Rwanda’s genocide as a catalyst for international human rights violations, and a lesson learned from the students and researchers at the Aegis Trust
Another lesson from Rwanda, say researchers, is the need to seek multiple narratives — from people inside and outside the region, and from perpetrators as well as survivors. The story of the Rwanda genocide being driven by tribal hatreds was simple in the years immediately after, according to New York University’s King, who studies conflict and education. King says that scholars have a crucial role to play in developing nuanced accounts of the political and social factors that underlie these events. They could help researchers understand why people commit atrocities, as well as contribute to developing approaches that help to stop them.
The RPHE programme also holds lessons for making the broader academic community more inclusive. The problem is with the journal editors and peer reviewers who often dismiss work from Rwanda and other countries because they have preconceived ideas of where the work was produced.
“There are cultural nuances that have to be told by the very people that go through those experiences,” says Sandra Shenge, who is director of programmes at the Aegis Trust based at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, and former RPHE manager. The grants were modest — just £2,500 (US$3,150) each. Shenge says that the response was amazing. More than 500 applications were received on the first call.
The effects of epigenetic inheritance on the mental health of genocide survivors: What scientists are learning from Rwanda? A case study of the Rwandan Genocide
“In terms of the scale of violence, the scale of disruption, the scale of suffering, they are enormously important events,” says Scott Straus, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
Some scholars say that studying genocides can yield many benefits, but that stopping them from happening is ultimately a political matter decided by nations and international bodies.
Even though evidence-based interventions for survivors have continued, people still have significant mental scars from their experiences. Almost 30% of genocide survivors in the most comprehensive mental-health survey conducted to date have reported symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, compared with 3.6% of the general population.
There’s more to biological studies than that, says Jansen. “We want to evidence that, and have that recorded for history: this is what happened.” The evidence helps to fight genocide denial, he says.
Munyandamutsa was the leader of the training of practitioners, but many others went overseas to train. But about half didn’t return, says Iyamuremye.
For this year’s commemorations, the RBC and other organizations have trained 5,000 responders around Rwanda to support distressed people. But Iyamuremye and his colleagues have learnt that the commemorations themselves can be therapeutic: they give people the opportunity to talk about their trauma and support each other.
Researchers have discovered that people who were not alive during the genocide are still suffering. “Intergenerational trauma is a challenge and a reality in Rwanda. This needs to be targeted with strong, strong interventions,” says Iyamuremye.
The research analysts found that mothers who were exposed had around 24 differentially methylated regions compared to the control group. The team found that many of the methylated regions were the same in mothers and in the children that they were pregnant with during the genocide4,5. The research indicates a way in which trauma can transcend at least one generation, and the researchers suggest that lasting effects could be passed down through multiple generations through a mechanism of epigenetic inheritance.
The University of Rwanda and the Belgian neuroscientist had collaborated to begin a larger study. In 2017, the pair, with US partners, won funding from the US National Institutes of Health to extend their investigations.
Source: After the genocide: what scientists are learning from Rwanda
From Genocide to Reappropriation: How Rwanda and Namibia dealt with their past, or what Rwanda did during the Holocaust, or when Namibia was able to do so through epigenetic inheritance
Multi-generational epigenetic inheritance is controversial. Many scientists are sceptical about whether methylation marks on DNA in humans can be inherited.
Some practical benefits of their work can be seen by Mutesa and Jansen. When scientists spoke to the study participants about how trauma could affect their children, they noticed a rise in resilience. For instance, if survivors’ children were performing poorly in school, parents now saw a possible reason. Children with psychotherapy can be supported by researchers. The parents could understand why their children were being mistreated.
More than 5,000 people were killed at Ntarama, among them babies, children, and pregnant women, according to the site manager of the Ntarama Genocide Memorial. “People used money to bribe the perpetrators so that they could choose the way of being eliminated. “They could choose to be shot, instead of using machetes,” as he walks me through the church. More remains are found each year, and that leads to more deaths in the mass graves.
Another author whose work has been published through the Genocide Research Hub is sociologist Assumpta Mugiraneza9. From a hilltop office with views over Kigali, Mugiraneza runs an organization called the IRIBA Centre for Multimedia Heritage. Kinyarwanda has an audio-visual archives of testimonies from the genocide and of life before 1994.
The centre, she says, is designed “to support the process of reappropriating the past”. We should dare to seek humanity where humanity was denied, to think about genocide.
Researchers agree that studying atrocities is a difficult undertaking. “Research involves talking to survivors who have endured unimaginable horror and putting yourself in the position to listen and hear and be empathetic,” says David Simon, who directs the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
Still, scholars say that, through these studies, they are developing a broader understanding by identifying similarities among different genocides. These include what happened in Rwanda and the Holocaust, as well as in the genocide of the Armenian people in 1915 and of the Herero and Nama people in what is now Namibia, starting in 1904.
All of them shared common ingredients, according to researchers. The first is racializing members of society and identifying an ‘inferior’ segment of the population to be eliminated. Other factors include planning massacres and spreading an ideology. The involvement of the state in the killings is one of the last parts, according to historian Vincent Duclert.
Straus is also studying causal factors shared by different genocides, and why some conflicts that have the ingredients of genocide do not escalate into them — violence in Mali in the 1990s and Côte d’Ivoire in the early 2010s are two examples10.
Some scholars worry that there has been less emphasis on elevating the voices of survivors, given that judicial inquiries focused so much on perpetrators.
Source: After the genocide: what scientists are learning from Rwanda
On the anniversary of the Rwandan prisoner’s persecution in the 1990 Rwandan genocide, written in the memory of Jean Duclert
He met with Duclert, who was commissioned by the French president to conduct a study on France’s role in the genocide in order to understand how the French government could have contributed to it. The 1,000-page report was presented in October 2021. it claimed that French authorities didn’t take enough measures to prevent a genocide when they saw evidence as early as 1990.
The husband and children were killed. When she reached safety at the Hôtel des Mille Collines — featured in the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda — one of the first things she wanted was a pen and paper to record what had happened.
I have not yet spoken at length about what those years in a Rwandan prison were like, or about the daily reality for Rwandan political prisoners who, like me, found themselves behind bars for exercising their freedom of expression. It has been a long year of physical and emotional healing for me that has allowed me to start writing again, and I think it will last the rest of my life.