Bringing Genocide to the People: Historical Circumstances, Politics, and the Making of Civilian Perpetrators in Rwanda, 1994
Jennifer Lamphere Thesis Submission
MA History: Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1 July 2015
Supervisor: Prof. dr. Johannes Houwink ten Cate Second Reader: Dr. Kjell Anderson
Contents
I. Introduction………..3
II. Historiography, Research, and Methodology………...………7 III. Socio-Political History of Rwanda, 1860-1990……….20 IV. Context for Genocide: Difficult Life Conditions,
Civil War, and Radicalization, 1990-1994……….29 V. Civilian Perpetrators: Organization, Mobilization, and Negotiation...
………...………...43
VI. Conclusions………....53
VII. Bibliography and Figures…….
………...60
I. Introduction
What are we talking about when we discuss perpetrators of mass violence? Is a perpetrator only a person who draws the blood of another, or is it a person who hits a dead body in an act of obedience, or who loots after a massacre conducted by a gang of killers? The study of perpetrators has come to include a wide range of acts and actors. The term has its origins in Holocaust historiography, where it was used to refer to the many different people, civilians and otherwise, working in active support, or passive compliance, with the Nazi project. Studies of other instances of mass violence have since borrowed the term, as it is evocative of guilt but free of the legal bearings that come with other terms like “war criminal” or the alternative moral universe of military or political actors. In this way, the term perpetrator does not refer to the elite organizers of mass violence, those who would typically be held accountable on the international stage for their crimes, as at Nuremberg or before the international tribunal in Arusha. The perpetrator is the everyman—the untrained grassroots killer, the informative local accomplice, perhaps even the bystander who turns a blind eye. Perpetrator studies, while inclusive of elite organizers, are largely concerned with these other actors in society, the civilians or “the masses” who are so crucial to mobilize in times of crisis. To understand mass violence, and especially instances of total genocide, it is through the study of perpetrators that we can begin to shed light on how and why neighbors decide to take up arms against neighbors.
As with any attempt to explain the complexities of human behavior in a specific moment in time and in a specific historical context, the study of genocide perpetrators draws on the knowledge and theories of many different disciplines. The foremost contributions come from history, political science, and the social and behavioral sciences—together these disciplines seek to explore both the external and internal mechanisms at work on an
individual, or group of individuals, that result in their transformation from psychologically normal individual to an agent of violence. In other words, “perpetrator research is centrally concerned with the question of what makes non-violent, psychologically normal individuals capable of transmuting their behavior and norms sufficiently to commit or assist atrocity.”1 In historian Richard Overy’s keynote address at an academic conference dedicated solely to the topic of perpetrators of mass violence, he identified a division of labor that has heretofore
1 Richard Overy, “Perpetrator Research in International Context,” Keynote Address, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, Berlin, Germany, January 27, 2009. The full text of the address is available online.
guided work of this nature.2 He sees the study of perpetrators and perpetration—the first being the human actors and the second being their actions as connected to the greater genocidal project—as the aggregate of two separate but related questions: how individuals can commit atrocity and why particular atrocities happen. Overy finds the first question, how individuals can commit atrocity, to be the domain of the human sciences, and of social psychology in particular. Explanations of this type look at human behavior and the internal processes that drive it; for a perpetrator of genocide, these internal processes may include cognitive dissonance, increased personal satisfaction due to in-group membership, Lifton’s concept of “doubling,” or addictive euphoria related to the frenzy of mass killing.3 These are examples of the chiefly psychological processes that facilitate an individual’s negotiation with a situation that requires the transmutation of their behavior and norms. The second question, why particular atrocities occur, is the domain of historians according to Overy. Historians are tasked with explaining the environmental details or the “contingent historical factors” that make atrocity possible, including ideology, politics and policy, institutional or structural dynamics, and place.4 However, as Overy says, the “how” and the “why” are not mutually exclusive. Rather, both are necessary in order to arrive at an understanding of a particular episode of mass violence and to understand the people who made it possible.
Many theories have been offered for understanding and explaining perpetration. In this context, a theory is a framework for understanding created through a process of abstractions of the elements of different atrocities that coalesce and allow for generalized statements aimed at explaining a phenomenon. There are the ideologically based theories, which, often ignited by state sanctioned propaganda, privilege fear and hatred as the main mechanisms that make atrocity possible. In a similar vein, one finds theories of evil monsters or cults of personality that at once demonize and glorify a small group of individuals who led the population astray with their charisma and manipulation; though, theories of this sort are now considered outdated. Hannah Arendt was one of the first to challenge the idea of evil monsters, or evil geniuses, in her book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in which she characterized her subject as an unoriginal, mindless bureaucrat, or the embodiment of the
2 Ibid., p. 2-3.
3In his work Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Robert Lifton coined the term “doubling” as the key to understanding how the Nazi doctors came to do the work of
Auschwitz. In psychological terms, doubling is the division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self. Doubling is now a term used to discuss how perpetrators of genocide can function in an environment of evil while still holding on to their prior self.
“banality of evil.”5 Conversely, there are theories that emphasize structural or material factors in influencing perpetration, such as Ervin Staub’s difficult life conditions theory or
economically oriented frustration-aggression theories.6 While theories of this variation speak to conflict on a more general level, they are still applicable to genocide as one type of conflict among many.
Additionally, theories from the social sciences offer insight into the group dynamics of perpetration with concepts such as peer pressure, the social context of violence and
socializing into violence, in-group and out-group dynamics, the power of shared identity, and paradigms of human behavior in reaction to orders from authority figures. Psychologists have also taken the small group dynamics of perpetration out of historical context and simulated them in experiments. Two of the most famous experiments testing psychologically normal individuals in situations of pressure are the Milgram experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Both experiments found that psychologically normal individuals could exhibit behavior that was to the detriment of others when put under certain conditions. These experiments are frequently used to support theories about the nature of the perpetration of violence, including instances of genocide.
To one degree or another, all of the theories that have been ventured are valid
considering that mass violence is typically an event with multiple causes. No single theory of perpetrators encapsulates both why and how mass violence occurs without borrowing from another. Furthermore, the wealth of theories put forth on the topic speaks to both the complexity, and sometimes inconceivability, of mass violence as well as to the issue of reoccurrence. Atrocities occur again and again in different societies and at different times and places in history. Similarly, the perpetrators of atrocities reflect the diversity of their
historical circumstances. To study one perpetrator does not account for all perpetrators, nor does the study of small groups of perpetrators reflect the full range of possible individual experiences. This is one of the fundamental challenges in perpetrator research—to accurately capture the range of individual experiences while also generalizing their experiences so as to conceptualize the whole.
Perhaps the theory that has found the most acceptance among scholars for its conceptual flexibility in describing both individuals and the larger social body comes from Christopher Browning’s work on Police Battalion 101 and their role in acting out the final 5 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York: Viking, 1963, p. 7.
6 Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989, p. 13-14.
solution in Poland under the Nazi regime.7 In his book on the topic, Browning argues that the men who made up the particular battalion in question were not virulent anti-Semites, and as such they were not moved to action by a fervent belief in Nazi ideology or a culturally ingrained obedience to authority. What’s more, the men represented an average cross-section of the adult German population at the time in terms of demographics. They were “ordinary.” Yet they carried out extraordinarily brutal massacres of Jews, with only a minority choosing to opt out while the majority continued to kill. Browning’s book was groundbreaking in its revelation that the orders given to the men were not indispensable and also in its conclusion that if this group of ordinary men could transform into mass murderers what group could not? By that rule, given the right mix of environmental and psychological factors, any ordinary man could potentially become a perpetrator of mass violence. This idea is disturbing to many. Most “ordinary” people would like to consider themselves incapable of the actions exhibited by perpetrators of mass violence. Yet, as other instances of mass violence in the 20th century have shown, Browning’s “ordinary men” theory rings eerily true.
In 1994, some 800,000 Rwandans—mostly from the Tutsi ethnic group—were slaughtered by their Hutu neighbors over the course of 100 days. Although the military and paramilitary groups led the charge, this was an instance of total genocide characterized by extremely high levels of civilian participation.8 Civilian is being used here to mean a person who is not an active member of the military, paramilitary, police, or a belligerent group in a conflict. The violence between civilian perpetrators, or “ordinary men,” and their victims was chillingly intimate; people turned on their friends and relatives at close range, using
instruments of agriculture as instruments of terror. Why did so many civilians engage in violence, and what mechanisms were at work for these psychologically normal people as they transformed into mass murderers? Further, what were the historical circumstances that came to a head in April of 1994 that made this atrocity possible? These are some of the questions that have guided research on the Rwandan genocide and on the ordinary men and women who carried it out.
II. Historiography, Research, and Methodology
7 Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in
Poland, New York: Harper Collins, 1992.
8 Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006, p. 1.
The historiography of the genocide in Rwanda has undergone significant developments over the past twenty-one years. What was originally characterized as the spontaneous flare-up of ancient tribal hatreds was quickly revealed to be a sophisticated modern genocide planned and put into motion by members of the Hutu extremist political faction.9 Through field research conducted by notable academics and from reports by journalists, international observers, human rights practitioners, and former government officials, the genocide has come to be known as a paradigmatic example of the very word itself. There now exists an agreed upon narrative of events—though certainly still subject to interpretation—that serves as the foundation of the vast and diverse body of literature growing around it.10
This literature includes contributions from history, political science, anthropology, and the social sciences, as well as from law, transitional justice, and students of humanitarian intervention.11 In light of the volume of literature, selectivity rather than comprehensiveness guided the choice of sources that will be discussed herein.12 The selected works reflect both the most significant contributions to the field and those that deal with the social and political dynamics in Rwanda leading up to and during the genocide. Works concerned with the aftermath of the genocide and questions of reconciliation and “rendering justice after a crime of such enormity” lie beyond the scope of this particular project.13 It is also significant to note that the selected works come from the body of English language literature; a comprehensive overview of both the English and French literature is again beyond the reach of this project. With that being said, the selected works will serve as stopping points as we trace the
chronological trajectory of scholarship on the genocide, with specific attention to the thematic concerns and questions that informed each stage of development. In addition to highlighting areas of disagreement and ongoing debate, the following discussion will identify areas for further research.
9 Ibid., p. 17-19.
10 These agreed upon facts refer to the timeline of events and the roles of high-level individual actors in the genocide, which are the common consensus amongst scholars. This does not refer to the ways in which different groups of Rwandans talk about the genocide, amongst whom there is still much discord.
11 Scott Straus, “The Historiography of the Rwandan Genocide,” in The Historiography of Genocide, edited by Dan Stone, 517-42, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, p. 517.
12 Following the example of selectivity over comprehensiveness as modeled by René Lemarchand in his article “Rwanda: The State of Research,” published in the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence. 13 Straus, “The Historiography of the Rwandan Genocide,” p. 517.
Prior to the genocide of 1994, Rwanda was a little-known country on the international stage relative to its more politically powerful neighbors in the Great Lakes region.14 However, historians, political scientists, and anthropologists had long been documenting Rwandan history, including the cycle of revolutions and armed conflicts, cultural traditions, state and local government structure, and matters of ethnic identity. In 1970, French historian and political scientist René Lemarchand published Rwanda and Burundi, an in-depth look into “the history of two semi-feudal societies caught up in the turmoil of a swiftly changing environment, in which traditional bonds [were] suddenly ruptured or loosened to give birth to new social groupings and values.”15 Despite similar political institutions and social structures, the two countries responded in radically divergent ways to the challenges of state building.16 Lemarchand chronicles the contrasting patterns of development experienced by Rwanda and its “false twin” Burundi throughout the process of political modernization.17 With respect to the process of political modernization in Rwanda, Lemarchand provides a comprehensive analysis of the dissolution of the monarchy, the myths and realities of the so-called “peasant revolution,” the role of Belgian authorities in the colonial period, and the emergence of the “single-party state” model.18 In addition to a balanced historical narrative, Lemarchand’s early work offers many useful insights into the turbulent dynamics at work in the re-born state, especially regarding the effect of the single-party state system on the maintenance of countrywide stability. The book still stands as one of the best accounts of this period in Rwandan history and continues to inform our understanding of the context in which the genocide occurred many years later.
While Lemarchand focused primarily on the political sphere, scholar Ian Linden provided a definitive account of the other significant sphere of influence operating in Rwanda —the church. In his 1977 book, Church and Revolution in Rwanda, Linden details the vacillating patterns of interaction between the Catholic missions and the two principle segments of Rwandan society, the Hutu and the Tutsi.19 He argues that the reversal of favor from the Tutsi to the Hutu in the late fifties and early sixties was instrumental in ensuring the 14 See Omar McDoom, “War and Genocide in Africa’s Great Lakes Region Since Independence,” in
The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, edited by David Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, 550-575,
New York: Oxford UP, 2010.
15 René Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970, Full text available online through the University of Florida Digital Collections Library.
16 Ibid., p. I. 17 Ibid., p. I. 18 Ibid., p. 262.
success of the Hutu “revolution.” What’s more, Linden deftly highlights the relationship between church and state in colonial Rwanda, one of accommodation and opportunism. The evolution of this relationship during the colonial period and in the years following the end of colonial rule is highly relevant to the role of the church during the genocide of 1994.
Twelve years later, again on the theme of revolution, African Studies scholar
Catharine Newbury published Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960.20 The book centers on what Newbury calls “the social preconditions of
revolution,” that began in pre-colonial times, intensified during the colonial period, and provided the impetus for the rise of rural political consciousness in Rwanda.21 She frames her argument around the single province of Kinyaga and underscores the effects of the following three changes in that community: “shifts in the nature of clientship relations, changes in labor control patterns, and the development of subjectively held ethnic differentiation between Hutu and Tutsi.”22 Newbury ultimately concludes that oppression did matter for cohesion, just as Lemarchand concludes that the single-party state model mattered for countrywide stability, though in Newbury’s text it is not entirely clear that ethnicity was the primary binding agent for the peasant population. Although much of the literature written in the period 1970-1990 was targeted at a niche audience, the outbreak of the genocide rendered these works all the more significant as practitioners and writers across many disciplines looked backwards in order to familiarize themselves with the history of social and political revolution in Rwanda and, more problematically, to search for connections between past and present. The books written by Lemarchand, Linden, and Newbury continue to be
foundational sources for many of the scholars writing on Rwanda today.
When the genocide broke in April of 1994, much of the initial commentary portrayed the violence as a spontaneous outburst of ancient tribal hatred. As Scott Straus writes:
African political history, both recent and distant, has never commandeered great international attention, and thus tribe for many is the essential unit of analysis for explaining outcomes on the continent. Rwanda is no exception to the rule, and when the genocide broke, ‘tribalism’ overwhelmingly framed the debate.23
In order to redress the misconception so widely circulated in the public sphere, regional specialists and scholars moved quickly to investigate and publish accounts of the violence
20 Catharine Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda,
1860-1960, New York: Columbia UP, 1989.
21 Ibid., p. 10-15. 22 Ibid., p. 178.
that were less culturally reductive.24 Journalist and Africa scholar Gérard Prunier released The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide in 1995.25 Prunier begins, like authors before him, by digging into Rwanda’s colonial past in order to argue that the artificial reconstruction of traditional Rwandan society by the colonizers resulted in the creation of a cultural myth of Tutsi superiority. He then continues on to detail the period that he refers to as the “Hutu Republic” spanning the years 1959-1990, before moving on to the crucial events of 1990-1993 including the civil war, attempts at foreign intervention, and the peace negotiations at Arusha; this all serves to foreground his final four chapters on the genocide and its aftermath. In these chapters, Prunier labors to make clear that the genocide was not a spontaneous outburst but the product of a plan that served central political and economic interests. His work does much in the way of establishing facts without dramatization. Furthermore, he devotes sections to the organizers, the killers, the victims, the bystanders, patterns of killing, the timeline of the massacres, and the ensuing refugee crisis, thereby creating a clear picture of a process rather than a one-off outburst of violence. If Prunier falters anywhere, it is in his limited attention to inter-ethnic relations between Hutu after the advent of multi-party
political system, which had a highly divisive effect at both state and local levels. But, overall, the book is one of rich historical anecdotes and critical analytical insight.
Shortly after the publication of Prunier’s book, Human Rights Watch released their investigative report on the genocide. Written by regional specialist Alison Des Forges and based on research conducted by Des Forges and a team of seven research assistants, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda has become the definitive account of the genocide thanks to wide-ranging historical scope and proven reliability of factual
information.26 In the words of Lemarchand: “With exemplary meticulousness, [Des Forges] delves into the historical past, lays bare the workings of the propaganda machine, the organization of the killings, the strategies of slaughter, [and] the social structures that provided support.”27 Further, she “brings out the regional dynamics at work and leaves no doubt as to the mix of obfuscation and indifference that marked the international
community’s response.”28 Hers is a work of impressive totality that mirrors the complexities of the total genocide at hand. In addition to the quality of coverage on the aforementioned 24 See Straus for examples of media commentary on genocide in The Order of Genocide, p. 19. 25 Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, New York: Columbia UP, 1995. 26 Alison Des Forges, “Leave None to Tell the Story”: Genocide in Rwanda, New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999.
27 Lemarchand, “Rwanda: The State of Research,” p. 4. 28 Ibid., p. 4.
topics, Des Forges also manages to “see the other side of the genocidal coin.”29 She recognizes outright that Tutsi were not the only victims, writing “thousands of Hutu were slain because the opposed the killing campaign and the forces directing it.”30 As such, her narrative is carefully balanced in its assignation of guilt and victimhood. In this way, Des Forges was ahead of the trend in expanding the circle of victims, and conversely expanding the circle of perpetrators to consider atrocities committed by the Tutsi led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), prefiguring what would later be a contentious debate on the double-genocide thesis and on crimes committed in the context of war.31 Des Forges also portended a later trend in the field with her assessment of the motivations of the killers. She emphasizes the diversity of individual motives—ranging from hatred, to wartime fear and insecurity, to greed and opportunism, to fear for personal safety and that of their families.32 With such a high level of civilian participation in the genocide, to put forth a single, explanatory motive would be overly reductive. Research on the killers and their motivations would be picked up later by scholars such as Scott Straus and Lee Ann Fujii, the conclusions of whom both reinforced Des Forges’ initial assessment.33
As epitomized by the works of Prunier and Des Forges, the focus of the scholarship in the late 1990s was on correcting public misconceptions and creating a factually accurate narrative of events that situated the genocide in historical context. To this end, scholars and practitioners established that the genocide was rooted in Rwanda’s colonial past, was
intimately tied to the civil war beginning in 1990, and was systematically ordered by a small group of state and military functionaries. Furthermore, they clearly demonstrated that the ancient tribal hatred theory was a mischaracterization of events, which were in fact tied to complex political and social dynamics in a newly modern state. Once this conceptual groundwork was laid, there was a thematic shift in the literature on Rwanda produced in the early 2000s. This shift signaled a turn to one integral piece of the puzzle that was not adequately accounted for: mass civilian participation. Political scientist Mahmood
Mamdani’s book When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in 29 Ibid., p. 4.
30 Des Forges, “Leave None to Tell the Story,” p. 1.
31 The origins of the “double-genocide” theory can be traced to French journalist Pierre Péan’s book
Black Furies, White Liars (2005), in which the author asserts that the cause of the genocide was not
the Hutu regime but the Tutsi rebels who shot down President Habyarimana’s plane and in a larger sense, the history of Hutu oppression by the Tutsi. More generally speaking, the phrase “double-genocide” may also refer to the atrocities committed by the RPF during and after their offensive to retake Rwanda.
32 Des Forges, “Leave None to Tell the Story,” p. 770. 33 We will return to these authors in detail later on.
Rwanda, is an excellent example of the beginning of this thematic shift.34 Mamdani builds upon the earlier work of scholars such as Newbury and Lemarchand in his socio-political history of Rwanda and reasserts the top-down narrative of the genocide established in the late 1990s. However, he also turns a critical eye to the issue of civilian participation. Mamdani offers what he calls an “alternative explanation” for the high level of civilian involvement in the genocide, one that privileges the political aspects of the genocide above the other two explanatory factors identified by the author, the economic and the cultural.35 The strength of Mamdani’s alternative explanation lies in his focus on the “moment of decision” and his argument that the decision is conscious, the result of deliberation and therefore one that bears individual responsibility rather than attributing participation to the larger forces of necessity or obedience to authority.36 Mamdani’s book also offers a useful geographical element; the author incorporates discussion and comparison of other African nations, notably South Africa and Uganda, as relevant to the political situation in Rwanda.37
Before moving on to the wave of scholarship dealing with civilian participants in the genocide, it is beneficial to acknowledge the wealth of eyewitness accounts and
non-academic writings that also emerged in the 2000s. From former government officials to international observers and journalists, personal accounts poured forth into the public sphere, as did the stories of Rwandans themselves. Among the contributions from international observers, one stands out: Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire’s book Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, first published in Canada in 2004.38 Dallaire served as the Force Commander for the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) from 1993-1994. He witnessed the preparations for war, the outbreak of the genocide, the rapid radicalization of Hutu extremists, and the abandonment of the Rwandan people by the international community. His book provides searing commentary not just on events to which he was witness, but also on the lethargic bureaucratic structure of the United Nations and its ultimate failure to intervene.39 By putting his experiences on paper, Dallaire wanted to bear
34 Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in
Rwanda, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001.
35 Ibid., p. 196 and p. 202. 36 Ibid., p. 196-197.
37 Ibid., on Uganda see Ch. 4 and on South Africa see Ch. 7.
38 Roméo Dallaire and Brent Beardsley, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in
Rwanda, New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005.
39 For more information on the United Nations and Rwanda, see Michael Barnett, Eyewitness to a
witness on behalf of all lost Rwandans and to remind the world of its collective failure to prevent genocide.40
Among the research done by journalists, Linda Melvern and Jean Hatzfeld have produced some of the most compelling accounts of the genocide. Melvern is a widely published investigative journalist and was one of the first to publish an account of UN decision making about the crisis unfolding in Rwanda. Her first book on the genocide, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide,41 was published in 2000 followed shortly by a second book, Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide published in 2004.42 The latter is based on testimonies to the International Criminal Tribunal for
Rwanda (ICTR), interviews with participants and survivors, and documents left behind by the génocidaires when they fled from the RPF. Melvern effectively weaves different types of documentary evidence together in order to give insight into the minds of the elite planners of the genocide. In contrast, French journalist Jean Hatzfeld focuses on the experiences of ordinary people. He presents his interviews with survivors and perpetrators without heavy authorial overhead. Hatzfeld has published multiple books, both in French and English, since the genocide in 1994. On the survivors he put forth Into the Quick of Life: The Rwandan Genocide—The Survivors Speak, a collection of interviews with survivors in Bugesera about their present lives and individual attempts to come to terms with and explain the reasons behind the extermination.43 On the perpetrators he put forth Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, a collection of raw and chilling interviews with a group of ordinary men who became mass murderers.44 Both books contain responses directly from the interviewees interspersed with sections of Hatzfeld’s background commentary on the landscapes and rhythms of the Rwandan countryside. Hatzfeld’s style is particularly effective in Machete Season, where the killers speak directly to the reader without the intermediary of a narrator. The book is also unique in that the men interviewed were members of an unofficial killing group or “gang;” they gathered and did their “work” together each day. This allows for useful insight into social psychology and the small group dynamics of perpetrators. For this reason, and many others, Machete Season is of the utmost importance for anyone seeking to
40 Sentiment expressed by Samantha Power based on personal conversations with Dallaire, in her foreword to the revised 2005 edition of Shake Hands with the Devil.
41 Linda Melvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide, London: Zed Books, 2000.
42 Linda Melvern, Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide, London: Verso, 2004.
43 Jean Hatzfeld, Into the Quick of Life: The Rwandan Genocide—The Survivors Speak, New York: Serpent’s Tail, English edition published in 2008.
understand the dynamics of perpetration in this particular genocide. Overall, eyewitness accounts such as these are an invaluable source of anecdotal information for the international community.
To return to academic scholarship in the 2000s, we pick up with Scott Straus’s 2006 publication The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda.45 With this study, Straus sought to redress the gap between theory and evidence in scholarship on the Rwandan genocide. He argues the following in his preface:
Observers had formulated numerous hypotheses about why genocide happens, but the evidence was thin . . . Journalists (like me) had quoted a couple Rwandans, and those quotations became the basis for theories. Human rights activists showed that
particular leaders planned the violence. Historians showed the deep roots of identity. Propaganda was a fascination. But how specifically did all this relate to the actual violence? Why did people kill?46
In order to answer these questions, Straus interviewed a random sampling of roughly 210 convicted perpetrators incarcerated in 15 different Rwandan prisons at the time of his research.47 He asked a series of questions about who the perpetrators were, what their belief systems were before the genocide, how they were mobilized, what happened during the violence, and why they committed violence; responses to these questions form the
evidentiary backbone of the book.48 Ultimately, Straus found that the mechanisms driving individuals to kill were not primarily about ethnic prejudice. Rather, the principle
mechanisms were wartime uncertainty and fear, social pressure, and opportunity.49 Though Straus presents theories for both macro and micro levels of society, it is his findings in the latter category that have important implications for the field. Moreover, Straus writes that his findings support “ordinary men” theories of genocide.50 The civilians who participated in the genocide were not especially mad, sadistic, hateful, or uneducated. Instead they were largely ordinary men, seeking to protect themselves and their families.
45 Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006.
46 Ibid., p. x-xi. 47 Ibid., p. 5.
48 Ibid., p. 5. While the transcripts of the interviews are not included in the book, Straus published selected excerpts in a separate volume called Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan
Genocide, New York: Zone, 2006.
49 Ibid., p. 9 and in further detail throughout Ch. 4.
50 The “ordinary men” theory originates from Christopher Browning’s landmark work on a group of perpetrators during the Holocaust titled Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final
In this way, Straus’s findings refute what he calls the “conventional wisdom” on the genocide, that is the initial characterization of the violence as a primitive outburst of tribal hatred. However, by 2006 this was already an interpretation in decline so it may be more apt to appraise Straus’s work as the final nail in the coffin of the tribal hatred theory. Straus’s book also marked a divergence from the methods of the authors before him. He focused on the systematic collection of information and using that information to generate numerical figures, resulting in a kind of empirical evidence rather than anecdotal. He also did not frame his analysis around Rwanda’s history, as many authors did in an attempt to excavate
explanatory factors and political maneuvers that could have predicted the genocide. While Straus does describe Rwandan history for the purpose of context, he does not use this history to portray the genocide as an inevitable outcome based on the past. This is a highly
significant divergence from prior scholarship. That the genocide was not the inevitable outcome of a turbulent political history underscores the importance of researching the micro-level dynamics of violence and the experiences of individual actors.
Scholar Lee Ann Fujii did exactly that in her book Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda, published in 2009.51 Following in Straus’s footsteps, Fujii revisits the motives behind the participation of ordinary men and women in the genocide through a series of interviews with perpetrators in Rwandan prisons and with survivors and bystanders in the two rural communities of Ngali and Kimanzi. She too argues that ethnic hatred and fear do not satisfactorily explain the mobilization of civilians against each other. And so, in
attempting to explain participation in such brutal and intimate neighbor on neighbor violence, Fujii proposes her own theory that emphasizes the social context of action. She asserts that state-sponsored ethnicity was not an external force acting on people, but a “script for violence” that people acted out and the performances of which varied from actor to actor.52 Fujii explains, “Through this alternative lens, state-sponsored ethnicity ceases to be some monolithic ‘thing’ that leads inexorably to violent end.”53 Rather, she frames state-sponsored ethnicity as “but one set of constructed meanings, among multiple possibilities, and one that remains open to interpretation . . . it shifts attention to the directors and actors, and by doing so, provides the possibility for agency at every level. ”54 As such, her theory accommodates
51 Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2009. 52 Ibid., p. 12-13.
53 Ibid., p. 13. 54 Ibid., p. 13-14.
for the differentiation in actions and motives of Hutu at all levels of society, especially differentiation at the local level.
This differentiation at the local level, first pointed out by Des Forges, is the impetus for the wealth of regional and micro-level studies that are the trend in current scholarship. Recent articles published by scholar Omar McDoom include “Who killed in Rwanda’s genocide? Micro-space, social influence and individual participation in intergroup violence”55 and “The Psychology of Threat in Intergroup Conflict: Emotions, Rationality, and
Opportunity in the Rwandan Genocide.”56 Both articles deal with individual participation in the violence at the small group level and argue respectively that violence may be as much the product of social interaction as it is of individual agency. In addition to the plethora of works on the micro-level dynamics of violence, there has been rising interest in the Malthusian dimension of the genocide at the local level. The inner tensions arising from population densities and the growing scarcity of cultivable land are variables of great interest for many social scientists. Building on the work of Catherine André and Jean-Philippe Platteau, in which the two researchers demonstrated the impact of land hunger on intra-Hutu killings in a single commune, Jared Diamond’s writings on the same topic focus on the influence of high population density and scarce land resources on Hutu killings of Tutsi.57 In a similar vein, Marijke Verpoorten published an article titled “Leave none to claim the land: A Malthusian Catastrophe in Rwanda,” in which she “provides a meso-level analysis of the relation between population pressure and the intensity of violence measured by the death toll among Tutsi across small administrative units.”58 Her results indicate that the death toll was
significantly higher in localities with both high population density and little opportunity for young men to acquire land; however, she acknowledges the possibility that the results are related to the ease of mobilization by elites in densely populated areas or to basic
opportunism rather than resource-based need or fear.
While micro-level studies continue to contribute to our understanding of the ways in which the genocide unfolded in different localities, macro-level explanations of the genocide
55 Omar McDoom, “Who Killed in Rwanda’s Genocide? Micro-space, social influence and individual participation in intergroup violence,” Journal of Peace Research 50 (2013): 453-467. 56 Omar McDoom, “The Psychology of Threat in Intergroup Conflict: Emotions, Rationality, and Opportunity in the Rwandan Genocide,” International Security 37.2 (2012): 119-155.
57 Jared Diamond, “Malthus in Africa: Rwanda’s Genocide,” in Collapse: How Societies Choose to
Fail or Succeed, New York: Viking, 2005.
58 Marijke Verpoorten, “Leave none to claim the land: A Malthusian catastrophe in Rwanda?”
have become the subject of the relatively recent trend of comparative analysis. Rwanda is increasingly used as one case among several in comparative works seeking to illuminate the dynamics of genocide as a reoccurring social phenomenon. For example, in The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, written by Michael Mann, the author uses a selection of nine different cases, including the Holocaust, Cambodia, and Rwanda, to argue that ethnic cleansing is a product of modernity brought on by the confusion of the demos (democracy) and the ethnos (the ethnic group).59 On Rwanda specifically, Mann emphasizes the importance of nationalism, especially Hutu nationalism born at the time of independence, and the importance of wartime escalation. In Benjamin Valentino’s book Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century, the author draws on a wider reaching
selection of cases—including communist mass killings, ethnic genocides, and “counter guerilla campaigns”—in order to stress the strategic origins of genocide and, for the case of Rwanda, the deliberate nature of the top-down genocidal policy in reaction to the perceived Tutsi threat.60 Similar to Mann, Jacques Sémelin heavily accentuates ethnic nationalism in his book Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide.61 Using the
Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia Herzegovina, Sémelin weaves a compelling narrative of the dangerous real world consequences of ideologies of purity and the delusional rationality that drives the process of destruction in their name. Comparative works such as these strive to cast a new light on each individual case, as well as furthering the overarching understanding of genocide as a whole.
Despite the ever-growing collection of works on the Rwandan genocide, there remain several understudied dimensions and points of contention. As has been shown, the existing literature focuses on the historical background and preconditions to the genocide, establishing the roles of the people and military bodies responsible for initiating the genocide, and
illuminating the macro-level dynamics that brought the genocide about. Micro-level dynamics are increasingly being brought to the fore, but continued work in this vein is necessary. Further research is also needed on bystanders to the genocide, on gender and sexual violence during the genocide, and on reconciliation and identity in post-genocidal society. Continued points of contention include the identity of the group responsible for
59 Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, New York: Cambridge UP, 2005.
60 Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004.
61 Jacques Sémelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide, New York: Columbia UP, 2007.
President Habyarimana’s assassination, the nature and extent of the crimes committed by the RPF, and the so-called numbers game as related to the evaluation of victims on both sides, along with the double-genocide debate. As Lemarchand writes on these points of contention, and on the state of research on Rwanda as a whole, “The absence of a common consensus of opinion about the why and how of the Rwanda bloodbath helps explain those grey zones which so profoundly complicate our understanding of why so many were killed, in so little time, and with such devastating consequences.”62 While those grey zones may never become fully clear, there remains much to be exposed about Rwanda and the genocide.
Among the studies on civilian perpetrators, Des Forges, Straus, and Fujii have made the most significant contributions to our understanding of how and why ordinary Rwandans became killers. From Des Forges, we received detailed descriptions of the rationale and dynamics of civilian mobilization at the local level, with special attention to two regional case studies. From Straus, we received the revelation that ordinary civilian perpetrators were largely not motivated to kill by ethnic hatred. Rather, the three primary motives articulated in his cross-section of convicted perpetrators were wartime insecurity and fear, social pressure, and opportunity. From Fujii, we received both a concurrence with Straus’s findings regarding ethnic hatred and the idea that the social context of violence was instrumental in shaping the perpetrator’s individual performance of the script of state sponsored ethnicity. All three scholars emphasized the range of motivations at play—not limited to wartime insecurity and fear, social pressure, and opportunity, but also including personal revenge, self preservation, protection of others, greed, careerism, and so forth. With so many perpetrators involved in the killings—Straus estimates that there were between 175,000-210,000 perpetrators or the equivalent of 7-8% of the active adult Hutu population at the time—it is difficult to account for every individual experience, let alone every set of individual motives.63 Correspondingly, it is also difficult to account for the fact that motives are not static. Rather, the concept of motivation is an open one, with primary, secondary, and tertiary components and the potential to be in a constant state of flux based on the individual. Moreover, one of the challenges inherent to using interviews with former perpetrators of genocide is that they may represent their motives however they want. The way in which perpetrators articulate their motives may differ if they are pre-trial versus post-trial, if they chose to plead guilty or maintain their innocence, if they were even incarcerated at all or remained free, or, more 62 Lemarchand, “Rwanda: The State of Research,” p. 3.
63 Straus, “How Many Perpetrators were there in the Rwandan genocide? An estimate,” Journal of
simply, if psychological coping mechanisms interfered with memory or representation of the self. Interviews with perpetrators are extremely important, but they do have their limitations in terms of constructing an unbiased narrative. And so, from the work of Des Forges, Straus, and Fujii (among others), we have a general understanding of why some civilians killed, in as much as we can understand such a thing in the face of widespread individual variation and the regional variation of the way in which the genocide played out on the ground.
If motive is an individual reaction to a situation, then perhaps we should turn to the study of the situation in which the individual perpetrator had to negotiate terms in order to continue his or her existence therein. The actions of an individual are theoretically a reflection of the situation they are in, and vice versa. Following the adage “perpetrators are not born, they are made,” the path of exploration then becomes a matter of not why civilians killed, but what contingent situational factors brought them to the moment of perpetration in the first place.64 With this approach, perpetrators are not taken out of their historical context, as they often are in studies of small group dynamics or psychology. The historical context and the immediate situational exigencies in the environment of a perpetrator are paramount; without the specific timeline of events and the socio-political mechanisms at work, the genocide in question would not have happened at the time or place that it did, or with the people it did. To keep the study of civilian perpetrators in Rwanda from becoming ahistorical, we will keep the perpetrators firmly situated within time and place. Accordingly, in response to the established knowledge of perpetrator motives, to the need to keep perpetrator research historical, and to the usefulness of further exploration of the dynamic processes of
perpetration at the local level identified by scholars in the field such as Lemarchand, the following research question will guide the approach to the study of civilian perpetrators in Rwanda from here on out: What contingent historical factors resulted in high numbers of ordinary civilians facing a situation in which the outcome involved the perpetration of violence, and once in this situation why did said civilians ultimately tip in the direction of participation?
In order to formulate a comprehensive answer to this question, it is necessary to begin with a brief history of Rwanda, beginning in pre-colonial times, then moving forward through the period of colonial rule, and then through the cycles of revolution and violence that
happened in the move to independence. This part of Rwandan history holds much
significance for understanding where the country was on the eve of the civil war in 1990 in terms of identity formation, cultural mythology, and years of institutionalized discrimination. 64 Richard Overy, “Perpetrator Research in International Context,” Keynote Address, p. 15.
After an overview of early history, the focus will transition to the years 1990-1994— specifically the difficult life conditions brought on by economic collapse, the course of the first civil war, and the Arusha peace process—leading up to the tipping point to genocide, the assassination of President Habyarimana. The civil war had a direct impact on the
radicalization of a small group of Hutu elites who ultimately chose organized genocide for the nation; it also affected the daily lives of civilians around the country by normalizing violence and creating a security vacuum in which uncertainty and fear were left to fester. After tracing Rwandan history to the assassination, the final section will explore the top down organization of the genocide, the dynamics of civilian mobilization at the local level, and the dilemma of the individual in facing negotiation with an extreme situation. Taken together, the socio-political history of Rwanda, the civil war, the dynamics of civilian mobilization and the individual negotiation process will aid in the construction of a narrative on the making of civilian perpetrators, born from a system of terror that both solicited and enforced their participation in violence. Additionally, the evidence used in the construction of this narrative will include government documents from the National Security Archive in Washington D.C., judgments and evidentiary documents from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania, and interviews with convicted perpetrators conducted by academic researchers and journalists. The selected sources mirror the macro, meso, micro style organization of the study, working from the national level down to the level of the individual, with the archive and tribunal documents contributing to the narrative of the development and organization of the genocide and the interviews contributing to the narrative of the individual acting out the plans from above. By incorporating macro, meso, and micro level analysis, the individual civilian perpetrator can be understood as a part of a system and as a part of a larger history.
III. Socio-Political History of Rwanda, 1860-1990
Rwanda is a small country with an area of only 26,338 km2, located a few degrees below the equator in the Great Lakes region of Africa.65 It shares borders with Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC); it also shares a history of conflict and instability with its regional neighbors. Nicknamed the “land of 1,000 hills,” the Rwandan landscape is dominated by a series of hills and lakes, with high mountains marking the northwestern border with Uganda.66 The western border with the DRC marks the depth of 65 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p. 1.
the Rift Valley, including the big lakes Tanganyika and Kivu, while sloping lower lands, partly filled with marshes, dominate the eastern part of the country, extending all the way to the Tanzanian border.67 Unlike other African states that are “often spread out over large swathes of sparsely settled territory,” Rwanda has historically had the highest population density of any African country.68 Due largely to the landscape, which offered protection from malarial mosquitoes, hostile tribes, and slave raiders, Rwanda provided a prosperous living environment for its inhabitants and remained free of foreign interference until European colonization in the early twentieth century. As Prunier writes, “This prosperity, coupled with freedom from disease and with physical security, was conducive to very high densities of human occupation.”69 To quote specific figures from Straus: “On the eve of independence in 1959, Rwanda averaged 241 persons per square mile—a density ratio that was sixteen times greater than in the Belgian Congo at the time, eight times greater than in South Africa, and marginally greater than France.”70 High population density and topography also contributed to another hallmark of the Rwanda state—highly effective mobilization of the population.71
Rwanda was settled over a period of two thousand years, first by aboriginal ancestors of the Twa and later by Bantu groups who migrated from other parts of Africa for agricultural purposes.72 Of the Bantu groups there is debate over who arrived first, the Hutu or the Tutsi. Regardless of this debate, which will take on greater significance in the colonial period, the Bantu groups lived in close proximity to one another, if not together: “Originally organized in small groups based on lineage or on loyalty to an outstanding leader, they joined in building the complex state of Rwanda. They developed a single and highly sophisticated language, Kinyarwanda, [and] crafted a common set of religious and philosophical beliefs . . . ”73 The minority Twa, making up less than 1% of the population and speaking a variation of
Kinyarwandan, were less integrated into Rwandan society than the Hutu and Tutsi, who even intermarried and moved in and out of the same fluid social strata.74 Contrary to popular myth,
67 Ibid., p. 1.
68 Straus, The Order Of Genocide, p. 214. 69 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p. 2. 70 Straus, The Order of Genocide, p. 214.
71 Both Prunier and Straus make this point. Straus uses the phrase “broadcasting power,” a term originally used by political scientist Jeffrey Herbst, to characterize the ease with which the Rwandan state spread messages and exercised power across densely populated territory, both before the genocide and as it was taking place.
72 Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, p. 31. 73 Ibid., p. 31.
74 Mamdani notes that intermarriage was not common but did occur, further stating that the history of cohabitation and intermarriage spans centuries, p. 53.
the ethnic categories of “Hutu” and “Tutsi” had their origins more in socio-economic status than in race. In a country based on agriculture, there was a significant socio-economic distinction between farming and animal husbandry. Des Forges writes that when Rwanda emerged as a major state in the eighteenth century, “its rulers measured their power in the number of their subjects and counted their wealth in the number of their cattle.”75 Therefore, farmers had lower status and less political power than pastoralists or “cultivators” who managed and owned cattle. In general, Hutu were farmers and Tutsi were pastoralists.76 The Tutsi also controlled the monarchy, which was of critical importance as pre-colonial Rwanda operated from the epicenter of a powerful kingship, which was running a sophisticated monarchical political system.77 Des Forges sees the delineation of categories as the result of state growth:
As the Rwandan state grew in strength and sophistication, the governing elite became more clearly defined and its members, like powerful people in most societies, began to think of themselves as superior to ordinary people. The word “Tutsi,” which apparently first described the status of an individual—a person rich in cattle—became the term that referred to the elite group as a whole and the word “Hutu”—meaning originally a subordinate or follower of a more powerful person—came to refer to the mass of the ordinary people. The identification of Tutsi pastoralists as power-holders and of Hutu cultivators as subjects was becoming general when Europeans first arrived in Rwanda at the turn of the century, but it was not yet completely fixed throughout the country.78
As such, the difference could be seen as class based, between rich and poor, or as a division of labor between farmers and pastoralists. Either way, as Des Forges makes clear, the
categories were not static. Indeed, “not all Tutsi were royal aristocrats, and not all Hutu were poor farmers.”79 For example, a Hutu could become a Tutsi after acquiring enough cattle. Conversely, albeit less commonly, a Tutsi could become a Hutu with a fall from socio-economic status.80 Ultimately, the Hutu-Tutsi divide in the pre-colonial Rwandan state was evocative of the relationship between elite and subject. Colonial rule would only serve to distort the differences between groups, further institutionalizing racial divides and contributing to mythologies of oppression, both real and perceived.
The colonial period in Rwanda was short-lived, but nevertheless had a lasting effect on society. In the words of Lemarchand, “despite the brevity of the colonial interlude, its 75 Ibid., p. 32.
76 Straus, The Order of Genocide, p. 20. 77 Ibid., p. 20.
78 Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, p. 31. 79 Ibid., p. 20.
impact was overwhelming.”81 The Germans arrived in Rwanda in 1897, at a crucial time in the transformation of the country’s politics. The Tutsi king had just died, leaving the line of succession in dispute. Members of the king’s inner circle moved to take power through a coup d’état, securing the power of the monarchy and the continued centralization of state power.82 Since the Germans maintained only a very light presence in Rwanda, they allowed the monarchy a great amount of autonomy in determining state affairs. German support bolstered the monarchy’s hold over rural areas of the country and reinforced the social hierarchy of Tutsi above Hutu. Prunier writes that the German presence was “structurally essential” to the consolidation of Tutsi power because it “inaugurated a colonial policy of indirect rule, which left considerable leeway to the Rwandese monarchy and acted in direct continuation of the pre-colonial transformation towards more centralization, annexation of Hutu principalities, and increase in Tutsi chiefly power.”83
In 1918 Germany was stripped of its colonies under the Treaty of Versailles; the two territories of Rwanda-Urundi, as they were jointly called (later Rwanda and Burundi), became a League of Nations protectorate governed by Belgium and administered separately with two different Tutsi monarchs.84 The Belgians continued to rule Rwanda in much the same way as the Germans, with the “least cost and the most profit,” by making use of the impressive indigenous state infrastructure.85 However, they sought to make many changes to the Rwandan state “in the name of efficiency.”86 They began by regrouping the units of administration into “chiefdoms” and “sub-chiefdoms,” eliminating hierarchies and creating uniformity in goods and services. The reduction of officials was intended to streamline communication and to reduce burdens on the population, but instead the “chiefs” and “sub-chiefs” continued to contract out work to unofficial representatives who lived off the local people.87 As Des Forges states, “Rwandan officials were not helpless pawns but rather real players in the game of administrative reform. Politically astute, they understood how to evade the intent of European orders even while apparently conforming to them.”88 Consequently, the density of administration diminished little. In fact, elites benefitted from the
81 Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi, p. 47. 82 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p. 23-25. 83 Ibid., p. 25.
84 “Rwanda: A Historical Chronology,” Frontline, published online by PBS and WGBH Educational Foundation, 1995-2014.
85 Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, p. 34. 86 Ibid., p. 35.
87 Ibid., p. 35. 88 Ibid., p. 35.
administrative changes. With power concentrated in fewer hands, there were also fewer opportunities for subordinates to seek protection from rivals or to move to an area with less oppressive governance: “In the 1920s and 1930s, the Belgians made it far harder for the weak to escape oppressive officials; not only did they eliminate the multiple hierarchies but they also restricted changes in residence from one region to another and they prohibited new settlement in the forest.”89 Furthermore, the Belgian administrators frequently overlooked the abuses of officials as long as they “got the taxes collected, the roads built, and the coffee planted.”90 Essentially, the Belgians concentrated power in the hands of the chosen elite and used a policy of indirect colonial administration as a reason to turn a blind eye to corruption and internal tensions.
Not only did Belgian authorities concentrate power in the hands of the Tutsi, but they also institutionalized the racial divide between Hutu and Tutsi by making changes to
education policy and determining the possible career options for members of both ethnic groups. The Catholic Church, which had maintained a presence in Rwanda since the beginning of German occupation, had a monopoly on the provision of education in the country.91 School education was not compulsory and came at a price. As such, illiteracy rates remained high among Hutu farmers. As the “natural born chiefs,” according to the Belgians, the Tutsi were given priority in education so that the Church and the colonial administrators could develop their influence over the future elite of the country.92 Because higher education was meant mostly as preparation for careers in government administration, Hutu were effectively locked out of such roles. The Belgians also systematically removed Hutu who were already holding positions of power, thus creating a cycle of oppression that spanned multiple generations. In the words of Mamdani, “as a process both ideological and
institutional, the racialization of the Tutsi [and the Hutu] was the creation of a joint enterprise between the colonial state and the Catholic Church.”93 What’s more, the Belgians introduced a system of identity cards that labeled Rwandans by their ethnicity in the 1930s, effectively reinforcing a “fixed notion of ethnic membership.”94 Each Rwandan was asked to self-declare 89 Ibid., p. 35.
90 Ibid., p. 36.
91 Linden, Church and Revolution in Rwanda, p. 189.
92 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p. 33. He also mentions that to obtain any kind of post-secondary education the Hutu often had to become theology students. The number of Hutu in theological positions was significant in the social revolution of 1959 and contributed to the relationship between the church and the Hutu government leading up to the genocide. Des Forges makes the same point in her work on p. 36.
93 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p. 87. 94 Fujii, Killing Neighbors, p. 110.
his or her own identity, and some Hutu and Tutsi were able to change their group affiliation to their advantage.95 But overall, official population registration made switching groups more difficult. Changes such as these made ethnic categories a more concrete part of public life.
In addition to making ethnic categories more firm and immutable in the public sphere, the Belgians also promoted a mythical history that “simultaneously served Tutsi interests and validated European assumptions” about the settlement of Africa.96 In line with the prevailing racial convictions of the time, because the Tutsi more closely resembled Europeans in their physical appearance the Belgians assumed their superiority over the Hutu.97 With this line of reasoning, the Belgians “found it reasonable to suppose [the Tutsi] closer to Europeans in the evolutionary hierarchy and hence closer to them in ability,” thus making them the natural leaders of the Hutu and the Twa.98 This conceptualization of Rwandan society epitomized the fashionable “Hamitic hypothesis” of the day, which saw “civilization in Africa as the product of ‘Caucasoid’ (white-like) Hamitic peoples.”99 In this version of Rwandan history, the Twa hunter-gatherers arrived first, followed by the more advanced Hutu who displaced them. Then the Tutsi descended from the north, using their superior political and military abilities to conquer the Hutu masses. On the “Hamitic hypothesis” Des Forges states: “This distorted version of the past told more about the intellectual atmosphere of Europe in the 1920s than about the early history of Rwanda. Packaged in Europe, it was returned to Rwanda where it was disseminated through the schools and seminaries.”100 By circulating this mythical history in schools, and by ensuring the continued status and power of the Tutsi, the Belgians created a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts that strikingly accentuated the real world divide between people of a shared ethnic group. In other words, the Belgians helped to make myth a reality. The ruling elite benefitted greatly from the circulation of this narrative; meanwhile, the Hutu “officially excluded from power, began to experience the solidarity of the oppressed.”101
The end of World War II brought changing tides to the Belgian approach to Rwanda. The newly established United Nations pressured Belgium to introduce reforms that increased Hutu political representation and increased the opportunity for Hutu to participate in public life. Reforms proceeded slowly, with the Belgians supervising the move of several Hutu to 95 Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, p. 38.
96 Ibid., p. 36.
97 According to Straus, colonial-era documents consistently describe the Hutu as short, dark-skinned, and wide-nosed, whereas the Tutsi are described as tall, elegant, light-skinned, and thin-nosed, p. 21. 98 Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, p. 36.
99 Straus, The Order of Genocide, p. 21.
100 Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, p. 37. 101 Ibid., p. 38.
positions of administrative power, higher levels of admittance of Hutu into schools and higher education, and limited elections for advisory government councils.102 The changes, despite being slow and perfunctory, raised concern amongst Tutsi regarding their firm monopoly on state power. On the other side, the Hutu seized the opportunity to speed along the process of democratization. When confronted with “what suddenly appeared an
irresistible popular pressure for change,” only then did the Belgians “actively and deliberately seek to synchronize constitutional reforms with political change.”103 The period of 1959-1962 saw accelerated democratization and eventually the establishment of popularly elected central and local governments.104 Unfortunately, the change in the Belgian approach was too little, too late.
Straus summarizes the period of transitioning Belgian favor from Tutsi to Hutu in the following way: “In brief, the old-guard Tutsi elite whose interests were at stake resisted reform, but their measures to reassert control back-fired, hardening Belgian commitments to change and radicalizing the emergent Hutu counter-elite.”105 The year 1959 saw the death of the Tutsi king, Mutara Rudahigwa, who had been in power since 1931 and who had been a stabilizing influence in terms of keeping the peace.106 He was succeeded by a younger half-brother who was inexperienced and heavily influenced by the most conservative Tutsi group.107 Extremist political parties gained strength on both sides—for the Hutu, the
Parmehutu party, and for the Tutsi, the Union Nationale Rwandaise (UNAR). According to reports, in November 1959 several Tutsi assaulted a Hutu sub-chief and so Hutus retaliated by attacking Tutsi officials.108 Hundreds of people were killed before the Belgians restored order, after which they replaced many Tutsi authorities with Hutu.109 The Parmehutu party won the first elections held in 1960 and 1961, declaring a republic that was later confirmed by a majority vote to end the monarchy. In 1962, Belgian authorities withdrew and the Parmehutu formed a new government and installed a new president, Gregoire Kayibanda.110 As a result, thousands of Tutsi were forced to flee to neighboring countries. Together, these
102 These examples of Belgian reforms come from Des Forges, p. 39-40. 103 Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi, p. 79.
104 Ibid., p. 80-81.
105 Straus, The Order of Genocide, p. 21. 106 Des Forges, Leave None, p. 39. 107 Ibid., p. 39.
108 Ibid., p. 39. 109 Ibid., p. 39.
events came to be known as the “Hutu Revolution” and ushered in the years of the “Hutu Republic.”
At this point, the “shifts in the meaning of ethnic identity now came full circle: race thinking that had once hardened identity categories and benefitted the Tutsi minority now gave rise to ethnic nationalism.”111 The ensuing years brought cycles of retributive violence from both sides. In 1961, groups of displaced Tutsi attempted to organize simultaneous attacks from their camps in neighboring countries.112 Two years later, a group of Tutsi exiles in Burundi led an attack that came dangerously close to reaching Kigali, prompting Hutu officials to respond by authorizing attacks on Tutsi civilians still residing within the country.113 Following the government-authorized attacks in 1963, more Tutsi fled the
country; it is estimated that “by the mid-1960s half of the Tutsi population was living outside Rwanda.”114 The year 1967 marked another anti-Tutsi purge, followed by renewed massacres and removal of Tutsis from universities in the early 1970s.115 Hutu leaders used the attacks by Tutsis-in-exile to create a common bond of Hutu solidarity and to solidify their grasp on power. Furthermore, they used the attacks to craft “the myth of the Hutu revolution as a long and courageous struggle against the ruthless forces of oppression.”116 The identity cards “which had once served to guarantee privilege to the Tutsi,” now served as a tool for discrimination against them.117 Hutu officials flipped the narrative of the colonial period, using the ideas of Tutsi superiority and their supposed foreign origins as justification for violence and for the retributive measures of discrimination put in place against them. Indeed, the meaning of ethnic identity had come full circle.
The cyclical violence and unstable balance of power in Rwanda was not unique in the region. Within the Great Lakes region, every generation born since independence in Uganda, the DRC, Rwanda, and Burundi lived through either war or genocide.118 Frequent regime transitions have occurred through military coups, victory in civil wars, or the assassination of a head of state. Regimes that have stayed in power for a given amount of time were typically 111 Straus, The Order of Genocide, p. 21.
112 Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi, p. 222. Leaders of militant Tutsi groups tried to organize simultaneous attacks from Uganda, Tanzania, the DRC, and Burundi, in order to retake power. 113 Des Forges, Leave None, p. 40.
114 “Rwanda: A Historical Chronology,” Frontline, 1995-2014. 115 Ibid., Frontline.
116 Des Forges, Leave None, p. 40. 117 Ibid., p. 41.
118 Omar McDoom, “War and Genocide in Africa’s Great Lakes Region Since Independence,” in
The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, edited by David Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, 550-575,
