Where Are my People? A Question for Genocide Deniers

by Minega K Albert

Where are my people?

  A Question for Genocide Deniers

  By Minega K. Albert

  Copyright 2015, Minega K. Albert

  All rights reserved. Thank you for downloading this book. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial purposes. Thank you for your support.

  Chapter 1: Why now?

  In 1994, Rwanda was hit by one of the fastest and most deadly mass killings of the modern times. Even though the United Nation and other international organisations have declared the massacres of Tutsis in Rwanda a Genocide, many researchers and among them eminent scholars keep questioning its legitimacy to be called a genocide. Some of them challenge the death toll of Tutsis slaughtered during the 1994 horrible three months. They base their researches on population censes and assumption rates of birth and death which were available before 1994 and come up with an extrapolated number of Tutsis living in Rwanda before April 1994. From there, and using statistics of genocide survivors released by the government of Rwanda after the Genocide, they challenge the approximate death toll of almost a million of people reported to have been perished from April to July 1994.

  Another trend of researchers claim that the massacres against Tutsis in 1994 should not be qualified of Genocide as it would not comply with the genocide process detailed in a document developed and presented to the US, State Department 1992, by Dr. Gregory Stanton, the president of The Genocide Watch.

  In the maze of revisionist reports and reposts of the defenders of the Genocide against Tutsis, my query as a writer and a genocide survivor is: “why such vehement attacks when the Genocide against Tutsis happened on a broad daylight with the coverage of international media and while the highest international institutions such as the UN were represented in the country? There could be many realities behind the revisionist reports. One of these would personal interests of the real actors of the genocide or their sympathizers. But there is a major fact which deserves to be considered: did all the researchers who conducted surveys about the genocide understand the Rwandan society, especially that of before 1994?

  Chapter 2: The war of figures

  The number of victims of the Rwandan genocide serves as a challenging argument in the hands of the increasing number of the revisionists. As none had the interest to count the number of people while they were slaughtered, the only way to have an approximate death toll is to use the existing figures collated from three national population censes conducted in Rwanda in 1952, 1978 and in 1991. Due to the socio-political situation of Rwanda prior to 1994, many factors which could have influenced or affected in a way or another statistics reported out of each census should be observed. In most of the studies conducted after the genocide these factors were ignored or minimized due to the lack of enough of evidences to back their theories.

  Another significant argument in the hand of the Rwandan genocide revisionists is the number of Hutus killed during the massacres and the war to liberate the country. For some researchers, the number of Hutu victims would be even higher than that of the Tutsis. Still according to their reports, the fact that Tutsis under the RPA army won the war, it would be enough evidence that Hutus were the one targeted during the massacres and not the other way round.

 

  2.a. Manipulated figures

  For political reasons, under the two first republics, the number of Tutsis living in Rwanda was under reported to minimize their presence in the country. In 1973 Juvenal Habyalimana took power in a military coup and overthrew President Gregoire Kayibanda’s government, accusing him of failing to unite all Rwandans. It was true that under the rule of President Kayibanda, killings of Tutsis have occurred every time the country faced attacks of Inyenzi, a group of Tutsis who have fled the country since 1959. Habyalimana used the same pretext to remove his former friend and mentor from power and declared Rwanda a “State of Unity, Peace and Development”. For the whole world to endorse his military coup, he vowed to protect Tutsis who have been persecuted and killed under the rule of his predecessor, and since then until 1994, no massacres of Tutsis were reported in the country. People of all ethnic origins were reported to live in harmony, and mutual respect. They created strong ties through marriages and other social encounters.

  However, the new government installed other ways of discrimination in order to set limits on Tutsis undetected by outside observers. A system of quotas based on the percentage of each ethnic group was installed. Through the system, the government could determine how many Hutus, Tutsis and Twa were allowed to access education, public employment or to be recruited in the army. Related institutions and through the national censes had to make sure that the official number of Tutsis never reach 10 % of the total population of the country. That way only a handful of Tutsi kids would access the high schools and when they finished they would even be less to be admitted in higher studies. The same system was applied for hiring workers in the public sector, which was almost the country’s only employer that time. And even tighter measures were taken when recruiting for the army where the number of Tutsis was equal or slightly superior to zero, national wide.

  In her article published on the African Arguments blog, right after the diffusion of the “Rwanda, the untold story” aired on the BBC2 news channel, Ms Marijke Verpoorten, an Associate Professor in the University of Antwerp in Belgium, questioned seriously the method used by Christian Davenport and Allan Stam, two American researchers to come up with a death toll of around 200.000 Tutsis slain during the genocide. Mr Davenport and Stam took into account the allegations of underreporting of Tutsis in the population censes conducted under Habyalimana’s rule, and chose to base their study statistics collated in the census of 1952. They assumed that population census to have been fairer in reporting as it took place before started the country’s ethnical tensions. On over five million of people living in Rwandans at that time, 8% were reported to be Tutsis, hence a total number of 506.000 of living in Rwanda in 1952. Based on that figure and applying an extrapolation rate of annual growth of 2.5% they came up with a figure of 595.000, assumed to be the total number of Tutsis living in Rwanda in 1994.

  Here comes the first inconsistency of the two researcher’s findings. The population census of 1991 reported that the total number of Tutsis living in Rwanda was 596.000 representing 8.4% of the population. If Stam and Davenport chose to base their research on the data of 1952, allegedly because the reports of censes conducted under Habyalimana’s regime were trusted to underreport the number of Tutsis, it’s not understandable how they got to consider their even smaller result (506.000 Tutsis). They might have realised that something was wrong with that figure.

  Ms Des Forges Tutsis of Rwanda claimed to have found serious evidence of the underreporting of Tutsis under Habyalimana’s regime. Through to a research she conducted in 2005, she found that local population data reported in 1990 matched everywhere with the data given by the population census of 1990, except at one point: the number of Tutsis. For Ms Des Forges and according to that research, Tutsis living in Rwanda by the last census in 1991 were almost 11 % of the total population; reaching a figure around 754.000. When increased by 2.5%, the Rwandan annual rate of that time, Tutsis living in Rwanda on the eve of 1994 would reach easily 800.000. Ms Des Forges was considered a specialist of Rwanda as she has spent many years in the country and spoke Kinyarwanda, the local language.

  Another fact need to be considered when speculating on the hypothetic number of Tutsis living in Rwanda before 1994. As it is recognized in the whole world, deadly wars have always been followed by “baby booms”. In Rwanda,
between 1959 and 1973, Tutsis were threatened, persecuted and killed. After President Habyalimana took power and declared a state of peace and Unity, Tutsis felt relieved got married and started having many children. This is to contract some theories who report Tutsis to have been less reproductive than Hutus. On the eve of 1994, there was a big number of Tutsis families with children as many as of any other family in the country.