Labour of love at Rwanda's school of hate Campus was HQ for genocide

KIGALI may be bigger and more important. The resort of Gisenye on the shores of Lake Kivu is perhaps more beautiful. Ruhengeri's volcanoes and gorillas are certainly more famous, but Rwanda's proudest possession was always the south-western town o f Butare.

Butare is home to Rwanda's national museum and numerous research institutes. Its centre is replete with outdoor cafes and restaurants where waiters in black bow-ties and clean white shirts serve customers with silent aplomb. Perched above the treelined streets on a hill on the edge of town is the main campus of Rwanda's national university.

Surrounded by a spectacular arboretum, the Butare campus is enough to make any British red-brick institution weep with envy at the sweep of its libraries, laboratories and classrooms.

But the splendour of the campus has been tarnished by genocide. When madness and death engulfed Butare on 19 April last year, a centre of learning had no meaning. Knowledge was not only useless but dangerous. Libraries were ransacked, laboratories destroyed and classrooms wrecked.

Students and teachers were hacked to death or gunned down by mobs and soldiers bent on eliminating the enemies of Rwanda's Hutu extremist state. The killing in Butare became known in Rwanda as "the massacre to end all massacres".

It is not just bloodstains and bullet-holes that have marred the campus, but also its history as intellectual headquarters of the extremists who planned the massacre of a million people.

It was in Butare's halls of academia that the ideology of Hutu ethnic supremacy was nurtured and given dubious stamp scholarly respectability by a handful of extremist intellectuals. Ferdinand Nahimana, an ideologue and accused war criminal, who rose to infamy as the director of a radio station that urged listeners to kill Tutsi "cockroaches", built his academic career in Butare. Leon Mugesera, who in 1992 exhorted Hutus to "unearth the battle-axe" and send the Tutsis back to Ethiopia, their supposed country of origin, by way of the Nyawarungu River, was once a "distinguished" professor at Butare.

These men fled the country when their enemies in the Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) defeated the extremist government and ended the genocide last July. Their ghosts, however, still haunt the shattered Butare campus.

No one is more aware of this than the new vice-president of the university, Emmanuel Bugingo. "This university was on the front line of the political divisions of this country," said Dr Bugingo, a grey-haired former professor of business administration

who used to work in Chicago.

"We had killers on campus. When I say killers, maybe they didn't pick up machetes and cut people down, but they master- minded the genocide. All the killing in Rwanda was carefully planned by intellectuals and those intellectuals all passed through this university."

The politicisation of the university goes back to 1973 when the late president, Juvenal Habyarimana, came to power in a military coup. Under Habyarimana, a small clique of people from the region around his home town of Gisenye, an area well known for extremist views, enjoyed state power that extended to the university.

"From 1973 on, the recruitment of students and teachers was not based on merit but on the power structure of the country, the region of origin and the ethnic background of the candidates," Dr Bugingo said. "Most important, there was no room for the exchange of ideas. This is the most important thing we must now change."

Dr Bugingo is part of a small team chosen by Rwanda's new government to rebuild the university and to turn it from a centre of hatred and intolerance into a place of learning and reflection. It will be an uphill struggle.

Although the broken glass and masonry have been swept away and the bloodstains washed off the walls, the hard work is only just beginning. What was not ransacked was destroyed. There are no computers, few typewriters and fewer books.

But the university's material damage was dwarfed by the loss of life.Of 250 academics 1,000 staff and 3,000 students before the massacres, at least 1,200 were killed, including 30 academics and 1,000 students.

Many fled after the RPF victory. Less than 20 per cent of the original academic body have heeded a call to return to work and so far only 1,000 students have registered for new classes.

"Those who came back are those were are opposed to the divisions of the past. They escaped and came back. Those who stayed away are those responsible for planning the propaganda of the genocide and organising the killings," Dr Bugingo said.

New academic staff have been recruited from among returning Rwandan refugees, victims of earlier Rwandan pogroms, victims who have seized the opportunity afforded by the RPF's victory to come home.

There are now 120 lecturers back at work, enough to reopen the university at the end of the month. This will stand out as one of the most important symbols of life returning to normal in Rwanda. But Dr Bugingo knows opening the doors is not enough. The greatest challenge is not restarting classes with few resources, but dealing with the past in a society rent apart by hatred.

"When classes begin and people come back, I expect problems. The genocide was so big, the complicity so widespread, that I expect recriminations among the students. It is inevitable, and we will have to manage that and face up to our own past," Dr Bugingo said.

To deal with the task, a rehabilitation committee has been formed by some staff. It will address the problems brought by returning students as well as charting the university's direction. "We must return the university to its rightful place. We must openly discuss all ideas, even those like Hutu nationalism, so we can expose them as false premises," Dr Bugingo said. "We must show the way to objective thinking, where facts are accumulated and then conclusions are drawn, and not the other way around as it was before. If we can't do that, it is better to leave this place as a museum."