Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [42]
Perhaps the most amazing reconciliation efforts in the world are those taking place in Rwanda. In 1994, killers from the Hutu majority slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis and their Hutu sympathizers in ninety days, mostly by using machetes. One of the greatest regrets of my presidency is that I did not send forces as a part of a U.N. mission to stop it. In 1998, when Hillary and I visited Rwanda, I apologized for not doing more sooner and asked to meet with survivors who were trying to put their country together again.
In a small room at the Kigali airport, six survivors told us their stories. The last speaker, Josephine Murebwayire, was a dignified woman who described how her family had been identified to the rampaging killers as Tutsis by Hutu neighbors whose children had for years played with hers. She was badly wounded by machete hacks across her back and left for dead. When she regained consciousness, she was lying in a pool of her own blood with her husband and six children dead beside her. She told Hillary and me she had cried out to God in despair that she had survived, then came to understand that “my life must have been spared for a reason, and it could not be something as mean as vengeance. So I do what I can to help us start again.” She was raising six children who had lost their parents in the massacre.
Several times after leaving the White House, I went back to Rwanda, where my foundation has major AIDS and economic development projects. My friend Casey Wasserman and I also helped the Rwandans complete their memorial to the genocide. It has powerful exhibits in a simple but beautiful building that sits on a hillside in Kigali, the capital city. Into the hill are dug eleven large tombs containing the bones of more than 250,000 of the victims. I was given a tour of the exhibits by a handsome young man who told me he had lost more than seventy relatives in the killing, from his immediate family to aunts, uncles, and cousins. When I asked him if his loss made it difficult for him to work at the memorial, he said no, it was therapeutic because it helped him and those who visited to begin again. Then I told him about meeting the woman who had lost her husband and six children on my first trip in 1998 and said he reminded me of her. “I should,” he said. “She’s my aunt.”
There are lots of stories like that in Rwanda. President Paul Kagame has established reconciliation villages in which Hutus and Tutsis live side by side. I visited one of them and saw a Hutu woman holding hands with her Tutsi neighbor whose husband and brother were killed. The Hutu woman’s husband was in prison awaiting a war crimes trial for playing an important role in the genocide. I talked with a young Hutu who had come back from exile in the Congo when the president said low-level Hutu combatants could return if they confessed their crimes and did whatever community atonement service the village ordered them to do. The people I met had gathered at the home of a Hutu woman, who was caring for two orphaned Tutsi children who were bedridden, gravely ill with an incurable congenital medical condition.
Rwandan women have adopted between 400,000 and 500,000 orphans. Women comprise 49 percent of the lower house of Parliament, the highest percentage in the world. And they are making major contributions to the economic recovery of their country. Pascasie Mukamunigo is a Tutsi woman who lost her mother, brother, husband, and the youngest seven of her ten children. She also lost her life savings and her basket-weaving business. At fifty, she had to begin all over again. With a Hutu neighbor she recruited people into a basket-weaving collective that now has 120 members, including several men. One of her young basket makers eventually confessed to Pascasie that he had killed one of her sons. Racked with grief and guilt, he told her he would understand if one of her surviving sons killed him. Instead, she forgave him. When asked why, she said, “What good does revenge do me? What good does it do anyone? It doesn’t help us to heal.