Citation
The killing in Rwanda is different, in magnitude and nature, from the
all-too-familiar scenes from contemporary Africa. It is the ugliest of
all human crimes, genocide, committed by Hutu extremists against the
Tutsi minority and Hutu who stand for compromise.
Preparations for mass killing began in 1990, when the regime of the
late President Habyarimana first faced the simultaneous threats of
rebellion by the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and the
transition to multi-party rule. Starting in 1991, members of the
now-notorious interahamwe militia were mobilised from every community
in the country.
Pushed by his own hardline coterie, who saw that peace proposals of aid
agencies and neighbouring states led inexorably to the loss of their
unfettered power and privilege, the President repeatedly stalled.
Finally, the extremists mounted their putsch and the United Nations
promptly quit.
When the signal was given on the night of April 6-7, the Presidential
Guard set about murdering opposition politicians and dissidents,
following a prepared list. The senior politicians and generals who are
orchestrating the massacres are known, and should be indicted for
genocide. However, it does not explain why a small cabal has been able
to mobilise thousands of people to hack their neighbours to death
simply because they are different.
Their extremist allies are tapping widespread Hutu frustrations and
playing on the economic desperation of young peasants. Rwanda is
overcrowded to the point of claustrophobia.
At a deeper level, the extremists have used a racist ideology that
would be dismissed as laughable were it not so demonically powerful.
This has used a discredited racial theory to incite anti-Tutsi
violence. The origins of the "Hamitic theory" lie in the refusal of
European explorers to believe that Bantu Africans could have developed
sophisticated kingdoms such as pre-colonial Rwanda. Hence they invented
a new race of "African Aryans" the Hamites who had supposedly migrated
from Ethiopia, bringing civilisation. Colonial rule turned traditional
African kingship by the Tutsi elite into a rigid caste system cruel and
sanctified by racial theory.
Although it is 35 years since the demise of Tutsi supremacy, the theory
lives on, turned round by Hutu extremists to justify killing their
erstwhile masters. The reason why thousands of corpses have floated as
far as Lake Victoria is that a Hutu ideologue made a well-publicised
speech in 1992, in which he called for the Hutu to "return" the Tutsi
to Ethiopia via the short-cut of the Nyabarongo river. This peculiar
racial ideology is almost certainly what transformed the crisis into
full-scale genocide.
Meanwhile, dictators are watching events, and the international
community's response. Revulsion is tempered, in some cases, with
admiration for the sheer audacity of what the Hutu extremists are
attempting to do. If they succeed, and retain legitimacy, Rwanda is an
advertisement for genocide.
Alex de Waal is co-director of African Rights, a human rights
organisation based in London.
