Economic and Political Weekly November 18, 2000 4104

We Wish to Inform you That

Tomorrow We Will be Killed with
Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
by Philip Gourevitch; Farrar Straus
and Giroux, New York, 1998;
ISBN: 0-374-28697-3;
pp 356.
Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan
Genocide of 1994 by Christopher C
Taylor; Berg, Oxford and New York,
1999; ISBN: 1 85973 273 9 (cloth);
1 85973 278 X (paper);
pp 197.
VINAY LAL
I
n the spring and summer of 1994, over
a period of three months, as many as
8,00,000 Tutsis were brutally and swiftly
sent to their graves as the rest of the world
simply waited and watched. Early that year,
on January 11, the Canadian commander
of the UN peace-keeping force in Rwanda
cabled his superior in New York, Kofi
Annan, advising him that Rwanda was
about to erupt into violence, and that the
Hutu government was hatching elaborate
plans for the slaughter of the minority Tutsi
population. This warning was repeated
and others confidently presume that they
stand exonerated. Subsequently, an en-
lightened commentator, such as Bernard
Lewis or Paul Johnson, steps forth to remind
the world that the west is unique in that
it has the capacity for self-reflection and
the courage to admit to the wrongs it has
committed.
Though the Rwandan genocide merely
takes its place alongside the catalogue of
other monstrosities in the 20th century,
and is condemned to oblivion in the near
future so long as there is no concerted
lobby to speak for a poor central African
nation which has almost nothing to offer
to a world enthralled by globalisation and
the digital revolution, it should have a
centrality in our awareness of the affairs
of humankind. There is such an overwhelm-
ing consensus among scholars in the west
that the Jewish holocaust represents the
paradigmatic instance of genocide and
human suffering that to even dare to suggest
that the sufferings of people elsewhere
have been comparable if not more horren-
dous in their implications opens one to
charges of anti-Semitism. Yet, as some
scholars of comparative genocide history
are aware, the Armenian genocide (the
reality of which is still disputed by the
Turkish government) means at least as
much to Armenians as the Jewish holo-
caust means to Jews, and no one has even
begun to comprehend how the genocide
perpetrated by the Pakistani army in what
was then its eastern province in 1971
lacerates the memory of Bengalis. The
victims of other comparatively silent
genocides cannot even claim the status of
victims. Six million Jews, gypsies, homo-
sexuals, and others construed as undesir-
ables by the Nazi state were murdered,
but it is just as important to acknowledge
that the rate of extinction during the
Rwandan genocide was appreciably
greater, and that nearly 8,00,000 Tutsis
were killed at the frightening rate of 9,000
people every day and this without the
paraphernalia available to the purportedly
more civilised Germans, who instituted a
bureaucratic and highly centralised regime
of industrial death. Never since the atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have
people so efficiently been despatched to
their death on this scale.
It is also useful to recall that the Rwandan
genocide occurred nearly 50 years after the
western democracies had been idiotically
shouting themselves hoarse with the plati-
tudinous cry, Never again. Only a few
dissenters, such as the survivor of
on subsequent occasions, but general
fatigue on the part of the international
community regarding participation in
peace-keeping operations, to quote from
Boutros-Ghalis introduction to a 1996
UN report on the Rwandan genocide, led
Annan and Boutros-Ghali, as well as
European and American diplomats, to
ignore these warnings. Very recently, Kofi
Annan, who was rewarded for his inaction
and pusillanimity by being raised to the
secretary-generalship of the UN, has issued
expressions of regret that more was not
done by the UN and the major western
powers to prevent the genocide. Though
Madeleine Albright, the then US ambas-
sador to the UN, herself elevated to the
office of the secretary of state in president
Clintons cabinet a few years ago, remains
characteristically unrepentant, Clinton
himself has gone on record saying that his
administration was negligent in the perfor-
mance of its duties, not only as the self-
appointed policeman of state morality
around the world, but as a signatory of the
Genocide Convention, which obligates
parties to the treaty to take all measures
to prevent genocide. This, too, has become
the way of the world: evil perpetrated or
condoned is after the safe interval of many
years sought to be exculpated by an empty
apology, and the likes of Albright, Clinton
Rwandan Summer of 1994
Economic and Political Weekly November 18, 2000 4105
Auschwitz and great Italian writer Primo
Levi, had the foresight to recognise that
a Final Solution, having been attempted
once, could all happen again. That Levi
took his own life many years subsequent
to his liberation makes us ponder whether
it was Auschwitz that finally did him in,
or whether it was the 20th centurys re-
lentless love of killing, repeatedly compel-
ling Levi to bear witness, exhausting his
sensibilities and his will to live. The ease
with which the Rwandan genocide was
allowed to take place suggests that the west
nearly desired it, and looked at it much as
they did upon the Iran-Iraq war of the
1980s, as a fortunate manifestation of
Social Darwinism at work in the political
arena. If Muslims were bent upon destroy-
ing each other, they were to be encouraged
by artfully feeding both sides with arms
and ammunition or supplying Saddam
Hussein with intelligence even as nego-
tiations were taking place with Iran in
this behaviour, all the more to make the
west Asia reliant upon the American se-
curity apparatus; and if Tutsis and Hutus
had devolved upon an expedient mecha-
nism for resolving Rwandas overpopula-
tion problem, who in the west had the
moral authority to intercede on humani-
tarian grounds? When called upon by
Jewish leaders to bomb the railway lines
that were shepherding the Jews to their
gruesome end at Auschwitz, the US and
the Allied Powers desisted on the specious
grounds that this would enrage the Nazis,
and further endanger the lives of their
prisoners; and apropos Rwanda, when
human rights campaigners called on the
US to jam the Hutu radio station, RTLM
(Radio Television Libre de Mille Collines),
which openly, repeatedly, and vehemently
called on the Hutus to exterminate the
Tutsi cockroaches, they were informed
that the US stood for the freedom of
expression or the unfettered right of people
to goad others to murder.
The ignoble conduct of France, like-
wise, is clearly on record: while the geno-
cide was taking place, France, which had
persuaded itself that the Anglo-American
world was desirous of depriving it of its
prestige and influence in Francophone
Africa, sent troops and arms to assist the
Hutus in the fulfilment of their genocidal
ambitions. The year after the genocide,
president Chirac opened a meeting of
Francophone African leaders, to which
Rwandas new Tutsi president was not
invited, with a moment of silence in the
memory of Habyarimana, the Tutu leader
whose death served as a pretext to elimi-
nate the Tutsis, though the 8,00,000 vic-
tims of genocide were not so remembered
[Gourevitch:292]. To admit all of this is
not to raise the bogus spectre of a con-
spiracy: there was certainly no interna-
tional plot to encourage much less aid the
Hutus in eliminating the Tutsis, whatever
the conduct of any particular nation, but
nonetheless the Hutus were permitted to
continue with their genocidal activity. Even
on April 21, 1994, three weeks after the
genocide had commenced, and one week
after the murder of 10 Belgian peace-
keepers had impelled Belgium to with-
draw from the United Nations Assistance
Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), the com-
mander of UNAMIR had declared that
with a well-equipped force of 5,000 sol-
diers and the authority to take interven-
tionist action, he could swiftly bring the
genocide to an end. Yet the response of
the Security Council, which some years
ago surrendered its independence to the
US, was to cut short UNAMIRs strength
in Rwanda by 90 per cent. Albright wished
to eliminate even the skeleton force of less
than 300 soldiers that remained. Thus
Gourevitch, in his moving account of the
genocide, states candidly that the deser-
tion of Rwanda by the UN force was Hutu
Powers greatest diplomatic victory to date,
and it can be credited almost single-
handedly to the United States (p 150).
The common and erroneous representa-
tion of the conflict in Rwanda as an ex-
pression of age-old animosities, a tribal
war in the Dark Continent among people
still bereft of civilised norms, was given
free reign in the western media. A number
of works, from the unusually informed
journalistic reporting of Gourevitch to the
massively detailed Human Rights Watch
report by Alison Des Forges and the ana-
lytical study by Taylor, have offered a far
more complex reading of the Rwandan
genocide which underscores the chilling
modernity of this conflict and establishes
how hatred is manufactured. Gourevtichs
title, We wish to inform you that tomorrow
we will be killed with our families, is taken
from a letter dated April 15, 1994 ad-
dressed by seven Tutsi clergymen to pastor
Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, a Tutu who
headed the adventist church and hospital
complex in Kibuye. Pastor Ntakirutimana
had urged the Tutsis to take shelter in his
church, and doubtless the seven Tutsi
pastors wrote as men of god to another man
of god, beseeching him to extend his
protection to them: We believe that, with
the help of god who entrusted you the
leadership of this flock, which is going to
be destroyed, your intervention will be
highly appreciated, the same way as the
Jews were saved by Esther (p 42). But
this church leader, who would subsequently
make his way to the US, sent back a cryptic
reply: Your problem has already found
a solution. You must die (p 28). The next
morning the Hutus descended upon the
church and hospital; they left shortly before
midnight, when they could find no one else
to kill. Over two thousand children, women,
and men had sought refuge in the complex.
Both Gourevitch and Philip Taylor dwell
on the so-called Hamitic hypothesis by
way of furnishing an intellectual geneal-
ogy of the Rwandan genocide. Rwanda is
populated by three ethnic groups. The
Hutus, comprising (before the genocide)
80-85 per cent of the population, claim to
be autochthonous to the region, making
their living mainly as cultivators; the Tutsis,
who form 15-20 per cent of the population,
are mainly cattle-herders; and the Twa,
whose numbers are miniscule, have tradi-
tionally been hunter-gatherers and potters.
In the pre-colonial days, the differences
were seldom sharply marked, though, as
the authors observe, there were clear hi-
erarchies. The Twa, for instance, have
always been despised by both Hutus and
Tutsis; and the Hutus, who make their
living from the soil, were viewed by Tutsis
as partly impure. Nonetheless, social re-
lations were characterised by fluidity. For
instance, a patron who overtly exploited
a client found that the latter would aban-
don the relationship and seek the protec-
tion of someone else [Taylor:43, 66].
Marriages between Hutus and Tutsis were
common enough, that the word kwihutura
came to mean, to become Tutsi, to cease
being Hutu [Taylor:66, 72, 168].
Gourevitch speaks of Rwandan society as
fiercely hierarchical here the Tutsis were
aristocrats; Hutus were vassals. Yet the
lines between them remained porous,
and in some areas these categories had no
local significance (pp 48-49). All groups
shared the same language, religious dif-
ferences were never acute and unlike in
many other African countries, Islam was
never to have a strong presence in Rwanda,
and the greater majority of Rwandans have
been Christians since the establishment of
colonial rule.
The Germans, and then the Belgians
(who inherited Rwanda from Germany
following first world war), were, however,
predisposed to viewing the Hutus as
Economic and Political Weekly November 18, 2000 4106
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Economic and Political Weekly November 18, 2000 4107
existing in a relationship of absolute
servitude to the Tutsis, more particularly
because the Tutsis, taller and more strik-
ingly looking than the Bantu Hutus and
endowed with longer noses and more oval
faces, were presumed to be the remnants
of one of the lost tribes of Israel, indeed the
very descendants of Ham [Taylor:58-61].
This hypothesis was first put forth by the
English explorer, John Hanning Speke,
since Speke was not prepared to believe
that the little culture and civilisation that
existed in central Africa could have origi-
nated with the true curly-head, flab-nosed,
pouch-mouthed negro [Gourevitch:51].
While no white man doubted that the
Africans were properly placed under the
subjugation of European Christians,
amongst the Rwandans the Tutsis were fed
a discourse which postulated their intel-
lectual superiority over the stocky Hutus,
whose very physique was represented as
making them fit for hard work (p 39). The
Hamitic hypothesis was doubtless an in-
vented tradition, spun out of whole cloth
in Gourevitchs words (p 51), but the Tutsis
clearly saw the advantages to be derived
from reinforcing European notions of
their superiority by constructing an elabo-
rate justification of their supremacy
[Taylor:42, 56]. The Hutus were to take
this history just as seriously as the Tutsis.
For instance, in 1992, the Hutus were called
upon by one of their ideologues to send
the Tutsis back to Ethiopia and two years
later when the killings began in earnest,
thousands of Tutsis were ferried to their
death on the Nyabarongo River, a tributary
of the Nile that, after snaking its way
through Rwanda empties into Lake Victoria
[Gourevitch:53].
Under the Belgians, Tutsis were favoured
for government jobs, and given much
greater access to educational institutions.
The first Bishop of Rwanda, writing in the
1930s, openly advocated discrimination
against Hutus and stated that the colonial
state had no chiefs who are better quali-
fied, more intelligent, more active, more
capable of appreciating progress and more
fully accepted by the people than the Tutsi
[Gourevitch:56]. Tutsi chiefs levied taxes
on Hutus, while the Belgians subjected
them to forced labour. However, for a
variety of reasons, both the Catholic Church
and the Belgian administration began to
gravitate towards the numerically prepon-
derant Hutu community following second
world war, and a number of Hutu intel-
lectuals felt encouraged enough to issue
the Hutu Manifesto of 1957. Deploying the
Hamitic hypothesis, the manifesto argued
that as the indigenous majority, the Hutus
were inherently entitled to exercise power
[Gourevitch:58]. With the disintegration
of colonial rule in 1959-60, the achieve-
ment of this power became a political
reality.
Rwanda was declared a republic in
January 1961 and full independence was
granted the following year. The differ-
ences that the colonial regime had sought
to institutionalise were reproduced by the
Hutus. Identity cards, which described
Rwandans as Tutsis or Hutus, over-
looking the intermarriages and complex
history of interactions between the two,
were retained. If the discourse of Tutsi
extremism had stressed their intellectual
superiority, the narrative of Hutu extre-
mism highlighted the foreignness of the
Tutsis and claimed Rwanda for the indige-
nous Hutus. Census figures were manipu-
lated by the new Tutu regime as a measure
of pest control. If Tutsis could be shown
to be fewer in numbers, even their propor-
tional entitlements would be decreased. A
system of reverse meritocracy, which
elevated the Tutsis with lowest scores in
entrance exams over the Tutsis with the
highest scores was introduced, not so
perversely as one might imagine, since it
had the effect of keeping the Tutsi intel-
ligentsia out of the entrails of power
[Gourevitch:66]. Tutsi-Hutu relations,
which cannot here be probed in detail,
deteriorated considerably after 1960 and
often degenerated into violence. This in
turn precipitated the flight of Rwandan
Tutsis, a million of whom were living in
exile, nearly half of them in Uganda at the
time of the genocide.
As the events of 1994 were to show, the
Hutus and Tutsis had been taught only too
well new ways of hatred. Gourevitch tells
a gripping tale, but his narrative is only
one of the collective histories and memo-
ries, and of the manner in which hatred
inserts itself into veins and arteries of the
body and the body politic alike. His ac-
count is capacious enough to trace the lives
and harrowing experiences of a number of
individuals, so that we are ever mindful
of the language in which genocidal vio-
lence speaks and disrupts patterns of
everyday life, erodes the trust upon which
human relations are founded, generates a
stench of fear that hangs heavily in the air,
and creates a momentum in which bodies
relentlessly pile upon each other.
Gourevitch tells of the difficulties en-
countered by the survivors whose very
existence appeared to serve as proof of
their collaboration. They were taunted by
Tutsis returning from exile with the ob-
servation, The smart ones are dead and
those who survived are traumatised
(p 233). Perpetrators, victims, collabora-
tors, survivors, bystanders, abettors, these
terms are yet inadequate, since every society
has its conscience keepers. The stories of
those who gave their lives to save others
have still to be told and it is on this note
that Gourevitch ends his account. In April
1997, three years after the genocide com-
menced, Rwandan television circulated the
story of a group of armed Hutus who
descended upon a girls boarding school
in Gisenyi and ordered the Hutu girls to
separate themselves from Tutsi girls.
Declaring themselves Rwandans the girls
wouldnt oblige. They were beaten and
indiscriminately shot dead (pp 352-53).
Philip Taylor, in his Sacrifice as Terror:
The Rwandan Genocide of 1994, offers a
more scholarly and analytical interpreta-
tion which stresses how history, anthro-
pology, biology, and theology colluded in
drawing seemingly ineradicable lines of
difference between the Hutus and Tutsis
and generating this conflict. Like
Gourevitch, he first focuses on the Hamitic
hypothesis, but then develops two further
ideas, both of which have been inadequately
understood, if at all, by most observers of
this calamitous set of events. Drawing on
the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Michael
Taussig, Bruce Kapferer and others,
Taylor delineates the particular cosmo-
logy of terror embodied by the Rwandan
genocide, and sketches the ontology of the
body prevailing in Rwandan thought. He
argues that everyday Rwandan thought is
deeply permeated by twin ideas of what
might be called fluid flows and ob-
structing beings and that the construction
of the moral person in Rwanda is best
understood as a dialectic of flow and
blockage. Illnesses are characterised by
irregularities in the flow of fluids. For
instance, an old woman, because she has
ceased to menstruate, is construed as a
blocking being (pp 113, 124). The
Rwandan King was thought to facilitate
flows as he was the very conduit through
which fluids passed. Yet, in early Rwandan
thought, he was also viewed as someone
who might have to be sacrificed, as he
exercised the greatest power to enact
blockage (pp 122-26). The Tutsis, in
Hutu extremist discourse, were rendered
as blocked beings. If every atrocity takes
a particular form, this genocide, torture
4106 Economic and Political Weekly November 18, 2000
Economic and Political Weekly November 18, 2000 4108
and murder would show a preoccupation
with the movement of persons and sub-
stances and with the canals, arteries, and
conduits along which persons and sub-
stances flow: rivers, roadways, pathways,
and even the conduits of the human body
such as the reproductive and digestive
systems (p 128). Tutsi males, even those
too young to reproduce, were emasculated
and Tutsi womens breasts were slashed.
Both the penis and the female breast
produce fertility fluids (p 140). Even
more strikingly, Taylor attributes the thou-
sands of roadblocks that were set up to the
same ontology of the body. The Hutus
persisted with these barriers though they
were counterproductive in the military
sense, since they diverted manpower away
from the battles that were raging with the
Rwandan patriotic front, the Tutsi-led
resistance force which eventually over-
threw the Hutu government (pp 133-34).
As Taylor further reminds us, every
genocide also reflects the power relations
between men and women. This is not merely
a nod in the direction of political correct-
ness which requires that men be sensitive
to questions of gender, nor is Taylors
concern animated only by the fact, impor-
tant as it is, that at least as many Tutsi
women as men were killed in the genocide
(p 154). If in early Rwandan thought the
king was seen as a liminal being, the pre-
eminent facilitator of flows just as much
as the most potent blocked being, Taylor
finds that Tutsi women stood at the bound-
ary between the Tutsis and the Hutus, a
boundary that was otherwise perforce de-
clared to be impermeable. Taylor asks why
in pre-genocide Rwanda it was common
to find Tutsi women married to Hutu men,
but that marriages between Hutu women
and Tutsi men were exceedingly rare.
Colonialism had also brought forth the
notion that paternity determines ethnicity
(p 167), and it is understandable that Tutsi
women, after the ascendancy of Hutus to
political power, should not have been averse
to marriages with Hutu men. But what
might have induced Hutu men to take Tutsi
wives, even as racial purity was increas-
ingly becoming an essential component of
Hutu ideology? Taylor finds that Hutu
men, loath though they may have been to
admit it, largely accepted the politics of
Hamitism and in particular the presump-
tion, shared by white Europeans, that Tutsi
women were far preferable as sexual
companions than Hutu women. Tutsi
women stood as living examples of the
porousness of distinctions that had become
hardened over time and as such they had
to bear the brunt of Tutu fury, held aside
for special experiments in inflicting terror.
Taylor observes, Many Tutsi women
suffered breast oblation, or were raped
before being killed. Others were impaled
with spears from vagina to mouth or
compelled to commit incest with male
family members (p 176).
Taylor does not sufficiently extend this
point, in what is otherwise an incisive
study. It is the fear of sameness rather than
the fear of difference that kindled the fire
of hatred. The Hutus and Tutsis have in
the past doubtless viewed their relations
as existing in a hierarchical framework,
but difference itself was never wholly ir-
reducible in pre-colonial Rwanda nor was
it invested with ontological sanctity. To
admit this is not to assimilate the Rwandan
genocide, accomplished largely with
machetes, axes, and spears into a seamless
history of genocidal violence. Indeed, the
Rwandan genocide marks the first time
since the passage of the Genocide Con-
vention of 1948, which the US signed 14
years after Rwanda signed it in 1975, that
the United Nations was willing to use,
howsoever grudgingly and belatedly, the
word genocide. Almost all forms of
genocidal terror under modernity have been
inspired by the fetish to enumerate, cate-
gorise, differentiate and eliminate ambi-
guity and the Rwandan genocide appears
to be on course in this respect. Viewed
from almost any perspective, the Rwandan
genocide, predicated on discourses of
racism, social evolutionism, ethnic nation-
alism and essentialism, shows itself to be
not (as Gourevitch rightly stresses) an
exemplary instance of the chaos and
anarchy associated with collapsed states,
but rather a characteristically monstrous
effusion of order, authoritarianism, de-
cades of modern political theorising and
indoctrination, and the intolerance accom-
panying such modern political practices
and thinking (p 95).
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