Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory

7. The Great Lakes Genocides: Hidden Histories, Hidden Precedents

129 This chapter explores a range of hidden and little-known genocides in the modern history of the African Great Lakes region and the implications of incorporating them into our comparative understanding of genocide, both in a regional context and beyond it. These implications are at once conceptual/theoretical, pedagogical/practical, and moral/ethical. They touch upon central, sometimes incendiary debates in genocide studies and the wider public sphere. They also typify what genocide studies is partly about: the “salvaging” and comparative integration of genocides that have been ignored or effaced from the record, often because a reckoning with them would challenge the power of dominant myths and their guardians. I begin by outlining the specific “hidden” genocidal events that should be incorporated if the beginnings of a coherent portrait are to be drawn of modern “Great Lakes genocides” (1959 to the present). I then discuss the tendency to reframe and resituate genocides in comparative genocide studies, extending the analysis to a broader “Great Lakes” contextualizing of the “Hutu Power” genocide of Tutsis in 1994. Genocidal Events The only genocide in the African Great Lakes region to have commanded the consistent, indeed canonical, attention of genocide scholars and activists is the holocaust of at least half a million Rwandan Tutsis, together with tens of thousands of oppositionist Hutu, between April and July 1994. The numerous genocidal events preceding and following the 1994 watershed may all be classed as hidden genocides. In addition to meriting study on their own terms, all are essential to understanding the apocalyptic events in Rwanda in 1994. In 7 The Great Lakes Genocides Hidden Histories, Hidden Precedents ADAM JONES 130 ADAM JONES chronological order, the major landmarks are: the “independence massacres” of Tutsis, beginning in 1959–1960 and reaching a crescendo in 1963–1964; the 1972 genocide/eliticide in Burundi; the renewed massacres of Rwandan Tutsis in 1990–1993, as well as killings of a smaller but unknown number of Hutu civilians by the Tutsi-dominated RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) in zones of Rwanda under its occupation; the reciprocal genocidal killing in Burundi in 1993; the subsidiary but substantial genocidal killing of Hutus by RPF forces during the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis in April–July 1994; and the Congolese catastrophe following the Rwandan genocide, including both the “genocide of the camps” (my term) inflicted by RPF forces and their allies in 1996–1997 and the wider, more decentralized genocidal killing since then by military and paramilitary forces under diverse sponsorship (Rwandan in particular). It is my contention that the “hidden” aspect of these genocides is a consequence of political and methodological factors. Politically, at least since the ebbing of the early post-independence crises, the Great Lakes region of Africa has been consigned to the margins of international affairs and social-scientific scholarship. There could be no more vivid indicator of this marginal status than the almost-unanimous decision by key international actors to flee the Rwandan scene in April 1994, thereby allowing the genocide of the Tutsis to unfold FIGURE 7.1. Map of Africa’s Great Lakes Region. (Definitions of the region vary. This one excludes Uganda, as does the present chapter, which focuses on Rwanda, Burundi, and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.) (Courtesy ReliefWeb) THE GREAT LAKES GENOCIDES 131 unmolested. Since that time—fueled by a pervasive sense of shame that the postgenocide government of Rwanda has dexterously manipulated and by Western powers’ designation of the “new Rwanda” as a model for all Africa—the tendency has been to focus exclusively on the Tutsi genocide of 1994. This has the effect of constructing a crude moral dichotomy around the Hutu-Tutsi divide (Hutu = bad/genocidal/perpetrators; Tutsi = good/victims/rescuers). This mapping of the Hutu-Tutsi relationship is further limited to Rwanda alone, thereby obfuscating (1) the similar conflict configurations in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo), and (2) the role of Tutsi agents, in particular the present Rwandan government and its affiliated Congolese militias, in perpetrating acts of mass violence, including genocide, both before and after the 1994 watershed. There is a more “neutral” methodological process at work here as well, however. It comprises the tendency of comparative genocide scholarship, first, to orient itself around an “anchoring” genocide, generally but not always one occurring on a vast scale, and second, once anchored, to begin explorations of contiguous...