60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

hotel rwanda – the challenges of historicising and commercialising genocide 185
Rwanda gained over half its foreign exchange earnings, plummeted
in the latter half of 1989. 29 The resultant insecurity and hardship were
important ingredients in the escalation of violence. Hard on the heels
of the economic crisis came one of even greater proportions when,
in October 1990, an RPF invasion from Uganda plunged Rwanda
into civil war. The small, ill-equipped Rwandan army was unable to
counter the guerrilla tactics of the battle-hardened, well-disciplined
RPF fi ghting force backed by the Museveni government of Uganda.
30 Throughout the early 1990s Rwanda was in the grip of civil
war, which went badly for the Rwandan army and Habyarimana. Put
under severe pressure by the RPF invasion, the economic crisis and
a dramatic rise in military spending, Habyarimana was forced by his
foreign backers, especially President Mitterand of France, to agree
to a process of internal political reform and to negotiate a settlement
with the RPF. By the latter half of 1993 these talks, held at Arusha,
Tanzania, yielded a ceasefi re as well as an agreement to form a powersharing
transitional government with the RPF.
Demanding loyalty to the Hutu nation above all else in this time of
unprecedented crisis, Hutu extremists, many of whom were to be
found in the ruling party, the army and upper levels of the state bureaucracy,
regarded Habyarimana’s reforms as betrayal and were determined
to derail the Arusha agreement. In this atmosphere of sustained
and dire crisis that included economic collapse, eff ective defeat
in civil war, heightened racialised hatred, recurrent political assassination,
periodic massacre of Tutsis 31 and a disintegration of social order,
the Hutu extremist leadership resorted to mass violence against
Tutsis as a solution to the problems facing the Hutu nation. Their tactics
included the training of Interahamwe 32 militia, the vilifi cation of
Tutsi through a concerted propaganda campaign, the importation of
tens of thousands of machetes and the circulation of hit lists of promi-
29 Foreign income from coff ee exports dropped to one fi fth of its 1980s level within
four years. The currency was severely weakened, state revenues fell drastically and
peasants growing coff ee faced destitution.
30 Exiled Rwandan Tutsis formed a signifi cant proportion of Museveni’s rebel fi ghting
force and played a major role in his overthrow of the Obote government in the mid-
1980s. Unable to meet their aspirations of citizenship because of growing Ugandan
resentment of exiles, Museveni tried to rid himself of a potentially dangerous problem
by supporting their armed repatriation to Rwanda.
31 The main massacres were of an estimated 300 Tutsis at Gisenyi in October 1990, of
at least 1000 across the north and northwest provinces in January 1991, of several
hunderd in Bugesera in February and March 1992 and a further 300 in northwest
Rwanda in January 1993.
32 Interahamwe, Kinyarwanda for ‘those who attack (work) together’, was the youth militia
attached to the ruling MRND party.