Why Jeannette employs her family's killers
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Call it trickle-down reconciliation. After the genocide - in which some 800,000 people were killed in just 90 days - Rwanda's Tutsi-dominated government proclaimed, "We are all Rwandans," and created a climate of extreme political correctness. It's now taboo even to utter the words "Hutu" and "Tutsi." The aim is to quash any public mention of ethnicity - and therefore any recurrence of violence - while focusing on economic growth that will benefit both Hutus and Tutsis. It's the Rwandan equivalent of President Reagan's economic approach: Create a rising economic tide to lift all Rwandan boats - and float them away from the jagged rocks of ethnic conflict. "The more people have a house and a car, the less reason they have to throw a stone at someone," explains Shyaka Kanuma, editor of Focus, a private newspaper in the capital, Kigali.
Yet the strategy is risky. It leaves little room for direct dialogue about why ethnic tensions exploded - and how a recurrence can be prevented. Government-sanctioned "gacaca" community courts aim to bring justice and reconciliation - and ostensibly provide a forum for dialogue - yet they are overwhelmed with cases and are seen by some as one-sided and biased. In general, "There is no reconciliation going on - Hutus still hate Tutsis, and Tutsis still hate Hutus," says one political analyst who asked not to be named because of the taboo against speaking so frankly. More ethnic killing is "inevitable," he adds, if political leaders fail to spread the country's wealth equitably.
Indeed, the threat of violence from both sides still looms. This extremism is "like a lion who is asleep," says one human rights activist who also asked not to be named because of the sensitive nature of her comments. "But when he is hungry, he will wake up." This hunger, she adds, is fueled by economic inequality. By this analogy, Rwanda's challenge is like trying to feed a lion while it sleeps - and hoping it doesn't wake up.
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For five years after the genocide, Jeannette rarely spoke. She had few people to talk to and little to say. She avoided the killers, who still lived in town. Afraid of reprisals, they avoided her, too.
But by 1999, a group of neighbors had decided to start a coffee cooperative. For decades, local coffee farmers had sold raw beans to middlemen at low prices. Now the cooperative wanted to help farmers keep more of the profits.
Jeannette decided the time was right to join the Abahuzamugambi cooperative. She had inherited her dead relatives' coffee farms, and she was looking for help in making the fields productive and profitable. Yet her decision was based on more than money. After five years of isolation, "I thought that coffee-growing could connect me to other people," she says. It was also a way of honoring her family, which had grown coffee for generations: "Coffee can help me remember the relatives."
Some Tutsis wouldn't join the cooperative - whose name roughly means "growing together" - because it included Hutu killers. But for Jeannette, it was a lifesaver. If it hadn't come along, she says, "I would have gone mad."
Soon she had business relationships with people who killed her family members. Then, to her surprise, in cooperative meetings, bits of truth would emerge about what had happened in 1994. Jeannette says several people - both Hutus and Tutsis - told her Anastaz was part of a group that had killed her husband. At first, "If I had a gun, yes, I would have killed him," she says. But, living on her own, she feared reprisals: "I had no one to protect me."
As years passed, the cooperative prospered - linking into the $20-billion global "specialty coffee" market, which includes roasters like Starbucks. The cooperative now even sells its own brand - "Maraba Bourbon" - at retail stores in Britain.
Over the years, Jeannette began to separate killers' past deeds from their current contributions. "This doesn't change the emotions," she explains, "but it does help me interact" with them. Through the cooperative, she says, "We've been building a relationship that changed our lives. We ended up reconciling in a way we didn't know."
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Rwanda's economy is expanding quickly. And coffee exports are helping fuel it.
Since 1995, the country has often achieved 7 percent annual growth. This year, coffee surpassed tea as the country's biggest export, bringing growing prosperity to the country's 500,000 coffee farmers. One group of 20,000 farmers saw revenues of about $800,000 last year, says Dr. Schilling, a Texas A&M professor, who runs a US-funded initiative called the Partnership to Enhance Agriculture in Rwanda through Linkages (PEARL). It helps connect Rwandan farmers with high-end overseas buyers. This year's harvest was better than last year's, so the 12 cooperatives expect about $2 million in revenues. Roughly 85 percent of profits go to the farmers, whose average coffee-related annual incomes have jumped to $400 in 2006, up from $75 in 2001 , Schilling says.
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