United Nations Radio

Patrick Mureithi

In 1994, 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda within a matter of weeks, about 20% of the population. Many of those who survived witnessed the slaughter of their loved ones at the hands of their neighbors. Sixteen years later they still live with the trauma of those one hundred days of genocide. Bissera Kostova has more on this.

Clip v/o: My name is Marie Claire. I have 3 children. I was widowed by genocide.

NARR: This is a clip from a documentary film called ICYIZERE, or Hope.

Clip: The killers were our neighbors. We had good relations. But they still came to kill us.  I was living without living. I was like a tree. Waiting for my last day to come.

NARR: ICYIZERE was produced by Patrick Mureithi, a US-based filmmaker, originally from Kenya. It is about a workshop hosted by the African Great Lakes Initiative that brings together ten victims and ten perpetrators of the genocide in Rwanda. Mr. Mureithi estimates that about 3,000 people have participated in these workshops. He filmed one of them.

Mureithi: In this workshop of 20 participants I focused on four individuals: a lady by the name of Mama Aline, who lost her husband during the genocide. He actually heard her screaming and he came out from his hiding place to come and help her and he was dragged to his death. And she doesn't know how she survived. She says she barely escaped death many times. She had three children and all her children survived miraculously. However, she lost her husband, she lost all of her siblings, all of her cousins, all of the people of her generation and older have been gone and so she talked about being extremely lonely and having no one she felt she could connect to. Another individual was a young man by the name of John, who was four at the time of the genocide and he's twenty years old now. And he was holding his mother's hand when she was hacked to death and the baby on her back was killed. And he was saved by a pastor, who was in the militia that attacked the mother. And another was a perpetrator by the name of Jean-Baptiste, who was part of a militia. He was told that if he did not take part in the killings, then his wife was Tutsi and his children would be killed. And so he was engaged in the killing in 1994, fled to the Congo and then went back to Rwanda, where he was arrested and spent five years in jail. And at that time in 2003, the President of Rwanda released a decree conditionally releasing the prisoners who had confessed and so he was released during that time. And the fourth person is the main facilitator of the workshop and she's a genocide survivor, who again barely escaped with her life and lost her parents and many of her relatives, was traumatized and went to a similar and found healing and so for her, she feels it's like her life's mission, it's what she has to do is to share that there is, in fact, hope and people can heal from their trauma.

Kostova: So it's not about justice so much as therapy?

Mureithi: It is about the need to face your trauma and the need to know what it is that is tormenting you and what I observed while filming was that once people got to understand this concept of trauma and what it was, then they realized that what they were going through was not an insanity, they were not crazy, that what they had was a natural human reaction to unnatural events. And just that knowledge alone helped to liberate them a bit, because they could label it and they could see that it was in their loved ones and some survivors saw that it was in some perpetrators. And so my observation has been that trauma is a very great obstacle, if not the greatest obstacle towards true reconciliation and true forgiveness.

Kostova: So the perpetrators, who participated, were they also deemed traumatized?

Mureithi: Jean-Baptiste talked about how he realized that he was traumatized during the workshop. He didn't know what it was. And at one point he even talked about how he would wake up from his sleep screaming. You know, he would see the image of the person that he killed asking him why did he do what he did and he would be tormented by that. And he'd wake up screaming and his wife would ask him why he woke up in such a state and he couldn't even explain it to her. So at that point realizing that he was traumatized was a turning point for him and after that time he actually reached out to some of the survivors in the workshop and to Mama Aline and even until today they do communicate with each other and are neighborly toward each other, which was not the reality before the workshop.

Kostova: So you think this process can be applied elsewhere?

Mureithi: Absolutely! They brought together two sides of a conflict in this workshop and it can be applied universally. Actually, someone from Ireland had watched the documentary in Kansas City and he does reconciliation work in Ireland and he said that he wanted to show the film there because he thought that the people there could learn from the insights that were shared within the film. I have gotten the chance to show the film in Kenya, where I'm from after the political violence that took place in 2007/2008 and everyone that watched the film said that the situation was very similar to what happened in Kenya and that it is important to learn from the mistakes of our neighbors. Even in Springfield, Missouri, where I live, I have had people come up to me and talk about just how personally it has revealed to them that there's certain legacies within their families that they need to address. It has revealed to them that they are traumatized. I think this is a film that is not just about the Rwandan story, or about the African story, it's a film about the human story and the human condition.

Kostova: And is there a special methodology that the workshop uses?

Mureithi: There is a special approach that the workshop uses, because it could be a potentially dangerous situation, to bring together these two parties. And I think what makes it most effective is that the facilitators are individuals who were traumatized, and who attended similar workshops and who found a sense of healing, and so when they stood in this room and told them that it is possible to heal and shared a little bit of their story, I think the participants wanted the same tranquility and dignity and peace of mind that the facilitators had and so they were willing to stick with the workshop and to go through the exercises. The process of the workshop is on the first day there's a lot of ice-breaking exercises, where they play lighthearted children's games. There was one game similar to Simon Says, but they called it sinagarooka, which means "it can fly". You know, they would use these games to just elicit laughter, and I noticed when that happens, there was a sense of relief among the participants - they felt like they could loosen up and sit more comfortably and be more relaxed, and so by the end of first day people were more at ease than they were when they first came in and perpetrators saw there were survivors and survivors saw there were perpetrators and it was very uncomfortable. On the second day they have a skit where they show good listening and bad listening. And then they introduced trauma. And there's always a lot of audience participation. And when they talk about the symptoms you hear people starting to talk about how "Oh, I see this in my husband" or "I see this in my brother." And you know, rarely will they say they see it in themselves, but some do and I think when they do begin to talk about how they see it in others, they do see it in themselves, too. Then the facilitators have them write down three things that they have lost.

Clip

Mureithi: And it is during that time that the emotional atmosphere of the room becomes very charged and there's a lot of weeping and a lot of grieving of what was lost and everyone is given the chance to talk and when they do talk, everyone listens and there's something very healing in being listened to and in speaking out your pain, as opposed to holding it in, which many of them have done for a very long time. And on the third day they have trust-building exercises. One that really moved me was when they blind-folded one group and had the other hold their hands and Mama Aline and Jean-Baptiste ended up doing this together and they would walk them around the building where the workshop was taking place and then they'd switch the roles and walk them and then they'd talk about how it felt being blindfolded, holding the hand of someone, who you previously had not necessarily stood next to and had never held their hand and trusted them in such a way. And such a simple exercise has a very profound effect on the participants. And they talk about ways that they can build trust. In an agricultural society, they talk about the tree of trust, and what are the roots of the tree of trust and what are the fruits and during that time people discuss the past history of Rwanda. One of them talked about how parents tell their children "These are how the Hutus are" - they are like this and like this. "These are how the Tutsis are." And so she said "we grew up hating the Hutus." So they do discuss how people can from a very young age be indoctrinated in such ideology and how it's necessary to work against that and cast aside stereotypes, so by the time it is all said and done, you have people that were very wary and fearful of each other, by the end shaking hands and some of them embracing. And when I went back 8 months later, I realized that also now they had begun to invite each other into their homes and they had begun to try and rebuild relationships.

MUSIC:
Mureithi: The movie is called ICYIZERE: hope and the website is josiahfilms.com

NARR: Patrick Mureithi is currently working on another film titled "The eye is the window" about a form of therapy called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). After hearing about it he arranged for some of the participants of the workshop to undergo the treatment and he says it was highly effective in alleviating their lingering trauma.

Mureithi: I did film the therapy treatment that Mama Aline and John received last year. I do feel that the greatest malady in Africa is trauma. I think that is the reason why we have a lot of repeated cycles of conflict. It's because the underlying trauma is never addressed and one of the symptoms of being traumatized is being hyper-vigilant and with this hyper-vigilance then there's always the threat of future violence. So I want to make a documentary that encourages people to look at the roots of the violence and to introduce them to EMDR, because there are EMDR therapists around the world, and many therapists continue to be trained in EMDR and for such a cost-effective and effective form of therapy to go unnoticed, I feel is not right. And so I'm hoping that such a documentary would reveal to people that it is okay if you are wounded, if your heart is broken. What is not okay is leaving things as they are denying yourself the peace of mind and the joy that is your birthright.

NARR: Patrick Mureithi, a documentary film maker, based in Missouri in the US. For UN Radio, I'm Bissera Kostova.

Duration: 12'30"