Word: bizimana
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...known as the "Land of a Thousand Hills." Since 1994, when the country convulsed in genocidal spasms that killed 1 million people, it has mostly been a land of tears. As the country's Minister of State for Education--and at 34 the youngest member of the Cabinet--Bizimana must try to salvage a ravaged and traumatized generation of Rwandan children. It is a daunting task. More than 300,000 school-age children were orphaned by the war. The school system is crumbling and underfunded, and many of its teachers either perished in the slaughter four years ago or have...
...Bizimana has some scars of his own. In the old Rwandan regime, he was director of education. As a member of the majority Hutu tribe, he was expected to join in the Hutu militants' three-month campaign of genocide against Tutsi and moderate Hutu. Bizimana refused and toward the end sought refuge in a hospital. When the Tutsi-majority Rwandan Patriotic Front seized power in July 1994, he chose not to flee. Both decisions nearly cost him his life. Even today, a uniformed armed guard escorts him everywhere. Bizimana has tried to come to terms with the cataclysm, but there...
...some the answer is as intractable as it is frightening. The animosity between Hutu and Tutsi, many Westerners believe, grew out of fierce and ancient tribal hatred. But Rwandans like Bizimana, who each day grapple with explaining the unspeakable, resist this orthodox notion of tribalism. "The genocide philosophy was created in the colonial period to divide people who shared a common culture," he says. In the 1920s, Belgian colonial authorities classified Rwandans into different tribes. One group of families, whom the Belgians called Tutsi, was given the advantages of Western culture, such as access to schools. The rest were labeled...
...Bizimana refers to Hutu and Tutsi as "small political and economic" groups. "You cannot call them tribes," he says. Yet even if tribalism is an inadequate term, it does speak to an emerging and explosive phenomenon in other parts of the world. Fragmentation, Balkanization, the dissolution of states: at a time of blurry borders and contested nationhood, ethnicity may become the most common--and easiest--organizing principle for nation builders. In the next century, conflagrations of apparent tribalism will not be set off by old ethnic rivalries as much as by contemporary political struggles--struggles that power-hungry leaders will...
...part, Bizimana believes that in order to exorcise their genocidal demons, Rwandans must look forward, into the promise of the global economy, and back, to the values of an authentic tribal heritage. "We need to be inspired by the positive values of our history," he says, "and combine them with the great universal values of the rest of the world." Perhaps realizing the burden he shoulders as one of his country's last hopes, he adds, "It is not enough to use these values as slogans or for propaganda. We have to live these principles for ourselves as leaders...