Prelude to Genocide

Arusha, Rwanda, and the Failure of Diplomacy

David Rawson

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780821446508
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As the initial US observer, David Rawson participated in the 1993 Rwandan peace talks at Arusha, Tanzania. Later, he served as US ambassador to Rwanda during the last months of the doomed effort to make them hold. Despite the intervention of concerned states in establishing a peace process and the presence of an international mission, UNAMIR, the promise of the Arusha Peace Accords could not be realized. Instead, the downing of Rwandan president Habyarimana's plane in April 1994 rekindled the civil war and opened the door to genocide.

In Prelude to Genocide, Rawson draws on declassified documents and his own experiences to seek out what went wrong. How did the course of political negotiations in Arusha and party wrangling in Kigali, Rwanda, bring to naught a concentrated international effort to establish peace? And what lessons are there for other international humanitarian interventions? The result is a commanding blend of diplomatic history and analysis that is a milestone read on the Rwandan crisis and on what happens when conflict resolution and diplomacy fall short.

Published in partnership with the ADST-DACOR Diplomats and Diplomacy Series.

NOTES

Documents with the notation (AC) are from the author’s collection, archived at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon.

PROLOGUE

1. The common English adjective for Rwanda is “Rwandan”; however, in their own documents, the Front keeps the French spelling “Rwandese,” as in Rwandese Patriotic Front and Rwandese Patriotic Army. This study keeps to the adjective form that the Front has chosen.

2. By “international humanitarian intervention,” I mean actions by states and interstate actors that abridge national sovereignty (intervene) in the interest of preserving human life and restoring peace in a particular country. Finnemore similarly defines humanitarian intervention as “deploying military force across borders for the purpose of protecting foreign nationals from man-made violence.” Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs about the Use of Force (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 53. Fassin argues that natural disasters and human conflict “are now embedded in the same global logic of intervention . . . and the conflation of political and moral registers.” Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi, eds., Contemporary States of Disaster (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 10. My definition admits of any actions of “coercive inducement” that abrogate sovereign jurisdiction. See Donald C. F. Daniel and Bradd C. Hayes, with Chantall de Jonge Oudraat, Coercive Inducement and the Containment of International Crises (Washington, DC: The United States Institute of Peace, 1999), 21–24.

3. Throughout this study, the capitalized terms “Observer,” “Facilitator,” or “Convener” indicate an official status at the Arusha peace negotiations, as distinguished from other observers, facilitators, or conveners in other situations.

4. The document, formally entitled Peace Agreement between the Government of the Republic of Rwanda and the Rwandese Patriotic Front, is commonly called the “Arusha Accords” since it incorporates seven different protocols signed at different times in the Arusha peace process.

5. For details on the coup, see Filip Reyntjens, Pouvoir et droit au Rwanda: Droit public et évolution politique, 1916–1973 (Tervuren: Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale, 1985), 506–8. Reyntjens records that Habyarimana, initially loyal to President Kayibanda, had his hand forced first by Kabyibanda’s attempt to purge the administration of suspect northern elements and then by the impatience of other officers, especially Lt. Col. Alexis Kanyarengwe. The Committee for Peace and National Unity had seven of eleven officers from Rwanda’s northern prefectures.

6. The manifesto and statutes for the movement were published on the second anniversary of the coup. See Mouvement Revolutionnaire National pour le Développement, Manifeste et Statut, Kigali, 5 Juillet, 1995 (AC).

7. Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (Boston: Da Capo, 2014), chap. 14.

8. Cited in Michael Ignatieff, “The Art of Witness,” New York Review of Books 42, no. 5 (March 23, 1995). See also Czesław Miłosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983).

9. Joseph C. Miller, “Beyond Blacks, Bondage, and Blame: Why a Multi-centric World History Needs Africa,” Historically Speaking 6, no. 2 (November/December 2004): 7, 11.

10. Ibid., 8.

11. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1958]), 192.

12. Ibid.

13. See the epilogue for a review of this literature.

14. See the Belgian inquiry at http://www.senate.be/english/rwanda.html, and the French investigation at http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dossiers/rwanda/rapport.asp.

15. See “Report of the Conference,” The Rwandan Genocide: Can It Happen Again? The Paul Simon Center for Public Policy, University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale, 1999.

16. See United Nations, The United Nations and Rwanda, 1993–1996 (New York: United Nations Department of Public Information, 1996).

17. The majority of the documents in this study, then, have been taken from the archives of the Department of State or those of other US foreign affairs agencies. The documents are essentially of two kinds: Department of State telegraphic messages to and from embassies, and internal messages within the bureaucracy such as memoranda, background papers, and e-mails. I use in this study a simplified citation system that identifies the document first by date, then by type, and finally by subject matter. Dates for telegraphic traffic use the abbreviated form found on the cable, that is, “28 Jun 92,” or “08 Aug 92,” with a six-digit number for the Department of State cables and a five-digit number for cables from embassies.

These documents can be retrieved by referencing the document number and date from the National Security archive at nsarchive.org, or the State Department’s Freedom of Information Act website: foia.state.gov. In these notes, documents marked “(AC)” are available in the author’s collection archived with other documents at George Fox University, Newberg, Oregon.

INTRODUCTION

1. Human Rights Watch, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, written by Alison Des Forges (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999).

2. Gérard Prunier, The Rwandan Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

3. Fred Grünfeld and Anke Huijboom, The Failure to Prevent Genocide in Rwanda: The Role of Bystanders (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2007).

4. André Guichaoua, From War to Genocide: Criminal Politics in Rwanda, 1990–1994, trans. Don E. Webster (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015).

5. Robert E. Gribbin, In the Aftermath of Genocide: The U.S. Role in Rwanda (New York: iUniverse Inc. 2005

6. Theogene Rudasingwa, Healing A Nation: A Testimony (North Charles-town, SC: Create Space Publishing, 2013). See chaps. 15 and 16.

7. Enoch Ruhigira, Rwanda: La fin tragique d’un régime, 2 vols. (Paris: La Pagaie, 2011), 136–50.

8. Herman J. Cohen, Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacemaking in a Troubled Continent (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 180.

9. Bruce D. Jones, Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failure (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001); see chap. 4.

10. Compare Alexis Kagame’s Un abrégé de l’histoire du Rwanda, de 1853 à 1972 (Butare: Éditions Universitaires du Rwanda, 1975) and René Lemarchand’s Rwanda and Burundi (New York: Praeger, 1970) with Jan Vansina’s Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) and David Newbury’s “The Clans of Rwanda: An Historical Hypothesis,” Africa, Journal of the International African Institute 50, no. 4 (1980): 389–403.

11. Vansina, Antecedents to Modern Rwanda, 34.

12. Ibid., 122.

13. A succinct and contextualized treatment of this question is in Jean-Pierre Chrétien, The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History, trans. Scott Straus (New York: Zone Books, 2006), 70–83.

14. Vansina, Antecedents to Modern Rwanda, 134–39. The word kuhutuza, from which the name Hutu derives, means “to become impoverished.”

15. See Alison L. Des Forges, “Extending Court Power, 1905–1913,” chap. 5 in Defeat Is the Only Bad News (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), for a discussion of the expanding Rwandan Kingdom and revolts against the central court, especially in the north.

16. Or in Lord Lugard’s terms, “the tutelage of nations not yet able to stand by themselves,” as well as the material obligation for “development of natural resources for the mutual benefit of the people and of mankind in general.” Frederick Lugard, The Dual Mandate (London: Frank Cass, 1965), 58, 59. These ideals, already much promoted by Lugard and his journalist wife Flora Shaw, were first encapsulated in book form in 1922 as the mandate system was being framed.

17. For a study of the league’s effort to keep Belgium from merging the occupied territories directly into the administration of the Belgian Congo, see Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 204–10. The Belgian formula was to establish a vice-governor general for Ruanda-Urundi who reported through the governor general in Leopoldville to the minister of colonies in Brussels, a chain of command much too close for the liking of many in the Mandates Commission.

18. Louis Franck, “Memorandum, 15 June 1920,” cited in Pedersen, Guardians, 240.

19. European colonizers compounded their inattention to lineage and clan affiliation by isolating social constructs (Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa) largely related to status and tying them to theories of migration and race then popular in European anthropology. The colonizers (whether German or Belgian) not only accepted the traditional political and social order but believed that it was natural; Tutsi aristocrats were born to rule. See Chrétien, “An Ancient Human Se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• One: Ceasefire
• Two: Law
• Three: Power Sharing
• Four: Impasse
• Five: Endgame
• Six: Things Fall Apart
• Epilogue
• Chronology
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index