60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

162 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
by superior races’. He associates the monarchic institutions in the area
with the arrival of a ‘conquering superior race’, carrier of a ‘superior
civilisation’ (quoted in Prunier 1995: 7).
- Léon Mugesera, Vice-President of the Gisenyi MRDN(D) Section
(Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement et la
Démocratie) 7 in an address to the party militants of the Kabaya souspréfecture
on 22 November 1992:
The fatal mistake we made in 1959 was to let them [the Tutsi] get
out… They belong in Ethiopia and we are going to fi nd them a
shortcut to get there by throwing them into the Nyabarongo River
[which fl ows northwards]. I must insist on this point. (Quoted
in Prunier 1995: 173)
- ‘Tutsi’ response to the Hutu Manifesto of 1957:
…the relations between us (Batutsi) and them (Bahutu) have always
been until now based on serfdom; therefore between them
and us there is no basis of fraternity… Kigwa found the Bahutu in
Rwanda… History says that [our] kings killed the Bahinzi [‘Bahutu
kinglets’] and have conquered the Bahutu lands of which the
Bahinzi were kings… Since our kings conquered the countries of
the Bahutu and killed their kinglets, how can they now claim to
be our brothers? (Nkungabagenzi 1961: 35-36; quoted in Eltringham
2006: 433)
- The January 1994 edition of Kangura denounces Batutsi as ‘invaders’
who have ‘stolen the country’ (Chrétien et al. 1995: 118; quoted
in Eltringham 2006: 435).
The idea of the struggle of the races in these statements is closely
aligned with an understanding of castes. It goes back to pre-modern
dynastic regimes regarding themselves as separate ruling groups or
groups of conquerors. In contexts of pre-modern Europe, the social
division between the nobility and the other estates was understood by
the nobility as an irresolvable war of the races, long before ‘race’ came
to be associated with biological, phenotypical and evolutionist indicators.
Such race-thinking, buttressed as it was by 17th century mightright
doctrines, was as resolutely opposed to the absolute monarchy
as it was to popular government, and the establishment of the ‘nation’
with a nominally internally unifi ed ‘people’. In 17th century France,
and in prerevolutionary and revolutionary England, a declining aris-
7 Habyarimana’s party, many of whose leaders were among the alleged genocidaires.