Is Genocide Still Possible in Rwanda?

Twenty years ago there was a massacre, a genocide in Rwanda that bruised the conscience of Africa and the world. For the past twenty years, the memory of that dastardly event has especially marked the history of Rwanda. If memory of such tragedies is to help us not to repeat them, then it does not appear that remembering the deaths that took place in Rwanda this time twenty years ago is serving that purpose well. The reason for this is simple: the conditions that made for genocide in Rwanda twenty years ago are still with us today. In his perceptive essay about structural violence in Rwanda on the eve of the genocide, Peter Uvin laments how on the eve of the genocide, Rwanda was being touted as the jewel of progress in Africa even as the elite was subjecting the people to injurious lives. A similar thing is happening today as the West is touting Paul Kagame's Rwanda as the cleanest country in Africa even as he is silencing his critiques by death, threats of death, and imprisonment. The genocide in Rwanda was perpetrated by political and economic exclusion, by the perception of one group of people as the rightful heirs to Rwanda, as other groups were marginalized. This basic tendency has not gone away under Paul Kagame. Machiavelli might have said that a leader should rather be feared than loved and Kagame may think this is a good idea. However, people are prevented from killing each other not by fear but by the perception that their destinies are intertwined. By running opponents aground, Kagame is not doing much to stave off the possibility of a future genocide. Rwanda may be clean but the politics still stinks.

See Peter Uvin, "Development Aid and Structural Violence: The Case of Rwanda," Development, vol. 42 no. 3 (September 1999).