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By Root 2098 0

to light the keg. In most areas of Rwanda, that match was ethnic hatred whipped up by politicians cynically concerned with keeping themselves in power. (I say “most areas,” because the large-scale killings of Hutu by Hutu at Kanama demonstrate a similar outcome even where everybody belonged to the same ethnic group.) As Gérard Prunier, a French scholar of East Africa, puts it, “The decision to kill was of course made by politicians, for political reasons. But at least part of the reason why it was carried out so thoroughly by the ordinary rank-and-file peasants in their ingo [= family compound] was feeling that there were too many people on too little land, and that with a reduction in their numbers, there would be more for the survivors.”

The link that Prunier, and that André and Platteau, see behind population pressure and the Rwandan genocide has not gone unchallenged. In part, the challenges are reactions to oversimplified statements that critics with some justice lampooned as “ecological determinism.” For instance, only 10 days after the genocide began, an article in an American newspaper linked Rwanda’s dense population to the genocide by saying, “Rwandas [i.e., similar genocides] are endemic, built-in, even, to the world we inhabit.” Naturally, that fatalistic oversimplified conclusion provokes negative reactions not only to it, but also to the more complex view that Prunier, André and Platteau, and I present, for three reasons.

First, any “explanation” of why a genocide happened can be misconstrued as “excusing” it. However, regardless of whether we arrive at an oversimplified one-factor explanation or an excessively complex 73-factor explanation for a genocide doesn’t alter the personal responsibility of the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, as of other evil deeds, for their actions. This is a misunderstanding that arises regularly in discussions of the origins of evil: people recoil at any explanation, because they confuse explanations with excuses. But it is important that we understand the origins of the Rwandan genocide—not so that we can exonerate the killers, but so that we can use that knowledge to decrease the risk of such things happening again in Rwanda or elsewhere. Similarly, there are people who have chosen to devote their lives or careers to understanding the origins of the Nazi Holocaust, or to understanding the minds of serial murderers and rapists. They have made that choice not in order to mitigate the responsibility of Hitler, serial murderers, and rapists, but because they want to know how those awful things came to be, and how we can best prevent recurrences.

Second, it is justifiable to reject the simplistic view that population pressure was the single cause of the Rwandan genocide. Other factors did contribute; in this chapter I have introduced ones that seem to me important, and experts on Rwanda have written entire books and articles on the subject, cited in my Further Readings at the back of this book. Just to reiterate: regardless of the order of their importance, those other factors included Rwanda’s history of Tutsi domination of Hutu, Tutsi large-scale killings of Hutu in Burundi and small-scale ones in Rwanda, Tutsi invasions of Rwanda, Rwanda’s economic crisis and its exacerbation by drought and world factors (especially by falling coffee prices and World Bank austerity measures), hundreds of thousands of desperate young Rwandan men displaced as refugees into settlement camps and ripe for recruitment by militias, and competition among Rwanda’s rival political groups willing to stoop to anything to retain power. Population pressure joined with those other factors.

Finally, one should not misconstrue a role of population pressure among the Rwandan genocide’s causes to mean that population pressure automatically leads to genocide anywhere around the world. To those who would object that there is not a necessary link between Malthusian population pressure and genocide, I would answer, “Of course!” Countries can be overpopulated without descending into genocide, as exemplified