The Rwandan Quagmire

We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch is a comprehensive analysis of the Rwandan genocide. The book interweaves the history of the Rwandan people, first-hand accounts of the genocide, and political narratives of the period of turmoil that followed.

The account is fascinating and well written. But despite having read the 353-pages of the book, I am still at a loss in understanding how a tragedy like the Rwandan genocide could have happened. This is not to say that the book is not extremely thorough in its explanation of the events that led to the mass killing of Rwandan Tutsis-- it is. But even after reading about the colonial legacies of the Belgians, the history of social inequality and violence between Hutus and Tutsis, the collapse of the economy in the 1980's, or the boom of genocidal propaganda in the 1990's, I am left with a feeling that something still does not make sense.

The events that took place in Rwanda in 1994 stand out because, unlike in other cases of genocide such as in the Holocaust, the killing was not achieved, per se, through state-operated, systematic means. Efficiency was not achieved through technology. Instead, "the people were the weapon: the entire Hutu population had to kill the entire Tutsi population." (96). The genocidaires relied on every single member of the Hutu majority to carry out their campaign to annihilate the Tutsi population. The genocide that ensued was the swiftest, most efficient mass killing of the twentieth century, with over 800,000 people being slaughtered in a mere 3 months.

As someone who studied social sciences in college, I tend to think that everything that happens around us has an explanation. Revolutions and wars, treaties and alliances, can be studied as combinations of underlying factors and variables that interact in a particular way to create a specific outcome. However, sometimes, like in the case of Rwanda, it seems that we are at a loss in understanding what happened. The tools at our disposal all of a sudden prove to be useless.

Any historian can tell you that the assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana was the spark that ignited the fire in Rwanda in 1994. But unlike in other historical events, we are not talking about a state, or a faction of the state, making a decision to go to war. We aren't talking about people having a collective uprising against the government. We aren't even talking about scores of people suddenly deciding to attack a neighboring country. We are talking about ordinary citizens picking up machetes and killing each other. In Rwanda there was a tipping point when, literally, doctors started killing their patients, teachers started killing their students, and neighbors started killing each another. There are even reports of brothers killing brothers, husbands killing wives. When, and how, does that spark go off collectively for hundreds of thousands of individuals, turning ordinary citizens into killing machines? Society, on its most basic level, collapsed. Ties of affiliation created by family, community, or professional duty degraded and broke down completely. How, if at all, can we make sense of this?

I feel conflicted. I'd like to think that there is a way to break it down, to analyze what happened from a rational, methodological angle. To some degree, I would like to beleive that if we are able to demystify what occurred, we might be more successful at identifying similar events in the future, thus increasing out ability to stop tragedies before they occur. But perhaps that is just my own naive hope. What really went through the mind of those hundreds of thousands of individuals is something that neither Gourevitch, nor any reader of his book, may ultimately know.

The text also raises some fascinating questions about foreign involvement in Africa, and also of the lack thereof. The history of Rwanda has been marked by one catastrophic intervention from a foreign power after the other. To start out, the borders of the country were carved out in Europe without any regard to natural or ethnic boundaries. In the eighteenth century the Belgians, for their own administrative and financial purposes, reified sectarian identities, through extremely racist methods of classification such as measuring the widths of people's noses, dividing the country into two competing camps.

And the list of mistakes committed by foreign governments extends well into our era. In 1994, the great powers and the United Nations cowardly failed to even acknowledge that a genocide was taking place, in fear that an acknowledgment would equate a mandatory intervention. Other countries, such as France, had no qualms about continuing to support the Hutu authority, pretending that what was going on in Rwandan was a civil war of all against all, rather than acknowledging the reality of the situation.

Even after the worst was over, the world continued making mistakes. The international community set up incredibly misguided aid programs that directly helped the genocidaires, giving the people who committed the genocide food and shelter, and ignoring the survivors who had been victims of unprecedented violence. The reason behind this preposterous mistake was that hundreds of thousands of Hutus, had crossed an international border into Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and as such were regarded as refugees in need of the world's pity and aid. The Tutsi survivors of the genocide, on the other hand, remained in Rwanda and largely ignored simply because they failed to classify under the narrow definitions of what the UNHCR considers a "refugee."

Despite the generally depressing subject matter of the book, Gourevitch ends with a note of hope. It was neither the international community nor the Hutu men and women who made the right choices in Rwanda. The last page of the book contains a description of a small, yet significant, act of heroism that highlights that, even in times of despair, there are right choices to be made. And, surprisingly, sometimes the right choices are made by those whom we may least expect to do so:

"During the attack on the school in Gisenyi, as in the earlier attack on the school in Kibuye, the students, teenage girls who had been roused from their sleep, were ordered to separate themselves-- Hutus from Tutsis. But the students had refused. At both schools, the girls said they were simply Rwandans, so they were beaten and shot indiscriminately." (353)