Michael Ignatieff (born 1947) is a public intellectual, academic, journalist and, at one point, back in his native Canada, a high profile politician. Back when I was a student in the 1980s he was all over the British media, fronting thoughtful documentaries and high-end discussion programmes on Channel 4.
Ignatieff’s written a lot – novels, memoirs, histories, countless articles. One consistent strand of his output has been a series of books meditating on the nature and meaning of contemporary warfare. This began in 1993 with Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism and was followed by The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience in 1998.
In the introduction to this volume, written in December 1999, Ignatieff says Virtual War is, in effect, the third in a trilogy about the nature of modern war – but this statement has been rendered redundant by the fact that he’s gone on to publish several more. As far as I can make out the sequence now runs:
1993: Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism
1998: The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience
2000: Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond
2003: Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan
2004: The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror
2017: The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World
His books contain extensive descriptions of contemporary conflict zones, fighting, wars and aftermaths. The first book in the series (‘Blood and Belonging’) contains riveting eye-witness reporting from the conflicts in former Yugoslavia; the second one has a chapter where he accompanies the head of the United Nations to Rwanda, Zaire and Angola; and the fourth one adds scenes from the conflict in Afghanistan. This one contains reportage from a Kosovar refugee camp and a description of a Kosovar village, Celine, where a disgusting massacre was carried out by Serb paramilitaries.
But Ignatieff is not a war reporter; there are plenty of those, filing daily reports from the front line of conflicts around the world. And similarly, he is not a military analyst; there are thousands of those, publishing papers in specialist journals analysing this or that aspect of the hardware or strategy involved in the world’s many conflicts.
Ignatieff stands aside from both those genres because his stance can perhaps best be summarised as ‘a moral philosopher considers modern conflict’. He goes into military and technical detail where necessary – for example, in this book he gives a detailed description of the command and control centres running the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, an extended explanation of how targets were established, confirmed and then the complex bureaucracy planners had to go through in order to get permission to bomb them. Very detailed, very informative.
But that isn’t where Ignatieff’s interest lies. He is interested in what this kind of conflict tells us about the nature of modern warfare and, above all, about the moral and political attitudes of the West – what it tells us about ourselves and the modern societies we live in. He is interested in trying to unpick the complex moral issues which the conflicts he covers raise or have created or are evolving or distorting. His aim is:
exploring the new technology of war and the emerging morality governing its use. (p.7)
Maybe it’ll help if I summarise the short introduction in which Ignatieff unpacks the different senses of the word ‘virtual’ which underpin this book and give it its title.
(If you want to know the historic and geopolitical background to the war in Kosovo read the relevant section of my review of Anthony Loyd’s book, Another Bloody Love Letter. Ignatieff devotes a fascinating chapter, ‘Balkan Physics’, to a detailed account of the recent history and complex power politics which led up to the conflict, paying special attention to the failure of American diplomacy in the region and then to the change of tone brought by new Secretary of State, Madeline Allbright, pages 39 to 67.)
Virtual warfare
Ignatieff thinks the Big New Thing about the war in Kosovo was that it was a virtual war. What does he mean? Well, he uses the word ‘virtual’ in quite a few senses or contexts.
1. The public
It was a war which most people in the West watched on their screens, in which they had little or no investment or commitment. For Ignatieff this is a worrying new development. For example, will ‘war’ slowly morph into a particularly gruesome spectator sport? Does this mean that the populations of the West no longer believe in their causes enough to slug it out face to face? Will this, over the long run, weaken our resolve to mount wars when we need to?
2. Air force screens
It was a ‘virtual war’ in at least two further senses. The ‘war’ consisted mostly of NATO’s 78-day-long bombing campaign carried out against Serbian forces inside Kosovo and against crucial infrastructure in Serbia itself, especially in the capital Belgrade. No ground forces were sent into Kosovo and this, apparently, confused NATO’s air force, whose doctrine and training leads all of them, from air commodores down to pilots, to be expect to co-ordinate air attacks with ground forces, to be called in by radio to support ground attacks. They were unused to an army-less war.
Instead, the pilots, and their controllers back in control and command centres in locations in the West (Italy, Germany, Belgium, the US, the UK) worked via computer readouts of target information and then by sharing the view of the in-plane cameras which the pilots were using.
Thus the people choosing the targets and guiding the pilots towards them had pretty much the same view as the viewers at home (who got to see selected plane or missile-based footage which NATO released to the press). Obviously they were deeply involved in actually making it happen, identifying, assessing, instructing and so on. But nonetheless, it was, for these technicians, also a ‘virtual’ war, fought or, more accurately, experienced, via screens.
3. No army
Let’s go back to that point about no army. There was no NATO presence at all in Kosovo during the 78-day bombing campaign. There had been Western observers and peacekeepers in Kosovo but overnight they became enemies of Serbia, liable to be arrested and used as hostages, and so they were all withdrawn. So there were no NATO soldiers on the ground at all. Which is why Ignatieff very reasonably asks, What kind of war is it which involves no army at all on our side?
And furthermore, no casualties. None of the pilots of the thousand or so NATO planes which flew nearly 100,000 sorties were lost. A couple were downed by ejected. So Ignatieff further asks, What does it mean that the West can now go to war without fielding an army and without risking the life of a single combatant? Surely this is the kind of war fought by people who don’t want any casualties, a kind of war without the physical risk.
Previously, wars have involved loss of life on both sides. Western leaders have been slow to commit to war (British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain being maybe the most famous example) because they knew the bloody horror it entailed. But now there is no bloody horror. There is no risk. What, Ignatieff asks, does that do to the very definition and concept of war?
How does that change everyone’s perception of what a war is? How does it effect:
1. Policy makers Does it make them more liable to intervene if they think they’re risking less – financially, but above all in terms of casualties, with consequent minimal damage to their domestic reputation and ratings?
2. The public in Western nations Will it teach the public to become so risk-averse that as and when a serious commitment of soldiers on the ground is required, it will be unacceptably unpopular? Will old-style fighting become less and less acceptable to a public acculturated to watching everything happen on a video screen? Will we refuse to countenance any conflict in which we lose soldiers?
3. The enemy On the face of it, the use of laser-guided precision weapons ought to scare adversaries so much that they are put off ever triggering the intervention of the West and its high-tech weapons. In fact, as he reports in detail, the reality in Kosovo turned out to be the exact opposite: President of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, cannily triggered the West and then, in defiance of all our best efforts, carried out his nation-scale ethnic cleansing.
Because Milošević knew that as soon as the bombing started NATO would withdraw its ground forces and so he would be free to do what he wanted to the Kosovar population. He intended to drive them right out of their own country using exemplary terror i.e. using his army and paramilitaries to massacre entire villages and burn them to the ground, thus terrorising populations nearby to flee across the border into Macedonia or Albania – and that is exactly what happened. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees were harried out of their own country, even as the NATO bombing campaign proceeded. According to Human Rights Watch, by early June 1999, more than 80 percent of the entire population of Kosovo and 90 percent of Kosovar Albanians had been displaced from their homes. Amnesty International estimated that nearly one million people were forced to flee Kosovo by the Serb terror campaign.
On the face of it, then, this new kind of hi-tech gee-whiz ‘virtual’ war let the bad guys get away with it, with genocide and ethnic cleansing. In other words, the first ‘virtual’ war undermined its own rationale: it seemed very much as if what was needed to force the Serbs to end their ethnic cleansing was precisely what had been so carefully avoided i.e. face-to-face clashes between NATO forces and Serb forces. In other words, traditional warfare.
4. No mandate
Lastly, Ignatieff claims it was also a virtual war in the sense that the forces involved weren’t technically atwar. The NATO forces who bombed the Serbs for 78 days never actually declared war on Serbia, no UN resolution was passed to justify this attack on a sovereign state, and none of the legislatures of the European countries who went to war were called on to vote for it.
NATO lawyers cobbled together a justification in law but, like everything to do with the law, it is subject to endless interpretation and debate. Even the outcome was unorthodox, a so-called ‘military technical agreement’ which didn’t settle any of the issues but merely allowed the entrance of NATO ground forces into Kosovo to protect the population while the diplomats went back to the negotiating table. But the fundamental issue is simple: Was NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia legal or illegal under international law?
I’m no lawyer but what I took from Ignatieff’s account was that the campaign was technically illegal but was morally and politically justified. NATO used force as a last resort, after all attempts at mediation and conflict resolution – mainly at the talks held between NATO, the Kosovo Liberation Army and Milošević at Rambouillet in France – failed to find a solution.
NATO’s aim was to save lives, to put an end to Serbia’s low-level policy of massacre and ethnic cleansing. But does a worthy aim – saving the lives of a defenceless population – justify breaking one of the fundamental principles of the UN and the post-war international consensus, namely that the integrity of the nation state is sacrosanct; that nobody has a right to intervene militarily in the affairs of another state. This is one of the central moral-political-legal questions which Ignatieff returns to again and again.
To intervene or not intervene?
Like its two predecessors and its successor, Virtual War is a) short and b) not so much one consistent through-written book, but a collection of articles, published at different times in different magazines, but with enough thematic unity to work as a book. And each article or chapter focuses on particular aspects of the Kosovo war which I’ve itemised above.
Thus the issue I just described – whether the West was justified in attacking Serbia – is dealt with in chapter three, which consists entirely of an exchange of letters between Ignatieff and the British lawyer and politician, Robert Skidelsky, three from each of them.
The chapter may be short (16 pages) but it gets straight to the point and is packed with argumentation on both sides. Skidelsky argues that respecting the integrity of states has (more or less) kept the peace since the Second World War. If we alter that fundamental premise, if – like UK Prime Minister Tony Blair – we argue that we are so convinced of our moral rectitude and our case that we are justified in intervening in other countries wherever minorities are threatened by oppressive governments – then the world will descend into chaos.
Ignatieff politely but firmly disagrees. He describes himself as an ‘internationalist’, meaning that he agrees that the basis of the international system is the integrity of the nation state, but he also believes in the human rights of individuals and of communities, and that this second principle can clash with the first and, in Kosovo, trumps it.
He’s our author, so the weight of evidence from the other chapters tends to bolster Ignatieff’s argument. But Ignatieff tries to present a fair fight, giving Skidelsky’s objections as much air time as his own views. I very much took Skidelsky’s point that the notion Tony Blair was promoting in various public speeches (particularly, apparently, one given in Chicago on 22 April 1999, pages 72 and 74), that the West not only has the power to intervene in rogue regimes, but is obligatedto intervene, is a terrible precedent. The road to hell is paved with good intentions (p.73).
And indeed, we know what happened next, which is that, after the 9/11 attacks, the US, under President George W. Bush, bolstered by Tony Blair and his interventionist stance, decided to intervene in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Overthrowing the absolutely awful dictator, Saddam Hussein, sounded like a great idea. Liberating Iraq and rebuilding it as a modern democracy sounded like a great idea. And how did those interventions turn out? Catastrophic wastes of time, money and lives, which left the region more unstable than before.
In this respect, Virtual War is a snapshot in time, capturing a moment when the interventionist mindset was new and still being explored and worked through. This is a fancy way of saying that quite a lot of it feels out of date. Ignatieff’s subtle premonitions about a new type of warfare have been completely superseded by subsequent events in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Content
As mentioned, the book consists of chapters which bear a strong resemblance to standalone magazine articles. In his previous books these had each been based around particular issues or countries. Here each chapter revolves around a central figure. These are:
Richard Holbrooke, impresario of the 1995 Dayton Agreement which ended the Bosnian War, architect of US policy in the Balkans, who Ignatieff follows and interviews as he mounts frantic shuttle diplomacy in the runup to the outbreak of hostilities (December 1998).
Robert Skidelsky, British economic historian, crossbench peer in the House of Lords, and vocal opponent of the bombing campaign against Serbia who Ignatieff debates the legality of the NATO bombing offensive with (May 1999).
General Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) from 1997 to 2000, who commanded Operation Allied Force during the Kosovo War, and is profiled as part of an extended description of how the bombing campaign was managed, not only technically in terms of selecting targets etc but at a diplomatic level (June 1999).
Louise Arbour, a Canadian, who was Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, and of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. In this role she indicted then-Serbian President Slobodan Milošević for war crimes on 27 May 1999, the first time a serving head of state was called to account before an international court. Ignatieff interviews her at length on the tribulations of setting up the Tribunal and especially of getting enough evidence to prosecute Milošević (July 1999).
Aleksa Djilas, Yugoslav writer and dissident, friend of Ignatieff’s, opponent of the bombing campaign not only on general humane grounds but because he is a Serb and so imprisoned by the propaganda of the regime. He flatly denies that the massacres of civilians, whose bodies Ignatieff saw with his own eyes, were carried out by Serbs. claiming they must have been caught in the crossfire of battles with the KLA. He couldn’t accept the fact that his nation was carrying out a genocide using Nazi tactics. Refusal. Denial.
As in The Warrior’s Code, Ignatieff has fantastic access to the top dogs: he accompanies leading figures such as Holbrook and his cohort of other US negotiators (ambassador Richard Miles; liaison officer with the KLA fighters, Shaun Byrnes) in the fraught weeks leading up to the bombing campaign; he has lunch with US ambassador to Macedonia, Chris Hill; he is part of the press pack covering a visit of Arbour’s to the Kosovar village of Celine, scene of a typical Serb massacre of unarmed civilians (lined up and machine gunned in cold blood). He interviews Arbour at her headquarters in the Hague, a conversation he reports at length.
Ignatieff vividly conveys what life is like for these jet-setting international politicians and lawyers: 1) the hectic lives, the endless mobile phone calls, dashing for planes or helicopters, setting up meetings, taking more calls. He 2) acutely dissects the issues they have to grapple with. But where Ignatieff comes into his own is with his 3) insightful analysis of the themes or issues or moral problems arising from the challenges they face; the general issues which arise from trying to resolve ethnic conflict, from intervening in a sovereign state, from trying to achieve some kind of justice for the victims.
Critique
1. The idea of a screen war not so novel
For me the weakest part of the book was Ignatieff’s claim that watching a war via a TV screen was somehow a) new, b) morally degrading, c) fraught with perilous consequences. It shares the same tone of moral panic as the chapter in The Warrior’s Code about the ever-increasing power of television. Looking back from 2023 both concerns seem out of date and overblown. Since Ignatieff was writing (in 1999) screens have come to dominate our lives to an unimaginable extent, and this has had many social consequences which impact Ignatieff’s ideas and interpretations.
But I disagree that watching a war on the telly was something radically new in 1999. People in the UK had been watching war footage on telly at teatime ever since the TV news was established in the 1960s. I remember listening to punk songs taking the mickey out of it in the 1970s (5.45 by Gang of Four, 1979).
And, of course, in the UK we had a war of our own, in Northern Ireland, which was on the TV news almost every night for decades before Ignatieff started worrying about it. So I question Ignatieff’s claim that watching the Kosovo conflict on the telly was a radically new departure with worrying social implications.
2. Kosovo’s ‘virtual’ war in no way replaced conventional conflict
At a more serious level, the ‘virtuality’ Ignatieff wants to make such an innovation of Kosovo hasn’t changed the face of war as much as he claims. In his long final chapter Ignatieff claims the West is living through a revolution in warfare, and that the new technology of cruise missiles, laser-guided bombs, and remote control will change warfare for good, and he sets off worrying about the implications for all of us.
But it wasn’t true. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 wasn’t carried out entirely by remote control, it required a conventional army with tanks and armoured cars and all the rest of it, and then degenerated into a counterinsurgency which was even less remote, very much requiring boots on the ground (as described in excruciating detail in Thomas E. Ricks’s two books about the Iraq War, Fiasco and The Gamble).
OK, so was Iraq just a blip, have other wars continued the radical new ‘virtual’ path worries about? No. Take the war in the Ukraine. A conventional army (accompanied by its disgusting mercenaries) has invaded a neighbouring country and is being repelled by an entirely conventional army and air force. No doubt lots of screens are being used by everyone involved, maybe drones are being deployed and maybe some of the missiles are cleverly targeted, but most are not, and the whole thing feels like a traditional boots-on-the-ground conflict.
So not only have a lot of his concerns about war and society been superseded by the events of the last 23 years, but his central concern about the perilous consequences of ‘virtual war’ can now be seen to be exaggerated and unwarranted. He worries that war via screens will end up being no more than a spectator sport, emptied of meaning, and lacking engagement or understanding by the wider population. That is not at all what happened with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Anticipations of ‘Empire Lite’
In scattered remarks through the book, and then more pithily in the introduction, Ignatieff draws the central conclusion which will go on to underpin the next book in the sequence, 2003’s ‘Empire Lite’.
It is based on the run of events during the 1990s in which the UN and the so-called ‘international community’ performed so abysmally. They let down the Marsh Arabs who revolted against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and were very slow to support the Kurds who Saddam drove up into the mountains to die of exposure. They abandoned the mission to Somalia after the Black Hawk Down incident in 1994; in the same year the member states of the UN failed to cough up enough troops to enable the peacekeeping force in Rwanda to prevent the fastest genocide in history. Then in July 1995 UN peacekeepers once again stood by helplessly while Serb militia rounded up some 7,000 boys and men in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica and murdered them all.
In his earlier books Ignatieff visited the sites of mass murder in Rwanda and of massacres in Bosnia. This book gives a stomach-turning description of the massacre of unarmed Kosovar women and children carried out by Serb paramilitaries at a village called Celine. Did those Serb soldiers think it was serving their country to shoot unarmed women and children point blank in the head? Did they think this is what soldiers do? That this is what makes you a man – murdering little children?
These experiences drive Ignatieff to his Big Conclusion, which is that the West needs to intervene more, more deeply, more extensively, with more troops and resources, and for longer, than it has hitherto done.
Sitting above the Stankovec 2 refugee camp, packed with Albanian Kosovars who have been hounded from their homes by the Serbian army, and reviewing the West’s dismal record of failing to prevent ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, Ignatieff’s conclusion is surprisingly blunt:
This must be stopped. Now. By persistent and precise military force. (p.45)
His humanitarian principles, his concern to protect the vulnerable, lead him to believe that the intervention of the West is vitally required, as here in Kosovo, to prevent yet another crime against humanity, and this is the nexus of his argument with Robert Skidelsky.
But he goes further. Ignatieff thinks that the only way to prevent these crimes happening in the first place is to help developing countries build stronger states. And the only way this can be done is by major intervention, supervisions and investment in failing states by the West. And that means, in practice, America. He shares the view he attributes to the roving American diplomat Richard Holbrook, that:
the Americans are the only people capable of replacing the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarians – the only people with the character required for an imperial vocation. (p.35)
America needs to be more imperial, more prepared to intervene to stop states failing, to prevent genocides, to create more stable polities. And it’s this idea which was to be the central theme of the book which followed this one, Empire Lite, arguing for greater American commitment to places like Afghanistan and written on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
In other words, Ignatieff’s fine and subtle humanitarian principles led him to support George Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, support he later came to bitterly regret. Seen from this perspective, Ignatieff’s books on foreign affairs are almost like a tragic novel, about a highly intelligent and deeply philosophical man who argues himself into supporting Bush and Blair’s idiotic invasion of Iraq.
The scale of the waste
Alongside Ignatieff’s brilliant descriptions and fascinating insights, one aspect which comes over really strongly is how extremely expensive it is to wage this, or any kind, of conflict in the modern world. The cost of one jet. The cost of maintaining it. The cost of training one pilot. The cost of training the small army of technicians and engineers required to maintenance the jets. The cost of housing and feeding them all somewhere far from home. And then the cost of the munitions, up to a million dollars per missile.
One of the problems which the bombing campaign encountered was that the Serbs turned out to be very good indeed at hiding from the planes. They were expert at camouflage, deception and the use of decoys. They learned to turn off the radar on their anti-aircraft guns so as not to be detected. They hid all their real armour and created fake tanks and trucks made of wood and canvas. Hence the accusation that NATO was dropping million-dollar missiles to blow up ten-thousand-dollar decoys (p.105).
But stepping back, for a moment, from the geopolitical, historical, military and diplomatic contexts which Ignatieff explains so well…My God, what a colossal, colossal waste of money! If a fragment of what the war cost had been invested in the economy of Kosovo and its million-strong population it could have been rich as Luxemberg by now. I know the waste of war is a cliché but given the extortionate cost of modern equipment, arms and infrastructure, modern war amounts to the expense of hyperwaste in a sea of need.
Pleasure
Hopefully, by now you can see where Ignatieff is coming from. As I said above, he is not a war reporter or a military analyst or a commentator on international affairs. He is fascinated by the moral issues thrown up by conflict in the modern age and by the way our understanding of those issues and their implications were changing and evolving during the 1990s and into the Noughties.
He is also a really beautiful writer. Ignatieff writes a clear, deceptively simple prose which fluently embodies his continual stream of sharp observations and acute analysis. The combination of lucid prose with measured analysis and thoughtful reflection makes him a tremendous pleasure to read.
Credit
Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond by Michael Ignatieff was published by Chatto and Windus in 2000. References are to the 2001 paperback edition.
“General Bosco Ntaganda told us: ‘When you’re a soldier, women are free. Everything is free.’”
(former child soldier talking to David van Reybrouck)
David van Reybrouck’s complete history of Congo includes a chapter devoted to the conflict variously known as ‘the Second Congo War’ or ‘the Great War of Africa’ which is reckoned by commentators to have lasted from 1998 to 2003. I reread this chapter to compare it with the book-length account by Joseph Stearns, which I’ve just read.
Great War of Africa dates
The war began in August 1998, little more than a year after the First Congo War ended, when the joint forces of Rwanda and Uganda invaded eastern Congo for a second time, this time not to overthrow the old dictator Mobutu – which they had achieved in the first Congo war (October 1996 to May 1997) – but to overthrow the figurehead they’d replaced him with as president, Laurent Kabila. Kabila had come to power solely on the back of Rwandan and Ugandan army units, but once he was firmly established as new ruler of Congo, he expelled the very military advisers who had helped him win power a year earlier. This wasn’t as ungrateful as it sounds. The Rwandans in particular quickly aroused a lot of popular resentment, particularly among the population of the capital, Kinshasa, who they treated badly.
This new, second war of the Congo lasted till July 2003, a complex peace treaty was signed which allowed for the ‘Transitional Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’ to take power. During the war Kabila was assassinated by one of his own bodyguards but the regime in Kinshasa smoothly replaced him with his son, a senior officer in the army who turned out to be a surprisingly effective ruler. Despite the peace treaty, violence continues in many parts of the country, particularly in the Kivu region in the east of the country, to this day.
What made it a ‘great’ war is the way so many neighbouring countries got drawn into it. Ultimately, nine African countries and around thirty local militias became involved in the conflict. By 2008, the war and its aftermath had caused an estimated 5.4 million deaths, hardly any through actual fighting, a fair number through massacre and murder of unarmed civilians, but the vast majority caused by disease and starvation. Another 2 million people were displaced by the conflict.
David van Reybrouck versus Jason K. Stearns
Basically, although van Reybrouck’s account is almost exactly one tenth the length of Stearns’ book-length account (32 compared to 337 pages) it feels, paradoxically, more factual and comprehensive. If asked which text a beginner should read, I’d recommend the van Reybrouck chapter rather than the Stearns book.
Stearns engages in extended digressions based around in-depth interviews with key players, for example the ageing Marxist professor Ernest Wamba dia Wamba who was made the main spokesman of the rebel RCD. He gives profiles of some of the gung-ho entrepreneurs who took part in the Congo government’s firesale of its mining assets which leads into an entire chapter about blood diamonds and so on. By contrast, van Reybrouck manages to include some interviews of his own, but only after he has given a good, clear overview of the conflict.
He divides the war into 4 phases:
1. The invasion August 1998
In August 1998 Rwanda, backed by Uganda and Burundi, invaded Congo. The cities in the east were taken immediately, and General James Kabarebe led a daring air assault on the military base at Kitona on the Atlantic Ocean west of Kinshasa with the aim of making a lightning strike on the capital. Rwanda-Uganda made the invasion out to be the work of a domestic rebel movement, the Congolese Rally for Democracy or RCD, which they cobbled together for the purpose (hence the appointment of hapless professor Wamba dia Wamba who was way out of his depth, and whose extended interview with Stearns provides an interestingly oblique angle on events).
2. The stalemate September 1998 to July 1999
The central fact of the war was that, unlike the assault in the first war, the Rwandan invasion failed to overthrow Congo’s leader. In 1997 Mobutu had no friends and was easily overthrown but, for their own reasons, several neighbouring countries wanted Kabila to remain in power and intervened to make sure he did.
At the last minute Zimbabwe and Angola sent contingents of soldiers who halted then threw back the RCD advance. After Zimbabwe and Angola, Namibia joined in as well. Northern allies were found in Sudan, Chad, and Libya, each of which had its own reasons for preventing Kabila’s fall. Sudan offered help because of its ongoing conflict with Uganda over the latter’s support for rebels in southern Sudan. Libya provided a few planes in order to break out of its international isolation. Chad sent 2,000 soldiers as a gesture of solidarity with Sudan and Libya. In the end, Kabila had a seven-nation army at his disposal. This was enough to blunt and then halt the Rwandan-Ugandan advance.
The front stabilised. In the east of the country, the rebels were engaged by the informal groups: the fanatical Congolese patriots who formed the Mai-mai, which had emerged during the refugee crisis after the Rwandan genocide; and the Rwandan Hutu militias who had also emerged from the same event. Both were now supported by Kinshasa. So now you have ‘official’ armies from Rwanda and Uganda fighting heavily armed and loosely organised militias.
When Chad withdrew from Équateur province in 1998, that part of the country fell into rebel hands but the occupying force was not the RCD but a new rebel army supported exclusively by Uganda: the Mouvement pour la Libération du Congo (MLC), commanded by Jean-Pierre Bemba, son of the wealthiest businessman of the Mobutu era.
So by about this point the map of the conflict sort of settled into place. To the west and south were Kabila with his Angolan and Zimbabwean allies; up in the northern jungle was Bemba with his Ugandan-supported MLC; and to the east Wamba dia Wamba with his Rwandan-supported RCD, which fought against the Kinshasa-backed Interahamwe and Mai-mai.
In July 1999 the heads of state of the seven nations involved in the war signed the Lusaka Peace Agreement. It contained complex provisions and the details of what was and what was not implemented but the summary is, it didn’t work. The conflict continued.
3. The dissension August 1999 to July 2000
Having given up on taking Kinshasa, Rwanda and Uganda who, along with local militias, now controlled the eastern half of Congo, turned to looting it. It wasn’t long before the former allies fell out. Ugandan forces had captured Kisingani, centre of the lucrative diamond trade and Rwandas forces now tried to seize it, leading to prolonged urban warfare which devastated the city. Locals remember a series of street battles, nicknamed the ‘one-day war’ (August 1999), the ‘three-day war’ (May 2000) and the ‘six-day war (June 2000), the latter despite the presence in the city of the UN in the shape of the Mission de l’Organisation des Nations Unies au Congo (MONUC) to supervise the supposed peace deal.
The rebel movement spit into a pro-Rwandan and a pro-Ugandan schism, the RCD-G (for Goma) and the RCD-K (for Kisangani) led by the egregious Wamba dia Wamba. And then another splinter group, the RCD-N for National. Schisms and splinters.
4. The anarchy aka the looting July 2000 to December 2002
In the north, the rebellion crumbled completely. Pro-Ugandan rebels no longer fought against Kinshasa or pro-Rwandan rebels, but simply among themselves. New, smaller armies arose. In Ituri, in the far north-east, the maze of conflicting militias became ever-more complicated. Each side, each militia, looted whatever it could, murdering and intimidating anyone who stood in their way.
Van Reybrouck gives an explanation of Rwanda and Uganda’s expropriation of Congo’s mineral wealth which is shorter but punchier than Stearns’. Both countries suddenly started exporting gold and diamonds and tin, none of which came from their own territory, all stolen from Congo. In a really ringing sentence he sums up the situation:
The scramble for Africa was now being organised by the Africans themselves.
On an almost daily basis I read references to white European colonists and imperialists looting Africa because those sentiments are used as power plays in contemporary political and cultural discourse. You rarely read the extent to which African rulers, in Congo, Nigeria and countless other countries, have mercilessly pillaged and robbed their own countries and peoples.
Van Reybrouck explains that this final phase, the looting phase, dragged on for so long because it was so profitable for so many people. War became business with guns. Violence was commercialised. Locals made more money in coltan or gold mines than subsistence farming, and all manner of middle men up to the exchequers of Rwanda and Uganda profited. For many dirt-poor Congolese joining a militia and looting food, goods, demanding payoffs, partying, destroying property and raping women was a tempting career. Hence the proliferation of militias and the spread of violence across this huge region.
Non-involved nations, especially South Africa, spent a lot of energy trying to negotiate a peace. In July 2002 the Pretoria Accord was signed which pacified a large part of the area, with Rwanda agreeing to the withdrawal of its estimated 20,000 troops from the DRC in exchange for an international commitment to the disarmament of the Hutu militia Interahamwe and ex-FAR fighters.
5. The long tail
This isn’t part of van Reybrouck’s schema, but there was obviously a fifth phase, post 2003, whereby the war, or sustained unrest, continues to this day in the extreme eastern part of Congo, in the areas that border directly on Uganda (Ituri) and Rwanda (Kivu). These areas have been subjected to bouts of extreme violence, massive human rights violations and tremendous human suffering.
Stearns interviews the hapless professor Wiamba put in ‘charge’ of the RCD, who is appalled by details of the massacres he tells him about. But in the second part of his chapter, Van Reybrouck is if anything even more insistent on the organised violence and intimidation, especially as practiced by the RCD.
He interviews a lorry driver who took dissidents and journalists and, after a while, anyone someone had a grudge against and had paid the RCD to get rid of, describing how they were rounded up into a draughty warehouse where they were kept till they were strangled to death or tied with ropes and taken in speedboats out into Lake Kivu and chucked over the side. He describes it all as he and van Reybrouck sit in a cafe, sipping beers and looking out over beautiful Lake Kivu where they disposed of hundreds and hundreds of bodies.
He interviews a doctor whose family were wiped out by shelling but who continued to treat the wounded throughout the six-day war in Kisingani. He tells the extraordinary story of Lieutenant Papy Bulaya who ends up lost deep in the jungle with a handful of comrades and forced to submit to the local warlord and ivory hunter.
Listening to Papy was like rereading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, an immersion in a gloomy, dark-green world full of lethargic violence. A world of shady characters as cruel as they were bleak and drunken.
Both Stearns and van Reybrouck complain that ‘the West’ and ‘the media’ and ‘the public’ are repelled by Africa and focus only on the bad news from Africa, associate Africa only with images of savagery and massacre, and so on. Somehow they both miss the obvious fact that their own books partake in this process: do nothing but ram images of African violence and cruelty and pointless war and disease and famine deep into their readers’ imaginations.
Bulaya tells van Reybrouck how one of the RCD spin-offs he was associated with captured Pygmies and ate them:
The Pygmies’ family members were even forced to consume parts of their murdered relatives’ bodies. The hearts of newborn babies were cut out and eaten…Papy sneered, snorted. His sombre words dripped with contempt. “One day I lost track of my friend, my comrade. At first we couldn’t find him. Then we saw him at a bend in the road. Ramses had got hold of him. His head was impaled on a stick. His penis was tied to the stick a little farther down.”
In Ituri district the two major population groups, Hemas and Lendus, revive ancient ethnic hatreds in their struggle over the lucrative local goldmines. Van Reybrouck interviews a Hemas man who underwent the following experience at the hands of a local féticheur or witch doctor:
“He had two eggs. They tied me up, I was scared to death. He rolled the eggs over the ground at my feet. I was told that if the eggs rolled away from me I would be considered innocent. But if they rolled toward me, then I was a Hema and therefore guilty. I was lucky, the eggs rolled away. But Jean, who was with me, was not as fortunate. The eggs rolled the wrong way and they told him to run for it. While he was running away, the Lendu shot arrows at him. He fell. They cut him to pieces with their machetes, right before my eyes. Then they ate him.”
The books I read a few months ago about the Victorian explorers Henry Stanley or the explorers involved in the quest for the source of the Nile repeat the modern, politically correct view that those old white Victorians exaggerated the extent of cannibalism in the Congo in order to justify their ‘civilising’ mission. It’s typical of our mixed-up values that suggesting Congolese were cannibals in the 1870s is an outrageous racist slur and you have to be careful how you repeat it, whereas absolutely no-one is denying that some Congolese were practising cannibalism just a few years ago. Cannibalism and disgusting human butchery.
“It was in 2000. We were at our own home. My husband imported goods from Dubai. The soldiers came in. They were Tutsis. They spoke Rwandan. They sacked everything and wanted to kill my husband. ‘I’ve already given you everything,’ he told them, ‘so why do you want to kill me?’ But they said: ‘We kill big traders with the knife, not with a gun.’ They had machetes. They started hacking at his arm. ‘We have to chop hard,’ they said, ‘the Nande are strong.’ Then they butchered him, like in a slaughterhouse. They took out his intestines and his heart…. I had pick up all the pieces. They held a gun to my head. I wept. All the pieces of my husband’s body. I had to gather them together. They cut me with a knife, that’s how I got this scar. I have another one on my thigh….I wept and they started raping me. There were twelve of them. And then my two daughters in the next room.” (Masika Katsua in interview)
Summary
Jason K. Stearns’ book about the Great War of Africa is very good. But arguably David van Reybrouck’s chapter is better. It is not only more concise but gives a much better overview of the different phases of the conflict, bringing out its internal logic. And it contains interviews with participants and eyewitnesses which are the equal of anything in Stearns, and – in the case of Lieutenant Papy Bulaya’s narrative – surpass it and almost anything else you could ever read in the most improbable adventure yarn or most stomach-churning horror story.
Credits
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason K. Stearns was published in 2011 in the United States by Public Affairs. All references are to the 2012 Public Affairs paperback edition.
Congo: The Epic History of a People by David Van Reybrouck was published in Dutch by De Bezige Bij in 2010. All references are to the paperback version of the English translation by Sam Garrett, published by Fourth Estate in 2015.
Surprisingly for a contemporary book, Congo: The Epic History of a People is available online in its entirety.
“You have missed some of the enemies. You must go back there and finish them off. The graves are not yet full!”
(Radio Milles Collines)
“Go everywhere, spare no one, not even babies.”
(Lieutenant Bizumuremyi)
“No amount of its cash or its aid will ever wash its hands clean of Rwandan blood.”
(Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire who led the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, talking about the UN’s guilt)
Linda Melvern
Melvern is a seasoned investigative journalist who worked on the Sunday Times in the 1980s. In her introduction, she tells us she was putting the finishing touches to The Ultimate Crime, a history of the United Nation’s first fifty years, at the UN headquarters in New York, when the first reports of the Rwanda genocide started to come in in April 1994.
She was able to interview people within the UN hierarchy and monitor the institution’s ham-fisted response as events unfolded, and this forms the basis of her first book on the subject, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide (1995).
So why write another book on the same subject ten years later? The central reason is that during that time the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was set up and went to work, tracking down and bringing to justice the Rwandan army and government officials responsible for the genocide. The ICTR’s work resulted in a wealth of new evidence, the coming to light of countless documents, letters, faxes and so on, as well as extensive eye-witness accounts of key meetings and events.
In addition, documents and paperwork regarding the role of Western nations such as Belgium, France, the US and UK had emerged, as well as memoirs by central players, most notably Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire who led the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) and whose book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda was published in 2003.
Using her contacts at the UN Melvern has amassed extensive records of communications, faxes, memos which passed between its senior officials, such as the Secretary-General himself, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and his appointment as head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, who didn’t get on at all with Dallaire, and did everything to subvert his authority.
And then there are documents and quotes from the international charities involved such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières, Amnesty International, Oxfam, Africa Watch and more.
In other words, this book is an update of her previous one which takes account of the huge number of new documents and testimonies which had become available, and this explains why the book is littered with references to witnesses, witness accounts, interrogations, statements under oath, quotations from papers, memoirs, faxes, interviews and much more.
Scholarly apparatus
This explains why there is such a scholarly apparatus to the book, which has 100 pages of notes and appendices. The notes themselves are very thorough and I enjoyed reading some of the random factoids as much as the main text (such as the fact that ‘There are no surnames in Rwanda. Women do not take the name of their husbands, and children do not bear the name of their parents.’ p.285; or that Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana had his predecessor, Grégoire Kayibanda, who he overthrew in a coup, locked up and starved to death because Habyarimana had a voodoo superstition that if he spilled Kayibanda’s blood in any way, he would be haunted by his spirit, p.287).
The notes are followed by a long section on sources, detailing books, reports, papers and journals relating to the genocide. I can imagine these would be very useful for a scholar setting out to study the genocide.
There’s a 13-page chronology of Rwanda which starts in the colonial period, but once it arrives at the commencement of the civil war with the invasion of the RPF in October 1990 becomes surprisingly gripping.
And, most striking of all, Melvern includes the full text of The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It’s only five pages long. And – according to my present understanding – completely failed to prevent the genocide in Rwanda, Saddam’s attempts to exterminate the Kurds, the mass murders in former Yugoslavia (Srebrenica, Kosovo), the Darfur genocide, mass murders in the Syrian civil war and what, nowadays, seems to be accepted as China’s repression and mass murders of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. Apart from these blips, it’s been a roaring success.
It’s worth quoting the official UN definition of genocide in full:
Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
I’m interested to see the words ‘in part’. I thought genocide meant the intent to completely wipe out a group; I’m interested to see it’s significantly broader than that. I bet there’s vast scholarly debate on the subject…
Conspiracy to murder – the downsides
Terrible style
So much for the provenance of the book, what’s it like to read? Well unfortunately, despite the huge amount of research which Melvern has obviously put into the book, it suffers from some severe deficiencies. Very quickly you realise she writes a clunky, repetitive form of English, with odd, uncomfortable phrasing of even simple facts. Quite a few sentences felt like they’d been translated from another language and I frequently wondered whether English is Melvern’s first language, she sometimes struggles so badly to express herself in it.
Poor narrative skills
Bigger than that, though, is Melvern’s struggle to fully work through the material she’s amassed. The clunky English is often the expression of tortuous thinking.
The opening chapters giving the earlier history of Rwanda through the colonial period, the Hutu Revolution of 1959, the Habyarimana coup of 1973 and the build-up to the invasion of Rwanda by the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in 1990, all these are basic facts which are admirably described in the books by Philip Gourevitch, Fergal Keane, David van Reybrouck or the Wikipedia entries.
But in Melvern’s hands they are told in a contorted way which I sometimes found hard to follow. For example, it was only because I’d read the other, much more clearly expressed accounts, that I could follow her description of the RPF’s origins in Uganda. She doesn’t bring out the key role played by the RPF leaders in Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement which overthrew Uganda’s dictator Milton Obote, and how that experience inspired them to think about attempting to overthrow their dictator, Juvénal Habyarimana.
The facts are all here but Melvern often lacks the ability to bring to the fore the ones that matter while leaving others in the background, to shape the facts into a narrative. Reading a book like this which completely lacks that skill makes you realise how important it is, particularly in factual-historical narratives.
Lack of interpretation
The same goes in spades for the end of the book. One of the concluding chapters looks in detail at the numerous (conspiracy) theories which have arisen around the shooting down of the Rwandan president’s private jet, which was what triggered the crisis. Melvern lists all the theories which have been put forward over the previous ten years by an impressive roster of interested parties, but she never manages to come to a conclusion. The more I read, the more confused I became. She doesn’t state which one she, as an investigative journalist who’s given it more time than you or I will ever manage, believes in (pages 260 to 266).
Even more glaring is the crude and clumsy way the book ends. The final chapter describes the setting up of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) but fails to stand back and give us an overview of its work. Instead it dives right into a detailed account of the proceedings against one of the central figures, Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, drilling down to such a detailed level that she quotes the cross-questioning Bagosora was subjected to in court by prosecuting council, Canadian lawyer Drew White (pages 281 to 283).
And then the book just stops, not quite in mid-sentence, but right in the middle of quoting the accusations White put to Bagosora and the latter’s indignant denials. It just stops, without any attempt at a conclusion or perspective.
I think all these flaws stem from Melvern’s apparent inability to think about the events she’s describing, to step back and place them in a wide-ranging intellectual or conceptual framework. Compare and contrast the terrific books on international affairs by Michael Ignatieff which I’ve just read. Ignatgieff is an intellectual to his fingertips, which means that he can’t describe any event in the real world without bringing to it fascinating and thought-provoking insights, placing it in a rich intellectual context, broadening individual moments out to make useful and interesting generalisations about civil war, humanitarian intervention and so on.
Melvern, by contrast, rarely if ever provides any insight into anything. She has amassed an awesome amount of documentation and arranged it in precise and accurate order, but this book doesn’t really reflect on any of it in any significant way.
Conspiracy to murder – the upsides
So far, so negative, and at moments in the first 50 or so pages I was tempted to put the book down for good and move on to something less clunky and more thoughtful. However, around page 60 the narrative is transformed with the UN decision to set up the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). From this point onwards the book becomes first interesting and then absolutely riveting. I found myself gripped and thrilled by the narrative.
As explained, this isn’t because of any storytelling skills on Melvern’s part – selecting light and shade, carefully modulating the pace, dropping in selected insights and context – no, it’s because she has assembled a precise and specific and detailed account of the events of the genocide and these are, in themselves, gripping, horrifying and addictive. I went from feeling very meh about her so-so attempts to describe the historical background, to being utterly riveted. From page 60 to 260 I couldn’t put the book down.
The documents she has so carefully assembled allow Melvern to put together a meticulous day-by-day, and often hour-by-hour account of the key decisions made by the key players. Since she uses eyewitness testimony which emerged during ICTR trials, we are taken right into the rooms where the key decisions were made. You can see the sweat on the foreheads of the army chiefs as they agonise over what to do in the emergency meeting called as soon as news of the president’s plane crash (on 6 April 1994) arrives. You can smell the cigarette smoke and the paranoia.
Eyewitnesses testify to the specific words and phrases used by the senior army figures as they debate who should assume power, as they agree it must not look like a coup, as they allow Hutu Power exponents like Théoneste Bagosora to insist that the civilian Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana (a moderate Hutu) must not be allowed to take power. Witnesses testify to adjutants being sent into side rooms to phone through orders to the Presidential Guard. Within the hour Uwilingiyimana’s house was surrounded, then she was beaten and murdered (p.163).
Melvern includes transcriptions of phone calls made by ministers in the supposed interim government as the Presidential Guard knocked on their doors, made them and their families lie on the floor, then murdered them (p.151). It is terrifying.
On the government side, Melvern explains more clearly than anything else I’d read how the shot-down plane was carrying not only the president but the army chief of staff and key ministers so a real power vacuum appeared at the top of the Rwandan state (p.137). She shows how, although the exponents of Hutu Power had for a long time been developing a detailed plan for the complete extermination of the 10% or so of the population who were ethnic Tutsi, there was nonetheless initial confusion about who was to do what, and where power ultimately lay. It took some days before Jean Kambanda, a regional leader of the Hutu extremist party, the Republican Democratic Movement (MDR), was appointed Prime Minister of the caretaker government and was its nominal leader throughout the genocide.
In fact one of the many fascinating things that comes over from her super-detailed account is that power shifted throughout the three month period of the genocide. By the end even the senior army officers were scared of the lawless, murderous Interahamwe militia and the men who controlled it who are, at one point, named as Robert Kajuga, Bernard Maniragaba, and Ephren Nkezabera (p.232) with their political master being Mathieu Ngirumpatse, chairman of Habyariman’s party, the MRND (p.198).
One of the absolutely key things which comes over in her account is the centrality of the Rwandan Civil War. I hadn’t quite grasped that UNAMIR was solely set up to oversee the implementation of the Arusha Accords, signed in August 1993, which gave the RPF positions in a Broad-Based Transitional Government (BBTG) and in the national army.
Thus Dallaire arrived in the country 6 months before the genocide occurred and the early sections about his arrival are devoted to a very detailed consideration of what the accords demanded and how the Hutu Power die-hards within President Habyarimana’s cabinet and army absolutely refused to implement them. They would literally rather die than see RPF Tutsis in positions of power in the cabinet or the army.
Habyarimana’s government put as many obstacles as possible in the way of implementing the accords, and Melvern’s detailed explanation of how they did this, and which ministers in the government were responsible, and General Dallaire’s exasperated attempts to get the two side to co-operate, make for fascinating reading.
It also reinforces everything I’ve read in other accounts which is the idea that, as the Western sponsors of the peace deal, namely France, Belgium and America, brought pressure on Habyarimana, and as he showed signs of buckling, giving in and starting to implement the accords (i.e. integrating the Tutsi RPF into the Rwandan army and cabinet) that’s when the hardline Hutu faction decided to get rid of him. Hence the widely-held theory that it was soldiers, militia or even mercenaries following orders from Hutu Power extremists, who assassinated their own president and then blamed it on the Tutsi RPF.
And immediately put into force a long-gestated plan to exterminate the entire Tutsi population of Rwanda, some 1.5 million men, women, children and babies.
Radio Milles Collines
Her treatment of Radio Milles Collines is a good example of Melvern’s strong points. All the other accounts certainly mention the radio station and its role in spewing poisonous racist genocidal propaganda from its founding in July 1993 and then going into overdrive during the period of the actual genocide (7 April to 15 July 1994).
It is typical that Melvern gives it its full name – Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines – and thereafter refers to its proper initialism (RTLMC).
But, more importantly, Melvern explains who founded it, how it was funded, how it was run. She names the director-general Félicien Kabuga; the director Ferdinand Nahimana who was a respected historian; Jean Bosco Barayagwiza, chairman of the executive committee, who was also policy director in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and so provided a direct conduit from the genocidal government; editor-in-chief Gaspard Gahigi, and the day-to-day manager, Phocas Habimana. She gives us pen portraits of the four main broadcasters:
Kantano Habimana, who called for “those who have guns [to] immediately go to these cockroaches [and] encircle them and kill them…”
Valérie Bemeriki, the only female presenter, who encouraged the use of machetes not guns to eradicate the Tuti, telling her listeners to “not kill those cockroaches with a bullet — cut them to pieces with a machete”
Noël Hitimana
and Georges Ruggiu, a white man from Belgium who urged listeners to kill Tutsis and told them that “graves were waiting to be filled”
So Melvern’s great strong point is that, in the words of the old cliché, she names the guilty men. And by naming them she makes the entire thing incredibly more real and present. Instead of being a faceless emitter of toxic propaganda, Radio Milles Collines becomes a much more real institution, populated by flesh and blood people with specific personalities. Via eyewitness accounts we sit in on some of the editorial meetings, we are told how the poison messages were sent by named officials in the army or Hutu Power leadership, she quotes from the broadcasts.
We get a feel for the smirkingly jokey style of Valérie Bemeriki and we get several pages of the account Ruggiu gave years later to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda of, on several occasions, being shown round roadblocks in Kigali by the side of which were piles of bodies of people who had been hacked to pieces. He noticed that some of them were still breathing and suggested to the Interahamwe that they shoot dying to put them out of their misery, but the blood thirsty young men just laughed and said the ‘cockroaches’ weren’t worth a bullet (p.209).
So every element of the genocidal regime is treated in much more detail than in other accounts, and the repeated references to specific named individuals responsible for specific genocidal decisions and actions begins to build them up into real people. You can see why Melvin’s research was quoted in court proceedings against the génocidaires and why she is liberally quoted on the Wikipedia pages about many of them. It’s because she does such a good job of associating named individuals with specific meetings in specific locations which took specific murderous decisions.
She appears to have set out to document every single instance in which Tutsi were killed, even when it was ‘only’ a handful, documenting the time and place and numbers and the police or militia or army leaders in charge. In this sense the book is like a very long charge sheet.
The trials
And this brings us to another positive aspect of the book, which is the way she then follows these named individuals into their afterlives, on the run from the authorities, arrested, and then their court proceedings at the ICTR.
All the other books I’ve read roll straight on from the genocide to the refugee crisis in eastern Zaire, to the regrouping of the génocidaires in the camps, to the eventual invasion of eastern Zaire by the RPF, on to the overthrow of President Mobutu and so on, in a continuous sweep of unfolding history.
Melvern ignores all that, ends her main narrative with the victory of the RPF in July 1994, and then switches her focus to the efforts to bring the génocidaires to justice. And because she has named them so consistently throughout the text and, as far as the evidence allows, pinned them to specific meetings and decisions, by the end of the book these guys are more than just names, they have the same kind of monstrous reality as Goebbels or Himmler.
Twelve of the leading Rwandan génocidaires and the sentences they received at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
This focus on trials prompted me to do a bit of searching on the internet and Immediately discovered the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s website. As far as I can see this shut down in 2015, along with the court, some 20 years after it was set up. But it contains a simple but fascinating page listing all 92 genocidaires who were brought to with full details of the charges and their sentences.
Once I discovered this I began to look up the individuals Melvern mentions, for example the man who emerges as the closest thing to a mastermind of the genocide, Bagosora and then go on to surf through the documents relating to his trial.
Fascinating to see how so many of the people she mentions in the book were indeed brought to justice (including the popular singer Simon Bikindi, who wrote songs and made speeches inciting the Hutu majority to liquidate the Tutsi.)
We learn about the trial of Hassan Ngeze, director and editor of the Kangura magazine which published the ‘Hutu Ten Commandments’ in its December 1990 edition and played a key role in spreading Hutu supremacist ideology. During the genocide, Ngeze helped organise the Impuzamugambi militia and is said to have personally supervised and taken part in torture, mass rape and killings of Tutsis.
About Matthieu Ngirumpatse and Edouard Karemera, key figures in organising the genocide who were both sentenced to life imprisonment. The RTLM directors Ferdinand Nahimana and Jean Bosco Barayagwiza, mentioned above, were both given life sentences.
Venturing beyond the ICTR website, I discovered that the smirking RTLM announcer Valérie Bemeriki was convicted by a gacaca or local community court and sentenced to life imprisonment which she is currently serving in Gikondo prison, Kigali.
Main findings and insights
The Rwandan genocide was preventable. Decisive intervention by a sizeable and properly armed force could have stopped it.
The West behaved shamefully. After ten of its peacekeepers were murdered, Belgium withdrew the rest and the Belgian foreign minister Willy Claes rang round other nations telling them to withdraw their troops as well, claiming they’d all be massacred (p.219).
It’s a complicated series of events, and Melvern documents how arguments and debates and discussions influence a body like the United Nations, but there was a catalogue of failings which she anatomises in great detail. One of these was that Dallaire’s alarmed messages were often intercepted and superceded by the far more calm and complacent assessments of the situation by Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh.
I knew the US not only downplayed the genocide but actively undermined the UNAMIR force. As the genocide got underway, the Americans argued for downscaling the UN presence against all Dallaire’s protests.
The US put every obstacle in the way. (p.234)
But it was news to me that the UK took America’s side and also made every effort to downplay the situation, to resist requests for help, only reluctantly sending a fleet of clapped out lorries towards the end of the murdering. David Hannay, Baron Hannay of Chiswick (Winchester and New College, Oxford) was our man at the UN, arguing that we shouldn’t intervene to save the genocide victims. John Major was British Prime Minister. Eternal shame.
To be fair to the Western powers, Melvern’s account brings out how a number of players, starting with the Rwandan government, managed to hoodwink people for some time by portraying the violence as a fresh outbreak of the civil war. In other words, some Western officials and most of the Western media thought it was just a resumption of the hostilities which had characterised the country since the October 1990 invasion.
These people, exemplified by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright, later claimed they weren’t properly briefed by the UN bureaucracy, and she shows how there’s a flicker of truth in this, for example the way Booh-Booh doctored and toned down the accurate factual briefs an anguished Dallaire was sending daily from Kigali.
But it doesn’t hold up as much of a defence, because the foreign ministers of some other countries quickly grasped what was going on and spoke out against it early and strong, notably Colin Keating ambassador from New Zealand and the ambassadors from the Czech Republic, Spain, Argentina who lobbied hard for the massacres to be formally defined as a genocide. But the representatives of America and Britain vetoed this and they had the decisive say. Shame.
It goes without saying that the French government:
helped the genocidal regime at every opportunity
had military advisers at every level of the Rwandan army and Presidential Guard who did absolutely nothing to intervene or prevent the massacre
continued to break sanctions and fly in weapons to arm the murderers even after the genocidal massacres had begun
offered refuge to the wife and relatives of the assassinated president – some of the hardest core promulgators of racist, supremacist, genocidal Hutu Power ideology – in Paris
and then sent in a massive consignment of troops and equipment, not to stop the genocide, but to set up a safe haven in the western part of Rwanda into which over a million Hutu refugees, including the entire genocidal government, leaders of the murderous militias, could flee and be safe from the advancing RPF
“It was the French government which facilitated the cohesive migration of the interim government, in effect the political, military and administrative leadership of the genocide.” (p.250)
and then, when the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was established, sent emissaries, journalists and historians to meet its new head, South African judge Richard Goldstone, to tell him that the stories about the genocide were simply untrue (p.275)
And then when the genocide was over… the French ambassador to the UN, Jean-Bernard Mérimée, blamed the UK and the USA for everything (p.260)
The French government stood shoulder to shoulder every step of the way with the administrators of the greatest genocide since the Holocaust. Even after the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had conquered the whole of the country and brought the genocide to a halt – the only power on earth which acted to do so – the French continued to undermine them in every way possible, blame them for shooting down the president’s plane, accusing the RPF of massacres while conveniently sheltering, supporting and overlooking the crimes of their own Hutu clients. Viva la France!
RPF official Tito Rutaremara documented fifty-six ways in which the militias killed people in the genocide the French claimed never happened, including using machetes, clubs studded with nails, screwdrivers, hammers, hoes, spades and so on (p.253). Pregnant women were commonly disembowelled. Men had their penises cut off. Young children were chopped in half.
Accounts tend to focus on the anti-Tutsi propaganda and massacres, but Melvern brings out in some detail that many of the victims were moderate Hutus, who the Hutu fanatics saw as traitors to their own race, starting with the Hutu Prime Minister and all the moderate members of Habyarimana’s cabinet who were murdered in their homes within hours of the plane crash.
She also brings out the north-south divide in the country. The Hutu Power heartland was in the north and sometimes Hutus from the south were murdered indiscriminately simply because they were southerners. Up to 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered, but as many as 200,000 Hutus were, too.
Main conclusion
Arriving exhausted at the end of the book, after 284 pages of gruellingly detailed evidence, one big conclusion leapt out at me. Gourevitch and Keane’s accounts both betray their nice white guy bewilderment and incomprehension at the scale and ferocity of the killing. Both men say, in effect, I have no idea why this happened.
Reading Melvern’s book totally explains why it happened. She explains how Hutu-Tutsi tension was over a century old, but received its modern animus as long ago as 1959 when the Hutu Revolution swept away the Tutsi monarchy, amid the usual feverish revolutionary rhetoric about overthrowing the exploiters and taking back their country for themselves.
She shows how this rhetoric never subsequently went away but became entrenched and embedded at every level of Rwandan society. Hutu propagandists, of which there were many, tried to make it a central plank of state education that the Tutsi were not Rwandan at all, but invaders from the North who had oppressed and enslaved the virtuous Hutu.
There was continual low-level harassment of Tutsis from independence in 1962 right through to 1994, which occasionally rose to the higher level of localised massacres. Real massacres. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of innocent Tutsis were hacked to pieces or hammered to death at intervals and various locations throughout the 1960s and 70s.
“I would like to inform the chamber that this hatred existed for a very long time, since 1959 in particular, until the time when the genocide took place in 1994.” (Militia leader and ICTR prosecution witness Omar Serushago, quoted on page 169)
So this was emphatically not a harmonious society living in peace. It was a society riven with inter-ethnic tension, in which localised pogroms broke out again and again, in which media at all levels – papers, magazines and radios – pumped out a continuous stream of anti-Tutsi propaganda.
In other words, closer familiarity with the problems of Rwandan society turns your attitude around 180 degrees, from wondering how such a thing could ever have happened, to wondering why it didn’t happen sooner.
In a sense the interest in the story is that such ferocious hatred had to wait so long to burst out into the open. And it’s interesting that it only did so under the stress of three Big Events:
In 1989 there was a worldwide glut of raw materials which led to a collapse in the price for Rwanda’s main exports, tea and coffee, which itself led to widespread poverty, misery and the traditional search for scapegoats. The government encouraged the 90% Hutu population to blame ‘Tutsi exploiters’ in much the same way the Nazi government encouraged the German population to blame all their tribulations on the Jews. So: Economic stress.
In October 1990 the small Rwandan Patriotic Force, soon to be led by Paul Kagame, invaded the north of the country, starting what became known as the Rwandan civil war, which underwent fluctuating fortunes for the invader and the government but led, eventually, to a peace treaty, the Arusha Accords, signed in the autumn of 1993. So: Civil war.
Assassination of the president. On the night of 6 April 1994 Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down as it came in to land at Kigali airport. It was the middle of the night so families across the country heard about it on the TV news, which spread the rumour that the country was once again, suddenly, under treacherous attack. All the people the journalists spoke to remember where they were when they heard the news. It was a JFK or 9/11 moment. Everyone knew something terrible was going to happen, a state of extreme crisis was created. So: mysterious assassination of the country’s leader.
And then there’s the fourth factor or element, which isn’t quite an event but rather the thing Melvern devotes her book to, which is:
The plan. Rwanda was a highly regimented, hierarchical and organised society. Since the RPF invasion of October 1990, influential elements in the cabinet, the civil service and above all the military, including the sinister Zero Network, had been making detailed plans to carry out a systematic, well-organised extermination of all the Tutsis which would end the Tutsi Problem forever.
So if you want a summary of why the Rwandan genocide took place, it goes something like this:
Generations-long inter-ethnic hatred directed from the Hutu majority against the Tutsi minority.
Deep rural depression, affecting the living standards of most of the population and exacerbating existing tensions and resentments.
Invasion of the country by a largely Tutsi force leading to civil war which could easily be portrayed as an attempt to reverse the Hutu revolution and re-subject the Hutu population to slavery and serfdom.
The sudden, terrifying and mysterious assassination of the president leading to widespread panic and hysteria.
At which (perfect psychological) moment the Hutu Power strategists immediately began implementing a far-reaching and well-worked-out plan for mass extermination, rousing a hard core of about 100,000 fanatical Hutu nationalists, at all levels of local government, who used lists of Tutsi names and addresses to drive from one neighbourhood to another, from one village to another, systematically rounding up all the Tutsi ‘spies and traitors’ who they accused of planning to help the invaders complete the reconquest of their country, and methodically hacking them to pieces with machetes, in a bid to end the ‘Tutsi Problem’ forever.
Surely if you put it like that, the Rwandan genocide is far from incomprehensible but can be seen as the result of a series of stresses (poverty, civil war) applied to a society already boiling over with seething hatred, all of which were ruthlessly exploited by the genocidaires who Melvern goes to such lengths to identify and provide evidence directly relating them to the killing.
Surely a good grasp of the background and the sequence of events makes the genocide seem the reverse of incomprehensible – it comes to seem human, all too human.
Credit
Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide by Linda Melvern was published by Verso Books in 2004. All references are to the revised 2006 paperback edition.
Nobody likes empires but there are some problems for which there are only imperial solutions.
(Empire Lite, page 11)
Nations sometimes fail, and when they do only outside help – imperial help – can get them back on their feet. (p.106)
A bit of biography
In the 1990s Ignatieff managed to combine being a tenured academic, a journalist making extensive foreign trips, and a TV presenter. Without planning it, Ignatieff fell into a rhythm of publishing every 2 or 3 years short books chronicling the unfolding of the failed states he visited, and the chaos which engulfed some countries after the end of the Cold War.
These short but engaging studies build up into a series of snapshots of the new world disorder unfolding through the 1990s and into the post 9/11 era, mixed with profound meditations on the morality of international affairs and of humanitarian intervention:
Blood and Belonging: Journeys Into the New Nationalism (1994)
Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (1997)
Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (2000)
Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan (2003)
The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (2004)
The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (2017)
Ignatieff’s disappearance from British TV and radio around 2000 is explained by the fact that he moved from London to America to take up a post at Harvard. The gap in the sequence of books listed above is explained by the fact that in 2005 he was persuaded to stand as an MP in the Canadian parliament, that in 2006 was made deputy leader of the Canadian Liberal Party and in 2009 became Liberal Party leader. Under his leadership the Liberals lost badly in the election of 2011 and Ignatieff quit as party leader. He went back to teaching at university, in between-times undertaking extended trips to eight non-Western nations which form the basis of his most recent book, The Ordinary Virtues published in 2017.
Empire Lite: Introduction
Three of the four chapters in this book started out as magazine articles published in 2002, so very soon after the seismic shock of 9/11. The premise of the book as a whole is that America is an empire which refuses to acknowledge the fact.
The Americans have had an empire since Teddy Roosevelt, yet persist in believing they do not. (p.1)
But America is not like any previous empire, it doesn’t have direct control of colonies, it is an ’empire lite’, which Ignatieff defines as:
hegemony without colonies, a global sphere of influence without the burden of direct administration and the risk of daily policing. (p.2)
Nonetheless, America is the only global superpower, spends a fortune on an awesome array of military weapons and resources, and uses these ‘to permanently order the world of states and markets according to its national interests’ (p.2) which is what he considers to be imperial activities.
In this book Ignatieff sets out to look at the power, reach and, in particular, the limits of America’s informal empire by looking at three locations he knows well and has covered in previous books, Bosnia and Kosovo in former Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. In his previous books he has covered states which were collapsing into anarchy and attempts to bring peace to them. Now he is moving on. This book:
deals with the imperial struggle to impose order once intervention has taken place. (p.vii)
It focuses on the problem that, although many states in the modern world have failed or are failing and although some kind of humanitarian intervention is emphatically called for, yet intervention is dogged with problems. Two of the biggest are:
the practical limitations of what can be achieved
the tension between what the intervening power (almost always America) wants to achieve, and the wishes of the local population
After 9/11
The chapters of this book were written during the 18 months following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, after George Bush had declared a ‘War on Terror’ in a speech 2 weeks later (20 September 2001), and just as America was limbering up to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein on the controversial pretext of confiscating his weapons of mass destruction. The book was completed and sent to the publishers in January 2003 and the invasion of Iraq began on 20 March 2003.
In other words it was conceived and written in a very different climate of opinion than his pre-9/11 works and 9/11 dominates its thinking. Ignatieff says ‘the barbarians’ have attacked the imperial capital and now they are being punished.
And yet he warns that the ‘War on Terror’ may turn into a campaign without end. He quotes Edward Gibbon who, in his history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, attributes the fall of Rome to what is nowadays called ‘imperial overstretch’, to the effort of trying to extend imperial control to regions beyond the empire’s natural borders. The Americans cannot control outcomes everywhere. This book sets out to examine the ragged edges where American hegemony reaches its limits.
Ignatieff says the terrorists who attacked on 9/11 co-opted grievances and the rhetoric of Islam into an unabashed act of violence. Violence first, cause later. What is worrying is the huge wave of support they garnered in parts of the Islamic world which feels it has been oppressed and humiliated for generations. It’s not just the obvious example of the Palestinians, oppressed by America’s client state Israel (Ignatieff mentions the pitiful inadequacy of the 1990 ‘peace treaty’ which set up the Palestinian Authority) but of dissident voices all across the Arab world.
9/11 highlighted the limitations of American influence in Islamic states. America has poured billions of dollars into Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and yet Osama bin Laden was a Saudi citizen and the Pakistanis founded, trained and supervised the Taliban which was giving Al Qaeda hospitality at the time of the attacks. And, as we have seen just a month ago (August 2021), the Taliban were to prove impossible to extirpate and have just retaken Afghanistan after 20 years of supposed ‘nation building’. So:
America may have unrivalled power but it has not been able to build stability wherever it wants on its own terms. (p.10)
Problems of empire
Ignatieff bubbles over with ideas and insights, too many to summarise. I was struck by his notion that the central problem of empires is deciding which of the many demands made on them that the imperial authorities should respond to. This is a fascinating insight to apply to the history of the British Empire, which never had enough resources to properly deal with the endless flare-ups and problems in the numerous countries it claimed to manage. Eventually it became too expensive and too complicated for a country brought to its knees by two world wars, and we just walked away. The mystery is how we managed to hang on for so long.
And now the Americans face the same problem. Ignatieff interprets the crisis in Afghanistan as a result of the way the Americans spent ten years lavishly funding and supporting the anti-Soviet resistance (in reality, a congeries of regional tribal groupings to which we gave the blanket name ‘the mujihadeen’). Then, when the Soviets withdrew in 1989, so did the Americans; walking away and letting the highly-armed tribal groups collapse into prolonged civil war, out of which emerged the extremist Taliban who were to give shelter and succour to al-Qaeda ten years later.
Another way of putting this is that America hoped, with the end of the Cold War, to benefit from a ‘peace dividend’: to reduce its armed forces, to withdraw from various strategic parts of the world, job done. On the contrary, as Ignatieff’s previous books have shown, imperial withdrawal from countries around the world did not lead to an outburst of peace, love and understanding but to the complete or partial collapse of many states and the emergence of new kinds of conflict, of ethnic wars, ‘ragged wars’, chaotic wars, and widespread destabilisation.
In these zones of chaos (Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia) the enemies of the West, and of America in particular, have flourished and now, in 2002, as Ignatieff was writing these pieces, American rulers had to make some very difficult decisions about where to intervene and how much to intervene, and for how long.
Chapter 1. The Bridge Builder
The bridge in question is the bridge over the River Neretva in the centre of the town of Mostar in southern Bosnia. The town actually takes its name from the bridge, which is called the Stari Most (Old Bridge) in Serbo-Croat, and from the bridge-keepers, known as mostari, who guarded it.
The Stari Most was built by the Ottomans in the 16th century, was one of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s most visited landmarks, and was considered an exemplary piece of Islamic architecture. It was erected in 1566 on the orders of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and designed by the Ottoman architect Mimar Hayruddin.
During the Yugoslav civil wars Mostar suffered two distinct conflicts: after Bosnia-Herzogovina declared independence in April 1992 the (mostly Serb) Yugoslav Army went in to try and crush its independence. They were opposed by an army quickly assembled from both the Croat and Bosnian Muslim (or Bosniak) population (which both made up about a third of the city’s population). In June 1992 the Croat-Bosniak forces successfully attacked the besieging Yugoslav Army and forced them to withdraw from Mostar. Lots of shelling and shooting resulted in the town’s historic buildings getting badly knocked about, but not the bridge.
The bridge was destroyed as part of the second conflict, for after jointly seeing off the Serbs, tension then grew between the former allies, the Croats and Bosniaks. In October Croats declared the independence of a small enclave which they called ‘the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia’, supported by the government of neighbouring Croatia and this triggered the Croat–Bosniak War which lasted from 18 October 1992 to 23 February 1994.
The Old Bridge was destroyed by Croatian forces on November 9, 1993 during a stand-off between opposing forces on each side of the river. It’s said that more than 60 shells hit the bridge before it collapsed. The collapse of the bridge consolidated the complete ethnic division of the city into Croat west bank and Muslim east bank.
What’s amazing is the enmity that lingered on after the ‘end’ of this small war. The town actually had six bridges and some of the others survived but adult men were forbidden from crossing over to the ‘enemy’ side. Ignatieff tells the story of a Muslim lad who drove over one of the surviving bridges to visit a Croatian girl he’d known before the division. On the way back he was shot in the back of the head by the Croat checkpoint guards and his car slowed to a halt half way across the bridge as he died (p.33). To understand the Yugoslav catastrophe you have to get inside the minds of the soldiers who did that.
While UN peacekeepers eventually moved in to supervise the fragile peace, the European Union considered how to repair the devastated infrastructure all across the former Yugoslav states. Ignatieff meets the man charged with rebuilding the famous Mostar bridge, a French architect named Gille Pequeux. Ignatieff spends time with him, learning how the Frenchman is doggedly studying whatever architects’ plans still survive from the original bridge, analysing the ancient techniques the Ottomans used to cut the stone and carve runnels along the inward-facing sides of it, which were then filled with molten lead to tie them together. In every way Pequeux is trying to make the reconstruction as authentic as possible.
Ignatieff drolly points out that the president of Turkey offered to fund the rebuilding the bridge as a symbol of Turkey’s long-term presence/contribution/imperial occupation of this part of Europe. The EU politely turned down the offer and insisted it was done by one of their own. So it is drily ironic that the much-lauded rebirth of this ‘symbol of multiculturalism’ entailed a diplomatic rebuff of an actual gesture of multiculturalism (p.36).
But rebuilding bridges and houses and hospitals and mosques is easy. Reconciling the people who live and work in them is much harder. Ignatieff is blunt. The EU and America have spent over $6 billion ‘reconstructing’ Bosnia but it is still ruled by the crooks who rose to power during the wars and a big part of the aid money, like aid money everywhere, is routinely creamed off by corrupt leaders and gangsters.
Now the leaders of the rival communities never meet and rarely talk. They only get together for the photo opportunities required to make a show of unity for the press and EU officials to ensure the all-important foreign aid cash keeps flowing. As soon as the lights are turned off they turn away from each other.
For our part, the West is disillusioned. Real reconciliation has not taken place. Corruption is endemic. Some of the refugees have returned to their homes but for many, ethnic cleansing achieved its goals. They will never return. And many of the locals still hate each other.
And so Ignatieff points out that rebuilding the bridge is as important for the morale of the interventionist West as for the locals. We need it to prop up our delusions that opposite sides in a civil war can be reconciled. That our costly interventions are worthwhile.
This lovely essay rises to a poetic peroration:
The Western need for noble victims and happy endings suggests that we are more interested in ourselves than we are in the places, like Bosnia, that we take up as causes. This may be the imperial kernel at the heart of the humanitarian enterprise. For what is empire but the desire to imprint our values, civilisation and achievements on the souls, bodies and institutions of another people? Imperialism is a narcissistic enterprise, and narcissism is doomed to disillusion. Whatever other people want to be, they do not want to be forced to be us. It is an imperial mistake to suppose that we can change their hearts and minds. It is their memory, their trauma, not ours, and our intervention is not therapy. We can help them to rebuild the bridge. Whether they actually use it to heal their city is up to them. (p.43)
Beautiful rhythm to it, isn’t there? Lovely cadences. The flow of the prose beautifully embodies the flow of the thought, which is both clear and logical but also emotive and compelling. Ignatieff writes like this everywhere: he is lucid and logical, but also stylish and evocative. He’s the complete package.
Chapter 2. The Humanitarian as Imperialist
This essay opens in 2000 with Ignatieff attending a press photo shoot given by the UN representative in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, and a Spanish general, who have persuaded two local Kosovar politicians, one of them a former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army nicknamed ‘the snake’, to accompany them to the site of an atrocity. In the night someone laid a landmine. This morning a van driving between two Serb villages ran over it, it detonated, killing two outright and blowing the legs off the one survivor. The two Kosovar politicians say the required words about the need to change hearts and minds. Kouchner delivers his patter. The photographers snap, the new crews record, then it is over and everyone jumps into their cars and speeds off.
Ignatieff accompanies Kouchner to a Serbian monastery. Father Sava, the head of the monastery, has been chosen as a ‘moderate’ leader of the minority Serbian community left in Kosovo when the war ended in 1999. Attacks on Serbs are continuing on a daily basis. Kouchner and the Spanish general assure Father Sava that they are doing everything they can to protect his community. It doesn’t much matter since the simmering Serb community doesn’t believe either Sava or the UN. Not when members of their families are getting blown up or shot every day.
The international community is having to rebuild Kosovo from the ground up, rebuilding its entire infrastructure, economy, everything, making it ‘the most ambitious project the UN has ever undertaken’ (p.51).
Once again Ignatieff repeats that the West wants ‘noble victims’ and doesn’t know how to cope when the victims (the Kosovo Albanians) turn on their former oppressors (the Serbs).
Bernard Kouchner
All this is by way of introduction to a long profile of Bernard Kouchner. Being Ignatieff, he sees Kouchner not so much as a person but as a walking embodiment of an idea, in this case the way the entire doctrine of ‘humanitarian intervention’ has changed and evolved over the past thirty years.
Ignatieff says Kouchner came of age during the heady revolutionary days of Paris 1968. In a change-the-world spirit he volunteered to go serve as a doctor with the Red Cross in Biafra. However, he drastically disagreed with the Red Cross ideology of neutrality, non-intervention and non-reporting, removed his Red Cross armband and was among the founder members of the French organisation Médecins Sans Frontières or Doctors Without Borders. These guys are more prepared to call out the aggressors and killers in the war zones where they operate. Ignatieff considers the pros and cons of the two positions, the Red Cross’s studied neutrality, Médecins’ political engagement.
Ignatieff claims Kouchner also pioneered the involvement of the media in humanitarian aid, realising that people need to be shocked out of their complacency by images of horror and starving children on their TVs. He has been involved in various publicity stunts which drew down a world of mockery from liberal commentators but do, in fact, help to publicise his causes.
It is Kouchner, more than anyone else, who created the modern European relationship between civic compassion, humanitarian action and the media. (p.61)
Kouchner parted from Médecins when the latter won the Nobel Prize in 1999. This is because Kouchner had moved on from thinking aid organisations should speak out about evil, murder, massacre, human-engineered famine and so on, and had progressed to a more assertive position – that humanitarian organisations needed to get involved in political attempts to combat evil.
Aid organisations talk about ‘civil society’ and the ‘humanitarian space’ but Ignatieff says Kouchner thought this was an illusion. Aid agencies are supported and enabled by nation states. More than that, some crises aren’t humanitarian crises at all, they are crimes. Thus Saddam Hussein attacking his Kurdish population, trying to exterminate it and driving it up into the mountains to starve to death wasn’t a ‘humanitarian crisis’, it was a crime against humanity. Situations like this don’t call for the discreet, neutral aid providing of the Red Cross; they must be opposed by force.
This led Kouchner to become deeply involved in French and then UN politics. In 1988 he became Secrétaire d’état for Humanitarian Action in 1988 in the Michel Rocard cabinet, then Minister of Health during Mitterrand’s presidency. He served in the European Parliament 1994 to 1997, chairing the Committee on Development and Cooperation. He became French Minister of Health 1997 to 1999 in Lionel Jospin’s government, and then served as Minister of Health for a third time, 2001 to 2002.
Ignatieff says Kouchner’s positions, then, aren’t just interesting conversation pieces, but have directly influenced French government action. Thus his position influenced the French decision to back the UN resolution to send a peace-keeping force into Bosnia, part of which was meant to protect Sarajevo and Srebrenica. This failed miserably, with the Serbs bombing Sarajevo for years, and rounding up and exterminating 8,000 Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica under the noses of the 300-strong UN peacekeeping force.
The logic of this sequence of events is that only force can work against evil aggressors, and it was this thinking which finally led the Americans to intervene, when they ordered air strikes against Serbian positions in defence of a Croat advance; and then onto the sustained bombing of Belgrade from March to June 1999 to persuade the government of Slobodan Milošević to stop the massacring of Albanian Kosovars.
So the appointment of Kouchner as UN Representative to Kosovo in 1999 was full of historical ironies and meanings. This was the man who had led humanitarian intervention away from the studied neutrality of the 1960s, through active calling-out of the bad guys, towards evermore aggressive intervention against the wrongdoers. So it is the evolution of Kouchner’s theoretical positions which interests Ignatieff.
In this chapter he reiterates what are, by now, becoming familiar points. One is that modern-day ‘humanitarian’ intervention is ‘imperial’ in a number of ways. First and foremost, imperialism means powerful states compelling populations in weaker ones to behave how the powerful ones want them to. But all this talk about reconciliation is far from disinterested altruism: the European nations want to sort out the Balkan issue and impose peace and reconciliation so as to remove a source of political instability which could (in an admittedly remote scenario) draw in either Russia or Turkey. More immediately, restoring some kind of peace is designed to cut off the influx of the Balkans’ most successful exports to Europe, which Ignatieff drily lists as organised crime, drugs and sex slaves (p.60).
Secondly, as in his concluding essay about Bosnia and Afghanistan and in The Warrior’s Honour, Ignatieff is very, very sceptical about the chances of anything like genuine reconciliation. The same ethnic groups are now at daggers’ drawn and will do everything they can to harm or kill members of the opposing groups. He claims that Kouchner was taken aback by the ferocity of the tribal hatred he encountered when he first arrived (p.63), and depicts Kouchner, when he’s not performing for the cameras, as an exhausted and disillusioned man.
As in the essay on Mostar, Ignatieff asks why the victims should be obliged to conform to the Western stereotype of the noble-minded victim? In reality, the second they had the chance, the ‘victims’ have turned the tables and are carrying out a campaign of revenge killings and terrorist atrocities against the Serbs still stuck in north Kosovo who haven’t been able to flee to the safety of Serbia, every bit as brutal as the violence which eventually prompted NATO to start bombing Belgrade.
Ignatieff sees Kouchner as an imperial viceroy who has been parachuted in to try and rebuild the country and prepare it for ‘autonomy’. He calls Kouchner’s power a ‘protectorate’ with a pretence of local autonomy but where rule actually stops with the imperial viceroy, as in the Raj, as in the British and French mandates in the Middle East between the wars. If that was ‘imperialism’, surely this is, too.
Once again, Ignatieff makes the point that maybe what Kosovo needs is not a moderately independent-minded Kouchner, but an utterly independent-minded General MacArthur, the American general who was given a free hand to rule Japan as he saw fit for six whole years after the Second World War. Maybe what the Balkans need is not less imperialism, but a more naked, out-and-out, assertive imperialism. Do this, or else.
(In the event Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on 17 February 2008. As of 4 September 2020, 112 UN states recognised its independence, with the notable exceptions of Russia and China.)
Chapter 3. Nation-building Lite
Max Weber said a state is an institution which exerts a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence over a given territory. Generally, this monopoly is channeled via the institutions of a professional police service and an army. In a Western nation the police are subject to elected politicians and their work feeds into an independent judiciary, while the army is trained and led by professionals.
In a failed state, weapons are everywhere and the use of violence is widely dispersed. Usually, after a period of anarchy, warlords emerge who control the application of violence, at least in their territories, but often only up to a point, and sometimes cannot control permanently embedded, low-level street violence.
The essence of nation-building is to get weapons out of circulation – out of the hands of warlords, paramilitaries, criminal gangs and punks on the street – and restore that monopoly of violence which is one definition of a functioning state; and in so doing to create a space in which non-violent politics – negotiation, discussion and compromise – can be encouraged. It may still be a violent and corrupt state but it is, at least, a starting point.
Ignatieff pointed out in The Warrior’s Honour that, in quite a few failed states round the world, this is now harder to do than ever before, because modern weapons are so cheap and easily available. Some societies have become so soaked in guns that it’s hard to see a way back to unarmed civility.
Afghanistan
And so on to the specific country in question, Afghanistan. Ignatieff recapitulates the modern history of Afghanistan, the Soviet invasion of 1979, the West’s backing of the mujahideen who, once the Soviets left and the West walked away in the early 1990s, degenerated into a civil war of regional warlords. But Ignatieff’s interest in the story is, as always, in the principles and theory behind it.
Reconstruction
He repeats one of his central ideas which is that nation-building takes a long, long time, and then gives a striking example. America’s own nation-building, starting with the Reconstruction Period after the civil war, arguably took an entire century, right up until the civil rights legislation of 1964 finally abolished discrimination against Afro-Americans (p.85).
Reconstruction in Germany and Japan took about a decade, but in both countries the nation-builders were starting off with states with well-defined borders, established (albeit corrupted) institutions, and ethnic homogeneity. The populations of both countries wanted to be reconstructed.
Don’t say when you’ll leave
Igantieff makes the point that one of the secrets of success for an empire is the illusion of permanence, of longevity. As soon as you announce that you’re leaving at some fixed moment in the future, all the vested interests rise up and jockey for power. This is vividly demonstrated by the absolute chaos triggered when the Belgian imperial authorities abruptly withdrew from the Congo at independence, as provinces seceded and new parties jockeyed for power using extra-political means i.e. guns and coups. Same thing happened in Angola where the abrupt announcement of the imperial power, Portugal, that it would completely withdraw its forces in a matter of months led to civil war between the various independence paramilitaries, a civil war which dragged on for 27 years and wrecked the country.
Ignatieff says the Americans have a poor track record on this matter, and a bad reputation for walking away from chaotic states as soon as it suits them. This means local warlords realise they just have to mind their manners and bide their time.
The American withdrawal from Afghanistan, 2021
What Ignatieff didn’t know in 2002 was that the Americans would stay for an epic 20 years nor that the same rule of permanence was to apply: that as soon as Joe Biden announced the US were leaving, people all across the country realised the Taliban would swarm back into power and began making arrangements accordingly, i.e. Afghan police, army and local governors defected to the Taliban within days o fthe last Yanks leaving, so that the entire Afghan security apparatus melted away and the Taliban were in Kabul within a week.
Not so easy, running an empire, is it? Maybe the thousands of American academics who loftily criticise Britain’s chaotic withdrawal from Palestine or India will reflect on the cracking job their boys did in Afghanistan. With 70 more years of academic theorising and practical experience than the Brits, the Yanks still made a complete shambles of it.
Europe and America: division of roles
Ignatieff makes another snappy point: how can American Republican administrations, who are fanatically opposed to Big Government, find themselves spending tens of billions of dollars creating huge administrations in foreign countries? Easy. They get the Europeans to do it. The Americans are good at fighting (Ignatieff says that, in a sense, America is the last truly warlike nation in the West) so they handle the bombs and drones and special forces. Then the Europeans then move in with the peacekeeping police forces and the droves of humanitarian aid agencies, building schools, hospitals etc. Yin and yang.
Chapter 4. Conclusion: Empire and its Nemesis
Ignatieff describes modern Western nation-building as ‘imperial’ because:
its main purpose is to create stability in border zones essential to the security of the great powers
the entire project rests on the superior armed might of the West
no matter how much ‘autonomy’ is given to local rulers, real power always remains in Washington
In addition, he repeats the point that all empires have to ration their interventions. You have limited resources: which of the world’s endless trouble spots can you afford to address? Ignatieff points out the basic hypocrisy of ‘humanitarian intervention’ which is that it is only carried out in places which are convenient or important to the West. The West is never going to intervene in Chechnya or Crimea or Xinjiang because they are the preserves of other empires.
And the new imperialism is not only lite it is impatient. The British gave themselves generations to prepare the populations of India for independence. The UN gives places like Kosovo or Afghanistan 3 years before they have to hold their first elections. Hurry up! This is costing us money!
No imperialists have ever been so impatient for quicker results. (p.115)
Why? Partly the short attention span of the modern media, always hurrying on to the next story. (It took, by my calculation, about ten days from the American departure from Afghanistan being the biggest story in the whole world to being completely ignored and forgotten about.)
And then the short election cycles in democracies. Whatever plans you put in place now, at the next election in a few years’ time the leader of the opposition party will be promising to bring our boys home and save everyone a shedload of money. Western democracies, by their very nature, struggle to make long-term commitments to anything.
This concluding essay takes its title from a reflection on the enduring force of nationalism which empires find so difficult to counter. In the end, the European empires were defeated by the indomitable resilience of their colonies’ nationalist movements. This was the lesson the Americans should have learned from Vietnam. It wasn’t their weapons which won the Viet Cong victory, it was their nationalist convictions. Nationalism always trumps empire.
Nationalism will always prove to be the nemesis of any imperial nation-building project. (p.117)
Ignatieff didn’t know this when he wrote these lines, but they were to apply to the American invasion of Iraq which commenced just as his book was being published. The Americans overthrew a dictator and promised to bring peace and plenty but were utterly unprepared for the violence of the forces that then attacked them from all sides.
Thoughts
1. So Ignatieff’s message is that if liberal humanitarians really want to do good, they should really intervene: go in hard, defeat the bad guys, disarm them, force parties to the negotiating table, and run things themselves, setting up strong national institutions and teaching squabbling factions what democracy looks like in practice. And they have to do this for years, decades maybe, until the institutions and mindsets of civic society have been thoroughly inculcated. And only leave when everything is completely in place for the transition. In other words – imperialism. Not the kind of imperialism which exploits the native populations and rips off their raw materials. An altruistic imperialism, a humanitarian imperialism. But imperialism all the same.
2. When Ignatieff devotes a chapter of The Warrior’s Honour to the West’s growing sense of weariness and disillusion with humanitarian intervention, I suspected he was mainly talking about himself. This book shows a further deterioration in his attitude. I simply mean he has become markedly more cynical.
Across-the-board hopes have been crushed, ideals have been compromised, ambitions have been stymied. Much of this may reflect the appalling history of the 1990s, but I also think some of it may be a projection of Ignatieff’s own growing disillusion.
You feel this downward trajectory when he says that Bernard Kouchner arrived in Kosovo in July ‘talking about European values, tolerance and multiculturalism’ but by Christmas this had been revised down to hopes for ‘coexistence’ (p.63). Kouchner simply hadn’t anticipated the hatred and the intransigence which he found in Kosovo. So many aid workers and proponents of humanitarian intervention don’t. In Blood and Belonging Ignatieff refers fairly respectfully to ‘the international community’. Eight years later he refers to it as:
what is laughingly referred to as the ‘international community’. (p.97)
His journey his taught him that the international institutes he used to respect are, in fact, a sham.
He is particularly disillusioned with the international aid industry, which he sees as almost a scam, a locust swarm of very well-paid white Western graduates, who fly in, can’t speak the language, pay over the odds for everything thus pricing the locals out of accommodation and food, stay hunkered down in their armoured enclaves, drive everywhere in arrogant white 4-by-4s, and cook up huge impractical ‘aid’ projects without consulting any of the locals. All the Afghans he talks to complain to Ignatieff about the NGOs’ arrogance and condescension. It is the old colonialist attitude but now with emails and shades. During the course of this book he takes to referring to the aid organisation community dismissively as ‘the internationals’, by contrast with the poor, often ignored ‘locals’, the people who actually live there.
In this book Ignatieff is as clever and incisive and thought-provoking as ever. But sometimes he sounds really tired.
Credit
Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan by Michael Ignatieff was published by Vintage in 2003. All references are to the 2003 Vintage paperback edition.
The family of nations is run largely by men with blood on their hands.
(The Warrior’s Honour, page 82)
The main title and the picture on the cover are a bit misleading. They give the impression the entire book is going to be an investigation of the honour or value system of the many groups of soldiers, militias, paramilitaries and so on involved in the small wars which broke out across the world after the end of the Cold War.
Not so. This book is more varied and subtle than that. The investigation of ‘the warrior’s code’ is limited to just part of the longest section, chapter 3. No, in the introduction Ignatieff explains that his overall aim in this collection of essays is not to investigate them, the people massacring each other in failing states, but to examine why we in the rich West feel so obliged to intervene in foreign countries to bring peace to those state, feed the starving, house the refugees, etc.
The narratives of imperialism are dead and buried but they have, according to Ignatieff, left us with ‘the narrative of compassion’. Why? Is this a novel development in world history, that the rich nations feel such a connection with the poor and such a moral obligation to help them? If so, what does this mean in practice? And why do our efforts seem doomed to fail or fall so far short of what is needed? And if our current efforts fail, what is needed to bring peace, order and fairness to the trouble spots and failed states of the world?
Introduction
Ignatieff sees the modern culture of international human rights and the conviction of so many in the West that we have to help the poor in the developing world – all those refugees and victims of famine or conflict – as a new development in human history, ‘a crucial new feature of the modern moral imagination’.
Our moral imagination has been transformed since 1945 by the growth of a language and practice of moral universalism, expressed above all in a shared human rights culture. (p.8)
I’m not totally convinced. It’s been a long time since 1945 and the founding of the UN and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The situation he describes in 1998 as if it was a sudden new thing was actually the result of a long evolution of legal understanding and organisational practice. The UN, aid agencies and charities have been working since the end of the Second World War, changing and adapting to a changing world.
And the sudden sense of ‘crisis’ he describes in his 1994 book Blood and Belonging and in this book, may have seemed suddenly more real and acute at the time (the early 1990s) but now, looking back, seem more like part of an ongoing continuum of disasters which had included Biafra and Congo in the 1960s, the Bangladesh Crisis of 1970, the overspill of the Vietnam War into neighbouring Laos and the killing fields of Kampuchea 1975 to 79, the Cyprus Crisis of 1974, the long civil war in the Lebanon which began in 1975, the Uganda–Tanzania War of 1978, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and so on.
So the problem of violent civil war was hardly a new phenomenon in the early 1990s.
On the one hand, taking the long view, maybe he’s correct that it is a newish phenomenon that people in the West, spurred on by television news, feel a moral obligation to help people in the Third World caught up in crises. But I can immediately think of two objections. One is that my recent reading of Victorian explorers and politics shows that the plight of people in the developing world was widely publicised back then, in the 1870s and 1880s, by explorers and missionaries who wrote numerous books, newspaper articles and went on popular lecture tours around their countries, drumming up support for the poor of Africa. Which in turn inspired charitable societies to be set up to help people in poor countries. In those days they were missionary societies but surely the fundamental aim was the same – to bring peace to troubled areas, to build schools and wells and help the natives.
Ignatieff writes as if ethnic cleansing were a new phenomenon, but I can think of the Bulgarian Uprising of 1876 which was brutally suppressed by the Ottoman Empire which sent its militias into Bulgarian villages to murder thousands of men, women and children. Maybe 30,000 Bulgarians died and the bloody repression was widely reported in Britain and became known as the Bulgarian Atrocities. The Liberal politician William Gladstone wrote a famous pamphlet about it which castigated the pro-Turkish policy of the British government of the day led by Benjamin Disraeli. Eye-witness accounts of western journalists who visited the burned-out Bulgarian villages and described the dead bodies lying everywhere were very widely reported in the European and British press.
All this is not really much different in spirit from the eye-witness accounts of Saddam’s gassing of Halabja or the Serb mass murder at Srebrenica, nor from the way these atrocities were widely reported in the West, arousing anger and indignation, and surely they anticipate the journalistic denunciations of the inaction or impotence of the British government which have echoed down the ages.
So the basic structure and content of reporting foreign atrocities has been around for at least a hundred and fifty years. On the other hand, maybe there is something to Ignatieff’s claim that television, in particular in the 1980s and 1990s, brought these disasters into everyone’s living rooms with a new urgency and prompted calls for action and triggered mass charitable movements on a previously unknown scale.
He’s thinking of Live Aid from 1985, and that certainly felt like a truly epic event. But surely, looking back, it was only part of an ongoing continuum of public sympathy and charitable donation? There had been huge publicity about the Biafran civil war and famine 1967 to 1970, many pictures, news footage, public outcry, pressure on the government to intervene. I’ve seen Don McCullin’s photos of the prolonged Congo Crisis from the same decade, ditto. In 1971 the Concert for Bangladesh raised money for UNICEF’s work in the new country born amid famine and war, for the first time using pop culture to raise awareness about an international disaster and combining it with fund raising.
Like most journalists and commentators, Ignatieff is making the case that the thing he’s writing about is dramatically new and requires his urgent analysis, so read my stuff and buy my book – but which, on a bit of investigation, is not nearly as dramatically novel as he claims.
Chapter 1. The ethics of television
This first chapter focuses on this issue. It reflects Ignatieff’s conviction that one of the things which is new in the 1990s is the way disasters in faraway countries are mediated by television.
He describes the way television news is selected, structured and edited, the way it is a genre in its own right. Fair enough, I used to work in TV news, I know very well what he’s talking about. But hand-wringing about the positive or negative effects of TV now seems very dated, very 1980s and 1990s. Things have, to put it mildly, moved on. He was writing before the internet and a full decade before smart phones and social media began. How people get their news, and how it is packaged for their slick consumption, has dramatically changed. But in any case, I find this whole ‘media studies’ approach to newspapers, telly and social media profoundly boring.
Excitable commentators these days have transferred their moral panic from TV to social media and not a day goes by without hand-wringing articles about the devastating impact of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and the rest, hand-wringing articles about ‘fake news’, and so on. Who cares. It’s not interesting because:
it is an over-analysed subject – there must by now be thousands of articles agonising over the same ‘issue’ which all end up with the same conclusion – something must be done but nobody can say exactly what
so all this kvetching leads to precisely no practical result – thousands of articles saying how terrible Facebook is and yet Facebook is still there
so ultimately it’s boring; in the 1990s people kept on watching TV news despite hundreds of articles and books saying how bad our addiction to TV was, and now, 25 years later, people carry on using Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and all the rest of them, no matter how much the chattering classes tut and fret
Ignatieff summarises the argument of his first chapter thus:
the moral empathy mediated by television has a deep philosophical history, namely the emergence of moral universalism in the Western conscience (which he traces back to Montaigne and Locke)
moral universalism (no man is an island; any man’s death diminishes me) is permanently at odds with moral particularism (we should worry most about family, friends and our own people)
in the second half of the 20th century, moral universalism has increasingly taken an apolitical siding with the victim
there is a moral risk involved, which is that too many pictures of too many victims leads to indifference or, at worst, disgust with humans, and misanthropy
this risk is increased by television’s superficiality as a medium – people watch, are shocked for 30 seconds, then are immediately distracted by something else, then something else, then something else again: pictures of disasters, famines and so on become hollowed out, the viewer becomes more and more blasé
I dislike writing about morality because I think it has so little applicability to the real world. Give a moral philosopher a minute and she’ll start describing some improbably complex scenario designed to force you to make some kind of ‘moral’ decision you would never face in real life. (‘Imagine you have the power to save the world but only by killing an innocent child, would you sacrifice one life to save billion?’ – that kind of thing. Time-passing undergraduate games which have no application to real life.)
I also dislike writing about morality because morality is so endless. It is a bottomless pit. There is no end to moral hand-wringing… but at the same time most moralising writing has little or no impact on the world. It’s a paradox that moral philosophy ought to be the most practical and applicable form of philosophy, but is often the opposite.
I also dislike writing about morality because it is often sloppy and superficial. This first chapter is by far the worst in the book. To my surprise Ignatieff bombards us with cultural references which he himself (ironically, in light of his accusations that television is superficial) treats very superficially. In rapid and superficial succession, he namechecks the history of Christianity, Roman slave society, early enlightenment philosophers like Montaigne and Bayle, then leaps to the French literary critic Roland Barthes, mentions the racism inherent in imperialism, explains some Marxist theory and practice, namechecks the French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the American politician Robert MacNamara, the theorist of colonialism Fritz Fanon, gives a list of post-war atrocities, civil wars and famines, then a list of international charities, quotes a snippet from Don McCullin’s autobiography, then briefly mentions the Vietnam War, Bosnia, the Rwandan genocide, CBS’s nightly news, the New York Times, Goya’s Horrors of War, Picasso’s Guernica.
See what I mean? It’s magpie philosophy, feverishly jumping from reference to reference. ADHD thinking. Compare and contrast with Blood and Belonging. In that book each 30-page chapter was set in a specific location. Ignatieff met and interviewed a cross-section of people from the country at length who we got to know and understand. Their lives and experiences then shed light on the place and the situation and allowed Ignatieff to slowly draw out more general ideas about the world we live in. This is what makes it an outstanding book.
This first chapter on telly in The Warrior’s Code is the opposite. It addresses a tired theme with a machine-gun rat-a-tat-tat of highbrow references, thrown out at such a rate that there isn’t time for any of them to acquire depth or resonance. I started skipping paragraphs, then entire pages.
This introductory essay shows Ignatieff at his most modish and pretentious and sometimes plain wrong. Take, for example, his passage on the way the state funerals of President Kennedy, Winston Churchill or Lady Diana were covered on TV.
These are the sacred occasion of modern secular culture, and television has devised its own rhetoric and ritual to enfold viewers in a sense of the sacred importance of these moments: the hushed voices of the commentators; loving attention to uniforms and vestments of power; above all, the tacit inference that what is being represented is a rite of national significance. (p.31)
This is not only pompous pretentiousness using breathy metaphors to dress up the bleeding obvious, but it is also largely wrong. The funeral of a much-loved president or prime minister actually is a rite of national significance, there’s no ‘tacit inference’ about it. Television has not ‘devised its own rhetoric and ritual’ for covering these events: I think you’ll find that funerals had a fair bit of rhetoric and ritual about them centuries before TV came along, that in fact a key aspect of Homo sapiens as a species appears to be the care we’ve taken to bury people, as evidenced by graves from up to 80,000 years ago. All telly has done is develop technical ways of covering what were already highly rhetorical and ritualised events.As to ‘the hushed voices of the commentators’, well, you do tend to keep your voice down at a funeral, don’t you. As to attention to ‘uniforms and vestments of power’, again I think you’ll find people at presidential and prime ministerial level have always paid a lot of attention, since time immemorial, to wearing precisely the correct outfits at a funeral, complete with the insignia of office or medals for military types.
In other words, this paragraph is dressing up the obvious in pretentious metaphor to make it sound like insight. But it isn’t thinking or valuable analysis, it’s just being a smart-ass. Having ‘proven’ that TV has a semi-religious, ritualistic aspect, Ignatieff goes on to use this proof as the basis for further argument. But the argument, as a whole, fails, because it is based on precisely the kind of assertion and rhetoric demonstrated in this passage, rather than on the facts and real insights which characterise the far better Blood and Belonging.
This first chapter about TV ends up by concluding that watching a 90-second TV news item isn’t as informative as reading a good newspaper or magazine article about the subject, let alone a book. Well… that’s not a very original or useful thought, is it?
The final few pages call for television journalism to completely change itself in order to give more information about the world. That way, via detailed discussions of gathering crises, viewers might get to learn about famines and wars before they broke out. This ‘transformed’ type of TV might help viewers to understand the world so much better that we could all prevent atrocities and catastrophes before they happen.Well, no.
This is such a utopian notion as to be laughable.
The entire chapter now feels utterly out of date. My kids don’t watch any TV news (and neither, in fact, do I). All they know about the world comes to them via their feeds on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and a host of other social media apps I’ve never heard of.
Blood and Belonging is a brilliant book because it examines in detail the political situations of half a dozen part of the world and:
Although they’re nearly 30 years old, his snapshots of moments in each country’s history remain relevant to this day because they continue to be excellent analyses of the basic ethnic and political situations in each of the countries.
So acute is his analysis of different types of nationalism that the general principles he educes can be applied to other nationalist crises elsewhere in the world, and still apply to this day, in 2021.
Whereas this essay about the special power of television news not only felt contrived and superficial at the time (when I first read it, back in 1998) but has dated very badly and now feels relevant to no one.
Chapter 2. The narcissism of minor differences
Chapter two is much better because it starts from a specific time and place. It invokes the time Ignatieff spent in a village in Croatia holed up with Serb paramilitaries in the basement of an abandoned farmhouse, an observation post from which the bored Serbs occasionally take potshots at their one-time Croat neighbours who are holed up in a similar ruined building two hundred and fifty yards away. How did it come to this?
This chapter picks up themes from Blood and Belonging and digs deeper. The most obvious thing to an outsider like Ignatieff is not the way Serbs and Croats come from distinct ethnic and religious groups, or represent the so-called Clash of Civilisations (the concept promoted by Samuel Huntingdon which became fashionable in the 1990s). It’s the opposite. Serbs and Croats come from the same racial stock, they look the same, they speak the same language. Sure, they belong to different religions (Croats Catholic, Serbs Orthodox) but Ignatieff’s point is that hardly any of the men he talks to go actually to church and none of them gave religion a thought until a few years ago.
Ethnic conflict is not inevitable
Ignatieff’s central point is that ethnic nationalism is NOT the inevitable result of different ethnic groups sharing one territory. Serbs and Croats lived happily together in Croatia and Serbia when both were governed by an (admittedly authoritarian, communist version of) civic nationalism.
The ethnic nationalism which tore the former Yugoslavia apart was the conscious creation of irresponsible rulers. It didn’t have to happen. Ethnic conflict is not inevitable where rulers make a sustained effort to inculcate civic nationalism at every level of their society. But once you let ethnic nationalism in, let it gain a foothold, it quickly spreads. Go out of your way to actively encourage it – as Franjo Tuđman did in Croatia and Slobodan Milošević did in Serbia – and you get disaster.
That 600,000 Serbs lived inside Croatia didn’t matter when Croatia was merely part of a larger federal country. But when Croatia declared its independence on 25 June 1991 and began aggressively reviving all the symbols of Croat nationalism, those 600,000 Serbs became intensely anxious about their futures.
Instead of doing everything in his power to address those concerns, the ruler of Croatia, Franjo Tuđman, made a series of errors or deliberate provocations. He restored the Croatian flag. Street signs began to be changed to Croat. The government announced that Croat would become the official language of the country and become the only language taught in all the schools. All of this reminded older Serbs of the Yugoslav civil war of 1941 to 1945 when Croatia allied with Nazi Germany and carried out a genocide of Serbs, murdering as many as 100,000, most notably at the notorious concentration camp at Jasenovac.
In other words, Serbs began to have real concerns that they were being quickly manoeuvred into becoming second class citizens in a place where they’d lived all their lives. Tuđman failed to address these concerns and so left the door open for the leader of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, to depict himself as the heroic saviour of the Serb minorities within Croatia and (then the other Yugoslav states, notably Bosnia-Herzegovina) and to send into those territories units of the Yugoslav Army (mostly staffed by Serbs) along with new Serb paramilitaries, to ‘save his people’.
A proper understanding of the sequence of events makes crystal clear that the situation came about because of the complete failure of all political leaders to maintain and promote civic society and their crude rush to whip upethnic nationalism of the crudest kind.
Nationalism creates communities of fear, groups held together by the conviction that their security depends on sticking together. People become ‘nationalistic’ when they are afraid; when the only answer to the question ‘who will protect me now?’ becomes ‘my own people’. (p.45)
The psychodynamics of ethnic nationalism
So much for the macro scale, the large political picture. But Ignatieff is fascinated by the nitty gritty of what the individual Serbs in the basement of a ruined farmhouse think they’re actually fighting for. And here he makes some brilliant observations about how fake ethnic nationalism is and what a struggle it is, deep down, to really believe it.
He does this through a long consideration of Sigmund Freud’s idea of the narcissism of minor differences. Freud started from the observable fact that people who hate each other the most are often very close, for example, members of the same family, or husbands and wives. Nations often reserve their strongest antipathies for their neighbours, for example the English and the Scots.
To outsiders, these look like people who live in the same place, speak the same language, share the same values and experiences, and so on. And yet they are often divided by real antagonism. It’s as if, in the absence of all the large-scale differences, all their psychic energy is focused on the tiniest trivialest details.
Like a lot of Freud, this isn’t completely persuasive but let’s run with it for the time being. But Freud says something else, which is that when individuals join a group, they voluntarily suppress their own individualism in order to belong.
Ignatieff stitches together these insights to develop his own variation on Freud’s ideas, which states that: a nationalist takes the minor differences between himself and the ‘others’ he wishes to distinguish himself from and, in the process of promoting themselves and their cause, inflates these trivial differences into shibboleths, into stumbling blocks, into the things which define himself and his group.
Nationalism is guilty of a kind of narcissistic attention to trivial details (how you wear your hat, how you pronounce one particular letter or sound, this national song instead of that national song) and exaggeration – turning apparent trivia into a matter of life and death.
It has to be like this because this systematic overvaluation of our story, of our suffering, of our language, of our patriotic songs and so on always comes at the price of a systematic denigration of other people’s same attributes. An unrealistic over-valuation of the self seems to necessarily involve an equally unrealistic depreciation of others, and this depreciation is most intense at the point where the other approaches nearest to being like you.
The nationalist thinks his tribe and nation are wonderful, special and unique so that if someone calmly points out that they are actually pretty much the same as the other half dozen tribes or nations which surround it, the nationalist will furiously deny it, and the more alike they actually are, the more furious the denial will be.
Thus there is an anxiety at the heart of nationalism. When Ignatieff talks to the Serbian paramilitary in the farm basement he slowly realises that the man has a bad conscience, a very bad conscience. When asked why he hates the Croats a couple of hundred yards away, he comes up with all kinds of reasons, many of which contradict each other, until Ignatieff realises that there is no reason. There is no rational reason why Serb should hate Croat or Croat hate Serb. Instead they have plunged into this mental condition of Group Narcissism in which they find psychological validation, reassurance and belonging by investing all their psychic energy in the Group Ideology, an investment which denies reality. Which denies that they were ever friends, went to the same schools, drank in the same bars, shopped in the same shops, were married to each other’s cousins and so on.
If you allow a rational consideration of the situation to enter, it undermines the unrealistic fantasy at the core of ethnic nationalism and this is why ethnic nationalists get so angry about it, furiously denying that they have anything in common with them, the others. They are all murderers and rapists; we are all heroes and martyrs. The possibility that ‘they are just flawed people like we are cannot be allowed otherwise it brings the entire artificial and overblown fiction of nationalist belief crashing down.
This interpretation explains for Ignatieff what he observes in so many nationalist communities which is a large amount of fakery and insincerity. It often seems as if the politicians, ideologues, spokesmen and soldiers on the ground don’t entirely believe what they say. Ethnic nationalism is always characterised by inauthenticity, shallowness and fraudulence. It is if the extravagant violence with which ethnic nationalist beliefs are stated amounts to wilful overcompensation for notions the speaker knows, deep down, not to be true. He knows that his Croatian neighbour is not actually the murderer and rapist which his Serbian nationalism tells him he is, but… but to carry on being a member of The Group he has to conquer his own doubts. He has to march in line, wear a uniform and badge, get drunk with the boys and shout out patriotic songs.
All to conceal from himself his uneasy awareness that it’s all bullshit.
I’d take Ignatieff’s idea and extend it to explain another common phenomenon. This is the way that, when you watch documentaries which interview people caught up in massacres, wars and genocides, they themselves don’t really understand what happened. They look back and they can’t really explain why they and their friends grabbed their machetes and ran round to their neighbours’ house and hacked him, his wife and his children into hunks of bloody meat, as hundreds of thousands did during the Rwandan genocide. Now, calm and quiet for the camera, sitting sedately in their garden sipping tea and talking to the interviewer, they can’t quite believe it happened. I’ve noticed this in many TV documentaries about atrocities. Years later the participants can barely believe it happened.
Clearly, this is because it was a kind of mass intoxication. It was a delirium, like a prolonged party in which everyone was in a mad, feverish, drunken mood and did all kinds of wild things… and then they sobered up. Indeed Ignatieff records how everyone he spoke to in Yugoslavia expressed surprise at how quickly the boring, everyday society they knew collapsed so completely into a Hobbesian nightmare of terror and bloodshed. They describe it as a kind of madness or intoxication.
Words of advice
He concludes with words of advice for liberal society which arise out of these investigations and which can be summarised in two strategies:
1. His analysis suggest there is a kind of basic mathematical formula at work, an inverse ratio: the more people overvalue their group, their tribe, their nation (and overvalue themselves as a part of this Heroic People), the more, as if by some fateful psychological law, they will denigrate outsiders who are not members of the Heroic People. The more intense the positive feelings for our tribe, the more intense our negative feelings for the other. The cure for this is, pretty obviously, to moderate our feelings for our side. To cultivate a nationalism which is proud of various aspect of our national life and culture, but not blind to its faults, not exaggerated.
We are likely to be more tolerant toward other identities only if we learn to like our own a little less. (p.62)
All historical precedent suggests that the more you big up yourself, the more you will find someone to denigrate and anathematise.
2. Nationalist intolerance works by converting real people into abstractions.
Nationalist intolerance requires a process of abstraction in which actual, real individuals in all their specificity are depersonalised and turned into carriers of hated group characteristics. (p.70)
The solution to this is to consider everyone as an individual, including yourself. Instead of thinking of yourself primarily as a member of this tribe or nation or people or group, you should consider yourself as an individual person. This then forms the basis for treating everyone else you meet as themselves individuals in their own right, and not as representatives of this or that group, with all the (probably) negative connotations you associate with that group.
The essential task in teaching ‘toleration’ is to help people see themselves as individuals, and then to see others as such. (p.70)
This is difficult, Ignatieff says. It goes against the grain of human nature. But it is vital to the preservation of civil society.
Credit
The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience by Michael Ignatieff was published by Chatto and Windus in 1998. All references are to the 1999 Vintage paperback edition.
New world disorder reviews
History judges no one. There will be no reckoning at all. (p.55)
‘Hutus must stop having mercy on the Tutsis.’
Eighth of the Hutu Ten Commandments published by Hutu Power propagandist Hassan Ngeze in 1990 (page 88)
Disappointment
Simon’s law of book-buying states that the more you spend on a book, the more likely you are to be disappointed. Nothing has brought me as much pleasure as picking up a copy of my childhood favourite, The Town That Went South by Clive King, for 30p in a National Trust second-hand bookshop a few years ago. By contrast, I paid full whack to buy We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families and almost immediately took against it.
The shiny cover of the Picador paperback somehow belies the fact that it was published in 1998 and so is nearly a quarter of a century old.
Next, the introduction by Old Etonian and Conservative Party leadership contender Rory Stewart is reasonable enough but offers no insights or ideas. In fact it opens with disappointing stupidity. His very first sentence is: ‘Is genocide a suitable subject for literature?’ to which the obvious answer is, ‘Yes, everything is a suitable subject for literature’. More specifically, ‘Yes – have you not heard of Holocaust literature?’ Literature about the killing fields of Cambodia, about the Armenian genocide, and so on? So it’s a non-question asked for purely rhetorical effect.
And finally, Gourevitch’s book itself is also disappointing because, although it contains a lot of good quality history of the background and buildup to the genocide, of the events of the genocide itself, and then a detailed account of the aftermath up until late 1998 when he completed his text, and although it contains interviews with a phenomenally large number of representative figures – it is continually interrupted by Gourevitch’s own meditations on the nature of genocide, what we should feel about genocide, whether we can write about genocide, the difficulty of imagining genocide and so on, which are uniformly poor quality, entry-level, GCSE-level. Trite ideas padded out with lame and obvious quotes. It is a big disappointment. Gourevitch may be a terrific reporter but he’s no intellectual.
The tone is set in the puzzling first chapter where Gourevitch retails a conversation he had with a pygmy (one of the aboriginal inhabitants of the region now known as Rwanda, who were swamped by later Bantu incomers and now make up about 1% of the population). This conversation delivers the thumpingly banal message that humanity is one and needs to be united in its struggle against nature. This is the ‘insight’ message Gourevitch chooses to open his long book about the Rwandan genocide with, i.e. not very insightful at all, certainly not worth paying £10 for.
With a sinking feeling, I realised within a few pages that this book was not going to offer much insight into politics or human nature. In fact, in the passages where he tries to ‘think’ about the genocide, Gourevitch’s banal meanderings tend to blanket and dull the impact of the horrifying facts he sets down so powerfully in the factual passages.
The second disappointment is that a major part of the book’s USP is that it contains interviews and conversations Gourevitch had with scores of Rwandans from all parts of the country, from all classes and professions, Hutus and Tutsis, which go to create an impressive mosaic, like the walls of photos I’ve seen in some art installations, hundreds of photos of ordinary people caught up in a nightmare. Hence the book’s sub-title, Stories from Rwanda.
But I’m sad to report that these stories, also, partake of the general disappointment because they, also, are often surprisingly dull and banal. Obviously, many of the interviewees describe horrifying scenes: they describe entire lives lived in the shadow of the ethnic conflict between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi populations, they describe the repeated crises in the 1960s and 70s, when small-scale pogroms, massacres and localised ethnic cleansing broke out for one reason or another; then they describe the atmosphere of fear created by the RPF invasion of 1990 and the emergence of really vitriolic Hutu supremacism, the advent of magazines and radio stations calling for the complete extermination of the Tutsis; and then describe gathering round their radios to listen to the dreadful news that the moderate Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane had been shot down as it came into land at Kigali airport and the terrible sense of doom most of them felt.
And then, of course, Gourevitch includes eye-witness account of going into hiding, being arrested, trying desperately to contact family members, watching people being shot, hacked to death with machetes, driving through smoking villages, coming across streets full of bodies, terror and despair.
The content of these stories is, of course, gripping and horrifying. But the style is uniformly flat. They all sound the same, they all speak very simply. Either that’s because all Rwandans sound the same, very simple and flat. Or because all Rwandans are dull and boring. Or maybe because every interview had to be carried out through an interpreter, since most Rwandans speak French, and French has less lexical variety than English and that’s why everyone comes out sounding the same. Or maybe it’s because all the testimony has been first translated, and then put through Gourevitch’s own style machine. All the interviews are made up of suspiciously complete sentences. There are no hesitations or repetitions or stumblings. All Gourevitch’s interviewees speak in perfect and grammatically correct sentences. They all sound the same and they all sound boring.
He even manages to make Paul Kagame sound boring, which is quite a feat. Paul Kagame was born and raised a Rwandan exile in Uganda. He volunteered to join the Ugandan army, rose quickly through the ranks, studied military theory, was a senior officer in the rebel force which helped Yoweri Museveni overthrow the Ugandan dictator Milton Obote. Kagame then went on to become a co-founder and eventually leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) which invaded north Rwanda in 1990 and fought the Rwandan army to a ceasefire in 1993. Kagame was still working through implementation the peace accords he signed with the Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana in August 1993, when the latter’s plane was blown out of the sky in April 1994. This was the trigger for Hutu Power extremists in the government to launch their genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsi population, so Kagame immediately resumed the RPF incursion into Rwanda, quickly seizing large parts of the country, taking the capital Kigali on 4 July 1994, then pushing west to conquer almost the entire country and putting an end to the genocide by 17 July 1994.
Kagame then took up the twin roles of vice-president and defence minister in the post-genocide government, but everyone knew he was the real power in Rwanda, which he has gone on to lead down to the present day, 2021, when he is still serving as president.
Kagame is described by analysts as a military leader of ‘genius’ for turning the RPF from a ragtag of half-armed volunteers into a highly disciplined and effective military force (p.218). And then, after all this, he went on to be the military and strategic brains behind the alliance of armies, the AFDL, which invaded east Zaire in 1997 to close the Hutu refugee camps where Hutu Power génocidaires had been regrouping and preparing for genocide part two. This was the incursion which led to the AFDL marching all the way to Kinshasa and overthrowing Zairean dictator Joseph Mobutu.
In other words, Kagame is one of the most fascinating characters of the late 20th/early 21st centuries and Gourevitch has had the privilege of interviewing him not once but on numerous occasions. And yet, in Gourevitch’s hands, this is what Kagame sounds like:
“I have wanted to be original about my own thinking, especially in regard to my own situation here. Not that I don’t realise that there are other people out there to admire, but it is just not my habit to admire anybody. Even if something has worked, I think there are many other things that could work also. If there’s anything else that has worked, I would certainly pick a bit from that. But if there could be another way of having things work, I would like to discover that. If I could have some original way of thinking, that would be OK for me.” (quoted on page 213)
Pretty dull, eh. It’s far too harsh to say that Gourevitch is a lightweight and he makes everyone he interviews sound like a lightweight, but that thought did cross my mind during more than one of the duller interviews in the book.
He’s spoken to literally hundreds of people, including many key players and all kinds of experts and aid and UN officials and yet…hardly any of them say anything interesting. Only towards the end did some of the Rwandan officials complaining about the utter ineffectualness of the international community make an impression.
A literary account, alas
Gourevitch is a longtime staff writer for New Yorker magazine and a former editor of The Paris Review. He knew nothing about Rwanda or African politics before he watched the shocking images on the TV news as the Rwanda genocide broke in spring 1994. Fascinated and appalled he realised he had to find out more (or realised this was a terrific opportunity for an ambitious journalist looking for a subject for a book).
So Gourevitch began visiting Rwanda in 1995 (p.7) and over the next two years made nine trips to the country and to its neighbours (Zaire, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania) to report on the genocide and its aftermath. He made 6 trips lasting a total of 9 months (p.185). During that time he interviewed hundreds of people from Rwanda and the neighbouring countries and the book contains an impressive number of first-hand, eye-witness testimony from many, many Tutsi survivors, as well as more confrontational interviews with men accused of complicity or of organising particular local massacres.
Possibly his lack of background in African affairs partly explains the air of hopeless bewilderment he exudes right from the start. In the opening sections of the book Gourevitch goes heavy on his inability to imagine the events, on the importance of imagination in our lives, his interest in how people imagine their identities, on the importance of the narratives which shape their lives. In other words, he brings a heavily literary slant to his huge and complicated subject.
On the first page of his text he mentions Charles Dickens, on page 3 he is citing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, there are epigraphs from George Eliot and John Milton. Directly after that limp quote from Kagame which I cite above, Gourevitch says it reminds him of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke writing on love and art (p.213).
Oh dear. It is going to be literary journalism, the worst sort, the type of journalism which spends a lot of its energy emphasising the author’s own sensitivity, which foregrounds his own emotional responses, to the subject matter, rather than doing a journalist’s job which is to get on and tell you what happened and let interviewees tell their own stories, preferably without a load of editorialising about how you everything you find out about the horrors makes you feel. In the showbiz world of American journalism, ruined by the egotistical displays of Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe in the 1960s, it is acceptable to put the author and his responses at the centre of the story, but I wanted a history, I wanted to know the facts, not reiterations of how a pampered New York journalist was appalled to discover how brutal life is in much of Africa and how thoughtlessly cruel human beings can be.
His factual sections are sensational but when he stops to reflect on it all, Gourevitch writes quite a lot of stupid things. When he writes that ‘Power is terribly complex’ on page 78 I suddenly realised I was dealing with an idiot. My daughter learned more about political, social and cultural power in her GCSE Sociology course than Gourevitch displays in this entire book. All the ‘reflection’ in the book displays a disappointingly low knowledge of political theory, knowledge of international relations, or philosophy about human nature.
And I was irritated by his casual assumption that the ‘we’ he continually refers to are all white, liberal, college-educated, East Coast readers of New Yorker magazine, that ‘we’ all share his over-developed moral scruples and his severely under-developed sense of world affairs, geopolitics, African history and politics. Right at the beginning he tries to implicate the reader in his sensitive moral scruples:
I presume that you are reading this because you want a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. (p.19)
Well, er, no. I am not disturbed by my interest in reading about the Rwandan genocide in the same way that I am not disturbed by my interest in reading about the Holocaust, or the Second World War, or the First World War, the Somme, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American Civil War, the Tapei Rebellion, the rape of Nanking, the Gulag Archipelago, the Russian Civil War, the Ukraine famine, the Partition of India, Islamic State, the Crusades, the decimation of the Incas and Aztecs, the violent rise of Islam, the blood-soaked fall of Byzantium, the life and massacres of Genghiz Khan. I could go on…
I am reading this book because I want to be better informed about human history which, as anyone who has even a superficial knowledge of the subject knows, amounts to an unrelenting series of wars, massacres, genocides and bloodbaths. I’m kind of used to it.
So, no, I am not in the slightest disturbed by my curiosity to want to understand a recent historical event better. Seems perfectly normal to me, and most of the history books I read include passages where historians say the public in general ought to be more aware of history. In addition, many progressive historians and commentators tell us we need to get out of our Eurocentric frame of reference and understand more about the wider world and places beyond London or Paris. So that’s why I’m reading a book about Africa, and about one of the most striking events in post-war African history.
Gourevitch’s comment betrays a basic…what…dimness, obtuseness, ignorance…about the entire subject of History and why people would want to study it, which is to find out what happened, to try and understand why it happened, in order to better understand the forces at work in the world around us, now, in the present.
The facts
The book consists of three elements:
Gourevitch’s self-consciously literary fretting over the power of imagination and the importance of narrative and the centrality of stories and the difficulties of human identity and a familiar checklist of progressive, liberal arts issues
interviews with scores of Rwandans, UN officials, foreign doctors and aid workers, politicians and so on, giving often harrowing descriptions of their experiences or clarifying the political situation in Kigali, in the UN, in the aid camps in Zaire
actual historical facts
When he sticks to the facts, Gourevitch is very good indeed. Suddenly, about a third of the way into the book, after the kind of maundering speculation I’ve been slagging off, it changes tone dramatically and becomes a riveting account of the early history of the country, a description of the colonial era when the Belgians divided the two ethnic groups of Hutu and Tutsi the better to control them, and how this ethnic division, once created, went on to dog the Rwanda, which won independence in 1962 but continued to suffer repeated outbreaks of ethnic violence, pogroms and massacres (the massacres of 59, of 61, of 63, and so on).
In what follows I extract the facts Gourevitch gives and supplement them from other sources to try and create a comprehensive and useful timeline.
Rwandan history
In 1994 Rwanda had a population of about 7 million. Relatively small, it was the most densely populated country in Africa. About 85% of the population were Hutus, 14% Tutsis and 1% pygmies known at the Twa.
Rwanda is divided into five provinces: Kigali, Northern, Eastern, Southern and Western.
Because they were illiterate, no Rwandans before the arrival of Europeans had ever written anything down. Therefore, their prehistory relies entirely on unreliable oral traditions and speculation. Modern archaeology tentatively suggests that the hilly region was inhabited by pygmies as long ago as 8,000 BC, before it was slowly infiltrated from 700 AD by Bantu tribes from West Africa who went on to form the Hutus, and by ‘Nilotic’ ethnic groups from the north who were ancestors of the Tutsi (p.49). Maybe.
Hutus and Tutsis
For centuries before Europeans arrived, the Tutsis were nomadic cattle rearers, which made them wealthier than the Hutu majority who were mostly static farmers; the ruler of Rwanda was a Tutsi and the aristocratic Tutsis looked down on the peasant Hutus.
The regime was essentially feudal: Tutsis were aristocrats; Hutus were vassals. (p.49)
Although there’s a racial stereotype that the Hutus are full-on ‘negroid’ African in appearance while the Tutsis have narrow faces, with narrow noses and thin lips, in reality scores of generations of interbreeding meant the majority of the population didn’t conform to these stereotypes and very often Rwandans couldn’t tell which groups each other belonged to (p.50). Plenty of the Rwandans Gourevitch talks to tell him they pass for one ethnic group when they in fact belong to another. In other words, it wasn’t such a starkly obvious divide as between blacks and whites. Many Hutus and Tutsis are indistinguishable.
Tutsi ruler Kigeli Rwabugiri reigned from 1853 to 1895 and expanded the kingdom to its greatest extent. He oversaw a society which was regimented and hierarchical, with layers of military, political and civil chiefs and governors, priests, tax collectors, sub-chiefs, deputy governors and so on (p.49). Divisions between Hutu and Tutsi were hardened, with the former obliged to perform forced labour for the latter.
When the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 carved up Africa between the European imperial nations, Rwanda was handed to the Germans because they had explored the region, had missionaries on the ground, and nobody else wanted it (p.55). After Germany lost the Great War, Rwanda was combined with the neighbouring nation of Burundi and handed by the victorious allies over to Belgium, because they abut the huge Belgian Congo to the west. Belgium ran Rwanda from 1918 to 1962.
The Belgians hardened the ethnic division in the country by compelling every citizen to state on their identity papers which group they belonged to. This had the effect of crystallising a racial divide which had been far more fluid and flexible before.
The Hutu revolution
Throughout the century Hutu resentment at their inferior status simmered. With the advent of an educated class it found expression. In 1957 nine Hutu intellectuals published a Hutu Manifesto. Its full title was ‘Note on the social aspect of the native racial problem in Rwanda’ and it was ten pages long. The manifesto called for a ‘double liberation’ of the Hutu people, from the colonial oppression of the Belgians, and then from the racial oppression of the Tutsis. The manifesto called for the political disenfranchisement of the Tutsi, banning intermarriage between the two groups, and banning the Tutsi from military service.
1959 Hutu political leaders backed by elements in the Belgian administration overthrew the Tutsi monarchy (which had continued to exist throughout the colonial period) and replaced it with a republic. Violence against Tutsis spread across the country and tens of thousands of Tutsis fled to neighbouring countries, including Uganda. (When many of these exiles returned with the triumph of the RPF government in 1994, they were referred to as ’59ers’.)
Independence 1962
Rwanda was separated from Burundi and the two countries gained independence on 1 July 1962. Tutsi militias raised among exiles, especially in neighbouring Uganda, staged occasional raids into Rwanda, which always led to reprisals by the Hutu government. In December 1963 a Tutsi raid led to Hutu reprisals in which tens of thousands of Tutsis were massacred, in what one journalist called a genocide and Bertrand Russell declared was the worst massacre since the Holocaust. (This Russell quote crops up in Fergal Keane’s book on the genocide; it’s obviously one of those quotable quotes you get extra marks for in your GCSE essay.)
More than 336,000 Tutsi left Rwanda in 1964 to escape the Hutu purges. In 1972 Tutsi school students across the country were attacked, beaten, their houses torched. So large-scale massacres and pogroms came in waves.
Meanwhile, in neighbouring Burundi, it was the Tutsis who were in charge and in 1973 embarked on a pogrom of Hutus. As many as 100,000 were killed and a further 200,000 Hutus fled as exiles into Rwanda, where every one of their stories fed the fuel of anti-Tutsi anger.
The 1973 influx of Hutu refugees inspired the Rwandan president Grégoire Kayibanda to order his army chief of staff, Juvénal Habyarimana, to set up ‘committees of public safety’, which promptly set about massacring Tutsis. On this occasion the victims were ‘only’ in the hundreds, but as many 100,000 Tutsis fled abroad.
To summarise, Rwanda and Burundi have a long record of attack and counter-attack, profound ethnic antagonism and ethnic cleansing of the two groups which dated back before independence and flared up on an almost annual basis, with the Tutsi almost always being victimised, massacred, and fleeing the country in tens of thousands. The 1994 genocide was generations in the making.
Habyarimana’s coup 1973
In 1973 Rwanda’s army chief of staff, Hutu nationalist Juvénal Habyarimana, carried out a coup, overthrowing president Kayibanda and declaring himself president of independent Rwanda. Under his rule Rwanda became a totalitarian, one-party state in which every citizen was compelled to be a member of his MRND party and was required to chant and dance in adulation of the president at mass pageants (p.75). Habyarimana was to remain dictator of Rwanda for 21 years, kept in place by lavish aid from Western nations and in particular from his most loyal Western supporter, France. Naturellement.
Gourevitch makes the point that during the 1980s and 90s France channeled huge amounts of armaments to the Hutu government, up to and through the actual genocide; that French advisers helped the government at all levels; that French president Francois Mitterand’s son Jean-Christophe was an arms dealer who made a packet from the trade (p.89).
In 1986 the global price of Rwanda’s main exports, coffee and tea, collapsed, and real hardship for the majority of the population added to simmering Hutu disaffection. The racist, supremacist policies of Hutu Power spread like a virus, popularising the insulting term inyenzi or cockroaches for Tutsis.
The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) The Tutsis in Uganda
But so did the Tutsi fightback. It is important to understand the role played by Ugandan politics. In 1979 Tutsi exiles in Uganda formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). (It was initially known as the Rwandan Refugees Welfare Association and then, from 1980, as the Rwandan Alliance for National Unity (RANU)). It was formed in response to the persecution of Tutsi refugees by the regime of Ugandan president Milton Obote. Obote accused the Rwandans of collaboration with his predecessor, Idi Amin.
Tutsi refugees Fred Rwigyema and Paul Kagame had joined Yoweri Museveni’s rebel Front for National Salvation (FRONASA). Museveni had fought alongside Obote to defeat Amin in 1979 but withdrew from the government following Obote’s disputed victory in the 1980 general election.
With Rwigyema and Kagame, Museveni formed a new rebel army, the National Resistance Army (NRA). Their campaign to overthrow Obote’s government became known as the Ugandan Bush War.
Obote remained hostile to Rwandan refugees throughout his presidency and in 1981 forced RANU into exile in Kenya. In 1982 he encouraged local councils to force Rwandan refugees out of ordinary civil life and into refugee camps. When Rwandans attempted to cross the border back into Rwanda, the Habyarimana regime confined them to isolated refugee camps and closed the border to prevent further migration.
You can see why many Tutsi exiles found themselves in an impossible position and it explains why so many joined up with Museveni’s NRA with the aim of overthrowing Obote and restoring their rights within Uganda.
In 1986 the NRA captured Kampala with a force of 14,000 soldiers which included 500 Rwandans, some of them senior officers, among them Kagame and Rwigyema. Museveni was grateful for their support and relaxed all Obote’s laws discriminating against Rwandans.
But you can also see why their success in the Bush War led soldiers like Rwigyema and Kagame to think they might launch a similar military attack against the consider an attack against Rwanda, with the aim of overthrowing the dictatorial Habyarimana regime, installing a moderate government and so allowing the Rwandan refugees inside Uganda to return home. And you can see why the new man they’d helped to power in Uganda, Museveni, would support such a move.
The Rwandan civil war 1990 to 1994
At its 1987 convention RANU renamed itself the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). After a small-scale incursion was repelled in 1989, a cohort of Tutsi soldiers within the Ugandan army deserted, along with uniforms, arms and ammunition and invaded north Rwanda in 1990. It was the right year, as the Cold War came to an end and Western powers abruptly ceased their support for African dictators like Mobutu of Zaire and Habyarimana of Rwanda and force them to instal multi-party democracies.
The RPF incursion developed into the Rwandan Civil War. (To give a sense of the relatively small scale of all this, the original Tutsi incursion numbered some 2,500 soldiers who effectively went AWOL from the Ugandan army, accompanied by some 800 civilians such as doctors and nurses.) The RPF were defeated and repelled by the Rwandan Army (bolstered by French troops flown in to prop up another notorious African dictator) and withdrew to the Virunga mountains where Paul Kagame, establishing himself as its paramount leader, led a very effective regrouping and reorganisation. He attracted funds and exiles, he imposed strict military discipline and turned the RPF into an impressive fighting machine. In 1991 they emerged from the mountains to conduct an effective guerrilla campaign, hitting military targets across the north.
Throughout this period Hutu Power stepped up their propaganda that the Tutsis were parasites on decent hard-working Hutus, exacerbated by the war which Hutus blamed on Tutsi invaders. The circle around Habyarimana’s wife, Agathe, set up a propaganda magazine, Akura, edited by Hassan Ngeze, who developed into the Dr Goebbels of the regime and in December 1990 published a Hutu Ten Commandments mandating Hutu supremacy in all aspects of Rwandan life (p.87).
Propaganda claimed the Tutsis were an alien people, were not Christians, were fighting to gain dictatorial control of Rwanda, restore the old monarchy and reduce the Hutu majority to slaves. In 1992 Hutu Power ideologue Leon Mugesera made a much-reported and chilling speech calling on Hutus to send the Tutsis back to Ethiopia by river i.e. as corpses down the river Nyabarongo (pages 53 and 96). And throughout the war Radio Rwanda broadcast anti-Tutsi hate and there were sporadic anti-Tutsi pogroms around the country, in which thousands were murdered.
The RPF invasion ratcheted up the very anti-Tutsi hate they were set up to counter.
Fragile peace 1993
By 1992 Habyarimana had been forced to accept a measure of multi-party politics and had included politicians not members of his party in the cabinet. It was these opposition politicians who met with the RPF leadership and negotiated a ceasefire in July 1992, leading to face-to-face peace negotiations.
It’s vital to realise that the hardline Hutus, often referred to as the akazu (p.81) and linked with the extended family of the president’s wife, disapproved of Habyarimana’s willingness to compromise and negotiate. They began setting up parallel hard-line Hutu structures within the organs of state, the civil service, the media and the army. Historian Gérard Prunier names late 1992 as the time when the idea of a genocidal ‘final solution’ to kill every Tutsi in Rwanda was first floated among this group. It was led, ironically enough, by one of the new parties encouraged to form by Western pressure to set up a proper democracy, the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic (CDR).
When Habyarimana signed a treaty with the RPF in early 1993 promising a transition to a genuine pluralist democracy in which Tutsi rights would be respected the CDR refused to sign, organised nationwide protests and encourage anti-Tutsi violence in which hundreds were murdered. In response the RPF resumed hostilities, this time defeating the Rwandan army which hadn’t been paid due to the country’s deteriorating economy.
Ever-faithful France sent troops to bolster the Rwandan army. The numbers are tiny. Just the arrival of 400 well disciplined and trained French troops was enough to halt the RPF advance. Nonetheless the RPF came within striking distance of Kigali but Kagali overruled his senior officers and refused to take the capital, shrewdly pointing out that it would alienate his foreign backers and the Hutu population. Instead he declared a ceasefire and called for more negotiations.
On the Hutu side, factions arose in all the parties which allied themselves with what became known as Hutu Power. Each party split into a moderate faction which believed in some amount of political negotiation, and a ‘Power’ faction, which rejected compromise and stood for total Hutu supremacy (p.97). Youth militia wings of each of the parties emerged, including the Interahamwe meaning ‘those who attack together’, who had their origin in football supporters clubs (p.93).
Habyarimana began to realise that the Hutu Power militants were more his enemy than the RPF. After prolonged haggling over the make-up of the post-war Rwandan army, a formal peace treaty was signed on 4 August 1993 (p.99). A transitional government was to be set up with members from all the main parties. UN troops were flown in to supervise the treaty, while Hutu Power authorities began to plan a genocide. Four days after the signing a new radio station set up by the akazu, Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines, began broadcasting genocidal propaganda (p.99).
The general situation was not helped at all when president of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, who had been elected in June as the country’s first ever Hutu president, was assassinated by extremist Tutsi army officers in October 1993, leading to a Hutu uprising and a violent crackdown by the Tutsi army which left around 50,000 dead (p.101). The assassination reinforced the notion among Rwandan Hutus that the Tutsi presented a permanent threat and that there could be no peace, not real long-lasting peace, until they were completely eliminated. This very fragile ‘peace’ lasted from August 1993 till April 1994.
Trigger for the genocide 1994
On the night of 6 April 1994 a plane carrying president Habyarimana and his counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi – both Hutus – was shot down as it approached Kigali airport, killing everyone on board. Hutu extremists blamed the RPF. The Hutu Power wing of the army, led by Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, assassinated the next in line to civilian authority, the (Hutu) Prime Minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, along with ten Belgian UN soldiers charged with her protection (who were tortured first, p.114), and immediately started to implement the campaign of slaughter which they had been developing for years. It was to be a ‘final solution’ to the Tutsi problem.
The RPF claims that Hutu extremists themselves murdered their own president because he was engaged in negotiations with the Tutsis i.e. was a moderate Hutu and seen by a ‘sellout’ by the extremists on his own side.
The very next day, 7 April, as systematic killings across the country began, Kagame warned he was abandoning the treaty and the RPF broke out of its base in the north, attacking into Rwanda in three directions. So the genocide took place against the backdrop of renewed invasion and war. The RPF slowly seized territory in the east, heading south. UN troops were stationed in the demilitarised zone in the north but were ordered to withdraw to their camps to avoid getting involved in the fighting.
You can see why the renewal of war incited the Hutu Power advocates to carry out the genocide with feverish haste, ordering their followers at local level to kill as many as possible as quickly as possible before either the RPF won or the international community stepped in. For Hutu Power, it was a race against the clock.
The genocide – 100 days in 1994
Between April and July 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days. Three key facts to grasp are that:
1. The Hutu Power extremists had been preparing for this day for years, had drawn up lists of every Tutsis in the country with names and addresses, had assigned local Hutu leaders to direct and manage the slaughter, and had plans to take over state radio The Hutu extremists set up a radio station, RTLM, and newspapers which circulated hate propaganda, urging people to ‘weed out the inyenzi‘, to broadcast messages of hate. In other words, it was all extremely well planned. The identity cards which every Rwandan had been obliged by law to carry ever since the Belgians introduced them in 1931 (p.56) now became death warrants for any Tutsi stopped by police, militias, at road blocks, in the street, stopped search identified and hacked to death with a machete.
2. Second thing is that Rwanda was unique in tropical African countries in having been, from before Europeans arrived, a highly hierarchical country, organised like a pyramid from each district up to the top of government. Habyarimana’s governing party, the MRND, had a youth wing called the Interahamwe, which was turned into a militia to carry out the slaughter, but they operated within a highly organised society. It was a very well-organised genocide.
3. French troops, fighting on the side of the Rwandan army, freed up resources which Colonel Théoneste Bagosora could redirect to speeding up the genocide (p.90). On the nights of 16 and 18 June French arms shipments were flown into Goma in Zaire and then ferried across the border to support the genocidal Hutu Power regime (p.155). Gourevitch writes of:
The French political and military establishment’s…blatant complicity in the preparation and implementation of the butchery. (p.155)
I was amused to read that as the RPF closed in a French military plane whisked Habyarimana’s wife, Agathe, the central figure in the networks of Hutu Power, the leading figure in the azaku, to safety back in the homeland of liberty, equality and fraternity. Vive la France!
Number killed
At least 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in just 100 days, making it the fastest mass killing in human history. People were slaughtered at a faster rate than even during the Holocaust. Some Tutsis, commentators and historians put the figure higher at 1 million, for example a Red Cross report published soon afterwards.
What’s Somalia got to do with it?
Six months before the genocide broke out American troops had carried out Operation Gothic Serpent, an attempt to take on the evil warlord, Mohamed Farrah Aidid.,who ruled Mogadishu, capital of Somalia, which led to the so-called Battle of Mogadishu on 3 and 4 October 1993 during which a black hawk helicopter was shot down and 19 American soldiers were killed and 73 wounded. Not just that. The American corpses were paraded through the streets, and filmed and the video footage beamed around the world. The world’s only superpower was humiliated.
This explains why, when trouble broke out in another faraway African state, the administration of President Bill Clinton desperately tried to ignore it, then downplay it. Gourevitch quotes the press conferences given while the genocide was being carried out in which the poor press secretary tried to explain the administration’s position that ‘genocidal acts’ were taking place but these didn’t amount to an actual genocide. Why the hair-splitting? Because if the Americans conceded it was a genocide, then they would be legally obliged under the Genocide Convention of 1948 to intervene. And Clinton refused under any circumstances to risk another Black Hawk Down humiliation. And therefore officials at every level of the administration were under strict orders never to use the g word.
A bit too neatly Gourevitch says that in May, as the genocide was in full swing, he was visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which happened to have been opened by President Bill Clinton who made a speech repeating the museum’s motto Never Again. But not only did it happen again, and the American government was the number one reason that the West, the international community and the United Nations did not do more to stop it (as explained in detail on pages 151 to 154). Disgusting.
French involvement and guilt
By June the RPF, attracting more and more Tutsi recruits, controlled the east of Rwanda, had surrounded the key cities including Kigali. In the same month France launched Opération Turquoise in the west of the country, entering from bases in the Zairian cities of Goma and Bukavu and eventually controlling the western fifth of Rwanda in order to create a safe haven for refugees. The fact that many of these refugees were Hutus, fleeing the advancing RPF army, and included many Hutu Power administrators and officials, has led to claims ever since that the French in effect protected those responsible for the genocide.
From the moment they arrived, and wherever they went, the French forces supported and preserved the same local political leaders who had presided over the genocide. (p.158)
Throughout the genocide French military spokesman argued that it was a ‘two-way’ genocide, both sides were as bad as each other and sneeringly referred to the RPF as the Khmer Rouge. The French had many motivations. 1. To maintain hegemony over the widest possible area of francophonie. 2. To maintain its credibility with the other African dictators it supported. Hatred of the English. Hard though it is to believe, the French government opposed the RPF because they originated in English-speaking Uganda. French culture must be preserved even at the cost of supporting the largest genocide since the Holocaust. This was recognised as a factor in France’s support for mass murder by as senior figure as Paul Kagame:
‘If they wanted people here to speak French, they shouldn’t have helped to kill people here who spoke French.’ (p.160)
The permanent grievance of the history’s losers.
The signal achievement of [France’s] Opération Turquoise was to permit the slaughter of Tutsis to continue for an extra month, and to secure safe passage for the genocidal command to cross, with a lot of its weaponry, into Zaire. (p.161)
Scum. cf p.289 and p.325.
End of the genocide July 1994
By late June the RPF had surrounded Kigali and took the capital on 4 July, followed on 18 July by the major towns of the north-west, forcing the interim government into Zaire. The RPF victory ended the genocide as well as the civil war. By the end of July 1994 Kagame’s forces held the whole of Rwanda except for the Turquoise zone in the south-west.
The international community, the UN troops on the ground and the French had done fuck-all to halt the worst genocide since the Second World War. (To be fair, Canadian General Roméo Dallaire sent his superiors in New York advance warnings he had learned from high-placed Hutu dissidents that a really huge massacre was being planned. When they ignored his warnings and actively reduced the UN presence on the ground, he and his reduced forces were at least able to provide refuge for thousands of Tutsi and moderate Hutu at its headquarters in Amahoro Stadium, at other secure UN sites, and assisted with the evacuation of foreign nationals.)
Instead the genocide ended solely as a result of the military intervention of Paul Kagame’s RPF (p.143). (Mind you, you could make the case that the genocide only came about because of the sequence of events following the RPF’s initial invasion of 1990, designed to overthrow the ‘legitimate’ Hutu government. Academics, commentators and advocates of all sides can spend the rest of time assigning blame.)
Map showing the advance of the RPF during the 1994 Rwandan genocide (source: Wikipedia)
Aftermath – flight of the Hutus
As the RPF closed in the Hutu extremists prepared not just to flee the country, but used state radio and local authorities to terrify the Hutu population into believing they too, in their turn, would be slaughtered by vengeful Tutsis. Which explains why some two million Hutu peasants took to the road and fled west into Zaire, eventually setting up huge refugee camps as big as cities.
And indeed the RPF were accused of themselves killing thousands of Hutu civilians as they took power, and of pursuing and Hutus across the border in Zaire as they tracked down members of the notorious Interahamwe. The RPF denies this was intentional but Gourevitch has Kagame admitting certain rogue elements in his army may have carried out illegal revenge attacks. He tried to restrain them, some were tried and imprisoned, but there’s a limit to his control.
But the bigger story, which Gourevitch dwells on at length, was the creation of vast Hutu refugee camps which became cities in their own right, homes to countless businesses, run with fear and intimidation by Hutu Power administrators, and funded and supported by the international community and hundreds of well-meaning aid agencies.
Ethnic cleansing in East Congo 1995 to 1996
The resulting situation in eastern Congo became chaotic with Rwandan Tutsis tracking down and massacring Hutus, and Hutu extremists regrouping in the vast refugee camps helped by Western governments and aid agencies a) launching cross-border raids back into Rwanda to murder survivors and kill witnesses and b) embarking on their own campaigns of ethnic cleansing against ethnic Tutsis who had lived in Zaire for generations, specifically in the area of Kivu around the Zairean town of Goma.
In other words, intense Hutu-Tutsi animosity, spilling over into massacres and ethnic cleansing continued for years after the genocide itself was ended by the invading RPF.
First Congo War 1996 to 1997
Gourevitch spells out how the genocide was a gift from God for Congo dictator Seko Sese Mobutu (p.281). The old bastard had been unceremoniously dumped by his Western supporters when the Cold War ended in 1990 and had gone through a lean time manipulating a succession of fig-leaf ‘democratic’ governments while he slowly lost control of the lucrative mining industries which had kept his kleptocratic state alive, inflation soared to 9,000 per cent, the economy collapsed.
But with the advent of nearly two million refugees in the far east of his country in 1994, Mobutu was suddenly the man the international community and countless aid agencies had to go through to help them and he proved a willing participant, seeing as he got to cream off significant percentages of the money passing through his capital and its crooked banks. Leading the charge was, of course, the dictator’s most loyal Western friend and the most avid supporter of the genocidal Hutus, France.
France, ever eager to bail out Hutu Power, broke ranks with the rest of what in Cold War parlance used to be called the ‘Free World’ and unilaterally restored aid to Zaire – which meant, of course, to Mobutu who shovelled the money directly into his Swiss bank accounts. (p.281)
Throughout the spring of 1996 Hutu Power militias based in the refugee camps funded by the West continued a campaign to ethnically cleanse the area of North Kivu of its native Zairean Tutsi population, Gourevitch tours the area after such cleansing, travelling through miles of devastation, meeting terrified refugees. The RPF Rwandan government demanded something be done to protect the Tutsis. Zaire protested no such cleansing was going on. The international community did precisely nothing (p.289).
Eventually Kagame was forced to consider direct military intervention into eastern Zaire where the camps were located. His ally Museveni had introduced Kagame to Zairean revolutionary and guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila. They began recruiting troops and creating networks of like-minded soldiers, militias and exiles which coalesced into the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation or AFDL.
Since North Kivu had been largely ethnically cleansed of Tutsis, Kagam predicted the Hutu Power militias would next turn on the 300,000 or so Tutsis living in South Kivu, known as the Banyamulenge after the town they were meant to have immigrated from back in the seventeenth century.
In September 1996 Hutu militias began attacking the Banyamulenge, burning houses, assassinating key officials, executing people in the street. They were fully supported by Mobutu’s army and media, who blamed the Tutsis victims for every atrocity. This was the same pattern and rhetoric which had led to the genocide. Tutsis fought back and were aided by Rwandan soldiers infiltrated into the area (p.295).
When the local Zairean governor declared that the entire Banyamulenge population had one week to vacate their homes and leave the territory, it was precisely the kind of categorical provocation Kagame had been waiting for. He immediately ordered the advance of the amalgamated forces which he, Museveni and Kabila had created into South Kivu. He tells Gourevitch he had three aims:
protect the Banyamulenge Tutsis, arm them, empower them to fight and protect themselves
to dismantle the notorious refugee camps and get their Hutu occupants to return to Rwanda where they would be treated decently
to ‘change the situation in Zaire’ i.e. remove Mobutu as an active supporter of genocidal Hutu Power and replace him with a modern, neutral figure
The AFDL advance was as disciplined and effective as the RWP invasion of Rwanda 2 years earlier. It had the decisive effect of breaking the grip of Hutu Power on the camps and forcing an estimated 700,000 refugees to abandon the camps and trek the 20 or 30 miles back across the border into peaceful Rwanda, and return to their communities. Obviously, there were all kinds of problems with this enormous reintegration into such a densely populated country and with so many divisive memories, but the wholesale massacre of Hutu refugees which the Hutu Power ideologues had terrified the refugees with never happened.
But to the wider world’s surprise the invading AFDL didn’t just invade the Hutu camps, tracking down Hutu Power exponents, freeing the majority of the Hutu refugees into returning to Rwanda – they then declared their intention of marching on Zaire’s capital, Kinshasa, approximately two and a half thousand miles west.
Fall of Mobutu May 1997
It took the AFDL a long seven months to get there, more a tribute to the shocking state of Zaire’s roads and infrastructure than to any opposition put up by the rubbish Zaire army, the FAZ (which Gourevitch describes as ‘Mobutu’s famously cowardly army’, p.256).
As Kabila’s troops approached the capital, president Nelson Mandela of South Africa flew in to try and broker a deal, but failed. Mobutu wanted to stay on the scene, if only as a figurehead president, while Kabila, leading the winning army, wanted all or nothing. Mobutu, his family and cronies fled, Kabila’s troops entered Kinshasa and on 30 May 1997 Kabila was sworn in as president. Next day Kabile changed the country’s name from Zaire to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was to be president until his assassination in 2001.
The Second Congo War 1998 to 2003
Kabila turned against his own backers, responding to the Congo public’s dislike of the occupying army of Rwandans and Ugandans and summarily expelling them all in 1998. Bad move. Rwanda and Uganda again collaborated in putting together an invasion force, this time with the aim of overthrowing Kabila and installing a more compliant president. However, the conflict ended up roping six other African nations into the fighting which degenerated into chaos.
The conflict dragged on till 2003 by which time an estimated five million people had died as a result of the conflict. Some armed groups remain active in the areas near Rwanda’s border right up till the present day, 2021.
The post-genocide period
The last hundred pages of this 350-page book cover the period after the genocide. Gourevitch describes the surprising number of Tutsis who returned from exile all over the place, not just the neighbouring countries of Uganda and Tanzania, but Europe and America, once it was clear that a democratic, mixed ethnicity and peaceful government was in place. And the inevitable tensions this led to between those who’d lived through the horror and seen family and loved ones literally hacked to death before their eyes, and returnees from abroad who moved into the many empty houses, tidied up the mess left by the departing Hutus, had barbecues, laughed and joked as if nothing had happened. Many of the survivors Gourevitch interviews find this difficult to cope with (pages 229 to 241).
He covers the massacre of Hutu refugees at the Kibeho refugee camp. He visits post-genocide prisons packed with Hutus who are strangely passive. Considering that high-profile Hutus were being assassinated on the outside, many of them were relieved to be in the relative safety of prison, regularly visited by international aid workers and monitors. He describes in detail the paradox of Hutu Power genocidaires being protected and funded by western aid agencies, at the complete inability of the international community, yet again, to intervene to stop their attacks into Rwanda and their ethnic cleansing of North Kivu and, yet again, the only thing to stop it being a military invasion organised by Paul Kagame, this time in the shape of the coalition AFDL.
At this kind of thing – specific settings and the issues arising from them – Gourevitch excels and his book will remain a valuable record and testimony to the tense, disorientated spirit of the period after the genocide and before the second Congo war of 1998, the one which degenerated into the Great War of Africa. Gourevitch thought he was covering an event which had finished but ended up recording a moment in the continual, ongoing flux of human events, the edgy post-genocide moment which has itself become part of history.
Stupid remarks
Gourevitch peppers the books with remarks which are, presumably, intended to be insightful, but as someone who did a history GCSE, A-level, history-based degree and has spent my life reading history books and attending history exhibitions, I found disappointingly obvious and trite.
Colonisation is violence and there are many ways to carry out that violence. (p.55)
Every war is unconventional after its own fashion. (p.82)
They sound good, don’t they, they create a good literary, rhetorical effect, they sound profound, but a moment’s reflection tells you they are trite or untrue. He operates on a very superficial level. When he quotes Lord Acton’s hoary dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as if it was a useful contribution to the debate about the genocide, you realise you are dealing with a child. He quotes Stalin’s alleged saying that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic, as if it’s a dazzling new discovery (p.201). Disappointing.
Worst of all, Gourevitch develops a theory of human nature based on his literary feelings, on the premise that the most important thing about human nature is the power of the imagination. Instead of seeing things in political terms, he again and again reverts to modish blah about narratives and stories and identity and returns again and again to the importance of imagination, narrative and stories. He is more indebted to Coleridge than Clausewitz. John Milton, Charles Dickens, Rilke, George Eliot, these are his terms terms of reference. It is thin stuff and wholly inappropriate to the subject matter.
He keeps writing things I profoundly disagree with.
We are, each of us, functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us… (p.71)
(Note the prissy, attention-drawing use of commas, a rhetorical flourish to make the sentence sound more considered and profound.) I am a Darwinian materialist so I simply disagree. I would counter-suggest that we are, each of us, (sic) not at all functions of how we imagine ourselves, but functions of how our bodies work, products of our biology, of the complex interaction between our genetic inheritance and the myriad biochemical signals the environment we find ourselves in sends us or triggers in our bodies.
If I am starving to death in one of the world’s countless famines or dying of cancer or stroke or heart attack or delirious with malaria it doesn’t really matter what my imagination or anyone else’s imaginations are doing. I am a function, first and foremost, of my biology, all else is secondary.
He writes that the most basic function of power is to coerce us into its narratives. This reads to me like the modish bullshit of the English graduate. The whole approach reeks of the trend across all the humanities and high brow journalism to invoke the magic words ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ as if they explain everything about human nature and politics, but they don’t. If someone puts a gun to your head and tells you to do something or die, complex theories of meta-narrative and Coleridgean distinctions between imagination and fancy become irrelevant. When he writes:
I felt tempted, at times, to think of Rwanda after the genocide as an impossible country. (p.224)
I felt tempted to throw the book out the window. This is high-sounding bullshit. What does it even mean? A country is a country is a country, borders on a map, enforced by border police, with a government and administration and laws and a currency. Russia continues to exist after its century of Soviet tyranny, Germany is going strong, decades after the Holocaust and its violent partition, even Cambodia is still a country after the horror of the killing fields – and so on and so on. Clearly the worry that Rwanda is an ‘impossible’ country is a problem which only exists in Gourevitch’s head and shows you just how obtuse his responses can be.
There’s a lot to be written about the ideology of Hutu Power which drove the genocide and the way it shaped the actions of the génocidaires at all levels of Rwandan society, but Gourevitch doesn’t have the conceptual framework or academic training to do it. He makes repeated efforts to do so, but I found them shallow and disappointing.
The big takeaway
Leaving Gourevitch out of the equation, I think the biggest single thing to take away from study of the Rwandan genocide is that it wasn’t a one-off, inexplicable outbreak of barbarity. The one big thing you learn from studying it is that it was simply the highest point of a century-old culture of ethnic rivalry and hatred, which broke out from the 1950s onwards in repeated massacres and pogroms, exactly as the Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe were subject to centuries of persecution and pogroms way before the Holocaust.
In that sense it is far from inexplicable, it is very, very explicable. What turned the long history of minor, localised outbreaks of ethnic violence into a genocide was the hard work of the Hutu Power ideologues who set out to organise the extermination of the Tutsis by harnessing the organisation and technology of a modern state, using state radio, magazines, and every level of the highly structured administration to promulgate simple messages of hate and desperation. It boiled down to: “Kill the cockroaches before they kill us!” and hundreds of thousands of Hutus, primed by decades of negative propaganda, bought this message and acted on it (p.251).
But study of the Rwandan genocide doesn’t stop in July 1994. Like all the other accounts I’ve read, Gourevitch shows how it leads directly on to the issue of the Hutu refugee camps and the way the Hutu Power génocidaires survived and recreated their power structures there, terrorising hundreds of thousands of refugees, carrying out deadly incursions back into Rwanda, and then setting about the ethnic cleansing of east Congo. And how that led directly to the AFDL invasion of Zaire which became known as the First Congo War, and how that led on to the second invasion of Congo, by Rwandan and Ugandan forces which led to the disastrous Great War of Africa.
For a few months the specific genocidal Hutu Power campaign was able to be carried out with unbridled ferocity, but the killing of Tutsis had been commonplace for decades before it, and the killing of comparable numbers of Hutus (maybe as many as 100,000 Hutus were killed in all forms of revenge attack, from individual reprisals and local pogroms through to the more organised massacres in the refugee camps) followed seamlessly after it.
Gourevitch ends his book gloomily with Bill Clinton’s flying visit to Rwanda in March 1998 (he didn’t even leave the airport) but during which he acknowledged that the events of 1994 had been a genocide and that ‘the international community’ had done too little to intervene. The later sections of his book testify over and over to the complete failure of the international community, America or the UN to act either to prevent the genocide or to intervene to prevent the regrouping of the génocidaires in the camps. Gourevitch gets progressively more angry about it.
But the thing that comes over in his last few pages is the way the killings resumed inside Rwanda. During 1997 and into early 1998, as he was finalising his account, the number of murders and massacres of Tutsis by revived groups of Hutu Power génocidaires was steadily increasing. In fact the book ends with yet another grim atrocity, an account of how a group of 150 Hutu Power militia and interahamwe attacked a boarding school in Gisenyi and hacked to pieces the 17 schoolgirls and a 62-year-old Belgian nun.
In other words, as he ended the book, the tide of communal hate killing had returned and was rising. I’ll need to read other books to find out what happened next…
A correct understanding of human nature
The Rwandan genocide itself was a definable and unique historical event with a specific start and a specific end-point. Gourevitch, throughout his book, professes himself puzzled and bewildered at how it could ever have happened, incapable of imagining the motivation and mindset of ordinary people who took up machetes to hack their neighbours and own family members to pieces.
But the more you study it, the more understandable the Rwandan genocide becomes, provided you have a correct understanding of human nature.
We humans are animals, part of the animal kingdom, subject to the same constraints and urges as other animals. My son who’s just completed his Biology degree, said one of his lecturers summed up all animal activity in a snappy motto: feed, fight, fuck. That’s it. Like all animals, we humans are programmed to mate and reproduce; to do that effectively, we have to fight or compete (albeit in socially mediated and sublimated ways) for a mate. But none of this can take place unless we can feed and water ourselves on a regular basis.
For sure, the so-called ‘mind’ and ‘reason’ which well-fed philosophers have pontificated about for millennia, beginning in the slave societies of ancient Greece and Rome, is also a deep part of human nature – but most people, even the most highly educated, are fundamentally irrational and easily swayed. Humans are very suggestible and easily steered towards courses of action which let them fulfil their primal urges – hunger, lust, violence, and the more socialised wishes for praise and acceptance, wealth and power, no matter how local and fleeting. (Presumably Gourevitch has heard of Sigmund Freud. If so, why has he not learned anything from him, from the grim conclusions Freud drew about human nature based on the First World War?)
The great appeal of war for young men in less-than-perfectly-disciplined armies is that you can fulfil a lot of these really primitive urges. As well as the joy of killing alongside a closely-bonded band of brothers, war all too often provides endless opportunity for risk-free sexual violence. Hence the outbreak of mass raping during every conflict in human history, including the Rwandan genocide.
Once you align your thinking with the basic facts that humans are fundamentally irrational animals, driven by a cacophony of unconscious primitive urges, which lead them to make all kinds of irrational mistakes and, given the opportunity, behave terribly – then most of human history, including all its atrocities, make perfect sense, indeed seem inevitable.
Human nature doesn’t change, at least not on a timescale which human society registers. Give or take a few differences in social conventions, we understand the motives of medieval kings and Roman emperors just fine. And they map very well onto to the behaviour of contemporary African dictators such as Mobutu or Bokassa, just as the lickspittles and hangers-on in the court of each would be interchangeable, and just as the lives of the ordinary businessmen or urban workers or peasants doing forced labour in the fields would be recognisable in 1st century Rome or 20th century Congo.
It is only if you have a wrong understanding of human nature that you are surprised by atrocity and barbarity. Only if you assume that everybody else is as highly educated as you, as well-read in Rilke and Milton, as able to eat out in 5-star restaurants around the world on New Yorker expense accounts. If you come from this blessed background then you might be tempted to think that everyone else is as kind and generous and thoughtful and concerned about issues of gender and equality and identity and narrative as you are. So it is only if you live in this cloud cuckoo-land, liberal arts culture that you are going to be shaken to your core when you visit a country where hundreds of thousands of people undertook the systematic slaughter by hand of their neighbours and even their own family members.
The Armenian Genocide. The Russian Civil War. The Ukraine Famine. The Second Word War. The Holocaust. 20 million Russian dead. Indian Partition. The Great Leap Forward. The Chinese Cultural Revolution. Pol Pot in Cambodia. The Yugoslav wars. Has he not heard of these and many other comparable mass murders?
Why has he not learned the simple lesson that this is what humans do. In the right circumstances, whipped up by the right leaders, humans are capable of any atrocity. The Rwandan genocide wasn’t an inexplicable outbreak of madness but just the most recent example of an enduring and central aspect of human nature.
Gourevitch displays the same naive or obtuse shock every time he comes to ‘think about’ the genocide. The shock and dismay of a privileged, literature-soaked author, at the pinnacle of his liberal profession in the richest country in the world, amazed to discover what life is like in one of the poorest countries in the world (which is how Rwanda was classified by the World Bank in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, a place where the average annual wage was estimated to be $80, far less than Gourevitch and his fellow editors of The Paris Review probably used to spend on one business lunch.)
It isn’t anything ‘wrong’ in human nature or ‘wrong’ about the human imagination which he is discovering. Human nature is human nature just like gravity pulls things towards the centre of the earth, the sun rises in the morning, fire burns and so on. It is a basic fact of the world we exist in.
The reason Gourevitch is shocked is that he had such a completely mistaken view of human nature in the first place. He had read about the Holocaust but not really processed its lessons, what it tells us about what ‘ordinary’ people are capable of, namely any level of cruelty and barbarity if they think it means they and their loved ones will survive.
It is the shock of a pampered American discovering that the rest of the world is not like America, in fact it is inconceivably different. (Gourevitch is well aware of the issue of American parochialness and American ignorance. He routinely criticises the sparse and uninformed commentary on the situation in Rwanda and Zaire which he reads in even leading American newspapers like the New York Time and Washington Post, e.g. pages 297, 343. What’s the title of the Green Day song, American Idiot.)
Because he has diametrically the wrong view of human nature, Gourevitch at various points describes the genocide and the killings which followed it as a kind of failure of political and cultural imagination (p.206).
On the contrary, from my point of view, the Rwandan genocide was a kind of fulfilment of the profound and bestial aspects of human nature which I’ve described – albeit carefully whipped up, legitimised and organised by the Hutu Power propagandists. The genocide is explicable because it derives from understandable, analysable aspects of human nature. Have you not read any human history? Do you not know it amounts to a catalogue of massacres and genocides?
The common objection people make to my view of human nature, starting with my own kids, is: “Well, it’s not like that where I live. Where I live everyone is nice and friendly and caring. If what you say is true, how come everyone isn’t at everyone’s throats all the time?”
But the answer is simple: we in the West are well fed. Really well fed. The biggest medical problem in the West is the epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Fat people don’t fight. Even the most casual knowledge of history shows a direct correlation between hunger and social upheaval. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the rise of the Nazis took place in societies pushed to the brink by famine, hunger and extreme social stress; in Weimar Germany mass unemployment meant people were literally starving.
In these circumstances, the most basic human drives come to the fore and can be manipulated and directed by those who understand how: Danton, Lenin, Goebbels, Pol Pot and, in Rwanda, the exponents of Hutu Power such as Hassan Ngeze and Colonel Théoneste Bagosora.
It follows that the fundamental aim of any government should be to manage the economy in such a way as to ensure that most of its citizens are fed, not only as a good in itself but as the basic protection against social collapse and reversion to barbarism. To take a leaf from Gourevitch’s book and quote a famous literary figure, it was Bertolt Brecht who wrote: “Food first, then fancy talk about morality”. (“Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” The Threepenny Opera).
Feeding your population, ensuring security of food, then of housing, then of work which is rewarded with a stable currency, are probably any modern government’s top priorities.
Gourevitch’s assembly of all the facts and his narrative of the deep history, build-up to and then catastrophic events of the Rwandan genocide are thorough and authoritative, and he has obviously interviewed an enormous variety of people who shed light on all levels of events, victims and perpetrators, as well as numerous UN and aid officials, ministers, government spokesmen, including president Kagame of Rwanda and president Museveni of Uganda. It’s a hugely impressive roster. He had tremendous, what the journalists call “access”.
For all these reasons his book tells a searing story and will remain important evidence. But every time he stops to ‘think’ about what he’s describing, he displays a regrettably low level of awareness about human nature, society and history. He demonstrates that he is an idealistic American unprepared for a world which is mostly not populated by well-read, New York liberals. His bewilderment is sometimes so total I wish I found it funny, but it ended up being deeply irritating and marring my admiration for the extensive and very impressive factual sections of his book.
Cecile Kayirebwa
We are animals, bound by the same fundamental facts and constraints of biology as all other life forms on earth. And yet we belong to a freak line of evolution which has led us to develop language, speech, writing, mathematics and technology, and create an impenetrably complex labyrinth of cultural artefacts. One among billions of these human artefacts is this song written by Rwandan poet and singer, Cecile Kayirebwa, which laments the victims of the Rwandan genocide.
Credit
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1998. All references are to the 2000 Picador paperback edition.
Books & Boots 