Rwanda - History
The single most important fact in the pre-independence history was the domination of the Hutu majority by the Tutsi minority. Two periods of colonial rule did not basically alter the traditional structure; in fact, for reasons of expediency, the colonial administrations served to reinforce Tutsi control. The colonial era did, however, foster a gradual political, social, and economic evolution of the Hutu. Restrictions placed on the arbitrary powers of the monarch, the introduction of a money economy, and the access of a growing number of Hutu to some degree of education were among the factors that contributed to the eventual dissolution of Tutsi dominance.
During the 17th century, pastoral relations of reciprocity known as ubuhake evolved into a system in which Hutu farmers pledged their services and those of their descendants to a Tutsi lord in return for the loan of cattle and use of pastures and arable land. However, membership in an ubwoko and class were fluid. Affiliation was determined by paternal ancestors. Intermarriage and multiple marriages were common.
Some Hutus took Tutsi status and some Tutsis lost their status as Tutsis. Most rural Tutsis enjoyed few advantages over rural Hutus. The first European known to have visited Rwanda was German Count Von Goetzen in 1894. He was followed by missionaries called the “White Fathers.” In 1899, the mwami submitted to a German protectorate without resistance. Belgian troops from neighboring Belgian Congo chased the small number of Germans out of Rwanda in 1915 and took control of the country.
The Republic of Rwanda became an independent member of the world community of nations as recently as 1962, but its existence as a social and political entity can be traced back through several centuries with two distinct periods, precolonial and colonial. In the precolonial period, dating from the 14th or 15th century to the close of the 19th century, most of the present area of the country was gradually brought under the centralized control of the Tutsi monarchy and was developed into a cohesive social and political system.
Rwanda shared its colonial history with Burundi because the two kingdoms were administratively joined by Germany into a single territory. Historically, they had been separate, and the two administrations were unable to develop them into a political union.During a colonial period that covered slightly more than a half-century, the area was administered successively by Germany and Belgium. After the Great War, the League of Nations mandated Rwanda and its southern neighbor, Burundi, to Belgium as the territory of Ruanda-Urundi. Following World War II, Ruanda-Urundi became a UN Trust Territory with Belgium as the administrative authority. The Belgian Administration after 1946 was continued under a Trusteeship Agreement of the United Nations (UN).
Reforms instituted by the Belgians in the 1950s encouraged the growth of democratic political institutions but were resisted by the Tutsi traditionalists who saw in them a threat to Tutsi rule. Hutu leaders, encouraged by the Belgian military, sparked a popular revolt in November 1959, resulting in the overthrow of the Tutsi monarchy. Two years later, the Party of the Hutu Emancipation Movement (PARMEHUTU) won an overwhelming victory in a UN-supervised referendum.
An awakening Hutu political consciousness during the 1950's created a momentum that resulted in the collapse of the Tutsi monarchy in 1959 and led to political independence as a republic on July 1, 1962. During the 1959 revolt and its aftermath, more than 160,000 Tutsis fled to neighboring countries. The PARMEHUTU government, formed as a result of the September 1961 election, was granted internal autonomy by Belgium on January 1, 1962. A June 1962 UN General Assembly resolution terminated the Belgian trusteeship and granted full independence to Rwanda (and Burundi) effective July 1, 1962.
Gregoire Kayibanda, leader of the PARMEHUTU Party, became Rwanda's first elected president, leading a one-party government chosen from the membership of the directly elected unicameral National Assembly. The Kayibanda government promoted a Hutu-supremacist ideology, and a series of anti-Tutsi “pogroms” and other violence gravely affected internal security and provoked the further flight of Rwandan Tutsis.
Rwanda established relations with 43 countries, including the United States, during the first 10 years. Despite some progress, inefficiency and corruption festered in government ministries in the mid-1960s. On July 5, 1973, the military took power by force under the leadership of Maj. Gen. Juvenal Habyarimana, who dissolved the National Assembly and the PARMEHUTU Party and abolished all political activity.
In 1975, President Habyarimana formed the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (MRND) as Rwanda’s only legal party. The movement was organized from the “hillside” to the national level and included elected and appointed officials. During his tenure, violence against Tutsis continued without effective prosecution of wrongdoers, prompting more exoduses.
Under MRND aegis, Rwandans went to the polls in December 1978, overwhelmingly endorsed a new constitution, and confirmed President Habyarimana as president. President Habyarimana was re-elected in 1983 and again in 1988, when he was the sole candidate. Responding to international as well as public pressure for political reform, President Habyarimana announced in July 1990 his intention to transform Rwanda's one-party state into a multi-party democracy. He also indicated that Rwanda “had no room” for its largely Tutsi population living in exile, so they were not welcome to return to Rwanda.
On October 1, 1990, Rwandan exiles banded together as the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and invaded Rwanda from their base in Uganda. The rebel force, composed primarily of ethnic Tutsis who had not been allowed to return to Rwanda under the Kayibanda or Habyarimana regimes, blamed the government for failing to democratize and resolve the problems of some 500,000 Tutsi refugees living in the diaspora around the world. The war dragged on for almost 2 years until a cease-fire accord was signed July 12, 1992, in Arusha, Tanzania, fixing a timetable for an end to the fighting and political talks leading to a peace accord and power sharing, and authorizing a neutral military observer group under the auspices of the Organization for African Unity. A cease-fire took effect on July 31, 1992, and political talks began on August 10, 1992. The talks concluded in a peace accord that was not implemented.
On April 6, 1994, the airplane carrying President Habyarimana and the President of Burundi was shot down as it prepared to land at Kigali. Both presidents were killed. Military and militia groups began rounding up and killing all Tutsis and political moderates, regardless of their ubwoko. The Rwandan prime minister and her 10 Belgian bodyguards were among the first victims. The killing swiftly spread from Kigali to all corners of the country; between April 6 and the beginning of July, a genocide of unprecedented swiftness left over 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus dead at the hands of organized bands of militia--Interahamwe. Even ordinary citizens were called on to kill their neighbors, friends, and family members by local officials and government-sponsored radio; many complied. The president's MRND Party was implicated in organizing many aspects of the genocide.
The RPF battalion stationed in Kigali under the Arusha Accords came under attack immediately after the shooting down of the president's plane. The battalion fought its way out of Kigali and joined up with RPF units in the north. The RPF then resumed its invasion, and civil war raged concurrently with the genocide for 2 months. French forces landed in Goma, Zaire in June 1994 and then deployed throughout southwest Rwanda in an area they called “Zone Turquoise,” ostensibly to quell the genocide and stop the fighting there, though some Rwandans asserted that they were complicit; many members of the genocidal rump regime established after the genocide began escaped through the French zone to eastern Zaire. The RPF defeated the Rwandan Army, which crossed the border to Zaire followed by some 2 million Rwandans who fled to Zaire, Tanzania, and Burundi as refugees. The RPF took Kigali on July 4, 1994, and the war ended on July 16, 1994. The country was decimated, having been ravaged by war and a brutal genocide. Over 800,000 had been murdered, another 2 million had fled, and another million were displaced internally.
The international community responded to the humanitarian disaster that developed among the refugees in Zaire with one of the largest humanitarian relief efforts ever mounted. The United States was one of the largest contributors. The UN peacekeeping operation, UNAMIR, was drawn down during the fighting but brought back up to strength after the RPF victory. UNAMIR remained in Rwanda until March 8, 1996.
Following the establishment of armed groups and a local rebellion in the camps in eastern Zaire, Rwandan and Ugandan troops invaded in late 1996. This triggered the return of more than 800,000 back to Rwanda in the last 2 weeks of November, followed at the end of December 1996 by the return of another 500,000 from Tanzania, both of which occurred in huge waves. Roughly 70,000 Rwandans were estimated to remain outside of Rwanda, and they include remnants of the defeated army of the former genocidal government, its allies in the civilian militias known as Interahamwe, soldiers recruited in the refugee camps before 1996, as well as children of those groups and opponents of today’s government.
In 2001, with over 120,000 Rwandans in prison and virtually no judicial system in existence (most lawyers and judges had been killed or fled during the genocide), the government began implementing a grassroots village-level justice system, known as gacaca, to address the enormous backlog of genocide cases. Many convicted were sentenced to public service rather than prison, but because of the continuing high numbers of prisoners, the Government of Rwanda periodically arranged prison releases, including the January 2006 release of approximately 7,000 prisoners. By December 2010, gacaca officials reported having concluded more than 1.2 million cases. These courts planned to complete their caseload in 2011.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
