Review of Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide
Leonhard Praeg
Political Studies Department
Rhodes University, Grahamstown.
This is an impressive work of research. It is thorough, uncompromising in its attention to detail, and relentless in allocating responsibility to all parties whose activity or, in the case of the UN, UK and US, inactivity contributed to a genocide that is now widely acknowledged to have been a "murderous campaign of horrifying efficiency" that has "no comparison in modern times".' As John Pilger comments, the book is "in the finest traditions of investigative journalism".
Following her previous book on the topic, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide (2000), it exposes in even more excruciating detail and with reference to many previously unused sources, two main themes that run through the genocide discourse: one, the extent to which the genocide was meticulously planned over a three-and-a-half-year period by the Hutu-led government of Habyarimana; and two, the complicity of the international community in the genocide - a complicity that went as deep as the refusal to use the word 'genocide' in reference to the slaughter until it was almost over.
So intimately are these two themes interwoven that it is difficult to know whether "conspiracy" here refers to the Hutu's intention to "finish the work of 1959" or the internationalcollusion to let it happen. I want to focus on these two themes, less with an intention to critique the text than to contextualise it. For a chronicle of the events that unfolded between April and June 1994, the book is unsurpassed.
It is hard to imagine that there could be any significant facts - aside from the crucial question 'Who was responsible for shooting down Habyarimana's plane?' - that would contribute to our knowledge of what happened. In another sense, however, the book is really a starting point for considering crucial questions about the meaning of the genocide. That this book does not address this question is not a shortcoming, for it is not intended as a philosophical meditation on the meaning of the genocide. Melvern's text will no doubt in future become indispensable to those who do ask questions about the genocide's self-conscious sacrifical rhetoric (Girard), its appalling excesses and the unspeakable extremity of the violence perpetrated. These questions can be approached using the two themes identified here.
What are the grounds for claiming that the international community should have intervened? There are at least three. The first is historical and holds that the genocide was to a very large extent the logical conclusion of a colonial history of indirect rule and the expedient re-invention of ethnicity. At the very least countries such as Belgium and France should have played a leading role in preventing the genocide. That they had more than ample warning about an imminent apocalypse can now no longer be disputed. But there is also a second ground for intervention that draws the entire international community into the circle of complicity.
This is a moral, humanitarian obligation to intervene on behalf of intended victims of politically motivated violence. Moral obligations, however, can be slippery to define - particularly if there are no immediate political or economic benefits to be had from honouring one's moral obligations. Hence, in true Hobbesian fashion, a third contractual ground is necessary to compel nations to act morally. This is the function of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted in 1948. This articulates, as it were, the meta-rules of engagement where collective forms of violence are concerned. Because it has the status of an agreed-upon rule, it theoretically should disallow nations to plead the 'Mogadishu syndrome' or 'compassion fatigue' where Africa is concerned.
Books in this investigative genre represent the claim that had this rule been followed and the contract honoured, the genocide would never have occurred. This is true, and Melvern's text is a monument to the conspiratorial lawlessness of international actors such as the US, UK and France during the period 1990-1995. The question this text cannot (afford to) ask is: What does it mean to interpret violence like this in a context where there is very little in the form of what Vandersluis et af call a background language of human rights? In the absence of such a culture of human rights, what does it mean to read violence as a violation of these rights'! hooking from, as opposed to at Africa, this question generates a profound paradox, one which relates to the indecipherable (Derrida) nature of foundational violence (Girard).
In this case the genocide articulated itself, sacrificially, in terms of a re-enactment of the foundational violence of 1959. For Derrida'* such foundational violence, and here we must include their deferred re-enactment, is indecipherable because it happens "outside time". We judge it with reference to a law or order of things that the violence in question may one day and in retrospect be judged or mythologised (Girard) to have been instrumental in bringing about. In this way the recourse to violence will be justified by alleging the founding, in progress or to come, of a new law.^ Human rights discourse effectively functions as such a law, one that we unthinkingly but necessarily apply to judge those instances of collective forms of violence that reflect the birth of this law/order. Suggesting such a reading amounts to anticipating a mythology which, it could be argued, will make it difficult to judge the violence in question.
The difficulty is exactly the point. From an African perspective the untimely insight and self-conscious understanding of the indecipherable nature of genocide as (deferred) foundational violence opens the door to a kind of interpretive vertigo where we know that a judgement, in Derrida's sense of the word, is as precarious as it is necessary. To balance the precarious and necessary, is to engage in the intellectual equivalent of the violence paradox. In the absence of doing so, however, we run the risk of thinking that a formidable chronicle of what happened is a sufficient monument to why it happened. But this is not a statement about Melvern's book. It is a statment about all the books African philosophers should be writing.
Leonhard Praeg
Political Studies Department, Rhodes University, Grahamstown
1. Verso, April 2004.
2. Ibid.
3. Vandersluis, S. and Yeros, P. 2004. Poverty in World Politics: Whose Global Era? London: Macmillan.
4. Derrida, J. 1992. "The Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority". In Carlson, D., Cornell, D. and Rosenfeld, M. (eds.) Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. New York: Routledge.
5. Ibid..
