Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence

4. Building a Rwanda "Fit for Children"

79  4 Building a Rwanda “Fit for Children” kirrily pells You children must be worthy of Rwanda. Children are the Rwanda of tomorrow. Minister of gender and family rights, National Summit, July 2007 You say many goals that inspire us but you should come to the grassroots level and see the exact situation. Rwandan youth to the minister of youth, culture and sports at NGO-organized Ingando, April 2006 Globally, childhood is a political space where society’s present anxieties and future aspirations play out. In times of uncertainty and transition, the symbolic positioning of children in nation-building narratives assumes greater importance. As demonstrated by the first quotation above, post-genocide Rwanda is a paradigmatic case in which the language and symbolism around children are central to a new metanarrative of national rebirth. Nowhere is this more apparent than at the National Summit for Children and Young People, where discourses of children’s rights are used by government actors to consolidate certain historical narratives and to project moral authority upward to the international community and downward to the Rwandan people. However, as illustrated by the second quotation above, Rwandan children are not passive consumers of these discourses. Instead, children and young people are actively engaged in reframing these narratives, thus highlighting a tension between national rhetoric and local, lived experience. 80 B u i l d i n g a R w a n d a “ F i t f o r C h i l d r e n ” This chapter begins by exploring the government’s symbolic constructions of childhood in the new national metanarrative and how this is enacted through the National Summit for Children and Young People. It then draws on focus group research, conducted between 2006 and 2008 with children and young people, to argue that children’s everyday experiences lead them to challenge the dominance of the nation-building narrative—not on ideological grounds but on its failure to address the practicalities of daily life. “Umwana Ni Umutware”: Children and Nation-Building During the 1994 genocide, children were victims and (less often) perpetrators of murder, mutilation, rape, theft, and destruction (Des Forges 1999; HRW 2003). An estimated 300,000 children were slaughtered and approximately 10 percent lost one or both parents. Many children still suffer the consequences of the genocide: 110,000 children live in child-headed households (due to the death or imprisonment of their parents), 7,000 live on the streets, and 19,000 under the age of fifteen are infected with HIV/AIDS. Since the genocide, the new government has made serious efforts to protect children’s rights. It incorporated aspects of the Convention on the Rights of the Children (CRC) into domestic legislation in 2001, and it enshrined children’s rights in the 2003 Constitution (RoR 2003). The government has included children’s rights perspectives in various policies, including the National Policy on Orphans and Vulnerable Children (MINALOC 2004) and the five-year National Strategic Plan (MIGEPROF 2006). In line with political transitions elsewhere, the Rwandan government symbolically links children and children’s rights to a national rebirth and a reimagined future (see Cheney 2007). This is typified by President Paul Kagame, who grew up in exile and returned victorious in 1994 to become “the father of all orphans” (MIGEPROF 2007). Children also represent all their family members who died: “you live in place of your parents, you are the future generation” (MIJESPOC 2006). “Igiti Kigororwa Kikiri Gito”: National Summit for Children and Young People Since 2006 the Ministry of Gender, and Promotion of Child and Family Rights (MIGEPROF) has organized an annual National Summit for Children and Young People. One child is peer-elected from every sector to K i r r i l y P e l l s 81 attend a series of preparatory meetings, which is followed by a two-day event where delegates are given the opportunity to present their opinions, ideas, and concerns to various government and nongovernmental organization (NGO) representatives. The image of Rwanda as a country “fit for children” is projected up to the international level through the presence of large numbers of representatives from international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), donors, and diplomats, and down to the local level through the mobilization of children for government programs such as Vision 2020 and the Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (EDPRS). The 2007 summit was presented as an...