ABSTRACT
This paper tries to read together three texts that refer to the Rwandan genocide and to draw attention to certain paradoxes that emerge from the way in which the texts might be said to talk to and past each other. The overall intention is to throw light on the complications in witnessing such an event, and to themes of justice and politics that arise.
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Notes
P. Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow we will be Killed with Our Families (London: Picador, 1998), 12.
Ibid.
Including the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the George K. Polk Award for Foreign Reporting and the Guardian First Book Award.
These brief quotations are all taken directly from review comments contained on the book-jacket and in the inside-cover; 2000 edition, London: Picador.
A. Lasker-Walfisch, Inherit the Truth 1939–1945: The Documented Experiences of a Survivor of Auschwitz and Belsen (London: Giles de la Mare Publishers, 1996), 124–127.
This point is discussed at length by Seamus Heaney in The Government of the Tongue (London: Faber and Faber, 1989).
Gourevitch, supra n. 1, at 19.
Gourevitch, supra n. 1, at 19.
Gourevitch, supra n. 1, at 6. Gourevitch returns to this ‘utopian’ aspect of genocide elsewhere throughout the book.
S. Felman and D. Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Ibid., at 48.
M. Mutua, ‘Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights’, Harvard International Law Journal 42 (Winter 2001), 201.
Following this idea a little further, the much touted ‘corruption’ of African leaders, which is generally employed as a rhetorical balancing tool when the issue of the disparity of North/South economic power relations and resultant exploitation and lack of development of African states is raised as an issue, takes on the flavour of a metonymic signifier of the more generalised corruption of the broader culture. This in turn legitimises the structuring economic power relation, and naturalises the imbalance in a thinly veiled racialism.
Mutua, supra n. 12, at 10.
The standard work here is T. Packenham, The Scramble for Africa (London: Abacus, 1992).
Arguably this underplays the role played by simple greed and the profit motive in the colonisation of Africa. For an account which stresses this element see A. Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (London: Pan, 2006).
In her book, Reading Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Anne Orford does a great job of teasing through the arguments surrounding the justice of humanitarian intervention (in the main, military) in situations where the underlying dynamic is of economic structural relations that constitute large-scale continuing intervention that is rendered invisible by the assumed correctness of international economic relations.
Mutua’s argument is perhaps overly polemic on this precise point, but interesting nonetheless.
For an entry point to this debate in relation to Rwanda, see S. Strauss, ‘How Many Perpetrators were there in the Rwandan Genocide? An Estimate’, Journal of Genocide Research 6/1 (March 2004), 85–99.
Excluding, as he put it ‘the somewhat conventional horror of eyewitness accounts’.
G. Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis (London: Hurst and Company, 1997), 357.
Practically all monographic accounts of the Rwandan Genocide or of elements within it, aside from eyewitness testimonies, find it necessary to supply a version of the longer term structural imbalances and tensions in Rwandan society, which were certainly contributing factors to the events of 1994. See, for example: Prunier, ibid.; B. Jones, Peacemaking in Rwanda; The Dynamics of Failure (Colorado: Reinner Publishers, 2001); L. Kirschke, Broadcasting Genocide; Censorship, Propaganda and State-sponsored Violence in Rwanda 1990–1994 (London: Article XIX, 1996); C. Taylor, Sacrifice as Terror; the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, (Oxford: Berg, 2001).
M. Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Mamdani, ibid.; preface xiv.
A modified contemporary version of this hokum, entitled ‘Negro Slavery and the Myth of Ham’s Curse’ can be read at http://www.geocities.com/athens/oracle/5862/slavery.html.
Mamdani, ibid., at 82.
Mamdani’s discussion on this point is also a useful reminder that the racial theories which underpinned Nazi ideology were pan-European in origin and pervasive in European social relations to other peoples in the period.
Mamdani, ibid., at 11.
Mamdani, ibid., at 12.
No mention, for example, in W. Schabas, Genocide in International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). The point should also be made that in the wake of the genocide in Rwanda and the international legal cognisance given to that genocide through the ICTR, there has been a considerable pattern of, to coin a phrase, genocide inflation. This is evident in particular in the pages of The Journal of Genocide Research, which in practically each issue contains an article proposing another historical case of mass murder as an instance of genocide. This is no criticism of the journal, simply an observation on the auto-generative capacities of a field of interpretation and on the sometimes troublesome interface between legal conceptual language and general social language.
Hochschild, ibid.
Hochschild, ibid.
Mamdani, ibid., at 13.
Mamdani, ibid., at 13, citing F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 1967), 33.
Mamdani, ibid., at 14.
The notion of ‘top-down’ organisation of the genocide relies heavily on the implication of media figures in the dissemination of instructions regarding the imperative to murder Tutsis.
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School of Law and Associate Researcher Transitional Justice Institute, University of Ulster. I would like to thank, for supporting the research leading to this paper, the Law School Research Strategy Fund, and the Transitional Justice Institute. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article for their constructive comments.
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McNamee, E. Writing the Rwandan Genocide: The Justice and Politics of Witnessing after the Event. Law Critique 18, 309–330 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-007-9015-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-007-9015-5