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Structural Violence and the Struggle for State Power in
Rwanda: Why ‘Conflict Resolution’ and Other External
Interventions Have Made Things Worse
Andy Storey
Paper for presentation at the PSAI Annual Conference, 8-10 October
2010, Dublin Institute of Technology
Introduction
Between April and July of 1994, 800-850 thousand people were slaughtered in
Rwanda (Prunier, 1995: 265). The vast majority of the dead were members of the
minority Tutsi ethnic grouping, and the evident intent to wipe out the Tutsi as a
people renders this a clear case of genocide. The genocide was planned and
implemented by a ruling clique organised within the state apparatus, and members of
the majority ethnic grouping – the Hutu – were also killed if they were seen as
opponents of this clique, despite the fact that they shared the ethnicity of the
genocide’s organisers. Since 1994, violence has continued in central Africa – inside
Rwanda itself and, especially, in neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo
(DRC, formerly Zaire) where millions of people have died – and this will be
discussed later in the paper.
The 1994 genocide occurred despite the existence of a peace and power sharing
agreement (the Arusha Accords) to which all parties to the conflict had ostensibly
subscribed, and despite the presence of a small UN peacekeeping mission despatched
to help implement that agreement. The immediate trigger for the onset of the mass
killings was the shooting down of the plane carrying the Rwandan president, Juvenal
Habyarimana, an event that is clouded in mystery as to the motivations and identities
of those responsible (see below). While such a dramatic incident might derail even a
firmly entrenched peace deal, the fact that the Arusha Accords played no role
whatever in restraining the violence is nonetheless striking. This paper seeks to
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address the failings of the Arusha peace and power sharing process. I will argue that
the Arusha process was more a part of the problem than it was part of any putative
solution because it heightened tensions within élite circles and provided a channel
through which aspirant élites could pursue their dangerous goals. Nor were matters
helped by the duplicitous and sinister role played by the French government.
However, even more fundamentally, the Arusha process, rooted as it was in power
sharing modalities between various élite and aspirant élite actors, failed to tackle the
most pressing problems of Rwandan society: chronic and worsening poverty;
entrenched and intensifying inequality; institutionalised racism; the denial of people’s
dignity and self-respect; a pervasive sense of impunity in the context of egregious
human rights abuses; and the oppressive presence of the state in all aspects of societal
life (Uvin, 1998: 45). This disastrous cocktail – creating what Uvin (1998) calls a
situation of ‘structural violence’ – laid the basis for mass participation in the genocide
of 1994. Far from helping solve these problems, international intervention – in the
form of economic ‘structural adjustment’ that ran parallel to the Arusha negotiations –
worsened the situation, as the penultimate section of this paper will demonstrate.
Finally, the paper will look at post-genocide Rwanda and how the legacy of the
Arusha Accords has, amongst other devices, been used to legitimise new forms of
repression at the same time as the abuse and violence inflicted upon ordinary
Rwandans (and their neighbours) has been intensified. First, however, we must begin
with an outline of the historical, economic and political context within which these
events occurred.
Rwandan history: power and ethnicity
The question of ethnicity
Rwanda is a very small, landlocked country in central Africa, about the size of the
Irish province of Munster or the US state of Maryland. However, its relatively large
population size – approximately 7.2 million before the genocide and growing by more
than 3 per cent per annum – made it the most densely populated country in Africa
(World Bank, 1994: 1; Uvin, 1998: 180). In the early 1990s, Rwanda was amongst
the ten poorest countries in the world in per capita income terms; approximately 95
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per cent of its population lived in rural areas, with 90 per cent engaged in agriculture
(World Bank, 1994: 1).
Prior to 1994, Rwanda’s population consisted of two main, indigenous ethnic groups
– the Hutu, who accounted for approximately eighty-five per cent of the population,
and the Tutsi, who accounted for most of the remaining fifteen per cent (with the Twa
group accounting for probably less than one percent).1 The two main ethnicities have,
for as long as recorded history, lived side by side, eaten the same main staple foods
(beans, bananas, cassava and potatoes), spoken the same language (Kinyarwanda),
practiced the same cultural rituals, and shared membership of ethnically cross-cutting
clan, kinship, religious and neighbourhood groups (Van Hoyweghen, 2000: 2).
Despite these commonalities, the two groups are usually seen – by themselves and by
others – as separate and distinct peoples.
Rwandan history is a deeply contested site of struggle (Van Hoyweghen, 2000: 3).
There is a fair degree of consensus around the idea that ‘Rwanda itself, as a country,
began to take shape in the 16th Century with the full political institution of kingship, a
The phrase ‘indigenous’ is used to denote differentiation from the white, mostly European
community, who represented an economically and socially important group in the society also (Uvin,
1998: 16).
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gradual expansion of its territory and an increasing centralization’ (Goyvaerts, 2000:
172), and that this process of state formation was intensified under the centralising
and expansionary reign of King Rwabugiri between 1860 and 1895, immediately prior
to the advent of colonialism (Goyvaerts, 2000: 160). By this time, ‘Power in Rwanda
was unified and centralized around the person of the king and his court’ (Hintjens,
2001: 28), often identified as ethnically Tutsi in character.
The Tutsi (associated with a pastoral lifestyle) are frequently portrayed as invaders
who came from the Horn of Africa and imposed a harsh autocratic régime, with a
monarchy at its apex, on the earlier arriving Hutu (usually associated with cultivation
of the soil). A version of this history emphasises claimed differences of racial origin,
portraying Tutsi as of ‘Nilotic’ stock and the Hutu as ‘Bantu’, with the Nilotic Tutsi
arriving as conquerors of the Bantu Hutu (Takeuchi, 2000: 181). However, other
assessments indicate that all of the different groups may have arrived in migratory
waves over many centuries, and that theories of conquest must be abandoned
(Takeuchi, 2000: 185).2 Some go so far as to suggest that the terms Hutu, Tutsi and
Twa referred more to social status than to ethnicity in pre-colonial times, and point to
the existence of 18 separate clans that all contained Hutu, Tutsi and Twa members
(Hintjens, 2001: 27-8). For Goyvaerts (2000: 157, 168), Hutu and Tutsi referred to
occupational categories within a ‘fairly integrated society’ that was ‘essentially
harmonious’, being based on relations of exchange principally centred on cattle and
land.
According to this latter version, while the Rwandan king was always drawn from a
Tutsi lineage within the Nyiginya clan (Takeuchi, 2000: 190), other important
positions – especially that of ‘land chief’ (Goyvaerts, 2000: 170) – were filled by
Hutu notables, whilst many Tutsi, like their Hutu counterparts, remained outside the
world of power and privilege (Takeuchi, 2000: 198). When Hutu assumed important
positions within pre-colonial society, they may have become ‘honorary’ Tutsi –
indicating a degree of social mobility (Goyvaerts, 2000: 172-3) – but we cannot be
certain of this because we do not even know for sure ‘to what extent this Hutu [or
Tutsi] identity was deemed important’ (Takeuchi, 2000: 194). And in parts of the
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country, especially the north-west, Hutu rulers enjoyed large measures of autonomy
from the rule of the royal court; in this part of the country patron-client relationships
operated within the Hutu group rather than between Tutsi and Hutu (Takeuchi, 2000:
189).
Colonial rule
The German colonial administration was established at the end of the nineteenth
century and was succeeded by that of Belgium after the end of World War I
(Pakenham, 1991: 671-2).3 Both German and Belgian administrations exploited the
hierarchical structure of Rwandan society as a mechanism of indirect rule, with a
certain stratum of Tutsi deployed as a colonial ruling class, as ‘junior clerks in the
juggernaut that was the civilising mission… as both instruments and beneficiaries of
colonialism’ (Mamdani, 2001: 27). Hutu kingdoms in the north-west of the country
that had previously enjoyed a measure of autonomy were brought under the control of
the central Tutsi court with the military assistance of the colonisers, and Hutu chiefs
throughout the country were replaced by Tutsi at the instigation of the colonial
powers (Van Hoyweghen, 2000: 4). Whatever fluidity had previously existed in the
system was greatly restricted as a system of ethnic identity cards was introduced (in
1933) and ethnicity thus became a strict (patrilinear) inherited characteristic (Hintjens,
2001: 30). Post-independence regimes continued to use these ethnic identity cards
until after the genocide in 1994.
Hintjens (2001: 29-30) identifies other salient features of colonial rule:
‘relations of clientship between Hutu and Tutsi lost any voluntary quality they
might previously have had; clients were no longer able to escape to another
patron if they were dissatisfied with their existing one. Belgian colonial rule
also introduced a cash-crop economy into Rwanda, which displaced the barter
and gift economy of traditional feudal society… Whilst consolidating Tutsi
2
For other perspectives on these debates, see Mullen (1995) and Pottier (1995); see also Kamukana
(1993), Mamdani (1996 and 2001), Newbury (1988) and Prunier (1995).
3
Nominally, these countries were run by Belgium under a Mandate from the League of Nations, and
then as UN Trusteeship territory, and were not, strictly speaking, colonies; the distinction is a fairly
meaningless one in practice and the term colony is here used to avoid causing unnecessary confusion.
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aristocratic hegemony, the German and especially the Belgian colonizers
undermined the material basis for the kingdom, in the shape of relations of
reciprocity, duty, protection, military service and dealing with disputes.
Forced labour was increasingly geared towards colonial infrastructure
projects, including roads, buildings, terracing and cash-crop production.
Monarchic rule thus gradually came to be identified with a system of sharp
repression and economic exploitation; the Tutsi themselves rather than the
Belgians appeared to be the agents of colonization’.
Tutsi were systematically favoured in employment and education and accorded the
status of a superior ‘race’. These ‘new theories of racial origins were propagated in
schools, seminaries and in official documents’ (Hintjens, 2001: 30). Mamdani (2001)
lays particular emphasis on this ‘racialisation’ of Tutsi identity, the way in which the
colonial powers legitimised Tutsi rule by invocation of the claim that Tutsi were not
indigenous to the country, that in fact they were a superior race originating from the
Horn of Africa or further north. This idea was first propounded by the explorer John
Henning Speke, in 1864, who argued, on the basis of perceived physical
characteristics, that the Tutsi represented a superior civilisational form that had
arrived in the region from Ethiopia (Takeuchi, 2000: 181). Bizarrely, this idea also
extended to believing that the Tutsi were descended from Ham (a son of Noah) – the
theory came to be described as the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’ (Taylor, 1999: 55-97). This
conception of Tutsi non-indigeneity, and racial superiority, would first be used to
justify Tutsi rule (in effect, colonial rule through the Tutsi) and, later, in part, to
justify their extermination.4 Before and during the 1994 genocide, regime
propagandists urged their followers to send the Tutsi ‘back’ to Ethiopia by dumping
their bodies in the north-flowing Nyabarongo river (Prunier, 1995: 171-2).
Horowitz (1997: 22) notes that ‘Those engaging in genocide nearly always define the people to be
purged and liquidated as alien or enemy populations’: thus the construction (by colonial and postcolonial powers) of the Tutsi as an alien race can be read as a prerequisite for the subsequent genocide,
in the same manner as in Hitler’s Germany ‘the precondition for mass extermination was engineered
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The post-colonial period
The run-up to independence (in 1962) saw a reversal of the colonially imposed order,
with some Hutu seizing control and beginning a series of pogroms against the Tutsi
population. This reversal had at least partial support from the Belgian colonial
authorities who were by now fearful of the perceived anti-colonial radicalism of the
Tutsi élite, and who saw a small, emerging Hutu élite as more appropriately
conservative successors to colonial rule (Hintjens, 2001: 31). Some 20,000 Tutsi
were killed and an estimated 40-70 per cent of the Tutsi population fled Rwanda
between 1959 and 1964 (Mollan, 1996: 8). Those Tutsi driven into exile – many of
whom grew up in refugee camps in Uganda – became the source of a rebel movement,
the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which was to attack the régime in 1990,
demanding the right to return to the land they and/or their parents were expelled
from.5 Those Tutsi who remained in Rwanda after 1962 were the subject of
discrimination in education, employment and other areas; their status is summarised
by Prunier (1998: 120) who describes Tutsi after 1962 having:
‘settled into a form of second-class citizenship… Their employment in the
public sector was limited; they were forbidden to join the army;6 Army officers
were forbidden to marry Tutsi wives; and Tutsis generally had to respect a 9 per
cent quota in any given professional branch. Their non-participation in politics
was a tacit understanding. But apart from crisis periods, the ordinary Tutsi
peasants were pretty much left alone as long as they did not have to deal with
the administration. The better-educated Tutsi often chose the professions,
business and the Church because these occupations allowed them to escape
government harassment’.
dehumanisation: the division of the citizenry into organic members and alien intruders’ (Horowitz,
1997: 222).
5
For information on the political and military evolution of this group within Uganda up until 1990, see
Mamdani (2001: 159-84) and Prunier (1998). The RPF also contained some prominent Hutu members
who had broken with Habyarimana’s regime (see below). There is a distinction between the RPF, a
political party, and its military wing – the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) – but the two will largely be
used interchangeably in this paper to denote a fairly unified political-military movement.
6
Other sources, including Prunier himself (1995: 75), indicate that there was, by the late 1980s, one,
single Tutsi army officer (Kakwenzire and Kamukana, 1999: 73). Up until almost the very end of the
Habyarimana régime, there would not be a single Tutsi bourgmestre (equivalent to a mayor) or préfet
(regional governor); there were two Tutsi in a parliament of seventy members, and one Tutsi minister
in a cabinet of 25-30 members (Prunier, 1995: 75).
8
According to Prunier (1995: 76), ‘some well-known Tutsi businessmen had made
fortunes and were on very good terms with the regime’.7 Tutsi were also well
represented in the staff of international aid agencies, as indicated by a review of
German aid to Rwanda: ‘in the majority of projects and organisations, the proportion
of Tutsi considerably outstripped their proportion of the population’8 (Schürings,
1995: 496; see also Mamdani, 2001: 139-40). Given the huge – by Rwandan
standards – salaries and privileges available to those working in this sector, this Tutsi
‘over’-representation fuelled resentments and jealousies (Braeckman, 1996: 105). Of
course, business success or access to jobs with international organisations only
applied to a relatively small section of the Tutsi population – the vast majority
remained peasant farmers – but it was sufficiently noteworthy to attract comment and
resentment, and therefore provide a basis for an ethnic scapegoating strategy pursued
in the run-up to the genocide (Storey, 2006; Eltringham, 2000: 18).
The post-colonial régime was initially (during the so-called First Republic) dominated
by Hutu from the south of the country, but from 1973 onwards (formally entitled the
Second Republic) power became concentrated in the hands of a northern Hutu élite
under the leadership of President Habyarimana, who took power in a military coup.
Habyarimana nominally accepted Tutsi as an indigenous ethnicity, albeit a historically
privileged one against whom a measure of discrimination (through, for example,
quotas in education and employment) was accordingly justified. This (partial)
acceptance of a Tutsi right to belong in Rwanda did not, however, extend to those
Tutsi in exile.
‘Although officially his policy was described as one of national unity and ethnic
reconciliation, Habyarimana’s ideas on the conduct of public affairs did not
differ fundamentally from those of his predecessor. Although a system of
quotas for the participation of Tutsi in public life was now formally introduced,
the Rwandan state maintained its basic mono-ethnic character and the general
7
According to one Tutsi woman who previously had experience of those circles, such businesspeople
were very much dependent on patrons (Hutu) within the state apparatus (interview, Nairobi, 1 st July
1999). Prunier (1995: 151) claims that President Habyarimana deliberately fostered Tutsi
businesspeople so as to limit the emergence of Hutu businesspeople who might become contenders for
political power.
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ideology on the role of the Tutsi was not substantially altered. As long as the
Rwandan economy prospered, a number of Tutsi were tolerated as entrepreneurs
in the economic and commercial sector but key positions in the army, the
diplomatic service or the world of finance were denied to them’ (Gorus, 2000:
182).
Whatever the truth of Habyarimana’s claimed or perceived commitment to ethnic
reconciliation, his totalitarian credentials were impeccable. He instituted a singleparty state, with every citizen an automatic member of that party – the Mouvement
Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement (MRND).9
‘The MRND organised umuganda, or weekly communal public labor, to build
bridges, improve roads, and terrace hillsides, as well as animation, regular
loyalty rituals to demonstrate support for the state and regime. Habyarimana
created parallel state and party structures that reached down to the most local
level to facilitate monitoring and control of the population. Social organisations
were almost entirely subsumed by the party, which organised women’s and
youth groups, published its own newspaper, and controlled radio broadcasts’
(Longman, 1999: 342).
This was ‘a political system that held the vast majority of its population [Hutu and
Tutsi] – its rural population – in the grip of myriad local authorities whose powers
were literally unlimited and unaccountable to any but their superiors… this tightfisted
dictatorship combined administrative, executive, legislative, and judicial powers’
(Mamdani, 2001: 152). The role played by those who sat at the apex of this power
pyramid – the northern élite, the so-called akazu – was central (see below).
Following the RPF invasion in 1990, the régime’s repression of the local Tutsi
population intensified. These human rights abuses are discussed further below. The
war itself was mostly fought in the north of the country. The RPF had invaded from
Uganda – where most of them had lived in exile – and they retained support bases
8
My translation from the French original.
In July 1991, the words ‘et la Démocratie’ were added to the party’s name, thus turning the acronym
into MRNDD; I mainly use the term MRND(D) to denote the party under both monikers.
9
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across the border. Many had previously been members of Yoweri Museveni’s
guerilla army in Uganda, and had then become members of the official Ugandan army
when Museveni took power in Uganda in 1986. So they possessed both substantial
military capacity and contacts, their former comrades in Uganda remaining broadly
supportive of them throughout their attempt to capture ‘their’ country of Rwanda
(Prunier, 1995). After being initially repulsed by the Rwandan army, the RPF
regrouped and undertook a prolonged guerilla campaign involving sporadic offensives
from their northern bases and occasional (short-lived) captures of large towns. They
were contained, in large part, by French military support for the Habyarimana regime
(discussed further below). However, the RPF found little in the way of popular
support inside Rwanda (from Tutsi or Hutu).
Despite prolonged peace and power sharing negotiations at Arusha in Tanzania
(discussed in detail below), between April and June 1994, following the mysterious
killing of Habyarimana himself,10 the army and government-run militias initiated and
led the genocide. As Prunier (1995: 241-2) has stated, ‘the actual organisers of the
genocide were a small tight group, belonging to the regime’s political, military and
economic elite’, and the role of this group is the subject of the next section. The RPF
succeeded in militarily defeating the government forces in July 1994, while itself
committing massacres of civilians during its advance (Pottier, 2002: 156), and the
present government is dominated by the RPF – its record will be discussed in the last
section of this paper.
The akazu: at the heart of the state
Akazu is a Kinyarwanda word meaning ‘little house’.11 In the 1980s, it came to be
applied to the country’s ruling clique – the politico-commercial network centred
around the President’s family and, to a greater extent, that of his wife (Reyntjens,
1994: 189). This network, compared by many observers to a mafia-type organisation
10
It has long been thought that the most likely explanation of his death is that he was killed by
members of the akazu itself, concerned at his alleged betrayal of the Hutu extremist cause; this is
discussed further below (Prunier, 1995: 213-29). However, more recent evidence from (not necessarily
fully reliable) RPF defectors suggests that it was the RPF which shot down Habyarimana’s plane as it
was returning to the capital Kigali (Lemarchand, 2006; Robinson and Ghahraman, 2008).
11
The term had originally referred to the inner circle of the royal court in pre-colonial Rwanda; the
modern grouping was, for obvious reasons, also described as ‘le Clan de Madame’ (Prunier, 1995: 85).
11
(Braeckman, 1994: 104), had its geographical origins in the north of the country,
especially Gisenyi (more precisely, Bushiru) where Madame Habyarimana came from
(Gasana et al, 1999: 159).12 President Habyarimamana himself was not necessarily
the most powerful figure in this network (Prunier, 1995: 85-7), and there is some
evidence that he was personally distrusted by those who saw him as overly
conciliatory towards Tutsi interests, especially business interests (see above).
Gisenyi, heartland of the akazu, supplied one-third of the top jobs in government and
almost all leaders of the security forces, as well as enjoying a wholly disproportionate
share of development projects and higher education places (Human Rights Watch,
1999: 47).
As an example of how the akazu operated, one of Madame Habyarimana’s brothers,
Séraphin Rwabukumba, was the head of La Centrale, a quasi-monopoly food
importing company which was responsible for disbursing numerous and lucrative
commercial privileges, including market access, and fiscal and customs exemptions
(Braeckman, 1994: 104; Human Rights Watch, 1999: 44; Reyntjens, 1994: 190). An
article published in the Rwandan newspaper Kinyamateka in November 1989
denounced the abuses of this company concerning the acquisition of import licences
(Sibomana, 1999: 26).13 Another brother, Protais Zigiranyirazo, is plausibly argued to
have been responsible for the murder of the naturalist Diane Fossey after she
threatened to expose akazu activities involving the smuggling of gorillas (and parts
thereof), drugs, gold, and diamonds from Walikale in Zaire (Braeckman, 1994: 108;
Gordon, 1994).
Braeckman (1994: 104, 105-7) pinpoints Michel Bagaragaza (also from Gisenyi) as
another key figure in the network, especially in using his position as manager of the
national tea agency (OCIR-Thé) to supervise drug trafficking: internal and external
trade in cannibas had developed under the control of government agents in the 1980s.
Agathe Habyarimana’s prominent role was partially attributable to her being descended from a
powerful northern Hutu lineage, whereas Juvenal Habyarimana was more of a ‘self-made’ person
(Prunier, 1995: 86). ‘While the president’s lineage was that of “client” (ubugeregwa), which originally
did not have the right to land tenure, his wife’s lineage was that of “patron” (ubukonde), which did
have land tenure rights’ (Takeuchi, 2000: 189). On the wider significance of northern Hutu history –
and, especially, the key role of the ‘noble’ lineages – for the modern politics of Rwanda, see Des
Forges (1986).
13
La Centrale later lent vehicles to militias for transport during the genocide (Sibomana, 1999: 36).
12
12
Human Rights Watch (1999: 200, 304) notes that the tea factories in the south of the
country ‘remained in the hands of people from the favored regions of northwestern
Rwanda, linked by loyalty and kinship to the Habyarimana family’; in March 1992,
OCIR-Thé contributed $1 million of current and future (mortgaged) tea receipts as
part of a $6 million arms deal with the Egyptian government. According to Verwimp
(2001: 3), Alfred Musema, director of the tea factory and plantation in western
Kibuye prefecture, was also a member of the akazu; ‘Most of the tea producing
facilities were financed by donor agencies, making the tea industry, and more
specifically its high operating costs, a good example of rent-seeking by the Akazu
members. Only the Akazu really benefited from tea production’ (Verwimp, 2001: 34).
According to Gorus (2000: 183), Guatemalan cocaine was being flown into Europe
via the Rwandan capital Kigali on board the presidential plane. Involvement in
prostitution, arms dealing and illicit currency trading are also amongst the charges
levelled against members of this network (Braeckman, 1994: 109-11; Reyntjens,
1995: 284). In addition, the akazu’s extraction of ‘commission’ payments may have
played a role in the collapse of the mining company SOMIRWA, which went out of
business in 1985, having contributed an average 15 per cent of foreign exchange
earnings in the early 1980s (Braeckman, 1994: 89; Marysse et al, 1994: 27;
Reyntjens, 1994: 190).
Such activities extended, naturally enough, to the international aid business, Rwanda
being one of the largest recipients of foreign aid (relative to size of the population and
the economy) in Africa (Hanssen, 1989). In 1991, aid was equivalent to 21.5 per cent
of Rwandan GDP (Mission d’Information Commune, 1998 (Tome 1): 23); between
1982 and 1987, foreign aid is estimated to have funded 70 per cent of public
investment (Uvin, 1998: 42). Prunier (1995: 88) points to the example of a World
Bank-supported project through which part of Gishwati forest in the north of the
country was logged to clear space for cattle-ranching: ‘Although both the land and the
funds were public, profits accruing from the development were shared between the
“big men” of the regime and crooked World Bank expatriates’ (Prunier, 1995: 88).
Whether through such straightforward corruption, or through less blatant mechanisms,
13
in Rwanda and elsewhere, ‘most of the development aid funds ends up in the hands of
the richest 1 percent of people in society’ (Uvin, 1998: 123).
By the second half of the 1980s, there was no shortage of ‘evidence of increasing
corruption and favoritism on the part of Habyarimana and his inner circle’ (Human
Rights Watch, 1999: 47; see also Adelman, 1999: 188; Gasana et al, 1999: 158;
Guichaoua, 1998: 33; National University, 1998: 28). Guichaoua (1998: 33) states
that by this time it was impossible not to notice the presidential circle’s
monopolisation of the country’s wealth, together with the evident corruption of that
circle. ‘In 1988, the Catholic newspaper Kinyamateka began to flout the rules of state
censorship, publishing open discussions about the economic problems of the country
and the corruption of state officials’ (Longman, 1999: 343). Between June and
December 1989 this newspaper, according to its editor, ‘published a series of articles
denouncing the large-scale embezzlement of public funds by government
authorities… Habyarimama and his people were plundering the country while the
peasants were starving. We had evidence that he or his wife were diverting funds
allocated to buying food for the population to import luxury items instead, for
example televisions which were sold at vastly inflated prices. We also had
information on drug trafficking’ (Sibomana, 1999: 25). The editor in question –
André Sibomana – was prosecuted by the government in 1990 and his paper sued, but
the charges were thrown out after a short trial in September of that year because,
Sibomana himself claims, proof of the allegations was furnished (Sibomana, 1999:
26). Such criticism of the régime was dangerous: a member of parliament who
denounced state corruption in road-building contracts was murdered in August 1989,
as was a ‘vocal and outspoken’ journalist in November of that year (Prunier, 1995:
89).
The akazu’s activities continued during the war (after October 1990). The focus then
tended to be on diverting resources – including from the state employees’ pension
fund – towards military ends, such as the usage, in 1992, of money earmarked for
food and drug imports for arms purchases (Hintjens, 1999: 257; Melvern, 2000: 64-8).
But the personal profit motive was not entirely abandoned, with Habyarimana himself
depositing commission payments from armaments deals in European bank accounts
14
under the names of various associates and of his children (Human Rights Watch,
1999: 123).
From gangsterism to massacres: the ongoing centrality of state power
In July 1992, Christophe Mfizi, a former associate of Habyarimana and director of the
state information agency, wrote a denunciatory open letter, detailing the activities of
what he termed a ‘zero network’ (in essence, the akazu – see Prunier, 1995: 168)
dominating the political and economic life of the country, and increasingly involved
in massacres and other human rights abuses (reprinted in Mas, 1999: 124-33). Mfizi’s
allegations are worth quoting at some length because they shed valuable light on the
interconnections between state power, commercial enrichment and, to a growing
extent, massive human rights abuses; he refers to the ‘zero network’ as
‘a network of people who have systematically infiltrated the whole life of the
country: political, military, financial, agricultural, scientific, educational,
familial and even religious. This network considers the country to be a private
enterprise which it is legitimate to milk for maximum profit, and this justifies all
sorts of policies … It is very rare in recent years for people to gain or retain
important positions without forging client relations with an important member
of this network… It is this ‘zero network’ that has heightened ethnic and
regional cleavages to conceal its own views and interests’ (cited in Mas, 1999:
126-7).14
Mfizi’s self-serving testimony needs to be treated with caution, but it has been
supported by other sources. The director of a local magazine also published, in 1992,
an article identifying 25 members – including the President himself, three of his
brothers-in-law, and a son-in-law – of a group operating as ‘death squad’ organisers
targeting those seen as threats to the régime (cited in Reyntjens, 1996: 247).
14
My translation from the French original.
15
There had been no major violence against Tutsi between 1973 and 1990’ (Mamdani,
2001: 142). 15 But a tendency for the akazu to become involved in massive human
rights violations (in addition to corruption and associated repression) was decisively
established at around the same time as the RPF invasion of October 1990. ‘In
October 1990 and again in January and February 1991, local officials incited Hutu to
attack their Tutsi neighbours. More than six hundred Tutsi died in these attacks and
scores more were wounded and lost all their belongings’ (Africa Watch, 1992: 2). A
report from Amnesty International in May 1992 documented the involvement of state
agents in mass murder and torture, specifically including: the extrajudicial killing of
over 1,000 Tutsi; the routine usage of torture and ‘disappearances’; and the
imprisonment without charge of over 8,000 people, including a number of political
prisoners (Amnesty, 1992: 1). Amnesty’s findings were confirmed by an
international commission of inquiry on human rights abuses in Rwanda committed
after October 1990 – its report in March 1993 found that the Rwandan government
had been responsible for the deaths of some two thousand people and that these deaths
were sanctioned by the very highest forces in the land (cited in African Rights, 1995:
33). By this time, ‘there was no Tutsi family in Rwanda that did not live in
permanent fear’ (Uvin, 1998: 65), and with good reason. Not only was violence a
lived reality, it was expected to worsen: in March 1992, the Belgian Ambassador to
Rwanda sent his Ministry of Foreign Affairs a memorandum referring to ‘a secret
military staff charged with the extermination of the Tutsi of Rwanda in order to solve
forever, in their way, the ethnic problem in Rwanda and to destroy the domestic Hutu
opposition’ (cited in Verwimp, 1999: 4).
The degree of central control behind the abuses was apparent at least as early as
February 1992, when Africa Watch wrote:
Braeckman (1994: 97-100) claims that the régime’s human rights record was already appalling from
at least 1981 onwards, and Prunier (1995: 82) reports that as early as the 1974-77 period the régime
murdered some 56 opponents, though he also considers it one of the least bad in this respect in Africa
up until 1988 (1995: 83). Many commentators claim that there was a marked change for the worse in
the policies and attitudes of the régime between the 1970s and 1980s. For example, Kimonyo (2000:
20) refers to the changed behaviour of the élite as it moved from relative modesty towards brazen
arrogance and corruption. There is no doubt that the degree of corruption and brutality of the
Habyarimana régime intensified over time, even though there is disagreement about the timing of the
key turning points.
15
16
‘Rwanda is a small, highly centralised state where subordinates typically
respond quickly and effectively to directives from above. If subordinate
authorities, civilian and military, are violating the rights of others, it is either
because they have been ordered to do so or because they expect to elicit support
and approval from their superiors for doing so. The failure to bring any persons
accused of human rights violations to justice supports the conclusion that
violators are acting at the direction of or under the protection of some of the
most powerful political figures in Rwanda’ (Africa Watch, 1992: 29, emphasis
in original).
As this last quote indicates, what above all else facilitated the practice of illegal and
repressive activities on the part of the akazu was control of the state. And the state, in
turn, exerted a large measure of control over society. The state was, for example,
directly and indirectly involved in a huge number of Rwanda’s economic enterprises
(Ngayinteranya, 1989: 37; Nyinawagaga, 1992: 19); its presence in the financial
sector was described as ‘overwhelming’ (World Bank, 1991: 4). A 1993 World Bank
report (World Bank, 1993: 30) referred to the single (state) party being implicated in
virtually all aspects of Rwanda’s economic life up to 1990, while a 1994 report
continued to describe ‘pervasive government interference in virtually all aspects of
economic life’ (World Bank, 1994: 1).
Without state control – direct and indirect – over the economy and society, the akazu
could not function, economically or politically (Cart, 1995: 476). ‘In Rwanda, it is
certainly proximity to political power that creates wealth’ (Willame, 1995: 150;16 see
also Uvin, 1998: 21). Habyarimana, for example, could demand that private
enterprises contribute to his cause because they needed state approval and concessions
to ensure business profitability (Human Rights Watch, 1999: 43), and foreign aid
‘could only be appropriated through direct control of government power at high
levels’ (Prunier, 1995: 84). In Rwanda, battles over the distribution of economic
resources were (and are), in effect, battles over control of the state (African Rights,
1994: 20).
16
My translation from the French original.
17
The economic centrality of the state was part of a wider system of state control over
society (clearly evident at the levels of politics and the machinery of repression in the
massacres described above). After 1962, traditional systems of social mediation and
regulation – such as councils of elders and the local-level gacaca conflict resolution
process – were replaced by state agents and bodies (Colletta and Cullen, 2000: 38).
This phenomenon is well described by Uvin (1997: 97):
‘The Rwandese state has been able to expand its presence to the most remote
corners of the territory and of social life. Representatives of the state and of the
single party were present at even the lowest level of social organisation: each
“colline” (hill – the basic geographical reference point in Rwanda), each
extended family was in permanence surrounded by centrally-appointed
administrators, teachers, agricultural monitors, internal security agents or police
agents, as well as by local party cadres of all kinds. The state was in charge of
all fields of human endeavour, from education, health and rural development, to
the promotion of culture and the “right” social values…’.
The question of who would retain or assume ‘ownership’ of this apparatus of control
was the key stake of political struggle in Rwanda in the early 1990s.17
Mass impoverishment and growing inequality
‘Some Rwandans were indeed getting rich: those who worked for the state
directly, those employed by its offshoots, parastatal enterprises, and those who
ran economic development projects controlled by state officials. State
employees and the military also used access to preferential treatment to build
profitable private businesses. But the prosperity was both fragile and
superficial. The mass of the people stayed poor and faced the prospect of
getting only poorer. More than 90 per cent lived from cultivation and while the
population grew, the amount of land did not. The land available to ordinary
cultivators actually diminished in some regions as local officials appropriated
17
This is not necessarily to say that all organs of state power were available to the akazu for the
purposes of private wealth accumulation – Marysse et al (1994: 83) claim, for example, that the
18
fields for development projects and as members of the urban elite bought out the
poor, establishing themselves as absentee landlords’ (Human Rights Watch,
1999: 45).
Economic crisis and structural violence
While the akazu thrived, the great mass of Rwandans became progressively poorer
during the 1980s. And, as the above quote illustrates, part of the reason why they
became poorer was precisely because the akazu and its wider circle of associates was
thriving, an increasing concentration of land ownership being the most obvious
manifestation of how that symmetrical process of enrichment and impoverishment
was occurring. Braeckman (1996: 106) identifies a trend from the 1980s onward of
indebted farmers being obliged to sell their lands to progressively richer traders
connected to the ruling élite. Erny (1994: 80), referring to the 1980s, also records the
same phenomenon, as well as the resentment it inevitably aroused as people compared
the increasing concentration of land ownership to the days of ‘feudal’ Tutsi rule. A
respondent to a participatory survey on poverty carried out at the end of 1993 decried
the fact that land was being under-utilised by its owners, who were described as being
neither farmers nor from the respondent’s region (World Bank, 1994: 125).
Development projects funded by foreign aid also played their part in appropriating
land from poor farmers (Uvin, 1998: 147).
It is important to note that resentment, indeed desperation, arising from mass
impoverishment would have been expected to arise in the Rwanda of the 1980s and
early 1990s, even if inequality had not been worsening. UN figures indicate that
between 1973 and 1980, real average annual growth in Gross Domestic Product
(GDP) in Rwanda was 6.5 per cent; between 1980 and 1985, this figure had fallen to
2.9 per cent, and for 1986-1990 it was minus 0.3 per cent. A principal problem lay in
the evolution of global commodity markets: between 1985 and 1992, the real world
price of coffee (Rwanda’s main export) fell by seventy-two per cent; between 1986
and 1992, the real purchasing power of Rwanda’s export earnings fell by fifty-nine
per cent (Woodward, 1996: 19, 21). The ensuing crisis in the state finances was a
Rwandan Central Bank was not an instrument of patrimonialism, unlike the allegedly typical situation
19
major reason for the adoption of a World Bank/IMF-sponsored structural adjustment
programme in late 1990, which itself contributed to social tensions and fears (Storey,
1999 and 2001, and see also below).
This very severe foreign exchange problem arose in the context of an agricultural
sector already structurally crisis-ridden by a chronic shortage of land and rapid
population growth, with associated declines in soil fertility, reflecting the exhaustion
of an agricultural development model which had placed little onus on intensification,
innovation or export-orientation (Uvin, 1998: 57). The emphasis had instead been
placed on appropriation for cultivation of pastoral land held by Tutsi who were
murdered or fled from the 1950s to the early 1970s, and on measures such as clearing
forests and draining marshes (André and Platteau, 1998: 3-4; World Bank, 1993: i).
Between 1962 and 1969, such measures ensured a 50 per cent increase in available
arable land (Gasana et al, 1999: 157). But, with ongoing population growth, this
approach was obviously not sustainable in the long run. Population density rose from
221.9 people per square kilometre in 1970 to 283.5 in 1978, and to 386.7 in 1986
(Gasana et al, 1999: 159).
By the early 1990s, more than half of all Rwandan farmers occupied farms of less
than one hectare, often on ecologically fragile soils, while up to 25 per cent of the
population was landless (Mullen, 1995: 23). Forty-three per cent of all farm
households lacked enough land to subsist upon (Uvin, 1998: 113). In the most
densely populated regions this had the effect of postponing or ruling out marriage,
because custom dictated that a man without sufficient land could not marry (Human
Rights Watch, 1999: 46).18 Both desired family size and actual fertility rates declined
sharply (Uvin, 1998: 56). There was also a marked increase in crimes of violence in
rural areas (Baechler, 1999: 150). One desperate response to the tightening
population-land pincer movement was to switch from cereal and bean cultivation
towards that of root crops, so that many people’s diet became increasingly proteindeficient (Mamdani, 2001: 146).
elsewhere in Africa.
18
This appears to have generated an increase in co-habitation and births out of wedlock, a radical
break with Rwandan tradition (Human Rights Watch, 1999: 46; Kayitare, 1999: 11).
20
Surveys conducted in 1990 and 1992, in regions relatively unaffected by the war,
found that 75 per cent of the population had seen their money incomes fall by 35 per
cent per annum, principally because of the declining availability and quality of land
(Marysse et al, 1994: 56-7, 86). In addition, the arrival of the AIDS virus in the early
1980s (May, 1995: 322-3), drought (in 1984), excessive rain (in 1987) and plant
disease (in 1988) all weighed in to contribute to declining production and food
security levels (Uvin, 1998: 57). Localised crop failures in the south of the country in
1989 led to starvation deaths and the forced emigration abroad (to Burundi and
elsewhere) of several thousands (World Bank, 1991a: 1, 5). By 1989, an estimated
one in six Rwandans was affected by famine (Pottier, 1993: 5), one quarter of all
children were severely malnourished (World Bank, 1991a: 1), and some 50 per cent
of all children suffered from stunting (Uvin, 1998: 112).
From October 1990 onwards the country was also caught up in a war which was
costing an estimated $100 million per annum, and which was causing massive
displacement and disruption, especially affecting the most fertile northern regions
(Marysse et al, 1994: 10; Waller, 1993: 12).19 According to one estimate, the onset of
war resulted in the displacement of 15 per cent of the population – 1 million people –
and prompted the army to swell in number from 4,000 to 40,000 men (Marysse et al,
1994: 83). Further extensive population displacement occurred in the wake of an RPF
offensive in early 1993 (Prunier, 1995: 175). Between 1989 and 1991, military
spending as a proportion of GDP rose from 2 per cent to 6.9 per cent (Dorsey, 1994:
154), and stayed at least that high thereafter (Uvin, 1998: 56). War-related disruption
and displacement probably contributed to the fact that, by 1991, an estimated 1 in 5 of
the population was HIV-positive (World Bank, 1995: 8). The displaced were also to
prove fertile sources of recruitment for the soon to be notorious interhamwe militias,
who would play a key role in the 1994 genocide (Prunier, 1995: 165). For all of the
above reasons, it is estimated that average GDP per person in Rwanda declined from
$355 in 1983 to $260 in 1990 (Uvin, 1997: 106), and declined even further thereafter
as the war persisted.
The northern regions were also the focus of Rwanda’s fledgling tourist industry, built around the
attractions of the mountain gorillas (Marysse et al, 1994: 10).
19
21
Peter Uvin (1998) argues that Rwanda of the early 1990s had become what he terms a
‘structurally violent’ society. This condition is characterised by extreme poverty –
Rwanda, proportionately, may have had more absolutely poor people (perhaps 90 per
cent of the population) than anywhere else in the world (Uvin, 1998: 117). But it was
also characterised by inequality, injustice, discrimination, corruption, and treatment of
the poor with contempt. The poor – the vast majority of the population – were
subjected to humiliation and a state of permanent exclusion from the benefits of
‘development’, benefits that neither they nor their children could ever hope to achieve
but which were flaunted in their faces by wealthy locals and foreigners. ‘[T]he poor
were considered backward, ignorant, and passive – almost subhuman – and were
treated in a condescending, paternalistic and humiliating manner’ (Uvin, 1998: 128),
by both the Rwandan élite and by expatriates.20
‘Long before the 1990s, life in Rwanda had become devoid of hopes and
dreams for the large majority of people: the future looked worse than the
already bad present… Peasant life was perceived as a prison without escape in
which poverty, infantilisation, social inferiority, and powerlessness combined to
create a sense of personal failure’ (Uvin, 1998: 117).
Rising inequality
We will return later to the consequences of this ‘structural violence’ for participation
in the genocide. Worsening inequality was by no means solely responsible for the
increasingly dire (structurally violent) conditions faced by the mass of Rwandans.
But rising inequality did play its part. The most systematic account of the scale of
growing inequality is provided by Maton (1994: 10, 21): he argues that up until the
1980s a sort of paternalistic communalism helped ensure that the distribution of land
and income in Rwanda was relatively equal, but that this traditional pattern was then
replaced by what he terms a savage individualism. The field research of Colletta and
Cullen (2000: 50) also suggests that individualism was at this time eroding traditional
20
Uvin pays particular attention to the role of aid in creating or compounding this condition of
structural violence e.g., ‘aid financed much of the machinery of exclusion, inequality and humiliation;
provided it with legitimacy and support; and sometimes directly contributed to it’ (Uvin, 1998: 231),
this last a reference to, for example, the expropriation of peasant land for aid-funded development
projects.
22
social bonds: ‘increasing monetization and individualism, as well as widespread and
worsening poverty, were to blame for the decrease in mutual assistance and gift
giving within communes’. This was not a matter of market relations replacing state
regulation, but rather one of state agents exploiting market penetration to reinforce
their power and wealth.
Amongst the beneficiaries (and, to an extent, initiators) of this shift towards
individualism were, of course, members of the akazu, who, in particular, began to
increasingly take over land previously under the control of smaller, often indebted
farmers (such indebtedness arising as a function of factors such as population growth
outstripping land availability, soil depletion, drought, etc., as discussed above). In the
absence of a formal market in land (all land was, nominally, the property of the state),
this process of concentration, Maton argues, took the form of transfers of user rights
in exchange for clearance of debt or some other consideration. Maton (1994: 29)
estimates that the gini coefficient – a measure of societal income inequality21 – rose
from 0.357 in 1982 to 0.505 in 1989 (and possibly even to 0.583 by 1992).
In the rural areas, the percentage of income held by the richest 10 per cent –
themselves often traders or civil servants not actually resident in those areas – rose
from 20 per cent in 1982 to 41 per cent in 1992 (Maton, 1994: 29). Over the same
time period – 1982 to 1992 – the average number of calories consumed per day by the
poorest 10 per cent of the rural population declined from 1,805 to the catastrophic
figure of 773, a rate of decline almost twice as severe as that recorded for the average
person in a rural area (Maton, 1994: Table A-1).
Micro-level support for the broad thrust of Maton’s argument is provided by André
and Platteau (1998) in their detailed study of changing land relations in one small part
of north-western Rwanda between 1988 and 1993. This study confirms a tendency
towards growing inequality in land ownership and, concomitantly, a growth in
landlessness and poverty. The authors found that many of those in a position to
21
The closer this number is to zero, the more equal is the society considered to be; the closer to one
the more unequal. A rough rule of thumb is that a gini coefficient of between 0.2 and 0.35 denotes a
relatively equal society, while a gini coefficient of 05 to 0.7 indicates a highly unequal society (Todaro,
1994: 140). By this reckoning, Rwanda changed from a relatively (by global standards) equal to a
relatively unequal society over the course of the 1980s.
23
expand the size of their holdings had access to off-farm income, and that increasing
recourse was being made to the (nominally illegal) land market i.e., land was being
bought and sold in violation of its supposedly communal nature. Approximately twothirds of all such sales were found to be ‘distress sales’ i.e, sales to clear debts or for
some other such pressing reason (André and Platteau, 1998: 24-5).
This is not to suggest that the beneficiaries of the concentration of land ownership
were exclusively akazu members – the phenomenon was much more widespread than
that. This is also demonstrated by the work of André and Platteau (1998: 39-41), who
found that a disproportionately large number of killings during the genocide in the
north-western region they studied were probably related to prior land disputes i.e.,
there was a generalised settling of scores against ‘land grabbers’ and others. This was
overwhelmingly ‘Hutu on Hutu’ violence as there were very few Tutsi in this part of
the country, and it can be safely assumed, given the enormous levels of power and
protection they enjoyed, that akazu members and associates were not amongst the
victims.
However, the resentment felt by ordinary peasants at heightening land concentration
probably contributed to disillusion with the Habyarimana régime (discussed further
below) even when régime cronies were not directly involved in the acquisition of
land. In Kibuye prefecture, for example, ‘The local peasant population was very
hostile to the establishment of the tea plantation since their land was expropriated.
The peasant families had to move to other less fertile land or even migrate’
(Verwimp, 2001: 3). This resentment also applied vis-à-vis the wealth and arrogance
of foreign aid workers – average expatriate incomes were some 600 times higher than
those of the average farmer (Uvin, 1998: 115) – and the expropriation of land for
‘development’ projects.
The inequality-enhancing effects of land concentration were being compounded by
the scarcity of non-farm employment opportunities, and by the fact that those
opportunities were themselves unequally distributed, as a 1991 study made clear:
‘Available evidence on nonfarm employment in Rwanda suggests that, although
very small (accounting for only 12.7% of rural income) it fits the classic J-curve
24
pattern. Those from high-income households are drawn to the upper end of this
sector based on their access to the kinds of resources and training necessary to
compete effectively for jobs, while those from poor households are gradually
squeezed off of their farms and into agricultural wage labour and the lower end
of the nonfarm sector…’ (Clay and McAllister, 1991: 37).
Another indicator of growing inequality is provided by the banking system.
Ngirabatware and Rusibane (1993: 71-2) record an expansion of overall lending to the
private sector during the 1980s – but principally to coffee traders, or for the purchase
of houses and cars, rather than for more productive investment. The coffee sector
benefited from subsidised credit provision, though there is evidence that most such
credit went to a small number of large exporters and intermediaries rather than to the
growers themselves (World Bank, 1991b: 15). A specific example of financial sector
inequality is provided by the Banques Populaires – intended to promote rural savings
and investment – which accounted for 14 per cent of all deposits in the Rwandan
banking system in 1990 and 9 per cent of all outstanding credits (World Bank, 1991b:
30). The deposit structure in the 1980s became increasingly dominated by ‘urbanbased and relatively high-income groups’, with less than 3 per cent of depositors
accounting for 49 per cent of all deposits at the end of 1989 (World Bank, 1991b:
32).22
Rising protest
In summary, the activities of a ruling élite were contributing to, though they were not
exclusively responsible for, societal inequality, mass impoverishment and a situation
of ‘structural violence’. This was generating resentment on the part of the mass of the
population (the vast majority of whom were Hutu) and undercutting the legitimacy of
the régime, which had always based its internal legitimacy on its claim to be
protecting and advancing the welfare of the Hutu majority. There might previously
have been at least some element of truth in that claim – Austin (1996: 12) describes
Rwanda’s agricultural policies as having been ‘relatively farmer-friendly by
22
Similarly for loans, average Banque Populaire new loan size rose almost three-fold between 1987
and 1989 (World Bank, 1991b: 32-3). For the smaller Banque Rwandaise de Développement, at the
25
continental standards’. For example, between 1982 and 1988, Rwandan coffee
producers received 67% of the market price for their produce, compared to 54% in
neighbouring Burundi (Maton, 1994: 31), and the government sought, against World
Bank advice, to maintain producer prices for coffee (which is principally a
smallholder crop in Rwanda) in the early 1990s (Marysse et al, 1994: 84; and see also
below).
However, this apparent attentiveness to coffee producers requires
qualification: coffee production was compulsory and profoundly unpopular (see
below), and a reason for its promotion by the state was the fact that, unlike banana
production for local sale or exchange (which many people would have preferred to
concentrate upon), the fact that coffee had to be centrally collected for export meant
that it lent itself to the creaming off of a surplus on the part of the élite (Van
Hoyweghen, 1999: 356).
For the great mass of ordinary people, the benefits accruing from the fact that they
were ruled by Hutu rather than Tutsi were wearing thin, with the result that a
profound rupture was opening up between the people and the political class (Voyame
et al, 1996: 141). A symbolic demonstration of this rupture was the action of southern
(mostly Hutu) farmers in tearing up anti-erosion devices and destroying communal
wood lots which they had been forced to dig or construct under the government’s
compulsory communal labour programme (Mukankusi, 1998: 40; Mamdani, 2001:
147). From the middle of the 1980s there were widespread protests against, and noncompliance with, this umuganda system of compulsory communal labour (Kimonyo,
2000: 70; Uvin, 1998: 125), in part because at least sometimes it had to be performed
on lands privately owned by the régime’s cronies (Prunier, 1995: 87). Whereas prior
to the 1980s resistance to such ‘development’ schemes had been ‘inconsistent and
occasional’, it now became ‘more vocal, and less sporadic’ (Hintjens, 2001: 8).
Even more dramatically, the end of the 1980s saw the uprooting of up to 300,000
coffee trees, cultivation of which (see above), was also meant to be compulsory
(Kimonyo, 2000: 50; Smith, 1998: 242). The advent of multi-party democracy (see
next section) provided a channel through which popular discontent could be expressed
and raised the very real prospect of the akazu losing its grip on the organs of state
end of 1989, just seven borrowers accounted for 43 per cent of all outstanding loans (World Bank,
26
power – organs which, as discussed above, were vital to akazu wealth accumulation.
Longman (1999: 344) describes a situation characterised by ‘declining legitimacy of
the regime, decreasing compliance with state directives, increasing criticism of state
officials and practices, and growing formal and informal protest’.
Wagner (1998: 32) documents this phenomenon at the level of one particular
commune in Butare in the south of the country: ‘Public acts of defiance took place…:
taxes were withheld, administrative meetings boycotted, communal property
vandalized and stolen, and buildings of the commune robbed of their windows and
doors… By November 1992, communal officials, including the communal police
inspector and the head (brigadier) of the communal police, had been so thoroughly
intimidated that none of them were going to work’. In a May 1993 communal
election in this particular area, the position of bourgmestre went to an opposition
politician (Wagner, 1998: 33).23
Threats to akazu control of the state
‘fewer and fewer Rwandans benefited from the state’s patronage networks.
Resources were increasingly concentrated within a highly militarized and
fanatically loyal sector of the population, including the army, members of
parties loyal to the President and the growing number of informal “Hutu
Power” militias’ (Hintjens, 2001: 36).
Habyarimana was forced by international pressure to legalise opposition political
parties in 1991, and a large number of such parties quickly became active (Prunier,
1995: 126). The most important of these were: the Movement Démocratique
Républicain (MDR), the largest party and broadly representing the southern Hutu who
had been marginalised by Habyarimana’s ‘northern’ coup; the Parti Libéral (PL), a
party associated with the business sector and including a number of Tutsi
businesspeople; the Parti Social Démocrate (PSD), a largely anti-sectarian and leftleaning party; and the Parti Démocrate Chrétien (PDC), associated with the Catholic
1991b: 43).
23
This did not, in this case, represent a move towards moderation, as the bourgmestre in question
allied himself with extremist forces and helped organise the genocide in his area (Wagner, 1998).
27
Church.24 By early 1992, ‘Rallies organised by the opposition coalition drew as many
as 30,000 people… Prominent opponents of the regime and democracy activists were
confident that power was on the brink of changing hands’ (Longman, 1999: 339). In
April 1992, Habyarimana installed a multi-party government consisting of ten
ministers from his own party and nine from the opposition. Electoral competition,
together with forced concessions to the rebel RPF, ‘threatened to deprive the
Habyarimana regime and its cronies of their control of the state’ (Uvin, 1998: 63).
Other commentators have also emphasised the role of pressure for democratisation in
aggravating the fears and insecurity of the Rwandan ruling élite (Andersen, 2000:
445; Percival and Homer-Dixon, 1995).
In particular, it was feared that rival Hutu politicians would be able to exploit growing
poverty and inequality to discredit and oust from power the ruling clique. That this
was a very real possibility became especially apparent in 1992 when Habyarimana
formed his new, coalition government. The new ministers moved to ensure that their
own supporters gained key posts in central and local government, and also sought to
end the systematic discrimination in education policy which had assured children
from north-west Rwanda disproportionate access to school places (Human Rights
Watch, 1999: 54-5; Prunier, 1995: 145-6). In the last section, we saw how power was
also shifting to opposition politicians at local and communal level.
Such moves prompted, by way of reaction, a powerful coalition of interests
determined to defend the old order. This extended beyond the akazu itself to include
state employees who feared that the new political forces would use state patronage to
employ their ‘own’ people at all levels of the hierarchy. With economic crisis and
‘structural adjustment’ (discussed further below) simultaneously placing a cap on the
total number of jobs available, ‘Low-ranking officials in the villages – including
administrators, teachers, agricultural extension workers, health workers and
policemen – saw their prospects of promotion vanish, and even faced the possibility
of losing their jobs altogether’ (African Rights, 1994: 19). If the Arusha Accords (see
next section) had been implemented, all administrative positions were to be reviewed
24
Though the MRND(D) was also close to the Catholic Church; the Catholic Bishop of Kigali was a
member of the MRND Central Committee until December 1989 (Prunier, 1995: 83) and a Papal visit in
1990 conferred significant approval on the Habyarimana regime (Sibomana, 1999: 85).
28
within three months of the formation of a new government, with dismissal of
personnel on grounds of incompetence or human rights abuses a distinct possibility
(Human Rights Watch, 1999: 126). The role of middle- and low-level state agents in
organising the 1994 genocide assumes particular significance in this regard (African
Rights, 1994: 22).25 And to this list should be added the members of the newly
expanded army, who lived ‘relatively well – from exactions if not from salary’, and
who ‘dreaded demobilisation’, an especially acute fear amongst the senior officers
who were targeted for first-stage demobilisation (Human Rights Watch, 1999: 60,
125; see also Prunier, 1995: 150). Some senior officers came together in an
organisation called AMASUSU in order to protect their positions (Hintjens, 2001:
36).
Despite the ability to draw on this constituency of support, the akazu still faced a
powerful threat because most Hutu were excluded from the benefits of state
patronage, a situation which particularly rankled with some southern Hutu who
bitterly resented the north-western monopoly over power (Voyame et al, 1996: 139).
Certain of the southern Hutu leaders had always seen north-western dominance as a
form of internal colonialism (Overdulve, 1997: 51). ‘Many Rwandans suspected that
the new parties and opposition politicians offered nothing new and that if they gained
office, they would act much like their predecessors, although perhaps favoring a
different region or ethnic group’ (Longman, 1999: 346); but, at the same time, a
survey of peasants’ attitudes towards multi-partyism in 1991 found that while some
were cynical about the whole business, others expected multi-partyism to offer better
control of public life so as to render impossible the favouritism, land-grabbing and
generally arrogant behaviour of those who saw themselves as above the law (Erny,
1994: 92).
How was the akazu to deal with this challenge? One response was simple violence:
‘Hutu... opponents of the government... began to be branded as “the enemy
within”’(Vassal-Adams, 1994: 23). Fears on the part of local-level élites of the
opposition organising on a non-ethnic basis prompted targeting and repression of
25
Braeckman (1996: 105) highlights the particular fears of the younger members of the Hutu élite,
who realised that a return – and this was a key demand of the RPF – of Tutsi refugees from abroad,
29
opposition activists (Longman, 1995 and 1999: 348). Ruling party militias disrupted
opposition party rallies and became more generally involved in what Longman (1999:
348-9) terms the ‘organisation of chaos’ – the carrying out of seemingly random
bomb attacks, robberies, rapes and other crimes, with the apparent intention of simply
heightening public insecurity and therefore generating ‘nostalgia for single-party
authoritarian rule’ (Longman, 1999: 350).
Another tactic was to seek to manipulate the democratisation process: crucially, in
early 1992 a party called the Coalition pour la Défense de la République (CDR) was
formed, pushing a Hutu extremist agenda and criticising the MRND(D) for conceding
too much to the RPF and the other opposition parties. This party is widely reckoned
to have been a creation of the akazu itself, and its role was to state positions that
Habyarimana and the MRND(D) themselves perhaps believed but preferred not to be
seen saying (Human Rights Watch, 1999: 52-3). Dorsey (1994: 199) describes the
CDR as consisting of ‘senior government officials and businessmen’. Co-option of
leading figures in other opposition parties was also a favoured régime tactic, with
Habyarimana establishing ‘Hutu Power’ (usually referred to simply as ‘power’)
factions within the main opposition parties (Prunier, 1995: 181; Uvin, 1998: 65). It
was in this context of extreme violence and instability that the Arusha Accords were
negotiated.
Arusha and its discontents
Process and outcome
As mentioned above, in April 1992, Habyarimana had installed a multi-party
government consisting of ten ministers from his own party and nine from the
opposition. Between May and June 1992, representatives of three of those opposition
parties – the MDR, the PSD and the PL – met with the RPF and it was agreed that
peace negotiations between all parties should be initiated (Mamdani, 2001: 210). The
Arusha peace negotiations opened in July 1992 under the auspices of the Organisation
for African Union (OAU) and facilitated by the government of Tanzania. OAU
many of whom were highly educated, would intensify competition for employment and higher
30
secretary-general Salim Ahmed Salim (a Tanzanian) played a prominent role. As
well as the various Rwandan parties, there were also delegations from five other
African countries: Burundi, Zaire, Senegal, Uganda and Tanzania itself. Four
Western countries participated as observers: France, Belgium, Germany and the US;
the UK, Canada, the Netherlands and the European Union (EU) monitored the
negotiations from local embassies. After 13 months of talks, punctuated by stop-start
conflict in Rwanda, a peace deal was signed in August 1993 that centred on a power
sharing arrangement between government and opposition forces (Melvern, 2000: 52).
The only major party to be excluded from the negotiations was the CDR. The RPF
refused to negotiate with the CDR on the grounds that it was simply a front for the
MRND(D) and that it was overtly racist – no one with even a Tutsi grandparent could
join the CDR (Melvern, 2000: 54). All other parties to the talks wanted the CDR
included and British and US diplomats pressured the RPF to agree to this, but to no
avail: ‘Western governments saw the exclusion of the CDR as a departure from
constructive negotiations, insisting that a more substantive role should be given to
those who stood to lose power’ (Melvern, 2000: 54; see also Mamdani, 2001: 211).
This is discussed further below.
The Rwandan government delegation was first led by the Minister for Foreign
Affairs, Boniface Ngulinzare of the MDR (as representative of the coalition
government) and later by the Minister for Defence, James Gasana of Habyarimana’s
MRND(D) (Mamdani, 2001: 210). Neither man spoke for the hardline Hutu faction –
Gasana fled into exile later in 1993 and Ngulinzare was killed in the genocide in April
2004 (Mamdani, 2001: 210). The hardliners were represented by Colonel Théoneste
Bagosora, who frequently attended at Arusha to monitor developments and who
would go on to be the main coordinator of the genocide (Prunier, 1995: 163). The
CDR (and the akazu) was, de facto, present at the talks through Bagosora, if not in a
negotiating capacity. It was also far from clear that the government delegation spoke
for Habyarimana himself, whose exact relationship to the hardliners was itself unclear
(see above). In November 1992, Ngulinzare stated: ‘the MRND keeps talking in
contradictory ways. On the one hand, it pretends to support the peace negotiations
and on the other hand it keeps sabotaging them. The party has to choose: either it
education places.
31
supports the negotiations or else it fights them’ (in Prunier, 1995: 171). This tension
was evident when a provisional power sharing agreement was agreed in January 1993
that envisaged the creation of a Broadly Based Transitional Government (BBTG) with
5 cabinet posts allocated to each of the MRND(D) and the RPF, 4 to the MDR, 3 to
each of the PSD and the PL, and one to the PDC. MRND(D) and CDR supporters
demonstrated in Rwanda against the deal and the MRND(D) national secretary
claimed that his party had rejected the agreement (Prunier, 1995: 173).
In claimed response to government-organised massacres of Tutsis, the RPF broke a
ceasefire in February 1993 and restarted the war (Prunier, 1995: 174). The massacres
were real (Kuperman, 2004: 74), but some commentators attribute the renewal of
hostilities to the RPF’s desire to demonstrate its military prowess in order to
strengthen its negotiating position prior to discussions around the integration of the
government and rebel armies (Lemarchand, 2006: 6; Melvern, 2000: 58). France sent
military aid and troops to support the government (see below for further discussion of
the French role). Between February and March 1993, the ‘opposition’ parties met
with the RPF (in Burundi) and issued a call to, amongst other things, renew the peace
negotiations (Prunier, 1995: 179). However, by now Habyarimana had created the
‘power’ factions of each opposition party (see above) and representatives of these
factions simultaneously grouped with the MRND(D) and the CDR to condemn the
RPF:
‘So there was the paradoxical situation of one set of delegates from four
political parties [the MDR, PL, PSD and PDC] condemning in Kigali what
another set of delegates of the same four political parties had supported in
Bujumbura [Burundi] on the same day’ (Prunier, 1995: 179).
As late as July 1993, Habyarimana was resisting signing up to a deal. However, in
late July aid donors (including the World Bank) insisted that aid to the government
would be halted unless a deal was reached; even Habyarimana’s most ardent
supporter, France, joined in this effort (Human Rights Watch, 1999: 124; Kuperman,
2005: 75). The composition of the BBTG (with cabinet seats to be allocated as agreed
in January) was confirmed in the August 1993 agreement – this was to hold power for
a maximum of 22 months until elections could take place (Melvern, 2000: 53). The
32
agreement also contained provisions for a merged national army made up of the
existing Rwandan army (the FAR, 60%) and the RPF (40%), with the officer corps to
be split 50:50; the right of return for all refugees was also accepted, a crucial demand
of the Tutsi exiles (Mamdani, 2001: 210-1). There was no provision for any amnesty
for human rights abuses (Melvern, 2000: 53), and the hitherto powerful office of the
Presidency was to become a largely ceremonial position (Taylor, 1999: 50).
Habyarimana almost immediately sought to derail the agreement by insisting that the
MDR, PL, PSD and PDC government ministers come from the ‘power’ factions of
those parties and that the BBTG be broadened yet further to include the CDR
(Kuperman, 2004: 76). The appetite for implementing the agreement was also
weakened by the assassination in October 1993 of Burundi’s first Hutu president by
Tutsi soldiers and subsequent massacres of Hutus in that country. Neighbouring
Burundi’s ethnic balance mirrors that of Rwanda but the Burundian army is Tutsidominated and has always held major power in the country – the October events were
portrayed as confirming the dangers of allowing any Tutsi role in government and,
crucially, the army (Kuperman, 2004: 76); the atmosphere inside Rwanda was
worsened (as were material conditions) by the fact that some 300,000 Hutu refugees
fled from Burundi into Rwanda (Stettenheim, 2002: 232).
What derailed Arusha? Or, whose interests did Arusha serve?
A fragmented Rwandan government delegation
The negotiators for the Rwandan government were disproportionately drawn from
MRND(D) ‘liberals’ and from the opposition parties who had entered into coalition
with the MRND(D), in part because Habyarimana wanted to distance himself from
the process (Clapham, 1998: 203). These people had formal control of certain
ministries but did not exercise de facto power over many of the real levers of power in
Rwanda. In part, they were using the Arusha negotiations to enhance their own power
against that of Habyarimana and the MRND(D) (Prunier, 1995: 163; Stettenheim,
2002: 225). (And they were also in opposition to the ‘power’ factions within their
own parties). It was therefore not surprising that the final settlement
33
‘gave an extraordinary weighting in the proposed transitional government to
parties with no military strength, no control of territory, and an as yet
undetermined level of popular support. Confident in their ability to capitalize
both on their Hutu ethnic identity (which would enable them to sideline the
RPF), and on the unpopularity of the Habyarimana regime, the minor parties
then hoped to establish themselves more firmly in power through early
elections’ (Clapham, 1998: 205).
But these parties were vulnerable to the charge that by granting so many concessions
to the RPF, they were ‘betraying’ the Hutu people – a charge vociferously levelled
against them by the CDR and their own ‘power’ factions (Mamdani, 2001: 211). They
were well aware that by signing the Arusha Accords they might well be signing their
own death warrants, and so it proved for many of them. Their gamble failed and/or
the trap set for them by Habyarimana was successfully sprung. They were not helped
by the lack of external support available to them relative to that available to the RPF
(from Uganda and the wider Tutsi disaspora)26 and to the MRND(D)/CDR (from
France especially – see below; Clapham, 1998: 199). Nor were they helped by the
belligerence of the RPF.
The strategy of the RPF
Kuperman (2004) attributes much of the blame for the genocide to the RPF. His list
of charges includes: invading in the first place; launching military offensives in 1991
and 1992; being opposed to compromise during peace negotiations in 1992 and 1993;
breaking the ceasefire in early 1993 (see above); refusing any renegotiation of Arusha
in late 1993; refusing ceasefire offers at the start of the genocide in April 1994; and
pursuing a military strategy during the genocide that prioritised military victory over
the protection of ordinary Tutsi (Kuperman, 2004: 62). The RPF is estimated to have
massacred tens of thousands of civilians between April and September 1994
(Reyntjens, 2004: 194). In addition to those civilians they themselves killed, from the
beginning of their campaign, Kuperman argues, ‘the rebels expected their invasion to
26
The charge that the RPF was backed by the US government (Herman and Peterson, 2010) lacks
compelling evidence, though there were certainly some links – for example, RPF head Paul Kagame
34
trigger a violent backlash against Tutsi civilians in Rwanda’ (2004: 61). To this
charge list may be added the (contested) claim that it was the RPF that shot down
Habyarimana’s plane and directly triggered the genocide in April 1994 (Lemarchand,
2006: 6; Robinson and Ghahraman, 2008).
Specifically, in the context of the Arusha Accords, the RPF – the most capable and
determined party to the negotiations – pursued a maximalist agenda, especially with
regard to the division of the military. According to the then US Assistant Secretary of
State for Africa, ‘RPF demands concerning the future of the military were guaranteed
to push the regime into a state of total paranoia’ (in Kuperman, 2004: 75). The
insistence on excluding the CDR may be seen as another example of this approach
(Mamdani, 2001: 211; Melvern, 2000: 54). For many observers, the exclusion of the
CDR was the fatal flaw of the Accords.
Excluding the CDR
Spears (2000: 115) argues that ‘the lesson of Rwanda is that one cannot afford to
leave anyone out of the political process’. A diplomat who was involved in the
Arusha negotiations is quoted as claiming that ‘the 1993 Arusha Accords were the
perfect example of the failure of power-sharing because of a basic decision to exclude
a group of people’ – the CDR (in Lemarchand, 2006: 5). The CDR certainly
represented those akazu elements who had most to lose from the introduction of
power sharing (Stedman, 1997: 21; see also Mamdani, 2001: 211).
‘[There is a view that] The extremists were driven into a corner first by
excluding them from the government and then by removing their control over
the military. The hard-liners were left with the stark choice of loss of power
or violent opposition. Underlying this view is the unprovable counterfactual
argument that the extremists might not have perpetuated their plans had they
been included in the government’ (Stettenheim, 2002: 234).
spent some time at Fort Leavenworth, the élite US army training school, prior to the 1990 invasion
(Herman and Peterson, 2010: 23-4).
35
The viability of this ‘counterfactual’ has been forcefully challenged by Clapham
(1998: 205-6):
‘These groups [CDR/akazu] were fundamentally irreconciliable to any
resolution of the conflict through a negotiated settlement… The incorporation
of such groups into the Arusha process could only have aborted the process
itself. It could certainly be argued that this would have revealed the futility of
the negotiations, and compelled a resort to war which would in the event have
produced a less damaging outcome than eventually resulted from the divorce
between a public but meaningless mediation and a covert but all too real
preparation for mass murder; but there is no plausible basis for the belief that
it could have led to a viable settlement’.
A ‘settlement’ involving the CDR could only have been premised on their being in
charge or their being defeated (Clapham, 1998: 209). But the CDR could not easily be
defeated so long as they received external backing from France.
French intervention
France consistently and substantively supported the Habyarimana government and the
akazu, a point not lost on CDR protestors decrying the peace negotiations in October
1992 – their chants included ‘Thank you President Mitterand’ and ‘Thank you French
People’ (Prunier, 2005: 162-3; see also Callamard, 1999; Mas, 1999; Sitbon, 1998).
French Foreign Ministry officials may have had some reservations about this support
but were overridden by the approach of President Mitterand and of the French
military (Human Rights Watch, 1999: 116). French military support was crucial in
repelling the RPF offensive of early 1993 (300 new French troops were rushed to the
country), and French instructors deployed at this time trained the militias who would
go on to perpetrate the genocide the following year (Prunier, 1995: 164-5, 176). The
French Secret Service – the Direction Générale des Services Extérieurs (DGSE) –
spread disinformation about the RPF offensive (such as massacre allegations) to help
justify further French intervention (Prunier, 1995: 176).
36
In February 1993, the French Minister for Cooperation, during a visit to Kigali, asked
non-MRND(D) parties to ‘make a common front’ with Habyarimana in opposition to
the RPF (Prunier, 1995: 178), a direct undermining of the ostensible French
commitment to inclusive negotiations at Arusha. Though the French government did
press Habyarimana to agree to the deal in July 1993, reports indicate that
Habyarimana expected the French to back him in subverting the Accords after their
signing (Stettenheim, 2002: 226). France supplied arms to Rwanda in January 1994
in contravention of the Arusha Accords (Stedman, 1997: 23), and French military aid
continued even after the genocide had begun in 1994 and a UN Security Council arms
embargo had been imposed (Andersen, 2000: 441). 27
Arusha: preparing the apocalypse?
Those who had most to lose from a power sharing agreement in Rwanda did not
meaningfully participate in the Arusha negotiations, and even if they had done so they
would not have been willing to genuinely commit to any significant diminution of
their power. And their stubborn refusal to cede power was backed up by the military
and political support of France. Those who did participate on the government side
were mostly seeking to enhance their own political prospects rather than, necessarily,
instituting a stable, fair and sustainable settlement. The RPF pursued a hardline
approach that heightened the insecurities of the akazu and their allies, making it more
rather than less likely that extreme violence would be precipitated, which may well
have been what they really wanted all along (Kuperman, 2004). This was a recipe for
disaster.
Underpinning all this was that in Rwanda, access to state power determines almost all
economic and political outcomes (and, indeed, very often whether one lives or dies).
State power cannot easily be shared in such circumstances (Clapham, 1998: 203-4).
By creating yet another challenge to akazu power, and by providing the RPF with a
forum to pursue their maximalist strategy, in a context where French support meant
27
During the Arusha negotiations the Rwandan government entered into a $12 million arms deal with
French company DYL Investments, allowing the regime access substantial quantities of new weapons
and ammunition (Melvern, 2000: 55). It is unlikely the French government was unaware of this
arrangement.
37
the regime could not realistically be dislodged, the Arusha Accords themselves
became part of the preparations for the apocalypse, to adapt a phrase Bagosora (see
above) allegedly used when leaving the Arusha negotiations (Melvern, 2000: 54).
While domestic actors (such as Bagosora) bear primary responsibility for the
cataclysm of 1994, and for the strategic manipulation/subversion of the Arusha
Accords, some international actors clearly did Rwanda few favours either. And this
was true of actors other than France, as the next section will demonstrate.
Structural adjustment
The content of adjustment
As a result of the economic crisis developing during the 1980s (see above), Rwanda
signed a structural adjustment agreement with the World Bank (WB) and the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) in September 1990. The board of the WB
approved a Structural Adjustment Credit in June 1991. The adjustment package
contained the usual policy prescriptions (Storey, 1999), including:

Devaluation of the Rwandan Franc – by 40 per cent in November 1990 and by
a further 15 per cent in June 1992;

Controls on recruitment and salaries in the public sector;

Increased user fees for health, education and other services;

Reduced subsidies to coffee producers;

The phased removal of protectionist trade restrictions;

Privatisation of some state enterprises;

Some increased taxes;

A social ‘safety net’ programme designed, in theory, to cushion the impact of
adjustment on the poorest.
The extent to which all of these elements were actually implemented is a matter of
some debate (World Bank, 1997: 12; Uvin, 1998: 58; Chossudovsky, 1995).
However, even partial implementation had serious consequences for both the
Rwandan élite and ordinary Rwandans.
38
Élite impact
The most notable and unambiguous short-term impact of adjustment was a massive
increase in development aid – from both the WB and bilateral donors – to help (or so
it was intended) the Rwandan government implement the reform measures (Uvin,
1998: 87-8, 91). The WB itself proffered a structural adjustment credit of $90
million, of which $55 million had been disbursed up to September 1993 (World Bank,
1995). Other donors (mainly the US, the EU and European governments) pledged
$126 million in support and ended up delivering slightly more than that – over $137
million (World Bank, 1995: Table 8.b.2). Some at least of this assistance probably
substituted for aid that would in any event have been extended but, overall,
adjustment facilitated a significant increase in the resources available to the Rwandan
state. Comparing average annual aid levels over 1988/90 with those of 1991/93, with
the exception of two donors – the Netherlands and Finland – the trend during this
period was towards a substantial aid increase: from $150 million to $206 million
(Barré et al, 1999: 48). Germany and Belgium recorded the largest increases. Most of
this additional aid came in the form of balance of payments support in the context of
the structural adjustment programme (Uvin, 1998: 87).
The aid was conditional on the adoption of economic reforms, but it was also linked
to some political reforms: as we saw in the earlier section, the WB joined in concerted
donor efforts to push the regime into agreeing to the Arusha Accords – talks, which
were due to begin in early 1993, on a new joint WB/IMF programme of support were
postponed until the government had signed on at Arusha (UNDP, n.d.: 30). But aid
was not made seriously conditional on human rights observance. WB officials
reportedly raised concerns about militarisation, and the WB President wrote to
Habyarimana on the matter in April 1992, but little action ensued (Melvern, 2000:
67). In part, this has been argued to be because the WB worried that imposing overly
harsh aid conditionalities on the government could destabilise the Arusha negotiations
(Barré et al, 1999: 10-11). And the WB has subsequently explicitly said that part of
the reason for proceeding with the structural adjustment credit was to show support
for the peace negotiations and for the process of political liberalisation (World Bank,
1995: 1). Indeed, according to Melvern (2000: 68), the WB was instrumental in
ensuring a resumption of aid to Rwanda at a donor meeting in June 1993: ‘it would
39
appear that a plea was made in favour of the regime by a World Bank official who
reminded the other delegates that in Rwanda at least the government was in control of
the country’ – which, as we have seen in earlier sections, was precisely the problem.
Much of the aid bolstered structures of élite enrichment and militarisation (Ahluwalia,
1997: 508). Much of the increased military spending was hidden – through, for
example, the diversion to the army of lorries purchased for ostensibly agricultural use,
and the usage by militias of hospital vehicles (Melvern, 2000: 67) – but ‘It is a
mystery why the five missions sent by the World Bank to follow and supervise the
SAP [structural adjustment programme] between June 1991 and October 1993 failed
to notice all this [diversion of funding, and other] activity’ (Melvern, 2000: 67).
We can never know if events would have turned out differently if, for example, aid
had been withheld, though Anderson (2000: 451) argues that stronger human rights
conditionality in 1992 might have proved effective. Certainly, the continuation of
funding to the Rwandan state enhanced its legitimacy and may well have encouraged
it to believe it could get away with still further abuses (Storey, 2001). And it was not
as if the WB was not willing to challenge the state in quite radical ways: the WB at
one stage requested that RPF representatives be associated with the negotiations on
the structural adjustment programme in order to ensure continuity of economic policy
in the event of (partial or complete) regime change (World Bank, 1995: 12-13). But
the content of adjustment was, for the most part, non-negotiable, with one recorded
exception – the state’s reluctance to fully remove coffee subsidies:
‘The rationale was Rwanda’s precarious social and political situation. Full
liberalisation of producer prices for coffee would have led to a 35-45%
decline…, a risk the authorities were not prepared to take in rural areas
vulnerable to a rebel takeover… [It was] an untenable proposition on political
and security grounds’ (World Bank, 1995: 4, 9).
The attentiveness to the concerns of the state élite contrasts sharply with the
disinterest in how other aspects of adjustment were impacting on the poor, as the next
section demonstrates.
40
Mass impact
As well as playing a role vis-à-vis the state-based Rwandan élite, structural
adjustment also impacted directly on ordinary Rwandans, who protested against its
imposition upon them (UNDP, n.d.: 28; World Bank, 1995: 11). The 1990 and 1992
devaluations contributed to increases in inflation – from 1 per cent in 1989 to 19 per
cent in 1991, and 10 per cent for each of 1992 and 1993 (Woodward, 1996: 20;
André, 1997: 63, 65). The WB (1994: 15) has argued that the social impact of
inflation was limited by the fact that food prices rose less sharply than overall prices,
and that many of the poor were subsistence farmers outside the cash economy. In
fact, 25 per cent of the population was landless and many more had to supplement
their own production with purchased food and other goods (Mullen, 1995: 23). The
WB itself (World Bank, 1991a: 19) had noted, based on 1988 survey data, that ‘the
vast majority of farmers, although producing most of the beans and sorghum which
they consumed, were also net purchasers of these staples. Their interest was clearly in
being able to buy food at as low a price as possible’.
The claimed benefits of devaluation, in terms of boosting the prices received by
coffee farmers in particular, were cancelled out by the simultaneous policy of seeking
to reduce state subsidies to those producers, though subsidies were not entirely
eliminated (see above, and Marysse et al, 1994: 37). Meanwhile, increased user fees
for health and education services ‘contributed significantly to social tensions and
fears’ (Newbury, 1995: 14). This last point is also made by Sellstrom and
Wohlgemuth (1996: 20) who cite ‘ample evidence that the introduction of higher fees
for health and education, among other things, added to the already heavy burden on
Rwanda’s poor’.
Of course, as described in earlier sections, Rwanda’s economy was in crisis in any
event – with or without adjustment. However, it seems clear that adjustment made
things worse for ordinary people and compounded their already atrocious situation,
adding further to the ‘structural violence’ of their lives. Even for those not at the
cutting edge of poverty – state employees – adjustment’s cap on public sector
recruitment would have contributed to fear and insecurity, especially when allied with
the threat of new political masters making new appointments (see above).
41
Why adjustment mattered
Structural adjustment, through its facilitation of increased aid, boosted state capacities
for violence and probably also enhanced the élite’s belief that it could commit ever
greater human rights abuses with impunity. At the same time it heightened fears of
lower-level state employees that they would lose their jobs and probably made them
more willing to join in genocidal violence as a means of countering another threat to
the positions – the Arusha Accords. Meanwhile, the mass of ordinary Rwandans
suffered through increased inflation and user fees.
The structural violence under which Rwandans lived has been persuasively argued to
be a key motive force for mass participation in genocide (Uvin, 1998). Hundreds of
thousands of people perpetrated atrocities (Mamdani, 2001: 5-6). Uzukwu (1999: 57,
emphasis added) accurately describes the events in Rwanda in 1994 as ‘possibly the
first popular genocide in contemporary history’. Uvin links this to the frustration,
hopelessness and anger engendered by structural violence. These, in turn, Uvin
argues, provoked a desire for scapegoating because the identification and persecution
of a scapegoat, at a socio-psychological level, helped to combat low self-esteem and
provided some sense of hope and direction. The existence of deeply rooted racism 28
meant that a scapegoat (the Tutsi) was readily to hand and élite (akazu) manipulation
ensured that was the direction towards which anger was channelled. If neither the
racism nor the élite manipulation had been present, structural violence might have
‘only’ led to ‘ordinary’, albeit acute, violence of a purely criminal nature (Uvin, 1998:
138-9). By enhancing élite capacities and adding to structural violence, structural
adjustment made its own contribution to this explosive mix.
28
The social construction of ethnic identification was reinforced in Rwanda by periodic outbreaks of
violence (‘Bayo Adenkanye, 1996: 39). The tendency for violence to compound ethnic identification is
well attested: the victims tend to define themselves as a victimised group and their oppressors as an
oppressing group, while the perpetrators may well further dehumanise the attacked people (again in
collective terms) in order to justify, to themselves and to others, their own violence (Uvin, 1998: 230;
Uvin, 2001b: 86-7; Ryan, 1996). In the Rwandan context, ethnicity-enhancing violence was most
directly evident in the 1990 invasion by the RPF: whatever their claims to a non-ethnic ideology, the
RPF soldiers were mostly Tutsi which meant that Tutsi were, by definition, killing Hutu, including
innocent civilians, and disrupting the lives of others (Prunier, 1995: 175).
42
Back to the future: the legacy of the Arusha Accords and the reality of Rwanda
today
Electoral facades
Rwanda at the end of the genocide was, in human terms, a devastated country: at least
800,000 people were dead; 2 million refugees had fled abroad; 1 million people were
living in ‘internally displaced’ camps inside the country; some 500,000 ‘old caseload’
Tutsi refugees had returned after many years in exile; most civil servants were dead or
were refugees (Reyntjens, 2004: 178). Furthermore, the country’s infrastructure lay
in ruins, crops and livestock were mostly destroyed, and banks and businesses had
been ransacked (Reyntjens, 2004: 178). In the midst of this chaos, the political
situation seemed almost promising, in that the victorious RPF affirmed it remained
committed to the Arusha Accords, only insisting that the MRND(D) be excluded as
having been a party to genocide.29 A minister in the new government argued that
‘Arusha was well negotiated. It offered the promise of political stability. It was our
bible’ (in Bruce, 2007: 11).
‘The government that was inaugurated on July 19, 1994, was a genuine
government of national unity. It was fully in the spirit of the Arusha Peace
Agreements of August 1993… The new president, Pasteur Bizimungu, was an
RPF Hutu who had been a government civil servant in the 1980s. Of the
twenty-one ministries, the lion’s share (eight) had gone to the RPF; the rest
were evenly distributed, with four ministries going to the… [MDR], three to
the… [PSD], three to the Liberals, two to independent personalities, and one
to the small Christian Democratic Party. In ethnic terms fifteen of the new
ministers were Hutu and only six were Tutsi. After such a catastrophe the new
cabinet looked like a small miracle of reason in a sea of madness’ (Prunier,
2009: 7).
And yet, within barely a year, that ‘miracle of reason’ would be revealed as a shallow
façade. On a range of issues – justice (the often arbitrary arrest and detention of
43
alleged genocide suspects), the possession/repossession of property, monopolisation
of economic resources (Dorsey, 2000: 324-6; and see also below) and others – a
clique within the RPF leadership began to impose its own policies regardless of the
wishes of the majority of either Tutsi or Hutu (Prunier, 2009: 43). In April 1995,
Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA, the RPF’s military wing and now the official army of
Rwanda) troops massacred thousands of Hutu ‘internally displaced people’ at a camp
in Kibeho, southern Rwanda; the RPF insisted the troops had acted in self defence and
that casualty figures were much lower and, for the most part, foreign governments
(including the most important aid donors) went along with this fiction (Prunier, 2009:
37-42). The Minister for the Interior, Seth Sendashonga (somewhat unusual in being
a Hutu member of the RPF), opposed the Kibeho massacre as well as other human
rights abuses (‘disappearances’, assassinations, etc), largely perpetrated by the RPF’s
Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI). Matters came to a head in August 1995
when Sendashonga, along with other ministers, was fired and he and the
primeminister (Faustin Twagiramungu, an MDR Hutu) were placed under house
arrest (Prunier, 2009: 46). Both fled the country in late 1995,30 and Sendashonga was
murdered by RPF agents in Kenya in 1998 (Prunier, 2009: 365-8). A wave of other
people also fled Rwanda at this time, including judges, diplomats, army officers and
journalists, and all testified to an intensifying climate of authoritarian rule and human
rights abuses (Reyntjens, 2004: 180).
Tens of thousands of civilians were killed by the RPA in 1997 and 1998 in the context
of counter-insurgency operations, especially in the North West of the country
(Reyntjens, 2004: 195). Controversial ‘villagisation’ (imidugudu) programmes –
grouping people together in concentrated settlements, on grounds of either ‘security’
and/or agricultural ‘efficiency’ – began in 1999 and were sharply criticised by human
rights groups and others (Human Rights Watch, 2001; Van Leeuwen, 2001). Another
wave of high-profile political resignations (forced or otherwise) followed in 2000,
including President Pasteur Bizimumgu (to be replaced as president by the head of the
RPF, and de facto national ruler, General Paul Kagame); the MDR was banned as a
political party in 2003 on the grounds of promoting ‘divisionism’ (Niesen, 2010: 713;
29
Though the RPF did (unilaterally) alter the Accords in some ways, including, crucially, the
reintroduction of a powerful Executive Presidency (Renntjens, 2004: 178).
44
Reyntjens, 2004: 184; Lemarchand, 2006: 7). Twagiramunu (having returned to
Rwanda) ran as an independent candidate against Kagame for the Presidency in 2003
but, in a context of widespread intimidation and vote rigging, Kagame won easily
(Prunier, 2009: 295). Parliamentary elections later in 2003 saw all candidates not
members of, or allied to, the RPF debarred or intimidated out of the electoral running
(Reyntjens, 2004: 186), following a pattern established at deeply flawed local
elections in 2001 (Reyntjens, 2004: 182). Bizimungu was arrested in 2002 (along
with dozens of supporters) and convicted in 2004 on charges that were clearly bogus –
the real agenda was to foreclose his and others’ attempts to form a new political party
(Niesen, 2010: 713; Prunier, 2009: 294-5; Reyntjens, 2004: 193).31
Already in 1996, despite the seemingly multi-ethnic nature of the government, Tutsi
domination of Rwandan political life was evident: a majority of MPs, two-thirds of
Supreme Court judges, 80 per cent of mayors, most senior civil servants, university
teachers and students, and the entire leadership of the army and intelligence services
were Tutsi (Reyntjens, 2004: 188). By 2000, the RPF accounted for 11 out of 20
government ministries (compared to 8 out of 21 in 1994) – 12 of those 20 were Tutsi;
and Tutsi monopolisation of all spheres of public life had grown ever more marked
(Reyntjens, 2004: 188). This, however, could not be openly discussed – under the
guise of transcending ethnicity, the new regime has banned any reference to ethnicity
in public discourse and in outlets such as the education curriculum, though of course
private knowledge of ethnic identity, and its importance, remains pervasive (BuckleyZistel, 2009; Clark, 2010; Ingelaere, 2010b; McLean Hilker, 2009; Zorbas, 2009).
A climate of fear and the emergence of a ‘new akazu’
But Tutsi dominance of the country was, as with earlier Hutu dominance (see above),
selective and confined to a small circle of people – the ‘Ugandans’ – with close
family and historical links to each other (Dorsey, 2000; Hintjens, 2008: 13). It is
important to note that this new ruling clique was equally happy to harass, jail and
assassinate Hutu and Tutsi opponents of the regime – their underlying agenda was
30
Twagiramungu was replaced by another MDR Hutu, Pierre-Célestin Rwigema, who would in turn
flee abroad in 2000 and be granted asylum in the US (Reyntjens, 2004: 180-1).
45
based on power, not ethnicity (Lemarchand, 2006: 7). Reference was made earlier to
massacres perpetrated by the RPA during counter-insurgency operations in the late
1990s. By 2001 (and indeed earlier), it was evident that ‘violence directed against
anyone who could oppose the regime… ha[d] been increasing and… reflect[ed] the
totalitarian and militaristic nature of the current government and its president, Paul
Kagame’ (Uvin, 2001a: 184, emphasis added; see also Dorsey, 2000). After 2001,
abuses such as extra-judicial killings escalated (Front Line, 2005). The death penalty
was formally abolished in 2007 (to be replaced by life imprisonment in solitary
confinement) but extra-judicial killings continue unabated (Commonwealth Human
Rights Initiative, 2009: 38; see also Boctor, 2009). Few prosecutions have been taken
against alleged perpetrators of this violence and, where they did occur, sentences were
lenient and/or only partially served (Reyntjens, 2004: 208).
More broadly, over a period of time,
‘Government restrictions on free speech, reproductive health, homosexuality,32
political association and land use signalled increased repression and lack of
freedom in Rwanda. Opposition to government policies often led the
government to accuse its critics of engaging in “genocide ideology”, a vaguely
defined offense established in 2008 that does not require any intent to assist,
facilitate, or incite violence on the basis of ethnicity’ (Human Rights Watch,
2010: 150; see also Front Line, 2005).
Media freedom became increasingly circumscribed through legal and extra-legal
measures. Even the staff of newspapers once seen as pro-RPF (Rwanda Newsline and
Imboni) were threatened or felt forced into exile in 2001 (Reyntjens, 2004: 181).
Journalists critical of the government were routinely accused of the vaguely defined
offence of ‘divisionism’, the stated reason for banning the MDR (Human Rights
Watch, 2010: 151). Those found guilty of ‘divisionism’ may be jailed for up to 5
years (Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, 2009: 30). Many journalists have
indeed been jailed, or assassinated. The editor of an anti-government newspaper was
31
Bizimungu was pardoned and released in 2007 but one of his co-accused, former Transport Minister
Charles Ntakirutinka, remains in jail, serving a 10-year sentence (Human Rights Watch, 2010: 149).
32
See also Coalition of African Lesbians et al (2009).
46
shot dead in Kigali in June 2010, for example, shortly after reporting on the attempted
assassination of a dissident RPA general in South Africa (Independent, 2nd July 2010).
At a local level, cases taken under the gacaca courts, ostensibly established to apply a
form of ‘restorative justice’ for genocide crimes, were ‘increasingly related to
government silencing of political dissent and private grievances… [leading] many
Rwandans to flee the country to escape condemnation or perceived threats of renewed
prosecution’ (Human Rights Watch, 2010: 148). Gacaca constitutes, in large part, a
diversion aimed at international actors, ‘a smokescreen to divert attention away from
the real injustices in Rwanda and the region’ (Hayman, 2009: 171). The gacaca
tribunals are state courts, not community institutions (Commonwealth Human Rights
Initiative, 2009: 47), and they operate on a formalised and top-down basis, always
attended by government representatives, while RPF crimes are excluded from their
remit; ‘this particular form of justice has been made subservient to the government’s
political mission’ (Oomen, 2005: 905; see also Ingelaere, 2010a).
Human rights groups – hamstrung by the reality and fear of arrest, ‘disappearance’ or
assassination – can do little to challenge such phenomena (Beswisk, 2010; Front Line,
2005). The space within which civil society can genuinely contest government policy
is severely circumscribed (Beswick, 2010; Front Line, 2005), and the most successful
civil society groups are those that serve state ends (Beswick, 2010: 245).
In 2004, a
number of national and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs),
including the critical human rights group LIPRODHOR, were accused by a
parliamentary organisation of contributing to ‘divisionism’ and either suppressed and
expelled (Buckley-Zistel, 2009: 47).
Pre-1994 Rwanda was previously described as being characterised by ‘a political
system that held the vast majority of its population [Hutu and Tutsi] – its rural
population – in the grip of myriad local authorities whose powers were literally
unlimited and unaccountable to any but their superiors… this tightfisted dictatorship
combined administrative, executive, legislative, and judicial powers’ (Mamdani,
47
2001: 152). The same holds true today (and is discussed further below in terms of
social control in rural areas).33 .
As with the period of MRND(D) rule, political and economic power are closely
intermeshed. In 1998, a document believed to be written by a former RPF cadre
accused the new ruling élite of constituting a ‘new akazu’. This ruling group was, it
was claimed, accumulating money through the collection of informal ‘taxes’ and
‘voluntary contributions’ to the war effort, and through siphoning off money from
public enterprises (Reyntjens, 2004: 190). Key RPF personnel sat on the boards of
Rwandex (the main coffee exporter), Rwandatel (the telephone company) and the
Sonarwa insurance company; two of the RPF’s largest financial backers during the
war ended up running banks (Dorsey, 2000: 324-5). Public works contracts were
granted to military or ex-military figures with no obvious qualifications or capacities
for the tasks at hand; similar figures would insist on becoming shareholders of
profitable private businesses, whether owned by Hutu or Tutsi (Dorsey, 2000: 325-6).
However, the largest revenue stream to the RPF came from outside Rwanda itself
through violent and predatory activities in neighbouring Democratic Republic of the
Congo (DRC). Initially, in 1996, this involvement had the main objective of closing
the refugee camps in which the former genocidal forces and hundreds of thousands of
civilians had become ensconced after their flight from Rwanda in 1994 – these camps
were indeed closed, and mass killings of civilians by the RPF and its allies were
carried out in the process (Reyntjens, 2004: 205). A second major phase of conflict
began in August 1998 and has led to considerable criticism of all parties involved
(including several other governments in the region) over civilian casualties, other
human rights abuses, and the looting of DRC resources. A UN Panel report on the
issue in 2001 constituted a damning indictment of the Rwandan government’s piracy
of DRC resources – including cobalt, coltan, copper, diamonds and gold (UN Panel,
2001: 3). The Rwandan army, its civilian bureaucracy and Rwandan businessmen
were found to be closely integrated in this process of exploitation (UN Panel, 2001:
28), as the following example illustrates:
One vehicle for forming the cadres of this system are the ingando (‘solidarity camps’) attended for
an average of two months by about 3,000 pre-university students each year and distilling the official
version of Rwandan history and politics (Clark, 2010: 139).
33
48
‘On the Rwandan side, most companies with important activities related to the
natural resources of the… [DRC] are owned either by the Government or by
individuals very close to the inner circle of President Kagame. Rwanda
Metals, for example, is a company involved in coltan dealing. It purchases
coltan and exports it out of the continent…. In mid-January 2001, some very
reliable sources met with the senior management of Rwanda Metals in Kigali.
During these discussions, the Director told them that Rwanda Metals was a
private company with no relation to the army. He further explained that he
was expecting key partners for discussions. As discussions continued, the socalled partners arrived as planned; unfortunately, they were in Rwandan army
uniforms and were top officers. This incident confirms accounts from various
sources that Rwanda Metals is controlled by RPF’ (UN Panel, 2001: 15).
Such activities came at a high human cost. By 2007, it was estimated that as many as
5.4 million people had died in the DRC (directly or as a result of war-induced hunger
and disease) in the period of conflict after 1998 (International Rescue Committee,
2008: ii). Another UN-established expert group on the DRC reported in 2008 that
Rwanda maintained support for murderous militia groups within the DRC (Group of
Experts, 2008), prompting the Netherlands and Sweden to suspend budget support to
Rwanda (the issue of how the current Rwandan regime relates to the ‘international
community’ is returned to in a later section).
Poverty, inequality and structural violence in Rwanda today
There has been some apparent progress made on the socio-economic front in the postgenocide period: a reconstructed infrastructure, a functioning state apparatus, and
relatively high levels of economic growth (which averaged 6.7 per cent per annum
between 2000 and 2008, for example) (Ansoms, 2009: 289-90; World Bank 2010b).
For many commentators, however, these claimed benefits are, at best, unequally
distributed: ‘The benefits of the country’s economic progress have been channelled
almost exclusively to the new elites living in their large villas in Kigali, while 90 per
cent of the people continue to scrape together an existence below the poverty line in
49
rural areas’ (Oomen, 2005: 900). Hintjens (2008: 20) concurs: ‘most indicators
suggest Rwanda is now more class divided and class polarised than ever before’.
Consistent data are not available for the period, but aspects at least of poverty and
inequality do appear to have worsened during at least some of the post-genocide
period. High rates of economic growth between 1995 and 2000 slightly reduced
poverty but the rural areas (where the vast majority of the poor live) were largely
bypassed (Ansoms, 2008; Hintjens, 2008: 20). While the proportion of the population
living in poverty fell from 60.3 per cent in 2001 to 56.9 per cent in 2006, the absolute
number of people living below the poverty line rose from 4.82 million to 5.38 million
over the same period (Ansoms, 2009: 290). Indeed, one estimate suggests that
between 2000 and 2004, average per capita income fell from $260 to $220 (Hintjens,
2008: 20). The gini coefficient was estimated at 0.47 in 2001 and at 0.51 in 2006
(Ansoms, 2009: 290).34 Ansoms (2009: 290) argues that ‘In rural areas, certainly,
progress has been limited and has remained concentrated in the hands of a small class
of agricultural entrepreneurs, while the majority of Rwandan peasants are confronted
with increasingly difficult living conditions’. Food and asset vulnerability, along with
continuous food shortages, remain pervasive in rural areas (Hintjens, 2008: 20).
‘Distress sales’ of land are once again common (see earlier sections), dependence on
food aid for survival is common, and many of the rural poor lack access to even basic
healthcare and education services (Hintjens, 2008: 20, 21). Rwanda is characterised
by a pronounced ‘urban-rural divide, where a Tutsi-dominated political élite in Kigali
appropriates the benefits of economic growth while very little trickles down towards
Rwanda’s peasant and rural poor’ (Ansoms, 2008: 16; and Ingelaere, 2010a).
While the Habyarimana regime maintained at least rhetorical support for the rural
sector (Verwimp, 1999), the new RPF rulers (mostly Tutsi raised in urban areas
outside Rwanda) are alienated from the Rwandan countryside and view it
contemptuously as a site of backwardness (Ansoms, 2009: 296). They also do not, as
an élite, depend to the same extent as the previous regime on extracting a surplus from
tea and coffee production, with their focus much more strongly on cross-border ‘rentWe saw earlier that Maton (1994) estimated the gini coefficient at 0.505 already in 1989 – if these
figures are comparable, it may suggest that inequality fell in the late 1990s and began rising again in
the early 2000s.
34
50
seeking’, especially vis-à-vis the DRC (see above, and Hintjens, 2008: 20). However,
élite groups, typically based in urban areas, do stand to gain from the thrust of current
agricultural policy, which favours ‘professionalisation’ and ‘modernisation’ of the
sector through the development of ‘competitive’, commercial farmers – this is likely
to further marginalise and impoverish small farmers, whose off-farm employment
opportunities are likely to be limited (Ansoms, 2009: 300, 302). Insofar as the RPF
has a constituency amongst the rural population, it is with the ‘old caseload’ refugees
– mainly Tutsi returning from Uganda and elsewhere – and it is only for this group
that the country’s land law tends to be invoked to deal with landlessness (Hintjens,
2008: 20). As for the rest, the judgement about élite attitudes in pre-1994 Rwanda
again holds true: ‘[T]he poor were considered backward, ignorant, and passive –
almost subhuman’ (Uvin, 1998: 128),
Instead of (even rhetorical) attentiveness to the concerns of the rural masses, the state
seeks to manage them through imihigos, ‘performance contracts’ between each
district’s mayor and the presidential office, through which various targets are to met –
or penalties imposed (Huggins, 2009: 299; Rwanda Research Group, 2009: 292).35
The targets include quantities of specific crops in specific areas – for example, in one
collective village (umudugudu) in the south of the country, in pursuit of such a target,
farmers who uprooted coffee trees were told they would be fined 100 Rwandan francs
for each tree uprooted and imprisoned in the event of non-payment of fines (Ansoms,
2009: 305). Land appropriation is also threatened against non-compliant farmers
(Human Rights Watch, 2010: 151). Farmers are obliged to join ‘cooperatives’
through which they are told not only what crops to grow but are also forced to buy
particular types of seeds and fertilizers from the authorities and to conform to agreed
weeding and harvesting schedules (Huggins, 2009: 297, 300). Diversified farming
(‘patchwork’ planting of bananas, beans, cassava, sorghum and other food crops), and
the practice of leaving some land fallow at times, is being replaced by dictated and
continuous monocropping of, for example, maize – ecological diversity is thereby
threatened and vulnerability to disease and other hazards enhanced (Huggins, 2009:
298, 300-1). Privately owned banana groves have been destroyed at the behest of
35
The word imihigo derives from a pledge of loyalty made by a soldier to the king (Rwanda Research
Group, 2009: 292) – the irony (or appropriateness?) of its current usage may not be lost on the people
concerned.
51
local administrators – bananas are part of the exchange economy and therefore
compete with the cash crop economy favoured by government (Huggins, 2009: 299).
The switch to cash cropping has negative gender implications in that women tend to
have more control over non-cash assets (Huggins, 2009: 302); the much-lauded
progress made by Rwanda on gender equality at the national level – Rwanda has a
higher proportion of female members of parliament than any other country in the
world – is irrelevant as far as the position of the vast majority of rural women is
concerned (Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, 2009: 37-8).
Whereas the Habyarimana regime needed farmers to produce coffee (to create a
surplus for élite appropriation) in the case of the RPF such tactics are more to do with
social control. In many locations those attending any form of public meeting are
ordered to wear shoes or flip-flops – people arriving at markets barefoot have had
their money confiscated to buy shoes for them (Ansoms, 2009: 304; see also
Ingelaere, 2010a). Within several imidugudu it is obligatory to build stables for
livestock and not to allow livestock graze outside the house – these are onerous or
impossible burdens for poorer farmers (Ansoms, 2009: 304).
‘these policies seem to be primarily concerned with the appearance of poverty,
rather than alleviating the actual experience of poverty. It is… an “imposed
modernity” that seems to result in nothing more than the cosmetic upgrading
of rural life while hiding the true extent of poverty’ (Ansoms, 2009: 304-5).36
There is also a pronounced ethnic dimension: control is exercised through appointed
(not elected) officials (of which the most powerful is the executive secretary) who
draw salaries and whose career prospects are dependent on following government
diktats – these people are often Tutsi with no prior connection to the area and who are
accountable upwards to central government but not downwards to the people
(Ingelaere, 2010b: 288-90).
Traditional wood-fuelled ovens for making bricks have also been banned in rural areas – only
‘modern’ ovens are allowed, which has increased the cost of bricks to the rural population and denied
local entrepreneurs an important off-farm opportunity (Ansoms, 2009: 304).
36
52
Conclusion: international (in)action and (bleak) prospects for the future
‘Far from supporting the regime, most Rwandans fear it’ (Hintjens, 2008: 18)
Despite overwhelming evidence of its murderous brutality (at home and abroad), the
absence of any real democracy in the country, and the (at best) uneven nature of
economic progress, the Rwandan government retains substantial external support –
‘Rwanda is often described as a “donor darling”, receiving relatively high levels of
aid and successfully attracting a relatively large number of donors’ (Beswick, 2010:
230). USAID (2009) notes that ‘the Government of Rwanda is committed to
development, recovery, and reconciliation’. The British Ambassador to Rwanda
observes that there are ‘very, very few areas in which you could say there were
difference of opinion’ between Rwanda and Britain (in Elliot, 2009).
Foreign grants account for approximately 45-50 per cent of the total Rwandan
government budget (Hayman, 2009: 163). As with pre-genocide Rwanda,
international actors seem willing to strengthen a state ‘that [has] proved to be a killing
machine’ (Oomen, 2005: 907). Why should this be the case? One answer is that some
donors are impressed at the government’s reconstruction and development efforts
(Beswick, 2010: 246), however unequally distributed their rewards. Another is that
the RPF government has been highly effective at creating and cashing a ‘genocide
credit’: by portraying itself as the saviour and defender of an ethnic minority, and
highlighting the failure of external actors to protect that minority, it has enhanced its
negotiating hand with (allegedly guilt-wracked) Western powers in particular (Pottier,
2002). Ironically, the genocide survivors themselves typically remain marginalised
and impoverished (Schimmel, 2010), the government’s rhetorical manipulation of
them notwithstanding.
It would be inaccurate to describe aid support to Rwanda as an unconditional blank
cheque, however, as ‘donors and international human rights organisations continue to
be concerned about political liberties’ (Hayman, 2009: 158). Norway froze support in
1999 until Rwanda withdrew (or appeared to withdraw) from the DRC, and even the
UK – a major supporter of post-genocide Rwanda – delayed aid support on these
grounds in 2004 (Hayman, 2009: 173). We saw earlier how the Netherlands and
53
Sweden suspended aid in 2008 over Rwanda’s activities in the DRC; similarly,
Belgium and EU suspended some aid after the Kibeho massacre in 1995 (see above)
though this was quickly resumed, and the US and the UK supported the Rwandan
government throughout the Kibeho controversy (Hayman, 2009: 169). Some donors
have expressed concerns about apparent coercion within the imidugudu/villagisation
programme, and the gacaca initiative (see above) has also been queried, but for the
most part aid support has not been withheld on these grounds (Hayman, 2009: 171).
In 2003 EU observer missions were critical regarding the elections held that year (see
above) and, again, threatened to withhold support; the Netherlands in particular did
withhold funding on this basis (Hayman, 2009: 172). Nonetheless, after the elections,
‘Official donor statements reiterate[d] the importance of good governance and
political dialogue, but there [we]re only rare cases of outright criticism’ (Hayman,
2009: 172) and any delayed aid was largely delivered.
Hayman concludes that ‘donors have remained largely supportive even in the face of
signs of increasing authoritarianism and poor political governance’ (2009: 177). One
possible explanation for this (apart from the ‘genocide credit’ and the perception of
development progress mentioned above) is the skill of the Rwandan government in
speaking the language of international development – strict adherence to neo-liberal
economic policies and stated commitments to ‘poverty reduction’, ‘participation’,
‘gender equality’, achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and other
beloved buzzwords of the international development sector (Hayman, 2009: 175;
Oomen, 2005: 901). For the staff of aid agencies who rarely venture into rural areas
this may be a persuasive discourse (Ingelaere, 2010a). And, for some external actors
at least, there may be a genuinely held belief that the RPF, for all its faults, represents
the only bulwark against renewed genocide and that its technical competence and
ability to maintain some form of (repressive, relative) peace37 could yet prove a
springboard for more broadly based development in the future (Uvin, 2001a).
Other motivations may be more overtly self-serving: Jacques and Tuckey (2008)
claim that US support (the US is the largest single aid donor to Rwanda) is based on
the interests of US companies in accessing DRC resources and Rwandan cooperation
37
What Hintjens (2008: 21) describes as an ‘armed peace’.
54
in the US-led ‘war on terror’. More broadly, Rwanda may represent an example of a
so-called ‘governance state’, in which ‘a ruling group within the party and/or state..
enjoys a solid hold on the state and.. is aligned with the concerns of external agencies’
(Harrison, in Beswick, 2010: 246). The external concerns that the ruling group in
Rwanda can demonstrate alignment with include the following:

The US ‘war on terror’, with Rwanda able to position itself as an ally of the
US in that regard (Jacques and Tuckey, 2008), much in the way that the
previous akazu was able to align itself with French foreign policy interests;

Access to natural resources for Western corporations in the DRC (Jacques and
Tuckey, 2008);

Neoliberal economic policy, which the Rwandan government nominally
adheres to (Dorsey, 2000: 314), thus earning itself the approval of the IMF and
WB at the same time as the state and/or (official or unofficial) state agents sit
at the centre of almost all (legal and illegal) activity (see above); again, this
parallels the behaviour of the previous regime during the period 1990-94 and
earlier (Storey, 2001). The IMF (2010) claims that economic growth in
Rwanda is ‘underpinned by sound macroeconomic policies, high.. investment
and commitment to implement a vigorous structural reform agenda’. The WB
has labelled Rwanda the ‘world's top reformer’ in the 2010 Doing Business
report because of a variety of pro-business policy changes (World Bank,
2010a).

Stated commitments to ‘participatory practices’, ‘poverty reduction’, ‘gender
equality’ and the MDGs, amongst other fashionable concepts in the
international development field (see above).
The RPF élite has, in summary, decisively established its domination over Rwandan
society and has been able to align itself sufficiently well (rhetorically or in reality)
with the goals of international actors so as to attract substantial international support
and ward off any particularly significant international censure. Crucially, one such
55
international goal is the idea of power-sharing and ‘national reconciliation’, as
conceived under the Arusha Accords. According to the official Rwandan government
website,38 the ‘principal provisions [of Arusha] now constitute the Fundamental Law
of the Republic of Rwanda’. Non-RPF and Hutu ministers continue to hold cabinet
positions (however non-existent their real power is): the letter of Arusha is (partly)
observed even as its spirit is violated. Once again, the Arusha Accords are being
strategically appropriated to legitimise the claim to power of a brutal and rapacious
élite, even as the underlying condition of ‘structural violence’ for the vast mass of
ordinary people is intensified – ‘most Rwandans, who are excluded and know full
well that they have been robbed of their civil and political rights, are frustrated, angry
and desperate’ (Reyntjens, 2004: 210). We have been here before.
References
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