FEMMES

Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, a former guerrilla who led an

invading force to suppress the genocide, rules with an iron fist and
allows little dissent. Seeing his country so devastated and broken
because of the genocide, Kagame realised he needed the Rwandan
women, who were the majority survivors of the genocide, to step up
and fill the vacuum. A new constitution was passed in 2003 decreeing
that 30% of parliamentary seats be reserved for women. The
government also pledged that girls’ education would be encouraged
and that women would be given leadership roles in the community and
in key institutions. Women soon blew past the 30% quota and today,
with 64% of its seats held by women, Rwanda’s parliament leads the
world in female representation.

In the last 20 years, life expectancy has doubled in Rwanda. The

country has built a near-universal health care system that covers more
than 90 percent of the population, financed by tax revenue, foreign aid
and voluntary premiums scaled by income. Deaths of children under
five have been cut in half. A compulsory education programme has put
boys and girls in primary and secondary schools in equal numbers.
Women can now own and inherit property and are active leaders in all
sectors of the nation, including business, while national mandates are
reducing violence against women. All these factors point to the fact
that despite its past trauma, Rwanda has come out on top.

Clearly, stronger women build stronger nations. And if one looks at the
state of the world today, with over twenty brutal armed conflicts taking
place at any given time and unprecedented levels of violence against
women, there has never been a greater need to support such
initiatives that change the world, one woman at a time.

Women make up the majority of parliament in this African country.

Currently, 64 percent of its parliament is female, and it has been
ranked the highest country in the world with most women in
parliament, as of January 2017.
According to the UN, rates of domestic violence are considered high in
the country.
The call for equality was led not by thousands of women but by one man
— President Paul Kagame, who has led the country since his army stopped
the genocide. Kagame decided that Rwanda was so demolished, so
broken, it simply could not rebuild with men's labor alone. So the
country's new constitution, passed in 2003, decreed that 30 percent of
parliamentary seats be reserved for women. The government also pledged
that girls' education would be encouraged. That women would be
appointed to leadership roles, like government ministers and police
chiefs. Kagame vowed to not merely play catch-up to the West but
leapfrog ahead of it.
The country embraced Kagame's policies and even went beyond his
mandatory minimum. In the 2003 election, 48 percent of parliamentary
seats went to women. In the next election — 64 percent. Today Rwandan
politics is cited as a model of gender inclusiveness.
Justine heard countless stories like this — women were still expected to perform
even ceremonial domestic duties. It was rarely an option to outsource such tasks
to a maid or get your husband to shoulder more work at home. Some women
feared violence from their husbands if they didn't comply with these
expectations, and one said that she had felt so trapped, she had contemplated
suicide.

Justine says that for some of these women, the very real strides that they were
making outside the home could feel less like liberation and more like a duty to
be fulfilled. Being a "good Rwandan," as she termed it in her research, meant
both being patriotic — serving her country through her public work and career
— but also being docile and serving her husband. As a result, Justine said, a
female politician could stand up in parliament, advocating for issues like
stronger penalties for sexual violence and subsidized maxi-pads for the poor,
but find herself scared to speak out about the oppression in her own home. But
despite these efforts, gender-based violence in Rwanda remains a
tragic reality: one in three women in the country has experienced
domestic abuse, according to UN Women. Rwanda is still a
patriarchal society and norms are strictly defined by gender,
especially at home. Abuse can range from physical to psychological,
sexual or economic.

 Feminism? "That's not Rwandan," they told her. "That's for Westerners."
In 2013, it was the first country ever to have more women than men
in parliament. According to the World Economic Forum, it now ranks
fifth in efforts to reduce the gender gap — the only non-Scandinavian
country on the shortlist.
FRANCOPHONIE
For more than a year now Rwanda has been campaigning enthusiastically to be the next
leader of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, an organisation of
French-speaking states that have political, social and economic connections with
France. The new secretary-general will be chosen at the Francophonie’s upcoming
summit in Armenia in October lors du sommet qui se tiendra les 11 et 12 octobre à
Erevan, en Arménie.. Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, is already chair of the African
Union, so if his country nets the Francophonie seat, it will lead two of the world’s
largest regional and global organisations.
Rwanda’s minister of foreign affairs and co-operation, Louise Mushikiwabo, is
campaigning to become the Francophonie’s secretary-general. She’s focusing on four
main issues: increasing the influence of the French language around the world,
elevating Francophone countries within political and economic international debates,
tackling youth unemployment, and exchanging governance practices (encompassing
everything from national reconciliation practices to better tax collection systems).

Before the genocide began, the French and Rwandan governments had worked
together closely for years. Then-president Juvénal Habyarimana shared close
relations with his French counterpart, François Mitterand. Scholar Gerard
Prunier has described how at the time, French officials distrusted the Rwandan
Patriotic Front (RPF), then a Uganda-based rebel group of Rwandan exiles,
which it considered part of an Anglo-American attempt to undercut France’s
influence in central Africa.

This concern led France to boost its support of Habyarimana despite his
government’s ethnic-based public policies, which hindered and victimised
Rwanda’s domestic Tutsi population – and which ultimately set the stage for the
genocide.

Habyarimana was killed when his Falcon 50 plane was shot down by unknown
assailants on April 6 1994, triggering the mass murder of hundreds of thousands
of Tutsi Rwandans. The plane itself was a French gift, and was piloted by a
French crew.

What’s particularly troubling for the current Rwandan government and

genocide survivors is the history of French assistance in the formation and
training of the Interahamwe, the killing squads that spearheaded the genocide.

After the Rwandan Civil War began in 1990, France provided arms and sent
military personal to Rwanda in order to train Interhamwe forces.
Journalist Linda Melvern has researched the close relationship between French
and Rwandan officials, and described how France sent military teams of
“advisers” and “technical assistants” to prepare not only the Rwandan military
but the Interhamwe to stop the RPF and their allies at all costs. France has
never fully accepted its responsibility for the consequences.

Since taking power and leading the formation of a post-genocide Rwandan

state, the RPF government has consistently held sceptical views of France and
French identity. Post-genocide reconstruction has largely tried to turn away
from French influence in politics and society. The most pressing example is the
demotion of the French language.

Despite Mushikiwabo’s campaign to increase the language’s relevance in the

international community, domestically speaking, French has been steadily
demoted. It is no longer the country’s primary language (alongside
Kinyarwanda) as it was in the past. Since 2008, English has overtaken French as
the primary state-recognised foreign language, and Swahili was recently added
to the list.

But the demotion of French isn’t just about France’s troubling history in
Rwanda; it also reflects a generational shift. The bureaucrats and officials who
fought in the Rwandan Civil War (1990-1994) and the genocide have slowly
been replaced by a new generation of English-speaking Rwandans. Additionally,
many Rwandan elites within the government and private sector consider
adopting English a matter of necessity, since it’s generally perceived as the
primary language of international trade.

Kigali a, depuis la rentrée 2010, fait de l’anglais la seule langue d’enseignement public,
en remplacement du français. Plus important, son président, Paul Kagame, impute
depuis des années et avec constance une immense responsabilité à Paris dans le
génocide des Tutsi en 1994.
L’arrivée probable de Louise Mushikiwabo au poste de secrétaire générale de l’OIF
peut donc apparaître comme une victoire diplomatique pour chacun des deux pays.
Pour Emmanuel Macron, qui tente d’imposer une image publique de liquidateur des
fantômes de la Françafrique, faire revenir le Rwanda dans le giron de la Francophonie
– considérée à tort comme le pré carré français – est un coup de poker. Un acte
désolant pour ceux qui considèrent que « la France se couche devant ceux qui
insultent son passé », mais aussi une ouverture sur la relation que
peut tisser l’ancienne puissance coloniale avec les nations africaines.
Inquiet de l’arrivée probable de la chef de la diplomatie rwandaise à la tête de l’OIF,
Reporters sans frontières rappelle que, dans son classement 2018 sur la liberté de la
presse, le Rwanda est 156e sur 180 pays évalués. L’organisation insiste en soulignant
que parmi les 58 Etats membres de la francophonie « seuls cinq […] ont un bilan pire
que le Rwanda en matière de liberté d’information ».