Fujii-The Power of Local Ties

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The Power of Local Ties: Popular Participation in the Rwandan GenocideLee Ann Fujii

To cite this Article Fujii, Lee Ann(2008) 'The Power of Local Ties: Popular Participation in the Rwandan Genocide',Security Studies, 17: 3, 568 — 597To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09636410802319578URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09636410802319578

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Security Studies, 17: 568–597, 2008Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0963-6412 print / 1556-1852 onlineDOI: 10.1080/09636410802319578

The Power of Local Ties:

Popular Participation in the Rwandan Genocide

LEE ANN FUJII

How do ordinary people come to commit genocide against theirneighbors? Ethnicity-based approaches cannot explain the differ-ent pathways that lead to mass violence or the different forms thatparticipation takes over time and place. In Rwanda, different pro-cesses and mechanisms led some to join in the carnage while oth-ers resisted. Utilizing Mark Granovetter’s concept of “social embed-dedness,” this article argues that social ties and immediate socialcontext better explain the processes through which ordinary peo-ple came to commit mass murder in Rwanda. Leaders used familyties to target male relatives for recruitment into the killing groups,which were responsible for carrying out the genocide. Ties amongmembers of the killing groups helped to initiate reluctant or hesi-tant members into committing violence with the group. Finally, tiesof friendship attenuated murderous actions, leading killers to helpsave Tutsi in specific contexts. Which ties became salient dependedon the context. In the presence of the killing group or authority(ies),low-level participants (a group I call “Joiners”) tended to go alongwith the violence. Alone, Joiners often made different choices. Thefindings in this article are based on data collected during ninemonths of fieldwork in two rural communities and two central pris-ons in Rwanda.

In April 1994, Christophe became a hunted man. On the night of 6 April,assailants shot down the plane carrying the Rwandan president as it triedto land at the airport in the capital, Kigali. Fingers pointed immediately to

Lee Ann Fujii is assistant professor of political science and program coordinator in theWomen’s Leadership Program at George Washington University.

The author wishes to thank Deborah Avant, Chip Gagnon, Villia Jefremovas, OmarMcDoom, Johan Pottier, Scott Straus, Dvora Yanow, Eugenia Zorbas, and two anonymousreviewers for their extremely helpful comments on various versions and sections of this article.

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The Power of Local Ties 569

the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel army that had invaded the countryon 1 October 1990. In August 1993, the RPF signed a peace agreement withPresident Habyarimana, marking a momentous step toward ending the warand Habyarimana’s one-party state.1 Within hours of the crash, however,specially trained militia, soldiers, and Presidential Guard began going doorto door with lists of targets and dispatched their victims with gruesome effi-ciency. Outside the capital, the genocide followed a different path. Violencebegan at different times in different regions.2 Local leaders and political en-trepreneurs seized the opportunity of the president’s assassination to securetheir own power by enlisting local residents into genocide. Many peoplerefused. Others found ways to avoid involvement. Many, however, did par-ticipate, like those who began hunting Christophe.

When violence began in his cellule, Christophe went to a neighbor’shouse to hide.3 Fearing too many people were there, he fled to anotherhouse. While he hid, a member of one of the local killing groups (whichlocal residents refer to as Interahamwe), stopped to alert Christophe that therest of the Interahamwe was on its way to kill him.4 Christophe fled andsurvived the genocide. Why would an Interahamwe help him like that?, Iasked during one of many interviews with him. Christophe replied matter-of-factly, “Because he was my friend.”

Christophe’s experience was not unique. Many survivors of the geno-cide tell similar tales of aid and succor from Hutu, even Hutu who wereactive participants in the genocide. So intense was the violence that manyTutsi who survived did so only because of the help of a Hutu friend, familymember, neighbor, or stranger.5 The intimacy and magnitude of the violenceraises important questions about the nature of popular participation in thegenocide. Who were the peasant killers known as Interahamwe? How didthey come to participate in the genocide? And why would some Interahamwetry to help the very people they were supposed to kill?

1 The politics and events leading to the genocide are much more complex than this introductionallows. For more detailed accounts, see Jordane Bertrand, Rwanda: Le Piege De L’histoire (Paris: Karthala,2000); Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story (New York: Human Rights Watch and FederationInternationale des Ligues des Droits de L’homme, 1999); Andre Guichaoua, ed., Les Crises Politiques auBurundi et au Rwanda (1993–1994) (Paris: Karthala, 1995); Gerard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: Historyof a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Filip Reyntjens, L’Afrique Des Grands Lacsen Crise (Paris: Karthala, 1994); Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power and War in Rwanda(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).

2 Scott Straus, “How Many Perpetrators Were There in the Rwandan Genocide? An Estimate,” Journalof Genocide Research 6, no. 1 (2004): 94-95.

3 A cellule comprises roughly one hundred to two hundred households. For a diagram of the ad-ministrative hierarchy in Rwanda in the early 1990s, see Appendix.

4 The term “Interahamwe” requires some clarification. Originally the term referred to a speciallyrecruited and trained militia in Kigali. In my two rural research sites, however, residents used the term torefer to local bands of killers.

5 Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, 13.


570 L. A. Fujii

THE PUZZLE OF POPULAR PARTICIPATION IN MASS VIOLENCE

Questions of mass participation in violence constitute a central puzzle inthe study of ethnic violence and genocide.6 From a rationalist standpoint,popular participation in genocide is puzzling because ordinary people arebetter off under conditions of peace than violence. For the masses to supportelite projects of genocide or ethnic cleansing makes no sense since they incurmost of the costs, and elites, most of the benefits.7

Attempts to explain popular participation in mass violence tend to focuson ethnicity as one of the main drivers of the violence. As many scholars havetheorized, in times of crisis and insecurity, people line up behind their ethnicleaders to ensure their own security and survival.8 Theories that view actors inethnic terms offer only partial explanations, however. Aggregation at the levelof ethnic group occludes the variation that occurs within groups. As micro-data from diverse cases attest, people rarely act as ethnic blocks when facingthreats. Rather, identities, interests, and alliances emerge endogenously—through the unfolding of violence itself.9

By definition, genocide is the organized attempt to exterminate a targetgroup, which genocidal leaders often (though not always) define in ethnicterms. To infer from this definition that ethnicity is therefore the reason thatordinary people kill is to confuse conceptual criteria with putative causes.That genocide occurs within a framework of ethnic targeting does not makeethnicity the sole or even primary motive for ordinary people to participate inviolence. The question of why and how people come to kill under the guiseof genocide (or other forms of organized violence) is a matter of empiricalinvestigation.

The micro-level literature on civil war and the Holocaust offers some an-swers. A key insight from this literature is that while people may kill underthe pretext of ethnic ideologies, real motives and interests are often rooted in

6 James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, “Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic Identity,”International Organization 54, no. 4 (2000): 846.

7 Rui J.P. de Figueiredo, Jr. and Barry R. Weingast, “The Rationality of Fear: Political Opportunismand Ethnic Conflict,” in Civil Wars, Insecurity, and Intervention, ed. Barbara F. Walter and Jack Snyder(New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 262.

8 Ibid; Russell Hardin, One for All (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Barry R. Posen, “TheSecurity Dilemma and Ethnic Conflict,” Survival 35, no. 1 (1993).

9 Paul R. Brass, Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence (Prince-ton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Valere Philip Gagnon, Jr., The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia andCroatia in the 1990s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004); Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence inCivil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Stathis N. Kalyvas, “The Ontology of ‘PoliticalViolence’: Action and Identity in Civil Wars,” Perspectives on Politics 1, no. 3 (2003); Ian Kershaw, “The Per-secution of Jews and German Popular Opinion in the Third Reich,” in The Persisting Question, ed. HelenFein (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987); Paul Richards, Fighting for the Rain Forest (Oxford: James Currey,1996); Jeremy M. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2007); Elisabeth Jean Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).



local relations and power structures.10 Indeed, the key finding of ChristopherBrowning’s work on the ordinary men comprising Reserve Police Battalion101 was that neither anti-Semitism nor firmly held Nazi beliefs were neces-sary to motivate these men to march thousands of Jewish civilians into thewoods and shoot them in the back of the neck. Rather, what made thesemen participate in the mass murder of unarmed civilians was a feeling ofobligation to one another and a desire not to leave such an unpleasant dutyto peers.11

Ethnicity leads us away from the situational and social dynamics thatBrowning highlights. The argument I propose follows Browning’s lead andseeks to fill in the gaps left by ethnicity-based theories. This explanationdoes not deny the importance of ethnicity during genocide but adopts amore granular lens to investigate the micro-processes that lead some peopleto participate in genocidal violence, while others evade, resist, refuse, or defyorders to participate. These micro-processes involve shared understandingsof ethnicity but do not reduce to ethnic logics alone.

Like Browning, I focus my argument on the lowest-level participantsin the Rwandan genocide. I call these actors “Joiners” because, in one wayor another, all joined in the violence of genocide, the goal of which wasthe extermination of all Tutsi in Rwanda. Joiners’ participation, I argue, wasnot always or even primarily shaped by ethnic imperatives, such as fear ofthe Tutsi-led RPF or hatred of Tutsi in general, but by social dynamics thatsometimes took precedence over ethnic considerations. What shaped theprocesses through which Joiners became involved in the violence and thevariety of actions they took at different moments were social ties that becamesalient in specific contexts. Family ties served as conduits for recruitment.Local leaders targeted male relatives for recruitment into the killing groupscharged with carrying out the genocide. Ties also formed among membersof the killing groups through group activities and interactions that often tookplace before any killing began. These ties helped to pull hesitant or reluctantJoiners into violence.

Once people joined in the violence, their actions took different forms indifferent contexts. Depending on who was present, Joiners acted on ties totheir group, prior ties to Tutsi victims, or ties to local leaders. In the presenceof other group members or leaders, Joiners tended to go along with theviolence. Alone, they made different choices, sometimes acting to save Tutsiinstead of killing them.

10 Mart Bax, Medjugorje: Religion, Politics, and Violence in Rural Bosnia (Amsterdam: VU Uitgeverij,1995); Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War; Kalyvas, “The Ontology of ‘Political Violence”’; StephenC. Lubkemann, “Migratory Coping in Wartime Mozambique: An Anthropology of Violence and Displace-ment in ‘Fragmented Wars,”’ Journal of Peace Research 42, no. 4 (2005).

11 Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution inPoland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).


572 L. A. Fujii

The explanation I proffer is not causal in the usual sense of identifyingthe variables that lead to specific outcomes. It is causal in the processualsense. What I seek to answer are “how” questions: how did ordinary peoplecome to be involved in mass violence, and how did different actions (bothviolent and non-violent) become possible in different contexts? Understand-ing these micro-processes requires uncovering how people made sense ofthe violence and how people made sense through violence. It requires, inshort, a meaning-centered approach.

COLLECTING NARRATIVE DATA IN POST-GENOCIDE RWANDA

The following analysis draws its data from interviews on the Rwandan geno-cide, a case where ethnic imperatives appear to have been at their most pow-erful given the extent of ordinary people’s participation—over one hundredsixty thousand civilian perpetrators by one conservative estimate.12 The datacome from intensive interviews conducted in two rural communities and twocentral prisons in Rwanda: “Ngali” in the center-south prefecture of Gitaramaand “Kimanzi” in the northern prefecture of Ruhengeri.13 I chose these twolocations to capture crucial north-south cleavages that have long markedRwandan history and politics.14 Each research site was a rural secteur, anadministrative unit comprised of roughly one thousand households or aboutfive thousand people. In addition to conducting interviews in the two sites,I interviewed former residents of Ngali and Kimanzi who were accused ofhaving participated in the genocide and incarcerated in the local prisons foreach community.

Across both research sites and prisons, I talked to eighty-two peoplein 231 individual interviews (see Figure 1). In addition, I conducted twogroup interviews, one in each research site.15 Everyone with whom I spoke,including prisoners, had lived in one or the other community at the start ofthe civil war in 1990, except for three people who fled to Ngali when thegenocide started. Of the eighty-two people I interviewed, twenty-eight were

12 Straus estimates between one hundred seventy-five thousand and two hundred ten thousandtotal perpetrators, of which 90 percent would have been “non-hardcore civilian perpetrators.” Straus,“How Many Perpetrators?” 94-95. More recently, proceedings from gacaca (community-based courts)have resulted in accusations against five hundred thousand people. Lars Waldorf, “Ordinariness andOrders: Explaining Popular Participation in the Rwandan Genocide,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 2,no. 3 (2007).

13 At the time of the civil war and genocide (1990-94), Rwanda was organized into eleven prefectures.All place names below the level of prefecture are pseudonyms, as are the names of people.

14 Rene Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970); CatharineNewbury, The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860–1960 (New York:Columbia University Press, 1988); Filip Reyntjens, Pouvoir et Droit au Rwanda (Tervuren, Belgium: MuseeRoyale de l’Afrique Centrale, 1985).

15 In one group interview, there were six men; in the other, there were three. The first took place inKimanzi secteur and the second in Ngali’s central prison.



Kimanzi (north) Ngali (center-south)

Number of Interviews

Number of Informants

Number of Interviews


Secteur 67 26 78 28

Prison 41 11 45 17

Total 108 37 123 45

FIGURE 1 Breakdown of Interviews by Research Site.

in prison at the time of my field research, all accused of having participatedin the genocide. Sixteen of the twenty-eight prisoners had taken part in agovernment program that offered the possibility of a reduced sentence (atthe court’s discretion) to those who voluntarily confessed their participationin the genocide. At the time of my fieldwork, none of the confessed prisonersI spoke with had had his dossier processed, so all had yet to benefit fromthe program. Of the twelve prisoners who did not confess, two had alreadybeen sentenced (one to life in prison and the other to death); the remainingten maintained their innocence and thus elected not to confess.

Interview Languages and Protocol

I conducted the interviews in Kinyarwanda, the native language of allRwandans, with the help of a French-Kinyarwanda interpreter. BecauseKinyarwanda is an extremely nuanced language, my interpreter and I workedclosely in French to clarify meaning and to interpret cultural and contextualcues. My interpreter was a woman who had lived in Rwanda all her life. Shehad a great deal of experience working in rural regions all over the countryand a particular talent for putting people of all backgrounds at ease.

We conducted interviews in people’s homes or in a private area in theprison courtyards, where we could be sure of privacy. Each interview beganwith an introduction of myself and my interpreter along with a detailed ex-planation of the entire project. This introduction took several minutes andincluded assurances that we would never share their answers with anyoneelse, including Rwandan authorities. The lengthy explanation up-front al-lowed us to demonstrate that we had nothing to hide—that we were whowe said we were. Accurate and detailed self-presentation is especially im-portant in conflict settings where suspicions of others, particularly outsiders,can run very high.16

16 N. Patrick Peritore, “Reflections on Dangerous Fieldwork,” The American Sociologist (Winter 1990);Jeffrey A. Sluka, “Participant Observation in Violent Social Contexts,” Human Organization 49, no. 2(1990).


574 L. A. Fujii

Only one person declined to be interviewed. The woman’s refusal ac-tually reassured me that people did not feel pressured to talk with us.No prisoner ever declined to be interviewed. To the contrary, many ex-pressed their appreciation of being asked to talk with us since interviewsgave them the opportunity to spend time in the open courtyard of the prisongrounds, outside the confines of the interior building which housed the mainpopulation.

Gaining the consent and trust of informants was particularly important inlight of my overall research strategy, which was to go back to the same peopleand talk to them multiple times. My belief was that over time I would be ableto build a level of trust and rapport with a core group of informants, whichwould allow me to broach topics that were sensitive, delicate, or complex.One topic that was particularly delicate, for example, was ethnicity, a factorso central to any study of genocide but banned by the government at thetime of my fieldwork. By talking to people over several months, I was able togather data that could not be accessed through a single interview or multipleinterviews conducted over a period of just days.

I used a “funnel” method to whittle down the number of people withwhom we spoke at each round of interviews, as time constraints did notmake it possible to speak with all eighty-two people multiple times. In thefirst round, we spoke with eighty-two people; in the next round, we spokewith a subset of that original number; in the next, a subset of the previoussubset, until, by the end, we had spoken to a handful of people (nine toten) in each research site and prison multiple times. Figure 2 identifies thebreakdown of people interviewed more than once. Reading across each rowshows how many people we interviewed twice, three times, and so forth.For example, the number of people interviewed at least five times was five inKimanzi and seven in Ngali. Reading down the columns headed “Kimanzi”or “Ngali” shows how many people from each site we interviewed multipletimes. For example, in Kimanzi prison, we interviewed one person twice,four people three times, and five people five or more times.

Selection of Interviewees

The research design drew its inspiration from Kristen Monroe’s work on altru-ism.17 To investigate altruistic behavior, Monroe constructed a continuum ofrational behavior, anchored by self-interested actors at one end and selfless(altruistic) actors at the other. To study mass-level participation in violence, Iconstructed a spectrum of responses to genocide. At one end of the spectrum,I placed the least or non-violent response, which I identified as “rescuing,”

17 Kristen Renwick Monroe, The Heart of Altruism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996);Kristen Renwick Monroe, “John Donne’s People: Explaining Differences between Rational Actors andAltruists through Cognitive Frameworks,” Journal of Politics 53, no. 2 (1991).



Kimanzi Ngali

Total Number of Interviews

with Same Person



2 6 5

3 4 1

4 2 2

Secteur

5+ 5 7

2 1 6

3 4 1

4 0 3

Prison

5+ 5 2

FIGURE 2 Breakdown of People Interviewed Multiple Times.

and at the other, the most violent, which I identified as “killing.” In betweenthose two poles I hypothesized a wide range of responses, including refus-ing to participate in the violence (resisting); witnessing without taking partin the violence (witnessing); avoiding participation in the violence (evading);turning people in to authorities (denouncing); and stealing the property ofthose killed or in hiding (pillaging). I arrived at some of these categoriesprior to going to the field. Others, however, emerged during the course ofthe fieldwork, as I learned from people’s testimonies the kinds of actionspeople actually took during the genocide. Figure 3 shows the spectrum andcategories of responses.

What the spectrum provided was a model for thinking both deductivelyand inductively about the range of responses people exhibited or could haveexhibited during the genocide. Narrative data helped to elucidate how peopleended up at different points on the spectrum at different times.

To locate people whose experiences reflected as much of the spectrumas possible, I used a purposive selection strategy. The goal was to capture abroad range of perspectives so that the data did not privilege certain viewsof the violence over others (such as the perspective of survivors).

Rescuing Resisting Witnessing Evading Pillaging Denouncing Killing

FIGURE 3 Spectrum of Responses to Genocide.


576 L. A. Fujii

To locate people to interview, I worked with residents as well as localauthorities. I did not rely on any single person as an interlocutor or any singlenetwork of relations (say, that of a prominent member of the community) toavoid personal biases that might have led me to some people and away fromothers. Instead, I sought out people who covered as much of the spectrumas possible. I quickly realized, however, that people would not come to meself-identified according to my categories. I therefore had to talk to themto find out what they did during the genocide. If informants’ experiencesfairly matched those of other people to whom I had already talked, I didnot continue interviews with them. If the experiences differed from others, Ioften continued.18

What I discovered through the course of interviews was the extent towhich the categories on the spectrum represented ideal types. In reality,people did not fall neatly into any one category; most occupied more thanone category at a time or moved between categories. People in the samecategories were not monolithically similar either. Witnesses came in all guises.They included people who fled and people who stayed put, people whoclaimed to have seen everything and people who remained at home hopingto see nothing. In addition, some responses to the genocide came up onlyrarely during interviews. I had a difficult time, for example, finding anyonewho would admit to having pillaged despite widespread acknowledgementthat pillaging had taken place.19 Only at the end of my fieldwork did twopeople admit pillaging property from Tutsi who had fled or been killed.

Factors That Shaped Testimonies of the Past

In addition to the challenges of finding people whose experiences reflecteda range of response to the genocide, I had to take into account the role

18 Other factors also played a role in my decision to continue or not continue interviewing thesame person. Some people showed little interest in being interviewed or were difficult to find. Instead ofexpending extra—and oftentimes fruitless—effort pursuing people who did not want to be interviewed, Ifocused my attention on those who did. I was fairly confident that if those individuals who avoided beinginterviewed had something to hide, their stories would come up in interviews with others. This assumptionmay have been mistaken, however. Whole communities can engage in “social” or “cultural censorship,”remaining silent on topics deemed divisive or harmful to the community. On social censorship, see SandraE. Greene, “Whispers and Silences: Explorations in African Oral History,” Africa Today 50, no. 2 (2003).On cultural censorship, see Robin E. Sheriff, “Exposing Silence as Cultural Censorship: A Brazilian Case,”American Anthropologist 102, no. 1 (2000). Hence, if such censorship was in place, then certain storieswould have remained hidden no matter to whom I spoke. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers forthis point.

19 This was a problem I did not anticipate, particularly since I knew that many prisoners had alreadyconfessed to having killed, a far worse deed in my mind. I discussed this problem with two Rwandancolleagues. One conjectured that people did not want to admit to pillaging because of the shame attachedto such an act since it indicated the pillager coveted what another person had. My other colleague pointedout that admitting to pillaging would make the pillager liable to pay restitution, yet another reason tokeep quiet on this matter.



that memory played in how people talked about the past. At the time of myfieldwork, ten years or more had passed after the events in question. In sucha period, memories undoubtedly change. People forget some details andmisremember others. They rearrange chronologies, confuse sequences, andgive greater weight to some moments than to others.20 People in closed socialenvironments often develop consensus versions of events. Most of the pris-oners we spoke with, for example, had been in prison for at least eight years,some close to ten. In that amount of time, prison culture likely produced aparticular way of talking (and perhaps thinking) about the genocide.21

What people remember about past violence, however, is not simply afunction of memory (either individual or collective) but of current politicalconditions, which endorse or promote certain narratives of the past over oth-ers. This was certainly the case in Rwanda, where the RPF-led governmentwas intent on promoting a view of the genocide and war that contained nomention of RPF war crimes and thus no recognition of those who suffered atthe hands of the RPF. The same government had also banned talk of ethnicity(based on the belief that such talk was a central factor leading to the geno-cide). This meant I could not seek out people of a certain ethnicity. Therewere also high levels of suspicion and distrust after the genocide. Peoplefeared being falsely accused and thrown into prison if they talked to thewrong people or said the wrong things.

I dealt with these field realities in several ways. To manage the challengeof varying memories, I cross-checked people’s answers through follow-upquestions and posed the same question to different people. By triangulatinganswers, I was able to fill in details or clarify timelines. To probe the topic ofethnicity, I posed questions about the person’s family background. Havingrich grandparents, for example, often indicated that a person’s family wasTutsi (the category “Tutsi” at one time signified a family of means, and thecategory “Hutu” indicated a family of lesser or no means). Finally, my inter-preter and I made a concerted effort to be consistent in everything we didso to allay people’s suspicions and fears that we were spies or governmentagents. We always made sure to come on days when we had appointmentsand not show up unexpectedly.

Did these strategies work? I believe they did. Over time, people’s fearsand suspicions seemed to lessen. People became more forthright and re-vealed more of their histories as well as additional details about their actionsduring the genocide. Indeed, the two people who admitted to having pillageddid so only after several interviews. I do not think they would have admitted

20 Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories (Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1991).

21 On the “double genocide” thesis which was promulgated in the prisons, see, for example, PhilipVerwimp, “Testing the Double-Genocide Thesis for Central and Southern Rwanda,” Journal of ConflictResolution 47, no. 4 (2003).


578 L. A. Fujii

this to me at the first or even second interview. Still, people made mistakesrecounting what they had seen or done or had trouble remembering certaindetails. The trustworthiness of their narratives, however, did not depend onthe accuracy or truthfulness of their answers but on the shared meanings andlogics contained within them. The goal was not to test hypotheses about spe-cific variables but to uncover the subjective and intersubjective meanings thatpeople used to explain what they had lived through, survived, participatedin, or witnessed.22 From a meaning-centered approach, bias is assumed sincesocial meanings do not fall from the sky fully formed. The way I dealt withall challenges I encountered in the field was through careful, reflexive datacollection, which included a skeptical stance toward all narratives. It was this“attitude of doubt” and reflexivity that ensured the quality of the data.23

THE SOCIAL EMBEDDEDNESS OF GENOCIDEIN TWO RURAL COMMUNITIES

To analyze these data, I adopted a sociological framework based on thework of Mark Granovetter and his concept of “social embeddedness.”24

Granovetter’s argument is simple but powerful. He argues that most behav-ior is embedded in networks of interpersonal relations. Social relations, heargues, have an independent effect on actors, one that is neither merely“frictional” nor overly deterministic.

For Granovetter, systems of social relations can and do act as sitesof trust-building (as the literature on social capital teaches), but this doesnot preclude the possibility that distrust and malfeasance can arise at thesame time. Granovetter points to a key reason for this seeming paradox.Malfeasance—particularly of the ambitious variety—generally requires teamsor groups of bad-doers. Simply put, people cannot commit large-scale baddeeds alone. “The extent of disorder resulting from force and fraud” dependson how social relations are structured or organized. An elaborate heist mightrequire a small group of thieves, but a war requires much larger numbers ofpeople organized into social units called “armies.” As Granovetter explains,

22 This is a typical focus of interpretive research. As Dvora Yanow explains, “Interpretive researchrarely proceeds from a formalized hypothesis because the researcher does not know ahead of timewhat meaning(s) will be found, expecting them to be generated through (participant-)observing and/orconversational interviewing and/or the close reading of documents.” Dvora Yanow, “Neither Rigorousnor Objective? Interrogating Criteria for Knowledge Claims in Interpretive Science,” in Interpretation andMethod: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn, ed. Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (Armonk, NY: M.E Sharpe, 2006), 71.

23 Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, “Judging Quality: Evaluative Criteria and Epistemic Communities,” inInterpretation and Method; Yanow, “Neither Rigorous nor Objective?”

24 Mark Granovetter, “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,”American Journal of Sociology 91, no. 3 (1985).



“More extended and large-scale disorder results from coalitions of combat-ants, impossible without prior relations.”25

Granovetter’s notion of social embeddedness leads us to expect thatparticipation in the Rwandan genocide was neither random nor all-inclusivebut structured by pre-existing networks of social relations. These networksmade certain people more available for recruitment than others; these sameties also shaped the form of participation by leading people toward certainactions (violence) and away from others (resisting) in a given moment.

By applying Granovetter’s concept of social embeddedness to the geno-cide, I do not mean to imply that social ties dictated individual or groupbehavior. True to Granovetter’s concept, I argue that people neither actedas atomized individuals, untouched by prior relations, nor were pushed inany single direction by existing social structures. Rather, existing ties shapedhow people saw their options in a given moment, and thus, how theyacted.

Joiners and Their Ties to the Community

Ties, as Granovetter would point out, are not stand-alone structures that acton their own; rather, they require actors to act on them. Who were the peo-ple responsible for committing the violence in the two research communities?Were they simply “loose molecules” bent on wreaking havoc and destruc-tion,26 or professional thugs intent on profiting from violence,27 or “violencespecialists” whose specific talent was to instigate or foment violence?28 Itturns out they fit none of these categories. Instead, those responsible forcarrying out the violence organized by local and supra-local leaders wereordinary men and women of their communities, whom I call “Joiners.”29

Joiners were ordinary in the sense that they were indistinguishable fromothers in their community. The Joiners I interviewed were all married menwith children. Their average age was thirty-two. Most stated their occupationas farmer (umuhinzi).30 Most were born in the same community in whichthey lived at the time of the genocide. None held positions of state authorityabove the level of responsable before the genocide or civil war. None hadany special police or military training prior to the start of the killings. The

25 Ibid., 492 (emphasis added).26 Robert D. Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1994.27 John Mueller, “The Banality of Ethnic War,” International Security 25, no. 1 (2000).28 Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).29 Methodologically, I consider Joiners to be prisoners who had confessed to participating in the

genocide.30 While most Rwandans would probably identify themselves as farmers, many earn “off-farm” in-

come through other means. On how men and women make extra money working in brickyards, forexample, see Villia Jefremovas, Brickyards to Graveyards: From Production to Genocide in Rwanda (Al-bany: State University of New York Press, 2002).


580 L. A. Fujii

demographic findings from Scott Straus’s nationwide sample of confessedand sentenced perpetrators confirm that Joiners from Ngali and Kimanzi wererepresentative of low- and mid-level perpetrators across the country.31

The category “Joiners” does not imply that all participated in the sameway. Some participated more directly, more enthusiastically, or more vio-lently than others. The label “Joiner,” therefore, does not imply anythingabout how the person participated, only that the person did participate inthe genocide in some way.

How were Joiners linked to the rest of their communities? As Granovetterleads us to expect, people in Ngali and Kimanzi were linked through adense set of interpersonal ties. These ties were “multiplex” in that peoplewere linked through multiple roles.32 The same person could be another’sgeographic neighbor, administrative authority, and family member. In bothcommunities, these ties crossed ethnic lines. Among the eight survivors Ispoke with from Ngali, for example, half were married to Hutu spouses atthe time of the genocide.33

In addition to ties through marriage, Hutu and Tutsi in both communitiesshared longstanding and sometimes very close friendships. In the northernresearch site of Kimanzi where the number of Tutsi was very small (approx-imately twenty-five in the whole secteur as opposed to some three hundredTutsi in Ngali), close friendships between Hutu and Tutsi were not uncom-mon and were expressed through a ritual known as a “blood pact,” wherebytwo people swear lifelong loyalty to one another by cutting under their navelsand drinking each other’s blood. Hutu and Tutsi in both communities alsoexpressed close friendship through the exchange of cows.

How Joiners Came to Join

How did Joiners come to be involved in the violence? What was the pro-cess for joining? Straus conjectures that recruitment was random but notesthe importance of face-to-face encounters for recruitment into the killinggroups.34 Verwimp identifies from which socio-economic segments of thepopulation the majority of perpetrators came. He finds that perpetrators wereover-represented in the richest and poorest segments (in terms of landhold-ings); he also finds that perpetrator households were often represented by

31 Straus, The Order of Genocide, 103-10. In addition, the data are consistent with a household-leveleconomic survey that Philip Verwimp conducted in three provinces. The average age of perpetrators fromthis survey was thirty-three. Philip Verwimp, “An Economic Profile of Peasant Perpetrators of Genocide:Micro-Level Evidence from Rwanda,” Journal of Development Economics 77, no. 2 (2005): 306-7.

32 Jeremy Boissevain, Friends of Friends: Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions (New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1974), 30.

33 The selection strategy I used was purposive, not random. The fact that half of the eight survivors inone research site were married to spouses of the other ethnicity is notable but not necessarily an accurateindicator of the rate of intermarriage in the community as a whole.

34 Straus, The Order of Genocide, 120.



a single male perpetrator (usually the father or a son) “[a]s if householdsdecided to supply the labour of one person per household to the genocidaleffort.”35 Verwimp can only speculate as to the reasons why these patternsoccur. He writes that people may have viewed genocide duty similarly toumuganda, a state-imposed communal work requirement that mandatedone participant from each household.36

The work of Straus and Verwimp sheds important light on the socio-economic profiles of perpetrators, but neither provides insight into the pro-cesses that led specific people to join, while others did not. Two pathwaysemerge from my data: targeted recruitment by local leaders who used familyties and a self-reinforcing process built on group ties. A clear instance of theformer pathway is found in Ngali and the latter in Kimanzi.

RECRUITMENT IN NGALI

In Ngali, there was a single, unequivocal leader of the genocide, whom I callJude.37 Though Jude died in 1997, information about him was readily avail-able.38 By all accounts, Jude wielded a monopoly on the means of coercion.Local residents described Jude as “the head of the Interahamwe [local killinggroups],” “president of the Interahamwe,” “the head of Pawa,” “the head ofthe killers,” and “our leader.”39

The person Jude ousted as conseiller, or head of Ngali, was his ownnephew, Paul. People consistently described Jude as all-powerful and Paulas powerless. As one Joiner remarked, “At that time, Paul was incapable ofmaking decisions. We saw that Jude had replaced Paul. It was Jude who waspowerful” [Olivier, #2/5].40 An older resident of Ngali went further, saying,“He was a leader. He would say all the time that he was working with theauthorities of the province of Gitarama. He would do whatever he wanted,no matter where, no matter when, at whoever he wanted” [110, #2/6].

Jude’s first task as new leader was to appoint new responsables for eachof the cellules and to recruit and organize local residents into the activitiesof genocide.41 Activities began with burning Tutsi homes and looting Tutsiproperty. In a week, they escalated to killing Tutsi.

35 Verwimp, “An Economic Profile of Peasant Perpetrators,” 308-9 (emphasis in original).36 Ibid., 309, note 4.37 All names are pseudonyms to protect identities.38 According to his wife, Jude died shortly after he and his family returned from exile in the Congo

in 1997. Jude was taken directly to the local jail (cachot communal) and died three days later. His wifenever specified the cause of death. Others reported that Jude had been killed.

39 Pawa, derived from the English word “power,” became the slogan of extremists during this period.40 The nomenclature “#2/5” refers to which interview from the total number of interviews the quota-

tion came. In this case, for example, the quotation came from the second of five interviews with Olivier.41 The head of a cellule is called a responsable. For more information on Rwanda’s administrative

structure in the 1990s, see Appendix.


582 L. A. Fujii

For Jude and his lieutenants, genocide started at home. Family ties op-erated as a primary avenue for recruitment. Jude first targeted immediate andextended family members into forming the killing groups and threatened tokill any family member who refused to go along with his plans. One of Jude’schief lieutenants, a man one elderly resident referred to as Jude’s “advisor,”targeted family members for both recruitment and killing [110, #2/6]. Thisman killed the Tutsi children of his sister then tried to kill his sister.42 He alsoforced a nephew to join the Interahamwe. The nephew had been friendswith Christophe, whose tale of escape began this article. In an interview,Christophe explained the nephew’s forcible recruitment.

INTERVIEWER: When you say that your friend became an Interahamwebecause of his uncle, what do you mean? That his uncle forced him to jointhem?

CHRISTOPHE: He forced the child to be in the group of Interahamwe. Evenmy cow was killed by the [uncle’s] group. My friend’s father did nothingduring the period of the genocide and there is another paternal uncle whodid not participate in the genocide.

INTERVIEWER: How did the uncle force your friend to join the Intera-hamwe?

CHRISTOPHE: [The uncle] was the head of Pawa. He was powerful and hetold [my friend] to join the Interahamwe and if he did not join them, theywere going to hurt him.

INTERVIEWER: If your friend refused to join the Interahamwe, would he[the uncle] have killed him?

CHRISTOPHE: He would have killed him [Christophe, #7/8].As Christophe’s testimony underscores, far from insulating family mem-

bers from pressures to commit genocide, family ties made certain relativesready targets for recruitment.

Christophe’s account also indicates, however, that not all family mem-bers joined in the genocide, and of those who did join, not all were forced.Jude’s nephew, Paul, for example, did not go along with Jude’s orders tokill all Tutsi. Instead, Paul defied those orders and helped many Tutsi es-cape by issuing them papers stamped with the official secteur seal (stampeddocuments carrying great weight in Rwanda). The document stated that theholder was Hutu, had lost his or her identity card, and would obtain a newcard following the end of the war. This paper enabled many local Tutsi toflee the area and escape the genocide.

Jude threatened Paul on numerous occasions for his rescue operations,calling him icyitso, or accomplice. Jude also reported Paul’s activities in hisweekly reports to communal authorities. There is no indication, however,that Jude ever roughed up Paul or threatened to kill or imprison him. In fact,

42 Ethnic identity is defined patrilineally in Rwanda. Thus, the children of a Hutu woman and Tutsiman are Tutsi.



Jude’s and Paul’s relationship appears to have wavered between rivals andcollaborators during the genocide. One survivor, for example, explained howher husband asked Jude to protect her from a relative who had threatenedto kill her. “My husband went to Jude. He gave him some beer, and Judeasked Paul to give me a paper that said that I was Hutu” [114, #6/7]. Thiswoman’s experience suggests that Paul’s activities sometimes served a usefulpurpose for Jude, which may explain why Jude did not have Paul killed.It also suggests that despite his refusal to join directly in the violence, Paulnevertheless collaborated with Jude in certain instances.

JOINING IN KIMANZI

In Kimanzi, joining followed a more bottom-up process. Mass violenceagainst Tutsi began in Kimanzi shortly after a bold attack by the RPF on anearby town in January 1991. In the atmosphere of war, groups became siteswhere Joiners could make sense of a highly uncertain and volatile situation.Through talking, exchanging information, discussing rumors, and conductingnight patrols, ties formed among Joiners. Repeated interactions strengthenedthese ties to the point where the group’s view of the situation overrodedoubts or hesitations on the part of individual Joiners. The experience ofStefan illustrates this process clearly.

Stefan was a slight man. His face was hollow, with deep-set eyes andsunken cheeks, making him look much older than his age. In 1991, the yearhe took part in the mass killings of Tutsi in Ruhengeri, Stefan was a 27-year-old married man with three children. He was a close neighbor of the soleTutsi living in the area. As neighbors, the two had a history of sharing beers,conversation, and chores.

Stefan describes his involvement in his neighbor’s murder in very am-biguous terms, wavering between having merely witnessed the killing andhaving directly participated. This murder took place in January 1991, whenthe civil war with the RPF was barely three months old and confined to thenorthern parts of the country. In late January, the RPF launched a lightningstrike on the main provincial town of Ruhengeri. The RPF held the town forone day and released all the prisoners in the central prison. Following thisstrike, authorities in Stefan’s community began issuing calls to the populationto root out RPF accomplices, who they defined as all Tutsi in the community.During this period, Stefan became unwittingly involved in the murder of hisneighbor.

INTERVIEWER: Did you see the killings of your neighbors?STEFAN: I saw the death of GK, and he was the one we killed.INTERVIEWER: How was he killed?STEFAN: We were by the road, for example [names people in the

group]. We were hearing that at [my neighbor’s] house, there were ibyitso


584 L. A. Fujii

[accomplices; plural of icyitso] of the Tutsi. We arranged the day to go attackhis house. Me and three others, we went there as well. When we got there,we searched for the ibyitso, but there weren’t any. It was [my neighbor’s]son, GK. [One in my group] said to GK, “It’s you Tutsi who are causing allthese problems.” And he killed him with a machete [Stefan, #1/5].

Additional details of this killing come from other accounts. AnotherJoiner in the same group explained that when the group of twelve to fifteenmen arrived at the victim’s house, several surrounded the house to preventescape. One Joiner then threw rocks on the roof to make the man comeout. When the man emerged, he had a machete in his hand and managed tostrike the first blow. The group killed the man instantly.

What emerges from Stefan’s account is the importance of his interactionswith the group prior to the group’s descent on the victim’s home. Theseinteractions took place amidst the insecurities of war, which had caused bothHutu and Tutsi to flee their homes and to be vigilant about the possibilitythat RPF accomplices were hiding in their midst. In such a climate, uncertaintyreigned. Stefan’s neighbor, however, was someone Stefan had considered afriend. What made Stefan go along with the group?

INTERVIEWER: At that time, how did the people distinguish between theTutsi who were true ibyitso and those Tutsi who were not?

STEFAN: The community made no distinction between one kind of Tutsiand the other. At that time, all Tutsi were ibyitso.

INTERVIEWER: And that’s what you believed at that time?STEFAN: People differ from one another. For me, like my neighbor, I didn’t

think that he was an icyitso but the others had just come to tell me that hewas an icyitso whatever that was [Stefan, #2/5].

Despite Stefan’s own, individual doubts that his neighbor and friendwas really an icyitso, Stefan acceded to the group’s determination that theman must be icyitso because of the rumors. Stefan’s interactions with thegroup shifted his judgments, aligning his view of the situation with that ofthe group. Ties to the group pulled Stefan along by erasing doubts andhesitations.

Others from Stefan’s group describe a similar process. One man stated hewas only “present” at the killing of the victim. He went to help accompany thesuspected neighbor to the communal authorities [407A, #2/2]. Another Joinerfrom the same group described his involvement as completely spontaneous.“The people who were coming from [names cellule] passed in front of ourhouse, and we followed them because they told us that in our cellule therewas someone who was hiding ibyitso. This was the way in which I came tobe in the group” [410, #3/5]. As these additional testimonies indicate, Joinersdid not necessarily set out to commit violence yet ended up participatingin murder nonetheless. The momentum of the group led these Joiners toparticipate in violence against Tutsi.



COMPARING JOINERS TO RESISTERS

Joiners were not simply unwitting followers of their groups, however. Joinersalso helped to create the very ties that bound them to their group. Whatfacilitated this process was Joiners’ readiness to look to the group to makesense of the situation. By looking to the group, Joiners were able to shift thelocus of agency away from themselves as individuals. As individuals, Joinerstended to see themselves as powerless to change or alter their situation.It was not that Joiners failed to see refusal (to join in the violence) as anoption; rather, Joiners did not believe refusing, resisting, or protesting wouldaffect the immediate outcome one way or the other. Indeed, when I askedthem if they tried to resist or refuse orders, most Joiners issued a commonrefrain: they had no power, or no one would listen to them. As one Joiner(from the same group as Stefan) explained when I asked him what he didwhile the group killed the victim, “I did nothing. No power at that time” [407A,#2/2]. A Joiner from Ngali spoke in nearly identical terms. At the time of thegenocide, this man was a responsable for one of the cellules in Ngali and,hence, claimed some authority through his position. Yet, he, too, describedhis situation as one where no one would listen to him. Explaining why hedid not try to stop two men from killing a child he had been looking after,the Joiner remarked, “I did nothing because they weren’t listening to me”[206, #1/1].

Other Joiners spoke in similar terms when explaining the situations theyfaced. No one would listen to them, or there was nothing they could doto stop others from killing whatever victim was at hand. These claims ofpowerlessness are, perhaps, too convenient to take seriously, but they arealso too numerous to dismiss. The question, however, is not whether Joinerswere or were not telling the truth but whether it is possible to detect thelogic underlying what they do say.

One way to identify this logic is to compare Joiners’ actions to resisters.I define resisters as people who openly refused to join in any genocidalactivities when pressed to do so. When comparing resisters to Joiners, thedifference in how actors in each group saw themselves in situations of in-security or threat is striking. Unlike Joiners, resisters did not see themselvesas powerless and did not believe that refusing would be pointless. Rather,resisters drew a clear line between what they would and would not do underany circumstance. Resisters maintained this line even when facing some ofthe same threats and pressures to engage in violence as Joiners did.

Frederic illustrates this difference clearly. Frederic was born and raised inNgali. He earned his living as a farmer and never went to school. He marriedat a young age and shortly after his second child was born, problems betweenhim and his wife began. His wife had become angry when Frederic gave hissisters some land. She was so angry she poisoned several of Frederic’s sistersin an effort to reclaim the land her husband had given away.


586 L. A. Fujii

By the time of the genocide, Frederic and his wife had been marriedfor over ten years and had eight children. By 1994, Frederic was accustomedto the use of violence to solve family problems. Indeed, one might go sofar as to say he was resigned to violence, powerless to undo what his wifehad done. It would be wrong, however, to assume that Frederic took suchan attitude when the problem of politics began to emerge. Even before thegenocide began, Frederic had run-ins with Jude who used both carrots andsticks to convince Frederic to toe the line. While many in his communityfollowed Jude’s orders, Frederic did not.

INTERVIEWER: Were there people who refused to follow this order [to joina specific political party] despite the threats?

FREDERIC: For example, me. I refused to join the MRND party.43 He, [Jude]said that there was one party. I came to tell him that he shouldn’t make mychoice for me.

INTERVIEWER: When you refused the order to join the MRND, how did Judereact?

FREDERIC: After having refused to join the party, there were tensionsbetween him and me. When they started to do the patrols, I, too, would goand Jude would say among us is an icyitso, meaning me. I was able to go twodays without going there [to do the patrols]. They would come looking for meand punch me. Another day, they were going to kill a cow of [my neighbor].They came to ask me to take some of the meat. I refused again, and they hitme, insulted me, saying that they didn’t know my origin [ethnicity]. And theywould block me saying that I had to stay near them to keep me from tellingpeople what they had done.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you refuse each time?FREDERIC: Because it was wrong to eat someone else’s cow. For me, I

can accept dying instead of hurting others [Frederic, #2/5].At a subsequent interview, I asked Frederic about his relationship with

Sophie, a local woman who helped raise Frederic after his parents had died.Sophie taught Frederic that good behavior was showing obedience towardothers, a common theme in all the interviews where the subject of goodbehavior arose. This valorization of obedience, however, did not translateinto Frederic obeying orders he believed to be wrong.

INTERVIEWER: You said the last time that you refused to follow the ordersof Jude. Did Jude ever threaten to kill you when you refused his orders?

FREDERIC: Jude made threats to me after refusing to eat meat from theneighbors’ cows. He sent a boy who beat me up and asked me to go do thepatrols. The boy forced me to go. If not, they were going to kill me. When I

43 The Mouvement Revolutionnaire National pour le Developpement (MRND) was the party created byPresident Habyarimana shortly after he took power in a 1973 coup. Frederic is probably mistaken aboutthe party, however. It is more likely that Jude was a member of the Mouvement Democratique Republicain(MDR), which had its roots in this region.



got there, Jude told me that he didn’t know my background [ethnicity], andright away, he asked me to pay him some money to save my life. If not, hewas going to bust my head open. I gave him seven thousand [about US$50]to save my life.44

INTERVIEWER: Why weren’t you obedient at that time with Jude and hisgroup?

FREDERIC: Because I saw that Jude and his group were harming othersand well, everyone should have a right to his life [Frederic, #3/5].

Gustave, a resister from Kimanzi, gave a similar explanation as to why herefused to join any violent activities. “The conseillers were giving the ordersto the people to participate in the politics, but some people accepted andthe others refused to follow the orders because of their beliefs which didn’taccept participating in it, for example, the killing. And that was my also mycase. My heart [conscience] did not allow me to participate in the politics[Gustave, #2/6].” Gustave said no one tried to force him to join what he calls“the politics” after he refused, but he acknowledged that others in Kimanziwere threatened for refusing.

What makes Gustave and Frederic different from the Joiners in theircommunities? The key difference seems to be that resisters did not relin-quish their agency to that of a group but continued to act as individuals. Asindividuals, both Frederic and Gustave maintained a clear sense of what wasright or wrong under any circumstances and both abided by that sense ofright and wrong even under threat of harm. For these two men, situationalexigencies did not override their own personal, moral compass. For example,even though Frederic participated in night patrols (as did many Tutsi in thebeginning), he remained steadfast in his refusal to join Jude’s political partyor to partake of stolen meat. Gustave and Frederic never looked to others tomake sense of the situation; instead, they looked to their own consciences,or “hearts.” For resisters, group ties exerted no influence because resistersnever looked to the group to figure out how to think or how to act; they alsodid not go along with group activities they knew to be wrong.

Joiners, by contrast, never mentioned the rightness or wrongness oftheir actions when they explained or described how they became involvedin the genocide. This does not mean Joiners did not know what they weredoing was wrong, only that in the moment, their individual sense of right orwrong did not guide their actions. Instead, Joiners relinquished any sense ofindividual responsibility to the group and went along with group actions ateach step.

44 In 1994, the exchange rate in the informal market was 182 Rwandan francs to the dollar. Prunier,The Rwanda Crisis, 130, note 7. By local standards, 7,000 Rwandan francs,would have been a considerablesum of money.


588 L. A. Fujii

How Joiners’ Participation Varied

Once Joiners engaged in the violence, why did their participation take variedforms? Stories from survivors at both research sites attest to the importanceof bonds of friendship in explaining why even the most active killers tried tosave the lives of Tutsi friends. As these stories indicate, Joiners did not viewall Tutsi as a monolithic group to be exterminated but, in many instances,continued to see Tutsi friends as people they should help, not hurt.

Paul

How were ties of friendship established? A group interview at the Ngaliprison with Paul, the former conseiller of Ngali ousted by Jude, and twoJoiners named Eugene and Felix shed light on this question. The three werean unlikely trio, differing quite a bit in age, education, and personality. Theypresented themselves as a group of close friends, so I chose to talk to themtogether for our first interview. Of the three, Felix and Eugene had con-fessed to participating in the genocide; Paul, however, had maintained hisinnocence.

With his large personality, Paul quickly took over the interview andanswered all the questions himself, while Eugene and Felix seemed contentto remain silent. The interview was shortened when I realized it was not goingto be a group interview but one with Paul and two onlookers. What did comeup during our brief exchange, however, was insight into the friendship thethree shared before the genocide.

INTERVIEWER: Did you three know each other before the genocide? Sincewhen?

PAUL: Yes, we knew each other because we had been neighbors for along time.

INTERVIEWER: You went to the same primary school?PAUL: No.INTERVIEWER: Before the genocide, how much time did you spend

together?PAUL: We were neighbors; we would share everything. Despite some

being older than others, we were together a long time until the period of thegenocide and the war.

INTERVIEWER: How did you become friends?PAUL: We lived in the same secteur, almost the same neighborhood. We

would help each other. All of that. It’s that no one wished anything bad tohappen to anyone else.

INTERVIEWER: Can you give me an example where you needed help, andthe others helped you?

PAUL: For example, helping the other with work in the field, cultivatingtogether. Another example, helping each other at the time of a wedding



where there was someone who would be receiving a cow. Another example,helping each other take the sick to the hospital [Groupe #1/1].

This description of what constituted friendship between the three is con-sistent with other testimonies on friendship from Joiners and non-Joinersalike. Friendship was facilitated by geographic proximity. Being neigh-bors enabled frequent contact and regular interaction. Friendships formedthrough shared activities, such as chores and gestures of mutual aid andsupport.

Friendship, however, did not lead Paul, Felix, and Eugene to make thesame choices during the genocide. This is not surprising given the trio’s verydifferent positions in the community when the genocide began. As conseiller,Paul had been in a position of authority and was even able to use his formerposition to help save Tutsi. Helping Tutsi, however, sometimes gave rise tounexpected forms of complicity. One person Paul helped, for example, washis friend, Eugene, who used the stamped paper Paul gave him not to fleethe area but to pursue a very different strategy of survival.

EUGENE

Eugene was a young man in his twenties when the genocide began. Hemarried only two years before and had one child. Like most people in Ngali,he experienced no problems when the Rwandan civil war started in 1990.The war was far away and life remained calm. After the assassination ofthe president, however, people began to threaten and hunt down Eugenebecause he was among those “who had to be killed.”

Eugene’s prior relations with Hutu friends, Paul among them, helpedshape his range of options. Eugene was able to obtain the stamped docu-ment from Paul, which stated he was Hutu and had lost his identity card.This document gave Eugene the possibility of fleeing the area and escap-ing the genocide. Rather than use this document to flee, however, Eugenedecided instead to join the Interahamwe in order to save himself. At firstglance, Eugene’s strategy might seem irrational, but on closer inspection, itmade sense. By joining the Interahamwe, Eugene was not placing himselfwith strangers who might turn on him but with longtime friends who couldcamouflage him.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you decide to confess?EUGENE: It was because I saw the death of a lot of people.INTERVIEWER: You confessed to having done what?EUGENE: I was witness to everything I saw and by whom.INTERVIEWER: You yourself killed no one?EUGENE: Me, I didn’t kill anyone.INTERVIEWER: Even though you were among a group of Interahamwe?EUGENE: Yes.INTERVIEWER: What were you doing in this group if you didn’t participate

in the killings?


590 L. A. Fujii

EUGENE: Me, I was an observer.INTERVIEWER: What was your role, your job, as observer?EUGENE: There were a lot of us. It was the young men I had known

for a long time. I was among the young people during the war, and I saweverything that they did, and I had no role. I was with them in order to savemyself.

INTERVIEWER: The other young people in your group were your closefriends?

EUGENE: Yes.INTERVIEWER: No one in your group wanted you to participate in their

activities?EUGENE: Yes, there was one who gave me a person to kill, but I refused

to kill her [Eugene, #3/4].Eugene’s actual participation may not have been simply an “observer,”

as he insists. In his letter of confession to the prosecutor, Eugene detailsthe killings of five victims and specifies his own participation as follows:“I was always with the group of Interahamwe who would go hunt Tutsi. Iparticipated in the genocide because there were times when I would handover Tutsi to the group of Interahamwe and at the roadblock” [Eugene, lettre].

It is difficult to determine which version of Eugene’s involvement is moreaccurate. There are reasons to be skeptical of both. Prisoners wrote lettersof confession with the goal of garnering favorable consideration from theprosecutor, who had the power to award the confessing prisoner a reducedsentence. As many of these men had already been in prison for nearly tenyears by the time of my fieldwork in 2004, receiving a reduced sentencewas tantamount to immediate release. Thus, it is not surprising that in theletters, Joiners speak in language that is direct and detailed about the actsthey committed. In interviews, by contrast, Joiners tended to talk in termsthat minimized their agency in the activities to which they had confessed. AsEugene maintained above, “I had no role.”

Regardless of the actual extent of Eugene’s participation, the strategyEugene deemed optimal to his survival was to join the Interahamwe ratherthan flee. This choice Eugene admitted freely. What made this option notonly possible, but also logical, was Eugene’s history of friendship with theothers in the group of Interahamwe he joined.

INTERVIEWER: How many people did your group kill? More than ten peo-ple?

EUGENE: It was a lot. More than ten people. It was my group that killednearly everyone in our secteur.

INTERVIEWER: How did your group choose their victims?EUGENE: The group killed Tutsi.INTERVIEWER: Did you know all your group’s victims?EUGENE: Yes, they were our neighbors. Because you knew all the people

in your secteur.



INTERVIEWER: And all the members of your group of killers were also fromNgali?

EUGENE: Yes, they were from Ngali secteur.INTERVIEWER: Over how many days did your group kill?EUGENE: I was with the group for a month. They went to the Congo, and

as for me, I stayed in Ngali.INTERVIEWER: When did your group form as a group?EUGENE: Before the war, we were a group, and we continued this group

even during the war.INTERVIEWER: A group of what? Friends? Killers? Bandits?EUGENE: Before the war, we were friends. We were in business selling

food and small livestock [Eugene, #3/4].Eugene’s responses highlight the importance of prior connections—not

only to leaders such as Jude but also to fellow Joiners—in shaping not onlywhich options Eugene saw available but also which options appeared opti-mal. As Eugene remarked in a later interview, “For me, I followed the groupbecause I knew the young men who made up the group really well. . . ”[Eugene, #4/4]. In other words, knowing the young men in the group madeEugene calculate that joining them as an Interahamwe was his best option.

According to Eugene, he was not the only Tutsi to make this choice.Three other Tutsi followed the same strategy, paying Jude money so hewould allow them to join the Interahamwe [Eugene, #4/4]. This strategy ofjoining the side of the killers shows that Tutsi made their decisions based onprior relations with Hutu and that these prior ties could, at times, trump thesalience of a person’s ethnic identity during the genocide.

MICHEL

Ties of friendship were also crucial in leading certain Joiners to try to helpTutsi they had known previously as close friends, neighbors, or relatives.Eugene, for example, had tried to help his favorite uncle during the genocideby bringing the man food in his hiding place. Michel and his siblings triedto save four Tutsi friends and neighbors by hiding them in their homes.

Michel had been in prison nearly ten years by the time of my field-work. He looked younger than his age. His demeanor was reserved, evenshy. During the first interview, Michel avoided eye contact and answered allthe questions with a quiet earnestness. The second interview began with aquestion about the Tutsi he mentioned saving during his first interview.

INTERVIEWER: The last time you told us that you saved four people. Tellus how you decided to hide these four people.

MICHEL: I saw that the killing was terrible, and I saw especially that ourneighbors were suffering, that I had to do some good. I give you the exampleof the lady PT. Between her house and mine, there is a sister house. As wehad shared everything before, I decided to save her.


592 L. A. Fujii

INTERVIEWER: Did PT ask you to save her?MICHEL: She did not ask me to save her. She just came to our house, and

we agreed to hide her and to share with her what we had at the time untilthe end of the war.

INTERVIEWER: Who were you with at your house?Michel: My sister [names her], my little brothers, [names them]. Except

that [one of my brothers] had his own house and we hid them together.INTERVIEWER: Did you hesitate to hide this woman at first?MICHEL: We did not hesitate to hide her except that each time the killers

would come to search for people to kill. But we did everything possible toprotect her [Michel, #2/3].

Michel’s rescue activities did not keep him from participating in themurder of another Tutsi, however. This victim was a stranger in Ngaliand had stopped at Michel’s house to ask for directions to a neighbor’shouse. Michel described his involvement in this man’s murder in ambiguousterms.

INTERVIEWER: What happened next at your house? After this man’s arrival?MICHEL: Once he got there, he asked me to show him the path that leads

toward [a neighbor woman’s] house. I kept him at my house a while, andafter a few minutes, a man named MG came to my house and asked him [thestranger] to follow him. This man followed MG to the roadblock where theywere working.

INTERVIEWER: Who was this man named MG?MICHEL: He was the leader of the roadblock.INTERVIEWER: What did he want with this man?MICHEL: He wanted to have him killed, and he was killed at the road-

block.INTERVIEWER: Were you able to see the killing of the man from your house?MICHEL: No, because between the roadblock and my house, there is a

forest.INTERVIEWER: How did you know this man was killed at the roadblock?MICHEL: The killers passed by near my house saying they had killed him.INTERVIEWER: How did MG know that this man was at your house?MICHEL: I don’t know.INTERVIEWER: Why did MG and the others want to kill the man who was

at your house?MICHEL: When MG arrived at my house, he started to ask him lots of

questions, and maybe he noticed that this man was among those peoplewho they were supposed to bring to the roadblock.

INTERVIEWER: Did you know that MG was going to kill this man when hetook him to the roadblock?

MICHEL: Yes, I thought about his being killed because there were someothers who were killed like that except that there was nothing I could do forhim.



INTERVIEWER: Did you try to keep MG from taking this man from yourhouse?

MICHEL: Yes, I tried to stop him, but he didn’t listen to me. Afterwards,I ran into MG [the neighbor woman whose house the stranger was trying tofind] who had me imprisoned, and I told her that MG did not want to let thisman go.

INTERVIEWER: What did you say to MG in trying to keep him from takingthis man to the roadblock?

MICHEL: After talking to this man, MG asked me what this man was doingat my house. I told him that he came to ask me the path that leads to [theneighbor woman’s] family. He told me he was going to take him to theroadblock, and I asked him to let him go to [the neighbor woman’s] housebefore taking him to the roadblock. MG refused and asked the man to followhim.

INTERVIEWER: Was MG alone or was he with some others?MICHEL: Yes, he was alone.INTERVIEWER: Was he armed?MICHEL: I don’t remember if he was armed [Michel, #3/3].In his letter of confession, Michel painted quite a different picture of

this incident. In the letter version, Michel not only helped escort the manto the roadblock, he also had a direct hand in killing him. Even the versionfrom Michel’s interview, however, indicates some complicity in the stranger’smurder. Why else would Michel delay the man at his house if not to detainhim long enough for MG to arrive and interrogate the man? That MG showsup a few moments later indicates that Michel expected, or perhaps feared,MG’s arrival.

Whatever the reason, Michel’s attempt at preventing MG from taking thestranger to the roadblock seemed hardly a sincere effort at trying to savethe man: all Michel suggested was taking the man to the neighbor’s housefirst and then to the roadblock, where the man was to be killed anyway.Michel’s response to the situation seemed to have been the result of twofactors. First, the appearance of the roadblock leader in Michel’s house con-strained Michel’s options. It denied Michel the possibility of acting differ-ently toward the stranger, such as helping him elude the nearby roadblock.Second, the man’s status as a stranger meant that Michel had no prior tiesto him and, perhaps as a result, felt little obligation to try to help him.After all, Michel saw his own neighbors suffering when the genocide be-gan, not the stranger who showed up at his door. Saving a Tutsi strangerwould have meant risking not only his own life but also the lives of theother Tutsi Michel claimed he and his siblings were hiding at the time. Thislack of ties to the stranger might have meant the difference between Micheltrying harder to save the man and going along, however reluctantly, withhis murder.


594 L. A. Fujii

OLIVIER

As the cases of Michel and Eugene show, both ties and context mattered inshaping Joiners’ actions. In the presence of authority figures or a group ofInterahamwe, Joiners tended to go along with genocidal activities. Alone,Joiners took quite different actions, as the case of Olivier illustrates.

By his own admission, Olivier and his group had participated in nearlyevery killing in Ngali. Olivier seemed every bit the willing executioner, takingan active role in the genocide throughout Ngali. At one of our last interviews,I asked Olivier if he had ever tried to save anyone. The frankness of hisresponse was startling.

INTERVIEWER: Did you ever try to save someone during the genocide?OLIVIER: No, it was impossible.INTERVIEWER: Why was it impossible?OLIVIER: Because when you would say something about saving someone,

they [the other Interahamwe] would tell you to kill him yourself. There wasa boy who was fleeing. When I ran into him, I told him to take another pathbecause he was headed toward the Interahamwe. He’s alive.

INTERVIEWER: Did you know this boy?OLIVIER: Yes, I knew him. He lived in our cellule.INTERVIEWER: Why did you help this boy?OLIVIER: He was my neighbor but not close. We weren’t close friends.

But I ran into him when I was alone, and that’s why I saved him. But whenyou ran into someone when you were in a big group, it was hard to savesomeone [#4/5].

Olivier’s story of helping the fleeing Tutsi boy is striking not only be-cause Olivier refrained from killing the boy or calling the group over to killhim but because Olivier actually helped the boy escape the killers. This in-cident underscores the importance of context in shaping how Joiners actedtoward Tutsi in a given moment. Indeed, Olivier’s case suggests that imme-diate context (that is, being alone) was more important than prior ties inproducing acts of rescue rather than acts of killing. As Olivier admitted, hedid not help the boy because of any special prior relationship the two had;rather, he helped the boy simply because he could—because he was alone.Being alone presented Olivier with an option he did not believe he had whenhe was with the group. Alone, he could help the boy escape without riskingpunishment at the hands of his group.

JOINERS VERSUS RESCUERS

Acts of rescue, however, did not turn Joiners into rescuers. Here, the term“rescuer” refers to people who risked their lives to save Tutsi and who didnot participate in the genocide in any way. To be sure, acts of rescue came inmany guises and from many quarters. Some gestures of aid were momentary



(alerting a Tutsi family to flee as killers approached). Other efforts were moresustained (hiding Tutsi in one’s home).

The difference between Joiners and rescuers, then, was not in the typesof rescue activities undertaken (since these activities overlapped) but the roleties played in determining who Joiners and rescuers sought to help. UnlikeJoiners, rescuers did not help Tutsi only when circumstances allowed butrisked their lives to save Tutsi at the moment help was needed. Joiners likeOlivier and Michel, by contrast, tried to help Tutsi only when they deemedthe risks to be minimal.

Rescuers also did not confine their activities to helping only those withwhom they had some prior tie; they helped friend and stranger alike.45 Nei-ther did rescuers make distinctions between people they liked and peoplethey disliked before the genocide. For example, Sophie, the woman whohelped raise the resister Frederic, helped anyone who came to her houselooking for a place to hide. One Tutsi who sought refuge with her was aman she and most of the community disliked, yet she helped him.

Because their activities could be thwarted by anyone willing to exposethem, rescuers were extremely careful to conduct their activities in secret.Unlike Joiners, rescuers saw the danger in the multiplex ties in which theywere embedded. As a result, they remained ever vigilant, particularly of those(such as family members) who were in the best position to denounce theiractivities to authorities. Indeed, one rescuer from a community outside Ngaliwent so far as to threaten his sister with death if she denounced the Tutsi hewas hiding, even as he enlisted her help in feeding them.46

To avoid detection, rescuers worked alone or with a very small numberof trusted friends or family members. For some rescuers like Sophie, havingonly a few close friends helped her during the genocide. Sophie explainedthat had she had many friends, she would not have been able to keep her se-cret. Not all rescuers were marginal members of society, however. A rescuerfrom Kimanzi said he had always had many friends, but during the genocide,he put his trust in three close friends after he himself was forced into hidingalong with the Tutsi he had been helping. Similarly, not all socially marginalpeople were rescuers: character, not social status or ties, distinguished res-cuers from the rest of their communities.47

Whether socially marginal or well-liked, rescuers saw ties as potentiallythreatening to their activities and thus tried to find ways to navigate those tieswithout drawing suspicion or revealing the nature or extent of their activities.

45 This section draws from my data on rescuers as well as accounts of rescuers featured in AfricanRights, Hommage au Courage (Kigali and London: African Rights, 2002).

46 Ibid., 23.47 This finding is consistent with Monroe who argues that for rescuers, their identity or sense of

themselves in relation to others makes rescue an immediate and automatic response to anyone in needof help. See Kristen Renwick Monroe, The Hand of Compassion (Princeton: Princeton University Press,2004).


596 L. A. Fujii

Joiners, by contrast, experienced ties as empowering. It was through ties thatJoiners knew how to think and thus how to act.

CONTRIBUTING TO THE MICRO-TURN IN THE STUDYOF CONFLICT AND VIOLENCE

This article argues that the pervasive understanding of ordinary people com-mitting mass violence for reasons of ethnicity—be they ethnic loyalties, ide-ologies, animosities, or fears—is mistaken. It is not that ethnicity is unimpor-tant but rather that it operates as an organizing principle during genocide,not as an automatic trigger for mass participation in violence. Beneath thisprinciple of organization, more immediate logics are at work, shaping howpeople become participants in violence and the actions they take in a givenmoment.

The mechanisms I have highlighted are social ties and social context.Social ties and context led the lowest-level participants toward and awayfrom violence at different moments. Some Joiners came to participate in theviolence through forcible recruitment by local leaders, others through groupactivities and interactions. Once the killings began, however, ethnic logicsdid not take over completely; rather, ties of friendship sometimes attenuatedJoiners’ murderous actions, leading them to help, hide, or camouflage Tutsiwhen the opportunity arose. Which ties became activated in a given momentdepended on who was present. In the presence of authorities or groups,Joiners tended to go along with the violence; alone, they could and oftendid make different choices.

The findings of this article contribute to the micro-turn in the studyof social violence.48 The findings are consistent with other recent work onRwanda as well as other genocides.49 They are also consistent with recentliterature on rebel groups that notes the importance of social networks andties in mass recruitment50 and the various ways in which ordinary peopleparticipate in civil wars, from provisioning soldiers with food51 to denouncingneighbors.52 What this study additionally points out are the unexpected waysin which perpetrators act as contexts shift or change. Macro-level approaches

48 Charles King, “The Micropolitics of Social Violence,” World Politics 56, no. 3 (April 2004).49 Browning, Ordinary Men; Alexander Laban Hinton, Why Did They Kill? (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2005); Straus, The Order of Genocide.50 Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence.51 Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador.52 Martin Dean, “Local Collaboration in the Holocaust in Eastern Europe,” in The Historiography of the

Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Martin Dean, “Microcosm: Collaborationand Resistance During the Holocaust in the Mir Rayon of Belarus, 1941-1944,” in Collaboration andResistance During the Holocaust, ed. Paul A. Levine, David Gaunt, Laura Palosuo (Bern: Peter Lang,2004); Nicholas Gage, Eleni (New York: Ballantine Books, 1983); Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in CivilWar.



are unable to uncover these shifting dynamics and thus put too much stockin overly broad categories such as ethnic groups or masses. As the findings ofthis study show, genocidal violence, like all political violence, is multi-layeredand, hence, not reducible to ethnic logics alone.

APPENDIX

At the time of the genocide, Rwanda’s administrative structure includedeleven prefectures, each headed by a prefet appointed by the president. Eachprefecture, in turn, was subdivided into the following units.

Préfecture (11)a

(préfet)b

Commune (~13) (bourgmestre)

Secteur (~10) (conseiller)

Cellule (6-10) (responsable)

FIGURE 4 Administrative Hierarchy in Rwanda, 1990-94. aNumber of units contained in theunit above. Thus, the number “11” next to “Prefecture” means that in 1994, the country wascomprised of eleven prefectures, each of which included approximately thirteen communesbHead of the administrative unit.


Fujii-The Power of Local Ties

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