The Ministry of Health should commission a thorough psychological diagnosis on perpetrators of the Genocide against the Tutsi, to determine their frame of mind when they committed the horrific acts in 1994. The call was made by Tom Ndahiro, a researcher on the Genocide against the Tutsi while speaking at the event to commemorate employees of the health ministry who were killed during the Genocide. The commemoration event kicked off with laying a wreath at Ndera memorial site in Gasabo district, where the medical workers and patients at the Ndera Neuropsychiatric Hospital killed during the Genocide are laid to rest. “Starting the commemoration event from the Ndera brings me to question whether a person who kills a psychiatric patient is actually normal,” he said. Going forward, Ndahiro urged the ministry to commission special research on the mindset and thinking capacity of the perpetrators, focusing on how a normal person can overnight turn into something worse than an animal. Ndahiro then talked about the role of doctors who were in charge of saving lives, but instead chose to deny that life to some of their patients, something that is totally against their oath of service. He gave an example of Theodore Sindikubwabo, who was the interim president of the government that executed the Genocide, who was a doctor by training. Sindikubwabo was named president of an extremist government that was selected on the basis of how deep each of the members hated the Tutsi. “Analyzing his statements (during the Genocide), I wonder if he ever thought about the Hippocratic Oath he made when he became a medical doctor, because the key promises in the oath is to salvage life,” Ndahiro said. In his speech, the Minister of Health Dr Daniel Ngamije said that it was despicable that doctors and other employees in the health sector descended on their colleagues and killed them. Ngamije called upon all heads of hospitals around the country to take it upon themselves to gather information on all employees in the health sector who were killed during the Genocide to ensure that they are all honoured. “So far, we have 44 names of victims who worked at the ministry but there is still a long way to go. We need to gather all the names such that during periods like these, we can stand with their surviving family members to commemorate them,” Minster Ngamije said. Stanisilas Simugomwa, a Genocide survivor who worked at the ministry as a driver during the Genocide recounted events of 27 years ago and before as “very difficult in all aspects.” He said that to start with, getting any government job was an uphill task for a Tutsi, adding that he was unfairly dismissed on different occasions on the account of his ethnicity but somehow got the job back. “During the genocide, a bad situation got even worse and we only managed to survive thanks to the few people that helped us along the way,” said Simugomwa. Among other mourners, the event was attended by Dr Kasonde Mwinga the country representative of the World Health Organization in Rwanda, heads of different agencies under the Ministry of Health, victims’ families and other employees of the ministry.
