The Rwandan Genocide and the World

19 Sep 2008

Retrospectively, the Rwandan genocide of April to June 1994 appears as one of the strangest phenomena of the late 20th century. Perhaps the most bizarre part was the way in which the perpetrators seemed to have thought their grisly endeavor was actually feasible, that it could succeed. The reasons for their deadly delusions were multiple.

By African standards, Rwanda was a “good” country. Almost entirely peaceful after its violent period of decolonization from 1959 to 1963, the country had little corruption and an almost sanctimonious government and civil society. It was mooted as “the Switzerland of Africa” (it was actually one of the highest per capita recipients of Swiss aid). Compared to its neighbors, corrupt Zaire or bloody Uganda, ruled by Mobutu and General Idi Amin respectively, the presidency of Juvénal Habyarimana looked very mild indeed. The Rwandese regime thought of itself as virtuous and believed that the rest of the world agreed. In a way this was true, if you happened to know the country. But before 1994, Rwanda was a mere speck on the map, whose very existence was virtually unknown outside Africa. A good opinion of itself and a high degree of ignorance of the rest of the world combined to make the very provincial Rwandan leadership blind to the broader realities of the planet.

History plays a role, and France too

History also played its part. Decolonization had been a very violent affair in Rwanda with the Hutu majority wresting power from the traditionally dominant Tutsi minority. The Tutsi did not accept their political downfall easily and they organized guerilla groups to try and overthrow the new Hutu regime. They failed, and in the process many died. The regime of President Grégoire Kayibanda, then considered to be “friendly” because he was anti-communist, was allowed to quietly massacre the “Red” Tutsi who had sought Chinese support and who were later to fight in the Congo in support of Che Guevara’s ill fated adventure. Solidly pro-western, the Hutu regime in Rwanda felt diplomatically secure.

What of the role of France? Paris was extremely unhappy at seeing the Pro-French Habyarimana regime attacked by a band of outlaws coming from a neighboring, English-speaking country. Given the French concept of power and influence in Africa, Rwanda was part of the French-speaking camp and should be defended against “Anglo-Saxon imperialism”. The rulers of Rwanda misjudged the extent of that support and felt that, with a bit of prodding from its “friends”, Paris could be persuaded to accept the monstrous thing they were planning to carry out.

From 1990 to 1993 – and particularly from 1990 to 1992 when Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, the French president’s son, was at the helm of French-African affairs – the MRND inner circle in Kigali felt that it had little to worry about on account of its closely supportive French friends. This, incidentally, was the basis of later accusations that Paris had prepared, aided and abetted the genocide. The accusation, if taken in the technical sense of consciously supporting and facilitating the massacre of 800,000 human beings, is ridiculous. But if we shift our gaze to the political level then, indeed, the French government of the time carries a heavy responsibility.

This responsibility does not come from deliberately planning evil but rather from superficiality, negligence, blindness, political misjudgment and archaic prejudice. French policy in Rwanda cleared the path for catastrophe out of sheer stupidity. When French Minister for Cooperation Marcel Debarge, for example, went to Kigali in early 1994 and called for the union of the Hutu around President Habyarimana, he did not realize that his call would be picked up by the local political scene as a disavowal of the Hutu opposition which was then trying to break the tragic impetus of the extremist circles surrounding the president. The Hutu moderates at the time needed help rather than censorship from Paris. Unknowingly, the French minister was condemning these moderates to death and many later perished in the genocide.

Finally, there was the blindness and timidity of the United Nations, which seemed more preoccupied with sticking to the proper niceties of diplomatic relations than with actually finding out what was going on in Rwanda where it had deployed its military force. The Hutu regime felt that UNAMIR was a toothless tiger and that it had a free hand in undertaking a campaign of violence.

These are the mistakes that made the genocide possible. Why recall and summarize them? Because, in many ways, none of these have disappeared and some new ones been added to the picture.

Never again…until the next time

One of the shocks caused by the Rwandan genocide was the betrayal of the “never again” promise made to the world by the United Nations in 1945 after the holocaust of the Jews. Half a century after Auschwitz, a distant and exotic government could pick up the scepter of evil and kill 10 percent of its population in three months in full view of the world. We have just summarized some of the key factors that allowed the perpetrators to think they could get away with it. But since February 2003, a slow motion genocide has unfolded in the Darfur province of Sudan. The international community has looked on, ignorant at first, then stunned, then willfully impotent and finally indifferent.

Granted, when we consider culture, history, intent, policies, strategy and probable future consequences, the two genocides belong to radically different types. But let us look closer at the cluster of factors surrounding the two cases.

Contrary to Rwanda, Sudan and its regime were definitely not “nice”. The long North-South war of 1983-2002 was accompanied by far too many atrocities for them to be classified as a case of collateral damage. The Khartoum regime was already suspect of quasi-genocidal behavior both in Southern Sudan and in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan.

But in 2002, at the end of the Sudanese civil war and in the wake of 9/11, the United States had a desperate need for a “good” Arab regime that would be its friend. The “evil Sudan” of President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright suddenly became the “cooperative” Sudan that was reputed to help Washington in its “War on Terror”. American blindness to the reality of Sudanese policies (and to the realities of Khartoum’s strategic choices) strangely resembles French blindness vis-à-vis the Rwanda of the early 1990s. The reasons are not at all the same but the result is similar: politically motivated willful blindness in the face of extreme danger. A major power thinks it needs a smaller one for reasons of its own and refuses to see what such an alliance entails.

Whither the international community?

And what about that mythical entity, the so-called “international community”? Is it better prepared to deal with horrors of such magnitude? It appears not. Here again, Darfur is very much the litmus test. The bout of genocidal violence unleashed in Darfur by the Sudanese government started in the spring of 2003. Nothing was done for almost a year and when action was undertaken it was, as usual, “outsourced” to the humanitarians. The African Union Mission (AMIS) remained a largely symbolical entity which, just like UNAMIR in Rwanda ten years earlier, was there mostly to count the dead bodies and generally report on the situation without being capable of protecting the civilians. Then came the “hybrid force” concept in 2007 which, after the vote of a UN resolution, was supposed to become UNAMID, the UN/AU mission to Darfur. A year on, UNAMID has full legal existence but is struggling to be born in practical terms.

In 1994, the international community was running towards the fire escape, trying to get out of Rwanda before it could be forced to do something. Now, the international community is dragging its feet towards the entrance. Is that an improvement? Not really. The only difference lies in the pattern of problem avoidance. Instead of shamefully running away, the international community pretends to be doing something and disconsolately laments its failure at achieving anything beyond the usual humanitarian stopgap measures.

Which brings us back to the new cottage industry, “conflict resolution” (some more modest souls prudently call it “conflict management”). This is a thriving business, with many NGOs, think tanks and research centers all gathering data, studying it, busily putting together all kinds of analyses and publishing the results. These are read by international specialists who meet to discuss the findings at serious conferences and seminars.

But then its business as usual. Power politics continues to run along traditional lines, from the obviously futile (solemnly warning a sarcastic Russia about its Georgian behavior) to the unavoidable (trying to remonstrate with the United States about invading Iraq) while everywhere else, “small massacres keep bubbling on” (the phrase is borrowed from an article in The Economist about Burundi in the mid-1990s). The main lesson to be drawn by future genocide planners is: “Do not flaunt what you are doing and stand on the brakes when the media are concerned”.

The last line of intervention comes from the notion of transnational justice and, in particular, from the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Special Tribunal on Rwanda in Arusha, which was the only legal outcome of the 1994 genocide, has proven to be largely useless, sentencing discredited has-been politicians to pitiful jail terms while being largely incapable of addressing the wider consequences of the 1994 horror, such as the refugee massacres in the Congo in 1996-1997. The ICC now threatens to actually do something about “real” politicians, i.e. people who are still actively at the helm when the judicial action is undertaken. This is why the possible indictment of President Omar Hassan al-Beshir by the ICC is so important, both symbolically and practically. The point is to break out of the realpolitik prison and actually do something, instead of endlessly talking.

The raw scars aren’t healing in Rwanda

One question remains in this review of the genocide and its wider impact: what about Rwanda itself? Unfortunately, the story here is no more encouraging. The genocide was a phenomenon of such horror, such unmitigated violence, that it has left the country deeply traumatized. The official discourse is that everything is fine; apart from some “divisive” elements, everybody is “reconciled” within a new “democratic” dispensation. This could not be further from the truth.

Rwanda is superficially fixed, the state is working, the infrastructure has been repaired, and the regime has shamed the international community into subservience and large amounts of financial aid. But Rwandan society has not healed. The Tutsi exiles that came back and won the war in 1994 have pocketed everything. The small Rwandese polity is theirs, lock, stock and barrel. They have allowed a few polite Hutu hangers-on at the surface of their system but they have kept control of the core parts. President Kagame’s 2003 electoral victory was acquired too easily to be true: 95 percent of the vote to 3.62 percent for his opponent, veteran Hutu politician Faustin Twagiramungu.

Twagiramungu had impeccable anti-Habyarimana credentials and had nearly gotten killed in the genocide. He was the archetype of the “liberal Hutu”, but that did not prevent him from being obliquely portrayed as a génocidaire during the presidential campaign. In any case the word génocidaire is used by the present regime interchangeably with “opponent”. Having dared to criticize the RPF, the author of these lines has been called a friend of the génocidaires, despite having written a book sharply detailing the mechanics of the genocide.

The RPF system in Rwanda, which knows it is detested by the Hutu majority, feels so embattled that no amount of criticism is tolerated, either inside or outside the country. Most genocide analysts, who were all sharply critical of the Habyarimana regime and broadly sympathetic to the RPF, are now considered to be “enemies” because they dared to state the obvious, i.e. that the RPF has established in Rwanda a new form of ethnic-based dictatorship run by Tutsi politicians and top civil servants who have replaced the pre-1994 Hutu elite. This, perhaps, was unavoidable given the depth of the 1994 chasm. But no dispassionate analysis of the present phenomenon is possible because the RPF regime is ready to prevent it – forcefully if needed – and because the international community still has not recovered from the abyss of its shameful 1994 cowardice.

Collective guilt has worked wonderfully and nobody has dared to confront the present regime on its post-genocide record, which includes violent political repression in Rwanda itself, the massacre of more than 200,000 Hutu refugees in the Congo in 1996-1997, the creation of an ethnically-based dictatorship, and precipitating a war in the Congo that has killed more than three million people between 1998 and 2003.

Such criticism is particularly delicate because the Hutu majority is largely unrepentant. Some of its members have understood that massacre is not an acceptable tool of government. But they remain a minority. For the majority of the Hutu, what happened in 1994 was not a genocide but a “war” in which the Tutsi and the liberal Hutu were simply “collateral damage” in a situation of armed conflict. They often use the deliberately blind attitude of the international community who, in order to expiate its 1994 guilt, refused to condemn (or even to see) the killings later committed by the RPF.

Thus, the situation remains extremely dangerous for the Tutsi RPF. It runs a dictatorship just like the MRND of old ran its own Hutu dictatorship. But it’s sitting on a time bomb. Many Hutu in Rwanda dream of “taking their revenge” for their 1994 defeat. Criticizing the RPF is theoretically easy but practically difficult because the chance of recreating a new “neutral” polity was lost in 1994-1995 when the RPF deliberately torpedoed the post-genocide Government of National Unity in favor of establishing its ethno-political system. The Kibeho massacre and the later assassination of RPF Hutu Interior Minister Seth Sendashonga put paid to any possibility of a true policy of national reconciliation.

Rwanda has been, by turn, a horror story (1959 to 1963, and 1994) and a “peaceful Switzerland”. It has once again entered a period of latency. The RPF regime has closed the open wounds without performing the necessary surgery on the damaged organs. Today President Kagame hopes to drown Hutu political resentment in a flood of economic development. He is working very hard to turn Rwanda into some kind of African Singapore where political tension will become diluted in economic growth. This seems like a very distant dream indeed, starting as it does with a backwards, peasant-based economy.

Meanwhile one can only hope that history will not repeat itself and that Kagame’s successor will have the wisdom of progressively opening up the presently frozen political landscape before Rwanda enters another of its violent periods.

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