Ethnic Politics and Democratic Transition in Rwanda by David Kiwuwa

Author:David Kiwuwa [Kiwuwa, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Freedom, Political Science, Political Process, General
ISBN: 9780415616089
Google: uGclH0p46ogC
Goodreads: 13714110
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-01-15T08:38:32+00:00

Reflections on Rwandan genocide

For a period of 100 days between April and July 1994, approximately 800,000 to just over one million men, women and children were massacred in Rwanda (African Rights 1995; Gourevitch 1998; Melvern 2000; Bhavnani and Backer 2000: 286). This highly organised and systematic extermination of the Tutsi (and methodical killing of moderate Hutu) by Hutu extremists decimated nearly two-thirds of the Tutsi population, leaving an indelible print on the country’s socio-political psyche. This genocide, while not the first attempt to exterminate the Tutsi as there had been previous large-scale massacres, achieved rather tragic consequences (United Nations 1996: 37). Sparked off by the assassination on 6 April 1994 of the Rwandan Hutu president, J. Habyarimana, along with his Burundian counterpart with the downing of their plane, a fuse to the carnage that was to follow had been lit. Within hours, the Tutsi extermination programme and purges of Hutu moderates had been set in motion, the intensity of which picked up pace in the following weeks and months. At a rate arguably five times faster than the Jewish holocaust, the Rwandan genocide resulted in ‘one of the highest casualty rates of any population in history from non-natural causes’ (Prunier 1995: 265). As Gourevitch (1998: 3) noted, ‘this was one of the most efficient mass killings since the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’. All the while, these massacres increasingly took on an ethnic character, more so when the Tutsi rebels intensified their attack on Rwanda during the ensuing civil war. The Rwandan genocide, while similar in intent to earlier genocides of Jews and Armenians, deviated in its framework (Destexhe 1995; Valentino 2001: 8). The irrational brutality and orgies of casual violence, mass involvement and intensity, and using violence explicitly as a means to an end, marked out Rwanda from other past genocides. This tragedy, while usually couched in ethnic terms, was erstwhile begging far more fundamental questions. Did the search for political liberalisation degenerate into systematic genocide and if so why? Or using Mann’s (1999: 19, 2004, see also Conversi 2006) logic, why and how did democracy have a darker side? This is a rather challenging question but one I shall seek to address.

The Rwandan genocide has been subjected to significant reductionism. Friedman (1999: 350) has reduced the event to some kind of unmitigated violence as a result of historical ‘tribal hatred’ borne of ancestral enmities and absence of state control. He notes that for the Hutu and Tutsi, ‘they just have brutal competition for scarce land, energy and water, with Tutsi and Hutu tribesmen taking turns downsizing each other to grab more resources for themselves’. A number of writers have advanced other grounds like state weakness or externally induced tensions (Collins 1998; Chossudovsky 1997: 115; Karnik 1998: 615; Jones 1995; 2001). Valentino, Fein and Krain’s works attribute this genocide to conditions of external international pressure or internal guerrilla threats, while Gurr and Harff (1994), Landis and Boucher (1987), Klinke et al. (1997), NURC (2000b: 6) and Magnarella (2005)

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