as warned by the national radio: “Watch the nose, it's thin and narrow, and the height: Tutsi are tall!” As one observer noted, “There was nothing subliminal about Kabila's messages. Like the infamous radio broadcasts that primed Rwanda's Hutu for the massacre of more than five hundred thousand Tutsi in 1994, the invitation was to kill.”48 Never before has the common imagination generated a more deadly potential for regional instability.
The final word must be left to Leszlek Kolakowski:
A myth may grow like a tumor; it may seek to replace positivistic knowledge and laws, it may attempt forcibly to take over all areas of culture, and may become encrusted in despotism, terror and mendacity. It may also threaten to relieve its participants of responsibility for their own situation, drain away the desire for freedom, and bring the value of freedom as such under suspicion.49
Such is the bitter lesson we have learned from the endless bloodshed in the Great Lakes, where the Hamitic myth is indeed growing like a tumor, with few signs of remission.
Chapter 4
Genocide in the Great Lakes: Which Genocide? Whose Genocide?
The title of this chapter is deliberately provocative. Can there be any doubt about the responsibility of the government of the late President Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda for what has been described as the biggest genocide of the end of the century? Can one seriously question the active involvement of high-ranking officials, the presidential guard, the local authorities, and the militias in the planning and execution of a carnage that took the lives of an estimated 800,000 people, three fourths of them Tutsi? Would anyone deny the critical role played by the Hutu-controlled media in providing incitements to genocide? The answer is clearly in the negative.
But there is another side to the story, inscribed in the very different perceptions that Hutu politicians and intellectuals have of what is and what is not genocide, who the real génocidaires are and who the victims are. Questions have also been raised by Western observers as to whether the Tutsi invaders, under the banner of the RPF, were not involved in the genocidal killing of innocent Hutu civilians. More recently, human rights groups, most notably Human Rights Watch,1 have provided crushing evidence of massive human rights violations against Hutu refugees in eastern Congo by units of the all-Tutsi RPA, thus adding a third genocidal massacre to the record.
Regardless of whether it makes any sense, morally or intellectually, to hold a brief for the Hutu as a group, the issues it raises cannot be dismissed out of hand: Would the genocide have occurred if the RPF invasion had not taken place, threatening both the heritage of the 1959-62 Hutu revolution and the state born of the revolution? Why should the genocide of the Tutsi, and their presumptive allies among the Hutu population, mask the countless atrocities committed by the RPF in the course of their military operations in Rwanda? Can one turn a blind eye to the systematic killing of tens of thousands of Hutu refugees in eastern Congo by the RPA?
And what of Burundi? Can one seriously maintain, against every shred of evidence, that the only genuine genocide suffered by this God-forsaken land was the genocide of Tutsi by Hutu in October 1993? If, as Presidents Museveni and Kabila insist, historical depth is the essential condition for a fair investigation of the 1997 massacres of refugees, why not expand the mandate of the UN Commission of Inquiry back to the 1972 genocide of Hutu by Tutsi, to bring out the chain of causality between past and present atrocities?
These are not meant to be rhetorical questions. They go to the heart of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict and bring to light important dimensions of the continuing crisis in the Great Lakes. What makes these questions so highly controversial is not that there are no answers but that the answers given by Hutu and Tutsi point to radically different interpretations of the same ghastly events. The focus here is on the distortions inscribed in the cognitive maps of both victims and perpetrators—that is, memory—in response to the exigencies of the moment, in turn providing justification for further killings.
To move beyond the realm of conventional historical description is essential if we are to grasp properly the moral rupture involved in genocide. By the same token, failure to take this critical aspect into account—how the horrors of genocide profoundly alter the image that one has of the other—must be seen as a key factor behind the inability of “peacemakers” to come to terms with the psychological roots of ethnic conflict. The case of Burundi—the site of a fourth, yet seldom mentioned genocide—is a case in point.
A Forgotten Genocide
No other country on the continent has received more assiduous attention from so many conflict-resolution experts than Burundi over the last three years—and with so few results.2 Since the assassination of its first elected Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, at the hands of the army on October 23, 1993, countless conferences, seminars, workshops, and peace missions have been organized by governmental and non-governmental organizations to prevent the country from sinking ever deeper into chaos. Whether the aim was to “structure the peace process,” “initiate a dialogue to break the power of terror,” “encourage the participation of citizens in peace-making,” or “confidence-building,” the hope was that sanity would ultimately prevail, that a compromise would be reached, and the killing would stop.
That so many well-intended peacemakers failed to come anywhere near achieving any of these objectives is not too surprising if one considers the depth of the antagonisms pitting Hutu against Tutsi. The anomaly lies in the failure of the peacemakers to see genocide as the central issue that underlies civil strife in both Burundi and Rwanda. The 1972 genocide in Burundi, like the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, is indeed the cataclysmic event which lies at the root of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict. This is where the historical experience of Burundi (and Rwanda) differs markedly from that of most other war-torn societies in Africa. Dealing with “post-conflict” situations is one thing; healing the wounds of genocide is a very different matter.
Amazingly, the 1972 killings of Hutu by Tutsi—what Stephen Weissman calls “the first clear genocide since the Holocaust”—have sunk into near oblivion.3 The most obvious explanation for this extraordinary case of historical amnesia is the conspiracy of silence, which to this day surrounds the circumstances of the killings, their scale, and their impact on subsequent developments.4 Remarkably few observers seem to realize that the first genocide to be recorded in the annals of independent Africa occurred not in Rwanda but in Burundi, in the wake of an aborted Hutu-instigated uprising that caused the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of Tutsi civilians. Estimates of the number of Hutu killed during the ensuing repression range from 100,000 to 200,000. The killings lasted from April to November 1972, resulting in the death or flight into exile of almost every educated Hutu. Day after day truckloads of Hutu young men—primary and secondary school children, university students, teachers, agronomists, and civil servants—were sent to their graves.
Why dredge out of the shadows of history a carnage that took place twenty-five years ago? Because the 1972 genocide in Burundi provides the historical thread that enables us to make sense of subsequent developments. It explains the anti-Tutsi backlash in Rwanda that paved the way for the seizure of power by Juvénal Habyarimana in 1973 and the ascendency of northerners; it explains the rise of a radical political movement among those Hutu refugees who sought asylum in Tanzania (the Parti pour la Libération du Peuple Hutu, better known by its acronym, Palipehutu); and the very difficult problems posed by the resettlement of refugees in the days following President Melchior Ndadaye's election in 1993. Above all, it helps us understand why, after twenty-five years of unfettered control of the state, the army, the schools, and the nation's wealth, many Tutsi simply refused to contemplate a transfer of power to Hutu claimants, and why, ultimately, so few shrank from the use of violence to reverse the verdict of the polls.
Most importantly, memories of the 1972 genocide are the critical frame of reference for understanding the violent reaction
