A Transcultural Approach to Healing Genocidal Wounds
in Rwanda(1)Occasional Paper #13:OP:1
By Christophe
C. Kougniazondé
September 1997
To adopt a life that is essentially non-assertive, non-violent,
a life of humility and peace is in itself a statement of
one's position. But each one in such a life can, by the personal
modality of his decision, give his whole life a special orientation.
It is my intention to make my entire life a rejection of,
a protest against the crimes and injustices of war and political
tyranny which threaten to destroy the whole race of man and
the world with him. By my monastic life and vows I am saying
NO to all the concentration camps, the aerial bombardments,
the staged political trials, the judicial murders, the racial
injustices, the economic tyrannies and the whole socio-economic
apparatus which seems geared for nothing but global destruction
in spite of all its fair words in favor of peace. I make
a monastic silence a protest against the lies of politicians,
propagandists and agitators, and when I speak it is to deny
that my faith and my church can ever seriously be aligned
with those forces of injustice and destruction. But it is
true, nevertheless, that the faith in which I believe is
also invoked by many who believe in war, believe in racial
injustices, believe in self-righteous and lying forms of
tyranny. My life must, then, be a protest against these also,
and perhaps against these most of all.
Thomas Merton Preface to the Japanese Edition of The Seven
Story Mountain(2)
I. Introduction: Crisis Identity Card of Africa
Under the title "Africa Shifts Toward Democracy, Finding
Both Hope and Peril," the New York Times, in its delivery
of June 21, 1994, characterizes Rwanda in the following terms: "Africa's
Hell, pure and simple, with prospects ahead of more grisly
killings by either Hutus or Tutsis, barring outside intervention."(3)
This gruesome picture, both actual and predictive, is just
one among the many wars and conflicts which have affected
and afflicted the continent since independence.(4)Indeed,
cases of actual or potential serious state collapse are legions
in Africa. On the one hand lie cases in which large-scale
armed violence abated or stopped: Zimbabwe, Uganda, Namibia,
Chad, Somalia, and South Africa. Yet the social fabric still
remains very delicate and fragile. Moreover, the social and
political balance between the forces enmeshed in the power
struggle is still too volatile to think that a definite national
consensus has been devised to the satisfaction of the majority
of the people in these countries. On the other hand, lie
the most tragic instances to date: Somalia, "the case
study in the failure of international intervention,"(5)
Angola, in its 19 year-old fratricidal war after years of
liberation struggle against Portuguese colonial domination,
Burundi, with its recurring tragedy of ethnic massacres;
the Sudan, devastated by the continent's longest war aggravated
by a North-South schism itself worsened by the militant and
extremist Islamic intolerance of the Khartoum government,
Mozambique awaiting with anxiety its first pluralist election
after the precarious peace set in, and Liberia, where a protracted
internal war (somewhat tempered by the Cotonou Accord) continues
its carnage. A unique case in point of political insanity
remains the colonialist war Morocco has been fighting against
the Sahraoui people in Western Sahara.
Such disintegration has not reached the same proportion
as in other countries. Nevertheless rebellion in eastern
Sierra Leone, Casamance (Senegal), and Djibouti, ethnic fighting
in northern Ghana, Tuaregs uprisings in Mali and Niger, and
popular unrest in Guinea (Conakry), rampant violence in Congo,
constitute serious threats to stability, and more importantly,
to the fragile democratic opening being re-tried in Africa.
More frightening, however, is the increasing violent and
organized militancy adopted by Islamic Fundamentalists in
Morocco, Niger, Egypt, Nigeria, Tunisia, etc. This is likely
to paralyze these countries, as in Algeria, where the Islamic
Salvation Front's violence has kept everything in abeyance
over the last three years or so. Last, the social and political
tensions in Togo and Zaire, and the precarious balance between
state and society in those countries under the IMF caudine
forks, exacerbate the despair and helplessness that characterize
Africa as we approach the twenty-first century.
Alongside those disparaging pictures, however, there is
a new dawn emerging: its spectacular embodiment is "the
election of President Nelson Mandela in South Africa. It
was not just that Mr. Mandela triumphed in the last redoubt
of White minority rule. It is that he welcomed his former
foes, F. W. de Klerk and Chief Mangosuthu G. Buthelezi, into
his administration with open arms, providing an object lesson
in the value of tolerating the opposition as a form of good,
stable, even shrewd government."(6) Its first manifestation
(after the Western nations, under the guise of communism
containment, stifled the experiment in its infancy in Angola
and Mozambique) is to be found in Namibia. Its most recent
illustration is taking shape in Rwanda, where the Tutsi-dominated
Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) formed its first cabinet appointing
Pasteur Bizimungu and Mr. Twagiramungu, both Hutu, as president
and prime minister. The new cabinet, through its president,
appealed to all Rwandans to return to Rwanda and promised
there will be no reprisal against the refugees after repatriation.
The RPF created at once a new dynamic and an unusual spate
of "hope for Rwanda."(7) It explicitly endorsed
the power-sharing scheme embodied in the August 1993 Arusha
Accord between the RPF and the former Rwandan Government.
Yet, the fate of any policy of national reconciliation and
political reintegration will depend on the attitudes of international
aid agencies, and the responses of the international community
in general, the Western nations in particular, toward the
new political life dawning in Kigali. The new leaders, however,
must hasten to create the conditions of democratic legitimacy
for their military victory and make the way for a long-lasting
honey moon between them and the Rwandan people of all conditions
and ethnic background.
The tasks of building a new Rwanda, engineering and gearing
the birth of a new nation urge us to focus on the future.
Yet, to understand the thrust of this analysis and the rational
behind its prescriptions, it is imperative to investigate
the past and expose the root causes of the savagery that
has brought Rwanda into an absolute state of wrack and ruin.
After this historical synopsis, I attempt to evaluate the
cost the Rwandan people paid as a result of their encounter
with Europe, before assessing what needs to be done in order
to successfully face the challenges that this particular
case represents for the modern Homo Politicus. At
each of these steps, special attention is devoted to the
place and role of the Roman Catholic Church. This reflection
wonders whether the tragedy that has clutched and aggrieved
Rwanda since 1959 can be read as the outcome of some form
of nationalism or just blunt barbarism. It refuses to see
the continuing "seasons of blood"(8) as ethno-tribal
cleansing and invites to consider the 1994 crisis as the
apex of a long-standing political conflict whose complexities
defy conventional conflict resolution panaceas.
II. Root Causes of Rwanda's Tragedy
A. The Pre-Colonial Background to the Three Decades of
Intermittent Horrors.
Located in the Central African Rift Valley, Rwanda is a
small landlocked country (26,338 square km) of the size of
Belgium, its former colonial metropolis. It hosts a population
of 8.2 million that includes three ethnic groups: the Twa
or Batwa, the Hutu or Bahutu, and the Tutsi or Batutsi. This,
it is said, is the order in which these people established
themselves in the country. Before the 1959 Revolution, which
caused the first Tutsi exodus, they represented respectively:
1% (Twa), 84% (Hutu), 15% (Tutsi). Probably as a result of
the exodus, these figures are now: 1%, 90%, and 9%.(9) Rwanda
has the highest density in mainland Africa, 271 inhabitants
per square km, climbing up to 422 should one take into account
only the arable area.
Before European conquest of Rwanda-Urundi, ethnicity
was not a major factor distinguishing between the different
groups inhabiting this land. It was rather their socio-professional
occupations that drew some distinctive lines between them.
Thus, the Twa were hunters and potters; the Hutu agricultural
producers; and the Tutsi, cattle herders. According to Ian
Linden, actually, "genetic differences" between
the three groups "have no operational significance";
ethnicity is seen "as a component" of power ideology,
where different "group[s] of people hav[e] the same
relationship to the mode of production". "The Hutu," he
wrote, "are therefore a class in as much as they are
direct agricultural producers in a feudal mode of production.
The Tutsi are a class in as much as they appropriate surplus
labor in the same mode of production." But the feudal
economy was not a common feature of the country as a whole:
although it was to be extended by the colonial power, "the
isolated Tutsi households of the north were simple cattle-herders
in an exchange relationship with Hutu farmers. In such regions
production was dominated by kingship."(10)
There is general agreement that the Tutsi were the last
to settle in the country. But there has been no such agreement
as to "how the Tutsi minority managed to extend their
hegemony over the Hutu peasant."(11) This is no place
to comb in detail all the responses given to this question.
The most ideological of these which set the ground work for
ethnicity and ethnic hatred is examined in the following
sub-section. The basic mechanism whereby the majority of
the population were subjugated is, however, recognized by
a wide range of students of Rwandese politics: ubuhake or "contract
of servage," also known as "cattle agreement" or "cattle-clientship."(12)
The ubuhake allowed eventual land dispossession and domination
of Hutu by Tutsi. In Rwanda,
Cattle were wealth, the key to political and social
standing; and the cattle were owned almost exclusively by
the Tutsi. The Hutu desire to own cattle was the fundamental
reason for their subjugation. The Hutu wanted cattle; the
Tutsi wanted servants and labor for their crops. The Tutsi
despised agriculture. To acquire cattle the Hutu obligated
themselves to perform services for the Tutsi. In Rwanda,
this took the form of a cattle agreement called the ubuhake,
which enabled the Hutu to obtain cattle, provided they were
loyal to the Tutsi who granted them the cattle. The cattle
agreement involved subjugation on the part of the Hutu to
the extent that in some places, in return for the use of
cattle, the Hutu relinquished their pastures and arable land,
and were bound to provide crops as well as personal and military
services for the Tutsi. In this way the Tutsi wielded almost
total political and economic power over the Hutu. On the
other hand, the personal allegiance between the Tutsi and
Hutu ensured protection for the latter. The Tutsi exploited
the Hutu, but also provided security.
Over a period of centuries the Tutsi had gradually
usurped the ownership of the land from the Hutu. All land,
theoretically, became the property of the mwami, the
absolute and semi-divine sovereign.(13)
This political and economic domination is the basis of the
coercive bras de fer to engage the people in their
future relations. Real estate constitutes a two-way-mechanism
to self and political alienation: land owning is the surest
path to ennoblement, that is, in our case "tutsification." And
the latter makes one eligible for political office holding.
Those seeking protection in general, and those seeking to
escape from "the threat of expulsion in personal relationships" are
all-inclined to alienate further land. In an environment
of this sort where clientship predominates, "powerful
landowners and patrons represented in microcosm the political
power of the State as a coercive organ of the ruling class." (14)
Evolution up the social ladder in this land was thus conditioned
by a cause-effect dialectic, cow-land: possession of the
former gets one started; it moves one into cattle-owning,
itself bringing under one's control land, the latter conferring
some class status upon its owner (15) This process, brought
to completion through manipulation of traditional symbols
of kingship and religion, transformed Rwanda into a feudal
state with: "a subject peasantry; widespread use of
the service tenement (i.e. the fief) instead of salary, ,
the supremacy of a class of specialist warriors; ties of
obedience which bind man to man fragmentation of authorityleading
inevitably to disorder."(16)
There is, however, a general agreement that, in the resulting "society
of great internal complexity," the Batwa and Bahutu
enjoyed fairly peaceful relationships. Moreover, to consider
Hutu and Tutsi as "tribes," or even as "distinct
`ethnic groups'" would be inaccurate. As Alex de Waal
observes, Rwanda was one of the rare "true nations in
Africa". Rwandans "speak the same language, share
the same territory and traditional political institutions,
anddespite caricature to the contraryit is often impossible
to tell which group an individual belongs to on the basis
of physical appearance"(17). So, despite Tutsi colonialism,
deeply resented by Hutu, instances of open animosities and
violent outbreaks were minimal, up until the Europeans conquered
that "African Switzerland," sitting up-the-hill,
in the form of a "human heart," in central Africa.(18)
B. Ideology of Ethnic Hatred: A Result of "Divide
and Rule" Policies
So, despite the "suffocating constraints of the caste
system in which [they] had been enclosed"(19), the people
of Rwanda of the Mwami (this is the official title
of the king of Rwanda) contrived to maintain a relatively
low level of violence against each other. This apparently
bizarre homeostasis between the oppressed and their oppressors,
was probably due to the effectiveness of the image of the mwami as
the "projected father" of everyone in Rwanda: Twa,
Hutu, Tutsi. He was regarded as "source of justice,
promoter of the lowly," and a "negation of the
stratified society over which he ruled"(20). It was
considered a serious insult to even think of the ethnic appurtenance
of the mwami or his mother: they are kings (abamis)(21).
German conquest, and later on, Belgian colonial administration,
eventually brought down this superficial symbiosis through
relentless efforts of ethnicization. To start with, Europeans
saw in Ruanda-Urundi only "barbarism" to be "submit[ted]
to civilization" by "turn[ing]"the countries
into "coffee lands"(22). To achieve such a goal,
colonial rule and missionary Catholicism (the White Fathers)
colluded to produce the racial-supremacist ideology that
sharpens the Hutu-Tutsi pre-colonial difference.
Hutu extremism and the option for the "final
solution" are not gratuitous historical accidents: they
are the product of the Western ideology of racial supremacy
and policy of "divide and rule." European conquerors
were impressed by the sophisticated central Tutsi-run organization
of the kingdom they found in Rwanda. But imbued with their
racial biases, they could not admit that such complex political
and administrative sophistication was the work of Africans.
If not European, such genius "could only have originated
from a place geographically, culturally and above all racially
nearer Europe, that is Ethiopia."(23)
Thus, on the ground of purely racial and racist prejudices
and for political purposes, the Germans and later on the
Belgians elevated the Tutsi to an extra-African, White, Asian
or Aryan origin. Their "gigantic stature and patrician
gait" signals their origin and their mission in life:
they must "rule, command"(24). Tutsi domination,
for the Germans, is an "innate" attribute of "their
superior intelligence, calmness, smartness, racial pride,
solidarity and political talent"(25). As a result, "the
Tutsi consider themselves", according to European testimonies, "as
the top of the creation from the standpoint of intelligence
and political genius"(26). In contrast, the Hutu are
portrayed as "a singularly servile, boisterous and cowardly
people, whose sense of dignity and amour propre had been
dulled almost to extinction by centuries of bondage"(27).
This hypothesis that sees no civilization in pre-colonial
Africa that was not brought about by outside forces was given
strong support by the Roman Catholic Church in Rwanda, in
particular, by the White Fathers' Mission. After the League
of Nations gave Belgium, in the aftermath of World War I,
the mandate to run the former German territory of Ruanda-Urundi,
there was some hesitation as to what direction to take. They
undertook an experiment of appointing Hutu chiefs and kings.
On express advice of the ecclesiastic leadership in Rwanda,
the colonial power moved to the absolute consecration of
Tutsi domination over the full range of the territory. Indeed,
on advice of, and active campaign by Archbishop Classe, the
Belgian colonial administration ousted Hutu and replaced
them with Tutsi chiefs. The alleged motive was that Hutu
chiefs failed their rulership test. The most dramatic instance
of destitution came about on November 12, 1931, when King
Yuhi Musinga, who resented both Belgian presence and the
Catholic Church influence in Rwanda, was deposed on the ground
that he lacked "prestige and authority"(28).
For the Church, the road to progress lay nowhere but in
the hands of "Tutsi youth eager to learn, willing to
know what comes from Europe and to imitate Europeans, able
to acknowledge that ancestral customs have become obsolete,
yet endowed with the same good political shrewdness and adroitness
their ancestors showed in the governance of men".(29)
So convinced, Archbishop Classe consorted with the colonial
regime to engineer a transfer of power from Hutu majority
to Tutsi minority and worked to consolidate Tutsi domination
through mass conversion, the preeminence of Catholicism,
and the absolutism of the colonial state. The peak was reached
when in 1943 such intimate collusion brought about the conversion
of Mwami Mutara III who was to dedicate his kingdom
to Christ, the King.(30) In 1946, on the occasion of the
dedication, Mutara III thanked Christ-the-King to have given
Rwanda the divine light of Belgian colonial administration
along with its science of good government.(31)
The active involvement of the Church in Rwandan politics
would not, however, have brought to fruition the transformation
of Rwanda into a catholic state without the ruthless iron
fist of the Belgian colonial state. The religious influence,
on the other hand, constituted the superstructural rampart
without which colonial brutality against, and de-humanization
of, the Rwandese people could not have reached its goal without
any major social explosions against Belgian colonial regime.
It is notorious that a handful of colonial officers
were displayed by the Germans in Ruanda-Urundi for financial
reasons essentially. Historically, it should be recalled,
it was those financial constraints, limiting colonial metropolises'
ability to import the staff necessary to run the colonies
from the "mother country", that forced them to
open schools for training indigenous auxiliaries. What must
be stressed is how "so much was accomplished by so few
people"(32) to render German, and later on Belgian,
rule effectual.
C. Sowing the Germs of Butchery
Both Germans and Belgians failed to promote any remarkable
economic development; but they were, in contrast, successful
in maintaining order and recognition of their respective
kings.(33) Both resorted to indirect rule. Whereas the German
officers leaned on Musinga and established with him reportedly "mutually
advantageous relations," the Belgians undertook to weaken
local chiefs and made them dependent upon Belgian administrative
will. In any event, however, there was no doubt as to the
most effective recourse when it came to maintaining authority.
Brutal punitive expeditions were the principal means German
officers used to bring `rebel' or recalcitrant chiefs into
compliance with German rule or Mwami authority: systematic
destruction or burning of whole villages and their agriculture,
cattle appropriation, hangings. Even in Burundi where violent
repression was reputed to be lesser than in Rwanda, refractory
chiefs' villages were set on fire and cattle were arrogated
as a way of ruining the people and obtaining submission.(34)
Moreover, the Belgian soldier in Rwanda was "a professional
looter, and [was] capable, whether on his account or by order
of his superiors, of sucking as much out of an acre as professionals
born and bred to the work."(35) On the other hand, Belgian
colonial policy makers, just like their British or French
counterparts, never planned for the independence of their
colonial possessions. The idea of independence imposed itself
as a result of the heavy and invaluable part the colonies
took in World War II; this contribution was indeed acknowledged
in the Atlantic Charter through the promise of self-determination
to colonial people in case of victory over Germany and its
allies. Although the juridical mission of the trust authority
was to methodically prepare the country for independence,
Rwanda, not unlike Belgian Congo, was not ready for the show
of party politics that came with it. The country "split
along ethnic and regional fault lines." As Pakenham
observed, " When the Belgians scuttled out of the Congo
in July 1960, they had left the country well prepared for
war and anarchy. The prospects of their departure from Ruanda-Urundi,
though delayed for two years, had the same disastrous effect".(36)
If anything it can be argued that Belgium, with the
active collaboration of the church, through the supremacist
ideology and the manipulation of images and cultural symbols,
set in place Tutsi ethnic hegemony atop a powder-keg whose
fate would depend on the outcome of clashing nationalisms.
The same causes producing the same effects, when, starting
in the 1950s, the colonial state and the church switched
side away from Tutsi nationalism to cultivate and harness
Hutu nationalism, they bred and fueled Hutu extremism whose
expression is not far removed from the patterns of looting
and punishing proper to colonial soldiers.
D. Clashing Nationalisms and the Emergence of Hutu Extremism
A by-product of the above evolution, Hutu nationalism is
also a direct result of Western racism and ethnocentrism,
that is, European blind opposition to change in the status
of the colonies after World War II. Such opposition was rationalized
as opposition to, and containment of, Communist expansion
into the so-called developing areas. In Rwanda, this new
ideology caused both the Church and Belgium to switch their
alliance from Tutsi elite to Hutu counter-elite.(37) With
strong support from both temporal and spiritual powers, Hutu
elite operated without restraints pushing for their exclusive
hegemony.
It must be emphasized here that Tutsi domination over centuries
could have generated a strong Hutu nationalism even in the
absence of the political circumstances that marked its emergence
in the 1950s. But without these circumstances, it probably
could not have taken the deadly form it has displayed with
such consistency since its inception. A fundamental factor
that upset the balance of power to the detriment of the Hutu
is the Belgian colonial policy that limited their access
to power and to education. But the distributions of favors
by the Church and Belgium are linked to each group's attitude
toward the Church.
Fascinated by the relative central organization and stability
they met in Rwanda, in comparison to the anarchy prevailing
in Burundi, both colonial institutionsChurch and colonial
administrationfavored Tutsi aristocracy from the start. Yet,
those attuned to power and politics know what may threaten
their power basis, even in its slimmest form. Thus, unlike
the Hutu, the Tutsi showed no enthusiasm for Christianity.
They were at once skeptical of the intentions of the Church
and of Belgium. First hesitant, then cautious, they converted
however en masse in the 1930s and 1940s. The apex of the
conversion came about with Mwami Mutara's baptism
in 1943. The honeymoon did not last very long however. By
the early 1950s, European colonial obstinacy caused the wind
of nationalism to swirl from Asia into Africa. Within Rwanda,
loyal to its ultimate goal, that is to establish "a
capitalist elite firmly" anchored "in the neo-colonial
net,"(38) Belgium, with the support of the Church, was
pressing for reforms including the abolition of ubuhake,
the socio-economic basis of Tutsi domination, actually abolished
in 1954.
In the national debate over socio-economic reforms and social
justice, Tutsi elite and Hutu counter-elite split. Tutsi
aristocracy became increasingly nationalistic, anti-clerical
(Tutsi Abbé Kagame's staunch opposition to the White
Fathers is unique in Rwanda's nationalism history), calling
for independence as soon as possible. For the Mwami,
such independence would lead to a constitutional monarchy.
Organized into the Union Nationale Rwandaise (UNAR)(39)
the Tutsi called for land reforms, higher education, and,
to confound Hutu propaganda, selected as UNAR president François
Rukeba, a Hutu of half Congolese breed.(40) Bent on evicting
trust authority through self-government, Tutsi nationalism
called for the abolition of Belgium-established ethnic distinctions
on the national identity card. Rhetorically, at least, these
nationalist claims were all-inclusive.
The Hutu nationalist agenda, against the backdrop of the
Tutsi call for inclusion perceived as a new stratagem to
secure Tutsi aristocratic dominance over the majority of
the Rwandese people, called for the codification of customary
law, legal recognition of private property rights, abolition
of ibikingi, (41) development of credit unions, freedom
of expression and economic union with Belgium. It saw causes
of malaise in the Belgian indirect rule, prevalence of ubuhake,
absence of a strong middle class and syndicalism.(42)
Ideologically, the Hutu credo sounds very much like a middle-class
liberal petition. The Bahutu Manifesto, however, adopted
ethnic overtones: it denounces the "political monopoly
of one race, the Tutsi race [emphasis mine]
which, given the present structural framework, becomes a
social and economic monopoly," and proposed, as a remedy, "the
integral and collective promotion of the Hutu."(43)
Official documents and tracts as well treated Tutsi as "Hamitic," as
foreigners to be returned to their fathers in Abyssinia via
the sea.(44) The open attack on the Kalinga (the sacred
drum of the Nyiginya dynasty) was indicative of Hutu
extreme abhorrence of Tutsi "colonialism" from
which they are now seeking "independence." The
demand was politically very explicit. "The fact of independence
for the Hutu people vis-à-vis Tutsi colonialism will
be definitely and solemnly consecrated by the total abolition
of the triple myth of Tutsi feudal colonialists, `Kalinga-Abiru-mwami'"(45).
More telling, however, was Hutu opposition to the suppression
of ethnic identification on the national identity card, fearing
this would only increase the Mutusi preferential treatment,
while concealing Muhutu discrimination whose statistical
evaluation it would render very difficult, if not impossible.(46)
Clashes between the two antagonistic nationalisms became
virtually inevitable. But the spark that set the country
ablaze was the sudden death, on July 25, 1959 of mwami Mutara
who died shortly before he was to make an important policy
statement. Apparently, he went to Bujumbura, in then Urundi,
to consult with the Belgian administration. Only hours after
his exchange with the Belgian officials, he suddenly died
on foreign soil in Bujumbura, after an injection he received
from his personal doctor. The official explanation was that
the mwami died of a heart attack.
But for the Tutsi, this was just another assassination,
probably plotted by the same agents (the colonial state and
the church) who killed the father, Mutara Rudahigwa, baptized
in 1943. The successful designation of Jean-Baptiste Ndahindurwa
as successor Mwami under the name of Kigeri V outmaneuvered
both Belgian officials and Bahutu nationalists. It was known
as the coup d'état of Mwima. Belgian ratification
of Kigeri designation was seen by Hutu as a rekindling or
refurbishment of the monarchy.
The Church threw all of its weight behind the Bahutu claims.
A pastoral letter of February 11, 1959, called peremptorily
to "dissolve racial differences into the higher unity
of the Communion of Saints," while acknowledging that "in
our Rwanda , riches, political and even judicial power, are
in reality to a considerable degree in the hands of people
of the same race."(47) The Church, upset with Tutsi
sympathy with the Protestant Church, showed open opposition
to both independence and unity, as it saw in the growing
independence nationalism in Rwanda and Congo as well the "sad
reality of Communism " creeping into the regions.(48)
How the nationalists on each side viewed and portrayed themselves
throws some light on the nature of their respective nationalism.
Hutu elected to the National Parliament identified themselves
with the "Monrovia Group," whereas elected Tutsi
called themselves the "Casablanca Group." In African
political jargons, the former means moderate and pro-Western,
the latter progressive/revolutionary and anti-colonialist.(49)
In any event, Hutu nationalists did not consider themselves
as revolutionary; they praised Belgian munificence in their
Manifesto, which contends Tutsi evil to be worse than the
European, and rejects "hamitization" as being unnecessary
for reaching out to Western civilization.(50)
This polarization led to the deadly confrontations that
bereaved the country starting with the peasant revolution
of 1959. After independence, the Hutu-Tutsi schism was compounded
by another, this one internal to the Hutu, whereby the Hutu
of the North (mainly Gitera) opposed those of the South (Gitarama).
The new schism led to the coup de force of Juevenal
Habyarimana (North) that overthrew the Gitarama-born President
Kayabinda in 1973. This new dimension of the crisis meant
in practical terms that the victims of the massacres, since
1973 at least, were no longer only Tutsi, but also Hutu and
Twa who found themselves in opposition to the Habyarimana
regime whose longevity in power depended upon the "efficient
system of repression " it engineered.(51)
E. Immediate Factors Leading to the Grand Catastrophe
Despite the "long story with complex roots, many contradictions,
[and] brutal twists of fate," some "sudden accelerations
and periods of spiritual collapse screw[ed] on the fuse"(52)
and caused it to eventually blast off in April-May 1994.
These events are by nature political, economic, social and
cultural. A detailed analysis of the accelerating course
is not necessary here. It suffices to just point, in swift
strokes, to the main events.
The tonic mélange of contradictory political, social-religious,
and economico-cultural factors transformed "the African
Switzerland" into the Auschwitz of Africa. Politically,
simultaneous foreign pressures for democratic opening and
military support sent a wrong message to the Habyarimana
régime, leading it to rather deliberately "dodge
any basic change and just to co-opt the opposition into a
docile business-as-usual `new'" governmental structure.
The resulting manipulation of the democratic transition process
in a country already at war since 1 October 1991, and the
French Legion military support eventually gave the upper
hand to the regime to "veer off into violence" and
methodically set the ground for the madness which follows.
In addition, in December 1991, the Catholic church let off
its long-time ally, the "sociological majority." In
a pastoral letter, "the primate of Rwanda first offered
a strong self-criticism of the church itself, for its cozy
association with the regime" before picking up on the
social and political malaise of the Rwandese society. According
to Gérard Prunier,
He then went to denounce a political situation
where `assassination is now commonplace', where the government
refused to play the democratic game fairly, where opposition
parties were mostly opportunistic, where nobody seemed serious
about reaching a negotiated peace with the guerrillas and
finally where there was no serious debate on the real social
sins of the country which were buried under political verbiage,
namely of discrimination in education and neglect of the
living conditions of the peasantry.(53)
This shift of loyalty by the church constitutes, in fact,
a dramatic withdrawal of legitimacy to a regime openly more
concerned with "keeping its money and privileges" than
anything else.(54) The last straw which broke the back of
the Rwandese camel was, however, the Arusha Peace Accord
of 4 August 1993. It called for: a transitional government
to include the guerrillas, the fusion of the Forces Armées
Rwandaises (55) and the Rwandese Patriotic Army,(56)
the deployment of the United Nations Mission for Rwanda,
and the demilitarization of Kigali.(57) For the regime and
its supporters, the Accord embodies a scathing defeat. Only
four days after the Agreement was reached, the massacre started
with no apparent sign of improvisation.(58)
These political developments themselves festered against
a backdrop of economic(59) and cultural down-slides. First,
the war efforts of the Government depleted foreign currency
reserves of the country, aggravated its foreign debt, and
resulted in an unprecedented inflation.(60) At the same time,
the International Monetary Fund, through its Structural Adjustment
Programme, has brought the Rwandese people at arm-length
control, overseeing two devaluations of the national currency
between 1990 and 1992, while the prices of coffee and tin,
precipitously collapsed. Scattered famine in the country
compounded with demographic pressure(61) and the decline
in foreign aid to bring the infectious and explosive situation
to its full ripe stage, stirring up fears of every description,
sending the political and military élite at each other's
throats to increase and improve on expected spoils range. The
Rwanda Crisis, by Gérard Prunier, offers the following
picture:
In the case of Rwanda, the free fall of world
coffee prices in the late 1980s corresponded with the political
disintegration of the regime. [] The élite of the rubanda
nyamwinshi had been kept reasonably satisfied with the
proceeds of coffee, foreign aid, tin and tea, roughly in
that order. By 1989 coffee and tin prices were both near
total collapse, and foreign aid was shrinking. The élite
started tearing each other apart to get at the shrinking
spoils, Abakiga against Abanyanduga, then among
the victorious northerners Abashiru against Abagoyi,
and within the top Abashiru people between the various
affinity groups or families. Mme Habyarimana, nicknamed `Kanjogera'
in memory of the murderous nineteenth-century Nyina Yuhi,
emerged at the top of the heap as the best player. . .
Of course, the atmosphere quickly became suffocating. Corruption
had become an open sore in a country co-administered by the
Catholic church and priding itself on its virtue. Political
murders were taking place with abandon among an élite
which had known only one bout of eliminations, after Kayinbanda's
downfall, and was used to a peaceful life. The small men
of rubanda nyamwinshi, in whose name all this was
being done, started to grumble. And this is where the growing
crisis went from the economic to the cultural.(62)
In the last analysis, it is the stratagem of the Northern
clan to hold on to power that defeated the Arusha Peace Accord.
The butchery that followed was a major element of the plot.
The Peace Accord provided for a transitional coalition cabinet
to be inaugurated on December 31, 1993. The inauguration
never took place. In fact, under the pretense that his Staff
never briefed him that it was set for that day, late president
Habyarimana put off the ceremony ad eternam (63).
The Government side, on the contrary, charged that the RPF
has obstructed the implementation of the Accord by withholding
its participation in the interrim government.(64)
III. Groping with the Massacre
A. The Lack of Adequate International Response
The abyssal exodus of Rwandans into Zaire caught the
world unawares. It generated an attention rivaling the one
that prompted "Operation Restore Hope" in Somalia.
None the less, a similar, large-scale massive response is
yet to be seen. What makes the difference between Somalia
and Rwanda, you may ask? Why such nonchalance or apparent
indifference until things got out of hand?
The answer is to be found in the geo-political importance
of the two countries. If Rwanda were located in the Horn
of Africa, in the vicinity of the Red Sea, at the door-step
of the world's largest oil wells, as is Somalia, the terrors
in Rwanda and the anarchy that developed in their shadow
might have been seen as potentially too dangerous to be tolerated.
In addition, I would suggest, many people do not see Rwanda
as part of "useful Africa," despite its proximity
to Zaire. Or, precisely because of that proximity, the political
calculus was to buy time for governmental troops. It may
have been to prevent the Patriotic Front from gaining control
of Kigali when uncertainty still existed as to what they
might do, or what regional political chemistry a RPF government
in power in Kigali may concoct along with the Museveni regime
in Kampala, or, in alliance with a Tutsi domination in neighboring
Burundi. It may also be that the silence was generated by
weariness with the Habyarimana regime and designed to help
the RPF to win its war of attrition over Kigali. But this
last hypothesis would ring sound only if a total embargo
had been put to work against Kigali. The French unilateral
intervention allegedly to draw a line around the so-called "safe
area" in the south-western Rwandan sand,(65) does not
support this conjecture; nor does the arms supply to the
government by France, Zaire, Egypt, and the former South
African Apartheid regime.(66)
The sluggish response of the international community
betrays the old political realist wariness according to which
states prefer to observe and wait for one side in a conflict
to crush the other. Indeed, it exhibits old tactics of the
Westphalian system to just wait and eventually extend recognition
and support to the victor. The US withdrawal of recognition
from the Rwandan government right after the RPF took military
control of Kigali, and President Clinton's dispatching of
Brian Atwood, the USAID administrator, William Perry, his
Defense Secretary, and his Joint Chiefs Staff, General Jdoukatchivili
(?) to visit the Central African region only substantiates
this opinion.
The external world has largely perceived the Rwandan tragedy
essentially as one of those "outbreaks of tribal violence
and `ethnic cleansing'" that erupt in the "backwaters" of
remote and "destitute" Africa, "where foreigners
rarely venture to tell the world about it". Otherwise, "to
the outside world, the tribal massacres there [in Rwanda]
were an inexplicable horror, an atavistic replaying of ancient
hatreds" compounded by "a reform-minded change
under the prodding of Western countries gone horribly wrong."(67)
This perception of African conflicts is groundless and wrong.
To view what reliable media reported as a meticulously planned
genocide in Rwanda as "a mindless tribal violence" is
a reflection of the prevalence of old stereotypes. But it
is exactly how it has been seen, and that is why the outside
world, especially the big powers, abstained from even providing
the resources and logistic African troops needed to move
in and possibly head off the senseless slaughter.
B. A Political Conflict
As shown earlier, the conflict is essentially political,
and has a long historical background. Political animosities
and horrors as have polarized the Rwandan society were woven
through centuries.
There are many instances of European failure in Africa.
Rwanda is one of the most tragic instances of Africa's encounter
with Europe, one case in illustration of European failures
in Africa. The monumental level of dehumanization achieved
by colonial policy can today be measured only in the magnitude
of the horrors the world has witnessed since independence
in the country, but all especially in the macabre tragedy
that unfolded before the indifferent eyes and apathetic complacency
of the international community in the mid of 1994. This failure
is also that of the Roman Catholic Church because the church
has been intimately associated with power-holders of every
description since its arrival at the "ibwami" (the
royal court) in Nyanza in Rwanda on February 2, 1900.(68)
A historical lesson which stands out in relation to
the Rwandan situation is that:
The tragedy of history is not the perpetual hopeless
clash between saintly individuals and diabolic establishments,
it is rather the perpetual clash between the relatively decent
societies and the bloody ones. To be more precise: the perpetual
cowardice of relatively decent societies whenever they confront
the ruthlessness of oppressive ones.(69)
This is particularly true of most African conflict cases;
even in those lands where no large-scale terror has been
recorded, in the daily life and struggle over scarce and
ever shrinking resources, one finds the decent societies
of Africa giving in to ruthless power-greedy elites, be they
civilian or military. I suggest that this is the logic of
violence politics as has governed the world all over. So,
any endeavor to devise, implement, sustain and further lasting
solutions to the politics of carnage and terror which has
engulfed Rwanda, must acknowledge the multifaceted failure
of the past. It must also go beyond conflicts and mass slaughter
to grasp and tackle their root causes.
The basic equation behind the Rwandan horrors is the struggle
for power domination. So, in 1959, the Hutu, with the support
of the Catholic Church, shook off centuries-long political
and economic domination of Tutsi aristocracy. Ironically,
however, emancipating themselves from the aristocratic oppression,
the Hutu showed no signs of toleration of diversity. Indeed,
since the Hutu took power and forced the minority Tutsi into
exile, the power base and the struggle for its control dramatically,
drastically, and swiftly reversed: from ethnic (Tutsi-Hutu)
divisions into regional (Hutu-Hutu along North-South) cliques. "What
is vital for understanding the reasons of the tragic split
which led to the present Rwandese ultra-violence," Prunier
observes rightly, "is the fact at the time it was
a centre versus periphery affair and not one of Tutsi versus
Hutu."(70) Indeed it is this power squabble that
led to the 1973 coup d'état whereby Chief of Staff
Habyarimana (a Northwestern Hutu from Gisenyo) overthrew,
in 1973, Mr. Kayinbanda, the first president of Rwanda, (a
Southerner, from Gitarama). The same cause producing the
same effect, it's not surprising that the prospects of sharing
power with, not only Hutu Southerners, but also with refugee
Tutsi as a result of the 1993 Arusha Accord ushered in the
phobia of the hard-liners who methodically designed, prepared
and exacted the carnage which started with the murder of
the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi on April 6, 1994. According
to news reporters,
The killings, when they came, were not random, or even spontaneous.
This was no outbreak of spontaneous ethnic hatred, or a frenzy
of universal madness. The killing machine had been well prepared
in advance, the targets, at least in the early days, had
been carefully chosen, the killers (in the army, the Presidential
guard and the militias) were given precise orders. The aim
was nothing short of the total elimination of the political
opposition in all its forms, and particularly the RPF supporters
(who, in the eyes of those orchestrating the massacres, automatically
included all Tutsis) and the preservation of the power of
a small clique.(71)
It is hard to say how many Rwandans have been killed since
the Hutu uprising of 1959. In recent years, punctuated by
RPF guerrilla war, the targets of the carnage have been Tutsi
and other moderates who happened to favor opposition parties
to Major-General Juvenal Habyarimana's regime. But until
the invasion of 1990, Tutsi lives were the prominent, if
not only target of planned violence. The massacre between
1959 and 1963 took 100,000 Tutsi lives, and forced 200,000
into exile. The jacquerie broke out from time to time (whether
initiated by Hutu or by Tutsi incursive attacks across borders
from Uganda) without anyone paying careful attention to its
toll. It seems further difficult to estimate the number of
victims of the war since 1990.
In contrast, starting in April of 1994, using "the
Nazi industrialized method of genocide," in a matter
of ten weeks Rwandan extremists (militias and army, and Hutu
civilians) killed between 500,000 and one million people,
and forced nearly half of the surviving population to seek
protection in neighboring countries. Even in the refugee
camps, over 50,000 "people have died from disease since
they first crossed into Zaire in mid-July."(72) And,
still now, "people are being killed every day for just
talking about going back to Rwanda".(73) As Robert Block
related:
Much of Africa's most densely populated country has become
a hollow, wind-swept land of rolling hills and smoking volcanoes.
Where there are people, they live in ghost towns or in displaced persons camps
where they are looked after and fed by foreigners. In rural areas controlled
by the victorious Tutsisthere are farmers and soldiers and hardly anyone else:
few if any shopkeepers, no barbers, no street vendors, no officials. There are
no police, no courts, no judges, no law. The capital of Kigali still has less
than half of its 350,000 pre-war population.(74)
IV. Glimpses of Hope
The new power configuration in Kigali reveals the tension
between nightmare and hope set up in the introduction. It
shows that there is still room for hope in poverty-stricken
and violence-laden Africa. A democratic and multiracial South
Africa, under the enlightened leadership of President Nelson
Mandela and the African National Congress, stands as the
best beacon of such hope. The Namibian and Ugandan experiments
fall within this same category. Similarly, in Rwanda bereft
by the "most brutal and horrific confrontation" this
century has witnesseda "rebuke" to Africa(75) emerged
a new hope, embodied in the RPF and its coalition government.
In fact, in its eight-point program the Front made public
before it invaded Rwanda across from Uganda, the removal
of "the system which generates refugees" was an
explicit goal along with "democracy and national unity".(76)
In practical terms, this means that the potential for inclusion
and inclusiveness as political tools for bringing about national
unity and societal cohesion is there. A first step in that
direction, once the refugees return home, is to be found
in the interim cabinet in which "parties other than
the R. P. F. obtained over 50 percent of the posts.(77) There
resides a potential for a lasting solution to the crisis.
Besides this internal political dimension of the Rwandan
nightmare lie the regional and international aspects. An
immediate regional concern is the Zaire of General Mobutu.
Mobutu's regime over years since its coming to power operated
as an advanced outpost of the Western interests in the region.
Mobutu's own ambition to play a regional hegemon fueled his
lust for power, making him a puppet who reigned with an iron
fist over his people he has rendered more and more destitute.
His hostile resistance, over 4 years, to the national urge
to promote political openness does not make him suited to
play any major role in the eventual denouement of the Rwandan
crisis, although we must reckon with the very presence in
his country of over 2 million of the latest refugee influx.
This 25 th hour tragic exodus of refugees into Zaire, it
may well be suspected, could be the outcome of the French
intelligence working hand-in-hand with that of Zaire through
the high command of "Operation Turquoise," the
French forces in the so-called "Safe Zone" along
which borders with Zaire the huge flow of refugees was recorded.
Mobutu's close relations to the Habyarimana regime, his own
long political alliance with West-European imperial powers,
makes him untrustworthy in the process to bring peace into
Rwanda. The world awaits the day the big powers will eventually
put someone like Mobutu into quarantine.
Although suspected of backing Tutsi claims, Uganda may play
a positive stabilizing role in the region first through its
attempt to resolve its own national question and also through
the demonstration effect of its democratic experiment in
case this is successful. Tanzania must be given credit for
its role in the region. It must be induced to initiate and
effect a sub-regional non-aggression pact and a mechanism
of consultation at the highest level, which must hold periodical
and rotational meetings. Such action should be tried in concerted
effort with Uganda, and must include all the Great Lakes
Region countries. The last chance of peace, however, resides
in the joint economic and social development efforts that
remain to be undertaken. It must be remembered that the volatility
of the social situation in both Rwanda and Burundi demands
that no time and no opportunity is wasted.
Can Rwanda count on the international community of states?
The answer to this question is an inqualified yes! However,
caution is recommended in the face of the overall response
of the international community of states to the traumatic "senseless
massacre and genocide"(78) that afflicted Rwanda. Whether
out of "empathy fatigue" or because of being frightened
away by the mismanaged operation(79) in Somalia, selfish
national interests pre-empted states reactions following
the massacre of April 1994. Eventually, too little was delivered
too late and under conditions which are least amenable to
human dignity. The most tragic yet was "that Africa,
rather than moving decisively to prevent the massacre that
took place, sat back and looked to the world community for
intervention."(80)
A. What Is To Be Done
My personal sympathy lies with individual citizens's actions,
no matter where they live. Given the unfettered Christian
faith of the Rwandan people, it is my suggestion that both
as human beings (susceptible to be moved by the gloomy spectacle
of young children and babies crying on the dead bodies of
their parents or teens carrying the corpses of their younger
brothers or sisters),(81) and as Christians, we mobilize
resources to help the Rwandan people to return home and return
to life. Pressure must be put on the U. S. government so
as to bring to an end the old Cold War policy in which an
umbilical cord of security and mutual concern links the United
States only to Europe. Such an ethnocentric attitude, incompatible
with the universalism inherent in a superpower role, is counter-productive
to the lives and freedoms of the people who inhabit the non-European
regions of the world.
Humanitarian interventions must not aim to feed public relations
only. For interventions designed to shape and sell the self-serving
image of a good, well-intended, generous, well-disposed and
caring nation cannot be and have not proven effectual. When
they are not "too little too late," such interventions
do not address the root causes of the crisis. They reshuffle
the symptoms of the crisis, but leave the root causes intact.
Like paramecia in hibernation, after the winter of outcries
and condemnations passed, these causes resurface ever stronger.
New conflicts erupt that keep aid and relief industries busy.
This is the self-reproductive cycle of conflict and violence.
In more concrete terms, what can we do to help the people
of Rwanda retake possession of their country and their lives?
The UN Secretary-General, Dr. Boutros Boutros Ghali, rightly
observed in his Agenda for Peace that to pre-empt and prevent
war, we must deal with "the deepest causes of conflict:
economic despair, social injustice, and political oppression."(82)
I posited earlier that the crisis is eminently political.
Dispossessed of their land, deprived of any meaningful social
positions in their own society, subjugated, dominated and
oppressed, there were not many avenues left to the majority
of the people but to shake, neutralize, and throw into the
dustbin of history the yoke of the few: be they feudal aristocrats,
oligarchic elite, civilian or military. The ultimate solution
to the crisis thus must be political. Contingency measures
are in order, however, to alleviate the suffering of those
involved in the delicate situation that prevails today both
in Rwanda and in neighboring countries. Indeed, relief efforts
must be guided by the cognizance that what happens in Rwanda
is likely to produce a demonstration effect in Burundi.
1. Emergency Assistance
Emergency assistance must be prompt and comprehensive. Indeed,
the new government of President Pasteur Bizimingu is faced
with two-fold bitter legacies, in addition to the smoldering
ethnic animosity that has fueled ethnicity since late 1959.
Nearly half of the Rwandan nation fled the country, with
the active killers and murderers dispersed amid them in their
refugee camps; on the other hand, the economy is shattered.(83)
Another element which has to be taken into account in providing
emergency aid in cases like this one is the "time-bomb" that
the defeated military represent: their leader, Major-General
Augustin Bizimungu has publicly declared his determination
to fight his way back to Kigali. Brian Atwood, President
Clinton's special envoy to Rwanda, warned that the military "are
planning to invade the country"(84). According to Radio
BBC, the soldiers have not disbanded and are seeking fresh
weapons and ammunitions.(85) In Eastern Zaire, especially,
soldiers are reportedly being trained for counter-offensive.
The true emergency here requires that "coping with the
present disaster" go "hand in hand with thinking
about the future."(86) The inadequacy of the international
community's response to the crisis that I underlined earlier
must be qualified here. The sluggish international response
was punctuated by the tergiversation and indecision of the
UN, and exacerbated by the lack of resources that bred inaction
on the part of the OUA. All three connived to create a unique
and unparalleled precedent: over half a million human livesthat
could have been sparedwere lost in a carefully planned genocide;
and another over 2 million humans were instructed or forced
to leave the country by the same agents that committed the
genocide, and that the belated international responses have
been feeding in the refugee camps scattered in neighboring
countries. One wonders what motivations stand behind the
UN Security Council's handling of the Rwandan crisis; or,
for that matter, what caused the big economic powers' unwillingness
to let the UN perform the mission, or to get individually
involved. This situation has been a test case of the independence
of the international body.
Ironically, however, the refugee crisis received an attention
far greater than the muted outrage that followed the genocide.
The US Administration committed about $500 million and thousands
of troops. While the United Nations sought to raise $465
million from its office in Geneva. But given the state of
the economy, the extent of the slaughter, the number of the
refugees, and the threats that non-disarmed former governmental
troops constitute, emergency measures that fall short of
becoming permanent assets for the reconstruction of the country
cannot help to stabilize the new Rwanda and its government.
Political and development assistance must be jointly delivered
to make emergency aid viable and create a secure lease on
the future.
2. Political and Developmental Assistance.
Without the political and developmental assistance, emergency
aid will only fall into a bottomless hole. The fundamental
political action likely to challenge the root causes of the
Rwandan nightmare is dealt with in more theoretical terms
in the last section of this paper. What follows underscores
the political dimension of the emergency phase and prepares
the ground for a more structural action.
Traditional conflict management considers these two phases
as unconnected. This is one of the big mistakes of past experiences.
To act to lessen the threats underlined earlier, these political
and developmental measures must be taken as a way of setting
in motion confidence-building measures.
One such measure that may appear draconian but is vitally
indispensable would consist in regrouping former government
soldiers and militias in neighboring countries away from
civilian populations they have manipulated into exile. Political
figures of the defeated government may be induced to assemble
in a quarter that is shared neither with the armed forces
nor with the civilians. This separate encampment is designed
to limit, if not prevent, the continuing brooding of hatred
and politicization of refugees by those who committed the
massacres in the first place.
To sort out the refugees before they settle in different
camps may not be easy task. It may exacerbate the already
extremely harassing tasks of relief organizations and agents
and other officials and volunteers. Yet, there is no substitute
to this option if the desired goal is to pre-empt a new surge
of violence in the near future. The first two weeks following
the takeover of the capital must be essentially devoted to
the sorting out and encamping of refugees by category of:
soldiers, political officers, and civilians.(87)
Discriminatory encamping of refugees appears à priori unjust
vis-à-vis those who lost in the confrontation which
caused the refugee flow. It is nonetheless necessary as no
other option exists that pre-empts a new surge of violence
by cutting the grass from under the feet of those likely
to initiate it by way of revenge or plain chance. To make
this measure effective would require a total embargo of weapons
and ammunitions to both sides in Rwanda. The embargo applied
to the new hosts of Kigali, coupled with the disarming of
the soldiers before their repatriation, reduces the imbalance
in favor of the new government, creates a unique situation
likely to set Africa apart from the politics of brutal force
and violence which has prevailed the world over since the
Westphalian system settled in.
To disarm the soldiers before they return to Rwanda would
help or compel them to lower their stakes; it sends a message
to the soldiers that they are returning home not as soldiers
but as citizens; it would place a new responsibility on the
government to welcome every returning refugee as a citizen
on equal footing, without discrimination, whether positive
or negative. This measure also lowers the cost of reconstruction
as it does not put any additional pressure on the government
to automatically absorb a good proportion of returnee soldiers
to become part of the armed forces. Reintegration must be
resolved in terms of re-conversion: while keeping the size
of the army down, this approach reduces the functional and
structural costs of managing state machinery and reinforces
the potential for increasing governmental and national output.
Of itself this action aims at starting a process of disarming
the African state. This is no place to lay out all the contours
of this dramatic proposition. The foundations for it are
obvious. One central tenet deserves just mentioning here:
African armies are one essential cause of the backwardness/underdevelopment
of the continent.
To see defence spending as a cause of underdevelopment runs
contrary to the opinion which considers the military as " an
important agent of development;" indeed, in Odetola's
review terms, "the most effective supervisory agency
for directed [social] change" and economic development.(88)
In this framework the military becomes the sole guarantor
of social and political stability, a sine qua non for social
and economic development. Thus a positive correlation is
suggested between defense spending and growth, which invites
to believe that local weapons production plants not only
promote development but help also eliminate dependency.
The opposite opinion sustains that local industries for
the manufacturing of weapons and ammunitions rather "restructure" than
eliminate dependence.(89) Besides, not many African countries
(perhaps South Africa, Nigeria and Libya) own African weapons
and ammunitions factory funded by African capital and run
by African intellectual expertise to promote technology that
subsequently sustains African economy. Moreover, those concerned
about social and human development insist rather rightly
on the correlation between defense spending and social welfare
and posit that armaments adversely affect social welfare
in general, and constitute a "cause of underdevelopment" in
Third World countries.(90) The truth of the matter is that "militarization
distorts and inhibits the development process in all sectors
of world society, especially in those which are weakest and
poorest."(91) To say nothing of "the human costs
of failures in development" which "can have far
greater long-term effects than even large-scale non-nuclear
war."(92) The very case under consideration calls for
almost no caution when assessing the impact of foreign "military
assistance and" unbridled "weapons trade opportunities." Under
a telling title, Born Arming: Development and Military
Power in New States, Mullins suggests, at the conclusion
of his seminal work, "that military assistance produces
dependence not independence, promotes stagnation not development,
results in insecurity not security."(93) If the concern
is collective security and people's peace, as it should and
must be, the most hopeful direction to a future of promising
social concord and peacefully sustained political justice
lies in the demilitarization and disarming of the African
state.
For the same reasons, in case soldiers cannot be disarmed
before their return, every attempt should be made to disarm
them not too long after their arrival in their home country.
The creation of one single-army and the army size can, in
either hypothesis, be predicated against the real security
threats and needs of the nation and not the political outbids
of either side and the increasing build-up of violence that
such practice nurtures.
The above measures call for a strong peace-keeping force
under the command of a UN-appointed officer whose deputy,
as a matter of principle, must be an African homologous of
identical military ranking. The strong peace-keeping force
compensates for the down-grading of the national army and
operates during the transition period to build the confidence
of the people in themselves as they relearn how to interrelate.
The transition, in this specific case, should be long enough
to allow such a slow process of psychological and cultural
healing to take place.
A unique action that will operate as a catalyst for such
healing and will ensure its long term effectiveness and viability
is education. Education will facilitate the healing and promote
adhesion to it. Along with the disarming of soldiers, and
resettlement of refugees upon their return, this constitutes
the number-one priority. Thus the need to launch a strong
drive for education, large-scale teacher training, building
of schools. This is the domain where confidence building
measures must be emphasized. Here, also, must the pursuit
of equality be underscored. For, it is through the channel
of school and the church that the venom of ethnic fear, hatred,
and insecurity has been passed over to generations. School,
without the shadow of doubt, has, since the German establishment,
been a major asset whereby Tutsi secured their domination.
Even after independence, when things changed, Tutsi withdrew
into seminaries which became, as a result, the "havens
of Tutsi ascendancy, and the education system, a threatening
stronghold of undiminished Tutsi power."(94) Under successive
Hutu regimes, and particularly under Habyarimana, ethnicization
became the key principle of, and the first condition of access
to, both education and public service. Although no domain
is to be neglected, it is especially in this field of education
that the most profound therapeutic action must be undertaken.
Successes here will both condition and determine successes
everywhere else.
The school system need be democratized in terms of students,
staff, and teachers. That is why international support is
necessary to allow and encourage the interim government to
deepen, widen, consolidate, and strengthen reconciliation
efforts and a policy of inclusion. It remains evident, given
the historical causes of the conflict, that economic empowerment
of the Rwandans coupled with their democratic political participation
and involvement in decision-making process will siphon the
venom of ethnic hatred and antagonism. It becomes necessary
to mobilize international efforts to help the RPF devise,
develop and implement an immediate return/resettlement and
economic development program.
In any case, the earlier the refugees return to Rwanda,
the better off they would be, and the less painful and more
economical the support provided for them would be for the
international community.
B. The Solution of the Future: Setting the Groundwork
for Collective Hegemony
A question of both theoretical and practical relevance one
may ask in this case is who to blame for the recurring blood
bath in this country. Who is the villain? As relevant as
it seems, finger-pointing will not be of any major help if
the physical and emotional wounds are to be healed.
As a matter of fact, it may be possible to identify those
who were part of the chain of command that ordered to execute
and/or eliminate people for one reason or another. But is
it enough to punish the head without punishing the arms which
executed the orders? How likely is it to identify all those
involved in carrying out these orders without error, so as
to do justice to all those who have suffered by their hands?
To what extent would not vengeance only help plant new seeds
for another cycle of vendetta to be dreaded in the life of
the Rwandan people?
Obviously, there is no easy and definite answer to these
questions. The solution of collective hegemony I am proposing
is supported by two main considerations. The first one is
an old African conflict resolution principle. According to
this principle, if one throws out every fire wood that becomes
smoky, the risk is great that the hearth may become empty.
Theoretically, this rejects capital punishment and expatriation
as means of rendering justice since both may reduce population
by ways which are unnatural, and therefore, ethically wrong.
In practical terms, the principle expresses the actual difficulty
of exacting a proportionality between the guilt and the reparation:
in the best scenario, it is advised, we may only approximate
the actual fault line, unless one applies the vengeance law
of eye for eye. Juridically, the intention behind the act
that calls for reparation and the one behind a reparation
act cannot be identical and should not coincide at all. If
at all, the proportionality will only be an artificial construct.
If we cannot in our desire for justice erase every detail
of the wrong committed without bordering on vengeance, this
principle calls strongly for toleration. None the less, toleration
is no exception to punishment: the philosophical foundation
of the principle places primacy on the survival of the community
and the compelling obligation to make cohabitation possible
within such a community.
There is thus still room to punish the authors of the bloodshed.
For there should be no amnesty for war criminals: murderers
and torturers in the Rwandan military units and in the militias,
and their officers, and going up the chain of command to
political leaders must be brought to justice. Something of
the sort of a War Crimes Tribunal as set forth for the former
Yugoslavia may be appropriate in the Rwandan instance. The
difficulty remains, however, the reliability of evidentiary
leads more likely to be gathered from refugees who have been
trained by their colonial rulers and their Rwandan post-independence
partners to hate each other as if they were of different
antagonistic racial stock. Besides, any attempt at settlement
in Rwandawhere Hutu have been ravaging the countrymust equally
help ease tensions in Burundiwhere Tutsi have engaged in
equally appalling brutalities against Hutu. Additionally,
it would be an uneasy bet to try to single out with neat
demarcations who belongs to one ethnic group from who does
not.(95) This is not to suggest, like Dr. Vellut, that the
pogroms were a "people's genocide, collectively carried
out, with, at the end, the perspective of an ethnically homogeneous
territory."(96) I showed earlierand Dr. de Waal confirmed
this in his "Genocidal State" that the mass killing
was not "driven by antagonisms as old as the hills,
which cannot be stopped, and for which no individuals can
be held responsible;" nor, was it perpetrated by "uneducated
peasants immune to ideological exhortations".(97) The "racist
ideology [may have] passed over the head of uneducated peasants,
but it was not they who directed the slaughter; it was the
army officers, bourgmestres, schools teachers and party officialsin
many cases forcing Hutu peasants to kill their neighbors
at the point of a gun".(98) The point is that this distinction
between those who "ordered," "directed" the
barbarity and those who "executed" it sometimes
fearing for their own lives would be instrumental to the
process of healing and reconciliation.
The second consideration for toleration on the road to collective
hegemony stems from the fact that the true and real villain
in the case under examination is to be found in the long
standing alienation existing within Rwanda and that has triggered
time and time again an unusually large-scale blood bath here
as well as in the neighboring Burundi.(99) This alienation
is a product of hate and fear. It is perpetuated by the fears
of minority Tutsi that giving up their centuries-long dominant
position would entail their absolute and complete elimination
as a community by the Hutu majority. How to eliminate such
alienation remains the biggest puzzle of the history of man.
Writing of the Burundi case, a former US Ambassador to Bujumbura
(Burundi) observed rightly: "until the either-or mentality
of dominating or being eliminated is overcome, it is doubtful
that the Tutsi will engage in the process of working things
out."(100) The same is true of the Tutsi of Rwanda.
More important yet is the truth that until such a false dichotomy
and the mentality which sustains it is overcome, the very
history of these two landlocked Central African countries
teaches us that life for any of the three ethnic groups is
to be a permanent and deadly nightmare. For "violence
begets violence and the violence becomes more atrocious in
each instance".(101)
This sad lesson implies that none of the communities either
in Rwanda or Burundi can achieve ethnic hegemony at the expense
of the other ones. To be effectual, to avoid the pitfalls
of past history, and to face the challenges of modern history,
nationalism, in the African context at large, and especially
in our current case, cannot and must not be exclusive. It
must overcome competitive elite politics vying for prebendal
financial, political, and personal security. The basic equation
of nation building here cannot be the tangential intersection
of exclusive interests, but rather the common fountain of
converging aspirations and dreams.
As human beings, Rwandans of every condition, social status,
and biological stock whether Twa, Hutu, or Tutsi, long for
a hospitable land where one can live in peace, acquire property,
have children, enjoy freedom from want, oppression, and domination.
Not only does everyone have the right to a nationality, but
none of the Rwandese people shall be arbitrarily deprived
of their nationality.(102) Moreover, as the poet Langston
Hughes warns us, a "a dream" that is "deferred" produces
no security for any side involved. Whether it dries up like
a raisin in the sun, festers like a sore and runs, or stinks
like a rotten meat, or sags or just explodes, it is potentially
poisonous and actually infectious:(103) it is conducive to
social depression to be discharged through aggressive and
violent règlements de compte.
The magnitude of the destruction, the dismal state of the
Rwandan national economy and the abyssal depth of the social
needs of both recent and old refugees call for a conscious
and deliberate effort at all levels to arouse and liberate
the capacities of ordinary people in the satisfaction of
whose expectations the new leaders of Rwanda must ground
the foundation of the legitimacy and stability of their regime.
These expectations are at once economic, social, psychological
and political. Politically, there must be room for an increasingly
broad participation in public life which must become the
bargaining place between the main cultures that make up the
social fabric of Rwanda. Although political parties might
be of some import in exacting some order at this stage, long
term prospects for peaceful stability grounded in economic
justice and social equality will rise only as a result of
collective hegemonic democracy based on cultural pluralism.
Elite party politics failed Africa. It failed Rwanda through
its force and persecution politics.
Nationalism, also, can achieve its historical role of unifying
what remains of the brothers and sisters who now show evident
signs of weariness with fratricidal slaughter. To keep it
from devolving into its destructive formalso known to the
world outside Africa(104) that has been at work in Rwanda
since before independence, it must become a liberating framework
for inter-ethnic interaction, cultural emancipation and exchange
within Rwanda itself rather than the old scheme of "colonial
partnership against the Hutu,"(105) or neocolonial self-righteousness
against the Tutsi.
It is my contention that the RPF, given its political agenda,
and being the embodiment of only one-sixth of the total population,
has as its only successful alternative such integrative,
non-exclusionary, nationalism designed to foster collective
hegemony of all the Rwandan people. It is an option that
would move up the Rwandan people toward an equitable, interdependent
society in which exploitation and oppression of the weakest
of its members give way to societal control over collective
direction of its evolution.
A society of collective hegemony is neither exploitative
nor oppressive: it strives to ensure to everyone "equality
of conditions, or in other terms, equal access for everyone
to the means of self-improvement and joy." For "that
is the law that the voice of justice strictly imposes upon
humanity."(106) It is a person, not thing, or, to be
sure, a people-centered and oriented society to be grounded
in freedom and justice and in which priority is given to
programs of social uplift at the expense of military build-up.
In the limbo of the Rwandan ethnic hostilities, the project
of collective hegemony requires a special promissory note
which must be redeemed. This promissory note is cultural.
Cultural democracy through cultural pluralism is to be the
main ingredient of any political cuisine that may flatter
Africans' taste and promote their appetite and desire to
get involved in the public debate and take charge of their
own lives. In particular, for the Rwandese people to definitely
turn their backs on their somber past and enlist a future
of hope and self-realization, they must work patiently to
free themselves from two currently seething psychological
setbacks. To paraphrase Tocqueville, Tutsi minority shall
overcome "their views of the innateness of their own
superiority," and Hutu majority and Twa shall overcome "their
enmity for the humiliation and suffering" and oppression "they
have experienced". To prevent false racism and ethnicity
from "perpetually haunt[ing] the imagination" of
the Rwandese people, "like a painful dream,"(107)
they are to free themselves from ethnically based prejudices,
distorting assumptions "about how they got where they
areand what they are doing there anyway."(108)
This would be a two-pronged action. In the first instance,
Rwandan society, like any other national society, is e
pluribus unum. The first move must clearly acknowledge
the parts that form such society: while vying for a unum,
that is, a national entity, free of the current polarizing
dilemmas and convulsions, each of the three groups inhabiting
Rwanda deserves plain and full recognition as a cultural
entity. For, if life is made up of things we may change more
or less easily, history has not recorded instances in which
one changed one's grandfather.(109)
The healing movement, in this primary essence, seeks progressively
to alter structures and institutions so as to make them truly
inclusive. That is "corporate" multicultural politics,
in opposition to its so-called "liberal" veneer
that argues that current generations are under no obligations
at all to seek solutions for old problems created by their
fathers. (110) The advantage of a self-conscious multicultural
society is that it allows each of its groups to value, take
pride in, and publicly display its own distinctive qualities
and features, that is, its "quintessential self".
While "groups are accorded respect, individuals are
offered `equal opportunities'". (111)
To cement the fabric of the society, reduce chances of conflict,
and pre-empt future explosions of boorishness, another step
is necessary: the multicultural politics must be complemented
and furthered by a politics of inter-cultural communication.
Left to itself, multiculturalism, even in its corporate form,
may become self-deluding, narcissic, or even ethnicist. As
multiculturalism underscores group rights and individual
rights as well, and calls for "major compensatory measures
to make up for massive dimensions" of multifaceted discriminations
of the past,(112) the absence of such measures, or any serious
flaw in their dispensation could easily lead to ethnicization
or polarization of inter-group relations and inflame their
lingering hatred. It becomes absolutely necessary to establish
a healthy dialogue among the various cultural segments that
make up the population.
This dialogue is assumed by and through inter-cultural
communication. The main difference between inter-cultural
and multicultural communication is that the former takes
the debate and exchange among societal segments one step
further from where the latter left it. Indeed, in a multicultural
setting, the various groups operate as entrenched, autonomous,
self-celebrated cultural entities. Groups interaction operates
by ways of spectacles and performances that are attended
on the basis of friendship, empathy, sympathy, condescension
or pure curiosity. Obviously, all these instances are valued
and appreciated as means of distraction, and often as sources
of information too. Yet, they do not foster any in-depth
dialogue likely to open up avenues of collaboration and partnership
to sustain societal and community togetherness. If at all,
the dialogue is kept in the low-profile zone of informative
exchange.
On the contrary, dialogue is a necessity in an inter-cultural
society. Here, in fact, societal segmentsboth as groups and
in their various individual components, and their cultural
lives, their aspirations and their dreams, are grasped as
in constant, open and moving market where they may-and actually
docollide or collude, interact, intersect, overlap or diverge.
The inter-cultural society acknowledges the dynamism involved
in such complex process: it "acknowledges the difficulties,
misunderstandings and disgruntled exchanges occurring when
and where" such give-and-take dynamic is in motion.
More importantly, however, it does not consider any of these
as insurmountable or indomitable obstacles, but rather as
many "fertile grounds [all] pregnant with creative possibilities".(113)
This model of inter-cultural communication, for one thing,
fits perfectly into the African traditions of palaver where
conflicting, even diverging, opinions are never to be considered
as obstacles, but rather as invitations to pursue the dialogue
until a common ground agreeable to all sides is found. On
the other hand, the Western modality of cultivating opposition
is alien to most African cultures. For instance, the term
opponent/opposition does not exist in my own language; the
same may be true of many other African languages. In lieu
of these most Africans would resort to the categories of
enemy/enmity. And God knows that most Africansat least in
their traditional settingsdo not like letting things evolve
to the level of enmity. Or, if so, it is a major responsibility
of the elderly to talk it out and bring it down to the level
of resolvable conflict.
Building on the role of the elderly in conflict resolution
in traditional Africa, I posit that a sustained inter-cultural
democracy is the only path to salvation in Rwanda and Burundi.(114)
Inter-cultural democracy is grounded in four principles.
It accepts, fosters, and develops the principle of partnership,
acknowledging the inevitability of disagreements and building
on areas of agreement. It calls for collaboration, and to
that end, emphasizes the necessity of selecting issue areas
which are of importance to all sides involved. It operates
as special custodian of the society's pluralist values which
it helps to further. It keeps conflict to its minimum by
cultivating the willingness of all sides of the political
and social spectrum, to accept the inevitability of differences,
to respect reasoned disagreement and to keep litmus-test
issues to a minimum.(115)
Of itself, a regime of collective hegemony constitutes
a confidence building measure and process in a volatile and
hostile environment like Rwanda. It regards no single group
as a pariah. By validating every group culture and giving
each side a chance to be heard, and creating common ground
for a minimal platform of joint collective action, it levels
off perceived insecurity on all sides and reverses the political
game from a zero-sum to something mutually beneficial. In
providing a continuum for collaboration or a "nexus
for cooperation," whereby the rules of the game are
clearly delineated and known to each actor, and are not spelt
out in ethnic terms, this regime de-escalates stakes and
allows optimum resource extraction and allocation to satisfy
collective rather than individual and idiosyncratic goals.
When survival is no longer at stake, pre-eminent group position
is no longer perceived as vital. Therefore, the rule of force
can give way to that of dialogue and cooperation: ethnicity
is de-emphasized. It creates therefore the optimal conditions
for solid institutions building processes likely to benefit
from the support of all sides despite cross sections interests
at variance.(116) Thus, it can be argued, it creates the
best chances for the legitimization of a regime and its institutions.
To be viable, such a regime, built on a solid groundwork
of internal legitimacy and cultural dialogue, would require
from the international community, especially from the big
powers, a new culture of politics. The drama of African international
relations is that Africa's decolonization, as elsewhere in
the Third World, was unidimensional. The colonized people
were decolonized, but the colonizers were not. Theoretically
the bondage of colonial control is over, but the colonial
powers never felt the need to free themselves from the "colonial
neurosis": the colonial ideology, the settler mentality
and behavior. That is precisely what needs to be done. Europe
needs to be decolonized. African relations to Europe need
to be decolonized. Africa's relations to the United States
in particular must be dislodged from the quarter of open
complicity with European colonial powers where the Truman
administration housed them by turning his back on the Atlantic
Charter and choosing the European side in the issue of decolonization.
Old European humanism will neither support nor facilitate
the emergence of the regime of collective hegemony. It must
be recalled that until Europe got "crammed with riches" it
grabbed from the so-called "new continents" it
enslaved, Europeans enjoyed and experienced de jure no
humanism nor human rights. The old tradition of European
monarchs and other autocrats granting rights to their subjects
translated into the modern Westphalian system of the state
elite granting rights to the people from whom they rented
their authority. Taken to its international dimension, this
anomaly translates into the arrogance of European powers
that exempted Africa from self-determination rule at the
Versailles Peace Conference to set up the mandate system
under which Rwanda was to fall to the Belgians who, after
the Germans, institutionalized the naked oppression of the
country by fashioning racial prejudices and creating and
intensifying social stratification.(117) The same oddity
has precluded the North-South Dialogue from ever reaching
any positive conclusions to the satisfaction of the "wretched
of the earth." It has, it seems, forever corrupted the
political system to the point of reversing the order of normalcy
and the relations between the governed and those who govern.
One of the outcomes of the Westphalian state-system has been
that today, instead of the people granting and limiting the
rights of the governing elite, it is the other way around:
it is the governing élites who grant or uphold rights
to the governed masses of the people. Intrinsically, to reject
a politics of violence that has tainted and subjugated our
world and adopt instead a more humane and humanist and liberating
web of relations among free people and countries, that is,
to achieve the "global village" we all dream of,
we must review our politics of human rights. Fundamentally,
all human beings, regardless of race, gender, and social
stations in life, are equal: we all have every right and
the right to everything.
This view of things calls into play three corollaries. These
are inevitable actions that are urgently needed to be taken
in order to create a viable, consistent, and enduring environment
for peace, justice and security in the world, and all especially,
in the places of critical crisis like Rwanda, Burundi, or
former Yugoslavia. The endless tergiversation about the crisis
in the former Yugoslavia invites one to believe that the
gun-boat diplomacy, even translated into peace-keeping agency,
cannot breed humanism. Recourse to the use of force must
be discouraged, starting with the big powers imposing self-restraints
in resorting to, or promoting the use of, force. The old
ways of responding to crisis and conflict are proving ineffectual,
even deleterious.
Responsibility must be given to the people to control their
own destiny. This may require at once abstaining from exporting
institutional models, or promoting our own side in the struggle,
largely unresolved in many African countries, to dominate
the public arena and to control resources allocation. Democratically
inclined countries and individuals, in order to bring about
a world secure enough to devote time, energy, and resources
to the full development of humankind, must support the people
rather than the power elite. That is, a world where the scourge
of war and violence politics is eliminated; and where the
incommensurable resources squandered to develop, increase,
and perfect the means of killing or maiming men, women, and
children could be invested to relieve the world and humankind
from those dangers that threaten their existence altogether.(118)
In this same vein, a dramatic alteration of aid-politics
is in order: instead of giving aid that does not aid,(119)
donor countries which are a consumer of primary products
and others from Africa may buy the latter at a price that
is substantial enough to allow into these countries a flow
of resources likely to cover both subsistence and development
needs. What Africa needs most is the protection of her production.(120)
This would be a starting-point of a new, humanist economics
whereby consumers and producers are credited with equal rights
which are given equal regards in the transaction between
Africa and the Western nations.
The next century will be marked by increasing egalitarian
and survival demands by the have-nots and the "wretched
of the earth."(121) To meet such demands the international
community must invent, without delay, a new dynamic of neutral,
that is, raceless empathy. To try to "set afoot a new
man," aloof from and above the appalling cynicism and
violence we've witnessed in Rwanda and Burundi, and to a
lesser extent in other parts of Africa, no other task is
more urgent than to set the African men and women free from
hunger, free from ignorance, and free from poverty. That
requires us all to resolutely expand the circle of those
for whom we care.
Christophe Kougniazondé is a Ph.D. candidate
in Government and International Studies at the University
of Notre Dame. He is currently completing a dissertation
on "Militarization and Political Violence in Tropical
Africa." He is from Benin, West Africa. He can be contacted
at Christopher.Kougniazonde@nd.edu.
NOTES
1 This paper is articulated around the Rwanda
crisis of 1994. Its analyses and recommendations may, however,
apply to Burundi, or even to most African internal conflicts
