Future of Conflict #13: Strength In What Remains

This week I read Strength In What Remains by Tracy Kidder.

It’s a book about one man’s (Deo) escape from genocide.

I know.

The genocide in Burundi in 1993, specifically, just before the better-known genocide in neighboring Rwanda in 1994.

A genocide is a fully out-of-control conflict. Nobody benefits.

We are in a cultural moment leaning towards using power and violence to solve disputes, rather than rights-based or interest-based approaches.

Besides learning about history (so I’ll be less condemned to repeat it), there are two important questions from this book I want to share with you:

• How to prevent genocide? (systemically and personally)
• How to remember genocide?

How to prevent genocide (systemically)

The basic takeaway here is that the narrative that: “ethnic and religious conflicts have been happening forever and are inevitable” was wrong in this case (and probably many other cases):

According to a widely respected historian of the precolonial era, Jan Vansina, the meanings of “Hutu” and “Tutsi” changed over the centuries but generally described “relative categories,” not geographical origins or clans or tribes. Certainly, most objective differences between Hutus and Tutsis had disappeared over the centuries before Europeans colonized the kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi. Hutus and Tutsis spoke the same language and practiced the same religions. They shared the same taste for banana beer and the same proverbs and, for the most part, the same territories.

These people mostly looked and acted the same. However, there was a social stratification that happened (pre-colonial) which was then ethnicized by the colonial authorities so that ethnicity became a central fact of life.

By the end of colonization, the calcified caste system had settled into an oppressive and unstable equilibrium (Tutsis on top, Hutus on bottom) that was bound for violence.

Whose fault was it? The simple answer is “everybody’s”. Historians agree that the oppression and caste system predated colonization, and that the set-up for genocide wouldn’t have been possible without the obsession with ethnicity and division that Europeans brought to the table.

But the deeper reason why conflict could take root and become so widespread was that peoples’ basic economic needs were unmet.

Deo later ends up working for Paul Farmer and makes the connection between disease and genocide prevention:

At the school of public health, Deo had heard the term “prevention” used repeatedly. But if there was someone who really understood prevention, he thought, it was Paul Farmer, and prevention not just of disease but of catastrophes like genocide.

In his mind, Deo distilled the [Partners In Health] message this way:

“By all means, let’s do prevention! Prevent people from suffering! Don’t wait for people to feel like their lives are not worth living. Once they feel that way, how are they going to feel about another person’s life?”

There is a question of degree, of course, but I see the same dynamic at play in Americans who want to deny civil rights to immigrants and Salvadorans who want to deny due process rights to young men suspected of gang activity:

Don’t wait for people to feel like their lives are not worth living. Once they feel that way, how are they going to feel about another person’s life?

So the systemic answer to genocide prevention has to do with preventing structural violence. Kidder leans on historian Peter Uvin to explicate structural violence:

The physical and psychological violence of poverty, the type of violence that had surrounded Deo all through his childhood and adolescence. Hunger and disease and untimely death. Exclusion from the means to a better life, especially exclusion from secondary school and college. And examples of what the peasant majority was being excluded from—portly men in suits, foreign development workers and their privileged Burundian and Rwandan counterparts riding through dirt towns in SUVs.

There was the violence of widespread unemployment, the plight of many young men who were prime recruits for armies and militias. There was rampant and blatant corruption, and complete impunity for those who practiced it—and impunity also for the soldiers who killed and the officers who gave them their orders.

Uvin concludes:

Social exclusion and the ethnicization of politics… are the two central elements to violent conflict in Burundi and Rwanda that, like electrons, spin around a core of massive poverty and institutional weakness.

Obviously, preventing that is a big task that is related to using large sums of money effectively.

The personal version is much simpler and much more difficult.

Here’s a “success story”, how one priest — Abbé Zacharie Bukuru — trained his students into solidarity during the ensuing civil war:

He had forbidden the students their radios.

Night after night he had cloistered them and let them talk, intervening only now and then to limit the invective between the Hutu and the Tutsi boys.

The proof that this had worked arrived in a dreadful way.

“Hutu, Tutsi were everywhere here together, praying together. We were an example of unity,” Zacharie told me. He added, “They wanted—how do you say in English—eradicate this example of living together.”

By “they” he meant the contingent of rebel Hutu militia which, on the morning of April 30, 1997, came out of the mountains and descended on the school, like the wolf on the fold.

The soldiers busted open the doors to the dormitory, and their commander ordered the students to divide themselves: “Hutu brothers over here, Tutsi cockroaches there.”

The children simply refused to comply, knowing full well it would lead to indiscriminate murder.

The Hutus would not abandon their schoolmates.

The soldiers tried to kill them all.

Some of the dying boys quoted Jesus on the cross, crying out to God to forgive their killers because they didn’t know what they were doing.

There were 150 students at the school. Some were wounded, and many escaped.

In all, forty students were murdered.

This is at once a tragic and inspiring story. It’s the kind of sacrifice that Gandhi goes on endlessly about. It’s the kind of behavior that rests upon humans understanding our true life and valuation is moral, not physical. The students concluded that ratting out their colleagues was worse than physical death.

Tough sell for most of us.

One of the most important details of this story is about the radios.

The preist took away the ability of the conflict entrepreneurs to get into the heads of the students, and forced them to interact on their own terms.

He didn’t (couldn’t?) prevent them from discuss ethnic politics and arguing about things. But he changed the game to involve the people in the community, and limited the power of outsiders.

What’s the corollary for our current politics of polarization, whether it’s anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish, anti-immigrant, or anti-redneck?

How to remember genocide?

As a student of transformational mediation, I’m always wrestling with the role of truth, justice, forgiveness, and reconciliation during and after a conflict.

When doing a mediation — somehow — it doesn’t matter what happened in the past. It only matters what the participants (once freed from any power imbalances) agree to regarding their futures.

That agreement doesn’t require seeing eye-to-eye about what happened. In fact, it’s virtually guaranteed their narratives didn’t align going in, and won’t align going out.

Deo and Tracy get into this question a lot on a massive, genocidal, scale. They visit dozens of memorials across Rwanda and Burundi in an attempt to grasp how much Remembering is helping.

Here’s the argument for Remembering and the memorials stacked with skulls and femurs:

They were a means of keeping a history that had to be known.

The fact that mass slaughters hadn’t been prevented in places all over the world—and weren’t being prevented now—didn’t argue against these attempts to preserve the memories of former massacres and the hope they represented, that someday “Never Again” might seem like more than a pious, self-enhancing platitude.

And surely these sites had great value for many survivors, as public recognition of their suffering, as places to mourn their murdered friends and families.

Surely the sites were psychologically useful for some, as they seemed to be for Deo.

This might be familiar to you — it was to me. I grew up in a culture of Never Again, especially around the Holocaust and the evils of the Nazis. I don’t think I ever questioned the narrative until reading this book.

But Deo grew up in a different culture. In Brazil they have saudade, in Germany they have schadenfreude, and in Burundi they have gusimbura:

There once was a man who went out walking. On the trail, he met a head rolling across his path.

He started bothering the rolling head with questions: “What killed you, head?”

The head replied: “Would you keep going and stop reminding me of unpleasant things? I died a hero, but you will be killed by your own tongue,”

The man continued his walk. When he arrived at his destination, he told the people there: “Do you know what I saw? I met a rolling head on my way here, and I asked it: ‘What killed you, head?” And it replied: ‘I died a hero, but you will be killed by your own tongue.”

The people told him: “If you don’t show us this talking head, we will kill you.” And the man said: “Let’s go. If you don’t find the head talking, do whatever you want to me.” And the people said: “Let’s go!”

When they came upon the head, the man started talking to it, but the head said nothing. The man insisted, but the head did not say a word. Upset because the man had lied to them and wasted their time, the people beat him. They beat him until he was unable to walk. After they had left, and the man was writhing on his back on the ground, the talking head laughed at him and said: ‘Didn’t I tell you that you would be killed by your own tongue?””

To gusimbura is to intentionally stir up painful memories and reopen emotional wounds. In Burundi, the culture leans against naming the dead and bringing up the evil of what’s happened.

Tracy writes:

A lot of Western thought and psychological advice assume that it is healthy to flush out and dissect one’s memories, and maybe this is true. And yet for all that, I began to have a simultaneous and opposite feeling: that there was such a thing as too much remembering, that too much of it could suffocate a person, and indeed a culture. Our tour of [genocide memorial] sites began to seem relentless. Observing Deo’s endlessly renewed sorrow, I found myself thinking that there was something also to be said for a culture with a word like gusimbura.

Forgiveness is an internal dynamic — it’s about “giving up all hope of a better past”. I believe forgiveness is “mandatory” for those who want to live free and actualized lives. It requires neither consent, nor participation, nor change from anybody else.

Reconciliation is about rebuilding relationships with our conflict partners. For many of us, reconciliation is optional. We can do a cost-benefit analysis: “Is it worth talking to the step-mother who abused me?” (or not)

But in communities divide by genocide, where neighbors were literally setting people on fire a few decades ago, reconciliation seems a little less optional. That is, the consequences of non-reconciliation are significant and include further cycles of catastrophic violence.

What is the role of strident denunciations of evil in that context? And how effective is it anyway? Has all of the Never Forget around the Holocaust reduced violence against Jews, Roma, homosexuals, or dissidents?

In a cultural moment where rulers with authoritarian tendencies all over the world (USA, Italy, India, Hungary, El Salvador, Tunisia, etc.) are creating and using scapegoats to consolidate power, are there better techniques for stopping isolation, exclusion, and violence?

Deo’s answer can only be a personal one, but I find it incredibly relevant, even if I doubt it would be my own response. At this point in his story, he is in medical school and has spent years building a clinic in rural Burundi:

One day a woman approached Deo with her head bowed and said, “You don’t know me, but I want to say that I am so sorry for what happened.”

Deo suspected that she was confessing to some offense against his family during the war. Her words worried him. If people thought he planned revenge, they might try to kill him first.

But it seemed to Deo that [the clinic] was becoming a “neutral ground,” a place where Tutsis from the mountains and Hutus from the lakeside could mingle without fear. A place of reconciliation for everyone, including him. And he hoped he wasn’t dreaming.

“What happened happened,” Deo said to the woman. “Let’s work on the clinic. Let’s put this tragedy behind us, because remembering is not going to benefit anyone.”

I’m not from Burundi, I didn’t grow up with gusimbura, and I think Remembering is essential.

But there’s another step there that Deo has grasped.

In order to get beyond conflict — if we don’t have the luxury of leaving the relationships — we need something more than just Remembering. We need something constructive that binds us together and allows us to rebuild a relationship that based on something other than the violence and shame we experienced.

It’s like dialogue but more physical, more tangible. Something that creates a shared common experience of trust, like Deo’s health clinic.

The other aspect of Remembering that is insufficient has to do with the self-image of the perpetrator. If we want to move forward, we have to create opportunities for the “oppressor” character to see themselves as something other than an oppressor. If we confine them to their historical identity, we lose the opportunity to give them a way out.

According to my wife, only 3% of the French were actively involved in the resistance to the Nazi’s in World War II.

But President de Gaulle repeatedly claimed that “Touts les Français” were part of the resistance.

Why?

Sometimes, when we fuck up, we need a way out. We need a myth that increases the likelihood we’ll do the right thing next time.

Once again, it’s universal basic positive reinforcement — what can I do with you after the last genocide that will have the greatest positive effect on your behavior during the next one?