The Black Box

[Alex G]

"...I do recall about a million people were killed in a civil war in Rwanda a few years back, and I never heard word one of concern about it from most folks (and still don't). That conflict was started by a military dictatorship. I never once heard a suggestion that the US military go in and protect millions of people from a brutalizing situation begun by military dictators."
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begun by military dictators???

the root cause can be traced back to the Belgians, who became the "proprietors" of Rwanda after they "inherited" it post World War I

In the 1920s, the Belgians began to alter the Rwandan state in the name of "administative efficiency"

During their colonial tenure, the Germans and Belgians ruled Rwanda indirectly through Tutsi monarchs and their chiefs. The colonialists developed the so-called Hamitic hypothesis or myth, which held that the Tutsi and everything humanly superior in Central Africa came from ancient Egypt or Abyssinia. The Europeans regarded Hutu and Twa as inferior to Tutsi. Sixty years of such prejudicial fabrications inflated Tutsi egos inordinately and crushed Hutu feelings, which coalesced into an aggressively resentful inferiority complex.

...the Belgians decreed that Tutsi alone should be officials. They systematically removed Hutu from positions of power and they excluded them from higher education, which was meant mostly as preparation for careers in the administration. Thus they imposed a Tutsi monopoly of public life not just for the 1920s and 1930s, but for the next generation as well. The only Hutu to escape relegation to the laboring masses were those few permitted to study in religious seminaries.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the Belgians made it far harder for the weak to escape repressive officials; not only did they eliminate the multiple hierarchies but they also restricted changes in residence from one region to another and they prohibited new settlement in the forests. The one avenue of escape still possible was migration abroad and thousands took that route beginning in the 1920s. But those who preferred not to leave Rwanda had little choice but to submit to increased exploitation of officials now freed from the constraints that once limited their demands.

European administrators generally overlooked the abuses of those officials who got the taxes collected, the roads built, and the coffee planted. They established European-style courts which they expected would protect the ordinary people, but they usually did not. The judges saw themselves as defenders of the elite, not the masses.

During 1933-34, the Belgians conducted a census and introduced an identity card system that indicated the Tutsi, Hutu, or Twa “ethnicity” of each person. The identity card “ethnicity” of future generations was determined patrilineally; all persons were designated as having the “ethnicity” of their fathers, regardless of the “ethnicity” of their mothers. This practice, which was carried on until its abolition by the 1994 post-genocide government, had the unfortunate consequence of firmly attaching a sub-national identity to all Rwandans and thereby rigidly dividing them into categories, which, for many people, carried a negative history of dominance-subordination, superiority-inferiority, and exploitation-suffering.

The Hutu Revolution --

Belgium continued its support for the Tutsi until the 1950s. Then, faced with the end of colonial rule and with pressure from the United Nations, which supervised the administration of Rwanda under the trusteeship system, the colonial administrators began to increase possibilities for Hutu to participate in public life. They named several Hutu to responsible positions in the administration, they began to admit more Hutu into secondary schools, and they conducted limited elections for advisory government councils. Hardly revolutionary, the changes were enough to frighten the Tutsi, yet not enough to satisfy the Hutu. With independence approaching, conservative Tutsi hoped to oust the Belgians before majority rule was installed. Radical Hutu, on the contrary, hoped to gain control of the political system before the colonialists withdrew.


The Boiling Point --

The warning that was ignored by the UN Jan 11, 1994

It was sent to U.N. headquarters in New York by Major General Roméo Dallaire, U.N. force commander in Rwanda. Dallaire urgently requested protection for an informant who outlined to him Hutu plans being made to exterminate Tutsis; to provoke and kill Belgian troops so as to guarantee Belgium's withdraw from Rwanda; and the location of interahamwe arm caches. Everything Dallaire's informant told him came true three months later.

General Dallaire received a reply the same day. It came from the desk of Kofi Annan, then head of U.N. peacekeeping. Dallaire was told the U.N. didn't agree with his plan to raid the arm caches and furthermore, he must inform the president of Rwanda what he had learned from the informant, even though it was the president's own inner circle that was planning the slaughter of Tutsis.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/evil/warning/

Chronology of UN/US actions
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/evil/etc/slaughter.html