No, things were not good before 1990

On this Liberation Day I found myself contemplating. I thought about my experience in Rwanda before the Genocide. My thoughts took me to a comment that was once made by a Genocide suspect. It was in 2010, the man, who looked like he was in his late 50s, stood in front of court and uttered this statement: “In our community, we had no problem between the Hutu and Tutsi until the RPF started the war.” But the problem is that this wasn’t the first time I had heard such a statement. Many people across generations, even Genocide survivors, have made similar statements in casual conversations. The argument, often made by Genocide deniers, goes that the Hutu and Tutsi were living in harmony, which the RPF disrupted on October 1, 1990. I thought about this “harmony.”At the policy level, the first thing that came to mind was the quota system, what was known as “politiki yo kuringaniza.” Introduced in the 1970s, its stated objective was to establish the equilibrium of opportunities between the ethnic groups. However, its real objective was to make exclusion systemic. Under this system, the potential for a Tutsi to access opportunities in the public and private sector was seriously curtailed. For instance, very few of them would be allowed in school, politics, and in the army – to the extent that the only Tutsi senior officer in the army is known by name (Colonel Ruhashya). I have an uncle who was among the brightest students in primary school. However, he could not continue to secondary school despite having been one of the best in an entire region (Nyaruguru) in national exams. And he is not alone. I’m sure many families have relatives who missed the opportunity to pursue their dreams due to systemic exclusion. I was also personally affected. As a child, growing up in Kigali in the late 1980s, I feared everyone: the police, the local leaders, and even my classmates. I had grown to think of them as strangers because of the bad experiences I had encountered in my relationships with them, as well as the despicable things I had seen happen to my parents at the hands of the authorities. I was a kid but what I saw was humiliating. My dad would see a policeman and would cross the road. I would see him wanting to become invisible to the officer. He feared that by looking at him he could trigger unwanted attention. As a result, he would often return to the direction he was coming from and wait, for however long it took, till the gendarme (as the police were called then) posted on our route would leave. In school, kids were beating others. It was not the usual kind where kids fight amongst each other in playgrounds. This was different. A kid would beat up another who could not fight back. As early as primary school the kids knew that some amongst them could be abused and that such abuse would not result in punishment. How did they know, one might ask? The teachers were required to have an annual census to ascertain whether the quota system was being implemented. Consequently, the teachers would ask the Hutu to stand up, and take a head count. And then the Tutsi would do the same. This was done in plain sight. I remember the first time this happened to me. The teacher called for the Hutu to stand up. I remained seated. He called on the Tutsi to stand up. I remained seated, again. Then asked me and I said “ Ndi Umunyarwanda” (I am Rwandan). The teacher beat the crap out of me that day. I will never forget. Then there were the night patrols. Soldiers led by the “conseiller” (The then Local Executive Secretary) would come and search the house. They would turn everything (mattresses, sheets, etc.) upside down and in ruins.I used to hate when they came after we had fallen asleep because this meant we had to wake up in order to undergo the search. Or when they came during dinner time. The food would be tossed on the floor with little regard for us, like the time when one soldier’s ballonet stuck in the bugali I was about to eat. It was just inhumane. This, unmitigated abuse, was rampant in the late 1980s; it only intensified in the early 1990s till it blew up in 1994 in the form of genocide. Essentially, saying that the Tutsi and Hutu lived in harmony until the RPF attacked is to distort history, to strip the Genocide of the intent and planning that underpinned it; it is to ignore the segregationist policies of the genocidal regimes, the ethnic based identity cards without which it would have been difficult to know who must be killed, as well as the vile rhetoric that taught people how to kill. In short, to be a Tutsi before 1990 was to accept that you will be denied life that is beyond mere existence. I was barely 10 years old but I know that, more than anything, the objective was to humiliate and to deny life. Indeed, we were humiliated: we saw our parents unable to protect us, let alone themselves. However, I also know that others suffered much worse fate than humiliation because the perpetrators often had the power to take with them anything, or anyone. Some to this day are yet to hear from loved ones taken away in such circumstances. Was this harmony? Happy Liberation Day to all!

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No, things were not good before 1990