World on Fire World on Fire World on Fire

by Amy Chua

  In October 1990 a Tutsi-led rebel army calling itself the Rwandese Patriotic Army (RPF) invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda. According to Gourevitch, most Rwandan Tutsis had no idea that the RPF even existed. But to mobilize support for himself, Habyarimana declared all Tutsis in Rwanda to be RPF “accomplices,” and Hutus who did not accept this view were branded “Tutsi-loving traitors.” Hutu extremists and Hutu youth militias “promoted genocide as a carnival romp. Hutu Power youth leaders, jetting around on motorbikes and sporting pop hairstyles, dark glasses, and flamboyantly colored pajama suits and robes, preached ethnic solidarity and civil defense to increasingly packed rallies.” Other Hutus “drew up lists of Tutsis, and went on retreats to practice burning houses, tossing grenades, and hacking dummies up with machetes.”

  Meanwhile, “freedom of the press,” ironically encouraged by Amnesty International, led to the enormous influence of a newspaper called Kangura—“Wake It Up”—which billed itself as “the voice that seeks to awake and guide the majority people.” The Kangura, launched in 1990, was edited by Hassan Ngeze, a diabolically effective Hutu supremacist with a knack for appealing to the ordinary Hutu. On one occasion another newspaper ran a cartoon depicting Ngeze on a couch, being psychoanalyzed by “the democratic press.” The cartoon showed the following exchange:

  Ngeze: I’m sick Doctor!!

  Doctor: Your sickness?!

  Ngeze: The Tutsis . . . Tutsis . . . Tutsis!!!!!

  Ngeze was apparently delighted; he ran the cartoon in his own Kangura. In his most famous article, “The Hutu Ten Commandments,” published in December 1990, Ngeze called on Hutu women to “guard against the Tutsi-loving impulses of Hutu men”; declared all Tutsis “dishonest”; and urged Hutus to have “unity and solidarity” against “their common Tutsi enemy.” The Hutu Ten Commandments were widely circulated and phenomenally popular. The eighth and most frequently quoted commandment said, “Hutus must stop having mercy on the Tutsis.”10

  In 1993, President Habyarimana signed a peace accord with the RPF. Hutu Power leaders cried treason, branded Habyarimana an “accomplice,” and called for the extermination of the entire Tutsi population: for being sympathizers of the RPF—and just for being Tutsi “cockroaches.” Ngeze added his voice. In Kangura, he warned the United Nations Assistance Mission to stay out of the way and urged Rwandans: “[L]et’s kill each other. . . . Let whatever is smouldering erupt. . . . At such a time a lot of blood will be spilled.”

  In the spring and early summer of 1994, Hutu Power began broadcasting nationwide calls for the slaughter of Rwanda’s Tutsis. In Gourevitch’s words, “Hutus young and old rose to the task.” In just one hundred days, ordinary Hutus killed approximately eight hundred thousand Tutsis, mostly with machetes:

  Neighbors hacked neighbors to death in their homes, and colleagues hacked colleagues to death in their workplaces. Doctors killed their patients, and schoolteachers killed their pupils. Within days, the Tutsi populations of many villages were all but eliminated, and in Kigali prisoners were released in work gangs to collect the corpses that lined the roadsides. Throughout Rwanda, mass rape and looting accompanied the slaughter. . . . Radio announcers reminded listeners not to take pity on women and children. As an added incentive to the killers, Tutsis’ belongings were parceled out in advance—the radio, the couch, the goat, the opportunity to rape a young girl. A councilwoman in one Kigali neighborhood was reported to have offered fifty Rwandan francs apiece (about thirty cents at the time) for severed Tutsi heads, a practice known as “selling cabbages.”11

  Many Westerners, including close friends of mine who are human rights advocates, insist that the horrors of Rwanda had nothing to do with democracy. Democracy, they say, does not include ethnic venom and mass killings. But to think this way is simply to define away the problem. Before 1957, when the movement for Hutu “majority rule” began, there had never been any recorded episode of systematic violence between Hutus and Tutsis.12 Sudden political liberalization in the 1990s unleashed long-suppressed ethnic resentments, directly spawning Hutu Power as a potent political force. Undoubtedly, Belgian racism and favoritism and decades of corrupt dictatorship laid the groundwork for the genocide that followed. But the fact remains that a majority of the Rwandan people supported, indeed personally conducted, the unspeakable atrocities committed in 1994. These atrocities were in a terrible sense the expression of “majority will” in the context of mass poverty, colonial humiliation, demagogic manipulation, and a deeply resented, disproportionately wealthy “outsider” minority.

  Genocide in the Former Yugoslavia

  A more complicated example is the former Yugoslavia, where among many other dynamics, the Croats and Slovenes have always been, and continue to be, disproportionately prosperous vis-à-vis the more populous Serbs. The former Yugoslavia was composed of six states, which can be divided into two groups: the more economically developed northern states (Croatia and Slovenia) and the markedly poorer, less developed southern states (Bosnia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia). The Serbs were the largest ethnic group in the former Yugoslavia, numbering approximately 9.3 million and comprising more than a third of the population. By contrast, there were roughly 4.6 million Croats in the former Yugoslavia.

  The northern peoples of Croatia and Slovenia traditionally enjoyed a much higher standard of living than those of the south. In 1918, the year Yugoslavia was first formed, Croatia and Slovenia accounted for roughly 75 percent of Yugoslavia’s industry. Foreign investment and markets continued to favor the north, and by 1930 its share of industry had reached 80 percent.13 The reasons for the north’s market dominance are at least in part geographical and “cultural.” The northern states border Italy and Austria. Moreover, Croats and Slovenes have their cultural roots in Western Europe: They are almost all Catholic, were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and have traditionally used the Roman alphabet. As a result, Croats and Slovenians have long had important business and trade ties with the Western European nations, including Germany, which has been a major foreign investment partner.

  The south, by contrast, was part of the Ottoman Empire; Serbia borders Romania and Bulgaria on the east. The Dinaric Alps cover most of Bosnia, Montenegro, and western Serbia, which made communications between regions historically very difficult. Most Serbs belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church and favor the Cyrillic script. Serbia suffered economically under Turkish rule. Infrastructure and industry were neglected, and the majority of Serbs continued to engage in low-technology agriculture, although oppressive rural taxes drove many farmers to the cities and neighboring states.14

  For these and other reasons, the wealth disparity between north and south has always been striking and a fertile source of ethnic resentment in the Balkans. In 1963 the per capita income in the south was less than half that in the north. By 1997 this disparity had increased so that the south’s per capita income was only 25 percent of that in the north. In 1997 the average GDP per capita in the north was $6,737, while the south’s was only $1,403. As of 2001 the World Bank placed Slovenia in the high-income and Croatia in the upper-middle-income bracket, while the states in the south all fell into the lower-middle-income bracket. Education, communication, and health levels are also notably higher in the north than in the south; the infant mortality rate in the north, for example, is approximately half what it is in the south. Little has changed since the late 1970s, when one sociologist observed:

  [T]he disparities in development and in lifestyle between the Slovenia and Croatia that I knew and [Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia], were also striking—and troubling. Often what I saw in [the south] reminded me of what I remembered of Yugoslavia of the 1950s and at times even of what I had seen while travelling to and in India. Dirt roads, ragged children, open sewers or peasants who would get off the bus in the middle of nowhere to take a path which led across mountains to a hamlet on the other side—all these were a stark contrast to life in the “north.” There, by 1978, Volkswagens had replaced tiny Fi
ats and major cities could boast occasional traffic congestion, shopping trips to Italy had become de rigueur for the growing middle class, and the yearning, and to some extent the accessibility, for the “exotic” could be seen in such things as the proliferation of new and modified dessert recipes substituting bananas, kiwis and pineapples for apples, cherries and strawberries.15

  Once again, as with all ethnic conflict, it would be absurd to reduce the historical enmity between Croats and Serbs to economics. Among other details, Croats, with Nazi support, killed thousands of Serbs (along with Jews and Gypsies) in concentration camps in World War II. Ethnic hatred has thus long been present in the former Yugoslavia, but from 1945 to 1980 it was held in check by the charisma and iron hand of Josip Broz Tito, himself part Croat, part Slovene. Tito brilliantly played the republics off one another. To diminish Serbian power, Tito reconfigured the former Yugoslavia, creating the provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina and drawing other boundaries that left millions of Serbs living outside the (then) state of Serbia. At the same time he filled Croatia’s police and bureaucracy with Serbs, redistributed wealth from the wealthier north to the poorer south, and made ethnic nationalism a crime.16

  As hindsight knowledge has allowed many commentators to observe, Tito’s Yugoslavia was a bomb waiting to explode. And the bomb was detonated by—democratization. In Croatia the first free post–World War II elections in 1990 produced a landslide victory for demagogue Franjo Tudjman’s nationalist Croatian Democratic Union party—a party basically defined by its hatred of both the ethnic Serbs living in Croatia and their cousins in Serbia. One of Tudjman’s first official acts was to demote the Serbs (roughly 12 percent of the population) by giving them inferior status in the Croatian constitution. The Croatian majority loved it. “Everything for Croatia! All for Croatia!” yelled ordinary civilians.17

  Meanwhile, 1990 democratic elections in Serbia swept Slobodan Milosevic to power on a similar wave of ethnonationalist euphoria. Now that Milosevic has been tried as an international war criminal, it is easy to forget how much the Serbian people once adored him. He was for millions, especially the great masses of frustrated, uneducated rural poor, “the saint of Serb nationalism,” the long overdue champion of a Greater Serbia. Even as his chief hatemonger Vojislav Seselj was roaring to hysterical crowds, “We will kill Croats with rusty spoons because it will hurt more!” the Serb Orthodox Church blessed Milosevic’s Serbian nationalism as a “new holy crusade.”18

  In 1991, Croatia and Slovenia declared independence. Led by Milosevic, the Serbs responded militarily, seizing a third of Croatia and murdering thousands. In 1992, Bosnia declared independence as well. Soon the entire region was engulfed in civil war, mass expulsions, and genocidal violence. In all, thousands of ordinary citizens, mostly men, were killed, often after being tortured in ways painful even to describe. Meanwhile, in female concentration camps, tens of thousands of women were raped, some of them more than a hundred times. One of the explicit goals was to impregnate the victims, many as young as twelve, with the “Serbian seed.” Thus, victims who survived the rapes were usually released only after they were in an advanced state of pregnancy, when abortion was no longer feasible. “This baby is not a part of me, it is like a stone in my body,” one pregnant, multiple-rape victim said afterward from a Sarajevo hospital. “As soon as I deliver this child the doctors had better take it away. I will kill it if I see it.”19

  There is plenty of guilt to go around, but by all accounts the more numerous Serbs, who had historically dominated the Yugoslavian military and police forces, were at the forefront of the ethnic cleansing and brutal violence. “Ejecting” or “eliminating” Croats, Slovenes, and other “foreigners” threatening Serbia’s rightful power in Yugoslavia was the guiding, and sadly mass-supported, ethnonationalist principle. In a now famous speech delivered in March 1991—which contains a telling allusion to Croat and Slovene market dominance—Milosevic declared to thunderous applause: “If we must fight, then my God we will fight. And I hope they will not be so crazy as to fight against us. Because if we don’t know how to work well or to do business, at least we know how to fight well!”20

  The situation in the former Yugoslavia is enormously complicated, and I am certainly not offering an “explanation” for the tremendous ethnic hatred or atrocities that unfolded there in the 1990s. Indeed, this is probably a good place to reiterate what I am not arguing in this book. I am distinctly not arguing that market-dominant minorities are the source of all ethnic conflict or that market-dominant minorities are the only targets of ethnic persecution. On the contrary, in the former Yugoslavia for example, Serbs were also ethnically cleansed from the Krajina region of Croatia, while huge numbers of Albanians were exterminated en masse; neither group was a market-dominant minority.

  Rather, the point is that in virtually every region of the world, against completely different historical backgrounds, the simultaneous pursuit of markets and democracy in the face of a resented market-dominant minority repeatedly produces the same destructive, often deadly dynamic. Sudden, unmediated democratization in Yugoslavia—as in Rwanda—released long suppressed ethnic hatreds and facilitated the rise of megalomaniac ethnic demagogues as well as ferocious ethnonationalist movements rooted in tremendous feelings of anger, envy, and humiliation. As in so many economically distressed countries (post-Communist Yugoslavia was mired in foreign debt) with a market-dominant minority, simultaneous economic and political liberalization directly pitted a poorer but much more populous and militarily powerful group claiming to be the “rightful owners” of the country against a hated, wealthier, “outsider” minority. In the former Yugoslavia, the result of market liberalization and democratic elections was not prosperity and political freedom, but rather economic devastation, hatemongering, populist manipulation, and civilian-conducted mass murder.

  CHAPTER 8

  Mixing Blood

  Assimilation, Globalization, and the Case of Thailand

  The destructive ethnic dynamics described in the previous three chapters, while strikingly recurrent across different regions and countries, are not intended to be universal laws of nature. To begin with, there are some developing countries that do not have market-dominant minorities; I will discuss these countries briefly below. In addition, as people often say to me, even in countries with a market-dominant minority, surely there must be exceptions to the rule. Thailand is often pointed to as such an exception—a poor country with a market-dominant minority where the pursuit of free market democracy arguably has not generated ethnic resentment or any of the kinds of backlashes I’ve described. I will examine the ethnic “success story” of Thailand more closely below.

  Developing Countries

  without Market-Dominant Minorities

  Not all developing countries have market-dominant minorities. China is an important case in point. Although the market reforms of the last decade have dramatically benefited China’s coastal provinces (for example, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Fujian) over inland provinces, and urban areas over rural areas, China does not have any economically powerful ethnic minorities. On the contrary, the Han Chinese in China, comprising 95 percent of the population, have represented an economically and politically dominant majority vis-à-vis ethnic minorities like the Tibetans, Uighurs, and Miao for three millennia.1 Needless to say, China has plenty of other problems: endemic corruption, immense wealth inequalities, and so on. It just happens not to have the problem of a market-dominant minority.

  With China’s astounding growth rates over the last decades, many have suggested that China will soon join the ranks of the “Asian Tigers”—Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore—none of which is considered “developing” anymore. Along these lines it is striking to note that none of the Asian Tigers has ever had a market-dominant minority. In all the Asian Tigers, the ethnic majority—the Japanese in Japan, the Koreans in South Korea, and the Chinese in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore—is both economically and politically dominant.r />
  Indeed, in Japan and Korea, ethnic minorities are not merely economically disadvantaged but practically nonexistent. (It was only in 1997 that the Japanese formally acknowledged the existence of an indigenous ethnic minority, the Ainu.) In Hong Kong the English and Chinese are both relatively prosperous, but the latter, at 99 percent of the population, are today by far the economically dominant group. In Taiwan, Han Chinese, including both the Taiwanese Chinese and the mainland Chinese (descendants of the group of Chinese that arrived in Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek in 1949), constitute roughly 99 percent of the population, with non-Han aborigines composing the other 1 percent. Even if the Taiwanese (roughly 85 percent of the population) and the mainlanders (14 percent) were viewed as distinct ethnic groups, the mainlander “minority” is not market-dominant. In Singapore, the Chinese constitute roughly 77 percent of the population and are an economically, politically, and culturally dominant majority vis-à-vis the country’s Indian and Malay minorities. Among other factors, the lack of a market-dominant minority in all these Tigers probably helps explain their economic success relative to the far poorer and less stable neighboring Southeast Asian countries of Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.2

  Nor are market-dominant minorities present today in most Eastern European countries; the terrible exception of the former Yugoslavia has already been discussed. While virtually all countries in Africa are marked by severe ethnic divisions, a few (for example, Botswana or Sudan) do not appear to have market-dominant minorities. The countries of the Middle East will be discussed in Part Three.

  Thailand: An Exceptional Case?

  A few years ago a graduate student named Kanchana came to my office to see if I would be willing to supervise a paper she wanted to write on legal protections for cultural artifacts taken from Thailand, her native country. After an interesting discussion about possible approaches to her paper, I asked Kanchana a question that, in retrospect, would probably be grounds for a lawsuit under today’s standards of political correctness—I asked whether she was an ethnic Chinese.