Rwanda at a glance: Lessons for Sri Lanka?

Rwanda has a millennial history of kingdom governance.

- CALLY ALLES

The people are called Abanyarwanda. They speak the same language, used to have the same traditional religion and believed in Imana (God). They have the same culture, ethics and moral values.

Until the 1960s when the Belgians brought a Republic model of political administration, Abanyarwanda had never known any high intensity inter community killings. In fact, they were and still are bound by one language Ikinyarwanda, religious belief and Igihango, a traditional blood pact that cemented the social bond and fraternal unity.

The colonialists introduced a divide and rule method of suppression, and the people who shared the same language, the same beliefs, the same villages, having intermarried across centuries, were told that they are so different ethnically; the Hutus, the Tutsis and the Twas, originally established based on socio-economic parameters with a social mobility structure, were codified as totally distinct ethnicities.

The consecutive two Republics of former Rwandan Presidents Mr. Kayibanda and Mr. Habyarimana exacerbated ethnicity and sectarian politics. They set a base for ethnic cleansing and later Habyarimanas government executed the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

The Rwandese Patriotic Front led a revolution struggle and defeated the genocidal regime in 1994, after over 1 million Tutsi were slaughtered countrywide. Some Hutu were also massacred because they opposed the genocide commission.

Genocide perpetrators fled to neighboring countries, mainly to the DR Congo (then Zaire), and also to Tanzania and Burundi.

The genocide perpetrators were provided a safe haven in DR Congo and exported in DR Congo the genocide ideology. They killed and expelled to exile in neighboring countries and beyond the Congolese Tutsi.