Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence

3. The Ruler's Drum and the People's Shout: Accountability and Representation on Rwanda's Hills

67  3 The Ruler’s Drum and the People’s Shout Accountability and Representation on Rwanda’s Hills bert ingelaere Introduction I was interviewing peasants in southeast Rwanda in 2006 about their experience of political representation when an old man made a cryptic remark: “The cry [shout] is not winning from the drum [Induru ntirwana n’ingoma].” I wasn’t surprised by this response, as Rwandans tend to speak in proverbs. But it wasn’t until I came across an article by Alison Des Forges that I began to understand what he had meant. As Des Forges explained: “During the nineteenth century the Rwandan state grew stronger and the rulers more ambitious. ‘The drum is greater than the shout’ became an accepted proverb, meaning the power of the state exceeds that of the people” (Des Forges 1986, 312). As part of that state expansion, nobles from the largely Tutsi court had been sent north to govern what had previously been an autonomous and predominantly Hutu region. By invoking this proverb, the elderly peasant sought to explain the post-genocide present in terms of the pre-colonial past—not the 68 T h e R u l e r ’ s D r u m a n d t h e P e o p l e ’ s S h o u t Rwandan Patriotic Front’s (RPF’s) imagined past of nonethnic harmony, but rather a past marked by the central state’s political (and ethnic) domination over the periphery. In this chapter, I examine the interplay between state power and peasants at the local level. Despite the recent proliferation of writings on the postgenocide regime, political representation and governance at the local level remain largely unexplored. Such a bottom-up perspective helps “bring peasants back into an understanding of the political and social processes of the state” (Newbury and Newbury 2000, 874). I argue that, under the guise of “decentralization ,” the RPF has actually expanded the central state’s political reach down to the local level. Crucial to understanding this process is the fact that locally elected representatives have been displaced by centrally appointed authorities . Not surprisingly, then, accountability in local governance structures flows upward to central authorities, not downward to the population. This chapter shows how the RPF has created parallel channels of command and control in the countryside to maintain centralized control over the population. These developments are worrying because top-down and authoritarian power structures are precisely what made the administration of violence so viciously efficient in 1994. The chapter begins with a brief overview of how the RPF has restructured the state at the local level as part of its larger social engineering campaign. It then describes local elections on a rural hill in 2006 and the subsequent marginalization of those elected representatives. Finally, it describes governance practice in the periphery. Restructuring Governance in the Countryside During the First (1962–73) and Second (1973–94) “Hutu Republics ,” Rwandan society was hierarchically organized into prefectures (provinces ), communes (municipalities), sectors, cells, and, at the lowest level, nyumbakumi (groupings of ten households). Each commune was run by a bourgmestre (mayor) directly appointed by the president. Their position was similar to the chiefs who had existed prior to the so-called 1959 Hutu social revolution (Lemarchand 1970, 183–88; Reyntjens 1987). A consultant for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) found that the appointment of bourgmestres “gives central authorities strong control and monitoring powers over the activities of the commune” (Goetz et al. 1994, 5). Ironically, B e r t I n g e l a e r e 69 the consultancy report was published in May 1994 when the state was mobilizing many bourgmestres to direct genocidal killings in their communes. Several years after the genocide, the idea of restructuring the state in the countryside surfaced during the so-called Urugwiro meetings between May 1998 and March 1999 (RoR 1999). Every Saturday, then-president Pasteur Bizimungu met “representatives of Rwandan society” to discuss pressing issues and debate possible solutions. Some participants in these meetings identified centralized state structures as a major factor in the genocidal violence and so proposed decentralization for future conflict prevention. Decentralization also chimed with donor priorities for good governance (USAID 2002; Oxfam 2002; SIDA 2004; UNDP 2005). The RPF-led government adopted a decentralization policy in 2000 (RoR 2001). Following that, it abolished the sous-prefectures and replaced...