ABSTRACT
I have previously argued that crafting appropriate institutions that not only balance the tension inherent in deeply divided post-conflict states but also moderate the behaviour of actors is seen as an important cornerstone to political stability and democratic transition. In a wide-ranging interview President Kagame reiterated this necessity when he noted that ‘we need to put institutions and structures in place that we avoid exclusion of any kind’ (Kagame 2007). Electoral institutions and attendant processes are part of that toolkit. As such, the Arusha Accords, protocol on power sharing, article 23, called for elections after the transitional phase. When examining institutional engineering earlier, elections were advanced as part of the toolkit for the transition process, but more importantly as a mechanism for legitimating political power and its distribution (Bratton 2007: 97). It is in this context that this chapter seeks to examine such a crucial indicator, the 2003 Rwandan elections as a real-life laboratory to interrogate our theoretical propositions advanced in Chapter 1. While analysing these elections I seek to examine not only their substantive contribution to the transition narrative in Rwanda but equally to establish if our earlier theoretical proposition about ethnopolitical mobilisation is in fact relevant to these contests. Following the logic of the current democratisation narratives it is hard to envisage democracy without elections, yet it is not hard to come across elections without democracy. While the general observation that elections are a necessary but not sufficient condition for modern democracy has been broadly accepted, the notion that they appear meaningful through complying with minimum democratic norms is still porous. But the real dilemma is when elections oscillate across a hard to specify but purportedly real threshold of openness and competitiveness (Schedler 2002a: 38). When then do elections count as a legitimate vehicle of the democratisation process? Rwanda’s experience with elections does present an important theoretical and empirical window into the efficacy of elections in democratisation politics of deeply divided post-conflict societies. Rwanda’s 2003 elections can be considered as a watershed moment that marked the country’s embarking on the path towards the ‘democratic club’. Shadowing this transition was evidently a painful socio-political history, and whether Rwanda had overcome this trauma was as yet to be partially answered by these elections. In particular, these elections had important resonance for
divided polities in sub-Saharan Africa and the democratising world in general (Chua 1998, 2003). While these were held in a complex and apprehensive political atmosphere, with the Hutu as a demographic majority and the Tutsi as a dominant political minority, the dynamics involved had far-reaching implications. In examining the 2003 Rwandan elections, I attempt to address a key question: in the shadow of ethnopolitical sensitivities, how far did these specific elections move Rwanda along the democratisation continuum or, put another way, how meaningful were these elections to Rwanda’s transition efforts? In interrogating these electoral dynamics I am at the same time evaluating the empirical robustness and efficacy of the institutional engineering thesis. The 2003 presidential and parliamentary elections in Rwanda were indeed the first substantive political test post-genocide. Most crucially, they were perceived as a barometer of the de-ethnicisation of national politics by the transitional government of national unity (Assimwe and Wakabi 2003: 5). These were the first post-genocide multiparty elections that marked some kind of discontinuity from Rwanda’s long legacy of authoritarian leadership: ethnic exclusion and periodical state-sponsored internal ‘terrorism’. As a general trend, these elections would be referred to as ‘founding elections’, though on this occasion we shall refer to them as ‘transitional elections’ (Bratton 1998: 51; Linz 2000: 33; Carothers 2002; Schedler 2002a: 36, 2002b: 103b). A late third-wave rider, Rwanda had been a late-comer to the general procession towards democratisation. However, its first democratic footsteps followed the promulgation of the country’s constitution through the 4 June 2003 referendum. This new constitution provided the general blueprint upon which subsequent elections were run. Despite general anxiety over the elections coming amidst continued distrust, latent ethnic tension and institutional fragility, Rwanda set out on the 26 August and later September 2003 to prove the sceptics and the prophets of doom wrong (Ntiyamira 2003: 9). What follows is an attempt to analyse the nature and implications of these elections for the Rwandan general transition. For a comprehensive analysis and evaluation, I intend to address both the presidential and parliamentary elections concurrently as similar or overlapping issues make this inevitable.
