Cup soccer 'unifies' Rwandans
2004-01-20 23:24
Mugonero - A decade after the 1994 genocide in which up to a million people died, mainly ethnic Tutsis, Rwanda is sending a football side to compete in the Africa Nations Cup in which Tutsis will rub shoulders with their former enemy, the Hutu.
"When we are in the stadium there are no Tutsis and there are no Hutus, we are all just Rwandans," said Caesar Kayizari, chairman of the Rwandan football federation, Ferwafa, as the national side prepared to fly out to Tunisia.
During the 100-day slaughter in 1994, which was minutely planned by the extremist ethnic Hutu regime at the time, football stadiums often served as killing fields.
Local authorities encouraged Tutsis to assemble on the pitches, where they would be sitting ducks as militia and soldiers threw grenades at them.
Any survivors would then be hacked to pieces with machetes.
Ten years later, the Amavubi national line-up due to travel to Tunis for the football cup was made up of Tutsi survivors of the genocide and Hutus, even if official references to ethnicity are now banned and private ones frowned on.
"Football matches are a place where Rwandans put aside their differences.
8 000 were massacred
The ethnic group you belong to doesn't have much importance in that context," said Jules Nsabimana, a 40-year-old teacher who regularly attends matches.
Football is by far Rwanda's most-popular sport. Fans of other sports, such as volleyball, sometimes complain football gets more than its fair share of funding.
The same people who complain, however, are often part of the crowd packing out Kigali's main Amahoro Stadium for big matches.
Mugonero gained infamy when 8 000 people were massacred in the town's Adventist church and hospital complex in 1994.
The two men in charge of the complex, pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana and his doctor son, Gerard, have both been convicted for their role in the genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which sits in the Tanzanian town of Arusha.
Near the complex, now rebuilt, 14-year-old Pierre Duwamungu proudly holds aloft a football made out of green plastic carrier bags bunched up and tied together with a couple of pieces of wire that appeared to be on the point of unraveling.
"Yes, I know what happened there," he says.
"They killed Tutsis. But now we all play football together."