onset of genocide. 15 Due to the great dependence on coffee production, the global price drop, together with the onslaught of drought, caused the ruriganiza famine in 1989. 16 This led to thousands of Rwandans (the majority of them Tutsis) fleeing to neighbouring countries. Hutus, in turn, seized the land of those who had fled. This may have aided in provoking the RPF invasion the following year. The collapse of the global market for coffee had further effects. Kamola summarises these, claiming that: “These economic stresses created the conditions in which state-owned enterprises went bankrupt, health and education services collapsed, child malnutrition surged, and malaria cases increased by 21%. The escalating prices of consumer essentials and fuel led to a 25% reduction in coffee production as farmers switched back to food crops, since coffee revenues no longer even covered inputs”. 17 The impacts of the crisis, Kamola goes on, affected Hutus much more dramatically than it did their Tutsi counterparts, because under Habyarimana, who had implemented affirmative action measures to counteract the preferential treatment Tutsis received under colonial control, ‘they were the primary recipients of the civil service jobs which could no longer be funded.’ 18 We can thus see that the economic crisis contributed to the outbreak of genocide in creating further divisions and tensions amongst the Hutus and the Tutsis. But why was the Rwandan economy so dependent on coffee production? The answer to this question is found, once again, in the legacies of colonialism. The policies implemented in the restructuring of the economy under Belgian colonial rule include not only making the national economy increasingly dependent on export crops, but these policies are also largely responsible for plotting one tribal group against another, increasing the ridge between Hutus and Tutsis. It was the Europeans who focused on increasing coffee production when threatened by Brazil’s control over the global coffee industry in the 1920s. 19 One important way in which the economic structure of Rwandan society was altered through colonial practices, was through the policy of ‘streamlining’. 20 This essentially meant that, where once power was shared between three chiefs (usually a combination of both Hutus and Tutsis), all the power was now merged into a single chief. Lemarchand accurately summarises the problems arising from 15 Kamola, ‘The Global Coffee Economy and the Production of Genocide in Rwanda’. 16 Ibid., p. 583. 17 Ibid, p. 584. 18 Michel Chossudovsky, ‘Human security and economic genocide in Rwanda’, in Globalization, Human Security and the African Experience , ed. by Caroline Thomas and Peter Wilkin (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999), pp. 121-122. 19 Kamola, ‘The Global Coffee Economy and the Production of Genocide in Rwanda’, p. 578. 20 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, pp. 26-27.
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