Chronological Index:

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The Intermediate Elites

The transmission of the instructions to murder was carried out, in addition to the media, by local elites (Longman, 1995: 19; Wagner, 1998: 30), which were above all composed of civil servants and shopkeepers (de Lame, 1996: 148). In the few regions that opposed the massacres, the replacement of prefects (préfets ) and burgomasters (bourgmestres – non-elected civil servants representing the State) imposed the new order (HRW, 1999: 312). Assailants and victims were assembled in stadiums or churches. Roadblocks were set up and those opposed to the violence were often threatened with death (HRW, 1999: 279). The classical levers of peasant mobilization (such as mandatory weekly collective labour – umuganda ) were employed, as well as a program of ‘civil self-defense’, which required the organization of daily rounds and the distribution of weapons to men ‘with something to defend’ (HRW, 1999: 128). In fact, the adhesion and rallying of these elites to the ethnic project seems to be bound up with threats of violence and the possibility of losing their jobs should they oppose the massacres.

It is possible that at this level ethnicity was invested in representations of social class. However, it would be a mistake to view the evolution of the forms of violence affecting Rwanda in the light of what emerged as their denouement in 1994. To do so would ignore the basic differences between the origin of each of these crises, the groups that provoked them, their purpose, and the way in which peasants took part in them. The identification of Tutsi populations as the targets of violence itself changed. The 1959 Revolution was presented as the overthrow of the established order and of a ruling class, the Tutsi aristocracy. This was not the case in 1973, when Committees of Public Safety, established by students, organized a purge of secondary schools and the university, and then of the civil service and businesses. Tutsi elements were regarded as a group active throughout the region, which had become a direct rival for positions. Beyond the colonial legacy of ethnic categories, this class mediation (maintained by the quota system established by Juvénal Habyarimana), reformalized the resentment on an ethnic object (Uvin, 1999: 41).

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