Rwanda, the “Land of a Thousand Hills,” is filled with lush mountains covered by terraced farms and banana trees, and framed by blue and purple volcanic mountains. Yet, in this idyllic setting between 800,000 and 1 million people were killed in a genocide 15 years ago that attempted to destroy the country’s Tutsi minority.
“If I had to sum up Rwanda in two words, they would be ‘beautiful’ and ‘depressing’,” says Valerie Love, who spent three weeks in the country in July as part of a human rights delegation from the United States. “Being there was surreal – incredibly moving and uplifting one minute, and totally gut-wrenching the next.”
While there, Love, the curator for Human Rights Collections at UConn’s Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, witnessed the new government’s progress toward political stability and economic growth, but also saw reminders of the country’s past.
From gacaca courts that bring members of the community together with the accused before a panel of judges, to slogans written on buildings in rural areas calling for peace, to the work at the Kigali Memorial Centre, which documents genocide in Rwanda and elsewhere in the world, the events of 1994 are acknowledged but not discussed.
“Mention of the categories of Hutu and Tutsi are taboo in the name of national unity,” says Love, “and since 1994, there has been a moratorium on the teaching of history in schools.”
Love was in Rwanda as part of a trip sponsored by Global Youth Connect, a Colorado-based organization that brings together human rights activists under the age of 30 from the United States with other human rights activists and organizations in post-conflict societies. All the delegates participate in a cross-cultural human rights workshop and spend time volunteering together with human rights organizations in the host country.
Love is no stranger to genocide and post-conflict societies. She is the great-granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, and attended a summer institute on genocide at the University of Toronto in 2007. She has also spent time in South Africa, where she helped develop a school library in the village of Mseleni in Kwa Zulu Natal.
Among the materials Love oversees at the Dodd Center are oral histories of members of the African National Congress who led the struggles against apartheid in South Africa, and publications from human rights organizations around the world.
During her trip, she learned that many of the Rwandese human rights delegates were survivors who had lost parents and family members. On a bus ride to learn about land conflicts in the Rwaza sector in Northern Rwanda, Love sat next to a 27-year-old Rwandese delegate, who showed her cell phone photos of herself and her friends, as well as a photo of her parents’ bones recovered after the genocide.
“In retrospect, I realized that it was an enormous display of trust, but at the time, it made me feel queasy,” Love recalls. “Some of the stories and information that I learned from survivors are so gruesome that I hesitate to even repeat them, wondering if there can possibly be any educational value in horrific details of human suffering. It’s a question I’m still not sure of the answer to, but one that as an archivist working with human rights collections, I’m forced to grapple with daily.”
She acknowledges that there are many social issues yet to be addressed in Rwanda, but was encouraged by the work of human rights activists she met who were working on a variety of issues, including promoting justice and reconciliation, gender equality, sexual and reproductive health, education rights, and land reform, and working to end discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered Rwandans.
Love says the country has made enormous progress in the years since the genocide.
“Kigali is currently one of the safest and cleanest capital cities in Africa,” she says. “Rwanda is the first country to have a female majority in Parliament. The progress that’s been made to build stability and unity since the genocide really is astounding.”
