Please disappear - or at least relocate to Burundi, Jordan, or just hide behind that wall?

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on some of the early or alternative proposals for post-genocide reconstruction/ reconciliation in Rwanda. I’ve come across some creative stuff, but this one in particular floored me.

Chaim Kaufman, an Associate Professor at Lehigh University, feels that rather than attempting to resolve ethnic tensions in Rwanda (which many have argued to be largely economically driven) we should just separate the ethnic groups, creating a Tutsi state somewhere in Burundi, where there are Tutsis anyway (Some of you already picking up on the parallels?)

In his own words: “Solutions that aim at restoring multi-ethnic civil politics —such as power-sharing, state re-building, or identity reconstruction—cannot work because they do nothing to dampen the security dilemma, and because ethnic fears and hatreds hardened by war are extremely resistant to change.”

Kaufmann proposes that “stable resolutions of ethnic civil wars are possible, but only when the opposing groups are demographically separated into defensible enclaves.” (Drum roll – here it comes) He proposes that Rwandan Tutsis should, together with Burundian Tutsis “be encouraged to relocate to a smaller, defensible, ethnically Tutsi state.”

Why don’t we just go ahead and give autonomy to the several thousand ethnic groups in Africa and call it a day? I can't believe that people are still trying to solve problems started by this narrow perception of the nation-state by using that very same construct.

But more importantly – who, you might ask, does he think should do all this “encouraging”? One might assume the International community, or maybe the African Union. Others might argue that this “encouragement” has already been undertaken numerous times through various incidents of ethnic cleansing culminating in the 1994 genocide - this is when tens of thousands of Tutsis fled to neighboring Uganda and Burundi.

Kaufman is (perhaps not as intentionally or maliciously) doing with his pen what others have attempted to accomplish with the machete (or the merkava). That the Ivory Tower is held to such low standard of responsibility towards the potential implications of their theories is frustrating, especially when they freely use vague, painful euphemisms like “encouraging to relocate.” What happens when Tutsis refuse, which I can guarantee they would? Maybe we could use “mild to moderate physical pressure,” another one of my favorites?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for academic freedom. I just think that some people are more concerned about contributing to some sexy debate in an esoteric political science journal than they are with the real questions at hand. This debate in particular is not as harmless as one may think, as it is reminiscent of another one that has gained mainstream support elsewhere in the world, as “Transfer” (of the Palestinian population to some other Arab country) is debated on Israeli radio stations and public television, using much of the same arguments.

Perhaps the real “fuck you” to proposals such as this one has been given by the Tutsis themselves when they opted to return en masse at the first chance they got (right after the genocide, in 1994), despite being mostly well-adjusted and affluent in the neighboring countries.