Body politics and the Rwandan crisis

Third World Quarterly

Volumn 24, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 479-493

  Baines, Erin K ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ETHNIC CONFLICT; GENOCIDE; HUMAN RIGHTS;

AFRICA; CENTRAL AFRICA; RWANDA; SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA;

EID: 33746463497     PISSN: 01436597     EISSN: 13602241     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0143659032000084429     Document Type: Article

References (71)

1. C Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror: The Rwandan Genocide of 1994, Oxford: Berg, 1999, p 18.
2. On international explanations, see M Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide: the United Nations and Rwanda, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002
3. B Jones, Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failure, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001
4. A Kuperman, The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2001
5. and P Uvin, Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda, CT: West Hartford, Kumarian Press, 1998.
6. On regional and national explanations, see M Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001
7. G Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997
8. and D Newbury, 'Understanding genocide', Aftican Studies Review, 41 (1), 1998, pp 73-97.
9. See for example Human Rights Watch (HRW) & A DesForges, Leave No One to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, HRW 1999, at http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/rwanda/
10. HRW, Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence during the Genocide and its Aftermath, HRW, 1996, at http://www.hrw.org/reports/1996/Rwanda.htm
11. and African Rights (AR) Omaar Rakiya & Alex de Waal, Rwanda: Death, Despair and Defiance, London: Africa Rights, 1995.
12. P Uvin, 'Reading the Rwandan Genocide', International Studies Review, 3 (3), Fall 2001, p 98.
13. The one exception I am aware of is Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror, to whom I owe a debt for the rich empirical evidence he provides in his anthropological study. Adam Jones (2002) contributes an important empirical study of the genocide, breaking down acts of violence on the basis of male and female sex. However, his article lacks a sustained historical analysis, often taking 'sex' or 'gender' out of the ethnic and class contexts and reiterating the discursive separation of men and women, privileging men while failing to provide a sustained analysis of masculinities.
14. A Jones, 'Gender and genocide in Rwanda'. Journal of Genocide Research, 4 (1), 2002, pp 65-94.
15. After reading Diane Nelson's A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quintessential Guatemala, I began to think about the 1994 genocide and nation building in post-1994 Rwanda from the perspective of body politics. Nelson's text is a compelling exploration of binary discourses on nationalism in post-conflict Guatemala that centre on the body. She likens the nation to a body as a metaphor but, given the mass displacement, torture, rape and murder, the material body too is viewed as a site of inscribing a vision of national unity on an otherwise ambiguous body politic. D Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala. Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1999.
16. Ibid, p 6.
17. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers.
18. Rwanda was first under German colonisation in the 1890s and then Belgian in 1918.
19. In the Old Testament of the Bible, Ham, son of Noah, was outcast after looking upon his father drunk and naked. As punishment, his children would be born slaves to their uncles, having black skin.
20. Both Hutu and Tutsi held this view before colonialism: The Twa were greatly mistreated and subject to racial discrimination. They were also considered 'untouchable' and 'impure' - like diseases to the body of the kingdom.
21. According to this view, the Tutsi had arrived from Ethiopia, conquered the Hutu and cast them into servitude long before the colonialists had arrived. Here the Hutu nation is imagined and claimed for the 'native', as the Hutu Manifesto calls for a 'double liberation of Hutu from both 'Hamites' and 'Bazungu' (whites) colonization'. Quoted in Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p 116. The Manifesto positioned the Hutu elite as the protector of this nation.
22. Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror, p 119.
23. Over 90% of the Rwandan population live in rural areas, and are dependent on subsistence agriculture.
24. M Domosh & J Seager, Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers make Sense of the World, New York: Guilford Press, 2001, p 164.
25. Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror, pp 167-168.
26. Presumably, colonial constructions of beauty continued into this era. Marriage to Tutsi women is still considered a status symbol, affirming Hutu masculinity and the practice was accepted socially. Even hard-line Hutu were known to have Tutsi mistresses.
27. V Jeffremovas, 'Acts of human kindness: Tutsi, Hutu and the genocide', Issue: Journal of Opinion, XXIII (3), 1995, pp 28-31.
28. In contrast, sexual deviance would be encouraged among Hutu men leading up to and during the genocide as a way of reaffirming masculinity, superiority and control over the seeds of the imagined alien threat.
29. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p 76.
30. At the onset of the Rwandan genocide, 60% of the population were under the age of 20. Presumably 30% were male, and 30% were female.
31. C Newbury & D Newbury, 'A Catholic mass in Kigali: Contested views of the genocide and ethnicity in Rwanda', Canadian Journal of African Studies, 33 (2&3), 1999, p 302.
32. Some of those Hutu who participated in the genocide did so because they believed they were being threatened by an external 'other', reproducing the logic of the colonial state.
33. See Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror, pp 161-163.
34. Anne McClintock. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest, New York: Routledge, 1995, p 365.
35. Domosh & Seager, Putting Women in Place, p 172.
36. Rwandan National Anthem, 1962.
37. A central network among the Northern elite was the Akazu or little house, referring to the economic clique surrounding Habyarimana's wife, Agathe.
38. Kangura, No 6, quoted in Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis.
39. Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror, pp 172-173
40. Ibid, p 164.
41. The assumption is that as men, they posed the greatest threat to the state, given that men are primarily political and public sphere actors.
42. The first democratically elected Hutu President in Burundi, Ndadaye was murdered by extremist element of the Tutsi military. Under Tutsi authoritarian control, the Hutu majority has been subjected to violent oppression since independence. Sharing the same language and other attributes of Rwandans, Hutu extremists sometimes referred to Burundi as their accursed 'Siamese Brother', again in reference to the metaphor of the nation as a body.
43. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p 4.
44. Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror, p 131.
45. HRW & DesForges, Leave No-one to Tell the Story
46. and AR & Rakiya, Death, Despair, Defiance.
47. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press, 1967.
48. Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror, p 95.
49. Burundian refugees participated in great numbers in the genocide in the South of the country. Most had fled in 1988 after the massacre of Hutu by the Tutsi-dominated paramilitary, and again in 1993 after the murder of Ndadaye. They are reported to have been the most vicious of torturers, cutting Achilles heals and inflicting extreme and cruel, slow deaths. This might provide some evidence for the claim that the greater the internalisation of inferiority and resentment of the Tutsi, the more callous the violence.
50. See also Erin K Baines, 'Les femmes aux mille bras: Women building peace in Rwanda', in D Mazurana & J Parpart (eds), Gender and Peacekeeping, forthcoming.
51. HRW & Desforges, Leave No-one to Tell the Story, 1999, p 297.
52. Quoted in ibid, p 296.
53. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p 194.
54. See P Landesman, 'A woman's work', New York Magazine, 15 September 2002.
55. R J Liften, quoted in ibid, np.
56. See R Coomaraswamy, 'A question of honour: Women, ethnicity and armed conflict', lecture delivered at the Third Minority Rights Lecture, 25 May 1999, Geneva Switzerland.
57. Report of Elenor Richtler-Lyonette, in a mission report commissioned by the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, 1995.
58. C Strozier, quoted in Landesman, 'A woman's work', np,
59. The total number of women raped is unknown, although estimates vary between 250 000 and 500 000.
60. See HRW, Shattered Lives, pp 24, 18, 39-65.
61. See also AR & Rakiya, Death, Despair, Defiance, pp 410, 439.
62. Although rape in 'private' spaces was equally symbolic of the invasion of the personal realm, thought to be outside politics.
63. L Hansen, 'Gender, nation, rape: Bosnia and the construction of security', International Feminist Journal of Politics, 3 (1), 2001, p 60.
64. The terms 'wife' and 'marriage' are used in Rwandan testimonies in reference to situations of forced marriage, rape and sexual slavery.
65. Quoted in AR & Rakiya, Death, Despair, Defiance, p 415.
66. Quoted in ibid, p 416.
67. Nelson, A Finger in the Wound, p 220.
68. Hutu Army Chief of Staff, quoted in I Martin, 'Hard choices after genocide: Human rights and political failures in Rwanda', in Jonathan Moore (ed), Hard Choices: Moral Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention. MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998, p 159.
69. For a preliminary consideration, see E Baines, Vulnerable Bodies: Gender, the UN and the Global Refugee Crisis, London: Ashgate, ch 5, forthcoming.
70. René LeMarchand, 'Hate crimes: Race and retribution in Rwanda', Transition, 9 (1&2), 2000, pp 114-132. Also at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/transition/vOO9/9.1lemarchand.html.
71. Nelson, A Finger in the Wound, p 209.