Causes of Civil War in Rwanda: the Weight of History and Socio-Cultural Structures

Abstract

Questions at issue Can the slaughter of perhaps as many as a million people in three months of the 1994 Rwandese civil war be given an understandable explanation? How could this disaster take place in a community comprised of two groups that speak the same language, share the same religion , belong to the same clans and inhabit the same hills? These two questions can be merged and transformed into one main issue that is dealt with in this chapter: Why did the Bahutu and the Batutsi in Rwanda organize themselves to kill each other-what was the civil war in Rwanda really about? 1 The issue has preoccupied my mind since the outbreak of full-scale civil war in 1994. It is my conviction that the cruelty of such conflicts as the one in Rwanda disgrace the dignity of the human kind and should be avoided in the future. But in order to achieve that ambition, we ought to know why they do occur. My approach is from a sociological and peace research perspective. My point of departure for this discussion is that armed conflicts are only transformations, manifestations of socio-structural conflicts. Thus, in order to understand the social forces underlying the civil war in Rwanda and try to identify possible, sustainable solutions, we have to uncover the socio-structural conflict underlying the armed conflict. The causes of conflicts do not explain conflict behaviour, and war is a conflict behaviour. Our focus here is the causes of the conflict, or, to use the terminology of peace research, the 'conflict object(s)'. Conflict objects as well as conflict behaviour have histories, and these histories should not be conflated. We are not trying to explain the causes of the genocide. The issue of genocide as a conflict behaviour incarnates socio-psychological, socio-political and legal implications that are 68 E. Braathen et al. (eds.), Ethnicity Kills?