the global coffee economy and the production of genocide in rwanda
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The global coffee economy and theproduction of genocide in RwandaIsaac A Kamola aa Department of Political Science , University of Minnesota , 1414Social Sciences Building, 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN,55455, USA E-mail:Published online: 13 Apr 2007.
To cite this article: Isaac A Kamola (2007) The global coffee economy and the production ofgenocide in Rwanda, Third World Quarterly, 28:3, 571-592, DOI: 10.1080/01436590701192975
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The Global Coffee Economy and theProduction of Genocide in Rwanda
ISAAC A KAMOLA
ABSTRACT Most academic work on the genocide in Rwanda uses either amethodologically social scientific or historical approach to explain thegenocide’s root causes. These causal stories most often focus on ethnicityand, in doing so, understate how structured economic-material relations madethe conditions for genocide possible. Turning to Louis Althusser’s concept ofstructural causality, I form an alternative method for narrating the genocidewhich treats the genocide as the result of highly complex and over-determinedsocial relations. The paper then re-examines the structural causality of thegenocide, focusing on how the coffee economy intersected with the economic,cultural, state, and ideological registers at which the genocide was produced.Representing the genocide in terms of structural causality addresses how over-determined exploitative relationships—between Hutu, Tutsi, coloniser, colo-nised, rich, poor, farmer, evolue, northerner, southerner, coffee producer, coffeeconsumer, etc—produced the genocide.
Therefore, dealing with African societies’ ‘historicity’ requires more than simplygiving an account of what occurs on the continent itself . . . It also presupposes acritical delving into Western history and the theories that claim to interpret it.(Achille Mbembe)
The 1994 genocide in Rwanda was, and continues to be, a global event. Whilethe vast majority of wounds were sustained within Rwanda’s nationalborders, the violence was actually produced at many different locationsthrough complex and highly stratified material relationships.1 Pre- and post-independence colonial practices institutionalised in foreign aid donors,commodity markets, and international lending institutions formed theeconomic –material base on which a deadly mixture of ethnic ideology,arms exports, foreign military support, forced democratisation, an invadingarmy, impotent international institutions, hate radio, elite manipulation,individual complicity and regional instability created a nexus of precarious,perverse and ultimately genocidal social relationships. The genocide’s effectsare also global and continue to reverberate in the form of refugee camps, a
Isaac A Kamola is in the Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, 1414 Social Sciences
Building, 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA. Email: [email protected].
Third World Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 3, 2007, pp 571 – 592
ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/07/030571–22 � 2007 Third World Quarterly
DOI: 10.1080/01436590701192975 571
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war crimes tribunal, regional military realignments, and massively deadlyconflicts throughout the region. In addition, the genocide continues to bediscursively reproduced through the mass media, NGO reports, acts ofremembrance, confessions, testimony, documentaries, motion pictures andnumerous academic books, articles and conferences. While many instances ofmass violence—the war in Congo, for example—are relatively obscure toWestern audiences, the ‘Rwandan genocide’ is continually reproduced as aglobal sign which continually intersects disciplined academic debates andpublic discourses alike.For many in the Western academy—like myself—the genocide is unknown
in its immediacy and exists only as mediated through apparatuses ofrepresentation. Most of these representational practices seek to explain theincomprehensibly complex social relationships which coalesced in genocide.Journalists were the first to circulate explanations for why the genocide wastaking place, framing the violence in the language of ‘ancient hatreds’.2 Theubiquity of these often racist, primordialist accounts troubled manyacademics who, in turn, dedicated themselves to providing more sophisti-cated causal narratives. Johan Pottier contends that, since April 1994,‘numerous journalists, aid and relief workers, diplomats, politicians andacademics . . . [have] embarked on a mental crusade to make sense of asituation seemingly drained of every form of logic and morality’. As a result,Rwanda has become ‘re-imagined . . . through a synchronized production ofknowledge’ as a local site of ‘ethnic conflict’.3
Most academics who have responded to these ‘ancient hatreds’ accountshave framed the genocide in primarily ethnic terms. Catharine Newburywarns that ‘obsessively’ focusing on ethnicity leads scholars to ‘overlookquestions of power and class’.4 Despite this warning, however, scholars of thegenocide continue to leave ‘class’ largely unexplored, even while producingincreasingly sophisticated understandings of ethnicity and its politicalmanipulation. While this lack of class analysis undoubtedly reflects a post-cold war academic environment in which rational individualism, economicliberalism and identity politics have become hegemonic, it also indicates afailure of critical scholars to explain how economic –material analyses arestill relevant, given that economic determinist accounts of ‘class conflict’ nolonger seem to apply.5
While many academics recognise that the genocide occurred during aneconomic crisis brought on by the collapse of international coffee prices, theyoften treat this crisis merely as a backdrop against which essentially ethnicviolence played out. They contend that, even if economic crisis helped sparkthe violence, ‘political manipulation’ of ethnicity is what really transformedeconomic resentment ‘into an engine of violence’.6 In placing Rwanda’scentury-long integration into the coffee economy at the centre of my analysis,I illustrate how ethnicity and class can be understood as over-determinedregisters which overlap, blurring into and reordering each other in complexand often contradictory ways. While ethnicity is never synonymous with‘class’, these two registers of social relationality constantly reproduce eachother. Over the course of a hundred years, ethnic and class relations had
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over-determined each other such that by 1994 the conditions for genocidewere present in Rwanda.This article begins by explaining how the two major trends in scholarship
on the genocide—one using social scientific methodology, one narratinghistorical contingency—share similar causal assumptions. I then introduceAlthusser’s concept of structured causality as a way to explore theeconomic –material dimension of the genocide without falling back on aneconomically determined understanding of ‘class conflict’. The second part ofthis article re-narrates the history of the genocide by arranging the historicalevidence around coffee, as opposed to ethnicity. In so doing, I show how whatis commonly understood as a local ‘ethnic conflict’ can simultaneously bedescribed as an over-determined symptom of a particularly violent neoliberalrestructuring of the global capitalist economy.
Narrating the genocide’s causality
Numerous scholars have attempted to identify genocide’s root causes. Theseaccounts can be divided crudely into two categories: one that employs socialsciences methodology and one that narrates historical events as contingent.Most methodologically social scientific accounts develop models that
simplify the genocide into a series of variables operating within a definablechain of causality.7 Other social scientists use the genocide as one case studyuseful in proving a general set of hypotheses about ‘ethnic conflict’ ingeneral.8 Taking the world as objectively given, these ‘problem-solvingtheorists’ try to isolate a conflict’s root cause believing that doing so enablesinformed decision-makers to prevent such violence in the future.9
Achille Mbembe forcefully criticises such social science as uninterested in‘comprehending the political in Africa’ and instead concerned exclusivelywith ‘what is immediately useful’ for the purpose of ‘social engineering’. Inhis view such scholarship is ‘dogmatically programmatic’, ‘cavalier’ and‘reductionist’; it eviscerates history by replacing the lived practices ofparticular Rwandans with a timelessness and placelessness which can only bemade meaningful by academics uniquely poised to decipher otherwise‘senseless’ violence.10 These approaches also imply that the Western audiencefor whom the social scientist writes is objective, benevolent and interested inpreventing the violence conducted by the ‘local’ Rwandan population.If one accepts Mbembe’s critique, as I do, one turns to scholarship on the
genocide offered by historians, regional specialists and social scientists whoexplicitly situate the violence as embedded within its deeply historical,political, economic and social contexts. Catharine and David Newbury’sexemplar article, ‘A Catholic Mass in Kigali’, is successful as a historicallyrich, contingently causal account. They argue that, while the genocide is oftenconsidered an ‘ethnic conflict’ it is important to recognise that ethnicity isneither ‘an enduring, unchanging element of social formation’ nor ‘aninstantaneous, recent invention’. Instead, political leaders carefully plannedthe genocide by mobilising ethnic divisions during a time when ‘Rwanda’sstate and society were in severe crisis’ as a result of ‘changing configuration[s]
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of regional, class, and ethnic divisions in Rwanda’ and ‘the growingmilitarization of state and society’, which coincided with failed ‘politicalliberalization and multipartyism’. They conclude their article by recognisingthat, while the genocide was planned by individual actors, it had ‘strongovertones of class conflict’, even if ethnicity ‘served as the language throughwhich these fears and ambitions were expressed’. Unlike methodologicallysocial scientific approaches, this account (and others of a similar style)recognises the genocide as resulting from complex, historical and contingentcauses, and refuses to reduce the genocide to underlying logics or sets ofvariables.11 Narrating the genocide as historically contingent, however,means that it is presented as specific to Rwanda, where, it is implied, theparticular combination of causes only existed in one particular location andat one particular moment. In other words, in these accounts, the genocide isoften narrated as an exceptional exercise of violence, unprecedented in itsmagnitude, velocity and personal cruelty.While these historically rich accounts are immensely valuable, we must also
ask what is lost in viewing the horror of the genocide in Rwanda as entirelyunique. This is an especially important question given that ethnicised anddecentralised mass violence is becoming an increasingly common condition inmuch of the previously colonised world.12 It is, therefore, necessary todevelop techniques for narrating instances of postcolonial violence in wayswhich recognise their particular, yet over-determined, causality. This can beaccomplished by focusing on the conditions which produced the genocide asopposed to the threshold13 at which over-determined relations becameuniquely organised into genocide. The genocide’s threshold, however, did notmaterialise from nowhere; it took more than a century of social arrangementand rearrangement, production and reproduction, and class and ethnic re-articulation to over-determine the genocide. In this way, the genocide inRwanda is neither reductively (causally) determined nor merely the sum ofcontingent social discontent, evil individuals, political calculation, andinstitutional failure. To develop this point further I introduce Althusser’sconcept of structural causality.
Structural causality
Most accounts of the genocide, including those detailed above, assume whatAlthusser calls ‘transitive causality’, in which cause and effect operate likebilliard balls: ‘homogeneous but atomized elements bounce off each other ina linear and unique sequence lacking any general structure beyond thecumulative effects’ of their individual interactions.14 It presupposes a ‘planarspace’ in which all phenomena have ‘an object-cause’ and play outhomogeneously in a ‘linear’ fashion.15 In the methodologically socialscientific accounts the genocide’s cause(s) are understood as discrete, butabstracted, variables (‘population density’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘regime type’, etc).Historical narratives, even those which assume a contingent rather than ahomogenously linear logic of causality, also explain the activity of individualsor groups in terms of transitive causality (‘X did A and Y responded B). In
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many of these accounts, an essential cause—an abstraction like ‘class’ or‘ethnicity’—stands in for the ‘real objects’, ie the infinitely complex totalitywhich actually produced the genocide.Marx, Althusser argues, imploded the empiricist theory of transitive
causality by contending that only real objects exist. While every representa-tion necessarily abstracts real objects, these abstractions (which arethemselves real objects) are placed within a narrative structure in which truecomplexity is reduced to its essential components. As a result, the act ofattributing transitive causality is always political, and produces new socialrelationships with their own material effects. For example, a narrative of thegenocide which focuses on ‘ancient hatreds’ effectively renders economic –material relationships invisible.Althusser offers ‘structural causality’, also known as over-determination,
as an alternative to transitive causality. For Althusser, change does not takeplace when unchanging objects co-occur at a discernible and understandablemoment. Instead change is the perpetual condition of immanent productionand reproduction within a structured totality, a mode of productionconsisting of a base and a semi-autonomous superstructure. Unlikeeconomically determinist Marxist accounts, which view the base as solelydeterminant of the superstructure, Althusser contends that the semi-autonomous superstructure contains different regions, registers and levelswhich are often in contradiction. The structure is not, therefore, ‘an essenceoutside’ (ie ‘capitalism’, ‘ethnicity’, etc) but is instead ‘immanent in itseffects . . . the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects’. Structuredregions—‘deep and complex’ sets of relationships—produce different, andoften contradictory, effects.16 For example, in some ways the ideologies ofethnicity, development, and liberalisation aided the extraction of wealth fromRwanda while, simultaneously, in other ways they contradicted colonial orcapitalist accumulation.Within the structured totality, therefore, over-determined contradiction is
neither the unfolding of contingent transitively causal events nor themanifestation of an overarching ‘general contradiction’ (ie proletariat/bourgeoisie or Hutu/Tutsi), but always a unique set of overlapping,intersecting and irreducible contradictions at multiple registers, which areorganised under a particular global mode of production. My account of thegenocide, therefore, does not look for the genocide’s true root cause butinstead attempts to explicate one aspect of the genocide’s production.
Narrating the genocide in terms of structural causality
Given the limitations of both methodologically social scientific approachesand those accounts focusing on historical contingency, I attempt here tonarrate the history of the genocide in terms of structural, or over-determined,causality. How does one write a historical narrative of the genocide as over-determined? First and foremost such a narrative recognises that no historicalrepresentation can ever completely capture the incomprehensible complexityof the genocide. Instead, one starts with the recognition that the genocide’s
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real cause is an infinitely complex totality produced by millions of peoplewho, over an extended period of time, occupied different and over-determined ethnic, class, institutional, regional, global and ideologicalpositions. A narrative predicated on structural causality, therefore,recognises that the particularity of the genocide’s ‘real’ causality can neverbe known in its totality. One also acknowledges that the very particular socialrelations which existed at the threshold of the genocide have continued toundergo transformation and, as a result, even the representations of thegenocide—produced by Rwandans and Western academics alike—are alsocontinually over-determined, constantly being re-inscribed with new mean-ing. As a result, a narration committed to over-determination should neverbe read as an authoritative causal explanation, but rather as a real objectsituated within its own structured relationships and productive of its owneffects.Second, narrating the genocide in terms of over-determination means
remaining attentive to economic –material relationships without falling backon economically deterministic accounts. I do not, for example, argue that thegenocide was essentially a conflict between rich and poor or caused by globalcapitalism (commodity traders, the IMF, etc). Instead, my narration illustrateshow the coffee economy was productive of the conditions for genocide andhow subjects with different class, ethnic, regional, educational, etc position-ality were, at different historical moments, influenced by institutions andideologies that both constrained them and created the very possibilities foraction. In this way the narrative is not about relatively constant relationshipsbetween unchanging classes and ethnicities but about how different, and oftenconflicting, registers of human activity and subjectivity coalesce in particularmoments to form social relationships which are simultaneously unique andstructured by the global mode of production. For example, unlike much of thescholarship which would look at ethnicity in Rwanda as a relativelyunchanged colonial artifact, an account wedded to over-determination wouldsee ethnicity as an ordered set of social relations which, in contact with otherrelations such as class, is constantly changing over time, making newrelationships possible.Finally, a narration which starts from the premise of over-determination
identifies how the genocide in Rwanda is not an isolated case of unthinkableethnic violence but instead a singular example of the violence producedwithin a highly stratified mode of production which is global in scope. Unlikenarratives that depend upon transitive causality, an over-determinednarrative allows us to see how actors at different registers and at differenthistorical moment—colonialists, colonised, Hutus, Tutsis, northerners,southerners, farmers, evolues (see below), refugees, commodity traders,coffee drinkers, arms manufacturers, development agents, IMF officials,foreign diplomats, guerrilla fighters, etc—all produced the possibility forgenocide. This is done by, on the one hand, recognising that human activityat many different registers was necessary to produce the conditions for thegenocide while, on the other hand, illustrating how not all activity is equallysituated within structured relationships. An over-determined analysis looks
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at those moments at which contradictions at different, hierarchicalregisters—economic or otherwise—overlay each other in ways that makethe conditions for violence possible. For example, while ethnic identities mayfacilitate economic exchange during a time of relative prosperity, during aneconomic crisis they can be re-articulated as ways of organising violence.
Coffee and the production of genocide
In this section I re-narrate the production of genocide in Rwanda in terms ofstructured causality. While I could approach this task from any one of anumber of angles, I have chosen Rwanda’s century-long integration into thecoffee economy and the austerity measures resulting from the 1989 collapseof international coffee prices as my organising principle. Despite considerableevidence that the coffee economy was a major aspect of life in Rwanda, verylittle scholarship has attempted to explain how particular social relationsorganised around the coffee economy may have produced the conditions forgenocide. By focusing on the coffee economy and re-narrating the genocide interms of structural causality, I hope to 1) move beyond the limitations of thesocial scientific and historically contingent approaches summarised above;and 2) show that the genocide is over-determined within a global mode ofproduction.In narrating the genocide in terms of the coffee economy I am not arguing
that ethnicity is unimportant to understanding it, nor do I dispute the factthat ethnicity is a definitive lived reality for many Rwandans—victims andgenocidaires alike. I am suggesting, rather, that focusing solely on ethnicitycan have the unintended effect of obscuring the important ways in whichethnicity is over-determined within asymmetrically structured materialconditions. While I see my contribution as complementing the historicalaccounts of the genocide, elevating the coffee economy to the centre of myanalysis allows me to emphasise moments in which it is particularly apparenthow the genocide was not a contingent anomaly but instead situated withinstructured, yet over-determined, material relationships.
Colonialism to independence
Before contact with the Germans, the Rwandan kingdom became increas-ingly centralised under the reign of Rwabugiri (c 1860 – 95). As it did, ‘Tutsi’came to denote lineages of cattle-wealthy chiefs close to the king while ‘Hutu’referred to everyone else. The German, and later Belgian, colonialists usedtheir military superiority to remake these economic and political signifiersinto ‘ethnic’ identities in order to ease the extraction of wealth from thekingdom. Under pressure to erect an ‘economically solvent colonial state’,the colonial administration established indirect rule in which Tutsi chiefsserved as ‘intermediaries’ between the European and native populations. Thechiefs received military support to help solidify their political control.17
Many Tutsi chiefs and sub-chiefs profited substantially from this effort to‘integrate Rwanda into the world economy’.18
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German imperialists were originally attracted to Rwanda because of itsgood agricultural conditions and well organised political structure. Aroundthe turn of the century missionaries began experimenting with small-scalecoffee cultivation in German East Africa, bringing coffee to Rwanda in 1905.19
During the 1920s European countries felt threatened by Brazil’s commandingcontrol over world coffee production and began actively encouraging large-scale coffee production in their African colonies,20 with the result that Africancoffee production increased dramatically by the mid-1950s.21
In 1927 colonial authorities in Rwanda began aggressively promotingcoffee production.22 By 1931 they adopted official policies enabling chiefs andsub-chiefs to force their subjects to cultivate coffee for export. Tutsi chiefswere encouraged to use their ‘traditional authority’ to levy labour tribute, orubureetwa, forcing the peasantry to both work on the chief’s plantations andbuild colonial infrastructure. Because Tutsis were excluded from ubureetwa,the burden to pay tribute fell on the non-Tutsi, which gradually consolidatedthe Hutu into an increasingly identifiable and impoverished agricultural class.Eventually ubureetwa became codified into colonial law, which gave chiefsfurther backing from the colonial state and made paying tribute increasinglydifficult for Hutus to avoid. In 1949 ubureetwa was officially abolished andreplaced with taxation which was justified as more humane than forcedlabour. In practice, however, Hutus were forced to pay taxes and work onprivate plantations owned by local chiefs.23 Supported by colonial powers,chiefs and sub-chiefs increasingly consolidated control over land, taxrevenue, agricultural products, and labour.24 In addition, the colonial statebegan enforcing coffee cultivation including specific pruning, spraying andmulching procedures thereby bringing farmers increasingly under thecolonial state’s authority.25
European indirect rule was justified using the Hamitic Myth, whichasserted that the Tutsi, as Hamites, were naturally superior to the NegroidHutu.26 The Hamitic hypothesis was taught to Tutsis in schools andseminaries throughout colonial Rwanda, helping to create a culture of Tutsisuperiority. In addition to disseminating and moralising the Hutu/Tutsidivision, the Catholic Church served as a powerful apparatus for theideological justification of indirect rule. For example, Leon Classe, a Germanpriest influential in advising the Belgian take-over of Rwanda, vocallysupported ‘medieval-style’ land ownership, with a Tutsi aristocracy rulingover the majority of landless Hutus. In 1933 this ideological separationbetween Hutu and Tutsi was reinforced when the colonial state distributedethnic identity cards to systematise the restriction of administrative jobs andhigher education to Tutsis.27
By mid-century the inequalities caused by forced labour, asymmetricalaccumulation, and ethnic segregation became impossible to ignore. ManyHutus—especially in regions brought under Belgian and Tutsi controlrelatively late—began vocally opposing Tutsi chiefs. In the southwest(Kinyaga) and northwest (Gisenyi and Ruhengeri) Hutu leaders, with thehelp of a newly sympathetic Catholic Church, openly expressed theirdissatisfaction with Tutsi rule.28 By the early 1950s the increasingly visible
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ultra-exploitation of the Hutus, coupled with the expansion of the casheconomy, made ‘neo-traditional’ clientship both less legitimate and lessprofitable.29
Amid increased domestic criticism, UN pressure and the growingeconomic infeasibility of colonial rule, the colonial administration and localmissionaries expanded educational and political opportunities for the Hutupopulation. The newly educated class of Hutu, evolues, continued to pub-licise the economic and political oppression to audiences in Europe, the UNand throughout the greater Catholic Church. They consolidated masssupport domestically by establishing political parities, social groups andperiodicals.In 1956, to aid impoverished Hutu farmers, Father Louis Pien donated a
hectare of land to establish the coffee co-operative Trafipro (Travail, Fidelite,Progres) in Gitarama, which provided important economic and leadershipopportunities for the emerging Hutu counter-elite. In 1957 GregoireKayibanda, a southern Hutu businessman and eventual first president ofRwanda, became head of Trafipro. From this position, Kayibanda launchedthe Mouvement Social Muhutu (MSM)—the precursor to the Parti duMouvement et l’Emancipation Hutu (Parmethutu)—and established an elitecircle which became the ruling clique at independence. It was within thisemerging social formation that Kayibanda and others wrote the widelycirculated Hutu Manifesto, which contended that the ‘problem is above all aproblem of political monopoly . . . held by one race, the mututsi’.30
Some politicians, however, attempted to organise Rwandans around classas opposed to ethnicity. A few months after signing the Hutu Manifesto,Joseph Habyarimana Gitera, broke with MSM to form l’Association pour laPromotion Sociale de la Masse (Aprosoma). Gitera, unlike Kayibanda,advocated a common cause between Hutu and poor Tutsi. While Gitera’spotential audience was larger, Kayibanda—being a ‘teacher and leader ofseveral organizations’ including Trafipro—had the skill and opportunity tobuild a grassroots organisation ‘based on a structure of local cells, with aparty organizer on each local hill’. In addition, Kayibanda created strategic‘linkages’ between the Hutu evolue and the rural population. As colonial rulewaned, ethnicity emerged as the most viable basis for political and economicmobilisation, and accordingly, MSM, Aprosoma and other Hutu organisa-tions began to re-articulate national Hutu identity under the common bannerof Hutu Power.31
However, while the Hutu educated class was successfully mobilisingaround ethnicity, economic and political inequality remained largelyunchanged. For example, by 1958 the success of Rwandan coffee salestransformed Trafipro into a prosperous organisation worth half a millionfrancs and representing more than 100 members. However, despite originallybeing an organisation for Hutu farmers, the 1958 membership and board ofdirectors was dominated by Tutsis.32
By the time of King Mutara Rudahigwa’s death in 1959, the transition todemocracy was becoming increasingly ethnicised. Parties which organisedboth Hutus and Tutsis lost ground to Parmehutu and the royalist Tutsi
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party, Union Nationale Rwandaise (UNAR).33 In January 1961 80% ofRwandans voted to end the Tutsi monarchy, thereby opening the door for atransition towards independence. A year later Kayibanda’s Parmehutu partywon a large majority and declared a ‘Hutu Revolution’. During this period aseries of failed invasions by Tutsi refugees sparked pogroms against thedomestic Rwandan Tutsi population in which tens of thousands were killedand hundreds of thousands displaced.34 These attacks were used by the newlyminted Hutu politicians to create the myths of ‘a Hutu revolution’. Duringthese reprisals many Hutus received goods and land seized from Tutsivictims.35
The rise of Parmehutu to power, however, did little to ease the deprivationexperienced by the impoverished Hutu majority. The European populationand Tutsi aristocracy retained the ‘well-paid jobs, foreign educationopportunities, cars and fuel, brick houses, telephones, and other instrumentsof development and power’. In fact, the majority rural population saw littleeconomic transformation. The only difference was felt by the new Hutu ‘stateclass’, which enjoyed the political and economic benefits once reservedexclusively for Tutsi elites.36 During this period, coffee became Rwanda’smajor export and the primary source of foreign currency.37 As it did so, theHutu ruling class began to centralise control over its production andexportation.
The International Coffee Agreement
Even as coffee became increasingly important to the Rwandan economy, bythe mid-1950s the international coffee economy was largely in crisis. Immensestockpiles,38 over-production39 and the growing popularity of Africanrobusta varietals40 sent the coffee commodity market into a tailspin. In1957 seven Latin American nations signed the Agreement of Mexico, inwhich they agreed to withhold coffee from the market in an attempt to raiseprices. However, this plan failed in the face of continued African coffeeproduction. During the early 1960s the US government, the US coffeeindustry, Latin American coffee producers and recently independent Africannations like Rwanda all advocated for global regulation of the coffeeeconomy, culminating in the signing of the International Coffee Agreement(ICA).41 Arranged during a 1962 UN conference, the ICA attempted tostabilise the global coffee market by imposing quotas and price controls onthe 43 exporting and 24 importing countries which comprised 99% of theworld coffee market.The ICA was also designed to consolidate the coffee economy in the hands
of the USA, western Europe and the large South American coffee producers,however. Votes within the overseeing body were distributed in proportion tothe volume of coffee exported or imported. For example, in 1968 Brazil (thelargest exporter) received 332 votes while the USA (the largest importer)received 400 votes; Rwanda received six votes.42 Most African countriesreceived few votes, despite having larger percentages of their total economydependent on coffee.
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The ICA was a mixed blessing for many African countries. On the onehand, fixed prices insured prices well above 1962 levels.43 On the other hand,quotas locked many African countries into small, inflexible market sharesduring a period of increased international demand. Many African countriessigned the ICA, fearing that, without a treaty, Brazil would sell its massivecoffee reserves, effectively bottoming out international coffee prices anddestroying fledgling African producers.44
As the international price of coffee increased, the Rwandan Hutu elitesought to consolidate control over this increasingly valuable commodity.Starting in 1962, the same year Rwanda signed the ICA, President Kayibandatransformed Trafipro into a state-run marketing board which, by 1966,maintained 27 national shops and 70 coffee purchasing points throughout thecountry. Northern Hutu elites were highly sceptical of Trafipro, arguing thatit was a monopoly operating in favour of southern businessmen fromGitarama at the expense of those from the north. By the late 1960s Trafiprowas responsible for fostering ‘regional bias, corruption and [a] climate ofterror’ as it became ‘the backbone of an authoritarian regime’ in which‘northern businessmen found themselves pushed out of business and out ofpolitics’.45 Such intense inter-elite regionalism created a considerable politicalproblem for Kayibanda, who claimed to rule in the name of the entire Hutumajority. Kayibanda’s regime deflected regionalist divisions by repeatedlyarticulating the Tutsi as a common enemy. Tutsis were denied jobs, educationand military service. By 1973 ‘Public Safety Committees’ routinely carriedout violence against Tutsis. The resulting violence, however, could not becontained along ethnic lines as Hutu politicians from both the north andsouth used the committees to settle personal disputes, often of a regional, asopposed to ethnic, nature. The resulting tit-for-tat violence created theconditions of instability in which Major-General Juvenal Habyarimana,supported by northern Hutu business elites, seized power in July 1973.While Habyarimana initially eased the ethnic and regional conflict which
had become the hallmark of Rwandan politics during the 1960s and early1970s,46 the contradictions between the impoverished rural and the wealthyurban populations were increasingly exacerbated by Habyarimana’s efforts togain the support of Western capitalist countries. Trafipro—one of Kayibanda’smajor sources of political control—was abolished and Habyarimana instituteda series of economic reforms, known as ‘planned liberalism’, which pushed forgreater privatisation under the banner of rural prosperity.47 To attractinternational investors, Habyarimana renamed the ruling party the Mouve-ment Revolutionaire National pour le Developpement (MRND) and parliamentwas termed the Conseil National du Developpement. During this period,Rwanda received large sums of foreign development aid, witnessed consider-able economic growth, and was heralded as an African success story.48
While Habyarimana’s policies helped increase Rwanda’s GDP and itsHuman Development Index (HDI) rating, massive class inequality continuedto exist. Privatisation policies resulted in greater destitution as rural stores,farming equipment, sources of credit and transportation were bought by wellconnected individuals. Under Habyarimana’s liberalisation platform wealthy
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farmers bought up land owned by small-scale farmers at such a pace that, bythe mid-1980s, nearly 26% of the population was landless.49 By 1991 43% ofthe land was held by 16% of the landowners. The urban elite shielded itselffrom rural discontent by re-enforcing colonial restrictions on movement,preventing the growing landless population from moving to urban centrs.During this time the urban class in Kigali prospered, enjoying unprecedentedwealth, paved roads, increased car ownership, and plentiful fuel, buildingmaterials and food. On the eve of the genocide the wealthiest Rwandansconsumed 51% of rural revenues compared with only 10% in 1982.50 By 1986coffee exports had reached more than 42 000 tons and comprised 82% ofRwanda’s total income from exports.51
As coffee became an increasingly important part of Rwanda’s economy,Habyarimana restructured the domestic coffee economy such that it benefitedthe urban and northern Hutu elites. He also simultaneously offered both non-coercive and coercive incentives for members of the rural farming class toconvert more of their land to coffee production. The government purchasedcoffee from the rural population through its marketing board, Rwandex.During the coffee boom in the 1970s and 1980s, Rwandex increased thepurchasing price from 60 Rwandan Francs (RwF) to 120RwF, thusproviding substantial incentive for coffee cultivation.52 Given that overallincomes were falling and land was becoming increasingly scarce, many poorfarmers turned larger percentages of their land over to coffee.53 In order tomaximise the amount of coffee produced, Habyarimana also instituted aseries of policies which included restricting fertiliser use to coffee and tea,penalising those who intercropped or damaged coffee trees, and vilifyingthose growing competing commodities.54
During this time, coffee made up the vast majority of Rwanda’s exportsand funded increasingly larger percentages of the state budget. As the ruralpopulation grew more coffee, the political elite prospered. The considerablegains, however, were never reinvested as the ruling Hutu class recklesslyspent coffee profits. In fact, the money from the price stabilisation fund(Fond d’egalisation)—established to collect boom-time profits and secure thepurchasing price during bust years—was channelled back to governmentcoffers, leaving no security net.55 One example of this profound corruptionwas the fact that Seraphin Rwabukumba—brother of Habyarimana’s wife—ran both La Centrale (the official importer of high-end consumer goods) andthe National Bank’s foreign currency division, allowing him to easily divertcoffee profits into the hands of the well connected Hutu class.56
Such reckless economic policies, however, should not be dismissed asmerely gross mismanagement. On the one hand, Habyarimana’s policies weredesigned to secure the loyalties of the rural population by purchasing coffeeat increasingly higher prices while, on the other hand, using the surplus tomute the conflicts within the ruling Hutu class which routinely flared up whenthe international price of coffee dipped and ‘sufficient financial lubrications’were found lacking.57
Increased coffee production also traded off with food production and jeo-pardised Rwanda’s food security. Habyarimana’s National Food Strategy,
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unveiled in the early 1980s, claimed to provide food security by promotinginter-regional trade and food aid marketing by limiting the foreign currencyspent on food-stuffs. In 1988 the government banned all food imports. Thesepolicies—officially justified as a strategy for increasing Rwanda’s self-sufficiency—squeezed the rural population even further and left the regimewith sole control over the outflow of foreign currency, which it used toimport luxury goods consumed by tourists, the national elite and the smallurban population.58 Also during this period, the Office pour la Promotion, laVente et l’Importation des Produits Agricoles (Oprovia)—established in ajoint venture with the European Community to help stabilise the price of keyfoodstuffs—was bankrupted when the government failed to reimburse it forthe huge financial losses it suffered.59
The relatively rapid deterioration of rural life took place along ethnic andregional lines, with districts supportive of the pro-Tutsi Rwandan PatrioticFront (RPF) and former Hutu president Kayibanda being hit hardest. In 1989Rwanda was hit simultaneously by drought and falling coffee prices which, inthe absence of food reserves, culminated in the deadly ruriganiza famine thatkilled hundreds and forced more than 10 000 refugees—primarily Tutsi—toBurundi and Tanzania. Because the famine occurred in the southernGikongoro prefecture—a region considered ‘quasi-lost’ to the RPF—Habyarimana withheld food aid, choosing instead to horde the limited foodreserves for military use should the RPF invade (see below). Many in theruling Hutu class responded to the famine by seizing land from those fleeing,possibly using World Bank development funds to buy up land and cattle forpersonal gain.60
During the same period the prefectures of Gitarama and Butare, despitepossessing 20% of the population, received only 1% of the government’sfunding, while most of the development aid was channelled into the hands ofthe northern Hutu elite and the northern provinces of Ruhengeri, Gisenyiand Cyangugu.61
During the 1970s and 1980s Rwandan political, social and economic liferested increasingly upon a complicated set of over-determined contradictions.The strained agricultural class was expected to be both self-sufficient and toprovide increasing amounts of national wealth. As more land was convertedto coffee production, the system became increasingly dependent on highinternational coffee prices, which allowed the government to buy coffee fromfarmers at rates high enough to offset lost food production. Despite thesegrowing contradictions, the Rwandan economy was such that some classeswith particular ethnic and regional connections reaped considerable benefitsfrom high international coffee prices.62
Austerity and the post- ICA Rwanda
In 1986 global over-production of coffee began driving prices down. Between1986 and 1987 Rwanda’s sales of coffee plummeted from 14 billion RwF tofive billion RwF. As a result, the government started to accrue con-siderable debt.63 In 1988 the World Bank suggested that Rwanda adopt
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macroeconomic reforms, including trade liberalisation, currency devaluation,lifting agricultural subsidies, privatising state enterprises and reducing thenumber of civil servants.64 Intent on boosting coffee exports, the Rwandangovernment, following World Bank advice, devalued the Rwandan franc by40% in November 1990 and by another 15% the following June. The firstdevaluation, however, took place just six weeks after the RPF invaded andsparked massive inflation, a collapse of real earnings and dramatic priceincreases for consumer goods.65
In 1989 the world’s largest coffee exporters and importers torpedoed therenegotiation of the International Coffee Agreement.66 Many ICA opponentsargued that abandoning the agreement would boost market liberalisation inline with the newly hegemonic Washington consensus. In June 1989, amidfears that the ICA would fall apart, massive sell-offs began and internationalcoffee prices dropped from $1.80/pound to $1.00/pound.67 Prices droppedanother 40 cents after 4 July, when the quotas were officially ended. As theinternational price of coffee lost nearly two-thirds of its value in less than twomonths, international institutions established to stabilise African commodityprices failed. Falling coffee prices were so dramatic that, in 1990, Uganda,Rwanda and Ethiopia alone exceeded the European Union’s Stabilisation ofAgricultural Exports Receipts System (Stabex) fund by $847.84 million.68
Within Rwanda, the collapse of coffee prices began to expose economiccontradictions which, up to that point, had been smoothed over by highcoffee prices. In 1990 the government’s purchasing price for coffee fell from125RwF to 100RwF per kilo, forcing many farmers, despite severe penalties,to uproot their coffee trees in favour of food crops.69 The government had noaccrued savings and, to maintain rural allegiances, adopted an increasinglydesperate policy of purchasing coffee at prices dramatically higher thaninternational rates. Currency devaluation, collapsed coffee prices and thegovernment’s continued subsidisation of the coffee sector resulted in Rwandaaccruing $1 billion in foreign debt by 1994.70 These economic stresses createdthe conditions in which state-owned enterprises went bankrupt, health andeducation services collapsed, child malnutrition surged and malaria casesincreased by 21%. The escalating prices of consumer essentials and fuel led toa 25% reduction in coffee production as farmers switched back to food crops,since coffee revenues no longer even covered inputs. This collapse ingovernment services affected Hutus most dramatically since, under Habyar-imana, they were the primary recipients of the civil service jobs which couldno longer be funded.71
As the contradictions in the economic base of the Habyarimana regimebecame uncontainable, deeply embedded political contradictions surfaced.During the late 1980s and early 1990s Habyarimana faced increaseddemands—international and domestic—to democratise Rwanda. In the late1980s poor economic conditions and increasing evidence of corruption withinthe government caused many Rwandan journalists, intellectuals andpoliticians to agitate for an end to single party rule. In addition, foreigngovernments and international aid organisations—all proponents of rapidliberalisation—began pressuring Habyarimana to establish a power-sharing
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government. At the Franco-African summit in 1990 French PresidentMitterrand told Habyarimana that future economic aid would be linked topolitical democratisation and the establishment of a multiparty system. WhileHabyarimana feared that democratisation would place the nation’s stabilityin jeopardy, the plummeting price of coffee meant that he was now almostcompletely dependent on foreign aid to keep his fragile government afloat. InJuly 1991 the constitution was amended to make multiparty competition fullylegal. Within months more than 15 political parties were registered, forcingHabyarimana to agree to a power-sharing government.72
As the economic base unravelled and the government became increasinglydependent on aid doled out by foreign governments, political tensions withinthe ruling Hutu class surfaced. With the legalisation of opposition parties, anew party—Coalition pour la Defense de la Republique (CDR)—began tocampaign on the platform that no party, not even Habyarimana’s MRND,represented the Hutu majority’s true beliefs. The CDR was merely a front formore radical elements of the MRND, including the akazu, a group ofextremists centred around the president’s wife, Agathe Habyarimana.73
In October 1990 the RPF—supported by the Ugandan and US govern-ments as well as the European and American Tutsi diaspora—invadedNorthern Rwanda from Uganda. The RPF’s initial invasion was repelled bythe Forces Armees Rwandaises (FAR) assisted by troops sent by France,Belgium and Zaire.74 The RPF troops, however, continued to occupynorthern Rwanda, initiating an ongoing civil war. Within this climate ofgrowing insecurity, northern Hutu elites turned towards ethnicity to re-articulate the ‘Tutsi’ as including the RPF, Tutsis living within Rwanda, allopposition parties and moderate Hutus. Tutsi, in other words, came to meana common enemy which was everywhere, both inside and outside Rwanda.A rash of low-intensity violence accompanied the rapidly failing
democratisation efforts. New opposition parties conducted campaigns ofterror, ‘encouraging’ local politicians to join their party. Opposition groups,especially the Mouvement Democratique Republicain (MDR), targeted MRND
members, their families and property, forcing some to change partyallegiance. This practice—known as kubohoza, or ‘liberation’—provokedthe MRND to retaliate.75 In this context each party developed a youth wing,which became its primary tool for intimidation. The MRND’s Interahamwewas especially potent because of its substantial size and professional militarytraining.Failing coffee prices and increased debt meant that the vast web of
patronage and the ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ at the heart of Habyarimana’srule were starting to come undone. In April 1988 Habyarimana’s friend andpotential future vice-president, Colonel Stanislas Mayuya, was murdered.His killing was followed shortly by that of a number of politicians andjournalists.76 In May 1993 the moderate Hutu, Emmanuel Gapyisi, wasassassinated, revealing the growing divide between multiparty moderates andthe ‘new opposition’ extremists.77 The CDR and its allies (akazu, the ZeroNetwork death squad, the Interahamwe, and army extremists) employedethnic difference as a way to galvanise support using newspapers, radio
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stations and ethnic massacres to induce fear and undermine the Habyar-imana government. The latter was increasingly seen by radicalised Hutus astoo moderate in its treatment of the ‘Tutsi’ enemy.78
In the face of these increasingly uncontainable economic, political andethnic contradictions, the Habyarimana government and the CDR began toorganise for mass violence, thereby pushing Rwanda closer towards thethreshold of genocide. However, even as plans for the genocide were beingmade by Hutu extremists within the CDR, the World Bank and IMF continuedto loan Rwanda considerable sums of money in the hope that it could mendits failing economy. Instead of using the money to rejuvenate the obliteratedcoffee economy, the cash-strapped and embattled Habyarimana used thefunds to purchase the military hardware used to arm the rapidly expandingmilitary and paramilitary groups. During this period the Rwandangovernment spent $112 million to arm the population with weapons boughtfrom France, Egypt and South Africa. France’s national bank, CreditLyonnais, provided the credit guarantees which made many of thesetransactions possible.While firearms were purchased from abroad with foreign aid money, major
players in the coffee industry were busy supplying the hoes, axes andmachetes. The largest importer of machetes during this period was FelicienKabuga, a friend of Habyarimana and a wealthy coffee exporter. RwandexChillington, a joint venture between the British company Plantation &General Investments and the coffee production company Rwandex, was thelargest domestic producer of metal tools and sold more machetes in February1994 than during the entire previous year.As weapons became increasingly available, the MRND distributed them to
the Interahamwe, as well as to its rural supporters, through a highly organisedsystem of prefectures, sub-prefectures, communes, sectors and cells.79 Manyof the arms purchased during this period were later used to execute thegenocide. Foreign loans also made it possible for the ailing government toexpand its military from 5000 to 40 000 soldiers in a matter of weeks.80
Much of the foreign currency used to purchase these weapons wasdeposited directly into the Banque Nationale du Rwanda by the IMF andWorld Bank. These loans were ended in 1993 when it became clear that thegovernment had abandoned its expressed intentions of using the money fordevelopment projects and debt restructuring. The government’s surplusfunds held in foreign bank accounts, however, were never frozen and, as aresult, internationally donated hard currency continued to fund thepreparations for the genocide.81
Oblivious to the intensifying contradictions, the international communitynot only continued to push for multiparty democracy but also insisted uponpower sharing with the RPF. However, after nearly a year of negotiations,Habyarimana, fearing domestic retaliation from the CDR, remained unwillingto sign Arusha Accords. The deadlock came to an end in July 1993 whendonors including France and the World Bank informed the desperateHabyarimana that they would withhold aid funds if he failed to accept theaccords.82
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On 4 August, under pressure from the international lending institutions andthe foreign governments on whom he had become dependent, Habyarimanasigned a treaty ending the civil war with the RPF. Most of the radical MRND
and the CDR members strongly opposed the Arusha Accords and finalisedplans to maintain power through violent means. On 6 April 1994, with thedowning of President Habyarimana’s plane, Rwanda’s highly conflictual andover-determined social relations erupted in a genocide which killed morethan a half million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. While this violence wasextraordinary, it was neither a contingent event transitively caused by specific(ethnic) conditions nor the determined result of colonialism, ‘evil’ individuals,failed institutions, or falling coffee prices. Instead, over-determined relationsof ethnicity and class—as well as region, religion, education, etc—werereordered and reproduced by other over-determined relationships of coffeeimportation and exportation, debt, foreign aid, liberalisation and democra-tisation. In April 1994 the over-determined contradictions reached the pointat which the existing conditions for mass violence become so intense that theyexploded beyond their threshold, resulting in genocide.While the horror of the hundred days of killing is well documented, we
should also be reminded that the genocide is not the final culmination ofRwandan history. Many of the social relationships, subjectivities, ideologies,alliances, relations of extraction, and individual actors which produced thegenocide continue to produce, and reproduce, Rwandan and global socialrelationships to this day. It is important to be cautious, for example, aboutunproblematically that the establishment of coffee co-operatives—somesponsored by development agencies like the US Agency for InternationalDevelopment (USAID)—is necessarily crucial to Rwanda’s post-genocidereconciliation.83
Conclusion
Today most of the academic production concerning the genocide in Rwandaremains wedded to the concept of ‘ethnic conflict’ which, while necessary toexplain the genocide, is not sufficient. Reducing the violence to anexceptional ‘ethnic conflict’ threatens to depoliticise academic representationby giving the genocide no explanation other than itself. This trend is alsopervasive in contemporary academic reproduction of conflicts in Congo,Bosnia, Liberia, Haiti, Sudan, Palestine, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Iraq,Kosovo, Somalia and Afghanistan, among other places, which tends to focuson the local ethnic, religious or nationalist extremism as the essential cause ofviolence. These accounts help insure that the complex and violent contra-dictions produced within the capitalist global mode of production remain aretreated as merely isolated exceptions and, therefore, invisible to critique.However, as producers of knowledge within this global mode of
production, academicians can—as Althusser urges us to do—use our wordsas ‘weapons, explosives or tranquillizers and poisons’ to struggle against theideological productions which justify and obfuscate continued exploitation.84
A critique of neoliberal and postcolonial capital can adopt the strategy of
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narrating particular expressions of violence as symptomatic of an over-determined global mode of production. Doing so challenges the ideologicalcover academics so commonly grant to neoliberal and post-colonial capital.
Notes
I would like to thank Asli Calkivik, Lisa Disch, Kevin Dunn, Bud Duvall, Stefan Kamola, Serena Laws,Govind Nayak, David Newbury, Kartik Raj, Michele Wagner, Amentahru Wahlrab, an anonymous TWQreviewer, my co-panelists at the 2006 Western Political Science 2006 Illinois State University GraduateStudent Conference Association and 2006 International Studies Association, as well as all my friends andcolleagues in the Minnesota International Relations Colloquium for their kind comments and support.1 Mamdani argues that both academic and popular accounts are ‘silent’ about the genocide’s externalcauses. However, while Mamdani portrays the genocide as regional, I narrate it as produced at manyoverlapping locations including the sub-national, national, regional and international registers. Toavoid constituting the genocide as a ‘local’ event, I use the phrase ‘genocide in Rwanda’ as opposed to‘Rwandan genocide’. M Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and theGenocide in Rwanda, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001, p 8.
2 The Christian Science Monitor, for example, reported that ‘tribal bloodshed’ and ‘savage killing’ was‘lurking around corners amongmuddy trains and behind thick undergrowth’, that ‘ethnic slaughter’ waserupting from ‘latent rivalries between the Hutu and Tutsi tribes’. The New York Times claimed thatHabyarimana’s assassination ‘reignited the centuries-old hatred’ between Hutu and Tutsi. TheWashington Post referred to the violence as ‘tribal bloodletting’ and feared that Rwanda was ‘plung[ing]deep, deep into the heart of darkness . . . There is no ideology or religious zeal at work—just raw hatred.’S Peterson, ‘Bloody hills of Kigali’,Courier-Mail, 13 April 1994; Peterson, ‘A Rwandan church becomesa fortress’, Christian Science Monitor, 19 April 1994, p 7; Peterson, ‘Rwanda’s tragedy plays out in war-torn capital’, Christian Science Monitor, 19 April 1994, p 6; D Lorch, ‘Rwandan refugees describehorrors after a bloody trek’,New York Times, 23 April 1994, p 1; KRichburg, Rwandan leaders struggleto rebuild nation, UN report on revenge killings by Tutsis sets back attempts to bring refugees home’,Washington Post, 24 September 1994, A39; and J Parmelee, ‘Fade to blood: why the internationalanswer to the Rwandan atrocities is indifference’, Washington Post, 24 April 1994, C3.
3 J Pottier, Re-Imagining Rwanda: Conflict, Survival and Disinformation in the Late Twentieth Century,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp 204, 4.
4 C Newbury, ‘Ethnicity and the politics of history in Rwanda’, Africa Today, 45 (1), 1998, p 19.5 Mamdani, for example, argues that class is not useful when examining the genocide because‘postcolonial political violence’ appears to cut ‘across social classes rather than between them’(emphasis in original). I reintroduce an explicitly Marxist account to the study of ‘ethnic conflict’ byusing Althusser’s concept of ‘structured causality’ to think past the economistic determinist approachesMamdani rightly criticises. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p 19. See also Mamdani, ‘Africanstate, citizenship and war: a case-study’, International Affairs, 78 (3), 2002, p 498.
6 R Omaar & A de Waal, Rwanda: Death, Despair, and Defiance, London: African Rights, August 1995,p 14. See also L Melvers, Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide, London: Verso, 2004; P Uvin,‘Prejudice, crisis, and genocide in Rwanda’, African Studies Review, 40 (2), 1997, pp 91 – 115.
7 Bhavnani and Backer use spiral and in-group policing equilibria to track how messaging andinteractions change during different ‘episodes of violence’. de Figueiredo and Weingast employ arational choice approach to explain why ‘citizens whose primary interest is in peace choose to supportbloody ethnic conflict’. Collier and Hoeffler argue that wars in Rwanda resulted from low incomelevels, the presence of natural resources, and high population densities. R Bhavnani & D Backer,‘Localized ethnic conflict and genocide: accounting for differences in Rwanda and Burundi’, Journal ofConflict Resolution, 44 (3), 2000, pp 283 – 306; R de Figueiredo Jr & B Weingast, ‘The rationality offear: political opportunism and ethnic conflict’, in B Walter & J Snyder (eds), Civil Wars, Insecurity,and Intervention, New York: Columbia University Press, 1999, pp 261 – 302; and P Collier &A Hoeffler, ‘On economic causes of civil war’, Oxford Economic Papers, 50, 1998, pp 563 – 573.
8 Snyder uses the genocide to support his claim that democratisation creates instability when hijacked bynationalist elites. Valentino draws from the Rwandan case to prove that ‘mass killing’ is a strategicpolicy forged by elites and executed by a small group of ‘true believers’ and psychopaths. For Snyderand Jervis the genocide shows how the security dilemma explains the cause of civil wars. Gurrassembles data on 116 nations with ‘disadvantaged and politically active minorities’ (size of theminority, total population, government type, etc) to compute which variables, if present, lead toviolence. J Snyder, From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict, New York:WW Norton, 2000, pp 296 – 306; B Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th
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Century, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004, pp 178 – 188; J Snyder & R Jervis, ‘Civil war andthe security dilemma’, in Walter & Snyder, Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention, pp 15 – 37; andT Gurr, Peoples Versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century, Washington, DC: United StatedInstituted of Peace Press, 2000.
9 R Cox, ‘Social forces, states and world order: beyond International Relations theory’, in R Keohane(ed), Neorealism and its Critics, New York: Columbia University Press, pp 204 – 254.
10 A Mbembe, On the Postcolony, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001, p 7.11 C Newbury & D Newbury, ‘A Catholic mass in Kigali: contested views of the genocide and ethnicity in
Rwanda’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 33 (2 – 3), 1999, pp 294, 296, 316. For other examples ofgood historical contingent accounts, see A Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’: Genocide inRwanda, New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999; J-P Chretien, The Great Lakes of Africa: TwoThousand Years of History, trans Scott Straus, New York: Zone Books, 2003; G Prunier, The RwandaCrisis: History of a Genocide, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995; D Newbury,‘Understanding genocide’, African Studies Review, 41 (1), April 1998, pp 73 – 97; and P Uvin, AidingViolence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda, West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1998.
12 See, for example, K Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996; and M Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, Stanford, CA:Stanford, 1999.
13 I use the term ‘threshold’ in much the same way Althusser uses ‘ruptural unity’. For Althusser a‘ruptural unity’ is a ‘vast accumulation of contradictions’ coming at the moment of radicalrestructuring and revolution (as in his example of the Russian Revolution). The threshold is also aparticular playing out of human activity whereby over-determined relationships fail so completely thatthey become fundamentally reordered. However, unlike the ‘ruptural unity’ which describes arevolutionary moment, I introduce the term threshold to mean those moments when over-determinedcontradictions reorder the mode of production through the mass destruction of human life.L Althusser, For Marx, trans Ben Brewster, New York: Vintage Books, 1970, pp 99 – 100.
14 R Resch, Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory, Berkeley, CA: University of CaliforniaPress, 1992, p 47.
15 Note that here the term ‘linear’ does not necessarily mean a straight line, because the ‘causal’ variablescan have interactive and ‘non-linear’ effects. However, the emphasis on determinant causalitynonetheless remains the same.
16 L Althusser & E Balibar, Reading Capital, Ben Brewster, trans., London & New York: Verso, 1999,pp 188 – 189, 184 (emphasis in original).
17 C Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860 – 1960, New York:Columbia University Press, 1988, pp 11, 53; and Omaar & de Waal, Rwanda: Death, Despair, andDefiance, pp 2 – 7.
18 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, p 35.19 J Kieran, ‘The origins of commercial arabica coffee production in East Africa’, African Historical
Studies, 2 (1), 1969, p 52; and J de Graaff, The Economics of Coffee, Wageningen: Centre forAgricultural Publishing and Documentation, 1986, p 209.
20 B Dinham & C Hines, Agribusiness in Africa, London: Earth Resource Research, 1983, pp 52 – 53.21 During the postwar boom African countries grew an increasingly large portion of the world’s coffee. In
the 1940s countries outside Central and South America—mostly in Africa—grew 14% of the world’scoffee, 19% by the early 1950s and 30% by the late 1960s. During the 1950s coffee productionaccelerated in Burundi and Rwanda (jointly administered) reaching 600 000 60-kg bags in 1959. RLLucier, The International Political Economy of Coffee: From Juan Valdez to Yank’s Diner, New York:Praeger, 1988, pp 31 – 33; and P Rourk, Coffee Production in Africa, Washington, DC: United StatesDepartment of Agriculture, September 1975, p 21.
22 de Graaff, The Economics of Coffee, pp 209 – 210.23 Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression, pp 141 – 46; and Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers,
pp 93 – 98.24 C Newbury, ‘Colonialism, ethnicity, and rural political protest: Rwanda and Zanzibar in comparative
perspective’, Comparative Politics, 15 (3), 1983, p 263.25 D Newbury & C Newbury, ‘Bringing the peasant back in’, American Historical Review, 105 (3), June
2000, p 868.26 The Hamitic Myth is not a coherent ideology but changed over time to justify different modes of
labour extraction. The story of Ham was first used by Europeans to argue that Africans weresubhuman and therefore could be enslaved. John Hanning Speke’s version of the myth, widelydisseminated throughout Rwanda, was produced a half century later to explain how Africans could beboth subhuman and capable of developing the complex political structures that were then being‘discovered’ throughout Africa. In this rendition some Africans are Hamitic (half European) andtherefore superior to other ‘Negroid’ Africans. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, pp 79 – 87;
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Omaar & de Waal, Rwanda: Death, Despair, and Defiance, pp 7 – 10; and E Sanders, ‘The Hamitichypothesis: its origin and functions in time perspective’, Journal of African History, 10 (4), 1969,pp 521 – 532.
27 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, pp 36 – 37; and Chretien, The Great Lakes of Africa, p 273.28 By the late 1930s the older European leadership within the Rwandan Catholic Church was dying off.
While figures like Fathers Classe and Hirth—‘upper class men with rather conservative politicalideas’—had been highly influential in supporting the early policies of Tutsi superiority, the newgeneration consisted of Flemish clergy from primarily working class backgrounds. Coincidentally theCatholic Church in Rwanda became increasingly sympathetic to the Hutu cause. H Hintjens,‘Explaining the 1994 genocide in Rwanda’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 37 (2), 1999, p 254;Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p 44; and S Hoyweghen, ‘The disintegration of the Catholic Church ofRwanda: a study of the fragmentation of political and religious authority’, African Affairs, 95, 1996,pp 380 – 381.
29 Prunier writes that, after the Second World War, ‘Social relationships became grimmer and more fullof conflict at a time when, paradoxically, the neo-traditionalist forms of clientship . . . had become lessand less a way of making money. The War had brought with it a vast expansion of the cash economy inwhich the Hutu had shared. The old clientship system, which was basically part of the non-monetaryeconomy, was accordingly becoming increasingly obsolete . . . the old oppressive forms wereperceived . . . more harshly as they lost their real power and as their cultural legitimacy waned.’Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p 42.
30 See I Linden, Church and Revolution in Rwanda, Oxford: Manchester University Press, 1977, pp 239,258; Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p 118; Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression, pp 184 –191; and Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p 45.
31 Mamdani,When Victims Become Killers, pp 117, 121 – 125; and Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression,pp 188, 192 – 193.
32 Linden, Church and Revolution in Rwanda, p 239.33 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, p 38.34 Uvin, Aiding Violence, p 20.35 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, p 39; and Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p 103 –
131.36 Uvin, Aiding Violence, pp 20 – 21.37 de Graaff, The Economics of Coffee, p 211.38 Because Rwanda is landlocked and must transport potential cash crops to Mombasa or Dar es Salaam
for export, coffee—being non-perishable—is a particularly attractive crop. However, because greencoffee lasts for years in storage, large coffee growing nations like Brazil stockpile green coffee as a wayto regulate coffee prices. As a result, even as African coffee production grew in terms of market sharebetween the 1950s and 1960s, this success was largely dependent on free-riding on Brazil’s policy ofmaintaining prices by withholding its large stockpiles from the market. By 1962 Brazil held stocks ofcoffee which equalled 208% of its annual production. H Laurens van der Laan, ‘Boosting agriculturalexports? A ‘‘marketing channel’’ perspective on an African dilemma’, African Affairs, 92 (367), 1993,pp 176 – 177; and Lucier, The International Political Economy of Coffee, pp 118 – 120.
39 During the 1940s and early 1950s the high international price of coffee drove many governments toencourage coffee production as a source of earning foreign currency. However, because coffee treestake between four and seven years to mature, by the mid-1950s there was severe, and largelyunforeseen, over-production, which caused the price of coffee to fall from $0.79/pound to $0.34/poundbetween 1955 and 1962. Lucier, The International Political Economy of Coffee, pp 118 – 120.
40 The international coffee market is bifurcated between two commercially grown species—arabica androbusta. Arabica, grown in Brazil and Colombia, is of high quality but requires considerable inputsand can only grow at certain altitudes. Robusta coffee is more durable, pest-resistant, and suitable tothe low altitudes and humid conditions found in Indonesia, Vietnam and much of Africa. Robustarequires fewer inputs and less labour to produce larger, lower-valued yields. Robusta coffee, usedprimarily in instant coffee, became increasingly valuable during the 1950s and 1960s when demand forinstant coffee peaked. Rwanda grows Arabica coffee. See SJ Carr, ‘Improving cash crops in Africa:factors influencing the productivity of cotton, coffee, and tea grown by smallholders’, World Bank,Washington, DC, 31 August 1993, p 24, 32; Lucier, The International Political Economy of Coffee,pp 118 – 120; and Dinham & Hines, Agribusiness in Africa, pp 52, 54.
41 The US government became interested in regulating coffee prices when Kennedy came to power.Unlike Eisenhower, who saw such an agreement as a ‘sin against free enterprise’, Kennedy advocated acoffee treaty as part of his ‘Alliance for Progress’ approach to Latin America. He also feared that theeconomic destabilisation in Latin America caused by low coffee prices would be exploited by Cuba.Kennedy was also swayed by the requests made by newly independent African countries to stabilise thecommodity market as a path to national development. The National Coffee Association, the US coffee
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roasting trade group, also supported the ICA, fearing that potential political instability resulting fromlow prices would threaten the coffee supply. Lucier, The International Political Economy of Coffee,pp 122 – 126.
42 ‘International Coffee Agreement’, 18 March 1968 (renegotiation of 1962 agreement), found atAustralian Treaty Series #21, Australian Government Publishing Service, at http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/dfat/treaties/1968/21.html.
43 RH Bates, Open Economy Politics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997, p 25.44 B Dinham & C Hines, Agribusiness in Africa, London: Earth Resources Research, 1983, p 57.45 J Pottier, ‘Taking stock: food marketing reform in Rwanda, 1982 – 98’, African Affairs, 92 (366), 1993,
p 11; and Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p 58.46 Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, p 140.47 Newbury & Newbury, ‘Bringing the peasant back in’, p 872.48 Uvin, Aiding Violence; and P Verwimp, ‘Development ideology, the peasantry and genocide: Rwanda
represented in Habyarimana’s speeches’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2 (3), 2000, pp 325 – 361.49 Uvin, Aiding Violence, pp 112 – 113.50 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, p 45; Newbury & Newbury, ‘Bringing the peasant back in’,
pp 873 – 874; Uvin, Aiding Violence, pp 112 – 113, 116; Verwimp, ‘Development ideology, the peasantryand genocide’, pp 328 – 333; and E Toussaint, ‘Rwanda: the financiers of the genocide’, Committee forthe Abolition of Third World Debt, 12 April 2004, at http://www.cadtm.org/imprimer.php3?id_article¼611.
51 See T Sellstrom et al, ‘International response to conflict and genocide: lessons from the Rwandaexperience’, Journal of Humanitarian Assistance, 14 April 1996, at http://www.reliefweb.int/library/nordic/book1/pb020c.html.
52 Verwimp, ‘The political economy of coffee, dictatorship, and genocide’, European Journal of PoliticalEconomy, 19 (2), 2003, p 172.
53 Pottier, Re-Imagining Rwanda, p 21.54 P Verwimp, ‘Agricultural policy, crop failure and the ‘Ruriganiza’ famine (1989) in southern Rwanda:
a prelude to genocide?’, paper presented at the ‘Frontiers of Development’ economic conference,Economics Department, Catholic University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium, 30 May 2002, pp 28 – 29,available at http://www.econ.kuleuven.be/eng/ew/discussionpapers/Dps02/Dps0207.pdf.
55 Verwimp, ‘The political economy of coffee, dictatorship, and genocide’, p 172.56 Verwimp, ‘Agricultural policy, crop failure and the ‘Ruriganiza’ famine’, pp 23 – 24.57 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p 82.58 Verwimp, ‘Agricultural policy, crop failure and the ‘Ruriganiza’ famine’, pp 22 – 24.59 Pottier, ‘Taking stock: food marketing reform in Rwanda, 1982 – 98’, pp 21 – 29.60 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, pp 87 – 88.61 Newbury & Newbury, ‘Bringing the peasant back in’, p 873; and Uvin, Aiding Violence, p 124.62 M Chossudovsky, ‘Human security and economic genocide in Rwanda’, in C Thomas & P Wilkin
(eds), Globalization, Human Security and the African Experience, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999,p 122.
63 Hintjens, ‘Explaining the 1994 genocide in Rwanda’, p 256.64 Chossudovsky, ‘Human security and economic genocide in Rwanda’, p 120.65 Uvin, Aiding Violence, p 58.66 Brazil believed it could increase its market share by abandoning the quota system and had successfully
diversified its economy such that coffee represented only 7% of its exports, as opposed to 50% in 1962.D Blackwell, ‘Bust letter stirs up world coffee market’, Financial Times, 22 September 1989, p 28. TheUSA criticised the ICA for two reasons: quotas limited the supply of increasingly popular arabicacoffees in favour of undesirable robusta varietals and the ‘two-tier market’ allowed producers to sellcoffee to non-treaty countries at half price. See ‘Why commodity pacts fail’, Financial Times, 4 October1989, p 22; and R Mooney, ‘Coffee price slides to 9½-month low’, Financial Times, 27 June 1989, p 32.
67 Bates, Open-Economy Politics, p 25.68 Under the Lome IV convention—between the EU and 66 African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP)
states—Stabex received $1.8 billion for the period 1990 – 94 to help stabilise the revenue of those statesexporting agricultural goods to Europe. See ‘EU/ACP: Court of Auditors criticizes Stabex system’,European Report, 7 June 1995; and Y Sharma, ‘Commodities: record payout from EEC ExportStabilization Fund’, Inter Press Service, 20 May 1992.
69 Verwimp, ‘The political economy of coffee, dictatorship, and genocide’, p 174.70 Ibid, pp 174 – 75; and Toussaint, ‘Rwanda: the financiers of the genocide’.71 Chossudovsky, ‘Human security and economic genocide in Rwanda’, pp 121 – 122; and Hintjens,
‘Explaining the 1994 genocide in Rwanda’, p 256.72 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, pp 47, 52 – 53; A Klinghoffer, The International Dimension
of Genocide in Rwanda, New York: New York University Press, 1998, p 20; L Melvern, A people
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betrayed: the role of the West in Rwanda’s genocide, London & New York: Zed Books, 2000, p 38;Newbury, ‘Understanding genocide’, p 89; Newbury & Newbury, ‘A Catholic mass in Kigali’, p 305;and Uvin, Aiding Violence, p 62.
73 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, pp 52 – 53.74 B Jones, Peacemaking in Rwanda: The Dynamics of Failure, Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001, p 29;
A Callamard, ‘French policy in Rwanda’, in H Adelman & A Suhrke (eds) The Path of a Genocide: TheRwanda Crisis from Uganda to Zaire, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1999, pp 157 – 183;WMadsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993 – 1999, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press,1999, pp 104 – 106; O Otunnu, ‘An historical analysis of the invasion by the Rwanda Patriotic Army(RPA)’, in H Adelman & A Suhrke (eds) The Path of a Genocide, pp 31 – 49; and Prunier, The RwandaCrisis, pp 100 – 108.
75 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, pp 54 – 57; and M Wagner, ‘All the Bourgmestre’s men:making sense of genocide in Rwanda’, Africa Today, 45 (1), 1998, p 32.
76 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, pp 87 – 89.77 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, p 113; and Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, pp 185 – 186.78 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p 182.79 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, pp 41 – 43, 55 – 56; Human Rights Watch, Arming Rwanda:
The Arms Trade and Human Rights Abuses in the Rwanda War, Human Rights Watch Arms Project,New York, January 1994, p 27; and Wagner, ‘All the Bourgmestre’s men’.
80 Chossudovsky, ‘Human security and economic genocide in Rwanda’, p 124; Des Forges, ‘Leave Noneto Tell the Story’, p 127; S Goose & F Smyth, ‘Arming genocide in Rwanda’, Foreign Policy, 75 (5),1994; Human Rights Watch, Arming Rwanda, pp 5, 27; Melvern, A People Betrayed, pp 64 – 67; andUvin, Aiding Violence, p 88.
81 The government was able to conceal its misuse of the loans by manipulating bank records, doctoringinvoices, reselling imported gasoline, and diverting development purchases like vehicles, gasoline andother supplies toward the military. See Melvern, A People Betrayed, pp 66 – 67; and Toussaint,‘Rwanda: the financiers of the genocide’.
82 Des Forges, ‘Leave None to Tell the Story’, p 124.83 Ben Richardson, ‘Coffee buzz lifts wartorn Rwanda’, BBC, 10 March 2004, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/
hi/business/3498712.stm.84 L Althusser, ‘Philosophy as a revolutionary weapon: interview conducted by Maria Antonietta
Macciocchi’, in Ben Brewster (trans), Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, New York: MonthlyReview Press, 2001, p 8.
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