By Kathleen Kern

Last month, on the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, the media were rife with analyses about how it could have happened and what the United States could have done to stop it. I read only one article about the role that the collapse of the Rwandan economy played in the genocide.

The article reminded me of a 1996 conversation I had with Mark Jantzen, who had just returned from a Mennonite Central Committee assignment in Serbia. How was it, I asked, that the people of the former Yugoslavia — a large percentage of whom had married outside their ethnic group — could have allowed Slobodan Milosevic and other nationalist politicians to develop their genocidal campaigns?

Without hesitation, Jantzen said, “It was the economy.” In the early 1980s, the Yugoslav government complied with the demands of the International Monetary Fund and Western creditors, approving economic programs that promoted market forces. The inflation rate soared, and the standard of living for most Yugoslavs plummeted. Arguments over which republics should be responsible for what share of the debt exacerbated ethnic conflicts.

The economic difficulties also made many inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia more receptive to militant nationalist sentiment already existing in the Balkans. Just as Hitler rallied a significant minority of Germans around the propaganda that Jews and Communists were behind the economic woes of the Weimar Republic, Milosevic was able to rally Serbs around the propaganda that Albanians, Croats and Muslims were responsible for their poverty.

Rwanda’s economic tailspin began in the late 1980s, when the international system of quotas for coffee production started to fall apart. Coffee exports made up 80 percent of Rwanda’s foreign exchange earnings. In 1989, U.S. government negotiators torpedoed the International Coffee Agreement on behalf of U.S.-based coffee corporations. Within months, the 70 percent of rural Rwandans who cultivated coffee were getting half of what they had previously received for their crop.

As the national debt soared, USAID told Rwanda that any further aid it received would be contingent on it institutionalizing IMF and World Bank policies. These policies included ending subsidies to the poor and drastically devaluing the Rwandan currency. They also included privatizing resources.

For example, in 1992 the World Bank ordered the Rwandan government to privatize its electricity and telecommunications companies and to hand over the sale money to the IMF for debt servicing. The government sold the utilities to a European corporation that fired hundreds of workers and jacked up electricity prices, causing a steep decline in urban Rwandans’ standard of living.

When the foreign loans started to flow into the compliant Rwanda, they were diverted toward the purchase of weapons. Uprooted farmers, and the urban unemployed who had nothing to lose, joined militias. Propaganda from the government told them they had something to gain, including the property of Tutsi neighbors, for doing so. The countryside descended into chaos, culminating in the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Rwandans in 1994.

Like many people, I find myself tuning out when experts throw around terms like “neoliberal reforms” or “S&P 500 index.” I never formally studied business or economics (so I always have a friend with a degree in economics vet my columns that deal with economic issues.)

However, we need to consider the role that economic collapse played in at least three major genocides of the last century. We must work harder to understand economic systems, because a great deal of human misery lies buried beneath the jargon.