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‘W
E
KILLED
THEM
BECAUSE
THEY
WERE
T
UTSI
.’
The Construction of the ‘Enemy’ Identity in Pre-Genocidal
Rwanda and Nazi Germany
Master Thesis Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Graduate School of Humanities, Department of History, University of Amsterdam Supervisor: Dr. Kjell Anderson (NIOD)
Second reader: Thijs Bouwknegt MA (NIOD) Submission Date: June 2015
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ………..…. 3
CHAPTER ONE: RACE OR ETHNICITY? ………... ………15
CHAPTER TWO: THEORIES OF GROUP IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION ………..30
CHAPTER THREE: MYTH, HISTORY & MYTHOHISTORY……….. 41
CHAPTER FOUR: PROPAGANDA AND THE POLITICAL USES OF MYTHOHISTORY……….54
CONCLUSION ………..68
INTRODUCTION
‘They no longer were what they had been’1 Introduction
‘We killed them because they were Tutsi.’ 2 This kind of statement is, in
essence, what separates genocide from other crimes. In genocide, people are targeted for who they are, not for what they do. As defined by The United Nations in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide is ‘any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group…’3(my emphasis). The
targeting of a group, rather than individuals, is what is important here. But how do these groups come into being? Who conceives of these groups? Kurt Johansson and Frank Chalk propose the definition of genocide as ‘a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator.’4 In their eyes, the victim group and all its members
are designated by the perpetrator rather than constructed by the victim group themselves. This is important as it means that the group definition is forced onto the victim group, without them identifying themselves as necessarily belonging to it. Additionally, victims often cannot ‘escape’ their identity as defined by the perpetrator. Victims are no longer seen as individuals but as a group, and their identity now becomes singular. This thesis will look at how abstract identities, based on ideas about ethnicity and race were constructed in Rwanda and Germany prior to genocide, in order to facilitate genocide.
People are multi-dimensional and have many identities; white, black, Irish, German, straight, gay, football player, painter etc. Human identity is infinitely
1 Jean Hatzfield, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2005), p.47.
2 Willa Michener, ‘The Individual Psychology of Group Hate’, Journal of Hate
Studies 10, no.1 (2012), p.16.
3 Article 2, United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide, United Nations, 1948.
4 As quoted in: Mario Bezbradica, Genocide Phobia in Serbia, (University of
divisible. Look at one group and you will find a sub-category and so on.5 However,
for many people nationality is the strongest identity. When people meet for the first time, one of the first questions that is asked is ‘Where are you from?’ This demonstrates that our world is constructed through and around identity, and more specifically national, racial, or ethnic identity. These concepts are discussed in more detail in Chapter One.
Throughout history we have defined each other by race, ethnicity, and nationality. This seems to be the easiest way that humans have found to divide the world into groups: humans have an inherent need to belong and to be social.6 Groups
exist so that we can feel that we belong by emphasising differences and similarities. These groups
can’t be understood objectively, as a collection of facts about blood types, skull shapes, average ages, preferred brands, and so on. Those facts seen from the outside can never tell what the human kind means. That meaning is made inside the heads of people who believe in it.7
No genocide could occur without xenophobia. It is only when xenophobia is manipulated and institutionalised that it becomes dangerous. These constructs of identity in and of themselves are not dangerous, they only become so when they are combined with a host of other factors, such as competition over resources and power. To quote Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli historian of the Holocaust, ‘the horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms, the horror is that it didn’t.’8
Perpetrators of genocide and mass atrocities are often described as ‘evil’, that is to say that they are profoundly immoral and wicked. This kind of terminology removes perpetrators from our realm of understanding. They are evil, what more is there to say? It is comforting for us to assume that this is correct and that perpetrators are nothing like us, but the reality is much more complex. It is possible to understand perpetration. Understanding the construction of the abstract identity of the ‘other’, and how this comes about, can shed light on how people can come to a point where they are able and willing to kill their fellow human beings, sometimes even neighbours, as
5 David Berreby, Us and Them: Understanding your tribal mind, (London:
Hutchinson, 2006), p.15.
6 Aristotle, The Politics, Book I section II. EBook, (Start Publishing LLC, 2012). 7 Berreby, Us and Them, p.18.
8 Yehuda Bauer, ‘Comparisons with other Genocides’ in: Rethinking the Holocaust,
was the case in Rwanda. Genocide could not take place without the creation of certain conditions. As Scott Straus, author of The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War
in Rwanda, has said ‘it may be true that genocide can happen in any society, but a
more accurate claim is that genocide tends to happen under particular conditions.’9
That is, how society is structured plays an essential role in determining whether and how genocide occurs.
Research Questions
There are a multitude of explanations for why perpetrators did what they did: careerism, ideology, conformism, and so on, but these do not account for how they were psychologically prepared to act in this way, and how the construction of the ‘other’ came about. This thesis will attempt to fill in a small piece of the puzzle. The main research question will be: How were abstract identities of the ‘enemy’ based on ideas of ethnicity constructed in Rwanda and Germany prior to genocide? The answer to this question will help to explain how the perpetrators were able to become so by examining psychological and societal constructs.
More recent scholarship has centred on the vast numbers of perpetrators and how ‘ordinary’ they were. This has led many scholars to come to the conclusion that we are all capable of committing genocide and mass atrocities, under certain conditions. One of these conditions is awareness of racial or ethnic difference. The goal of this thesis will be to examine these explanations and attempt to apply them to two of the twentieth century’s most infamous genocides, the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. Many books and articles frame genocide as ‘us’ against ‘them’, however, as ‘them’ is an artificial construction, this leads us to question ‘How this is possible?’ How is it possible for people to reach a point where they are able to commit this kind of crime and feel it is justified? How do the victims become so dehumanised in the perpetrators’ eyes that they are no longer worthy of life? How do these arbitrary and abstract categories of identity become so engrained that they cause people to ‘become evil’, and for others to die simply because they belong to the wrong category? How do these constructions of identity come about and how do they become so powerful? Only when we have answered these questions, can we address
9 Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda, (New
the question of whether everyone has the potential to become a perpetrator under certain conditions.
Overview of the Existing Literature
It is very difficult to put an exact figure on the number of perpetrators in either the Rwandan genocide or during the Holocaust. The high number has led scholars to question the idea that the psychological make-up of individual high ranking officials is the most important factor leading to genocide. These two genocides are characterised by mass participation, which leads us to ask: why and how? Arguably the most famous answer, with regard to mass participation in the Holocaust, is Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men. In his examination of reserve battalion 101, Browning, an American Holocaust historian, found a mixture of motivations for murder, including, ‘wartime brutalization, racism, segmentation and routinization of the task, special selection of perpetrators, careerism, obedience to orders, deference to authority, ideological indoctrination, and conformity.’10 Most notable was his idea of
the path of least resistance. He argued that it was easier for the men to shoot than commit an asocial act vis-à-vis their comrades by not conforming. ‘To break ranks and step out, to adopt overtly nonconformist behaviour, was simply beyond most of the men.’11 The crucial point is that the category of Jews was already in existence and
had been dehumanised to such an extent that these ‘ordinary men’ were able to kill more easily.12
Other authors, such as Daniel J. Goldhagen, a former associate professor of political science at Harvard University, emphasise the powerful force of ideology. He claims that there existed a particular kind of anti-Semitism in Germany which he called ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism’. This kind of anti-Semitism led Germans to
10 Christopher R. Browning, ‘Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 1010 in
Poland’, in: Jens Meierhenrich ed., Genocide: A Reader, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), p.215.
11 Browning, ‘Ordinary Men’, in: Meierhenrich ed., Genocide, p.216.
12 Christopher R. Browning, ‘Ordinary Germans or Ordinary Men? A Reply to the
Critics’, in: Berenbaum, Michael and Peck, Abraham J., eds., The Holocaust and
History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined, (Bloomington:
conclude that Jews ought to die.13 While many14 claim that Goldhagen overstates the
importance of anti-Semitism, it is impossible to speak of the Holocaust without mentioning it and acknowledging its role. While anti-Semitism explains why the Jews were the victim of choice in the Holocaust, it does not explain the nature of the crime against them.15 Scott Straus claimed that ‘categorizing the Tutsi as a unitary ethnic or
racial group’ was one of three factors which drove the genocide in Rwanda.16
Jacques Sémelin, a French historian, psychologist, and political scientist, argues that massacres are born out of mental processes. By this he means the way of seeing someone as ‘other’.17 ‘It is indeed first in the executioner’s eyes that the ‘other’
takes on the form of the enemy to be destroyed.’18 He calls the identity, which the
perpetrator creates, the imaginaire and argues that the perpetrator draws on human anxiety in order to distort reality. The idea of identity takes over everything else and removes the individual from the picture so that people become first and foremost the identity, which is imagined by the perpetrator. He even argues that prior to Hitler’s rise to power, many people who were later categorised as Jews, did not identify as such. 19
Manus Midlarsky, a professor at Rutgers University, argues that threat and vulnerability are necessary preconditions for genocide. The targeted population needs to be perceived as threatening and the perpetrators must feel vulnerable in order to create their ideas of a threatening ‘other.’20 Harold Welzer, a German social
psychologist, argues that a reality is created in which differences between people become binary, such as good and bad, and the reasons for mass murder become obvious to perpetrators.21 All these scholars discuss the ideas of constructions of
13 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, ‘Eliminationist Anti-Semitism as Genocidal Motivation’,
in: Meierhenrich ed., Genocide, p.121.
14 see in particular Christopher R. Browning.
15 Adam Shatz,‘Browning’s version: a mild-mannered Historian’s quest to understand
the perpetrators of the Holocaust’, in: Lingua Franca: The Review of Academic Life, (1997), p.51.
16 Straus, The Order of Genocide, p.225.
17 Jacques Sémelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and
Genocide, (London: C. Hurst & Co Publishers, 2013), p.9.
18 Sémelin, Purify and Destroy, p.21.
19 Sémelin, Purify and Destroy, p.21, 29, 30.
20 Manus Midlarsky, ‘The Killing Trap’, in: Meierhenrich ed., Genocide, p.166. 21 Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian Szejnmann eds., Ordinary People as Mass
Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspectives, (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
groups and identity, which indicates that they are crucial to the process of genocide. I want to look at how these identities come into being and how they can be manipulated to such an extent that murder is deemed necessary. Johannes Houwink ten Cate, a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, argues that scholarship on perpetrators has reached an agreement that the context and situational factors are more important than the individual psychological make-up.22
Scholars have researched these situational factors, particularly in terms of the social construction of genocidal societies.
James Waller, a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College, argues in Becoming Evil, that it is an inherent process in humans to distinguish in-groups from out-groups, and engage in ‘us-them’ thinking. Knowing who is in our group is extremely important for our species. He notes that this phenomenon can be seen in children as young as six years old, who exhibit strong preferences for their nationality over others. We define our in-group by what ‘they’ are not.23 There is no more common ground between the victims and the perpetrators.
He claims that the mere perception of belonging to two distinct groups is enough for inter-group discrimination.24 This is something which Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford
Prison experiment, discussed below, appears to support. Waller also outlines the concept of moral disengagement, whereby the category of ‘them’ is removed from our moral universe and thus makes it easier to commit atrocities against them. Our sense of right and wrong no longer applies to them. For Waller, deindividuation is also an important factor.25 This is the process whereby people are denied their individuality
and they become reduced to belonging to the identity of the group and no other. ‘The ease with which perpetrators can depersonalise victims, particularly when there is a tremendous power differential between the two groups, is paralleled by the ease with which perpetrators can rationalize harming their victims.’26 Waller also introduces the
idea of distance between perpetrator and victim. This distance is not only physical, it can also be psychological and moral. As the distance increases, killing becomes easier.
22 Johannes Houwink ten Cate, ‘The Future of Holocaust research’, Jewish Political
Studies Reviews 22, No.1-2 (2010), p.36.
23 James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass
Killing, Second Edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p.200.
24 Waller, Becoming Evil, p.176. 25 Waller, Becoming Evil, p.251. 26 Waller, Becoming Evil, p.220.
A number of experiments have given evidence that broadly supports these ideas. The now infamous Milgram experiment gave fuel to the notion that everyone has the potential to inflict pain on fellow human beings due to our inclination to obey authority. Participants were split into two groups, ‘learners’ and ‘teachers’. The ‘teachers’ were told that the experiment was about studying the effects of punishment on learning and had to administer an electric shock, which increased each time the ‘learner’ made a mistake. The ‘learners’, who were actually actors, were placed in a separate room and received no electric shocks. Despite many of the ‘teachers’ becoming distressed when the ‘learners’ began to show signs of pain, many participants continued until the most powerful shock on the generator.27 Stanley
Milgram concluded that humans have an extreme willingness to obey authority which meant that almost anybody could inflict pain and suffering on anyone else. This was an excuse that many Nazi perpetrators used as a defence. They were only following orders and were therefore not responsible for their crimes. However, recent research has called these ideas into question. This is because research has shown that people have different levels of empathy. Some people are simply born with higher levels of empathy, some are socialised to have more empathy and others have the ability to switch off their empathy.28 It is not yet clear how large of a role a person’s empathy,
or lack thereof, influences the likelihood of them becoming a perpetrator. If we assume that empathy plays an important role, how much influence does the construction of the identity of the victim have on empathy?
The Robber’s Cave experiment, conducted in 1954, split twenty-two eleven year old boys into two groups. These two groups lived in separate cabins in order to reduce contact between the two groups. The researchers set up competitive activities to pit the two groups against each other. Tension developed very quickly and soon the two groups could not avoid competitiveness even in non-competitive situations.29 This
experiment demonstrates how quickly people become loyal to their group based on superficial similarities, without the necessity of ‘deeper’ similarities such as shared history or nationality. Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison experiment, like the Robber’s Cave, showed how quickly humans adapt to their roles and how easy it is
27 Stanley Milgram, ‘Obedience to Authority’, in: Meierhenrich ed., Genocide,
p.153-4.
28 Ugor Umit Ungor, ‘Studying Mass Violence: Pitfalls, Problems, and Promises’,
Genocide Studies and Prevention 7, No.1 (2012), p.77.
for them to act violently towards others once they are perceived as no longer belonging to the in-group. Participants were randomly assigned the role of prisoner or guard. The experiment was originally supposed to last for fourteen days but had to be called off after six, because the level of brutality was so out of control. Zimbardo concluded that ‘individual behaviour is largely under the control of social forces and environmental contingencies rather than personality traits.’30
Mahmood Mamdani, a Ugandan academic, in his book When Victims Become
Killers, traces the origins of the construction and development of the Hutu and Tutsi
identities. He stresses the difference between different kinds of identities such as race, ethnicity and political. ‘As ‘race’ was said to distinguish the indigenous from the non-indigenous, ‘ethnicity’ was said to separate different groups among the indigenous.’ He argues that, because the Tutsi were continually defined as a race and not as an ethnicity, this reinforced the idea that they were foreigners in Rwanda, under the First Republic (1962-1973).31 However, he notes that, under the Second Republic
(1973-1990), the label of Tutsi shifted to become an ethnicity. Under the Second Republic the Tutsi were also allowed to participate in the political sphere. The distinction between Hutu and Tutsi remained as political identities.32 In his view, to understand
genocide you must see the world through the eyes of colonialism, i.e. the binary definitions of settler and native. In this way, the Tutsi were conceived of as a group that had ‘a privileged relationship to power before colonialism, got constructed as a privileged alien settler presence, first by the great nativist revolution of 1959 and then by Hutu Power propaganda after 1990.’33 Following this reasoning, he argues that the
genocide in Rwanda was not committed against neighbours, but against those who were perceived as foreigners.
Réné Lemarchand, a French-American political analyst, advocates the root cause of genocide being in the ‘extent to which collective identities have been mythologised and manipulated for political advantage.’34 He invokes the security
dilemma to illustrate the logic behind genocide; that you must attack them before they
30 Waller, Becoming Evil, p.231.
31 Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the
Genocide in Rwanda, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p.135.
32 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p.142. 33 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p.14.
34 Réné Lemarchand, ‘The 1994 Rwanda Genocide’ in: Totten, Samuel ed., Century
of Genocide. Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, (New York: Routledge, 2009),
attack you in order to survive. Similarly, Abram de Swaan, a Dutch sociologist and professor emeritus at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, argues that the campaign to dehumanise the victim group must be accompanied by a campaign to strengthen positive identification in the perpetrator group,35 i.e. the Germans were Aryan and the
Hutu were the true Rwandans. In this sense there are two dynamics at play. Perpetrators are not just victims of their social context, psychology, or their human nature. Perpetration involves choices. These kinds of explanations can only demonstrate how perpetration becomes possible. It cannot ever explain why an individual chooses to become a perpetrator.36
Case Studies
Popular conceptions of pre-genocidal Rwanda and the Holocaust put them at odds with one another. The Holocaust is seen, by some, as the culmination of hundreds of years of hatred and anti-Semitism and unparalleled evil.37 Rwanda is
often seen as a spontaneous outbreak of violence. Much of the blame for the genocide has been placed on the shoulders of the Belgian colonial powers, who put in place identity cards and a rigid system dominated by race. In reality, distinctions between Hutu and Tutsi existed long before the arrival of colonial powers so the origins of the genocide are not as simple as they might appear at first glance. The categories of Hutu and Tutsi were not stable.38 Additionally, the identity of ‘the Jew’ is difficult to
categorise as it was a mix of ethnicity and religion, and especially because it was a German notion imposed on many people who would not have self-identified as Jewish. Although seemingly superficially different, these two genocides had common features.
Pre-genocidal Rwanda and the Holocaust make for a good comparison because, while they have similarities, in that in both cases abstract identities were constructed and mythologised, the genocides unfolded differently. While there were many attempts to make the Holocaust as secretive as possible, by removing the Jews
35 Abram de Swaan, ‘Dyscivilization, Mass Extermination and the State’, Theory,
Culture and Society 18, No.2-3 (2001), p.268.
36 Waller, Becoming Evil, p.295.
37 Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p.188.
completely from German society and killing them in far away places out of sight, the Rwandan genocide unfolded out in the open. They also differ in terms of the technology that was used. The Nazis gassed the Jews in groups in concentration camps, while the majority of killings in Rwanda were executed by individuals with machetes and was therefore much more intimate.39 Despite this apparent ‘lack’ of
technology, the Rwandan genocide was the quickest and most efficient of the twentieth century.40
Another important difference between the Holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda is that while the Nazis attempted to wipe Jews off the face of the Earth, the Hutu only targeted Tutsi in Rwanda, despite many Tutsi living in neighbouring countries, such as Burundi and Uganda. The Nazis constructed the identity of ‘the Jew’ as being one of an international conspiracy whereas the Tutsi were constructed as a localised threat to Rwanda.
Despite their differences, the ideological preparation and construction of the identity of the victims was similar in Germany and Rwanda. In many instances Rwandan propaganda drew directly from Nazi influences. In both cases distorted, or mythical, versions of history were utilised in the construction of the victim identity. The eventual victims were well integrated into society.
the genocide carried out by Hutu Power was based on a strong belief in the need to rid Rwanda of Tutsis, and was justified with an ideological program that not only resembled Nazi anti-Semitism in terms of fantasies and phobias about the ‘polluting race’, but that required the removal of Tutsis from the category of ‘human’ in order to bring peace’ to Rwanda.41
Both the Hutu and the Germans made up the majority of the population and yet they perceived the minority, Tutsi and Jews respectively, as being a major threat. In both cases, the enemy outside, i.e. the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) or Bolshevism respectively, was equated to the enemy on the inside, i.e. the citizens, and eventual victims. This notion does not even need to be fully articulated in order to be powerful as often the less you know about something the more you fear it. Although the genocides unfolded dramatically differently and at different times, the way in which
39 Samantha Power, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,
(London: Harper Perennial, 2007), p.334.
40 Power, A Problem From Hell, p.334.
41 Richard H. King and Dan Stone, Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History, (London:
the abstract idea of identity of the victim was constructed was very similar and this makes them interesting topics for research on this topic.
Sources and Overview of Structure
This thesis will take a multidisciplinary approach, drawing sources from history, psychology, ethnography and sociology. As it is focused on theories and explanations of how identity and group identity is formed and constructed, there will be a strong reliance on secondary literature. However, the application of these theories to the case studies of Rwanda and Germany will be accompanied by references to primary sources such as Mein Kampf, and victim testimonies.
Chapter One will discuss the definitions of race, ethnicity, and nationality and how these affect the two cases of Germany in the 1930s and Rwanda. However, as will be shown these concepts are very fluid and can be redefined and abused for political ends, as was the case in both pre-genocidal Rwanda and Nazi Germany. The use of these concepts throughout the thesis will reflect how they were interpreted and understood in the particular circumstances, as very often scholars use these terms interchangeably. It will also set the scene and cover some historical background of the period leading up to the genocides.
Chapter Two will focus on theories of identity construction in genocidal societies and some of the techniques which are utilised in this identity construction. It will also look at how the construction of identity has affected the victims and their awareness of their changing identity. This section of the Chapter will rely heavily on primary source material.
Chapter Three will focus on mythohistory or mythical history, that is to say a kind of mixture of myth and history, such as the fabricated histories or myths which were circulated and believed prior to the genocides. This chapter will explore the source and function of mythohistory and will serve to contrast the historical context set out in Chapter One. It will also illustrate how mythohistory was used in both cases in order to construct the abstract identity of the ‘other’.
Chapter Four will explore how the political manipulation of mythohistory is used in the construction of the enemy identity. It will also look at how propaganda was used in the two case studies and its influence on the construction of the image of the enemy.
The concluding Chapter will attempt to draw together all the important points from the preceding chapters in order to present an answer to the question of how abstract constructions of identity of a certain group, based on mythohistory, became concrete enough for this group to become the victim of genocide. The use of mythohistory and other techniques, which will be outlined in the thesis, allowed for the identity, which the principal perpetrators created, to feel as though it was real and tangible for ordinary people. If enough people believe that something is real this becomes a new reality, not in the sense of objective truth but in the sense of subjective truth. Believing the constructed identity to be real allowed the perpetrators to act as if it were.
CHAPTER ONE:
DEFINITIONAL DISCUSSION & HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Introduction
‘Human beings classify everything, all the time.’42 This seems to be a natural
element of the human condition. It is in our nature to create groups, in order to understand the world and how we fit into it. Classification is necessary for description. How else would you organise anything?43 Classification is our way of
reducing the complexities of our world down to manageable size in order to have a better understanding of them. Categorisation or the belief in ‘human kinds’, as David Berreby, author of Us and Them calls them, is ‘the mind’s guide for understanding anyone we do not know personally, for seeing our place in the human world, and for judging our actions.’44 In other words, placing people in particular groups is simply a
way to allow us time in understanding how the world functions without having to examine each detail or individual in their own terms. Additionally, the classification (the placement in categories) of groups and of ourselves tells us how we should behave and how we are expected to behave.45 They are our way of reducing the
complex social world to manageable dimensions.46 Popular perception of concepts
such as ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ appear as primordial or natural. However, in many cases these classifications have been manipulated and produced for political purposes. Berreby also argues that categories arise out of the need of the categoriser and do not reflect objective reality.47 This important in the case of genocide as very often the
identity of the enemy does not reflect reality. ‘Ethnicity’ and ‘race’ are socially constructed ideas. They only exist because we believe they do.48
42 Marcus Banks, Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions, (London: Routledge
1996), p.188.
43 Tommie Shelby, ‘Race’, in: Estlund, David ed., Oxford Handbook of Political
Philosophy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p.16.
44 Berreby, Us and Them, p.26. 45 Berreby, Us and Them, p.44.
46 Aaron T. Beck, Prisoners of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility, and
Violence, (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1999), p.151.
47 Berreby, Us and Them, p.68. 48 Berreby, Us and Them, p.56.
Is classification inherently hierarchical? Classification implies giving order to something, and this is a similar notion to ranking. When classification becomes in some way hierarchical or antagonistic, issues arise. Perhaps it is the case that classification of living things, particularly humans, lends itself more easily to being ranked. By creating categories, we are implying that there is some difference between people and then comparing them. Comparison usually leads to value judgements. However, there are many instances of pluralistic ethnic countries which are peaceful. Therefore the mere existence of ethnic pluralism does not appear to be problematic. Other circumstances come into play, which cause them to become problematic, such as competition over resources. It becomes problematic when political conflicts take on ethnic dimensions.
Mamdani argues that ethnicity and race should be seen as political identities. He argues that this is because the world needs to be seen through the eyes of the constructions that colonialism set in motion, the binary notions of settler and native. It is through this view that the Tutsi became constructed as the privileged alien settlers.49
In the modern state, political identities are enshrined in law. This means that if the law recognises you as a member of an ethnicity or race, then your relationship to the state is mediated through these categories.50
This Chapter will discuss the terms ‘ethnicity’, ‘race’, and ‘nationality’ in order to understand how abstract identities based on ideas of ethnicity and race were constructed in Rwanda and Germany prior to genocide. Distinctions between these terms are somewhat arbitrary and artificial. The three concepts are often used interchangeably and frequently overlap. In addition, their meanings have evolved over time. In both pre-genocidal Rwanda and Nazi Germany, perpetrators imbued ethnicity and nationality with race. It will also give a brief overview of the situation immediately prior to the genocide in both countries. Understanding the context in which the genocides took place will also help to clarify how and why these identities were constructed.
49 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p.14. 50 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p.22.
Race, Ethnicity and Nationality
The concept of race has been used throughout history to justify violations of human rights such as civic exclusion, slavery, colonial subjugation, exploitation, and genocide, to name but a few.51 Eric D. Weitz, author of A Century of Genocide, argues
that race represents the modern way of understanding and organising human behaviour.52 But what exactly do we mean by race? Roy M. Wilson, the president of
Wayne State University, defines race as a ‘biological construct intended as a means of classifying different groups of people possessing common physical characteristics and socio-cultural affinities.’53 He argues that racial categories do not exist at the genetic
level and that it is now universally accepted that there is more genetic variability within a population rather than between groups.54 Weitz argues that ‘race is the
hardest and most exclusive form of identity.’55 Race includes the connotation that the
defined population has particular characteristics which are immutable and transgenerational. The characteristics are believed to be carried by every member of the ‘race’.56 Additionally, race is often ascribed to a group by an outside power, rather
than the group self-identifying as a race, although they may develop racial consciousness over time.57
Roger Scruton, an English philosopher, distinguishes between the moral idea of race and scientific attempts to divide humanity into races. He claims that race was originally used to describe people who were related by common descent and common history. The scientific and pseudo-scientific concept of race was developed in order to divide humans into races, which supposedly exhibited different inherited characteristics.58 With the advancement of theories of racial thinking, such as social
Darwinism in the late nineteenth century, assimilation, especially for Jews, as they already stood out as a group, became more difficult. Jewishness was now inescapable
51 Shelby, ‘Race’, forthcoming in: Estlund ed., Oxford Handbook of Political
Philosophy, p.2.
52 Eric Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation, (Oxfordshire:
Princeton University Press, 2005), p.17.
53 Roy M. Wilson, ‘What is Race?’, International Opthalmology clinics 43, No.4
(2003), p.1.
54 Wilson, ‘What is Race?’, p.1. 55 Weitz, A Century of Genocide, p.21. 56 Weitz, A Century of Genocide, p.21. 57 Weitz, A Century of Genocide, p.22.
58 Roger Scruton, The Palgrave Macmillan Dicitonary of Political Thought, Third
and ‘in the blood’. In the case of Nazi Germany, Jews were now a constant threat to the Aryan purity.59 Outward behaviour, such as the perceived Jewish monopolisation
of banking and finance, became perceived as a marker of biological deficiencies. This demonstrates the easy slippage between biological and cultural conceptions of race.60
By the latter half of the nineteenth century, race thinking had become a pseudo-science.61
Racism comes from the belief that there are significant differences between races and that these differences are sufficient reason to treat races differently, by discriminating against one.62 As race is often thought of as a biological difference,
divisions according to race give biological basis for hierarchical racial groupings.63
The concept of race alone appears to be unproblematic. It is when ideologies of racism or ideas like social Darwinism become pervasive that ‘race’ as an identity becomes a dangerous construct. Race usually carries with it connotations of hierarchy, which Weitz claims is not the case with ethnicity.64
Ethnicity usually refers to a group who share common culture, language, religion and a notion of a shared history.65 Donald L. Horowitz, a professor at Duke
University, notes that, in a study carried out in the Philippines, children as young as six were aware of their ethnic identity and by the age of ten were exhibiting ‘strongly ethnic responses.’66 The concepts of ethnicity and race are often intertwined and used
interchangeably. Indeed the Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘ethnic’ as ‘pertaining to race’, and ‘ethnicity’ as ‘a specified racial linguistic, etc, group.’67
Ethnocentrism refers to the attitude that unjustifiably supposes the superiority of an ethnic group.68 This is closely related to racism. Ethnic conflict is a worldwide
59 Weitz, A Century of Genocide, p.47. 60 Weitz, A Century of Genocide, p.108. 61 Weitz, A Century of Genocide, p.50.
62 Scruton, The Palgrave Macmillan Dicitonary of Political Thought, p.576. 63 Shelby, ‘Race’, forthcoming in: Estlund ed., Oxford Handbook of Political
Philosophy, p.2.
64 Weitz, A Century of Genocide, p.21.
65 Scruton, The Palgrave Macmillan Dicitonary of Political Thought, p.224 and
Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p.55.
66 Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, (California: University of
California Press, 2000), p.6.
67 Roxy Harris, ‘Ethnicity’, in: James Simpson ed., The Routledge Handbook of
Applied Lingusitics, (New York: Routledge, 2011), p.345.
phenomenon.69 In divided societies ethnicity is at the centre of politics, as outlined by
Mamdani above. These ethnic divisions can sometimes cause problems for the cohesion of states and peaceful relations within states.
Tied to nationalism (which will be outlined below), the ethnographical principle is defined by the Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought as ‘the principle that persons of the same race, language or ethnic group should be united in a common state, with its own territory and jurisdiction, so that political boundaries should coincide with the intuitively accepted sense of “who belongs” where’.70 This is
similar to the notion of the nation state, i.e. that a state should include only one nation. As ethnic differences are often related to other social differences, such as class, feelings of ethnonationalism can be made stronger where other senses of exploitation are manipulated.71
J. Milton Yinger, an American sociologist, argues that in our rapidly changing society we look for a ‘brand name’ in order to have some level of stability.72 Ethnicity
is used as a way to establish who you are. It is based on a myth of collective ancestry which is usually associated with certain traits which are believed to be innate. Attribution error, whereby the negative traits of a group are seen as part of their genetic characteristics while any positive traits are judged as being transitory or situational, is a problem.73 Ethnicity is often ascribed, not avowed.74 There are two
conflicting views on ethnicity, outlined by Esteban et al. The primordialist view is that ethnic differences are ‘deep, and irreconcilable and therefore invariably salient.’75
The instrumental view sees ethnicity as a strategic coalition which forms out of the desire to gain more economic or political strength and power.76 Either way, ethnic ties
tend to be strong and have an emotional attachment. If the ethnic groups are also ranked in terms of perceived superiority, this goes some way to explaining why conflict arises between ethnic groups.77
69 Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict p.3.
70 Scruton, The Palgrave Macmillan Dicitonary of Political Thought, p.225. 71 Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, p.5.
72 J. Milton Yinger, ‘Ethnicity’, Annual Review of Sociolpgy 11, (1985), p.162. 73 Yinger, ‘Ethnicity’, p.164.
74 Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, p.57.
75 Joan Esteban, Laura Mayoal and Ray Debraj, ‘Ethnicity and Conlfict: Theory and
Facts’, Science 336, No.6083 (2012), p.859.
76 Esteban, Mayoal and Debraj, ‘Ethnicity and Conlfict’, p.859. 77 Yinger, ‘Ethnicity’, p.161.
While Scott Straus found evidence of awareness of pre-existing ethnic and racial classifications in Rwanda, he found very little evidence for the existence of widespread ethnic hatred.78 Michael Mann, author of The Dark Side of Democracy,
argues that ethnic tension arises when one group feels oppressed by the other. He claims that, ‘truly murderous ethnic cleansing…is unexpected, originally unintended, emerging out of unrelated crises like war.’79 Ethnic differences tend to intertwine with
other identities (such as class) and when this occurs, differences between ethnic groups can become antagonistic.80 The difficulty for scholars is trying to understand
why it is that people tend to identify more with ethnic identities rather than cross-ethnic identities. This could potentially be explained by the fact that people do not tend to have an emotional, or sense of primordial attachment, to class. Additionally, class or social standing is changeable, whereas, ethnicity is difficult to change. Ethnicity is important for many people as it helps them to define who they are and where they fit into society. When ethnicity becomes married to the political process, it can become antagonistic.
Nation and race often slide into one another and are not easily distinguishable. They are human-made expressions of differences between us. The construction of a nation necessarily denotes who will be included, and crucially, who will be excluded.81 A nation usually consists of ‘a people, sharing a common language, with
common customs and traditions, which may have become sufficiently conscious to take on the aspect of law, and who recognise common interests and a common need for a single sovereign.’82 Nationalism refers to the belief that involves individuals
identifying with their nation and becoming attached to it. Many people also took for granted the idea of the nation state. That is to say they believed that people of the same nationality should have their own homogenous state. As Weitz notes, the very idea that states should be the only representatives of particular nationalities caused problems throughout the world as very few states were or are homogenous.83 The
conception of nation as being based on race becomes problematic when race is seen as constituting nationality.
78 Straus, The Order of Genocide, p.128. 79 Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, p.7. 80 Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, p.5.
81 Peter Hayes and John K. Roth eds., The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p.55.
82 Scruton, The Palgrave Macmillan Dicitonary of Political Thought, p.462. 83 Weitz, A Century of Genocide, p.50-1.
Germany in the 1930s
Dan Stone, a professor of Modern History at Royal Holloway (University of London), has argued that the Holocaust has become ‘the archetype of evil.’84 The
Holocaust took place over a much longer period of time than the Rwandan genocide and much of the killing was far less intimate. During the course of the Second World War approximately 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis. Raul Hilberg, an Austrian-born American historian, and others have argued that genocide unfolds in stages. The first step is to define the enemy category. In the case of the Holocaust, this required a definition of ‘the Jew’. To be a Jew became a punishable offence.85 He
says, ‘the definition of the Jews appears to be a relatively harmless measure…the definition of the victim was an essential requisite for further action.’86 However, the
definition of who was a Jew was not without complications. After almost 150 years of integration, how were Germans to be distinguished from German Jews?87
As Weitz notes, ‘the Nazis could not adhere exclusively to a biological definition of race…An Aryan who married a non-Aryan was not alien by birth or bloodline. But by dint of behaviour.’88 Additionally, many people who would not have
defined themselves as Jewish were defined as such by the Nazis, for example someone who had religious Jewish relations but was not religious themselves. This demonstrates just how arbitrary and abstract the identity of the victims was. The category of ‘Jew’ reduced its individual members to expressions of the group. The very concept of ‘the Jews’ is an abstraction. Accompanied by xenophobic assertions, this abstraction became more real and threatening than its individual parts.89
Furthermore, the Jews were the subject of ‘fantastic accusation(s), which were widely believed.’90 The Jews were responsible for Germany’s defeat in the First World War 84 Dan Stone ed., The Historiography of the Holocaust, (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004), p.1.
85 Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, p.1022.
86 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, Volume III, (New York:
Holmes & Meier, 1985), p.54.
87 Weitz, A Century of Genocide, p.114. 88 Weitz, A Century of Genocide, p.119.
89 Gavin I. Langmuir, ‘Toward a Definition of Anti-Semitism’, in: Meierhenrich ed.,
Genocide, p.126.
90 Willa Michener, ‘The Individual Psychology of Group Hate’, Journal of Hate
(known more commonly as the stab-in-the-back myth), they were associated not only with the threat of communism but also blamed for the evils of capitalism. Willa Michener, a research affiliate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues that these fantastical ideas were able to take hold because moderate anti-Semitism already existed in European culture. Throughout the duration of the Third Reich, these accusations festered as Jews were removed from all contact with gentiles, removing the possibility of a reality check.91
Anti-Jewish sentiments have long been a part of world history. While anti-Semitism is often driven by hatred, its exploiters are often cold-blooded or even indifferent to Jews, as was the case for many during the Second World War.92 In the
1980s Daniel J. Goldhagen published Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary
Germans and the Holocaust, in which he put forward the thesis of ‘eliminationist
anti-Semitism’. He argued that this kind of anti-Semitism was unique to Germany and captured the mind of all Germans. This particular brand of anti-Semitism concluded that all Jews ought to die.93 However, Germany was by no means the only country in
Europe where anti-Semitism was pervasive. Most scholars accept that there was no such thing as a national German anti-Semitism.94
Jews had for a long time lived in many different countries, and were often subject to discrimination. However the Holocaust was the first time they were targeted by an ideologically driven movement whose ultimate goal was their destruction.95 Hayes and Roth argue that the period of emancipation, which began in
the eighteenth century and ended in the early twentieth century and repealed discriminatory laws applying specifically to Jews,
provided the catalyst for the development of anti-Semitism because it seemed to signal a portentous reversal in the relations between Jews and non-Jews…from this time forward, anti-Semitic movement everywhere hinged on fantasies of enormous Jewish power.96
The acceptance of political anti-Semitism, they argue, was routine long before the Nazis came to power. The roots of anti-Semitism lie in Christianity, the refusal of
91 Michener, ‘The Individual Psychology of Group Hate’, p.20, 40.
92 Hayes and Roth eds., The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, p.23.
93 Goldhagen, ‘Eliminationist Anti-Semitism’, in: Meierhenrich ed., Genocide, p.121. 94 Stone ed., The Historiography of the Holocaust, p.10.
95 Hayes and Roth eds., The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, p.25. 96 Hayes and Roth eds., The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, p.27.
Jews to accept Jesus Christ as the Messiah and their role in His crucifixion. With the spread of racial thinking, the evils of Jews were no longer a product of religious belief but now lay in their blood and biology. Therefore the Jews would now be a constant threat as their negative traits could no longer be removed by baptism.97 With the rise
of insecurity after Germany’s defeat in the First World War, along with the ‘difficult political, psychological, social, and especially economic conditions’, anti-Semitism began to spread.98 The pervasiveness of race thinking at this time, outlined above,
ensured that the struggle against Jews was framed as existential, ‘in the most basic sense of the word, the conflict of two irreconcilable world forces, one culture-creating, the other life-destroying.’99 The Jews were not targeted merely because they
were Jews but because they came to represent and were entangled with Germany’s other struggles,100 such as economic and geographical.
Jens Meierhenrich, an associate professor at the London School of Economics, remarks that, while anti-Semitism was a necessary condition of the Holocaust, it is not a sufficient explanation.101 However it is important as the background against which
the Nazi campaign against the Jews was organised, and how they were able to motivate the German population. Without an enemy or scapegoat, there would be no perceived solution to the problems Germany was facing. Lebensraum, or ‘living space’, was also of great concern to the Nazis.102 There was a perception that there
would not be enough space for the Aryan volk to live in if the Jews and other ‘inferior’ races remained in Germany. The origins of Nazi anti-Semitism were in the crisis of the Weimar society, the astronomical war reparation payments, and the Great Depression, which aggravated many Germans who perceived the Jews as being disproportionately wealthy. Stone remarks that along with these factors, unemployment was extremely high towards the end of the 1920s, as was insecurity about the extreme left.103 The Jews were portrayed as being behind all these problems.
The general attitude towards Jews in Germany was open to manipulation by ‘rabid’ anti-Semites.104
97 Hayes and Roth eds., The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, p.58. 98 Stone ed., The Historiography of the Holocaust, p.11.
99 Weitz, A Century of Genocide, p.108. 100 Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, p.184. 101 Meierhenrich ed., Genocide, p.37.
102 Meierhenrich ed., Genocide, p.37.
103 Stone ed., The Historiography of the Holocaust, p.13. 104 Stone ed., The Historiography of the Holocaust, p.18.
Pre-genocidal Rwanda
The Rwandan genocide was the fastest genocide of the twentieth century. 105
In just 100 days, at least 500 000 people, primarily Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu, were murdered.106 The majority of killers, government soldiers or members of
militia, were well-equipped with automatic arms and grenades. As the killing spread to the countryside and was taken up by the populace, weapons became ‘increasingly unsophisticated – knives, machetes, spears, and the traditional masu, bulky clubs with nails protruding from them.’107 While the politically moderate Hutu were targeted as
individuals, the Tutsi were attacked as a group, evoking the Nazi campaign against the Jews. As Mamdani notes, ‘this single fact underlines a crucial similarity between the Rwandan genocide and the Nazi Holocaust.’108
Mamdani argues that there is a ‘silence’ about the history of the Rwandan genocide, as though there was no precedent or background to the genocide. In order to understand the genocide, it is necessary to contextualise it.109 The genocide in Rwanda
is often, and was at the time, described as the explosion of ‘ancient tribal hatred’.110
Not only is this wrong, it also absolved people from trying to understand the underlying causes of the genocide.
Concepts of ethnicity in Rwanda reflected imagined colonial stereotypes rather than historical reality.111 Ethnicity is very difficult to define in Rwanda as the
people share the same culture, language, religion, history, and they frequently intermarry.112 These factors usually make ethnic groups indistinct. Additionally,
ethnicity is a very malleable category. Prior to colonial times, there was considerable variation throughout the categories and they were not fixed. Hutu could become Tutsi
105 Power, A Problem From Hell, p.334.
106 Scott Straus, ‘How many perpetrators were there in the Rwandan genocide? An
estimate’, Journal of Genocide Research 6, No.1 (2004), p.88.
107 Power, A Problem From Hell, p.334.
108 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p.5. 109 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p.7-8. 110 Power, A Problem From Hell, p.356.
111 David Newbury, ‘Irredentist Rwanda: Ethnic and Territorial Frontiers in Central
Africa’, Africa Today 44, No. 2 (1997), p.212.
112 Dan Stone ed., The Historiography of Genocide, (Palgrave Macmillan: New York,
and vice-versa.113 There is no reliable history of the Rwandan pre-colonial state, as the
Rwandan historical tradition was oral. 114 This means that the pre-colonial origins and
roots of the relationship between Hutu and Tutsi are complicated and there is much controversy over it. Lee Ann Fujii, an assistant professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, argues that prior to the colonial period,
hutu and tutsi were terms, whose meanings varies by region and context. Those meanings, moreover, were social, not ethnic, in nature, referring to social origin, status or place of birth.115
‘Indeed, ethnicity was only solidified during the period of Belgian colonialism which began in 1912.116 It was during this time that the Hamitic hypothesis, that the Tutsi
were of Hamitic origin and therefore alien to Rwanda (to be discussed at greater length in Chapter Three) took hold. Under colonial rule, the Tutsi were categorised, by the colonial masters, as a Caucosoid rather than Negroid race, making them biologically superior and therefore more fit to rule than the Hutu.117
The Belgians picked out the Tutsi as the natural leaders because of ideas like the Hamitic hypothesis, and altered their identity to be ethnic and racial rather than aristocratic, as they had formerly been.118 Physical traits formerly associated with the
aristocratic class such as tallness, slenderness and a particular kind of nose now became associated with all Tutsi.119 The Hutu category became a social classification
to cover the vast majority and depicted them as short, dark and sturdy. Thus, physical features were taken as a sign of intellectual capacity and became a cultural feature.120
Furthermore, the Belgians introduced identity cards, specifying ethnic groups, which fixed these previously malleable identities. They radicalised the pre-existing social hierarchy, made race the determinant of power, and increased the arbitrary power of
113 Stone ed., The Historiography of Genocide, p.519.
114 Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with
Our Families, (London: Picador, 1999), p.48.
115 Lee Ann Fujii, Killing Neighbours: webs of violence in Rwanda, (New York:
Cornell University Press, 2009), p.61.
116 Villia Jefremovas, ‘Contested Identities: Power and the Fictions of Ethnicity,
Ethnography and History in Rwanda’, Anthropologica 39, (1997), p.96.
117 Christopher C. Taylor, ‘A Gendered Genocide: Tutsi Women and Hutu Extremist
in the 1994 Rwanda Genocide’, POLAR Journal of Multidisciplinary International
Studies 22, No.1 (1999), p.47.
118 Jefremovas, ‘Contested Identities’, p.96-7.
119 David Newbury and Catharine Newbury, ‘Bringing the Peasants Back In: Agrarian
themes in the Construction and Corrosion of Statist Historiography in Rwanda’, The
American Historical Review 105, No. 3 (2000), p.839.
the Tutsi.121 Mamdani argues that what was really at work was an effort to naturalise
political difference by depicting it as a reflection of biological and cultural difference.122 While the Belgians did not invent ethnicity or the categories of Hutu and
Tutsi, they imbued these categories with racial ideology.123 The purpose of
constructing these categories was almost certainly to make control of the colonised population easier. Colonising powers often sought to gain the most profit with the least cost. Putting a category of locals in charge meant that the Belgians could take a back seat. Additionally, putting the ‘race’ which most resembled Europeans in charge would have been in line with racial thinking of the time. Ethnicity was constructed in Rwanda for the same reason any categories of ‘human kind’ are constructed: to bring order to the world.
With the onset of decolonisation, in the 1950s, the Belgians began to increase Hutu political representation as they were under pressure from the United Nations, which was supervising the Rwandan administration under the trusteeship system.124
The Belgian officials had begun to fear the anti-colonial radicalism of the Tutsi elite.125 At the same time, the Hutu began to insist on their ethnicity as a way of
‘recognising and changing their pre-existing political and economic exclusion.’126
Independence meant ending Tutsi control.127 After the Hutu took power, they
massacred a portion of the Tutsi population which prompted many of them to flee to neighbouring countries.128 While the Tutsi were treated as the civilising
non-indigenous influence during colonial times, once independence came, their alienness was enough of a reason to treat them as politically illegitimate. Thus, the Tutsi were recognised as a race rather than an ethnic group.129 Meaning that the Tutsi were
foreign and not real Rwandans.
By 1989 the regime of president Habyarimana was facing a crisis as there was discontent with his government and growing economic problems. Like the Nazi
121 Stone ed., The Historiography of Genocide, p.520. 122 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p.42. 123 Jefremovas, ‘Contested Identities’, p.103.
124 Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, (New York: Human Rights
Watch, 1999), p.39.
125 Helen M. Hintjens, ‘When identity becomes a knife: Reflecting on the genocide in
Rwanda’, Ethnicities 1, No.1 (2001), p.31.
126 Stone ed., The Historiography of Genocide, p.520. 127 Stone ed., The Historiography of Genocide, p.520. 128 Sémelin, Purify and Destroy, p.14.
concern with Lebensraum, Rwanda was also concerned with ‘space’. Rwanda was facing a land crisis, with there being very little land for young people reaching the age of majority. This land crisis was further exacerbated by the threat of invasion of the RPF, who were expected to annex land once they attacked. Many Tutsi refugees who made up the RPF, were living in Uganda after the Tutsi massacres of the early 1970s. Villia Jefremovas, an associate professor of Global Development Studies at Queen’s University, argues that the reason identity and anti-Tutsi feeling was so easily manipulated was based on the pre-colonial and colonial history of Rwanda, and the make up of the RPF, which was largely Tutsi.130
Scott Straus argues that the factors which drove the genocide were civil war, state power and pre-existing ethnic/racial classifications. Additionally, fear and uncertainty caused the Tutsi to shift from being a neighbour to being an enemy, and an alien. Straus also notes that he found ‘little evidence of deep, pre-existing antipathy and prejudice towards Tutsis on the part of Hutu perpetrators.’131 This demonstrates
just how abstract these categories were. However, even if there was little ethnic hatred, as Scott claims, awareness of the stratification of ethnic groups is important as the categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’ are already defined. Ethnicity is still a category that matters at a certain level even if this is not the level of hatred. The pre-existing awareness of the categorisation is important on the level of implicit associations. What is meant by this is that simply the awareness of the existence of the different categories could mean that they become important on a subconscious level, so that the person may not even be aware that they feel prejudice.
Mamdani argues that there is no single answer to who is a Hutu and who is a Tutsi. He does however offer an explanation for the violence which is; ‘how Hutu and Tutsi were constructed as political identities by the colonial state, Hutu as indigenous, and Tutsi as alien.’132 Additionally, these identities hardened over time. Therefore, the
answer to this question is defined by the perpetrators, as Chalk and Johansson put forward in their definition. In the case of Rwanda, the state created the answer to this question.
Conclusion
130 Jefremovas, ‘Contested Identities’, p.99. 131 Straus, The Order of Genocide, p.224-5. 132 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p.34.
The concepts of ‘ethnicity’, ‘nationality’, and ‘race’ are often used interchangeably and frequently overlap. Differences in how they are understood. can help us to comprehend how perpetrators of genocide confuse these concepts and use them to create the ‘enemy’ identity. It is also important to understand the contexts in which these genocides took place in order to understand how abstract identities based on ethnicity and race were created. Conceptions of race or ethnicity are popularly seen as primordial, however, many scholars agree that these classifications are actually socially constructed.133 Humans tend to classify things and people. It is a way to
simplify our understanding of the world. The mere existence of ethnic pluralism does not appear to be problematic. It is when other circumstances are at play, or for example, it is implied that these differences between categories matter in some way and make one better than the other, that conflict arises.
Race is thought of as a biological construct, such that every member of the race carries characteristics associated with it. These characteristics are thought to be immutable. Race also usually carries with it notions of hierarchy. Ethnicity is often closely tied to race. It refers to the idea of a group who are supposed to share a common culture, language, religion and history. Often ethnicity is assigned and not chosen. Ethnicity tends to intertwine with other identifications such as class. When this occurs, and one ethnic group feels oppressed or threatened by the other, conflict arises. Like race, ethnicity is difficult to change. At the beginning of the twentieth century the European conception of the nation was heavily racialised, thus making their distinction very difficult.
The first step in genocide is to define who the enemy is. In the cases of pre-genocidal Rwanda and Nazi Germany, the regimes constructed the ‘enemy’ identity based on notions about race and ethnicity. They gave the identity of the victims characteristics associated with race and ethnicity in order to assert that the group’s characteristics and inferiority were immutable. The way that identity was artificially constructed helps to explain why genocide occurred in both Rwanda and Germany. Understanding the situation on the ground prior to genocide helps us to understand the context in which genocide took place and the background against which these identities were built.
133 Serge Moscovici, ‘A essay on social representation and ethnic minorities’, Social
Science Information 50, No.3-4 (2011), p.454. See also Mamdani, When Vicitms Become Killers and Berreby, Us and Them.
CHAPTER TWO:
THEORIES OF GROUP IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION
Introduction
The ‘Final Solution’ would not have been possible without the progressive steps to exclude the Jews from German society which…resulted in the depersonalization and debasement of the figure of the Jew.134 – Ian Kershaw.
The driving force behind acts such as genocide is ‘the perpetrators’ view of the victim: the image of the enemy. 135 This is how the perpetrator knows who to target
and why. The why is often embedded in the who. As Abram de Swaan notes, as a first step in the process of genocide the intended victim must be identified.136 Once
identified, this also creates a group identity for the perpetrators. These two identities develop in parallel. ‘Not’ Hutu or German is how the perpetrator group perceives the victims’ primary identity.
The campaign to dehumanise, de-individualise, and depersonalise the victim group goes along with a campaign to strengthen the positive identification among the rest of the population.137 Both the Rwandan Genocide and the Holocaust involved
mass participation, albeit in different forms. As Hilberg notes, the Holocaust ‘machinery of destruction was a remarkable cross-section of the German population. Every profession, every skill, and every social status was represented.’138 Whereas in
Rwanda, estimates of numbers of perpetrators range between 175 000 to 210 000.139
In both these cases a majority of the population was complicit in genocide. What can account for this mass participation? This is a question which is still being debated in the field, and to which this thesis is trying to make a contribution.
This Chapter will explore various theories about how group identity is constructed, techniques are employed to remove the Enemy from the realm of
134 As quoted in: Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1989), p.190.
135 Aaron T. Beck, ‘Prisoners of Hate’, Behaviour Research and Therapy 40, (2002),
p.210.
136 de Swaan, ‘Dyscivilization, Mass Extermination and the State’, p.268. 137 de Swaan, ‘Dyscivilization, Mass Extermination and the State’, p.268. 138 as quoted in: Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy, p.213.
139 Scott Straus, ‘How many perpetrators were there in the Rwandan genocide? An
