Rwanda 1994. Les politiques du génocide à Butare (review)

On April 6, 1994, following the assassination of President Habyarimana, mass murder became the law of the land in Rwanda. André Guichaoua's Rwanda 1994: Les politiques du génocide à Butare sheds light on this descent into hell by exploring how and why Butare Province, alone among Rwanda's ten provinces, developed the resolve to resist the campaign of slaughter, and how the Hutu-based national leadership turned Butare into a national laboratory for making the extermination of Tutsi and persona non grata Hutu a top priority, if not a duty, of Rwanda citizenship. Indeed, for nearly two weeks the population of Butare province (both Hutu and Tutsi)—led by a Tutsi Préfet (Jean Baptiste Habyarimana), a Hutu commander of the government armed forces, and a Hutu mayor of Butare, along with several other Mayors, intellectuals and businessmen—all resisted the call to kill. For a brief moment (of two weeks) they made of their province a "safe-haven." Only from April 19 did the government succeed in launching the genocide campaign—labeled "the work"—after removing from their official positions all of those labeled by the government as "resisters" (including the Préfet), and by bringing in soldiers and militias from outside to begin the slaughter.

Author of Destins paysans et politiques agraires en Afrique centrale [Peasant Destiny and Agrarian Politics in Central Africa] (L'Harmattan 1989) and several other illuminating publications on the Great Lakes region, Guichaoua happened to be in Rwanda when the pogroms started; since then, he has researched and written extensively on the subject. As a result of his work, several judicial tribunals on Rwanda have sought his assistance as expert witness—particularly the ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda), the U.N.-sponsored tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania.

Yet in this important book, Guichaoua shows himself to be as good a social theorist as a researcher. Applying the rigor of sociology to propose an original political reading of Rwandan events, Guichaoua presents this work in two main parts, introduced by a preamble. The preamble highlights the "social alchemy" from which developed both the myths and realities of the Hutu-Tutsi antagonism in Butare, a province that had shown "the most intense ethnic, social, economic and political mixture in the country" (10). This section also presents biographies of eighty-five prominent figures from Butare who contributed to "making history" (11–14).

Part 1 then explores the particularities of Butare, tracing its trajectory from a favored position in the colonial period, through its decline in the decolonization era, to the moment when it served as the principal arena of opposition to the Habyarimana regime during the short-lived democratization process of the early 1990s. Guichaoua argues that this unique character of Butare's history prompted the regime to implement a whole series of stratagems to maintain its influence; these included tightening control over the national university (based in Butare), support for Interahamwe militias through the resources of state-sponsored companies, the co-optation of local activists known for their extremism, opportunism, or cowardice, and a variety of other tactics.

The second part of Les politiques du genocide focuses exclusively on a singular political figure, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, then Minister of Family and Gender Affairs (and now on trial before the ICTR). The author had the good fortune of "discovering" the 1994 diary of Nyiramasuhuko, and the mine of information and revelations it contained. This extraordinarily valuable first-hand source sets out the day-to-day decisions of the ruling party (the MRND), as well as its existential fears and plans vis-à-vis the peace and democratization processes; details the plans for recruiting and financing Interahamwe militias; includes lists of people to be assassinated; and (after the defeat of the regime) discusses the militarization of the refugee camps in Zaire and the pursuit of "deadly ambitions" once in exile.

Building on Nyiramasuhuko's groundbreaking revelations and the author's own numerous oral sources and written documents, Guichaoua finds inadequate the arguments often...