The Rwandan genocide occurred in 1994 and only lasted for one hundred days but it left an indelible mark on the country. There are well known stories such as the one portrayed in the movie Hotel Rwanda where the manager of the hotel who was a Hutu and his Tutsi wife protected a large group of people from certain death. There are many other stories about the genocide in Rwanda that have a more sinister outcome, and I have chosen to tell the story of the Nyamata church and its leader.
The Nyamata church is located in Bugesera which is in the southern part of Rwanda. When the violence began many people who were parishioners of that church fled their homes and sought shelter in the church. The pastor of the church was Jean-Bosco Uwinkindi, he was a Hutu and had led the Pentecostal Church for many years. During the genocide that occurred there Uwinkindi, instead of acting as the protector of his flock, turned his parishioners and led a killing spree of the people hiding in the Church.
It is my intention to show how this small church located in the countryside can be used as lens to see the violence and betrayal that the Tutsi people endured all over the country. While there are some stories of those who were taken in and protected the vast majority of people turned on one another even if they had been friends and colleagues just days before.
I am using the court documents and testimonies from Uwinkindi's indictment by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the oral histories that the United Nations has collected from people that escaped death at the Nyamata Church as my primary sources. There are over 500 documents attached to the case. Uwinkindi was not tried at the Hague but was instead tried in Rwanda.Uwinkindi was not caught until 2012 and was not sentenced in Rwanda to a life term until 2015, twenty-one years after his crimes were committed. The story of the Rwandan governments eventual trial of Uwinkindi is a lesson in perseverance and patience to see those who wrecked havoc in the country brought to justice.
The one thing that I ran into was that because the indictment was originally brought by the International Criminal Tribunal some of the court documents are in French and my rudimentary French makes that a little hard to read but I've been plowing through them. Luckily, the actual victim testimonies in the indictment were translated from the speakers original language Kinyarwanda to French and then to English because the original judicial panel included both French and English judges. At times I also find myself needing to put the testimonies down and walk away just to get a break from the devastation.
This sounds very interesting and my (hopefully helpful) comment would be that you might need some clarity on whether you are doing a microhistory of the church incident or Uwinkindi's criminal conduct. I'm not sure if one is a subset of the other, whether the trial involved other crimes, or what other sources there are besides the transcript, but it seems to me that the narrower the topic, the easier it would be for you to get a handle on things and reduce it to a manageable microhistory.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very interesting case. I wonder to what degree some of the documents provide background of the actors. Specifically, I'm thinking of the Uwinkindi. I wonder if there might be enough material to focus primarily on Uwinkindi and get into the mentality behind the betrayal. I only bring it up because you seem to have so much material to include into a single paper. Uwinkindi looks to be fascinating because of the juxtaposition of a massacring religious leader.
ReplyDeleteYou've chosen a very emotional subject and this can be hard on a historian. As said by others it sounds like you have a lot of material on your hands. Try and narrow it down if you can to just a few actors and let their voices speak for themselves. If that proves problematic maybe you can shift focus to the trial of Uwinkindi instead of the massacre itself. This would give you opportunity to explore the structural relationship between the authorities and those they failed to protect rather than the suffering of the victims. Not saying it would be better that way, just another way to approach it. That said emotions are certainly a reoccurring theme in the microhistories we've read; and this subject would seem to lend much to that genre.
ReplyDelete