Monday, November 24

Clementine Igilibambe: Survivor of Genocide, Messenger of Change

Clementine Igilibambe spoke to the Adelphi University community on November 24, 2008, about her escape from the Rwandan genocide and what she is doing now to help those who have suffered and continue to suffer from the effects of this terrible battle.

Within the span of three months, 800,000 people were killed in the Rwandan genocide. Igilibambe has been working with those who have escaped and are trying to rebuild their lives.

“Refugees have to start all over,” Igilibambe explained, “their diplomas don’t count (once in the United States), they have no skills, and there is a language barrier.”

Igilibambe started the Clementine Refugee Scholarship Fund (CRSF). This program assists refugee students in paying for their college education, since many refugees must work full-time to help their families and don’t have the money to pay for college.

“It’s a lot of trauma trying to survive a genocide and then going into a totally different world,” she added.   

At the age of eight, in 1994, Igilibambe escaped Rwanda with her mother, father, and six brothers after the Hutu president was killed by a Tutsi rebel group.

The chaotic scene of gun shots and bomb explosions caused Igilibambe to lose sight of her parents. Igilibambe and her brothers lived in an abandoned house with about 30 other children after crossing the border into the Congo. The children fought ferociously over food and water. After several weeks, she was reunited with her parents and moved with them to a refugee camp in Kenya. Out of the 30 children that started in the house, only seven remained when Igilibambe left.

“That’s when I said ‘something has to change,’” she recalls, “It doesn’t have to affect the children.” 

There has been a struggle for power in Rwanda since Belgium conquered and colonized the country in the early 1900s. Belgium split Rwanda into two different kinds of people: the Hutus who are darker skinned and the Tutsis who are lighter in skin tone and more closely resemble people of European descent.

Tutsis started with the political power in Rwanda, though they only make up about fifteen percent of the population. Hutus, who make up the majority of Rwandans, had no political say and were tortured under Tutsi rule.

In 1959, the Hutu Revolt occurred. Here Hutus tried to kill as many Tutsis as they could. The Hutus won political control over Rwanda, and many Tutsis fled the country.

“Now the coin had been flipped so that Hutus were mistreating Tutsis,” Igilibambe explained.

“In 1994, (after the assassination of their president) the Hutus decided they needed to wipe out all the Tutsis to keep the power that they had.”

“In a way, [there were] two genocides going on at the same time,” she added.

Now that she lives in the United States, Igilibambe says she looks past everything that happened in order to better focus on how to fix the problem, rather than harping on the past.  

Along with her efforts, Igilibambe says that “The international community should be working together to forbid things like 1994 to happen again.” She also calls for a clarification of history, cooperation among the people in Rwanda, and democracy throughout the country. She believes that it is through these changes that peace and reconciliation in Rwanda can be achieved. 

Written by Michelle Consorte, LGS Freshman