Eugenie Mukeshimana

Anger made Eugenie Mukeshimana a human rights advocate. Before she left Kigali for the USA, Mukeshimana said she decided not tell Americans that she was from Rwanda. She explained, “I didn’t want them to think I had killed people during the genocide.”

On a full university scholarship to The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, Mukeshimana said she had to identify her homeland when instructors took attendance for the first time during the semester. “They couldn’t pronounce my name and asked me to do it,” she recalls. “When I spoke, they would ask about my accent and I would tell them I came from Rwanda.” Expecting a reaction, she said, “I was shocked. No one’s expression changed. No one leapt up. The instructors just proceeded to the next name on the roster.”

Her first year at university in the USA passed without anyone asking her about her experience in Rwanda. “How did 800,000 people die and no one asked me, ‘Why?’” she said she asked herself repeatedly during the year. She decided to ask her instructors if she could fulfill her assignments by using Rwanda as her frame of reference. It was at that point, she said, “My instructors started asking me to stay after class to ask me questions.” By the end of the semester, her instructors had raised the topic of the genocide in Rwanda during class time and her fellow students started asking her for more information. She began to receive invitations to speak to other classes. “That is how I began my career as a public speaker,” she says.

In 2010, she founded the Genocide Survivors Support Network, which, she says, “helps genocide survivors rebuild their lives and use their voices to contribute to genocide prevention.” Mukeshimana said she purposely decided not to limit her organization’s purview by calling it the Rwandan Genocide Survivors Support Network. She said that while she works primarily with people from the Great Lakes region of Africa, she has worked with Sudanese refugees.

When asked how she as a survivor of the genocide in Rwanda is able to work regularly with other genocide survivors, she quickly answers, “I realize I am fortunate. There was someone waiting for me in the USA when I arrived. I had a scholarship. I had a home to go to. A lot of survivors have to live next door to perpetrators of the genocide. I have been comfortable for the past decade."

“The majority of the survivors I work with were under 10 years of age when the Rwandan genocide happened. I was 23. I had experienced what it means to be raised by a family. I feel an obligation. Some of the survivors who have been able to move forward energize me to help someone else to experience joy and to know they are not alone.”

Mukeshimana was the Whitney M. Young, Jr. Advocate in the 2012 HRAP.

By Stephanie V. Grepo, Director of Capacity Building, ISHR, Columbia University