The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa. Rene Lemarchand
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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