Rwandan Genocide

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Thursday 8th May 2014 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (Mr Newmark) on securing this important and timely debate and the Backbench Business Committee on granting it. It is an honour to speak after the hon. Member for Hyndburn (Graham Jones), who spoke so passionately and movingly. I am also not the first Member who wants to thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), because it was through him that I had the opportunity—less recently than the hon. Gentleman—to visit the beautiful country that we are discussing, to meet the beautiful people who live there, and to learn a bit more about what is probably the most shaming inaction of the so-called advanced world in my lifetime.

When we were in Rwanda—there are other Members present who were on that trip—we repeatedly asked the survivors we met what we could do. They said consistently, “Remember us. Tell other people about us. Never forget, keep talking about genocide, keep reminding people that it can happen again.” I am speaking here today because before “never again” comes “never forget”. We are reminded of that by events happening now in the Central African Republic. Even while we were in Rwanda, at the genocide museum in Kigali the curator was talking about having to plan an extra space in the museum because of events in Darfur.

In that museum, one of a series of moving pen-portrait memorials reads:

“Name: Francine Murengezi Ingabire

Age: 12

Food: Eggs & chips

Best friend: Elder sister, Claudette

Death: Hacked by machete”.

While the genocide museum memorial in Kigali brought to life the personal, individual tragedy of the genocide, it was at the Murambi memorial that we were struck by the sheer scale and indiscriminate horror of what happened. We had been warned before going there of the harrowing nature of what we would see, but nothing could prepare us for what we saw at Murambi. Room upon room is filled with the remains of men, women, children and babies. They are preserved in lime having already reached various stages of decay. Some still have hair and some remnants of clothing. A few of the rooms are more like store rooms in which bundles of clothes are packaged up on shelves and human bones are stored and filed by length. The most powerful thing about that memorial is the simple repetitiveness of it. Room after room is filled with the remains of human beings just as they fell; all apparently the same, but of course not all the same, because each one is a Francine or a friend of Francine, with their own individual tragedy.

There are reminders in Rwanda of what happened and what could happen again. I remember checking into the convent in Butare. There was no street lighting in those days—I guess that things have moved on, as now there are broken street lights; before there were just no street lights outside Kigali. At one point, we caught a glimpse of the convent wall, encrusted with razor wire and broken glass, which served as a reminder of the protections that people still feel they may have to call on in future. At the time of the genocide, no church, school or convent was a place of sanctuary.

Despite those reminders, the most striking thing in Rwanda is how safe it feels and how nice everybody is. They are the most smiling people one could hope to meet. Indeed, even when we were in a room with prisoners dressed in their pink pyjama-like outfits to designate what they had done, we felt strangely safe. It strikes one as the one country in the world that is least likely to suffer genocide. Being there made me think about that phrase, “Man’s inhumanity to man” and what it really means; what mankind is capable of. The conditions that lead to genocide are something that I have discussed many times with my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) who has studied these subjects a great deal.

There is a unique historical context in Rwanda, as there is in every place that suffers genocide, but there is also a striking degree of commonality, of spottable signs that come up again and again: the identity documents with group or ethnic membership on them; the creation of a narrative, a problem or a question to which elimination of the group is the solution; the extensive planning for that extermination; the drawing up of lists; the ramping up of hate through controlled media; the catalyst event—in this case, it was the shooting down of the presidential plane—that is implicitly understood by people to mean that this is where the killing begins; and then the speed of the deadly operation that starts with moderates on all sides and, among the targeted group, with elites and those who are best able to organise.

Although there are all those elements of commonality, there are three things about the Rwandan genocide that make it startlingly different. The first was the mass nature of it. We cannot say that this was down to a few crack SS officers. The Interahamwe was a mass organisation, which was able to kill, because of the availability of machetes, without having been specifically armed. The second was the speed of it; the concentration of it. Almost one tenth of the population was wiped out within 100 days. Of course events were even more concentrated in the first days of the genocide. Third and most startling is that we knew about it. We, the world, knew about it and we did nothing to stop it.

One good thing to come from those terrible events in 1994 is the evolution of international law to go beyond the rights of nation states and to recognise our common humanity and the rights of all people. It is a moment that is pregnant with possibility, and of course in the grand sweep of history, we are still in that same moment that is pregnant with possibility, but it is also very precarious. There are two key tensions. The first is that the responsibility to protect is of course a challenge to national sovereignty, and it is understandable that some countries have worries about how it might eventually be a beachhead to richer nations once again imposing their will on smaller ones under the guise of humanitarian concern. The second is that force is quite rightly intended to be the last resort and we should allow time for other avenues to be followed and for other developments, but in 1994 in Rwanda there was no time. The need to go through the process of having discussions at the UN and so on was the problem.

Libya has been the one success so far of the responsibility to protect. We should not, because there has been only one example, underestimate its importance, as it is still a noble and worthwhile achievement. Even in the case of Libya, however, the deployment of the responsibility to protect was not uncontroversial because of what happened after the initial phase. As key countries such as China, Russia, Brazil, India and South Africa had misgivings, just being right about the rightness of humanitarian action was not enough. As we develop the responsibility to protect, we must proceed with caution, starting with how UN peacekeeping and peace enforcing operations are defined, as mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart). We must also consider the support we give to regional organisations in their work.

It is one thing for China, Russia and others to be opposed to or have serious misgivings about the responsibility to protect and its deployment in certain situations, but it is quite another for us to give mixed messages. I do not mean this as a party political point and I do not want it to be interpreted as that in any way, but we should not underestimate the impact of the United Kingdom or, indeed, the United States, France or others being unable to unite around either a motion—such as a motion tabled in this House—or an expression of will on a point such as Syria. I think that the Syria vote will end up being a turning point in more ways than we yet realise, but I hope that never again will this House of Commons have to be divided on such an important issue. I hope that whoever is in government and whoever is in opposition, we will always be able to show a united front on these critical issues of protection.

There are some things we can learn from what has happened in Rwanda post-genocide, both good and bad. It is worth remembering that far more good things than bad have happened in that country since, as the hon. Member for Hyndburn (Graham Jones) said, such as the focus on justice and truth, the use of the Gacaca courts, the revulsion against violence—it is quite remarkable that part way through this process Rwanda abolished the death penalty, when one might think that retribution would be far higher on people’s list of priorities—and the creation of a shared sense of nationhood under which there are no Hutus or Tutsis but only Rwandans. Economic growth has been exceptional and we have seen the development of a legal system, property rights and a private sector. All those things are important in tackling poverty and making barbarism less possible.

We should be proud of the UK’s role in such change, but we must be a critical friend and must hold the Government to account. More is needed, as the situation is far from perfect, even if considered apart from what has happened in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is fair to say that right after a genocide it would be totally unrealistic to expect the incoming regime to be indifferent to matters such as media ownership and how political parties might develop. We cannot expect a liberal democracy simply to be put in place and be fully functioning. However, this 20th anniversary is an appropriate time to put fresh pressure on our friends in Rwanda with regard to the development of civil society and a freer media and creating a space for political dissent, while being watchful against the development of political parties and movements based on racial and other divisive lines.

The most striking image of the genocide in 1994, in many ways, actually comes from a film, “Shooting Dogs”, which has already been mentioned. Today, the sports field at the école technique officielle is a place of calm—it is just a sports field—but the signs are still there if one looks. There are machete marks on the trees around the outside. What happened at that place is a microcosm of what happened in Rwanda, and what we must guard against happening ever again anywhere else. When the United Nations failed to agree action, and then when the first westerners were killed, the troops of the international force that the world had created to protect our universal values were told to drive away, leaving to their unthinkable fate the 5,000 or so men, women and children gathered at a place that they thought was to be a place of safety, even as the frustrated militia men in their hundreds gathered at the perimeter, lashing out with their machetes at the trees, venting their frustration at the mild inconvenience they had to go through of having to wait for the soldiers to leave before they could get down to their gruesome work.

The then leaders of nations who could have done something, and the United Nations itself, were chastened by what happened in that central African country in 1994, and by our collective world inaction. That led to that moment that I mentioned—the moment that is pregnant with possibility, through the responsibility to protect. That is a moment that we simply cannot afford to let pass.