Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [202]
That situation of chronic and escalating conflict forms the background against which the killings of 1994 took place. Even before 1994, Rwanda was experiencing rising levels of violence and theft, perpetrated especially by hungry landless young people without off-farm income. When one compares crime rates for people of age 21-25 among different parts of Rwanda, most of the regional differences prove to be correlated statistically with population density and per-capita availability of calories: high population densities and worse starvation were associated with more crime.
After the explosion of 1994, André tried to track down the fates of Kanama’s inhabitants. She found that 5.4% were reported to her as having died as a result of the war. That number is an underestimate of the total casualties, because there were some inhabitants about whose fates she could obtain no information. Hence it remains unknown whether the death rate approached the average value of 11% for Rwanda as a whole. What is clear is that the death rate in an area where the population consisted almost entirely of Hutu was at least half of the death rate in areas where Hutu were killing Tutsi plus other Hutu.
All but one of the known victims at Kanama fell into one of six categories. First, the single Tutsi at Kanama, a widowed woman, was killed. Whether that had much to do with her being Tutsi is unclear, because she furnished so many other motives for killing: she had inherited much land, she had been involved in many land disputes, she was the widow of a polygamous Hutu husband (hence viewed as a competitor of his other wives and their families), and her deceased husband had already been forced off his land by his half-brothers.
Two more categories of victims consisted of Hutu who were large landowners. The majority of them were men over the age of 50, hence at a prime age for father/son disputes over land. The minority were younger people who had aroused jealousy by being able to earn much off-farm income and using it to buy land.
A next category of victims consisted of “troublemakers” known for being involved in all sorts of land disputes and other conflicts.
Still another category was young men and children, particularly ones from impoverished backgrounds, who were driven by desperation to enlist in the warring militias and proceeded to kill each other. This category is especially likely to have been underestimated, because it was dangerous for André to ask too many questions about who had belonged to what militia.
Finally, the largest number of victims were especially malnourished people, or especially poor people with no or very little land and without off-farm income. They evidently died because of starvation, being too weak, or not having money to buy food or to pay the bribes required to buy their survival at roadblocks.
Thus, as André and Platteau note, “The 1994 events provided a unique opportunity to settle scores, or to reshuffle land properties, even among Hutu villagers . . . . It is not rare, even today, to hear Rwandans argue that a war is necessary to wipe out an excess of population and to bring numbers into line with the available land resources.”
That last quote of what Rwandans themselves say about the genocide surprised me. I had thought that it would be exceptional for people to recognize such a direct connection between population pressure and killings. I’m accustomed to thinking of population pressure, human environmental impacts, and drought as ultimate causes, which make people chronically desperate and are like the gunpowder inside the powder keg. One also needs a proximate cause: a match