HISTORY OF THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE

To understand some of the issues to which gacaca must respond, it is necessary to briefly explore the key historical events preceding and dur­ing the genocide, focusing on the origins of violence in Rwanda.

Between April and July 1994, Rwanda experienced one of the most devastating waves of mass killing in modern history. In around 100 days, nearly three-quarters of the total Tutsi population (which constituted around 11 per cent of the overall population of Rwanda in 1994, while Hutu constituted nearly 84 per cent) were murdered and hundreds of thousands more exiled to neighbouring countries.^[15] What distinguishes the Rwandan genocide from other cases of mass murder in the twentieth century, and in particular from the genocide of Jews during the Second World War, is the use of low-technology weaponry, the mass involvement of the Hutu population in the killings, the social and cultural similarities of the perpetrators and victims, and the astonishing speed of the genocide. The majority of murders were carried out brutally with basic instruments such as machetes, spears and spiked clubs and often near victims’ homes.^[16]

Events in the early 1990s are important for our understanding of the genocide.^[17] On 1 October 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), com­prising many descendants of Tutsi refugees who fled Hutu violence in the 1960s, invaded Rwanda from Uganda.^[18] Government forces repelled the RPF and a guerrilla war broke out in the north-east of the coun­try.

Events both within and outside of Rwanda exacerbated ethnic tensions during this period. The assassination on 21 October 1993 of Burundian President Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu, by members of the Tutsi-led army, led to mass killings of Burundian Hutu and the exodus of thousands of refugees to Rwanda, sparking fears among Rwandan Hutu that the vio­lence would spill across the border. Many Hutu politicians - aided by extremist media sources such as the Hutu newspaper Kangura and the country's largest radio station Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) - used the violence in Burundi as justification to call for greater suppression of Tutsi in Rwanda. ^[21] Meanwhile, Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, supported by the French government,^[22] was training Hutu youth militias called interahamwe - Kinyarwanda for �those who stand together' or �those who fight together' - in order to attack Tutsi.^[23] As Alison Des Forges from HRW explains, before the genocide �[m]assacres of Tutsis and other crimes by the Interahamwe went unpunished, as did some attacks by other groups thus fostering a sense that violence for pol­itical ends was “normal”'.^[24]

On the night of 6 April 1994, President Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira were returning from regional talks in Tanzania. At around 8.30 p.m., as their plane neared Kayibanda Airport in Kigali, two missiles fired from near the airport's perimeter struck the aircraft, which crashed into the garden of the presidential palace, killing everyone onboard.

The killing spree spread rapidly beyond Kigali into towns and villages across Rwanda. In the following weeks, government leaders fanned out from the capital to incite the entire Hutu population to murder Tutsi, backed by messages of hate on RTLM. By most estimates, around 250,000 Tutsi were killed in the first two weeks of the genocide.^[26]

The killing of Tutsi was far from spontaneous or indiscriminate and not, as the government tried to tell foreign diplomats and the inter­national media both at the time and after the genocide, merely a pro­portional military response to the RPF invasion.^[27] The violence was the result of long-term planning and systematic implementation by the Hutu regime. One source of evidence of the planning behind the govern­ment's campaign of violence was the extent to which the orchestrators of the genocide targeted key Tutsi and Hutu moderate political leaders in the immediate aftermath of Habyarimana's death. Their aim was to wipe out any semblance of political opposition before launching wider attacks against Tutsi.^[28] At around 11 a.m. on 7 April, government troops stormed the house of Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana who had called on the protection of ten Belgian UNAMIR soldiers. When the government troops ordered the peacekeepers to lay down their weapons, UNAMIR's mandate gave the Belgians no choice but to disarm, at which point the militiamen carried the peacekeepers away to be slaughtered and killed the defenceless Prime Minister in her front yard.^[29]

The murder of the Belgians had an instant effect on the UN mission.

To comprehend how the genocide was possible, we must explore key features of Rwandan history, particularly the nature of divisions between Hutu and Tutsi. Understanding these features will become important for later discussions concerning gacaca, as effectively rebuilding Rwandan society requires confronting the fundamental causes of violence. First, an examination of the pre-colonial era in Rwanda shows that a long- lasting hierarchy between different groups emerged gradually. The Twa, a pygmoid race of hunter-gatherers who today make up about 1 per cent of the Rwandan population, probably arrived around ad 1000, followed soon after by the Bantu-speaking Hutu, who were predominantly pastor­alists from the east. Tutsi herdsmen, most likely from southern Ethiopia, settled in Rwanda some time in the sixteenth century. The Tutsi arrived in Rwanda armed and well organised for military purposes, and soon conquered much of central Rwanda.

As the structure of the state became more clearly defined in the eight­eenth century, Rwandans began to measure their power by the number of subjects under their control and their wealth in terms of head of cattle.^[35] During this period, the word �Tutsi’ came to describe someone with many subjects or a large number of cattle, while �Hutu’ meant a subordinate.^[36] Identities on this basis were permeable: people initially labelled �Hutu’ could become �Tutsi’ if they acquired a certain level of prestige or wealth. During this period, however, Tutsi also began capturing land and cat­tle from Hutu; soon a Tutsi aristocracy emerged that ruled Rwanda by force, establishing a near-feudal class system, in which Tutsi came to dominate all facets of Rwandan life and many Hutu were plunged into abject poverty.^[37] Although these socio-economic divisions caused much resentment among Hutu, there is no record of violence between Hutu and Tutsi in the pre-colonial era. In fact, most commentators argue that Rwandan society during this period displayed a remarkable culture of peaceful obedience toward the mwami and his court.^[38]

The nature of Hutu-Tutsi relations changed drastically under colo­nialism, beginning with the arrival of the Germans in Rwanda in 1894. The German colonists immediately forged strong relationships with the ruling Tutsi, whom they perceived - on the basis of social Darwinist ideology - as the natural leaders of Rwanda. The Germans consequently chose to control Rwanda indirectly through the mwami and his circle of Tutsi administrators, thus continuing the �pre-colonial transformation towards more centralisation... and increase in Tutsi chiefly powers’.^[39]

I n 1919, Belgium gained control of Rwanda under a League of Nations mandate, and, like the Germans, initially favoured the Tutsi in socio-political terms.

The most significant contribution by the Belgians to the widening social, cultural and economic divide between Hutu and Tutsi, however, was the introduction of ethnic identity cards in 1933. The Belgians issued an identity card to every Rwandan man and woman that indi­cated whether he or she was a Hutu, Tutsi or Twa. Numerous factors determined an individual's ethnic categorisation,^[41] including his or her ownership of cattle. Individuals with ten or more head of cattle were classified as Tutsi, along with their offspring; those with fewer than ten were classified as Hutu. After 1933 people received their ethnic classifi­cation according to their father's line.^[42] This system continued through­out the twentieth century until it was abolished after the genocide. It was often on the basis of identity cards that Hutu killers identified Tutsi whom they massacred in 1994.^[43]

For more than twenty years, Belgian colonial policy in Rwanda rein­forced perceptions of Tutsi superiority and Hutu subjugation. After the Second World War, however, the Belgian colonial administration in Rwanda was placed under a UN trusteeship, which - in the era of grow­ing African nationalism - was designed to move the country towards independence. The Belgians recognised that the Hutu majority would inevitably dominate the nation socio-politically during any transition towards democratic government. To ensure a smooth transfer of power, the colonial administrators gradually began to shift allegiances to the Hutu, offering them jobs in the civil service and promoting them to other positions of influence.^[44] The result was a growing sense of Hutu empowerment. As Prunier explains, �in various parts of the country, the Hutu... started to organize, creating mutual security societies, cultural associations and. clan organizations.'^[45]

As Hutu gained control of the primary levers of power in Rwandan society, the years immediately preceding independence in 1962 and the rest of the 1960s were characterised by the first recorded instances of mass violence between Hutu and Tutsi. In 1959 the newly formed Hutu political party, the Parti du Mouvement de FEmancipation des Bahutu (PARMEHUTU), mounted a successful revolt against the Tutsi mwami. Beginning in 1959 and continuing into the early 1960s, PARMEHUTU characterised all Tutsi as lapdogs of the colonial powers and oppressors of Hutu, and incited mass killings of Tutsi.^[46] After independence, violent crackdowns by Hutu leaders on those viewed as subversives created a cul­ture of fear and stymied open debate and criticism of the state. In turn, government impunity became the rule as few Rwandans were willing to confront the violent and near-absolute authority of the Hutu lead­ership. In the political realm, the new Hutu hierarchy built upon the country's existing, highly centralised administrative structure, establish­ing the pattern for Rwandan bureaucracies over the next four decades. As Prunier argues, the Hutu government's demand for �unquestioning obedience was to play a tragic and absolutely central role in the unfold­ing of the 1994 genocide'.^[47]

Three elements of the genocide narrative above are particularly important for the discussion of gacaca in this book. First, �ethnic' iden­tities in Rwanda derive from permeable socio-economic divisions that became fixed under Belgian colonial rule and were subsequently manip­ulated by Hutu governments to shore up Hutu control and to subju­gate Tutsi. Divisions between Hutu and Tutsi are neither primordial nor static, but rather relatively recent, dynamic socio-political constructs, often manipulated for the sake of dividing the population to maintain control by certain political elites. Second, the Rwandan political realm has often been characterised by highly centralised government, ini­tially in the form of the mwami's court and later by Hutu administra­tions. Historians have regularly observed unusual and destructive levels of popular obedience towards social and political leaders in Rwanda;^[48] some argue that this culture of obedience was vital in the government’s ability to incite the Hutu population to perpetrate the genocide in 1994.^[49] Finally, a culture of impunity permitted the mass murder of Tutsi in 1959 and the early 1960s. Numerous commentators argue that the lack of accountability for crimes committed by these Hutu leaders in part afforded license to those who planned, incited and perpetrated the genocide in 1994.^[50]