The power of local ties: Popular participation in the Rwandan genocide

Security Studies

Volumn 17, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 568-597

  Fujii, Lee Ann ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 52449110542     PISSN: 09636412     EISSN: 15561852     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09636410802319578     Document Type: Article

References (83)

1. The politics and events leading to the genocide are much more complex than this introduction allows. For more detailed accounts, see Jordane Bertrand, Rwanda: Le Piège De L'histoire (Paris: Karthala, 2000);
2. Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story (New York: Human Rights Watch and Fédération Internationale des Ligues des Droits de L'homme, 1999);
3. André Guichaoua, ed., Les Crises Politiques au Burundi et au Rwanda (1993-1994) (Paris: Karthala, 1995);
4. Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995);
5. Filip Reyntjens, L'Afrique Des Grands Lacs en Crise (Paris: Karthala, 1994);
6. Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power and War in Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).
7. Scott Straus, "How Many Perpetrators Were There in the Rwandan Genocide? An Estimate," Journal of Genocide Research 6, no. 1 (2004): 94-95.
8. A cellule comprises roughly one hundred to two hundred households. For a diagram of the administrative hierarchy in Rwanda in the early 1990s, see Appendix.
9. The term "Interahamwe" requires some clarification. Originally the term referred to a specially recruited and trained militia in Kigali. In my two rural research sites, however, residents used the term to refer to local bands of killers.
10. Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 13.
11. James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, "Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic Identity," International Organization 54, no. 4 (2000): 846.
12. Rui J.P. de Figueiredo, Jr. and Barry R. Weingast, "The Rationality of Fear: Political Opportunism and Ethnic Conflict," in Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention, ed. Barbara F. Walter and Jack Snyder (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 262.
13. Ibid;
14. Russell Hardin, One for All (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995);
15. Barry R. Posen, "The Security Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict," Survival 35, no. 1 (1993).
16. Paul R. Brass, Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997);
17. Valère Philip Gagnon, Jr., The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004);
18. Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
19. Stathis N. Kalyvas, "The Ontology of 'Political Violence': Action and Identity in Civil Wars," Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 3 (2003);
20. Ian Kershaw, "The Persecution of Jews and German Popular Opinion in the Third Reich," in The Persisting Question, ed. Helen Fein (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987);
21. Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest (Oxford: James Currey, 1996);
22. Jeremy M. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007);
23. Elisabeth Jean Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
24. Mart Bax, Medjugorje: Religion, Politics, and Violence in Rural Bosnia (Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij, 1995);
25. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in CivilWar;
26. Kalyvas, "The Ontology of 'Political Violence"'; Stephen C. Lubkemann, "Migratory Coping in Wartime Mozambique: An Anthropology of Violence and Displacement in 'Fragmented Wars,"' Journal of Peace Research 42, no. 4 (2005).
27. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).
28. Straus estimates between one hundred seventy-five thousand and two hundred ten thousand total perpetrators, of which 90 percent would have been "non-hardcore civilian perpetrators." Straus, "How Many Perpetrators?" 94-95. More recently, proceedings from gacaca (community-based courts) have resulted in accusations against five hundred thousand people.
29. Lars Waldorf, "Ordinariness and Orders: Explaining Popular Participation in the Rwandan Genocide," Genocide Studies and Prevention 2, no. 3 (2007).
30. At the time of the civil war and genocide (1990-94), Rwanda was organized into eleven prefectures. All place names below the level of prëfecture are pseudonyms, as are the names of people.
31. René Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970);
32. Catharine Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988);
33. Filip Reyntjens, Pouvoir et Droit au Rwanda (Tervuren, Belgium: Musée Royale de l'Afrique Centrale, 1985).
34. In one group interview, there were six men; in the other, there were three. The first took place in Kimanzi secteur and the second in Ngali's central prison.
35. N. Patrick Peritore, "Reflections on Dangerous Fieldwork," The American Sociologist (Winter 1990);
36. Jeffrey A. Sluka, "Participant Observation in Violent Social Contexts," Human Organization 49, no. 2 (1990).
37. Kristen Renwick Monroe, The Heart of Altruism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996);
38. Kristen Renwick Monroe, "John Donne's People: Explaining Differences between Rational Actors and Altruists through Cognitive Frameworks," Journal of Politics 53, no. 2 (1991).
39. Other factors also played a role in my decision to continue or not continue interviewing the same person. Some people showed little interest in being interviewed or were difficult to find. Instead of expending extra - and oftentimes fruitless - effort pursuing people who did not want to be interviewed, I focused my attention on those who did. I was fairly confident that if those individuals who avoided being interviewed had something to hide, their stories would come up in interviews with others. This assumption may have been mistaken, however. Whole communities can engage in "social" or "cultural censorship," remaining silent on topics deemed divisive or harmful to the community.
40. On social censorship, see Sandra E. Greene, "Whispers and Silences: Explorations in African Oral History," Africa Today 50, no. 2 (2003).
41. On cultural censorship, see Robin E. Sheriff, "Exposing Silence as Cultural Censorship: A Brazilian Case," American Anthropologist 102, no. 1 (2000). Hence, if such censorship was in place, then certain stories would have remained hidden no matter to whom I spoke. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for this point.
42. This was a problem I did not anticipate, particularly since I knew that many prisoners had already confessed to having killed, a far worse deed in my mind. I discussed this problem with two Rwandan colleagues. One conjectured that people did not want to admit to pillaging because of the shame attached to such an act since it indicated the pillager coveted what another person had. My other colleague pointed out that admitting to pillaging would make the pillager liable to pay restitution, yet another reason to keep quiet on this matter.
43. Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).
44. On the "double genocide" thesis which was promulgated in the prisons, see, for example, Philip Verwimp, "Testing the Double-Genocide Thesis for Central and Southern Rwanda," Journal of Conflict Resolution 47, no. 4 (2003).
45. This is a typical focus of interpretive research. As Dvora Yanow explains, "Interpretive research rarely proceeds from a formalized hypothesis because the researcher does not know ahead of time what meaning(s) will be found, expecting them to be generated through (participant-)observing and/or conversational interviewing and/or the close reading of documents."
46. Dvora Yanow, "Neither Rigorous nor Objective? Interrogating Criteria for Knowledge Claims in Interpretive Science," in Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, ed. Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz- Shea (Armonk, NY: M.E Sharpe, 2006), 71.
47. Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, "Judging Quality: Evaluative Criteria and Epistemic Communities," in Interpretation and Method;
48. Yanow, "Neither Rigorous nor Objective?"
49. Mark Granovetter, "Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness," American Journal of Sociology 91, no. 3 (1985).
50. Ibid., 492 (emphasis added).
51. Robert D. Kaplan, "The Coming Anarchy," Atlantic Monthly, February 1994.
52. John Mueller, "The Banality of Ethnic War," International Security 25, no. 1 (2000).
53. Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
54. Methodologically, I consider Joiners to be prisoners who had confessed to participating in the genocide.
55. While most Rwandans would probably identify themselves as farmers, many earn "off-farm" income through other means. On how men and women make extra money working in brickyards, for example, see Villia Jefremovas, Brickyards to Graveyards: From Production to Genocide in Rwanda (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).
56. Straus, The Order of Genocide, 103-10. In addition, the data are consistent with a household-level economic survey that Philip Verwimp conducted in three provinces. The average age of perpetrators from this survey was thirty-three.
57. Philip Verwimp, "An Economic Profile of Peasant Perpetrators of Genocide: Micro-Level Evidence from Rwanda," Journal of Development Economics 77, no. 2 (2005): 306-7.
58. Jeremy Boissevain, Friends of Friends: Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974), 30.
59. The selection strategy I used was purposive, not random. The fact that half of the eight survivors in one research site were married to spouses of the other ethnicity is notable but not necessarily an accurate indicator of the rate of intermarriage in the community as a whole.
60. Straus, The Order of Genocide, 120.
61. Verwimp, "An Economic Profile of Peasant Perpetrators," 308-9 (emphasis in original).
62. Ibid., 309, note 4.
63. All names are pseudonyms to protect identities.
64. According to his wife, Jude died shortly after he and his family returned from exile in the Congo in 1997. Jude was taken directly to the local jail (cachot communal) and died three days later. His wife never specified the cause of death. Others reported that Jude had been killed.
65. Pawa, derived from the English word :"power," became the slogan of extremists during this period.
66. The nomenclature "#2/5" refers to which interview from the total number of interviews the quotation came. In this case, for example, the quotation came from the second of five interviews with Olivier.
67. The head of a cellule is called a responsable. For more information on Rwanda's administrative structure in the 1990s, see Appendix.
68. Ethnic identity is defined patrilineally in Rwanda. Thus, the children of a Hutu woman and Tutsi man are Tutsi.
69. The Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement (MRND) was the party created by President Habyarimana shortly after he took power in a 1973 coup. Frédéric is probably mistaken about the party, however. It is more likely that Jude was a member of the Mouvement Démocratique Républicain (MDR), which had its roots in this region.
70. In 1994, the exchange rate in the informal market was 182 Rwandan francs to the dollar. Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, 130, note 7. By local standards, 7,000 Rwandan francs,would have been a considerable sum of money.
71. This section draws from my data on rescuers as well as accounts of rescuers featured in African Rights, Hommage au Courage (Kigali and London: African Rights, 2002).
72. Ibid., 23.
73. This finding is consistent with Monroe who argues that for rescuers, their identity or sense of themselves in relation to others makes rescue an immediate and automatic response to anyone in need of help. See Kristen Renwick Monroe, The Hand of Compassion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
74. Charles King, "The Micropolitics of Social Violence," World Politics 56, no. 3 (April 2004).
75. Browning, Ordinary Men;
76. Alexander Laban Hinton, Why Did They Kill? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005);
77. Straus, The Order of Genocide.
78. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence.
79. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador.
80. Martin Dean, "Local Collaboration in the Holocaust in Eastern Europe," in The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004);
81. Martin Dean, "Microcosm: Collaboration and Resistance During the Holocaust in the Mir Rayon of Belarus, 1941-1944," in Collaboration and Resistance During the Holocaust, ed. Paul A. Levine, David Gaunt, Laura Palosuo (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004);
82. Nicholas Gage, Eleni (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983);
83. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War.