Rwandan Genocide (1994)

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Ten years ago, beginning in 6 April, the genocide in Rwanda began. It raged for about six weeks and was ended, as most genocides are, by the military defeat of the genocidaires. Most of the chronology below has been taken directly from Frontline: Valentina’s Massacre.

Contents

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Timeline

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Colonial Phase

1918 Under the Treaty of Versailles the former German colony of Rwanda-Urundi is made a UN trusteeship to be governed by [Belgium]. The two territories (later to become Rwanda and Burundi) were administered separately under two different Tutsi monarchies. Both Germany and Belgium turned the traditional Hutu-Tutsi relationship into a class system. The minority Tutsi (14%) were favored over the Hutus (85%) and given privileges and western-style education. The Belgians used the Tutsi minority to enforce their rule.
1926 Belgians introduce a system of ethnic identity cards differentiating Hutus from Tutsis. During the 1930s, a process of "Tutsification" results in a monopoly of political and administrative power in the hands of Tutsi.
1957 PARMEHUTU (Party for the Emancipation of the Hutus) formed while Rwanda still under Belgian rule.
1959 Hutus rebel against the Belgian colonial power and the Tutsi elite; 150,000 Tutsis fled to Burundi.
1960 Hutus won municipal elections organized by Belgian colonial rulers.
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Independence

1961-62 Belgians withdrew. Rwanda and Burundi became two separate and independent countries. A Hutu revolution in Rwanda installed a new president, Gregoire Kayibanda; fighting continued and thousands of Tutsis were forced to flee. In Burundi, Tutsis retained power.
1963 Further massacre of Tutsis, this time in response to military attack by exiled Tutsis in Burundi. Again more refugees left the country. It is estimated that by the mid-1960s half of the Tutsi population was living outside Rwanda.
1967 Renewed massacres of Tutsis.
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The Habyarimana Years

1973 Purge of Tutsis from universities. Fresh outbreak of killings, again directed at Tutsi community. The army chief of staff, General Juvenal Habyarimana, seizes power, pledging to restore order. He sets up a one-party state. A policy of ethnic quotas is entrenched in all public service employment. Tutsis are restricted to nine percent of available jobs.
1975 Habyarimana's political party, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (Mouvement Revolutionnaire National pour le Developpement, or MRND) is formed. Hutus from the president's home area of northern Rwanda are given overwhelming preference in public service and military jobs. This pattern of exclusion of the Tutsis continues throughout the '70s and '80s.
1986 In Uganda, Rwandan exiles are among the victorious troops of Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army who take power, overthrowing the dictator Milton Obote. The exiles then form the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi-dominated organization.
1989 Coffee prices collapse, causing severe economic hardship in Rwanda.
July 1990 Under pressure from Western aid donors, Habyarimana concedes the principle of multi-party democracy.
Oct. 1990 RPF guerillas invade Rwanda from Uganda. After fierce fighting in which French and Zairean troops are called in to assist the government, a cease-fire is signed on March 29, 1991.
1990/91 The Rwandan army begins to train and arm civilian militias known as interahamwe ("Those who stand together") For the next three years Habyarimana stalls on the establishment of a genuine multi-party system with power-sharing. Throughout this period thousands of Tutsis are killed in separate massacres around the country. Opposition politicians and newspapers are persecuted.
November 1992 Prominent Hutu activist Dr. Leon Mugusera appeals to Hutus to send the Tutsis "back to Ethiopia" via the rivers.
February 1993 RPF launches a fresh offensive and the guerillas reach the outskirts of Kigali. French forces are again called in to help the government side. Fighting continues for several months.
August 1993 Following months of negotiations, Habyarimana and the RPF sign a peace accord that allows for the return of refugees and a coalition Hutu-RPF government. 2,500 UN troops are deployed in Kigali to oversee the implementation of the accord.
Sept.1993-Mar.1994 President Habyarimana stalls on setting up of power-sharing government. Training of militias intensifies. Extremist radio station, Radio-Television Libre Mille Collines, begins broadcasting exhortations to attack the Tutsis. Human rights groups warn the international community of impending calamity.
March 1994 Many Rwandan human rights activists evacuate their families from Kigali believing massacres are imminent.
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The Holocaust

April 6, 1994 President Habyarimana and the president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, are killed when Habyarimana's plane is shot down near Kigali Airport. Extremists, suspecting that the president is finally about to implement the Arusha Peace Accords, are believed to be behind the attack. That night the killing begins.
April 7, 1994 The Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) and the Interahamwe set up roadblocks and go from house to house killing Tutsis and moderate Hutu politicians. Thousands die on the first day. UN forces stand by while the slaughter goes on. They are forbidden to intervene, as this would breach their "monitoring" mandate.
April 8, 1994 The RPF launches a major offensive to end the genocide and rescue 600 of its troops surrounded in Kigali. The troops had been based in the city as part of the Arusha Accords.
April 14, 1994 Belgium withdraws troops from the UN mission in Rwanda. Anarchy Rules Rwanda's Capital And Drunken Soldiers Roam City (NYT)
April 21, 1994 The UN cuts its forces from 2,500 to 250 following the murder of ten Belgian soldiers assigned to guard the moderate Hutu prime minister, Agathe Uwiliyingimana. The prime minister is killed and the Belgians are disarmed, tortured, and shot and hacked to death. They had been told not to resist violently by the UN force commander, as this would have breached their mandate.
April 30, 1994 The UN Security Council spends eight hours discussing the Rwandan crisis. The resolution condemning the killing omits the word "genocide." Had the term been used, the UN would have been legally obliged to act to "prevent and punish" the perpetrators. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of refugees flee into Tanzania, Burundi and Zaire. In one day 250,000 Rwandans, mainly Hutus fleeing the advance of the RPF, cross the border into Tanzania.

Former Rwandan Premier Pleads Guilty to Genocide (NYT) UN Chief Asks Rights Aide To Take On a Role in Rwanda (NYT)

May 17, 1994 As the slaughter of the Tutsis continues the UN agrees to send 6,800 troops and policemen to Rwanda with powers to defend civilians. A Security Council resolution says "acts of genocide may have been committed." Deployment of the mainly African UN forces is delayed because of arguments over who will pay the bill and provide the equipment. The United States argues with the UN over the cost of providing heavy armoured vehicles for the peacekeeping forces.
June 22, 1994 With still no sign of UN deployment, the Security Council authorizes the deployment of French forces in south-west Rwanda. They create a "safe area" in territory controlled by the government. Killings of Tutsis continue in the safe area, although some are protected by the French. The United States government eventually uses the word "genocide."
June 24, 1994 The Hutu government flees to Zaire, followed by a tide of refugees.
July 18, 1994 The RPF sets up an interim government of national unity in Kigali.
July 19, 1994 A cholera epidemic sweeps the refugee camps in Zaire, killing thousands. Different UN agencies clash over reports that RPF troops have carried out a series of reprisal killings in Rwanda. Several hundred civilians are said to have been executed. Meanwhile the killing of Tutsis continues in refugee camps.
July 23, 1994 President Bill Clinton orders the Pentagon to send relief supplies to aid Rwandan refugees. Under the Bougainvillea, A Litany of Past Wrongs (NYT)
August 21, 1994 The French withdraw from Rwanda and are replaced by Ethiopian UN troops.
August 1994 New Rwandan government agrees to trials before an international tribunal established by the UN Security Council.
November 1994 UN Security Council establishes an international tribunal that will oversee prosecution of suspects involved in genocide.
Jan. 5-10 1995 UN begins process towards finalizing plans with Zaire and Tanzania that will lead to the return of one and a half million Hutus to Rwanda over the next five months. UN Security Council refuses to dispatch an international force to police refugee camps.
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Epilogue

Feb. 19, 1995 Western governments, including the U.S. ($60 million), pledge $600 million in aid to Rwanda.
Feb. 27, 1995 UN Security Council urges all states to arrest people suspected of involvement in the Rwandan genocide.
Mid-May 1995 Tensions increase between the United Nations and the Rwandan government; the government growing resentful of the lack of international financial aid
June 10, 1995 UN Security Council unanimously agrees to cut by more than half the number of UN troops in Rwanda after a direct request from the Rwandan government to withdraw UN forces.
July 1995 More than 720,000 Hutu refugees around Goma refuse to return to Rwanda. Clergy in Rwanda Is Accused of Abetting Atrocities; Chaos Looms as Rwandans Refuse to Go Home (NYT)
August 1995 UN Security Council lifts arms embargo until September 1, 1996.
Sept. 20, 1995 At a Mass in Nairobi, Pope John Paul II urges an end to the bloodshed in Rwanda and Burundi.
Dec. 12, 1995 United Nations Tribunal for Rwanda announces first indictments against eight suspects; charges them with genocide and crimes against humanity.
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Assessment

We may agree that genocidal violence cannot be understood as rational; yet, we need to understand it as thinkable. Rather than run away from it, we need to realize that it is the "popularity" of the genocide that is its uniquely troubling aspect. In its social aspect, Hutu/Tutsi violence in the Rwandan genocide invites comparison with Hindu/Muslim violence at the time of the partition of colonial India. Neither can be explained as simply a state project. One shudders to put the words "popular" and "genocide" together, therefore I put "popularity" in quotation marks. And yet, one needs to explain the large-scale civilian involvement in the genocide. To do so is to contextualize it, to understand the logic of its development. My main objective in writing this book is to make the popular agency in the Rwandan genocide thinkable. To do so, I try to create a synthesis between history, geography, and politics.
[Mahmud Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, Princeton University Press (2002)[1]]


Mamdani's thesis is that the Rwandan genocide was part of a relentless pursuit of justice on the part of the perpetrators. As the quote points out, the massacre was carried out by huge cohorts of the population; in many cases, this can be laid to fact that the intensively organized Rwandan Republic was ably to use "snowball coercion," in which a mob forces those whom it encounters to choose between collusion and death; the members of the mob must continue to show their enthusiasm for killing or else they themselves will be killed by other members of the mob (who are all under the same dilemma). Such mobs typically have a core of militants, but typically these are not essential once the killing is underway: the conscripts typically understand that they must kill others who do not show sufficient zeal, or face the same fate themselves.

I asked whether there were no intermarriages in the secteur. "Too many. About one-third of Tutsi daughters would be married to Hutu. But Hutu daughters married to Tutsi men were only 1 per cent: Hutu didn't want to marry their daughters to Tutsi who were poor and it was risky. Because the Tutsi were discriminated against, they didn't want to give their daughters where there was no education, no jobs . . . risky. Prospects were better for Tutsi daughters marrying Hutu men. They would get better opportunities. "Tutsi women married to Hutu were killed. I know only one who survived. The administration forced Hutu men to kill their Tutsi wives before they go to kill anyone else-to prove they were true Interahamwe. One man tried to refuse. He was told he must choose between the wife and himself. He then chose to save his own life. Another Hutu man rebuked him for having killed his Tutsi wife. That man was also killed. Kallisa—the man who was forced to kill his wife—is in jail. After killing his wife, he became a convert. He began to distribute grenades all around.
[Chapter 1]


However, "snowball coercion" doesn't typically lead to the deaths of thousands, let alone, hundreds of thousands; the conscripts are not sufficiently "reliable" for the mob to, for example, never consume its militant core. On the contrary, genocide usually requires the intercession of a powerful state, and with it, a state narrative. That narrative defines the people in relation to the state, defines their enemies, defines the legitimacy of property, violence, and rulership. The fundamental narrative of the Rwandan revolutionary state was that the Tutsi represented an alien race, one-time colonial masters or surrogates of the European colonists. The mission of the new state, therefore, was Hutu power (later enshrined into the ideology, Hutu Power); the Tutsi were defined as eternal aliens, having no legitimate standing in the Hutu nation.

Arlette Vandeneycken: Tutsi were said to be Hamite cattle herders that migrated to Rwanda a few centuries earlier and subjugated the indigenous Bantu agriculturalists, the Hutu.[2] In the 1920s, colonial administration shifted the authority from the king to the chiefs, reorganized their power and racialized local authority. As a consequence, state power became more despotic. Tutsi privileges were branded as alien privileges, thus defining Tutsi as an alien race and power holders. In chapter 4 Mamdani depicts the decolonization movement, in particular the 1959 "social revolution," as an internal social movement that empowered the Hutu majority, which had been constructed by colonial administration and missionaries as indigenous, against the Tutsi minority constructed as alien. This social movement was based on a Hutu counter-elite that had established itself in response to the fixation of Hutu and Tutsi, and opportunities to escape these through the emergence of a market-based economy and missionary education.
The notion survived repeated pogroms of Tutsis after the '59 Revolution; in 1973 the first republic was overthrown in a coup d'etat. As Mamdani makes clear, concurrent events in Burundi, Kivu Province (Congo-Kinshasa), and Uganda were decisive in ensuring that the dread and social resentment of Hutus towards their Tutsi neighbors would be kept alive. The legitimizing narrative of Rwanda changed for a time; the Rwandan state acknowledged the Tutsi now as an ethnic group, but official discrimination persisted. Meanwhile, regimentation of Rwandan society proceeded as never before. Habyarimana availed himself of substantial aid to pave highways, arm, and modern agriculture. Like Ivory Coast, the country's economy became tied to coffee. During much of the early years of the second republic, the economy boomed; by '89, however, economic privation and a structural adjustment program pushed Habyarimana to allow multiparty elections.


In the elections, Hutu Power came to the fore as a revived, virulent anti-Tutsi ideology; at the same time, the exclusively Hutu army was fighting for its life against the increasingly effective, Ugandan-abetted, Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Without the repeated interventions of the French Army, the Rwandan Army was doomed. Meanwhile, the regimentation of the country enabled the military to take matters into their hands. Pogroms were growing in size and frequency, so that, by February '94 it was obvious that a genocide was in the works. It would seem that only Habyarimana was holding back the colossal network of death squads known as the Interhamwe, and his interest in doing so seemed to have been that the Rwandan Tutsi were serving as hostages. Again, the dread of RPF conquest meant a fear of losing land and political security for the Hutu; while it was not possible for the Tutsi to contemplate exterminating the Hutu, the example of neighboring Burundi was that a minority dominating the military could easily inflict gigantic slaughter and reduce the majority to servitude.


Finally, the historic narrative of the Tutsis as colonial perpetrators and strangers had not died in Rwanda; according to Mamdani, the dialectic of Hutu power was straight out of Franz Fanon. Violence was glorified not merely as a means of self-defense, but as a form of extreme justice, a way in which the subjugated people established their exclusive right to the land and the nation by bloodshed. It's very common for people to speak of a thing being established with blood, or shedding their blood for the creation/legitimization of a thing, and thereby making it an ineluctable fact. The participation of everyone in the genocide meant that the great majority of the Hutu population of the country would share in the bloodguilt of the deed, and therefore, have a stake in its perpetuation. It also signified that the Mahutu were prepared to kill in order to preserve Hutu Power.


Ultimately, the ideology that led to this genocide was the idea of racial justice: the idea that humans, classified as members of a race, could be held accountable for their past monopolization of power. The notion of racial justice as a part of decolonialization is actually quite old, and has led to a world of market-dominant (or once-dominant) minorities subject to periodic pogroms. One thing it has not led to, not ever, is anything like justice.

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Notes

  1. ↑ Usually, when a web log references a book, it links to the Amazon listing as I have done; however, I've just become aware of a resource called H-Net Online, where professional book reviews are available online (link for Mamdani review). The review I just linked is extremely helpful; it gives a chapter by chapter outline of the book, which will free me to describe my impressions.
  2. ↑ Mamdani never endorses the Hamitic hypothesis of Tutsi origins. See Review of Mamdani, African Studies Quarterly (Spring 2004) The whole review makes it clear that he refers to the hypothesis without endorsing it; the hypothesis itself actually plays a role in the history of Africa. However, the hypothesis was a racialist myth of colonialism, which held that cultural innovation must have come to Black Africa through the intermediary of a notionally Eurasian people, the "Hamites."
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See Also

Rwanda

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External Links

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Accounts & Forensics

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Aftermath

  • Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, commander of the Canadian peacekeeping forces in Rwanda during the genocide, made a visit to Kigali where he spoke on his experiences and his condemnation of the Western powers for failing to stop the genocide (" Reuters; Guardian; NYT)
  • "Western Leaders Absent as Rwanda Marks Genocide" (Reuters). Dallaire has already fielded criticism from Belgian legislators over handling of the genocide; he's thrown it back at the Belgian Senate, pointing out that they (as with the US State Department) gutted the peacekeeping mission.
  • Boutros-Boutros Ghali and others have continued to insist that Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian peacekeeper and author of Shake Hands With the Devil – The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (Carroll & Graf Publishers 2004), is a liar and a careerist. B-BG has insisted that, while the massacre in Rwanda was "100% US responsibility," the guilt lay not in refusing to act on Dallaire's faxes calling for greater peacekeeping resources, but precisely the opposite: that Dallaire was a US plant who caused the genocide by trampling on his obligations to be neutral. This astonishing rewrite of history has been circulated through the smallpox blanket of the so-called left, Counterpunch.
  • Kofi Annan's mea culpa (BBC)
  • Michael A. Innes, "Accountability for Genocide: Des Forges’ Torch", The Journal of Humanitarian Assistance (Oct 2001)
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Polemical

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