25 years to heal the invisible wounds of genocide

Psychologist Simon Gasibirege says that he is proud to be a Rwandan.

He was born there, now more than eighty years ago, into a Tutsi family.

“My heritage will be unity, reconciliation and the healing of hundreds of hearts in Rwanda.

Also healing myself and others,” he says.

Because, above all, Gasibirege considers himself a man of peace, a guy who was raised in love.

“I grew up without differentiating between Hutus and Tutsis.

My father had friends of both ethnicities and I was taught to respect all people,” he recalls.

Gasibirege had to live the darkest episode in the recent history of his country from a distance.

When, in 1994, a Hutu minority ordered and perpetrated the murder of almost a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus, approximately 20% of the population, he was a Rwandan refugee living in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo.

He before him passed through different countries and faculties.

He worked as an agricultural technician at the end of the sixties, raised money to start studying Sociology and left that career that would mark his life and his work: psychology.

In 1996, when the sores of Rwanda were still bleeding, he returned to his house to teach at the university and start workshops that would end up healing the wounds of thousands of people.

The healing and curing of people is a very long process.

When you have suffered so much, sometimes humanity is lost

“I didn't want to separate the Rwandans;

In my view, all of them had suffered genocide at different levels.

Even some of the culprits, people he had killed, were suffering inside.

You had to cure them all and you had to do it together, "explains the psychologist.

And he turns to a memory to illustrate his beginnings: “One day a group of women came to see me.

They were, in one way or another, victims of the genocide and they also told me that their neighbors insulted them for being so.

I met with them several times and understood that it was not only the survivors that had to be taken care of;

to achieve the total healing of the country, more profiles had to be included in the reparation.

And we had to go directly to the very communities where people live.”

That first contact with the victims was a seed that ended up germinating in the birth of Liwoha (

in its Spanish translation), a group that founded and still directs its own Gasibirege.

And those meetings gave rise to the trauma workshops, the working method by which this psychologist has been internationally recognized and imitated.

“Healing and curing people is a very long process.

When you have suffered so much, sometimes humanity is lost;

I've met people who didn't look like a human being,” he says.

The stages of healing

Each of the workshops devised by Simon Gasibirege is attended by some 30 or 40 people, lasts 11 days, is divided into three modules and each one addresses a different topic: dealing with emotions first, mourning later and, lastly, forgiveness and reconciliation .

Always under three rules: confidentiality, commitment to tell the truth and respect for everyone.

“We developed exercises that help attendees share their own stories, listen to each other, and feel compassion for each other,” says Gasibirege.

And he adds: “Many of the people he murdered, some still imprisoned in prisons, when he sits and listens to the survivors, he cries because he realizes the evil and the suffering he caused.

But it is important to bring together all the versions of the history of Rwanda, the one lived by the Tutsis and the one lived by the Hutus,

Gasibirege then explains the modules.

The first opens the wounds of the attendees.

It is time to share with others what happened before, during and after the genocide.

A painful but necessary trance.

“Emotions are the source of our energy, the gasoline of our existence.

It is essential to recognize them because they are the ones that guide us”, indicates the psychologist.

After this initial stage, the workshop focuses on dealing with grief.

“It is that it gives a lot of sadness, a lot of anger and a lot of fear.

All this prevents life.

Grief is a very bad and painful thing.

However, there are feelings linked to it that, if we manage to exploit them well, can help us manage our lives and our future”.

No one chose whether to be born Tutsi or born Hutu and the important thing has always been reconciliation in order to build a country together

The last of the modules, the one that concerns forgiveness, is the one that overcomes the original disbelief and the one that tries to put an end to the trauma.

First, attendees talk about forgiving oneself.

After doing it to others.

There are those who feel bad for having survived while their loved ones were annihilated.

There are those who feel responsible because they couldn't do anything for their own.

And there are many Hutus who feel guilty for not having helped when their neighbors suffered the wrath of an irrational mob.

"No one chose whether to be born Tutsi or born Hutu and the important thing has always been reconciliation in order to build a country together," says Liwoha's father.

And he emphasizes the importance of doing all this within the communities themselves so as not to leave anyone out.

“In Rwanda there is a tradition of bringing family and friends together to overcome conflicts together.

If someone is alone, it is extremely difficult to recover from such a great trauma.”

An international and extrapolable tour

Since the workshops began in 1996, Simon Gasibirege's method has been applauded, supported and imitated by other countries and used with victims of different conflicts.

The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation financed it in its early years and continues to push it today.

At the beginning of the century, Liwoha obtained economic support from different foundations and, in 2004, a German psychologist organized meetings between Gasibirege and different European authorities so that they could learn about the work of the Rwandan.

Organizations from Nigeria, Luxembourg or France have invited him to explore his method.

He also recognized his work by the Belgian state, which granted him a scholarship to travel to this country every six months.

“I was the only psychologist in Liwoha, so I also suffered and also got tired.

But, outside the political and official channels, the work of Simon Gasibirege has not gone unnoticed either.

And here, as before, the examples are numerous again.

Perhaps one of the most curious occurred in 2004, when the American television network HBO carried out an audiovisual project to tell the nightmare that Rwanda suffered in 1994. To do this, it hired survivors of the genocide and shot some scenes in the places where they had perpetrated the massacres.

So that no one would suffer negative psychological consequences from reliving the horror, the producers decided to bring in Gasibirege.

The

, which covered the recording, described the episode as follows: “The special effects team had scattered dead bodies in a swamp outside of Kigali.

The sequence was too much for a young woman from a nearby town who thought they were real.

She began to scream and sob.

Gasibirege said it took her two hours to recover.”

We must get each individual to think for himself and not get carried away by people who promote hatred and death

The workshops that the professor devised have not remained in the Rwandan genocide either.

With international support, this Rwandan psychologist has helped women sexually assaulted in the conflicts in the Congo and victims of multiple guerrillas in neighboring Burundi.

Always with the same premise: bring victims and perpetrators together, work on forgiveness, repentance and reconciliation.

Gasibirege says: “I know a story of a Brazilian Jesuit who does similar therapies: he brings together the whites and the blacks of the communities to work together.

It is that, if each one stays in his little corner, he only has a part of the story.

When you hear a soldier apologize and say: 'I did it because they forced me', then someone who has suffered the horror can see things in a different way”.

Since 1994, Rwanda has come a long way, both economically and socially, although 40% of its population still lives below the poverty line and almost three out of ten adults still cannot read and write.

Reducing both figures can be vital so that the shadows of the old ghosts do not reappear.

“The human being has the good and the bad, so, by our very nature, nobody can guarantee that something like this will not happen again.

There will always be a Hitler, a Franco or a Mussolini.

But you have to fight for most people to reject them.

We must get each individual to think for himself and not get carried away by people who promote hatred and death, ”he concludes.

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