Convicted Génocidaires: Keepers of “Bad History”

Abstract

As indicated in Chapter 1, I interspersed my interviews with memorial staff and survivors with fieldwork at five Rwandan prisons so I could interview convicted génocidaires. I sought out génocidaires’ perspectives for two reasons. First, it seemed unethical to place the “narrative burden” of giving testimony related to the genocide solely on survivors and bystanders, many of whom face significant mental and physical health challenges in the post-genocide period that might be exacerbated by spending long periods talking about their experiences.¹ This is not to say that génocidaires had been spared similar mental and physical health challenges—indeed, many of the génocidaires I interviewed exhibited anxiety, paranoia, and emotional distress, and admitted suffering from nightmares and other potential symptoms of trauma in discussing the genocide and their subsequent imprisonment, suggesting they too had been deeply and negatively affected by the violence they had enacted in the post-genocide period.² However, it is arguably more ethical for perpetrators to share the narrative burden of speaking about the genocide with survivors, bystanders, and other parties to the conflict wherever it is possible to gain access to their accounts. Second, I recognized that it is important to consider the experiences of génocidaires in conversation with the experiences of survivors to gain insight into how the genocide and Rwandan history more generally are interpreted by different parties to the conflict in the post-genocide period. This is particularly relevant as survivors and bystanders may not fully comprehend the various factors that motivated perpetrators’ actions surrounding periods of genocide, for example, or may not have been party to intimate details regarding the planning and inciting of genocide in their communities.