World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [88]
The Belgians openly favored the “more intelligent, more active” and more “refined” Tutsis, giving them superior education and assigning them all the best administrative and political positions. The Hutu majority was reduced to a humiliated pool of forced labor, required to toil en masse under their Tutsi taskmasters. Over the years, what French scholar Gerald Prunier has called “an aggressively resentful inferiority complex” deepened and festered among the Hutus.
6 By the time independence rolled around, the Tutsi were a starkly privileged, “arrogant,” economically dominant ethnic minority. And the Hutu political activists who were calling for “majority rule” and “democratic revolution” were seeking not equality—but revenge.
In March 1957, nine influential Hutu intellectuals published a tract known as the Hutu Manifesto, calling for “democracy.” Employing typical ethnonationalist rhetoric, the manifesto argued that Tutsis were “foreign invaders” and that “Rwanda was by rights a nation of the Hutu majority.” As usual, more moderate political voices were drowned out by the more compelling voices of ethnic demagoguery. Extremists all over the country rallied large crowds with calls to unite in their “Hutuness.” Meanwhile, the Belgians, seemingly oblivious to the escalating ethnic rhetoric, and now playing the role of ex-colonizer assisting the transition to independence, scheduled elections. But before the elections were even held, warfare began.
Rwanda’s “social revolution,” which eventually drove out the Belgians, began in November 1959. After a Hutu politician was attacked by Tutsis, violence spread throughout the country. In a popular uprising known as “the wind of destruction,” Hutus, usually organized in groups of ten and led by a man blowing a whistle, conducted a campaign of pillage, arson, and murder against Tutsis. In the midst of all this, even as Hutus were torching Tutsi homes, elections were held in 1960. Not surprisingly, given Rwanda’s demographics, Hutus won 90 percent of the top political posts. By then over twenty thousand Tutsis had been displaced from their homes and many thousands more killed or exiled. Hutu leaders organizing the violence were always the first to snatch Tutsi property.
7
Rwanda was granted full independence in 1962. Inaugurated as the country’s first president was Grégoire Kayibanda, one of the original authors of the Hutu Manifesto, who gave a speech proclaiming, “Democracy has vanquished feudalism.” But this was democracy of a pathological variety. President Kayibanda, notes Gourevitch, was at best a dull leader: “Stirring up the Hutu masses to kill Tutsis was the only way he seemed able to keep the spirit of the revolution alive.” In late December 1963, highly organized Hutu massacres left almost fourteen thousand Tutsis dead in the southern province of Gikongoro alone. Most of the victims were well-educated Tutsi men, although women and children were killed as well, often clubbed or speared to death, their corpses thrown into a river after their clothes were taken.
8
In 1973 a Hutu major general by the name of Juvénal Habyarimana seized power in a coup. Calling for a moratorium on anti-Tutsi violence, and even including some Tutsis in his rubber-stamp parliament, Habyarimana ruled Rwanda as a corrupt totalitarian state for two decades, engorging himself while the majority of Rwandans lived in extreme, frustrated poverty.
In the early 1990s the wave of democratization then sweeping the world hit Rwanda. Responding to pressure from the United States and Western Europe, and particularly from France, President Habyarimana made a show of abandoning totalitarianism in favor of “pluralism” and multiparty democracy. But the new “pluralistic” politics quickly showed a dangerously ethnic face. Among the non–sham opposition