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The paper discusses genocide in Rwanda. The genocide of 1994 was an apocalyptic event that shattered Rwandan society. Its roots lie in the twists and turns of Rwandan history since the colonial era. 800, 000 people were slaughtered in a matter of three months, which makes genocide in Rwanda the most frightening event of recent years. Outline Introduction Body Background Causes for genocide Consequences of genocide Reaction of international community Conclusion Genocide in Rwanda The civil war in Rwanda began on 1 October 1990 with an invasion from southern Uganda of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) rebel movement.
The next three years saw sporadic fighting between the RPF and the Rwandan army, interrupted by a series of partially observed cease-fires. In April 1994, the launching of genocide by Rwandan extremists brought about the collapse of a long-running cease-fire and brought the two sides back to war. Three months of fighting saw the RPF rout the former Rwandan army, but not before hundreds of thousands of Rwandans perished in a genocide conducted by Rwandan government forces. The eruption of conflict and civil war in the 1990 s, in both Rwanda and eastern Zaire, had its origin in modern struggles for power and wealth. The world, however, easily overlooked this modern origin, since the confrontations it witnessed appeared to have taken on strongly ethicize d, seemingly tribal overtones and justification. The Rwandan Genocide stands out as significant, not only because of the sheer number of people massacred in such a short period of time, but also because of how inadequately the United Nations (particularly, its Western members such as the United States, France and the United Kingdom) responded. (Wikipedia) The Rwandan 1994 genocide in particular, more than the fighting in eastern Zaire (1996 onwards), was for too long and at too great a cost portrayed by the media as rooted in tribalism.
Rwandas bloodbath was not tribal. Rather it was a distinctly modern tragedy, a degenerated class conflict minutely prepared and callously executed. Most of the world failed to see it that way, and continued to think of the conflict -- this after all was Africa -- in terms of centuries-old tribal warfare. The power of shamelessly twisted ethnic argument for the sake of class privilege was demonstrated most shockingly in the blatant imaginings about history that galvanized Rwandas Hutu Power extremists. These extremists killed Rwandas Tutsi and sent their bodies back to Ethiopia via the Nyabarongo and A kagera rivers. The imagined origin of the Tutsi, along with their (poorly understood) migrations and conquest of Rwanda, were evoked by power-crazed Hutu politicians to instill ethnic hatred in the very people they themselves oppressed: the victims of class oppression were spurred on to kill a minority group which the oppressors had labeled the real enemy. (Pottier) Some 800, 000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu who declared their sympathy with the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) were slaughtered in a matter of three months.
Today, those who govern post-genocide Rwanda also imagine the past in order to make sense of the present, but they do so in different, more subtle ways. Post-genocide leaders regard Rwandas pre-colonial past as something of a golden era, a state of social harmony later corrupted by Europeans. Vital to the justification of minority rule, their message is delivered in a well-rehearsed manner and style, marked sometimes by omission (of well-established counter-evidence) and sometimes by disregard for context. Complexity and context are continuously screened out of contemporary representations of the Old Rwanda, as could be seen, for instance, in official testimonies just prior to Zaires civil war.
Against available empirical evidence, the Rwandan governments representation of the historically evolved border separating the two countries evoked a late nineteenth-century situation in which Rwanda and eastern Zaire had been linked in political harmony. The Rwanda genocide grew out of an explosive struggle for resources which embattled politicians ethicize d to their advantage, if only fleetingly. A crisis rooted in class and regional interests was turned into a conflict for which an ethnic minority, the Tutsi, was held responsible. While most in the international community initially failed to understand the genocides multiple causes, some knowledgeable academics showed and shared their insights. Preparations for genocide, invariably dressed up as self-defense against the Rwandese Patriotic Front, an organization ethicize d as the Tutsi invader, had started some two years before the actual slaughter when every numb kumi (ten houses) every cell, the smallest administrative unit -- received a gun from the national army.
Many of those involved in planning the 1994 genocide saw themselves as patriots, defending their country against outside aggression. (Case Study) The availability of about 150, 000 guns meant that the state authorities could mobilize every prefecture, commune, sector and numb kumi in a matter of hours. The Hutu extremist militias in Rwanda did not possess technicals nor did most of them have firearms of any sort. Most were unemployed or underemployed adolescent males armed with clubs and machetes and imbued with the assurance that they were acting out the will of their countrys leaders with the support of the majority of their compatriots. They could have been neutralized with little or no loss of life on the part of an intervening force. As for Rwandan Government Forces, who were indeed well armed, that is another story. These latter might have resisted an intervention, but their resistance would not have lasted long.
In four years of war with the Rwandan Patriotic Front, Rwandan Government Forces had shown that they were poorly organized, poorly led, relatively unmotivated, and only effective when backed by French artillery and advisors. Rapid and unambiguous action by an intervention force could have bottled up most of the RGF in their garrisons. Instead, shortly after the death of ten Belgian soldiers who were part of the UN peacekeeping forces, the Security Council chose to reduce its forces in Rwanda to an ineffectual number and to observe the genocide from the sidelines. (Pottier) In many respects, both the war and genocide were conducted in ethnic terms. The membership of the RPF was predominantly Tutsi, whereas the government of Rwanda (we will sometimes use the acronym GoR in reference to the Rwandan government) was dominated by Hutu. (A third ethnic group, the Twa, represented only 1 percent of the prewar population and was never a significant factor in the war. ) The genocide was targeted principally against the Tutsi, although a large number of Hutu's were also killed, especially at the onset.
Was this ethnic war? An outburst of ancient enmities? Journalistic accounts of the genocide painted it as an all-out war: Hutu against Tutsi. It is in this moment of ethnic competition, and the creation of a large exodus population in the neighboring countries, that we find one of the long-term roots of the Rwandan civil war in the 1990 s. The civil war in 1990 would be launched by the descendants -- familial and political -- of this period of competition, and the memory of Tutsi dominance, however brief, would be a critical factor in the political mobilization toward genocide.
The scale and intensity of human suffering in Rwanda during the three bloody months of genocide are shocking. Clearly, the human suffering of the genocide was the overwhelming consequence of the failure to contain the escalation of the Rwandan war, overshadowing all other consequences. Yet other consequences were significant. First among them, in chronological terms, was the humanitarian crisis produced by the genocide, wherein more than half of the Rwandan population was displaced from their homes. This crisis generated an overwhelming response from the international relief system and the wider international community. Literally hundreds of relief organizations flooded into Rwanda to respond to some portion of the misery.
No fewer than eight nations sent military contingents to assist the relief process. The United Nations provided the reinforcements to UNAMIR that had not been forthcoming during the genocide itself. In the first five months of the response, the international community spent more than $ 1. 2 billion dollars responding to the humanitarian aftermath of the genocide. The fact that the response to the aftermath dwarfed in scale and commitment the response to the actual genocide was an irony not lost on Rwandans. As quickly became clear, the humanitarian aftermath of the 1994 genocide contained within it the seeds of renewed conflict.
The enormous international energy that characterized response to the humanitarian crisis was not matched by similar energy with respect to preventive efforts to halt the renewal of conflict. Instead, the international community engaged in what Susan Woodward has called humanitarian containment. The result was continued instability and insecurity in Rwanda. This insecurity was in turn the direct cause of yet another round of violent conflict: the civil and regional war for control of Zaire and the subregion starting in 1996. The strategy of the architects of genocide can thus be summarized as comprising the elements of demonization, polarization, and escalation. The demonization of the RPF began early in the war.
As war moved into the political arena, extremists fought to win over the moderate center, polarizing politics in Kigali in a manner that complicated the possibility of power sharing and forced moderates into a difficult and dangerous choice (to put it simplistically) between the CDR and the RPF. Finally, they escalated the war, moving quickly to kill off those moderates who would not join their effort and thereby tearing down any possibility of negotiated peace. Bibliography: Pottier, Johan. Re-Imagining Rwanda: Conflict, Survival and Disinformation in the Late Twentieth Century.
Cambridge University Press, 2002. Case Study: Genocide in Rwanda, 1994, web Rwanda: The Untold Story of the Rwandan Genocide, web Rwandan Genocide, Wikipedia, web
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