In 1995 Human Rights Watch and the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH) started a project under the leadership of Alison Des Forges to document the Rwandan genocide of 1994. As early as 1993 these and other organizations had reported on massacres of Tutsis and Hutus as well as other violations of human rights that had been perpetrated both by the Rwandan government of the time and its armed opposition, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). In 1994, as the violence against the Tutsi minority mounted, these organizations tried to call to the attention of the international community the unfolding genocide, but as we now know such appeals went purposely unheeded by the UN, the United States, France, Belgium, and some African states. The result was the mass murder of over 500,000 Tutsis--three quarters of the population-- in less than one hundred days. Based principally on primary sources such as Rwandan government documents and interviews with some of the actors, the Des Forges led project is now completed. Leave None to Tell the Story, promises to become a major documentary source as well as a standard interpretation for the Rwandan genocide.
When in the 19th century first the German and then Belgian colonialists came upon Rwanda and Burundi they were struck by the wealth, power, and social organization of the two kingdoms. The Europeans noted that in both societies a "Tutsi" aristocracy of pastoralists dominated a "Hutu" peasantry. Though both groups were African, it seemed to the Europeans that physically the Tutsi resembled Europeans and thus were "racially" distinct from and superior to the Hutu. Applying racial categories to social differences as was common in 19th century Europe, the colonialists invented the "Hamitic hypothesis" in which the Tutsis were cast as a superior "race" of conquerors from "Ethiopia" that had subjugated the seemingly inferior native Bantu Hutu some hundreds of years prior to European colonization.
Lacking manpower to rule their colonies in Africa, the European colonialists invariably had to rule through local agents, and in the case of both kingdoms they chose and rewarded the Tutsi to fulfill that role. Unfortunately for later developments the latter were only too glad to oblige (since, in effect, the Europeans reinforced their power and superiority), and in time Tutsi and Hutu came to view each other not as members of the same loosely stratified communities ruled by kings to whom both felt allegiance but as separate races of conquerors and conquered.
This was the situation until after the Second World War and the defeat of Nazism. The new Belgian administrators who were now in posession of both kingdoms had become less racist and more egalitarian than their predecessors (if nothing else, Nazism had given racism a bad name!). Moreover, with the acceleration of the anti-colonial movements all over the Third World, including Rwanda and Burundi, colonial administrators had to reconsider their relations to their dependencies.
From the perspective of the new post-war dispensation, where self-determination and democracy were the vogue, it became apparent that Belgian rule via Tutsi overlordship of the Hutu was long passe. Indeed, the new European paradigm now blamed the Tutsis as an illegitimate, racially distinct, foreign ruling class that had seen its day, and it was the Hutu who were belatedly recast as the genuine "people" of Rwanda and Burundi. In 1959, with the aid of Belgian administrators, political movements led by Hutu elites revolted against their Tutsi overlords in Rwanda and displaced one "ethnocracy" with another. Where formerly Tutsi ruled, now Hutu called the shots. However, next door in Burundi the Tutsi were able to hold on to power. Warned by events in Rwanda, The Burundian army dominated by Hima Tutsi--an offshoot of the Tutsi stratum-- subverted popular elections that would have brought the Hutu majority to power and created a Tutsi "ethnocracy." Indeed, until 1994, when talking about genocide in the former Belgian territory, most people referred to the selective genocide of an estimated 100,000 educated Hutus in 1972 in Burundi by the Tutsi- led government and army. (See Rene Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide, 1995). Thus Rwanda and Burundi became mirror images of each other. Such were the initial conditions for the subsequent violence that overwhelmed both societies.
Des Forges stresses that violence and genocide in Rwanda were not the results of ancient primordial "tribal" enmities. They were the endproducts of a process that commenced with the constructs of European colonialism and racism. Her analysis of the role of colonialism in manufacturing "racial" divisions between Hutu anad Tutsi in Rwanda coincides with the view of other scholars, such as Gerard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, 1995 (rev. ed. 1998). She emphasizes that the genocide was initiated and orchestrated by a radical Hutu elite at the center of government, calling itself "Hutu Power," that had close ties to President Habyarimana, the army, the police, the party structure, and the mass media. "The genocide resulted from the deliberate choice of a modern elite to foster hatred and fear to keep itself in power."
Notably she stresses the role that an orchestrated "campaign of genocide" played in convincing and then mobilizing tens of thousands of ordinary Hutus to become the executioners of their Tutsi neighbors. Initiated in Kigali, the capital, the genocidal campaign spread to every prefecture, commune, sector, and village. It utilized the mass media to vilify the Tutsi minority as well as the Hutu opposition. Both were said to be traitors in league with the invading RPF. Rwandese Tutsis were demonized and accused of harboring murderous intentions against all Hutu. They were labeled ibyitso (traitors) and inyenzi (cockroaches). It was a case of "kill or be killed." With a 66 percent rate of literacy and a 29 percent rate of radio ownership (59 percent in the cities), Rwanda was a setting where the mass media proved very effective as tools of mobilization and propaganda.
But even before April 1994 and the actual genocide, Hutu Power's campaign also relied on direct action to make the case for Tutsi perfidy and to frighten and involve ordinary Hutu. Thus on October 4-5 it staged a phony attack on Kigali, which it blamed on the RPF. It initiated very real massacres of Tutsis as reprisals for RPF incursions and as a way of habituating ordinary people to violence. And it used traditional means of mobilization in the villages such as calling people out to do communal work, umuganda, but in this case "work" meant mass murder.
Starting as reprisal for the RPF's invasion from Uganda in 1990, Hutu Power's campaign to prepare people for genocide was so successful that by 1994--when the order came down to start the killing--the speed with which people were slaughtered in Rwanda surpassed that of any other genocide in the modern era. If not for the military victory of the RPF no Tutsis or moderate Hutus (those who opposed the genocide) would likely have survived.
The concept of a "genocidal campaign" is important for an understanding of what happened in Rwanda, but it leaves some questions unanswered. For the distinctiveness of the Rwandan genocide lies not only in its organization and speed; it lies also in the extent of its mass participation. Tens of thousands of ordinary Hutu peasants and workers wielding machetes, clubs, hoes, or other farming implements joyfully massacred their Tutsi neighbors. Priests, pastors, and ministers turned on their flocks, as did husbands on their wives and wives on their husbands; although, it should also be well noted that many refused to get involved, and some even hid and attempted to save people targeted for death. Where did the tens of thousands of killers come from? What was going through their minds as they joined the campaign of mass murder?
Some indication of ordinary Hutu attitudes might have been derived from the work of Liisa Malkki's Purity and Exile (1995). In that pioneering work, based on interviews with Hutu refugees from the violence in Burundi, Maalki demonstrates how all Tutsis were demonized by an ideology (which she calls a "mythico- history") that viewed them as foreign invaders intent on subjugating or destroying the Tutsi. If such an ideology was widely spread in Rwanda before the violence it might help to explain the success of Des Forge's "campaign of genocide."
Des Forges gives us some clues: No doubt the propensity of ordinary "law-abiding" people to do as they are told by their leaders played a role, as did the endless propaganda of Radio Milles Collines, which could use the war to make it appear as if all Tutsi were in league with the RPF invaders whose main goal was to kill or subjugate the Hutu. Greed for land and property no doubt played an important role in the motivations of poverty stricken villagers, but what is missing is their voice. What did ordinary Hutu make of their Tutsi neighbors, of Habyarimana, of the RPF? How did they justify the violence to themselves? Such questions-- admitedly very difficult to study--are alluded to but left largely unanswered in this work.
Another point that needs to be raised is this study's treatment of the RPF. "The crimes committed by RPF soldiers were so systematic and widespread and took place over so long a period of time that commanding officers must have been aware of them" (14). Although she avoids the pitfall of blaming each side equally for the violence, and she does not accuse the RPF of genocide, she fails to differentiate strongly enough, as in the quote above, between the atrocities committed by the RPF in war-time, including mass revenge killings against the Hutu by some units, from the planned and systematic mass murder whose clear intent was the extermination of the Tutsi minority perpetrated by the Rwandan state and its followers.
Another study might also have stressed more strongly the African international context and especially the reciprocal interconnection between violence in Burundi and Rwanda--a point often missed by scholars and journalists. Some major examples make the point clearly: 1) The revolution of 1959 in Rwanda impelled the Tutsi army to seize power in Burundi; 2) the massacres of 1972 in Burundi had profound consequences in Rwanda, not the least of which was to bring Habyarimana to power; and 3) the 1993 assassination of President Melchior Ndadeye, the first elected Hutu president, killed by units of the Tutsi-dominated army in 1993 had a direct connection to the unrest and subsequent genocide in Rwanda.
This is not to argue that the events in Rwanda were indistinguishable from those in Burundi. There is a difference stressed by the UN itself between massacre and total genocide. What happened in Rwanda was total genocide and needs a framework of its own for an explanation. That the total genocide in Rwanda was influenced by events in Burundi is another matter altogether.
In sum, Des Forges's is the best and most detailed study of the Rwandan genocide that we have to date, and her concept of a "campaign of genocide" is an important conceptual contribution to our understanding, but some important issues remain unresolved.