Learning from the Past: Three Lessons from the Rwandan Genocide

Abstract

The past cannot be changed, but we can learn from it. The purpose of this article is to explore some of the lessons that can be learnt from the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. The first of these is that the génocidaires should not be dehumanised. This is simply to engage in the very process that made genocide possible in the first place. Rather, they should be given a voice. As the work of authors such as Hatzfield, McDoom, Mironko and Straus demonstrates, perpetrators’ stories can offer an important ‘insider’ perspective into events and add richness and texture to top-down elitist accounts of the genocide. The second lesson is that while it may be comforting to believe that genocide is only carried out by monsters and psychopaths – by people ‘not like us’ – the reality is that it is ordinary people who, under certain circumstances, commit genocide. Hence, it should not be seen as a crime that can only occur in ‘faraway’ places. The final lesson, which pertains to how we deal with the perpetrators of genocide and mass crimes, is that retributive justice is not a panacea in either post-genocide Rwanda or in post-conflict societies more generally. Perpetrators should be held accountable for their crimes, but criminal trials have limitations, particularly in facilitating reconciliation. Rather than relying exclusively on retributive justice, therefore, post-conflict societies should wherever possible seek to combine criminal trials with restorative justice mechanisms.

Keywords:

• gacaca
• genocide
• génocidaires
• post-conflict societies
• retributive justice
• restorative justice
• Rwanda

Notes

Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (1948) defines genocide as, ‘Many of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’.

Some scholars, however, have expressly sought to redress this. For example, objecting to the fact that hitherto Indian history has been written from a colonialist and elitist point of view, the Subaltern Studies Group seeks to rewrite the history of colonial India from the distinct point of view of the masses (see, for example, Guha 1994; Guha and Spivak 1988).

Important exceptions exist, however. In her book on Bosnia, for example, Bringa explains, ‘this book is concerned with the voices behind the headlines, the lived lives behind the images of endless rows of refugees and war victims deprived of past and future, defined by others solely in terms of what they have lost – as refugees (1995:5); and in his book Life Laid Bare, Hatzfield interviews survivors of the Rwandan genocide, in order to bring their ‘astonishing stories’ to the reader (2006:5).

Outside the particular case of Rwanda, two significant exceptions are Browning (1992) and Waller (2007). According to Matthäus, Browning's book – which focuses on the men of Order Police Reserve Battalion 101, who took an active part in implementing the ‘Final Solution’ in Poland – ‘put the problem of perpetrator motivation where it had never been before: at the top of the historiographic agenda’ (2005:206).

On the eve of the genocide, Nyamata district had a population of as many as 119,000 and a post-genocide population of just 50,000.

According to Stanton, uni-causal models are among ‘the least productive explanations for genocide …’ (2007:vii).

Orth, for example, maintains that, ‘… one must remember that Rwanda is a highly ordered society where people respect authority due to the power to exert harm … Much of the population, especially in the northwest, perceived their leaders as legitimate, even as the leaders extolled the people to kill. This literally put blood on everyone's hands …’ (2006:240).

Mironko notes the relative absence of economic explanations in his interviewees’ accounts. He also acknowledges, however, that such absence ‘does not indicate anything about the presence of these conditions on the ground in 1994’ (2006:168).

The example of Goran Jelisić, a Bosnian Serb sentenced by the ICTY to forty years’ imprisonment for war crimes in Brčko, highlights this. In May 1992, Jelisić allegedly executed more than 100 prisoners in a period of eighteen days, although only thirteen of these killings were actually proven. Despite the brutal nature of his crimes, ‘The defence correctly pointed out that Jelisić acted as an executioner only during those 18 days in May – not before and not after’ (Drakulić 2004:71). What therefore happened to Jelisić during those eighteen days? According to Drakulić, ‘Perhaps what had changed was not the person, but the circumstances … For the first time in his short life, Goran Jelisić was in a position of power … He was given a pistol and the freedom to use it, and he became intoxicated by the new possibilities’ (2004:72–3).

Mironko, for example, distinguishes between, inter alia, ‘1) those who planned and oversaw the genocide (the “architects”), 2) those who commanded the army (“FAR”), 3) the local militias (“Interahamwe”), and 4) subordinates who carried out their orders’ (2006:163).

According to one Rwandan génocidaire, ‘we no longer considered the Tutsis as humans or even as creatures of God’ (Hatzfield 2005:136).

To cite Baum, ‘Dehumanization overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder’ (2008:33).

This is echoed by Halpern and Weinstein, who maintain that, ‘reconciliation requires the rehumanization of the “other”, and for that to occur, the “other” must be vested with qualities that are familiar and accepted’ (2004:307).

Yet as Allcock points out, ‘if “the Balkans” have come to signify conflict and fragmentation, this is because the region has been the arena in which the larger conflicts of European powers have been concentrated and, to some extent, conducted by proxy’ (2000:24).

Allcock, for example, maintains that, ‘perhaps it is true that Balkan societies are more violent than “western” societies, perhaps not. Nevertheless, we should not overlook the possibility that our perception of difference rests in part upon the existence within “western” societies of mechanisms which systematically suppress the open portrayal of certain kinds of violence when they occur “at home”‘(2000:383).

According to one victim of the genocide in Rwanda, ‘those who did this were not demons or drug-crazed interahamwe, as the Whites kept saying. They were neighbours with whom we used to chat while walking to the market’ (Hatzfield 2006:113); and Cramer maintains vis-à-vis the Holocaust that, ‘Hitler's willing executioners [a reference to the work of Goldhagen 1997] were typically extraordinary only in their ordinariness, in how disturbingly like the rest of us they were’ (2006:25).

According to Straus, ‘… in the Rwandan case, genocide included the participation of hundreds of thousands of individuals, of whom the majority had no prior history of committing lethal violence’ (2006:2).

Of course there were criminals who fought in the war in the former Yugoslavia, most notoriously the bank robber Arkan (Željko Raznjatović) and his infamous ‘Tigers’, a paramilitary organisation ‘composed of as many as ten-thousand well-armed, well-trained gangsters, ex-cons and soccer fans …’ (Stewart 2007:8). While the ‘Tigers’ committed despicable war crimes, for example in Vukovar, acts of extreme violence were also committed by ‘ordinary’ people, men like Duško Tadić (the first person to be tried at the ICTY) who before the war had been a karate teacher in the Bosnian town of Kozarac. War essentially transformed ordinary people and their ordinary everyday lives in the most tragic way. To cite the late Miroslav Deronjić, the former president of the crisis staff in Bratunac municipality who was sentenced by the ICTY in 2004 to ten years’ imprisonment, ‘instead of our lives, the only true value we had, we began to make up and accept some other values. Instead of ordinary words that we knew, we began to speak some great words: State, nation, religion’ (Deronjić 2004:4).

The Croatian writer Drakulić thus observes that, ‘The more I have occupied myself with the individual cases of war criminals [in the former Yugoslavia], the less I believe them to be monsters’ (2004:167).

Mironko, for example, remarks of his interviewees, ‘what emerges overall, though, is how ordinary these killings seem to the perpetrators and how casually they still seem to regard their participation in them’ (2006:184). The manner in which normal and abnormal become conflated in situations of mass killing has also been remarked upon in other contexts. For example, in his book on Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of the German Order Police which, in 1942, shot dead some 1,500 Jews in the Polish village of Józefów, Browning notes, ‘As the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 demonstrates, mass murder and routine had become one. Normality itself had become exceedingly abnormal’ (1992:xix).

A euphemism for killing with a machete.

Staub notes that, ‘Certain characteristics of a culture and the structure of a society, combined with great difficulties of life and social disorganization, are the starting point for genocide and mass killing’ (2007:4).

Baum, however, maintains that, ‘Bipolar societies that lack mixed categories, such as Rwanda and Burundi, are the most likely to have genocide’ (2008:33).

Cautioning against foreign involvement in the former Yugoslavia, for example, the former US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger maintained that, ‘if people are intent on killing each other under conditions in which it is almost impossible for the outside world to do anything without losing itself many lives, then my answer is: “I'm sorry, but they are going to have to kill each other until they wear themselves out and have enough sense to stop”’ (cited in Fleming 2000:1219); and according to Lord David Owen, the former EU envoy to the former Yugoslavia, ‘history points to a tradition in the Balkans of a readiness to solve disputes by the taking up of arms and acceptance of the forceful or even negotiated movement of people as the result of war. It points to a culture of violence …’ (1996:3).

Rather than focusing on difference, therefore, we should instead focus on our common humanity. To cite Arendt, ‘in political terms, the idea of humanity, excluding no people and assigning a monopoly of guilt to no one, is the only guarantee that one “superior race” after another may not feel obligated to follow the “natural law” of the right of the powerful, and exterminate “inferior races unworthy of survival”; so that at the end of an “imperialistic age”, we should find ourselves in a stage which would make the Nazis look like crude precursors of future political methods’ (1991:282).

‘Restorative justice views crime as a harm to individuals, their neighbourhoods, the surrounding community, and even the offender. Crimes produce injuries that must be repaired by those who caused the injury. In this sense, crimes are more than a violation of law, and justice is more than punishment of the guilty. Restorative justice strives to promote healing through structured communication processes among victims, offenders, community representatives and government officials. It also strives to accomplish these goals in a manner that promotes peace and order for the community, vindication for the victim, and recompense for the offender. Under this restorative perspective, justice is not based on punishment inflicted but the extent to which harms have been repaired and future harms prevented (Gilbert and Settles 2007:7).

Stover and Weinstein do admit, however, that ‘… it is possible this could change over time’ (2004:323).

According to Minow, ‘reconciliation is not the goal of criminal trials except in the most abstract sense’ (1998:26). Yet both the ICTY and the ICTR identify reconciliation as one of their objectives. UN Security Council Resolution 827 (25 May 1993), which set up the ICTY, does not actually refer to reconciliation. However, in the Tribunal's first annual report submitted to the UN Security Council in July 1994, the then ICTY president, Antonio Cassese, states that, ‘the role of the Tribunal cannot be overemphasized. Far from being a vehicle for revenge, it is a tool for promoting reconciliation and restoring true peace’ (1994:12). The claim that the Tribunal can contribute to peace and reconciliation in the former Yugoslavia is also made on its website (http://www.un.org/icty/cases-e/factsheets/achieve-e.htm). In contrast, UN Security Council Resolution 955 (8 November 1994), which established the ICTR, explicitly states that, ‘the prosecution of persons responsible for serious violations of international humanitarian law’ will ‘contribute to the process of national reconciliation and to the restoration and maintenance of peace’. One possible explanation for this difference in wording is that the ICTR was established in a post-conflict environment, in contrast to the ICTY. Thus, in the latter case, the UN Security Council was concentrating on achieving negative peace (the cessation of hostilities), while in the former it was also interested in achieving positive peace (reconciliation). Neither the ICTY nor the ICTR, however, has defined exactly what it means by reconciliation – interpersonal reconciliation or national reconciliation, ‘thin’ reconciliation (‘… to reconcile, different subjects must agree only “to render no longer opposed”, which means sharing a present that is nonrepetitive’ [Borneman 2002:282]) or ‘thick’ reconciliation (‘the restoration of relationships’ [Rigby 2006:47] and ‘a changed psychological orientation toward the other’ [Staub 2005:301]) – and neither has elaborated upon how exactly this goal is to be realised.

Amstutz thus highlights ‘the inadequacy of the criminal justice system itself in dealing with society-wide atrocities’ (2006:553).

In the literature on peace-building and transitional justice, countless definitions of the term ‘reconciliation’ can be found. It seems that no two scholars agree upon what exactly reconciliation is and what it entails. Thus, according to Weinstein and Stover, reconciliation ‘is a murky concept with multiple meanings’ (2004:5). This author, however, favours the definition proffered by Rigby. For him, reconciliation is ‘focused on the restoration of relationships. As such, reconciliation can embrace both initiatives intended to bring about socio-economic and political institutional changes that might facilitate the restoration of new relationships, and initiatives aimed at changing people's perceptions of themselves and former enemies such that new constructive relationships might be created’ (2006:47).

Eltringham notes that, ‘… certain members of the current political class in Rwanda appear to globalise guilt according to ethnic identity’ (2004: 69).

Eltringham cites a Rwandan pastor who reported, ‘people ask, “who can we forgive when we don't know exactly who has wronged us?”’ (2004:75).

The ICTY is located 900 miles outside of the Balkans, in the Netherlands, while the ICTR is based in Arusha, in Tanzania. In contrast, the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) is situated in Freetown, the Sierra Leonean capital.

Unlike the ICTR, national courts in Rwanda can sentence an accused to death. The anomalous position is thereby created whereby the granting of a death sentence depends not on the gravity of the crime, but on whether the defendant happens to be tried at the ICTR or in a national court.

The Organic Law for the Creation of Gacaca Jurisdictions was adopted by Rwanda's parliament in February 2001.

Category two to four suspects include perpetrators, conspirators and those who destroyed property.

Tiemessen, however, notes that, ‘the Government of Rwanda does not pretend that Gacaca today strictly adheres to its indigenous form [i.e. as a mechanism to moderate disputes vis-à-vis land use, land rights, cattle, inheritance rights, and so on]. Officials argue that its reinvention takes the form that it does to better accommodate for the severity of the crimes in its mandate and volume of cases to be tried’ (2004:61).

Daly observes that, ‘From the outset, the transitional Rwandan government of national unity has been committed to principles of retributive justice and has consistently declined to pursue reconstructive projects as its primary response to the genocide; it views reconciliation as an inadequate substitute for prosecution’ (2002:367).

For Waldorf, ‘The real danger of gacaca is that it will wind up ascribing collective guilt to most Hutu’ (2008:431).

According to Zehr, one of its leading advocates, restorative justice ‘begins with a concern for victims and their needs’ (2002:22).