Is “Neighbor” an Empty Concept? How Neighbours Turned Against Neighbours in 1994 Genocide

Can people really kill their neighbours – massively and out of hatred? Is it anthropologically possible? Massacres and genocide of neighbours have become a subcategory of mass violence studies over the past two decades. Dr, Jean-Philippe Belleau, from the University of Massachusetts Boston, explains what could have pushed neighbours to hunt and kill neighbours during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. The text is adapted from study titled: “Neighbor” is an Empty Concept: How the Neighbourly Turn in Mass Violence Studies has Overlooked Anthropology and Sociology. Published in “JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH”, May 2022.

More than any other instance of mass violence, the Rwanda genocide has been characterized as a close-range genocide (“génocide de proximité”). Two books based on post-genocide interviews with perpetrators and victims exemplify how the focus on social bonds at the micro-level allows to understand behaviours; the first by political scientist Lee-Ann Fuji, the second by historian Hélène Dumas.

Fuji’s nuances reveal two social phenomena. The first is the fluidity of behaviours. Perpetrators rescue, friend betray, bystanders turn into perpetrators and vice-versa; even Hutu rescuers can express hatred against Tutsis; people are moved at once by self preservation and empathy, calculation and hatred, beliefs and evasion. Individuals seem to move from neat analytical categories (perpetrator, bystander, etc.) to others in seconds, and back, especially as fear fatigue exhausted ethical stands.

However, behavioural changes seem almost always based on relatedness. The book also highlights how connections, between perpetrators and between perpetrators and victims, informed behaviour and sometimes contradicted orders. Relationships between perpetrators and victims were made of connections or acquaintanceships – people they knew or knew of, and often “absent ties,” as explained below. Often, the perpetrators knew the victims by face, as during the Kishinev pogrom; often, they knew their names. In Fuji’s account, those engaged in the very act of killing did not have an interpersonal relationship – a strong bond.

Protagonists at the most local level acted on personal motives rather than out of ethnic hatred. These personal motives were mainly of two orders: social bonds, and material interests. Social bonds were causal to recruitment as well as to the sparing of victims:

genocide at neighbor level was socially embedded in a set of dense ties … [which] were the sum of face-to-face interactions …

Most Interahamwe units were composed of ten to fifteen individuals. The act of killing was usually carried out by one person only. Social bonds are usually described as violated by failure to rescue. “I confessed that I had a part in the killing of my neighbor because we killed him before my eyes and I didn’t life a finger to save him … ” Another Interahamwe did not lift a finger to save a 13-year-old boy he used to babysit and who was killed, possibly the most striking violation of a social bond in the book.

The fluidity of behaviours, which Aliza Luft conceptualized as “behavioral boundary crossing,” is best highlighted by descriptions of murderer-rescuers, perpetrators who saved friends while killing Tutsis in other villages. Fuji tells of three young Tutsi, scared and without options, who joined an Interahamwe whose members were fully aware of their identity. Yet, they accepted the three Tutsis because they were their own friends from childhood.

[T]ies of friendship could in certain circumstances trump the salience of a person’s ethnic identity … In these moments, ties of friendship clearly mediated between the script for genocide and people’s strategies and actions.

In Fuji’s book, Tutsis saved by Interahamwe members and Joiners shared social ties:
Ties of friendship … led Joiners to help Tutsis they had known as longtime friends or neighbors when circumstances allowed.

In every instance of Tutsis spared by perpetrators presented in the book, we see a preexisting interpersonal relationship. These horizontal bonds, as Fuji astutely remarks, collided with other bonds, also horizontal (between perpetrators) and vertical (to their hierarchy):

Out of sight of leaders or other killers, Joiners were able to act on ties of friendship, helping Tutsi they had known as long-time friends or neighbors … It was social ties, not ethnic membership, that patterned processes of recruitment and targeting …

Hélène Dumas develops the same thesis as Fuji, who is mentioned in passing in the introduction – since Dumas diverges from Fuji about the general breaking of social bonds, a dialogue with the American author’s groundbreaking work would have been fruitful. She focuses on Shyorongi, a town of about 50,000 inhabitants. Relying on expressions such as “world of neighbors,” “logics of pogrom,” and “horizontal massacres,” which convey social violations meaning, Dumas emphasizes the social dimension of the genocide:

A common trait unites all the actors: a profound social, even affective, intimacy. Neighbors, friends, school peers, army draftees, teachers and students, even families constitute the primary sociology of trials, where they come to express how the massacres deeply damaged all these bonds … leaving communities shattered.

Relationships, however, are rarely described beyond brief sketches and appear neither “deep,” nor “intimate,” or even “affective.” Rather, they appear as “weak ties.” For instance, François Mupende evokes a mob formed after one of the many bar brawls described in the book:

Among them was this man whose family had received cows from my father. He was the first one to show our house [to a murderous mob].

This unnamed “man” participated in a mob against a family he knew, but was it a relation- ship that went beyond an economic transaction or between acquaintances? Perpetrators also used their “intimate knowledge” of their Tutsi neighbours to better identify, locate and hunt the victims. As I develop further, knowing locations is not the same as “social intimacy” but does denote a connection.

Crucially, many (but of course not all) relations between Hutus and Tutsi had been mediated by rumours, envy, hatred, and cultural insecurity for years if not generations before the genocide and were often beyond repair. Innocent Twahirwa’s story is a case in point. A Tutsi married to a Hutu woman, Innocent was hunted by his own inlaws during the genocide. However, Innocent was hated by his Hutu wife and in-laws years before the genocide happened. Innocent’s own brother-in-law, Kayiranga, had once tried to kill him, within an infra-family conflict that had become ethnicized after matrimonial relations broke down and his in-laws predictably took his wife’s side. “There was no love left between my wife and I.” We learn little about Innocent’s behaviour toward her during these years, and why her brother “defended her” against Innocent, although Innocent concedes that he mistreated her.

The description of family relations prior to the genocide is of constant physical fights and threats, so the reader fails to see what social normalcy was later violated – a negative relationship closer to the predi- caments of intimacy that anthropologists and social psychologist have explored.57 Kayir- anga saved the couple’s daughter, but did not provide to save their three sons, who, we understood, were killed, but not by their mother’s Hutu family. (The father, Innocent, did not attempt to care much for them either once he had left to Kigali.)

Innocent’s story is supposed to exemplify:

the massacre within the family cell … [and reveal] the most intimate dimension of violence, at the heart of families.

Yet, there was apparently no killing within “the family cell” and relationships were negative. Kayiranga not saving his nephews represent a social violation, although we do not know the circumstances or the details of it, nor if he had a relationship with them, but in any case this failure is of a different order than infra-family killing. As to compensate, a short footnote tells of a Hutu man who killed his Tutsi brother-in-law without any more details. Fuji’s book, on the other hand, presents one instance of such family killing and the most extreme violations of kinship morality in the book: “This lieutenant killed the Tutsi children of his sister.” (Details and context about the exact responsibility and the relationship to the nephews are not stated – more on this subject in this article’s last section.)

Many Hutus, including Joiners, were reluctant to save Tutsis they knew well or Tutsis they had social bonds with, while they were being slaughtered next door. Yet, this is not a social violation of the same order, with the same cognitive process, as participating in the act of killing. Here, Fuji provides key details about the act of killing itself and there- fore about responsibilities: in the vast majority of murders, only one person held a machete; this person matters more than the others.

The historiography does not mention a case of a killer having what would qualify as a positive relationship, or even a weak tie, with the victim. Fuji’s precise empirical study also shows that the dominant pattern was that Joiners actually evaded killing people they knew, and the more they knew them, the higher their efforts to evade perpetration while avoiding alienating their genocidal peers.

Both Fuji and Dumas emphasize that many relationships between Hutus and Tutsis prior to the genocide were mediated by increasing hatred and insuperable fears. Both describe harm and denunciations within relationships that were already severely strained by the time the genocide started. This is particularly true of denunciations within the extended family, which not only violated social norms, but also kinship morality. “Denouncers often acted on personal dislikes, jealousies, and resentment when going after family members … A convenient way of getting rid of unwanted rivals.” Family conflicts made family ties particularly threatening during the genocide. Therefore, some went “after those they felt had somehow wronged them or bested them …”

Were there cases, if any, of “peaceful” families whose positive relationships were later violated during the genocide? In all the mixed families described in Dumas, relationships had been negative if not openly hostile for years before the genocide took place. Can a social relationship be anthropologically violated if it had already been strained beyond repair? And how often did relationships go beyond acquaintance levels?