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Chapter 4

Genocide in the Great Lakes: Which Genocide? Whose Genocide?

The title of this chapter is deliberately provocative. Can there be any doubt about the responsibility of the government of the late President Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda for what has been described as the biggest genocide of the end of the century? Can one seriously question the active involvement of high-ranking officials, the presidential guard, the local authorities, and the militias in the planning and execution of a carnage that took the lives of an estimated 800,000 people, three fourths of them Tutsi? Would anyone deny the critical role played by the Hutu-controlled media in providing incitements to genocide? The answer is clearly in the negative.

But there is another side to the story, inscribed in the very different perceptions that Hutu politicians and intellectuals have of what is and what is not genocide, who the real génocidaires are and who the victims are. Questions have also been raised by Western observers as to whether the Tutsi invaders, under the banner of the RPF, were not involved in the genocidal killing of innocent Hutu civilians. More recently, human rights groups, most notably Human Rights Watch,¹ have provided crushing evidence of massive human rights violations against Hutu refugees in eastern Congo by units of the all-Tutsi RPA, thus adding a third genocidal massacre to the record.

Regardless of whether it makes any sense, morally or intellectually, to hold a brief for the Hutu as a group, the issues it raises cannot be dismissed out of hand: Would the genocide have occurred if the RPF invasion had not taken place, threatening both the heritage of the 1959-62 Hutu revolution and the state born of the revolution? Why should the genocide of the Tutsi, and their presumptive allies among the Hutu population, mask the countless atrocities committed by the RPF in the course of their military operations in Rwanda? Can one turn a blind eye to the systematic killing of tens of thousands of Hutu refugees in eastern Congo by the RPA?

And what of Burundi? Can one seriously maintain, against every shred of evidence, that the only genuine genocide suffered by this God-forsaken land was the genocide of Tutsi by Hutu in October 1993? If, as Presidents Museveni and Kabila insist, historical depth is the essential condition for a fair investigation of the 1997 massacres of refugees, why not expand the mandate of the UN Commission of Inquiry back to the 1972 genocide of Hutu by Tutsi, to bring out the chain of causality between past and present atrocities?

These are not meant to be rhetorical questions. They go to the heart of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict and bring to light important dimensions of the continuing crisis in the Great Lakes. What makes these questions so highly controversial is not that there are no answers but that the answers given by Hutu and Tutsi point to radically different interpretations of the same ghastly events. The focus here is on the distortions inscribed in the cognitive maps of both victims and perpetrators—that is, memory—in response to the exigencies of the moment, in turn providing justification for further killings.

To move beyond the realm of conventional historical description is essential if we are to grasp properly the moral rupture involved in genocide. By the same token, failure to take this critical aspect into account—how the horrors of genocide profoundly alter the image that one has of the other—must be seen as a key factor behind the inability of “peacemakers” to come to terms with the psychological roots of ethnic conflict. The case of Burundi—the site of a fourth, yet seldom mentioned genocide—is a case in point.

A Forgotten Genocide

No other country on the continent has received more assiduous attention from so many conflict-resolution experts than Burundi over the last three years—and with so few results.² Since the assassination of its first elected Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, at the hands of the army on October 23, 1993, countless conferences, seminars, workshops, and peace missions have been organized by governmental and non-governmental organizations to prevent the country from sinking ever deeper into chaos. Whether the aim was to “structure the peace process,” “initiate a dialogue to break the power of terror,” “encourage the participation of citizens in peace-making,” or “confidence-building,” the hope was that sanity would ultimately prevail, that a compromise would be reached, and the killing would stop.

That so many well-intended peacemakers failed to come anywhere near achieving any of these objectives is not too surprising if one considers the depth of the antagonisms pitting Hutu against Tutsi. The anomaly lies in the failure of the peacemakers to see genocide as the central issue that underlies civil strife in both Burundi and Rwanda. The 1972 genocide in Burundi, like the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, is indeed the cataclysmic event which lies at the root of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict. This is where the historical experience of Burundi (and Rwanda) differs markedly from that of most other war-torn societies in Africa. Dealing with “post-conflict” situations is one thing; healing the wounds of genocide is a very different matter.

Amazingly, the 1972 killings of Hutu by Tutsi—what Stephen Weissman calls “the first clear genocide since the Holocaust”—have sunk into near oblivion.³ The most obvious explanation for this extraordinary case of historical amnesia is the conspiracy of silence, which to this day surrounds the circumstances of the killings, their scale, and their impact on subsequent developments.⁴ Remarkably few observers seem to realize that the first genocide to be recorded in the annals of independent Africa occurred not in Rwanda but in Burundi, in the wake of an aborted Hutu-instigated uprising that caused the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of Tutsi civilians. Estimates of the number of Hutu killed during the ensuing repression range from 100,000 to 200,000. The killings lasted from April to November 1972, resulting in the death or flight into exile of almost every educated Hutu. Day after day truckloads of Hutu young men—primary and secondary school children, university students, teachers, agronomists, and civil servants—were sent to their graves.

Why dredge out of the shadows of history a carnage that took place twenty-five years ago? Because the 1972 genocide in Burundi provides the historical thread that enables us to make sense of subsequent developments. It explains the anti-Tutsi backlash in Rwanda that paved the way for the seizure of power by Juvénal Habyarimana in 1973 and the ascendency of northerners; it explains the rise of a radical political movement among those Hutu refugees who sought asylum in Tanzania (the Parti pour la Libération du Peuple Hutu, better known by its acronym, Palipehutu); and the very difficult problems posed by the resettlement of refugees in the days following President Melchior Ndadaye's election in 1993. Above all, it helps us understand why, after twenty-five years of unfettered control of the state, the army, the schools, and the nation's wealth, many Tutsi simply refused to contemplate a transfer of power to Hutu claimants, and why, ultimately, so few shrank from the use of violence to reverse the verdict of the polls.

Most importantly, memories of the 1972 genocide are the critical frame of reference for understanding the violent reaction of many Hutu against their Tutsi neighbors upon hearing of Ndadaye's assassination. Perhaps as many as 20,000 Tutsi men, women, and children were hacked to pieces or burned alive in October and November 1993 in an uncontrolled outburst of rage—a tragedy inseparable from the fact that for many Hutu on the hills, the death of Ndadaye was the harbinger of a replay of 1972. It is estimated that an equal number of Hutu were killed by the all-Tutsi army in the course of an equally blind and brutal repression, causing some 300,000 panic-stricken Hutu to seek refuge across the border into Rwanda. It is easy to see in such circumstances why these refugees needed little prodding to join Rwanda's militias, the interhamwe, when the genocide got under way. What emerges from all this is not just a peculiarly ignominious episode in the history of Burundi, but one whose repercussions on recent events in Rwanda and in Burundi has been profound.

In what must be seen as the epitome of “inversionary discourse” (to use David Apter's phrase), today the concept of genocide is widely used as a form of discourse by Tutsi extremists to discredit their Hutu opponents, the better to consolidate their grip on what is left of the state. The 1972 genocide of Hutu by Tutsi has been obliterated from their collective memory. If the term genocide has any relevance to the Burundi situation, it can only apply to the massacre of Tutsi in 1993. Thus, by projecting the 1994 Rwanda genocide into Burundi, a new version of the country's history emerges, in which one genocide is forgotten (1972), and another invented (1993). The political implications are clear: only the Hutu politicians qualify as “génocidaires,” and none are more compromised in the killings of Tutsi than the top leadership of the Hutu-led Front Démocratique du Burundi (Frodebu). According to one version of what happened in 1993, since the Frodebu was all along involved in a gigantic plot to wipe out all the Tutsi, the army had no choice but to intervene and kill Ndadaye, the chief planner of the genocide, in order to prevent an even more devastating bloodbath: “what happened to our country is not accident, but a catastrophe engineered by the Frodebu.”⁵ In plain language, don't blame the army; the fault lies entirely with the Frodebu. Thus rewritten, the history of Burundi can be conveniently used to rule out all possibilities of compromise with Frodebu politicians.

Mythmaking: Through the Lens of Ethnicity

No group has a monopoly on mythmaking. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, the manipulation of the past in an effort to control the present was certainly very much in evidence in the writings of some Hutu ideologues associated with the Palipehutu, a stridently anti-Tutsi party born in 1980 in the refugee camps of Tanzania.⁶ Genocide, we argued, leaves a profound imprint on the processes by which people write, or rewrite history, on what is being remembered, and what is being forgotten. What is being remembered by many Hutu is an apocalypse that has forever altered their perceptions of the Tutsi, now seen as the historic incarnation of evil; what many Tutsi have forgotten, or refuse to acknowledge, is that they, and not the Hutu, were the first to use genocide in order to consolidate their hold on the state.

Nor is Burundi the exception. Much the same sort of hiatus between perception and reality can be seen in Rwanda and eastern Congo. Consider the case of Rwanda: astounding as it may sound, to this day many Hutu will vehemently deny the reality of a genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 people (of whom approximately one fourth were Hutu from the south-central regions). Not that they would deny the existence of massacres; that they were systematically planned and executed is what they contest. The war, they say, was the principal cause of the massacres. Had the RPF not invaded the country on October 1, 1990, the massacres would not have taken place. The onus of guilt, therefore, lies entirely with the RPF.

Rejecting this extreme view (even though most would agree that there is reason to view the RPF invasion as the root cause of the genocide, just as the abortive Hutu uprising was also the triggering factor behind the 1972 genocide in Burundi), others among the Hutu community in exile claim that there was not one but two genocides, a genocide of Tutsi by Hutu and a “countergenocide” of Hutu by Tutsi.⁷ The first received sustained attention in the media; the other went virtually unreported. The RPF troops, they claim, were wholly responsible for the wanton killing of thousands of Hutu civilians in the course of their military campaign, as they were for the killing of some 5,000 unarmed Hutu refugees at Kibeho in 1995, and more recently, for wiping out tens of thousands of refugees in eastern Congo. In short, the greatest disservice that the international community could render to the cause of peace, they say, would be to impute genocide only to the Hutu, as if the “good guy-bad guy” dichotomy were largely synonymous with the Hutu-Tutsi split.

Typically, and with utter disregard for the evidence, Tutsi officials generally advance the following counterargument: (a) although there were Hutu civilians among battlefield casualties, at no time have RPF troops engaged in cold-blooded executions of civilian populations; (b) the Kibeho killings involved at the most 300 persons, most of whom were former interhamwe, which is why they refused to return to their communes of origin; and (c) the search and destroy operations conducted in eastern Congo against Hutu refugees were targeted against interhamwe and ex-FAR and did not involve civilians.

Although the evidence collected by impartial observers casts serious doubts on each of these assertions, the more important point to stress is the tendency on the part of a growing number of Tutsi elites to substitute collective guilt for individual responsibility and to affix the label “genocidaire” to the Hutu community as a group. It is at this level that an ominous parallel emerges between the discourse of Tutsi extremists in Rwanda, within and outside the army, and their counterparts in Burundi: by attributing responsibility for genocide not to individuals but to a whole community—lumping together the perpetrators of genocide and innocent civilians, including those Hutu who risked their own lives to save those of their Tutsi neighbors—the result has been to create those very conditions that impel some Hutu to become rebels and ultimately “genocidaires.”

What it all means from the standpoint of everyday relations between Hutu and Tutsi is nowhere more painfully conveyed than in the commentary of an American aid official to this writer after his visit to Bujumbura in September 1997:

The more I deal with Burundi, the more I see and feel that the Hutu-Tutsi divide is not bridgeable in the foreseeable future, and may even have been deepened by events of recent years. A sort of caste system is definitely there, and those who have been accustomed to being on top are ready to do anything to maintain the social and political order as it is.…It is disturbing to me to see the very disdain even ordinary Tutsi have for Hutu, and how the ordinary Hutu meekly accept their status. I see how the ordinary Tutsi read the riot act to ordinary Hutu for even the most mundane infractions, or for nothing at all, when they would never do the same to another Tutsi. The poor Hutu just stand there and take it.…Another time I was in the Bwiza quarter with photocopies of photos appearing in your book. I was showing these to people, and they were commenting on them. The last photo was of President Ndadaye. When this photo appeared, all the small children surrounding us pounced quickly on it and began hitting it. I was really taken aback by this visceral, hateful reaction and greatly disturbed as these children tore the photo into dozens of pieces. How have even the small children learned such hate? What does this say about peace and reconciliation in our lifetime in Burundi?…The people in the neighborhood still relish talking about how the pregnant Tutsi woman married to a Hutu man living in this compound was burnt to death. They recount in gory detail how the flesh burnt until the foetus was visible.⁸

Violence as Discourse

If the symptoms of Burundi's “sickness” are easy to detect, the causes of the malady are more difficult to identify. To invoke ethnic hatreds does not carry us very far. Asking ourselves what impels people to kill each other brings to mind Paul Richard's analysis of violence in Sierra Leone as a form of discourse which, in the absence of alternative outlets, seeks expression in bloodshed. To quote:⁹

War itself is a type of text—a violent attempt to tell a story or to ‘cut in on the conversation' of others from whose company the belligerents feel excluded. Understanding war as text and discourse is not an intellectual affectation but a vital necessity, because only when ‘war talk' is fully comprehended is it possible for conciliators to outline more pacific options in softer tones.

David Apter makes a somewhat similar argument: “Violence,” he writes, “is itself a mode of interpretation, with interpretation leading to violent events: protest, insurrection, terrorism.”¹⁰

Looked at from this perspective, a certain logic begins to emerge in what otherwise could be dismissed as a case of tribal insanity. It is a logic that challenges some of the myths discussed earlier (e.g., the myth of Hutu as global genocidaires or the myth of Ndadaye's assassination as a preemptive strike made necessary to save the Tutsi from an impending genocide); by the same token, however, the violence through which this “text” expresses itself, in turn becomes the source of an “interpretation,” which generates further violence.

Let us return for a moment to Burundi and take a closer look at the outburst of anti-Tutsi violence triggered by the news of Ndadaye's death in 1993: inscribed in the unspeakable atrocities¹¹ committed by Hutu against Tutsi was a very clear interpretation of Ndadaye's assassination as the harbinger of a replay of the 1972 carnage. In the words of one Hutu, shortly after the news of Ndadaye's death had reached his commune, “back in 1972 they got us, but this time they won't!” (en 1972 ils nous ont eus; ils ne nous auront plus!). Again: “since 1972 it is our blood that's being spilled! Now we hear that President Ndadaye has been killed. If they did that, that means we are next.”¹² What all this adds up to is an unshakable conviction that the 1972 scenario was about to repeat itself.

From the vantage point of extremist elements within the Tutsi community, such an interpretation carries little or no conviction. The Tutsi “text” conveys a very different scenario, which might be summed up as follows: the wanton killing of innocent Tutsi families by their Hutu neighbors is traceable to a carefully planned attempt to annihilate the Tutsi community; the brains behind this dastardly plot are the Frodebu leaders; the most dangerous of the Frodebistes are those elements who joined Leonard Nyangoma's National Council for the Defense of Democracy (CNDD) and its armed wing, the FDD; only by physically eliminating the genocidaires within and outside the Frodebu can the Tutsi minority protect itself against genocide. Thus, with the Rwanda scenario held up as an omen of what the future holds in store, anticipation of genocide becomes justification for killing the potential génocidaires. There can be little question about the fear of the Tutsi minority that, if given the opportunity, the Hutu would not hesitate a moment to wipe them out, as happened in Rwanda. Meanwhile, as the number of Hutu officials killed increases, the threat of retaliation rises in proportion.¹³

By imputing genocidal motives to many key Frodebu leaders, by using scare tactics and assassination to exclude them from positions of responsibility in the National Assembly and the government, and by consistently denying them the status of legitimate interlocutors in the ongoing search for a negotiated solution; their accusers in effect gave them no other choice than to have recourse to violence and indeed genocide: a case in point is the horrendous killing of over 300 innocent Tutsi in Bugendana, on July 20, 1996, by bands of Hutu terrorists; such gratuitous carnage cannot be described otherwise than as a genocidal massacre.¹⁴

With the growing polarization of ethnic feelings, extremists at both ends of the spectrum are redoubling their efforts to make their voices heard, most of the time violently. On the Hutu side, Leonard Nyan-goma's CNDD insists that peace and reconciliation are contingent upon a return to the status quo ante, that is to the pre-1993 coup situation, when the Frodebu held a majority of the seats in parliament, in government, and in the provincial administration. Any suggestion that power sharing is the quickest path to reconciliation is rejected out of hand as unacceptable. Not only is the 1993 coup seen as a flagrant breach of constitutional legality; so, also, are the subsequent powersharing arrangements worked out by party representatives. Buyoya's coup of July 1996 merely prolongs the state of illegality created by the 1993 putsch. To paraphrase Richards, cutting in on the conversation of others (i.e., mainly Frodebistes and Upronistes) from whose company he feels excluded, Nyangoma's position can be reduced to the following propositions: (a) one does not negotiate with assassins; (b) the men responsible for Ndadaye's assassination must be brought to justice; and (c) nothing short of a return to the pre-coup legality can bring peace to the country.

Tutsi extremists, likewise, reject any thought of power sharing, but for different reasons. Nyangoma's mantra that one does not negotiate with criminals finds an echo in the Tutsi militia's insistence that one does not negotiate with génocidaires, a position also endorsed by the extremist wing of the predominantly Tutsi Union pour le Progrès National (Uprona). Because the label is now used to designate almost every Frodebu politician, as well as the CNDD/FDD leadership, it is difficult to see how a negotiated solution can be arrived at when virtually every Hutu of any standing is excluded from the negotiation by virtue of his participation in an alleged genocide.

The notion of collective guilt is the principal obstacle to national reconciliation. To hold all Tutsi collectively responsible for human rights violations is hardly more convincing than to assume that the hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees in eastern Congo were all involved in the 1994 genocide. Nothing is more specious than the argument that after the destruction of the refugee camps in November 1996 and the return of perhaps as many as half a million refugees to Rwanda, the only Hutu left behind were the génocidaires and therefore, that it was entirely legitimate for the Rwandan army to kill them to prevent them from doing further harm. And yet this is precisely the subliminal “text” that underlies the “cleansing” operations of the Rwandan military in eastern Congo. In healing, dealing, and coming to terms with the crises in Burundi and Rwanda, two different strategies are being tested: one focuses on the concept of healing and draws its inspiration from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu; the other puts the emphasis on the pursuit of negotiations aimed at a power-sharing formula. Though by no means mutually exclusive, neither strategy has yet given proper attention to the different versions of the “truth” about genocide, which may be the reason why the results, so far, have been somewhat less than impressive.

The limitations of power sharing as a way of promoting overarching cooperation at the elite level are nowhere more cruelly evident than in the disastrous outcome of the so-called Government Convention of September 1994. After endless rounds of negotiations it was finally agreed that 55 percent of cabinet posts and civil service positions would go to the Hutu-dominated Forces du Changement Démocratique (FCD)—of which the Frodebu was the key component—and 45 percent to the Tutsi-controlled Coalition des Partis Politiques de l'Opposition (CPPO)—led by the Uprona—while vesting all decision-making powers in a National Security Council (NSC) made up of a majority of CPPO elements. That the convention turned out to be a less than ideal solution is not surprising if one considers that the net result was to rob the Frodebu of its electoral victory while reducing the constitution to a mere scrap of paper. As Filip Reyntjens correctly noted, “the Government Convention is the institutional translation of the October 1993 coup: the constitution has been shelved and the outcome of both the presidential and parliamentary elections swept aside as the president and parliament are placed under the tutelage of an unconstitutional body.”¹⁵ It is one thing to share power and quite another to surrender power under the pressure of extremist militias and urban mobs.

It is in Rwanda that healing strategies have been applied most consistently, if not always successfully, by church groups. At the heart of such strategies is the belief that unless people are willing to confess their crimes and ask forgiveness, there can be no basis for reconciliation. Negotiations, no matter how carefully orchestrated, are no substitute for healing. In the words of Frank Chikane, former Secretary-General of the South African Conference of Churches, “negotiations can result from political pressures or from a mutual decision by parties to avoid a war because the costs are too great. This does not necessarily mean that the parties have had a change of heart—they are simply relocating the battleground to the negotiation table.”¹⁶