Turning Interahamwe: Individual And Community Choices In The Rwandan Genocide

Literature on the Rwandan genocide identifies a number of potential motivations for perpetrator participation, but the dominant paradigm emphasizes it as a bureaucratic, top-down process whereby an obedient population carried out the orders of a strong state authority. Testimony of killers from the community of Nyamata in the Bugesera region suggests that hatred may have been a product of rather than a cause of the genocide. Material interests also seem to have become an increasingly important motivator in that community to continue to participate as the genocide wore on as a "genocide economy" developed. Witness testimonies drawn from human rights literature show that simply relying on the traditional state power/obedience explanation for Rwanda's genocide is inadequate. In many communities local extremists held the real power, possibly through controlling groups of young men, and the authorities chose to go along. The common path by which most communities descended towards a large-scale massacre, as well as key linguistic changes during the genocide, both suggest the prevalence of known non-extremists choosing to join the killers. Thus many moderately-minded community leaders and ordinary people made decisions during the genocide out of a combination of intimidation and self-interest.