A HISTORICAL APPROACH TOWARDS ANALYSING RWANDAN GENOCIDE

OF 1994. BY AHMED ABUBAKAR LAMIN

ABSTRACT

The Rwandan genocide that happened to be one of the worst in human history had its root to
ethnic differences created by Belgian colonialists who came to Rwanda in 1916. They
perceived the Tutsis to be more superior to the Hutus. This manifests in favouring the Tutsis
more in education, jobs and other important aspects of human endeavour. As a corollary,
resentments and envy among the Hutus led to the bloodiest genocide in Africa. However, one
of the most important tools of identification of either of the ethnic groups in the genocide was
the identity card show casing the tribe you belong to, others include their race, height or
dialect. This paper has tried to explain the causes or what led to the Rwandan genocide of
1994 through historical approach. The analysis was however guided by historical approach.
The paper has been able to conceptually clarify the concept of genocide, Tutsi, Hutu, and
ethnicity. It also explained in detail the genesis of the Rwandan genocide using the historical
approach. Finally, it gave out the conclusion and references.

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INTRODUCTION

Historically the classification of one tribe i.e. Kinyarwanda into Hutu and Tutsi tribes can
be linked to When the Belgian colonialists arrived in 1916, they treated the Hutu and the
Tutsi as separate groups. The colonial power divided the groups by classifying Rwandans
into ethnic groups and making it obligatory for them to carry ethnic identity cards classifying
people according to their ethnicity. The Belgians deemed the Tutsi to be superior to the Hutu
and thus Tutsi were favored in administrative positions, education and jobs in the modern
sector (Newbury, 1995). However, resentment among the Hutu gradually built up,
culminating in a series of riots in 1959 which caused power to fall into the hands of the Hutu
who gained independence for Rwanda in 1962. After independence, the newly established
political regime actively engaged in anti-Tutsi propaganda. Leaders based their political
ideology on Hutu majority rule, which ultimately led to the exclusion of the Tutsi from the
political sphere and massive violations of human rights. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsi were
sporadically killed during a series of massacres that were followed eventually by the
Genocide against the Tutsi in 1994. In this genocide, more than one million Tutsi were killed
for the sole reason of being Tutsi. This genocide damaged and destroyed the social cohesion
and make up of Rwandan society.

CONCEPTUAL CLARIFICATION

Genocide: the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of

their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race. The term, derived from the Greek genos (“race,”
“tribe,” or “nation”) and the Latin cide (“killing”), was coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-
born jurist who served as an adviser to the U.S. Department of War during World War II.

Tutsi: Tutsi, also called Batusi, Tussi, Watusi, or Watutsi, ethnic group of probable Nilotic
origin, whose members live within Rwanda and Burundi. The Tutsi formed the traditional
aristocratic minority in both countries, constituting about 9 percent and 14 percent of the
population, respectively. The Tutsis’ numbers in Rwanda were greatly reduced by a
government-inspired genocidal campaign against them in 1994.

Hutu: Hutu, also called Bahutu or Wahutu, Bantu-speaking people of Rwanda and Burundi.
Numbering about 9,500,000 in the late 20th century, the Hutu comprise the vast majority in

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both countries but were traditionally subject to the Tutsi (q.v.), warrior-pastoralists of Nilotic
stock.

Ethnicity: a large group of people who have the same national, racial, or cultural origins, or
the state of belonging to such a group.

HISTORICAL APPROACH

According to the advocates of this approach, political theory can be only understood
when the historical factors like the age, place and the situation in which it is evolved are
taken into consideration. As the name of this approach is related to history, it emphasizes on
the study of history of every political reality to analyze any situation. Political thinkers like
Machiavelli, Sabine and Dunning believe that politics and history are intricately related and
the study of politics always should have a historical perspective. Sabine is of the view that
Political Science should include all those subjects which have been discussed in the writings
of different political thinkers from the time of Plato. This approach strongly upholds the
belief that the thinking or the ideology of every political thinker is shaped by the surrounding
environment. Moreover, history not only speaks about the past but also links it with the
present events. History provides the chronological order of every political event and thereby
helps in future estimation of events also. Hence, without studying the past political events,
institutions and political environment it would be wrong to analyze the present political
scenario/ events.

HISTORICAL EVENTS THAT LED TO THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE OF 1994.

From 1894 until the end of World War I, Rwanda, along with Burundi and present-
day Tanzania, were part of German East Africa. Belgium claimed it thereafter, becoming the
administering authority from 1924 to 1962. During their colonial tenure, the Germans and
Belgians ruled Rwanda indirectly through Tutsi monarchs and their chiefs. The colonialists
developed the so called Hamitic hypothesis or myth, which held that the Tutsi and everything
humanly superior in Central Africa came from ancient Egypt or Abyssinia. The Europeans
regarded Hutu and Twa (about 3% of the population) as inferior to Tutsi. Sixty years of such
prejudicial fabrications inflated Tutsi egos inordinately and crushed Hutu feelings, which led
to an aggressively resentful inferiority complex. Within the period of 1933-34, the Belgians
conducted a census and introduced an identity card system that indicated the Tutsi, Hutu, or
Twa “ethnicity” of each person. The identity card “ethnicity” of future generations was
determined patrilineally; all persons were designated as having the “ethnicity” of their

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fathers, regardless of the “ethnicity” of their mothers. This practice, which was carried on
until its abolition by the 1994 post-genocide government, had the unfortunate consequence of
firmly attaching a sub-national identity to all Rwandans and thereby rigidly dividing them
into categories, which, for many people, carried a history of dominance-subordination,
superiority-inferiority, and exploitation-suffering. In their “Hutu Manifesto” of 1957, Hutu
leaders referred to the identity card categories as “races,” thereby proving how inflexible
these labels had become in their minds. In fact, Hutu and Tutsi spoke the same language and
practiced similar religions. In November 1959, the pro-Hutu PARMEHUTU party led a
revolt that resulted in bloody ethnic clashes and the toppling of King Kigri V. By 1963, these
and other Hutu attacks had resulted in thousands of Tutsi deaths and the flight of about
130,000 Tutsi to the neighboring countries of Burundi, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic
of the Congo) and Uganda. The land and cattle that the fleeing pastoral Tutsi left behind were
quickly claimed by land-hungry, horticultural Hutu, As a result of the national election held
under UN supervision in 1961, Gregoire Kayibanda (an author of the “Hutu Manifesto”)
became Rwanda’s president-designate. Rwanda was declared independent on 1 July
1962.Supported by the Tutsi-dominated government in Burundi, Rwandan Tutsi refugees
there began launching unsuccessful attacks into Rwanda. These invasions were usually
followed by brutal Hutu reprisals against local Tutsi. The Hutu government used a failed
1963 invasion as the pretext to launch a massive wave of repression between December 1963
and January 1964, in which an estimated 10,000 Tutsi were slaughtered. Also surviving Tutsi
politicians still living in Rwanda were executed, (Donatien, 2014).

However, In July 1973, Major Juvénal Habyarimana, a northern Hutu, overthrew

Kayibanda, a southerner, and declared himself president of the Second Republic. Over the
next few years, his security forces would eliminate former president Kayibanda and many of
his high-ranking supporters as part of a plan to eradicate serious Hutu opposition.
Habyarimana’s kin and regional supporters filled high level positions in the government and
security forces. Close relatives of the president and his wife dominated the army,
gendarmerie and, especially, the Presidential Guard. Habyarimana’s Rwanda became a
single-party dictatorship, (Paul, 2002). He relegated the Tutsi to the private sector.
Regulations prohibited army members from marrying Tutsi. Habyarimana also maintained
the “ethnic” identity card and “ethnic” quota systems of the previous regime. By the mid-
1980s, the number of Rwandan refugees in neighboring countries had surpassed one-half
million. Thousands more were living in Europe and North America. Habyarimana adamantly

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refused to allow their return, insisting that Rwanda was already too crowded and had too little
land, jobs, and food for them. However, the surrounding countries were also poor and had
insufficient resources to accommodate both their own citizens and large refugee populations.
Rwandan Tutsi refugees in Uganda, together with some Rwandan Hutu refugees, formed the
Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and committed themselves to return to Rwanda. During 1990-
93, RPF troops conducted a number of assaults into Rwanda from Uganda in unsuccessful
attempts to seize power. The fighting caused the displacement of hundreds of thousands of
people. Habyarimana retaliated by heightening internal repression against the Tutsi. From
1990 to 1992, Hutu ultra-nationalists killed an estimated 2,000 Tutsi. Owing to European
pressure, especially from France, the Rwandan government allowed political parties and
press freedom in the early 1990s. The result was more pro-Hutu, anti-Tutsi extremism. The
December 1990 issue of a “Hutu Power” newspaper vilified the Tutsi as the common enemy.
Despite strong opposition from the growing Hutu Power movement, Habyarimana’s
government signed a series of agreements (the Arusha Accords) with the RPF that called for
a power-sharing government with the Tutsi, return of Tutsi refugees to Rwanda, and
integration of Tutsi into the armed forces. The RPF was to constitute 40% of the integrated
military forces and 50% of its officer corps. For Habyarimana, the Accords amounted to a
suicide note. Hutu Power leaders cried treason. If the Accords were implemented, many Hutu
elitists in the government and the military would lose their privileged positions. A significant
number of northern Hutu related to or allied with the powerful lineage of Habyarimana’s wife
were among those who would be adversely affected. Within days of the signing, Radio Milles
Collines, a new, private station, began broadcasting anti-Accord and anti-Tutsi diatribes from
Kigali. On April 6, 1994, as Habyarimana’s presidential plane neared the Kigali Airport on
his return from Dar-es-Salam, it was struck by a missile and plunged to earth, killing the
president and all aboard, (Mamdani, 2001). Although the identity of his assassins is not
publicly known, many foreign observers believe Habyarimana was killed by Hutu extremists
in his own military. Within the hour following the crash, and prior to its official
announcement over the radio, members of the Interahamwe (Hutu militiamen) had begun to
set up road-blocks in Kigali. During April 6th and 7th, the young men checked the identity
cards of passers-by, searching for Tutsi, members of opposition parties, and human rights
activists. Anyone belonging to these groups was set upon with machetes and iron bars. Radio
Milles Collines blamed the RPF and a contingent of UN soldiers for Habyarimana’s death
and urged revenge against the Tutsi. The Presidential Guard began killing Tutsi civilians in

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Ramera, a section of Kigali near the airport. Extremists in the president’s entourage had made
up lists of Hutu political opponents, mostly democrats, for the first wave of murders.

(Mamdani, 2001) However, it is important to note that the extremists exhorted the
Interahamwe and ordinary Hutu to kill Tutsi and “eat their cows.” The later phrase had both
symbolic and practical significance. Symbolic, because historically Tutsi supremacy had been
built on cattle ownership. Practical, because it also meant looting Tutsi homes, farms, offices,
businesses, churches, and so on. Theft was one of the principal weapons used to bribe people
into betraying and killing their neighbors. RPF troops from the north began fighting their way
south in early April in an attempt to stop the slaughter. By July 18, the RPF had reached the
Zairian border. Having defeated the Hutu militias that opposed them, the RPF unilaterally
declared a cease-fire. Within a period of only three months over 750,000 Tutsi and between
10,000 to 30,000 Hutu, or 11 per cent of the total population, had been killed, Paul (2002).
About two million people were uprooted within Rwanda, while the same number of Hutu fled
from Rwanda into Tanzania, Burundi, and Zaire. The RPF and moderate Hutu political
parties formed a new government on July 18, 1994, but the country was in chaos. The
government pledged to implement the Arusha Accords. The government publicly committed
itself to building a multiparty democracy and to discontinuing the ethnic classification system
utilized by the previous regime. Hutu and Tutsi lived together relatively peacefully prior to
the mid-nineteenth century, a time when their total population was comparatively low
(probably less than two million, versus over seven million in 1993) and land supply for both
Hutu farmers and Tutsi cattle grazers was ample. With rapid population growth in the
twentieth century, the situation changed. Rwanda was faced with a critical food-people-land
imbalance. Throughout the twentieth century, Rwanda’s people had placed tremendous
pressure on the land. As early as 1983, when Rwanda had 5.5 million people and was the
most densely populated country in all of Africa, expert observers warned that food production
could not keep up with basic needs. By 1993, one year before the genocide, the population
had climbed to 7.7 million without any substantial improvement in agricultural output even
though an estimated 95 per cent of the gainfully employed population was engaged in
agriculture. To the contrary, food production had been seriously hampered by periodic
drought, overgrazing, soil exhaustion and soil erosion. In the years leading up to the genocide
there had been a marked decline in kilocalories per person per day and overall farm
production. Famines occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s in several parts of the
country. Hunger was endemic. Rwandan youth faced a situation where many (perhaps most)

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had no land, no jobs, little education, and no hope for a future. Without a house and a source
of livelihood, they could not marry. Because of their historically different modes of
ecological adaptation—Hutu horticulture and Tutsi cattle pastoralism—within the context of
a society over 90 per cent agrarian, a rapidly growing rural population, no significant
employment alternatives, and diminishing food production and consumption per capita, the
Hutu and Tutsi became “natural competitors.” Those Tutsi still engaged in cattle pastoralism
wanted open ranges to graze their herds. In direct opposition, landless Hutu wanted those
very lands, marginal as they may have been for agriculture, to build homesteads on and to
farm. By flight or death of more than half of Rwanda’s Tutsi population from the early 1960s
to 1973, vast tracts of land in the eastern region were freed up for Hutu settlement and
cultivation. The political elites exploited these developments, which appeared to prove that
Hutu farmers could have sufficient land if the Tutsi were eliminated. By the mid-1980s,
population increases had again outstripped the amount of cultivable land. Farmers’ attempts
to increase food production by double-and triple-cropping their dwindling plots resulted in
soil exhaustion. Foreign technical experts could do little to help farmers; the problem was the
increasing imbalance of the land: people ratio. The 1990-93 war with the RPF contributed
further to the devastation of Rwanda’s economy. It displaced thousands of farmers in the
north, thereby causing reductions in food and coffee production. It closed Rwanda’s main
land route to Mombasa and the outside world. It destroyed Rwanda’s small tourism industry,
which had become the third major foreign exchange earner. There were few employment
alternatives to farming. The country’s major employer was the government. In the late 1980s,
the central government was employing 7,000 people and the local governments 43,000. By
law, only nine per cent of these employees could be Tutsi. Eliminating the Tutsi would open
up 4,500 more government jobs for Hutu. Because the country had no social security
program, the thousands of unemployed young people who entered the job market each year
lived on the very margins of survival. Many became easy subjects for recruitment and
manipulation. Two of the Hutu militias responsible for the mass killing were the Interahamwe
and as stated earlier, Habyarimana had adamantly refused to allow Tutsi refugees back into
the country, insisting that Rwanda was too small and too crowded to accommodate them.
Some Rwandans believed that mass exterminations were necessary to wipe out an excess of
population and bring numbers into line with the available land resources.

However, economic conditions alone do not explain the mass murders. The strategies
of Hutu leaders must also be taken into account. In this poor country, regional Hutu elites

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vied with each other to acquire the economic resources—especially tax revenue and foreign
aid—that the reins of political power controlled. Their common plan involved marginalizing
the educated Tutsi to eliminate any domestic competition from them and demonizing all Tutsi
so as to dupe poor Hutu, the vast majority of the population, into believing that the elites
protected them and represented their interests. With the Tutsi sidelined, Hutu regional elites
competed with each other. Rwanda’s poor economy rests on peasant subsistence agriculture
(African rights, 1995). The governing elite could extract only limited surplus value directly
from the peasant masses. In addition to taxes, the governing elite had two other potential
sources of enrichment: skimming export revenues and foreign aid. During the late 1980s and
early 1990s, the three sources of export earnings–coffee, tea, and tin–all declined. Coffee
export receipts declined from $144 million in 1985 to $30 million in 1993. Hence, export
revenues declined, government budgets were cut, and the only remaining source of
enrichment was foreign aid. Those who could benefit from it had to be in positions of
political power, Marc (1998).

Consequently, elite Hutu engaged in a fierce competition for control of the rapidly
shrinking economy. But, rather than negotiate in earnest with the RPF, Habyarimana chose to
increase the size of his armed forces (from 5,000 in 1990 to 30,000 in 1992), thereby
diverting scarce resources from needed food imports, health care, and education, Newbury
(1995). The rule of dominant persons does not depend on political or economic power alone,
but on persuading the ruled to accept an ideology that justifies the rulers’ privileged positions
and convinces the ruled that their best interests are being protected. From the 1960s until
1994, the ideology promoted by the Hutu ruling elite was as follows: Tutsi were foreign
invaders, who could not really be considered as citizens, (Munyandamutsa, 2001). The Hutu
had been the “native peasants,” enslaved by the aristocratic invaders: they were now the only
legitimate inhabitants of the country. A Hutu-controlled government was now not only
automatically legitimate but also ontologically democratic. This political ideology validated
both the persecution of Tutsi and the autocratic rule by some elite Hutu. As for its economic
ideology, the government promoted the idea that the Hutu “holy way of life” was farming. It
strictly limited rural migration to the city. People could not change their residences without
government permission, and that was rarely given. Consequently, the government made no
attempt to significantly diversify the economy so as to create a viable non-agricultural sector
or to limit population growth (except by killing and expelling Tutsi), (Pranier, 1995).

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CONCLUSION

The history of the Rwandan genocide is tied to the ways in which the Hutu, Tutsi and
Twa were treated by Belgian colonial masters differently. Upon their arrival in 1916, Belgian
colonists misinterpreted the existing socio-economic stratifications in Rwanda. Colonial
powers transformed the three existing socio-economic stratifications into ethnic groups. In
1931, Belgian colonial powers introduced ethnic identity cards indicating which ethnic group
each Rwandan citizen belonged to. The Belgians deemed the Tutsi to be superior to the Hutu
and thus Tutsi were favored in administrative positions, education and jobs in the modern
sector. This scenario led to the worst genocide in the history of mankind in which about a
million Tutsis were massacred the period of 100 days.

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