Images for Viewing:
Rwanda
People
Steep
Slope Erosion
Forest
Loss
Steep
Slope Agriculture
Afromontane
Forest
In the late 1980s Rwanda, the country of "a thousand hills", was considered by many Africans, visitors, and development workers to be the "jewel of East Africa" and "Africa's best kept secret". Sigourney Weaver and "Gorillas in the Mist" had brought international attention to the country through a movie filled with romantic images of Ruhengeri Prefecture's beautiful and forested landscapes. Volcanoes such as Karisimbi (4,507 m), Bisoke (3,711 m), and Sabinyo (3,674 m) graced the horizons of this seemingly peaceful and mountainous country.
Curiously out of the camera's field of view, however, was the real situation that confronted more than 95 per cent of the country's population of 7.5 million people. The typical steep hillslope up to the foot of the volcanoes was cleared, under intense cultivation, and poorly protected with either structural or biological terracing. The original afromontane forests were long gone, and more than half of those remaining in protected areas, such as the Parc National des Volcans, had been cleared in the 1970s and 1980s in the name of "development" and agricultural expansion. The countryside was one of the most densely populated in the world, with as many as 760 people per km2 and an annual growth rate of more than 3 per cent. Hillslope erosion, landslides, and annual soil loss were among the highest in the world, seriously threatening food production.
Ethnic tension, primarily between the Hutu and Tutsi groups, was more than a hundred years old and generally accepted as a fact of life. Between April and August of 1994, however, more than 1 million people, primarily Tutsi, were killed, and 2 million more turned into refugees, in one of the most terrible acts of genocide of the 20th century. As mentioned by Frederick Starr, the reasons behind this tragedy are extremely complex, widely thought to have included environmental scarcity, overpopulation, poverty, victimization, and ineffective, corrupt governmental regimes. However, the inherited burden of severe ethnic cleavage and animosity assuredly played important roles that are in need of much greater attention and analysis.
Pre-colonial differences between the Hutu and Tutsi, for example, were based primarily on basic distinctions between being an agriculturalist or pastoralist, and social interchanges between the two groups remained fluid. The German and Belgian colonial powers, however, favored the Tutsis for positions of local power that seriously began the process of thickening the walls of ethnic distrust, fear, and hatred. The Hutu "revolt" of 1959 led to Rwandan independence in 1962, which served to further divide and segregate ethnic categories and discrimination. According to Percival and Homer-Dixon (1995), these ethnic barriers were then exacerbated by a number of other significant factors that included the scarcity of land, the civil war, structural adjustment, the fall in coffee prices, Rwanda's position as a landlocked country with little chance for economic diversification, and a threatened and reactive governmental regime. When President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane exploded in the skies above Kigali on 6 April 1994, the violence that had gripped the country for the past 40 months, much of it rooted in historic grievances, also exploded.
One of the most important questions that has been asked frequently since the resultant genocide is, "could this tragedy have been prevented?" While dozens of international development agencies conducted business as usual in the very places that witnessed the most horrific massacres, were there in fact indicators of the severity of ethnic conflict that could have served as warnings? Most atrocities seem impossible to imagine until they actually happen. Nevertheless, are there warning signals that should be acknowledged and acted upon in the interests of preventing the eruption of similar conflicts and tragedies in the future?
In addition to the solid list of "best practices" mentioned by Starr, greater attention to the importance of ethnic grievance, whether recent or historic, seems long overdue.
References
Browsing Classification: Sociology and Demography: Warfare and
Refugees: Africa: Rwanda
Sociologie et démographie: Guerres et réfugiés
Sociología y demografía: Guerras y refugiados
Citation: Byers, A.C. 2002. Ethnic Conflict in Rwanda. Case study on "Conflict and Peace in Mountain Societies", Mountain Forum E-consultation for the Bishkek Global Mountain Summit, UNEP.
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