Rwanda

From Hobson's Choice

A nation of East Africa. Specifically, Rwanda is located in the gently mountainous chain of the Rift Valley, an immense geological formation extending from South Africa to the Levant.

1 History
2 Notes
3 See Also
4 External Links

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History

Rwanda is reputed to have been settled originally by the Hutu people, and several centuries later fell under the rule of a monarchy of the Tutsi (Watusi) people.

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European Colonial Rule

During the 19th century partition of Africa among the European powers (Conference of Berlin), the region of Rwanda-Urundi was "awarded" to the German Empire, where it was governed as part of Tanganyika. After World War I, Germany's former colonial empire was assigned to Belgium as a League of Nations mandate. Under Belgian rule, it was subjected to much closer supervision, and the Belgians sought to reform the local administration.

One of the significant Belgian innovations was the introduction of identity cards for Tutsis and Hutus (1926); this initially was intended to integrate the "traditional" social relations of the region, while introducing modern bureaucratic administration The effect was to harden the concepts of race among the Rwandans.

In 1958, on the eve of independence, the Belgian authorities shifted political allegiances, and now favored the Hutu. This was partly to undermine Rwandan nationalism, since the potential national elites (being Tutsi) now had to labor under the burden of Hutu scorn. The Hutu ousted the Tutsi monarchy, and hereafter the Tutsi became an "out-group" of Rwanda. Large numbers emigrated to Congo-Kinshasa, Burundi, and Uganda.

In 1961, Rwanda's independence from Belgium was essentially stage-managed; about the same time, its neighbors also became independent from either Britain (as Tanzania and Uganda) or Belgium (as Burundi and Congo).

In 1973, the Republic was overthrown by Gen. Juvenal Habyarimana, partly in response to revived violence against Tutsis in retaliation for the massacre of Hutus in Burundi. Initially Habyarimana's regime is a relief for Tutsis since it ends the random pogroms against them.

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Habyarimana's Developmental State

The most fateful decision of Habyarimana seems to have been the creation of a neo-Stalinist developmental state that would attract the assistance of major powers; those major powers took an interest in creating a counterweight to neoliberalism by backing an alternative model of development. The primary sponsor of the Rwandan developmental state was France, and to a lesser degree, China.^[1]

Under the neo-Stalinist concept, 3rd world countries cannot avoid a predatory relationship with the global economy unless they are fortified with an extremely powerful state, a command economy, and a fanatical defiance of the key superpower (viz., the USA). Opposition to the standard neoliberal model of development takes several forms, but one favors the totalitarian client state for this reason, and Habyarimana's regime certainly filled the bill.

Alison des Forges, HRW: Two years after the coup, in 1975, Habyarimana made Rwanda officially a single-party state under the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement, MRND). All Rwandans of whatever age were automatically members of the party. Over the years, Habyarimana constructed a cohesive monolith, with himself as president of the republic and president of the party and, at each level below him, the relevant government official simultaneously heading the corresponding level of the party. [...] The communes were divided into sectors, each of which had a population of some 5,000 people. The sectors were represented by elected councilors who together formed the communal council that supposedly advised the burgomaster ["commune leader"], but more often simply implemented his decisions. The sector was in turn composed of cells, each of which grouped together approximately 1,000 people. The cell had an elected committee of five persons, headed by a responsable (cell head), who were charged more with executing orders from above than with representing the views from below. That small part of the population employed in urban salaried jobs participated in the party at their place of work, where the work unit was also a party cell. This intensive administration had two objectives: control and mobilization. The control was implemented not just by the high ratio of officials to ordinary people but also by regulations governing population registration and movement. The Habyarimana government continued the use of identity cards and also required people moving from one location to another to register with the local authorities. Each commune submitted monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports of births, deaths, and movement into and out of the commune. The burgomaster kept agents of the secret service informed of any suspicious persons seen in his district. In his first months in office, Habyarimana ordered important government employees with master’s degrees or higher to take military training, apparently with the intention of providing one more channel for instilling habits of obedience to orders.

According to Des Forges, one important objective was agricultural modernization. All available labor was mobilized for rural improvements, then for glorifying the leader. None of this is unusual; in fact, it is a pretty standard playbook for modernization through import substitution and primative capital accumulation. What was alarming was the degree to which the modernization of the country was married to an agenda of Hutu revenge against the Tutsis. Also strange was the harmonious relationship between an essentially Guevarran-[[Frantz Fanon|Fanonist] plan of economic development and a thoroughly bourgeois foreign donor community:

Ibid: At the head of what was taken to be an honest and energetic administration, Habyarimana attracted substantial foreign assistance in the 1970s and 1980s. With such help, the government constructed an impressive infrastructure, particularly of roads and telephone and electric service. For the first decade, the economy did better than others in the same region, with a net increase in gross national product in relation to population, an achievement all the more remarkable given that Rwanda also had one of the highest rates of population growth on the continent. Donor nations applauded these accomplishments, regarding Rwanda as one of the few promising “models” in Africa. The expatriate experts who implemented the assistance projects in the country took great satisfaction not just in the results obtained but also in the personal ties that they developed with Rwandan counterparts.

Some Rwandans were indeed getting rich: those who worked for the state directly, those employed by its offshoots, parastatal enterprises, and those who ran economic development projects controlled by state officials. State employees and the military also used access to preferential treatment to build profitable private businesses. But the prosperity was both fragile and superficial. The mass of the people stayed poor and faced the prospect of getting only poorer. More than 90 percent lived from cultivation and while the population grew, the amount of land did not. The land available to ordinary cultivators actually diminished in some regions as local officials appropriated fields for development projects and as members of the urban elite bought out the poor, establishing themselves as absentee landlords.

Some readers will justly rebuke me for linking Guevara and Fanon to this. However, the neo-Stalinist model of economic development is predicated on an assumption of permanent confrontation between the exploiting capitalist power and the liberated people, for whom "freedom" means, liberation from alien exploitation. While this is not at all the outcome I would have expected, it appears the constant hostility between the thwarted oppressor and liberated revolutionary state seems to "keep the revolution honest"; in contrast, Rwanda (and Haiti under the Duvaliers, and Panama under Torrijos, and Algeria under Ben Bella) appear to be examples where the imperial power, having lost standing, cultivated a friendly relationship with the revolutionary regime.

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The Crisis of the Habyarimana Regime

Main Article on the Rwanda Genocide

While the French association with the Habyarimana-MRND regime was very important before, after October 1990 the relationship became very close. The RPF had invaded from Uganda,^[2] and Pres. Fran%C3%A7ois Mitterrand had an extremely close friendly relationship with Habyarimana. Mitterrand appears to have regarded Habyarimana's Rwanda as "Cuba in an ideal world"; his adviser for Latin American affairs was Regis Debray, an ardent supporter of Che Guevara who actually was captured with him by the Bolivian Army. Observing the humiliating US obsession with defeating Castro, Mitterrand and Debray apparently believed a congenial relationship could be achieved with a state actually following the Guevaran-Fanonist model.

Unfortunately, this seems to have smothered the entire project. Mitterrand's health was failing and his term was coming to an end. Within a year of the eruption of the war, Mitterrand's government pressured Habyarimana to allow for multiparty elections, hoping that a combination of military success and electoral politics would reverse the RPF's gains. At the same time, the influx of military aid accelerated. And while Habyarimana's regime was a totalitarian one, there is little doubt that the Rwandan Hutu population shared its enthusiasm for defeating the RPF. The akaza

Ibid: France officially supported peace efforts and was one of the sponsors of the Arusha Accords which stipulated the withdrawal of all foreign troops, except those involved in bilateral military cooperation arrangements. According to Gasana, however, who participated in some of the Arusha negotiations, the French were far less intent on a negotiated solution than were the U.S. and Belgium. Their support for Habyarimana and the MRND was such that they gave the impression that they actually favored a military solution to the conflict. On August 26, 1992, three weeks after the first part of the Accords was signed, Ambassador Martres formally agreed with the Rwandan government to expand the limited French military training program to the whole Rwandan army, making it possible to increase the number of “instructors” while removing combat troops. On January 18, 1993, Mitterrand addressed the delicate problem of continued military assistance in a letter to Habyarimana. Remarking that he would not want France to be reproached with having undermined the Arusha Accords, he continued, "I wish to confirm that on the question of the presence of the Noroît detachment [the combat troops], France will act in accord with [the wishes of] the Rwandan authorities." In February 1993 French authorities once more proved their support by sending more than 500 troops to "indirectly command" and assist the Rwandan forces in halting the RPF advance. They also stepped up delivery of arms and ammunition, sending up to twenty tons of arms a day, enough to cut into the stocks of the French army itself.

The French stopped short of actually sending a formal force, seeking instead to do so through the aegis of the United Nations. At the same time, the cadre of French diplomats directly connected with Mitterrand (as opposed to the professional career diplomats, who were less zealous about Habyarimana) tended to assimilate the Rwandan regime's thinking.^[3]

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Notes

↑ Allsion des Forges, "Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda," Human Rights Watch (1999); see "French Support for Habyarimana"
↑ Ibid, "Opposition within Rwanda"
↑ Des Forges cites Antoine Jouan, who declared the RPF, and not Habyarimana, should be blamed for the massacres of the Tutsi, because their agents had infiltrated and caused the Bugesera massacre [of Tutsi] in 1991.

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