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WSWS : News & Analysis : Africa

Imperialism and the Rwandan catastrophe

By the Editorial Board
29 July 1994

The wanton slaughter and mass flight in the east African nation of Rwanda is one of history's great human catastrophes.

More than 500,000 people have been massacred--half of them children under the age of 16. Millions have fled their homes for refugee camps where cholera and hunger kill thousands more every day.

An estimated 150,000 Rwandan children have lost their parents. Many saw their mothers and fathers butchered before their eyes. Others were separated from their parents in the chaotic rush to escape the violence.

In barely two-and-a-half months it is estimated that half of the country's original population of eight million have either been slain or turned into refugees. Western governments and international agencies have proven unable or unwilling to effectively aid the victims, much less prevent the disaster in the first place.

The slaughter in Rwanda represents the greatest single act of genocide in Africa's history, but it is not the first such event, nor will it be the last.

Even as the media focuses on the dying in Rwanda, similar tragedies throughout Africa barely attract attention. In Liberia 150,000 have been killed and a similar number made refugees in a protracted civil war. Somalia, Ethiopia and Sudan all remain embroiled in ethnic conflicts with hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring across their borders.

With the abandonment of socialist pretensions on the part of the bourgeois nationalist regimes in Angola and Mozambique, the civil wars which have wracked these countries for nearly two decades have increasingly taken on the character of ethnic struggles.

Less publicised massacres and "ethnic cleansing" campaigns have been carried out in Mali, Niger, northern Ghana and eastern Zaire.

What is the explanation for these bloody conflicts? Their immediate cause is to be found in the poverty and oppression which are deeper now than in the most hellish days of colonialism. The combined Gross National Product of all of Africa south of the Sahara--with a population of more than 600 million--is today less than that of Holland. Since the collapse of the commodity markets in the 1980s, per capita income has declined by almost 2% a year.

The continent has been marginalised by foreign capital, accounting for just 1% of total world investment. Heavily indebted, the region pays out considerably more in interest and service fees to the foreign banks than it receives in new credits.

The national development schemes of the 1960s and 1970s have been replaced by economic "adjustment" programs through which the International Monetary Fund and the Western banks squeeze out what little remains of Africa's wealth. These austerity plans render the national regimes even more powerless to deal with the social crisis.

More than a third of the continent's population live in what the international finance agencies describe as "absolute poverty," meaning they are unable to obtain the minimal necessities for survival. According to a recent report from the United Nations Children's Fund, 10,000 children die every day in Africa from preventable causes while another 10,000 are crippled for life.

Of the 14 million people in the world known to be infected with the HIV virus, at least 9 million are in sub-Saharan Africa.

All of these crises find sharp expression in Rwanda, Africa's most densely populated state. The scope of the Rwandan tragedy and the rapidity with which it developed may seem beyond comprehension. But such a catastrophe does not fall from the sky. It is the outcome of accumulated contradictions and social problems more than a century in the making.

To the extent that Western officials and the media offer any explanation, they cite long-standing antagonisms between the Hutu majority and the Tutsi minority. To attribute the Rwandan tragedy simply to tribal tensions, however, is to explain nothing.

Ethnic conflicts have deep historic roots in Rwanda, just as in the Balkans or the Indian sub-continent. In all three regions, however, their source is not some pre-historic blood feud, but more modern social and political conditions.

It was the Germans who first colonised Rwanda, together with the neighbouring kingdom of Burundi, in 1899. Germany found in these territories a complex arrangement of society with its own division of labour and forms of social gradation and subordination.

While routinely described in the West as "tribes," the differentiation between Tutsis and Hutus before colonisation was more on the order of occupational castes, the former pastoral and the latter agriculturist. The Tutsi minority dominated the society, with the Hutus bound to them by semi-feudal relations.

German colonialism, followed by Belgian, exacerbated and institutionalised the divisions between the two groups. The Germans attempted to use the Tutsis as colonial administrators, introducing racial theories about their supposed superiority over the Hutus and even their "Aryan" origin.

This system of racial classification had no more basis in science than the master race theories propagated by the Nazis a few decades later. The two groups speak the same language, share the same customs and a common land. Inter-marriage between them is commonplace.

The move toward independence in 1962 did not lift the burden of this legacy of colonialism. Instead independence was accompanied by a campaign on the part of Hutu leaders to settle accounts with the Tutsis. The racist theories of the Germans were adopted, albeit in an inverted form, by sections of the aspiring Hutu bourgeoisie, who attributed a foreign origin to the Tutsis and advocated their expulsion.

When a Hutu-dominated regime came to power in Rwanda, it ran a system resembling apartheid, with "tribal" identity cards and an ethnic quota system limiting the access of Tutsis to schools and government jobs.

Massacres and counter-massacres have recurred throughout the subsequent history of both Rwanda and Burundi. The genocide in Rwanda may in part be a delayed response to mass killings in neighbouring Burundi last fall, in which tens of thousands of people--most of them Hutus--were killed.

These conflicts have exposed the reactionary character of the nation-state system imposed in Africa's "decolonisation." History has discredited the conception that the African masses could find a road to development and freedom by establishing new national states within the framework of world imperialism.

The newly independent states were founded on the principle that the lines drawn by rival European imperialist powers in the late nineteenth century "scramble for Africa" represented sacrosanct borders defining sovereign nations.

In most cases these borders corresponded neither to the territories occupied by distinct peoples nor the necessities of Africa's economic development. But this did not deter the emerging African national bourgeoisie. This social stratum was determined to appropriate the old colonial state apparatus as a means of securing its own wealth and power.

The result was a map of Africa divided into nearly 50 separate states, 14 of them landlocked and including such unlikely territories as Gambia--20 miles wide and 200 miles long and enveloped by the neighbouring state of Senegal.

The Organisation of African Unity insisted that upholding these old colonial borders was the only way to prevent internecine wars. If the horror of Rwanda has demonstrated anything, it is the fallacy that "independent" national states under the rule of the bourgeoisie can serve as a bulwark against such strife.

This national state system has only exacerbated tribal conflicts, providing endless opportunities for manipulation by both the imperialist powers and rival national cliques in Africa itself, while solving none of the demands of the masses.

Imperialism's responsibility for the present holocaust is not simply a matter of blind economic forces or past history. The government which directed the bloodbath against the Tutsi minority was armed and supported by France. It was kept in power thanks solely to the intervention of French "advisers" who freed the country's own military to prepare and execute the slaughter of civilians.

The same French government which expressed shock and outrage over the killings in Bosnia had no qualms aiding a far greater bloodbath in Rwanda.

As for the United States, it has over the past several years carried out imperialist adventures in Panama, Iraq and Somalia. When one compares the resources which Washington marshaled to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq to the Pentagon's present relief operation in Rwanda one sees that imperialism is good only for mass destruction.

The principal interest of the imperialists lies in utilising the tragedy of Rwanda as a means of deploying their troops once again on the African continent. Just as in the US intervention in Somalia, the Rwandan disaster is becoming a pretext for the recolonisation of the region.

Five years after the capitalist ruling class proclaimed the triumph of capitalism and the emergence of a "new world order" based upon the disintegration of the Stalinist bureaucracies, Rwanda provides an appalling picture of the conditions which capitalism is preparing for masses of people all over the world.

The catastrophe in Rwanda represents a dire warning. The old social structures are collapsing and capitalism is incapable of replacing them. Without the emergence in the working class of a conscious movement based on the perspective of international socialism, the conflict between world economy and the outmoded capitalist nation-state will confront humanity with the threat of a terrible historical retrogression.

The failure of bourgeois nationalism in Africa and its grim legacy today underscore the necessity of reconstructing the workers movement as an international party that unites workers and the oppressed across all national, racial, ethnic and religious lines. Only such a movement can pose a viable alternative to the communal slaughter, impoverishment and war produced by the crisis of world capitalism.

See Also:
New evidence on the role of the US and France
Who is responsible for the genocide in Rwanda?
[29 April 1998]