revisionism anyone?

so my access to the internet was blocked. i am a member of several list-servs and am always participating in one debate or another. i think the posting that did me in was this one that i made to a members’ only list at Queen’s University. a few days after posting, i was called to ‘account’ for my revisionism by both survivors’ organisations as well as some members of the government, although i didn’t actually get my knuckles formally rapped for this one. i was simply informed that as a friend of Rwanda, i should be more careful about the kind of information i choose to share. here it the post in question…

“I think it goes without saying that there were factors other than ethnic hatred that led to Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. I haven’t read Diamond’s book, so cannot comment directly on his analysis on the genocide. However, reading your overview of his distinctions, ultimate and proximate explanations, leads me to believe that he has not visited Rwanda, but instead has based himself on reading the literature on Rwanda’s genocide and its aftermath. There are both academic and journalistic literatures, and together its quantity is voluminous and its quality mixed. Some works are unworthy of citation (see Pottier 2002 for critical analysis), others outstanding (e.g., DesForges, 1999; Prunier, 1995; Mamdani, 2001; Vansina, 2005; Uvin, 1998), and many in between (e.g., Dallaire, 2004; Eltringham, 2003; Harrell, 2003).

In the first place, I don’t think it is remotely accurate to suggest that Rwanda’s genocide was driven by ethnic hatred. Diamond correctly suggests there were other factors at play, notably competition for land, population density, and drought, and to some extent these factors did play a role. But his analysis is decontextualised from the local realities in Rwanda before the genocide. By decontextualised, I mean that his analysis is lacking local insights into local realities. I’m guessing that his analysis does not include a historical analysis of both Rwandan society and state. Important factors into understanding how fear, racism and violence culminated in the individual acts that constituted the Rwandan genocide must be considered. Without local knowledge, gained from ordinary people living on the ground, most analysis is missing big pieces of picture. I won’t get into broader debates about the validity of local knowledge, but suffice it to say local knowledge is usually overlooked in both academic and policy analysis of conflict and post-conflict situations. I’ll also avoid discussion of those age-old Western discourses that perceive African wars as ethnically-driven by a subaltern ‘other’ (although I wouldn’t be surprised if that was Diamond’s ontology).

His model also seems to ignore the relationship between the then-Rwandan government and the international community (see, e.g., Anderson, 2000; Uvin 1998). Major contributing factors squeezing the legitimacy of the pre-genocide government was the imposition of programmes of democratisation and economic liberalisation by the World Bank and IMF in 1989/90. This effectively wiped-out the ability of the Rwandan state to meet its patron-client obligations, and instead of promoting multipartyism resulted in ethnic polarisation along party lines. The imposition of democracy brought back the bad memories of independence when Rwanda’s first (and at the time, last) democratic experiment, which resulted in the first genocide of Tutsi (1959), and the mass exodus of Tutsi into neighbouring countries. These refugees, and their children, grouped militarily, forming the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and invaded from Uganda in October 1990, claiming their right to return to their motherland. During the period of multipartyism and liberalisation, the government also on the one hand fought (with French and Belgian support) the rebel RPF invaders, and negotiated with them at the Arusha Peace Accords. The then government used the invasion of the Tutsi rebels as a pretext to persecute Tutsis living in Rwanda at the time. In so doing, they resurrected the Hutu 10 Commandments, and used the local media machine to announce to ordinary Rwandans that their deepening poverty was the fault of invading Tutsi inyenzi (cockroaches), and that all Tutsi living in Rwanda were sympathisers with the rebels. In fact, few, if any Tutsi living in Rwanda at the time of the RPF invaded knew of its existence, and indeed of the more than 30 Tutsi that I have spoken to in my research on the period leading up to the genocide reported that they and their Hutu neighbours knew next to nothing of the political pressures facing the elite in Kigali. As one woman reported, ‘”…that was Kigali business. We didn’t think politics was any of our business and so we ignored what we heard. Things were being said but it wasn’t any of our concern”. These are the first signs that the genocide was pre-meditated and systematically planned, rather than the result of spontaneous ethnic violence (as it was characterised by the western media in the April to July 1994 period, see Pottier, 2002).

So it is a misnomer to characterise Rwanda’s 1994 genocide as ethnic. Its genesis is in the manipulation of ethnic identity by a power elite bent on holding state power more than on firmly held identities of ethnicity among local, ordinary Rwandans. I would argue that any so-called ethnic hatred has its basis in what Newbury (1988) called ‘the cohesion of oppression’. Rwandan society is characterised by structural forms of domination — that is institutional arrangements that allowed the political elite to appropriate labour, goods and services from a subordination population, both Tutsi and Hutu (and Twa). Social mobility in pre-genocide Rwanda was virtually fixed, although there are some examples of Hutu becoming Tutsi and Tutsi becoming Hutu recorded before the institution of identity cards in the 1930s, under the Belgian colonisers. The myth that the pre-genocide government propagated was that Tutsi were foreigners, and were illegal invaders to Rwanda. This discourse was ‘verified’ and indeed buoyed, by ideologies of race science from the early 1900s, with ‘scientists’ like Speke to local populations through dubious scientific measurements of width of nose, height of forehead, cranial capacity, etc.

These ‘theories’ of racial superiority were manipulated to justify the manipulation of ethnic identity as innate and immutable. They were also used by the political elite to maintain authoritarian-like control on Rwandan society. Ordinary Rwandans, the 90% of the population that lives a subsistence existence, understood that elite members of state institutions and organisations held power, and they both accepted and accepted that politics was the domain of the elite. The idea of mobility, that is moving up to the ranks of the powerful, or as one of my research participants put it, of “becoming an important person” was virtually nil. This high power divide exists where hierarchy is the societal standard, inequality is anticipated (and in some cases even desired), less powerful people expect to be dependent on more powerful people, centralisation of state institutions is popular and unquestioned, subordinates envision being told what to do, and privileges and social status are expected for elite members of society. The personal rule of the President is sacrosanct, as are relations of patronage and clientelism. These are the main qualities of Rwandan society before the genocide.

Ordinary Rwandans, of low social status, being in the main peasant farmers, petty traders, or day labourers, had a sense of security of knowing their place in society, and these characteristics allowed the idea of genocide – of neighbour killing neighbour, or friend, or spouse, to become possible. In short, the social fabric was such that to imagine a tear as violent as genocide was not much of a leap. These are characteristics that stifle innovation, individual reflection, initiative, or problem-solving, and ultimately made way for the conditions that would culminate in the genocide of Tutsi, and the politicide of Hutu and Twa (see the Radical Information Project for details of this distinction, as well as an analysis of the genocide through time and space: http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/davenport/genodynamics/index.htm ). The cohesion of oppression also allowed mid-level functionaries, well-aware of the political woes of their patrons, to form alliances and make deals, usually sealed in cash, with ordinary Rwandans to do the dirty work. The culture of oppression also allowed for the manipulation of ideologies that fed into the genocidal machinery of the state. In a country that was, as Diamond points out, reaching the limits of its cultivable land, as well as subject to the demands of exiles from a previous generation, both of which feed into the manipulation of the foreigner thesis.

I could go on, but suffice to say that to explain the Rwandan genocide as based on ethnic-hatred between Hutu and Tutsi is an oversimplification. I think also, it allows for the hastily drawn portrayals of peoples who are eternal foes that circumvent contextualised analysis of the multiple historical, sociological, cultural and political causes that led to the final, and lethal, decision to embark on a well-prepared campaign of slaughter.

And, finally, looking to the future, if post-genocide Rwanda, is to use the ethnic identity/hatred angle, which the present government is doing, under the banner of ‘Rwandanness’ (ethnic divisionism has been outlawed), it could lead to a re-creation of the same conditions that gave way to the 1994 genocide. For example, the discourse of ethnic hatred within Rwanda has pointed fingers at the international community for not stopping the genocide and has called on them to account. But what of the role of Rwandans themselves in killing their brethren? In qualifying the 1994 genocide as genocide driven by ethnic hatred veils the true nature of the conflict, and pushes us to ignore its realties, and in the process overlooking and/or underestimating the drivers of genocide. Those drivers need to be studied if we are to better understand political violence with an ethnic dimension.”