world’s inaction and even support of the genocidal regime. This served to frame Rwandans as twice victims: first of the genocidal regime and second of Western countries, based on insidious racism. In a notable example, Kagame said in his 2004 speech, “All these powerful nations regarded one million lives as valueless, as another statistic, and could be dispensed with. And of course some claimed that the dying people were not in their national strategic interests. But if the death of a million people was not a concern to them, then what is? I hate to think that this may be due to the color of the skin of these Rwandans who died or other Africans who might die in the future. Ten years after the powerful nations eventually called the mass killings by their proper name, genocide, they have not demonstrated proportional responsibility where it belongs.” Comments like these positioned Rwanda in solidarity with the African continent and the non-European developing world more globally.
Further, placing blame on foreigners exonerated Rwandans (particularly Tutsi) for certain forms of oppression and division in the past and the present. It was a counter-hegemonic move to neutralize international critiques of the RPF in the past or present and justify the government’s ongoing efforts to chart its own fate, consistent with the widespread use of culture to justify mediation in harmony legal models. Also, it allowed the postgenocide government to assert that the international community had a moral obligation to provide ongoing support, but on the RPF’s own terms.
Indeed, as I discussed earlier in the chapter, the international community carries a share of the blame. For good reason, between 2004 and 2008, the Hamitic Hypothesis was mentioned in newspaper articles, narrated by taxi drivers and tour guides, included as part of Rwanda’s official colonial history in the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center (Smith 2004:9), and referenced in virtually every academic and popular history of Rwanda.14 For more than a century, Europeans had argued that Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa constituted distinctly separate racial or ethnic groups.15 In the 1950s, the ideas at the core of the Hamitic myth were at the center of the Hutu Revolution, when leaders claimed Hutu autochthony and therefore rights to govern, while Tutsi were cast as foreign and innately domineering (Lemarchand 2009:58). In the 1990s, the same ideas played a central role in anti-Tutsi propaganda in the lead-up to genocide (Chrétien 1995:139–208). As I outlined earlier, scholars have further shown that the international community played a role in the escalating tensions and violence in Rwanda between the 1950s and 1990s and did not do enough to stop the genocide.
But placing blame on colonial leaders—and by extension on the West in the present—overlooks the problems in place under Rwandan leadership. Specifically, it erases how the reign of King Rwabugiri (1867–1897),16 who ruled immediately prior to the arrival of colonial leadership, marked a crisis of social health and spurred the formation of resistance or liberation movements directed against the monarchy, as well as examples of anti-Tutsi violence (Botte 1985a,1985b; Feierman 1995; Vansina 2004:137–138). Under Rwabugiri, internal factional rivalry among elite families fueled competition and further territorial expansion that increased insecurity and impoverishment for the bulk of the population, herders as well as farmers (D. Newbury 2009; Vansina 2004:126–139,163). The “nearly permanent recourse to violence” created social instability and led to social disaggregation (Vansina 2004:164–195). Catharine Newbury and Jan Vansina point specifically to the role of uburetwa, a form of mandatory unpaid labor performed for a chief as payment for occupation of the land, as “poisoning” interethnic relations because it was imposed only on farmers, not herders (C. Newbury 1980, 1988; Vansina 2004:134–139). To do uburetwa symbolized low status and powerlessness, and it was “difficult to exaggerate” its “exploitative character” (C. Newbury 1988:141). Uburetwa began under Rwabugiri, and although it would become even more inflexible and humiliating under colonialism, its damaging effects were well entrenched in the late nineteenth century (C. Newbury 1980; Vansina 2004:135–139, 192).17 Uburetwa remained relevant to understanding the meaning of exchange of labor in postgenocide Rwanda, as I discuss in more detail in Chapter 3.
In addition to silencing the existence of precolonial problems, placing blame primarily on the West overlooks how the system of “dual colonial rule” meant colonialism’s negative effects were attributable not only to Europeans but also to Rwandan elites (C. Newbury 1988:53; Reyntjens 1985:161–170). While Belgian policies increased chiefs’ power and provided incentives and rationalizations, through entry into the world economy, for them to take advantage of the rural population, it was the Rwandan chiefs themselves who determined how to meet, resist, or further exacerbate these demands, how much to privilege their own advancement at the expense of others, and how colonialism influenced the transformation of clientship ties (C. Newbury 1988:117–150). Many Tutsi chiefs ruled exploitatively, wielding power arbitrarily (Lemarchand 1970:35–40; Reyntjens 1985). Rwandan leaders, including Tutsi chiefs, were complicit in accepting and propagating the racial model of human diversity that Europeans brought to Central Africa. Framing the Hutu Revolution at independence as the result of colonially introduced ethnicity and as the early expression of genocidal ideology overlooks the long-term evolution of rural grievances underlying the transformations of 1959–1962, and the fact that the revolution addressed the political exclusion of the Hutu peasants who composed 80 percent of the population (Lemarchand 2009:31; C. Newbury 1978, 1980, 1988:178–179, 207–208).
Placing blame on the West during the genocide also allows the RPF to claim the moral high ground and solidify its “genocide credit” (Lemarchand 2009; Reyntjens 2005; Vidal 2001). For example, Kagame emphasized the moral purity of the RPF in his 2004 speech, saying, “I also have to thank the soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. In the fight many gave their lives in the cause of freedom and liberation. I know that every soldier in the RPF knew that the cost was likely to be high but the cause of freedom and liberation was one worth fighting for. We were fighting a difficult and determined enemy who was supported by powerful forces. We were fighting two wars at once. Our soldiers fought by day and rescued victims by night until they halted the genocide. Thank you to all of you.” He continued later, “And I say it, from the lessons we have drawn from our pasts, we will be very eager, and we are committed, to fight for our rights and fight for the rights for others who are targeted like the people of Rwanda were targeted during the genocide.” This attention to the moral virtue of the RPF erases accusations against Kagame and his RPF soldiers of committing atrocities during the genocide, specifically human rights abuses and reprisal killings against innocent Hutu civilians as the RPF pushed through Rwanda to Kigali.18 High-ranking Rwandan and international military personnel have argued that Kagame’s goals as head of the RPF were first and foremost to gain political control of Rwanda, and only secondarily to halt the genocide, with full awareness of the cost this would bring to Tutsi (Dallaire 2003:515; Prunier 2009:15; Ruzibiza 2005:10). Scholars argue that the RPF (now the RPA) continued to perpetuate violence and human rights abuses in the years after the genocide. By 1995, RPA soldiers conducted reprisal killings and created domestic insecurity, while Hutu were imprisoned summarily on genocide accusations (Reyntjens 1995). While Kagame claimed that only three hundred people were killed during the closing of a refugee camp in Kibeho in southern Rwanda in 1995, other reports claim as many as five thousand innocent people were killed (Lemarchand 2009:73; Prunier 2009:37–42). Some reports claim that in 1997 at least sixteen thousand innocent Hutu civilians in the north were killed when the RPA responded to incursions by Hutu rebels into Rwanda (Reyntjens 2009:175–176). Drawing attention to these RPF/RPA abuses should not be confused with supporting the double genocide theory or its implication that the RPF/RPA counterattacks exonerate genocide perpetrators; rather, it is recognition of the multiple forms and sources of violence during the 1990s (Prunier 2009:12–13).
Emphasizing National over Regional Dynamics
Kagame’s ten-year commemoration speech, consistent with the dominant narrative, emphasized the national dynamics of the genocide rather than situating it within a broader set of regional ethnopolitical struggles. Even as he gestured towards regional African cooperation, it was in the context of reiterating the right of a national leader to resolve internal issues. Kagame orated, “It is very important that the African countries get together, we sort out our
