Matt Hohenberger
Jr. Theology
April 14, 2008
The
Genocide in Rwanda
“My force
was standing knee-deep in mutilated bodies, surrounded by the guttural moans of
dying people, looking into the eyes of children bleeding to death with their
wounds burning in the sun and being invaded by maggots and flies.”[1] Romeo
Dallaire, the commander of the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda,
described a gruesome scene in Rwanda
of wounded Tutsi who had been attacked during one of the worst genocides in world
history. The Rwandan genocide was the systematic mass murdering of the Tutsi
people by the Hutu in 1994. The first killings began on April 6, 1994 until
July 18. The Hutu extermination of the Tutsi in Africa
was devastating because of the social tensions, the organization of the Hutu,
and the UN’s inability to take action against the genocide.
Racial stress was the main cause of
the genocide in Rwanda.
The Hutu was an indigenous tribe of farmers in the Rwandan region, and the Tutsi
migrated south from Ethiopia
in the twelfth or thirteenth century and claimed dominance over the region. After
centuries of dominance, the region came under colonial rule by the Belgians.
The Belgians introduced new ways of life to the peoples living in Rwanda
which changed social structures. “As a new class of educated Hutu stared to
demand majority rule and ‘racial’ self-determination, they were encouraged to
do so by a new generation of Belgian officials, clergy, and soldiers.”[2]
The Hutu started rivaling the Tutsi for power, and by 1945 they had even more
support from the Belgians. “Gradually, the Hutu elite came to regard itself as
the only authentic indigenous leadership of Rwanda,
and the Hutu as the only true ‘sons of the soil’.”[3]
Due to the increasing Hutu power in
Rwanda, Tutsi
were continually looked down upon and seen as the lower class of society. Finally,
in the Hutu Manifesto of February 1957, many Hutu elites expressed their desire
to end the Tutsi dominance and become the leaders of the nation. Soon a political
group, the akazu, portrayed the Bahutu Manifesto as
their main strategy. This small house of senior military and civilian officials
emerged, and began to dominate the most strategic positions in central
ministries and regional governments. This group continued to spread the want
for Hutu dominance over Rwanda.
The Hutu ability to justify their
actions was a leading factor in the cause of the genocide. The main way they
did this was to express feelings of defense. The akazu
elite wanted to continue dominance over politics, and so they revived a
conspiracy theory known as the Bahima conspiracy.
This plot was an elaborated plan supposedly devised by the Tutsi to kill off
enough Hutu to ensure an electoral majority. Many Hutu feared themselves being
slaughtered, and needed to take action to avoid being the victims of the
genocide. The Hutu were able to remove responsibility from themselves onto the
victims, a process known as victim blaming. There were also concrete reasons
that the Hutu used to justify the murders. Before the genocide, Rwanda
and Burundi,
neighboring countries, “resembled an inverted mirror image of each other; the
Rwandan state was controlled by Hutu elites, and Burundi
was controlled by Tutsi elites.”[4]
There were tense feelings in both countries between the two tribes. “The
persecution of Hutu in Burundi
was thus aggravated by, and in turn used to justify, the persecution of the Tutsi
in Rwanda.”[5]
The final event that was used to justify the genocide was the killing of
elected Hutu President Melchior Ndadaye
in October 1993 by the army. “This assassination… reinforced claims that power
sharing between Hutu and Tutsi was impossible.”[6]
With these feelings mixed into the country politics, a drastic event was
inevitable to end the competition.
Once the genocide began, the plan
was not difficult to follow through because of the history of obedience and
terror that the Rwandan peoples were accustomed to. “Prior to the genocide, a
form of chillingly purposeful bureaucratic control was exercised over the
population by governmental authorities.”[7]
The people of Rwanda
had a tendency to comply with the government, and most of the times they
replied with enthusiasm. The control the government had over the Hutu at the
time of the genocide created the genocide into a highly efficient mass
murdering. The Hutus most likely did not feel any regret because they did not
feel responsible as if they were only machines carrying out a job. Eric Fromm, a mid-1900’s philosopher and psychologist, explained
this feeling as, “My obedience makes me part of the power I worship… I can make
no error, since it decides for me.”[8]
The compliancy was so great that by April 20, every area in Rwanda
had been tortured.
With the tribal tensions running
high throughout Rwanda,
economic pressures pushed the Hutu to the brink of destruction. The country had
been economically stable while providing many services to the public such as
drinking water, electricity, primary education, and basic health care. Although
it was one of the most stable nations in Africa before
the genocide began. The good standards of living in Rwanda
“started to deteriorate when coffee priced fell in 1986-7; receipts from coffee
sales tumbled from 14 billion to 5 billion Rwanda
francs in a single year.”[9] As
the external debt continued to build up, the Hutu army blamed the economic
crisis on “a conspiracy of traders, merchants, and intellectuals, professions
in which Tutsi tended to specialize.”[10]
The Tutsi were then seen as the producers of the economic disasters, and in
turn, the inflictors of social changes which worsened the lives of most
Rwandans. The Hutu finally decided on a “final solution”[11]
to end their economic, political, and social struggles.
At the 1948 Genocide Convention,
after WWII, genocide was defined as any act with intent to destroy, in whole or
in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as the Tutsi in Rwanda.
On April 6, 1994, Rwandan President Habyarimana’s jet
was shot down, and “within hours of the plane crash Hutu militiamen took
command of the streets of Kigali
[Rwandan Capital].”[12] The
Rwandan genocide had begun. The entire genocide was well planned and organized,
mostly by the director of services in the Ministry of Defense, Colonel Theoneste Baosora. As he directed
the “final solution” activities, the Defense Minister, Major-General Aufustin Bizimana, controlled the
logistics of the genocide. The akazu were a major
group involved in planning the genocide because they wanted primary power over
the country. Their “efficiency in carrying out the killings proves that these
had been planned out well in advance.”[13]
Although these few men were the
main organizers, there were thousands of Hutus involved in the killings that
occurred in Rwanda.
Although the main army that carried out the plans was the Hutu people themselves,
“the executions were begun by the Presidential Guards as early as the evening
of the 6th.”[14] Because
there were only 1,500 Presidential Guards, they called for help from the Interhamwe and Impuzamugambi militias, who were mostly recruited from low-class people. The Interhamwe was the first civilian
militia whose slogan was “Let us go and do the work.”[15] These
men were armed with AK-47 assault rifles, grenades, and machetes in order to
accomplish the “bush clearings” of the Tutsi people. Everyone was expected to
support the effort by either picking up arms or betraying their Tutsi friends
and notifying Hutu military of the enemy. Those who did not participate in
these actions were thus declared enemies of the Hutu and were in turned killed.
These murderers went hunting for Tutsis, and in the process ravaged homes,
schools, and hospitals. Many times a crowd of refugees would flee into a
church, and the army would throw grenades through the windows until all were
killed. They would also go to the hospitals and line all the injured up and
execute them using their machine guns.
Machetes were the most common weapon used as Hutu militiamen would chase
down Tutsi and kill them with their knives. Another weapon that the murderers used
was the RTLM (Radio-Television Mille Collines) which
broadcasted messages to the army and Hutu to kill certain people. The radio
station helped make the killings fast and efficient. Three months after the killings began, approximately 800,000 Tutsi or anti-Hutu people had
been killed through the systematic genocide by the Hutu.[16] During
this three month period, the United States
took little or no interest or action in the events going on in Rwanda.
Samantha Powers explained:
“The United
States did much more than fail
to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN
peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda.
It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial
instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. The United
States in fact did virtually nothing to try
to limit hat occurred.”[17]
In fact, the genocide never received the top-level attention
it deserved, being passed off as a civil war that the United
States should stay out of. One reason that
the United States
stayed away was because Congress already owed the UN half a billion dollars, and
they demanded that the UN “learned to say no”[18]
to chancy situations. The events occurring in Rwanda
looked similar to the events in Somalia,
where the US had
failed to control the situations, and they did not want the same thing to
happen in Rwanda
to fervent a split in relations between the UN and Congress. Representative
David Obey explained the American desire for “zero degree of involvement, and
zero degree of risk, and zero degree of pain and confusion.”[19]
There were some pro-Rwanda diplomats, but they were heavily outvoted by other
anti-assistant consultants who did not have enough knowledge to make a well-informed
decision on the matter. American policy didn’t even acknowledge the fact that
genocide was occurring in Rwanda
because they didn’t want to have to take action. In a letter by an official in
the Office of the Secretary of Defense acknowledges these feelings by writing,
“Be Careful … Genocide finding could commit [the U.S.
government] to actually ‘do something’.”[20]
The American publics disinterest in the events in Rwanda
also weakened American policy because it did not create any urgency and could
“be avoided by Clinton at no
political cost.”[21] Therefore,
he never once assembled his top policy advisors to discuss the killings, and
unless a personally related diplomat to Rwanda
raised the question, the events went unseen. The most intentional ignorance
policy of the US
was the fact that they did not even attempt to halt radio transmissions from
RTLM, although they were the “country best equipped to prevent the genocide
planners from broadcasting murderous instructions directly to the population,”[22]
which would have helped decrease the massacres. Their reason for this was
because Congress thought the only solution was military action, which was
refused because the American safety was foremost.
Like the United
States, the United Nations also experienced
unwillingness to send help to Rwanda.
They did send Romeo Dallaire, a major general in Canada,
as the commander of the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR). But once the
fighting started, the UN peacekeepers who had arranged the Arusha
Accords, a government agreement to share power between the Hutu and Tutsi
armies, were evacuated while Dallaire remained. Both his troops and the Belgian
troops were sent well armed and ready to work, but other countries showed up
“bare-assed… and demanded the United Nations suit them up.”[23] A
total of 2,500 forces for the UNAMIR had shown up, but no one else wanted to
risk assistance. But on April 21, the UN Security Council cut those forces to
only 270 men to protect the Tutsi and to “show the will of the international
community.”[24] This
disgusted Dallaire who responded, “My mission was to save Rwandans. Their
mission was to put on a show at no risk.”[25]
The one man who was committed to saving lives was not given enough resources or
support to carry out his mission.
The Hutu extermination of the Tutsi
in Africa was devastating because of the social
tensions, the organization of the Hutu, and the UN’s inability to take action
against the genocide. After a history of social tensions, the “final solution”
was the extermination of the Tutsi people in Rwanda.
The conflict is far from over because there are the same tensions today in Burundi,
the neighboring nation to Rwanda.
Although the Tutsi and Burundi
people may appear to be uncivilized and too unimportant to defend, action must
be taken to stop the killings of any race anywhere. The world should not
tolerate deliberate exterminations of whole races.
Notes