Reconstructing or Dismantling the nation: a new ...

Reconstructing or Dismantling the nation: a new Rwanda?

Chapter by Helen Hintjens For book edited by Santosh Saha For Peter Laing May 2006

Reconstructing or Dismantling the nation: a new Rwanda? Modes of production and modes of destruction interact.1

Introduction This chapter considers some of the key institutional innovations in Rwanda since the genocide. Their impact is assessed in relation to the claim of the transitional regime (1994-2002) and the government since then, to be reconstructing Rwanda as a unified nation. The chapter considers how official narratives about the genocide and post-genocide eras have structured the way in which recently introduced legislative changes have been implemented. In particular, it asks whether the neglect of economic and social equity issues, in the name of national security and preventing future conflict, is not having perverse effects. Might rising social polarisation and inequality simply pushing national unity and reconciliation ever further away?

Can the instruments of national reconstruction, including

villagisation, land reform and gacaca councils, really foster a shared sense of Rwandan identity, and new and more inclusive forms of Rwandan citizenship? It is suggested that the growing neglect of the rural poor, in the name of modernity and efficiency, can only intensify social polarisation in Rwanda, in turn leading to greater insecurity.

Rather than overcoming the exclusiveness of pre-genocide politics, postgenocide reconstruction efforts seem to have created new patterns of inequality and social exclusion in Rwanda. Tight control over the population is seen as vital for security and ideological reasons. Among the most important changes are the removal of race labels from identity cards, a fund for survivors, a National Unity and Reconciliation Commission, solidarity camps (called ingando), a villagisation programme (imidugudu), and perhaps the best known of the reforms, the gacaca councils to hear and decide on crimes of genocide. There have also been reforms associated with the World Bank’s PRSP (Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper) process. Meanwhile, human rights organizations like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch criticize the Rwandan government for abuses of civil and political

rights, including through new laws that make ‘divisionism’ and ‘genocide denial’ criminal offences under Rwandan law.2

According to the official account of recent history told by the Rwandan government, the whole series of institutional and legal reforms introduced since the genocide represent a sincere effort to overcome the colonial legacies which in the past caused violence and institutionalised racism. It is surely right to argue that after civil war and genocide, lasting security and peace required a change in mental attitudes, and of the stigmatising race labels of the past. Stereotypical attitudes inherited from colonialism and feudalism needed to be dismantled; the question is whether they have been. Certainly, separate labels for Hutu, Tutsi and Twa were removed from people’s official identity cards almost immediately after the genocide. This chapter cannot determine whether this and other steps taken to foster national unity have worked. What it can do is question the official story, especially by relating identity formation to resource issues and people’s livelihoods, how they are constructed by the government and affected by postgenocide reconstruction policies. At the very least, the aim is to question whether more inclusive forms of political identity are emerging among Rwandans. It is suggested that the apparent respect for national unity among most Rwandans is based, at least in part, on fear of those who claim to protect them. One major fear is that those in power may not care whether most poor Rwandans sink or swim.

Economy and Governance: Waving and Drowning Among recent studies of post-genocide reconstruction in Rwanda, most proceed as if the problems of rebuilding Rwanda governance systems could be understood without much reference to how Rwandans actually survive and make a living.3 This is of course possible, but hardly realistic. As Uvin tried to show some years ago, to lessen risks of violent conflict and ensure longer-term peace the ‘structural violence’ of economic life needs to be undone.4 Policy reforms and new institutions cannot democratize society without strategies to reduce poverty and inequality. And most of the signs in Rwanda are that both are increasing, especially in the rural areas, which is where 90 per cent of the population still lives.5

Sometimes Rwanda has been viewed alongside such entities as Somalia, Afghanistan and Haiti as an ‘UCE’, an ungovernable chaotic entity, and an economically poorly performing country.6 The view that Rwanda is ungovernable is a minority opinion, however. One of the main donors, the UK DFID, provides direct budget support for the Rwandan government, and in part because the stakes of not doing so are seen as high.7 For the UK government, it seems that effective governance is the priority, rather than ‘good’ governance as such. An example is DFID’s approach to villagisation. Once it became obvious that physical force and land seizures were part of relocation policies, did DFID reduce its support for a programme that was explicitly security-oriented in terms of its priorities. The Netherlands was a major donor after the genocide, but has, like France and Belgium, retained a critical distance in relation to Rwanda’s ‘security’ claims, especially concerning its land policies and its military presence in the DRC.8

The present state of the Rwandan economy suggests growing polarisation and inequity, and the likelihood that structural violence is increasing rather than being reduced.9 On the one hand, overall data in agricultural surveys “suggests that…production (in kilo calories/person/day) in 2002 was significantly higher than in 1990, and almost back to 1984 levels”. 10 The Rwandan economy was reportedly one of the most rapidly expanding in Africa, with “shiny new office blocks and hotels…popping up all over the city” of Kigali, and average growth rates of 8 per cent per annum for the period between 1998 and 2002.11 Growth rates have flattened since then, however.

Since the genocide, the US, Britain and the Netherlands have replaced Belgium and France as the main foreign donors, and aid to Rwanda has increased overall. Internal indicators of inequity within localities and communities indicate that impoverishment of the many and enrichment of the few are raising the stakes in rural Rwanda. Recent estimates for 2005 suggest that around 50 per cent of the population (and 55 per cent of the rural population) lived below the extreme poverty level, compared with around 40 (to 46) percent three years earlier. At this level of poverty, “…one’s entire budget must be allocated to food”.12 Poverty

levels were close to 70 per cent nationally, with some variation between regions.13 For 2000-2001, poverty levels were estimated at 60 per cent, and for 2004 at over 70 per cent.14 Average land holdings declined from 2 ha in the 1960s, and 1.2 ha in the 1990s to just 0.7 ha by 2000 or so, with half of farmers cultivating less than 0.5 ha by 2005. All this land is generally cultivated in the form of five or more micro-plots.15 The GINI coefficient is estimated to have increased since the mid-1980s; it was estimated at between 0.45 and 0.51 by 2000-2002.16 Clearly, “insecure or insufficient access to land is a significant factor in the impoverishment of…rural people, and is therefore a structural cause of conflict”, and this is true not just of neighbouring DRC, but also of Rwanda itself.17 Meanwhile, pillage in the Democratic Republic of Congo became a system of organized military pillage by the end of the 1990s.

Evidence accumulated,

including official statistics from the Rwandan government itself, that millions of US dollars worth of rare minerals were being routed via the trade balance of Rwanda (where there are no mineral deposits to speak of). A UN Panel of Experts, investigating the Great Lakes region in 2001, obtained the following data from the Rwandan government.18 Rwanda: mineral production, 1995-2000 Gold (kg)

Cassiterite (tons)

Coltan (tons)

1995

1

247

54

1996

1

330

97

1997

10

327

224

1998

17

330

224

1999

10

309

122

2000

10

437

83

Year

Source: Rwanda Official Statistics (No. 227/01/10/MIN).

What this means is that the material basis for elite accumulation in Rwanda is more and more divorced from the domestic agrarian economy. This delinking of wealth from production within Rwanda changes the whole ideological and political axis of the political and military elite. To secure continued access to valuable

commodities, they have become enmeshed in trans-border chains of coercive relations involving militias and forced labour.

Securing Rwanda’s economic future may not be the overwhelming priority for the elite any longer, with the huge costs of military intervention in the DRC being more than offset by economic gains from mineral exploitation.19 As up to 80,000 demobilised ex-combatants returned to Rwanda in 2004-5 from the DRC, the knock-on consequences of the war there made themselves felt in every commune.20 Their reintegration into Rwandan society posed challenges, including the allocation of land, which was problematic. In 2003, DFID continued to assess Rwanda as increasingly vulnerable to “a possible breakdown in internal stability”.21

The whole question of land is neglected and made worse by

proposals to restrict ownership to larger plots, for example. As conflicts over land tenure and control of land intensify in Rwanda, this can feed inter-communal violence.22 In general, as one survey of peasant societies responding to stress has noted: “…peasants will attempt to avoid ‘problems’ and conflicts and seek to accommodate rather than confront”, but when pushed into landlessness, peasant-based survival strategies can include lethal means.23

The Official Story: a New Rwanda Amidst all of this, more than a decade after the genocide ended, the government seems in many ways to have done an admirable job.

There have been

“impressive” efforts to promote reconciliation through new institutions and processes, including legal ones. The aim of government policy is to create “a truly unified Rwandan political and social community”, quite an ambitious goal.24 At every opportunity, the government has presented itself as engaged in a struggle against the forces of ‘divisionism’, ‘genocide ideology’ and other national demons.25 The message is that these undermine Rwandan national security at home and in the wider region of the Great Lakes.

In his speeches and statements, President Paul Kagame reiterates his personal commitment to do all he can to wipe out the genocide mentality which is claimed to still be lurking inside so many Rwandans. Over and over again, survivors and

government officials are called on to declare that the genocide must never happen again. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that this has become the single, overwhelming goal of public policy during the post-genocide era. Genocide should never happen again; indeed genocide should not even be thinkable. In June 2004, the parliament went along with a report that a “genocide ideology” was spreading through Rwanda.26 What prompted this report were the killings of some genocide survivors in the wake of gacaca hearings starting that year throughout the country. The government tended to ignore the killings of suspected genocidaires and their families. Instead, the government insisted that these popular village-level hearings would bring suspected genocidaires to justice much faster, thus ending impunity and promoting national harmony. The high-sounding ambitions to ensure ‘Never again’ made Rwanda, just a few years after the genocide, “a story of hope” for some.27 The former UK Minister for International Development, Clare Short, declared that far from being a basket case, Rwanda had become an example to the world of what could be achieved through honest efforts, and relatively meagre means, when there was a political will to overcome a tragic past.28 Through hard work and good will, so goes the official story, the post-genocide Rwandan government, ably led by the RPF and the ascetic Paul Kagame, has made great strides towards overcoming genocide’s poisonous legacy. The economy had been recovering rapidly, and a new nation is being created out of the ashes of the old, divided Rwanda. There is of course some truth to this story, as there is to most stories. What is interesting about it is not so much what it says, but what it leaves out or fails to say.

The Rwandan government says it wants unity, and claims to strive for reconciliation through all means available. It is using a host of new institutions, at local and national level to enable all those who took part in the genocide confess their crimes. A central instrument in relation to the genocide, is the gacaca court, as described in the Government’s official website: The gacaca courts also have the advantage of involving the community in the trial and sentencing process. The Government of National Unity believes that involving the population in the trials can also contribute significantly to reconciliation.29

This process is taken to be the only possible starting point for national reconciliation, and the bringing together once more of saints and sinners under one roof. According to this story about Rwanda, those stubbornly unrepentant people who continue to deny their guilt are worse than those who confess, and are an obstacle to reconciliation and constructing a single national identity. They need to seek absolution.

This is the story of the new Rwanda, where survivors and returnees are bravely trying to put the past behind them, whilst the majority is still in denial about their guilt in the genocide.30 In the official story, what stands between the present insecurity and conflict in much of Rwanda’s rural areas and future reconciliation and peace, is a stubborn refusal to face the truth and confess past crimes. Survivors and genocide perpetrators can live in peace only once the guilty have suffered themselves, and confessed. Other causes of division, and the judging of other crimes – such as the alleged war crimes of the RPF against Rwandans and Congolese in DRC, are seen as secondary to the meta-crime of genocide. The continuing emphasis on the present legacies of genocide excludes almost all other forms of injustice and atrocity from official vision.

Fairy Tale Rwanda? The journalist George Monbiot calls this official account of the new Rwanda and its relation with the old pre-genocide and genocide Rwanda a ‘fairy tale’.31 It is noticeable that the official story of the new Rwanda is largely geared to an international and especially anglophone audience. This also happens to be an audience that is much less familiar with Rwandan pre-genocide history and the wider Great Lakes context in which the brave new Rwanda is supposedly being constructed.32

It is not surprising that the genocide is an all-pervasive theme in government political discourse. What is troubling is when other political, economic and ideological problems are obscured, glossed over and ignored in favour of an almost exclusive focus on the categories and problems inherited from the genocide.

The genocide is presented as the source of all of Rwanda’s

contemporary difficulties; genocide perpetrators have become the new scapegoats, responsible for all the nation’s problems. It is interesting that the centrality of the genocide ‘fairy tale’ in official accounts of Rwandan reconstruction has intensified rather than diminished as the genocide has receded in time. Preventing genocide becomes the central justification for so many new policies, for new laws and institutions. Yet Rwandans face many other problems beside the undoubted difficulties of overcoming a legacy of organised genocide.

Other aspects of conflict, for example related to access to land,

feature prominently in disputes and social unrest at local level. The impunity of the RPF and military forces for the atrocities and political crimes they are accused of committing both in Rwanda and the wider Great Lakes region undermines any belief in the sincerity of official pronouncements and intentions. But such things are rarely spoken of in public, as to do so will imply down-playing the central significance of the genocide to all that is new in Rwanda. Ironically, the new regime makes the genocide of 1994 the defining moment of a new era in Rwandan politics and history, the year zero of the new regime’s reconstruction of the nation.

Problems arise when the government of Rwanda speaks as if it represents genocide victims. By a strange process of inversion of the genocide ideology, survivors have come to be defined in a narrow ‘racial’ way rather than as any Rwandan who survived the genocide, and for example waited for the RPF to liberate them. Those forced to flee to Zaire or elsewhere were all defined as suspected genocidaires, in the official who’s who of recent Rwandan history. Yet during the genocide, and thereafter, it was not always obvious who were the victims and who the perpetrators; people could be both, or neither. Survivors, for example, could have a mixed family background that included both victims and perpetrators among their close relatives.

They could be associated with the

crimes of their genocidal relatives, or blamed for the ethnic identity of their Tutsi relatives. This complexity of real situations during the genocide was more likely to be acknowledged shortly after 1994.

For example, ‘moderate Hutu’ who

survived were included among the category of survivors after 1994. But with the arrival back in the country of many ‘old caseload refugees’, polarisation of

genocide-related identities into Hutu and Tutsi, victims and perpetrators intensified. Suspected killers were guilty by association; the fairy tale depicted them all in the same light.

The stigmatisation of the vast majority of ordinary people is obviously damaging to security in the new Rwanda. Repressing and riding roughshod over the poor, whether urban or rural, is one way for the government to consolidate its grip on power. But the price paid is to imperil the reconstruction of Rwanda along more inclusive and peaceful lines than before the genocide. Many whose families were victims of RPA (Rwandan Patriotic Army) and Rwandan armed forces in former Zaire, do not trust the government. But nor do many Tutsi survivors whose lands have been seized from them under the resettlement policies, or those who have moved to the cities, been arrested and detained in illegal detention centres in starvation conditions.33 Those who have been intimidated, lost their jobs, had relatives disappeared, or tortured and raped with impunity, are not likely to think in ways that promote national reconstruction and unity.

The grossly over-simplified account of the genocide and post-genocide reality in Rwanda operates more or less like a foundation myth for the project of a new Rwanda. It is the basis for envisaging how justice can be done, and some kind of normality restored, or created. Official Rwandan nationalism looks increasingly like the ‘victim diasporic nationalism’ of the Israeli state, for example. 34 In all this, the Rwandan political elite displays a remarkable indifference to the suffering of their perceived enemies both within Rwanda and outside. As the net is cast wider, the danger is that the enemy becomes poor Rwandans, especially subsistence farmers. Not only are they wrongly associated with inefficiency, small plot size, dispersed farming methods, but with the ancien regime and its claims to defend the ‘little man’. Like many others in the Great Lakes region, and elsewhere, poor rural and urban Rwandans live daily with what can be termed an institutionalised politics of fear.35

A Different Story of new Rwanda A very different account of the new Rwanda has been emerging since the genocide. This is the story of a government that seeks revenge through

intimidation, and with scores to settle. The policies introduced by successive regimes in place since 1994 were seen as deliberately divisive, and inherited from the past rather than marking a breakthrough for a more inclusive form of Rwandan nationalism. The “perception that power remains in the hands of Tutsi minority”, is widely held. And even if false or exaggerated, could, observers note that this could“…provide fertile ground for violent external intervention, possibly by foreign-based diaspora”.36 The Rwandan government believes its own fairy tale so well that it may have created what it claims to fear most, namely the desire for revenge from those who see themselves as excluded from full membership of the new Rwanda. In many respects: “the political culture of ‘authoritarianism’, which predated the post-1994 regime, has not yet subsided”.37 Anyone critical or independent individuals, institutions or media can be accused of these crimes, including human rights NGOs, which have also been used to purge the judiciary, public service organisations and the military.

Rwanda today is a scary place; the

thought police are out in force, and everyone can be accused, including teachers, lawyers, journalists and students. No organisation seems immune to accusations of this kind, not even survivors organisations as noted by Amnesty in its report for 2004!38

The new elite, like the pre-genocide regime before it, represents a

narrow segment of society that is rapidly increasing its share of wealth. Between 1990 and 2000, according to the Agricultural Household Survey, the share of all income groups fell except for the top 20 per cent, whose share grew by 27 per cent. The drop was most dramatic for the poorest 20 per cent of households. Their real incomes fell by 44 per cent, from 14,326 Rwanda francs per year to 7985 per year.39

The official story of the new Rwanda would be more convincing, perhaps, were it not accompanied by so much political repression and intimidation, through legal and illegal means. For example, the major opposition force, the MDR (Le Mouvement Democratique Republicaine) remains a banned party. Its members are arrested, arbitrarily detained by Intelligence services or the military, tortured and assassinated. Those who go into exile may be arrested or killed on their return; there are reports of refugees forced to return to Rwanda from exile being

sent to fight in Eastern DRC.40 The main contender for power in the presidential elections of 2003, Faustin Twagiramungu, was under house arrest at the time of the elections. According to Amnesty International, some of his former officials in the campaign have since been arrested and detained by Rwandan Intelligence Services. And another major opposition figure, Pasteur Bizimungu, launched an opposition party in 2002, and was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment two years later on cooked-up charges of civil disobedience and embezzlement.41 Journalists are vulnerable to arrest, and NGOs can be closed down if they displease the government.

Another problem is the continued culture of impunity among the army and officials since the genocide. The RPF, patently operating double standards, is happy to prosecute suspected genocidaires in makeshift village courts, but absolutely refuses to submit its own officials, leaders or soldiers to international justice institutions, including the ICTR, and has failed to prosecute soldiers and political leaders accused of past atrocities, both during the civil war and in the killing fields of Eastern Congo (former Zaire) ever since the genocide. This impunity is the corollary of the ‘good guy’ image that the new regime so assiduously cultivates abroad, especially in the anglophone world, but which is starting to wear rather thin.

Official accounts of the new Rwanda and of post-genocide justice, or the lack of it, are beginning to be questioned internationally as well as inside Rwanda. On the other hand, the story told about the genocide tends to correspond to that of all Tutsi as victims, and all Hutus as either moderates, and therefore dead, or as suspected of crimes of genocide, or complicity with such crimes. In this worrying dichotomy between goodies and baddies, ‘old caseload returnees’ are incorrectly collapsed with survivors, ‘new caseload’ with suspected genocidaires. The time may come when the apparent ‘Victim’s License’ of the present Rwandan government will run out. The crimes of the RPF will not always be excused just because Tutsi Rwandans suffered terrible persecution during the genocide and the RPF moved in militarily as the genocidal state withdrew with a large part of the Hutu population of the country. Excusing the crimes of the

present political leaders cannot help promote peace or heal the wounds of the genocide. Just as accusations of anti-semitism cannot adequately apply to all critics of Israel, so critics of the Rwandan government cannot be silenced simply by accusing them of ‘divisionism’ and ‘genocide denial’.

When critics of the government living in Rwanda, or Rwandans in exile, silence themselves through fear, and because they wish to protect their families from persecution, this is fully understandable. But that some Western government remain silent about the economic crimes and military atrocities of the Rwandan state in Eastern DRC is inexcusable. A distasteful mix of guilt about Western inaction during the genocide, and an understandable admiration for the government’s ability to reconstruct the country in a physical sense, needs to be undone. Donors’ strategic silences only serve to excuse the crimes of the current regime in Rwanda, both at home against their opponents and in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Rwandan military and economic intervention has been one of the primary destabilising factors in the past decade or so.42

The present rulers of Rwanda see themselves as the only ones far-sighted enough to be able to rid Rwanda of its demons. Their image of Rwanda is of a troubled country still divided into victims and victimizers. But the reason unity remains such a pressing priority is precisely because there is none. Reconciliation remains critical, precisely because post-genocide justice is so often lacking. The search for reconciliation and national unity cannot justify humiliating tens of thousands of prisoners and locking them up for more than a decade without bringing them to trial. It cannot explain why gacaca must involve confessions and plea-bargaining from those accused of crimes of genocide, and why Rwanda cannot afford proper processes of prosecution and legal defence in bringing to trial those suspected of crimes of genocide.

Nor do all Tutsi feel they benefit from the existing political and economic order; far from it. Some Tutsi survivors feel the government ignores them, and claims to speak in their name but fails to respect their rights. If the RPF is feared more than loved, it is also because they trample the rights of all their opponents, perceived or actual. Some genocide survivors are among the many Rwandans

who have continued to seek asylum overseas since the end of the genocide.43 The image of a secure and harmonious Rwandan nation, carefully nurtured for public and donor consumption, is simply not believable, being contradicted by too much evidence to the contrary.

Dismantling subsistence agriculture The situation is all the more serious given the way in which conflict, population movements, refugee inflows and outflows have undermined the spatial and material fabric of social relations which themselves underpin the survival of the rural poor. Piron and McKay observe that pre-existing systems of “…communitylevel societal protection, which were being eroded prior to the genocide, were destroyed by it”.44 Yet there are no obvious mechanisms that could reproduce some sense of social solidarity among the rural poor.

Villagisation has only

served to worsen the problem. During the process of relocation, government authorities are reported by Human Rights Watch to have seized land for granting to returnees, especially old caseload returnees. Quite often the land that was seized in this way was taken over by senior people with strong military and commercial ties to the government. An elite has been born, literally on the back of the poor, who retain only tiny micro-plots adjacent to relocation villages, not even sufficient for bare subsistence.45 Land take-over is justified by the supposed greater productivity of larger holdings.46 But as Alison des Forges of Human Rights Watch notes: "Making agriculture more productive is imperative, but progress towards that laudable goal must not be made at the expense of the human rights." said Des Forges. "Donors seeking to support beneficial change in Rwanda must consider how proposed reforms will affect the lives of all Rwandans."

The way land reforms have been framed in the past few years, show that the RPF still thinks there are scores to be settled, and that those who suspect the government of harbouring a grudge may be right. Under the new land policy, the landless are to be allocated plots, but the policy “defines the landless specifically as ‘old case’ refugees who have returned: Rwandans who fled the country in 1959 or later, and stayed outside the country for more than 10 years”. 47 returnees, thus excluding mostly Hutu ‘new caseload’ returnees.

It is worth pointing out that in only some cases were those in power in Rwanda today victims of the genocide themselves. So-called old caseload returnees from Uganda had been outside the country for decades, and invaded Rwanda in 1990 to take back power and land which they felt were theirs and had been denied them. This explains why old caseload returnees have explicitly been given priority in the new land laws recently introduced. New institutions, policies and laws introduced in Rwanda since the genocide put salt in old wounds rather than help heal them. The effect overall is once again to govern Rwandans by polarising them instead of by bringing them together and creating more inclusive forms of nationalism.

Old caseload returnees are given priority in terms of services, land and other benefits, compared with new caseload returnees. It so happens that the latter are mostly Hutu Rwandans returned from DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) and Tanzania. Even those broadly sympathetic to the goals of the Rwandan government, identify the problem of “patron-client relations between ‘old caseload’ returnees and local authorities, put in place by the RPF”.48

The present government, a mostly highly educated and anglophone elite, returned from mostly urban settings in Uganda.49 They may or may not speak kinyarwanda, and few are fluent in French, unless they returned from former Zaire or Burundi (and these categories of returnees are also relatively marginalised compared with the elite former exiled in Uganda. As second or third generation exiles, these returnees from Uganda have an outlook that is higly urban, sophisticated in the cosmopolitan sense, and far removed from the priorities of rural subsistence farmers with their indigenous knowledge, customary practices that are looked down on by the elites.

The average plot size in Rwanda is below the viable level set by the FAO. In line with this, a recent land law has placed a lower limit of 1 ha on all plots to be registered in future. A maximum size of 30 (later 50 ha) was also proposed in the draft law, but dropped in the final law. 50 The Rwandan government’s outlook is clearly for ‘modernisation’, and that: “subsistence agriculture must give way to

more intensive and market-driven agricultural enterprise”. The best safeguard donors seem to propose is to ‘monitor’ the effects of the new laws in terms of landlessness and food insecurity!51 Small and tiny farms still support the vast majority of the Rwandan population.

Indifference to those who engage in

subsistence agriculture means neglecting two thirds of the population or more. For those eking out a barely viable existence on tiny plots through the careful, risk-averse use of “diversified cropping patterns”, the new land policies can look like a death sentence.52

Pointing to the future This chapter has contrasted the disturbing political economy of post-genocide reconstruction with official ideas about the nation in Rwanda, and its relation to genocide. For social peace to prevail in Rwanda today, and for future conflict prevention, the public institutions of state need to be viewed as broadly legitimate. Chronic poverty is already far too high, and needs to be tackled as an immediate priority. The underdevelopment which serves to exacerbate the legal and human rights impunity of those in power should be tackled as a policy priority. Another concern is the way in which community-level practices of mutual self-help and social protection, which were powerful antidotes to economic and social insecurity in the past, have been destroyed by the genocide, and have not been reconstructed since then. Legacies of mistrust need to be overcome for some kind of social cohesion and community-level solidarity to be reconstructed. To do this it is not enough to make public statements and make institutional innovations. What is needed are actions to rapidly improve the conditions of life for the poorest farmers, who grow most of the food in the country.

When General Dallaire returned to Rwanda ten years after the genocide, he provided us with an example of how a more practical kind of elite might look in today’s new Rwanda. Weary of journalists’ constant questions about his state of mind, and what he thought of the country ten years after the genocide, Dallaire informed the press he was going into the Rwandan hills to do some manual labour, working on a small farm in exchange for food.53 As someone with his ear to the ground, who knows better than any other outsider what Rwandans have

been through, perhaps Dallaire was directing his comments at the aid workers and government officials in Kigali, whose hands tend to be for sipping cocktails or holding a steering wheel. Perhaps Dallaire had heard what we have tried to show here; that things are very hard for Rwandan farmers today, and that getting agricultural reconstruction on track without making people even poorer or throwing them off the land, should be the number one priority for long-term security and peace. The socio-economic roots of intolerance and race persecution are by now well-established and should hardly need to be reiterated, but it seems that they must be. The main purpose of this chapter has been to stress that improving the living conditions of the poorest Rwandans, especially subsistence farmers, is a precondition to any other measures that seek to secure a lasting peace in the country. Words: 5500

1 Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization or Empire? (New York-London: Routledge, 2004): 94. 2 Amnesty International, “Rwanda”, report for January-December 2004, http://web.amnesty.org, accessed 10 April 2006. On the accusation of divisionism, Laure-Helene Piron and Andy McKay, Aid in Difficult Environments: Rwanda Case Study Background Paper No. 4 for ODI Study on Poorly Performing Countries (London: ODI, March 2004): 28-9. 3 There are of course exceptions to this, including notably Johan Pottier, Re-imagining Rwanda: Conflict, Survival and Disinformation in the late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence: the Development Enterprise in Rwanda (West Hartford, CT: Kumarian, 1998). Ignoring poverty and land issues is more common, as in Filip Reyntjens, “Rwanda: Ten Years On, from Genocide to Dictatorship”, African Affairs 103, No.411 (May 2004): 177-210 and Nigel Eltringham, Accounting for Horror. Post-genocide debates in Rwanda (London: Pluto Press: 2004), for example. 4 Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence. 5 Philip Verwimp, Poverty Dynamics, Violent Conflict and Convergence in Rwanda, paper presented in Economic Research Seminar (The Hague, ISS:19.5.2006). 6 Oswaldo de Rivero, The Myth of Development: Non-Viable Economies of the Twenty First Century (London-Dhaka-Bangkok-Cape Town; Zed Books/University Press/Fernwook/White Lotus/David Philip/Books for a Change, 2001): 145-7. Poorly performing country is the classification used by the ODI, see Piron & McKay, Aid in Difficult Environments. 7 Piron & McKay, Aid in Difficult Environments: 26-7. 8 Jason Mosley, Land Policy in Rwanda: Issues for UK Policy (London, All Party Parliamentary Group on the Great Lakes Region and Genocide Prevention, November 2004): at http://www.appggreatlaes.org (accessed 2 April 2006). In this, the author mentions ‘concerns’ that arose when forced resettlement (villagisation) created the “potential for human rights violations”:

Piron & McKay, Aid in Difficult Environments: 26-7 report that 2/3 of DFID aid to Rwanda is in the form of direct budget support. 9 Verwimp, Poverty Dynamics, Violent Conflict: 42 shows GINI coefficients for a number of provinces, for male and female headed households, for different educational levels, and for occupations, varying from an overall average in 1990 of 0.41 to 0.51 in 2002. 10 Piron & McKay, Aid in Difficult Environments: 25. 11 Quotation from The Independent, 7 April 2004; growth rates reported in DFID (Department for International Development) Rwanda Country Assistance Plan (London: DFID, May 2003). High growth rates flattened out after 2002. 12 DFID, Rwanda Country Assistance Plan: 6. 13 Verwimp, Poverty Dynamics, Violent Conflict: 11; 42; 46 shows that the main vectors of inequality are province, the number of adults in the household; education levels of the head of household. This research is innovative and useful, but does not break down inequality in terms of the new categories inherited from post-genocide reconstruction; old and new caseload, fair trial. 14 Latest estimates reported in Verwimp, Poverty Dynamics, Violent Conflict. Estimates for 20002001 from Piron & McKay, Aid in Difficult Environments: 40-41. 15 Piron & McKay, Aid in Difficult Environments: 40. Herman Musahara & C. Huggins “Land Reform, Land Scarcity and Post-Conflict Reconstruction”, Eco-Conflicts 3 (No. 3) (Nairobi: ACTS, October 2004): 1-4 on the parceling of land holdings: 2. 16 Piron & McKay, Aid in Difficult Environments: 41 for 0.45 estimate; Verwimp, Poverty Dynamics, Violent Conflict, for 0.51 estimate. 17 Koen Vlassenroot & Chris Huggins, “Executive Summary: Land, migration and conflict in Eastern DR Congo”, Land Tenure and Conflict in Africa: Prevention, Mitigation and Reconstruction (Nairobi, ACTS (Africa Centre for Technology Studies: 2005): 20. 18 UN Panel of Exports, Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (New York, UN: 2001) at http://www.un.org/News/dh/latest/drcongo.htm 19 Saskia van Hoyweghen, “The Rwanda Villagisation Programme: Resettlement for Reconstruction?” in Didier Goyvaerts, Conflict and Ethnicity in Central Africa: 209-24 (Tokyo: Institution for Study of Foreign Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa: 2000). 20 Philip Verwimp & Mrijke Verpooten, “’What are the soldiers going to do?’ Demobilisation, reintegration and employment in Rwanda”, Conflict, Security and Development 4 (1) (April 2004): 39-57. 21 DFID, Rwanda Country Assistance Plan: 13-14. 22 UN Panel of Experts, Report of the Panel of Experts: showed that Rwanda suddenly became a major producer of gold after intervening in the DRC, former Zaire. The report had this to say on coltan, for example: “Given the substantial increase in the price of coltan between late 1999 and late 2000, a period during which the world supply was decreasing while the demand was increasing, a kilo of coltan of average grade was estimated at $200. According to the estimates of professionals, the Rwandan army through Rwanda Metals was exporting at least 100 tons per month. The Panel estimates that the Rwandan army could have made $20 million per month, simply by selling the coltan that, on average, intermediaries buy from the small dealers at about $10 per kg. According to experts and dealers, at the highest estimates of all related costs (purchase and transport of the minerals), RPA must have made at least $250 million over a period of 18 months. This is substantial enough to finance the war. Here lies the vicious circle of the war.

Coltan has permitted the Rwandan army to sustain its presence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The army has provided protection and security to the individuals and companies extracting the mineral. These have made money which is shared with the army, which in turn continues to provide the enabling environment to continue the exploitation. The last illustration of how Rwanda finances its war deals with the financial transactions involving Rwandan banks, RPA suppliers and RCD institutions. In these particular cases, Rwanda has used BCDI and SONEX to pay RPA suppliers.” (Paragraph 103 of the report). 23 Matthias Stiefel & Marshall Wolfe (eds), A Voice for the Excluded Popular Participation in Development: Utopia or Necessity? (London-New Jersey-Geneva: Zed Books-UNRISD, 1994): 45. 24 Quotations from Piron & McKay: 28-9, who qualify this goal by asking whether present policies nonetheless “contain the seeds of future instability”, given their divisiveness in practice. 25 Official website of the Government of Rwanda, http://www.gov.rw/ for the official account of the genocide, which concentrates on gacaca as the main response to backlogs in criminal justice. In addition, the http://www.gov.rw/ 26 Reported in Amnesty, Rwanda 2004: 1-2. 27 Clare Short cited in Michael Grosspietch, Received and projected images of Rwanda; perspectives of visitors and international tour operators, Masters Dissertation, University of Greenwich, September 2003. 28 Grosspietch, Received and projected images of Rwanda: 10. As UK Minister for Overseas Development, Clare Short oversaw a massive increase in the size of the aid budget allocated to Rwanda after 1997. 29 Government of Rwanda, Official website, presents gacaca as the single most practical response to tackling backlogs in criminal justice. 30 See discussion of range of estimates of genocide perpetrators in Helen Hintjens “Reconstructing Political Identities in Rwanda”, chapter for forthcoming volume to be edited by Phil Clark, Zachary Kaufman (eds) TITLE, Oxford University Press (c. 2007). In that chapter, I noted that estimates vary hugely; between Paul Kagame’s belief that around 1 million Rwandans were genocide suspects, the Rwandan ambassador to Belgium’s later estimate of 2 million, equivalent to almost the entire adult Hutu male population, as reported in Eltringham, Eltringham, Accounting for Horror: 70. At a conference in Oxford, in May 2004, a Rwandan government representative speculated: “Even if we find three quarters of the population guilty of genocide, it is not a problem”, Martin Ngoga, Talk on post-genocide justice systems in Rwanda, (Oxford: Oxford University), 15 May 2004. He was commenting on the rising number of genocide suspects being identified during gacaca court hearings because of the provision that naming others reduces sentences. 31 George Monbiot in The Guardian, 13.4.2004. 32 Johan Pottier’s study is among the more interesting and thought-provoking on the narratives of national identity in Rwanda after the genocide, Johan Pottier, Re-imagining Rwanda. Monbiot, The Guardian, op. cit. 33 Human Rights Watch “Uprooting the Rural Poor in Rwanda”, released 6.11.2001 http://hrw.org/english/docs/2001/06/11/rwanda187.htm, accessed 20.4.06. Also, Human Rights Watch, Swept Away. Street Children Illegally Detained in Kigali, Rwanda, released May 2006, at http://hrw.org/backgrounder/africa/rwanda0506/ 34 Monbiot, The Guardian, 13.4.2004. On victim diasporic nationalism, see Cohen, Robin, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London: UCL Press, 1997).

35 This idea is from Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization or Empire?: 23, who notes that when “the politics of fear is institutionalised”, intimidation need only involve the threat of violence to be effective. 36 Piron & McKay, Aid in Difficult Environments: 29. 37 Piron & McKay, Aid in Difficult Environments. 38 Amnesty International, “Rwanda”. 39 Verwimp, Poverty Dynamics, Violent Conflict: 43. 40 Amnesty International, “Rwanda”. 41 Amnesty International, “Rwanda”. 42 The Guardian, 13.4.2004 article by George Monbiot. 43 Filip Reyntjens, “Rwanda: Ten Years On, from Genocide to Dictatorship”, African Affairs 103, No.411 (May 2004): 177-210. 44 Piron & McKay, Aid in Difficult Environments: 26. 45 Human Rights Watch “Uprooting the Rural Poor in Rwanda”. 46 Mosley, Land Policy in Rwanda: 6. 47 Musahara & Huggins “Land Reform, Land Scarcity”: 3. 48 Jason Mosley, Land Policy in Rwanda: 3. 49 Reyntjens, “Rwanda: Ten Years On”: 201. 50 Mosley, Land Policy in Rwanda: 2-3. 51 Quotation from Mosley, Land Policy in Rwanda: 6. 52 Musahara & Huggins “Land Reform, Land Scarcity and Post-Conflict Reconstruction”: 3. 53 The Guardian 7 April 2004.

References (for Peter Lang volume, edited by Santosh Saha). de Rivero, O., 2001, The Myth of Development: Non-Viable Economies of the Twenty First Century (London-Dhaka-Bangkok-Cape Town; Zed Books/University Press/Fernwook/White Lotus/David Philip/Books for a Change). DFID, 2003, Rwanda Country Assistance Plan (London: DFID – Department for International Development). Eltringham, 2004, Accounting for Horror. Post-genocide debates in Rwanda (London: Pluto Press). Human Rights Watch, 2001, “Uprooting the Rural Poor in Rwanda” (London: Human Rights Watch), released 6.11 http://hrw.org/english/docs/2001/06/11/rwanda187.htm (accessed 20.4.06). Mosley, J., 2004, Land Policy in Rwanda: Issues for UK Policy (London, All Party Parliamentary Group on the Great Lakes Region and Genocide Prevention): available at http://www.appggreatlaes.org (accessed 2 April 2006) Musahara, H. and C. Huggins, 2004, “Land Reform, Land Scarcity and Post-Conflict Reconstruction”, Eco-Conflicts 3(3) (Nairobi: ACTS): 1-4 Nederveen Pieterse, J., 2004, Globalization or Empire? (New York-London: Routledge). Piron, L-H. and Andy McKay, 2004, Aid in Difficult Environments: Rwanda Case Study Background Paper No. 4 ODI Study on Poorly Performing Countries (London: ODI). Pottier, J., 2002, Re-imagining Rwanda: Conflict, Survival and Disinformation in the late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Reyntjens, F., 2004, “Rwanda: Ten Years On, from Genocide to Dictatorship”, African Affairs 103, No.411 (May): 177-210. UN. 2002, Report of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (New York, UN) at http://www.un.org/News/dh/latest/drcongo.htm (Accessed 12.4.2006). Uvin, P., 1998, Aiding Violence: the Development Enterprise in Rwanda (West Hartford, CT: Kumarian). van Hoyweghen, S., 2000, “The Rwanda Villagisation Programme: Resettlement for Reconstruction?” in D. Goyvaerts (Ed.) Conflict and Ethnicity in Central Africa (Tokyo: Institution for Study of Foreign Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa): 209-24. Verwimp, P. and M. Verpooten, 2004, “’What are the soldiers going to do?’ Demobilisation, reintegration and employment in Rwanda”, Conflict, Security and Development 4 (1) (April): 39-57. Vlassenroot, K. and C. Huggins, 2005, “Executive Summary: Land, migration and conflict in Eastern DR Congo”, Land Tenure and Conflict in Africa: Prevention, Mitigation and Reconstruction (Nairobi, ACTS (Africa Centre for Technology Studies).