Rwanda's Tangled Web

"Hate Crimes" by René Lemarchand, in Transition (2000: Nos. 81–82), 69 Dunster St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138.

In cases of genocide such as the 1994 bloodbath in Rwanda, in which more than a half-million Tutsi perished at the hands of the Hutu, the division between good and evil comes to seem starkly clear. "In Rwanda today," says Lemarchand, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Florida, Gainesville, "guilt and innocence are increasingly becoming ethnicized," with the minority Tutsi "now beyond reproach." But while there’s no denying "the evil committed in the name of Hutu power," it’s not the whole story, he argues.

In the first place, not all Hutu have blood on their hands, he points out. "If it’s true that 10 percent of the Hutu population participated in the killings... that leaves 90 percent... that did not—5.8 million Hutu." Moreover, some Hutu, at "considerable risk," saved thousands of their Tutsi neighbors from the machete.

At least 600,000 Tutsi were slaughtered between April and July 1994, before Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), made up mainly of Tutsi exiles, defeated the Hutu-dominated government. But the violent interethnic conflict began long before the genocide, Lemarchand avers, when the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Army, with support from the government of Uganda, launched a civil war against the government in 1990.

Nor were Tutsi the only victims of the Hutu rampage in 1994: It also claimed as many as 50,000 Hutu. "For many landless peasants," Lemarchand explains, "the genocide was...an opportunity to grab land from their neighbors, Tutsi and Hutu alike." Intra-Hutu politics also figured, with the ruling party fearing that a rival one might join forces with the RPF. Most of the "moderate Hutu" killed during the genocide belonged to that rival party.

Indeed, Hutu deaths ran much higher, Lemarchand says. If those who were killed during and right after the RPF’s advance on the capital of Kigali are added in, along with those who fled to Zaire and were later killed by their pursuers or died of disease and starvation, then the grand total of Hutu deaths comes to perhaps a half-million—only 100,000 or so fewer than the Tutsi deaths during the genocide of 1994.

Today, says Lemarchand, Rwanda "is more profoundly divided" between Hutu and Tutsi than ever, despite the lip service paid to "nonracialism" by the Tutsi-led government (which relies on foreign aid for twothirds of its budget). Kagame, who recently assumed the presidency, "has the ear of many in the West, not least because he knows how to appeal to its shame for not acting to end the genocide itself. Very little is said about the 120,000 Hutu suspects still languishing in overcrowded prisons; about the Rwandan army’s continuing activities in the eastern Congo...or about brutal raids against Hutu communities suspected of harboring genocidaires in Rwanda itself." Critics of these policies risk being accused of sympathy with genocidal forces, says Lemarchand, but "it is time to end the conspiracy of silence."