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