• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2182 0

was also involved, we need to begin with some background on the genocide’s course, the history leading up to it, and their usual interpretation that I shall now sketch, which runs as follows. (I shall mention later some respects in which this usual interpretation is wrong, incomplete, or oversimplified.) The populations of both countries consist of only two major groups, called the Hutu (originally about 85% of the population) and the Tutsi (about 15%). To a considerable degree, the two groups traditionally had filled different economic roles, the Hutu being principally farmers, the Tutsi pastoralists. It is often stated that the two groups look different, Hutu being on the average shorter, stockier, darker, flat-nosed, thick-lipped, and square-jawed, while Tutsi are taller, more slender, paler-skinned, thin-lipped, and narrow-chinned. The Hutu are usually assumed to have settled Rwanda and Burundi first, from the south and west, while the Tutsi are a Nilotic people who are assumed to have arrived later from the north and east and who established themselves as overlords over the Hutu. When German (1897) and then Belgian (1916) colonial governments took over, they found it expedient to govern through Tutsi intermediaries, whom they considered racially superior to Hutu because of the Tutsi’s paler skins and supposedly more European or “Hamitic” appearance. In the 1930s the Belgians required everybody to start carrying an identity card classifying themselves as Hutu or Tutsi, thereby markedly increasing the ethnic distinction that had already existed.

Independence came to both countries in 1962. As independence approached, Hutu in both countries began struggling to overthrow Tutsi domination and to replace it with Hutu domination. Small incidents of violence escalated into spirals of killings of Tutsi by Hutu and of Hutu by Tutsi. The outcome in Burundi was that the Tutsi succeeded in retaining their domination, after Hutu rebellions in 1965 and 1970-72 followed by Tutsi killings of a few hundred thousand Hutu. (There is inevitably much uncertainty about this estimated number and many of the following numbers of deaths and exiles.) In Rwanda, however, the Hutu gained the upper hand and killed 20,000 (or perhaps only 10,000?) Tutsi in 1963. Over the course of the next two decades up to a million Rwandans, especially Tutsi, fled into exile in neighboring countries, from which they periodically attempted to invade Rwanda, resulting in further retaliatory killings of Tutsi by Hutu, until in 1973 the Hutu general Habyarimana staged a coup against the previous Hutu-dominated government and decided to leave the Tutsi in peace.

Under Habyarimana, Rwanda prospered for 15 years and became a favorite recipient of foreign aid from overseas donors, who could point to a peaceful country with improving health, education, and economic indicators. Unfortunately, Rwanda’s economic improvement became halted by drought and accumulating environmental problems (especially deforestation, soil erosion, and soil fertility losses), capped in 1989 by a steep decline in world prices for Rwanda’s principal exports of coffee and tea, austerity measures imposed by the World Bank, and a drought in the south. Habyarimana took yet another attempted Tutsi invasion of northeastern Rwanda from neighboring Uganda in October 1990 as the pretext for rounding up or killing Hutu dissidents and Tutsi all over Rwanda, in order to strengthen his own faction’s hold on the country. The civil wars displaced a million Rwandans into settlement camps, from which desperate young men were easily recruited into militias. In 1993 a peace agreement signed at Arusha called for power-sharing and a multi-power government. Still, businessmen close to Habyarimana imported 581,000 machetes for distribution to Hutu for killing Tutsi, because machetes were cheaper than guns.

However, Habyarimana’s actions against Tutsi, and his newfound toleration of killings of Tutsi, proved insufficient for Hutu extremists (i.e., Hutu even more extreme than Habyarimana), who feared having their power