Rescuers Muted: Gendered Components of Silencing Rescuers During Commemoration Events of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda

• In Event: Atrocity Crimes: Challenges, Approaches and Impacts of Transitional Justice (ECACTJ)

Abstract

In the thirty-year period since the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the country has grappled with how to unify its citizens, prevent reprisal waves of violence, and promote forgiveness, with the goal of rebuilding the state. One of the solutions Rwanda has created to help solve these problems is to develop and propagate a unique national collective memory of the genocide. A major component of Rwanda’s state-led collective memory comes from annual commemoration ceremonies in which communities come together to hear governmentally sanctioned accounts of the genocide from people who survived, rescued, and perpetrated. Prior research has shown that survivors’ accounts at commemorations and memorials center around cohesive narratives that fit neatly within the governments account of the genocide. This criteria for whose narrative is shared has led to concerns about if narratives of certain groups, such as people who rescued or women, are being omitted. This research examines whose stories have not been told, with an emphasis on gender and on those who risked their lives to save others during the genocide. In total, 175 in-depth qualitative interviews (Male=113, Female=62) were conducted from 2018 to 2020 with individuals who rescued during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Within these interviews, fifty individuals expressed having never shared their experiences of the genocide at commemoration. Over half of those individuals were women (N=27). Common reasoning given by these women for having not shared their story included their husbands always being asked to testify instead of them, having never been asked to testify, and heightened emotional states surrounding the commemoration. These findings point towards the silencing of women’s narratives, resulting in their exclusion from Rwanda’s collective memory of the genocide.

Authors

• Anneliese Schenk-Day, Ohio State University

• Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira, The Ohio State University

• Nicole Fox, California State University Sacramento