All the attention on the genocide in Rwanda has not necessarily brought us closer to realizing that what happened there can happen elsewhere too. In using these opening quotations, I wish to link the lethal manipulation of identities in Rwanda to the human condition. Rwanda should certainly not be ‘written out of the rest of humanity’ (Newbury, 1998: 88) because what happened there in 1994 was beyond previous human experience. This was the fastest, most thoroughly ruthless programme of ‘racial’ killing yet imple- mented in the world. Like the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide is now part of the history of humanity, and deserves attention for that reason alone.
It is now virtually irrefutable that what happened in Rwanda in 1994 was state-sponsored genocide; a pre-planned, officially commanded killing of an identified ‘enemy within’. In Rwanda’s case the enemy was defined in ‘racial’ terms as the Hamitic race of Tutsi. All Tutsi were in turn equated with the military enemy, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which had first invaded from Uganda in 1990. Popularly however, the killings and deaths of 1994 and 1995 are still being attributed to ‘inter-tribal’ conflict or ‘ethnic violence’. Since many Rwandans and Burundians themselves understand such killings as the outcome of rivalries between ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ people, dating back centuries, in one sense, who are we as outsiders to disagree? Many studies are based on a similar point of view. One recent analysis com- paring Rwanda’s genocide, the Jewish Holocaust and ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia, for example, concluded that: ‘Regardless of their complex origins, these events demonstrate the capacity of ethnicity and race to arouse the emotions, sometimes to the point of homicidal fury’ (Cornell and Hartmann, 1998: 52).