"I ask myself what was it that made me act with such resolution. … It was without a doubt the will to give the people back their dignity. And it was probably just as much the desire to put down the arrogance and expose the duplicity of a basically oppressive and unjust aristocracy."
— Belgian Col. Guy Logiest
Philip Gourevitch tells us about Col. Logiest in his book We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families.
The colonel was an idealist who wanted to Do Good. He began as something like Alden Pyle in Graham Greene's The Quiet American and — in the single-minded pursuit of his ideal — ended up as something very nearly like Mr. Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Pyle and Kurtz were idealists too.
Col. Logiest had served in the Belgian Congo and had witnessed firsthand the worst injustices of colonialism and of the petty tyrannies that had succeeded colonial rule. He was determined to change all that.
"We have to take sides," Logiest said shortly after he arrived in Rwanda in 1959. And so when the Hutus of Rwanda's oppressed majority began rioting and burning the homes of the privileged Tutsi minority, Logiest took sides. The Belgian colonel, Gourevitch writes:
… who was virtually running the revolution, saw himself as a champion of democratization, whose task was to rectify the gross wrong of the colonial order he served.
And thus, in the name of democratization:
In early 1960, Colonel Logiest staged a coup d'etat by executive fiat, replacing Tutsi chiefs with Hutu chiefs. Communal elections were held at midyear, and with Hutus presiding over the polling stations, Hutus won at least 90 percent of the top posts. By then, more than 20,000 Tutsis had been displaced from their homes, and that number kept growing rapidly as new Hutu leaders organized violence against Tutsis or simply arrested them arbitrarily, to assert their authority and to snatch Tutsi property. …
"The revolution is over," Colonel Logiest announced in October, at the installation of a provisional government led by Gregoire Kayibanda, one of the original authors of the Hutu Manifesto, who gave a speech proclaiming: "Democracy has vanquished feudalism."
And they all lived happily ever after.
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