The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

160 annihilating difference
It is no accident, then, that in the months of June, July, and August of 1994, when
allegations of a massive genocide in Rwanda were just beginning to be taken seriously
in the international media, thousands of bodies began washing up on the
shores of Lake Victoria—bodies that had been carried there by the Nybarongo and
then the Akagera rivers. So many Rwandan corpses accumulated in Lake Victoria
that consumers in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda avoided buying fish taken from
Victoria’s waters, and the lake’s important fishing industry was seriously jeopardized.
In response, a publicity campaign was mounted to assure people that Lake
Victoria fish species, such as tilapia and Nile River perch, do not feed on human
corpses and that human remains only add more organic material to the water and
do not diminish the edibility of the fish. Although these pleas aimed at minimizing
the commercial impact of the large numbers of accumulated bodies, it was
nonetheless clear that these latter were insalubrious to people living near the lake.
Very quickly, local, national, and international efforts were mobilized to remove
the decomposing corpses from the lake and its shores.
Rwanda’s rivers became part of the genocide by acting as the body politic’s organs
of elimination, in a sense “excreting” its hated internal other. It is not much
of a leap to infer that Tutsi were thought of as excrement by their persecutors.
Other evidence of this is apparent in the fact that many Tutsi were stuffed into latrines
after their deaths. Some were even thrown while still alive into latrines; a
few of them actually managed to survive and to extricate themselves.
(2) Gusiba Inzira, “Blocking the Path.” Among the accounts of Rwandan refugees
that I interviewed in Kenya during the late spring and early summer of 1994, there
was persistent mention of barriers and roadblocks. Like Nazi shower rooms in the
concentration camps, these were the most frequent loci of execution for Rwanda’s
Tutsi and Hutu opponents of the regime. Barriers were erected almost ubiquitously
and by many different groups. There were roadblocks manned by Rwandan
government forces, roadblocks of the dreaded Interhamwe militia, Rwandan communal
police checkpoints, barriers set up by neighborhood protection groups, opportunistic
roadblocks erected by gangs of criminals, and even occasional checkpoints manned
by the Rwandan Patriotic Front in areas under their control. For people attempting
to flee Rwanda, evading these blockades was virtually impossible. Moreover,
participation in a team of people manning a barrier was a duty frequently imposed
upon citizens by Rwandan government or military officials.
Several Hutu informants who escaped Rwanda via an overland route explained
to me that they had had to traverse hundreds of roadblocks. One informant estimated
that he had encountered one barrier per hundred meters in a certain area.
Another counted forty-three blockades in a ten-kilometer stretch on the paved road
between Kigali and Gitarama. Leaving major highways was no solution, for one
would encounter barriers erected across dirt roads and footpaths manned by local
peasants. At every barrier fleeing people were forced to show their national identity
card. Since the ID card bore mention of one’s ethnicity, distinguishing Tutsi