"I am not divisible"

“I am not divisible” were the words that Shalom Director Jean de Dieu used to describe his mixed Hutu-Tutsi parentage. “I just am who I am, I’m Rwandan, I’m not divisible.”

How do you tell that to a genocide? I am not divisible.

It reminds me of a quote I read in John Paul Lederach’s “Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies.” Lederach describes the characteristics of contemporary armed conflict - they are increasingly more internal than international in cause and response, they are based on narrowing concepts of identity, they are fueled by Cold War small weapon production, and, finally, they are “by nature lodged in long-standing relationships.”

Long-standing relationships. Conflicts lodged in long-standing relationships.

Like the Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats. Like the members of the FARC and the Colombian army. Like the long-term inhabitants of Israel and Palestine. Like the Tutsis and Hutus. These are all groups that have been and are in long-standing relationships. Just saying the name of one group is often enough to evoke the name of the other.

But doesn’t it sound so much more difficult to justify violence when you speak of the two conflicting parties as being in a relationship? People who are in relationship seek to understand each other. People who are in relationship try to compromise. People who are in relationship learn to accept one another's faults. And naturally, sometimes people in relationship divorce, move away, lose contact, disagree, neglect, and ignore one another. They grow divided by interests or attitudes, priorities or locations. But does the relationship end there? Or does it stall? Does it die or does it go into hibernation? Do we bring in a third party to fix things? Do we go to a counselor?

Something that has fascinated me about Rwanda post-genocide has been the government’s insistence that all Rwandan refugees return to Rwanda. There are various reasons for this insistence. For one, many refugees were continuing to organize Hutu Power (anti-Tutsi) campaigns in the refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo and other neighboring countries, essentially continuing to be a danger to Rwandan society. Some will also say that the goal of getting genocidaires back into the country is to punish them either through vengeance killings or through prison time. Whatever the intention of the reuniting of the country, it is an interesting phenomenon to me to declare “we are all going to go through this process together.” And they have. Gone through it together. Like the gacaca local judicial tribunals. The community work day, umaganda, where all are requested to chop down overgrowth on roads or dig ditches. The 2,000+ economic cooperatives that have surged post-genocide to incorporate survivors and perpetrators of the genocide into responsible business models. And the thousands of Rwandan homes cohabitated by widowed and orphaned, Tutsi and Hutu. (Philip Gourevitch's book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow we Will be Killed with our Families, has many interesting cases of this last phenomenon.)

President Kagame has asked the people of Rwanda to 1) start wearing shoes and 2) forgive one another. And we are all waiting to see what happens when a people comes together to do just that.