Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (60 page)

events in northwestern Rwanda. There, in a community where virtually
everybody was Hutu and there was only a single Tutsi, mass killings still
took place
—of Hutu by other Hutu. While the proportional death toll
there, estimated as "at least 5% of the population," may have been some
what lower than that overall in Rwanda (11%), it still takes some explaining why a Hutu community would kill at least 5% of its members in the absence
of ethnic motives. Elsewhere in Rwanda, as the 1994 genocide proceeded and as the number of Tutsi declined, Hutu turned to attacking each other.

All these facts illustrate why we need to search for other contributing
factors in addition to ethnic hatred.

To begin our search, let's again consider Rwanda's high population density
that I mentioned previously. Rwanda (and Burundi) was already densely populated in the 19th century before European arrival, because of its twin
advantages of moderate rainfall and an altitude too high for malaria and the
tsetse fly. Rwanda's population subsequently grew, albeit with ups and
downs, at an average rate of over 3% per year, for essentially the same rea
sons as in neighboring Kenya and Tanzania (New World crops, public
health, medicine, and stable political borders). By 1990, even after the killings and mass exilings of the previous decades, Rwanda's average population density was 760 people per square mile, higher than that of the United
Kingdom (610) and approaching that of Holland (950). But the United King
dom and Holland have highly efficient mechanized agriculture, such that only a few percent of the population working as farmers can produce food
for everyone else. Rwandan agriculture is much less efficient and unmecha-
nized; farmers depend on handheld hoes, picks, and machetes; and most people have to remain farmers, producing little or no surplus that could support others.

As Rwanda's population rose after independence, the country carried on
with its traditional agricultural methods and failed to modernize, to introduce more productive crop varieties, to expand its agricultural exports, or
to institute effective family planning. Instead, the growing population was accommodated just by clearing forests and draining marshes to gain new
farmland, shortening fallow periods, and trying to extract two or three con
secutive crops from a field within one year. When so many Tutsi fled or were
killed in the 1960s and in 1973, the availability of their former lands for re
distribution fanned the dream that each Hutu farmer could now, at last,
have enough land to feed himself and his family comfortably. By 1985, all

arable land outside of national parks was being cultivated. As both popula
tion and agricultural production increased, per-capita food production rose
from 1966 to 1981 but then dropped back to the level where it had stood in
the early 1960s. That, exactly, is the Malthusian dilemma: more food, but also more people, hence no improvement in food per person.

Friends of mine who visited Rwanda in 1984 sensed an ecological disas
ter in the making. The whole country looked like a garden and banana
plantation. Steep hills were being farmed right up to their crests. Even the
most elementary measures that could have minimized soil erosion, such as
terracing, plowing along contours rather than straight up and down hills, and providing some fallow cover of vegetation rather than leaving fields
bare between crops, were not being practiced. As a result, there was much
soil erosion, and the rivers carried heavy loads of mud. One Rwandan wrote
me, "Farmers can wake up in the morning and find that their entire field (or at least its topsoil and crops) has been washed away overnight, or that their neighbor's field and rocks have now been washed down to cover their own
field." Forest clearance led to drying-up of streams, and more irregular rain
fall. By the late 1980s famines began to reappear. In 1989 there were more
severe food shortages resulting from a drought, brought on by a combina
tion of regional or global climate change plus local effects of deforestation.

The effect of all those environmental and population changes on an area
of northwestern Rwanda (Kanama commune) inhabited just by Hutu was studied in detail by two Belgian economists, Catherine Andre and Jean-
Philippe Platteau. Andre, who was Platteau's student, lived there for a total
of 16 months during two visits in 1988 and 1993, while the situation was
deteriorating but before the genocide's explosion. She interviewed members
of most households in the area. For each household interviewed in each of those two years, she ascertained the number of people living in the household, the total area of land that it owned, and the amount of income that its
members earned from jobs off the farm. She also tabulated sales or transfers
of land, and disputes requiring mediation. After the genocide of 1994, she tracked down news of survivors and sought to detect any pattern to which
particular Hutu ended up being killed by other Hutu. Andre and Platteau
then processed this mass of data together to figure out what it all meant.

Kanama has very fertile volcanic soil, so that its population density is
high even by the standards of densely populated Rwanda: 1,740 people per
square mile in 1988, rising to 2,040 in 1993. (That's higher even than the value for Bangladesh, the world's most densely populated agricultural na
tion.) Those high population densities translated into very small farms: a

median farm size of only 0.89 acre in 1988, declining to 0.72 acre in 1993.
Each farm was divided into (on average) 10 separate parcels, so that farmers
were tilling absurdly small parcels averaging only 0.09 acre in 1988 and 0.07
acre in 1993.

Because all land in the commune was already occupied, young people
found it difficult to marry, leave home, acquire a farm, and set up their own
household. Increasingly, young people postponed marriage and continued
to live at home with their parents. For instance, in the 20- to 25-year-old age
bracket, the percentage of young women living at home rose between 1988
and 1993 from 39% to 67%, and the percentage of young men rose from
71% to 100%: not a single man in his early 20s lived independently of his
parents by 1993. That obviously contributed to the lethal family tensions that exploded in 1994, as I shall explain below. With more young people
staying home, the average number of people per farm household increased
(between 1988 and 1993) from 4.9 to 5.3, so that the land shortage was even
tighter than indicated by the decrease in farm size from 0.89 to 0.72 acre. When one divides decreasing farm area by increasing number of people in
the household, one finds that each person was living off of only one-fifth of an acre in 1988, declining to one-seventh of an acre in 1993.

Not surprisingly, it proved impossible for most people in Kanama to
feed themselves on so little land. Even when measured against the low calo
rie intake considered adequate in Rwanda, the average household got only 77% of its calorie needs from its farm. The rest of its food had to be bought
with income earned off the farm, at jobs such as carpentry, brick-making, sawing wood, and trade. Two-thirds of households held such jobs, while
one-third didn't. The percentage of the population consuming less than
1,600 calories per day (i.e., what is considered below the famine level) was
9% in 1982, rising to 40% in 1990 and some unknown higher percentage
thereafter.

All of these numbers that I have quoted so far for Kanama are average
numbers, which conceal inequalities. Some people owned larger farms than others, and that inequality increased from 1988 to 1993. Let's define a "very
big" farm as larger than 2.5 acres, and a "very small" farm as smaller than
0.6 acre. (Think back to Chapter 1 to appreciate the tragic absurdity of
those numbers: I mentioned there that in Montana a 40-acre farm used to be considered necessary to support a family, but even that is now inade
quate.) Both the percentage of very big farms and the percentage of very
small farms increased between 1988 and 1993, from 5 to 8% and from 36 to 45% respectively. That is, Kanama farm society was becoming increasingly

divided between the rich haves and the poor have-nots, with decreasing numbers of people in the middle. Older heads of households tended to be richer and to have larger farms: those in the age ranges 50-59 and 20-29
years old had average farm sizes of 2.05 acres and only 0.37 acre respectively. Of course, family size was larger for the older household heads, so
they needed more land, but they still had three times more land per house
hold member than did young household heads.

Paradoxically, off-farm income was earned disproportionately by own
ers of large farms: the average size of farms that did earn such income was
1.3 acres, compared to only half an acre for farms lacking such income. That
difference is paradoxical because the smaller farms are the ones whose
household members have less farmland per person to feed themselves, and which thus need more off-farm income. That concentration of off-farm income on the larger farms contributed to the increasing division of Kanama
society between haves and have-nots, with the rich becoming richer and the
poor becoming poorer. In Rwanda, it's supposedly illegal for owners of
small farms to sell any of their land. In fact, it does happen. Investigation of land sales showed that owners of the smallest farms sold land mainly
when they needed money for an emergency involving food, health, lawsuit
costs, bribes, a baptism, wedding, funeral, or excessive drinking. In contrast,
owners of large farms sold for reasons such as to increase farm efficiency
(e.g., selling a distant parcel of land in order to buy a parcel nearer to the
farmhouse).

The extra off-farm income of larger farms allowed them to buy land
from smaller farms, with the result that large farms tended to buy land and become larger, while small farms tended to sell land and become smaller.
Almost no large farm sold land without buying any, but 35% of the smallest farms in 1988, and 49% of them in 1993, sold without buying. If one breaks
down land sales according to off-farm income, all farms with off-farm income bought land, and none sold land without buying; but only 13% of farms lacking off-farm income bought land, and 65% of them sold
land without buying. Again, note the paradox: already-tiny farms, which
desperately needed more land, in fact became smaller, by selling land in
emergencies to large farms financing their purchases with off-farm income.
Remember again that what I term "large farms" are large only by Rwanda
standards: "large" means "larger than a mere 1 or 2 acres."

Thus, at Kanama most people were impoverished, hungry, and desper
ate, but some people were more impoverished, hungry, and desperate than

others, and most people were becoming more desperate while a few were
becoming less desperate. Not surprisingly, this situation gave rise to fre
quent serious conflicts that the parties involved could not resolve by them
selves, and that they either referred to traditional village conflict mediators or (less often) brought to the courts. Each year, households reported on the
average more than one such serious conflict requiring outside resolution.
Andre and Platteau surveyed the causes of 226 such conflicts, as described
either by the mediators or by the householders. According to both types of
informants, land disputes lay at the root of most serious conflicts: either be
cause the conflict was directly over land (43% of all cases); or because it was
a husband/wife, family, or personal dispute often stemming ultimately from
a land dispute (I'll give examples in the next two paragraphs); or else be
cause the dispute involved theft by very poor people, known locally as
"hunger thieves," who owned almost no land and were without off-farm in
come and who lived by stealing for lack of other options (7% of all disputes,
and 10% of all households).

Those land disputes undermined the cohesion of Rwandan society's traditional fabric. Traditionally, richer landowners were expected to help their
poorer relatives. This system was breaking down, because even the land
owners who were richer than other landowners were still too poor to be
able to spare anything for poorer relatives. That loss of protection especially
victimized vulnerable groups in the society: separated or divorced women,
widows, orphans, and younger half-siblings. When ex-husbands ceased to
provide for their separated or divorced wives, the women would formerly
have returned to their natal family for support, but now their own brothers opposed their return, which would make the brothers or the brothers' chil
dren even poorer. The women might then seek to return to their natal
family only with their daughters, because Rwandan inheritance was tradi
tionally by sons, and the woman's brothers wouldn't see her daughters as
competing with their own children. The woman would leave her sons with their father (her divorced husband), but his relatives might then refuse land
to her sons, especially if their father died or ceased protecting them. Simi
larly, a widow would find herself without support from either her husband's
family (her brothers-in-law) or from her own brothers, who again saw the widow's children as competing for land with their children. Orphans were
traditionally cared for by paternal grandparents; when those grandparents
died, the orphans' uncles (the brothers of their deceased father) now sought
to disinherit or evict the orphans. Children of polygamous marriages, or

of broken marriages in which the man subsequently remarried and had
children by a new wife, found themselves disinherited or evicted by their
half-brothers.

The most painful and socially disruptive land disputes were those pit
ting fathers against sons. Traditionally, when a father died, his land all
passed to his oldest son, who was expected to manage the land for the whole
family and to provide his younger brothers with enough land for their sub
sistence. As land became scarce, fathers gradually switched to the custom of dividing their land among all sons, in order to reduce the potential for
intrafamily conflict after the father's death. But different sons urged on their father different competing proposals for dividing the land. Younger sons be
came bitter if older brothers, who got married first, received a dispropor
tionately large share
—e.g., because the father had had to sell off some land
by the time younger sons got married. Younger sons instead demanded
strictly equal divisions; they objected to their father giving their older
brother a present of land on that brother's marriage. The youngest son, who
traditionally was the one expected to care for his parents in their old age, needed or demanded an extra share of land in order to carry out that tradi
tional responsibility. Brothers were suspicious of, and sought to evict, sisters
or younger brothers who received from the father any present of land,
which the brothers suspected was being given in return for that sister or
younger brother agreeing to care for the father in his old age. Sons complained that their father was retaining too much land to support himself in his old age, and they demanded more land now for themselves. Fathers in
turn were justifiably terrified of being left with too little land in their old
age, and they opposed their sons' demands. All of these types of conflicts
ended up before mediators or the courts, with fathers suing sons and vice
versa, sisters suing brothers, nephews suing uncles, and so on. These con
flicts sabotaged family ties, and turned close relatives into competitors and
bitter enemies.

That situation of chronic and escalating conflict forms the background
against which the killings of 1994 took place. Even before 1994, Rwanda was
experiencing rising levels of violence and theft, perpetrated especially by
hungry landless young people without off-farm income. When one com
pares crime rates for people of age 21-25 among different parts of Rwanda,
most of the regional differences prove to be correlated statistically with

population density and per-capita availability of calories: high population
densities and worse starvation were associated with more crime.

After the explosion of 1994, Andre tried to track down the fates of
Kanama's inhabitants. She found that 5.4% were reported to her as having
died as a result of the war. That number is an underestimate of the total ca
sualties, because there were some inhabitants about whose fates she could
obtain no information. Hence it remains unknown whether the death rate
approached the average value of 11% for Rwanda as a whole. What is clear
is that the death rate in an area where the population consisted almost en
tirely of Hutu was at least half of the death rate in areas where Hutu were
killing Tutsi plus other Hutu.

All but one of the known victims at Kanama fell into one of six catego
ries. First, the single Tutsi at Kanama, a widowed woman, was killed.
Whether that had much to do with her being Tutsi is unclear, because she furnished so many other motives for killing: she had inherited much land,
she had been involved in many land disputes, she was the widow of a polyg
amous Hutu husband (hence viewed as a competitor of his other wives and
their families), and her deceased husband had already been forced off his
land by his half-brothers.

Two more categories of victims consisted of Hutu who were large landowners. The majority of them were men over the age of 50, hence at a
prime age for father/son disputes over land. The minority were younger people who had aroused jealousy by being able to earn much off-farm in
come and using it to buy land.

A next category of victims consisted of "troublemakers" known for being involved in all sorts of land disputes and other conflicts.

Still another category was young men and children, particularly ones
from impoverished backgrounds, who were driven by desperation to enlist
in the warring militias and proceeded to kill each other. This category is es
pecially likely to have been underestimated, because it was dangerous for
Andre to ask too many questions about who had belonged to what militia.

Finally, the largest number of victims were especially malnourished peo
ple, or especially poor people with no or very little land and without off-
farm income. They evidently died because of starvation, being too weak, or
not having money to buy food or to pay the bribes required to buy their
survival at roadblocks.

Thus, as Andre and Platteau note, "The 1994 events provided a unique
opportunity to settle scores, or to reshuffle land properties, even among

Hutu villagers.
...
It is not rare, even today, to hear Rwandans argue that a
war is necessary to wipe out an excess of population and to bring numbers
into line with the available land resources."

That last quote of what Rwandans themselves say about the genocide sur
prised me. I had thought that it would be exceptional for people to recog
nize such a direct connection between population pressure and killings. I'm
accustomed to thinking of population pressure, human environmental im
pacts, and drought as ultimate causes, which make people chronically des
perate and are like the gunpowder inside the powder keg. One also needs a proximate cause: a match to light the keg. In most areas of Rwanda, that
match was ethnic hatred whipped up by politicians cynically concerned
with keeping themselves in power. (I say "most areas," because the large-
scale killings of Hutu by Hutu at Kanama demonstrate a similar outcome
even where everybody belonged to the same ethnic group.) As Gerard
Prunier, a French scholar of East Africa, puts it, "The decision to kill was of course made by politicians, for political reasons. But at least part of the rea
son why it was carried out so thoroughly by the ordinary rank-and-file
peasants in their ingo [= family compound] was feeling that there were too
many people on too little land, and that with a reduction in their numbers,
there would be more for the survivors."

The link that Prunier, and that Andre and Platteau, see behind popula
tion pressure and the Rwandan genocide has not gone unchallenged. In
part, the challenges are reactions to oversimplified statements that critics with some justice lampooned as "ecological determinism." For instance,
only 10 days after the genocide began, an article in an American newspaper
linked Rwanda's dense population to the genocide by saying, "Rwandas
[i.e., similar genocides] are endemic, built-in, even, to the world we in
habit." Naturally, that fatalistic oversimplified conclusion provokes negative
reactions not only to it, but also to the more complex view that Prunier,
Andre and Platteau, and I present, for three reasons.

First, any "explanation" of why a genocide happened can be miscon
strued as "excusing" it. However, regardless of whether we arrive at an over
simplified one-factor explanation or an excessively complex 73-factor
explanation for a genocide doesn't alter the personal responsibility of the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, as of other evil deeds, for their actions. This is a misunderstanding that arises regularly in discussions of the
origins of evil: people recoil at any explanation, because they confuse expla-

nations with excuses. But it
is
important that we understand the origins of
the Rwandan genocide
—not so that we can exonerate the killers, but so that
we can use that knowledge to decrease the risk of such things happening
again in Rwanda or elsewhere. Similarly, there are people who have chosen
to devote their lives or careers to understanding the origins of the Nazi
Holocaust, or to understanding the minds of serial murderers and rapists.
They have made that choice not in order to mitigate the responsibility of
Hitler, serial murderers, and rapists, but because they want to know how
those awful things came to be, and how we can best prevent recurrences.

Second, it is justifiable to reject the simplistic view that population pres
sure was the single cause of the Rwandan genocide. Other factors did con
tribute; in this chapter I have introduced ones that seem to me important,
and experts on Rwanda have written entire books and articles on the sub
ject, cited in my Further Readings at the back of this book. Just to reiterate:
regardless of the order of their importance, those other factors included
Rwanda's history of Tutsi domination of Hutu, Tutsi large-scale killings
of Hutu in Burundi and small-scale ones in Rwanda, Tutsi invasions of
Rwanda, Rwanda's economic crisis and its exacerbation by drought and
world factors (especially by falling coffee prices and World Bank austerity
measures), hundreds of thousands of desperate young Rwandan men displaced as refugees into settlement camps and ripe for recruitment by mili
tias, and competition among Rwanda's rival political groups willing to
stoop to anything to retain power. Population pressure joined with those
other factors.

Finally, one should not misconstrue a role of population pressure among
the Rwandan genocide's causes to mean that population pressure automati
cally leads to genocide anywhere around the world. To those who would object that there is not a
necessary
link between Malthusian population
pressure and genocide, I would answer, "Of course!" Countries can be over-populated without descending into genocide, as exemplified by Bangladesh (relatively free of large-scale killings since its genocidal slaughters of 1971)
as well as by the Netherlands and multi-ethnic Belgium, despite all three of
those countries being more densely populated than Rwanda. Conversely,
genocide can arise for ultimate reasons other than overpopulation, as illus
trated by Hitler's efforts to exterminate Jews and Gypsies during World
War II, or by the genocide of the 1970s in Cambodia, with only one-sixth of
Rwanda's population density.

Instead, I conclude that population pressure was
one
of the important factors behind the Rwandan genocide, that Malthus's worst-case scenario