Twenty four years after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, Rwanda has seen growth and development in terms of infrastructure, security, reconciliation, and social tolerance through state and civil society initiatives. However, psychological wounds stemming from historical violence and other events that started in 1959 leading up to the genocide and its consequences remain a challenge. It is from this background that NAR and Interpeace jointly established the Societal Healing and Participatory Governance for Peace Program in 2015 to facilitate dialogue and create safe spaces for peace, in a bid to enable diverse groups to openly share their sensitive past and overcome their traumatic emotions and start the journey that would lead them to heal.
As part of the first exercise to inform the program implementation, a mapping of actors and approaches was conducted countrywide to establish approaches used in healing and four approaches were found, the holistic, individual, community and group approach. Owing to its relevancy in the Rwandan context and can serve a wide range of people, NAR chose to use the psychosocial support group approach.
This approach was applied to all boundary partners including youth and community members from diverse and homogeneous groups. At the beginning of these groups, members of the groups and peacebuilding staff had concerns on how diverse groups would share their sensitive emotions. On one hand, there were Genocide survivors who had suffered from isolation, grief, hopelessness, anger, and fear of perpetrators, while on the other, there were ex-perpetrators or the members of their families who had suffered from shame, fear to face genocide survivors, stigma and anger. To ensure the program benefits more diverse groups, NAR involved survivors, new and old case returnees, ex-combatants, marginalized groups and people married in mixed marriages, as all the groups had suffered from their own unique traumatic experiences.
The question is how could these people meet and share their sensitive past and emotions? The answer is that these people were made to interact and openly share their sensitive stories through safe and protected spaces facilitated by professional psychotherapists. Personal emotional wounds are hardly shared openly, and for wounded groups to overcome their traumatic emotions and start a journey of healing, requires a space that provides them safety and dignity. Wounding events such as genocide shutter people’s hopes and sense of humanity and belonging. People lost their family and loved ones and became both physically and psychologically isolated from the rest of the community members. When individuals live in isolation and are wounded, they lose the meaning of life and they get lost in rhetoric questions of why? (kubera iki)?
Wounded individuals need a listening ear without judgment and a shoulder to lean and cry on. They also need a place for belonging. In order to achieve meaning and belonging, these groups were supported through a safe space that accords them confidentiality and respect for each other’s opinion. They were mobilized to join psychosocial support groups voluntarily at their own will and were encouraged to start sharing their personal stories when psychologically ready to do so.
However, safe spaces become safe spaces when they are facilitated by professionals with experiences to facilitate wounded groups and have the capacity to manage strong emotions and professionally create a safe ambiance for group members to share sensitive issues that would not be otherwise shared openly. The question is what are those issues that people do not freely share in open spaces that would require safe and protected spaces? Perpetrators feared to disclose their sensitive stories due to shame and survivors feared the overwhelming emotions, marginalized groups (Batwa) feared to deal with the stigma, while the returnees felt that there were no spaces to share their wounds, but all these groups have been able to take steps in healing due to the safety of the spaces established and facilitated by NAR psychotherapists.
A senior counselor and former employee of World Vision Rwanda once remarked that healing is not like training or a meeting; it requires people to have safer places to internalize and deeply reflect on their emotions and be supported to release those emotions.
You can’t share your personal stories or deep emotions on the roadside or in public, but rather, people need a calm and quiet place, where they are focused, listened to protectively and compassionately. This explains why family dialogues and married couples look for calm spaces where they discuss sensitive issues without children hearing. A safe space goes beyond physical setting and involves behaviors and interactions that create an open and accepting environment where everyone feels respected and valued. A psychotherapist from NAR said.
Safe spaces facilitate groups to open up, create empathy between groups, support group members to gain a sense of belonging and ultimately increase cohesion and trust which are key factors for future reconciliation. Experiences from implementation of societal healing have shown that one of the key impacts of these spaces is confidence building, restoration of humanity and hope for the future, which contribute to self-development and healing. It is important to underscore that healing is a long-term process that people acquire at different stages during psychotherapy support and differ for individuals.
Lessons also demonstrate that not all people can heal from group therapy as some people may have deeper wounds that may not be shared in a group setting and require individual healing therapy. Groups with a common problem share their personal stories easily and faster than diverse groups, but the safety of the spaces contributes highly to both types of groups in terms of emotions sharing and healing. However, experiences also show that healing of deeply wounded groups such as women who were raped have to be supported separately to facilitate them release their strong emotions.
By and large, my personal learning in the process of individual healing is that safety and a positive environment are vital for healing not only for groups that have suffered from atrocities like genocide and crimes against humanity, but I have also learned that people whose dignity was affected at some point in life in serious ways that affected their esteem and confidence, may not heal in a lifetime until they get safer spaces to release their emotions and become supported to overcome them.