European colonists brought a myth with its own long history, a myth tailored to account for what looked to them like an anomaly: civilization in darkest Africa, kings and aristocracies and peasants, an advanced social order a little like Europe’s. Tutsis, many colonists seem to have believed, descended from the biblical Ham, the banished son of Noah. Tutsis had degenerated through long contact with the inferior race of native blacks, the Hutus. But Tutsis were still Caucasian under their black skins. Most likely they had come from Ethiopia, but the important point was that they had come from elsewhere on their civilizing mission. A Belgian who was for many years in charge of administering Burundi, Pierre Ryckmans, described the situation as he saw it in 1931. (He used the terms “Batutsi” and “Bahutu,” derived from the Kirundi plural.) “The Batutsi were destined to rule; their mere demeanor lends them considerable prestige over the inferior races that surround them…. There is nothing surprising about the fact that the less shrewd, simpler, more spontaneous, and more confiding Bahutu braves let themselves be enslaved.” These ideas in themselves had consequences. But the administrative changes that embodied the ideas, the changes that the colonists imposed, mattered more.
The Germans and their successors, the Belgians, never occupied the colony in large numbers. Until the late 1930s, they were fewer than one thousand. They ruled, as is often said, indirectly. Essentially, they placed power in the hands of aristocratic Tutsis in Rwanda and of the ganwa and Tutsi aristocrats in Burundi. They left the shells of the old kingdoms in place, but made the system of government more remote from the population. And ethnicity became a central fact of life. The Belgians classified the natives ethnically—through a census, completed in the 1930s. From then on, every Rwandan and Burundian had a single fixed identity, inscribed on a card. More than ever before, one’s chances depended on whether the card read Hutu or Tutsi.
Not all Tutsis benefited. “Ordinary Batutsi who lived on the hills (who constituted at least 90 percent of all Batutsi) were invisible,” writes the historian Jean-Pierre Chrétien—invisible, that is, to the colonists. The great majority of Tutsis remained cow-keepers, many of whom did some farming, and, as before, they shared with Hutus the same religions (some 70 percent professed Christianity by the end of colonization), the same language, and the same hills. Many also shared harsh treatment from the Tutsi chiefs. But if you were a Hutu, your prospects were very grim. What little the colonist provided in the way of higher education, the real ticket to power and privilege, was reserved for a handful of Tutsis—and, in Burundi, for ganwa as well as some Tutsis. Most of the Hutus with important public positions lost their jobs and were replaced by Tutsis. Hutu farmers were forced to plant certain crops for the benefit of the colonist. The precolonial practice of enforced communal labor was greatly extended. All Tutsis were excused, but Hutus were obliged to work for nothing, as virtual slaves, sometimes for three days out of every six, on projects designed by the Belgians or the Tutsi chiefs. The Belgians gave the ganwa and Tutsi chiefs considerable autonomy—to extract this forced labor, to collect taxes from the peasants (more than occasionally with whips and canes)—and many chiefs grossly abused their power. One result of all this appears to have been periodic famines. Another was great resentment among Hutus, at least in Rwanda.
Historical inevitability is a fiction. But it is hard to read about the colonial past of Rwanda and Burundi and not imagine that it sealed the future.
According to the Historical Dictionary of Burundi, the Belgian settler Albert Maus is said to have been “pathologically anti-Tutsi.” Supposedly, he killed himself on learning of the victory of Prince Rwagasore’s political party in 1961.
Rwagasore was married to a Hutu and made his party multiethnic. He was very unpopular with the Belgian administrators because he demanded immediate independence for Burundi. According to the Historical Dictionary, there is some evidence that the Belgian Resident in Burundi encouraged Rwagasore’s political rivals to murder him: “Rwagasore must be killed!” the Resident supposedly said, adding, “Once the deed is accomplished, the lake is not too far away.”
There has been considerable debate as to the nature of the violence that immediately followed the assassination of Burundi’s President Ndadaye in 1993, particularly the massacres of Tutsis that occurred in many locales. Some have insisted that these were “spontaneous.” Others have said that there was considerable planning involved: that Hutu extremists seized the occasion to try to carry out pre existing plans for the extermination of Tutsis.
In July 1994, a group of human rights specialists from various countries issued a report on the aftermath of the assassination (Human Rights Watch and others, Commission internationale d’enquête sur les violations des droits de l’homme au Burundi depuis le 21 octobre 1993, Rapport Final, July 1994). It is an incomplete account of the massacres, but its tone seems evenhanded. It blames “important officers of the Burundian army, including the chief of staff,” for the assassination, which the officers, all of them Tutsi, surely knew would set off violence throughout the country. It also blames Hutu “provincial and local authorities” as well as the Hutu government ministers who fled Burundi and used Rwandan radio to “broadcast appeals for resistance.” The report states: “The ministers who made appeals for resistance could have used the same means of communication to call for an end to the massacres.” The report’s summary goes on:
In those places where a large number of Tutsi were killed, an important minority of local government officials participated in the summary executions or incited others to carry them out. In these communes, the killings began with detaining the Tutsi as hostages, often in public buildings. Tutsi government employees also used their positions and the resources of their posts to facilitate the killing of Hutu. These findings call into question the thesis that the violence was spontaneous, at least as a general explanation for the killings.
The Tutsi army, as it happened, reacted rather slowly. But around the time Deo crossed the border into Rwanda, back in 1993, fleeing Burundi, the army was following its old pattern:
The army and police used excessive and unnecessary force, including heavy machine guns of 14.5 mm and 20 mm cannons, armored vehicles, and helicopters, against a civilian population that was usually trying only to flee or to protect itself. The army and the police attacked communities where the Tutsi had been detained or killed. But they intervened also in communities where there had been no killings, thereby introducing the very violence that they were supposed to be quelling. In some cases they killed the civilian population themselves, and in some cases they provoked reprisals against the Tutsi.
Rwanda’s genocide began about six months after Ndadaye’s assassination, in April 1994, with the murder of Rwanda’s president. Burundi’s president, Ndadaye’s appointed successor, also died in the crash. Arguments as to who shot down the plane still continue, along with arguments as to how many were killed in the ensuing four months of slaughter. Most of the victims were Tutsis. But many Hutus were also killed, for opposing absolute Hutu power before the genocide, for being suspected of moderate views, for refusing to participate in the killing. Maybe some were killed for trying to save Tutsis. Some Hutus killed other Hutus for their land and possessions. Some Hutus died simply because they were mistaken for Tutsis.
It appears that a faction of Rwanda’s Hutu political elites began planning the extermination of Tutsis and Hutu enemies around 1992, two years after the expatriate and mainly Tutsi army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, invaded from Uganda. Some historians say that the RPF played an essential role in the genocide, by introducing violence into the situation. But from all I read, it seems as if Rwanda was by then already saturated with violence and the threat of violence. In any event, Rwanda’s genocide was, without any doubt, a state-sponsored slaughter. The faction that controlled the government saw its power and privileges threatened—by discontent and anger among the Hutu population, by an economic decline that fed popular unrest, and by international pressure that Rwa
nda become a multiparty democracy, pressure that increased after the invasion by the RPF. In August 1993, Rwanda’s president and the RPF signed a peace agreement, which would have ended the existing dictatorship. To the ruling faction, the agreement was anathema. In his book about the genocide, Philip Gourevitch writes that the preparations for mass slaughter got fully mobilized only after the peace agreement was signed—“only when Hutu Power was confronted by the threat of peace.”
The RPF invasion exacerbated the country’s economic problems. Mahmood Mamdani and others write that the fact of the invasion—its violence, the masses of internal refugees it created—was probably a temporary boon to the government, lending it legitimacy and popular support. The invasion also provided the extremists an ideal basis for a well-orchestrated campaign of virulent anti-Tutsi propaganda. The assassination of Ndadaye in Burundi in 1993—and the arrival in Rwanda of hundreds of thousands of Burundian Hutu refugees—gave anti-Tutsi propagandists additional material for articles in Kangura and broadcasts on Rwanda’s hate radio. Moreover, it is said that a number of Burundian Hutu refugees joined in killing Rwandan Tutsis.
A lot of the writing on Rwanda’s genocide can be seen as a search for causes of the violence, with some authors emphasizing one cause, others adducing concatenations of causes, primary and secondary: colonialism’s legacies (especially the propagation of the myth that Tutsis were a superior race of alien invaders); past and present violence that hardened ethnic prejudice and helped to beget further violence; political opportunism that took advantage of a largely uneducated population, imbued, some have said, with the habit of obedience; overpopulation, environmental degradation, and economic distress that led to competition for dwindling resources; the harmful and appalling role played by France and the criminally negligent response of the United Nations, the United States, and other Western powers, both to warnings of genocide and to the mass slaughter itself.
Of the scholars I read, Peter Uvin takes the greatest pains to adduce the possible causes and to discriminate among them, dismissing several that are widely mentioned. (The notion, for instance, that Rwandan peasants participated in mass violence because of their culture of obedience: “This is the same population that spends an inordinate amount of time and energy disobeying the messages that come from above,” writes Uvin.)
Uvin writes extensively about the role of international development aid—work in which he himself once participated, in both Rwanda and Burundi. As in Burundi, Rwanda’s economy and government were entirely interwoven with foreign aid and dependent on it. The administration of that aid, Uvin writes, was a vehicle “for exclusion and for the reproduction of privileges for a small elite.” What Uvin calls “the development enterprise,” far from improving the lives of the majority, increased inequality and fostered “prejudice, humiliation, and infantilization” among the peasant majority. To summarize Uvin’s argument: international aid, all unwittingly, fostered “structural violence,” an essential element in the acute violence that overwhelmed Rwanda in 1994. Structural violence was, undeniably, the substrate on which long-standing institutionalized prejudice operated. “If one recognizes the condition of structural violence, one can understand that profound racist prejudice and outbursts of murderous violence are part of a continuum of ever-present violence in which violence is the answer to violence, and in which victims temporarily become perpetrators and then victims again.”
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