Rwanda's Notorious Passport To Death, a KT Press Report

    KIGALI, RWANDA, July 17, 2015 /24-7PressRelease/ -- In 1929, Louis Joseph Postiaux, a Belgian colonial governor of Rwanda, summoned all traditional chiefs 'for a surprise meeting'.

He said that he wanted all Rwandans, including the chiefs, to acquire the 8-page booklet, referred to as "Ibuku", written in French and Flemish, the administrative languages used in Belgium's East-Central Africa colonies.

The mandatory booklet (Indangamuntu) tagged holders ethnically (Hutu, Tutsi or Twa), replacing the vast clans.

"Failure to get one attracted a punishment from the colonial penal code: eight whips." Prof. Gamariel Mbonimana, a historian told KT Press.

After the collapse of the colonial regime in 1962, the ID was maintained with lesser pages, to facilitate segregation against Tutsis.

This bred an ethnically polarized society leading up to the quota system, allocating the Hutu 90% of available opportunities in education and employment, while the Tutsi were allowed just 10%.

Laurent Nkongori, now a lawyer with the Rwanda Human Rights Commission, almost lost his job of a human resource officer at Utexrwa, a textile company, for allegedly breaking the rule.

"The office of the president summoned me and said I was employing a bigger percentage of Tutsi, just because they had found some relatively tall workers in the company," Nkongoli says.

During the genocide in 1994, ID's were used to identify Tutsi at roadblocks and murder them.

"I chewed my identity card when I reached the road block," Chantal Mukamana, a genocide survivor narrates how she narrowly survived the militias who would have killed her had they been presented with her ID.

When the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) stopped the Genocide, the ID was replaced by another without ethnic details.
In 2008, the paper ID was replaced with the current electronic one.

Pascal Nyamurinda, the Director General of the National Identification Agency, says over six million citizens (60% of the population) have been issued with smart IDs, valid for travel to regional member states; Uganda, Kenya and Burundi.

Another ID, valid for 10 years, is expected to be launched soon with a person's pension, health insurance, tin number, passport, driving license, personal identification and other details.

Almost a century later, today, "We celebrate an ID card which does not allow anyone to hunt us based on our ethnicity," says Mukamana.

Full story available here: http://ktpress.rw/the-passport-to-death-story-of-rwandas-notorious-id-2549/

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