Rwanda is now a peaceful country which remembers each year, the awful genocide of 1994. People can blindly become killers if their leaders are successful in instilling enough fear into them. Learning from history is an antidote.
There are anniversaries and anniversaries. There are those that celebrate a marriage or a person surviving another year. There are those to remember the death of someone, or of many. There are those to commemorate a hero of the country or a war won.
And then, in another order of things, there is the anniversary, today, of the Rwandan genocide. When the date of the death of a close relative arrives, it is normal for your stomach to churn. In Rwanda, even though 30 years have passed, on April 7, the whole country’s stomach is churning. Two days of national mourning are imposed, but even if the state did not insist on keeping alive the memory of so many deaths, people would fall silent, or break into tears, anyway.
Why? Because every Rwandan has at least one relative who died or who participated in a massacre that took nearly a million lives in a hundred days, the vast majority of them by machete. The order came from above by radio, from the command of the so-called “Hutu Power”, to exterminate from the face of the earth the entire Tutsi minority. Tens of thousands of normal people turned into psychopathic butchers, signed up for the task.
After the madness had passed, those same people have become peaceful. Yes, that’s the word. There is no more peaceful country in Africa than Rwanda, a perfect example of not repeating history by remembering it. I tell my friends that if they want to visit a place with elephants and lions, there is no place where human beings are gentler or more peaceful, none where they will feel safer, even with small children in tow.
During those hundred days from 7 April 1994, parents paid the killers to kill their children. You heard me right. They paid them. To dispatch them with bullets instead of machetes. Then they would chop up the parents. They often took a break from what they called, without irony, “the job”. To keep their victims from escaping they would cut off a leg, and then come back and finish them off.
I know because I have been to Rwanda half a dozen times. Nothing in life compares to the testimonies I heard there. Like that of Leopold, who told me that he had killed a hundred people inside a church; or that of Marcelin, a Hutu who beat his Tutsi wife to death as a condition imposed on him by a horde not to kill his seven children.
There is more, much more, but I’ll stop there. What I want to highlight is how so many went from being decent people to being beasts for a time, to being decent people again, and to remain so to this day. The lions are lying down with the lambs. Hutus and Tutsis live without revenge in harmony.
This leads me to believe, despite the evidence to the contrary, despite the fact that the drums of war are once again resounding around the world today, that the natural condition of human beings is peaceful coexistence. Violence is also part of man’s nature (almost always man’s, not women’s) but to a lesser extent, and in specific circumstances, and among a reduced sector of humanity.
See how savage the Nazi world war was and see how peaceful the Germans have been since then. Notice that in the midst of the frenzy of those conflicts of the last century, what most people longed for most was peace. As in Russia or Israel or Palestine today.
Crazy, isn’t it? A constant of the human condition is that wars and other horrors continue and will continue to occur despite the fact that almost everyone is against them, and it is all because of the determination of a minority. This minority consists of what we call leaders, by definition dangerous people who, in extreme but all too common cases, express their abnormality in a mixture of narcissism, rancour, megalomania, paranoia and sadism.
In other words, we are talking about the Hitlers, the Putins and the Netanyahus. I return to some words of Bertrand Russell that I quoted last week: “I cannot bear the thought that millions of people can die in agony just because the rulers of the world are stupid and evil.”
Yes, but – with all due respect to Russell – I don’t know about stupid. They are cunning and cynical too. They know how to win people over. They know how to use the most powerful tool of persuasion there is. They know that fear, always fear, is the weak point of Homo sapiens. They know that through fear they can convince people to do anything, even to kill.
Here is another quote, this time from someone who was at the other extreme to Russell, Herman Göring, Hitler’s second in charge:
“Naturally, ordinary people do not want war: not in Russia, not in England, not in Germany either. But, in the end, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy and it is always easy to drag people along, whether in a democracy, in a fascist dictatorship, in a parliament or in a communist dictatorship…All you have to do is tell them they are under attack and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
Correct. It worked in Germany, of course. It worked in Rwanda, where a little Hutu cabal put so much fear into their own that they turned them into wild beasts, or silent accomplices of wild beasts. It is working now for Putin in Russia and for Netanyahu (oh irony that they are copying the Nazi lesson to the letter!) in Israel. It’s a winning formula that depends on two things: to adapt Russell’s quote, people being stupid and leaders being evil. And why are people stupid? People are stupid because they don’t learn from history.
In Rwanda they have stopped being stupid, at least for now. The biggest fear they have, and today’s anniversary reminds them of it, is that April 1994 will happen again. Depending on the horrors of each country, others would do well to succumb to that healthy fear.
This column appeared in Clarín, Argentina, on 7 April 2024, and is translated by Kieran Tapsell.
John Carlin is a journalist, author and columnist for both English and Spanish language newspapers.
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