Explaining the Rwandan Genocide

Article by Kate Banks. Edited by Hannah Lyons. Additional Research by Michelle Brien. 

When looked upon from the comfort and stability of the West, the atrocities that occurred in Rwanda in 1994 appear inhuman and unexplainable. However, when the long and short term causes of the genocide are examined in greater detail, it becomes painfully apparent that the perpetrators of this hideous mass slaughter were people, people not so different from you or I, but people pushed to the brink of desperation. This leads to the uncomfortable question of whether we would have acted in the same manner if we found ourselves in a similarly difficult condition, and more disturbing still, whether a situation of equal magnitude could occur again in the future. 

However, before these questions are answered, I must first outline what actually happened in Rwanda sixteen years ago. Prior to the genocide, the country’s population was 85% Hutu, 14% Tutsi and 1% Twa, groups defined more by economic and social status rather than ethnicity. However, ethnic differences between the Hutu and Tutsi had been played upon to such an extent, first by the colonial Belgians and then by subsequent the Hutu government, that ethnic tensions had reached fever pitch by 1994. On 6th April that year, the Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana, was assassinated at Kigali airport. Blame was quickly laid upon the Tutsi-led RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front), sparking an unprecedented Hutu backlash where between five hundred thousand and one million Tutsi and Hutu sympathisers were massacred within one hundred days. This was a faster pace than even the Nazis were able to exterminate the Jews during the Second World War. 

Although it may seem tremendously farfetched to suggest that this outburst of neighbour against neighbour slaughter was entirely state engineered, one cannot underestimate the role of the government in fostering an environment in which racial hatred was accepted, indeed, actively encouraged. Belgian colonists arrived in Rwanda with pre-conceived ideas of Caucasian superiority and thus favoured those with lighter skin and smaller noses; most of those fitting this model also considered themselves to be Tutsi. The Belgian colonists further confirmed the idea that the Hutu and Tutsi were different races by enforcing the use of I.D cards in 1938 which stated the race of every Rwandan national. The impact of this was quite far reaching, as people had defined themselves in terms of region, culture and wealth prior to colonial rule. The colonial government then proceeded to give Tutsis better paid and better respected jobs than the Hutus, cultivating long term resentment. However, the Tutsis lost favour with their colonial master just as the Belgian’s were leaving and Rwanda was thus left in the hands of the Hutu, whom were inevitably seeking revenge for years of oppression. 

However, though the Hutu government under President Habyarimana did undoubtedly seek to oppress the Tutsis, (exemplified by the introduction of educational quotas which restricted Tutsi presence in schools to no more than fourteen percent,) evidence suggests that Habyarimana did not set his programme of genocide into motion until his power was threatened in 1990. The President’s position was under three simultaneous threats in that year: economic turmoil following the collapse of the international coffee market in 1989, internal dissent within his own party and the RPF invasion in 1990. Habyarimana thus needed a common enemy for his people to unite against and a distraction to shift focus from himself. The Tutsis therefore became scapegoats, exactly as the Jews had been in 1930’s Germany and as the Muslims had been in 1980’s Bosnia. His government thus began “practising” genocide, assassinating approximately two thousand Tutsis between 1990 and 1993, triggering very little response from within Rwanda itself or the international community at large. The ease with which he was able to accomplish this violence encouraged him to embark upon a programme of rapid societal militarisation, diverting World Bank funding to pay for cheap weaponry, such as machetes. A scheme of prolonged brainwashing was also put into action; the vastly influential Radio Machete declared the Tutsi to be ‘cockroaches’ and proclaimed that it was the Hutu’s patriotic responsibility to exterminate this societal burden. Although the Radio Machete was not directly controlled by the government, there was definitely coordination between the two organisations, exemplified by the station’s hint that a significant event was scheduled for April and urged the Hutu to ‘join in’ when it happened, thus illustrating the degree of cooperation between state and media. 

Although there were undeniably ethnic causes of the Rwandan genocide, economic factors also played a huge contributory role; the collapse of the coffee market in 1989 devastated the local economy. However, the state’s reliance on coffee had caused long term problems even before the collapse; coffee cultivation meant that land quality and peasant plot sizes had decreased, whilst landlessness had increased. This in turn meant that people could only make a small amount of money from the land and poverty rose, many consequently did not have enough funds to marry and remained single for longer. It is therefore unsurprisingly that poor and unmarried Hutu men were drawn to militias such as the Interahamwe, as they provided both wealth (through looting) and status, exactly what these young males craved. 

Thus, by April 1994 Rwanda was in a state of crisis: the economy had collapsed, which only added to problems of landlessness, over-population and societal change. At the same time, the government was propagandising that the Tutsis were the root of all these problems and inciting racial hatred against them. This created a “kill or be killed” mentality in which previously rational people were driven to killing their former friends and neighbours through extreme fear. Therefore to address the questions I asked at the beginning of this article: yes, it is very possible that if similar conditions were to arise in the West we too could become embroiled in a horrific genocide. Moreover, I am without doubt that an equally violent episode could unfold in the future.

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