RWANDAN PRISONS OR THE RETURN OF SERVITUDE

RwandaNet
05.23.98


If the current Rwandan government were overthrown today, what would be its legacy? Most of the people in Kigali, including the once hard core supporters of RPF do not hesitate to answer this question: Death and Prisons.

Rwandan prisons have arguably become the most crowded, most dangerous, and most inhumane prisons in the World. Hundreds of thousands of people are held in truck containers, disused factories, old bathrooms, wet or leaking dungeons, or anywhere things can be confined.

Prisoners are regularly tortured. Thousands have lost limbs, developed skin diseases, or caught recurrent or terminal illnesses. "Rwanda prisons are a living example of the curse on humanity; the proof of what an evil man can do to its neighbor," said one Rwandan Tutsi religious man who regularly visits prisons.

1.RWANDAN PRISONERS: THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF RWANDAN HUTU ELITE

Rwandan prisoners are highly educated on average. What the current Rwanda government calls the "mastermind behind the 1994 genocide", most people believe is a way of targeting ethnic Hutu elite. Hutu lawyers, medical doctors, teachers, engineers, former burgomasters, civil servants, banquers, business people, etc. all are there, rotting silently in the unforgiving jails. Unfortunately these intellectuals and professionals are most often the target of tortures, abuses, and killings by the Government police or gens d'armes in charge of prisons security.

2. RWANDAN PRISONS: THE RETURN OF THE OLD MONARCHISTIC SLAVERY

"I wake up at the first coq's chant. I warm up food, take my cattle outside, go fetch water from the source. Then I wake up my 11 year-old daughter, shows her the food for her young sisters and brothers. I have 2 boys, 5 and 9 years old, and another daughter, 7 years old. Also, I have adopted 3 children of my sister, killed by Interahamwe in 1994, and whose husband was killed by RPA (current government) soldiers in Kibeho in 1995. Then I set up for the communal dungeon where my husband is jailed. I get there around 9 A.M. Most often, we have to wait for up to four hours to deliver food to our husbands. Sometimes the police or gens d'armes ask for money so that we can see our husbands. It is possible we do not see our husbands for days, during which they starve. All of us are women, married to dead men walking. I leave the communal office around 3-4 P.M, get home at nightfall. The following day, I have to work in other people's fields so that I can have food for my kids and my husband for the day after. Although I am a Tutsi woman, most of my Tutsis relative and friends have rejected me for being married to a Hutu. I can't work my fields, I just can't. I have neither seeds, nor time, nor energy. I prefer to work for others. Sometimes I want to kill myself. Then I think about my 7 children and my husband. And that is what keeps me going. I am scared that, one day, I may wake up in the morning and decide that I can't go on any longer."

This story of a woman in South of Rwanda is heard too often in Rwanda, where hunger, disease, despair, and death have become everyday life for women and children. It shows how the prison system has transformed the Rwandan society into the most brutal system of slavery of modern times.

3. DESTROYING THE RWANDAN PRISON SYSTEM IS A VICTORY AGAINST SLAVERY

Rwandan prisons have become the single most important achievement of the current Rwandan Government. "They serve multiple objectives for the current Rwandan government. The ultimate objective is ethnic cleansing against Hutus. Here is how the plan works: First, Hutu elite, including educated, professional, business people, teachers, and activists are accused of genocide and thrown in jail, or are simply and coldly killed. Then families are required to feed those in jail. The families cannot work their own fields and have to work for others, Tutsis or the so called "moderate" Hutus in power. Ultimately, the families end up trading their property for food or for money to bribe the police. By the time the husband dies in jail, the family has lost everything and will have to live in perpetual slavery. This is really a plan of extermination of an entire ethnic group, " explains this former political science teacher, one of the Rwandan Liberation Army rebels in charge of teaching rebels' ideology to new recruits.

4. PRISONS ARE NOT EASY TARGETS: THEY ARE INSTRUMENTS OF SLAVERY

After successful raids on prisons, Rwandan rebels are closing schools in regions of their activities. Rwandan rebels embarked on the campaign of closing both prisons and schools to emphasize their beliefs that, currently, these two systems are instruments of servitude. Only very few prisons and schools in Gisenyi and Ruhengeri operate, in the midst of heavy Rwandan military protection afforded this region. Yet the increasing strength of the Rwanda rebels in this region is simply too much for the government to handle. "The overall impression is of a war which has not run its course, and where as long as the government doesn't acknowledge its weaknesses, the guerrilla fighters will continue to burn prisons and liberate more prisoners, thus increasing the size of its force, and many innocent school children will die in cross-fires," said a NGO official in Kigali, before adding, "but given the brutality of the government soldiers and the lack of political will from their leaders, I do not think the killing will stop anytime soon." In fact, contrary to the mediatized belief following the victory in 1994, Rwandan government troops behave more and more as murdering packs of roving wolves. At the same time Rwandan rebels, usually called bands of hoodlums and thugs by Rwandan government controlled media, are professionalizing their own organization, and training their troops.