Chronological Index:

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The ambiguous attitude of the national and local elites to a peasantry that they often described as «the masses» (de Lame, 1997: 159), was a mixture of contempt and fascination and can be better appreciated in the way they addressed the population during the massacres. We see this in the metaphors used by the extremist media to describe the Rwandan population: ‘The people, that is the true shield, the real army which is strong.... The Armed Forces do the fighting, but the people say: we hold the rear, we are the shield. The day the people rises up and no longer wants you, hates you in unison and from the bottom of its heart, when you will make it nauseous, I ... I ask myself where you will escape. Where can you go? ‘ (RTLM, April 3, 1994, in HRW, 1999: 214). A condition of the unfolding and extension of the killings, the participation of the maximum possible portion of the population in them, also made it possible to exonerate those who conceived them. During a foreign tour, representatives of the provisional government explained to Western diplomats and at the United Nations that the massacres were the result of an uncontrollable dynamic of popular fury (HRW, 1999: 332-333). The most recent estimates of the numbers of killers strongly qualifies this representation of popular massacres, resulting in a range of 175-210,000 killers (in the strict sense), or between 14 and 17 percent of the active Hutu adult male population (Strauss, 2006: 103-118).

 Contexts: Differences and Repetitions

Each of the episodes of violence that the country experienced occurred in a regional context. The parallel history of neighboring Burundi had a strong impact in Rwanda on several occasions. The massacres that occurred there in 1972, and which were primarily directed against Burundi’s Hutu elites, had a certain impact on the Rwandan elites who, less than a year later, organized purges aimed at excluding Tutsis from the university, the civil service and businesses (Munyarugerero, 2003: 133-141). In 1993, the assassination of the democratically elected Hutu President of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, prompted the exodus of several hundred thousand Burundian Hutu refugees to Rwanda, some of whom were to take an active part in the 1994 massacres (HRW, 1999: 162). After the resumption of the offensive by the FPR in 1993, and a few weeks after the signing of the Arusha Accords, the assassination of Melchior Ndadaye increased the distrust of the FPR felt by a number of members of Rwanda’s internal opposition.

Added to this dynamic of exported and imported violence were the cyclical effects of repetition. Power propaganda systematically compared the FPR’s attack of 1990 to the incursions made by Tutsi exiles in the 1960s, reducing the two conflicts to one and the same perpetual war, vaunted by several decades of official history. However, 80 percent of Rwandans had been born after independence (1962) and had not lived through this period (Uvin, 1999: 32). The evident similarities between the situations of 1959, 1963, 1973 and 1994 make sense only in their reformulation, organization and integration into an official ideology. It is the fact that certain social groups claimed responsibility for them which makes them seem like repetitions of the same conflict. Appropriated and reinterpreted, these disparate contextual elements became the raw material for self-fulfilling prophecies (Lemarchand, 1970: 344), which can only be transcended by the writing of a common history.

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