(by George Weiss, Director Radio La Benevolencija HTF)

Well, today its my turn to write something, since Nan and Annemarie asked me so nicely. I am supposed to write a few words about the Benevolencija, my organization that invited this wonderful group of people to Rwanda to perform this play, and why we did it. But before I bore you with the background info, here a few words about yesterday, Saturday, 7^th April.

That day, 18 years ago, the streets of the city of Kigali reverberated with single shots and explosions, barricades were erected along all its main streets, commandos entered the garden of the moderate Rwandan  prime minister, stormed into her  house and killed the petrified woman, others captured and killed ten Belgian UN soldiers in a move to make the UN leave the country, Radio Mille Collines issued its famous coded order “cut the tall trees” which mobilized the Hutu population, and the killing, the genocide started in the houses, at the barricades and in the churches were the Tutsis had fled. Yesterday was the day of the opening of the Rwandan Genocide commemoration week.

The Cambodians, the Dutch- and the Benevolencija production team were all invited to the city stadium where the ceremonies took place. Everybody was tired from the rehearsals that have been going on every day, and no one expected in truth anything else then a formal exercise. But it proved an unexpectedly moving experience for us all.

We were seated in the VIP section of the stadium as a special symbolic gesture of our Rwandan hosts.. I sat behind Theary, Sina, Sokly and Sovanna. We had been told the ceremony would start at 9, but everyone was waiting for the president to arrive, -  he finally came only by 12:00. The sun beat down on us, performers played beneath us to synthesizer playback, filmed by TV crews whose video feed was displayed in a huge billboard opposite us, transmitted live all over Rwanda. Slowly the atmosphere of the thing got to everyone. Half crazed cries started reverberating across the stadium from the gleaming ranks full of people opposite us as individuals started to obviously break down and were quickly carried, crying , out of the stadium like in some charismatic church in the mid-western US. And then I noticed Theary, then Sokly then Sovanna  slowly, silently wiping tears of their check. And it brought home to me once more the whole reason why we are doing this thing here. - They are also genocide survivors, after all they were aged ten and more during the Cambodian genocide and they are traumatized too. Of course, hearing people cry out like this would bring up their own trauma. But they were  silent, silent and sweet. Just drying their tears. Difficult not to reach out to them to comfort them.

My organization, Radio La Benevolencija HTF, that brought this play to Rwanda, has a funny name. It is named after the Benevolencija, the Humanitarian organization of the tiny Jewish Community of Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. In the beginning of hostilities in1994 its members found themselves employed as mediators between the warring sides since they were the only local entity that everyone could accept as neutral. Since this status provided protection, they started writing in their Serb, Croat- and Muslim friends and friend’s friends into their community until it became a multi- ethnic mix, nothing to do with any religious or ethnic entity at all any more. Then they smuggled out over 3000 threatened people of all three ethnicities from the city, by giving them papers as “jews” , provided one of the only postal- and pharmaceutical services and in general employed their century-old know-how to protect others just as they would have liked others to have protected them during the holocaust. I set up a support network then for these people, and my dutch NGO, set up 8 years later shares their ideology of transmitting historic know-how in self-empowerment from one group of individuals or societies, that have suffered from ethnocentric violence, to another. In Rwanda we are operating a prototype project that attempts to embed in the general population know-how based on research into the universal psychological mechanisms of how perpetrators were created in the great genocides of the 20^th century, so that the population can learn to recognize these mechanism and resist them. As trauma plays a central role in this incitement, trauma healing plays a central role in our work.

To embed this know how, we use a long –running radio soap opera, (by now 9 years), based on edutainement principles that reaches 85% of the population, plus news-background and debate radio and TV programs for the leadership audience, as well as grass roots activist groups to carry out actions in the spirit of the role models featured in the radio soap. Evaluations by teams from Yale University, NYU, Antwerp University a.o. show impressive results of this media methodology in making individuals more resistant to incitement, inspire them to active bystandership as peacebuilders, and learning how to deal with trauma.

Bringing a Cambodian play to Rwanda is, for us, another, important way of doing this job. –The idea is to show the population in this country, but also in Cambodia that they are not alone in having had to go through these horrible experiences and that they can actually learn from each other. The societies and the historic consequences are so different – Cambodians have hardly judged any of their perpetrators while in Rwanda up to 14 000 village courts judged up to one and half million genocide perpetrators and suspects in the Gacaca Village tribunals. But some Rwandans are today somewhat disillusioned with this process. It did not really bring the relief they had expected from it. Much still remains not talked about in this troubled society, or, when it is, people often doubt the honesty of what they hear. Watching the quiet, earnest Cambodians perform Annemarie’s play, I cannot help feeling that the very earnesty and beauty of the play can move all Rwandans to go further into themselves and heal better. And maybe even enhance an experience of loving kindness to one another, as I start feeling towards these earnest, humble and strong individuals siting in front of me, silently drying their tears.

George Weiss, CEO Radio LaBenevolencija HTF