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.When population grows,the extra people added to the population also themselves reproduce as incompound interest, where the interest itself draws interest.That allows ex-ponential growth.In contrast, an increase in food yield does not then fur-ther increase yields, but instead leads only to arithmetic growth in foodproduction.Hence a population will tend to expand to consume all avail-able food and never leave a surplus, unless population growth itself is haltedby famine, war, or disease, or else by people making preventive choices (e.g.,contraception or postponing marriage).The notion, still widespread today,that we can promote human happiness merely by increasing food produc-tion, without a simultaneous reining-in of population growth, is doomed toend in frustration or so said Malthus.The validity of his pessimistic argument has been much debated.Indeed, there are modern countries that have drastically reduced theirpopulation growth by means of voluntary (e.g., Italy and Japan) orgovernment-ordered (China) birth control.But modern Rwanda illustratesa case where Malthus's worst-case scenario does seem to have been right.More generally, both Malthus's supporters and his detractors could agreethat population and environmental problems created by non-sustainableresource use will ultimately get solved in one way or another: if not by pleas-ant means of our own choice, then by unpleasant and unchosen means, suchas the ones that Malthus initially envisioned.A few months ago, while I was teaching a course to UCLA undergradu-ates on environmental problems of societies, I came to discuss the difficul-ties that regularly confront societies trying to reach agreements aboutenvironmental disputes.One of my students responded by noting that dis-putes could be, and frequently were, solved in the course of conflict.By that,the student didn't mean that he favored murder as a means of settling dis-putes.Instead, he was merely observing that environmental problems oftendo create conflicts among people, that conflicts in the U.S.often become re-solved in court, that the courts provide a perfectly acceptable means of dis-pute resolution, and hence that students preparing themselves for a careerof resolving environmental problems need to become familiar with the ju-dicial system.The case of Rwanda is again instructive: my student was fun-damentally correct about the frequency of resolution by conflict, but theconflict may assume nastier forms than courtroom processes.In recent decades, Rwanda and neighboring Burundi have become syn-onymous in our minds with two things: high population, and genocide(Plate 21).They are the two most densely populated countries in Africa,and among the most densely populated in the world: Rwanda's averagepopulation density is triple even that of Africa's third most densely popu-lated country (Nigeria), and 10 times that of neighboring Tanzania.Geno-cide in Rwanda produced the third largest body count among the world'sgenocides since 1950, topped only by the killings of the 1970s in Cambodiaand of 1971 in Bangladesh (at the time East Pakistan).Because Rwanda'stotal population is 10 times smaller than that of Bangladesh, the scale ofRwanda's genocide, measured in proportion to the total population killed,far exceeds that of Bangladesh and stands second only to Cambodia's.Bu-rundi's genocide was on a smaller scale than Rwanda's, yielding "only" a fewhundred thousand victims.That still suffices to place Burundi seventh inthe world since 1950 in its number of victims of genocide, and tied forfourth place in proportion of the population killed.We have come to associate genocide in Rwanda and Burundi with ethnicviolence.Before we can understand what else besides ethnic violence wasalso involved, we need to begin with some background on the genocide'scourse, the history leading up to it, and their usual interpretation that I shallnow sketch, which runs as follows.(I shall mention later some respects inwhich this usual interpretation is wrong, incomplete, or oversimplified.)The populations of both countries consist of only two major groups, calledthe Hutu (originally about 85% of the population) and the Tutsi (about15%).To a considerable degree, the two groups traditionally had filled dif-ferent economic roles, the Hutu being principally farmers, the Tutsi pas-toralists.It is often stated that the two groups look different, Hutu being onthe average shorter, stockier, darker, flat-nosed, thick-lipped, and square-jawed, while Tutsi are taller, more slender, paler-skinned, thin-lipped, andnarrow-chinned.The Hutu are usually assumed to have settled Rwanda andBurundi first, from the south and west, while the Tutsi are a Nilotic peoplewho are assumed to have arrived later from the north and east and who es-tablished themselves as overlords over the Hutu.When German (1897) andthen Belgian (1916) colonial governments took over, they found it expedi-ent to govern through Tutsi intermediaries, whom they considered raciallysuperior to Hutu because of the Tutsi's paler skins and supposedly more Eu-ropean or "Hamitic" appearance.In the 1930s the Belgians required every-body to start carrying an identity card classifying themselves as Hutu orTutsi, thereby markedly increasing the ethnic distinction that had alreadyexisted.Independence came to both countries in 1962.As independence ap-proached, Hutu in both countries began struggling to overthrow Tutsidomination and to replace it with Hutu domination.Small incidents of vio-lence escalated into spirals of killings of Tutsi by Hutu and of Hutu byTutsi.The outcome in Burundi was that the Tutsi succeeded in retainingtheir domination, after Hutu rebellions in 1965 and 1970-72 followed byTutsi killings of a few hundred thousand Hutu.(There is inevitably muchuncertainty about this estimated number and many of the following num-bers of deaths and exiles.) In Rwanda, however, the Hutu gained the upperhand and killed 20,000 (or perhaps only 10,000?) Tutsi in 1963 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]