Bringing Rwanda Genocide Grassroots Reconciliation Experience to the Classroom

The end of genocidal killing tends to be the beginning of a new phase of living with the painful past for most perpetrators and survivors of a genocide. After the 1994 Rwandan genocide, most survivors had no alternative but to live next to people who had participated in causing them grievous harm. Without consulting survivors’ or getting their views, the Rwanda government started releasing into society large numbers of perpetrators and alleged perpetrators in 2003. These perpetrators or alleged perpetrators had been in prison since 1994 and most of them went back to the exact communities where they had participated in carrying out atrocities. In order to ensure that there is peaceful coexistence, need for forgiveness and reconciliation become critical, and that is evident in the Rwandan culture where there is a saying, Usaba imbabazi azahabwa (He who asks for forgiveness will be forgiven). However, forgiveness and reconciliation is not easy and tends to be an emotive issue especially when survivors are being required by society or the government to forgive the perpetrators. Worse still is if the survivor saw firsthand the perpetrator kill members of the survivor’s family. This challenging work of reconciling perpetrators and genocide survivors is what Pastor Philbert Kalisa from Rwanda does on a day to day basis. Having been a refugee and born in exile in Burundi and being stateless up to the age of 29 years, Pastor Kalisa has first-hand experience of what prejudice and lack of peace can mean to a human being. To spread the good work he is doing, REACH Rwanda and REACH USA have been gracious to create awareness of the good work that Pastor Kalisa is undertaking. On 17th April 2012, the USF Holocaust and Genocide Studies Center in conjunction with Dr Kissi brought Pastor Kalisa on campus to speak to Dr Kissi’s class of undergraduate students taking a course on the History and Theory of Genocide. These students had a rare opportunity to hear from the pastor about the unique healing, forgiveness and reconciliation efforts that were being undertaken at the grassroots level in Rwanda in order to have a peaceful Rwanda. Among the ways the many approaches that Pastor Kalisa uses is to have perpetrators and survivors work together to build houses for survivors, having a survivor adopt a child of a perpetrator and the use of sports to create more opportunities for children of survivors and perpetrators to to live together in harmony.