Ordinariness and Orders: Explaining Popular Participation in the Rwandan Genocide

Abstract

The most troubling and perplexing aspect of the Rwandan Genocide is why so many joined the killings so quickly. This participation seems even less comprehensible given the violence’s terrifying intimacy: ordinary killers often turned on their Tutsi neighbors and family members, using machetes and other everyday tools. Searching for answers, journalists and even some scholars have clutched at comforting metaphors and mono-causal explanations: a ‘‘blood orgy,’’ tribalism, ethnic hatred, hate radio, a ‘‘culture of obedience,’’ structural violence, and ‘‘conspiracy to murder.’’ With bracing clarity and scrupulous fairness, Scott Straus painstakingly demolishes these simplistic notions and sets a new standard for empirical research on mass violence in The Order of Genocide. Using data from interviews with 210 convicted, confessed perpetrators and with a range of actors in five communities, Straus constructs a sophisticated explanation of how genocidal violence happened at the local level. First, he finds that most perpetrators in rural Rwanda were ordinary farmers (though rural elites and young thugs played a crucial role in driving the violence). Second, most of those ordinary perpetrators committed genocide for fairly banal reasons: ‘‘the Rwandans’ motivations were considerably more ordinary and routine than the extraordinary crimes they helped commit’’ (96). Third, he calculates that between 175,000 and 210,000 civilians participated in genocidal violence—an enormous number, to be sure, but far fewer than the half-million who now stand accused in Rwanda’s community courts (gacaca). Finally, he identifies three key factors behind the widespread participation: (1) anger, fear, and uncertainty caused by the renewed civil war; (2) opportunism linked to local power struggles; and (3) social pressure and coercion derived from intra-group dynamics, state authority, communal labor obligations, and social surveillance. The latter point is perhaps Straus’s most controversial finding. Challenging popular conceptions of the Rwandan Genocide, he writes that ‘‘intra-ethnic coercion and pressure [among Hutu] appear to have been greater determinants of genocidal participation than interethnic enmity [between Hutu and Tutsi]’’ (148). This explanation is consistent with many of the testimonies I have heard in gacaca trials, but more systematic analyses of those testimonies and more micro-level studies are needed. A constant refrain that Straus hears from confessed perpetrators is that they were following orders and that disobedience would have led to punishment or even death. This sounds like egregious self-absolution from admitted killers, but Straus makes us take it—and them—seriously. Nonetheless, it would have been helpful to parse perpetrators’ motivations more closely to distinguish better among group conformity