60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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170 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness sectionally usurped violence on a massive scale, and genocide. 18 The categorisation of the Batutsi as a diff erent ‘race’ casts them in the role as heirs of the colonial state, stoking a civic confl ict played out as racial confl ict. Establishing a structural equivalence between Batutsi and colonisers, both as caste and race, the genocide was legitimated as both democratic/social revolution and liberation from colonialism. Those claiming ‘Bahutu’ ethnicity did so by reference to symmetrically racialised ascriptions, considering themselves as ‘native peasants’ enslaved by aristocratic invaders, and liberated by the 1959 ‘social revo lution’ (analogous to the French Revolution that had disempowered the aristocrats), which had restored to them the status of the only legitimate inhabitants (see Prunier 1995: 46). 19 We recognise an Arendtian trajectory here, which fi nds its most consistent (though not explicit, deliberate or systematic) application in Mamdani’s work. Mamdani analyses the deadly dynamic of interlocking instituted social facts of various political forms of social domination, of nation, race (as both elite/caste and biologically construed ‘race’), and ethnicity converging in postcolonial Central and Southern Africa nation-state formation. This dynamic should lead us, likewise with Hannah Arendt, to challenge the equation of the democratic project with the national project. 18 Driven out by the pogroms against the Batutsi in Rwanda in 1959, exiled Batutsi had fl ed to other Central African countries, forming a diaspora. While they were considered to be of a diff erent ‘race’ in Uganda, they were held to be ethnic Banyarwanda (which encompasses all Rwandans) in the countries that granted them refuge. In the early 1980s, the Rwandan government under President Habyarimana attempted to put ‘Bahutu’ and ‘Batutsi’ on an equal footing by instituting the category of ‘Batutsi’ as an ethnic category, and by admitting limited numbers of Batutsi to serve in government posts. However, this process of ‘indigenisation’ was not extended to those living in exile outside of Rwanda, who had eff ectively been rendered stateless. Batutsi exiles in Uganda formed the National Resistance Movement, pushing for Rwandan citizenship to be granted on the basis of residence (ius soli) rather than (ethnic) descent (ius sanguinis). This was rejected and, in 1990, the question of Rwandan citizenship was decided on the basis of ethnic descent exclusively, precipitating a crisis of postcolonial citizenship across the entire Central African region. Those exiled and rendered stateless on the basis of ‘race’ demanded indigenisation. Banyarwanda and people of Asian descent were expelled from Uganda. Banyarwanda tried to return fi rst to Uganda, then to Rwanda, to claim citizenship rights. Under force of arms, exiled Banyarwanda were repatriated in Rwanda after the invasion of the Rwandan Patriotic Front in 1990. Racial categorisation of the Batutsi was revived in the confl ict that ensued, and the distinct and mutually exclusive categorisation of Bahutu and Batutsi acquired renewed social and political signifi cance. (Mamdani 2001: 17, 18, 135, 156, 160, 189, 232, 275). 19 Nigel Eltringham casts aspersions on Mamdani’s analysis in terms of a replay of the ‘native-settler’ dynamic in postcolonial Rwanda after 1959: The argument that the 1994 genocide can be reduced to a playing out of the colonial dialectic ignores the fact that violence, from 1959 onwards, involved diff erent confi gurations of external involvement (Belgian 1959; French 1990-1994); intra-Hutu rivalry (northern vs. south/central in 1973 and 1990-1994); the manipulation of external threats (inyenzi 1961-1968); events in Burundi (1972-1993). (Eltringham 2006: 434)
Literature Arendt, Hannah (1994), The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), San Diego, New York, London: Harvest, Harcourt. Arendt, Hannah (1953), ‘A Reply to “The Origins of Totalitarianism” by Eric Voegelin’, Review of Politics, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 77-78. Reprinted in Kohn, Jerome (ed.) (1994), Essays in Understanding, New York: Harcourt, pp. 402-403. Arendt, Hannah (2001), ‘The Concentration Camps (1948)’, in Morgan, Michael J. (ed.), A Holocaust Reader. Responses to the Nazi Extermination, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Arendt, Hannah (1968), Men in Dark Times, New York: Harcourt. Benhabib, Seyla (1996), The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, Thousand Oaks, London, New Delhi: Sage. Benhabib, Seyla (2002), ‘Political Geographies in a Global World: Arendtian Refl ections’, Social Research, vol. 69, no. 2 , pp. 539-566. Boulainvilliers, Henri Comte de (1727), Histoire de l’ancien gouvernement de France, Den Haag and Amsterdam. Boulainvilliers, Henri Comte de (1732), Essais sur la noblesse de France, Amsterdam. Buranelli, Vincent (1957), ‘The Historical and Political Thought of Boulainvilliers’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 18, no. 4, pp. 475-494. Chrétien, J-P., Dupaquier, J-F., Kabanda, M., Ngarambe, J. (eds) (1995), Rwanda: Les médias du genocide, Paris: Éditions Karthala, Reporters sans Frontières. Eltringham, Nigel (2006): ‘Invaders who have stolen the country’: The Hamitic Hypothesis, Race and the Rwandan Genocide, Social Identities, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 425-446. Engels, Frederick (1953), Letter to Heinz Starkenburg, 25 January 1894, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, pp. 548-551. lineages of racism in genocidal contexts 171 Foucault, Michel (2003), Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 (trans. David Macey), London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press. Gobineau, Comte de (1967), Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humaines (1853), Paris: Éditions Pierre Belfond. Hanssen, Beatrice (2000), Critique of Violence. Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory, London and New York: Routledge. Harrow, Kenneth (2005): ‘“Ancient Tribal Warfare”: Foundational Fantasies of Ethnicity and History’, Research in African Literatures, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 34-45. Mamdani, Mahmood (2001), When Victims Become Killers. Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Marx, Karl (1953), Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, 5 March 1852, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, pp. 83-87. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1969), On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) (trans. Walter Kaufmann), New York: Vintage Books. Pottier, Johan (2002), Re-Imagining Rwanda, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prunier, Gérard (1995), The Rwanda Crisis 1959-1994. History of a Genocide, London: Hurst & Co. Sieyès, E-J. (1982), Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-Etat? (1789), Paris: PUF. Speke, John Hanning (1863), Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile, London: Blackwood. Stockhammer, Robert (2005), Ruanda. Über einen anderen Genozid schreiben, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Tsao, Roy (2002), ‘The Three Phases of Arendt’s Theory of Totalitarianism’, Social Research, vol. 69, no. 2, pp. 579-619.
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no. 50 | december 2008 Revisiting t
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Revisiting the heart of darkness -
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Acknowledgements The larger part of
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Dennis Brutus, born 1924 in then Rh
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In short, both the understanding of
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Behind most mass violence lurk econ
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ehind most mass violence lurk econo
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Is there a south perspective on gen
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is there a south perspective on gen
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The Voksenåsen Statement Genocides
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This Development Dialogue is publis
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