Hinting atrocities.
I just keep racking up instances where I see things going on in the US that are eerily familiar to things I’ve read about Rwanda. Seems problematic.
People with some influence have been describing some pretty terrible plans and ideas. One might think it’s advantageous to actually prevent disasters. Everything sounds alarmist until something terrible happens. The people trusted with power to keep peace seem laser focused on hassling people wearing N95s to avoid infectious disease, and stun-locked on taking care of the private security needs of high level executives with taxpayer money who are worried about irate customers of the corrupt private health insurance market. Meanwhile, pay no attention to how preppers on the fringe are being told that doctors are trained as part of a mafia state that’s ready to kill them on purpose. And land grabs, and fears of land grabs, seem to lurk behind historic instances of mass ethnic cleansing and cyclical polarized tensions, strife, and worse.
But I’m probably just an alarmist, right?
Oregon Coast residents receive racist letters asking to track people of color Portrait of Isabel Funk Isabel Funk Salem Statesman Journal Dec 24, 2024 Racist letters mailed to people in Lincoln County advised residents to track and report information about people of color, according to the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office. The letters, titled "The Brown Round-Up Part 1," advised about the kind of information to collect related to people of color, according to a copy of the letter shared by KOIN. The letters claimed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security would be creating a hotline for people to report this information to help "the largest round-up of brown illegals in our history." The Lincoln County Sheriff's Office denounced these letters and urged community members to "do the right thing."
Mother Jones - December 22, 2024 “The Brown Round-Up”: The Racist Chain Letter Terrorizing an Oregon County Recipients—including a mayor—were told to surveil “brown folks” at churches, schools, and stores. Julianne McShane Perhaps most disturbing are the ways that the letter directly echoes some of the Trump administration’s own anti-immigration talking points: Attacks on sanctuary cities, promises of detention, and allegedly solving the housing crisis through mass deportations, which the letter compares approvingly to Japanese internment.
An image of a letter reportedly distributed in Oregon is titled “The Brown Round-Up Part 1” and this letter instructs people that they should be noting the license plate numbers on cars driven by “brown folks” that they see while at church, schools, and shopping centers, or as part of landscaping or construction crews on the job, for the purpose of reporting this information to Homeland Security because they claim a hotline for this purpose will be created by the Trump administration. The part highlighted emphasis added states quote: “As you know, at no point during the home purchase process, is a potential homebuyer required to show citizenship status. So when the brown folks are rounded up, their properties will be confiscated just like the properties belonging to the Japanese in California were during World War II. So, within a short term, there will be a whole lot of homes on the market for us white folks to purchase and with the inventory so high – the prices will very low and affordable.” (sic.)
The New York Times - Trump Blames Immigrant Surge for Housing Crisis. Most Economists Disagree. The former president often implies that deportations will bring down housing costs. Reality is more complicated. By Jeanna Smialek Lydia DePillis and Natasha Rodriguez Oct. 11, 2024 Former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, regularly blame America’s housing affordability crisis on a recent surge in immigration. They point to their plans for mass deportations of undocumented workers as part of the solution. But most economists do not believe that immigrants have been a major driver of the recent run-up in housing prices.
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.”
The research further suggests that although the masses are relatively more ignorant than the elite, and although the elite to some extent coerced the masses into killing, the participation of the masses in the Rwandan genocide cannot be explained by simple ignorance and coercion. 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 the fear of losing the land they owned to the returning refugees. Having participated in the massacres of the Tutsi in 1959 and thereafter, the peasants harbored fear of prosecution and revenge. Both the question of resources, especially land, and the concern for personal security were reinforced by the history of impunity and elite mobilization. The presence of a highly centralized and hierarchical state, the small size of the country, a relatively developed infrastructure, and lack of language barrier in communication, also made it easy for the elite to mobilize and to some extent to coerce the masses.
In October 1990, a group of elite, high ranking (predominantly) Tutsi officers in Uganda formed the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) and invaded Rwanda to reclaim their homeland. This sparked the civil war between the RPF and the President Habyarimana’s government army, the Rwandan Armed Forces (Forces Armées Rwandaises, FAR). In the face of increased landlessness, unemployment, population growth, poverty and the RPF threat, Habyarimana used the vulnerability of the rural population to push Hutu extremist ideologies that blamed Tutsi dominance for Hutu suffering: “the [market] collapse sentenced many poor to unprecedented levels of despair, making them vulnerable to manipulation by politicians in search of extreme solutions to their country’s (and to their own) growing insecurity” (Pottier 2002:21). Meanwhile, predominantly Hutu private actors linked to the Akazu12 were able to use their businesses to economically benefit from the anti-Tutsi campaign through the selling of arms, the provision of hotel grounds for secret meetings and militia trainings and the use of company resources such as cars for the transportation of kidnapped and killed persons. The financing of the civil war and the genocide was ensured as “Rich Hutu businessmen provided enough capital to import one machete for every third Rwandan male. In the absence of a ready supply of guns and ammunition, these machetes and homemade pangas, or nail studded clubs, became the weapons of choice for the Interahamwe13 and other militias” (USAID 2008:8). Radio-Télévision Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM) and the Kangura newspaper were owned by Hutu businessmen and used as the mouthpiece of Hutu extremists to demonize all Tutsi as the ‘principal enemy’, calling them inyenzi, ‘cockroaches’, while the ‘partisan enemy’ was anyone who supported the former in any way (Des Forges 1999:62-3). After two years of continuous fighting between the FAR and the RPF, the Arusha Peace talks were initiated in June 1992 in order to end the civil war through the consolidation of rule of law, a power- sharing agreement, repatriation and resettlement of (mostly Tutsi) refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs), the integration of the armed forces and other provisions (Wage and Haigh 2004:5- 10). Habyarimana’s concession to the Arusha Peace talks and the subsequent creation of 15 new political parties instigated fierce rivalries between parties and the use of ‘youth militia’ which normalized the use of violence for political ends. During the civil war, the ‘Hutu Power’ movement gained momentum in the country, recruiting thousands of civilians into the Interahamwe militia, distributing arms throughout the population, spreading ideologies of genocide and pulling the wool over the eyes of international observers. They instilled fear amongst those who had land and power to lose, “Every day Hutu farmers and businessmen were called upon to protect themselves against the Tutsi ‘foreign invaders’ [...] who would threaten to take their properties and once again cast them into servitude; resurrecting the historical narrative of the social revolution” (Baines 2004:134- 135). The elite politicization of ethnicity remained a strategy used to ensure a popular rural support base (Wyss 2007). Despite the initiation of the Arusha Peace Accords, the civil war lasted four years, killed approximately 10,000 people and set the stage for the 1994 genocide.
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 FROM HATE SPEECH TO INCITEMENT TO GENOCIDE, the part highlighted emphasis added states quote: “RTLM functioned differently than traditional radio.130 Listeners could call in to interact with messages from other people and gossip while RTML was broadcasting live. The announcers would then transmit the information without assessing its veracity.”
RTLM functioned differently than traditional radio.130 Listeners could call in to interact with messages from other people and gossip while RTML was broadcasting live.131 The announcers would then transmit the information without assessing its veracity.132
An image of text from Leave None To Tell The Story Genocide in Rwanda written by Alison Des Forges, the part highlighted emphasis added states Page 121, quote: “Burgomasters were providing lists of “persons who joined the ranks of the inkotanyi” at least through August 1993.” Page 123, quote: “During the genocide, assailants often justified killing Tutsi by claiming they had found lists of Hutu marked for executions on the person or property of their intended victims. Many such accusations were false, although some RPF supporters did apparently make lists of likely backers or opponents as part of the data about local communities that they supplied to the RPF.”
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
Allison Des Forges: “Tutsi means literally someone who's powerful, someone who's rich, and Hutu means literally a person who is someone else's follower or servant or client. These terms originally were applied to people - someone is a Tutsi, someone is a Hutu, right. They were not groups as such. But as Rwanda became a powerful state, the elite, an elite developed, and that elite became known as Tutsi, they were the people in power, and the great Hutu majority the 85%, 90% even, of the population were more or less excluded from that opportunity to rule. This was the situation that existed during the colonial period. Partway through the colonial period, the colonial administration decided that it was in their interests instead to try to give more power to the majority. This then caused a revolution, and the people who held power, the Tusi, all of a sudden became the people who had no power. The Hutu became the power brokers and the Tusi, the former rulers, became an elite that was discriminated against.”
Corinne Dufka: “When I was interviewing these these militia men from this one checkpoint I asked them and I said you know there are a lot of accounts of a lot of killing going on and of massacres going on I didn't use the word genocide but I used the word massacres – of massacres of Tutsi going on now is this true and how can you explain it and so on and so forth and you know one I got the predictable answer of you know of denial as well as explaining that in fact it was the Tutsis who were actually planning to massacre the Hutu.”
Allison Des Forges: “It's important to make the link between what happened even at that very lowest grassroots level and what was happening here in New York or at the UN or in Washington or Paris or Brussels. The failure to call the genocide by its rightful name was certainly part of what made the government able to pretend this was legitimate. They used that legitimacy to say to the people of Rwanda: You see, everyone understands what we're doing, they know it's a legitimate exercise in self-defense.”
Corinne Dufka: “Part of the job of of Human Rights Watch is to report on these underreported conflicts and to create a sense of moral outrage which is appropriate, to get people interested to get people to identify through the voice of the victims and the witnesses with what they're suffering, and to create a sense of moral outrage and hopefully then beseech upon the international community and key actors a responsibility to intervene.”
Allison Des Forges: “Having the connection with Human Rights Watch gave me the platform that allowed me to use my information to bring it directly to the policy makers. We now know, we didn't know at the time, but we now know how effective that was. We went to Senator Kennedy for example at one point to say, one of the most effective things that the US could do would be to jam radio RTLM. This would have first of all interrupted the flow of information so that orders weren't given to stop the red car at the barrier, but it would also have immediately shown that this government and its message was in fact illegitimate. It would not have required any US troops it could have been done by airplane. So Senator Kennedy took this idea and we know that it was followed through all the way to the highest ranks of the Pentagon – because we now have the documents showing the chain of that. So the idea got there, it got forward but at the Pentagon gone they decided that $8,000 an hour was too much to spend. So they decided not to do it. The legacy of the Rwandan genocide – it's as if you took a picture of a family and ripped it down the middle and then tried to fit the halves back together again. Even with the best glue in the world it's never going to be the same. People betrayed their deepest values in order to kill, in order to rape, in order to pillage, their friends and neighbors and their own family members. Whether you look at it from the point of view of the victim or the point of view of the perpetrator, these are not things that can ever be forgotten.”
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.”
Waiting for First Light: My Ongoing Battle with PTSD - Roméo Dallaire
At the main anniversary event in the Kigale Stadium, I met with Tutsis who had survived the brutality of the genocide in ways I could not fathom but deeply admired. I was dismayed to discover that they had been displaced by the Tutsi diaspora who returned after the fighting stopped. Many who had stayed through the genocide had also stayed in Rwanda, rather than fleeing, through independence in 1962, and had also lived through the subsequent coups and civil wars. But they were often treated as collaborators instead of courageous survivors. They received no compensation for their losses or acknowledgement of their agonies during the genocide. If they had died, they would have been honoured and commemorated, but because they were alive they were treated with suspicion, like second class citizens or worse. This injustice shook my feelings of commitment and faith in the Rwandans’ desire for nation building. Not only did reconciliation between the Hutus and the Tutsis remain extremely challenging, but there were clearly serious divisions within the groups too. I was amazed that after having been taught the consequences of such discord in the bloodiest and most murderous of ways, they were still capable of maintaining divisiveness and hatred. The situation left me with a dangerous feeling of fatalism.
A Problem from Hell, 2003, by Samantha Power
As was true with previous genocides these US officials were making potent political calculations about what the US public would abide. Officials simultaneously believed the American people would oppose US military intervention in central Africa and feared that the public might support intervention if they realized a genocide was underway. As always they looked to op-ed pages of elite journals, popular protest, and congressional noise to gauge public interest. No group or groups in the United States made Clinton administration decision makers feel or fear that they would pay a political price for doing nothing to save Rwandans. Indeed all the signals told them to steer clear. Only after the genocide would it become possible to identify an American constituency for action. At the height of the war in Bosnia the op-ed pages of America’s newspapers had roared with indignation. During the 3 month genocide in Rwanda they were silent, ignorant, and prone fatalistically to accept the futility of outside intervention.
But sure, there’s nothing to worry about right? It can’t happen here, right?