Current mood:	concerned
Current music:	Nirvana, "The Man Who Sold the World"

[BRIEF NOTE] Rwanda, 10 years later
I read this story in the National Post today, as I ate lunch in the cafeteria:

Rwanda 1994 killings weren't 'genocide': US study
US researchers are challenging the conventional view that the 1994 massacre of some 800,000 Rwandans was a "genocide", drawing an angry response from the government who accused them of insulting survivors.

An aide to Rwandan President Paul Kagame said the research was a "malicious" attempt to distort the truth just days ahead of memorials on Wednesday to mark the 10th anniversary of the start of the killings.

The research also questioned the commonly held view that the majority of victims were from Rwanda's ethnic Tutsi minority, rather than the Hutu majority, in another challenge to a government dominated by Tutsis.

"People simply have the basic facts wrong, and worse, many don't even appear interested in assembling the necessary information," Christian Davenport said, a political science professor from the University of Maryland who carried out the study.

"We consider this more of a totalitarian purge, a politicide, rather than ethnic cleansing or genocide," Professor Davenport said in a statement.

The conventional view says extremists from the Hutu majority organised a genocide in an attempt to exterminate Tutsis, who they perceived as challenging their long-standing domination of the government.

[. . .]

Professor Davenport agrees the killings began with an organised cadre of Hutu militiamen, but argues that they quickly cascaded into an ever-widening circle of violence, with both Hutus and Tutsis playing the role of victims and aggressors.

"Our research strongly suggests that a majority of the victims were Hutus - there weren't enough Tutsis in Rwanda at the time to account for all the reported deaths," Professor Davenport said, who worked with an associate, Allan Stam, from Dartmouth College.

"Either the scale of the killing was much less than is widely believed, or more likely, a huge number of Hutus were caught up in the violence as inadvertent victims.

"The evidence suggests the killers didn't try to figure out who everybody was.

"They erred on the side of comprehensiveness," Professor Davenport said.

Many researchers and the government maintain that most of the victims were Tutsis, while Mr Kagame, himself a Tutsi, has based much of his legitimacy on his role in leading the Rwandan Patriotic Front rebels who ended the genocide.

This story has been misreported as suggesting that there wasn't a genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda. (Indeed, the study's authors have since offered a clarification.) As my review last year of Mahmood Mamdami's superlative book on the Rwandan genocide, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (sample chapter here), makes clear, there was virulent anti-Tutsi nationalism in Rwanda, produced by a Belgian colonialism that made an absurdly clear and generally problematic distinction between Hutu serfs and Tutsi rulers. In this perspective, it doesn't matter whether most of the "Tutsis" killed in the genocide were actually Hutus, or that many of the people killed were murdered not because they were Tutsi (if they were Tutsi at all) but rather because they were the losers in disputes over politics or between neighbours. What matters is that the extyerminationist rhetoric vis-á-vis Tutsis was activated in 1994, and that this rhetoric was used to justify the killing.

As Mamdami also makes clear, though, Rwanda's genocide and subsequent events--including the installation of the RPF and the initiation of a Congolese war that may have killed as many as four million people--was the product of a general crisis of citizenship in the African Great Lakes region. Tutsi refugees in Uganda weren't allowed to assimilate legally and were encouraged to invade their homeland to get rid of them; Rwandans and Burundians failed to develop all-encompassing national identities, Rwanda excluding Tutsis and Burundi excluding Hutu; Zaireans/Congolese simply didn't have a state capable of creating any worthwhile citizenship. Everywhere in the Great Lakes (save Burundi, miraculously), long-standing problems with the rhetorics of nationalism and citizenship became visible for the first time in 1994.

These problems still exist, of course. As this article in The Scotsman concludes, "there is no political opposition: opponents of now-President Kagame have a tendency to disappear. There is no real free press, dissent from the government line is not tolerated, and the autocratic, duplicitous Tutsi oligarchy has shown that it is prepared to employ any means to protect itself, remain in power, and to make sure that genocide never visits this beautiful land again." And if, as seems increasingly possible, Kagame was in fact responsible for ordering the shoot-down of the Rwandan president's airplane that started the whole genocide in the first place, that means that individuals and political forces responsible for the 1994 genocide and all its consequent miseries are still in power.

A rather depressing column in The Monitor (Kampala, Uganda) suggested that the causes of the genocide shouldn't be investigated, for proof of Kagame's responsibility "will most certainly destabilise the leadership in the accused countries, all this at the sensitive time when Rwanda prepares to mourn its dead and Uganda is sitting on a powder-keg of a political transition." This is likely true. It's also true, though, that if the only thing that has changed since 1994 in Rwandan and central Africa politics is that different people administer the same policies, the set of actions which led to the genocide of 1994 will recur. After all, thanks to migration from Uganda the Rwandan Tutsi population is back up to pre-genocide levels, and even without the Tutsis being considered central Africa has plenty of vulnerable minorities remaining.

The Head Heeb has recently commented on the need to appropriately commemorate the Rwandan genocide from 1994, and to learn from the experience so as to prevent recurrences. I fear, though. that the people currently in power--like Paul Kagame--are simply cynically using the genocide to reinforce their current positions. Real changes in the rhetorics of nationalism and citizenship in central Africa will have to wait for a long time.

UPDATE (6:54 PM) : Crossposted to Bonoboland.