When ex-combatants become the face of Rwanda’s renewal

And why Kagame’s cult-like popularity endures

Her voice is slow, soft and tortured as ex-combatant Furaha Penina recalls how she was captured at the age of 14 years and dragged into the life of a militia child soldier in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

She had been separated from her family as they were running away from armed groups killing and sometimes cannibalising anyone in sight.

Penina was born in DRC to Rwandan parents who had fled the 1994 Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi and moderate Hutus during which over 800 000 people, predominantly Tutsi, were killed.

As little Penina ran to escape the massacres, she found herself in the territory of the Mai-Mai—the umbrella name for community-based militia groups active in eastern DRC.

The Mai-Mai were formed in the 1960s, initially as local self-defence forces to protect their communities against marauding rebel groups during Mobutu Seseseko’s reign when DRC was called Zaire, but faded away as violence appeared to ebb.

But they re-emerged in full force in the early 1990s to repel the influx of genocidal soldiers of the Rwandan Armed Forces (ex-FAR) and other resurgent rebel groups.

The ex-FAR were once part of the then Rwandan national army that played a key role in the planning and execution of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, but who—after committing genocide and having been defeated by President Paul Kagame’s Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF)—run away to DRC where they morphed into numerous names and even more splinter groups.

Jason Stearns, a Nairobi-based senior analyst in the International Crisis Group, once told IRIN that even after Mobutu was overthrown in 1997 by an alliance of rebel movements led by Laurent Kabila, who grabbed power and renamed the country DRC, the fighting did not stop.

Thus, the Mai-Mai soon expanded beyond community protection, evolving into a brutal militia attack force that began to terrorise some of the very communities it was supposed to protect as the scramble for mineral resources replaced freedom as the main objective amid interethnic conflicts that resulted in attacks against civilians, killing tens of thousands of people and displacing millions of others.

Penina, now 23, painfully described the violence she and her mates endured within Mai-Mai—an experience she does not wish on any young person and the reason she thanks the Rwandan Government every day for saving her from it and giving her a new positive purpose.

Her story mirrors that of Irakoze Martin, now 26 years of age.

He was born in DRC to parents originally from the Western Province of Rwanda, but who had run away from the country in 1994.

After just finishing secondary school in DRC, he visited a friend in a nearby area. While there, the so-called Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDRR) militiamen abducted and forced them to be soldiers. Martin was 18 years of age at the time.

FDRR is made up ex-FARs—the defeated genocidal army that flee to eastern DRC and which remains a menace throughout the Great Lakes region.

“After basic training, we went to fight the national army of DRC called the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo [FRDC], which then was in bad books with FDRR,” Martin said.

He was with FDRR for five years after which he joined M23, which is now the biggest armed rebel threat to Kinshasa since 2022 when it resumed fighting after being dormant for at least a decade.

“During these fights I almost died. I still see my friends dying around me,” said Martin.

He added: “I got tired of watching my friends die and of fighting without knowing why I was fighting. They were not even paying us. All we got was food, weapons and uniform,” he said.

Then, in the middle of despair, Penina and Martin—at different times in their respective armed groups—heard that in their native country Rwanda, their government is encouraging people like them to return home where they would be demobilized and reintegrated into Rwandan society.

Thus, in April this year, they deserted their armed groups and arrived at Motobo Demobilisation Centre in Musanze District in northern Rwanda, roughly 120 kilometres from the capital Kigali, where Nation on Sunday met them last Saturday, on June 22.

At Motobo—an arm of the Rwanda Demobilisation and Reintegration Commission (RDRC) created in 1997—the two former combatants have been undergoing a five-month rehabilitation and reintegration programme that include Technical and Vocational Education Training (TVET) studies, literacy and numeracy lessons, unity and reconciliation as well as patriotism.

At the end of the programme, discharged ex-combatants acquire skills in different areas such as masonry, domestic electricity, crop production, hair dressing, tailoring, welding and automobile mechanics, which give them an opportunity to enter the job market and easily become part of their ancestral communities.

While she has not fully completed her programme, Penina is already a hair dresser in her community, a stunning transformation from her days in bush wars just months earlier.

“I learnt hair dressing skills from Motobo Centre and for the first time I am making my own money. I am at piece and although I still do not know where my parents are, even whether they are alive or dead in DRC, the community here has accepted me. My life has been transformed. My life was surrounded by death and blood. Today it is surrounded by love and endless possibilities,” said Penina.

The story of Penina and Martin—and the more than 13 000 ex-combatants who have been demobilised and reintegrated into their motherland—are really the story of Rwanda.

This is a country that rose from the ashes of tragedy and unimaginable pain, from deep and deadly ethnic divisions between Tutsi and Hutu fanned by colonial interests to a nation united by its shared history towards a renewal that has made Rwanda one of the most progressive countries in the world.

It emerged from civil war and the genocide a battered country, with life expectancy in 1994 at just 14 years amid high risks of death from killings and communicable diseases such as malaria, HIV and Aids rampant at the time as the virus was also a weapon of war through rape, according to Dr. Sabin Nsanzimana, Rwanda’s Health Minister who is also an HIV specialist and epidemiologist.

Today, life expectancy in Rwanda is nearly 70 years—shoulder to shoulder with those of developed countries.

A country that had people being hacked as a pastime at any given moment 30 years ago is, according to Gallup, now the 5th safest country to walk in at night globally and the number one in Africa.

Rwanda—which is 4.5 times tinier than Malawi—boasts the lowest debt ratio in the region and is the number two country in Africa for doing business.

Its economy, which was literally bleeding from machete gashed wounds three decades ago, is now one of the fastest growing in the world averaging 7.5 percent growth.

Rwanda is also rated as having one of the strongest and well-managed institutions on the continent, especially in the sectors of health, education, agriculture, infrastructure management as well as information, communication and technology (ICT).

And the man who has presided over this transformation, President Kagame—despite accusations of human rights violations, of clamping down on civic space and intimidating political opponents—is set to win a fourth term when the polls close in Rwanda on July 15.

“We have seen significant improvements in our livelihoods over the past years. Our children are no longer malnourished, we have schools, access to healthcare, and new roads. We are here to support and listen to what more he [Kagame] will deliver for us,” said Jeanne Mujawamariya, a 35-year-old resident of Musanze District, told The New Times.

In the 2017 elections, Kagame and his RPF swept 99 percent of the national vote and his two rivals—Frank Habineza of the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda and independent candidate Philippe Mpayimana—are unlikely to perform any better.

And so the Kagame cult and governing style live on, buoyed by support from the likes of former combatants Penina and Martin who now see him as their saviour—the same way Genocide survivors have seen him over the past 30 years.