Rwandan Hutu Regime example essay topic

Intervention in the Rwandan Genocide: Prevention preferable, but better intervention second best The Hutus and Tutsis were not traditionally different, and ethnicity in Rwanda only became important during Belgium colonization when the more European-looking Tutsis were chosen as the aristocracy to rule over the Hutus. After Rwanda's independence in 1961 the Hutu majority, comprising roughly 85% of the population, ruled the country. Between 1961 and the outbreak of genocide in 1994 many Tutsis fled the regime due to its discriminatory practices and anti-Tutsi policies. Even after gaining control of the country, however, Hutus had been scared of a Tutsi coup or an invasion from the Tutsi refugees in neighboring Uganda. The regime of president Habyarimana played on these fears in order to distract Rwandans from failing policies and keep their declining party in power. It was the assassination of the president that precipitated the implementation of ethnic cleansing, although not the cause; plans for such an event had been planned out by Colonel Boga sata the previous year, the assassination of the country's Hutu leader just happened to be a convenient event for his clique of extremist Hutus to exploit.

In October of 1993 the UN Security Council authorized the UN Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR) following a period of strife between the Rwandan Patriotic Front and the Hutu regime of Rwanda. When the government ordered assassinations were carried out in Kigali on April 6, 1994 there were about 2,500 UNIMAR peacekeepers in Rwanda. Soon after the violent outbreak Hutu government forces executed ten Belgian UNIMAR peacekeepers. On April 14 Belgium announced that it would be withdrawing its UNIMAR battalion, an action that unnerved other involved states and led the U.N. Security Council to cut the number of troops to a mere 270 the following week.

Only after a month of vacillation did the UNSC vote to send 5,500 troops back into Rwanda, but it still dragged its feet and as of July only 10% of the promised force had been deployed (Economist, 1994). The RPF, meanwhile, had launched into Rwanda and by mid-July, it had ousted the genocidal regime from Rwanda. Preceding the Rwandan genocide, numerous western states made claims of their willingness to intervene in a humanitarian crisis, and this kind of rhetoric has proved counterproductive in the past by encouraging insecure regimes to act hastily. Alan Kuperman said "If the West is unwilling to deploy such robust forces in advance, it must refrain from coercive diplomacy aimed at compelling rulers to surrender power overnight. Otherwise, such rulers may feel so threatened by the prospect of losing power that they opt for genocide or ethnic cleansing instead". (Kuperman, p. 106).

An example of this was the acceleration of ethnic cleansing and Albanian deportations directly following NATO's warnings to Milosevic that he and those complicit would be prosecuted for crimes against humanity; sometimes threats, especially ones unlikely to be backed by significant force, can act counter productively by limiting the regime's choices and increasing their desperation to retain power, increasing the likelihood that they will resort to desperate measures such as ethnic cleansing. If Milosevic already believed that he would be prosecuted for war crimes, then he has less incentive to avoid measures that violate international law. In order to understand how the Rwandan Hutu regime could have been best dealt with it is important to understand the surrounding circumstances. President Habiyarimana's regime was losing popularity due in part to unsuccessful economic policy, and his small clique of Hutu extremists was desperate to cling to power. They, as well as other Hutus, were terrified of the notion that Tutsis may come back into power and implement the same kind of Hutu oppression that was experienced during its years as a Belgian colony. Many of the minority Tutsis, feeling threatened by Hutu rule, fled to neighboring Uganda and Burundi, leaving the group to represent only 9% of the Rwandan population in 1991.

The depletion of UNAMIR troops after the Tutsi slaughter was known indicates a gross lack of political will. There has been intense debate over how many troops could have significantly abated the number killed, and there have been some claims that the genocide could have been halted completely if there was a more suitable reaction. Leading this camp of thought is General Romeo Dallaire, the commander of the U.N. peacekeepers in Rwanda. He claimed that if he had been provided the 5,000 troops that he had requested he would have been able to halt the killings. This has since become a widely accepted, albeit unsubstantiated, statistic.

More conservative estimates claim that a moderate force of 13,500 troops could have saved 100,000 Rwandans, an eighth of the overall death toll; close analysis of the circumstances surrounding the genocide reveals that it is unlikely that intervention, although not necessarily prevention, could have saved any more than 150,000. These low estimated are based on several problematic factors; first of all, the slaughters did not start in Kigali and spread outward, as many journalists have claimed. Rather the conflict began in Kigali and the rural slaughter than followed was initiated almost simultaneously in all regions. This near immediate spread to the countryside was due in part to the organization of the Hutu militia that began its campaign of slaughtering Tutsis on orders from the in Kigali. Also, the estimate of 5,000 troops seems especially low considering that this would have allotted roughly 1,000 troops to the capital of Kigali, which translates into three troops for every thousand citizens - a mere drop in the bucket, which would very likely be impotent in the containment of conflict were it to break out. Another factor to take into consideration is that Dallaire did not request the troops until April 10, and it would have been unlikely that the troops and materials could have been delivered to landlocked Rwanda sooner than April 20 (Kuperman, 102), by which time the majority of Tutsi deaths had already occurred.

It is also important to keep in mind that by the time it is obvious that genocide is occurring there have already been a massive amount of deaths, as the recent situation in Darfur exhibits. The astonishingly rapid rate at which the Rwandan slaughter took place made the possibility of a successful intervention highly unlikely. Looking at the circumstances of the genocide, it seems that intervention in the case of Rwanda could have, at best, served as damage control. The Hutu state-run media used several forms of propaganda in order to deepen ethnic cleavages, one of which was "hate radio". Leading up to and during the genocide the government-run radio station spread the message of Hutu superiority and wariness of the danger of the power-seeking Tutsis. The radio commanded its Hutu listeners to slaughter Tutsis and moderate, i.e. uncooperative, Hutus.

It provided explicit instructions on how to kill your neighbors, where Tutsis are likely to congregate, and even named specific targets to be assassinated. If it was somehow possible to overtake the radio station, to which many Rwandans listened, and let the populations know that they would be held accountable for the crimes committed and for complicity with the genocidal regime. This would hopefully differ from the previously discussed counterproductive methods of coercion perhaps by assuring people that they would be granted amnesty for their refusal to participate in the cleansing, harboring targeted Tutsis, or for opposing the genocidal regime. If the radio station could get out a message that assuaged the political fears that had been instilled in them through skillfully crafted propaganda by assuring Hutus that the state would not return to a system of Hutu repression experienced during colonial times, then perhaps Hutu complicity would have been hampered. UNAMIR's hasty withdrawal from Rwanda failed to consider the potentially problematic situation following the RPF's coup. After Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Front won power, there were a massive number of atrocities committed indiscriminately against Hutus by the new regime.

Had UNAMIR kept a number of peacekeeping forces in Rwanda after the cease-fire, a large number of power abuses could have potentially been averted. While the ICT, courts, and domestic courts have all successfully prosecuted genocide-related crimes by Hutus, the atrocities committed by the Rwandan Patriotic Army against Hutus, the armed faction of the RPF, have been largely overlooked and by the Tutsi-led regime. Had there been a foreign peacekeeping presence in Rwanda following the regime change it might have contributed to a feeling of security, and a knowledge that they would be increasingly accountable for their actions. In conclusion, the rapid rate of killing, government induced ethnic cleavages, and other situational factors made intervention in Rwanda a difficult venture that could have, at best, served to taper the huge number of casualties. Preventative measures would have been preferable to any acts of intervention that were, or could have been, carried out; this is due to the celerity of the killings, the efficacy of the government's program of mass ethnic mobilization, the vulnerability of the poorly armed minority Tutsis, and the widespread nature of the conflict.

If limited to intervention, however, it still could have been carried out in a much more effective way. The most obvious failure behind the intervention was the lack of political will displayed by UN members from the outset when they refused to send in the suggested number of troops, and when they chose to pull out half of all UNIMAR troops from Rwanda several weeks into the genocide. Many more Rwandans might have been saved had the size of the UNIMAR force task been more appropriately sized, although as stated earlier, it would not have prevented the genocide. Another means that may have discouraged participation in the genocide was countering Hutu propaganda.

By reaching Rwandans in a similar manner as the government, such as radio, they may have countered some of the effects of the propaganda by reinforcing the idea of accountability for actions, and informing the population of peacekeeping troops, hopefully calming the fears of group loss of political power or unfair oppression. The final failure of UNIMAR was its hasty withdrawal from Rwanda, allowing for atrocities to be committed by the new regime, i.e. the RPF. The hurried exit of peacekeepers allowed for a period of victor's justice, in which the Tutsi-led regime now acted with impunity, indiscriminately killing Hutus regardless of their complicity in the genocide. This has further damaged relations between the ethnic groups, and has deepened the preexisting cleavages. The presence of a peacekeeping force to maintain order and accountability of the new regime could have hampered such atrocities. The Rwandan situation highlights the limits of intervention, and unfortunately as long as the duty of intervening lies in the hands of slow-responding multinational bodies and democracies too scared of a plummeting public opinion to risk troops for less central or non-state interests, it appears that humanitarian crises run the risk of progressing unacceptably far before the situation can be brought back under control.

Bibliography

The Economist. Learning from Rwanda (U.N. Peacekeeping Operations). April, 1994.
Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch / FISH, 1999).
Kuperman, Alan J. Rwanda in Retrospect. Foreign Affairs 79, no. 1 pp. 94-118 Jan / Feb, 2000.
Report of the Independent Inquiry Into the Actions of the United Nations During the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, 15 December 1999, accessed December 17, 1999 at web.