To stop violence, grieve like Rwandans

Twenty years ago this week, Rwanda erupted into genocidal violence. Across the hillysub-Saharan nation, members of the Tutsi ethnic minority died at a rate of nearly 10,000 per day. With the genocide now long in the past, Rwanda poses an interesting example – if only because it bears unnerving resemblances to Bangladesh.

Jessore Hindus suffered gunfire and beatings; Dinajpur Hindus, mass arson. In Rishipara, thugs raped Hindu women. Throughout election time, violent incidents plagued Hindu families in more than two dozen villages. By now, this is not news. Indeed, 95-year-old Hindu Adhir Pal summed up the attacks with quiet resignation in January: "It has almost become a norm to attack the Hindus in Bangladesh after the general elections every five years."

The recurring pattern of violence against the country's largest minority is one of the many reasons Bangladesh in 2014 looks like Rwanda in the years before the genocide – like 1959, for example, when an outburst of violence in the rural hills separated Rwanda's Hutu ethnic majority from the Tutsi minority, or the early 1990s, when extreme right-wing agitations laid groundwork for Hutus to slaughter Tutsis. But there's a silver lining to this resemblance: it means that the way Rwanda has transcended its violence might also be applicable to Bangladesh.

There are obvious differences between the two countries. One is a hilly African country of 11 million people, the other an Asian delta with a population more than ten times that size. Rwanda is known for its tightly controlled, highly centralised state; Bangladesh for a shambolic government whose recent elections may soon be redone.

Most importantly, there is a strong contrast between the few feeble attempts to stop the well-predicted violence against the ethnic minority in Rwanda in the 1990s, and the large number of people who raised their voices against attacks on Bangladeshi minorities earlier this year. The country is making important efforts to keep the current chaos from spiralling out of control. This makes the answer to my article's central question clear: no, Bangladesh is not the next Rwanda.

But the question has an obvious rebuttal, too: Wasn't Rwanda once the next Bangladesh? After all, Bangladesh suffered genocide 23 years before Rwanda did. And while the world remembers Rwanda's genocide as a high-water mark of 20th century tragedy, the conflict in Bangladesh was no less severe.

Perhaps equating the two conflicts is surprising. But there are striking similarities. Take, for instance, the two conflicts' death tolls. Highest estimates say that Rwanda's genocide killed one million people in a 100-day conflict (April 7 to mid-July, 1994). Upper estimates of the death toll in Bangladesh in 1971 are around three million people killer in a 265-day conflict (March 26-December 16, 1971). These both average about a spine-chilling 10,000 deaths per day – or about seven human lives ending each minute, round the clock, on every single day of fighting.

Lower figures might be more accurate, but they offer little comfort. The Human Rights Watch report Leave None to Tell the Story calculated 507,000 deaths in Rwanda. Hotly debated figures from the Bangladeshi conflict cluster around a plausible (but uncertain) 1.25 million. These 5,070 and 4,238 deaths per day are still similar – both heart-breaking, nearly incomprehensible losses.

Both places have experienced the same general narrative arc, too. First, there was a huge spike in deadly conflict for a period of months, followed by a long tail of less-intense fighting for years.

In Rwanda, hostilities between Hutus and Tutsis erupted repeatedly in the few years after the genocide. Later on, efforts to address war crimes sometimes led to renewed bouts of violence.

For now – setting aside the prospect of intensified aggression against Hindus in the future – the pattern in Bangladesh traces the same rough path. There was the huge and rapid death toll of 1971, followed by a lingering pattern of repeated aggressions. These have been stirred up by efforts to address war crimes, among other things.

Comparisons between nations will always be open to interpretation. Their value lies in their ability to provoke thought. For me, what jumps out is how differently the two genocides are remembered – and what that might suggest about the violence against Hindus in Bangladesh right now.

Unlike Bangladesh, where public discussion of the war often focuses on anger alone, Rwanda makes space for public grief. Bangladesh has one Liberation War Museum; Rwanda, a half-dozen genocide memorials. And while both places make the start and end of the conflicts with public holidays, Rwanda also designates April 7-14 as a national week of mourning each year. This week, many survivors cried and screamed during a special public commemoration.

There has also been a programme that connects genocide perpetrators to the people they hurt for direct, person-to-person forgiveness. The results are striking. One survivor said, "Sometimes justice does not give someone a satisfactory answer — cases are subject to corruption. But when it comes to forgiveness willingly granted, one is satisfied once and for all."

The international community regards Rwanda with great seriousness, too. There is a group called Zen Peacemakers Order, for example, which holds religious retreats to Rwanda encouraging people to bear witness to the genocide (they also go to the WWII concentration camp Auschwitz). As best as I can tell, no similar retreat happens to Bangladesh.

This does not mean forgoing war crimes tribunals. Rwanda's International Criminal Tribunal began trying genocidaires in 1997, just three years after the genocide. The country also tried to use a quasi-traditional Gacaca court system to promote reconciliation between neighbours. Even now, there are calls for France to participate in additional war crimes trials. The efforts far outweigh the belated, limited trials in Bangladesh – and they are part of a process, not the sole aspect of it.

The differences are clear. Two decades after the genocide, Rwanda has little violence between former combatants. In contrast, Bangladesh is still enduring skirmishes pitting ethnic nationalists against Islamists more than four decades after its conflict ended.

Causes of violence on a national scale are hard to isolate. But it's reasonable to guess that whole-hearted efforts to acknowledge the Rwandan genocide have helped reduce intergroup tensions. In many nations, efforts to come to grips with past conflicts have been part of eliminating risks that survivors will be harmed again, harm others, or maintain circumstances that afflict the next generations with violence.

Bangladeshis of all faiths did the right thing by standing up against the violence. But if Adhir Pal is right, attacks on Bangladeshi Hindus will resume when elections or other events provoke them. Completely stopping it will involve many actions to support justice, security and reconciliation.

Maybe what Bangladesh needs to include in that effort is an acknowledgement of not just the anger, but the enormous grief, fear, and sadness that still lingers here. Bangladesh should follow Rwanda's example. We should spend much more time grieving the losses that set the stage for this violence – those thousands of deaths a day not so far back in this country's past.

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M. Sophia Newman, MPH, is a freelance writer and a public health researcher specialising in mental health.