Last Friday, April 7th, Rwanda commemorated the 29th anniversary of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis, when over 800,000 of them, along with some moderate Hutus, were massacred by the majority Hutus. Ahead of the International Day of Reflection, the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide had noted that history shows hate speech can be a precursor to the commission of atrocious crimes, as happened in the Holocaust and in the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and therefore should be avoided. As Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his wife lit the symbolic flame at the Gisozi National Memorial in Kigali, he cautioned, “We cannot, however, ignore the fact that things like violence and hate speech persist. Not so far away from here.”
An official report on the Genocide against the Tutsis offered a chilling background that is instructive for present-day Guyana: “Organizers of the genocide used ideology to bring Hutu to fear and hate Tutsi. They then used the institutions of the state to transform the fear and hate into the myriad acts of hunting, raping, and killing that made up the genocide. To make the ideology deadly, the leaders had to be able to give orders and see them executed — for this, they had to control the military, the administration, and the political parties. They used the radio, too, to disseminate propaganda, but without the other channels of command, the radio itself would not have sufficed.
“Among the false ideas drawn on by political leaders and propagandists backing the Hutu leader Habyarimana was the following: Tutsi were foreign to Rwanda, and had no right to live there; Despite the 1959 revolution, when 20,000 Tutsis were killed, Tutsi continued to enjoy higher status and greater wealth than Hutu, and were in some way responsible for continuing Hutu poverty, and Tutsi posed a danger to Hutu, who were always the victims, whether of Tutsi military power or of Tutsi cunning (use of their women to seduce Hutu, use of their money to buy Hutu), and so Hutu had a right and a duty to defend themselves.
“From 1990 through the 1994 genocide, propagandists used newspapers and later the radio to disseminate these ideas hostile to the Tutsi. It was particularly the last idea — that Hutu were threatened and had to defend themselves — that proved most successful in mobilising attacks on Tutsi from 1990 through the 1994 genocide. In late 1993, the Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Armed Forces warned the men under his command that the (Tutsi) enemy was still intent on taking power, and would do so at any price. Emphasising that they were not to put their faith in negotiations and that they must really “understand what kind of enemy” they were fighting, he circulated a report from a military commission that had examined ways to defeat the enemy.
“The report divided the enemy into two categories, the principal enemy and partisans of the enemy. The principal enemy was: the Tutsi inside or outside the country, extremist and nostalgic for power, who have NEVER recognized and will NEVER recognize the realities of the 1959 social revolution, and who wish to reconquer power by all means necessary, including arms. In defining the partisans of the enemy, the military commission made the necessary nod towards democratic openness, saying political opponents should not be confused with the enemy. But then it condemned Tutsi and those Hutu who opposed President Habyarimana. In several places, it used “Tutsi” as equivalent to enemy, and it said that Tutsi were unified behind a single ideology: Tutsi hegemony.
“The document deplored the loss of Hutu solidarity, which it blamed on enemy machinations. It listed the establishment of multiple political parties as an advantage for the enemy, and warned that infiltrators had led these parties to favour the RPF. It asserted that opponents of Habyarimana were “turning public opinion from the ethnic problem to the socio-economic problem between the rich and the poor.”
It behooves leaders in plural societies like Guyana to remember the lessons of Rwanda.
