著者

鶴田 綾

出版者

一般財団法人 日本国際政治学会

雑誌

国際政治 (ISSN:04542215)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.2015, no.180, pp.180_43-180_54, 2015

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Shared histories are one of the most crucial factors in constructing ethnicity and nationhood. Redefining what to remember in new socio-political contexts is important for nation-building and reconciliation, especially after mass violence including genocide. However, this redefinition poses some problems. First of all, a country's official history has been rewritten and exploited by power; historians have warned that governments exploit history in order to justify their rules and to silence dissenting voices. Secondly, it is not easy to deconstruct a previous version of historical narratives associated with past ethnic violence and replace it with a new one. Rather, the content of the new narratives can be problematic since there is a danger that it may aggravate existing ethnic conflicts. If so, what kind of historical narratives are needed in post-conflict circumstances in order to avoid further violence?For 20 years since the genocide took place in Rwanda in 1994, a vast amount of literature has been published to explore the background and process of the genocide. Recently, scholarly attention has gradually been shifting to post-genocide issues including transitional justice, national reconciliation and state-building. However, we cannot fully understand post-genocide Rwanda without putting it into a historical context and paying attention to the continuity of historical narratives.This article examines the historical narratives in colonial, post-colonial and post-genocide Rwanda. First, the assumption of the 'Hamitic Hypothesis' that the Hamitic Tutsi were superior to the Bantu Hutu and that Rwanda was a centralised kingdom of the Tutsi affected the European policy of indirect rule. Based on the hypothesis, the Tutsi leaders in late colonial Rwanda claimed that Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa had lived peacefully as Rwandans and that the Europeans had divided Rwandans into ethnic groups. The first Hutu administration in the post-colonial period claimed that the Tutsi were foreigners and not authentic Rwandans and that, since the Hutu had been so oppressed by the Tutsi, they needed to liberate themselves by means of revolution. President Juvénal Habyarimana, who overthrew Kayibanda and established the Second Republic in 1973, also claimed the Hutu authenticity and the legitimacy of 1959 Revolution. The ideology of the 1959 Revolution was widely publicised and contributed to ethnic division, which together with other political, economic and social factors, led to the genocide in 1994. After the genocide, the Rwandan Patriotic Front regime has returned to the narratives of the previous Tutsi leaders and emphasised pre-colonial 'national unity' and the 'invention' of ethnicity under Europeans during the colonial period and the European manipulation of the Hutu Revolution. Compared with research previously conducted by researchers, all of these historical narratives that powers in Rwanda have had from the colonial era to the present have emphasised certain aspects of the past and neglected the others, partly contributing to the escalation of the ethnic conflict. Thus, in order not to rekindle the ethnic conflict but to avoid future violence, the new historical narrative should be more nuanced and comprehensive.