Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

ARUSHA ACCORDS
24
an embargo is implemented by the UN, the UN, in turn, must establish a Sanction Committee
to monitor the effectiveness of an embargo, gather information regarding its effectiveness,
address humanitarian exceptions, and keep the international community
informed of the progress of such efforts. Individual nation-states themselves have also
sanctioned such embargoes, usually through their own control and limiting of exports to
warring countries.
Arusha Accords. A set of five agreements signed by the Hutu-dominated government
of Rwanda and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in Arusha, Tanzania, on August 4,
1993. It was intended that the Arusha Accords would end the civil war between the two
parties. The talks leading to Arusha were cosponsored by the United States, France, and
the Organization of African Unity and ranged over a wide variety of topics: refugee resettlement,
power sharing between Hutu and Tutsi, the introduction of an all-embracing
democratic regime, the dismantling of the military dictatorship of President Juvenal
Habyarimana (1937–1994), and the encouragement of a transparent rule of law throughout
Rwanda. In the months that followed the signing of the accords, a number of meetings
took place for the purpose of negotiating their implementation. These meetings
required the parties to travel to and from Arusha, sometimes by road and at other times
by plane. It was after one of these meetings, on April 6, 1994, that the plane carrying
Habyarimana and the president of Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira (1955–1994), was shot
down—it has never been proven conclusively by whom—by a missile fired from the outskirts
of the Kigali Airport. All on board were killed, triggering the genocide of Rwanda’s
Tutsi population and the murder of moderate Hutu over the next 100 days.
Aryan. Originally a Sanskrit term understood to mean “noble” or “superior.” Ironically,
the term Aryan was, originally, a reference to a group of people who lived in a region now
divided into India, Afghanistan, and Iran. The people were hardly, as the term now suggests,
blond-haired and blue-eyed.
Via a rather tortured and twisting road of numerous interpretations and conflations of
Sanskrit, Indo-Iranian, and German words by various scholars and nonscholars, the term
was eventually adopted by nineteenth-century European and U.S. “race specialists” who
came to understand the word to mean something along the lines of “the honorable people.”
Many of these same individuals came to believe and tout their descendants as being
Nordic. Physical characteristics such as blond hair, blue eyes, above-average height, a particular
shape of the skull, muscularity, and athletic prowess were later characterized by the
Nazis as evidence of membership in the “true Aryan race,” distinct from such “lesser
forms” as Jews and blacks. Although other so-called white Europeans, such as Poles, may
have shared some of these characteristics, they were, according to the Nazis, ineligible for
membership in their “master race” and were referred as untermenschen (subhuman).
Ironically, other than SS Chief of the Reich Security Main Office Reinhard Heydrich
(1908–1942), none of the other Nazi leaders (e.g., Hitler, Bormann, Goering, Goebbels)
met their own criteria of Aryan Nordicness.
Aryan Myth. Though the root meaning of the word Aryan comes from the Sanskrit in
which it means something akin to either “nobleman” or “gentleman,” a nineteenth-century
misreading of history suggested an invasion of the Indian continent and peoples by a fairskinned
Central Asian migratory superior warrior race. Ultimately, Hitler and the Nazis
drew upon that misunderstanding to divide the world between themselves (Aryans)—
insisting that the Germanic peoples were themselves the descendants of that original