Does the continuation of acts of genocide mean that we are doomed to repeat history?
In the coming months Belgium will put two Rwandan half-brothers on trial for their role in the 1994 genocide. Etienne Nzabonimana and Samuel Ndashyikirwa are accused of aiding a machete-punctuated massacre of 50,000 people by militia, who they then rewarded with beer. This is the latest in a spate of cases aimed at bringing to justice those deemed responsible for the deaths of 800,000 Tutsis in less than 100 days by the ethnic Hutus.
In the most appalling bloodbath of recent times, many Hutus brutally killed and mutilated their own friends and neighbours because they were Tutsis. ABBC documentary last year focused on the village of Nyarubuye where, ten years before, Gitera Rwamuhuzi and his colleagues took part in a characteristic killing spree in their local church, amputating and maiming people they had spent their whole lives with. All over the country, ‘ordinary’ men became butchers of women and children.
How do we explain such atrocities? Rwamuhuzi prefers to focus on the supernatural. “We were not ourselves. Beginning with me, I don’t think I was normal. You wouldn’t be normal if you start butchering people for no reason. We had been attacked by the devil.” This is the explanation we would all like to believe. That millions of people turned evil, led by a malevolent force. We feel that by understanding what makes someone turn into a killer we are justifying it, humanising it.
Yet the fact that genocide has been relatively widespread throughout human history seems to suggest that there is something inherently human about it. To use Hannah Arendt’s phrase, it is not to dismiss evil, it is to affirm that there is a ‘banality’ to it. Their behaviour was rooted in normality, an aspect of which is every man and woman’s inherent prejudice.
In the case of Rwanda, the Tutsis and the Hutus share the same language and traditions • there was no innate hatred between the two. However when the Belgians arrived in Rwanda in 1916, prejudice was nurtured. They did their best to make the races as different as possible, introducing identity cards, and labelling the Tutsis the ‘superior’ race • in a typical tactic of ‘divide and conquer’.
There is obviously a big leap from prejudice to genocide, but if prejudice becomes strong, anything can follow. Christopher Browning’s famous example of this is the 500 members of the German Military Police, who were asked to destroy a village in Poland. Even though no reprisals would follow if they refused, only 12 men did, leaving 488 to slaughter hundreds of innocent women and children in cold blood. Prejudices are dangerous things. Yet everyone, whatever creed or colour, has them.
One may well argue that prejudices are a thing of the past, when people did not know any different. But it is certain some people are racist still. In general, we have learned the lessons of history. It is unquestionably true that explicit prejudice is dying away. However studies have shown that implicit prejudice is still observable in our behaviour.
In 1987, the BBC carried out a documentary called Black and White, in which a black man and a white man were secretly filmed going in search of the same accommodation, jobs, and entertainment. On many occasions the black man was rejected while the white man was accepted. There is no conscious display of racism, but it is obviously there. Once this prejudice becomes socially acceptable however, it becomes more active.
A survey by the Islamic Human Rights commission showed whereas in 1999 only 35 per cent of respondents had suffered discrimination, since September 11th this figure had risen to 80 per cent. Arzu Merali, the co-author, said this was due to discrimination against Muslims being ‘normalised’. If we start to feel that we are justified in treating those different to ourselves in a different way, then we will do so without feeling immoral.
Prejudice is there in everyone, it is just society that holds us back, even from admitting it to ourselves. Why is this that we are all inherently prejudiced? A famous experiment in 1961 examined group conformity. Twenty-two boys attended a summer camp in which they were assigned a team, and these teams had to compete against each other. Very soon fights broke out and the boys reverted to stereotyping the other team and showed clear antagonism towards them.
By nature, our way of preventing the world from being meaningless chaos is to classify things and people into groups. We use social categories to discriminate between those who belong to our group and those who do not. However the more psychologically salient those categories are, the more discrimination there will be.
When the Belgians gave Tutsis a superior position under the colonial regime, the differences between them and the Hutus immediately became very important, leading to prejudice and animosity. Animosity led to genocide. The possibility of society changing means that there is always a danger of such prejudices coming to the surface.
What can be done about this? The reason why obvious racism and racist attacks are dropping is because they have become socially unacceptable, and the continuation of this process must be our goal. Unless we succeed, genocide will occur in the future and will be supported and carried out by normal people such as those in Rwanda. There is no getting away from this, for in the Darfur region of Sudan we are still seeing the terrifying possibilities of the human condition.
19th May 2005