Alain Destexhe, from Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century
In the spring of 1994, the Western media reported "tribal warfare" of unusual ferocity in Rwanda, a small central African country with Zaire on its west, Uganda on its north, and Kenya on its east. Together with its southern neighbor, Burundi, Rwanda had been a German colony from 1885 to World War I and a Belgian mandate from 1925 to 1962. In 1994, the majority Hutus seemed intent on killing as many of the minority Tutsis, who had formerly enjoyed something of an elite status, as they could. In the summer months of the same year, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a group composed largely of Tutsis in exile in Uganda, with some Hutus hostile to the regime, led an invasion that succeeded in toppling almost the entire Hutu government. The leadership of the fallen regime encouraged Hutus to flee the country, and hundreds of thousands did so, huge numbers ending up in a sprawling refugee camp in Goma, just across the Zairian border.
Alain Destexhe is an experienced observer of African affairs and the former secretary general of Médecins sans Frontières Doctors Without Borders), a worldwide relief and health organization very active in Africa. In his work, excerpted here, he traces how the Tutsis, who raised cattle and acquired wealth and status separating them from the Hutus, who were mostly crop farmers and laborers, became the objects of murderous resentment.
Source: Alison Marschner, trans., Alain Destexhe, Rwanda and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1995), pp. 28, 30, 31-32, 33, 37-38, 43, 47, 49, 61-62, 70, passim. Used by permission.
HUTU RACIST IDEOLOGY
It took exactly fifty years...it or something very like it has indeed happened again. Just as Hitler's grand plan was founded on an ingrained European anti-Semitism which he played on by singling out the Jews as the source of all Germany's ills, the Hutu radicals are inheritors of the colonial lunacy of classifying and grading different ethnic groups in a racial hierarchy. While the Jews were described by Nazis as "vermin," the Tutsis were called invenzi ("the cockroaches that have to be crushed"). Anti-Tutsi propaganda presented them as a "minority, well-off and foreign" - so similar to the image developed to stigmatize the Jews - and thus an ideal scapegoat for all Rwanda's problems.
In a country which receives virtually no information from the outside world, local media, particularly the radio, play an essential role. For a large part of the population, a transistor radio is the only source for information and therefore has the potential for exerting a powerful influence. Rwandan radio broadcasts are in two languages, French and the national language, Kinyarwanda, which is spoken by all Rwandans. Less than a year before the genocide began, two close associates of President Habyarimana set up the "private" radio station, known as Radio Mille Collines (Thousand Hills). Assured of a large audience thanks to regular programs of popular music, the programs in Kinyarwanda broadcast unceasing messages of hate, such as "The grave is only half full. Who will help us fill it?" Christened "the radio that kills" by its opponents, it was the basic instrument of propaganda for the Hutu extremists, and the militias rallied in support of its slogans. On 6 April 1994 the plane carrying President Habyarimana and President Cyprien Ntariyamira of Burundi was shot down by rocket fire. Although it is not yet known who was behind this assassination, it is clear that it acted as the fuse for the eruption of violence which led to the greatest tragedy in the history of the country.
As the stereotypes of physical characteristics do not always provide sufficient identification - and can even be totally misleading - it was the identity cards demanded at the roadblocks set up by the militias that acted as the signature of a death warrant for the Tutsis. As control of the road could not alone ensure that no Tutsi escaped, the militia leaders divided up the territory under their control so that one man was allocated for every ten households in order to systematically search for Tutsis in their immediate localities. In this way every Tutsi family could be denounced by somebody who knew the members personally: pupils were killed by their teachers, shop owners by their customers, neighbor killed neighbor and husbands killed wives in order to save them from a more terrible death. Churches where Tutsis sought sanctuary were particular targets and the scene of some of the worst massacres: 2,800 people in Kibungo, 6,000 in Cyahinda, 4,000 in Kibeho, to give just a few examples. In Rwanda, the children of mixed marriages take the ethnic group of the father and, although many of the Hutu killers - including some militia leaders - had Tutsi mothers, so effective was the indoctrination program, that even this apparently counted for nothing. Radio Mille Collines encouraged the violence with statements such as that made at the end of April 1994, "By 5 May, the country must be completely cleansed of Tutsis." Even the children were targeted: "We will not repeat the mistake of 1959. The children must be killed too." The media directly influenced Hutu peasants, convincing them that they were under threat and encouraging them to "make the Tutsis smaller" by decapitating them. In the northern areas occupied by the RPF, the peasants were astonished that the Tutsi soldiers did not have horns, tails and eyes that shone in the dark as they had been described in radio programs.
The genocide spread rapidly to cover the whole country under the control of the government army. By the end of April, it was estimated that 100,000 people had been killed. There are aspects of this genocide which are new and contemporary; others we have seen before. The use of propaganda, the way control was exercised over the administration: these are all reflections of the modern era. So too are the extreme racist ideology and the radical determination to exterminate all Tutsis in one all-encompassing blow. It would be a mistake to think that the killings were carried out in an archaic manner: the reality is that they were meticulously well organized. However, the means used to accomplish them were primitive in the extreme: for example, the use of machetes and unfunis (wooden clubs studded with metal spikes). Unfortunately, the media eclipsed the first aspect of its preoccupation with the second.
Nobody really knows the exact origin of the Hutu, Tutsi and Twa peoples (the Twa represent only one percent of the population and have never played a significant role in the region). The three groups speak the same language, share the same territory and follow the same traditions. By all definitions, this should qualify Rwanda as a nation in the true sense.
The first Europeans to reach Rwandan territory described the people and their way of life in terms very much influenced by the scientific ideas of their time. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the origin of Africa's many peoples was regarded by Europeans as rooted in the biblical story of Ham, Noah's son. The book of Genesis tells how Ham and his descendants were cursed throughout all generations after he had seen his father naked. The "Blacks" were believed to be descendants of Ham, their color a result of that curse. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, linguistic studies, archaeological research and rational thinking led to a questioning of this theory, which was subsequently replaced with a system of classifying people according to their physical characteristics: skin color, type of hair, shape of the skull, etc. Those who were then classified as "blacks" were regarded as "another" kind of human being, not descended from Noah. Yet this classification did not cover the whole population of the African continent. Explorers in the region we now know as Niger and the areas of the Zambezi and the Upper Nile, came across people that did not correspond to the caricature of the negro. So it was that German, and later Belgian, colonizers developed a system of categories for different "tribes" that was largely a function of aesthetic impressions. Individuals were categorized as Hutu or Tutsi according to their degree of beauty, their pride, intelligence and political organization. The colonizers established a distinction between those who did not correspond to the stereotype of a negro (the Tutsi) and those who did (the Hutu). The first group, "superior Africans," were designated Hamites or "white coloreds" who represented a "missing link" between the "whites" and the "blacks." Also included in this group were the Galla peoples of Ethiopia and Somalia. "Any quality attributed to an African group must be read as a sign of interbreeding with non-negro' cultures":3 this "hamitic" ideology translates into the hypothesis, for which there is no serious proof, that a migration of the Galla took place in the seventeenth century, thus explaining the similarities between the Galla and the Tutsi.
The Belgians also favored the Tutsi students and the main priority of Rwanda's schools was their education. As this was, inevitably, also the policy at the tertiary level, the educated elite at the country's university, Astrida, the future administrative and technical backbone of the country, were very largely Tutsi. The colonizers blamed the imbalance in the schools and resulting low social standing of the Hutu on Hutu passivity, making no acknowledgement of their own role in the situation. The legacy of this theory continues even today. The missionaries also supported the Tutsi power structure, using it to evangelize from the top down. The Tutsi chiefs, once they had become Christian, then felt a moral obligation to convert the Hutu masses. The seminaries were more open to the Hutu than the schools. Although, after 1959, the educated Tutsi sometimes backed the theory of the mono-ethnic origins of the population following the removal from power of the Tutsi aristocracy...the myth of Egyptian origins and Hamitic superiority was supported by many among the Tutsi people. Some Hutu discovered the extent to which they, the "native" people of the region, had been "despoiled" and developed their own theory of the "Ethiopian invaders," categorizing the Tutsi as colonizers, the same as the Belgians. Rwandan Tutsis were from now on treated as immigrants and the 1959 "revolutionaries" called for "the return to Ethiopia of the Tutsi colonizers." The Hutu had begun to believe that they alone were the native people of Rwanda.
(Footnote: 3 This hypothesis originated with the British explorer J.H. Speke; reference to it continued as late as 1945. Jean-Peirre Chretien, Burundi: P l'histoire retrouvée (Paris: Karthala, 1993).
Belgium, criticized at the UN for a colonial policy that ensured that only a handful of the local population in their colonies received sufficient training for them to eventually be promoted to the higher levels of their national administrations - a policy aimed at ensuring that they would not think they were capable of running their own country - gradually ceded power to the small Hutu elite. The democratic principle of majority rule was cited as justification for the removal of the Tutsi from their previous positions of influence; a complete reversal of previous political policy. The Hutu became the "good guys" who "have been dominated for so long by the Tutsi" and the Belgians now expressed "sympathy for the cause of the suppressed masses."
In 1959, a series of riots directed against the authority of the Tutsi chiefs were allowed by the Belgians to escalate into a revolution accompanied by massacres which killed more than 20,000 Tutsi. What happened in Rwanda illustrates a situation where the coexistence of different social groups or castes metamorphosed into an ethnic problem with an overwhelmingly racist dimension. The caricature of physical stereotypes, although they did not always hold true and were probably due to the principle of endogamy practiced by each group despite the number of mixed marriages, was manipulated to provide proof of the racial superiority of one group over the other. Archaic political divisions were progressively transformed into racial ideologies and repeated outbreaks of violence resulting from the colonial heritage which was absorbed by local elites who then brought it into the political arena. The present generation has internalized this ethnological colonial model, with some groups deliberately choosing to play the tribal card. The regimes that have ruled Rwanda and Burundi since independence have shown that they actually need ethnic divisions in order both to reinforce and justify their positions. Finally, however, it was the ethnic classification registered on identity cards introduced by the Belgians that served as the basic instrument for the genocide of the Tutsi people who were "guilty" on three counts: they were a minority, they were a remainder of a feudal system and they were regarded as colonizers in their own country.
Day by day, as the death toll increased in the spring of 1994, the reality that a genocide was underway became clearer. By the end of April, it was estimated that 100,000 people had been killed, by mid-May 200,000, and by the end of May half a million. Although nobody really knew the actual death toll, the signs of massacres were everywhere and the River Nyaborongo carried thousands of corpses towards Lake Victoria along what Hutu propaganda described as "the shortest way back to Ethiopia."
Taking humanitarian, rather than political, action is one of the best ways for a developed country to avoid facing up to its responsibilities in the wake of a disaster such as Rwanda. Another way is language. Employing a particular vocabulary can cast doubt on the actual causes of the massacre and foster confused images of the guilty and the victims. "Warring parties," "belligerents" and "civil war" on one hand, and "aggression," "massacre" and "genocide" on the other, are all strong words - but they are not synonyms in meaning. Under the cover of a supposed objectivity, to suggest that "both parties" have committed atrocities can often be seen as an underhand way of giving them the same status. To speak of tribal disputes when an armed majority perpetrates a genocide against an unarmed minority is patronizing and meaningless. The aggression against the Bosnians and the genocide of the Tutsis both exceed civil war. In the case of Rwanda, to compare the RPF with the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) is at best a display of ignorance, at worst propaganda. The FAR have committed a genocide and the RPF have carried out exactions: the two things cannot be compared. If a distinction is not made, then genocide is reduced to the status of common murder - but murder is not the same as genocide. They differ both in nature and in degree, a fact that needs to be constantly emphasized if the crimes committed in Rwanda are not to be pushed to the back of international consciousness.
The racist philosophy of the previous Hutu government and the dangers of trivializing, and even forgetting, the events of last summer are summed up perfectly in a remarkable interview with Francois Karera, the former mayor of Kigali, now living comfortably with his family in Zaire, just a few miles from the misery of the refugee camps (one of which he is responsible for). According to Karera, "The Tutsis are originally bad. They are murderers. The Tutsis have given the white people their daughters. Physically they are weak - look at their arms and legs. No Tutsi can build: they are too weak...they just command...The others work. If the reasons are just, the massacres are justified. In war you don't consider the consequences, you consider the causes."4
The perpetrators of genocide should permanently lose any legitimacy as rulers of their people. They should be outlawed by the international community and brought to trial for their crimes. In the case of Rwanda, no attempt should be made to negotiate with those responsible for the genocide of the Tutsis: they are not only directly responsible for this worst possible crime against humanity, but also for the exodus from Rwanda and the catastrophic events in Goma which followed. When the new Allied forces won victory in 1945, there was never any question of providing a role for the Nazi party in the new Germany, nor of considering just how small a fraction of the population it really represented. The Nazis were banned outright and the authors of genocide then, as should happen in Rwanda today, lost any right to participate in public life.