A Formula for Genocide

...It also supported the doctrine of Hutu Power...

...But whatever the intensity of those old feuds, Tutsis and Hutus had co-existed, sharing in the same social and political structure without killing one another...

...27...

...Meanwhile the camps were organizing themselves into "perfect replicas of the Hutu Power state—same community groupings, same leaders, same rigid hierarchy, same propaganda, same violence...

...On July i6, the Hutu Power leader who had become president on Habyarimana's death in a plane crash in April, made it to the French-occupied area of Rwanda...

...The French promised to arrest him, but didn't...

...If you were a bureaucrat with a foreign-aid budget to unload, and your professional success was to be measured by your ability not to lie or gloss too much when you filed happy statistical reports at the end of each fiscal year," Gourevitch writes, "Rwanda was the ticket...

...Meanwhile Hutus and Tutsis intermarried, fought in the same armies, and lived in the same hillside villages...

...ambassador to Rwanda suggested to the Habyarimana government in 1991 that it abolish ethnic identity cards, the French ambassador intervened, and the cards were retained...

...This time Albright got the vote postponed four days...

...troops under Canadian Maj...

...Rwanda was the graveyard for lofty moral assumptions by the so-called international community, and a lesson in how not to deal with Africa...

...It also proved that Africans should intervene themselves, and not depend on Western governments, much less the U.N., to do it for them...

...The Cold War was over, and Western governments wanted their African client regimes to make gestures toward democratization...

...Everyone knew the ruling clique would not surrender power voluntarily...

...It had been announced on the radio and in the newspapers...

...25 But on October I, 199o, everything changed...

...But very little changed for the average Rwandan, whether Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa, although everyone noticed that President Habyarimana and his wife, Madame Agathe, were growing rich...

...He and members of his cabinet fled to Zaire...

...To brighten Rwanda's image in the eyes of foreign donors, police in Kigali began to arrest prostitutes, and the Interior Ministry deputized Catholic militants to wreck shops that sold condoms...

...Demographic figures are suspect, but one estimate is that 84 percent were Hutu, while 15 percent were Tutsi, and 1 percent were Twa...

...Gourevitch's book in its way is a cautionary tale, a warning about what can happen when governments neglect African realities...

...Nonetheless the mass killings in 1994 might still have been prevented...

...Kaiser Wilhelm's agents worked with the Tutsis, and established a suzerainty...

...The U.N...

...A 1975 agreement between France and Rwanda stipulated that French troops could not participate in active operations, but that was simply ignored...

...French President Francois Mitterrand, Habyarimana's chief patron, told him to announce a multiparty system for Rwanda...

...White House officials insisted, though, that the administration was still concerned about Rwanda...

...Survivors of that particular massacre recall his reply slightly differently, although there was no question about its meaning...

...He told Dallaire he could neither seize the weapons, nor offer asylum to the informant...

...The new multiculturalism had come to Rwanda, and a unified nation was officially dead...

...No white man set foot in Rwanda, however, until 1894, when a wandering German count arrived at the Rwandan royal court...

...In a page-one story in 1997, the New York Times reported on the "age-old animosity between the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic 24 September to 9 8 • The American Spectator groups," but that was only the Times being the Times...

...Dallaire cabled Kofi Annan, then the chief of U.N...

...Tutsis tended to be tall and slender, and Hutus short and stocky...

...several government critics died in mysterious accidents...

...In 1973, Maj...

...for $15 million...

...0 n July 12, the International Red Cross announced that the genocide had now taken one million lives...

...ambassador to the U.N., opposed leaving even that token force...

...Ruthless dictators might rule elsewhere in Africa, but Habyarimana seemed benign...

...A French schoolteacher who worked for the U.N...

...The hills were thick with young whites working, albeit unwittingly," Gourevitch writes, "for the greater glory of Habyarimana...

...As U.N...

...The killers trained in militias for weeks...

...Nigeria has the most professional army in sub-Saharan Africa, and when it intervened in the fighting in Liberia and Sierra Leone it saved a great many lives...

...That same day, however, the U.N...

...It declared war on the Habyarimana regime, and called for an end to an ideology that "generates refugees...

...Two months after the RPF invaded Rwanda, Kangura, Madame Agathe's favorite newspaper, published a full-page picture of Francois Mitterrand...

...secretary general, requesting permission to place the informant and his family under protection, and then evacuate them from Rwanda...

...o foreign aid arrived in quantity: from Belgium, from S France, "ever eager to expand its neocolonial empire," from Switzerland, "which sent more development aid to Rwanda than to any other country on earth," from Washington, Bonn, Tokyo, and the Vatican...

...No treaties were signed, but the fact that they met—as professional soldiers they got on well—suggested possibilities for the future...

...Accordingly, while Habyarimana spoke publicly about democracy, Madame Agathe's akazu grew increasingly repressive...

...later wrote in Le Monde that what happened then was "a veritable genocide," and he accused European aid workers and missionaries of indifference to the state-sponsored slaughter...

...The RPF was made up of Tutsis and Hutus who had fled Rwanda, although its "military core," Gourevitch says, was "overwhelmingly Tutsi...

...In fact, Rwanda was being run as a corporate enterprise, and Madame Agathe, "a great churchgoer, fond of binge shopping in Paris, was the muscle behind the throne...

...Instead he told Dallaire to share his information with Rwandan President Habyarimana, even though the informant had said the weapons were to be used in Habyarimana's own campaign to exterminate the Tutsis...

...The affinity for the Tutsis and not the Hutus was to be expected...

...Belgian officials reserved the best jobs in the administrative system for Tutsis, while the school system, largely run by the Catholic Church, discriminated against Hutus...

...Subsequently, educated or prosperous Tutsis, or Tutsis who traveled abroad, were arrested, along with Hutus out of favor with the regime...

...Gourevitch quotes Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, who described the scene in Rwanda that year as "the most horrible and systematic massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis...

...The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank demanded that Rwanda implement "structural adjustment...

...When he cultivated a protégé outside the akazu, an akazu chief had the protégé shot dead...

...In the European imagination the Tutsis were a lost race of warrior kings...

...Later, to help finance the war, army officers set up marijuana plantations, and Jean-Christophe Mitterrand, Gourevitch writes, was "widely rumored to have profited from the traffic...

...A Belgian colonel named Guy Logiest, newly arrived in Rwanda, and imbued with the spirit of democratization, decided to reverse his country's colonial policy...

...By mid-1964, a quarter million or so Tutsis had followed the earlier refugees into exile...

...As many as 14,000 Tutsis died in a single week in one southern province alone...

...was now an accomplice in mass murder...

...Tutsi political activists beat up a Hutu political activist, and roving gangs of Hutus retaliated by attacking Tutsi officials and burning down Tutsi homes...

...The first instance of violence may be precisely dated: November 1,1959...

...Identity cards, however, were necessary for apartheid...

...All across Rwanda," Gourevitch writes, "murder, murder, murder, murder, murder, murder...

...But the death toll in Rwanda kept mounting, and in May the Security Council decided to vote again...

...Using executive fiat, he replaced the Tutsi chiefs with Hutu chiefs, and gave tacit approval while the new Hutu leaders began organizing violence against the Tutsis...

...and Britain, and the remnants of the anti-apartheid organizations that looked for a cause when apartheid died, and suddenly discovered Nigeria...

...But the church president is not persuasive...

...22 ing the more advanced weapons of destruction, the killers used only machetes, clubs, and small arms...

...Tutsis tended to thin lips and narrow noses, and Hutus to thick lips and flat noses...

...details about mismanagement and corruption began to leak out...

...Politics in Rwanda were complex—as they are in most countries in Africa—and Rwanda's had an extra dimension...

...Meanwhile the soldiers and diplomats who met in Nigeria included the commanding general of South Africa's defense forces, the chief of Ghana's defense staff, the Mozambique defense minister, the Liberian commanding general, the deputy commander of the Zimbabwe army, and most of the top echelon of the Nigerian army, including Abdulsalam Abubakar, who is now the head of state...

...The next two days some 500,000 Hutus fled Rwanda for Zaire...

...Meanwhile the death toll kept mounting...

...Victorian race theory suggested the Hutus were children of Ham, whose progeny through his son Canaan were cursed by Noah: "A slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers...

...byJohn Cony This century's best organized genocide took place not in the death camps of Europe or the killing fields of Southeast Asia, but in the small African nation of Rwanda...

...FormA ula for Genocide Pioneering journalist Philip Gourevitch has shown how Western race theory, arms, and money—combined with home-grown corruption—can turn a peaceful yet ethnically complex nation into a charnel house...

...French paratroopers were dispatched to help the Hutus fight the RPF...

...Security Council voted to reduce the U.N...

...The Tutsis in Uganda had been organizing for several years, raising funds and mobilizing support among other Tutsis in the worldwide Rwandan diaspora...

...peacekeeping, and now the U.N...

...When the League of Nations handed Rwanda over to Belgium after World War I, the affinity for the Tutsis persisted...

...Voices like theirs brought on Rwanda...

...It was, Gourevitch writes, "one of the most bewildering human spectacles of the century...

...Gourevitch later tracked down the church president in Laredo, Texas, where he lived in the home of his cardiac anesthesiologist son, a naturalized U.S...

...Granted that Gourevitch is a splendid reporter, but this seems unlikely...

...Belgian scientists measured Hutu and Tutsi physiognomies, and found that the median Tutsi nose, for example, was two-and-a-half millimeters longer and almost five millimeters narrower than the median Hutu nose...

...On July 19, the victorious RPF and surviving members of the antiHutu Power movement announced the formation of a new multi-ethnic government in Kigali...

...Then, on October 11, ten days after the RPF invasion began, local officials in the village of Kibilira told the Hutus their work duty for the month would consist of fighting their Tutsi neighbors...

...The largest took place just before Christmas in 1963: several hundred Tutsis, operating out of neighboring Burundi, advanced to within twelve miles of Kigali, the capital...

...He found a king, or Mwami, whose death the following year led to political rivalries among the then dominant Tutsi clans, and, in 1897, provided an opportunity for Germany to raise its flag over Rwanda...

...The winds of change had swept through Rwanda, and a provisional Hutu government had been installed under Gregoire Kayibanda...

...In Rwanda, meanwhile, the Habyarimana regime saw the invasion as an opportunity to deal with its "internal enemies," while banishing pluralism, and unifying the country...

...Democracy has triumphed over feudalism," Kayibanda declared when he took office...

...In June, despairing of U.N...

...Meanwhile restive Tutsi monarchists who had gone into exile were mounting small, and usually ineffective, guerrilla attacks inside Rwanda...

...The Hutus went to work with singing and drumming," Gourevitch writes, "and the slaughter lasted three days...

...There was no age-old animosity, of course...

...As Gourevitch says, much of the world would regard Rwanda as "an exemplary instance of the chaos and anarchy associated with collapsed states," but "in fact, the genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modem political theorizing and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously administered states in history...

...liberal delusions get in the way...

...Clearly there was a nobility in the Tutsis that was absent in the Hutus...

...Tutsis also tended to have lighter skins than Hutus...

...Gourevitch indicates this was done more or less secretly, and that when the Rwandans in the Ugandan army deserted en masse to join the RPF, "after stealing every bit of equipment they could grab," it surprised even Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni...

...As Colonel Logiest explained later, he wanted "to put down the arrogance and expose the duplicity of a basically oppressive and unjust aristocracy...

...it had come in only with this century, and as Philip Gourevitch notes in a brilliant new book, until the incidents in 1959, "there had never been systematic political violence recorded between Hutus and Tutsis—anywhere on earth...

...had failed to stop, or even hinder, genocide, but now it was leading one of the largest and most expensive relief operations in history...

...This works out to 333 deaths an hour, or five and a half every minute, an astonishingly efficient operation, especially when you consider that most of the deaths took place in the first few weeks, and that lackJOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...

...In effect the Hutus were disenfranchised, although they far outnumbered the Tutsis...

...Then, in late 1960, Logiest proudly announced that "the revolution was over...

...negotiated for a $5 million reduction in the rental charge...

...The government's budget was cut in half, but taxes rose, and forced-labor demands increased...

...Ostensibly her husband was ruling Rwanda, but inside his court, Madame Agathe maintained her own court, the akazu, and no one dared cross it, not even Habyarimana...

...Indeed, buttressed by quack science and a dubious theology, it became the keystone of colonial administration...

...The informant told Dallaire where the militia's weapon caches were located, and of the plans to use the weapons to exterminate Tutsis...

...Dallaire did not ask for permission to seize the weapons...

...These include, but are not limited to, Yoruba activists in Lagos, their intensely political expatriate supporters in the U.S...

...Juvenal Habyarimana overthrew Kayibanda, declared himself president, and called for a moratorium on attacks against Tutsis...

...The other astonishing thing is that many people both inside and outside Rwanda knew genocide was coming, but did nothing to stop it, and when global humanitarians did intervene, they helped not the victims but the killers...

...The majority Hutus would now be favored over the minority Tutsis...

...Pre-colonial Rwanda, though, was unaware of the Hamitic myth...

...Later the Hutus apparently moved in from the south and west, and the Tutsis from the north...

...And on July zo, the former Hutu militiamen began raiding the shipments of relief aid that was going into the new refugee camps in Zaire...

...People talked about it openly...

...But whether the warning will be heeded is questionable...

...Madeleine Albright, the U.S...

...The caption said, "A friend in need is a friend indeed...

...If the humanitarians "were essentially the dupes of their criminal guests," Gourevitch The American Spectator • September 1998 writes, "they were not unwitting about it, and with time, their service effectively made them co-conspirators of their guests...

...More advocates of reform left the country...

...Consequently, soldiers and diplomats from sixteen African nations met in Nigeria last winter to discuss mutual peacekeeping and security interests...

...Most of the press coverage, and nearly all of the Western political pronouncements on Nigeria, though, is influenced by liberals and their allies...

...As long as I live, in my whole life," the church president declared, "there is nobody I tried to help more than Tutsis...

...Self-defense units" were charged with "clearing the bush," a euphemism for murdering Tutsis and burning their homes...

...It was a run-through for what Hutu Power proponents would call the "final solution" a few years later...

...Gourevitch's book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), describes what happened next...

...policy was joined to ethnicity...

...But it could still have been prevented...

...At the same time they were using the camps as bases for new assaults in Rwanda...

...Africa still eludes the liberal mind...

...They were wiped out by Rwandan forces under Belgian command, but President Kayibanda declared a state of national emergency to combat "counter-revolutionaries...

...Romeo Dallaire arrived in Rwanda at the end of 1993, and almost immediately Dallaire found a "top level" informant in the Rwandan militia...

...The cost in human lives and suffering was incidental...

...A deceptive calm came over Rwanda, and foreign donors, at least, were impressed...

...The American Spectator • September 199 8 Much worse was yet to come, however...

...That pleased Western thinkers and statesmen, but as Gourevitch writes, all that happened was "that Hutu dictatorship masqueraded as popular democracy, and Rwanda's power struggles became an internal affair of the Hutu elite, very much as the feuds among royal Tutsi clans had been in the past...

...Habyarimana did as he was told, but, as Gourevitch observes, "instead of simple relief and enthusiasm, the prospect of open competition for power provoked widespread alarm in Rwanda...

...Certainly Africans know that, just as they also know Africa...

...In 1962, however, when Belgium granted full independence to Rwanda, and Kayibanda became its first president, he spoke of "two nations in one state...

...Therefore it had to be stopped, and the Habyarimana regime propped up...

...citizen...

...Whether the lesson has been learned, however, remains doubtful...

...some three hundred and fifty Tutsis were killed, and three thousand fled their homes...

...action, eight African nations said they would intervene in Rwanda if Washington would provide them 26 September 1998 • The American Spectator with fifty armored personnel carriers...

...force by 90 percent, leaving it with only 270 troops...

...Hutus were farmers and Tutsis raised cattle, but there were Hutu Mwamis and Tutsi Mwamis...

...commander, he assumed he did not need it...

...Nonetheless they would still be kept in their place, as would everyone else in Rwanda...

...The Hamitic myth was officially enshrined...

...The armored personnel carriers then sat on a runway in Germany, while the U.N...

...The regime said all Tutsis would be considered RPF "accomplices," and that any Hutus who did not agree were traitors...

...Rwanda, landlocked, poor, and only slightly larger than Vermont, was home to some 6 million people...

...Annan, however, disagreed...

...As always, France was wedded to the vision of a Francophone Africa...

...Many Tutsis and Hutus did not fit the physical archetypes, and there were even modestly tall pygmies...

...Thousands were displaced, and many went into exile...

...That was in 1988, and as Gourevitch notes, "a strange year followed...

...Eventually the White House agreed to the reduction, but by then no planes were available to transport the vehicles...

...Indeed the ideology of identity politics—"two nations in one state"—virtually required it to do so...

...France behaved execrably, funneling arms to the Hutu killers right up to, and during, the genocide in 1994...

...In 1930 the Belgian Bishop of Rwanda warned that any attempt to replace Tutsi chiefs with "uncouth" Hutu chiefs "would lead the entire state directly into anarchy and to bitter anti-European Communism...

...On July 13, the RPF captured a Hutu stronghold...

...It was either "Your problem has already found a solution, you must die," or "You must be eliminated, God no longer wants you...

...Whatever the differences between the two, Rwandawas a unified nation...

...In effect, the U.N...

...It had one language, Kinyarwanda, one national god, Imana, and a patriotic devotion to the Mwami, whether he was a Hutu or Tutsi...

...The White House said it would, but rather than turning the vehicles over to the Africans it decided to rent them to the U.N...

...G ourevitch's book, literary journalism at its very best, takes its lengthy title from a letter Tutsi pastors wrote to their church president, a Hutu, the day before they were murdered...

...And on April 21, 1994, General Dallaire said that with just 5,000 troops he could bring the murders to a halt...

...An army calling itself the Rwandese Patriotic Front, or RPF, invaded Rwanda from Uganda...

...On the other hand, African affairs are complicated, so who knows...

...Otherwise there is the risk of another Rwanda...

...The RPF, however, had emerged from Anglophone, or English-speaking, Uganda...

...He said he did not understand the accusations against him...

...it would contribute to a public-health plan to remove corpses from Lake Victoria...

...Everyone in Rwanda had known genocide was coming...

...The Twa, who are pygmies, were there first...

...When the U.S...

...Mitterrand liked Madame Agathe's husband, and Mitterrand's son, Jean-Christophe, an arms dealer and sometime African affairs official in the French Foreign Ministry, liked him, too...

...The genocidal campaign the Hutus waged against the Tutsis and any Hutus found unsympathetic to what would be called Hutu Power was now only a few decades ahead...

...Some 800,000 people were murdered in loo days...

...Famine struck...

...But Rwanda had to do more...

...And more than one hundred relief agencies were following, "frantic to get in on the astonishingly dramatic—and, yes, lucrative—action...

...If liberals and other humanitarians will leave them alone, and armored vehicles do not sit on runways, there may never be another Rwanda...

...Rwanda proved that some African problems can be solved only by military intervention, and that in the absence of intervention innocent people die...

...The humanitarians were caring for murderers, who had transformed themselves into victims...

...In 1933 Belgium began a census that led to the issuance of ethnic identity cards that stipulated the bearers as Tutsi, Hutu, or Twa, even though Rwandans themselves could not always tell one another apart...

...The state could order communal labor, for example, and no one could change residence without government approval...