Constructing identity through commemoration:Kwibukaand the rise of survivor nationalism in post-conflict Rwanda

Abstract

In the years following Rwanda's civil war, the country has remembered those killed in the 1994 genocide with 100 days of official commemoration, known as Kwibuka. The temporary commemoration period is characterised by an explicit acknowledgement and public discussion of ethnic identity, which stands in puzzling contrast to the state's policy of ethnic non-recognition, enforced during the rest of the year in hopes of achieving national homogeneity (Ndi Umunyarwanda). Thus, one observes seemingly diametrically opposed practices of legally erasing identity groups because of their link to conflict and a unique, three month-long saturation of reminders in the form of public speeches, memorial programming and burials, and commemorative signage. A blurring of ‘Tutsi’ with ‘survivor’ and the deliberate passing down of survivor identity to Tutsi youth have created, over time, conditions for a ‘survivor nationalism’, which exacerbates social tensions and risks sustainable peace in the long term.

Nation-Building Confessions: Carceral Memory in Postgenocide Rwanda

“…84 This is still going on today, except that now face time between confessors and victims' families appears to be nonexistent. Confessions happen inside prisons (according to the government) and on the outside, while commemoration participants speculate about the truthfulness of accusations, 85 claim commemoration as a time for survivors only (rather than being a broader continuation of reconciliation), 86 and complain that "perpetrators" do not respect Kwibuka. 87 Very little is known regarding how people know who is buried where, how families are reached to reunite them with the dead, or who makes the decision to include found bodies in commemoration activities.…”

“…24 I would argue that Kwibuka also represents uncertainty for the Rwandan government because reports of violence and convictions of genocide ideology and denial increase, thereby disrupting social calm and introducing an atmosphere of unease and traumatic memory for quite a long period. 25 In response to (or perhaps in spite of) the uncertainty, the RPF and its bureaucratic arms shore up national memory to continually reinforce the collective, rather than the individual, to emphasize the "group's vision of its past by means of cognitive learning and emotional acts of identification and commemoration." 26 In Rwanda, collective memory has been curated, in the aftermath of a mass atrocity and widespread political violence, within education systems.…”

“…When these identifiers are used, their reference point is always the genocide, which means that when Tutsis are named they are often valorized as survivors, while mention of Hutu identity frequently recalls their genocide-era status as perpetrators of violence. 48 During the rest of the year, memorials, museums, and preserved sites of violence (some of which shock in their explicitness) 49 exist as reminders of the conflict that include references to ethnic identity, but those memorial spaces are static and exist more for tourists and foreigners than for Rwandan residents. 50 Commemoration, on the other hand, is a dynamic process deploying and modifying memory through active participation.…”

“…During each 100 days of Kwibuka, ethnic designations are selectively revived ("Tutsi" much more freely than "Hutu"), which in turn does the work of reinforcing the divisions that caused the genocide despite an official policy of ethnic nonrecognition 75 -the result of which is that no one discusses ethnicity at all-during the rest of the year. 76 While commemoration events look different throughout the country and certainly take place in villages that would be all Hutu (were Hutu still an official identity group), for communities made up primarily of survivors, an essential component of Kwibuka programming is the burial of found families. This practice relies heavily on the Rwandan prison system and the state's decision to extract and release confessions.…”

Recycled rhetoric: examining continuities in political rhetoric as a resilience strategy in pre-independence and post-genocide Rwanda

“…Contextual factors help explain why a similar tactic failed to curb the rise of Hutu nationalism in the 1950s, ultimately leading to a shift in the balance of power inside Rwanda. In particular, the GoR's official discourse on the genocide, centring on the annual commemoration period known as Kwibuka , 5 stands in tension with its ‘policy of ethnic non-recognition’, and reflects a strategic choice on the part of the leadership to instrumentalise the genocide for political gain: an option that was not available to elite Tutsi in the 1950s (Baldwin 2019: 355). With Tutsi privilege embedded into the fabric of the Belgian colonial system, the native administration had no such reference on which to establish collective victimhood, which raised questions about elite demands to eradicate ethnicity in the absence of radical change to the institutional framework of the Rwandan state.…”