Remembering the Survivors of Genocide in Rwanda

N. Schimmel: On Genocide Survivors

ON APRIL 7 and throughout the rest of the month, governments, UN agencies, and Rwandans commemorated the seventeenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi, in which more than a million innocent people were murdered.

Every year since 1994 this date has yielded a predictable steady stream of statements of solidarity with Rwandans and promises of that rhetorically reliable but rarely acted upon conviction, “Never again.”

Commemoration is of vital importance. But it is not enough. The genocide is over, but the consequences of it are being felt again and again. The suffering, injustice, and destructiveness left in its wake are ongoing and deeply disabling.

The humanitarian principle of the “Responsibility to Protect” in international human rights law must—if it is to be meaningful—have a corollary: in the event of a failure to protect innocent civilians threatened with genocide, the UN and its member states have a responsibility to protect the rights and welfare of survivors of this crime.*

It is not enough just to remember a genocide–to express rejection of the attitudes that motivated it and their murderous consequences. Such rhetorical acts, however significant, do not house homeless genocide survivors, provide the sick among them with essential healthcare and psycho-social support services, provide orphans with scholarships to enable them to pursue an education, alleviate extreme poverty, or tangibly contribute to the rehabilitation of genocide survivors as individuals and as members of communities.

That is the standard by which governments and the UN ought to measure the sincerity of their statements and purported ethical commitments: real improvement in the lives of genocide survivors and increasing realization of the full range of their human rights. By that measure, the UN and its member states are failing, and egregiously so.

Three times the UN General Assembly has passed resolutions calling for UN agencies and member states to direct aid to address the unique needs and vulnerabilities of genocide survivors in Rwanda. At its sixty-ninth plenary meeting on December 23, 2005, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 60/225, entitled “Assistance to Survivors of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, Particularly Orphans, Widows, and Victims of Sexual Violence.” The resolution stated that it recognized

. . . the numerous difficulties faced by survivors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, particularly the orphans, widows and victims of sexual violence, who are poorer and more vulnerable as a result of the genocide, especially the many victims of sexual violence who have contracted HIV and have since either died or become seriously ill with AIDS.

This resolution was readopted in 2007 and reaffirmed principles of support for survivors expressed in Resolution 59/137 on December 10, 2004, which requested that the Secretary General “encourage relevant agencies, funds, and programmes of the UN system to continue to work with the Government of Rwanda to develop and implement programmes aimed at supporting vulnerable groups that continue to suffer effects from the 1994 genocide.”

Although the Rwandan government sets aside 5 percent of its annual budget for aid to genocide survivors and has implemented a number of programs to meet their needs, it lacks the financial and human resources necessary to provide adequately for the needs of all genocide survivors. Rwanda, many of whose citizens suffer acute poverty and a low level of economic development, faces ongoing challenges in finding sufficient economic resources to rebuild the institutions and infrastructure that were profoundly damaged or totally destroyed during the genocide. This costly effort further limits the government’s capacity for providing for genocide survivors.

And yet the UN remains in contempt of its resolutions to support survivors. UN agencies such as UNICEF and the UNDP have not delivered substantial and comprehensive programs to address the injustices and vulnerability that Rwandan genocide survivors currently face.

With few exceptions, other multilateral and bilateral aid organizations have a similar record of marginalizing the needs of genocide survivors, often subsuming them under broad development goals that have little positive impact on them and overlook their distinctive challenges. This is true of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and of most European development agencies working in Rwanda (with the noteworthy exception of the UK Department for International Development, which has contributed significantly to programs supporting genocide survivors).

Many development NGOs active in Rwanda maintain a similarly shameful policy of ignoring the moral and practical imperatives set out in these UN resolutions. Even NGOs with excellent reputations, such as Oxfam and World Vision, are inadvertently contributing to the marginalization of genocide survivors by not addressing their urgent needs systematically and substantially.

The needs of survivors have been documented by NGOs such as SURF Survivors Fund and by local community-based organizations led by genocide survivors such as AVEGA and IBUKA, but their calls for greater support have gone largely unanswered. For this reason, over 20,000 households of genocide survivors lack safe housing, and tens of thousands lack decent healthcare, trauma and mental health counseling, and a diet sufficient to ensure their health. Many are living in abject poverty and are stuck in a poverty trap, because they cannot afford school fees and associated costs for their children (or the children must stay home to care for their orphaned younger siblings), are physically disabled and cannot work to earn a living, and had their homes and other material resources destroyed or stolen in the genocide and never received compensation.

If the UN is to have moral credibility, and if international human rights and humanitarian law are to have real meaning, the Responsibility to Protect must be extended to provide support for survivors of genocide who struggle in its aftermath. It is the very least that the UN and its member states owe to survivors who lost families and friends and suffered horrific violence and devastation because of the failure of the UN to stop the genocide.

Survivors hear the same statements of solidarity each year on the April 7 anniversary of the genocide. And each year, after that day ends, very little has changed for them. This year, instead of platitudes and ephemeral words of support, Rwandan survivors deserve the resources that the UN General Assembly has repeatedly called for to enable them to realize their rights, restore their dignity, and achieve a measure of justice.

Noam Schimmel is a PhD student at the London School of Economics. He served as an intern in the Office of the Prosecutor at the UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

*In this article, I refer to Tutsis living in Rwanda during the period of April 7 to July 4 1994 as genocide survivors.

Image: A child in Umudugudu wa Kinyinya, a village of genocide survivors in Rwanda (Amy Rathgeb/2008/Flickr creative commons)