While Somalia’s dictator, Siyad Barre, orchestrated massacres of his political opponents during his final years in power, local “warlords” in charge of private militias continued the strategy following Barre’s fall from power and the collapse of a governing structure. The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer. The Khoikhoi became the chief source of colonial wage labour.
The former requires technical and administrative solutions (enhanced security, land mine clearance campaigns, demilitarization), but the latter poses challenges that are politically, psychologically, and culturally much more difficult to overcome. At the height the campaign some 19,000 Dutch troops were involved.
Genocide brings in its wake long term insecurities both physical—such as ongoing threats of banditry and assault and the dangers of landmines—and cultural—such as when those targeted for genocide continue to carry negatively marked identities within the larger political context. Moderate Hutus who did not agree with the government’s extremist policies were also painted as traitors. For survivors, genocide ends when they feel they have regained security and sustainability—either at home or in a place of refuge. In January 1994, just weeks after arriving in Rwanda, the UN Commander, Candian General Romeo Dallaire, sent a memo to the UN Security Council warning about the stockpile of weapons and an increase in violence between the Hutus and Tutsis. They remained isolated from other Africans for tens of thousands of years. In fact, it appears that lactose tolerance was introduced to Bantu speakers when they had kids with the pastoralist populations. Their population discovered agriculture, grew and took over larger areas of land. The U.S.-UN intervention did not bring long term security to the Somali Bantu farmers of the Jubba Valley. The warning went unheeded.
Throughout and following the genocide, many refugees fled Rwanda and were repatriated. Rwandans often transcended the categories of victim, perpetrator, bystander and rescuer-- acting as a rescuer at one moment and a perpetrator another. There are only an estimated 500,000 pygmies remaining, and their numbers are sharply declining in the face of slaughter and deforestation. With independence, the Hutus consolidated power and facilitated widespread discrimination against Tutsi, excluding Tutsis from prominent careers and implementing education quotas. Join the Ars Orbital Transmission mailing list to get weekly updates delivered to your inbox. Currently, humanitarian aid workers complain that humanitarian aid is all-too-often hijacked by political agendas, where aid is linked to conflict resolution or mediation. My impression is that the Ghost DNA in modern West African Bantus is more than tiny: more like 5% or more, which would be more than Europeans have Neanderthal ancestry. Rather, Somali Bantu refugees claim the U.S.-UN intervention heightened insecurity in the valley as militants were pushed out of areas secured by the intervention. But after a couple thousand years, the society reached a tipping point, and the hunter-gatherers were marginalized. As soon as the news of this order reached Holland it was repealed, but by this time the rest of the native population was in full-scale revolt. This appealed to the Hutu desire to create an ethnically Hutu-homogenous state. Some 50 perpetrators of the genocide have been found guilty by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, but most others have not been charged due to no witness accounts. They are also economic refugees; some fled because the continual looting of their food and dispossession of their farmland resulted in starvation.