“What’s happening in our neighboring country, in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, deeply disturbs and worries us. We’re hearing hate speech against Tutsis being openly expressed again, seeing them being killed for being Tutsi,” laments Josephine, a survivor of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, who now owns a small eatery in a popular district of Kigali.
To illustrate her point, she shows videos on her mobile phone that she claims are recent and from North — and South Kivu. The videos feature militia members in uniform marching and singing inflammatory songs against “cockroaches,” the nickname given to Tutsis by the killers of the 1994 Rwandan genocidal regime.
Videos display the corpses of “Congolese Tutsis,” the Banyamulenge, with their legs mutilated, reminiscent of 1994. In other footage, members of the FDLR (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda), an armed group founded in the early 2000s by Hutu genocidaires who fled to the DRC, are seen attacking villagers. “These videos plunge me back into what we lived through here; it’s horrible,” she says.
Painful memories
Moïse, a Rwandan living in Gisenyi (west of Rwanda), works just across the border in Goma (DR Congo), where he disguises himself as a Hutu. He confides that while the Banyamulenge are not directly threatened in the city, they are openly targeted by the FDLR and the Congolese army in the surrounding hills. “It reminds me of 1994, it’s senseless, as if nothing had happened,” a Benedictine nun from Gisenyi also laments.
These scattered testimonies are not isolated to Rwanda, where the volatile situation in eastern DRC, the stories of those returning like Moïse, the hateful rhetoric, and the images of anti-Tutsi violence flooding social media revive painful memories.
“You think the hatred has ended. It hasn’t. The toxic rhetoric about Tutsis, about ethnicization, the violence that accompanies it, 30 years after the genocide, are at our doorstep,” says Rwandan actress Isabelle Kabano. “We’re tired of this situation. Why does it reemerge in eastern DRC? Because the genocidaires of 1994 have settled there. And in 30 years, their ideology has spread to the top of the Congolese state,” she says.
During the International Francophone Book Fair, held at the beginning of March in the Rwandan capital, academic Alice Urusaro Karekezi also publicly expressed alarm over the resurgence of the rhetoric of the 1994 killers at the Rwanda border; and about the impunity they enjoy from Kinshasa and the UN which, as in 1994, neither disarms them nor ensures the protection of targeted populations.
A threat to society’s balance
The situation in eastern DRC, seen in Rwanda as a resurgence of the genocidal past into the present, is also viewed as a threat to the balance of a society traumatized by this past. A society that sought to overcome the division between Hutus and Tutsis, eliminating ethnic references in its 2003 Constitution in the name of the unity of the Rwandan people. This is why, in Kigali, there’s fear that the resurgence of anti-Tutsi persecution at its border might rekindle old ethnic reflexes.
“We’re not afraid of war with the DRC; we’re ready for it,” assures a source at the heart of the regime, “but we fear its effects on those here who silently regret the old regime. A war that could also push a considerable number of Congolese refugees persecuted for anti-Tutsism to us, risking the reactivation of ethnicist ideology (the assignment of everyone to an ethnicity, Editor’s note) that we abolished for the good of all.”
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