A book offers a synthesis of the genocide of the Tutsis in 1994, from the beginning of the war to the establishment of the memorial policy. Beyond that, it traces the history of Rwanda over the long term of XXe century, emphasizing colonial and ethnic constructions.
Since 1994, in the media sphere as in academic research, the genocide of the Tutsis has been the subject of numerous publications. Several researchers have undertaken field investigations, the publication of which began in 1999, with the monumental collective work directed by Alison des Forges, No witness must survive. The genocide in Rwandaa work followed by other academic publications, a first set of which was available in 2008.
So, after more than two decades of work, a publication taking stock of knowledge and accessible to a wide audience was desirable. In 2017, in the French-speaking field, Filip Reyntjens was the first to propose such a synthesis. A year later, the one published by Florent Piton has the much less narrow space of a “Reference”.
The genocide
The development of the “Repère” was carried out in conjunction with a process of academic research and writing. Florent Piton recently investigated in Rwanda the history of notables in the former prefecture of Ruhengeri (located in the north of Rwanda) from 1950 to 1994, the genocide constituting the horizon of his thesis. This means that the author knows and masters the research work on the genocide and, more broadly, on the political history of Rwanda.
Despite the title of the book, only two chapters out of six are devoted to the perpetration of the genocide. The first two chapters relate the political history of the kingdom, from the colonial period (1894) to independence (1959), then that of independent and republican Rwanda until the 1er October 1990, the date of the start of the war. It was launched from Uganda by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (FPR), a political-military organization formed by the second generation of Tutsis exiled following state violence against them since the late 1950s.
The third chapter describes the military, political and social upheavals of the period from the beginning of the clashes between the army of FPR and government forces (FAR), until April 6, 1994, the date of the attack on Rwandan President Habyarimana’s plane. This attack led to the resumption of war and opened the way to extremist authorities, who formed the government that organized the genocide.
The last chapter of the book, “Getting out of the genocide (July 1994-2018),” addresses a series of questions relating to, among other things, justice and memorial politics. Rather than devoting the greatest number of pages to the knowledge acquired by researchers on the modalities of the killings that lasted three months (until July 18, 1994, the date of the military victory of FPR), the author has chosen to trace the history of Rwanda over the long term XXe century.
Racial Imagination and Ethnic Collectives
During the last three weeks of April 1994, the majority of the victims of the genocide, several hundred thousand Tutsis, were killed, trapped in churches, communal compounds, stadiums, schools, hunted in the fields, banana plantations and marshes, attacked in their homes. Their killing gave rise to extreme cruelties.
This speed of execution of the massacres would be inexplicable without the massive participation of a part of the Hutu population, essentially peasants, who contributed to the denunciation, pursuit, and assassination of the Tutsis who lived in their communal sector, when they were not their neighbors. This is what must be described and analyzed, as closely as possible to the murderous practices, their unfolding and their organization.
It is also a question of explaining how, in what historical context and because of what political interests, the Tutsis, descendants of shepherds, and the Hutus, descendants of farmers, were formed into ethnic collectives, all having lived in a common space for centuries, spoken the same language, shared the same sacred universe and intermarried. Ethnic collectives were theorized at the beginning of the XXe century by the Europeans, when they decided to rely on the dominant Tutsi circles to form the colonial administration of the kingdom placed under Belgian mandate in 1919 (the Treaty of Brussels had recognized, in 1910, Rwanda as a German possession).
The racial imaginary of the time was called upon to justify the ethnic divide between Tutsis and Hutus, the former being considered naturally superior to the latter. Identity cards were created, which mentioned the ethnicity of the bearer. In the early 1960s, Hutu political leaders put an end to the monarchy, with the assent of the Belgian authorities (the Republic was proclaimed in 1961), before obtaining independence in 1962.
These events were preceded by serious violence against the Tutsis (17.5% of the population at the time), so much so that tens of thousands of them went into exile. The new republican authorities based their legitimacy on the fact of having fought against “feudal-colonialist” domination; they made anti-Tutsi ethnicism an ideological resource of their power.
Elements of debate
Florent Piton has constructed a clear and instructive narrative, clearly articulated by a set of titles and subtitles that clarify the questions. Tables, maps and boxes reproducing extracts from speeches or significant texts usefully complete the developments. If the author mentions a few points of disagreement, he most often adopts a smooth and overarching narration that evacuates any controversy and leaves him the last word. The non-specialist reader will gain a well-documented knowledge of Rwandan history since the XIXe century, but he will probably not sufficiently perceive how much the historiography of Rwanda is marked by the intensity of controversies and debates, as well as by the plurality of interpretations.
We will not, due to lack of space, proceed to a specialist reading. We will limit ourselves to two reflections. First, when he devotes a long part of the work to the decades preceding 1994, the author tends to “predict” the inexorability of the genocide, and this, from the “racial theories forged in European scientific offices in XIXe century” (p. 21). Certainly, he writes several times that the genocide was not foreseeable from the massacres of 1959, but more often the writing suggests the opposite. This is evidenced, among other examples, by the subtitle “Independence at risk of genocide?” (p. 43) or this commentary on the massacres of 1963-1964: “In some respects, these massacres prefigure those of the genocide, even if the scale of the transgressions does not reach that of 1994” (p. 48). This tendency towards a teleological reading is based on the affirmation of the prevalence of “anti-Tutsi racism” in the population.
In fact, we will note – and this is our second point – that the notions of racism or ethnicity are used interchangeably in this work, while they cover two distinct phenomena. Racism of European origin establishing a hierarchy between groups based on biological determinism and a stigmatizing pseudo-characterology was not self-evident in Rwanda, except among Hutu elements of the Westernized minority, as well as in the extremist propaganda disseminated during the years 1990-1994. But a political ethnicity did exist: the Tutsis were not treated as full citizens.
It remains that ethnic differentiation did not systematically induce forms of antagonism, whether in Westernized circles or among the peasantry. It is still one of the challenges of research to study how, after the outbreak of the war, the relentless politics of hatred resulted in the Tutsis being identified as the mortal enemies of the Hutus.