Because the law IS ambiguous

Last Friday, Rwandan President Paul Kagame told international media and diplomats to stop criticising the genocide ideology law. A summary of the speech is here.

In typical dictatorial style, Kagame was all bravado and no substance. The reason international observers, and some Rwandans, including opposition politicians from the Green Party and the UDF, criticise the law precisely because it is ambiguous. Article 19, in an excellent Comment writes, "that the Genocide Ideology Law is counterproductive to its apparent objectives (2009: 3).

Indeed, the objective of the law is to eliminate the genocide ideology from the hearts and minds of Rwandans. First, as the Article 19 Comment notes, the law is poorly defined: what is genocide ideology anyway? The government has never answered this question to the satisfation of international observers, despite publishing a Senate Report on the eradication of genocide ideology in Rwandan society in 2008. (This Report appears not to be available online. I have an electronic copy which I can share). Broadly stated, genocide ideology equates with ethnic enmity, meaning the hatred that Hutu have for Tutsi which caused them to kill in the first place. This simplistic interpretation of the root causes of the genocide ignores the prevailing academic research which finds that “Rwandans’ motivations [for killing] were considerably more ordinary and routine than the extraordinary crimes they helped commit” (Straus, 2006: 96). Among ordinary Hutu, participation was driven by intra-ethnic pressure from other Hutu, usually more socially powerful Hutu, security fears in the context of civil war and genocide as well as opportunity for looting and score settling. Ethnic enmity was not the main factor that pushed ordinary Hutu to kill their neighbours. It was the state-sanctioned order to kill combined with the context of fear and insecurity that made killing an option.

Yet, the genocide ideology law, and the sentiments behind it remains a fact of life in contemporary Rwanda. As a senior RPF official told me during my re-education in 2006, "“we [senior RPF members] would rather be conscious of our enemy [read Hutu] than naively pretend, like you whites, to think we have no enemy out there planning to exterminate us but instead to hopelessly fantasise about a utopian Rwanda”.

This sentiment, which I believe is widely held among Rwanda's current political and economic elite, is what drives Kagame's angry reaction to international critics. He sincerely believes that the RPF is dealing with an internal enemy. It is this belief that makes peace and reconciliation so elusive in Rwanda and the Great Lakes Region