History Behind The Rwandan Genocide
This is the history behind what started the Rwandan Genocide: Conflicts in post-independence Rwanda can be traced back to the colonial legacy of separating and dividing communities, as well as to the creation of a sectarian, one-party regime in Rwanda that could only stay in power by excluding or killing its opponents. Even though ethnicity is usually seen as a cause of conflict, it has often been used to hide the real reasons for the Rwandan conflict: authoritarian institutions and political cultures, as well as outside influences that have helped authoritarian regimes.
Before 1994, there were about eight million people living in the country. Most of them were Hutu (84%), Tutsi (15%), or Twa (1 per cent). But the current Rwandan government wants to get rid of putting people into groups based on their ethnicity. It says that Rwanda’s ethnic groups, which have been seen by many in those groups as being at odds with each other throughout history, are actually “three strands of the same rope” and are all part of the same Rwandan nationality, Banyarwanda, which is most obviously shown by the fact that they all speak Kinyarwanda.
From this point of view, the ethnic division of this country was not unavoidable; it was the result of a colonial policy. Rwanda got its independence in 1962, but it was on the colonists’ terms. The Tutsis who had been running the country for the colonists but were for independence by 1959 were overthrown and sent away with the help of the Belgians. When the previously oppressed Hutu majority took power, sectarian divisions got worse.
Every Rwandan citizen had to obtain an ID card that identified his or her ethnic group, just like in colonial times, which exacerbated these divisions.The Party for the Emancipation of the Hutu was very interested in the idea that the Tutsi, not Belgium, were the ones who oppressed the majority Hutu population (PARMEHUTU). It was led by Grégoire Kayibanda, who started the Rwandan First Republic and became its president after the “social revolution” of 1959–1962, when over half a million Tutsi were killed or forced to leave the country because of their ethnicity.
During the 1960s and early 1970s, there were many violent expulsions, and the remaining Tutsi were kept out of jobs, public life, and positions of political, economic, or military power. This created a system of discrimination that was similar to apartheid. To get access to state jobs or economic assets, a Tutsi needed a Hutu patron in government. During the colonial and precolonial times, the relationships between clients and patrons were repeated, but in the opposite order.
Inter ethnic tension became the main cause of the country’s problems, and sectarian prejudice and exclusion became important parts of the state because they were seen as necessary for the country to stay together. So, some people say that 60 years of colonial and Tutsi rule and 35 years of Hutu supremacy after the 1959 revolution (which sent half of the Tutsi population into exile) have changed the way the two groups interact in a fundamental way.
Since independence, political conflict and violence between groups have caused the Hutu and Tutsi to have identities that are different and at odds with each other. These identities are “ethnic.” Based on this analysis, you can’t figure out what’s going on without using these labels, since these are the labels that people themselves use. Kayibanda was afraid of being betrayed, so he surrounded himself with supporters and family members from the south of Rwanda and gave more favors to those he felt he could trust.
So, people who used to support PARMEHUTU in the north and center of the country became cut off from the president and from the political and economic levers he controlled. Kayibanda failed to keep control of the army, which made it possible for his chief of staff, Juvénal Habyarimana, to build a power base with family, friends, and allies from Habyarimana’s home region of Gisenyi in northwest Rwanda.
By the early 1970s, northern and central Rwandan Hutu were plotting to overthrow the Kayibanda government. They said the president couldn’t protect the country from attacks by “cockroaches,” or small groups of exiles who wanted to get rid of him, or keep peace and stability in a country where sectarian revenge was common.
So, on July 5, 1973, Habyarimana was able to take power in a military coup. The political tensions that led to Kayibanda’s ouster and the change from giving favors based on ethnicity to giving them based on region make it harder to say that conflict in Rwanda has always been based on ethnicity. Habyarimana set up a one-party state again, making sure that all of the political, military, and, by extension, economic power was in his hands and those of a small group of people, mostly family members, called the akazu (little house).
On the second anniversary of the coup, July 5, 1975, his Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement (MRND) released its manifesto. It made clear that the regime had once again adopted a quasi-apartheid agenda, which severely limited ethnic minorities’ access to education and state jobs and promised a strong official response to any perceived internal threat to national security.
Also in 1975, Rwanda and France signed agreements to work together on things like aid, trade, and cultural exchanges. This marked the official expansion of France’s influence in Africa from its own former colonies to include Belgium’s former colonies. A military technical assistance agreement made the military cooperation between France and Rwanda official.
At first, only a small amount of arms and military equipment were sent from France to Rwanda every year. Over the course of 15 years, this “little Switzerland of Africa’s” quietness and introspection hid a hardening of its authoritarianism. This was because it didn’t do anything to fix the basic injustice on which it was built: the forced exclusion of up to 600,000 citizens because of their religion. The main, long-lasting problem of Rwanda’s exiles came up again and again when tolerance for these people in neighboring countries was low. Habyarimana and the party he started insisted that “the glass was full.”
They said that with 8 million people living in 64,200 square kilometers and a high birth rate, Rwanda was too crowded to let the exiles come back. But in 1986, Rwandan refugees were at the front of Uganda’s National Resistance Movement’s (NRM) successful campaign to get rid of President Milton Obote. In 1982, Obote made a mistake when he tried to send Rwandans who had fled to Uganda back to Habyarimana’s hostile Rwanda. This made a lot of Rwandans in Uganda join the rebellion, and they eventually made up 3000 of the 14,000 soldiers in the National Resistance Army, or NRA.
These Rwandans made up a large number of the NRA’s top leaders, including chief of staff Fred Rwigyema and intelligence chief Paul Kagame (now Rwandan president). Rwigyema and Kagame came from a generation of exiles who had been radicalized by war and knew that, as Rwandans, they would always be stateless until their “right to return” was granted or taken away. They were also aware of the growing resentment toward the number of Rwandans in the new Uganda’s army and government, which was seen as dominance. So, in December 1987, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) was founded in Kampala.
The RPF was made up of Rwandan exiles in Uganda at first, but it also got support from the large Rwandan communities in Tanzania, Burundi, Europe, and North America. Rwandans who left their country wanted to get ahead by getting an education, and many successful professionals were ready to pay for the new movement. On July 27, 1987, the Central Committee of the MRND said again that it would not let a lot of exiles come back, even though pressure from other countries was getting stronger.
By the end of the 1980s, there was more pressure on the Habyarimana regime. A string of poor harvests and a decline in the price of coffee on the international market made this situation worse. Coffee was the country’s main export, and the cash crop economy was too dependent on it.
The regime was also unable or unwilling to deal with the country’s persistent poverty and frequent food shortages. Importantly, the problems of underused and unexploited land (including large areas of swamp that weren’t drained) and old ways of farming weren’t fixed, even though there were studies that suggested changes that would work.
Rwandan civil society and some of his foreign backers pushed for democratization, so Habyarimana let opposition political parties form and changed the name of his party, the MRND, to the National Revolutionary Movement for Development and Democracy. But he banned the new RPF and jailed people in the opposition who were too harsh on the regime. On September 7, 1990, Pope John Paul II visited the very Catholic country of Rwanda.
The pontiff didn’t ask his hosts to be more democratic or pay more attention to human rights, but Habyarimana thought that the sudden attention from the rest of the world called for a general amnesty for prisoners, except for those accused of subversion or endangering state security. This was a good move because it made room in the country’s prisons for the mass arrests that would happen after the RPF’s first offensive started three weeks later, on October 1.
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