Allan Stam, U-M Professor of Political Science and Faculty Associate at the Center for Political Studies, discusses the genocide, civil war, vendetta killings and random violence that took place in Rwanda in 1994. February, 2009.
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>> Good afternoon and welcome. I'm delighted to see all of you here today, and I hope that you are, like me, looking forward to [inaudible] interesting presentation. [Inaudible] School of Public Policy, and it's a real pleasure to have the opportunity to introduce our speaker this afternoon, Professor Allan Stam. Al's been a professor of political science here at University of Michigan since 2007, and he's very well known for his extremely innovative and very valid research on a number of topics that relate to [inaudible]. His current project involved developing his GIS model of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and you'll hear more about that today. [Inaudible].
He's also done work to model the effects of causality, of casualty sensitivity, excuse me, in democratic states.
Before coming to the University of Michigan, Al had been a member of the faculty at Dartmouth College, at Young University, and American University. He was the 2004 recipient of the International Studies Association [inaudible] Award, which is awarded annually to a scholar under the age of 40, judged to make the most significant contribution to the study of international relations and peace research.
He's published a long list of books and articles, book reviews and papers. He also served in the United States military from 1983 until 2002, retiring with the rank of Captain.
He received his Masters Degree and PhD right here at the University of Michigan so we claimed him as one of our own.
Please join me in welcoming Professor Allan Stam. [Applause]
>> Stam: Thanks very much. Thank you all very much for coming. It is a real pleasure to give a talk at one's alma mater, particularly one that I was employed. What we're going to talk about today is pretty obvious going by the title. I have to say this with no small amount of trepidation that I saw that Norman Finkelstein was giving a talk about the Arab-Israeli problem. Norman Finkelstein is most notable for his work on the Holocaust. I'm going to preface my remarks here because some of the things that I'm going to say in certain circles are exceedingly controversial. My Visa to Rwanda has been revoked. I'm a persona non grata there for some of the research that Christian Davenport and I have done. If at any time you get the sense that I'm a genocide denier, please raise your hand, and I will clarify for you that that is not the case. So let's get started because we actually have a lot of ground to cover. This is a very big, complicated project. There's no way any one person could've done this themselves. Christian Davenport is my principal collaborating colleague at University of Notre Dame. I'm going to show you later on this afternoon some, I think, quite exciting animated maps of Rwanda and the civil war that took place in 1994. Those were put together by David Gads, and he's a Vice President of ESRI, which is the company that has developed and owns ArcView GIS software. It turns out his wife is a Tutsi, and he heard of our work and said, "You guys are lame when it comes to presenting your work. Let me see if we can put something together that would actually make sense to people." David Armstrong is an applied statistical post-doc at Oxford. He's the person that's done most of the statistical analysis for us. There are 3 lawyers that have worked very closely with us on this project, Peter Erlinder is a Defense Attorney for one of the more reprehensible human beings on the planet. Barbara Mulvaney's the former State's Attorney for New Mexico and is now the Chief Prosecutor in the military trial in Arusha, Tanzania. Donald Webster is the Chief Prosecutor and former District Attorney in New York City, Chief Prosecutor in the military trial, in the political trial--I'm sorry-at the ICTR. The contribution of these two folks is critical. They enabled us to get access to 12,000 interviews that were conducted in Africa and Europe. These are confidential interviews that have been used by the ICTR. We used those interviews essentially to place the beginnings of killings in space and time. Peter Erlinder was critical for us, as I'll explain in a little bit. He provided access for us to both members of the Tutsi military as well as the FAR, the Rwandan state army organization, a bunch of folks that are in prison, to enable us to corroborate where the various military units were as time went by in 1994. [Inaudible], and Nick Greenfield have been graduate students or fellows that have done a lot of the, sort of, grunt work working on this. What I'm going to do today is I'm going to present a little bit of history. I'm going to show you a map-a very simple map-of Rwanda. I'm going to pose some questions, and I'm going to show you more maps. Now, let's back up a little bit and review essentially what it is that people think we know about the Rwanda genocide. As professors we tend to think in horror about Wikipedia, but it is the oracle of our age, for better or for worse, and this is what's there.
The Rwanda genocide was the 1994 genocide of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Tutsi and moderate Hutu sympathizers. The group was carried out by two extremist groups. At least 500,000 Tutsi and thousands of moderate Hutu's died in the genocide, and this is essentially... this is the story that we see in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and most of the popular press. The, probably the benchmark publication comes from Professor Samantha Power writing... She received the Pulitzer Prize for this in general nonfiction, a few years ago, A Problem from Hell-America and the Age of Genocide. In there she describes in the course of 100 days in '94, the Hutu government and its allies very nearly succeeded in exterminating the country's Tutsi minority, using crude implements, Hutu militiamen, soldiers, ordinary citizens murdered some 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu. This is what we think we know. Now, why should we care about someone, you know, somebody like Samantha Power? Well, when it comes to ideas and vision, our President Barak Obama has untapped Samantha Power. Now, she was to serve a very formal role in his administration, but due to some extraordinary impolitic remarks about Hillary Clinton, she has been reduced to a more informal advisory role. But, nonetheless, Power does provide big picture advice for Obama with her deep background in human rights dealings and genocide prevention. Another person that is of note who has made observations or participated in some of the policy planning that took place during the events of 1994, Susan Rice, who is the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Back in '94, she was working on the National Security Council under Richard Clark. In a meeting where they were discussing what the appropriate U.S. response should be, Ms. Rice said, "If we use the genocide and are seen as doing nothing, what will the effect on the November elections be?" Lieutenant Colonel Tony Marley , a staffer there, remembers saying, "We could believe the people would wonder that, but we can't believe people actually say it." Well, in fact, she did. Afterwards, though, I think she recognizes that this was perhaps a bridge too far. She swore to herself that "If I ever face such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required." So this is essentially the historical and policy context for what it was that happened and what I'm going to talk about for the next 45 minutes or so. Here's an alternative story to the Wikipedia story, and this is the one I think the data most closely supports. Most likely, and I'm going to talk a great deal about what it is that we have to assume in order to come to this conclusion, a million people died. Most likely, the vast majority of people that died were Hutu. At the time, contrary to shock on the part of the Clinton administration, shock on the part of the British administration, American, French, British, and Belgian leaders all knew what was going on. We now have access to--these were released 4 years ago--we now have access to the President's daily national intelligence estimate that he got every morning at 7 AM. Those documents detail what was going on with astonishing precision. Bill Clinton was aware of what was happening, while it was happening, on a close to day-by-day basis. During the weeks of this crisis, probably on average, 4 days a week the lead bullet in the NIE was what was going on in Rwanda. Now, interestingly, the CIA was aware of what was going on. Folks in the State Department were not acutely aware of what was going on. Now, in the end, the U.S. guy wins. Paul Kagame, the current President of Rwanda had spent some time in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, not too far before the 1994 genocide. Fort Leavenworth is the commanding general staff college. This is where rising stars of the U.S. military and other places go to get training as they are on track to become generals. The training that they get there is on planning large scale operations. It's not planning small scale logistics things. It's not tactics. It's about how do you plan an invasion, and apparently, he did very well. The second part of this story is there are no good guys. The standard story that we read, if you read the Wikipedia story or if you read the Samantha Powers book, there's clearly a group of people wearing white hats and a group of people wearing black hats. I hope by the end of this afternoon you will be convinced that there should be a pox on all their houses. Current President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, I suspect, is very like guilty of war crimes of pretty extraordinary scale. Now, we're going to back up, and we're going to go through a little bit of Rwandan history real fast. Ok, the relevant history starts off in the middle of the nineteenth century. Rwabugiri was the king in Central Africa. During this period of consolidation, we see essentially what emerges is feudal patronage system. Anybody that studies feudalism in Europe would be familiar with what's taking place there. It's also important because what Rwabugiri does is he centralizes control over the military. In 1890, the Europeans arrived, and as is often the case, this is fraught with hazard as we will see for the next hundred years. Rwanda becomes part of German East Africa. In 1919 as a result of the Versailles Treaty, Belgium is given Rwanda--Urundi as it was referred to at the time. In 1946, now known as Rwanda-Burundi, they become a U.N. trust territory to be governed by Belgium. This matters because, again, in the popular story, the U.N. seems to sort of magically appear in the early 1990's in the Arusha process, but in fact, the U.N. is there from the outset. The U.N. is aware and party to many of the political decisions that were made throughout the second half of the twentieth century that all sort of inexorably lead to the problems that take place in the 1990's. In 1957, and this is coincidental with very similar independent movement throughout the colonial world, we see the beginnings of a really powerful independence movement. The Hutu political and intellectual elite issue a manifesto. It's explicitly modeled on Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto. It's 10 points. It would be sort of like a Jay Leno list of the top ten things and why we are aggrieved. The reason why this really matters though is that Hutu ethnic based political parties are formed, and those parties, and the most important of which, the Hutu Power Party, traces its lineage back to this period. These are ethnically based political parties whose action plan is detailed in a 10 point document, and it basically says, "We're going to take over. We're going to be in charge, and it's our right to be so." In 1959 the independence movement gets some teeth, the Tutsi King Kigeli, a descendant of Rwabugiri and somewhere between 10,000 and 75,000 of his clan members and buddies are pushed out into Uganda. The best analogy to sort of if you're familiar with much-not even much-the sort of basics of modern European history, the analogy you want to have in your mind here is Krystal Nacht before World War II. There aren't a lot of Tutsi killed in the same way that there aren't a huge number of Jews subsequently compared to what happened subsequently on Krystal Nacht. If you trace the lineage of the Holocaust back, that was the big sign, and in 1959, this is the beginning of what takes place in 1994. In 1962 Rwanda is formally is recognized an independent state. They have a Hutu President. Another 50,000 Tutsi are pushed out of the country. It's in this exodus from 1962 that Paul Kagame as a very, very small boy, leaves and goes to Uganda. In 1963, 20,000 Tutsi are killed in Rwanda as a result of a failed Tutsi invasion from Burundi. Rwanda and Burundi are two small states. If you picture, sort of close your eyes and sort of think about Africa, think about what would be the pituitary gland in Africa, this tiny little spot in Central Africa, and there's two sort of sister states, north, south. They are roughly the same size and geographic proximity to one another as New Hampshire and Vermont are-actually in some ways very similar terrain as well. Now Burundi is the southern half of this pair of states, ok? The Tutsi had retained control through this period in Burundi, and they tried to put in place a Tutsi restoration. In 1972 in Burundi, the Tutsi realized that their hold on power is threatened, and so the Tutsi government, Tutsi military in Burundi, the southern half of this, tried to figure out what to do, and they decide they are going to act preventively, and what they're going to do is put together a list of all the Hutu that own property, other than small family plots, that have attended university, that own businesses, or are members of the military, and make a big name list of all these people, and then they kill them all. We don't know how many it is. Nobody knows. Somewhere between 50 and 200,000 people. This was written about in an Atlantic Monthly article that went nowhere. But the idea, and we're going to see that this notion of targeting people on name lists, this becomes the horrifying signature note of what happens in 1994. But it wasn't the Hutu that invented it. They didn't come up with the idea. It was the Tutsi government in Burundi that first had the idea to preventively wipe out an entire elite, and it actually works. Now, in 1973, we're jumping back up 20 miles north into Rwanda, there's a military coup lead by Juvenal Habyarimana. Juvenal Habyarimana was the guy that's President at the beginning of the genocidal civil war in 1994. Now he is the guy that is characterized as the moderate Hutu in the popular conception of this whole story. Samantha Power and some other people that I'm going to... Allison Deforge who just recently died in a plane crash in Buffalo, characterized Juvenal Habyarimana as the moderate guy. Now, if he's a moderate, boy they've got some crazy people in this country. The split here, this is a Hutu v Hutu split. The southern Hutu, because they live next door to Burundi, feel that some accommodation and negotiation is in order. The northern Hutu tend to be a little crazier. They don't want to negotiate with anybody. Habyarimana decides the southern Hutu are getting a little bit too close to the Tutsi in Burundi. So there's a coup. A handful of people are killed. Keep in mind when we think about the moderate Hutu solution, it is to kill people and replace them with yourself. That's the moderate solution. That's the historical context here. In 1988 there's extraordinary epic violence in Burundi again. Fifty thousand Hutu refugees come up from Burundi into Rwanda. Now, this matters because they bring with them stories. The stories they bring with them are about 1972 and subsequent abuses of the Hutu by the Tutsi military in Burundi. In 1990 the Rwanda patriotic front, this is a Tutsi military that is in Uganda. This is led by Paul Kagame and a group of colleagues of his. They had worked... The RPF had worked with and for the Americans and the British to back Museveni in Uganda. The RPF becomes the most powerful military in Central Africa. As a result, they become a threat to Museveni in Uganda. Museveni says "You guys have got to go." The RPF says, "Well, where are we going to go?" He says, "You know, you might as well go home," and they say, "Well, that's a great idea because that's actually where we'd like to go." And so they invade. It was an interstate war. Ok? So, I mean we need to be clear about that. It fails. This invasion fails. Although they do not end up giving back all of the territory, as we'll see in a minute, that they captured in 1990. In 1991 there are large scale retaliatory killings in northwest Rwanda. Now most of the people that die here are Tutsi. Not most...probably 60%. Christian Davenport and I went up there and talked to the people. The political system, the smallest political unit there is the hill or cell. They call it a hill. The political leader of the hill, and it's anywhere from 8 to 25 families and is just referred to as a Nimbuakumbie [assumed spelling], and what we did was we went around, and we talked to these local hillchees, and we said, "Wait, what happened in 1991? What's the... What's the local story?" And the common theme was what had happened in this area, and this is right up along the border with Uganda, that the Hutu army went up and they basically killed collaborators. The Nimbuakumbies all said the problem that they faced was they had to pick sides. As the invasion was beginning, the Nimbuakumbie had to decide who do we side with? Do we side with the RPF? Or do we decide with the FAR? Well, it looked like the RPF was going to win, and so locally, most of the local hill chiefs sided with the RPF or looked the other way as the RPF came through. France then intervened, and [inaudible] is shocked that the local Nimbuakumbie had not anticipated. Now it happens to turn out that in this particular area, the reason why the RPF started their invasion through there is because there are a fair number of Tutsi in this particular area. They thought that there would be a relatively sympathetic audience, but the key is that many of the people that are killed in this area also happen to be Hutu. The Hutu that decided the RPF was going to win and sided with the RPF, they were targeted also. So the basis for targeting here, at least the story on the ground was that basically you got targeted if you bet wrong. Now in 1993 in August, the Arusha Accords are signed. This was the U.S. forced, U.N. sponsored conflict resolution mechanism to work out a cooperative solution to the civil war. The RPF-these are the same people that invaded from Uganda 3 years previously-are given 5 out of 21 ministries, even controlled by troop count, forty percent of the control of the Rwanda military. Now this is a pretty good deal. The Tutsi in Rwanda make up about eight and a half percent of the population. These characters just invaded, I mean they violated international laws. So, all in all, this is a pretty sweet deal for an invading force representing a very small minority in the country. Now, as always, there's a certain yin and yang here. The U.N. also says, "In 22 months we will have free and fair democratic elections." That's why the Hutu Power formed in 1957 matters because political parties in 1993, they're the same parties. They're the same sets of preferences, and the preferences are to vote along ethnic lines. So the RPF knows in 1993 they have 22 months to come up with a solution because in 22 months they're going to be voted off the island. In October of 1993, the Burundi President, who's a Hutu at this point-the Hutu have gotten control in Burundi-and his entire cabinet are assassinated by Tutsi soldiers, but the coup attempt fails. Now interestingly there is no investigation. [Inaudible] Six months later on April 6, Juvenal Habyarimana, the new President of Burundi, the FAR, the Hutu military in Rwanda, the Chief of Staff, and 8 other cabinet members are assassinated. The plane they're flying in returning from Arusha is shot down as it was making its final approach into Kigali International Airport. Now, you would think, we've got one, two, three Presidents that have been assassinated. We have an Army Chief of Staff, an entire Cabinet, and 8 other new Cabinet members all assassinated in the space of 6 months. You would think there would be a public investigation, but this is Central Africa. The U.N. conducts an investigation and ends it, and it was never made public. Now, moments later the RPF literally, moments, within somewhere between 90, 60, and 120 minutes after this plane is shot down, the RPF invades. Now, we could characterize this invasion as, wow spontaneous reaction to go in and defend our allies. The problem is this invasion looks staggeringly like the United States invasion of Iraq in 1991. It is exactly the same features. There's a central drive in this case, due south towards Kigali, very much like the central drive towards Baghdad. There's the sweeping left hook, but in this because the map is reversed, it is a sweeping right hook. This was a plan that was not worked out on the back of an envelope. Fifty thousand soldiers move into action on two fronts in a coordinated fashion spontaneously. Now, simultaneously with this, a genocidal killing campaign begins in Rwanda. This is by the FAR, the so called genocidaires. This killing campaign is modeled after the campaign that took place in the 1970's in Burundi. There are name lists. Individuals are tracked down in a staggeringly sophisticated but low tech manner. By August 1, there are 2 million externally displaced people--this is great geography for a refugee--one million internally displaced people, and there's basically a million dead people. Now why does this matter? Well, 50% of the population of Rwanda in 90 days has been made a refugee or has been killed. This matters extraordinarily because ethnic identity is local knowledge as I'm going to try and show in a few minutes. Now, from '94 to '96 the refugee camps in the Congo that have some million and a half people in them, fall under control of the Hutu militias that have fled the country. In '96 the RPF invades and attacks refugee camps in the Congo. Somewhere between 50 and 150 thousand people are killed. The model you might want to have in your mind here is Cheboritza, but there some 2,000 people were killed; here, 50 to 150 thousand, but in both instances, the U.N. was there. In July of 1996 there is a coup in Burundi. Buyoya, this was the guy that was a Tutsi who had previously tried to take control 10 years earlier, finally managed to succeed. The Tutsi restoration in Central Africa is now complete. We have returned back to a full cycle to the Rwabugiri military political consolidation of the mid-nineteenth century. From 1998 to 2000, the RPF gains control of the eastern Congo, all the way to Kisangani or what is formerly known as Stanleyville. This is the last navigable point on the river coming up from the Atlantic Ocean. As the crow flies, Kisangani is 470 miles from Kigali. By the roads, it's about 800 miles. We interviewed the Defense Minister and the Solicitor General of the Rwanda Supreme Court, and Christian and I asked these guys, "What are you guys doing in Kisangani? It's kind of far. It's sort of going from Washington, DC to St. Louis." And they said, "Well, we have security concerns. There are Hutu militias in the jungle." And we said, "Yeah, you know, we went there, and we saw them, but you don't have to go to Kisangani to find them. They're 5 miles over the border. So why are you guys 500 miles into the Congo?" And there's this long pause, and the Solicitor General is the guy that really lost it, and he says to me, he says, "I went to the University of Chicago. I have a Masters Degree in International Relations. I've read Hans Morgenthau. I'm a realist. I know that the United States doesn't give a shit about what we do in this country, in this part of the world. We're going to do what we think we need to do to guarantee our security well." His words. Christian and I looked at each other. Christian was just shaking his head like, "I can't believe you just got this man to swear at you." And I said, "Wow, this is great. I can't believe this guy just admitted to occupying the eastern third of Africa to enrich him and his buddies." Now, how does all this go down? Well, there's essentially 4 principal ethnic groups. There's another one-the Twa. They make up about two-tenths of one percent of the population. We can safely ignore them, not because they're not a good decent people, but because they don't have much power here. Amongst the Hutu there are essentially two groups. There's the Hutu Power Party linked very closely to the Interahamwe, which is sort of a catch-all phrase for bad guys. Some of them are organized into militias. Some of them are gangs of young kids, but they're bad guys. Then there are the Hutu Moderates, led by Habyarimana. The difference between the Hutu Power Party and the Hutu Moderates is that the Hutu Power Party lost the election, and they want to get back in power. The reason why Habyarimana is moderate is because moderation is working for him.
He's got a good deal with the U.N. for the Arusha Accords, he gets to be President, and he gets an election, and if he can figure out how to fix the election, he'll get to stay President, too. So there's no need to be anything other than moderate at the time. Now the Tutsi are two... there are basically two groups also. There are the Tutsi Rwanda. They're elite as they are, are Francophone. They're the Tutsi ex-patriots in Uganda. They are Anglophone. Now, the Hutu extremists and the Tutsi ex-patriots both prefer no power sharing. They want 100% control of the country. Now, the Hutu moderates and the Tutsi in Rwanda, they're willing to accept the Arusha Accords. These guys, the Francofone Tutsi, they think this is the coolest thing that's ever happened. These were essentially the Tutsi that were the not elite Tutsi. All the elite Tutsi left in the late 50's and early 60's. These are the folks that got left behind. Now all of a sudden the Arusha Accords come along and actually guarantee them something, which they think is pretty awesome. Now what happens is the Hutu extremists bet wrong. They thought that these two Tutsi groups would have the same preference. They actually believed that if they started to kill off these people, that the Tutsi ex-patriots from Uganda would care. It turned out that they were wrong. Now, here's a map of Rwanda. Up here's Uganda. Here's Tanzania over on this side. Down here is Burundi, and over here is the Congo-actually you're not supposed to say the Congo anymore. Still say Congo. Now, each of these little areas here...this is a political commune or a prefecture. The number in there, which you can't see-don't worry about it, it doesn't matter-that's why it's cleverly color coded-that's the number of people that died in that political unit. This is essentially like the size of a town, a New England town, ok, each one of these political units. Each of these areas, and the bigger area would be like the equivalent of an American county. Ok. There's two things to note about this. One is, people died everywhere. This looks like a map of World War II in Europe. People are dying everywhere. It's a civil war, but there's something else to notice. There's a couple of red spots. Things got crazy in a few spots. If you look at a map of Eastern Europe after World War II, you'll see a very similar pattern. You would see there's killing everywhere, and then there's a few hotspots like Dachau, Auschwitz. Well, same thing here. Now, how many people died? A U.N. expert evaluating the population of Rwanda, estimated that 800,000 Rwandans had died between April and July. Seltzer-he's the expert-estimated the number of persons killed as at least half a million. Professor Gerard Prunier estimated that 130,000 Tutsi were alive in July, but there's another 20,000, perhaps, in Zaire or Tanzania. We're not really sure. If this number of 150,000 is subtracted from an estimated population of 657,000 Tutsi, this leaves 527,000 Tutsi killed-close to Seltzer's minimum assessment. It just comes from Human Rights Watch, the organization that Alison Deforge is very closely associated with. So we tried to replicate Mr. Seltzer's study. My name is Christian Davenport. We're writing for Professor Seltzer. I've been studying this stuff for about 10 years. I was curious how you generated your estimation of half a million killed during the violence of '94. Is there a paper? Could you tell us how you did it? We're looking forward to hearing from you. Dear Christian, thank you for your question and your interest. In answer to your first question, the key feature of my estimate of more than 500,000 deaths was not the specific figure of 500,000, but the words more than. The figure, more than 500,000, was modeled on the notion than an estimate of about, or at least 6 million died in the Holocaust, was sufficient for the Nuremberg prosecution. I can no longer recall why I settled on 500,000 as the lower anchor of my estimate. I do remain interested in the subject, however. Thanks for you interest. Regards, Bill-William Seltzer. This is the U.N. expert. This is the estimate that everything is based on-Suzanne Power, Wikipedia, Gurevich [assumed spelling], New York Times, Wall Street Journal, everywhere. He made it up. Why? Because they were outraged. Allison Deforge and Bill Seltzer were outraged that there wasn't going to be a tribunal like Nuremberg. They wanted the perpetrators to be held accountable. They wanted them rounded up and put in jail, and they felt, what did it take to get Nuremberg? Well, it took a big number to get Nuremberg. So, we need a number. We need a big number. We need a compelling number, and so they came up with one. Now the question is whether that's a plausible number or not. So, we have data, a lot of it. Most of it is really bad, and I'm going to explain in a minute why. So we have some data that's only large scale killings. We have some data that covers the whole country, some not. Physicians for Human Rights, these are some really crazy guys. They actually exhumed a mass grave, and they counted up the numbers of bodies in the grave. They identified them, separated them by age, sex, but the key was, based on thigh bones, they could come up with an accurate number of people that were in that mass grave. Ok? Now the reason why that matters is the Ministry of Youth, Culture, and Sport-that is an odd name, I have to say, it's sort of European, actually. In America we would not call the Ministry of Youth, Culture, and Sport the group responsible for doing the mass grave identification project, but in this case, that's who does it. So what we did was these guys, the Ministry of Youth, Culture, and Sport, catalogued all the mass graves in the country. There's about 130 of them. Christian and I visited 85 of those to make sure that the list was accurate. Every single place that was on the list that we went to exists. The number of bodies that are in those mass graves-we only have one that's been exhumed, but the exhumation numbers are pretty darn close to what's on the mass grave's identification project's claim of what should've been in there. Now, Human Rights Watch, they interviewed people. They did Allison Deforge, her collaborators and colleagues there, went around and interviewed people, refugees at the borders of Burundi and Tanzania to get estimates of how many people had died. We also have the Ministry of Education did a country-wide survey going house to house asking people about what took place in large scale massacres. The Ministry of Local Affairs, MINALOC, did a household census a few years afterwards and catalogued individual deaths. The Bucca is the Tutsi survivor organization, the indigenous group, they did an exhausted effort in collaboration with the Ministry of Local Affairs and a fellow named Phillip [Inaudible], who's a professor, or was a professor at Louisville University-to catalog what took place in one of the 13 provinces. They did an exhaustive study there. Africa writes, [inaudible] and ICTR witness testimony, we used all of these pieces of information to come up with essentially a weighted average. We took the witness testimony-as I said we had some 12,000 witness statements. We wrote software to go through and look for keywords. We then had, once we had keywords based on rape, killing, or assault, we then assigned undergraduate research assistants to go through and document what took place at what date in what location, and we used these as our start dates that I'll show you in a few minutes. What we do is, we take all this information and our applied statistician tells us what we're doing is just the right thing. We have a very sophisticated weighted average, and what we do is we weight it by some pieces of information we have great confidence in. Other pieces of information we have less confidence in, and so then what we can do is we can come up with a range of estimates of how many people died subject to assumptions. If we assume the Rwandan government's surveys are reasonably good, we can tell you what that number would be. If you believe Human Rights Organization's estimates based on other methodologies, we could tell you what that number would be. Ok? I don't think we're ever going to actually know specifically what happened, but I do think that the Rwandan government, for a variety of politically good reasons, made a good faith effort to document what happened both at the individual household census level and at the mass graves level, and they came up with some pretty darn big numbers. Now let's come up with some victim counts here. We start of with a set of assumptions. We start off with the population driven by the 1991 census. We have a population of about 7.6 million. The Tutsi population in 1991 is about 650,000. Now the question is how many Tutsi survive? Human Rights Watch estimated 150,000. That's from Gerard Prunier's estimate of 130,000. We contacted Mr. Prunier several times. It's an estimate. It's a back of the envelope, I sat down, I thought about it, I'd seen a lot of things happen, I'd talked to a lot of people. So it's an estimate. The Bucca has an estimate based on a 1998 count, household count, that there were 283,000 Tutsi survivors living in the country in 1998. AIDS and a variety of other pathologies are endemic in this part of the world. So we say, if we take the survivor organization's estimate, we think there were probably 300,000 Tutsi survived. Now that gives us the Human Rights Watch estimate of 500,000, conveniently--at least the math works out roughly. It's a good thing to see. Or if we use the survivor's organization estimate of how many Tutsis survived-and there's a reason they would bias it upwards., the fewer indigenous Tutsi there are that survived, the less claim to political control they have. So they have... Everyone here has a reason to fudge the truth, but if we use the Tutsi victim story, we end up with 345,000 Tutsi dead. That's a lot, and a significant proportion of those people that are dead out of that number died because their name was on a list. They were deliberately targeted because they were Tutsi's of a particular ilk. So where does this leave us? Well, we have a bunch of different data sources that cover the whole country. The mass graves project identifies 800,000 victims. If we subtract the Tutsi victims, it gives us 490,000 Hutu dead. If we take the government census from the year 2000, we have about 900,000 victims, 570,000 Hutu dead. If we use the Human Rights Watch estimates we end up with a slight smaller figure. Ministry of Local Affairs estimates 1.3 million dead. We come up with an estimate of about 900,000 Hutu that are dead. Our [inaudible] weighted statistical estimate if we privilege some of the government information, we end up with an estimate of roughly a million people that are dead, 700,000 Tutsi, Hutu victims. Now the key here is not that any of these numbers I think are right. I don't think we know What we do know though, I think with almost complete certainty, is that the standard story of a bazillion Hutu and a few... a bazillion Tutsi and a few Hutu isn't true. Everybody died in this story. There are no good guys. Now, here's the problem. Who's a Hutu, and who's a Tutsi? This is the fundamental problem here. This is Juvenal, the late, great Juvenal Habyarimana. He's a good looking guy. This is the President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame. Now if we're thinking archetypes, if we're thinking what is sort of the ideal type Hutu and Tutsi look like, these two guys are them. He is Mr. Tutsi. This guy right here, he is the most beautiful Hutu if you're putting together a Hutu ad campaign. But the problem is the degree of variation in Rwanda is extraordinary. In the 1920's and 30's, the Belgians put together a phrenology project. They wanted to... We found this in the archives of the National University. Christian and I spend a week there digging around just looking to see what was what. And it turns out that the Belgians had tried to put together a crude, multidimensional scale of Hutunists based on physical measurements-weight, height, density, forehead, hair height, nose width-dozens of indicators. Now it is true that there is a difference of means. They had hoped that the difference of means and the variance within the groups would be big difference in means, small variance. So you could give, say, I'm 98% sure that you're a Hutu based on your physical measurements. Problem is, it turned out like this. The Belgians drop the phrenology model. Why? Because it didn't work. They tried for 15 years to come up with a way to identify these people through physical, measurable attributes, and they failed miserably. It was not for want of trying though. Now, who's responsible? Well, that's an interesting question. What we've got going here is this is going to be an animation of the movement of the RPF coming from Uganda in 1994. We've got a little calendar down here. This is April, May, and June, and what we did was we started off with first the Defense Intelligence Agency estimates as published by Allan Cooperman in his book. Then we updated those with the CIA's national intelligence estimates. We then took those and we made maps, daily maps, and then we took those, and we gave them to Peter Erlinder who took them to both members of the RPF planning group from 1994, and then he took them to the guys, the senior officers in the FAR who were all in jail, and he said, "My colleagues have come up with these maps of where you guys were on these dates," and so we got corrections from the actual 2 militaries themselves, and we went back and forth iteratively, and now we have a consensus about this is where the front line was day by day during this whole period. Now, one of the things you're going to notice is the RPF moves in fifths and stars. This is not a continuous movement. Ok? Now, they come down from the north. This is very much a sweep. Here over the course of two days, they cut off... this is a major road out of Kigali. They cut off the road to make sure that heavy equipment can't come out. They leave open assailant though so that the Hutu can flee on foot. They then moved down, and this is a large north-south road, and they take an over watch position over the road, and then they sit and wait and wait and wait. Now, one of the things we're going to see is... [Background conversation] They walk. Ok, Bill, you've got to remember that this country, this is about 60 miles across from Kigali overland to here is a 2-day walk. Ok? This is... think Vermont. Think hoofing it over Vermont with footpaths like Ireland and England. There are footpaths everywhere, ok? So by blocking the roads, they prevent the movement of trucks and equipment, but it doesn't slow down or bar the movement of individual people. Ok? They can just walk out. Now the movement over here on the left, that was the French Army, the Operation Tur-quoise, to save the folks. Now what we're going to see next is we're going to overlay the killing data with the troop movements. We have up here-this is April 5, April 6-purple is really, really bad; pink is bad. The starting dates, the locations, come from eyewitness testimony. This all comes from the ICTR testimony. The scale of the killing in each of these locations comes from the aggregate data from both the mass graves identification project and the household census conducted by the Rwanda government.
^M00:44:42
[ Pause ]
^M00:44:49
Now, during this pause, there are negotiations going on in Kigali. Romeo Dallaire says at this point, to Paul Kagame, "Look, obviously the FAR is not going to stop the Interahamwe. You need to do it then." Kagame's response, according to Romeo Dallaire, is, "No. I'm not going to put any of my men's lives at risk." And so the process that the RPF follows is essentially the consolidation. They move forward, and then they consolidate.
They know what's going on. It's not hard. Everybody in this country knows what's going down, but the RPF doesn't do anything to stop it. Now, one of the things that is of great interest is once the RPF moves down and occupies the land along this road between Gitarama and Butare, they sit there, and you'll see there's a lot of killing that's going on not far away. This is a scale. This is zero to 60 kilometers. The difference from Gitarama to Kibuye is about 25 miles, less than the distance from Ann Arbor to Detroit. It's not far. These guys sit there. Now through Peter Erlinder, we interviewed some of the small unit commanders, lieutenants, and captains in the RPF and we said, "Just out of curiosity, I mean, you know, it's your country, but why didn't you guys do anything? Why did you just sit there?" And their response was, "Well, actually we did, but all of the small unit leaders that took the initiative to cross over the line were relieved of command directly by Kagame." Kagame by this point has been told that the United States will intervene. Kagame then replies through intermediaries to Bill Clinton and says, "If U.S. troops arrive, I cannot guarantee that my troops will not fire on them." That was the point at which Bill Clinton said, "Screw it. We're not doing anything." The French come in. Now all of a sudden the French arrive, and the RPF suddenly manages to be able to move rather quickly. Over the course of 4 or 5 days, they're able to move across an area that they had sat and watched for close to a month. And that's the end of the war except that, then over the course of the next two years, another 150,000 people died in this area in the Congo when the RPF invades over here. How did people die? A lot of different ways it turns out. These estimates come from witness testimonies, both from the ICTR as well as human rights organizations that went around and deposed people and asked people what had happened in particular locations. These data are highly unreliable, but we do have some confidence that a lot of people died in lots of different ways. Somewhere between 25,000 and 100,000 people probably died as a result of being explicitly named and hunted down and tracked. I interviewed a dozen people in prisons in Rwanda that were military commanders, and what they described was pretty horrifying. The political system they have there is built around the hill. Ten hills make up a commune. Ten communes make up a... Ten sectors make up a district. Ten districts make up a province. It's a very sort of pyramid based system. Every day the local Nimbuakumbie [assumed spelling] in a political cell, there'd be about 10 of them, would get together and they would share information of who was new into their hill and who was missing from their hill. These name lists would then rolled up and twice a week reported to the commune leader. This way they're able to track the movement of people very effectively in and out of political cells across the entire country. I found this out personally. I was following a graduate student around, and we were doing household survey in southern Rwanda, and all of a sudden a guy comes up to me and says, "By the way, your driver's been arrested." And I said, "Oh, well why would that be?" And the guy says, "Well, because I think the local police chief wants to talk to you, and he doesn't want to walk out here. So he figures if he arrests your driver, you'll go find your driver so you can get back to where you want to go." And I said, "That's pretty clever." So I walked to... I walked a couple of miles to the local police chief, and the local police chief says, "Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've been following you for 5 days." And I said, "How can you be following me for 5 days?" I've been in a bunch of different political units here, and he's really angry because this was at the district level, the district police station. I didn't have a letter from the district level sous chef, the local chief. I had a letter from the Presidential level all the way down to below the district, but I didn't have the district level, and he was very angry about this, but what I learned from this was after being interrogated for several hours, a couple... one of the things that was very funny, the thing that got me out-I tried everything. I tried my driver's license. I got to the point where I lay out my U.S. passport. The guy just like tosses them aside, and then I pull out my Dartmouth College ID, and he became fascinated with my Dartmouth College ID, and for some reason, that was adequate for him. But the thing that I really found fascinating was how they had tracked me. And he said, "Every day different people in his district would come and tell me that a tall white man has arrived in his district," told me every single house that we had gone and interviewed. He knew exactly where I had been for 5 days. Well, it turned out that when I interviewed people in prison, this is exactly how they tracked down people on the name list. Road blocks. A lot of people died at road blocks. A road block would be a footpath with two trashcans and a stick across it. Road blocks were manned by young boys between the ages of 8 and 17. Most of these kids were stoned cold drunk. The policy here was to bring to these group of kids every night a jerry can filled with banana beer. Now we know that these places were terrifying because the handful of journalists that actually were operating during this period described coming across these road blocks saying that they were absolutely terrifying, and these are essentially... these are white guys that are obviously not part of the problem. But the problem is you have armed kids, drunk out of their minds that had been participating in during the day killing sprees. So anybody that shows up in the dark is subject to be killed. Now you might say, "Well people had identification papers and everything." Well it turns out they did have identification papers. They had a slip of paper. The identification card for these folks is a slip of paper. This is a pretty warm and sweaty place. Imagine a thin slip of paper being all that you have. It's not like a U.S. passport that's waterproof or anything like that. Mass killings, we think somewhere between around a half million people died there. There's a lot of local violence. There's a lot of people that... [inaudible] describes in his book about focusing on the Greek Civil War, there are a lot of grudges in this country-land grudges, personal grudges. Once the RPF invades, there's a total breakdown in civil authority. People do what people have done. Think about the English civil war. Why does Hobbs go to France? Because it's nasty in England. RPF retribution killings, we guess somewhere between 100 and 150 thousand people died as a result of this. These are the air... These are the number of people that we estimate die in the areas where the RPF has solidified control after they had moved into an area. The RPF kill in the Congo externally displaced people, somewhere between 50 and 125 thousand people. Total death count range is from somewhere around 600,000 to 1.3 million. So what are our best comparison cases? How might we want to think about this? It turns out what took place in 1994 is on the one hand simpler, but on the other hand way more complicated than the standard story. The simplest story is it was a civil war that went really badly, and it just got totally out of control. The complicated story is there's a genocide. There's a politicide. There are people behaving beastly to their neighbors and family, all kinds of data generating processes. We like to refer to them as a social scientist, you're going, "Oh this isn't like the Holocaust." Part of it was, but that's not the majority of the deaths. This is like the 100 Years War, the English civil war, the Russian civil war, the Chinese civil war. In all of these civil wars, millions of people die-some of them deliberately by the state, but a huge proportion of them as a result of the total and utter complete breakdown of order. The Lord of the Flies sort of rings true here. Now, February 7 last year, a Spanish judge indicted 42 Rwandan army officers, and these are RPF officers, on charges of mass murder and crimes against humanity in the aftermath of 1994 genocide. Fernando Andreo, Spain's national court city, had sufficient evidence to implicate current President Paul Kagame a long string of reprisal massacres, but he can't indict Kagame because he's President and he has immunity. At the end of the day, at the cost of several billion dollars, the ICTR has now convicted some 30 genocidaires. Taken 10 years, several billion dollars, 30 people are in jail. Interestingly, Christian and I have tried for years to get permission to interview the convicted genocidaires that are being held in a prison in Central Mali. In case you didn't know, that is probably the most god-forsaken place on the planet. The U.N. refuses to allow us to see these people. They won't let us interview them. The story we've been told is these guys haven't talked to anybody. They haven't let on anything. They haven't broken trust with each other, and they haven't spoken to the U.N. about anything that happened. The U.N. is holding them in Mali with the promise of transferring them to a prison in The Hague so they might be able to see their families, all of whom live either in the suburbs of Toronto, Washington, DC, or Belgium. And on that uplifting note, I'll to stop and see if you guys have any questions. Yeah?
^M00:56:04
>> [ Inaudible ]
^M00:56:32
>> Stam: A lot of it is. Yeah, our best guess is that a lot of the Hutu are killed by Hutu. Ok, so one of the things that happened, there have been numerous incidents of large scale killing, not on this size, but by any other country or place of the world, you would consider 10,000 people killed a lot of people. And what had happened previously was that when violence would break out, people would move to municipal facilities-schools, community centers, churches, monasteries, and they would be safe in these municipal facilities. So when the violence goes down, people of both ethnic groups head to these places. Everybody's in... In most of these places when the Interahamwe shows up, the Interahamwe comes from another part of the country. The Interahamwe, they can't tell who's who. They just kill everybody... literally. Ok. So we think, we don't know, I mean this is the problem. There's no way to know for sure. We think that in these instances this is where a lot of the Hutu died. A lot of Hutu died at road blocks. And then there's a lot of Hutu on Hutu violence a la the Greek civil breakdown of order in civil wars that are neighbors stealing neighbors' property, neighbors going through and wiping out their neighbor's family opportunistically And so that's what we think accounts [inaudible].
^M00:58:09
>> [Inaudible ]
^M00:58:34
>> Stam: That's correct. And large scale retribution killings by the occupying force is again a crime against humanity. Ok. So under an international law, the RPF has responsibility to protect even if they are the invading force. They have a legal-and some people say moral-responsibility to protect people within the area they control, and the RPF troops engage in large scale retribution killings. Yeah? Last one, and then we're going to move on.
^M00:59:03
>> [ Inaudible ]
^M00:59:20
>> Stam: True. Yeah, yeah. So let me just... yeah, absolutely. So this is what motivated me to get involved in this. My military experience, I spent three years in the United States Special Forces. I then spend 10 years in the Army Reserves as a armor officer. One of the things that we did when I was in Special Forces, we would actually plan for... We'd sit down and draw detailed plans for how to go into a place and either take control of indigenous troops or stop them from doing what they're doing. And so, the thing that I wanted to do was to say, "Well, you know, is this true or not?" You know, how hard would it have been? So what we did was, Christian and I went to a bunch of locations where there were large scale killings, where 25,000 or more people died, and we wanted to see how hard would it have been to defend those places if we sent, say, a squad of American Marines or members from the Eighty Second Airborne. And it turns out, most of the places where the large scale mass killings took place-not all, but most of them are, in fact, on open, exposed hilltops with a single road approach to the hilltop. If you've ever been to the West Bank, kind of open, rolling terrain, long sight lines. So we concluded, "Well, it certainly wouldn't have taken very many people." It's a very small country. A Blackhawk helicopter can carry 14 guys and their gear. So basically one helicopter load probably would have been-maybe two-would have been enough to secure many of the places where between 5 and 40 thousand people were murdered. The problem was... And the United States had troops available to do this. There's a Marine unit in Gibuti that was ready to roll, 3,000 Marines. Kagame said he'd shoot on them. Now's the point at which the American President said, "We're not doing this. This is crazy." So the American people post-Somalia have no stomach for American troops being fired at while we're trying to do the right thing, and so we did nothing. I don't think there's any question that within 6 days of this starting, people in the government end, Germany, Britain, France, Belgium, and the United States all were aware of what was going down and how this was going to play out. The CIA's estimate before the plane was shot down is that between 75 and 150 thousand people are going to be killed in the violence that they think is coming. So you know, they're off by a couple hundred, a few hundred thousand, but they basically knew that this was going to happen, and they made a choice not to do anything. Now the question then becomes was that the right thing to do? That's a really [inaudible] one. Yeah?
^M01:02:13
>> [ Inaudible ]
^M01:02:57
>> Stam: Yeah, that's right. The people that leave in '57 and '62 are members of the Tutsi elite. It's essentially the clan, a couple of clans, that are descendants from [inaudible], and Kagame is a member of this clan. The people that are left behind are the poorer, less well connected Tutsi.
^M01:03:19
>> [ Inaudible ]
^M01:03:27
>> Stam: No they do not. No. That has been a common theme. Yeah?
^M01:03:32
>> [ Inaudible ]
^M01:04:24
>> Stam: There's a bunch of different things there. Rwanda becomes during the Cold War, certainly there's, you know, there's the U.S.-Soviet Communist capitalistic tangent, but there's also a tangent between former colonial powers. Ok, and there's the Anglophone-Francophone split that plays out in Africa. The Hutu are backed by the French. The Tutsi are backed by the English and the Americans. The English speaking people that had been in Uganda, they win. Having won, they intend to turn Rwanda into an Anglophone country. They want to drive out the French. They want to drive out French influence. They want to drive out the French language because the French had been backers of the Hutu. It is a not so subtle but defensible way of saying ethnicity doesn't matter. Most of the... most of the Tutsi and Hutu in the country don't speak anything other than Kinyarwanda. Ok. So essentially a choice of language is a choice of which group of elites will be in power, and what choice does an individual has essentially aspirations for, influence, wealth, or whatever in the future, what kind of choice, what kind of identification choice they have to make, and the current government is framing this as, "You've got to choose to be amongst us, and we are Anglophone Tutsi." Now the dilemma here is that the Kagame government, I mean, clearly the Kagame government, they took control of the country by force, ok. So there's no... They invaded into control. They weren't doing this to free the envisionist Tutsi. They invaded Rwanda to get Rwanda. They wanted control of this country, and now they have it. Ok. So if we could sort of bracket how you feel about territorial conquest for a moment-personally I don't think that's a good idea, but we'll set that aside? Relative to their predecessors, the Kagame government is doing a relatively good job, making things, sort of making the trains run on time. At the same time, they received a ton of dough from the Europeans and the Americans. Several billion dollars have been transferred to these people. Big checks have been written. The checks are being... starting to be withheld. USAID money is drying up. Belgian money is starting to dry up. French money is gone. Ok? And what we're starting to see as a result is an increase in authoritarianism in Rwanda. Rwanda today is basically close to being a totalitarian state. People's movements are monitored. Any room you go into that's like this or a bank or anything, there's a picture of Paul Kagame on the back. It's very Soviet. At the same time, they're maintaining order. When we went and interviewed the President of Abuka, he asked us, you know, "What are you doing? You guys are crazy." And we said, "Well, you know, we're truth seekers," some crazy story like that, and he pulled out a series of pictures, and he said, "You know , these are all the indigenous people that tried to do what you're doing." And we said, "Wow, those are great guys. Can we talk to them." He says, "No, they're all dead." Kagame had all those people killed. Alison Deforge, to her great credit, recognized after a number of years that the standard story that she had put forward in Human Rights Org's book probably didn't get the whole truth, and as a result of speaking out about the abuses of the Kagame government, she was barred access to Rwanda. I coincidently met a woman in the Education School at Berkley. We were sitting on an airplane. I gave this talk at Stanford last year, and I sit down and talk to this woman, and, you know, she says, "What do you do?" I said, "I'm a political scientist." She goes, "Oh my God. I just heard about this political scientist give the coolest talk about Rwanda." I said, "Oh, that was me." And so we started talking about things, and she says, "Well, you know we used to do a lot of work in Rwanda, but now they won't let us back." The schools have been purged. Then over the last 2 years she said that she... I've not been back in 4 or 5 years, but she said that in the last two years, it's become an edgier place. One of the things that we learned, Christian and I, we interviewed a bunch of people. There's an underground Hutu power movement in Kigali and Cuchari. It's great. It reminds me of stories about the Soviet Union. It's run out of book stores, [laughter] and we would go, you know, through intermediaries and stuff. We'd get to meet these crazy little guys in the basements of book stores and talk with them about what they wanted to see happen, and every single one of them said what we sort of euphemistically referred to people down in the American South with the saying, "The South will rise again." These people believe the Hutu Power Party will return, and they are adamant about this.
^M01:09:44
>> [ Inaudible ]
^M01:10:04
>> Stam: Gosh, should I be honest or not?
>> Yes.
>> Stam: [Laughter] It's, you know, it's one of these crazy things. It's a very safe place. It's a very safe place. I've travelled in, not in a lot, but in a fair number of crazy, dangerous places, and the amazing thing about Rwanda was when we were there, I went there 3 times, you could walk around at midnight almost anywhere in Kigali, and I felt totally safe. I never had any sense of unease there. Apparently that's not the case today that this has changed, but there is not a great deal of property crime. Now, everybody that has any money is armed to the hilt. Everybody has their own private security guys with AK47's or import carbines. All houses, everybody lives in a compound. Order is being maintained. At one point, Christian and I, we couldn't figure out. We were walking around-we spend a fair bit of time there-like, you know, a million people got killed. Not everybody does, a lot of people hacked up. Where are all the invalids? We couldn't figure it out. You would think with the degree of violence that there would be disabled people all over the place. You don't see any. And then we found them. They're kept in villages like leper colonies. They take them aside, and so that nobody can see them, and so we said, "Oh, well there you have it." We couldn't figure out where like, where are the really tough guys? And we looked, and we walked around, and we said, "It seems like anyone that would be physically capable of hacking somebody to death is gone. Where did everybody go?" And then I went to the prisons, and I saw literally tens of thousands of 5 foot 6 inch guys that looked like Lawrence Taylor, the linebacker for the New York Giants, and I said, "Oh, that answers my question." Everybody that could be a physical threat to the system has been incarcerated. So on the one hand, I think it's still actually a very safe place. So for the mom in you, you know, as long as she's not going to be there for 10 years, it's probably a very safe place. It's sort of like the... I think an analogy that might work would be the San Andreas Fault. There's a lot of tension building up at the San Andreas Fault right now. There's an area-I was just watching [inaudible]. So I was sitting around watching Discovery Channel two nights ago, and so apparently there's this area south of Los Angeles that's supposed to have an earthquake every 150 to 200 years, and there hasn't been one in 300 years, and they know underneath the ground how far things are out of whack with the surface. It's about 28 feet, and so they say, "Well, you know, at some point, the surface is going to catch up with the ground that's moving underneath, and I think that's true in Rwanda as well. The problem is, we don't know. You know, who knows when the big one's going to happen outside of LA? It's going to happen. I mean, it always has. You know, unless you think the world's going to stop rotating on its axis, it's going to happen, but people that live in Los Angeles blithely, happily go on, you know, and ignore the fact that at some point, it's all going to come crashing in the ground. So as long as your daughter's there for a little while, it should be totally fine. I think we have time for, like, one more question. Yeah?
^M01:13:18
>> [ Inaudible ]
^M01:13:32
>> Stam: Ok, so here's the question we want to ask these guys. When I came to graduate school in 1988, we studied deterrents. Nuclear deterrents was a big thing. It was the end of the Cold War, and we talked about throw weights and the size of [inaudible], and all these kinds of great bombs and rocket stuff, but it was all about the threat to kill everybody to deter something terrible from happening. We know, with certainty, that the Hutu military in Rwanda. the FAR, began developing plans for the genocidal campaign somewhere between 18 and 36 months before it actually went down. People in the United States were aware of these plans. People in Rwanda were aware of these plans. The plans, basically everybody knew that there was a plan out there to kill a significant proportion of the Tutsi. Now, the United States had plans. For 30 years, the United States had a plan to annihilate the Soviet Union, kill everybody, and the whole idea of having the plan was that we plan to kill everybody, so we don't have to. Paul Kagame knew when he invaded that there was a plan in place that was going to lead to the death of somewhere between 50 and 500,000 Tutsi. He knew it. Everybody knew it. What I want to know from these guys is, when they hatched this plan, and I'm not sure... who knows if they'd actually tell you sincerely or not, but I want to ask the question, "What were they thinking?" If the plan had worked, would it have been a deterrent plan, or did they actually really want to kill all these people the way Hitler did? In [inaudible] , Hitler lays out a plan to get rid of all the Jews because he wants to get rid of the Jews. From conversations I've had with a small number of Hutu-prison and elsewhere-lower level people, their belief was that it wasn't... didn't have to happen. They wanted control, and then once the killing started, they followed through with their plan, in the same way that if a nuclear war happens between the United States and the Soviet Union, we would have followed through with the plan. When I was an undergraduate, I had just come off of Special Forces team. Our job was strategic reconnaissance. The plan for us was that we would jump out of the helicopter and then walk to a railroad trans load site in what is today Ukraine, and they were a DESI-military district, and we would put a laser beam on this trans load site so an F16 could come by and drop a nuclear weapon on that site, and when I was taking these classes in undergraduate and graduate school on deterrents, some of my professors said, "Well that's stupid. Nobody in the Army would ever be dumb enough to do that," and I said, "Actually [laughter] yeah, we would have," for a variety of reasons, some good, some not good, but we would have done it. I had friends that were commanders of nuclear artillery batteries in Germany. They would have done it. So that the killing took place is not evidence that they wanted to do it. It's evidence that there was a real plan to do it. The intention of the plan, I think, is as yet unknown. It's an open question, and that's, from my perspective, somebody that studies deterrents, that is a fascinating question. Is the Rwandan civil war a failure of deterrents, ok, or is it, you know, essentially another example of people [inaudible]. And there's a handful of people that are, have a diminishing lifespan that actually know the answer to that question. So I guess we'll stop there. [Inaudible] [Applause]