Rwanda

We have been working in Rwanda since 1996, mostly through our partnerships with women’s organisations. Our main partner is Profemmes Twesehamwe, the main umbrella group for women’s organisations in Rwanda, with over 40,000 members based all over the country. By equipping them with peacebuilding skills, which they have now shared with many of their members, we have effectively established a Rwanda-wide peacebuilding network which is working to resolve local conflicts and promote reconciliation. It also monitors the local impact of national policies and feeds information back from the rural areas to the centre, so that grassroots experiences can be fed into campaigns to influence nation policy.

Currently, our focus in Rwanda has been on the Gacaca process:

Justice and reconciliation through Gacaca – Alert and ProFemmes Twesehamwe has conducted a massive awareness-raising campaign in an effort to make sure that women play a major role in the Gacaca system. The trials themselves began in 2005.

The conflict context

Rwanda is still gripped by the trauma of the 1994 genocide. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which took power in 1994 faced enormous challenges in responding to the consequences of the genocide – over 800,000 people dead, the economy and the physical and social infrastructure destroyed, 3 million refugees in neighbouring countries, posing an enormous security threat to the country, a huge number of orphans and widows and a massive prison population.

In the 11 years since the genocide, the government has managed to begin the reconstruction process, making significant progress in terms of managing the justice process and the prosecution of perpetrators of the genocide, engaging women in administrative and political leadership, reintegrating hundreds of thousands of refugees, demobilising almost 40,000 soldiers and kick-starting the economy.

Elections were held in 2004, when the incumbent President Paul Kagame won more than 90% of the popular vote and the RPF took the majority of seats in Parliament and government. While there has been criticism of government policy with regard to opening up of political space , the government has stated that it aims to build bottom-up democracy by empowering local communities to engage with the decentralised structures already elected by the local population. Although the decentralisation policy is a pertinent one, it will only work if power is completely decentralised and not controlled by one political party.

Over the last five years, there has been a notable improvement in the security situation. More than 3 million refugees have been reinstalled into their communities, the army has been integrated and ex-combatants demobilised. However it is premature to conclude that there is total stability. The country has thousands of young men trained in the use of arms, but for whom the demobilisation process has been frustrating, many of them unemployed. Many thousands of Rwandans including the FDLR movement based in the Congo (DRC) live outside the country with the main aim of overthrowing the current regime.

International Alert in Rwanda

Our office in Kigali provides technical support and advice to our local partners as well as monitoring and support for our London programme staff.

International Alert
Women’s Peace Programme – Rwanda
B.P 7063
Kigali
Rwanda

Tel: +250 570 150
Fax: +250 570 137
Email: Gloriosa Bazigaga

For more information, contact Sylvie Pereira

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Last updated: March 2006