Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (59 page)

We have come to associate genocide in Rwanda and Burundi with ethnic
violence. Before we can understand what else besides ethnic violence was
also involved, we need to begin with some background on the genocide's
course, the history leading up to it, and their usual interpretation that I shall
now sketch, which runs as follows. (I shall mention later some respects in
which this usual interpretation is wrong, incomplete, or oversimplified.)
The populations of both countries consist of only two major groups, called
the Hutu (originally about 85% of the population) and the Tutsi (about
15%). To a considerable degree, the two groups traditionally had filled dif
ferent economic roles, the Hutu being principally farmers, the Tutsi pas-toralists. It is often stated that the two groups look different, Hutu being on
the average shorter, stockier, darker, flat-nosed, thick-lipped, and square-
jawed, while Tutsi are taller, more slender, paler-skinned, thin-lipped, and
narrow-chinned. The Hutu are usually assumed to have settled Rwanda and Burundi first, from the south and west, while the Tutsi are a Nilotic people
who are assumed to have arrived later from the north and east and who es
tablished themselves as overlords over the Hutu. When German (1897) and then Belgian (1916) colonial governments took over, they found it expedi
ent to govern through Tutsi intermediaries, whom they considered racially
superior to Hutu because of the Tutsi's paler skins and supposedly more Eu
ropean or "Hamitic" appearance. In the 1930s the Belgians required every
body to start carrying an identity card classifying themselves as Hutu or
Tutsi, thereby markedly increasing the ethnic distinction that had already
existed.

Independence came to both countries in 1962. As independence approached, Hutu in both countries began struggling to overthrow Tutsi
domination and to replace it with Hutu domination. Small incidents of vio
lence escalated into spirals of killings of Tutsi by Hutu and of Hutu by
Tutsi. The outcome in Burundi was that the Tutsi succeeded in retaining their domination, after Hutu rebellions in 1965 and 1970-72 followed by
Tutsi killings of a few hundred thousand Hutu. (There is inevitably much
uncertainty about this estimated number and many of the following num
bers of deaths and exiles.) In Rwanda, however, the Hutu gained the upper hand and killed 20,000 (or perhaps only 10,000?) Tutsi in 1963. Over the course of the next two decades up to a million Rwandans, especially Tutsi,
fled into exile in neighboring countries, from which they periodically attempted to invade Rwanda, resulting in further retaliatory killings of Tutsi
by Hutu, until in 1973 the Hutu general Habyarimana staged a coup against

the previous Hutu-dominated government and decided to leave the Tutsi in
peace.

Under Habyarimana, Rwanda prospered for 15 years and became a fa
vorite recipient of foreign aid from overseas donors, who could point to a
peaceful country with improving health, education, and economic indica
tors. Unfortunately, Rwanda's economic improvement became halted by drought and accumulating environmental problems (especially deforesta
tion, soil erosion, and soil fertility losses), capped in 1989 by a steep decline
in world prices for Rwanda's principal exports of coffee and tea, austerity
measures imposed by the World Bank, and a drought in the south. Habyari
mana took yet another attempted Tutsi invasion of northeastern Rwanda from neighboring Uganda in October 1990 as the pretext for rounding up
or killing Hutu dissidents and Tutsi all over Rwanda, in order to strengthen
his own faction's hold on the country. The civil wars displaced a million Rwandans into settlement camps, from which desperate young men were
easily recruited into militias. In 1993 a peace agreement signed at Arusha called for power-sharing and a multi-power government. Still, businessmen
close to Habyarimana imported 581,000 machetes for distribution to Hutu
for killing Tutsi, because machetes were cheaper than guns.

However, Habyarimana's actions against Tutsi, and his newfound tolera
tion of killings of Tutsi, proved insufficient for Hutu extremists (i.e., Hutu
even more extreme than Habyarimana), who feared having their power di
luted as a result of the Arusha agreement. They began training their militias,
importing weapons, and preparing to exterminate Tutsi. Rwandan Hutu
fears of Tutsi grew out of the long history of Tutsi domination of Hutu, the
various Tutsi-led invasions of Rwanda, and Tutsi mass killings of Hutu and
murder of individual Hutu political leaders in neighboring Burundi. Those
Hutu fears increased in 1993, when extremist Tutsi army officers in Burundi
murdered Burundi's Hutu president, provoking killings of Burundi Tutsi by
Hutu, provoking in turn more extensive killings of Burundi Hutu by Tutsi.

Matters came to a head on the evening of April 6,1994, when the Rwan
dan presidential jet plane, carrying Rwanda's President Habyarimana and
also (as a last-minute passenger) Burundi's new provisional president back
from a meeting in Tanzania, was shot down by two missiles as it came in to
land at the airport of Kigali, Rwanda's capital, killing everyone on board. The missiles were fired from immediately outside the airport perimeter. It remains uncertain to this day by whom or why Habyarimana's plane was
shot down; several groups had alternative motives for killing him. Whoever

were the perpetrators, Hutu extremists within an hour of the plane's downing began carrying out plans evidently already prepared in detail to kill the
Hutu prime minister and other moderate or at least less extreme members of the democratic opposition, and Tutsi. Once Hutu opposition had been eliminated, the extremists took over the government and radio and set out to exterminate Rwanda's Tutsi, who still numbered about a million even
after all the previous killings and escapes into exile.

The lead in the killings was initially taken by Hutu army extremists,
using guns. They soon turned to efficiently organizing Hutu civilians, distributing weapons, setting up roadblocks, killing Tutsi identified at the roadblocks, broadcasting radio appeals to every Hutu to kill every "cock
roach" (as Tutsi were termed), urging Tutsi to gather supposedly for protec
tion at safe places where they could then be killed, and tracking down
surviving Tutsi. When international protests against the killings eventually
began to surface, the government and radio changed the tone of their propaganda, from exhortations to kill cockroaches to urging Rwandans to
practice self-defense and to protect themselves against Rwanda's common
enemies. Moderate Hutu government officials who tried to prevent killings were intimidated, bypassed, replaced, or killed. The largest massacres, each
of hundreds or thousands of Tutsi at one site, took place when Tutsi took
refuge in churches, schools, hospitals, government offices, or those other
supposed safe places and were then surrounded and hacked or burned
to death. The genocide involved large-scale Hutu civilian participation, though it is debated whether as many as one-third or just some lesser pro
portion of Hutu civilians joined in killing Tutsi. After the army's initial
killings with guns in each area, subsequent killings used low-tech means,
mainly machetes or else clubs studded with nails. The killings involved
much savagery, including chopping off arms and legs of intended victims,
chopping breasts off women, throwing children down into wells, and wide
spread rape.

While the killings were organized by the extremist Hutu government and largely carried out by Hutu civilians, institutions and outsiders from
whom one might have expected better behavior played an important per
missive role. In particular, numerous leaders of Rwanda's Catholic Church
either failed to protect Tutsi or else actively assembled them and turned
them over to killers. The United Nations already had a small peacekeeping force in Rwanda, which it proceeded to order to retreat; the French govern
ment sent a peacekeeping force, which sided with the genocidal Hutu gov-

ernment and against invading rebels; and the United States government declined to intervene. In explanation of these policies, the U.N., French
government, and U.S. government all referred to "chaos," "a confusing
situation," and "tribal conflict," as if this were just one more tribal conflict of
a type considered normal and acceptable in Africa, and ignoring evidence
for the meticulous orchestration of the killings by the Rwandan govern
ment.

Within six weeks, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi, representing about three-
quarters of the Tutsi then remaining in Rwanda, or 11% of Rwanda's total
population, had been killed. A Tutsi-led rebel army termed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) began military operations against the government
within a day of the start of the genocide. The genocide ended in each part of
Rwanda only with the arrival of that RPF army, which declared complete
victory on July 18, 1994. It is generally agreed that the RPF army was disci
plined and did not enlist civilians to murder, but it did carry out reprisal
killings on a much smaller scale than the genocide to which it was respond
ing (estimated number of reprisal victims, "only" 25,000 to 60,000). The
RPF set up a new government, emphasized national conciliation and unity,
and urged Rwandans to think of themselves as Rwandans rather than as
Hutu or Tutsi. About 135,000 Rwandans were eventually imprisoned on suspicion of being guilty of genocide, but few of the prisoners have been tried or convicted. After the RPF victory, about 2,000,000 people (mostly
Hutu) fled into exile in neighboring countries (especially the Congo and
Tanzania), while about 750,000 former exiles (mostly Tutsi) returned to
Rwanda from neighboring countries to which they had fled (Plate 22).

The usual accounts of the genocides in Rwanda and Burundi portray them
as the result of pre-existing ethnic hatreds fanned by cynical politicians for
their own ends. As summed up in the book
Leave None to Tell the Story:
Genocide in Rwanda,
published by the organization Human Rights Watch,
"this genocide was not an uncontrollable outburst of rage by a people consumed by 'ancient tribal hatreds.'... This genocide resulted from the delib
erate choice of a modern elite to foster hatred and fear to keep itself in
power. This small, privileged group first set the majority against the mi
nority to counter a growing political opposition within Rwanda. Then,
faced with RPF success on the battlefield and at the negotiating table, these few powerholders transformed the strategy of ethnic division into genocide.

They believed that the extermination campaign would restore the solidarity
of the Hutu under their leadership and help them win the war ..." The evi
dence is overwhelming that this view is correct and accounts in large degree
for Rwanda's tragedy.

But there is also evidence that other considerations contributed as well.
Rwanda contained a third ethnic group, variously known as the Twa or pyg
mies, who numbered only 1% of the population, were at the bottom of the social scale and power structure, and did not constitute a threat to
anybody
—yet most of them, too, were massacred in the 1994 killings. The
1994 explosion was not just Hutu versus Tutsi, but the competing factions
were in reality more complex: there were three rival factions composed pre
dominantly or solely of Hutu, one of which may have been the one to trig
ger the explosion by killing the Hutu president from another faction; and
the invading RPF army of exiles, though led by Tutsi, also contained Hutu.
The distinction between Hutu and Tutsi is not nearly as sharp as often por
trayed. The two groups speak the same language, attended the same churches and schools and bars, lived together in the same village under
the same chiefs, and worked together in the same offices. Hutu and Tutsi
intermarried, and (before Belgians introduced identity cards) sometimes switched their ethnic identity. While Hutu and Tutsi look different on the
average, many individuals are impossible to assign to either of the two
groups based on appearance. About one-quarter of all Rwandans have both
Hutu and Tutsi among their great-grandparents. (In fact, there is some
question whether the traditional account of the Hutu and Tutsi having different origins is correct, or whether instead the two groups just differen
tiated economically and socially within Rwanda and Burundi out of a common stock.) This intergradation gave rise to tens of thousands of
personal tragedies during the 1994 killings, as Hutu tried to protect their
Tutsi spouses, relatives, friends, colleagues, and patrons, or tried to buy off
would-be killers of those loved ones with money. The two groups were so intertwined in Rwandan society that in 1994 doctors ended up killing their patients and vice versa, teachers killed their students and vice versa, and neighbors and office colleagues killed each other. Individual Hutu killed
some Tutsi while protecting other Tutsi. We cannot avoid asking ourselves:
how, under those circumstances, were so many Rwandans so readily manipulated by extremist leaders into killing each other with the utmost
savagery?

Especially puzzling, if one believes that there was nothing more to the
genocide than Hutu-versus-Tutsi ethnic hatred fanned by politicians, are