Citation
THIS IS THE 39th in a series of dialogues with artists, writers, and
critical thinkers on the question of violence. This conversation is
with Linda Melvern, a British investigative journalist. For 25 years,
she has researched and written extensively about the circumstances of
the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. She served as a consultant to the Military
One prosecution team at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda,
and part of her archive of documents was used to show the planning,
financing, and progress of the crime. Her most recent book on the
subject is Intent to Deceive: Denying the Genocide of the Tutsi (Verso,
2019).
Brad Evans: Ever since the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994, you
have been active in terms of both the prosecution and meticulous
documentation and writings on the atrocity. Your latest volume, Intent
to Deceive, offers another very sensitive and crucial reading of these
harrowing events. Rather than simply looking upon the genocide as a
particular episode in the history of violence, you insist that any
claims for lasting justice demands our continued vigilance. What is it
about this atrocity and its memory that should still command our
attention today?
Linda Melvern: The crime of genocide — the intent to destroy a human
group — proceeds in stages. The crime does not begin with extermination
but with the classification of the population, with the polarization of
society. The destruction of a human group, in whole or in part,
requires effective propaganda to spread a racist ideology that defines
the victim as being outside human existence. With the crime of
genocide, the ideology serves to legitimize any act, no matter how
horrendous. Genocide requires the production of hate speech. The crime
requires organization and preparation. As it proceeds in stages,
genocide can be predicted — and with an international early warning
system is considered preventable.
The warnings of the risks to the minority Tutsi came at every stage of
the process in Rwanda, and all warnings remained unheeded. No tragedy
was heralded to less effect. In the years beforehand, no one gave the
conspirators reason to pause as they rehearsed their killing methods
and spread the hateful propaganda. All the while they remained safe in
the knowledge there would be little outside intervention. In the space
of three terrible months, April through July, more than one million
people were murdered.
You have referred to the genocide in Rwanda as a sadomasochistic
inferno. While the ability to dehumanize populations in preparation for
their slaughter appears all too common when confronting such extreme
violence, what do you think was particularly unique about this event?
And how might it better inform our understanding of violence as a
process?
A youth militia was central to the plans of the Rwanda “génocidaires,”
as the perpetrators are called. They indoctrinated the country’s
uneducated and unemployed youth with a noxious racist ideology known as
Hutu Power. These recruits received rudimentary training on the use of
weapons and thousands were taken to military camps where they were
trained to kill people at speed with machetes and other agricultural
tools. With sophisticated recruitment techniques, the plan was to have
Interahamwe in every Rwandan community. It was tightly controlled and
organized with militia committees in every one of the country’s 146
communes.
Understanding hate groups seems essential and the irrational hatred
they promote. “All power is Hutu Power,” the gangs of youths had
chanted in the weeks beforehand while they terrorized the streets on
motorbikes and in military jeeps, drinking beer, hurling vulgarities at
Tutsi, waving machetes. “Power, power,” they shouted. “Oh, let us
exterminate them.” When the time came, they did. The work of the
Interahamwe became fully apparent when on April 7 the extermination of
the minority Tutsi was getting under way.
We need to know more about the Interahamwe, of the transition made from
raw recruit to sadomasochistic killer. Most victims bled to death.
Later research showed most victims were killed by machetes (37.9
percent), followed by clubs (16.8 percent) and firearms (14.8 percent).
Some 0.5 percent of the victims were women raped or cut open, others
were forced to commit suicide, beaten to death, thrown into rivers or
lakes or burned alive, infants and babies thrown against walls or
crushed to death. There were an estimated 250,000 instances of rape.
Hutu Power propagandists had targeted Tutsi women; the targeting was
woven into the planning of the genocide.
At the end of the genocide of the Tutsi, the militia was 30,000 strong.
The Interahamwe broke the world’s most atrocious records for the speed
of the killing of human beings, estimated at five times that of the
Nazis. A senior US official who visited Rwanda some weeks afterward
described the country as “depopulated by machete”; the militia was a
“neutron bomb” for its ability to kill quickly and effectively.
What I found particularly compelling about your latest book were the
similarities it suggested with the organized violence of the Holocaust.
Instead of following a neat and reductive separation between European
and African forms of genocide, you also show how the bureaucratization
of the violence and the ability to deny the scale of the atrocity
through the logics of disappearance and removal of traces of the crimes
appear all too familiar. I’d like to ask you to explain more about this
violence of disappearance. How has it been integral to the denial of
the genocide (something that’s also tragically familiar with the legacy
of the Holocaust)?
The denial of genocide is the last stage of the process. It is when the
perpetrators cover up and destroy the evidence, try to block
investigation, and proclaim their innocence. In the circumstances of
Rwanda, the génocidaires argued the killing was justified as
self-defense and they tried to minimize the number killed. They claimed
the massacres were spontaneous, the actions of a fearful population.
There had been an “inter-ethnic war” caused by centuries-old
hostilities and the situation difficult for outsiders to properly
understand.
Like those who tried to prove the gassings exaggerated in the Nazi
concentration camps, the supporters of Hutu Power are determined to
minimize, obscure, and diminish what happened. In the trials of the
génocidaires at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR),
there was no shortage of scholars, regional experts, journalists, and
military officers who appeared to testify in court or write reports in
their defense.
The pernicious influence of Hutu Power lives on in rumor, stereotype,
lies, and propaganda. The movement’s campaign of genocide denial has
confused many, recruited some, and shielded others. With the use of
seemingly sound research methods, the génocidaires pose a threat,
especially to those who might not be aware of the historical facts.
The denial of genocide ensures the crime continues. It is intended to
destroy truth and memory, and it does the utmost harm to survivors. The
denial of the genocide of the Tutsi poses a direct threat to their
rights and welfare and contributes to their suffering. The promotion of
denial demonstrates a callous indifference.
The genocide is not an event to be commemorated every year for the
survivors, but something they live with every day. It devalues the
gravity of their experiences and their memories. For them, genocide is
a crime with no end.
Mindful of what you explained in terms of the politicization of memory,
to what extent does the history of European colonization work itself
into narratives of denial? Much has been written about the contested
colonial legacy to the slaughter, but how has it been mobilized in the
context of critiquing external agents and actors who have pressed for
justice and reconciliation?
The European colonization of this region of Africa brought theories of
race and the same ideas and stereotypes that the deniers use today
widely promoted by the administrators. The genesis of the 1994 genocide
of the Tutsi came some 30 years earlier, in 1959 when a so-called
social revolution was engineered by the Belgian military administration
and the 46-year-old Tutsi king died in suspicious circumstances. The
country was put under military control, and the Tutsi monarchy ousted
in violence and terror with the Hutu peasantry incited to rise up and
kill Tutsi neighbors. There was genocide conducted against Tutsi in the
’60s and ’70s.
The role of the Belgian military in events in Rwanda is crucial. In A
People Betrayed, I recount the decisive role of the Belgian Special
Military Resident Guy Logiest, who ensured the Tutsi monarchy was
abolished. I found some of his papers when consulting archives in
Kigali. Here I found how the Belgians had institutionalized and
bureaucratized the racism. A quota system had determined only a small
percentage of Tutsi would be allowed further education, opportunities
abroad, or employment in the administration. From 1959, the Tutsi were
excluded from public life. In the vast amount of paperwork in Kigali,
it was clear how the control was exercised by agents of the insidious
security services tasked with ensuring that people had the right race
marked on each mandatory identity card and Tutsi did not exceed the
quota. Political parties were created as either Hutu or Tutsi; Rwanda
was considered to be a democracy with majority rule by Hutu.
When carrying out your detailed research and work, you acknowledge a
very privileged access to many archived documents. While I have no
doubt this evidence has weighed heavy on you and raised serious
questions about personal responsibility and ethics, I would like to ask
how it has also changed your understanding of what actually constitutes
a crime against humanity.
A crime against humanity is a crime directed at a civilian population,
with attacks that are widespread and systematic. With the crime of
genocide, the perpetrators have a central and distinct purpose — the
elimination of a people entirely. The victim is chosen purely, simply,
and exclusively because of membership of a target group. In his
landmark book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in 1944, the
father of the Genocide Convention, Raphael Lemkin, explained that
genocide is not a sudden and an abominable aberration. It is a
deliberate attempt to reconstruct the world. The instigators and
initiators of genocide are cool-minded theorists first, and barbarians
only second.
During these three terrible months in Rwanda in 1994, nowhere was safe
for Tutsi. The wounded who sought medical help found killers waiting
for them in clinics and hospitals. There were doctors and nurses who
were accomplices to the killing or participated directly. Tutsi
patients were taken from the wards and hacked or shot to death.
Thousands of victims believed the guarantees given to them by
government officials who had urged them to congregate together to
ensure their safety. At one soccer stadium offered as a refuge the
massacre on April 18 saw grenades thrown into the crowds and machine
gun fire coming from the surrounding hills, that had lasted until there
was no more ammunition when the militia then came onto the football
pitch with their machetes and nail-studded clubs to make sure there
were no survivors. They returned the next morning looking for the
wounded to kill and bodies to loot. Some 2,500 families were entirely
wiped out on the Gatwaro playing field among the 30,000 people
murdered.
Every Rwandan had carried a compulsory identity card that bore ethnic
identity. A series of roadblocks, part of the genocide planning, was
established as the killing began in April. Each identity card was
checked, and anyone who was designated Tutsi was killed. But the
checking of cards became tiresome and after a while anyone who looked
like a Tutsi was killed. Some roadblocks were well organized with
corpses piled neatly alongside. Others had piles of bodies cut in
pieces. Tipper trucks sometimes came by with prisoners detailed to
collect bodies from the streets. Roadblocks became chaotic with
drunkenness, drug abuse, and sadistic cruelty. Some people paid for
death by the bullet. On one stretch of road in Kigali, there was a
barricade across the road every 100 meters.
In their trials, their defense lawyers argued the 1948 Genocide
Convention was inapplicable in the case of their clients because there
had been no intent to destroy a human group. With no planning or
preparation, they argued, the intent to destroy a human group was
lacking, and so with no intent, the 1948 Genocide Convention did not
apply.
I’d like to press you more here on your claim that “initiators of
genocide are cool-minded theorists first, and barbarians only second.”
It’s often comforting for us to think of perpetrators of extreme
violence as being monstrous, irrational, and behaving in an unreasoned
way. And yet we know from history that often the greatest violence is
cold, reasoned, and calculated. Thinking of this in terms of the
“warning signs” about the genocidal, at what point do you think that
derogatory racialized language becomes dangerous?
For the génocidaires of Rwanda, it had apparently seemed quite logical
to get rid of the Tutsi. How else were they to retain their power and
privilege? The Hutu Power extremists from the north, who for 20 years
had run the country as a personal fiefdom, did not want their way of
life to end and were horrified by an internationally sponsored peace
agreement, the Arusha Accords agreed in 1993. As far as they understood
the situation, they had been backed into a corner. The accords provided
for power-sharing with the largely Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front, a
highly disciplined army that in 1990 had invaded from Uganda determined
to oust the racist regime.
For the extremists of Hutu Power, the peace agreement that had ended
the civil war with the Rwandan Patriotic Front was a humiliation. The
peace agreement provided for the demobilization of both the Rwandan
army and the Rwandan Patriotic Front and a shared officer corps. It
provided for the repatriation of an estimated one million refugees, the
families of those Tutsi forced from the country in past pogroms and
living in neighboring countries. The agreement provided for elections
to create a power-sharing government. The once all-powerful presidency
held in the name of the Hutu majority was to become largely ceremonial.
The French military forces would leave, and there would be disarmament.
With the implementation of the agreement, the extremists feared they
would be held accountable for their long years of human rights abuses.
The president had sold out the farm to Tutsi, the traditional enemy,
they believed. The warnings came right at the outset with language of
division and difference.
One of the most challenging issues we face today in our societies is
how do we educate about such atrocities so future generations can
understand the horrors of the past in more considered ways. I’d like to
end by thinking about how we might teach about this violence to younger
audiences. If you were to speak to youths today about the violence,
what would you tell them and what positive message would you hope they
were left with?
The Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of
Genocide of 1948 was the world’s first human rights treaty, and it
stood for a fundamental and important principle: that whenever genocide
threatened any group or nation or people, it was a matter of concern
not just for that group, but for the whole of humanity. The Convention
preceded the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by 24 hours and it
was the first truly universal, comprehensive, and codified protection
of human rights. While the Universal Declaration was an affirmation,
the Genocide Convention was a treaty. The prevention and punishment of
genocide is not a choice — it is an obligation, incumbent upon all
government signatories to respect. The Genocide Convention was intended
to prevent and in the worst case to judge transgressors of the crime.
Following World War II, the international community accepted the
responsibility of constructing an international order aimed at avoiding
the recurrence of state-sanctioned racist policies that are directed
against specific groups. On December 11, 1946, at its first session,
the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution formally recognizing
genocide as a crime under international law. Resolution 96(I) affirmed
that:
Genocide is a crime under international law which the civilized world
condemns, and for the commission of which principals and accomplices —
whether private individuals, public officials or statesmen, and whether
the crime is committed on religious, racial, political or any other
grounds — are punishable.
The Genocide Convention enshrines the never-again promise, the world’s
response to the Nazi Holocaust in Europe and the revulsion at the
systematic policy to exterminate the Jews.
The Security Council of the UN is central to the application of the
Genocide Convention: Article VIII states that any contracting party may
call upon the competent organs of the UN to take such actions under the
Charter as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression
of acts of genocide. The United Kingdom has a permanent seat on the
Council, which carries special responsibility. It is up to us to ensure
that our own government abides by the Genocide Convention. It is up to
us to hold accountable those politicians who fail to uphold its treaty
provisions.
Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist, and writer,
who specializes on the problem of violence. He is the founder/director
of the Histories of Violence project, which has a global user base
covering 143 countries.
