hotel-rwanda.com

Chapter 20: The Spark and the Inferno V: The Collapse of the State

In a smoke-filled, curtain-drawn conference room on the second floor of the Hôtel des Diplomates in Kigali, the "interim government" of Rwanda held its cabinet meetings. Here, in the heart of the apocalypse, the atmosphere was not one of chaotic, bloodthirsty rage, but of grim, plodding, bureaucratic purpose. The men who gathered around the long table, their suits immaculate, were not wild-eyed fanatics high on hate; they were government ministers, civil servants managing a nationwide project of extermination with the sterile, passionless efficiency of a public works department. The true horror of their evil was in its absolute, banal normalcy.

The Prime Minister, Jean Kambanda, a former banker with a reputation for managerial competence, did not give fiery, demagogic speeches to rally mobs. He chaired logistics meetings, a pen and a legal pad in his hand. He would go around the table, calmly, methodically, receiving status reports from his ministers as if they were discussing the budget for a new highway.

The Minister of Defense, Augustin Bizimana, did not present grand battle plans against the advancing RPF army; that was a secondary concern. His primary updates were on the distribution of new crates of Chinese-made machetes, ensuring they were delivered in a timely and equitable manner to the regional governors, the préfets, for further distribution to the militias.

The Minister of the Interior, reading from a stack of telexed-in field reports, would calmly update the cabinet on the "progress of the work" in various communes. A mayor in Gikongoro needed more gasoline to run the bulldozers required to dispose of the overwhelming number of bodies clogging the local rivers. The Minister of Family and Women's Affairs, a woman who spoke with the soothing tones of a social worker, discussed the need for a more organized system to handle the "unclaimed property" left behind by the exterminated. They used a cold, administrative, and deliberately euphemistic language. They spoke of "clearing the brush," of "pacification work," of "neutralizing RPF accomplices," of dealing with the "refuse." The word "Tutsi" was rarely spoken. The word "kill" was almost never used.

The meeting would be interrupted by an urgent phone call on a secure satellite line. Kambanda would take it, his face a mask of polite, professional concern, listening patiently. It was a préfet from the Gitarama region. The Tutsi who had gathered at the massive Kabgayi church complex, thousands of them, were putting up a surprisingly organized resistance, he reported. They had armed themselves with stones, farming tools, and the bricks from a collapsed wall, and they had managed to beat back the first several waves of Interahamwe attacks. The local militia, the governor explained, needed support; they lacked the firepower to breach the main cathedral.

Kambanda listened, nodding. The issue was operational, a simple matter of resource allocation. He turned away from the phone for a moment, covering the receiver to confer with his Minister of Defense. A quiet, technical discussion ensued. The cabinet made a decision. Kambanda returned to the phone and gave a calm, quiet order: dispatch a specialized unit of the Gendarmerie from the capital, one equipped with grenade launchers and machine guns, to "assist the population in their civil defense work" at Kabgayi. A problem had been identified, a solution was proposed, and a policy was implemented. He hung up the phone and turned back to the agenda for the meeting. "Item number four," he said, "the fuel shortage in Butare."

From this sterile, air-conditioned room, the strings were being pulled. This was not the collapse of a state into a frenzy of anarchic, ethnic bloodletting. This was a state functioning at its peak, all its ministries and levers of power—from the national police to the local road crews—working in perfect, horrific synergy. This was a state achieving its ultimate, terrible purpose.

The Discourse 20: The Genocidal State

20.1 The Interim Government: A Genocidal Cabal
The Rwandan Genocide was not the result of a "collapsed state," "anarchy," or a spontaneous eruption of ancient tribal hatreds. It was, in fact, a supreme and terrifying act of modern state power, meticulously planned at the highest levels and executed by a disciplined, coherent, and centrally-commanded extremist government. This government successfully co-opted the entirety of its national administrative apparatus to carry out a program of total extermination. Crucially, this was not an administration that had descended into chaos. Throughout the 100 days of the genocide, civil servants continued to draw their salaries, essential state functions continued, and ministries maintained their bureaucratic routines. The genocide was not a replacement for the functions of the state; it was simply added to them as the state's highest and most urgent priority.

The group that seized power on the night of April 6, 1994, styling itself the "interim government," was an extremist Hutu Power cabal whose members were the primary architects and operational commanders of the genocide. Led by "Prime Minister" Jean Kambanda, this group provided the explicit, top-down command and control for the slaughter. This is not a matter of historical inference; it is a matter of legal record. In his subsequent testimony at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) after pleading guilty to crimes against humanity and genocide, Kambanda himself admitted unequivocally that the extermination of the Tutsi had been explicitly discussed and approved in cabinet meetings and was considered a core part of formal government policy. See [citation 1]. This direct, sworn admission from the head of the government provides the irrefutable link between the highest level of state power and the killings being carried out on every hill in the country.

20.2 The Pyramid of Control
The genocidal state operated through a clear and highly effective chain of command that mirrored the country's pre-existing and disciplined administrative pyramid. Orders, directives, and weapons flowed down this structure with bureaucratic efficiency:

• At the apex was the Interim Government Cabinet, where strategic decisions were made and policies (such as the arming of militias) were approved. While Kambanda was the public face, the undisputed operational power behind the throne was Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, who as chief of staff at the Ministry of Defense, served as the true mastermind and COO of the genocide.

• The cabinet passed its orders down to the regional governors (préfets), who served as the primary field commanders, directing operations and resource allocation within their prefectures.

• The préfets, in turn, passed directives and weapons to the local mayors (bourgmestres), who were often the most powerful and respected authority figures in their individual communities.

• Finally, the bourgmestres used the full weight of their local authority, employing the local police, the Gendarmes, and the heads of the ten-house cellules, to mobilize the Interahamwe and the general Hutu population to kill. See [citation 2].

20.3 The Co-opting of Legitimate Authority
The true "genius" of this evil, and the reason for its horrifying success, was its ability to co-opt and pervert the very symbols and institutions of legitimate authority. The genocide was presented to the population not as a descent into lawless chaos, but as the ultimate act of community organization, national defense, and patriotic duty. The bourgmestre, the trusted local official whom people relied on to solve land disputes and lead community projects, became the man who read out kill lists and directed the militias to the churches. See [citation 3]. The local doctor who ran the clinic was sometimes the man who provided the gasoline to burn the bodies. This perversion of normalcy was reflected in the killers' own language. The most common term used for the genocide, from the cabinet level down to the roadblocks, was akazi, the Kinyarwanda word for "work" or "labor." This transformed the extermination of their neighbors into a grim and patriotic public duty, the ultimate and final form of umuganda (communal work). See [citation 4]. This is the final, horrifying truth of Rwanda: the state did not fail or collapse. On the contrary, it functioned with terrifying perfection, succeeding in achieving what its leaders had designated as its primary and most sacred objective.