The twentieth anniversary of the Tutsi genocide, an intense and international commemoration, has generated numerous publications. Benoît Guillou’s work, which does not fit into this context, addresses the theme of forgiveness in Rwanda.
The author conducted several field surveys in Rwanda between 2003 and 2006. He derived an objective: to describe and analyze how, during this period, very diverse actors were engaged in discourses and practices which mobilized the theme of forgiveness . Addressing these questions as a sociologist had no precedent for the case of Rwanda, at least in works in French.
A proactive policy of forgiveness
The investigator recounts what struck him immediately. From the first years following the genocide, the language of forgiveness had taken on growing importance in the public space. However, such language contrasted with the mutual hatreds and fears very present in ethnic relations. 800,000 Tutsis were murdered in the genocide. The majority of survivors, whose families had been decimated, lived in miserable conditions. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of Hutu Rwandans, worried about the advance of the FPRhad fled to Congo during the years 1994-1997.
The new government was working to establish a penal system to judge and punish those who participated in the genocide ; the prisons were overcrowded with suspects most often arrested following simple denunciation. It was a moment filled with pain and resentment, unrelated to what the State and the Catholic Church then undertook: a proactive policy of forgiveness. Seeking to promulgate both the model of an institutionalized forgiveness, of a religious or secular order, these two powers interposed themselves between the genocidaires and the victims, inciting the former to ask for a pardon which the latter would be expected to grant them.
Whether it is a strategy that does not engage criminals in a sincere process of repentance and victims in the gift of authentic forgiveness, but contributes to supporting the political project of a “ transitional justice », a Rwandan interlocutor of Benoît Guillou readily admitted: “ Forgiveness by the Church always comes through the word of God. State forgiveness is by decree. With the government, it is an imperative: “It is necessary”. In church they tell you: “If you don’t forgive, you won’t get into heaven.” » (p. 150).
The investigation took place during decisive years for the establishment of jurisdictions gacaca. Campaigns were organized, encouraging suspects of crimes committed during the genocide to plead guilty and ask the victims for forgiveness. A Christian gacaca synod was organized in 1998 to prepare for the jubilee celebrating two thousand years of Christianity, at the same time as the centenary of the Catholic Church in Rwanda. It was a question of encouraging the faithful to learn forgiveness. In this line, in February 2000, at the opening of the jubilee year, the Archbishop of Kigali solemnly asked forgiveness in the name of the Church for the lack of courage of some of its members and for the crimes committed by Christians . That was an understatement. Work has shown the participation of priests in massacres and the murderous action of religious personnel in certain Catholic parishes, as well as in Presbyterian parishes.
During the decade following the genocide, whether during national and local commemorative ceremonies as well as the burials of victims, whether through legislative texts and arrests, the political authorities constantly denounced the genocidaires and massively incriminated the complicit Hutu population. As for the massacres of Hutu civilians committed in Rwanda and the Congo by the FPR (the Rwandan Patriotic Front, party in power since the end of the genocide), their mention was proscribed by the authorities: they did not fall under the jurisdiction of gacaca, any public demonstration of mourning was prohibited and those who risked recalling that the Crimes committed against Hutus remained unpunished and were subject to heavy reprisals.
In this context, what meaning could this forgiveness that they were asked to grant to the murderers of their loved ones have for Tutsi survivors of the genocide? ? Would the culprits, of their own free will, have approached the survivors to express their repentance? ? One of the successes of Benoît Guillou’s work is to have described what happens to individuals and between individuals when their experiences of extreme violence are rekindled.
Pardon instituted, pardon mediated
Drawing on his investigations in Kigali prisons, the author analyzes the implementation of a state policy establishing “ plead guilty », accompanied by a request for forgiveness. This procedure allowed the provisional release of thousands of prisoners who returned home awaiting their trial. This policy would not have succeeded without the intensity of the interventions carried out with the accused by mediators, most often belonging to religious associations.
For years, various mechanisms – specific religious rituals, prisoner committees organizing awareness sessions, multiple pastoral activities carried out by religious people, public declarations of confession – have “ sensitized » the prison population, made up of genocidaires “ proximity “. The observation is ethnographic to describe ceremonies and sermons surrounding daily life and to collect the reactions of prisoners: some declared that they refused to confess, others that they evaluated the risks and advantages of strategically measured partial confessions, and sometimes, some said they were relieved to have testified without omitting the cruelty of their crimes. Jean Hatzfeld reported the statements of killers who also ended by detailing the atrocities committed during the genocide.
Benoît Guillou believes that the authorities exploited the religious perspective of confession and repentance to get the detainees to fill out a form recounting the crime or offenses, giving information on the accomplices and ending with the presentation of apologies. to the victims. Thus, the request for forgiveness, which was not expressed in a face-to-face meeting with the victims’ parents, became a formality.
The incentives and procedures developed in prisons are echoed by media coverage that extends beyond the prison world. Indeed, religious associations and NGO foreign companies, working with prisoners, import know-how acquired in international post-conflict situations and widely publicize their interventions among various audiences. The work restores the scenographies of forgiveness associating repentants and victims, deployed in various spaces: prisons, parishes, and even national demonstrations where political authorities and religious leaders come together.
Forgiveness on a parish scale
Dominantly, recent works devoted to Rwanda are divided on the break of the year 1994: they are either studies on the modalities of the genocide, or research on the institutions and practices characteristic of state power established after the genocide. Benoît Guillou’s story draws its originality from the project of writing a micro-history that holds together the genocide and the post-genocide. This micro-story is that of a Catholic parish, Musha, located not far from Kigali.
Having met Tutsi survivors, Hutus accused of killing and unindicted Hutus, all witnesses to massacres, Benoît Guillou reconstructs the local course of the genocide and compares between them the meanings that the imperatives of forgiveness can have for a population immersed in such a past of inhumanity. The genocide there lasted twelve days: it began the day after the attack of April 6, 1994 against the plane of the Rwandan president and was stopped, on April 19, by the forces of the FPR who invested in the sector.
The killings were terribly deadly: in the cell (the smallest territorial division of the commune) where the author particularly investigated, there resided three Tutsi families, twenty-one members of which were killed. On April 13, carnage was perpetrated in the church and the parish enclosure where thousands of Tutsis had taken refuge. Soldiers, gendarmes and militiamen surrounded them, threw grenades, shot at the crowd outside and inside the church then ordered the villagers, who participated in the attack, to finish off the wounded. Few survived. Finally, when the troops of FPR established a base in Musha, they killed a large number of Hutu peasants who had not fled.
The author offers a chronicle of the situations that he observed or which were related to him: Sunday masses, ceremonies commemorating the genocide, basic ecclesial communities, markets, joint ownership of plots of cultivation, where, by necessity, victims coexist. refusing an extorted pardon, “ repented » provisionally released making no personal steps of repentance with the survivors, Hutu peasants deserting the commemorations of the genocide because they only honor the Tutsis while their own deaths are denied.
A detailed ethnographic approach, as practiced by the investigator, was necessary to test the institutional mechanisms for calling for forgiveness and reconciliation. What he is told, what he observes, is how much the behavior expected by the authorities remains a mere facade. After the massive abuses still so present in memories, speeches tending towards reconciliation have lost all credibility for most survivors. Even Christian feelings no longer have any hold, as one Tutsi expresses it: “ Nowadays, I notice that God is no longer independent, he is manipulated by men » (p. 148).
The impossible “ forgiveness from the heart »
The survivors, met by the investigator, explained that they opposed the “ political pardon » demanded by the State a “ forgiveness from the heart » (umutima), forgiveness that they were not ready to grant. With few exceptions, at least at the time of the investigation. This is the case of Xaverine, a peasant survivor of the genocide, with whom the author conducted long interviews. The loss of her husband and three sons made her “ like crazy » for a few months, furious with revenge, denouncing as many neighbors as possible to have them arrested, even if she was unaware of their real participation in the killings, until the day she tried to drown herself. Saved by a vision in which she found the strength to return to the shore, she embarked on a process of forgiving the murderers of her family and invested herself with a mission: to preach reconciliation in her parish, in prisons, and even ‘in Kigali during a public ceremony organized by the Catholic Church in 2001.
Two years later, Karinda, the murderer of one of her sons, comes forward to confess her crime, repent and ask for forgiveness. Since then, the two protagonists have prayed together, helped each other in the work, gone to religious associations and to the central prison of Kigali to relate an experience which they consider as a deliverance, as a spiritual conversion which allowed them to ‘escape from the hell “. Loneliness of these converts: Xaverine is harshly criticized by the Tutsi survivors in her cell, and Karinda will have to hastily leave the commune, feeling threatened by those who refuse to confess.
Benoît Guillou’s book is based on field surveys, effective documentary research (gray literature from religious and secular practitioners of reconciliation), constant attention to classic theoretical works devoted to the theme of forgiveness (those of Jankélévitch , Arendt, Derrida), but also on expert attention to the texts of Christian theologians. Finally, it takes advantage of research and debates in pragmatic sociology. This combination of interests and observations allows him to show the diversity of gestures and words mobilized by the different actors engaged in processes of forgiveness, a process under common constraint, that of state power.