Mahmood Mamdani's When Victims Become Killers

...There are some things that political theory can't explain...

...It has an air of unreality...

...He ought to try writing his next book without ever using the words "postcolonial" and "problematize...

...The so-called Second Republic, ushered in by General Juvenal Habyarimana's coup d'état in 1973, changed the status of Tutsi in Rwanda from race to ethnicity, thus opening limited political opportunity to them even as Rwanda became an increasingly centralized state with totalitarian features...

...Genocide, Mamdani argues, occurs between races, not ethnicities...

...It's a subordinate clause, provocative in itself, waiting to be completed by a main clause that's bound to be even more provocative...

...after so much talk of politics and identity, the raw facts of murder by machete never reach the page...

...Mamdani's argument gives him a dubious opportunity to see the four decades since independence in terms of the purported defense of "the gains" of the "social revolution," which makes Hutu violence slightly more legitimate...

...The really crucial event in the history of Rwandan identity, though, occurred during colonialism, when the Belgians institutionalized this structure with national identity cards...

...And this distortion continues in the chapters that follow the genocide, where Mamdani insists that the remnants of the genocidal regime have to be included in any regional solution to what has become a regional disaster...

...The central idea of the book, running straight through, is that Hutu and Tutsi are, above all, political rather than cultural or economic identities...

...At this point the whole edifice collapses...

...The Belgians also declared the Tutsi to be a nonindigenous group, racially "Hamitic," and thus equipped to bring a civilizing influence to the indigenous and benighted Bantu...

...In Mamdani's terms, the Tutsi went from being an ethnicity to a race, like Asians in Uganda or Arabs in Zanzibar, with inherent privileges and fateful consequences...

...He puts them in the same chapter ("The Civil War and the Genocide"), as if the two were coequal or at least continuous...

...FOR ALL THIS, Mamdani's attempt to make the genocide thinkable is remarkably successful— until he comes to the genocide itself...

...As such, they underwent key changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that set in motion the logic of genocide...

...When that state was centralized during the reign of Mwami Rwabugiri in the late nineteenth century, the political identities of the two groups clarified and hardened, with the Tutsi holding positions of power and the Hutu subordinate...

...But because Mamdani attributes something higher than a quest for power to the original killings in 1959, the moral ledger is askew: Many have claimed that the seeds of the genocidal violence that enveloped Rwanda in 1994 lie in the revolution of 1959...

...Often it followed armed incursions by Tutsi exiles from neighboring countries whose aim seems to have been the restoration of Tutsi power...

...When victims become killers— then what...

...Is becoming a killer contained in, explained by, being a victim...

...But the revolution was not a bloodbath...

...According to Mamdani and the sources he depends on, the Tutsi seem to have been a distinct ethnic group that migrated into the Great Lakes region from the northeast, while the Hutu were "simply those from a variety of ethnic backgrounds who came to be subjugated to the power of the Rwandan state...

...The highest contemporary estimate from a credible source of Tutsi deaths during the revolution is around two hundred...

...Mamdani makes much of the revolution of 1959, attributing egalitarian and democratic ideals to what, in hindsight, ap106 n DISSENT / Summer 2001 BOOKS pears to have been a mere "ethnic transfer of power," in the words of the French writer Gerard Prunier...

...In the end, it must be said that his goal of understanding how thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Hutus could be recruited to kill their friends and neighbors is never achieved...

...Then his approach becomes utterly inadequate, and its inadequacy leads him to make some dubious judgments about the genocide and the political landscape left in its bloody wake...

...Up to the end of the colonial era, Mamdani's theory illuminates the commonly accepted historical account in a way that makes this book a genuinely original contribution to understanding the Rwandan catastrophe...

...races try to eliminate foreign races...

...It's as if, with his increasingly single-minded focus on the threat of a Tutsi return to power during the civil war, Mamdani has missed the fact that the Hutu government had already decided that the Rwandan Tutsi must be eliminated...

...The mistake is in imagining that when victims—which the pre-1959 Hutu surely were—seize power, they do so legitimately and nobly by definition...

...evil" does not make much impression on the postmodern mind...

...108 n DISSENT / Summer 2001...

...Anti-Tutsi violence was chronic in the 1960s and early 1970s...

...The Tutsi exiles were throwing gasoline on dying embers...

...It is the greatest failure of Mamdani's book that the genocide (not the perfunctory one in its pages, but the one we know from other accounts and from whatever effort our own imaginations can make) comes across not as the culmination of everything he's discussed beforehand, but as something mysteriously apart...

...What's more, Mamdani, who is far more capable of writing a direct and intelligible statement than most academics, occasionally lapses into the kind of language that by its very nature evades the key questions of agency and responsibility...

...In response, the Tutsi in Uganda went home: they formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and invaded northern Rwanda in October 1990...

...Mamdani still sees Hutu Power, now fully dedicated to eradicating its perceived domestic enemies, as one among several political players whose interests and fears have to be taken into account...

...In other words, if the Rwandan Tutsi exiles had simply stopped their incursions (and given up their claim to being Rwandans), the Hutu government would have allowed Tutsi inside Rwanda to live peacefully, though as secondclass citizens without access to political power...

...Hutu power against Tutsi power: this was the brutal reality of violence in Rwanda from 1959 to 1994, with the far more numerous Hutu committing the far greater share of it (the opposite was true in neighboring Burundi, where the ruling Tutsi elite carried out their own genocidal anti-Hutu campaign in 1972), and defenseless Tutsi civilians inside Rwanda suffering the great majority of deaths...

...Mamdani still sees a balance of power between the RPF and Hutu Power, but, by April 1994, to be a Tutsi in Rwanda meant to be under a death sentence, with almost nowhere to hide...

...It was, as Mamdani points out, "a time of internal reform—and not repression—in Rwanda...

...Theory, which in Mamdani's hands explains so much of the preceding history, is defeated by the empirical fact of eight hundred thousand or more deaths in a hundred days, committed not just by dedicated units of the Armed Forces of Rwanda and the Interahamwe ("those who kill together") militias, but by thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of ordinary Hutus...

...In a book dedicated to making it "thinkable," the genocide itself occupies fewer than twenty pages...

...Everything that followed independence in 1962 shows that the Hutu leaders wanted majority rule, not because they believed in democratic principles, but because they wanted to rule...

...In 1990, Tutsi exiles in Uganda who had helped Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Movement fight its way to power suddenly found themselves declared aliens in their adopted country...

...The genocide was already fifteen days old...

...Understanding genocide carries intellectual and moral risks for the scholar, who functions somewhat like a laboratory scientist undertaking the study of a lethal virus while trying to remain uncontaminated...

...Without ever being legitimated, in Mamdani's version the genocide becomes one more event in a history of political conflict, rather than a crime of such magnitude that in some ways Rwandan history—ordinary history, the struggle for power between groups, the desire to live in peace on the part of individuals— stopped on April 6, 1994, and when it resumed nothing could be the same again...

...Mamdani accords the Hutu desire for power an emancipatory status not borne out by the facts he adduces to it...

...By putting in place the final squeeze," he writes, "the UN had succeeded in fully polarizing the situation...

...By his own account, he is impatient with scholarship that requires the "production of facts" to justify itself...

...only now, the distinction was stood on its head, as "foreign" Tutsi became non-Rwandans who existed in the soontobe-independent state at the sufferance of the Hutu...

...Are the implications of the killing different from when non-victims become killers, as in Nazi Germany...

...Mamdani is referring to a UN Security CounDISSENT / Summer 2001 n I07 BOOKS cil meeting of April 21, 1994, which demanded that the Rwandan government fully implement the Arusha accord...

...Block upon block, he constructs a sturdy-looking argument about the HutuTutsi conflict from the precolonial era to the decades of Belgian rule and the violent upheavals since 1959, all of it preparing the reader for the moment on April 6, 1994, when the slaughter of Tutsi and their Hutu sympathizers began in accelerated earnest...

...Mamdani's project has all the more potential for going seriously awry given that the tool he brings to bear on the genocide is not empirical fact but critical theory...

...The title of Mahmood Mamdani's new book about the Rwandan genocide of 1994— the twentieth century's final and most intensive— suggests this dilemma...

...Even in the context of Rwanda's bloody history, nothing can prepare us for the scale and intensity of the killing...

...Mamdani, following his own logic, sees the civil war that followed, which had sharply turned in the RPF's favor by 1992, as the direct cause of the genocide...

...The fact is that it was not the revolution, but attempted restoration and the repression that followed, that opened the gateway to a bloodsoaked political future in Rwanda...

...At the outset of When DISSENT / Summer 2001 n 105 BOOKS Victims Become Killers, he announces that he wants "to rethink existing facts in light of rethought contexts, thereby to illuminate old facts and core realities in new light...

...sTILL, ONE doesn't have to accept Mamdani's claims for the revolution to find his chapters on the years between independence and genocide instructive in light of his theoretical argument...

...He blames the Arusha accord of 1993, which nominally ended the civil war while resolving nothing politically, for excluding the most extreme elements of the genocidal ideology known as Hutu Power from the agreement, and he puts the onus squarely on the democratic opposition inside Rwanda, the "donor community," and the RPF...

...The apparatus of theory can be hauled in to justify anything...

...His most recent book is Blood of the Liberals...

...The situation was already fully polarized...

...The origins of both groups remain murky, which doesn't dissuade pro-Hutu or proTutsi scholars from trying to describe them, as if what happened in the fifteenth century somehow determines what we ought to think about what happened seven years ago...

...Is the meaning of the killing somehow changed...

...Do they remain in some sense victims...

...Without making any exaggerated claims about the Tutsi guerrillas as liberators—for Mamdani convincingly shows that they represented the most hard-line faction of Tutsi politics—it's easy to see the enormous disproportion between purported cause and concrete effect in this account...

...Internal politics in Uganda shifted the condition for citizenship from residence to origin...

...But with the so-called "social revolution" of 1959, the relation of his claims to the facts begins to provoke more questions than insights...

...WHEN VICTIMS BECOME KILLERS: COLONIALISM, NATIVISM, AND THE GENOCIDE IN RWANDA by Mahmood Mamdani Princeton University Press, 2001 364 pp $29.95 ANYONE WHO sets out to show how genocide can become thinkable ought to have an eye on the line beyond which it becomes justifiable...

...GEORGE PACKER is the author of The Village of Waiting, a memoir about Africa, which is being reissued this summer...

...This failure reveals something about the limits of those tools that Mamdani puts to such good use through large parts of this book...

...The genocide's origin in recent history, then, lies in ten or a dozen unsuccessful raids by armed Tutsi groups in the early sixties...

...The tragedy, as Mamdani points out, is that the Hutu accepted the old Belgian division between indigenous and nonindigenous...

...Or has some categorical change taken place...

...Mamdani was born and educated in Uganda, then taught at the University of Cape Town before joining Columbia University as a professor of government and director of the Institute of African Studies...

...Belgium's romantic favoritism marked Tutsis with the equivalent of the yellow star...

...Ethnic groups merely massacre one another...

...In 1959 Hutu groups killed several hundred Tutsi and—with the help of Belgian administrators, who had essentially switched sides—inverted the political structure and replaced the Tutsi elite with a Hutu one...