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Scott Straus, a Political Science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison has recently published Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide and is about to release a new book, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power and War in Rwanda. In this interview, he provides a brief overview of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, unravels the complicated notions behind the two ethnic groups, Hutus and Tutsis, and explains the implications that these categories had in terms of the genocide. Mr. Straus also tackles the difficult notions behind the intertwined relationships of perpetrators, rescuers and bystanders during the genocide in Rwanda.
TRANSCRIPT:
NARRATOR: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Your host is Jerry Fowler, Director of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience.
JERRY FOWLER: Our guest today is Scott Straus. He is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He has just published Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide, and has another book on Rwanda forthcoming, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power and War in Rwanda. Before going to graduate school, he was a Nairobi-based journalist and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the war in Congo in 1996. Scott, thanks for joining us.
SCOTT STRAUS: Thank you Jerry; I am delighted to be here.
JERRY FOWLER: I think most of our listeners are probably familiar with the Rwandan genocide which was ongoing twelve years, but could you give us just a brief overview of what happened in Rwanda?
SCOTT STRAUS: Sure. Basically, in 1994, on April 6th, 1994, the President of Rwanda was assassinated, and we still do not really know who assassinated him, but shortly thereafter, some hardliners within the military and within the ruling party; in particular, consolidated control of the Rwandan state. They very quickly attacked their Hutu political opponents, and proceeded also to attack members of the international community, and fairly quickly, moved into full-scale genocide. They declared war against the so called the Tutsi enemy. They deployed military units, paramilitary units, broadcast inflammatory radio messages, and proceeded to unleash large scale violence against the Tutsi civilian population. Generally recognized as the fastest or most rapid extermination of the 20th century, in about 100 days an estimated, at least half a million, Tutsi civilians died in pretty awful ways, and some people estimate that as many as a million died. Just as a parenthetical note, judging from my research, a lot of that violence actually happened in April and the first and second weeks of May, so some people extrapolate a kind average of x amount of people died over the 100 days, but in fact most of the killing was concentrated in the first half of the 100 days.
JERRY FOWLER: The two groups in Rwanda, as you say, were the Hutu, who were the majority, and the Tutsi minority. Sometimes it is a little hard to get our minds around; they consider themselves ethnic groups, but in some ways they were not ethnic groups as we might traditionally think of ethnic groups?
SCOTT STRAUS: That is right. It is a very complicated and fascinating and tragic story. The short answer to your question is that these are kind of social categories that existed in the society, at least when the genocide happened and in the modern era, these are social categories that were meaningful to people—that is people identified as Hutu or Tutsi, and they knew who was Hutu or Tutsi in most cases in their communities, and these were categories that were on ethnic identity cards. That said, these are not traditional ethnic groups in the way that most people tend to think of ethnic groups in the sense that Hutus and Tutsis speak the same language, they intermarry (or use to relatively frequently), they have the same culture, the same religions, they live next door to each other throughout the country. In some ways, these do not have the attributes of deeply divided ethnic groups that we tend to think of around the world. It is one of the puzzles of the Rwandan genocide: why groups that were so interconnected and had so many similarities ultimately why do you get this level of violence. The exact origins of the terms have been difficult to pin down in this subject of a very deep scholarship in the literature on Rwanda. It is clear that when Europeans began entering this part of central Africa, they had a big impact on what the categories meant and how salient they were. Prior to the colonial contact, it seems that the categories of Hutu and Tutsi related to economic status, or rather, social status, and to economic activity. Tutsis tended to be of higher status; they tended to be involved in pastoralism—that is raising of cattle; where as Hutus tended to be of lower status, and they also tended to be people who were involved agriculture, farming. It is also clear that the categories relate to a pre-colonial kingdom that is that they belonged to a particular political system in Rwanda at the time. That political system was fairly sophisticated, and when ultimately European missionaries and adventurers, travelers, and ultimately colonialists began to explore the area and ultimately take control of it, they interpreted the differences between Hutus and Tutsis as different races, and Tutsis as a superior race and Hutus as an inferior race, and they structured the colonial system around that particular structure. In other words, they systematically elevated Tutsis to positions of power and excluded Hutus. This had a very big impact, both in terms racializing identities in Rwanda, but also in terms of widening differences and intensifying differences and making them quite political. It is a long winded answer, but it is complicated.
JERRY FOWLER: Very much so, and this racial view that the Europeans brought was part of a general view of race and the relationships of groups that was very prevalent in the West in the early part of the 20th century and ultimately in Germany, it contributed to the Nazi’s view of Jews.
SCOTT STRAUS: That is absolutely right, and in some way—I have thought about this and it is sort of speculation—but in some way it is a kind of accident of history that Rwanda was colonized at the time it was when these racial theories were quite prominent and they ultimately had this effect and ultimately underpinned the ideology of genocide in the country. This is a time of social Darwinism, at the height of racial theory in Europe; it ultimately had an impact in Germany. This was part of the general way of viewing Africa as any kind of civilization seemed to be the work of a lighter skinned racial group, and this also served colonial interests at the time.
JERRY FOWLER: The focus of your research was interviewing Hutu individuals who were perpetrators of the genocide and are in prison in Rwanda. How many people participated in the genocide?
SCOTT STRAUS: This is a good question in the subject of a lot of disagreement in the scholarship. There are people who estimate that it was just tens of thousands who participated and some people estimate as many as three million—that is basically the entire adult Hutu population. Do not know for sure. It is clear that it depends a little on what you mean by being a perpetrator, being a participant in the genocide. Some people would say that anyone who complied with state orders during this period was a participant; let us say they participated in the civilian dissents for something like that. Other people—and this is how I tend to come down—estimate that or sort of think of a perpetrator as someone who took part in the killing of another person, that is either they did not necessarily have to deal the death blows, so to speak, but they were in groups where people were killed; that is they were present for the murder or attempted murder of someone. I tried to estimate based on the survey I conducted of perpetrators, and I estimated that somewhere between 175,000 and 210,000 perpetrators, so there was very significant civilian participation in the genocide. Of that number, there were fairly sizeable minority of soldiers and other people involved in military activity, as well as militias and so forth, but there were clearly a large number of civilians who took part in the genocide.
JERRY FOWLER: You interviewed a fair number of them—I think a couple hundred.
SCOTT STRAUS: That is right. I interviewed 210. Rwanda has a complex system of justice for prosecuting the genocide, and one of the consequences of this is that—at least when I was doing research in the early 2000s—there were a very large number of both suspected perpetrators and convicted perpetrators in Rwandan prisons. When I was there in 2002 doing this research there were about 210 thousand suspected and convicted perpetrators in prison. What I did was I focused on the perpetrators who had been convicted and I focused on the perpetrators who had also confessed to their crimes—that is people who admitted to taking part in the genocide, and I went into all the prisons where that population existed, and I took random samples from the population, meaning I just generated a random number and sampled perpetrators and then interviewed them using a questionnaire that I developed and interview about 210 using this method.
JERRY FOWLER: I was going to say—maybe you were getting to this—I think the question that most people ask is why did these people murder other people? In the Holocaust context, there has been a debate about whether the perpetrators are ordinary men caught up in circumstances or whether there is some deep-seeded hatred of the other, whether it is the Jews or the Tutsis, and I know you have some answers to that question.
SCOTT STRAUS: I tend to come down on the former side that these were clearly ordinary men. Let me give you again a sort of long-winded answer. It is a complicated question: why do these people kill, and I can give you a summary answer which is that I think that fear was a big part of it; I think social pressure from other Hutus—that is that men decided to take part in the genocide because they feared the consequences of not taking part, that is they are pressured by other men or pressured by other authorities and this kind of thing—sometimes greed played a part; sometimes ethnic hatred played a part, but not in the way that we think of ethnic hatred, and I will explain what I mean in a second. Just in terms of the ordinary man hypothesis, one of the things that I did with the results of my research was to compare the profile of the perpetrator, based on my findings, to the profile of the average adult Hutu man in the country, and they are remarkably similar, that is that at the average ago of the perpetrator that I interviewed was in the 30s, the average number of years schooling was a couple years, the average number of children was two, and when I compared all of these statistics—and there are others—when I compared them all to the national census figures, they are almost identical, that is the profile of the perpetrator based on my results is very similar to the profile of the average adult male in the country at the time of the genocide. Now, that said, there are some differences in—we tend to think of perpetrator as a singular category and I think this is a common limitation in the literature, but it is clear when you look at Rwanda that there were perpetrators, there were people who committed a lot of violence and people who committed less violence. One of the findings that I had was that the people who tended to commit more violence tended to be younger; they tended to have fewer pre-existing ties to Tutsis, and this kind of thing. One of the most remarkable findings that I had from this research is that about 66% of my sample had a Tutsi family member; in other words, that the majority of people who too part in the genocide based on my findings had a Tutsi relative, and I think in a way that that one finding speaks quite a bit about this question of ethnic hatred. These are groups that were very close to each other, they had lots of interaction, lots of cooperation and intermarriage prior to the genocide.
JERRY FOWLER: One thing that is along these lines and comes out from reading the interviews which are collected in your book, Intimate Enemy, is that a large number of the people who engaged in violence also saved Tutsis that they were close to. We often think of killer and rescuer and bystander being separate categories, but you had a lot of individuals who fell into all three of those categories.
SCOTT STRAUS: That is absolutely right, and in some ways the Rwandan case does disrupt some of those categories. In some cases, individuals would hide Tutsis in their homes, but then participating groups that were going around attacking Tutsis, as a way of proving that they were on the side of the killers, and therefore as a way of indirectly protecting the Tutsis that they were hiding. What I found is that many individuals faced very difficult moral choices, and they ultimately chose in ways I hope we all would choose not to do, that is they ultimately chose to take part in the killing and to commit harm against others, but sometimes the choices that they were facing were, “If I do not go out, with these groups, they might come into our house and kill the person that I am hiding;” “They might destroy our house;” “They might attack me;” and this kind of thing. It was very possible for a Rwandan perpetrator to be someone who was at the same time a rescuer and so forth. The worst killers, the ones who were the most aggressive during the genocide, tended not to fall under this pattern. This tended to be some of the lower level perpetrators of the genocide, based on my findings.
JERRY FOWLER: Were those people who engaged in the most killings, were they members of militias before the genocide started? Many of these people were not politically active before the genocide.
SCOTT STRAUS: Yes, that is right. Some of them were, but a lot of them were not, and what I found is that at the micro level and local areas what you saw were groups of men who became very aggressive. They were either local authorities or local elites, some people with some kind of education, some kind of status before the genocide, or they were people who were young, sometimes they were members of militias, sometimes they were people who had retired from the military, this type of thing. In these circumstances, they became very opportunistically aggressive and sort of led the charge and said, “The authorities tell us we have to go out and kill the Tutsis, and we must,” and then they would go around their communities and mobilize men to take part in the killing. Some of them were militia, but in many parts of the country, the ruling party did not have active armed militias and the opposition was in control, and in these places you tend to see that these were not members of the so called Interhamwe, which is the name of the ruling party’s militias; these were not members who ultimately became the most aggressive.
JERRY FOWLER: Stepping back a minute, it is often said that the genocide was very carefully planned and there was certainly a build up in the years before of demonizing the Tutsi on hate radio, but you actually take issue with the idea that there was always a plan that at some point there would be a genocide.
SCOTT STRAUS: First of all, let me be clear that there is no question in my mind that genocide happened, that this was a deliberate, well coordinated, well organized campaign of violence against the Tutsi minority. The question is when did the hardliners decide on extermination as a policy, and ultimately, what led them to do so. What I find in my research is a dynamic of escalation, and in my view the civil war, the assassination of the President, and then ultimately, the war that the Tutsi rebels won contributed to the escalation of the hardliners; it led them to the Rwandan final solution if you will. I think in a way, if we think of the Rwandan genocide as carefully, meticulously planned back in 1990, and back in 1991, even 1992 and 1993, then I think we miss some of the dynamics of the escalation and also what was driving the radicalization of the hardliners and ultimately what led to the genocide, in my opinion. I think that the war was a big part of this, and people tend to distinguish war from genocide. War is combatants fighting combatants and genocide is the attempt to annihilate a civilian population, but I think the logic of war contributed quite strongly to the logic of genocide in this case. In other words, it was not war; it was genocide, but the war that was happening, I think, was part of why hardliners ultimately chose genocide.
JERRY FOWLER: Given that, are there things that we can learn from your study of Rwanda that are relevant to other situations?
SCOTT STRAUS: Yes, there is a lot to learn.
JERRY FOWLER: Recognizing that we are near the end of the time that we have.
SCOTT STRAUS: There is a lot. Certainly one of the things that I hope my study does is it helps us identify the conditions in which genocide tends to happen. I think that genocide tends to happen in war. I think Rwanda is this; my study clearly shows this, in my view. The other thing that Rwanda shows is that there is this dynamic of escalation, a process of radicalization, and we should be careful to pay attention in situations where there are hardliners who begin to radicalize in any regime. In most regimes there are divides between moderates and hardliners. Once we begin to see this division, I think that is usually a recipe for radicalization. I think the other thing about recognizing a dynamic of escalation is that it also shows that if an intervention can be successful that the key is to try to neutralize the process of radicalization and that in the right conditions, people will not necessarily commit violence, that is that one of my other findings is that I do not think Hutus were programmed or predisposed to genocide or to committing large scale violence. I think that they committed genocide in particular conditions, and the question is trying to prevent those conditions from happening, or once war starts to happen to try to deescalate it. That is one of the findings. I also find that an intervention would have been successful in saving lots and lots of lives, and again, I think that what happened in Rwanda was a series of tipping points that allowed the hardliners to consolidate control and to commit this large scale violence, but that could have been short circuited with an intervention.
JERRY FOWLER: Scott, unfortunately we have come to the end of our time. Scott Straus has just published a book about Rwanda called Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide, and has another book forthcoming, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power and War in Rwanda. Scott, thanks for being with us.
SCOTT STRAUS: Thanks so much Jerry.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, visit our website at www.committeeonconscience.org.
