Getting Rwanda Wrong

Some wars are about environmental scarcity.  And some are just wars.

On first impression, the genocide in Rwanda presented a perfect illustration of the violent consequences of environmental stress.   Rwanda had too many people relying for their existence on too little land.  Deforestation, erosion and overcultivation had caused an agricultural crisis in a country almost completely reliant on agriculture.  Food and water shortages, and the attendant migration, strained social relations between groups.  For analysts perceiving African societies as anarchic worlds, it seemed inevitable that simmering tribal hostilities – in this case between the Hutu and the Tutsi – would erupt.

The interpretation fitted the tenor of the times.  The genocide occurred just two months after the appearance of Robert Kaplan’s influential Atlantic Monthly article, “The Coming Anarch.”  The article attributed the violence in Liberia, Senegal, and other West African states to environmental degradation and population growth, and predicted the spread of violence across Africa into other developing countries.  It gained the attention of the top levels of the U.S. administration and infiltrated received wisdom on the causes of conflict in the developing world.  Both U.S. President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore read and cited Kaplan’s apocalyptic tale.

Kaplan himself made the connection for Rwanda.  “The Rwandan civil war is military, political and personal in its execution; but these activities are playing out in a particular context: a merciless struggle for land in a peasant society whose birthrates have put an unsustainable pressure on it.”  International policy makers, their attention focused on the approaching United Nations’ Cairo Conference on Population and Development, picked up the theme.  Time magazine called Rwanda “a crucible full of explosives that nations watching from a comfortable distance have no idea how to hand.  War itself is redefined…. When the environment – soil, water, scarce natural resources – become the spoils that cause neighbours to kill neighbours.”

This commentary is too simplistic, interpreting African conflicts as tribal reactions to environmental scarcities.  African societies such as Rwanda, are as complex and nuanced as Western Societies.  To understand conflicts like the Rwandan genocide, we must examine all the issues motivating the conflict’s actors.  In the case of Rwanda, environmental degradation and population pressures, though they were critical development issues, had only a limited, aggravating role in the violence.  It was the insecurity of Rwanda’s Hutu elite, its fear of losing its grip on power, that caused it to target and slaughter its enemies.

The recent violence in Rwanda had its origins in the October 1990 attack by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) from its bases in Uganda.  Predominantly of Tutsi origin, many of the members of the RPF were refugees, or descendants of refugees, who fled Rwanda during the postcolonial establishment of a Hutu-dominated government in the early 1960’s.

The attack was timed to exploit increasing domestic opposition to the Hutu regime of President Juvénal Habyarimana.  A “structural adjustment policy”, forced upon the country by international lenders, was causing economic hardship.  Pressure for democratization, in what was still a one-party state ruled by a military regime, was growing.  Soon after the civil war began, drought struck, further adding to the stresses on the Habyarimana regime.

By 1992, the RPF controlled a significant portion of northern Rwanda.  With pressure on his regime increasing, Habyarimana agreed in April, 1992, to begin talks with the RPF, and to introduce a multiparty system and a coalition government.   But he immediately began to undermine both the democratization and peace process by conspiring with the two political parties that he controlled, forming militias known as the Interahamwe (those who attack together) and the Impuzamugambi (those who have the same goal).  The two groups received weapons from the army and killed hundreds of civilians, most of them Tutsi, suspected of antigovernment activities.

On July 31, 1992, a precarious cease-fire took effect in the war, and negotiations between the RPF and the government began in earnest in Arusha, Tanzania.  Talks concluded in August 1993, with the Arusha Accords, an agreement to form a broad-based transitional government.  Habyarimana would remain president during the transition period, but specified ministerial positions would go to members of the RPF and other opposition political parties.  Elections were scheduled to take place twenty-two months thence, and the RPF and the Rwandan army were to be combined to form a smaller, united national army.

On April 6, 1994, Habyarimana’s plane exploded in the skies above the capital city of Kigali.  Although those responsible for Habyarimana’s death have never been identified, Belgian peacekeapers reported seeing two rockers fired towards his plane from the vicinity of a camp belonging to the Rwandan Presidential Guard and army commandos.  (Many members of the Habyarimana regime had been unhappy with the Arusha Accords because they gave the RPF too much power.)  The Presidential Guard, the army, the Interahamwe, and the Impuzamugambi used the death of Habyarimana as an excuse to launch a long-planned and systematic extermination of Tutsi and of regime opponents.  They killed about 1-million of the country’s 7.5 million people.

The RPF responded with an offensive from the north; by July it had taken control of most of the country and established an interim government.  Members of the former Habyarimana government, the army, and the militias fled to Zaire and Tanzania where they joined more that 2-million other refugees, mostly Hutu fearing reprisals. 

The camps have degenerated in turn.  The Hutu militias are firmly in control.  Food from relief agencies has been stolen and sold to buy weapons.  Those who have expressed a desire to return to Rwanda have been threatened, or killed.  The Tutsi-dominated interim government in Rwanda, with the support of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, has called for the closing of the camps, hoping to rout out the militias and put an end to the conflict.  But given that the militias continue to stockpile weapons and carry out military – training exercises in the camps, an escalation of the violence, and even a military offensive by Hutu forces, is more likely.

Sorting out just what role environmental pressures played in this tragedy seems, on the face of it, easy enough.  Environmental scarcity – the scarcity of renewable resources like agricultural land, forests, water and fish is caused by resource degradation, population growth and inequitable resource distribution.  Scarcity, in turn, produces four principal social effects: decreased agricultural potential; regional economic decline; population displacement; and the disruption of legitimized and authoritative institutions and social relations.  These social effects can produce and exacerbate conflict between groups.  When clear social cleavages, such as ethnicity or religion, are also at plat the probability of civil violence is even higher.

Rwanda certainly had the historical ethnic divisions necessary to mobilize grievances.  The distinction between Hutu and Tutsi developed more on socioeconomic standing than on biological or cultural differences.  ( A variety of criteria determined ethnic affiliation, but perhaps the greatest was the possession of cattle were Tutsi, and those who had cattle were Tutsi, and those who did not were Hutu.)  Being Tutsi increasingly meant having wealth and power, while being Hutu became synonymous with subordination.  Political consciousness and discontent developed among the Hutu, producing the Hutu uprisings of 1959 and eventually Rwandan independence from colonial rule in July 1962.

The perception within Rwanda that independence was an ethnic struggle between Hut and Tutsi, - a “Hutu revolution” – set the tone of politics up to the present.  Independence was followed by heightened ethnic violence.  Tutsi refugees fled to Uganda, Tanzania, Zaire and Burundi.  Rwanda’s now Hutu-dominated government continued to sharpen ethnic divisions by issuing identity cards and by limiting employment and education opportunities for Tutsi.

By the late 1980’s, Rwanda also had an environmental crisis under way.  The country had not been, historically, an environmental disaster zone.  It has a moderate climate, with temperature varying according to altitude, and its central area is its bread-basket, having been settled and cultivated for centuries.  It is an overwhelmingly agricultural society.    Before the recent violence, ninety-five per cent of Rwandans lived in the countryside and ninety per cent of the labour force relied on agriculture as its primary means of livelihood.

Even so, Rwanda was densely populated.  In 1992, its population density of roughly 290 inhabitants per square kilometre was among the highest in Africa.  The population’s rapid growth exceeded the productivity growth of the country’s renewable resources.  Soil fertility fell sharply, mainly because of overcultivation.  Erosion, deforestation, and water scarcity became serious problems, compounded, especially in the southern regions of the country, by several droughts in the 1980’s and early 1990’s.

Environmental scarcities began to affect Rwandan society.  Agricultural production suffered.  In terms of per capita food production, Rwanda was transformed from one of sub-Saharan Africa’s top three performers in the early 1980’s to one of its worst in the late 1980’s.  Food shortages struck the southern and western parts of the country.  In 1989, 300,000 people, predominantly southerners, needed food aid due to crop failure.  (The regional nature of agricultural production is crucial to any analysis of environment-conflict links in Rwanda.  Farmers in the northwest were able to maintain higher productivity and to grow higher value produce, such as white potatoes.  They also received favourable development investment because the northwest was President Habyarimana’s home region.)

Internal migration increased.  But because the agricultural frontier was effectively closed, and urban areas had few opportunities for employment, most migrants settled on land of marginal agricultural potential – ecologically fragile upland and arid areas, hillsides, wetlands requiring drainage.

The state began to lose legitimacy.  The Habyarimana government had, in the past, managed to secure a great deal of international development assistance that had allowed it both to build a sophisticated infrastructure and to maintain its support among the people.  However, as noted, most of this assistance was channeled into the northwest, causing resentment in the rest of the country.  The 1989 famine, and the spectre of further food shortages in 1994, also undermined popular support for a government that had long congratulated itself on the country’s self-sufficiency in food.  Serious decreases in the price of coffee, which brought in ninety per cent of the country’s export earnings, and the structural adjustment policy implemented in 1990 exacerbated the country’s economic problem.  Dissatisfied with the government’s increasing inability to solve the crisis, opposition parties formed and organised peaceful protests.  Much of this opposition was based in the south and central parts of the country, the areas mot affected by environmental scarcity and least aided by government funding.

Environmental scarcity was unquestionably a factor in the conflict in Rwanda.  But it wasn’t necessarily the cause.  To determine that we must analyse all factors contributing to the conflict and the interaction of environmental scarcity with these factors.

Population pressures, decreased food production and the general lack of land and opportunity caused frustration.  There were reports on increase rivalry and conflict among neighbours over land.  Government propaganda attempted to capitalize on popular fear by stating that the Tutsi, in the form of the RPF, were coming to seize land.  This was significant threat in a land-scarce country.

But to establish the relationship between grievances like these and violence, three conditions must be met: first, deprivation must be increasing; second, deprivation must be increasing the level of grievance; and , third, the aggrieved must participate in the violence.  The first two conditions held in Rwanda, but the third did not.  The southwest experienced the greatest hardship.  The political opposition was based in the south.  However, the area remained relatively quiet for the first few weeks after the death of Habyarimana.   Only when the militias moved in and began their systematic killing of Tutsi and opposition leaders did violence overtake the south.  There is no conclusive evidence that large numbers of Rwandans – especially those experiencing the severest effects of environmental scarcity – participated in the killings.  And for those who did, there is substantial anecdotal evidence that they were coerced by militias and local authorities.

Nor is it clear that there are strong links between environmental scarcity, the decline of the Habyarimana regime’s legitimacy, and the outbreak of conflict.  Rwanda as certainly undergoing a difficult transition from authoritarian rule of democracy.  And at a critical moment, when the previous regime had lost all legitimacy yet the democratic institutions of the new regime had not fully developed , a coup d’etat occurred.

The connection between those developments, however, and environmental scarcity seems tenuous.  The regime’s agreement to undertake a transition to democracy was mainly a reaction, not to domestic opposition, but to the RPF invasion and civil war.  Although internal pressures for democratization, caused in part by environmental scarcity, were important, the regime appeared largely able to maintain control of the state apparatus when faced with domestic appeals for democratization.  It was the Arusha Accords that threatened members of the Habyarimana regime, in particular the army and militias, who would had had to share power and wealth with the RPF.

Nor does the role played by environmental scarcity in the manipulation of Rwanda’s ethnic cleavage seem to have been critical to the outbreak of violence.  Rwandan ethnic relations had long been used for political advantage, and the scarcity of environmental resources, combined with other factors, created in a context within which ethnic affiliations mattered.  Since all land was state owned, and distributed to the people by the government, the Hutu controlled the country’s most important environmental resource and could use ethnicity as the key to access.

Environmental scarcity, however, did not increase the salience of ethnicity among the majority of Rwanda’s population, or even among those who were most severely affected by the scarcity.  Instead, ethnicity was important among members of the elite because the predominantly – Tutsi RPF threatened the regime’s hold on power.   Moreover, ethnic divisions were not the only cleavages in Rwandan society: regional cleavages were important, especially under President Habyarimana’s rule.  Being a Hutu was not enough.  One had to be a Hutu from the president’s northwestern region or share the sentiments of Hutu extremism, which explains the large number of moderate Hutu targeted by the militias.

The most plausible explanation of the Rwandan conflict focuses on elite or regime insecurity.  In Rwanda, civil war and the Arusha Accords generated the bulk of this insecurity.  The role of environmental scarcity was limited, as there were other significant factors at work.  The civil war, the structural adjustment policy, the fall in coffee prices, and Rwanda’s position as a land locked country with little chance for economic diversification increased grievances, while weakening regime legitimacy and threatening its hold on power.  Rising external and internal demands for democratization compounded elite insecurity by eroding its control of such institutions as the army, the police, and the bureaucracy.

Although economic malaise, in part cause environmental scarcity, had hurt the majority of Rwandans, the effects on the elite and armed forces were indirect.  The Arusha Accords, however, providing as they did for a reduction in the size of the armed forces and for the integration of the RPF and the army into a new national force, were a direct threat.  The transitional government outlined in the Accords was to have included not only members of the RPF but also members of domestic opposition groups.   Those displaced by the Accords would have had few economic or political opportunities in either rural or urban areas.  Therefore, the power and priviledge of the regime and the army were threatened in a context of economic crisis and increased political competition.

The impeding implementation of the Arusha Accords – guaranteed by Habyarimana’s final trip to Arusha – signalled the death knell for the regime’s control of the state.  As he flew back, his plane was shot down, almost certainly by members of his own regime.  They seized control of the state and tried to gain the support of the population by targeting members of opposition parties and Tutsi as RPF sympathizers who had to be eliminated for national security.  But they underestimated the lack of popular support for their strategy and the military strength of the RPF, and were forced into the refugee camps.

The Rwanda case tells us important things about the complexity of links between environmental scarcity and conflict.  Scarcity did play a role in the recent violence in Rwanda, but that role was, in the end, surprisingly limited – and not what one would expect from a superficial analysis of the case.