Genocide Prevention in Rwanda and Abroad
Senior 6 · History
Genocide Prevention in Rwanda and Abroad
Lesson 1 of 5
25 min
In 1944 a Polish-Jewish lawyer who had fled to the United States, Raphael Lemkin, published a long study of how Nazi Germany ruled the countries it had occupied. In one chapter he proposed a new word for an old crime: the deliberate destruction of a whole people. He joined the Greek genos (race, tribe or people) to the Latin -cide (killing) and wrote "genocide". Four years later, on 9 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly turned his word into international law. In S1 you met the word and the stages; in this unit you study genocide as a historian, a lawyer and a citizen would: what exactly the crime is, what leads to it, and how it can be prevented.
Important
Source A: the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted on 9 December 1948 (in force from 12 January 1951)
Article I. "The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish."
Article II. "In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Article III adds that conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit it, an attempt to commit it, and complicity in it are also punishable. Rwanda is a party to the Convention.
Definition
Genocide (in law): any of the five acts in Article II, committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such.
Specific intent (dolus specialis): the aim to destroy the group itself. It is what separates genocide from other mass crimes, and courts usually prove it from evidence such as plans, speeches and the scale and pattern of attacks.
Crimes against humanity: widespread or systematic attacks on civilians, such as murder, extermination, torture or persecution, with no need to prove intent to destroy a group.
War crimes: serious violations of the laws of war, such as attacking civilians or killing prisoners, committed during an armed conflict.
Genocide ideology: under Rwanda's Law N° 59 of 2018, an act committed in public, "verbally, in writing, through images or in any other manner", that "manifests an ideology that supports or advocates for destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group" (Article 4).
Denial of genocide (negationism): saying or implying that a genocide did not happen, was not genocide, or was not planned, or distorting its facts to mislead the public.
Applying it to Rwanda. Hutu, Tutsi and Twa were social categories within one Rwandan people, who share one language, Kinyarwanda, one culture and the same clans. Colonial identity cards from the 1930s fixed the categories on paper, and the planners of the genocide targeted Tutsi as a group. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) held that the Tutsi were a group protected by the Convention, and in its first judgment, against Jean-Paul Akayesu on 2 September 1998, it became the first international court to convict a person of genocide. In 2006 its Appeals Chamber ruled that the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994 is a "fact of common knowledge" that no longer needs to be proved in each trial.
Figure 1. No single cause produces genocide; the risk rises when several factors combine. Drawn by Ganzaa.
| Factor | What it means | In the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi |
|---|---|---|
| Exclusionary ideology | a belief system that presents one group as foreign, dangerous or less than human | a false colonial theory (below) and, after 1959, politics that treated Tutsi as outsiders |
| Discrimination | laws and practices that deny a group equal rights | ethnic labels on identity cards; quotas limiting Tutsi in schools and public jobs from the 1970s |
| Impunity | earlier crimes go unpunished, so perpetrators learn they can kill without cost | massacres of Tutsi in 1959, the early 1960s, 1973 and 1990–1993 went largely unpunished |
| Crisis | war, economic collapse or political upheaval creates fear and a pretext | the fall of coffee prices in the late 1980s; the war from October 1990, which extremists used to call all Tutsi "accomplices" |
| Organisation and means | a state, party or militia that can plan, arm and direct killing | the Interahamwe militia, trained and armed; lists of people to be targeted |
| Propaganda | media that spread hatred and fear | the newspaper Kangura (from 1990) and the radio station RTLM (from July 1993) |
| Indifference outside | other states and organisations fail to act | the UN Security Council cut its peacekeeping force (UNAMIR) on 21 April 1994, two weeks into the genocide |
Warning
A false and harmful theory, explained so that it can be recognised. In the nineteenth century, European writers such as the explorer John Hanning Speke invented the "Hamitic hypothesis": the racist claim that Tutsi were a superior race of foreign invaders from the north-east. It was false: Rwandans shared one language, one culture, one faith in Imana and the same clans, and people could move between the categories. But the colonial state taught the theory in schools and used it to rank Rwandans, and before 1994 extremists turned it into propaganda that Tutsi were foreigners who did not belong. Never repeat it as fact; when you write about it, call it a false colonial theory and explain the harm it did.
Name the crime correctly. Write "the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi", the name used by the United Nations General Assembly since January 2018. It was the planned extermination of a group, not a war between two sides. Presenting it as a fight between two sides distorts the facts, and Law N° 59 of 2018 punishes distorting the facts of genocide in order to mislead the public.
Tip
Genocide or crime against humanity? In a source question, look for evidence of intent to destroy the group: plans, lists, speeches calling for a group to be wiped out, or the targeting of children, who pose no military threat. If the evidence shows widespread attacks on civilians but not that intent, the better legal label is crimes against humanity.
Important
Discuss. In 1948 states decided not to protect political or social groups in the Convention. Who might have gained from that decision? Should the definition be widened today, or would a wider definition weaken the word?
Office of the UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide: "When do you refer to a situation as Genocide?" (about 2 minutes, text slides and archive photographs of courts). Note why the Office says the word must be used precisely, and who has the authority to decide that a genocide has been committed.
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the analysis, the diagram (Figure 1), the table and the exercises.
