“Do your part” or even “Act out of a duty to remember”: this is how we could give a few subtitles to the newly published graphic novel Rwanda, in pursuit of the genocidaires. Its authors, Thomas Zribi (journalist and screenwriter) and Damien Roudeau (illustrator), address the question of the 1994 genocide from the little-known angle of its legal consequences and, in doing so, highlight an exceptional couple: Dafroza and Alain Gauthier.
For more than twenty years, the Gauthiers have dedicated themselves to tracking down genocidaires who fled to Europe, particularly to French soil. Because if we know today that more than a million Tutsi died during the extermination planned by the Hutu power, we must, as the album reminds us, imagine, for these “hundreds of thousands victims, at least as many murderers.” Certainly, a certain number of them were tried and sentenced during “gacaca”, the traditional courts set up in the 2000s in Rwanda. But how can we admit that other perpetrators and organizers of this “absolute crime” can lead a quiet life, protected from prosecution, under other skies?
It was this intolerable situation that pushed the Gauthiers to engage in what became the fight of their lives. How did these two “simple citizens” get there? Certainly, the couple has always been linked to Rwanda. Born in Butare in 1954, Dafroza completed her higher education in France and became a chemical engineer. Alain, for his part, is a college principal and was a teacher in Rwanda in the early 1970s. They were married, started a family and settled in France when, in April 1994, the horror of the genocide occurred. Dafroza’s family and loved ones are decimated.
“Guilty of being alive”
Months later, when it became possible for the Gauthier couple to return to Rwanda to honor their dead, the psychological shocks followed one another, from the discovery of places of memory, which left them speechless, to the emotion of meeting survivors who provide testimonies, each more unbearable than the other. Feeling, like many, “guilty for being alive” and wanting to act in one way or another, the Gauthiers decide to respond to the need for reparation that is being expressed. With friends, they created the Collective of Civil Parties for Rwanda (CPCR) in 2001 and will therefore do everything to flush out the genocidaires who have taken refuge in France so that they can be brought to justice.
The task turns out to be immense. It is estimated that between 200 and 400 murderers live on French territory. It is about identifying them, locating them, but also accumulating the elements allowing them to be sent to court. To do this, we must return again and again to Rwanda to comb the countryside in search of evidence, testimonies, or even people ready to become civil parties. However, explains Dafroza Gauthier, “there is almost no written material evidence… The survivors were fighting for their survival, they were hidden in holes, in forests… often they cannot identify their executioners”.
As in a report, the album follows the Gauthiers in their grueling investigations, which necessarily lead to retracing certain key moments of the genocide, such as the siege of a village or the assault on a church where hundreds of Tutsi believed they found refuge. The crossed memories show to what extent the massacre was organized and the dissemination of the order essential, making it possible to pass on the instructions for the killings from the government to the prefects, then to the mayors and their fellow Hutu citizens… Between modesty and accuracy, the illustration allows us to show the unspeakable and challenge the reader.
Restoring a “violated humanity”
For the Gauthiers, essential players in the defense of victims, it is also a matter of resisting physical and psychological exhaustion on a personal level and of managing to find a balance between this cause and their private life. Not to mention the threats that certain supporters of silence or impunity sometimes make against them. But the couple’s worst enemy turns out to be the passage of time. “For twenty-nine years, we have been denouncing the slowness of justice and the silence of the media,” underlines Alain Gauthier. In France, the first trial of a man accused of having participated in the genocide only took place in… 2014.
As rapper and writer Gaël Faye reminds us in the preface to the album: through justice, the “survivors who escaped the disaster wait for their violated humanity to be restored.” Nearly thirty years after the genocide, the results are weak. Only six people have been tried and convicted so far in France – three of them definitively, the others having appealed. The trial of a seventh person will begin on November 14.
A lot to wonder about. Get discouraged too. Before raising his head and going back into battle. Because as Dafroza Gauthier says with elegant modesty: “This work takes a lot of energy from us. But it has to be done, so we do it, that’s all. »