By the time of the Genocide against the Tutsi in 1994, media in the West often portrayed Rwanda as consisting of warring tribes. But this was not so.
Hutu and Tutsi and the smaller Twa minority have lived in Rwanda for many centuries. Hutu were largely agricultural people, Tutsi were mainly cattle herders and the Twa, hunter-gatherers.
Things were far less rosy in Rwanda in the early 1990s than the Western donor nations chose to believe. The economy was reliant not on exports but foreign aid. A tense struggle for power and wealth gripped the elite within President Juvenal Habyarimana’s government.
Corruption was rampant, and assassination and indiscriminate imprisonment of political rivals widespread. As coffee and tea prices slumped and drought decimated harvests, many rural poor were suffering starvation, while Tutsi villagers suffered massacres by government-backed militia and the army.”
Genocide never happens by chance.
Events in Rwanda,1994, were no exception.
For over a century the context of ethnic division was set.
For over thirty years the political divide widened.
For more than three years the struggle for power provided the excuse for disaster to occur.
When it finally happened, approximately one million people were murdered.
And only the killers were prepared for the bloodshed.
This was not tribal conflict or civil war.
This was 100 days of genocide.
By the time of the Genocide against the Tutsi in 1994, media in the West often portrayed Rwanda as consisting of warring tribes. But this was not so.
Hutu and Tutsi and the smaller Twa minority have lived in Rwanda for many centuries.
Hutu were largely agricultural people, Tutsi were mainly cattle herders and the Twa, hunter-gatherers. They spoke the same language, Kinyarwanda, and there was no difference in religion or culture.
Intermarriage was common. By 1994 at least twenty-five per cent of Rwandans had mixed ancestry. Ethnic differences were magnified during the colonial era.
It served the purpose of the colonisers to maintain a Tutsi King and create a ruling class. Although only a minority of Tutsi derived benefit from this elevated status, it was generally they, and not Hutu, who were given privileged positions.
The Belgian authorities formalised division between Hutu and Tutsi, introducing identity cards to Rwanda in 1932. When the cards were issued, 15 per cent were identified as Tutsi, 84 per cent as Hutu and 1 per cent, Twa.
In the years to come this ethnic identity determined much of an individual’s opportunity in Belgium’s Rwanda. By 1957 most of the school places, ninety-five per cent of the country’s civil service and nearly all chiefs and sub-chiefs were Tutsi.
It served the purpose of the colonisers to maintain a Tutsi King and create a ruling class. Although only a minority of Tutsi derived benefit from this elevated status, it was generally they, and not Hutu, who were given privileged positions.
The Belgian authorities formalised division between Hutu and Tutsi, introducing identity cards to Rwanda in 1932. When the cards were issued, 15 per cent were identified as Tutsi, 84 per cent as Hutu and 1 per cent, Twa.
In the years to come this ethnic identity determined much of an individual’s opportunity in Belgium’s Rwanda. By 1957 most of the school places, ninety-five per cent of the country’s civil service and nearly all chiefs and sub-chiefs were Tutsi.
In 1959, a violent uprising of Hutu was organised in collusion with the colonial authorities to kill thousands of Tutsi. Three years later, in 1962, Rwanda gained independence from its Belgian rulers. Its first government was led by Hutu nationalist Grégoire Kayibanda, founder of the Parmehutu, a ‘movement for emancipation of the Hutu ethnic group’.
Democratically elected in 1961, he promoted Hutu consciousness and unity. Rwanda became a highly centralised state with a single party system. In response to the first attempts from Tutsi in exile to regain power, massacres of Tutsi were once more carried out. Again, thousands of Tutsi fled Rwanda in order to escape death. The notion of an internal enemy developed during this period; the word ‘Inyenzi’, meaning cockroach, was coined to identify the Tutsi population.
Against a background of further discrimination against Tutsi, General Juvénal Habyarimana seized power through a coup d’état in July 1973, restoring order. As in the First Republic, he created a one-party state, legitimising only his own party, the Mouvement Révolutionaire et National pour le Développement (MRND). He
declared that all Rwandans were members of his party.
The regime’s stability attracted development aid from the West, and the general environment was free of unrest or state-sponsored persecution. Then, in 1986, coffee prices collapsed. As the economy deteriorated, the ruling Hutu elite – the ‘Akazu’ – tightened its grip on available wealth and political power.
At the same time, international donors began demanding financial and democratic accountability. In June 1990, following a meeting with chief foreign patron François Mitterrand of France, Habyarimana declared that a multi-party system would be established.
In 1991 several new political parties were formed, including the Mouvement Démocratique Republicain (MDR), a moderate Hutu opposition party later singled out for extreme violence, and the Coalition pour la Défense de la République (CDR), formed by Hutu radicals linked with death squads that had begun to train for, and carry out, massacres of Tutsi civilians.
Habyarimana’s MRND was responsible for establishing the Interahamwe, a flamboyant Hutu youth militia that gained enormous popularity. Advocating ‘Hutu Power’ and ‘Hutuness’ at the expense of Tutsi lives, their message was reinforced and spread by an extremist media.
