Behind the genocide: the roots of Rwanda

Ten years have passed since the genocide in Rwanda,
causing many to reflect on what exactly happened. There has been some attention
focused on the colonial legacy of manipulating ethnic tensions in order to
divide and conquer the people of Rwanda
as well as some attention on the Clinton
administration’s role in the failure of the UN Security Council to enforce the
1948 Convention on Genocide. But the crucial catalyst of the genocide has been
missing from the corporate media discourse.

            How is it
possible that a society could be so destabilized that people who had
intermarried and lived in peace for years could suddenly divide along ethnic
lines and go on a genocidal rampage, shooting and literally hacking each other
to death with machetes?

            Back in the
late 1980’s, just as Starbucks was beginning to expand, the international
system of quotas for coffee production started to unravel. In 1989, the US
government negotiators torpedoed the International Coffee Agreement at the
behest of the large US-based coffee corporations. Negotiators left the meeting
in Florida without a plan and
within months, coffee farmers in Rwanda
were getting half of what they had previously received for their crop.

            Seventy
percent of rural households cultivated coffee in Rwanda,
and coffee exports constituted 80 per cent of Rwanda’s
foreign-exchange earnings. While coffee was retailing in US
supermarkets at 20 times the price paid to Rwandan farmers, the rural Rwandan
economy was in a tailspin.

            Between
1989 and 1993 the World Bank stepped in to “fix” the problem,
utilizing the usual neoliberal intervention recipe of
trade liberalization, privatization of state enterprise, shedding of the
government safety net, shrinking of government (pink-slipping government
workers), currency devaluation, and cessation of all agricultural subsidies.
The result was that the Rwandan currency lost half of its value immediately,
inflation skyrocketed, public services collapsed. Children in the rural areas
started to go hungry. With health workers fired, Rwanda
was immediately swept up in an outbreak of malaria.

            The World
Bank froze coffee prices at the low 1989 price, and Rwandan farmers responded
by uprooting hundreds of thousands of coffee trees. When the usual World Bank
structural adjustment cocktail failed to turn the Rwandan economy around, the
World Bank redoubled its efforts and administered more shock therapy, devaluing
the currency even further. Under this “free market” system, neither
cash nor crops were worth anything. The countryside descended into total chaos.
When the foreign loans started to flow into Rwanda,
they were quickly diverted toward the purchase of Kalishnikovs
and other arms. Uprooted farmers, wandering youth, and the urban unemployed
joined the ranks of the militias. The powder keg had been ignited.

            Rwanda
must never happen again. On April 23-25, thousands of protesters will descend
on WashingtonDC
to protest the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (joining the March
for Women’s Rights on Sunday the 25th). We will be in the streets trying to
bring attention to the horrors perpetuated by the World Bank/IMF. Call the
Metro Justice office at 325-2560 (or reply to this email) if you want a ride to
DC.

            Greenbaum is an organizer with Metro Justice.

This article appears in Apr 14-20, 2004.