I am here to talk to you about the challenge of the problem of justice both internationally, but in this regard I will also be talking about the problem of justice in Rwanda itself.
But I want to start by thanking the organisers of this conference, which of course has come at the most opportune moment; and in this regard, I want to start by thanking Mr. John Philpot who has graciously invited me and I suppose all of you to come and have a very sincere and serious deliberation on this question of justice.
In starting to talk about the problem of justice internationally, or even in Rwanda in particular, I want also to remember some of the words of a very pre-eminent philosopher, John Rawls, who once said that justice is actually fairness. And I think for us in Rwanda or for us as human beings across the world, and in history, we want to look at justice as fairness. He also says that truth, in philosophy, is what actually justice is in social institutions. And he went on to say that if something is forced, then we have an inclination to abandon it simply because it does not hold, especially as far as philosophers are concerned. He also says that if social institutions are unjust, then we should be inclined to abandon these institutions, even when we might say that these institutions serve as many people as possible.
So as our starting point in this discussion, I would wish to simply reiterate that justice is fairness, and that truth as well as justice is what underlies some of the endeavours that we as human beings are trying to achieve in the whole of human history or human civilisation.
Let me go now to the question of justice in Rwanda because I think if there is a society in contemporary time that poses this question in its very direct and stark terms, it is the question of justice in Rwanda.
If we had a movie that tried to capture the movement of Rwandan society over the ages, over history, we could try to look at this movie having isolated the role of the individual or the impact of what has being going on in society on the individual level. We could also try to look at the level of the family, the community, the nation, and the region—because Rwanda is nested in the region and it has impacted the region as much as impacted the country itself—and also look at it from a perspective of the African continent and yes, even look at it from an international perspective. Then in this movie we would look, for example, how Rwanda has been governed from the monarchy to the colonial regime in the twentieth century, to the post-independence or the post-colonial regimes, including those that were labelled Hutu regimes and the current one, the regime of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which is of course labelled the Tutsi regime; and we would also pose the question, what next? And then when we look at this movie of Rwandan society over history, over millennia, over centuries, I have tended to look at five burdens that seem to weigh on the individual, the family, the community, the Rwandan Nation, the region, Africa, and the international community as a whole.
The first is the burden of history. Rwanda’s history is quite burdensome because we tend to have so many perspectives. To many the history is that of kings in Rwanda; to many others it’s the history of the colonial enterprise, I mean those who spent a lot of time trying to colonise Rwanda and who tend to look at themselves as the initiators of history, so that before them probably it was a dark history and after them probably something worse happened. And among the Rwandan people we tend to look at it differently. For example, after the RPF took over in 1994, history was such a challenging aspect of what we wanted to do that for many years, actually, the history of Rwanda was not taught to anybody. Because, what could we teach? How are we supposed to be teaching the history of Rwanda, when we tend to look at it in very, very different ways?
And so there is a burden of history. The kings, for example, believe that history ended in 1959. Those who initiated the Rwandan Revolution probably believe perhaps that history began in 1959. And ever since the RPF took over in 1994, it has tried to re-engineer history to sell its narrative. So there are all these competing narratives in Rwanda so that history has become a burden. Yet it is in history that we find ourselves, Hutus, Tutsis, and Twas, as a Nation, because Rwanda is a Nation that is centuries old, unlike many other entities on the African continent that would probably say that we are created by the colonial enterprise. So there is a burden of history.
The second burden is that of demography, which means we have the burden of the constituents of the demographic structure in terms of ethnicity and of region, and yes, even in terms of population pressures. When people look at Rwanda, many would look at Hutu, others might look at Tutsi, others at the Twa, others at the Hutu from the South or from the North, the so-called Bakiga/Banyenduga dichotomy. It is also a fact that we are a highly populated country. This in itself poses a challenge in terms of how we live together, and how we manage the country for the benefit of everyone. So this question of demography burdens us.
The third burden is that of the state. The ancient state, the pre-colonial state, was a state built by the kings, and they of course took their own advantage. When the colonial process began at the end of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century, the colonial state was super-imposed on the existing monarchical system. So some of the burdens that the king as a king and the people as subjects already inherited from many centuries, the colonial enterprise, over and above the king, created this kind of social language. Some of the king’s excesses were pronounced during the colonial enterprise and of course were not abandoned after we got independence. So the state has been at the heart of some of the serious injuries and serious trauma that have been imposed or inflicted on the individual, on the family, and on the communities in Rwanda. This is in itself a burden.
There is also the burden of the Church, because for over a hundred years, we have been Christianised. We’ve become a special nation of Christians and probably over ninety percent of the people in Rwanda are Christians. This in itself is a burden in the sense that the Church in its life has also had sometimes very close (sometimes too close for comfort) relations with the state and sometimes there has been friction between the Church and the state. This has created some of the problems we have today.
Of course there has been the problem of the foreigners who have been coming to Rwanda for quite a while. Sometimes the foreigners have engineered and re-engineered our own ideas and our own practice to the extent that sometimes it has caused some of the problems that we still experience today.
So there is the burden of history, the burden of demography, the burden of the State, the burden of the Church, and the burden of the foreigners.
But the question which is important for today’s discussion is what next, given this long history that has been a burden but in which there has been the good and the bad? How do we see the future? Because the current situation in Rwanda does not provide fairness, does not provide justice, and the institutions that we have in the country have not been seen as being fair. And therefore, it is the considered view of many Rwandans that we need to have justice in the country because there is no fairness in the country.
Looking at the question of justice in Rwanda, I can simply say that there are probably seven challenges we need to be thinking about as we look forward. First, how do we stop the trauma? Because with all these burdens, and especially the burden of the state, Rwanda has indeed come to a situation where we could say that for so many decades the state has been at the heart of traumatising Rwandan individuals, Rwandan families, and the Rwandan community.
How do we stop this kind of trauma, which exists in several dimensions? We have the political trauma in the country, living with the closure of the political space. We have trauma in terms of many people who are in jail. We have trauma in terms of fear and daily haunting that take place within Rwanda. People are in jail in Rwanda, people are in jail in Arusha, and we have people in jungles of the Congo. We have refugees; we have civil society that has been denied a space to operate. There is no media that are able to operate as they should. And so we have immense trauma that has impacted on the people for a long time. How do we stop it?
Number two: how do we heal? It is simply not enough to stop the trauma that has been imposed on the individual. Even in usual medical terms, you also have to stop the trauma and help the person to begin to heal.
Number three: not only should we stop the trauma and heal, we should be able to unite the Rwandan nation, because the Rwandan nation has been ruptured. It has been traumatised to the extent that right now, we are a completely polarised nation in both ethnic and regional terms. So we need to figure out how do we unite this nation?
Number four: at the heart of this enterprise of stopping the trauma, of healing, of uniting the Rwandan people, we must put the individual Rwandan at the heart of whatever we attempt to undertake. As John Rawls would argue, you cannot sacrifice individual rights simply because you’re saying that you want to do good for the community. I think there should be help about this, but at the very beginning of the process, the life of the individual, the rights of the individual must be protected and protected in a very strong way that begins to embrace the question of trauma, healing, and uniting the Rwandan people.
Number five: we must of course balance the individual versus community interests. Rwandans live on the hill, they live in these places where they have lived as communities for a long time. As Rwandans, they have not always killed each other as many historians make us believe, and so we would like this aspect to be understood. But the community interests must also be protected because that’s where the individual finds himself or herself, and the community will also help the individual to heal. And if we have free individuals within a community, one will also suppose that the community will benefit a lot from these free individuals.
Number six: we have to redefine what people call the national interest. Until now, the national interest has been defined in terms of the interests of a small group of people. Whether it was the interest of the king and the Tutsi chiefs, whether it was the colonial enterprise with the few people who serviced the colonial undertaking or the post-colonial regimes, whether called the Hutu regime or the Tutsi regime, it has always been the person at the top with a few people who define what is called the national interest. And so we must begin to build the kind of institutions that really consider the individual Rwandan, the community interests of Rwandans (be they Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa), to be at the basis of what the institution should be. People in Rwanda must be able to look at themselves being represented in the institutions, and they must be sure that the institution promotes and propagates the rule of law so that all Rwandans know that they have equal opportunity and that they are equal before the law.
Finally, this also relates to international law, because much of what we know as international law has come to the forefront with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. We know now that the ICTR has tried so many people accused of having participated in the genocide, and literally most of them are Hutus. There has been a demonisation internationally, and it is still so because of the narrative in place for a long time. Actually this international law has not been fair; it has not been just because many Rwandans feel that it has been leaning towards favouring the Tutsi against the Hutu.
I think it’s very important to understand that in the current regime there are Tutsi officers who committed crimes in Rwanda, who committed crimes in the Congo, including president Kagame himself, and all of these have not been held accountable for the crimes they have committed. So I think we must make sure that we struggle to make sure that international law serves the interests of all Rwandans without distinctions. By doing that I think it would be an immense contribution because Rwandans could also contribute to the development of international law. International law that really serves a faction of Rwandans does not help justice in Rwanda.
This would be the kind of round bargain that we should have on these issues of justice and fairness because we must go beyond ethnicity, we must go beyond narrow regionalism, and we must go beyond very beautiful laws and a brief constitution that elites are able to write and yet are unable to implement to ensure that justice and fairness are anchored in the interests of the Rwandan people.
I will conclude that this entire enterprise would be a grand bargain that would look at the interests of all Rwandans, and would support the individual, promote the community, and serve the nation as a whole. At the same time it would serve international law, and be served by international law, in a fair and just way. I think it must be finally anchored in truth, going back to John Rawls’ question of truth. This is what I think is very important, because Rwandans in their vicious interests sometimes have been able to perpetuate falsehoods so as to champion the interests of the faction. For now we must challenge these falsehoods and begin to look at each other and begin to tell the truth so that we can find number two, namely healing. Another concluding remark is that in truth we can find forgiveness and in forgiveness we can also perpetuate the culture of truth among us, among the Rwandan people.
It boils down to a bunch of ideas. All these notions of justice, truth, and fairness, and the question of what history should do, the questions of demography, the state, the Church, the role of foreigners—somehow it has been a contest of ideas throughout history, throughout human history. Rwanda should cease to be the country where people die because of their ideas.
I think that Wole Soyinka, the famous writer from Nigeria, once said that in most African countries, including his own Nigeria, and especially in post-colonial history, it has not been a question of ‘I am right and you are wrong’; no, it is ‘if you’re wrong, you must die.’ We must contend with the idea of people suffering because of their ideas, since this is also part of the problem of Rwanda. We must understand that we as Rwandans, we and the international community, including the participants who were heard today, should understand that these are a bundle of ideas and occasionally people will suffer and die for what they believe in. I think this is how ideas have been propagated throughout history—that’s how new ideas have come about, that’s how negotiations have come about, and we must be able to contend with new ideas in our society especially if there are ideas that are propelling the society towards truth and justice in our country.
Thank you very much
* Transcription of Speech by Theogène Rudasingwa at the Third International Conference on the Defence of International Criminal Law, “International Criminal Justice: Justice for Whom?” Montreal, Québec, September 29, 2012, translated by Carmen Nono.