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Hinweise auf Veranstaltungen, Symposien, Vorträge |
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René Lemarchand: Rethinking Genocide - Rwanda, Bosnia and Cambodia |
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| | | Die bewusste und verpflichtende kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der Vergangenheit ist eine wichtige Voraussetzung der Genozidprävention. Für René Lemarchand, Professor em. für Politikwissenschaft (Florida) ist diese Verpflichtung zur Erinnerung von großer Bedeutung. |
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Prävention heißt Begreifen und Sichtbarmachen |
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Zum einem, dürfen begangene Gräueltaten nicht in Vergessenheit geraten, und zum anderen können im Zuge der Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung mögliche Strategien zur Verhinderung von künftigen Völkermorden entwickelt werden. Lemarchand argumentiert, dass erst mit dem Begreifen und Sichtbarmachen der Gründe für menschliche Perversion Maßnahmen zur Bekämpfung des Barbarischen im Menschen entwickelt werden können.
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Verpflichtung zur Erinnerung |
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In einem Vergleich der Völkermorde in Ruanda, Bosnien und Kambodscha sollen Berührungspunkte aber auch Besonderheiten identifiziert werden, die über die bloße Darstellung hinaus, Erklärungen für die dort begangenen Verbrechen liefern. Denn die Verpflichtung zur Erinnerung beinhaltet auch den Auftrag nach Erklärungen zu suchen.
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René LEMARCHAND
Professor em. der Politikwissenschaften und Gründungsmitglied des Center for African Studies an der University of Florida. Internationaler Experte für Staatspolitik in Ruanda und Burundi, Berater der Vereinten Nationen, Weltbank, USAID (US Agency for International Development). |
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Abstract |
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Unlike other cases of mass murder (Cambodia, Burundi) the Rwanda bloodbath and the Holocaust are paradigmatic examples of genocide. The parallels between them have been noted time and again, most convincingly by Mark Levene. By the same token the differences cannot be shoved under the rug. To reduce the Rwanda genocide to a carbon copy of the Holocaust is likely to obscure its historical specificity, to miss its revolutionary underpinnings, and lead to a profound misunderstanding of the motivations behind the killings and of the the obstacles that lie in the path of reconciliation.
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What few attempts have been made to situate the Rwanda tragedy in comparative discourse show surprisingly little awareness of the theoretical debates about the Holocaust, particularly of the divergences between the "intentionalist" and "functionalist" schools of thought. The emphasis so far has been on the intentionalist dimensions of the Rwandan carnage, on the role played by ideology, the poisonous "tropical Nazism" distilled on the airwaves of Radio Mille Collines, and the role played by Hutu extremists in planning and orchestrating the killings.
Far less attention has been paid to "circumstance", to the gradual, blow-by-blow implementation of mass murder, a critical ingredient of the functionalist approach.
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This is an attempt to refocus the analysis of the Rwanda genocide on the functionalist dimension, shifting the emphasis to the sequence of events beginning with the Hutu revolution of 1959-62. Taking a leaf from Robert Melson's magisterial work on Revolution and Genocide, my contention is that the massive ethnic violence experienced by Rwanda society can best be seen as expressing the security dilemma faced by the Hutu leadership in coming to terms with the threats posed to the revolution by the Patriotic Revolutionary Front (FPR).
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In Rwanda as in Nazi Germany the roots of genocide are traceable to the lethal combination of revolution and war, each contributing the redefine the victims as "the enemies of the nation", and thus shifting the blame away from the perpetrators to the victims. The Hutu revolution, however, had little in common with its Nazi analog, and the civil war ushered by the FPR is a radically different phenomenon from the invasion of the Soviet Union by the German army.
Jews, after all, did not invade Germany with the massive military and logistical support of a neighboring state; nor did they once rule Germany as the political instrument of an absolute monarchy; nor were they identified with a ruling ethnocracy. At the root of the all-encompassing killing of Tutsi lies a security dilemma for which there was no equivalent in Nazi Germany: the Hutu, though spurred on by a murderous ideology, did not act from a long-standing racist disposition but from the intense fear of the threats posed to their security by the FPR invasion, culminating in April 1994 with the shooting down of the plane carrying Presidents Habyalimana of Rwanda and Ntaryamira of Burundi.
Fear of the Jews in Nazi Germany explains little; fear of a Tutsi take-over, which would turn the clock back to pre-revolutionary days, is a crucial element in the background of the killings.
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