Raising Hope

By Clive Mutiso/Kigali

From his fifth-floor office overlooking downtown Kigali, Jean-Pierre Bizimana surveys the landscape of a nation struggling to survive. The undulating countryside, full of rich volcanic soil, is rampant with disease and malnutrition. In much of rural Rwanda, fields lie fallow because there is no money for fertilizer and seeds. Ninety percent of the Rwandan population is unemployed. The average income is $180 a year, and life expectancy is 40.

Rwanda is known as the "Land of a Thousand Hills." Since 1994, when the country convulsed in genocidal spasms that killed 1 million people, it has mostly been a land of tears. As the country's Minister of State for Education--and at 34 the youngest member of the Cabinet--Bizimana must try to salvage a ravaged and traumatized generation of Rwandan children. It is a daunting task. More than 300,000 school-age children were orphaned by the war. The school system is crumbling and underfunded, and many of its teachers either perished in the slaughter four years ago or have fled into exile. The society remains haunted by the ghosts of recent history. "For the first time, we have decent leadership," Bizimana says, "although we have to remember the very important impact that the legacy of the previous regime has had on the collective subconscious of the country."

That's a grim warning for people in many of the world's flash points, from Cambodia to Mexico to Bosnia. But it is also a call for increased vigilance from the international community and a move away from the widely held view that tribalism is unavoidable. Visiting Rwanda last month, President Clinton acknowledged that the 1994 bloodletting was "certainly not the result of ancient tribal struggles...All over the world, there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed."

Bizimana has some scars of his own. In the old Rwandan regime, he was director of education. As a member of the majority Hutu tribe, he was expected to join in the Hutu militants' three-month campaign of genocide against Tutsi and moderate Hutu. Bizimana refused and toward the end sought refuge in a hospital. When the Tutsi-majority Rwandan Patriotic Front seized power in July 1994, he chose not to flee. Both decisions nearly cost him his life. Even today, a uniformed armed guard escorts him everywhere. Bizimana has tried to come to terms with the cataclysm, but there are no easy answers. "We have to ask ourselves, What provoked people to start thinking of themselves as threatened by their neighbors to the extent of trying to annihilate them?"

To some the answer is as intractable as it is frightening. The animosity between Hutu and Tutsi, many Westerners believe, grew out of fierce and ancient tribal hatred. But Rwandans like Bizimana, who each day grapple with explaining the unspeakable, resist this orthodox notion of tribalism. "The genocide philosophy was created in the colonial period to divide people who shared a common culture," he says. In the 1920s, Belgian colonial authorities classified Rwandans into different tribes. One group of families, whom the Belgians called Tutsi, was given the advantages of Western culture, such as access to schools. The rest were labeled Hutu. The Belgians claimed that Tutsi were cattle keepers and that Hutu mainly raised crops, but the division was arbitrary. "The Hutu and Tutsi are one people, with one language, who eat the same food and dress the same way," Bizimana says. "We follow the same occupations, worship together and intermarry. The real source of Rwanda's divisions is not ethnic but political and economic."

Bizimana refers to Hutu and Tutsi as "small political and economic" groups. "You cannot call them tribes," he says. Yet even if tribalism is an inadequate term, it does speak to an emerging and explosive phenomenon in other parts of the world. Fragmentation, Balkanization, the dissolution of states: at a time of blurry borders and contested nationhood, ethnicity may become the most common--and easiest--organizing principle for nation builders. In the next century, conflagrations of apparent tribalism will not be set off by old ethnic rivalries as much as by contemporary political struggles--struggles that power-hungry leaders will use to inflame tensions among groups. Says Bizimana: "We have to understand that politics based on tribalism--as it is now in much of Africa--will lead inevitably to the same end: massacres and genocide. And that will deprive the continent of its most important resource: people."

For his part, Bizimana believes that in order to exorcise their genocidal demons, Rwandans must look forward, into the promise of the global economy, and back, to the values of an authentic tribal heritage. "We need to be inspired by the positive values of our history," he says, "and combine them with the great universal values of the rest of the world." Perhaps realizing the burden he shoulders as one of his country's last hopes, he adds, "It is not enough to use these values as slogans or for propaganda. We have to live these principles for ourselves as leaders."