Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory, and Silence in Rwanda

Notes

229 Intro­ duc­ tion 1. Es­ ti­ mates over how many peo­ ple died in the 1994 gen­ o­ cide vary ­ widely. The most con­ ser­ va­ tive es­ ti­ mate of “at least a half a mil­ lion” comes from Human ­ Rights Watch and is based on a study con­ ducted by de­ mog­ ra­ pher ­ William Selt­ zer (Des­ Forges 1999, 15). A UN ex­ pert es­ ti­ mated that 800,000 Rwan­ dans had died ­ between April and July 1994, but this num­ ber in­ cluded those who died from ­ causes other than gen­ o­ cide (quoted in ibid.). Gér­ ard Pru­ nier (1997) es­ ti­ mates that ­ around 800,000 Tutsi lost their lives ­ between April and July 1994. In 2001 the Rwan­ dan­ government’s Min­ is­ try of Local Af­fairs con­ ducted a cen­ sus of vic­ tims and ar­ rived at an es­ ti­ mate of over 1 mil­ lion “killed in mas­ sa­ cres and gen­ o­ cide ­ between 1 Oc­ to­ ber 1991 and 31 De­ cem­ ber 1994” (IRIN 2001b). The re­ port es­ ti­ mated that 97.3 per­ cent of these vic­ tims were Tutsi, or ap­ prox­ i­ mately 1.04 mil­ lion. Al­ though the govern­ ment re­ port in­ cludes all Rwan­ dans who died due to mas­ sa­ cres and gen­ o­ cide from 1991 ­ through 1994, it is ­ likely that the Rwan­ dan govern­ ment es­ ti­ mates are high given that the 1991 cen­ sus es­ ti­ mated the Tutsi pop­ u­ la­ tion ­ within the coun­ try at 700,000. Notes 230 Notes to pages 5–16 2. The gen­ o­ cide plan­ ners ­ relied on the use of hunt­ ing lan­ guage and meta­ phors to or­ ga­ nize ci­ vil­ ian par­ tic­ i­ pa­ tion in the gen­ o­ cide: “Those peo­ ple ­ called to par­ tic­ i­ pate in the gen­ o­ cide trans­ formed them­ selves into hunt­ ers in pur­ suit of dan­ ger­ ous an­ i­ mals” (Mi­ ronko 2004, 52–53). This de­ hu­ man­ iza­ tion made it psycho­ log­ i­ cally pos­ sible for or­ di­ nary peo­ ple to be­ lieve their ac­ tions were for the good of the wider so­ ci­ ety and sanc­ tioned by the high­ est govern­ ment au­ thor­ ities. 3. To dis­ tin­ guish ­ between the waves of Rwan­ dan ref­ u­ gee move­ ments in the re­ gion, the UNHCR began to refer to the pri­ mar­ ily Tutsi ref­ u­ gees who left ­ Rwanda in 1959, 1962–64, or 1972 as “old case­ load ref­ u­ gees,” in that they had ­ long-standing ref­ u­ gee ­ status in UNHCR data­ bases. The more than one mil­ lion pri­ mar­ ily Hutu ref­ u­ gees who fled the coun­ try in 1994 were re­ ferred to as “new case­ load ref­ u­ gees” be­ cause their ref­ u­ gee ­ status ­ claims were more re­ cent. 4. ­ Begoña Aretx­ aga (1997) calls mem­ ory “cul­ tural re­ pos­ i­ to­ ries” of dis­ courses, im­ ages, rep­ re­ sen­ ta­ tions, and sym­ bols. 5. See Liisa ­ Malkki’s (1995) ex­ am­ ina­ tion of Bu­ run­ dian Hutu in ref­ u­ gee camps in Tan­ za­ nia. 6. I bor­ row the term “mythico-historical” from ­ Malkki (1995). 7. Do­ na­ tia spoke in ­ French: “Oui, c’est comme ça. Le gén­ o­ cide nous ha­ bite.” My trans­ la­ tion into En­ glish does not fully cap­ ture the ­ poetry or im­ agery of her state­ ment. An al­ ter­ nate trans­ la­ tion, “The gen­ o­ cide in­ hab­ its us,” comes ­ closer to a lit­ eral trans­ la­ tion, but the En­ glish word “in­ habit,” de­ spite its com­ mon root, is not quite a syno­ nym of the ­ French ha­ biter. 8. As Bruno La­ tour ­ stated it, “If you stop mak­ ing and re­ mak­ ing ­ groups, you stop hav­ ing ­ groups” (2005, 35). In other words, there are no ­ groups; there is only group mak­ ing. My ap­ proach draws on ­ actor-network the­ ory as elab­ orated by La­ tour (2005), Cal­ lon (1986), Law (1986), and oth­ ers. 9. See Pru­ nier (1997, 5) for these sta­ tis­ tics. These sta­ tis­ tics were also re­ ported in the CIA Fact­ book up until 2010 (eth­ nic­ ity was...