[LINK] "For Rwandan Students, Ethnic Tensions Lurk"

[rfmcdonald]

Josh Kron's article explores how the Rwandan governments efforts to close down public discussions about the Hutu-Tutsi differences that resulted in the 1994 Rwandan genocide has led to a displacement of these differences to areas as diverse as preferred second language and policies which punish students for dissenting from the official line.

The 1994 genocide, when Hutu death squads massacred hundreds of thousands of minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus, is never far away. At the university, where Hutus and Tutsis live and study side by side, many students are either relatives of the killers or relatives of the victims.

But the Tutsi-dominated government teaches that there are no Hutus or Tutsis, only united, patriotic Rwandans, part of a reconciliation policy enforced by laws criminalizing certain kinds of speech to the contrary.

So the students live in a surreal state of imposed silence, never talking about the one thing always on their minds: each other.

In one way, Feliciano Nshiyimana, a 26-year-old Hutu law student, is a paradigm of President Paul Kagame’s reconciliation efforts. At the crowded and competitive campus, where students sleep four to a room, two to a bed, he shares a bed with a Tutsi genocide survivor. Listening to MP3s on his laptop in his room, surrounded by toiletries, course printouts and posters of the Manchester United soccer team, he says that conversations among his roommates are delicate, but that they generally get along.

“Background is losing importance,” he said, but added, “If you have an ideology, you hide it.”

While students make acquaintances based on their interests, he says, campus life ultimately divides itself along linguistic lines, and friendships across those lines are rare.

“Linguistic lines,” in this case, is code for the ethnic groups that dare not speak their names. Although the linguistic differences are not cut and dried, for students “French speakers” means Hutu and “English speakers” means Tutsi, specifically those who returned from refugee life in English-speaking Uganda after 1994 and now run the country.

Such code has evolved in the face of the governing party’s efforts to keep peace and power by papering over ethnic identity and pushing a cult of nationalism.