Lars Waldorf

Revisiting Hotel Rwanda: genocide ideology, reconciliation, and rescuers

This article examines the tensions between the Rwandan governments discourse on reconciliation and its fight against negationism. It shows how the governments campaign against negationism has taken shape—from the law against “divisionism” in 2001 to recent accusations of “genocide ideology.” The article also explores the treatment of Hutu rescuers at the national level. It raises concerns that the broad definition and application of genocide ideology may have a negative impact on reconciliation in Rwanda.

Anticipating the Past Transitional Justice and Socio-Economic Wrongs

Even as transitional justice struggles to deliver on its original promises of truth, justice and reconciliation, more demands are being placed on it. Over the past several years, the transitional justice ‘industry’ has embraced holistic approaches that have it doing ever more. This article critically examines transitional justice’s recent attention towards historically constructed socio-economic inequalities. It begins by looking at the shift in transitional justice discourse and practice with respect to economic and social rights. Next, it discusses the arguments made for transitional justice’s engagement with those rights and looks at efforts by truth commissions and administrative reparations programmes to address them. Finally, it argues that transitional justice should avoid directly addressing past socio-economic wrongs and explores some alternate paths.

Melvern Linda. Conspiracy to Murder . New York: Verso, 2006. 380 pp. Maps. Bibliography. Index.

meant that lineage heads and heads of household lost authority over the labor of their children. Third, the book shows how the husband-wife relationship in Rwandan culture from the 1980s through the present is analogous to the patron-client relationship. Finally, Jefremovas discusses how the success of female entrepreneurs in the 1980s depended for social legitimacy on their relationships with men (husband, father, or brother), even when the women managed their businesses autonomously. Thus women who attempted to operate outside the bounds of social acceptability risked losing control over resources and access to the means of production. The appendixes, including a comparison of chronologies for Rwandan kings, time lines from European contact through the Belgian colonial period, and a chronological list of prestations, corvees, and taxes, are a nice addition. The book has a few minor weaknesses. The detailed description of the brickmaking process in chapter 2 is tedious; it is, nonetheless, relevant to the arguments in subsequent chapters where the author shows how heads of household lost authority over their childrens labor. At times, Jefremovass concision hinders her argument. The concluding chapter, in particular, presents highly contentious analyses of postgenocide politics as statements of fact. While Jefremovass conclusions about power relations in postgenocide Rwanda are supported by the research of others, a more robust presentation of evidence to support these conclusions would have strengthened the book. Brickyards to Graveyards should be read by anyone studying gender, land tenure, or labor in Rwanda or the Great Lakes region of Africa. In addition, those examining the (often hidden) role of women in labor market economies in developing countries could learn a lot here about research methodology. The book is too complex for use in lower-level undergraduate courses; however, it would contribute nicely to an upper-level course on the anthropology of labor or work, Marxist anthropology, or the anthropology of gender.

18.00. Paper.

Despite the growing attention to and burgeoning literature on legal empowerment, there has been surprisingly little focus on how it might promote greater social justice during political transitions from authoritarianism and from conflict. Such transitions can provide opportunities for challenging structural inequalities and for promoting legal mobilisation. This introductory article provides an overview of legal empowerment before examining its links to peacebuilding and transitional justice.

Introduction: legal empowerment in transitions

The most troubling and perplexing aspect of the Rwandan Genocide is why so many joined the killings so quickly. This participation seems even less comprehensible given the violence’s terrifying intimacy: ordinary killers often turned on their Tutsi neighbors and family members, using machetes and other everyday tools. Searching for answers, journalists and even some scholars have clutched at comforting metaphors and mono-causal explanations: a ‘‘blood orgy,’’ tribalism, ethnic hatred, hate radio, a ‘‘culture of obedience,’’ structural violence, and ‘‘conspiracy to murder.’’ With bracing clarity and scrupulous fairness, Scott Straus painstakingly demolishes these simplistic notions and sets a new standard for empirical research on mass violence in The Order of Genocide. Using data from interviews with 210 convicted, confessed perpetrators and with a range of actors in five communities, Straus constructs a sophisticated explanation of how genocidal violence happened at the local level. First, he finds that most perpetrators in rural Rwanda were ordinary farmers (though rural elites and young thugs played a crucial role in driving the violence). Second, most of those ordinary perpetrators committed genocide for fairly banal reasons: ‘‘the Rwandans’ motivations were considerably more ordinary and routine than the extraordinary crimes they helped commit’’ (96). Third, he calculates that between 175,000 and 210,000 civilians participated in genocidal violence—an enormous number, to be sure, but far fewer than the half-million who now stand accused in Rwanda’s community courts (gacaca). Finally, he identifies three key factors behind the widespread participation: (1) anger, fear, and uncertainty caused by the renewed civil war; (2) opportunism linked to local power struggles; and (3) social pressure and coercion derived from intra-group dynamics, state authority, communal labor obligations, and social surveillance. The latter point is perhaps Straus’s most controversial finding. Challenging popular conceptions of the Rwandan Genocide, he writes that ‘‘intra-ethnic coercion and pressure [among Hutu] appear to have been greater determinants of genocidal participation than interethnic enmity [between Hutu and Tutsi]’’ (148). This explanation is consistent with many of the testimonies I have heard in gacaca trials, but more systematic analyses of those testimonies and more micro-level studies are needed. A constant refrain that Straus hears from confessed perpetrators is that they were following orders and that disobedience would have led to punishment or even death. This sounds like egregious self-absolution from admitted killers, but Straus makes us take it—and them—seriously. Nonetheless, it would have been helpful to parse perpetrators’ motivations more closely to distinguish better among group conformity

Ordinariness and Orders: Explaining Popular Participation in the Rwandan Genocide

Abstract This article explores whether legal empowerment can address horizontal inequalities in post-conflict settings, and, if so, how. It argues that legal empowerment has modest potential to reduce these inequalities. Nevertheless, there are risks that legal empowerment might contribute to a strengthening of group identities, reduction of social cohesion, and, in the worst case, triggering of conflict. It looks at how two legal empowerment programmes in Liberia navigated the tensions between equity and peace.

Legal Empowerment and Horizontal Inequalities after Conflict

Alison Des Forges arguably did more than anyone to prevent, publicize, document, and ensure justice for the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which killed three-quarters of the resident Tutsi population of Rwanda. Yet, she was also able to see past the genocide thanks to her early career as a historian of colonial Rwanda and her late career as a human rights advocate in post-genocide Rwanda. Her historical scholarship, genocide documentation, and human rights reporting were all infused with intellectual rigor, nuanced understandings, and a generous attention to those sidelined by history, historiography, and politics. As a scholar-activist and public intellectual, she mentored, inspired, and influenced several generations of Rwanda scholars, genocide scholars, and human rights advocates. Over the past decade, Des Forges was constantly on the move, shuttling among field missions in Rwanda and Burundi, genocide trials in Arusha, advocacy meetings in various capitals, speeches on university campuses, grandchildren in Boston, and her home in Buffalo, New York. This whirligig of activity and activism ended suddenly on February 12, 2009 with a plane crash in Buffalo. With that, the community of scholars and human rights activists who work on the Great Lakes region of Africa suffered a massive loss. More critically, it silenced Rwanda’s most vocal champion of human rights. Des Forges began her 45-year engagement with Rwanda when, as an undergraduate at Radcliffe College in the early 1960s, she worked with Rwandans in refugee camps in Tanzania who had fled their country during violence in the late 1950s and early 1960s. That experience subsequently prompted her to conduct oral history on Rwanda’s hills for her PhD in History at Yale University. Her doctoral dissertation, Defeat Is the Only Bad News: Rwanda under Musiinga, 1896–1931 (1972), presents a trenchant analysis of the Rwandan kingdom before and during the early colonial period. Though the dissertation was never published, Des Forges produced several important articles and book chapters on colonial Rwanda. After several years of teaching, community activism, and raising children in Buffalo, Des Forges became re-engaged with Rwanda in a new capacity as a human rights advocate and historian of contemporary Rwanda in the late 1980s. She joined Human Rights Watch in 1988 and worked for the organization until her death, first as a board member, then as a researcher and consultant, and finally, from 2001 onwards, as a Senior Adviser (at which point, she finally agreed to accept a modest salary). In the early 1990s, Des Forges contributed to Journal of Genocide Research (2009), 11(2–3), June–September, 199–203