[kj] OT... World Destruction

[Neil Perry]

Agreed, it's a murky mess. But as you say, ultimately the killing was by
Rwandans. They chose that path.
A good book is the rather lengthily titled
'We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families',
by Philip Gourevitch.

N

"B. Oliver Sheppard" <bigblackhair at sbcglobal.net> wrote: Belgium and to a lesser extent France supported the codification of an 
ethnic Rwandan caste system. When Belgian troops defended the one-party 
Hutu government system in 1990 from a Tutsi uprising, an ethnic national 
ID card system was in place that made folks have to choose one ethnicity 
or another, Tutsi or Hutu, legally and formally, stamped onto their IDs, 
branded officially.

When Germany lost World War I, Rwanda became a Belgian colony (spoils of 
war) and initially used a Tutsi comprador govt. as their proxy to 
administer the region. This government was an undemocratic monarchy led 
by King Jean-Baptiste Kigeli V.

The Tutsi monarchy enacted forced-labor schemes and heavy taxation on 
the ethnic majority of Rwanda, the Hutus. This polarized and created 
animosity between the ethnic groups. (Also noteworthy: Hutus and Tutsis 
were now part of the same nation-state, a state arbitrarily drawn onto 
the map of Africa by European colonial powers whose roots are ultimately 
in the Berlin Conference of 1884 wherein the European nations carved up 
the continent into various regions on their drawing board. )

In 1961, the Belgian government switched sides (I'm not even sure why, 
honestly), taking away support from the Tutsi monarchy to the majority 
Hutus, logistically supporting a coup against the Tutsi king. This put 
the Hutus in power over the Tutsi minority; the Hutu leader and national 
president was now Dominique Mbonyumutwa. Belgium set the country free in 
1962 under these new & chaotic  circumstances. At this point, masses of 
Tutsis fled into neighboring Uganda or Burundi, fearing reprisals. By 
the 1970s the Hutu government put into place ethnic quotas controlling 
the percentage of jobs Tutsis could hold, as well as the maximum amount 
of income they could have; Tutsis could hold no more than 14% of any 
jobs at any given time. When Tutsis rebelled against this in 1990, 
French and Belgian forces arrived in the Rwandan capital to defend the 
Hutu one-party regime, a regime that had outlawed Tutsi political 
parties. Ceasefires between Tutsi rebels and the Hutu govt. were 
negotiated in Belgium in 1991, harkening back to the old colonial days. 
This failed when in 1994 the Hutu president was assassinated -- who did 
it is unknown. The Hutus blamed the Tutsis, and went all-out for final, 
genocidal revenge.

So, you can't say the Belgians directly caused the genocide. The people 
who did the actual, on-the-ground killing should be held responsible, 
obviously. But the situation has been fucked around with so much that 
it's hard to say there's no blood on Belgium or even France's hands. 
They militarily defended an autocratic regime that had outlawed rival 
parties, especially Tutsi political representation, and that had enacted 
legal quotas setting caps on the number of Tutsis that could have jobs, 
giving Hutus employment preferences. ("Ghosts of Rwanda" is a great 
documentary on the subject.)

-Oliver

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