What Do Folks Say about Arusha?
The conclusion of this study is that the Rwandan peace process, centered in the Arusha negotiations, helped set the dynamic context of genocide in Rwanda. Yet, in the voluminous reporting and analysis on the genocide in Rwanda, there is little systematic focus on the Arusha political negotiations, on the events leading up to those discussions, or on the effect of those negotiations on the outbreak of genocide. Few commentators stop by Arusha. Those that do intersperse occasional references to Arusha within their larger narrative. Most studies, with reason, concentrate on the breakout of genocide itself and its eventual suppression by the Rwandese Patriotic Front. Among the commonly cited references, the most comprehensive is Human Rights Watch’s Leave None to Tell the Story, which mentions the Arusha negotiations in various places but only as a backdrop to growing internal political tensions.1 Gérard Prunier’s The Rwanda Crisis gives a chapter to the negotiations but similarly focuses on how negotiations played out within Rwandan domestic politics.2 Grünfeld and Huijboom give numerous details about the situation in Rwanda during the period of negotiations, but little on the process of negotiations.3 André Guichaoua’s more recent work, full of behind-the-scenes details and excellent analyses of the ebb and flow of political contests within Rwanda, has but two chapters on the Arusha negotiations, and those are seen through the optic of the domestic political scene.4
Memoires of the period naturally deal with the moments when the writers were engaged in Rwandan affairs, most after the accords were signed. For example, in his excellent narrative on post-genocide Rwanda, Robert Gribbin, US ambassador in Kigali from 1996 to 1999, offers but a short chapter on the talks, noting, “I was not there and so cannot throw much light on the inner workings of the talks.”5
Two Rwandan accounts from opposite sides of the conflict give useful insights into the Arusha negotiations. Dr. Theogene Rudasingwa, an officer in the Rwandese Patriotic Army and the Patriotic Front’s representative to the OAU, was at the time of the Arusha negotiations RPF’s secretary general as well as a member of the RPF negotiating team. He does not treat the negotiations chronologically or thematically, but his Healing a Nation: A Testimony does highlight RPF’s ambiguity toward the peace process.6 On the other side, Enoch Ruhigira, at that time the director of Habyarimana’s presidential office, shows in his La fin tragique d’un régime how Habyarimana progressively lost the battle over the negotiating process as distance swiftly grew between the president and prime minister, between the presidential party and the internal opposition, and between the political elite in Kigali and the negotiators in Arusha.7
The most incisive analyses of the Arusha peace process and of its failures come from a key US policymaker of that time, Assistant Secretary Herman Cohen, and an academic and international consultant on peacekeeping, Bruce Jones. In a single chapter on Rwanda in his Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacemaking in a Troubled Continent, Cohen, with pointed realism, faults US policy for its failure to understand the depth of hostility in Rwanda (an arena of low US interest), for being obsessed with the negotiating process, and for not realizing that “as the Arusha process unfolded . . . it inadvertently guaranteed the genocide.”8
During the late 1990s, Jones, who is now a senior fellow at Brookings, wrote his doctoral dissertation on Rwanda. He published his Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failure in 2001 on the basis of his doctoral work. His chapter on the Arusha negotiations analyzes the negotiations through the optic of their peacemaking objectives. Although his narrative contains errors on chronology, procedural details, and negotiating dynamics, Jones tells the larger story with insight into why the Arusha negotiations looked so good and failed so miserably.
In his conclusion, Jones highlights what went wrong with third-party intervention in the Rwanda crisis: undue pressure to democratize; drawbacks in the facilitation of negotiations; lack of community-level buy-in with the peace process; and failure to plan for violent opposition or to account for spoilers and losers.9 I would agree with Cohen and Jones in their critiques of the Arusha process. But the social cataclysm that was the Rwandan genocide needs a more systematic explication of the international search for peace in Rwanda. That narrative begins with a look at what brought us to Arusha.
Antecedents
Like all Rwandan stories, this is a long one. Rwandan dynastic chronologies would push us back into the mystic past of the founding kings, Kigwa or Gihanga, depending on the legend. Some historians would credit stories about Ruganzu Bwimba, reputed to have built a kingdom in north-central Rwanda in the 1400s, only to have it fall apart in civil war five generations later. Others assert that it was rather Ruganzu Ndori who in the 1600s established the Nyiginya dynasty over the first Rwandan Kingdom of which we have reliable oral record.10
TRADITIONAL SOCIETY
Out of this ancient genesis, Rwandan social and political organization coalesced around descent groups. In Rwanda, heads of lineages formed alliances to build clans. “Being alliances rather than descent groups, clans were mutable . . . [and] the number of lineages composing a clan constantly varied over time according to the political adventures of the great families.”11
As with many other emerging polities of the Great Lakes area, Rwandan leaders knit ties with clans having reputed ritual power and built clientage through distribution of land and cattle. By the beginning of the 1700s, the Nyiginya Kingdom was a fragile coalition of lineages in south-central Rwanda. By the end of the century, “it had transformed into a unified, centralized and aggressive entity.”12 Three factors brought about this transformation: the centralization of power at the court; the extension of clientage to bring all land and cattle under notional royal authority; and continuous expansion under armies by which sons of the ruling elite proved their valor and into which all Rwandan citizens were incorporated.13
During the 1800s, the reach of the state (king and court) deepened. Cyrimina Rujugira (1770), himself a usurper, structured succession to a cycle of four regnal names, expanded court ritual, and increased the number of armies. Around the 1840s, as population and demands on land and pasture grew, the court reserved pasture domains for royal use and disposition. It then appointed chiefs of “tall grass” to oversee pastures and herds, as well as chiefs of land to manage farmers and their obligations. Add to these the commanders of now-ubiquitous armies, and a tripartite system of bureaucratic control emerges, especially in the districts close to the court.
This system did provide a sort of check against arbitrary power at the local level where a client, whether herder or farmer, could seek the protection of one lord against the predations of another. Nonetheless, under a clientage system now triply bureaucratized, exactions necessarily increased, impoverishing farmers and herders. Two “social categories” came to define subjects of the king: those who had lineage links to power and privilege—the Tutsi; and those who by dint of circumstance fell into servile status—the Hutu.14
That was the Rwanda that the Europeans “discovered” in the late 1800s: a country ruled by a king newly installed by the 1896 Rucunshu coup and hemmed in by courtiers, ritual, and intrigue; a territory densely populated at the center with farmers competing with herders for land; and a militarized society in which each person belonged to an army and was a client of a superior both for land and cattle. An overlapping system of chieftaincies administered central lands; at the periphery, sons of aristocrats with new armies pressed against surrounding polities, making Rwanda one of the more powerful kingdoms of the region.
COLONIAL RULE
Rwanda’s mountain fastness and warrior reputation had kept the outside world (including Swahili slavers and traders) at bay until German explorers crossed the land in the 1890s, with Count von Goetzen discovering Lake Kivu in 1894. Three years later, Hauptmann Ramsay offered the newly ascendant king, Mwami Musinga, a letter of protection. German forces
