Is Forgiveness Possible?
The Atlantic|November 2024
Thirty years after the genocide in Rwanda
Clint Smith
Is Forgiveness Possible?

He told me this on a warm March day in a courtyard in central Kigali, almost exactly 30 years later. I had come to Rwanda because I wanted to understand how the genocide is remembered-through the country's official memorials as well as in the minds of victims.

And I wanted to know how people like Longolongo look back on what they did.

Longolongo was born in Kigali in the mid-1970s. As a teenager in the late 1980s, he didn't feel any personal hatred toward Tutsi. He had friends who were Tutsi; his own mother was Tutsi. But by the early 1990s, extremist Hutu propaganda had started to spread in newspapers and on the radio, radicalizing Rwandans. Longolongo's older brother tried to get him to join a far-right Hutu political party, but Longolongo wasn't interested in politics. He just wanted to continue his studies.

On April 6, 1994, Longolongo attended a funeral for a Tutsi man. At about 8:30 p.m., in the midst of the funeral rituals, the sky erupted in red fire and black smoke. The news traveled fast: A plane carrying the Rwandan president, Juvénal Habyarimana, and the Burundian president, Cyprien Ntaryamira, had been shot down over Kigali. No one survived.

Responsibility for the attack has never been conclusively determined. Some have speculated that Hutu extremists shot down the plane; others have blamed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi military group that had been fighting Hutu government forces near the Ugandan border. Whoever was behind it, the event gave Hutu militants a pretext for the massacre of Tutsi.

The killing started that night.

Almost as if they had been waiting for the signal, Hutu militia members showed up in Longolongo's neighborhood. One group arrived at his home and called for his brother. When he came to the door, they gave his brother a gun and three grenades and told him to come with them.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November 2024 من The Atlantic.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November 2024 من The Atlantic.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

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