World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [87]
3
In Ethiopia, where members of the Eritrean minority have long dominated business, especially in key sectors such as transportation, construction, and electronics, the government took a more direct approach. Between 1998 and 1999 the Ethiopian government deported en masse 52,000 Eritrean-Ethiopians—almost the entire Eritrean community—as part of a larger war between Ethiopia and Eritrea. In classic ethnonationalist fashion, the expelled Eritreans—most of whom thought of themselves as Ethiopians—were first stripped of their citizenship. They were also deprived of education and separated from their families, with their businesses, pensions, and bank accounts subject to expropriation. Many of the deported Eritreans say they were forced to sign powers of attorney handing over their property to “full Ethiopians.” The Eritreans blame their expulsion on Ethiopian “jealousy, revenge, and greed”; some have called the actions “economic cleansing.”
The Ethiopian government played a major role in fomenting ethnic division and hatred within the country. Starting in 1992 the government issued to all residents identity cards providing an “ethnic” designation—for example, “Eritrean.” Although Eritreans have lived in Ethiopia as long as either country has existed within defined boundaries, the Ethiopian government subsequently declared all Eritreans to be “non-Ethiopian,” then “non-citizens,” and ultimately “aggressors.” Such scapegoating tactics have proved sadly effective in exacerbating ethnic hatred, a boon for the Ethiopian government, which looks forward to revenues from the expropriated properties and hails the awakening of a “true” Ethiopian people united “against an enemy in their midst.”
4
The Rwandan Genocide
The tragic case of Rwanda illustrates the most extreme form of majority-supported, democracy-assisted efforts to exterminate an economically dominant ethnic minority. Historically, Rwanda’s roughly 85 percent Hutus were cultivators, whereas the roughly 14 percent Tutsis were herdsmen. “This was the original inequality: cattle are a more valuable asset than produce,” writes Philip Gourevitch. After 1860, when Mwame Kigeri Rwabugiri, a Tutsi, ascended the Rwandan throne, the stratification between Hutus and Tutsis intensified. Rwanda essentially became a feudal kingdom in which Tutsis were overlords and Hutus their vassals. Still, the line distinguishing Hutu and Tutsi was much more porous than it would become later: The two groups spoke a common language, intermarriage occurred, and successful Hutus could “become Tutsi.”
In classic divide-and-conquer fashion, the Belgian colonizers injected a sharper and much more divisive sense of ethnicity into Rwandan society—a sense of ethnicity that also happened to corroborate the Belgians’ own “scientific” beliefs about racial superiority. To facilitate their own goals of colonial subjugation, the Belgians perpetuated the myth that the Tutsi—usually stereotyped as lanky, light-skinned, and thin-lipped—were genetically superior to, and thus born to rule over, the supposedly stockier, darker, thick-lipped Hutus. According to Gourevitch,
In addition to military and administrative chiefs, and a veritable army of churchmen, the Belgians dispatched scientists to Rwanda. The scientists brought scales and measuring tapes and calipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberances of Rwandan noses. Sure enough, the scientists found what they had believed all along. Tutsis had “nobler,” more “naturally” aristocratic dimensions than the “coarse” and “bestial” Hutus. On the “nasal index,” for instance, the median Tutsi nose was found to be about two and a half millimeters longer and nearly five millimeters narrower than the median Hutu nose.
5
In 1933–34 the Belgians conducted a “census,” then issued “ethnic” identity