Land Scarcity, Distribution And Conflict In Rwanda

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Chapter Two

Land Scarcity, Distribution and Conflict in Rwanda
Jean Bigagaza, Carolyne Abong and Cecile Mukarubuga

Introduction
Rwanda is a small country of eight million people in central Africa, with a long history of violent conflict dating back to 1959, and culminating in the 1994 genocide. Conflict in Rwanda has created a large refugee population inneighbouring countries, with Uganda and Tanzania being the largest refugee recipients before the 1994 genocide, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) receiving the largest number of refugees after the genocide. As this study will show, the Rwanda refugee population has had a destabilising effect on the entire Great Lakes region, including on Rwanda itself. This chapter examines the relationshipbetween land scarcity and conflict in Rwanda. Historically, land pressure has been a severe problem in Rwanda, where over 90% of the population practises agriculture. Land pressure has resulted in declining overall agricultural production, but increasing production for individuals and groups with favourable land and resource access. Cultivation is encroaching into wetlands, national parks andforest reserve areas to satisfy unmet demands for land by some, predominately underprivileged, groups. Large numbers of internally displaced persons have worsened stress in some ecologically sensitive areas, such as in forests, resulting in localised degradation of forest resources. We will assess the power dynamics in Rwanda insofar as power through control of the state is essential to control land.We will demonstrate that elite power struggles for control of the state links land and conflict in Rwanda where, historically, control of the state is the principal factor in rights to access, use and ownership of land. While many analyses focus on linkages between conflict and ethnicity, less attention has been focused on the role of land scarcity in the Rwanda conflict. A thoughtful analysis ofthe so-called ethnic conflict in Rwanda will show ethnicity is a cover for competition to control scarce land. Indeed, this study argues that the causes of conflicts in Rwanda lie in competition to access and control scarce land.1 We do not imply that land scarcity is the ultimate or most important root cause of the Rwandan conflict. It is, however, a critical component of the complex andintertwined causal factors. Since 1980 powerful economic, political and social grievances in Rwanda

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relate to land scarcity. Overpopulation as well as inequitable distribution of land worsened land scarcity for the rural poor. Increasingly, political power and representation by elite groups at the national level determined control of land. Widespread disinheritance ofland rights of the rural poor coupled with resource capture by elite groups has been closely related to deepening rural poverty in the 1980s and 1990s.2 Deepening rural poverty, in effect, led to violent conflict.3 Ethnic differences were less important in understanding the dynamics of the conflict than were elite competitions to dominate critical environmental decision-making processes throughcontrol of the state. In turn, elite groups characterised these competitions in ethnic terms. Over time, different groups in the conflict were polarised along ethnic lines and were purposefully driven to conflict through ideologies propagated through official media. Gasana observes that the rural poor (both Hutu and Tutsi) described the ruling elite collectively as abaryi (eaters) who to themrepresented a new, exploitative ethnic category.4 It can therefore be argued that the conflict in Rwanda was ultimately a struggle against inequitable distribution of land, tragically fought along ethnic, Tutsi versus Hutu, lines. Recent studies of the Rwandan conflict have come to appreciate and acknowledge the role played by ecological scarcity.5 Many studies, however, still focus intently on the role...