The Transformation of UN Conflict Management

Producing images of genocide from Rwanda to Darfur and beyond

Touko Piiparinen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135202873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The world has vowed "Never again" in memory of the 800, 000 Rwandans and other groups slaughtered by génocidaires. Yet, ever since the Holocaust, the international community has repeatedly betrayed its pledge, most notably in 1994 with regard to the Rwandan Tutsi, and again ten years later in Darfur.

This book examines how the UN failed to prevent or halt the Rwandan genocide: the most efficient mass killing in history. It offers a new explanation, focussing on the structure of the UN and four mechanisms which were pertinent to UN conflict management at that time: early warning; bureaucratic rationalisation; organisational learning; and Western normalisation. The author sees the Rwandan case as a 'child of its time', or a focal point in which the dysfunctions of the ailing conflict management mechanisms of the 1990s combined with devastating consequences. The book proceeds to examine the transformation of these mechanisms from Rwanda to Darfur - a development which is regarded as indicative of a wider tendency – or direction – in UN conflict management over the past ten years and in the foreseeable future.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of political science, international relations, ethnic politics, international organizations and conflict studies.

1
Rwanda, the genocide of our time

Introduction

Before setting out to explain and understand how it is possible that the UN Security Council failed to prevent the massacres in Rwanda, it is first necessary to describe the crisis. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a chronological and narrative story of the events of the Rwandan conflict. It will thereby lay the groundwork for subsequent chapters, which will tackle the more fundamental questions concerning the failures of the UN. This chapter will contest the way in which mass killings are universally labelled as ‘genocides’ at the expense of analyses of their particular historical circumstances and social contexts. A comparative framework will therefore not be applied; instead, the following analysis aspires to explore the particular conditions and mechanisms that produced the devastating events in Rwanda.

The Rwandan genocide was conducted in a routine and mechanical manner not (only) by madmen but mostly by normal people. As Gérard Prunier notes, this confirms Hannah Arendt’s adage that evil is extremely banal (Prunier 1998: xii). The nettoyage, or ‘cleansing’, of the minority Tutsi population became the civic duty of every Hutu in the country. Posters, leaflets and radio broadcasts had dehumanised the Tutsi into ‘snakes’, ‘cockroaches’ and ‘animals’ (Physicians for Human Rights (UK) 1994: 10). By the beginning of the genocide the Tutsi had become a socially dead people, like the Jews had become by the beginning of Hitler’s Final Solution. Dehumanisation, among other factors, created the ideal conditions for genocide. Moreover, Hutu extremists portrayed Tutsi as génocidaires themselves, who were allegedly plotting the extermination of the Hutu. This was pure misinformation, but fear among Hutu spread rapidly. Thus, when the genocide finally began, the killed Tutsi accumulated at three times the rate of dead Jews during the Holocaust. By some accounts, as many Rwandans killed as were killed (Berkeley 1998).

The potential for genocide began to emerge gradually under the colonial rule of Germany from 1897 to 1919, and then under Belgian authority from 1919 to 1962. The pace of this dangerous development was intensified with the 1959 revolution and the birth of the Hutu Republic. However, the operational mechanisms of genocide, such as killing squads and executive plans, were created only from 1992 onwards. This acknowledgement of the complexity of the Rwandan crisis is necessary, as it prevents us from drifting into backward causalities,¹ where reconstruction of past events overcomes description of past events. To use Colin Wight’s definition, backward causalities are complicit in the constitution of realities they merely claim to describe. They are similar to what John Shotter terms an ex post facto fallacy, which is committed as follows: being tempted to take one specific descriptive statement as true of a situation which is in fact subject to a number of possible interpretations, and then perceiving the constructed true statement retrospectively as quite definite (Shotter 1993: 85). Previous accounts have tended to commit an ex post facto fallacy by taking the term ‘genocide’ as the true and definite statement to describe the situation in Rwanda, without considering other possible interpretations.

Alain Destexhe begins his detailed account of the Rwandan conflict with the definition of three genocides in the twentieth century. Only then does he go on to elaborate the causes of the crisis, such as the aggravation of ethnic divisions and political extremism (Destexhe 1995). The Genocide Convention, which was signed by UN Member States on 9 December 1948, defines genocide as a criminal act with intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group in whole or in part.² The Rwandan massacres undoubtedly amounted to a genocide, as there were massive crimes against humanity committed with the intent of destroying the Tutsi as an ethnic group. Destexhe is also right, at least in legal terms, as to what constituted the three genocides of the twentieth century, namely the massacres of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks from 1915 to 1916, the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide.³

Where the above analysis might be somewhat misleading, however, is in prioritising ‘genocide’ over particular historical circumstances that led to the killings in Rwanda. It is true that describing the Rwandan conflict retrospectively as ‘genocide’ is the most adequate, evaluative, precise and accurate description of what actually happened there, as the judgemental rationality of critical realism also requires.⁴ However, beginning the narrative history with ‘genocide’ carries a wrong perlocutionary force. For, to begin the story with ‘genocide’ is to ignore all the other possible interpretations and elements of the crisis in existence in 1994, such as ‘civil war’ and ‘politicide’. What the perlocutionary force of the above investigation does is to create a sense of sensation: the genocide was occurring, the international community did nothing to stop it and, worst of all, the international community clearly knew in advance that it was going to happen. At the same time, the account conflates ‘ways to talk about things’ (transitive objects), i.e. ‘genocide’, with ‘things’ (intransitive objects), that is, the development of the situation in Rwanda. In short, one claims to see clearly the seeds of genocide in Rwandan history but begins his/her story by sowing them himself/ herself.

Therefore, judgemental rationality requires that this chapter will not begin with ‘genocide’ but with an analysis of the necessary relations that led to the Rwandan conflict, such as ethnic relations between the Hutu and Tutsi and the rise of political extremism. Thus far, researchers have come to a consensus that there was a causal complex at work leading to the genocide. Helen M.Hintjens divides these factors into three categories:

1 external influences of colonial and neo-colonial politics based on ‘divide and rule’, which created cleavages between the beneficiary Tutsi and suppressed Hutu;

2 domestic causes, including demographic and ethnic factors, such as over-population of a small country and the resulting struggle for scarce resources; and

3 psychological factors, such as deeply rooted social conformism and the blind obedience of Rwandans (Hintjens 1999: 243).

Three other prominent researchers on Rwanda, Filip Reyntjens, Gérard Prunier and René Lemarchand, agree that it was political factors, as opposed to ethnic ones, that formed the core group of causes in the causal complex leading to the genocide (Lemarchand 1999: 2; Prunier 1998: xiii; Reyntjens 1996: 240). Prunier best summarises this view: ‘The ruling fraction of the country’s elite manipulated the existing “ethnic” raw material into an attempt at political survival’ (Prunier 1998: 141). The emphasis put on regime survival serves the purpose of downgrading the popular and fallible view of Rwanda and Africa in general as the Conradian ‘Heart of Darkness’, where tribal violence prevails and explains all troubles. The sense of belonging to an ethnic group, however, is not synonymous with conflict, nor does a political elite necessarily use ethnicity as a tool for violent purposes. Therefore, Lemarchand makes an important distinction between ‘moral’ and ‘political tribalism’, the latter meaning ‘the use of ethnic identities in political competition with other groups’ (Lemarchand 1999: 2).⁵

In order to unravel the complex dynamics of political tribalism, it is necessary to analyse ethnicity first as the ‘raw material’, then to examine its subsequent exploitation for political purposes, and finally to reveal the factors that ultimately triggered this explosive mix into genocide. Therefore this chapter will proceed as follows. The first section concerning precolonial and colonial Rwanda will address the invariant factor of ethnicity, which has been exploited for various political reasons, first by German and Belgian colonial administrators from 1897 to 1962. The second section will examine how ethnicity was subsequently manipulated by the Hutu rulers: the Kayibanda government (1962–1973) and the Habyarimana government (1973–1994). Although the reasons for ethnic manipulation vary between the colonial and Hutu rulers, its consequences were invariably detrimental, contributing to an increase in the potential for genocide. The second section will proceed to touch upon the mechanisms of mass extermination as well as the main triggers that activated the deadly combination of ethnic bipolarity and political extremism into genocide. Furthermore, it will provide an overview of conflict management in Rwanda. The aim, however, will not be to discuss the failure of conflict management, nor to explicate its causes, as these issues will be examined in subsequent chapters.

Precolonial and colonial Rwanda

They were being killed for so long that they were already dead.

(Laurent Nkongoli; quoted in Gourevitch 1999: 23)

Rwanda is among the few African countries that have only two significant ethnic groups. The Hutu group is by far the largest with 85–90 per cent of the population; the other major group, Tutsi, being a minority with 10–15 per cent. The Twa constitutes a marginal group of only 1 per cent (Reyntjens 1996: 244). Using the term ‘group’ here instead of ‘tribe’ refers to the fact that, in contrast to the popular image, the Tutsi and Hutu have none of the characteristics of tribes, which mean micro-nations. When the early explorers arrived in Rwanda in the 1890s, they realised that these groups were not hugely different, but not similar either. On the one hand, the Hutu and Tutsi share the same culture, religion and Bantu language, i.e. kinyarwanda, and they have traditionally intermarried, but still they have different somatic types. The physical appearance of the Hutu resembles the standard Bantu aspect, whereas the Tutsi are tall and thin, often displaying sharp facial features similar to Europeans. Furthermore, the Hutu have traditionally been peasants cultivating land, whereas the Tutsi have made their living as cattle-herders (Prunier 1998: 5).

The Hutu and Tutsi have also differed in terms of political power. In the fifteenth century the Tutsi arrived from the Horn of Africa, probably from southern Ethiopia, establishing feudal kingdoms in the lands now called Rwanda and Burundi (Prunier 1998: 16). The Tutsi formed an aristocracy with the king, mwami, at the top of the hierarchy. Through a complex feudal order the Tutsi ruled over the Hutu by controlling the land, cattle economy, the monarchy and religious life (Sellström and Wohlgemuth 1995: 10; Vassall-Adams 1994: 7). The binding force in this social order consisted of ubuhake, or clientship contracts, which were entered into by a patron and client. In return for the labour and services of a client, a patron provided his client with protection, the use of land and cattle. Although ubuhake evolved with time, in the classical form of ubuhake a patron gave a cow to his client. The Hutu were most likely to find themselves at the bottom of this system as clients, under the protection of Tutsi patrons (Prunier 1998: 13). However, ubuhake formed a complex network where virtually everyone, except mwami, could be a client to someone else at a higher social level (Sellström and Wohlgemuth 1996: 23).

Although ubuhake and the feudal order created unequal relationships between Hutu and Tutsi, as well as structural violence and even potential for genocide, neither of these systems was a sufficient condition for ethnic conflict. Wars were also fought in precolonial Rwanda, but they were not waged among different ethnic lineages but were mostly for the purpose of defending the kingdom against external enemies, for expanding the kingdom by conquest, or for stealing cattle from neighbouring non-Rwandan tribes (Prunier 1998: 14). In precolonial times Hutu and Tutsi lived side by side relatively peacefully. In fact, as Tor Sellström and Lennart Wohlgemuth point out, ubuhake was an important factor in keeping society together until it was brought to an end in the 1950s. It was during the colonial rule of Germany from 1897 to 1919, and then under the Belgian rule from 1919 to 1962, that ethnicity was politically manipulated, thereby creating an ethnic tinderbox ready to explode. An integral part in the birth of this new ‘political tribalism’ was the ‘Hamitic thesis’, a product of the nineteenth-century racial thinking that was rapidly introduced to Rwanda by Western explorers, missionaries and anthropologists. In this book the history of Central Africa is viewed as the conquest of inferior Bantu races by superior Hamitic or Semitic races, the former referring to the native Hutu race, and the latter being the pastoral Tutsi invaders from Ethiopia. The Tutsi were viewed as a relative race to the Europeans, both descending from the Caucasus, and therefore the Tutsi were ‘bound’ to lead and rule over the ‘primitive’ Hutu. Everything valuable in Rwanda, whether cultural, social or political, was attributed to Tutsi achievements. That the physical features of the Tutsi resembled those of the Europeans was seen as proof of their superiority (Sellström and Wohlgemuth 1996: 10–11).

The Hamitic thesis had dramatic consequences. First, it became an unquestioned scientific canon for German and Belgian colonial authorities, which determined that the political and administrative posts were exclusively granted to Tutsi. Furthermore, ubuhake was reinforced to benefit Tutsi. From the end of the 1920s, the Belgian colonial rulers executed an administrative reform, culminating in Programme Voisin in 1930, which stated that political posts had to be filled by Tutsi (Sellström and Wohlgemuth 1996: 11). Priority in education was given to Tutsi children in order to exclude the Hutu from the future political elite. This exclusion resulted in frustration and discontent among the Hutu, which, in turn, played a role in the 1959 violence against the Tutsi (Prunier 1998: 33). Second, the Hamitic thesis had a direct impact on the local population. As Prunier puts it, ‘The result of this heavy bombardment with highly value-laden stereotypes for some sixty years ended by inflating the Tutsi cultural ego inordinately and crushing Hutu feelings until they coalesced into an aggressively resentful inferiority complex’ (Prunier 1998: 9). There were other administrative reforms imposed by colonial rule that also contributed to the tearing apart of the traditional social fabric. The introduction of obligatory identity cards in 1933 deepened the cleavages between the ethnic groups, as they showed which group, i.e. Hutu, Tutsi or Twa, a person belonged to (Sellström and Wohlgemuth 1996: 11).

Hutu Republic and genocide

For the crime of being a Tutsi, I had to beg pardon.

(A survivor of genocide; quoted in African Rights 1995: 299)

The aggravation of ethnic cleavages and the subsequent resentment felt by the Hutu population had increased the potential for ethnic conflict throughout the colonial period, especially in the 1930s. They were actualised for the first time on a massive scale in 1959, triggered by a Hutu revolution and the abolition of the Tutsi monarchy. The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda traces the roots of the 1994 genocide back to that period: ‘The revolution of 1959 marked the beginning of a period of ethnic clashes between the Hutu and the Tutsi in Rwanda, causing hundreds of Tutsi to die and thousands more to flee the country in the years immediately following.’⁶ The manipulation of ethnic ‘raw materials’ for political purposes was not halted by the emergence of the Hutu elite. In contrast, the establishment of modern political parties in 1959 in effect reinforced the ethnic lineages. PARMEHUTU, Parti du Mouvement de L’Emancipation des Bahutu (Party of the Movement and of Hutu Emancipation) and APROMOSA, Association Pour la Promotion Sociale des Masses (Association for the Social Promotion of the Masses) were composed first and foremost of Hutu, whereas UNAR, Union Nationale Rwandaise (Rwandese National Union) and RADER, Rassemblement Démocratique Rwandais (Rwandese Democratic Union) were dominated by Tutsi. What is notable here is that both the Hutu and Tutsi parties soon adapted racial rhetorics from the colonial past, and that tensions and physical violence between, say, PARMEHUTU and UNAR in November 1959, were viewed not only in political terms but also in racial and ethnic terms. Thus the ensuing violence was mainly between Hutu and Tutsi (Prunier 1998: 45–8).

The two prominent Hutu parties PARMEHUTU and APROMOSA won 83 per cent of the popular vote in the first parliamentary elections on 25 September 1961 (Sellström and Wohlgemuth 1996: 11). Rwanda became formally independent on 1 July 1962 under Grégoire Kayibanda’s presidency. Rwanda became republican, but the social and p...

Table of contents

• Routledge research on international organisations
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Rwanda, the genocide of our time
• 2 A critical realist approach to conflict management
• 3 UN conflict management of the 1990s
• 4 Explanatory theories of the UN’s failure
• 5 Early warning
• 6 Bureaucratic mechanisms
• 7 Future visions of conflict management
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index