Negative Heritage and Closing the Door on Comparison? A Case for the Historic Urban Landscape approach in post-genocide Rwanda

Ever since, discourses surrounding Nazi war crimes are strongly reiterated in memory practices and testimonies as well as in political arenas in Rwanda as a means of justifying suffering with a commemorative model already familiar to the international community. This is all the more complicated when read in conjunction with UNESCOs decision in 1979, based on recommendations by ICOMOS, that following the inscription of Auschwitz-Birkenau to the World Heritage Register it was to be the only site of its kind to be inscribed “and to restrict the inscription of other sites of a similar nature” (UNESCO World Heritage Centre). This exclusivity has, unintentionally, promoted a harsh and unjustifiable paradigm of human suffering by encouraging all genocides to be brought in line with the Holocaust – the consequences of which extend far beyond the scope of this blog post.

How does this play out in practice in the case of Rwanda? At the KGM and other regional genocide memorials across Rwanda, the sites are tended to and maintained by the local communities – most, if not all, of which have been affected by the genocide as first-generation survivors. In the wider historic landscape, survivors and perpetrators are forced to forgive and live as neighbours. The country is also scattered with a myriad of formal and informal commemorative sites commissioned and maintained by local communities dedicated to the preservation of memory and the notion of ‘Never Again.’

At the same time Holocaust tropes are actively promoted in both tangible and intangible heritage practices across the country. This is reinforced at the KGM, because its contributors, the Aegis Trust, hold strong roots in Holocaust memory. The Holocaust tropes seem to consume a large degree of (inter)national memory at the cost of local. Scholars such as Rebecca Jinks, Susan Cook, Phil Clark, Sara Guyer and Filip Reyntjens (to name but a few) have considered issues of genocide memory in Rwanda at length and offer nuanced perspectives as to how this dialect between the national and international conscience ought to be treated.

I would argue it is of interest to revisit the Rwandan case in light of the 2011 UNESCO Recommendations on the Historic Urban Landscape. Arguably, the living heritage of Rwanda, whereby survivors and perpetrators are encouraged to invited to forgive and live together harmoniously, make the historic urban landscape of the country one of the most complex and unique case studies of dark living heritage set amongst a convoluted political and social backdrop. Holocaust tropes enforced across the urban and social fabric further complicate the landscape. A Historic Urban Landscape Approach in Rwanda would do well in placing survivors and victims of the genocide at the centre of Rwanda’s living heritage by offering the possibility of recognition to the caretakers of memory, like those who tend to the maintenance of these sites, who have done so silently under onerous political and social conditions. This raises significant questions about the future of the memorial sites like the KGM.

For now, however, I wonder how an HUL approach would look when dissonant Heritage sites are compared with one another and when we complicate this conflict with international tourism. Does an HUL approach invite comparative analysis of genocide in multiple contexts? And if it does, how do we leave space for alterity and context? Whilst a landscape approach assumes a greater periphery of humanity, further research needs to be completed as to how to treat such a scope in relation to genocide heritage and an inevitable comparative model of suffering. Certainly, there is much to learn when comparing heritage contexts cross-continental, however, there must be limits to these comparisons and to the landscape periphery before the focus is lost on the people and community that informs the unique living heritage of a particular landscape. If it cannot, genocide memorials like the KGM are at significant risk of becoming shrines of the past, that pay homage to constructed political discourses at the expense of memory. In other words, these sites remain as liéux de memoire (Nora, 1984).

Whilst sites such as the KGM remain critical memory palaces in the local and international conscience, consideration must be paid to applying an HUL Approach that recognises and complies with the alterity of human experience. In sites of atrocity, whether it be the KGM or Auschwitz, human suffering ought not be compared. Commemorative Heritage in these sites represent precisely the tension Nora describes between history and memory that go on to produce and restate liéux de memoire – ‘moments of history torn away from the movement of history, then returned; no longer quite live, not yet death, like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded.’(Nora, 1984, p. 12) The question is then, how we reconcile these sites between life and death  – between history and memory – if indeed such a feat exists.