60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

184 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
perhaps as many as 150,000 fl ed to neighbouring countries. 28 Unable
to quell the unrest, the Belgian authorities ousted Tutsis from positions
of power and replaced them with Hutus.
As a result of the revolution, Rwanda gained independence on 1 July
1962 under a Hutu-dominated government led by Gregoire Kayibanda.
The Kayibanda regime was autocratic, corrupt and fi ercely anti-
Tutsi. Possibly as many as 2000 Tutsis were killed in a reign of terror
in the months after independence. When exiled Tutsis launched an
unsuccessful invasion of Rwanda in 1963 the Kayibanda government
instigated the massacre of between 10,000 and 14,000 Tutsi living
within the country. This set an ominous precedent of making the
internal Tutsi population scapegoats for the actions of Tutsi exiles, of
civilians participating in the killing and the property of victims being
distributed amongst perpetrators. Further massacres of Tutsi occurred
in 1967 and 1972-73, the latter in retaliation for the genocidal massacre
of 200,000 Hutus by the Tutsi-dominated government of Burundi.
Calm was restored to Rwanda when the minister of defence,
General Juvenal Habyarimana, took advantage of the chaos to stage a
coup d’état in July 1973.
The Habyarimana regime, though even more autocratic and corrupt
than that of Kayibanda, was one of relative calm during the 1970s
and 1980s partly because the price of its main export crop, coff ee,
remained stable at relatively high levels and partly because Habyarimana
took a softened stance towards the Tutsi. He allowed Tutsi participation
in the government and administration in terms of a rough
quota of 10 per cent and tried to change the dominant Hutu nationalist
discourse from one of seeing Tutsis as a race of alien invaders to
one that presented them as an indigenous ethnic group that was part
of the Rwandan nation. The attempt to ameliorate attitudes towards
the internal Tutsi population was negated by the failure to address
the danger posed by exiled Tutsis. This neglect was in retrospect the
key failure of the Habyarimana regime for it was the actions of the
exiles that was to trigger the civil war and the crisis that would lead
to genocide.
Hotel Rwanda also provides little insight into the more immediate
socio-political circumstances that contributed to genocide. There is
no reference to the severe economic crisis into which the society was
thrown when the international market price of coff ee, from which
28 Gangs of Hutu, giving vent to frustrations pent up over decades of oppression, moved
through the countryside attacking Tutsis, especially those in authority or wealthier
ones, forcing them to fl ee and burning their houses.