Rwandan Genocide

Andrew Jones Excerpts

Thursday 8th May 2014 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (Con)]

It is a privilege to follow so many powerful speeches from across the House. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree (Mr Newmark) on securing this debate. I am glad that the House has the opportunity to mark the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. It was so shocking, there was so much suffering and there are so many lessons for the international community after the shameful inaction, when what was happening was known about.

I wanted to participate in this debate because I was fortunate enough to visit Rwanda last year as part of a volunteer programme, Project Umubano, which has been described in this debate. It was a fascinating, thoroughly sobering and enjoyable experience. I joined the programme to teach business skills, but I think that I learned far more than I taught.

The genocide killed between 800,000 and 1 million people. Tens of thousands more were displaced and up to a quarter of a million women were raped. I want to spend a few minutes talking about how communities and countries can be rebuilt after such events. We talk about the challenges facing communities in this country and we all work to build stronger communities in our constituencies, but my mind boggles at the challenges that the Rwandan Government faced.

The Rwanda Governance Board has established several programmes to help with community building, especially through dispute resolution. While in Rwanda, I was fortunate enough to participate in one of those programmes, Umuganda, which was mentioned by the hon. Member for Hyndburn (Graham Jones). Umuganda means community service and it is a big deal in Rwanda. In practical terms, it takes place on the last Saturday of every month between 8 o’clock and 11 o’clock in the morning. It is compulsory: everybody aged between 18 and 65 has to participate. Businesses close and public transport is limited at that time. There are hundreds of projects across the country doing everything from cutting grass or cleaning an area to building a community facility.

The project I was involved in was building a storm drain. The whole of the volunteer group I was with, including colleagues from the House, participated. We carried dirt and stones and helped build the drain. We had a slightly surreal moment with a long human chain carrying the stones, which involved my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Mr Swayne) passing rocks to my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford (Jeremy Lefroy), who passed them to my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree, who passed them to me, and I passed them on. There must have been 200 or so people participating, working hard and with a great spirit. We met many local people, which was one of the highlights of my two weeks in Africa.

At the end of the session, the whole local community gathered to hear speeches from their local representatives and community leaders. I should mention that one of the speakers was my hon. Friend the Member for Stafford, who delivered a speech in flawless Swahili. There was an audible gasp of appreciation from the community at his language skills. The speech went down very well and there was much laughter. I have no idea what he said, but it was clearly very good.

The point of Umuganda is not the community projects themselves, although communities clearly benefit from them, but that people come together in a collective enterprise. It is about building links and cohesion, about creating loyalty to each other and to the communities they live in. People have put sweat into building something and they have a stake in seeing it thrive. I was certainly impressed by what I saw.

While in Rwanda, our group visited the national genocide memorial in Kigali, where my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West laid a wreath on behalf of the group. The centre is built on a site where more than 250,000 are buried. It was sobering to see the records of what had happened, and hard to grasp the scale of the numbers and the brutality.

I also visited a second memorial, at Ntarama. Deep in the countryside, Ntarama is a village and people had gone to its church for refuge. However, there was no safety there. It was attacked and around 5,000 people were killed, mainly women and children. As well as the mass graves, the site has stacks of bones on shelves, stained clothing and some personal belongings of those who died. It is hard not to be struck by the contrast between the peaceful surroundings outside—the trees and the birdsong—and the horror within. I shall not talk about the detail of the things that we saw. I have visited some dark places—for example, holocaust sites across Europe—but this was a very dark place indeed.

The transformation in Rwanda over just 20 years is extraordinary. I am not saying that everything is rosy. It clearly is not. However, there is economic stability and reconstruction, and fantastic levels of economic growth. There are strong efforts at community building, and it was one of those that I wanted to share with the House today.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Braintree again on securing the debate. We sometimes think that genocides are part of the horror of the second world war and something that we have left behind. That is wrong. There are examples from Cambodia, Bosnia and, of course, Rwanda. It is right to remember, to learn and to note our responsibilities.