Citation
The Rwandan genocide of 1994 was one of the defining events of the
twentieth century. It ended the illusion that the evil of genocide had
been eradicated and spurred renewed commitment to halting genocides in
the future.
For Rwandans, whether inside the country or abroad, the consequences of
the genocide are direct and tangible. They struggle daily to heal
broken bodies and traumatized psyches, to seek justice, and to recreate
trust among themselves. Yet the consequences of this genocide, enormous
as they are for Rwandans, do not stop at the border of that one small
country but spill onto the people of neighboring countries and far
beyond. Those living in the region have suffered from subsequent wars
of unimaginable cruelty and from the consequences of millions of people
in flight, both refugees and killers. Those further from Rwanda pay the
price of their failure to protect others, both in guilty consciences
and in the material costs of humanitarian aid and assistance in
rebuilding shattered societies.
The Rwandan genocide forced us to confront the massive killing of
civilians in a way we had not done for fifty years. Throughout the
second half of the twentieth century, we had seen ordinary people
deliberately slain in many conflicts, but not since the Holocaust had
we seen civilians massacred so rapidly, so systematically, and with
such a blatantly genocidal objective. And yet national governments and
international institutions refused to intervene, backing away from a
crisis that was politically complex but morally simple.
As the extent of the catastrophe became increasingly clear, the
international community was forced to reconsider its ideas and
practices in the realm of international justice and in the protection
of civilians in times of conflict. Through these changes international
institutions may regain some of the credibility lost by their inaction
during the genocide.
In 1994, the United Nations Security Council established the
International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to judge those who had once
been permitted to kill without hindrance. By doing so, it sought to
provide justice for the crimes of the immediate past and also spurred
the development of judicial precedents for the prosecuting genocides of
the future, no longer unimaginable as they had been a year before.
Eight years later, the International Criminal Court was created to
sanction and hopefully to deter genocide as well as other grave
violations of international humanitarian law. In addition, several
governments adopted laws permitting prosecution of genocide, war
crimes, and crimes against humanity in their own courts. Belgium and
Switzerland prosecuted and convicted persons accused of genocide and
war crimes in Rwanda in 1994 and at least two other countries are
investigating such crimes and may prosecute them.
Conscious of their own culpability for not halting the genocide, many
national and international leaders apologized to the Rwandan people.
The UN and the Organization of African Unity as well as the French
National Assembly and the Belgian Senate held inquiries about the 1994
events, hoping that understanding the past would make it easier to
prevent such tragedies in the future. Unwilling to confront its own
responsibility, the United States did not investigate its past record
but instead funded social scientists to develop models to predict when
and where genocides might occur in the future.
But foreseeing catastrophe does no good without the will to act and a
strategy for action. Recognizing this, an international commission
under Canadian leadership examined the responsibility to protect and
sought to determine when that responsibility would require states to
act against another that was putting its own citizens at grievous risk.
The Security Council too has focused on the protection of civilians,
particularly women and children, in conflict situations, increasingly
acknowledging that such protection is central to its responsibility for
the management of peace and security around the world. In 2001 a deputy
secretary-general of the United Nations told the Security Council that
the protection of civilians must become a regular and central aspect of
United Nations peace operations, and that this must be made clear in
their mandates.United Nations, Press Release, DSG/SM/129, SC/7051, 23/04/2001. How different from 1994 when the Security Council
was warned that protection of civilians in Rwanda would be costly and
might be an inappropriate activity for a peace-keeping force.
At a meeting in Sweden in 2004 where delegates of various states
renewed their pledges to prevent and halt genocide, the UN Secretary
General proposed establishing a post of special rapporteur to bring
information on possible genocides to the Security Council.
Recommendations from such a special rapporteur could serve as the
mechanism to trigger UN intervention.
More promising than all the reports and pronouncements have been the
cases where international actors intervened to stop the killing of
civilians. In 2003 UN peacekeepers in Ituri, in the northeastern
Democratic Republic of Congo, proved unable to prevent ethnically-based
killing of civilians. As in Rwanda in 1994, the UN troops were too few
and their mandate too restricted to permit effective action. But rather
than turn away from the situation as they had before, European nations
sent in a European Union force under French leadership. These troops
secured the main town, providing a safe haven for the threatened, until
a stronger UN force with a more robust mandate arrived to replace them.
If the Rwanda genocide had positive consequences elsewhere in spurring
action to avert genocide, its impact in Rwanda and the surrounding
region has been devastatingly negative. Since 1994 there has been
widespread conflict in central Africa: a serious uprising in
northwestern Rwanda, two major wars in the neighboring Congo and ten
years of civil war in Burundi. In all nearly four million civilians
have likely died as a direct or indirect result of military activity in
the region since 1994. The genocide has cast its shadow over all these
conflicts, spinning actors in directions they would not otherwise have
taken and coloring the analysis of events by the international
community. Both local and international actors claim genocide or the
need to prevent genocide to cover other political and economic
objectives. In local Congolese conflicts, such as that in Ituri,
contenders seeking foreign support charge each other with genocide, an
accusation that would not have been made before 1994.
The Rwandan genocide was intertwined with the war between the
government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Even after the RPF
victory in July 1994, the victors and losers could not behave like
parties in any ordinary war: neither side could shake loose from the
genocide. The defeated officials and officers who had led the killing
campaign had convinced themselves and those under their sway that the
Tutsi were an enemy to fight to the death. They could not consider
living in a Rwanda ruled by the Tutsi-dominated RPF. They knew too that
most of the world believed them guilty of genocide and they feared
being punished for their crimes if they remained in Rwanda. The RPF
well understood the threat posed by the former authorities and were
equally determined to eliminate the rest of their forces. Sure of their
moral high ground, the RPF would also continue to refuse dealings with
opposition movements abroad, grouping them all with the authorities
responsible for the genocide.
The Rwandan genocide influenced significantly the nature and intensity
of two subsequent wars in the Congo. One of these wars ousted Sese Seko
Mobuto, one of the longest-reigning dictators in Africa, and opened the
way for Rwanda to establish its influence over Congolese politics, an
influence that continues today, welcomed by some but unwelcome to most
Congolese.
In mid-1994 officials of the former government, soldiers, and militia
fled to the Congo, leading more than a million Rwandans into exile.
They carried with them their ideology of Hutu supremacy and many of
their weapons. They sought the support of local Congolese people as
well as of the government, hoping to broaden their base for continued
resistance against the RPF. They insisted that Rwandan Hutu and
different Congolese groups were a single Bantu people because they
spoke similar languages and shared some cultural traits. They said
Tutsi were "Nilotic" invaders who, together with the related Hima
people of Uganda, intended to subjugate the Bantu inhabitants. This
"Bantu" ideologyand the RPF determination to counter itformed the
framework for much of the military conflict in the region for the next
ten years.
In 1996 Rwanda and Uganda, led by President Yoweri Museveni, invaded
the Congo. Rwanda wanted to eliminate any possible threat from the
former Rwandan army and militia who were re-organizing and re-arming in
refugee camps in eastern Congo. Uganda sought greater political
influence and control over resources in the region. Together with their
Congolese allies, the Rwandan and Ugandan troops moved rapidly
westward, at first hunting down the remnants of the Rwandan Hutu from
the refugee campscombatants and civilians alikebut then setting another
objective, that of overturning Mobuto and his government. They
succeeded, but in 1998 the new Congolese government, led by Laurent
Desire Kabila, turned against its former supporters. Kabila told the
Rwandan and Ugandan troops to go home, thus provoking a new war. This
second Congo war at one point involved seven African nations and a host
of rebel movements and other local armed groups, all fighting to
control the territory and vast wealth of the Congo. Casualties among
civilians were enormous, from lack of food, medical care, and clean
water as well as from direct attack by the various forces.
The real nature of this war, like that of the first, was for a long
time disguised by the references to the genocide. In demanding a return
to national sovereignty Congolese officials spoke in anti-Tutsi
language and crowds in Kinshasa killed Tutsi on the streets. Rwanda
sought to justify making war by claiming the need to eliminate
perpetrators of the genocide who were operating in eastern Congo with
the support of the Congolese government. Rwandan authorities continued
to stress this supposed security threat from the other side of the
border long after the numbers and resources of the former Rwandan army
and militia had diminished and their members were widely scattered.
In 1997 and 1998, in the hiatus between the two Congo wars, soldiers
and militia of the genocidal government, supported by thousands of new
recruits, crossed from the Congo and led an insurrection in
northwestern Rwanda. The RPF forces suppressed the rebellion at the
cost of tens of thousands of lives, many of them civilians who happened
to live in the area. A substantial number of the rebel combatants had
not taken part in the genocide and seemed more focused on overturning
the government than on hunting down Tutsi civilians, but others
continued to harbor genocidal intentions and singled out Tutsi to be
attacked and killed.
Events in Burundi, a virtual twin to Rwanda in demographic terms, first
influenced and then were influenced by the Rwandan genocide. Burundi
was already immersed in its own crisis with widespread ethnic slaughter
in late 1993. These killings, as well as international indifference to
them, spurred genocidal planning in Rwanda. After April 1994 Burundians
viewed with horror the massacres of others of their own ethnic group in
Rwanda, Tutsi identifying with victims of the genocide and Hutu
identifying with those killed by RPF forces. Burundian Tutsi and Hutu
feared and distrusted each other more because of the slaughter in
Rwanda and each group vowed that its members would not be the next
victims. Former Rwandan soldiers and militia at times joined Burundian
Hutu rebel forces, bringing them military expertise and reinforcing
their anti-Tutsi ideas. RPF soldiers on occasion came south to help the
Burundian army prevent a victory by Hutu rebels.
Within Rwanda the RPF used the pretext of preventing a recurrence of
genocide to suppress the political opposition, refusing to allow
dissidents to organize new political parties and eliminating an
existing party that could potentially have challenged the RPF in
national elections. Authorities jailed dissidents and drove others into
exile on charges of divisionism, equated to an incipient form of
genocidal thinking even when opponents sought to construct parties that
included Tutsi as well as Hutu. During 2003, under RPF leadership,
Rwandans adopted a new constitution that enshrined a vague prohibition
of divisionism and made liberties of speech, press, and association
subject to regulationand possible limitationby ordinary law. In
presidential and legislative elections, the RPF came close to asserting
that a vote for others was a vote for genocidepast or future. With such
a campaign theme and with a combination of intimidation and fraud, the
RPF re-affirmed its dominance of political life.
In the years just after the end of the genocide, many international
leaders supported the RPF as if hoping thus to compensate for their
failure to protect Tutsi during the genocide. Even when confronted with
evidence of widespread and systematic killing of civilians by RPF
soldiers in Rwanda and in the Congo, most hesitated to criticize these
abuses. Not only did they see the RPF as the force that had ended the
genocide but they also saw all opponents of the RPF as likely to be
perpetrators of genocide, an assessment that was not accurate either in
1994 or later. So long as the parties were defined this way,
international leaders acquiesced inor even actively supportedthe RPF
activities in the Congo. Similarly international actors frequently
tolerated RPF limits on civil and political freedom inside Rwanda,
readily conceding the RPF argument that the post-genocidal context
justified restrictions on the usual liberties.
As the ten years after the genocide drew to a close, the international
community moderated its support of the current Rwandan government and
exerted considerable pressure to obtain withdrawal of its troops from
the Congo. Some international leaders began to question the tight RPF
control within Rwanda; diplomats and election observers from the
European Union and the United States noted abuses of human rights that
marred the 2003 elections. Despite these signs of growing international
concern, the RPF-led government appeared firmly seated for the near
future. Whether it will be able to assure long-term stability and
genuine reconciliation may depend on its ability to distinguish between
legitimate dissent and the warning signs of another genocide.
Human Rights Watch reissues this booksubstantially the same as the
original printingto ensure that a detailed history of the genocide
remains available to readers. Since its first publication in English
and French, the book has appeared in German and will shortly be
published in Kinyarwanda, the language of Rwanda. The horrors recorded
here must remain alive in our heads and hearts; only in that way can we
hope to resist the next wave of evil.
