The waning of hatred

[serenissima]

CSM: Africa After War: Paths to Forgiveness - Why Jeannette employs her family's killers

BUTARE, RWANDA - A tall, slender Tutsi woman named Jeannette Nyirabaganwa has at least 100 perfectly good reasons never to speak to Anastaz Turimubakunzi again.

That's how many of Jeannette's relatives, including her husband, parents, and baby, were killed during the 1994 genocide that raced through her hometown here in Africa's midsection. Anastaz is a confessed killer who, Jeannette says, helped murder her husband.

Yet Jeannette does, in fact, speak to Anastaz regularly. She even pays him - along with other Hutus who killed her relatives - to work on her coffee farm. Increasingly, their uneasy partnership is paying off: The beans they grow and pick together are being sold, along with those of many other Rwandan coffee farmers, to Starbucks and other high-end US coffee purveyors, creating growing prosperity for her, him, and others.

[Jeannette's personal history, snipped]

* * *

Call it trickle-down reconciliation. After the genocide - in which some 800,000 people were killed in just 90 days - Rwanda's Tutsi-dominated government proclaimed, "We are all Rwandans," and created a climate of extreme political correctness. It's now taboo even to utter the words "Hutu" and "Tutsi." The aim is to quash any public mention of ethnicity - and therefore any recurrence of violence - while focusing on economic growth that will benefit both Hutus and Tutsis. It's the Rwandan equivalent of President Reagan's economic approach: Create a rising economic tide to lift all Rwandan boats - and float them away from the jagged rocks of ethnic conflict. "The more people have a house and a car, the less reason they have to throw a stone at someone," explains Shyaka Kanuma, editor of Focus, a private newspaper in the capital, Kigali.

Yet the strategy is risky. It leaves little room for direct dialogue about why ethnic tensions exploded - and how a recurrence can be prevented. Government-sanctioned "gacaca" community courts aim to bring justice and reconciliation - and ostensibly provide a forum for dialogue - yet they are overwhelmed with cases and are seen by some as one-sided and biased. In general, "There is no reconciliation going on - Hutus still hate Tutsis, and Tutsis still hate Hutus," says one political analyst who asked not to be named because of the taboo against speaking so frankly. More ethnic killing is "inevitable," he adds, if political leaders fail to spread the country's wealth equitably.

Indeed, the threat of violence from both sides still looms. This extremism is "like a lion who is asleep," says one human rights activist who also asked not to be named because of the sensitive nature of her comments. "But when he is hungry, he will wake up." This hunger, she adds, is fueled by economic inequality. By this analogy, Rwanda's challenge is like trying to feed a lion while it sleeps - and hoping it doesn't wake up.

***

For five years after the genocide, Jeannette rarely spoke. She had few people to talk to and little to say. She avoided the killers, who still lived in town. Afraid of reprisals, they avoided her, too.

But by 1999, a group of neighbors had decided to start a coffee cooperative. For decades, local coffee farmers had sold raw beans to middlemen at low prices. Now the cooperative wanted to help farmers keep more of the profits.

Jeannette decided the time was right to join the Abahuzamugambi cooperative. She had inherited her dead relatives' coffee farms, and she was looking for help in making the fields productive and profitable. Yet her decision was based on more than money. After five years of isolation, "I thought that coffee-growing could connect me to other people," she says. It was also a way of honoring her family, which had grown coffee for generations: "Coffee can help me remember the relatives."

Some Tutsis wouldn't join the cooperative - whose name roughly means "growing together" - because it included Hutu killers. But for Jeannette, it was a lifesaver. If it hadn't come along, she says, "I would have gone mad."

Soon she had business relationships with people who killed her family members. Then, to her surprise, in cooperative meetings, bits of truth would emerge about what had happened in 1994. Jeannette says several people - both Hutus and Tutsis - told her Anastaz was part of a group that had killed her husband. At first, "If I had a gun, yes, I would have killed him," she says. But, living on her own, she feared reprisals: "I had no one to protect me."

As years passed, the cooperative prospered - linking into the $20-billion global "specialty coffee" market, which includes roasters like Starbucks. The cooperative now even sells its own brand - "Maraba Bourbon" - at retail stores in Britain.

Over the years, Jeannette began to separate killers' past deeds from their current contributions. "This doesn't change the emotions," she explains, "but it does help me interact" with them. Through the cooperative, she says, "We've been building a relationship that changed our lives. We ended up reconciling in a way we didn't know."

[Anastaz' point of view and overview of nation's current status, snipped]

Will peace strengthen and grow like this? Will it last for more than a generation? Can it take root in other places where ethnic hatred has festered for centuries?