The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

In 1959, in a telegram to the UN, Kayibanda, founder of the MDR-Parmehutu
and of the First Republic, called for the establishment of a Hutuland
and a Tutsiland; by 1960, this demand had been transformed into one for
the exile of the Tutsis; between 1962 and 1994, within Rwanda, to the institutionalization
of the exclusion of Tutsis; and by 1994, to the attempt to
exterminate the Tutsis by genocide, which is the extreme form of refusal
to live together (kubana), and thus the rejection of the nation.
A genealogy can be traced from the ideas of difference (affirmed by
Western observers) to the action of extermination (undertaken by the
killers of 1994):
The alien status of the Tutsi served to justify their status as second-class
citizens within Rwanda (the Tutsi is nothing more than a resident citizen
who has duties to the Hutu, Rwanda’s sole owners), which produced,
externally, the Tutsi refugees. The ideology proclaimed in 1960 by the
MDR-Parmehutu in its “Moving Appeal”, called on the Tutsis to leave
Rwanda, which was not their country, and to return to the place of origin
assigned them by the “Western scholars”. Rather than departing for
any such hypothetical place of origin, the Tutsis fled to the countries bordering
Rwanda.
There soon developed among the Tutsi refugee an attitude of rejection
towards exile, which conflicted with their attitude of rejection of return
and coexistence, based on the argument of the smallness of the country.
The Tutsi refugees believed since the ‘60s that all that remained for
them was to force a return to Rwanda. The looming forcible return of
the Tutsi probably engendered the idea of extermination. Since 1964,
the word “genocide” had become common; Kayibanda delivered it in a
speech in March 1964 by announcing that if by chance the Tutsis should
want to take Kigali; that would mean the extermination of their race – in
other words, genocide. He shouted it out; the word and the idea were
in the air, and the idea slowly began to circulate in certain circles of the
Hutu elite that the extermination of Tutsis would be somehow feasible,
given their small numbers. In 1994, this idea was nourished by other
factors, which appeared on the scene when the transition to action ar -
r ived. Thus, first came the word (in 1964), then the feasibility (throughout
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