Not Yet "Beyond Trauma" - Genocide Travels

I'm in Kigali for the second time in a year. I'm going to use my blog as a kind of journal to keep me reflecting and communicating because I'm on a 2 - week course entitled "Genocide and Mass Atrocities: Actors, Causes and Responses to Violence." It's run by the Aegis Trust who not only set up the Genocide Museum here but who are now in the archive, busy digitizing the evidence of the gacaca courts - 25 million of handwritten pages! and something which has never been done before. We were sent readings for the course about 2 months ago and were told to read everything before we came. It has been a steep learning curve and I've loved it! I'm not quite done yet - a few more papers to go! Today was the first day - there are about 45 - 50 of us here sitting in a big U - shape.
A large Rwandan contingent - academics from faculties of Law and Education, government employees, people involved with local governance, heads of small NGOs concerned with community mental health, marginalized  Batwa - the small indigenous people of Rwanda - and Rwandan culture. There are people from Kenya and Uganda, from a Genocide Studies Department in Amsterdam, a group of Swiss anthropology students, a British guy from the Royal Commonwealth Society and me. I have found out that quite a few of the Rwandans have studied short courses in South Africa. We have a deal with Rwanda that their students pay the same rate as South Africans so guys have studied governance at the University of Pretoria and the assistant head of the Law School studied in "Potch" - his abbreviation!
There is lots of discussion; many different viewpoints. Phil Clark, the Australian course leader from SOAS is very encouraging and validating of comments and questions so we are seeing an open space being created. We touched on the sore point of whether we would be allowed to say ANYthing i.e. talking about who is Tutsi or Hutu or that there was not a genocide? Our Rwandan lecturer put it as a question: Is genocide denial a hate crime or part of freedom of speech? In Rwanda denying that there was genocide in 1994 is a criminal offense and chargeable in court. You cannot deny, minimize or trivialize the genocide. This is also the case in some European countries with regard to the Holocaust but not in the USA. There it is considered part of freedom of speech. With regard to definitions - whether mass violence is genocide, a crime against humanity or a war crime - these should not be seen as describing a hierarchy of suffering. "Rather" he asked, "can you talk about these in a neutral way without being biased by the experience you have gone through?" This seems to be the difficulty the Rwandan refugees that I have met in the dialogue groups at the Cape Town Holocaust Centre seem to experience. They are not able to do this.