The IBUKA association has undertaken, numbers and scan thousands of archives, while the British NGO Aegis Trust will film the testimonials of survivors.
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At the Nyanza Genocide Memorial in Kigali, the metal statue of the memory flame rises in the middle of flowers and groves, in a perfectly maintained garden. It is on this site where, on April 11, 1994, nearly 2,000 Tutsi were massacred by the Hutu Interahamwe militia, which is the headquarters of the association Ibuka – “Remember you”, in Kinyarwanda language. Created in 1995, she has since accompanied, supported and represented unrelated the survivors of the genocide.
Near thirty years later, while Rwanda begins, Thursday, April 7, the e Commemoration of the genocide perpetrated against Tutsi, Ibuka continues to militate for the preservation of the memory of the victims . For three months, it has been able to classify, dial and digitize the thousands of archives that it has accumulated on its activities over time, between 1995 and 2010. Records that testify to the consequences of the genocide on the population, of the population. Reconciliation and justice process undertaken by the Rwandan government, but especially in the way the survivors have organized themselves to help each other and continue to live.
“These documents contain very important information. Yet they were poorly preserved, poorly managed. We could lose them,” explains Egide Nkuranga, the president of the association. The purpose of the operation, launched in partnership with the School of Higher Social Sciences (Ehess, Paris) and the Shoah Memorial, which finances: make history accessible to all. At the end of the exercise, the archives will be available on a digital library and available on site in Kigali. “They will be used by our children, by researchers, by people who want to get out of books, movies, all kinds of publications. Who says accessibility of archives says understanding what happened,” added Nkuranga Egide.
“These archives rested with their dead”
Previously, the files were piled fished in one of the memorial rooms, next to clothes of victims and even coffins. “These archives rested with their dead”, blows the French historian Hélène Dumas, coming from Paris to participate in the project. In front of her, the documents are now carefully classified by themes on long plastic tables: administration, justice, psychosocial questions …
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