Multiple motivations behind atrocities.

Longman, T. (2020). Twenty Years after Leave None to Tell the Story, What Do We Now Know about the Genocide of the Tutsi In Rwanda?. Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, 2(2), 40-47. Retrieved Jan 2, 2025, from https://doi.org/10.7227/JHA.042

Subsequent research on the motivations of people who participated in the genocide has challenged the centrality of ideology as a key stimulus for violence. Two important texts in particular have suggested that most people did not kill out of hatred of the Tutsi but rather for a variety of other reasons. In Killing Neighbors, the late Lee Ann Fujii looked at the ways in which social networks drew individuals into participating in the killing in two local communities, one in Rwanda’s north, the other in the centre of the country. She argues that ethnic difference was not itself the cause of the violence but was a tool used by elites to divide the population and that local-level group dynamics influenced people to participate. She labels those who killed ‘joiners’, because they were motivated not primarily by a desire to kill Tutsi but by a desire to be fully part of the group that was taking part in the killing (Fujii, 2009).

An image of text from Naval Postgraduate thesis of Jill D. Rutaremara March 2000, GENOCIDE IN RWANDA: TOWARDS A THEORETICAL APPROACH, the part highlighted emphasis added states quote: “Although the masses were motivated by looting and settling personal scores, they participated in genocide so as to grab land, a scarce resource in Rwanda, just as they had done during previous massacres. Some of them also participated in genocide out of fear of losing the land they owned to the returning refugees.”
An image of text from Naval Postgraduate thesis of Jill D. Rutaremara March 2000, GENOCIDE IN RWANDA: TOWARDS A THEORETICAL APPROACH, the part highlighted emphasis added states quote: “Although the masses were motivated by looting and settling personal scores, they participated in genocide so as to grab land, a scarce resource in Rwanda, just as they had done during previous massacres. Some of them also participated in genocide out of fear of losing the land they owned to the returning refugees.”

TRANSNATIONAL POLITICS Carl Wilkens: ‘Why I Stayed in Rwanda’

Genocide is a result of the process of polarisation, as opposed to unity and challenges in life that can be used to bring us together, or pull us apart. During a wicked snowstorm, the entire neighborhood can come together, shovelling each other’s driveways and sharing canned food. Or you can have people fighting in the grocery store over the last loaf of bread. Genocide stems from thinking: ‘My world would be better without you in it,’ solving a problem by eliminating the competition. But then it was a time of opportunity, until six months after we arrived, a war started. Past grievances and unhealthy practices of discrimination began to reach into the present. And I didn’t even know before arriving in the country that you had to identify your ethnicity as either Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa. It was so sanitized, so normalised at the time. The quota system was internalised. I didn’t see the harbingers. Things can creep up on you gradually, and somehow we just keep going. Even though we had a war, there was still optimism, especially regarding the transitional government. But a small core of intentional extremists lay in wait, while we were blinded by hope. In hindsight, I see the signs, but while I was living through it, nothing was obvious. We saw Hutus and Tutsis who were married, so the darkness was not so on the surface.

Confronting Evil: Genocide in Rwanda – Human Rights Watch Mar 28, 2014

Corinne Dufka: “These under reported kind of unseen conflicts don’t come out of nowhere there’s usually decades that proceed of often nepotism and corruption and bad governance and inequitable distribution of resources that create a population of very frustrated desperate individuals, particularly young men, who often take up arms to try to to try to redress some of these problems. And what starts off as a kind of bad governance and corruption, ends up in war crimes.”