Prelude to Genocide. David Rawson

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СКАЧАТЬ to ingrate it into central institutions.

      Regionalism was the flip side of centralizing power. The conquered periphery (Cyangugu and Kibuye to the west; Byumba and Kibungu to the north and east), once endowed with their own polities, resented the powerful center (Butare, Gikongoro) and the tributes it imposed. In the northwest (Gisenyi, Ruhengeri), former landlords still looked for ways to restore customary rights and political privileges. Regionalism, itself divided into loyalties (or enmities) built hill-by-hill, undercut attachments to the central state.⁴²

      Coercive violence has been a constant of Rwandan politics; the political elite brutally waged wars of conquest or battles for ascendency at court. Colonial invaders backed up the expansionary campaigns of the king (mwami), then imposed their own vision of “indirect rule,” rationalizing and institutionalizing coercive force. Labor levies, clientage obligations, and taxes grew more egregious and heavy as ambitions of the elite (whether traditional or colonial) increased in size and reach. After independence, enforced development programs undergirded the structural violence of elite regimes.⁴³

      Clientage was the network that knit Rwandan society together.⁴⁴ Under indirect rule, clientage persisted as a legally recognized institution. Weighty burdens of this institution were at the root of the 1959 “social revolution.” While the ideology of democratic representation might have challenged the monarchical system, the new republican order used clientage to enlist the support of the peasantry. Clientage, old and new, implied two things: the splendid isolation of the monarch (or president) who was always patron and never client, and networks of reciprocity and dependence from lords down to the lowliest peasants.⁴⁵

      Ethnic identity in Rwanda began with one’s lineage; lineages built alliances and formed clans. Today one might identify with traditional clans or feel linked (obliged) to former classmates, military or professional associates, or party organizations. Overarching these ascriptive or attributive identities are social designators that since the 1800s had come to reflect linkage to the political hierarchy and status within the clientage system: Tutsi and Hutu. Colonizers saw these as binary racial and occupational categories, born out of migratory patterns of conquest. Elites, struggling for power and place in the postindependence arena, used these designations to build loyalty and claim legitimacy. Amorphous categories became exclusive, hardened identifiers—matters of life and death.⁴⁶

      Profound psychological perceptions of superiority and inferiority underlay the interplay of these social categories.⁴⁷ This perceptual equation traditionally took on regional variances. Playing against this variegated background was the violence of modern Rwanda’s birth. The Hutu revolution of 1959, Tutsi exile attacks with attendant reprisals in the early 1960s, and pogroms against Hutu in Burundi all accentuated notions of ethnic identity and solidarity. Ethnicity formalized on identity cards and entrenched by political competition became the passkey for Hutu entrance into the modern world and a barrier to advancement for Tutsi. Left out of the national equation were Tutsi harried into exile in 1959, 1961, 1973, and 1978. Some were allowed to return, but most lived abroad for thirty years, a people with a country that would not accept them back.⁴⁸

       International Intervention and Peacemaking in Rwanda

      Eventually, the refugees did come back, not in the programmed return that the Habyarimana regime wanted, but in an insurgency led from Uganda on October 1, 1990, by the Rwandese Patriotic Front. What was to have been a quick overturning of a supposed weak and corrupt regime turned into an initial defeat for the RPF and then a protracted border war having all the elements of intractability.⁴⁹ States of the region and development partners rushed to quell the conflict and restore peace to the Rwandan people. But instead of a rapid settlement, a complex series of international interventions led eventually to the Arusha political negotiations and their result: the Arusha Accords of August 4, 1993. Within nine months, the negotiated peace went down with the crash of President Habyarimana’s plane as civil war and genocide erupted.

      Why were the hopes for peace set within the framework of the Arusha Accords so quickly crushed by political realities? This question drives our backward look over those events.

      DIPLOMATIC PERSPECTIVES

      A partial answer is to recognize that mediators, facilitators, and Observers involved in the international intervention did not fully comprehend the context of the crisis.⁵⁰ Our purchase on core dynamics was deficient in several regards.

      We were too sanguine about African societies’ vaunted capacity to endure. But the pressures of population growth, pluralistic politics, a deteriorating economy, and competition for power stretched Rwanda to its breaking point. In this context, pushing forward a peace agreement that required major structural change and redistribution of political and economic power brought not peace but civil war and genocide.

      We misconstrued relations of force in a seemingly powerless country. The UN Security Council deployed a peacekeeping force of minimal size and mandate. When President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down, extremist partisans quickly proved that the UN force had neither the mandate nor the materiel to counter determined opposition to the Arusha process.

      We glossed over the emotional roots of conflict, which, in the Rwandan case, were fear and loathing—fear that the “other,” once empowered, would be a perpetual oppressor, and the loathing that comes from devaluing one’s neighbor. The contenders were caught in an emotional recreation of self-images generated by diminution and demonization of the other side.

      We underestimated the will to power. Determination to control the political process brought an impasse to power-sharing talks; commitment to ascendancy brought disequilibrium to military negotiations; unwillingness to compromise blocked the installation of the transitional institutions. So when the president was killed, Rwanda was left without institutional authority, a void quickly filled by extremists who would hold on to power at all costs, even the slaughter of innocents.

      As we reflect on the historical complexity of Rwandan society, so also we should consider the capacity of the diplomatic intervention to restore peace. The mediators were focused on democratic practice and power sharing; the negotiating parties were contesting for power. Diplomats proposed classic peacemaking devices for bringing the parties together; the parties negotiated out of deeply rooted cultural dispositions. Thus, deficient understandings of Rwandan culture and traditional peacekeeping modalities framed international intervention in the Rwandan conflict. As an Observer remarked at the time, “We are, after all, diplomats, not social psychologists.”⁵¹

      MODES OF REPRESENTATION

      Interventions to bring peace to Rwanda moved through different modes.⁵² At the start of the Rwandan crisis, states with representation in Kigali negotiated with the Rwandan government, often comparing notes among embassies and following similar approaches but keeping to a traditional, bilateral mode. Meanwhile, states represented in Kampala held separate discussions with leaders of the Rwandese Patriotic Front.

      When political negotiations started in Arusha in August 1992, a parallel diplomacy emerged based on the conference principle.⁵³ Here the Observer group worked together in evaluating issues and jointly sharing their views with the Facilitator or with the parties themselves. As this study will show, the understandings arrived at in Arusha through this conference system were often out of touch with the bilateral discourse going on in Kigali, in Kampala, or in the capitals of concerned states.

      In August 1993, the conference negotiations produced the accords that took the peace process back to Rwanda under the aegis of the United Nations Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR). At this point, the conference was over and bilateral diplomacy was subsumed within a framework established by an international organization. The vital exchanges of bilateral negotiation and the collective wisdom of multilateral diplomacy became СКАЧАТЬ