never Again Rwanda we did research on societal healing in post-genocide Rwanda. The two main things we discovered were that trust and empathy—the two elements that every society in the world needs in order to function— had been destroyed in Rwanda.

In our research on memorials, we observed a huge influence in the way that Rwandan culture influences both the re-burials of genocide victims and the memorialization process.

When it comes to re-burials, there were many, many cases where families wished to re-bury their loved ones whose bodies had been scattered in the hills and marshes or left inside houses and churches or at other killing sites. But because of limited means and the urgency of the situation, many were unable to provide the full range of traditional Rwandan rituals at re-burial ceremonies and instead borrowed rituals that had followed genocides in other countries. So, in effect, traditional Rwandan culture was upended.

In terms of memorialization, most genocide survivors who share their testimonies do so in Kinyarwanda and, in a few cases, French. This makes the memory of the 1994 Genocide Against Tutsi in Rwanda a translated language when converted to English or other languages. And while in some circumstances the Kinyarwanda language—and Rwandans in general—use idioms and proverbs to associate their personal stories with their surroundings, not everything has an equivalent or has been perfectly translated. So more needs to be done in ensuring the accurate rendition of memory. 

There is also the need for continued partnership between various actors to document and use collected stories for the purpose of education, to organize inclusive conferences and dialogues at various levels, to create safe healing spaces in order to try and understand the dynamics of memory in post-genocide Rwanda. We need to explore how cultural and modern practices can be used to fill different gaps and to make sure that we are not missing anything. Because if we misrepresent a person’s story, then there continues to be mistrust, and that in turn affects the healing process.