By Michela Wrong
In Rwanda, April 7 is a public holiday of the most tragic kind: the annual commemoration of the 1994 genocide of nearly a million people. One of the sites that host remembrances is the Kigali Genocide Memorial, a museum honoring victims—including some 250,000 buried in mass graves beneath the facility. Rwanda’s most prominent genocide tribute attracts plenty of international attention. On the mass slaughter’s 20th anniversary, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon lit a flame there; Lonely Planet recommends it as a “top choice” for tourists, tens of thousands of whom visit it each year. To these guests, the museum delivers a clear message on behalf of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the country’s ruling force for more than two decades: “Never again.”
Over the past several years, however, a new breed of museum has appeared across Rwanda. These government-run sites—former historical homes and headquarters of the country’s rich, powerful, and royal—have received just a fraction of the global publicity given to genocide memorials. And the media have largely overlooked the sites’ troubling, if subtle, messages: signals of Rwanda’s increasing authoritarianism.
In December 2015, the government staged a rushed referendum on a constitutional change allowing President Paul Kagame to run for three more terms; he has already served more than 15 years. Against this backdrop, the new generation of memorials suggests a regime quietly bent on anchoring its legacy in brick and mortar and justifying its continued existence with a selective view of Rwandan history—one citizens know better than to contradict.
Take former President Juvenal Habyarimana’s villa in Kigali, opened as the Presidential Palace Museum in 2009. Habyarimana, an army chief of staff who led a presidential coup in 1973, lived in paranoid anticipation that his own turn would come: His palace is a mini-fortress equipped with motion sensors on its stairs and a fake wall in a TV room that opens to reveal a concealed rifle rack and secret staircase—an escape route for his family. Habyarimana famously perished alongside his Burundian counterpart when a jet they were traveling in was shot down in April 1994, the event that triggered the genocide. The plane fell right next to the presidential villa, which lies in an elegant Kigali suburb underneath the main flight path into the capital’s airport. A British TV crew that visited the site soon after the double assassination spotted what looked like human brains spattered on Habyarimana’s Mercedes-Benz.
Today, the plane’s twisted, rusting debris still sits where it crashed, just outside the villa’s garden walls. Museum visitors can wander around it as they please. So can the Rwandan couples who choose the villa as a venue for their wedding receptions, often held in a marquee on the lawn.
The anxiety-infused home and untouched plane wreckage serve as implicit warnings to anyone contemplating a change in Rwanda’s leadership. Officially, the Kagame-helmed RPF insists it had nothing to do with Habyarimana’s assassination; a 2010 government inquiry pointed the finger at extremists within Habyarimana’s own inner circle. Yet the regime perversely benefits from dogged suspicions of its guilt, voiced by its critics, because they are reminders of the RPF’s capacity to destroy its enemies. And destroy it does: As Human Rights Watch reported in 2014, the government “does not tolerate opposition, challenge, or criticism” and uses “arbitrary arrests, detentions, prosecutions, killings, torture, enforced disappearances, threats, harassment, and intimidation against government opponents and critics.” It has allegedly sent emissaries as far as Kenya, the United Kingdom, and South Africa to track down dissidents who, like Habyarimana in his villa, live in constant fear that the end is nigh.
Read more:The False Idols of Rwanda’s Genocide
Source: FP