Land and genocide: exploring the connections with Rwanda's prisoners and prison officials

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements The research upon which this article is based was begun in 1995 under the auspices of a USAID project and was continued in greater depth during three trips to Rwanda in 2002, 2003, and 2004 with the support of a 12-month, post-doctoral research grant from the United States Institute of Peace, Washington, DC. I would like to thank Rwanda's Minister of Internal Security and the Director of Prisons for granting me access to four prisons in Rwanda and for facilitating my interviews in these prisons. I would also like to thank Alison des Forges for her general insights and two anonymous reviewers for their specific comments. Notes 1. See, for example, Dobkowski and Wallimann (1998) Dobkowski, M. N. and Wallimann, I. 1998. The Coming Age of Scarcity: Preventing Mass Death and Genocide in the Twenty-first Century, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. [Google Scholar]; Homer-Dixon (1994) Homer-Dixon, T. F. 1994. 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Of note, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Sudan have dysfunctional land tenure systems and have experienced recent genocidal events associated with land-grabbing; however, it remains unclear if and how land and genocide are connected in these countries. 13. See, for example, Prunier (1995) Prunier, G. 1995. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar] regarding Rwanda. 14. An exotic example of how stressful land relations might be associated with genocide is found in Rappaport's (1967 Rappaport, R. A. 1967. Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People, New Haven: Yale University Press. [Google Scholar]) work in New Guinea. Rappaport described how one group sometimes eliminated a rival group—either by killing off its members or by driving them from a shared territory—when it believed that cultivated land was stressed and thus valued cultural activities were threatened (i.e. the exchange of pigs). (Anthropologist James Riddell pointed out this New Guinea example in a personal communication.) 15. See, for example, African Rights (1994 African Rights. 1994. Rwanda: Death, Despair and defiance, London: African Rights. [Google Scholar], p 24), Des Forges (1999 Des Forges, A. L. 1999. “Leave None to Tell the Story”: Genocide in Rwanda, New York: Human Rights Watch. [Google Scholar], p 561), and Musahara and Huggins (2005 Musahara, H. and Huggins, C. 2005. “Land reform, land scarcity and post-conflict reconstruction: a case study of Rwanda”. In From the Ground Up: Land Rights, Conflict and Peace in Sub-Saharan Africa, Edited by: Huggins, C. and Clover, J. 269–346. Nairobi: African Centre for Technology Studies and Pretoria: African Security Analysis Programme of the Institute for Security Studies. joint project of the African Centre for Technology Studies and the African Security Analysis Programme of the Institute for Security Studies [Google Scholar], p 276). According to Prunier (1995 Prunier, G. 1995. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar], p 301), after the RPF won the war, many returning refugees did in fact evict landowners. 16. See, for example, Des Forges (1999 Des Forges, A. L. 1999. “Leave None to Tell the Story”: Genocide in Rwanda, New York: Human Rights Watch. [Google Scholar], pp 11, 237), Mamdani (2001 Mamdani, M. 2001. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], pp 201, 220), Musahara and Huggins (2005 Musahara, H. and Huggins, C. 2005. “Land reform, land scarcity and post-conflict reconstruction: a case study of Rwanda”. In From the Ground Up: Land Rights, Conflict and Peace in Sub-Saharan Africa, Edited by: Huggins, C. and Clover, J. 269–346. Nairobi: African Centre for Technology Studies and Pretoria: African Security Analysis Programme of the Institute for Security Studies. joint project of the African Centre for Technology Studies and the African Security Analysis Programme of the Institute for Security Studies [Google Scholar], p 276), and Prunier (1995 Prunier, G. 1995. The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar], p 257). 17. The author suspects that some prisoners admitted to “justifiable” killings because they wanted to receive assistance with their legal problems or because they wanted to be released from prison through the gacaca process: the prisoners knew that they needed to “come clean,” although they needed to do so in a manner that minimized and somewhat sanitized their role in the genocide. 18. Human Rights Watch (1996) Human Rights Watch. 1996. Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence during the Rwandan Genocide and its Aftermath, New York: Human Rights Watch/Africa, Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Project, Fédération Internationale des Ligues des Droits de l'Homme. [Google Scholar] makes an interesting argument that the complex dynamic between genocide and conditions of land scarcity in post-war Rwanda has led some Tutsi returnees to take over the land of genocide survivors (presumably both Hutus and Tutsis) because they need land and because they suspect that anyone who survived the genocide must somehow be complicit in the genocide.