CASE STUDIES/215on account in large foreign banks, which the regime used to buy
arms. It can be argued that the Washington-based institutions failed
in their duty to monitor the way in which loan money was used.
They should have suspended credit in early 1992, when they realised
that the money was being used for arms purchases. They should have
alerted the UN. By continuing to provide financing until early 1993,
they helped a regime that was preparing a genocide. Since 1991,
human rights organisations had been reporting and condemning the
massacres that paved the way to genocide.
Rising Social Conflict
For the genocidal enterprise to get underway, it was not sufficient to
have a regime drawing up the blueprint and stocking the required
hardware. The country also needed an impoverished and
'lumpenised' citizenry, ready to do the irreparable. In Rwanda, 90 per
cent of the population live in the countryside, 20 per cent of peasant
families own less than half an acre. Between 1982 and 1994, there
was large-scale impoverishment of the majority of the rural
population; at the same time, a tiny section of the population grew
fabulously rich. According to Jef Maton, in 1982, the wealthiest 10
per cent of the population received 20 per cent of rural revenues; in
1992, they received 41 per cent; in 1993, 45 per cent; and by the
beginning of 1994, 51 per cent (Maton, 1994). The catastrophic
social impact of policies dictated by the IMF-World Bank combine
and the fall in world market coffee prices (a fall linked to the policies
of the Bretton Woods institutions and the US), played a central role
in the Rwandan crisis. The Habyarimana regime channelled
profound social discontent into implementing its plan for genocide.
The Genocide's Financiers
Between 1990 and 1994, Rwanda's main arms suppliers were
France, Belgium, South Africa, Egypt and China. China also provided
500,000 machetes. Egypt - whose joint Minister of Foreign Affairs,
responsible for relations with the African continent, was none other
than Boutros Boutros-Ghali - granted Rwanda a S6 million interest-
free loan in 1991 to purchase arms for its infantry divisions. When
the genocide got underway, France and the British firm Mil-Tec
provided arms to the rampaging army through the Goma airport