Remember Rwanda?

• Author: Gasana, James

The genocide of 1994 seemed inexplicable. But a study of links between extreme environmental degradation and the enormous violence that occurred between Hutus and Tutsis could have important implications for stressed populations in other regions.

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying the presidents of two African countries was struck by a missile and crashed. Both presidents--Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprian Ntaryamira of Burundi--were killed. Both were members of the Hutu ethnic group. Counting the murder of Burundi's president Melchior Ndadaye the previous October, a total of three Hutu presidents had been assassinated in six months.

The crash of the plane was described by a Rwandan official as being "like pouring fuel on a burning house." The country exploded into genocidal conflict between the Hutu and the rival Tutsi, who had been out of power in Rwanda but who had established a base in neighboring Uganda from which they had been launching attacks against the regime that had ousted them. Hutu bands killed large numbers of Tutsi in an effort to forestall the invasion. But within weeks, the Tutsi regained control and waged retaliatory attacks on the Hutu, hundreds of thousands of whom were by then fleeing the country.

The exchanges of massacres were so horrific that people in other parts of the world, who had paid little attention to Rwanda until news of the genocide broke, were bewildered as to what could have caused such fury. The conflict was portrayed in the media as one of deep ethnic hatred. But to those who were on the scene during the years preceding, the story is far more complicated than that. The real causes of the blowup are rooted in a half-century history of rapid population growth, land degradation, inequitable access to resources, political power struggles, famine, and betrayal.

James Gasana, who was Rwanda's Minister of Agriculture and Environment in 1990-92, and Minister of Defense in 1992-93, at one point tried to warn his government of the coming confiagration (see page 29), but to no avail. In the following article, adapted from a paper he wrote for the IUCN's Task force on Environment and Security, he analyzes what happened as environmental and economic decline set the stage for a social collapse. It's a story that has important implications not only for Rwanda, but for every region where population pressure threatens to exceed what the resource base can maintain.

Before the end of the 1950s, it was the Tutsis who dominated Rwanda, both sociologically and politically. Tutsis constituted only 10 to 15 percent of the population, but they owned most of the arable land and accounted for more than 95 percent of the chiefs and 88 percent of the bureaucracy. In 1959, however, a revolution by the Hutu peasants of southern Rwanda brought the Hutu to power and resulted in a redistribution of land to previously landless people. Many of the Tutsi aristocracy fled to neighboring countries, particularly to Uganda, from which they launched counter-attacks against the Rwandan regime in the 1960s.

The Hutu, enforcing a one-party regime in which the Tutsi had no voice, lived from then on with the specter of counter-revolution. The hostilities between the two groups were exacerbated by the Cold War, as the Communist countries helped arm the counterattacks of the Tutsi refugees, while the Western countries provided support to the the Hutu regime.

In 1973, under pressure from both internal dissent and external attack, the regime was toppled by a coup d'etat. Major General J...