Linda* is a mother and wife who lost her family during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. She was 16 years old, when armed men attacked her home in Bugesera, a town in Eastern Rwanda, and brutally killed her parents, siblings and friends.
“I lost all. It was hard to move on. I was so much wounded; my heart was bleeding,” she said.
When the killings stopped, Linda struggled for years to live with the harsh invisible wounds of seeing her father, mother and brothers murdered by neighbours.
“Imagine seeing the wife of someone who killed your family, take food to him in prison while you are starving with nothing to eat,” she said.
The traumatic experience left wounds too deep for Linda to heal on her own. She was not alone to suffer some form of physical or emotional hardship because of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.
Members of the reconciliation village sharing their experiences. Photo credit: Interpeace
She eventually got the courage to overcome her trauma after participating in a societal healing programme at the reconciliation village in Bugesera, established by Prison Fellowship Rwanda (PFR). However, it was not an easy journey for her to heal from her distress and extreme paranoia.
“First, we were not happy when the perpetrators confessed and were released from prison. We thought they will come and finish us,” said Linda. “When we were brought together, I was afraid. In this reconciliation village, survivors and genocide perpetrators collaborated in bricklaying. I often had fears that in the process, one of them [genocide perpetrators] will hit me with a hoe from behind,” explained Linda. “But with time I have forgiven them. No one forced me to forgive. Despite what they did, reconciliation is possible. We are the story,” she stated.
Members of the reconciliation village sharing their experiences. Photo credit: Interpeace
The reconciliation village hosts survivors of the genocide, perpetrators of the genocide, returnees from abroad who fled the genocide and vulnerable people from different communities.
“It was hard to look eye to eye with someone who killed my family,” said Linda.
On his part, Jean Pierre*, an ex-genocide prisoner said:
“I was scared to face the families of people I killed during the genocide. But with counseling by Prison Fellowship Rwanda, I decided to open up and confess what I did. I also confessed to my wife, to whom I had lied all along that I was unjustly imprisoned. I told her the truth that I killed our neighbours. She was shocked. My wife and children were traumatised after learning the truth’’.
Members of the reconciliation village sharing their experiences. Photo credit: Interpeace
A new programme to foster societal healing
The adverse impact of the genocide still weighs heavily on Rwandan society today. The country still grapples with a burden of trauma and mental health conditions. The release of some perpetrators of the genocide who have completed their prison terms has made the situation even more difficult.
Interpeace has commenced a new, innovative and holistic trauma healing programme in Rwanda to expand investment in mental health, address trauma and enhance social cohesion. The programme called “Reinforcing community capacity for social cohesion through societal trauma healing”, was launched in Kigali, on Thursday, 15 October 2020.
Executive Secretary of NURC, Fidèle Ndayisaba, EU Ambassador in Rwanda, Nicola Bellomo and President of Interpeace, Scott M. Weber. Photo credit: Interpeace
Through a partnership with the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission (NURC) and Prison Fellowship Rwanda, this programme will contribute to Rwanda’s efforts to address the invisible but deeply-felt wounds, and complement the remarkable investment and progress already made by the government of Rwanda and local civil society organisations towards trauma healing, social cohesion and improved livelihoods.
“This programme which proposes innovative and holistic approaches that simultaneously promote mental health, social cohesion and support sustainable livelihoods is a new contribution to our reconciliation journey,” said Fidèle Ndayisaba, Executive Secretary of NURC. He said “there’s a very close relation between mental health, reconciliation and economic well-being. We expect added value from this programme.”
Fidèle Ndayisaba, Executive Secretary of NURC. Photo credit: Interpeace
The programme will enhance capacities to address trauma and foster societal healing in Rwanda. As the country prepares to release over 20,000 prisoners in the next few years - amidst the prevailing trauma among survivors - the programme will support individuals grappling with anxiety and trauma, and the host communities to ensure effective reintegration.
“After 26 years of being in prison, they have not witnessed the tremendous changes that the Rwandan society has gone through. They need to be able to be brought into the reintegration process in communities,” said Scott Weber, President of Interpeace. “Prisoners need to become productive members of the society once again. Everyone hopes that they don’t go back into prisons through new crimes,” he added.
Scott M. Weber, President of Interpeace. Photo credit: Interpeace
This trauma healing programme is even more important for families with children experiencing adverse intergenerational trauma, where young people who did not live through the genocide still have post-traumatic stress disorders or other significant negative experiences.
“Reconciliation is a journey,” said Bishop John Rucyahana, Chair of the Board of Directors of Prison Fellowship Rwanda. “Two heads are better than one,” he said, as he welcomed the partnership with Interpeace to keep pace with the scale of need.
The scale of need across Rwanda shows how important it is for Interpeace, NURC and PFR to come together and support Rwandans to care for each other’s mental well-being.
Bishop John Rucyahana, Chair of the Board of Directors of Prison Fellowship Rwanda. Photo credit: Interpeace
The programme is funded by the European Union (EU) and will be piloted in Bugesera District in the next 18 months. Bugesera and Ngoma are among the Districts hardest hit by the Genocide Against the Tutsi.
“We are particularly happy to support this initiative given our long involvement in Rwanda’s post-genocide reconciliation and peacebuilding efforts,” said Nicola Bellomo, EU Ambassador in Rwanda.
Nicola Bellomo, EU Ambassador in Rwanda. Photo credit: Interpeace
The Rwanda Mental Health Household Survey conducted in 2018 revealed high prevalence of mental health disorders countrywide, particularly among the survivors of genocide; among whom Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) cases were found in more than 50%. Interpeace and partners hope to scale this societal healing programme to all 30 Districts in Rwanda in the next five years.
*Names changed for privacy reasons
A conflict between a local militia and national government forces in 2016 transformed the relatively calm Kasaï region in the Democratic Republic of Congo into the scene of violent intercommunal conflict. At least 5,000 people died and 1.4 million others were displaced by two years of violence. Since the end of confrontations in 2018, ethnic tensions have continued to simmer, raising serious concerns that violence may resurface. In a new report, Interpeace calls for inclusive and coordinated actions to address simmering tensions and foster peace, reconciliation and development.
The report, titled “Challenges and Priorities for Peace in Kasaï and Kasaï-Central”, presents the results of a participatory-action research carried out as part of an initiative launched in 2019 by Interpeace together with its partners Action pour la Paix et la Concorde (APC), Commission Diocésaine Justice et Paix (CDJP) and Travail et Droit de l’Homme (TDH) to help restore trust and collaboration between communities, national authorities, customary power and security forces. The report draws on broad consultations conducted between October and December 2019 among 426 citizens to identify the underlying causes of violence, available resilience capacities and the priorities for peace, security and development in the region. It is also based on the results of a quantitative survey of 848 individuals on the state of conflict, security, levels of trauma, trust, and socio-economic conditions in intervention sites.
The report identifies five major contentious issues at the origin of conflicts in Kasaï and Kasaï-Central. These include the instrumentalization of customary power for political means, ethnic competition to access political and economic power, and a lack of trust in national authorities and state institutions. The report also presents some of the obstacles to sustaining peace. Among them is the humanitarian crisis caused by the violence, which created tensions between displaced persons and host communities competing for food, access to water, care and education. Trauma, economic hardship and mistrust at different levels of the societies are also some of the impediments to peaceful cohesion.
To ensure that peace is sustained, the report proposes key recommendations to restore trust and reconciliation within communities and with national authorities. Peace education initiatives need to encourage and support individuals to embrace tolerance and dialogue to resolve conflicts. Sustained dialogues between customary chiefs, communities, authorities and security forces need to be facilitated to improve governance, prevent violence and promote reconciliation. A multisectoral programme for trauma healing needs to be established, and efforts are needed to support the demobilization and reintegration of former militiamen into communities in order to reduce insecurity and promote reconciliation. Finally, the report recommends making use of economic peacebuilding opportunities to improve living conditions of the population while enhancing social cohesion.
From March to August 2020, the preliminary results and recommendations of the report were presented to local, provincial and national stakeholders for validation. For the first time since the conflict, community members, customary leaders, authorities and security forces were brought together to discuss and reach a common understanding on the challenges to and priorities for peace. This made it a powerful tool not just for research but also for building consensus, reducing tensions and triggering collective action with a strong local buy-in.
Building on this positive momentum and recent security improvement in the region, the time is ripe for national and international decision-makers to understand and address the priorities identified by the population to prevent the resumption of violent conflict and advance reconciliation as well as inclusive socio-economic development.
Justice in Guinea Bissau is considered as the foundation for peace between citizens. However, the poor functioning and administration of the judicial system, combined with issues of corruption and widespread impunity, overwhelmed the effective governance of the justice sector in the country. Traditional or informal justice practices are highly valued by the population in Guinea-Bissau and are deeply rooted in the costumes of different communities which rely on them for the resolution of many conflicts. Although these practices offer benefits in costs and physical accessibility, research has shown how these conflict resolution mechanisms disproportionately affect vulnerable sectors of the population.
The justice sector in Guinea-Bissau is, thus, very complex and characterized by a plurality of practices, where the formal justice system coexists with informal and traditional structures. The wide dissatisfaction with the sector, caused by negative factors and actors, both in formal and informal practices, points at the need for improvement. Over the past decade, there have been reforms to the justice sector, but the process has been plagued with recurrent challenges in its implementation. In this context, Interpeace and its local partner Voz di Paz, sought to create new mechanisms and capacities for an active citizenry, empowered to monitor, evaluate and advocate for adequate public policies in the justice sector. A key starting point was establishing a participatory barometer to provide credible, independent and representative data about the situation in the country, to contribute to an increased participation of citizens in local governance of justice.
The report entitled, “Sintidu di justisa” (The Sense of Justice) - Participatory barometer on the perceptions and experiences of the population: How to improve the governance of justice in Guinea-Bissau, presents the results of a research process carried out across the country between September 2018 and February 2020, engaging more than 4,250 people, including 3,400 direct interviews in 180 communities. The report highlights the main elements that make up the different dimensions of the justice sector, to better understand issues as the concept of justice, access to justice, the experience with justice proceedings, the role of citizens and the role of traditional justice mechanisms. Moreover, a gender analysis was also carried out as part of the initiative.
The overall findings of this initiative aim to provide a strong basis for structural improvements of the justice sector in Guinea Bissau. Participants described the formal justice procedures as neither sufficiently transparent nor egalitarian and identified some of the major obstacles preventing good governance in the justice sector, including corruption, limited access to justice, social and economic inequality, and a lack of trust in the judiciary system. Expressions like “Guinea-Bissau's justice is applied only to the poor” demonstrate the population's perception of the justice system – 55% of the participants think there is a lot of interference by influential people and 47% think influential people have a lot of impunity. While the fact that half of the population (54%) does not feel safe to report or testify, sheds light on real obstacles in justice practices.
The barometer does not only show the challenges and institutional weaknesses in Guinea-Bissau’s justice system, but also highlights the elements of the justice sector that are most relevant for the population. The vast majority of the population (91%) believes that some conflicts are best resolved through traditional justice, which is considered to be the best form of conflict resolution by 61%, because of its reconciliation capacity and its knowledge of reality. As a result, the majority of the population insists that the formal justice system must find ways to collaborate with the traditional system in conflict resolution. Therefore, the results of the barometer don’t point to a dichotomy or a dispute between formal and traditional justice. On the contrary, they signal the urgent need for collaborative and coordinated work between both systems.
In this sense, the study also formulates recommendations, solutions, measures, and essential actions to achieve the necessary changes in the justice sector in order to develop a system that is more effective and responds to the population’s needs.
Read full report in Portuguese
Read Executive Summary in English
Read Executive Summary in Portuguese
Read Executive Summary in French
Can reconciliation be sustainable between communities that have experienced the most extreme forms of violence? This is one of the questions posed by 150 high-level stakeholders, during a regional forum held in December 2015 in Kinshasa, where they mandated Interpeace and its partners to conduct a research on the experiences of reconciliation in Burundi, DRC and Rwanda, to identify how these experiences can be leveraged to increase social cohesion and support peacebuilding efforts. The three countries make up a sub-region of the Great Lakes that has been marred by decades of violent conflict, including the Genocide against the Tutsi, the civil war in Burundi and the first and second Congo Wars. Our latest report presents results of a research conducted in Burundi, Rwanda and the provinces of North and South Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to respond to this mandate by identifying the resilience capacities that foster reconciliation in the sub-region.
The report, entitled “Resilience Capacities for Reconciliation in the Great Lakes Sub-Region”, is the third published under the programme: Cross-Border for Peace in the Great Lakes Region, launched by Interpeace and six partners in the Region in 2011. As with the previous research, it employed Participatory Action Research (PAR), combining qualitative and quantitative approaches, and engaged more than 9,000 people in the region – 50% of the participants were women and more than 30% were people under the age of 30.
Advancing reconciliation in the Great Lakes Region
The report sheds light on how the population of the sub-region defines reconciliation as well as the enabling factors and obstacles to reconciliation. It highlights a number of existing capacities in the sub-region that enable people to overcome the distrust left by years of conflict and to live together peacefully. These capacities manifest through individual, relational, cultural and institutional practices, allowing communities to cope with the consequences of violent conflict, and more importantly, to positively and sustainability transform relationships. The report also presents recommendations and priority actions, formulated by stakeholders themselves, to advance reconciliation in the region.
Among the key findings, the study highlights the importance of peace education for changing attitudes of individuals and structures, deconstructing prejudices and stereotypes, and developing the capacity to live together in a shared regional space. Consequently, stakeholders recommended promoting peace education that builds upon the existing efforts of members of the community and that is aimed at building a regional identity and sense of belonging.
The report also demonstrates how cross-border relations have played a major role in building resilience to conflict, despite geopolitical tensions. The efforts of women and youth to maintain these relations despite and during times of conflict as well as during times of peace were perceived to be a potential strength to build upon. Therefore, stakeholders recommended amplifying these efforts through the expansion and strengthening of inclusive economic projects of women and youth.
According to the research, approximately two thirds of the population in the region have experienced some form of violence related to conflict. The report highlights how trauma stemming from past and ongoing conflicts play a large role in the lives of the people of the Great Lakes sub-region. As such, stakeholders recommended initiating and expanding national and regional trauma healing strategies that are designed to heal wounds of the past as well as foster reconciliation and social cohesion.
Furthermore, insecurity, and in particular the proliferation of armed groups in eastern DRC and its regional implications emerged as a significant challenge to the sustainability of reconciliation efforts,. Stakeholders recommended cross-border learning and collaboration on demobilization and socio-economic reintegration of ex-combatants.
A key take-away from the report is that recognizing, strengthening, and building upon the resilience capacities that exist across Burundi, DRC and Rwanda has the potential to enhance efforts to foster sustainable peace and reconciliation throughout the region.
Cross-Border for Peace in the Great Lakes region programme
The Cross-Border for Peace in the Great Lakes Region programme was launched in 2011 by Interpeace and its partners to address key challenges to peace and reconciliation. The programme is currently in its second phase and is implemented by the following partners: Interpeace, Réseau d'Innovation Organisationnelle (RIO); Action Pour la Paix et la Concorde (APC) in South Kivu; Pole Institute and Centre d'Etudes Juridiques Appliquées (CEJA) in North Kivu; Centre d'Alerte et de Prévention des Conflits (CENAP) in Burundi and Never Again Rwanda (NAR) in Rwanda. This report is the third published under this programme. The first, published in 2013 focused on "Stereotypes and Identity Manipulations” and a second report on "Land, Identity, Power and Population Movements" was published in 2016.
Why does gender matter in peacebuilding? Gender disparities form arguably one of the most profound and pervasive sources of exclusion globally. Conflicts, and consequently peace, are profoundly influenced by and impact gender. Better understanding the gendered dynamics of conflict and implementing gender inclusive programming are critical to ensuring that peacebuilding efforts are more effective and sustainable.
In run-up to the 20th anniversary of the UN Security Council´s landmark resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, we are pleased to share the latest edition of Interpeace’s Peacebuilding in Practice paper, entitled “Ten Foundations for Gender Inclusive Peacebuilding Practice”. The paper presents lessons learned and recommendations from Interpeace’s experience and institutional reflection on how to develop, implement and evaluate gender inclusive programming. It aims to enable practitioners and policy-makers to better understand the gendered dynamics of conflict and to develop effective strategies that leverage gender inclusive programming to improve peacebuilding practice while advancing gender equality.
Read paper in English here.
Read paper in French here.
The following Ten Foundations for Gender Inclusive Peacebuilding Practice were identified through a series of programmatic and institutional reflections.
Interpeace's Peacebuilding in Practice papers are designed to showcase insights from our programmatic work, and to contribute to knowledge sharing and learning within the organization and the wider peacebuilding sector. Previous Peacebuilding in Practice papers are available here.
The 8th edition of the Geneva Peace Talks will be held on Monday 21 September 2020, the International Day of Peace. This year, the Geneva Peace Talks goes digital and will be livestreamed from Geneva.
The central theme for 2020 is Shaping Peace. In these unprecedented times of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Geneva Peace Talks aims to highlight our interconnectedness as what happens in one part of the planet impacts people around the world. The pandemic has unveiled deep systems of inequality, privilege, and injustice prevalent in societies around the world. We are now challenged to reflect on how we can shape our world and what we want our new “normal” to look like.
Our two moderators will guide you through short talks by individuals sharing their personal stories and experiences, to highlight their efforts to shape peace.
Learn more about each speaker at genevapeacetalks.ch
Sign up here for the live webcast
Join the conversation using #PeaceTalks on Twitter @PeaceTalksTweet, Facebook @PeaceTalks.net and Instagram @peace_talks.
The Geneva Peace Talks is a public event brought to you by the United Nations Office at Geneva, Interpeace and the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform, the Swiss Government and Salesforce to celebrate the International Day of Peace.
