Lessons from Rwanda: Why We Have Reason to Worry

The Trump campaign re-enacting the 1939 pro-Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden and the Republican Party’s closing message focusing on attacking immigrants and trans people have pushed me increasingly to realize:  I’ve seen this before. Thirty years ago in Rwanda, I watched the country move from hope and optimism to pessimism and fear as leaders divided the country along ethnic, regional, and political lines. What I see happening today in the United States fills me with a dreadful sense of déjà vu.

As background, I arrived in Rwanda in early 1992 for a year of dissertation research. Domestic protests and international pressure had recently forced President Juvénal Habyarimana to name a multiparty government led by an opposition politician, and many Rwandans believed that democratic transition was imminent. Over the next year, however, I watched as the country became increasingly polarized and violence became increasingly normalized, culminating in the Genocide Against the Tutsi that began in April 1994. I returned to Rwanda in 1995-1996 as the head of a Human Rights Watch project seeking to understand how the genocide occurred. That research project produced the prize-winning book, Leave None to Tell the Story.

What I witnessed in Rwanda makes me alarmed about the developments I have seen taking place in the United States over the past decade and particularly during the political campaign over the past year. I offer a few observations based upon my experience in Rwanda and my comparative study of mass atrocities.

It is important to realize atrocities do not require majority support. A committed minority with a passive or intimidated majority can accomplish considerable harm.  Most Rwandans did not support the genocide but it happened anyway.

State support makes committing atrocities easier and more effective and makes opposition more difficult. The Holocaust and the 1994 genocide in Rwanda were legal and opposing them meant opposing the state. Should Trump regain the White House and Republicans take control of Congress, opposition to their abusive policies of targeting opponents, excluding marginalized groups, and of deporting immigrants on a massive scale will be official policy and thus much harder to challenge.

What I learned in Rwanda, and what can be observed in the genocides in Armenia and the former Yugoslavia and in the Holocaust, is that genocide is always committed in the name of self-defense. Ideologies of hatred convince people that terrible acts are justified as a means of protecting themselves from attack. Rhetoric of “enemies within” is exactly the language used in Rwanda, in Germany under the Nazis, and in many other cases in which a powerful group justified their persecution of others.

These ideologies of hatred do not work as many think. They do not convince most people. Instead, they serve to single out potential victim groups and sow confusion and fear. Most Hutu didn’t hate Tutsi but came to see them as different and possibly allied with the invading Rwandan Patriotic Front. Ideology is most important for the committed core of supporters, not the general public, but given the means, this core can accomplish horrible devastation.

What I have seen firsthand in Rwanda and studied in other cases makes me deeply worried about what might happen in the United States if Trump returns to power. When we warn about the decline of democracy in the US today, it is not hyperbole but based on an understanding of history.

Yet there is cause for hope, even if Trump wins. Comparative study shows that atrocities are never inevitable and that levels of violence can be reduced through things such as early and forceful condemnation by religious and other public leaders, through popular protest, and through media exposure.

Of course our best protection from possible atrocities is to keep autocrats like Trump from taking power. If we can get enough people out to vote and prevent him from coming back to office, his hateful movement will be much less powerful. Keeping Trump out of office is out greatest hope.