I visited Rwanda just a few months after the horrific slaughter of approximately 800,000 people in 1994. I remember a Rwandan woman with whom I worked showing me a wedding photograph with about 50 guests and pointing hesitantly to a few saying ‘He’s still alive and she’s also still alive..’  She could identify only about five people in the picture who had survived.

What does this kind of mass trauma do to a society? Well, yesterday I returned from a week in Rwanda and it is a very different place. I was part of a Commonwealth Parlimentary  Association visit to learn more about their relatively new parliamentary democracy and, to some extent, to assess progress in all aspects of democratic reform. Rwanda has applied to become a member of the Commonwealth which will be decided at the next Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting due to be held in Trinidad in October.

It is almost impossible to imagine the kind of terror  to which people were subjected between April and July of 1994. There was a frenzy of killing, with the local language radio station directing militias to places where terrified groups of women and children attempted to hide. The slaughter of Tutsis, and moderate Hutus, by the Hutu majority was pre-determined, organised and thorough.

The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) which had been fighting a  bush war since 1990 assumed control after the genocide and eventually its leader, Paul Kagame, became President and has remained so. He and his Government embarked on a radical programme of reconciliation, stability, good governnance and development. It is impossible here to record all that has been achieved; however some examples of the programmes initiated and successfully expedited include encouragement and training for women to enter not only politics (women represent 36% of politicians in both the House of Deputies and the Senate) but also in the professions (the Chief Justice is a woman as are the Foreign Minister and the Head of Police); a powerful Ombudsman Office ensuring a corruption free political system; the establishment of a tax revenue system; land reform; measures to eradicate ethnic bias such as insisting on a 50/50 balance in all public sectors and many other innovations.
There are, of course, remaining concerns which we expressed vociferously – the media is not as unrestrained as it should be; the conditions of detention are in some cases poor and solitary confinement for serious crimes against humanity is practised. The local ‘Gacaca’ or traditional courts dispense summary justice for crimes as severe as genocide.

The answers we received to our concerns were given openly and with sustained arguments; for example, given the number of those suspected of genocide and other crimes against humanity what other system of justice, except the traditional courts, could be employed in a country where there were, when RPF took over, only 32 qualified legal people in the country? Furthermore it was said that traditional justice not only had safeguards but crucially involved local communities in both delivering justice and in integrating those exonerated back into society. 

There is much more to say in the next instalments of this story (the efforts to change UK law to enable suspects of genocide to be prosecuted in the UK courts; the memorial centre where 50,000 bodies have been unearthed from mass graves; the arguments for and against membership of the Commonwealth; the UK Government support for Rwanda). But this is enough for now.