Opinion
‘Qui est génocide?’ or ‘Who is genocide?’
With
these strange words, President Grégoire Kayibanda delivered, in March 1964, one
of the most significant speeches in Rwanda’s recent history.
He
clearly had a hard time using this new vocabulary he just introduced into the
Rwandan political landscape. The word genocide first came to him through
philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell, and then picked up by
Vatican Radio.
Delivered
two months after the first acts of genocide in the country’s history, this
speech rationalised the killings and legitimised the death of innocents.
The
speech explicitly placed Rwanda’s governance under a genocidal halo and created
an atmosphere of terror; terror that would characterise the daily life of some
Rwandans for over thirty years.
The
largest massacres began on 23 December 1963 in the then Gikongoro Prefecture
(present day Nyamagabe District), home to a large concentration of Tutsi
resistant to the revolutionary regime. The killings then spread to other
regions.
The
Hutu population of the region, armed with machetes and spears, began to
slaughter Tutsi, including women and children, in a systematic way.
One
missionary recalled how a group of Hutu “cut off the breasts of a Tutsi woman
and as she lay there dying, they shoved her mutilated parts down her children’s
throats as she watched”.
Another
missionary explained how on one hill, massacres lasted the entire night. “It
was incredible, the cries went on for hours and hours.”
The
lowest estimates indicate that there were tens of thousands of deaths in
Gikongoro alone, while others put the figure at 25,000 to 35,000 across the
country.
The
Parmehutu government explained these killings as the population’s angry
reaction to an Inyenzi attack.
The
Inyenzi were guerilla forces formed from Tutsi refugees, who – in fear of their
lives – began to flee in 1959 to neighboring countries.
Two
days before killings began in Gikongoro, on 21 December 1963, between 200 to
300 Inyenzi claiming to be from the nationalist party UNAR from Burundi – armed
with a few rifles, spears and arrows – had ruffled a few feathers by attacking
the Rwandan military in camp in Gako, Bugesera, about fifty kilometers from
Kigali.
From
there, they headed towards the Tutsi refugee camp in Nyamata where their ranks
swelled to a thousand men.
They
then headed to Kigali and were stopped about twenty kilometers from the capital
by the National Guard, who were well armed and commanded by Belgian
officers.
The
attackers suffered heavy losses, and the survivors returned to Burundi.
Based
on Belgian sources, it is clear the Belgian and Rwandan leaders of the National
Guard were aware of the time and place of the attack, and that the Inyenzi had
in fact been lured into a trap.
President
Kayibanda used the attack to inflict terror on the Tutsi and physically
eliminate political opposition.
He
sent a minister in each of the ten prefectures, to oversee the “self-defence”
of the population. A concept that would later return in the early 1990’s as
ordinary citizens – Hutus – were armed to ‘defend themselves’ against the Tutsi
“accomplices” of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF).
President
Kayibanda’s speech two months later made a clear point, “Assuming the
impossible, that you eventually take over Kigali, how can you measure the chaos
of which you will be the first victims? Understand this: It would be the total
and precipitated end of the Tutsi race. Who is Genocide?”
With
the ethnic cleansing of 1959-1961, the massacres in Gikongoro and elsewhere in
December 1963 and January 1964 as a backdrop, the radio address by President
Kayibanda marked the dawn of genocide ideology in the republican regime.
With
this public unveiling, he took the Tutsi community hostage. Their physical
survival now depended on total submission.
For
those who think this was just high level politics, I recommend Scholastique
Mukasonga’s book which records, in detail, how intimate this violent submission
was.
In
the years preceding the Genocide against the Tutsi, the speech of March 1964
was often cited by extremists with a mixture of respect and regret for not
having finished the Tutsi problem–in particular by hate media.
Twenty
years later, Kayibanda’s successors surpassed their master by carrying out the
fastest and most efficient genocide of the 20th century; they also coined the
word he was missing: Génocidaire.
Source:
www.newtimes.co.rw