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INTRODUCTION

Like most conflicts, the Rwandan civil war and attendant genocide are not easily confined within brackets of time. This study looks at the period of conflict in Rwanda from the incursion of the Rwandese Patriotic Army (RPA) on October 1, 1990, until the April 6, 1994 downing of President Habyarimana’s plane. This event relaunched the civil war and opened the door to genocide, bringing the Arusha peace process to an untimely end. An epilogue brings forward the implications of this period for the genocide and subsequent events in Rwanda.

In this introduction, I review perspectives on the Arusha negotiations found in current literature, recount the antecedents of the Rwandan conflict, and pose the question of why humanitarian intervention failed. Subsequent chapters seek the answers to that question in a story that follows the international intervention against the backdrop of political negotiations in Arusha and political wrangling in Kigali. In that narrative, the arc of humanitarian intervention confronts questions that are customarily faced in international interventions as well as questions that reflect the peculiarities of the Rwandan context. A notation of conflict-resolution issues at stake and an inventory of lessons learned thus bookend each chapter.

What Do Folks Say about Arusha?

The conclusion of this study is that the Rwandan peace process, centered in the Arusha negotiations, helped set the dynamic context of genocide in Rwanda. Yet, in the voluminous reporting and analysis on the genocide in Rwanda, there is little systematic focus on the Arusha political negotiations, on the events leading up to those discussions, or on the effect of those negotiations on the outbreak of genocide. Few commentators stop by Arusha. Those that do intersperse occasional references to Arusha within their larger narrative. Most studies, with reason, concentrate on the breakout of genocide itself and its eventual suppression by the Rwandese Patriotic Front. Among the commonly cited references, the most comprehensive is Human Rights Watch’s Leave None to Tell the Story, which mentions the Arusha negotiations in various places but only as a backdrop to growing internal political tensions.¹ Gérard Prunier’s The Rwanda Crisis gives a chapter to the negotiations but similarly focuses on how negotiations played out within Rwandan domestic politics.² Grünfeld and Huijboom give numerous details about the situation in Rwanda during the period of negotiations, but little on the process of negotiations.³ André Guichaoua’s more recent work, full of behind-the-scenes details and excellent analyses of the ebb and flow of political contests within Rwanda, has but two chapters on the Arusha negotiations, and those are seen through the optic of the domestic political scene.⁴

Memoires of the period naturally deal with the moments when the writers were engaged in Rwandan affairs, most after the accords were signed. For example, in his excellent narrative on post-genocide Rwanda, Robert Gribbin, US ambassador in Kigali from 1996 to 1999, offers but a short chapter on the talks, noting, “I was not there and so cannot throw much light on the inner workings of the talks.”⁵

Two Rwandan accounts from opposite sides of the conflict give useful insights into the Arusha negotiations. Dr. Theogene Rudasingwa, an officer in the Rwandese Patriotic Army and the Patriotic Front’s representative to the OAU, was at the time of the Arusha negotiations RPF’s secretary general as well as a member of the RPF negotiating team. He does not treat the negotiations chronologically or thematically, but his Healing a Nation: A Testimony does highlight RPF’s ambiguity toward the peace process.⁶ On the other side, Enoch Ruhigira, at that time the director of Habyarimana’s presidential office, shows in his La fin tragique d’un régime how Habyarimana progressively lost the battle over the negotiating process as distance swiftly grew between the president and prime minister, between the presidential party and the internal opposition, and between the political elite in Kigali and the negotiators in Arusha.⁷

The most incisive analyses of the Arusha peace process and of its failures come from a key US policymaker of that time, Assistant Secretary Herman Cohen, and an academic and international consultant on peacekeeping, Bruce Jones. In a single chapter on Rwanda in his Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacemaking in a Troubled Continent, Cohen, with pointed realism, faults US policy for its failure to understand the depth of hostility in Rwanda (an arena of low US interest), for being obsessed with the negotiating process, and for not realizing that “as the Arusha process unfolded . . . it inadvertently guaranteed the genocide.”⁸

During the late 1990s, Jones, who is now a senior fellow at Brookings, wrote his doctoral dissertation on Rwanda. He published his Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failure in 2001 on the basis of his doctoral work. His chapter on the Arusha negotiations analyzes the negotiations through the optic of their peacemaking objectives. Although his narrative contains errors on chronology, procedural details, and negotiating dynamics, Jones tells the larger story with insight into why the Arusha negotiations looked so good and failed so miserably.

In his conclusion, Jones highlights what went wrong with third-party intervention in the Rwanda crisis: undue pressure to democratize; drawbacks in the facilitation of negotiations; lack of community-level buy-in with the peace process; and failure to plan for violent opposition or to account for spoilers and losers.⁹ I would agree with Cohen and Jones in their critiques of the Arusha process. But the social cataclysm that was the Rwandan genocide needs a more systematic explication of the international search for peace in Rwanda. That narrative begins with a look at what brought us to Arusha.

Antecedents

Like all Rwandan stories, this is a long one. Rwandan dynastic chronologies would push us back into the mystic past of the founding kings, Kigwa or Gihanga, depending on the legend. Some historians would credit stories about Ruganzu Bwimba, reputed to have built a kingdom in north-central Rwanda in the 1400s, only to have it fall apart in civil war five generations later. Others assert that it was rather Ruganzu Ndori who in the 1600s established the Nyiginya dynasty over the first Rwandan Kingdom of which we have reliable oral record.¹⁰

TRADITIONAL SOCIETY

Out of this ancient genesis, Rwandan social and political organization coalesced around descent groups. In Rwanda, heads of lineages formed alliances to build clans. “Being alliances rather than descent groups, clans were mutable . . . [and] the number of lineages composing a clan constantly varied over time according to the political adventures of the great families.”¹¹

As with many other emerging polities of the Great Lakes area, Rwandan leaders knit ties with clans having reputed ritual power and built clientage through distribution of land and cattle. By the beginning of the 1700s, the Nyiginya Kingdom was a fragile coalition of lineages in south-central Rwanda. By the end of the century, “it had transformed into a unified, centralized and aggressive entity.”¹² Three factors brought about this transformation: the centralization of power at the court; the extension of clientage to bring all land and cattle under notional royal authority; and continuous expansion under armies by which sons of the ruling elite proved their valor and into which all Rwandan citizens were incorporated.¹³

During the 1800s, the reach of the state (king and court) deepened. Cyrimina Rujugira (1770), himself a usurper, structured succession to a cycle of four regnal names, expanded court ritual, and increased the number of armies. Around the 1840s, as population and demands on land and pasture grew, the court reserved pasture domains for royal use and disposition. It then appointed chiefs of “tall grass” to oversee pastures and herds, as well as chiefs of land to manage farmers and their obligations. Add to these the commanders of now-ubiquitous armies, and a tripartite system of bureaucratic control emerges, especially in the districts close to the court.

This system did provide a sort of check against arbitrary power at the local level where a client, whether herder or farmer, could seek the protection of one lord against the predations of another. Nonetheless, under a clientage system now triply bureaucratized, exactions necessarily increased, impoverishing farmers and herders. Two “social categories” came to define subjects of the king: those who had lineage links to power and privilege—the Tutsi; and those who by dint of circumstance fell into servile status—the Hutu.¹⁴

That was the Rwanda that the Europeans “discovered” in the late 1800s: a country ruled by a king newly installed by the 1896 Rucunshu coup and hemmed in by courtiers, ritual, and intrigue; a territory densely populated at the center with farmers competing with herders for land; and a militarized society in which each person belonged to an army and was a client of a superior both for land and cattle. An overlapping system of chieftaincies administered central lands; at the periphery, sons of aristocrats with new armies pressed against surrounding polities, making Rwanda one of the more powerful kingdoms of the region.

COLONIAL RULE

Rwanda’s mountain fastness and warrior reputation had kept the outside world (including Swahili slavers and traders) at bay until German explorers crossed the land in the 1890s, with Count von Goetzen discovering Lake Kivu in 1894. Three years later, Hauptmann Ramsay offered the newly ascendant king, Mwami Musinga, a letter of protection. German forces and firepower helped Musinga consolidate his rule at the court and expand Rwandan control in Gisaka to the southeast and Bugoyi in the northwest.

In 1907, Germany’s military protection changed to civil administration by indirect rule from a residency at Kigali. But in 1916, Belgian forces from the Congo pushed the Germans south out of Rwanda and beyond the rail center of Tabora. Belgium held its conquered territory provisionally until the Milner-Orts Agreement of May 30, 1919, ceded to Belgium the two German provinces of Ruanda and Urundi as the mandate territory of Ruanda-Urundi. At the Paris peace talks, the Mandates Commission approved the Belgian mandate and the Great Power Council of Five accepted the Milner-Orts Agreement on August 7, 1919.¹⁵ In 1947, this mandate evolved into a trusteeship under the United Nations.

The Belgians, like the Germans, faced the dilemma of how to assert authority over a polity already endowed with a sovereign, an administration, and a society knit together by clientage relations. Under ideals of the League of Nations mandate, Belgium was to assure the uplift of the local population as well as the development of natural resources.¹⁶ Belgium intended to meet these goals while administering the territory efficiently, with minimum investment and maximum gain from the territory’s dense population and fertile lands. Tying into the Congo’s physical and administrative infrastructure seemed the appropriate approach.¹⁷

Whereas in Congo, Belgian administrators ruled directly over respective provinces, in Rwanda, Belgium would follow the German approach of indirect rule. The goal, according to Colonial Minister Louis Frank, was to “associate the native princes with our plans and bring the indigenous ruling class into our service.”¹⁸ In 1919, the administration established schools for chiefs’ sons to train the necessary cadre. Then in 1926, the administration began to rationalize and decentralize the tripartite chiefs system while setting contiguous boundaries for chieftaincies and subchieftaincies.

This streamlined structure was to uniformly administer the provinces throughout Rwanda, with chiefs trained first at Nyanza and other local schools and then at Butare. The new structure was also intended to relieve the “Hutu masses” of burdensome obligations to three different chiefs. However, the traditional system of clientage, both in land and cattle obligations, remained, now legally and efficiently enforced. Ignoring common social identities found in lineage and clan, as well as regional variances in social structure, the mandate administration saw Hutu and Tutsi as the overarching social constructs of personal identification and, in 1931, established identity cards classifying each person accordingly.¹⁹

In the name of progress, colonial policy discounted regional differences, reinforced clientage obligations, and crystallized identities along ethnic lines. Moreover, the colonial regime, through the local chiefs, assessed a head tax, required labor on public works, and enforced agricultural plantings in food crops and coffee. The burden of obligation to political elites weighed heavily on the poor, whether Tutsi or Hutu.

The Mandates Commission of the League of Nations might never have approved a policy of “indirect rule” that coercive and controlling were it not for the Rwakayihura famine of 1929–30 in which thousands of Rwandans died in inaccessible parts of the country. Only draconian measures could build roads, increase harvests, and raise the taxes to keep the country together.²⁰ With the exile of the recalcitrant King Musinga and the investiture of the more educated and compliant Rudahigwa in 1931, the Belgian mandate took root.²¹

TRANSITION TO TRUSTEESHIP

The League of Nations had been content to let Belgium administer the territory and send reports on social and economic progress to the Mandate Commission in Geneva, there to debate the merits of Belgian policy. Following World War II, however, the newly created UN Trusteeship Council actively pushed for political change, as well as for economic and social development. Regular missions began in 1947, reviewing progress on site. Although traditional autocracy had been legally grounded and administratively rationalized under indirect rule, the council’s first visiting mission to East Africa was convinced that “political evolution has reached a stage when an acceleration of the movement would be justified without running any great risk of grave social upheaval.”²²

Grave social upheaval was precisely what occurred as Rwanda moved quickly toward independence in the late 1950s. By 1959, rural violence had broken out in northwest and central Rwanda, with massacres and hut burnings perpetrated by both Hutu and Tutsi partisans, while threats and intimidations harried Tutsi nobles into exile. In 1960, elected communal burgomasters and counselors replaced chieftaincies. As Reyntjens sums it up, “In less than two years [1959–1961], Rwanda had passed from a ‘feudal’ monarchy to a Hutu ‘democratic’ republic. . . . In 1952, the monarchist, fundamentally Tutsi regime was still solidly established, legally reinforced by 35 years of indirect administration. In 1962, Rwanda became independent under a republican, fundamentally Hutu regime.”²³

A SOCIAL REVOLUTION

Chrétien contends that “the 1959–1961 ‘social revolution’ is the key event in Rwanda, one that shaped the country’s politics for the next three decades.”²⁴ Radical changes brought about by that event found root in several factors:

• The UN Trusteeship Council’s interventions, which sought a rapid pace toward representative government and national autonomy²⁵

• The monopolization of power, position, and privilege by the ruling Tutsi elite²⁶

• The abolition in 1954 of ubuhake cattle-clientage without a concomitant reform of the land-tenure system²⁷

• The emergence of Hutu intelligentsia, who challenged the legitimacy of traditional institutions and symbols and called for democratic governance²⁸

• The death of Mwami Rudahigwa and the hardening of neo-traditionalist attitudes claiming right of conquest and superiority²⁹

• The creation of political parties mobilized by individual leaders and ideologically centered on presumed Hutu and Tutsi identities³⁰

Tensions built by these factors came to a crescendo on November 1, 1959, with the outbreak of violence around Kabgayi, center of the Hutu renaissance, and in the northwest, where clan leaders still opposed rule from the central court. By the time the violence abated, some three hundred Hutu and Tutsi were killed and twelve hundred were arrested, while the population of displaced burgeoned.³¹

To calm the storm, the Belgian administration installed Hutu chiefs and subchiefs in vacated chieftainships. They then implemented a previously planned administrative reform of replacing subchiefs with burgomasters and elected communal councils. A multiparty Provisional Council took over the legislative role of the High Council of State. After the failure of a reconciliation conference in early January 1961 at Ostend, Belgium, the Provisional Council called a national convention of burgomasters and municipal counselors. On January 28, these counselors deposed the “monarchy and all its symbols” and proclaimed a democratic republic.

Nine months later, under UN supervision but in an atmosphere of preelectoral violence and intimidation, legislative elections and a referendum on the monarchy confirmed the establishment of the republic and the parliamentary dominance of the Parmehutu Party. The elected legislators then set up the structures of the new republic, chose a government, and designated Grégoire Kayibanda as president. The “social revolution” thus gave birth to the government that took Rwanda to independence on July 1, 1962.³²

FIRST REPUBLIC

Around the edges of this new, landlocked republic, monarchists in refugee camps plotted a return to power. Host country control and internal divisions within refugee leadership kept the attacks from being more effective; but with each attack, Hutu took reprisals against Tutsi still living in Rwanda.³³

In December 1963, the monarchist UNAR party planned attacks from Congo, Uganda, Tanzania, and Burundi. While the other attacks were turned back, a refugee force from Burundi pushed to within twenty miles of Kigali before the Rwandan National Guard stopped the column. Tutsi opposition leaders were immediately arrested and executed without trial. Kayibanda ordered his ministers to organize civil defense in each prefecture; the national radio called for citizens to defend their country; some local officials urged the elimination of all Tutsi as the only solution. An orgy of hut burning and murder broke out, especially in areas of high Tutsi population. Some ten thousand men, women, and children were hacked to death.³⁴

In 1964 and 1966, refugees again attempted cross-border attacks. Each was turned back and followed by an anti-Tutsi pogrom. The 1963 victory at the Kanzenze bridge brought pride to the National Guard, solidarity to the Hutu cause, and a template for handling the Tutsi threat. Given their political utility, attacks against persons and property went largely unpunished; impunity for ethnic crimes became an unwritten understanding.

As the outside threat receded, internal divisions increased. Parmehutu became a de facto single party coping with land tenure issues, tensions within the National Guard, intraparty struggles, and disputes with the Catholic church. At the local level, burgomasters and prefects recreated networks of clients, extracting dues for services just like subchiefs and chiefs under the monarchical regime. Mismanagement and malversation abounded.³⁵

Hutu advancement remained at the core of the Parmehutu agenda, arbitrarily enforced in school admittances, civil service recruitment, and even checks on business payrolls. Hutu who fled the 1972 genocide in Burundi gave a further impetus toward Hutu identity. Ethnic solidarity became the watchword among Hutu intelligentsia and especially among politicians campaigning for elections in 1973. Vigilantism gave way to hut burnings and murders. The harassment and intimidation triggered yet another massive emigration of frightened Tutsi who had hoped to make their accommodation with the new regime.

SECOND REPUBLIC

In a situation of looming chaos, President Kayibanda finally called on the National Guard to restore order. On July 4, 1973, top ministers from the government attended the national day celebration at the US residence, then repaired to a nightlong meeting with President Kayibanda. In the early morning hours, the National Guard surrounded the meeting place and arrested all participants. A Committee for Peace and National Unity, made up of the National Guard High Command, had decided not only to restore peace but also to take over power.³⁶

The committee declared martial law, displacing all institutions of the First Republic, including the party, the national assembly, and the Supreme Court. President Kayibanda and seven other top members of his regime received suspended death sentences at a court martial.³⁷ Coup leaders settled into high ministerial and administrative posts, with the newly promoted National Guard commander, Major General Juvénal Habyarimana, being named president and minister of defense.

In 1975, Habyarimana established the Revolutionary National Movement for Development (MRND) as a nationwide movement dedicated to unity and development. By 1978, Rwandans adopted by referendum a new constitution legitimizing the movement with Habyarimana as its president. Military committee members held onto their sinecures, but power and decision making flowed to the president, who instituted an ethic of punctuality and hard work focused on rural development.³⁸ A policy of balance in regional development and in ethnic quotas for admittance to schools or civil service initially reduced interregional and ethnic tensions. Buttressed by connections to the president, some Tutsis prospered in the private sector, but others were denied access to higher schools or jobs.

Transition

The Kayibanda regime had held on shakily for eleven years, beset with attacks from without and social tensions from within; in contrast, the Second Republic constructed a system that lasted twenty-one years and projected an image of efficiency, economic growth, and national integration. Over time, however, Habyarimana’s policies of ethnic and regional balance devolved into instruments for preserving Hutu hegemony or for channeling projects and perquisites to the regime’s home areas of Gisenyi and Ruhengeri. The MRND single-party system, organized down to the ten-person “cellule,” became a means for political mobilization and autocratic control at the national and local level.

CONSTITUTIONAL REFORMS

Whatever the achievements of the Habyarimana administration, thoughtful commentators would have agreed that, by the late 1980s, Habyarimana’s one-party regime was losing its capacity to keep ahead of the political and developmental game. In response to political agitation and economic stagnation, Habyarimana promised constitutional reforms in 1990. These reforms were to establish political pluralism, to organize the eventual return of Tutsi refugees (after years of the regime’s efforts to get them squatters’ rights in neighboring countries), and to accept an economic structural adjustment program.

THE FRONT INVADES

Then, on October 1, 1990, the Rwandese Patriotic Army (RPA), the military arm of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), invaded from Uganda. Frustrated Tutsi in countries of asylum conceived the attack, which Hutu exiles’ tales of corruption, human rights abuse, and incompetence within the Rwandan regime had incubated. The RPF’s perception that Habyarimana and President Museveni of Uganda might agree to controlled repatriation midwifed the attack, which took disciplined, experienced RPF fighters deep into Rwandan territory. But they did not win the support they expected from Rwanda’s restive population. Eventually, over one million Rwandans fled southward from RPF control. Meanwhile, Tutsis within Rwanda were subject to arrest, intimidation, and massacres; with the onset of civil war, the cycle of ethnic violence and social displacement spun out again.

STATES INTERVENE

Almost immediately, European governments (France and Belgium) intervened with troops to protect their citizens gathered in the capital city of Kigali. Meanwhile, neighboring African governments sought to arrange a ceasefire. As the two armed elements engaged in periodic combat, political representatives met under the auspices of neighboring chiefs of state. They signed agreements but never observed a ceasefire.

Finally, at Paris in June 1992, France, with the backing of the United States, facilitated a framework for ceasefire talks. In July, the talks moved to Arusha, Tanzania, where, under Tanzanian facilitation, the two parties adopted an operational ceasefire plan. In August, they opened negotiations on a transition regime. These negotiations, scheduled to last two months, went on for a year, punctuated by foot dragging in Rwandan political circles, massacres in Rwanda’s north, and renewed fighting in February 1993. President Habyarimana finally signed the Arusha Accords with Rwandese Patriotic Front Chairman Alexis Kanyarengwe on August 5, 1993.

Nine months later, on April 6, 1994, someone shot down the president’s plane with ground-to-air missiles. Murderous revenge immediately broke out against the president’s political opponents and ethnic Tutsi. Embassies withdrew their personnel and citizens; the Security Council reduced the UN peacekeeping force to a small holding operation. Even as the Rwandese Patriotic Army and forces of a self-appointed Rwandan government contested for territory, extremist Hutu organized the genocide of eight hundred thousand innocents in just under one hundred days. The road to peace gave way to a policy of extermination.³⁹

The Legacy

Rwanda’s past casts an illuminating beam on the 1990–94 conflict in Rwanda. Evident traits of political culture have deeply rooted antecedents.⁴⁰

Expanding borders and centralizing power have been Rwanda’s leitmotif since the seventeenth century. While colonial agreements stopped territorial expansion⁴¹ and rules of the Organization of African Unity prohibited change to colonial boundaries, each historic dynasty persisted in claiming territory and seeking to ingrate it into central institutions.

Regionalism was the flip side of centralizing power. The conquered periphery (Cyangugu and Kibuye to the west; Byumba and Kibungu to the north and east), once endowed with their own polities, resented the powerful center (Butare, Gikongoro) and the tributes it imposed. In the northwest (Gisenyi, Ruhengeri), former landlords still looked for ways to restore customary rights and political privileges. Regionalism, itself divided into loyalties (or enmities) built hill-by-hill, undercut attachments to the central state.⁴²

Coercive violence has been a constant of Rwandan politics; the political elite brutally waged wars of conquest or battles for ascendency at court. Colonial invaders backed up the expansionary campaigns of the king (mwami), then imposed their own vision of “indirect rule,” rationalizing and institutionalizing coercive force. Labor levies, clientage obligations, and taxes grew more egregious and heavy as ambitions of the elite (whether traditional or colonial) increased in size and reach. After independence, enforced development programs undergirded the structural violence of elite regimes.⁴³

Clientage was the network that knit Rwandan society together.⁴⁴ Under indirect rule, clientage persisted as a legally recognized institution. Weighty burdens of this institution were at the root of the 1959 “social revolution.” While the ideology of democratic representation might have challenged the monarchical system, the new republican order used clientage to enlist the support of the peasantry. Clientage, old and new, implied two things: the splendid isolation of the monarch (or president) who was always patron and never client, and networks of reciprocity and dependence from lords down to the lowliest peasants.⁴⁵

Ethnic identity in Rwanda began with one’s lineage; lineages built alliances and formed clans. Today one might identify with traditional clans or feel linked (obliged) to former classmates, military or professional associates, or party organizations. Overarching these ascriptive or attributive identities are social designators that since the 1800s had come to reflect linkage to the political hierarchy and status within the clientage system: Tutsi and Hutu. Colonizers saw these as binary racial and occupational categories, born out of migratory patterns of conquest. Elites, struggling for power and place in the postindependence arena, used these designations to build loyalty and claim legitimacy. Amorphous categories became exclusive, hardened identifiers—matters of life and death.⁴⁶

Profound psychological perceptions of superiority and inferiority underlay the interplay of these social categories.⁴⁷ This perceptual equation traditionally took on regional variances. Playing against this variegated background was the violence of modern Rwanda’s birth. The Hutu revolution of 1959, Tutsi exile attacks with attendant reprisals in the early 1960s, and pogroms against Hutu in Burundi all accentuated notions of ethnic identity and solidarity. Ethnicity formalized on identity cards and entrenched by political competition became the passkey for Hutu entrance into the modern world and a barrier to advancement for Tutsi. Left out of the national equation were Tutsi harried into exile in 1959, 1961, 1973, and 1978. Some were allowed to return, but most lived abroad for thirty years, a people with a country that would not accept them back.⁴⁸

International Intervention and Peacemaking in Rwanda

Eventually, the refugees did come back, not in the programmed return that the Habyarimana regime wanted, but in an insurgency led from Uganda on October 1, 1990, by the Rwandese Patriotic Front. What was to have been a quick overturning of a supposed weak and corrupt regime turned into an initial defeat for the RPF and then a protracted border war having all the elements of intractability.⁴⁹ States of the region and development partners rushed to quell the conflict and restore peace to the Rwandan people. But instead of a rapid settlement, a complex series of international interventions led eventually to the Arusha political negotiations and their result: the Arusha Accords of August 4, 1993. Within nine months, the negotiated peace went down with the crash of President Habyarimana’s plane as civil war and genocide erupted.

Why were the hopes for peace set within the framework of the Arusha Accords so quickly crushed by political realities? This question drives our backward look over those events.

DIPLOMATIC PERSPECTIVES

A partial answer is to recognize that mediators, facilitators, and Observers involved in the international intervention did not fully comprehend the context of the crisis.⁵⁰ Our purchase on core dynamics was deficient in several regards.

We were too sanguine about African societies’ vaunted capacity to endure. But the pressures of population growth, pluralistic politics, a deteriorating economy, and competition for power stretched Rwanda to its breaking point. In this context, pushing forward a peace agreement that required major structural change and redistribution of political and economic power brought not peace but civil war and genocide.

We misconstrued relations of force in a seemingly powerless country. The UN Security Council deployed a peacekeeping force of minimal size and mandate. When President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down, extremist partisans quickly proved that the UN force had neither the mandate nor the materiel to counter determined opposition to the Arusha process.

We glossed over the emotional roots of conflict, which, in the Rwandan case, were fear and loathing—fear that the “other,” once empowered, would be a perpetual oppressor, and the loathing that comes from devaluing one’s neighbor. The contenders were caught in an emotional recreation of self-images generated by diminution and demonization of the other side.

We underestimated the will to power. Determination to control the political process brought an impasse to power-sharing talks; commitment to ascendancy brought disequilibrium to military negotiations; unwillingness to compromise blocked the installation of the transitional institutions. So when the president was killed, Rwanda was left without institutional authority, a void quickly filled by extremists who would hold on to power at all costs, even the slaughter of innocents.

As we reflect on the historical complexity of Rwandan society, so also we should consider the capacity of the diplomatic intervention to restore peace. The mediators were focused on democratic practice and power sharing; the negotiating parties were contesting for power. Diplomats proposed classic peacemaking devices for bringing the parties together; the parties negotiated out of deeply rooted cultural dispositions. Thus, deficient understandings of Rwandan culture and traditional peacekeeping modalities framed international intervention in the Rwandan conflict. As an Observer remarked at the time, “We are, after all, diplomats, not social psychologists.”⁵¹

MODES OF REPRESENTATION

Interventions to bring peace to Rwanda moved through different modes.⁵² At the start of the Rwandan crisis, states with representation in Kigali negotiated with the Rwandan government, often comparing notes among embassies and following similar approaches but keeping to a traditional, bilateral mode. Meanwhile, states represented in Kampala held separate discussions with leaders of the Rwandese Patriotic Front.

When political negotiations started in Arusha in August 1992, a parallel diplomacy emerged based on the conference principle.⁵³ Here the Observer group worked together in evaluating issues and jointly sharing their views with the Facilitator or with the parties themselves. As this study will show, the understandings arrived at in Arusha through this conference system were often out of touch with the bilateral discourse going on in Kigali, in Kampala, or in the capitals of concerned states.

In August 1993, the conference negotiations produced the accords that took the peace process back to Rwanda under the aegis of the United Nations Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR). At this point, the conference was over and bilateral diplomacy was subsumed within a framework established by an international organization. The vital exchanges of bilateral negotiation and the collective wisdom of multilateral diplomacy became subservient to international collaboration in the project of implementing the accords and the “technical” program of peacekeeping as outlined and captained by the United Nations.⁵⁴

This intervention on behalf of international peace and security and in the interest of rehabilitating the Rwandan state took on the cultural expectations of international diplomacy: giving status to arguments from both sides, seeking a middle ground, and urging compromise with a view to establishing an institutionalized agreement between contending parties.

However, this was not just an international diplomatic intervention to restore international peace and security. It was also a humanitarian intervention to save lives and comfort the hungry, sick, and homeless while protecting individual human rights on both sides of the conflict. The international intervention in Rwanda was driven by concern for the displaced and refugees, as well as by preoccupation with statecraft in Central Africa. The central question was whether the intervention could achieve its objectives in each domain. Obviously, it grievously failed in both regards.

Does “Humanitarian Intervention” Work?

In an insightful analysis, Anthony Lang has looked at international interventions taken for purported humanitarian purposes and found them wanting. Such interventions are, he finds, essentially self-serving, undertaken to heighten the image of those intervening rather than to succor the helpless. Echoing Hedley Bull’s reflections on the ambiguous status of human rights within the state system, Lang concludes that humanitarian interventions concentrate more “on saving the state than on saving people.”⁵⁵ Lang is not the only one to point out the failures of international humanitarian intervention; a plethora of recent studies take up the theme, many pointing to Rwanda as the demonstrative case.⁵⁶ However, Lang was one of the first in the genre, and he makes more explicit than most the connection between the failure of humanitarian action and the structural nature of state action.

Lang’s thesis is that the space of international action is “the province of the states themselves,” and that the language of international politics, including discourses on international humanitarian interventions, “is constituted and controlled by state interpretations.”⁵⁷ Moreover, in humanitarian crises caused by collapsing state structures, intervening states are concerned with reestablishing the disintegrating state so as to repair the breach in the state system.⁵⁸ Once reestablished, a revived state also contests within the interstate arena.

Meanwhile, the interests of individual citizens, victims of the humanitarian crisis, are secondary to the playing out of initiatives designed to establish state identity and state persona (including that of human rights advocate) in the interstate arena. According to Lang, “State agents focus more on other state agents in an intervention rather than on people who need assistance.”⁵⁹ The dynamics of state agency in an international crisis thus intrinsically conflict with the humanitarian aims of intervention. Nicholas Onuf echoes the theme: “The institutional machinery which governments have authorized for the protection of human rights greatly favors states over nationals; in effect, states’ rights trump individual rights.”⁶⁰

A Look Forward

A glance forward at the record in this study will show that a state-centric agenda driven by a diplomatic ethos of negotiation, fair play, and power sharing prevailed over the claims of humanitarian intervention that would put the real needs of people first. Diplomats did seek policy responses that met human need. But they persisted in deferring to sovereign choice, in treating both sides as equal parties, in holding faith in power sharing, and in promoting democratic choice as the antidote to conflict. These approaches, reflecting the essential values of the twentieth century, obviously did not work.

Yet, internecine conflict was not new to world leaders, nor was the quest for peace.⁶¹ Moreover, international peacekeeping had built up considerable experience and expertise since the Second World War. Thus, the unrolling of the Rwandan peacekeeping peace process as recorded in the several chapters of this book parallels similar endeavors in international conflict resolution.

First, parties in any conflict need to accept the reality of each other’s presence on the ground and work through to a sustainable “ceasefire.” Once the shooting has stopped, negotiations on the future order ensue: debates about fundamental “law,” or negotiations on “power sharing.” But negotiations about principles, structure, or power often come, as they did in Rwanda, to an “impasse.” Getting past an impasse to a final settlement, an “endgame,” is both an art and impelling goal of international mediation. A transition to a peaceful, secure future should then valorize provisions of a final agreement. Instead, in Rwanda’s case, “things fell apart.” In the Rwandan story narrated here, a brief analysis of conflict resolution issues at stake fronts each chapter. At the end of each chapter, I list the lessons we learned from that segment of conflict mediation, with specific insights into the tragic Rwandan experience.

Rwanda was a terrain where states and international organizations projected their own interests and identities; where peacemakers misjudged the depth of animosity between parties; and where the will to power of the contenders eventually overwhelmed the limited international project to hold the peace process on course. Customary modes of peacemaking and peacekeeping failed, and misjudgments of the peacemaking context contributed to the scenario that engendered genocide. Attitudes and habits of diplomatic actors, deployed in different arenas and within varying modes, did not mitigate the crisis. The Arusha political negotiations became a prelude to genocide and a tragic lesson in a failed international humanitarian intervention.