The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

The fear of Tutsi superiority may also explain the importance that
rape assumed during the genocide. Rape of Tutsi women was, for
the killers, a kind of completion of the self after a long fascination
with the Tutsi woman.
The fear of Tutsi superiority also explained the desire to humiliate
that ran throughout the genocide.
Hutu triumphalism expressed itself excessively in the songs sung during
the various episodes that punctuated the seizure of power by the Hutu
“revolution” of the 1960s. They had gone very far, and thought the situation
irreversible, it would be difficult to throw the machine into reverse
and achieve the return of the Tutsi, and when that return did loom
after October 1990, it seemed intolerable to many. The leadership exploited
this sentiment to mobilize the Hutus against the common danger.
Even today, in the recent diaspora, people can be found who considered
the return of the Tutsi to Rwanda, and to power, to be unthinkable, or at
most as temporary. There is room for the assumption that the so-called
“Hutu Power”, the Hutu extremists who perpetrated the genocide,
were those who pushed to an extreme precisely this feeling of the unbearable
return of the Tutsis. They literally could not and cannot “digest”
the return of the Tutsis. In 1994, they needed to exterminate them; later
they need to try to finish the job. It is this ideology that we must constantly
fight and eradicate.
The Burundian mirror: It has often been said that the two countries,
Rwanda and Burundi, are like twins. This is true because of their historical
and social similarities, and it is also true because they have grown like
twins, raised together by the same colonizer, who took care not to create
jealousy between them, and did in one place the same things as had been
done in the other, like a mother who dresses twins alike. This was also
true when African independence appeared on the horizon: in both countries,
the colonial administration, Western civil society and the churches
formed parallel projects to empower the Hutu – for liberation not from colonial
rule, but from the rule of the Tutsi, which they themselves had established
by means of their theory of racial superiority, and which had
become inappropriate as soon as it allowed the Tutsi to oust the Westerners.
Thus did the argument of the foreignness of the Tutsi prevail, and
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