Rwanda’s young Generation has not experienced the genocide. Many have grown up under a blanket of silence. How Germany’s ‘ 68 you ask the pressing questions.
From a few meters away is the small Joseph eyed interested in the Gacaca court, the has gathered. Several dozen men and women sitting in the shade of a large tree. He listens to you discuss and screaming, one wants to be physical. More exciting than the school, from which he has with a couple of friends stole, is the event in any case.
However, with his eight years, Joseph can’t understand what’s happening in the municipal-court proceedings, to draw the events of the 1994 genocide process, and the perpetrators to justice. Questions he’s not allowed to make. He was too young, told him the adults.
Rwanda “Generation After”
Today, Joseph Kalisz mid-twenty’s. He belongs to the “Generation After”, the Generation in Rwanda, which has not experienced the genocide in which over 800,000 people were killed. Like Joseph, many young Rwandans are raised under a blanket of silence. “The younger Generation hardly gets replies from your parents,” he says. “You don’t know the truth. You don’t know what really happened, and longs for truth. This makes it difficult to accept what was.”
Joseph Kalisz: “The young Generation does not know the truth.”
This Wednesday (04.07.) the invasion of the RPF-the anniversary of the genocide, troops in Kigali and thus the end of the Rwandan for 25. Time. But still Rwanda is struggling with the work-up. Every year, the victims. But what about the descendants? More than half of the population of Rwanda today is under 20 years old. With the consequences of the genocide, they also have to fight in different ways. “Some of them could or can not go to school, for example, because their fathers were killed, or as a perpetrator in jail,” says Joseph Kalisz.
When Trauma to children will be passed
Others in his Generation have been struggling with Depression and traumatic disorders. “As I have participated in a commemorative event, and we have seen a documentary about the Rwandan genocide, many of my friends like traumatized,” says the 21-year-old Liliane Niyigema. She too had cried for a long time. “You screamed so loud that I got scared.”
These events in commemorative events have also alerted researchers and psychologists. “It is primarily the 15 – to 25-year-olds, the traumatic have breaks experienced,” says Eugene Rutembesa, Professor of psychology and psycho-pathology at the University of Rwanda in Kigali. “So we asked ourselves: Why not relive you of the trauma, even though they were at the genocide’t it?”
Recent research at the centre for Mental health at the University of have shown that post can be passed on traumatic disorders genetically to children. Children of Tutsi mothers have experienced during your pregnancy, the genocide in Rwanda, developed significantly more frequent traumatic disorders and depression than children whose mothers were in 1994 in exile. “We were able to demonstrate that it is even at the epigenetic level changes,” explains Eugene Rutembesa. “Certain genes were mutated and stunted.”
Young Rwandans discuss in a lecture hall of University of Rwanda in Kigali
In search of answers
Liliane Niyigema sitting in the lecture hall listening with rapt attention to a talk on intergenerational trauma. She finally gets answers to questions that you dragged on for years around. A few rows in front of her, Joseph is sitting. Also, he takes notes.
Together with other participants and international experts discussing for a week at a Summer School at the Department of Mental health the major issues, problems and challenges of their Generation. How can we remember our past to distinguish without further in the Hutu and the Tutsi? Where can we ask our questions? How can we contribute to true reconciliation?
Memory as a political issue
Liliane is here because she is now a psychiatric nursing training. But also, because they are looking for their personal answers. “My mother or my father I could not ask, because it is such a sensitive topic,” she says. “This is a Problem. Because if I don’t know who my family is, it is difficult to know who I am today!” A Tremor in her voice gives an idea of how much you move, these questions of Identity.
Liliane Niyigemas parents have to weigh the genocide, only welded
As to the atrocities of 1994 is thought in Rwanda is highly political. Certain questions of responsibility and fault are excluded in the public discussion. But the Silence must not necessarily be repressive reasons, the historian Rainer Schmidt to consider. For almost three years, he teaches as a German guest lecturer at the University of Rwanda in political science and history. He says: There is also a pragmatic Silence that could help to overcome trauma.
Germany’s Silence after the Second world war
To understand what Rwanda’s young Generation is of concern currently, it helps to look in the German post-war history. Also in Germany at the end prevailed after the war’s first year-long Silence. Only the ‘ 68-Generation, the German “Generation After”, set out the spiral of silence to break through. “You don’t want to follow their parents, who didn’t want a lid on the story,” explains Rainer Schmidt. “The pressure on their own body, have felt that had to be drained.”
Whether Rwanda is now at a similar crossroads as Germany in 1968, is open. Historical Parallels can help you to understand, but also to mislead. To draw “a direct comparison is difficult, because such memory processes play always in specific historical and cultural constellations that can never be reproduced,” says Rainer Schmidt. The post-war years, the victim and the perpetrator had not lived in Germany in the same scale side-by-side, as it is today in Rwanda.
What is the direction you want to turn your country at the time of a reminder in the future, is for Liliane Niyigema on the Hand. You want, that your Generation will be heard. “We can’t change the past, but we need to be able to understand, so that we can experience healing and reconciliation. Our time is now.”