The Anthropology Of Genocide - WNLibrary

164 annihilating difference
of Rwanda where humanitarian organizations were able to intervene had also sustained
this injury. Medecins Sans Frontieres, when it entered eastern Rwanda in
late June of 1994, declared in presentations to televised media that this injury was
the one most frequently encountered in their area. Although MSF managed to save
many lives among those so injured, the organization warned that in virtually every
case, costly surgery would be needed to restore some mobility to the foot. This injury,
known in medieval France as the coup de Jarnac, has sometimes been attributed
to the influence of French troops and their alleged training of Interhamwe
militia members (Braeckman 1994). While I have no evidence to refute that in this
specific instance, Braeckman’s assertion does not explain why the technique had
been used in Rwanda during the violence of 1959–64 and in 1973. Moreover, in
previous episodes of violence, as well as in 1994, assailants also mutilated cattle
belonging to Tutsi by cutting the leg tendons. Although many cattle in 1994 were
killed outright and eaten, and others were stolen, a large number were immobilized
and left to die slowly in the field.
This technique of cruelty has a certain logic to it where human beings are concerned.
In the presence of a large number of potential victims, too many to kill at
once, Interahamwe might immobilize fleeing victims by a quick blow to one or both
of the Achilles tendons. Then the killers could return at their leisure and complete
their work. This makes sense, yet it does not explain why many who sustained this
injury were children too young to walk, elderly people, people who were crippled
or infirm, and people in hospital beds incapable of running away. It is here that the
pragmatic logic of immobilizing one’s enemies and the symbolic logic of “blocking
the path,” which are not contradictory in many cases, are in conflict. Why immobilize
the immobile? As with barriers on paths and roadways, there is a deeper
generative scheme that subtends both the killers’ intentionality and the message inscribed
on the bodies of their victims, even though these techniques of cruelty also
involve a degree of improvisation. Power in this instance, in symbolic terms, derives
from the capacity to obstruct. The persecutor “blocks the path” of human beings
and impedes the movement of the material/symbolic capital necessary to the
social reproduction of human beings—cattle. Even when it is apparently unnecessary
to arrest the movement of the already immobile, the assertion of the capacity
to obstruct is nonetheless the claim and assertion of power.
(3) The Body as Conduit. In addition to the imagery of obstruction, numerous
instances of the body as conduit can be discerned in the Rwandan violence of 1994.
This imagery tends to center on two bodily foci: the digestive tract and the
reproductive system. For example, after spending several days in Bujumbura,
Burundi, following our land evacuation from Rwanda, my fiancée, a Rwandan
Tutsi, and I took a plane to Nairobi, Kenya. When we arrived at the airport on
April 15, 1994, we were surprised to see a group of about fifty or so Rwandans,
mostly Tutsi, who had been stranded there for days. The Kenyan government,
allied to the former Rwandan regime and already sheltering thousands of refugees