Politics Archives - Martin's Booklog

Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd — Peter Verlinden

Published on July 17, 2022Leave a comment

Cover of Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd

Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd
Peter Verlinden
177 pages
published in 1995

Published in 1995 after the Rwandan genocide had just ended, Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd tries to explain the context and history in which it took place. The writer, Peter Verlinden is a Belgian journalist who had been covering events in both Rwanda and neighbouring Burundi for several years before. This is not a book about the genocide itself, which is only briefly touched upon in the last few chapters, but an explainer of what made it possible. With only 177 pages to cover the whole history of Rwanda it’s of necessity more of a sketch than a complete picture. As the title Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd (Hutu and Tutsi: Centuries of Conflict) indicates Verlinden argues that the genocide was only the latest in a long line of conflicts between the two ethnic groups and should be seen as such, not as some inexplicable outburst of violence. The genocide, together with what was happening at the same time in former Yugoslavia was what broke the short lived optimism brought on by the end of the Cold War. The idea that now the civilised world (sic) would be able to intervene in conflicts and resolve them was proven wrong by the inability or unwillingness of the UN to stop the genocide as it was happening.

By focusing on the supposed long standing history of ethnic violence in Rwanda you might read this as an excuse for the failure of Belgium and other interested nations to stop the genocide. We saw that line of thinking trotted out a lot during the early years of the Yugoslav civil wars, the idea that Serbs and Croats and Bosniaks just naturally hate each other which you couldn’t do anything about. I was a bit wary of this myself when I first read this, but on the whole I think Verlinden did a good job explaining the circumstances and history driving the genocide without excusing it. Verlinden lets the facts speak for themselves and it’s up to the reader to draw the conclusions and lament the missed opportunities to stop the genocide.

After setting out what the book is about, Verlinden starts with a short history of pre-colonial Rwandaand its first inhabitants, the Twa. These were forest dwellers until the Hutu appeared, some 200-3000 years ago, who brought agriculture with them. The Tutsi arrived later and were pastoralist herders. To say that the Tutsi conquered Rwanda from the Hutu would be wrong, but over the centuries their power did grow, conquering the various Hutu kingdoms. By the nineteenth century it was Tutsi king who ruled most of Rwanda and a Tutsi elite that shared that power, while the Hutu majority were mostly small farmers. A roughyl feudal society, with the Hutu farmers obliged to service their Tutsi masters in various ways through unpaid labour and taxes in kind. At the same time, there were no hard ethnic borders between Hutu and Tutsi. Hutu could become part of the elite even if that was rare and whether you were either depended as much perhaps on your social status as your ethnicity.

As per usual it was the colonisers that fucked things up. First the Germans, then the Belgians took that existing divide between Tutsi and Hutu and codified it as strict ethnicity. For various bullshit racist reasons the Tutsi were elevated as closest to being white and therefore natural leaders, which meant that they got most of the positions of power in government, church and trade. The Belgians especially favoured the Tutsi at first. It was only post-war, in the fifties that this stopped as new generations of Belgian colonial administrators and church officials started instead to take the impoverished Hutu’s side. Belgium never ruled Rwanda directly, but through the existing Tutsi kings, the same way the Germans had done. By now supporting a new generation of Hutu activists and intellectuals demanding a greater share of power, they of course threatened the monarchy and its power structures. Matters came to a head as Rwanda prepared for independence.

An attack on a Hutu politician led to mass attacks on Tutsi leaders and others. The kingdom collapsed, a republic was declared and hundred thousands of Tutsi fled abroad. In Rwanda itself Hutu took over much of Tutsi power and the republic lasted until 1973 when a coup deposed the government and the second republic was proclaimed. Throughout this there were low level tensions between the two groups and occassional outburst of violence, but the real trouble started in 1990, when Tutsi refugees invaded the country to liberate it. That led to several years of civil war and more mass violence against both Tutsi and Hutu, until a peace treaty was signed in early 1994. Everything seemed to be calming down again until the president was killed in an attack on his plane coming back from the peace conference. That was the point at which the genocide started, as at first the Tutsi rebels and sympathetic Tutsi leaders were targeted but quickly escalated to include all Tutsi or ‘Tutsi looking’ people were attacked, as well as moderate Hutu.

Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd concludes at this point. At the time of writing Rwanda was still in an uneasy peace, with Tutsi refugees from that first wave of violence at the establishment of the Rwandan Republic returning home after decades, while million others, mostly Hutu had now fled abroad. Many of the Rwandan Tutsi had died in the genocide and their place was taken over by the returnees, who became the new elite. You can see the fires for the next conflict already being stoked while the embers of this one were still glowing, the way Verlinden describes it. In the almost three decades that have been passed since a new genocide fortunately hasn’t happened, but the conflict ia still ongoing, with Hutu refugees in Burundi and the DRC continuing low level guerilla campaigns, while Rwande has intervened in the Congolean civil wars twice as well.

I first read this in 2002 when I got it as an ex-library book and reread it today purely because my eye fell on it. This was a decent primer on the context of the genocide, but these days you might as well read the Wikipedia articles on Rwanda and its history. that of course wasn’t an option in 1995 and barely one in 2002, so I’m grateful to Verlinden for this.

All the Shah’s Men — Stephen Kinzer

Published on September 24, 2014Leave a comment

All the Shah's Men

All the Shah’s Men
Stephen Kinzer
258 pages including index
published in 2003

If you read the name Roosevelt, you probably think of the American president during World War II, or perhaps his predecesor Theodore Roosevelt, who gave his name to the teddy bear. But there’s another Roosevelt who has been of some influence in world history, a grandson of Theodore, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., the man behind the coup against the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953. That was the coup that overthrew a government nominally an ally of the United States, on the behest of a British oil company to install a dictator whose father had had nazi sympathies, who himself would be overthrown a quarter century later in the Islamic revolution of 1979, when Americans were baffled to realise most of Iran hated them, a ahtred that had its roots in 1953.

That 1953 coup is one of those monumental changes in history that are far less well known than they should be. Though not exactly a secret, the American involvement and leadership of the coup is even less known, or at least that was the case when this book was published, in the year the US would invade another former client state, Iraq. These days the sad and sordid story of American meddling in the Middle East is well known, at least to those who paid attention to what happened after 9/11. I’m not sure how much Stephen Kinzer’s book contributed to this though.

On the face of it, All the Shah’s Men is a perfectly servicable history of the coup and the context in which it arose, with some attention to its consequences. Kinzer writes well and keeps your attention, adept at setting the scene. What bothered me however, especially in the later sections, is his ambivalent attitude towards the coup and its American ringleaders. To be sure, he doesn’t portray Kermit as a hero, but he doesn’t really condemn him either. In the last chapter, when he looks back at the inevitability of the coup, he comes close to victim blaming in arguing what the Iranian prime minister, Mossadegh, could and should’ve done to prevent the coup.

Kinzer starts well, in media res, with Kermit Roosevelt’s first, failed coup attempt, before tracing back the history of western interference in Iran. As per usual, it was the British who were to blame, ruling the country indirectly through a series of weak rulers, never permitting an effective state to arise on the borders of their Indian Empire. After World War I, with the discovery of huge oil fields in Iran, British influence in the country grew worse, with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company making millions sellings its oil without Iran profiting much of it.

He moves on to talking about the political careers of the shah, the ruler of Iran who had been put on his throne by the allies in WWII when his father proved to be slightly too enamoured of fascism. From there Kinzer also follows Mossadegh’s career, showing his integrity and idealism. While the former was ultimately a weak ruler, Mossadegh was an excellent politician and statesman, always operating with the best interests of Iran at heart.

Those interests very much included getting more out of Iran’s oilfields, attempting through negotiation to get a better share of Anglo-Iranian’s profits. British pigheadedness and racism however, both in the company as at governmental level made this futile however and in the end Mossadegh nationalised the company, which was hugely popular in Iran but not so much with the British. These immediately threw a hissy fit, withdrew all their employees (few Iranians working in other than menial positions there) and set out to economically sabotage the country through oil boycotts, as preparation for a possible invasion or other method of regime change.

For this they needed the Americans and as long as the Democrat Harry Truman was in the White House, they had no luck getting their support. All changed with the election of Eisenhower, who brought along the Dulles brothers, one who became the secretary of foreign affairs, the other head of the CIA. These were receptive to the idea of overthrowing Mossadegh and set out to work towards this. Ultimately, through Kermit Roosevelt’s hard work, they succeeded by a mixture of bribery and buying off of high ranking soldiers and police officers, CIA supported newspapers pumping out propaganda and downright hiring mobs to destabilise the country.

Now what struck me was the way Kinzer condemned Mossadegh in his epilogue. He argued that because of his refusal to come to a compromise with the British and their own fears for possible communist interference in the country, the Americans were forced to mount the coup, completely disregarding America’s own moral culpability. Worse, he argues Mossadegh had “helped bring Iran to the dead end it reached in mid-1953” after spending the entire book showing how this dead end had been brought about by British intransigence and CIA meddling! He also faults him for not actually being a dictator and coming down too weak on the coupists after their first, failed attempt.

What also struck me was the blithe disregard for Iranian suffering Kinzer displayed when he attempted to asses the consequences of the coup, in arguing that it “bought the United States and the west a reliable Iran for twenty-five years”. That’s a repulsive but sadly too common way to think about a quarter century of tyranny, torture and murder. Offhandedly musing that perhaps Iran wasn’t ready for democracy in 1953 doesn’t help either, as it shows a breathtaking arrogance considering how Iranian democracy was betrayed by the agents of the same country he belongs to.

In short then, if you know little about how this coup took place and the context in which it happened, this is a reasonable book but it displays all the shortcomings and tunnel vision you’d expect from a “veteran New York Times correspondent”. Somebody in his position, regardless of all the evidence, just cannot get themselves to see the evil that America has done.

Heat – George Monbiot

Published on September 4, 2009

Cover of Heat

Heat
George Monbiot
277 pages including index
published in 2006

Thanks to the climate change camp in London held this past week, global warming is back on the news agenda again. Despite the rear guard action fought by the Exxon-Mobile sponsored climate change denial groups, the media has sort of accepted the reality of it over the past two years, but as Alex Harrowell fulminates against, it’s largely treated as a consumerist, lifestyle issue:

As with most British media green pushes, there’s little sign of any interest in anything physical or lasting. Not an inch of rockwool. Everything is about changing your behaviour, and specifically micro-behaviour what you buy, or turning off lights, not how you work or where you live or how society works. Worse, it’s a demand for entirely free-floating behavioural change — nobody seems to be suggesting any way of monitoring or measuring the change, or any incentives. This isn’t going to work. And, again, it’s all consumer guff.

This is not something you can accuse George Monbiot of doing here. In Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning he quickly dismisses consumer driven solutions like the 10:10 campaign in the introduction. The entire point of the book is that we cannot solve the problem of climate change with lifestyle choices, but only through solutions that apply to everybody, not everybody else, as he puts it. He starts with the assumption that the only way to migate the consequences of global warming, as we cannot prevent it anymore, is to keep runaway climate change from happening and that can only happen if we can keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees celsius (above pre-industrial levels) in 2030. If not, major ecosystems begin collapsing as the ability to absorb excess carbon dioxide is exhausted. To keep this rise from happening we can’t just switch incandencent lightbulbs for LEDs, we need to cut 90 percent of our CO2 output. The challenge Monbiot sets himself in Heat is to show that we can do this without giving up our post-industrial lifestyles, by taking the United Kingdom as his test subject and looking at various aspepcts of our lives to see how CO2 output can be reduced in them. It is not a complete blueprint for change of course and you may not necessarily agree with all his solutions, but it is a genuine attempt at putting together a national plan of action that could be implemented relatively quickly and doesn’t require all of us to piss in hayboxes.

Killing Hope – William Blum

Published on May 28, 2009

Cover of Killing Hope

Killing Hope
William Blum
469 pages including index
published in 2003

William Blum is a veteran leftwing journalist, active since the 1960ties, who made his name leaking the name and addresses of 200 CIA employees back in 1969. Since then he has been working in relative obscurity until around the turn of the millennium when he wrote a bestselling book about the US’s foreign police: Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. It came at the right time to find its audience, just as interest in the subject soared due to the September 11 attacks. This succes is probably what got Killing Hope published, as it’s an updated version of one of Blum’s older books, originally published in 1986 as The CIA: A Forgotten History. It certainly has some of the hallmarks of a cash-in book, with the updating only going as far as the mid-nineties and the bulk of the book not noticably updated from the first edition. Many of the earlier chapters do not show much awareness of events and new revelations after 1986, if you see what I mean.

Killing Hope is the history of US military and covert interventions since World War II, with each chapter detailing a specific case. The chapters are in order of chronology, with several countries with a long history of US intervention having multiple chapters devoted to them. As Blum shows again and again in these chapters, the US talks a great deal about democracy and freedom, but the reality of its foreign policy at least since World War II is far different. With the excuse of “fighting communism” (or these days, “terrorism”) again and again the US has interfered on the side of dictatorships, nobbled democracies or fought liberation movements in order to safeguard its interests, be they strategic geopolitical ones or commercial ones. And Killing Hope is far from exhaustive, even in its original timeframe of 1945-1985 with Vietnam e.g. only having one short chapter devoted to it and little attention paid to other Asian countries like Taiwan, Japan or South Korea or even the UK.

Inventing Ruritania – Vesna Goldsworthy

Published on April 6, 2009

Cover of Inventing Ruritania

Inventing Ruritania
Vesna Goldsworthy
254 pages including index
published in 1998

What immediately came to mind when I picked up this book from the library was Edward Said’s Orientalism. Where that book looked at how Europe created its image of the Middle East, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination looks at how the western idea of the Balkans has been shaped or even created by writers of popular fiction and travel literature. Goldsworthy focuses mainly on British literature, as for British writers “the Balkans are sufficiently close to remain in the field of vision, yet remote enough to be relatively free of the ‘traditional friendships’ and ‘historical alliances’ which frequently inspire the specific interests in the area of other European powers” while they are “too far away to be of consistent interest to American writers”. Historically, she limits her inquiries to relatively modern times, from the early nineteenth century up to now, as she argues that the Balkans as an area of interest only emerged as Ottoman supremacy in the area was broken. Before there can be stereotypical images of the Balkans, there first has to be a Balkans, obviously and until the Ottoman empire started to disintegrate there wasn’t.

A book like Inventing Ruritania, which wants to expose the cliches with which western thought has been riddled about the Balkans, can’t help but be political. This is more so when you consider when it was published, in 1998, barely a year before NATO would wage its first humanitarian war against Serbia, just after the wars in Bosnia and Croatia had ended. You could see Inventing Ruritania as a sort of metacritique of the sloppy thinking in Britain and elsewhere with which these events were explained and written about. One of Goldsworthy’s points in this book is indeed to lay bare the sort of racist stereotyping language about the Balkans that is still used thoughtlessly, often by people who would never dream about deescribing areas like Africa or India in similar terms… Yet Inventing Ruritania isn’t a polemic, not even to the extent Orientalism was.