“Have you forgiven the Hutu killers?”
As a survivor of the genocide against the Tutsi, I have been asked this question for almost 30 years. It feels loaded, and somehow beside the point. Let me explain how it makes me feel, and why I think it is often the wrong question asked of the wrong person.
First, none of the Hutus who murdered my family has ever come to ask me for forgiveness. Even if they did, I don’t think I have the right to absolve such horrific crimes against my loved ones. The question makes it sound as if I owe the killers something, or must forgive just to satisfy social pressure.
Some young Hutus have asked for my forgiveness anyway, out of a misplaced, inherited guilt. I find that pointless, since they did not commit genocide. When a killer is prosecuted, his family does not apologize on his behalf. So the idea that an innocent Hutu friend needs my forgiveness makes little sense to me.
When Faced With Genocide, Forgiveness Loses Meaning
Faced with a crime on the scale of genocide, forgiveness itself starts to mean something different. My difficulty is not that I want revenge. It is that the scale of the violence is beyond human understanding. After losing my family, forgiveness feels out of reach.
As a badly wounded child, I never decided to withhold forgiveness. I believed it was justice’s job to hold people accountable and make sure this never happened again. My path is not to forgive the unforgivable but to understand how the genocide happened, so we can prevent it from happening again.
When people ask, I usually say that I forgive no one, yet I hold no hatred. What I have instead of forgiveness is a constant effort to understand how ordinary citizens came to embrace an ideology that called Tutsis “cockroaches.” Digging into the roots of that violence is how I make sense of the unthinkable. The better I understand how blind conformity spreads, the better I can stand up to the patterns that lead to genocide.
Rwanda’s history shows the danger of “us versus them” thinking once it takes hold in politics and society. The genocidal regime’s propaganda branded Tutsis as subhuman “cockroaches” to be killed without remorse. Worryingly, a similar sorting of people has come back under the RPF government: intore (RPF loyalists) versus ibigarasha (critics).
Once in power, the RPF soon labeled critics “enemies of the nation,” creating new divisions. Because I openly question the regime’s abuses, I once again face exclusion and repression, like many other Rwandans who dare to question any government policy.
The RPF presents itself as the savior of the Tutsi and spreads the fear that without it in charge, genocide will happen again. This puts enormous pressure on survivors to stay loyal and keep quiet. Those of us who speak out face retaliation, even though we lived through the genocide ourselves: intimidation, imprisonment, disappearances and staged “suicides.”
It is as if the RPF believes it owns survivors and can demand our silence whatever abuses happen. Many stay quiet even when their own loved ones are jailed or killed. That is how deep the fear goes.
This repression goes on despite a common belief in the international community that Tutsi survivors are privileged in post-genocide Rwanda simply because most of the RPF leadership is Tutsi too.
In truth, Tutsi who openly criticize the regime face as much brutality and oppression as any dissident Hutus. In fact, we are disproportionately represented among jailed political prisoners.
Today’s repression is not about ethnicity. Anyone who openly criticizes the ruling party, Hutu or Tutsi, survivor or not, risks severe retaliation. Questioning the regime takes real courage.
My goal is not to reconcile with unrepentant killers or forgive the unforgivable. It is to understand how authoritarian conformity works, and to expose how ordinary people can be trained into blind loyalty to leaders who divide them for power. I want to help take apart the machinery that makes dehumanization and genocide possible.
Justice Over Identity Politics
Forgiveness after genocide has no simple answers. Some survivors may choose to forgive individuals if it brings them peace.
But given the scale and the planned, collective nature of these crimes, blanket forgiveness does not fit my truth as a survivor. My priorities are justice, dignity for all Rwandans regardless of ethnicity or political views, and preventing the conditions that breed hatred.
Seen this way, the Rwandan government’s policy of making survivors live with released killers is unconscionable. It retraumatizes victims in the name of “healing” and “reconciliation.”
According to Prison Fellowship/Rwanda, the organization implementing them on behalf of the government, more than eight so-called “reconciliation villages” now make nearly 5,000 survivors to live alongside their families’ convicted murderers, often in duplex homes where they have no choice but to see their attacker’s face daily.
Survivors run into the people who shattered their lives in the morning as they sweep the yard, and at night as they do their chores. Many homeless survivors are pushed to share a roof with their attackers so the government can score political points, parading them hand in hand before dignitaries like King Charles as “success stories.”
This treats vulnerable survivors as guinea pigs and sacrifices their dignity for photo opportunities that whitewash grave crimes. How can such political theater help reconciliation? Is forced cohabitation really necessary? Should victims be made to forgive in public at all? No survivor should have to face, day after day, the people who ruined their lives.
Justice will not come from pressuring victims to forgive génocidaires in public. It will come from building a fair Rwanda where every citizen has basic rights and dignity, whatever their ethnicity. That is the only way to break the cycle of violence.
Persevering for Justice
My path is neither unconditional forgiveness nor revenge. I want to honor the more than one million lives destroyed, including my family’s. Their memory gives me the strength to help build a Rwanda defined not by old divisions or political allegiance, but by shared humanity and justice.
I keep trying to understand the blind obedience and political fanaticism that made killing the “other” seem normal. I hope that by uncovering the truth and demanding accountability, we Rwandans can one day write a new chapter, free of fear.
I lost my whole world as a child, and blanket forgiveness does not fit my truth. But bitterness does not define me either. I forgive no one and forget nothing, but I refuse to be consumed by hatred or corrupted by revenge.
What troubles me most are those who demand that victims like me forgive our attackers in public, under a government that still uses division as a weapon. Reconciliation cannot be forced through trauma and fear.
Real reconciliation can only grow on its own, as deep wounds heal.
Only by understanding and exposing the blind obedience and fanaticism that breed genocide can we stop it from happening again.
I grew up without parents in the years after the genocide. My deepest hope is that Rwanda’s young people find the courage to think for themselves, question power, and move beyond the divisions planted by past and present tyrants. Ends.
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