Capitalism is violence: Rwanda 1994 Part 1

The seminal work on the 1994 mass slaughter in Rwanda has been done by the late Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch (HRW), who along with co-researchers in 1999 produced the book Leave None to Tell the Story. The common story that people know about Rwanda in 1994 is taken from this book and is summed up by a couple of paragraphs on the book’s first page.

In the thirteen weeks after April 6, 1994, at least half a million people perished in the Rwandan genocide, perhaps as many as three quarters of the Tutsi population. At the same time, thousands of Hutu were slain because they opposed the killing campaign and the forces directing it.1

Des Forges goes on to write that,

This genocide resulted from the deliberate choice of a modern elite to foster hatred and to keep itself in power.2

This is the most commonly held belief about Rwanda 1994, but there is a lot of info out there that would suggest that this story is completely wrong.

In Leave None to Tell the Story Des Forges goes on to write,

The necessary data have not been gathered but speculation about death tolls continues anyway, usually informed more by emotion than by fact.3

One of the main catalysts driving Des Forges to write Leave None to Tell the Story was her desire to see Rwandans tried in the International Criminal Court for their participation in the genocide. It is by now pretty clear that she and others at HRW produced data "informed more by emotion than by fact."

First of all the numbers Des Forges bases her assumptions on are fabrications. Des Forges does not provide a citation for the statistic of 500,000 Tutsi killed but Professors Allan Stam of the University of Michigan and Christian Davenport of the University of Notre Dame believe the statistic comes from HRW specialist William Seltzer. Seltzer, writes that 800,000 Rwandans were killed in 1994, 500,000 of them Tutsi. Stam and Davenport, who were working to create a statistical analysis to detail the scale and location of killings in Rwanda during 1994, questioned Seltzer asking him how he came up with this statistic. Seltzer replied,

the figure 'more than 500,000' was modeled on the notion that the estimate of 'about' or 'at least' 6,000,000 died in the Holocaust was sufficient for the Nuremburg prosecution. I can no longer recall why I settled on 500,000 as the lower anchor of my estimate

So apparently the numbers were created so that Rwandans could be prosecuted for the killings and have no basis in reality.4

So how many people did die? The Tutsi survivor support network Ibuka, which is composed of refugees from the conflict, estimates that 345,170 Tutsi were killed. Davenport and Stam after years of research and time spent in Rwanda have found that most likely upwards of 1 million people were killed.5 Yes it is true that Des Forges writes that “moderate” (an extremely misleading term) Hutu were killed during this period, but if this was a straight up genocide against the Tutsi then how is it that almost all of the people killed were Hutu? Were the 700,000 other Hutu who died all "moderate" Hutu? That is very dubious, and in addition Des Forges writes only that “thousands” of “moderate Hutu” were killed, not 700,000.

So we can confidently throw out part of Des Forges’ story of the genocide, that it was almost all Tutsi being killed, and that some much smaller number of “moderate Hutu” were also killed. But what about her contention that,

This genocide resulted from the deliberate choice of a modern elite to foster hatred and to keep itself in power.?

This is also doubtful. In the years leading up to 1994, the elite of Rwanda was facing massive social unrest. Thanks to the efforts of international development agencies such as the World Bank, Rwanda was the poorest country in the world, and its citizenry was well aware of the magnitude of corruption taking place amongst the ruling political party, the MRND. Peter Uvin writes in Aiding Violence : The Development Enterprise in Rwanda,

By the 1990s, the legitimacy of the elite was very low: it was generally seen as a corrupt, distant group, interested primarily in self-preservation and enrichments. Thus, contrary to a widespread vision of Rwandese peasants as obedient executioners of orders from above—even if these orders involved killing their neighbors—they should be seen, like all people, as independent actors, facing constraints, to be sure, but capable of making decisions.6

This summary of the situation from Uvin seems in line with the fact that the majority of people killed, by a good margin, were Hutu. The elite was endlessly fostering hatred of the Tutsi ethnic group, but almost all of the people killed were Hutu. Combine this with the atmosphere of civil unrest in the lead up to 1994 and it seems very doubtful that all of the killings, or even most of the killings in 1994 were orchestrated or instigated by a small elite. Rather as I will explain in subsequent articles, it seems that Rwandans killed each other in order to be able to feed themselves and their families or for reasons similar to this. In addition, if we want to find someone to blame for the killing, as Des Forges and HRW wanted to, we should look no further than Washington DC. That is where the World Bank is headquartered. Of course, HRW is a liberal organization based in America where prisons are for people of color. Rwandans are most definitely not white, but there are plenty of white World Bank employees, and all World Bank employees promote the interests of capital, we can see why one group is put on trial and another is not.

• 1 Forges, Alison Liebhafsky. "Introduction." In "Leave none to tell the story": genocide in Rwanda. New York: Human Rights Watch ;, 1999. 1.
• 2ibid
• 3Forges, Alison Liebhafsky. "Leave none to tell the story": genocide in Rwanda. New York: Human Rights Watch; 1999.
• 4 Stam, Allan. "Understanding the Rwandan Genocide." Lecture, from University of Michigan Ford Center for Political Studies, Ann Arbor, February 1, 2009.
• 5ibid
• 6 Uvin, Peter. "Political and Economic Crises and Radicalization of Society." In Aiding violence: the development enterprise in Rwanda. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1998. 68.