DOCSLIB.ORG

The Decolonizing Potential of Local and Metropolitan Literature of the Rwandan Genocide

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
The Decolonizing Potential of Local and Metropolitan Literature of the Rwandan Genocide University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository Graduate Studies The Vault: Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2012-10-03 The Decolonizing Potential of Local and Metropolitan Literature of the Rwandan Genocide O'Neill, Kate O'Neill, K. (2012). The Decolonizing Potential of Local and Metropolitan Literature of the Rwandan Genocide (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/28045 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/263 doctoral thesis University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission. Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY The Decolonizing Potential of Local and Metropolitan Literature of the Rwandan Genocide by Kate O'Neill A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH CALGARY, ALBERTA September, 2012 © Kate O'Neill 2012 ii ABSTRACT Rwanda has been well-defined on the international stage. However, international understandings of the genocide do not sufficiently represent the perspectives of Rwandan citizens. The popular construction of Rwanda as a nation over the past eighteen years has used the Rwandan Genocide as a defining feature of Rwandan national identity. Governed by colonial rule from 1884-1962, Rwanda continues to be defined by neocolonial forces. In response to this problematic reality, literary representations of the genocide are beginning to provide a forum for Rwandan voices to assert authority over the cultivation of Rwandan identity for Western citizens. This dissertation considers seven diverse literary texts about the Rwandan Genocide which attempt to bridge the socio-political distance between Rwandan and Western citizens. Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families and Gil Courtemanche’s A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali offer a detailed consideration of Rwandan history and culture to challenge the colonial rhetoric used to explain the genocide to Western citizens. Élisabeth Combres’ Broken Memory, Jean-Philippe Stassen’s Deogratias, and Tierno Monénembo’s The Oldest Orphan explore the lived experience of genocide and the impact of violence on individuals and communities, affectively conveying the complexity of genocidal suffering in order to escape the media binary of victims and perpetrators. Véronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana and Sonja Linden’s play I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady from Rwanda demonstrate the significant post-genocide recovery achieved within Rwanda, and consider the value of cross-cultural interaction in further affirming this recovery. iii This study draws on the insights of postcolonial theory, trauma theory, and scholarship in the area of national identity to parse the role of these texts in recovering a productive sense of Rwandan identity for Western readers. This dissertation argues that these texts provide Western citizens with an understanding of national Rwandan identity that allows critical recognition of the superstructure of Western neocolonialism. As such, these narratives have the potential to enable Western citizens to recognize and challenge the role of the superstructure in shaping public discourse about the Rwandan Genocide. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Table of Contents iv Chapter One Literature as a Response to Genocide 1 Chapter Two Tracing the Rwandan Genocide as an International Event 25 Chapter Three Contextualizing Rwandan History and Culture through Literature 69 Chapter Four Exploring Rwandan Identity and Experiences of Genocide through Literature 122 Chapter Five Affirming Recovery and Demonstrating Cross-Cultural Activism through 199 Literature Chapter Six Decolonizing the Western Mind through Western Literary Engagement 262 Chapter Seven Conclusion 304 Bibliography 311 Appendix A: Chronology of Events 326 Appendix B: Map of Rwanda 333 1 Chapter One: Literature as a Response to Genocide Crimes against humanity require new means of redress, a mechanism that records hidden histories of atrocity, didactically promotes collective memory, and gives victims a place of respect, dignity, and agency in the process. Catherine Cole, “Performance, Transitional Justice, and the Law: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” 171. The writer of fiction can be and must be the pathfinder. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonizing the Mind, 85. As one aspect of the public discourse concerning genocide, literature demonstrates a great deal about the perceived social and political importance of violent conflict. The public discourse on the Rwandan Genocide, in which almost one million people were killed between April and July 1994, demonstrates this observation. Literature is a powerful social tool because it instigates consideration of another’s lived experience among a broad potential readership. Literary expression allows personal resistance to be shared within a community, enabling collective action. As bell hooks states, “speaking is not solely an expression of creative power; it is an act of resistance, a political gesture that challenges politics of domination that would render us nameless and voiceless…[it] can be healing, can protect us from dehumanization and despair” (8). Writing has addressed a range of human injustices; representing lived experiences of inequality has helped to establish new limits to private and public behaviours. Literary depictions of gender and racial oppression throughout the twentieth-century have channelled individual dissatisfaction with the social order into powerful socio-political movements. Literature similarly undercuts the efficacy of large-scale systems of oppression, such as European colonization, by allowing local victims to enunciate their rejection of authoritarian rule and reclaim their cultural and political identities. Even during the 2011 Arab Spring, it was the written word which empowered individuals to collectively initiate social change in the face of 2 authoritarian regimes. Western and Rwandan writings about the Rwandan Genocide and the post-genocide era evoke the horror of genocide, but many authors have recognized the decolonizing potential of such writing. Tracing the state of the nation through its history, its citizens, and its post-genocide recovery, these texts lay the groundwork for a strong Western understanding of emergent Rwandan national identity. Rejecting imposed identity constructions and drawing attention to the external political structures of neocolonial control, this discourse functions as a fragile but potentially powerful rewriting of Rwandan identity which has the potential to instigate important socio-political change. As a literature of resistance, genocide literature at large explores a subject that is as personal as it is political. The Rwandan Genocide writings examined in this dissertation identify genocide as a localized event, targeting a specific group of people and permitted by the particular socio-political realities of a given community or nation. However, genocide is also an international concern. Genocidal violence rejects the concept of human rights and invokes hierarchies to re-imagine a new social order. Because genocide destroys lives and undercuts the rhetoric of equality at the very root of modern international interactions, this crime demands responses from the international community. These responses demonstrate the socio-political factors which inform specific international relationships and interactions. Media responses tend to focus on the statements and actions of those perpetrating violence, as well as the demonstrable victims of violence. Political and militaristic responses can be both rhetorical and active; when the content of these messages diverge, they demonstrate the intersection of ideological and practiced international politics. While these responses are at times productive, neither emphasizes the lived experience of genocide in a way that is comprehensible and comprehensive. However, by merging the personal and the political, genocide literature explores the impact of 3 mass-violence on the individual victim and the distanced observer, permitting an informed engagement with the politics of genocide in the modern era. The Western response to the Rwandan genocide demonstrates the influence of colonial and neocolonial ideology on Rwanda’s identity within the international community. The underwhelming Western engagement in Rwanda’s genocide and post-genocide recovery suggests a continued neocolonial dismissal of Rwandan national identity within the Western community of nations. By framing the genocide in colonial terms and explaining the mass killings as indicative of innate African chaos, media and political responses demonstrate that Rwanda continues to be defined by the limiting racial hierarchy which enabled the colonial encounter. This neocolonialism has been a serious impediment to Rwanda’s recovery from colonialism, as well as from the genocide of 1994. While Rwanda has instituted internal recovery measures, Rwanda’s recovery must also address the external prejudices which allowed the genocide to occur without significant Western response. It is here that the literature of
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Entanglements of Modernity, Colonialism and Genocide Burundi and Rwanda in Historical-Sociological Perspective
    UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS Entanglements of Modernity, Colonialism and Genocide Burundi and Rwanda in Historical-Sociological Perspective Jack Dominic Palmer University of Leeds School of Sociology and Social Policy January 2017 Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ii The candidate confirms that the work submitted is their own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. ©2017 The University of Leeds and Jack Dominic Palmer. The right of Jack Dominic Palmer to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by Jack Dominic Palmer in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would firstly like to thank Dr Mark Davis and Dr Tom Campbell. The quality of their guidance, insight and friendship has been a huge source of support and has helped me through tough periods in which my motivation and enthusiasm for the project were tested to their limits. I drew great inspiration from the insightful and constructive critical comments and recommendations of Dr Shirley Tate and Dr Austin Harrington when the thesis was at the upgrade stage, and I am also grateful for generous follow-up discussions with the latter. I am very appreciative of the staff members in SSP with whom I have worked closely in my teaching capacities, as well as of the staff in the office who do such a great job at holding the department together.
    [Show full text]
  • Preparing for Genocide: Community Work in Rwanda
    A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Bonnier, Evelina; Poulsen, Jonas; Rogall, Thorsten; Stryjan, Miri Working Paper Preparing for genocide: Community work in Rwanda Working Paper, No. 2015:1 Provided in Cooperation with: Department of Economics, Uppsala University Suggested Citation: Bonnier, Evelina; Poulsen, Jonas; Rogall, Thorsten; Stryjan, Miri (2015) : Preparing for genocide: Community work in Rwanda, Working Paper, No. 2015:1, Uppsala University, Department of Economics, Uppsala, http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-242293 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/125541 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.eu Department of Economics Working Paper 2015:1 Preparing for Genocide: Community Work in Rwanda Evelina Bonnier, Jonas Poulsen, Thorsten Rogall and Miri Stryjan Department of Economics Working paper 2015:1 Uppsala University January 2015 P.O.
    [Show full text]
  • Myth and Memory: the Construction and Deconstruction of Ethnic Conflict in Colonial and Post-Colonial Rwanda
    COPYRIGHT AND CITATION CONSIDERATIONS FOR THIS THESIS/ DISSERTATION o Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. o NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes. o ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. How to cite this thesis Surname, Initial(s). (2012) Title of the thesis or dissertation. PhD. (Chemistry)/ M.Sc. (Physics)/ M.A. (Philosophy)/M.Com. (Finance) etc. [Unpublished]: University of Johannesburg. Retrieved from: https://ujdigispace.uj.ac.za (Accessed: Date). Myth and Memory: The Construction and Deconstruction of Ethnic Conflict in Colonial and Post-colonial Rwanda By Nicasius Achu Check A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Literature and Philosophy Promoter Prof Yolanda Sadie Department of Politics and International Relations University of Johannesburg 2015 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION, AIM & SCOPE OF STUDY 13 CHAPTER 1 CONCEPTUAL AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 1 Introduction 46 1.1 Understanding myth and memory 47 1.2 Conceptual and analytical understanding of myth and memory 54 1.2.1 Functional myth model 55 1.2.2 Rational myth model 56 1.2.3 Political myth model 57 1.2.4 Structural myth model 60 1.2.5 Elements of the structural approach 61 1.3 On the conceptualisation
    [Show full text]
  • History and Peacebuilding: the Role of Colonialism and Authoritarianism in Serbia and Rwanda
    History and Peacebuilding: The Role of Colonialism and Authoritarianism in Serbia and Rwanda Master’s Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Graduate Program in Global Studies Carina Ray, Advisor In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Global Studies by Bethany Clark May 2017 Copyright by Bethany Clark © 2017 ABSTRACT History and Peacebuilding: The Role of Colonialism and Authoritarianism in Serbia and Rwanda A thesis presented to the Graduate Program in Global Studies Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Waltham, Massachusetts By Bethany Clark This thesis studies the role histories of colonialism and authoritarianism had in effecting the types of peacebuilding processes that developed in Serbia and Rwanda after their conflicts in the 1990s. It contends that while Serbia’s history developed into a society that depended on civil society networks to act as a bridge between the population and the government, Rwanda’s created a society where the population depended on central authority. As a result, in the wake of conflict Serbian society depended on that history of civil society to foster healing and reconciliation, but Rwanda fell upon its history of central authority involving itself in culture and cultural institutions. As a result, Serbia’s civil society forms the vast majority of peacebuilding programs, but in Rwanda the government focuses on legal procedures and national programs. This thesis concludes that while both models of peacebuilding have benefits, one without the other cannot bring true reconciliation. iii Table of Contents Title Page i Abstract ii Table of Contents iii Introduction 1 Chapter One: Context of Case Studies and Literature Review 5 a.
    [Show full text]
  • "Race" Relations in Rwanda: an Historical Perspective
    University of Wollongong Research Online Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive) Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities 1-1-2010 "Race" relations in Rwanda: An historical perspective Deborah Mayersen University of Wollongong, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Mayersen, Deborah, "Race" relations in Rwanda: An historical perspective 2010. https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/1287 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] Race Relations in Rwanda: An Historical Perspective Deborah Mayersen „“Genocide” Charge in Rwanda‟ blared the headline in The Times; a few days later it was „Rwanda Policy of Genocide Alleged.‟1 Yet these headlines are not from 1994, but 1964. And while the massacres to which they refer occurred on a far smaller scale than the 1994 genocide, they are unprecedented as massacres targeted at the Tutsi minority as a group. They occurred at the end of a decade of radical change for the tiny nation. In 1954, Rwanda was administered as part of Ruanda-Urundi, a United Nations Trust Territory under Belgian trusteeship.2 The Tutsi minority was regarded as racially superior, enjoyed preferential access to privilege and almost exclusive access to indigenous positions of authority. Their position seemed stably entrenched. Yet an examination of Rwanda just ten years later reveals a starkly contrasting picture. By 1964, the newly independent Republic of Rwanda was ruled almost exclusively by the Hutu majority.3 More than 300,000 Tutsi refugees were scattered around its borders; thousands had been killed in massacres following a failed refugee invasion.4 In the intervening decade the nation had experienced the full throes of rapid decolonisation, revolution and its first democratic elections.
    [Show full text]
  • Understanding Revolution
    EXCERPTED FROM Understanding Revolution Patrick Van Inwegen Copyright © 2011 ISBNs: 978-1-58826-748-1 hc 978-1-58826-775-7 pb 1800 30th Street, Ste. 314 Boulder, CO 80301 USA telephone 303.444.6684 fax 303.444.0824 This excerpt was downloaded from the Lynne Rienner Publishers website www.rienner.com Contents List of Tables and Figures vii Acknowledgments ix 1 Understanding Revolution 1 2 The “Life Course” of a Revolution 21 3 The Structural Causes of Revolution 35 4 The Role of Ideology, Part 1: Liberalism and Nationalism 57 5 The Role of Ideology, Part 2: Marxism and Religious Thought 77 6 The Sources of Revolutionary Leadership 103 7 Mobilizing the Masses 127 8 The Outcomes of Revolution 147 9 The Study of Revolution 175 Appendix: Case Studies 183 American Revolution (1776–1788) 184 French Revolution (1789–1799) 190 Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) 196 Russian Revolution (1917) 201 Chinese Revolution (1949) 207 Cuban Revolution (1959) 213 Nicaraguan Revolution (1979) 217 Iranian Revolution (1979) 222 v vi Contents Philippine Revolution (1986) 228 Tiananmen Square Prodemocracy Movement (1989) 233 South African Revolution (1994) 239 Rwandan Revolution (1994) 245 Serbian Revolution (2001) 249 East Timorese Independence (1974–2002) 253 Nepalese Revolution (1996–2008) 259 Bibliography 263 Index 273 About the Book 289 1 Understanding Revolution Revolution is the sex of politics. —H. L. Mencken H. L. Mencken’s famous statement on revolutions is illuminating in two re- spects. First, revolutions can be viewed as the sex of politics in the sense that they give birth to nations. Out of revolutionary periods are born the coun- tries that populate the modern international system.
    [Show full text]
  • Repatriation of Rwandan Returnees in Kigali
    SIT Graduate Institute/SIT Study Abroad SIT Digital Collections Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection SIT Study Abroad Fall 2018 Repatriation of Rwandan Returnees In Kigali: Integration of those Born and Raised on Exile as a Result of the 1959 Violence Wave Cristina Taulet Sanchez SIT Study Abroad Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcollections.sit.edu/isp_collection Part of the African History Commons, African Languages and Societies Commons, African Studies Commons, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Commons, Peace and Conflict Studies Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, and the Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Sanchez, Cristina Taulet, "Repatriation of Rwandan Returnees In Kigali: Integration of those Born and Raised on Exile as a Result of the 1959 Violence Wave" (2018). Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection. 2905. https://digitalcollections.sit.edu/isp_collection/2905 This Unpublished Paper is brought to you for free and open access by the SIT Study Abroad at SIT Digital Collections. It has been accepted for inclusion in Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection by an authorized administrator of SIT Digital Collections. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Repatriation of Rwandan Returnees In Kigali: Integration of those Born and Raised on Exile as a Result of the 1959 Violence Wave Cristina Taulet Sanchez Davidson College Post-Genocide Restoration and Peacebuilding School For International Training Rwanda, November 2018 Taulet
    [Show full text]
  • The Rwandan Genocide: Eye Witnesses to a Human Catastrophe
    THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE: EYE WITNESSES TO A HUMAN CATASTROPHE A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of The School of Continuing Studies And of The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Liberal studies. By Benjamin Nzioka, B.A. Georgetown University Washington, D.C. April 2, 2011 THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE: EYE WITNESSES TO A HUMAN CATASTROPHE Benjamin Nzioka, B.A. Mentor: Gregory Havrilak, Ph.D. ABSTRACT On April 6, 1994, the jet carrying the Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana, was shot down as it approached Kigali airport—killing all aboard. The systematic slaughter of Rwanda‟s Tutsi minority by Hutu extremist hardliners began almost immediately. By killing ten UN peacekeepers, the hardliners who seemed to have done their homework well, knew the UN would abandon the peacekeeping mission and withdraw from Rwanda —and they were correct. For the next one hundred days using machetes and other low-tech weapons, the Hutus massacred almost one million Tutsis in a deliberate campaign to annihilate them. The systematic state-led effort to violently eliminate the Tutsi population unequivocally meets the definition of genocide adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. If signatories of the Genocide Convention are obligated to prevent and punish the crime of genocide, why did the international community become bystanders to this horror? How could the screams of one million people be ignored? This thesis will analyze the response of both the United Nations and the United States
    [Show full text]
  • United Nations Security Council (UNSC)
    UNITED NATIONS SECURITY COUNCIL United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda Chaired by William Wen Session XXIII United Nations Security Council United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda Topic A: Framework for the Mitigation of Ethnic Cleansing in Rwanda Topic B: Establishing Protocols for Resettlement and the International Tribunal Committee Overview ethnic cleansing and in assisting the recovery process. Most importantly, it is up Our committee, UNSC: United to all members of our UNSC committee to Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, is a avoid the inadequacies and major failures of historical re-imagining of the UN Security the 1994 UNAMIR in our re-imagining of the Council’s role in the Rwandan Civil War and Rwandan Civil War and Genocide. Genocide (1993 – onwards). After heavy fighting between the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front and the Hutu- Parliamentary Procedure majority Rwandan Armed Forces in the The UNSC: United Nations Rwandan Civil War, the Arusha Accords Assistance Mission for Rwanda is a was proposed to bring forth a new specialized committee. This means that democratic government that allowed unlike significantly larger General political participation by both ethnic Assembly committees, ours will compose of groups.1 UNAMIR was born in October 15 delegates each representing a nation that 1993, after Rwanda and Uganda requested is, for the sake of the committee, part of the UN presence in overseeing the United Nations Security Council in implementation of the Arusha Accords.2 1993/1994. After less than a year of operation, the Given the smaller nature of UNAMIR faced devastating setbacks specialized committees, debates can become ultimately culminating into a systematic more engaging, intimate, flexible, and fast- ethnic cleansing of Tutsi and moderate Hutu paced.
    [Show full text]
  • Divide and Rule: an Origin of Polarization and Conflict
    Divide and Rule: An Origin of Polarization and Conflict* Simon Alder Yikai Wang December 31, 2018 (link to latest version) Abstract We propose a theory of civil conflict where political elites strategically ini- tiate conflicts in order to polarize society and sustain their own power. We provide a micro-foundation for this divide-and-rule strategy by modeling po- larization as a lack of trust among groups in the population. Trust is shaped by economic interactions between members of different groups who observe past interactions and update their belief about the relationship with the other group. High trust in turn increases the expected gains from trade and there- fore the common interest of people to trade without being taxed by the elite. This leads to a revolutionary threat to which the elite responds by starting a conflict to interrupt trade and prevent trust from increasing further. JEL-Classification: D74, D83, F15, H30, N40 Keywords: Polarization, divide and rule, conflict, ethnic violence, autocracy, trade, trust *We would like to thank Simeon D. Alder, Josef Falkinger, Dominic Rohner, Viktor Tsyren- nikov, Fabrizio Zilibotti, Josef Zweim¨uller,and participants at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Economic Dynamics, the University of Oslo, and the University of Zurich for valuable com- ments. Caroline Chouard and Sebastian Ottinger provided excellent research assistance. Financial support from the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant IPCDP-229883) is gratefully acknowledged. Department of Economics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, [email protected]. Department of Economics, University of Oslo, [email protected]. 1 1 Introduction Conflict causes enormous costs, and yet we often observe wide support in the popu- lation for political elites that initiate conflicts.
    [Show full text]
  • IR Theory in Practice Case Study: the Rwandan Genocide, 1994
    Baylis, Smith and Owens: The Globalization of World Politics 7e Case Study: The Rwandan Genocide, 1994 IR Theory in Practice Case Study: The Rwandan Genocide, 1994 Introduction The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 has become one of the most widely studied examples of genocide since the end of the Second World War. It emerged in the context of the longer standing Rwandan civil war, in which the Hutu-led government and the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), which largely consisted of former Tutsi refugees and expatriates, formed the dominant opposing parties. The conflict itself had begun in 1959, during the Hutu-led Rwandan Revolution. An anti-colonial struggle at heart, it sought to overthrow the Tutsi monarchy that ruled Rwandan territory since at least the 18th century, and which both of Rwanda’s colonial powers in the 20th century—Germany and Belgium—had supported, themselves ruling through Tutsi monarchs. While Hutu-led acts of violence against RPF members began to increase in 1962, the year of Rwandan independence, this did not see a large-scale development until 1990, when large numbers of Tutsi refugees who had fled from Rwanda during the Hutu-led colonial revolt, returned from Uganda and other neighbouring countries, where they had occupied often high-ranking positions in the military. In 1993 the signing of the so-called ‘Arusha Accords’ by the two opposing parties saw a temporary period of ceasefire. However, the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana, who had been in office since a military coup in 1973, meant that the ceasefire was broken, eventually resulting in the events that we now call the Rwandan Genocide; a period of three months—from April to July 1994—during which large percentages of the Tutsi and Pygmy Batwa ethnic groups were killed, while almost two million Rwandan citizens—most of them Hutu—were displaced.
    [Show full text]
  • War As the Key to Unlocking Mass Murder the Rwandan Genocide Revisited
    ASPJ Africa & Francophonie - 4th Quarter 2013 War as the Key to Unlocking Mass Murder The Rwandan Genocide Revisited ARTHUR N. GILBERT, PHD* KRISTINA HOOK ince the term genocide was coined in the 1940s to classify specific crimes committed with the intent to destroy the existence of a group of people, this field of study has emerged as one of the most diverse and perhaps even the most divisive in modern academe. In his classic study Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, Robert SMelson argues that war, revolution, and genocide are intertwined as revolutionary regimes concurrently turn outward to fight wars and inward to exterminate ene- mies in their midst.1 Despite the influence of Melson’s framework in this scholas- tic field, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen dissents, arguing that genocide has little to do with war. In his view, genocide originates in the minds of people, who are in turn affected by culture and ideology.2 Such strong differences in opinion are of more than academic interest. Understanding genocide through the proper scholastic paradigm may aid in the prevention of future instances of mass murder. We have therefore identified Rwanda as an important test case for these two diverse hy- potheses. Drawing from a wide range of influential scholars and historical infor- mation, this article seeks to place the Rwandan case study within the general de- bate on mass murder. By doing so, we are able to identify not only current trends *An associate professor of international studies at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, Uni- versity of Denver, for many years, Arthur N.
    [Show full text]