On April 29th, 1994, Rwandan State Radio broadcast an ultimatum: by May 5th, the Rwandan capital of Kigali was to be cleansed of all Tutsis.  Nearly five years later and thousands of miles away, 45 unarmed Albanians were massacred in the Kosovo village of Racak by Serbian forces.  These two events have much more in common than ethnic hatred.  Both were watershed events which marked the beginning of what would later be termed genocide.  And both events mark the beginning of a particularly intense kind of international attention.  Most Westerners are aware of these two events, and the events which came directly after.  In Rwanda, the small United Nations peacekeeping force installed to oversee peace negotiations between the Hutus and the Tsutsis quietly withdrew after 10 days, and three months later, extremist forces had slaughtered an estimated 800,000 men, women and children.  In Kosovo, NATO began a bombing campaign aiming to prevent exactly this sort of horror, and Slobodon Milosevic eventually surrendered and was tried for war crimes (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/11/world/main1391629.shtml).  The Kosovo result reads like a textbook victory for the Moralist school of foreign policy I discussed last week: a clearly extremist group attempts genocide and is stopped by a coalition made up of the international community.
    But when we begin our story of Rwanda in April of 1994, or Kosovo in January of 1999, we are beginning in the middle.  And the end of the Rwandan genocide is not the end of the story of Rwanda, any more than Milosevic’s surrender is the end of Kosovo.  What came before?  What happened after?  Today, I will tell both stories: a story of a nation which we left alone, and a story of a nation we helped out of a moral sense of duty, not national interest.

    (http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/africa/rw.htm) The highlands of Rwanda are located in the heart of Africa, east of Lake Kiev: the last part of that continent to be touched by European Expansion. (http://rwandacinemacenter.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/dsc00668.jpg).  No formal records exist before the German arrival in 1860, but what they found was a Tutsi king and aristocracy ruling over their Hutu vassals.  Local tradition states that over the course of many centuries, the tall, cattle-hearding Tutsi migrated into the area and conquered the native Hutu people.  Although race certainly played a large part in the distinction between the two groups, it was not the exclusive qualifier: intermarriage blurred the line between the two races, and it was entirely possible to become an honorary member of the other group.  By 1860, the distinction was largely one of class as opposed to race.
    The year after the Germans arrived, King Rwabuguri died.  Elated, the Germans claim the region for the Kaiser.  But because it is so inaccessible, Germanic rule is indirect, consisting mostly of agents at the local courts of the region. 
    All this changes in 1914.  When the Germans get cheeky with Belgium’s border at the start of World War I, Belgium returns the favor in central Africa, taking over both Rwanda and Burundi in 1916.  The League of Nations upholds Belgium claims in the region once the war ends, and Belgium proceeds to administer its new colonies from the Belgian Congo.
    Here’s where things get fun.
    Early 20th century Europe was obsessed with the concept of race.  When the Europeans looked at Rwanda’s system, they saw yet another example of race dynamics: the superior Tutsis ruling over the inferior Hutus (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/1288230.stm).  The Belgians did not want to directly rule over inaccessible Rwanda any more than the Germans did, so instead, they institutionalized Tutsi rule.  Beginning in 1933, Rwandan citizens were issued a racial identity card, setting the caste system in stone.  Many European colonies in Africa used forced labor during this period: what makes Rwanda special is that it was the Tutsis, not the Europeans, at the other end of the lash.  Relations between the Hutus and Tutsis had never been harmonious in the past, but this was nothing compared to the resentment now brewing within the hearts of the brutally subjugated Hutus. 
    In 1957, Hutu leadership published the Hutu Manifesto, which anticipated a racial conflict between the two groups over the political future of Rwanda.  When a group of Tutsi political activists beat up a Hutu activist in Gitirama, anger overflows into what is today known as the ‘wind of destruction’.  20,000 Tutsis were killed, and many more fled as refugees into neighboring countries, including the hereditary Tutsi leader, the Mwami.  Given this and also the overwhelming Hutu majority in the country (85%), it is no surprise that elections in 1960 result in a near-complete victory for the Party for Hutu Emancipation.
    In 1962, Belgium granted Rwanda their independence, and the interim government of the 1960 elections takes over the government of this young republic.  The next decade is marked by racial conflict: Tutsi guerrillas from Burundi attempt to take over the Rwandan government until they are stopped only 12 miles from the capital city of Kigali.  This leads to a systematic massecre of “subversive elements”: within days, 14,000 Tutsis are dead.  This horror and turmoil ends when Juvenal Habyarimana, a military general, takes control of the government in 1973 and rules as a military dictator for the next twenty-one years.
    Ethnic tensions do not dissipate.  The Tutsi refugees of the 1950s wish to re-enter their homeland.  The Hutu government refuses.  In 1987, these refugees form the Rwandan Patriotic Front, or RPF, and resolve to topple Habyarimana’s regime.  In 1990, Tutsi officers in the Ugandan army desert and move to the Rwandan border with their equipment.  The war is ready to begin: a war which will culminate in one of the most singularly horrific acts of genocide the world has ever seen.
    Who are the good guys here, in this situation as it stands?  Who is the villain?  Everyone and no one.  The Europeans, undoubtedly the most culpable in this situation, have scarred this nation with enforced racism, but now they have withdrawn and restored sovereignty to the Rwandan people.  The Hutus, justifiably angry, have exploded into indiscriminate and monstrous violence against their former oppressors.  The Tutsis  have subjugated the Hutus for centuries and are poised at the border to retake Rwanda for themselves, yet they cannot remain homeless refugees, subject to brutal massacres every few decades.  Whose side would you take?  If you had a bomb, which side would you kill, to end this brutality? 
    A bomb cannot solve such a conflict.  The enemy is not a group, but an ideology: the insidious idea that race and tribe makes one group superior to another, that the other group’s existence imperils your own, that they are inferior and must be stamped out.  It is the ideology that gave rise to the term “cockroaches” for the Tutsis during this period, the same ideology which subjugated the Hutus under the Tutsi lash, the same ideology which led to the issuance of Racial Identity Cards in the 1930s.  Racism is the enemy here: an idea and a concept.  All the bombs and humanitarian aid in the world cannot kill a concept.  Only those who embrace such a concept can kill it, by rejecting it.



http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=ad24
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/1288230.stm

http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/key-issues/research-resources/conflict-histories/kosovo.aspx
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1530781.stm
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/balkans/workman.html