by Guy Arnold
The war in Sudan – Africa’s longest war – has defied any attempts at intervention although Sudan’s neighbours (Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda) have been involved on the fringes. Moreover, the nature of the terrain, the size of the country and the inability of either side to prevail decisively, even after winning particular victories, may at last have convinced both the government and the SPLA that neither can win. If that is the case, can they at last work out a solution: either a total split into separate countries or a genuine federal state that would retain Sudan’s integrity as a single state but allow real control over its affairs to the South, something that so far governments in Khartoum have always refused to contemplate. At least at the beginning of the twenty-first century it seemed possible, to put it no higher, to hope that decades of devastating warfare might have finally convinced the two sides that a peace would be beneficial to both.
CHAPTER THIRTY - FIVE
Genocide and Border Confrontation
The genocide that destroyed a million Rwandans and shocked the world in 1994 left a scar on Africa as it did upon the conscience of the West that could have prevented it but chose not to do so. And the brutal border war that erupted in 1998 between Eritrea and Ethiopia, two countries whose leaders only a few years earlier had together fought to bring about the downfall of Mengistu, evoked comparisons with European trench warfare. Why, in both cases, was there such ferocity? The answer in either case is not easy to find. What legacies provoked planned and deliberate genocide and what deep resentments could turn allies into enemies overnight? The fragility of state structures, the precarious nature of ethnic alliances, the legacies of colonialism which are still working their way through the system may each be cited as contributory causes yet none is sufficient to explain the nature of these violent eruptions. The violence that characterized much of Africa through the 1990s gave the impression that the continent was the surface of a vast volcano where explosions could break the surface almost anywhere as the whole gradually settled down and came to terms with realities that had long been under wraps.
GENOCIDE IN RWANDA
Colonialism as such may not be to blame for the genocide of 1994 yet it played its part and set the scene for what was to follow. The Belgians, who acquired Ruanda-Urundi from Germany at the end of World War I, regarded the Hutus as a serf class and in order to politicize the differences for their own purposes of colonial rule conducted a census and found that 14 per cent of the population was Tutsi and 85 per cent Hutu. Thereafter, as the administering power, the Belgians systematically favoured the Tutsis while the Hutus were largely denied education except for those training for the Catholic priesthood. During the 1950s, Belgium, like the other colonial powers, came under UN pressure to decolonize and to hand over power to a democratic political structure. Then, according to a UN Trusteeship Report of March 1961, ‘The developments of the last 18 months have brought about the racial dictatorship of one party’ the report warned, and ‘An oppressive system has been replaced by another one… It is quite possible that some day we will witness violent reactions on the part of the Tutsis’. Between Belgian colonial convenience – divide and rule – and United Nations insistence upon democratically regulated independence, the parameters for later disasters were set.1
‘The Second Republic began to unravel from about the end of the 1980s… a Structural Adjustment Programme was imposed from outside in 1990, and military spending rose dramatically following the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) invasion, also in 1990.’2 Already at this time, the result of earlier massacres and Hutu-Tutsi confrontations there were registered with the UNHCR 266,000 Tutsis in Burundi, 82,000 in Uganda, 22,000 in Tanzania and 13,000 in Zaïre. By the 1990s a crucial element in Rwanda’s overall problem was shortage of land. ‘In the absence of any technological breakthrough, and in the presence of an increase in the sheer numbers, soil fertility was decreasing. In response there was a shift away from cereals and beans towards root crops: the food basket was becoming protein-poor and starch-laden.’3 In the face of the RPF invasion, the Hutu army that stood at only 5,000 in 1990 grew to 30,000 over the two years to 1992 and its growth was paralleled by the formation of Hutu extremist political parties. President Habyarimana, despite negotiating with the Tutsis, was as determined to maintain Hutu supremacy as the Tutsis were to re-establish theirs. Furthermore, there was an external factor at work: the problems of 1990–94 were heavily influenced by Uganda where there was also a crisis of indigeneity. By permitting the RPF to invade Rwanda from its soil, Uganda was exporting its crisis and getting rid of non-Ugandans as in 1972 it had got rid of its Asians. Waves of Tutsi had left Rwanda on three occasions – 1959–61, 1963–64 and 1973 – and a significant proportion of them had settled in Uganda, though they all believed they had the right of return to Rwanda. By 1990, however, Habyarimana’s government could and did maintain that there was no land for them to return to. When the Tutsi-dominated RPF invaded Rwanda from Uganda over 30 September–1 October 1990 under Maj.-Gen. Fred Rwigyema (who was killed in the first week of fighting) Uganda sealed its border to prevent further Tutsis joining the RPF. The government of Rwanda appealed for help to Belgium (which sent 600 paratroopers), France (300 troops) and Zaïre (500, later increased to 1,000 troops). By the end of October Tutsis were being rounded up in Kigali. Uganda’s President Museveni claimed the rebels had agreed to a ceasefire but though President Habyarimana offered peace talks he insisted that there was no longer any available land for the Tutsis in Rwanda. Over December 1990–January 1991 more Tutsi rebels crossed the border. A settlement appeared to have been achieved in February 1991 when President Mwinyi of Tanzania presided at a meeting of Habyarimana and Museveni in Zanzibar. A border ceasefire between Rwanda and Uganda was agreed but sporadic fighting was to continue throughout the year. Uganda, which had close ties with the Tutsis, was unable even if it had been willing to stay out of the conflict. Representatives of the RPF and government met in Paris in June 1992 to work out an accord and one was signed that August. In October the government agreed to set up a transitional cabinet to include all political parties and the RPF and an agreement was signed in Arusha on 9 January 1993. However, it was then repudiated by Habyarimana’s ruling Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour la Démocratie et Développement (MRNDD) (National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development) and by the end of that month a new round of ethnic killing had broken out. By February hundreds of people were being killed and an estimated one million people had fled their homes to escape the conflict and become refugees. The RPF launched a new offensive from Uganda and recaptured Ruhengeri, which it had taken for a brief period in 1991. This new RPF offensive was condemned by Belgium, France and the United States and more French troops (in addition to the 300 already in the country) were sent to support the government. Both sides were guilty of atrocities during this new phase of fighting. Following a fresh ceasefire on 21 February, France withdrew its troops to Central African Republic. On 8 May the government announced a nine-month programme to demobilize 13,000 troops and 6,000 gendarmes. A buffer zone was established between government and RPF forces, to be monitored by a Military Observer Group (MOG) that had been created in 1992. On 30 May the government agreed to assist the return of 650,000 refugees, but the negotiations were broken off on 25 June amid accusations on both sides that the other was preparing a new military offensive.
Back in October 1990, the United Nations had created a UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR), which had a force of 2,500 troops to help maintain the peace following the initial RPF invasion. Its presence up to 1993 did not appear to have prevented any of the violence. In March 1994, after negotiating another truce, the RPF ambushed and killed 250 government troops. In Kigali the government reacted by claiming that 500,000 people had fled from the new violence in the north of the country. By this time the tensions that preceded the explosion of April must have been apparent to almost everybody. An interesting contrast was made between Rwanda and South Africa: ‘If Rwanda was the
genocide that happened, then South Africa was the genocide that didn’t. The contrast was marked by two defining events in the first half of 1994: just as a tidal wave of genocidal violence engulfed Rwanda, South Africa held elections marking the transition to a post-apartheid era. More than any other, these twin developments marked the end of innocence for the African intelligentsia… the civil war profoundly changed all those who took part in it. The Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) went into it as an army of liberation and came out of it as an army of occupation. The Habyarimana regime entered the war pledged to a policy of ethnic reconciliation and came out of it pledged to uphold Hutu power.’4 Journalists who visited RPF-controlled areas in 1992 and 1993 all agreed on one thing: that a desolate calm prevailed in these areas; they used the adjective ‘eerie’ to describe the feeling. A Kampala-based journalist, Catherine Watson, writing in1992, said: ‘In contrast, the area under the RPF is eerily calm. One of the most densely populated regions of Africa in peacetime, it now holds a mere 2,600 civilians grouped by the RPF into two “safe” villages.’5 The RPF admitted that only 1,800 Hutu peasants were left in an area which had had a population of about 800,000 before the war, and according to another Uganda journalist, Charles Onyango-Obbo, ‘The rebels have asked all civilians to leave, because they don’t want the responsibility of caring for them and fear infiltrations. Privately, some officers say they hope that as the number of displaced people swells, pressure will grow on Habyarimana to reach a settlement in the war.’6
The RPF invasion of 1990 inevitably raised the spectre in Kigali of a return of Tutsi power and led the Foreign Minister, Casimir Bizimunga, to accuse the invaders of seeking ‘a reversal of history’, which could only mean ‘forced labour and feudal servitude’ for the Hutus. On the other hand, the Hutus had come to see the Tutsis as a race alien to Rwanda. For those who believed in Hutu Power, the Hutu alone comprised the nation and the Tutsis were not part of it. The extreme Hutus who believed in Hutu Power felt they had to reverse Habyarimana’s attempt to rehabilitate the Tutsi as an ethnic minority in Rwandan society and treat the Tutsis as alien incomers to be rejected. The foremost representative of these views was the radio station Radio et Télévision Libres des Mille Collines, followed by the newspaper Kangura. Hutu Power was reinforced by the belief that the aim of the RPF was not simply rights for all Rwandans but power for the Tutsis. Propaganda, therefore, highlighted the threat of the Tutsis seeking ‘power’ and the government argued that it had to keep Tutsi power or domination over the Hutus at bay. The extreme propaganda of the Hutus suggested again and again that the Tutsis aimed to kill them. The RPF, for its part, resorted to the widespread displacement of Hutu civilians, to pillage and even the conscription of Hutus for forced labour. While the Tutsis used displacement as a weapon to persuade the government to reach a compromise, the Hutus resorted to massacres to achieve their dominance. Thus, when Habyarimana signed a power-sharing protocol at Arusha on 9 January 1993, the extreme Hutus resorted to a massacre of Tutsis at Gisenyi as a clear message to their own government not to share power with the Tutsis.
Juvenal Habyarimana, who had come to power in a bloodless coup in 1973, found by 1990 that he was becoming increasingly unpopular – like too many politicians he had stayed too long – and so, in answer to pressure for reforms, he introduced measures on 21 September designed to lead to a multiparty system. His plans were thrown into confusion by the RPF invasion at the end of the month. However, after the defeat of the RPF and their retreat back to Uganda, Habyarimana went ahead with his reform programme and on 10 June 1991 Rwanda ‘became’ a multiparty state. Habyarimana had hoped to persuade the Tutsis, or some of them, to return home and take part in multiparty elections but instead they launched a second invasion and were clearly intent only on seizing political control on behalf of their own ethnic group. These complex manoeuvres and events acted as the prelude to 6 April 1994 when the plane carrying Presidents Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi was shot down over Kigali and both presidents were killed. They were returning from a meeting in Tanzania with regional presidents at which they had been examining solutions to the rising Hutu-Tutsi violence. The assassination was later attributed to extremist Hutus opposed to any accommodation with the Tutsis. In Kigali the presidential guard went on the rampage and those immediately killed included the prime minister and three Belgian soldiers attached to the United Nations. Within two days the fighting had become general; in the north government forces and the RPF engaged directly with each other.
The killing in Kigali appeared to be indiscriminate and targets included ministers, nuns, priests and Belgian, Bangladeshi and Ghanaian peacekeeping troops. Many of these killings, by the presidential guard, were thought to be revenge killings for the murder of the president. Belgian and French troops prepared to evacuate their nationals and the Red Cross reported an initial 1,000 casualties. Paul Kagame, leading the RPF, which had reached the outskirts of Kigali, said it would restore law and order. French troops took control of the airport and supervised the evacuation of the 3,000 foreigners waiting to leave. Most of the people slaughtered in Kigali during this first week were Tutsis. Eight hundred Belgian paratroopers arrived. By 12 April the RPF army, 20,000 strong, was fighting its way into Kigali where it caused panic in the government. The deaths of Habyarimana and the Prime Minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, removed the two people who had publicly championed ethnic reconciliation; but Hutu extremists did not believe, or want to believe, in ethnic reconciliation. The history of the previous three decades gave them reason to think this way: the massacres of 1972, for example, had seen 200,000 Hutus including many schoolchildren and intellectuals killed while in neighbouring Burundi in 1993 the Tutsi-controlled army had murdered the country’s first Hutu president.
The government army of 30,000 now began to disintegrate; a week after the death of the two presidents an estimated 10,000 people had been killed in Kigali alone. On 13 April RPF Radio Muhabura announced that the northern region of Mutara had been liberated. As the chaos escalated the United Nations force (UNAMIR) began to leave the country, some of its members in panic, using the excuse that the government had not given them control of the airport. Accurate figures for casualties were impossible in such a fluid situation but according to Human Rights Watch of New York about 100,000 people altogether had been killed between 6 and 19 April while it appeared that a campaign of killing had been planned by Hutu extremists many weeks in advance, prior to the death of Habyarimana. Human Rights Watch claimed that ‘army officers trained, armed and organized some 1,700 young men into militia affiliated with the president’s political party’. The Security Council met on 21 April. ‘While the secretary-general requested more than a doubling of the size of the contingent (already in Rwanda), from the original 2,500 to 5,500, the major powers hesitated: led by the United States, the Security Council decided to leave behind a derisory force of only 270 soldiers. The message to the government was clear: implement the Arusha Agreement or else the UN will pull out and the RPF take power.’7 In the prevailing circumstances the government, whatever its intentions, could not implement the Arusha Peace Agreement of 9 August 1993 that led to the establishment of UNAMIR, as the UN Security Council knew full well. It was indulging in total hypocrisy. The failure of the UN to send more troops to Rwanda at this juncture, when it was increasing its presence in Bosnia, raised awkward questions about the racial bias of its policies and drew from Boutros Boutros-Ghali the sarcastic reference to ‘the rich man’s war’. By early May an estimated 200,000 people had been killed in three weeks of slaughter while 500,000 refugees had crossed into Tanzania. On 17 May the Security Council reversed its policy and voted to increase the size of UNAMIR to 5,000 although neither the US nor the EU were prepared to send any troops.
Two names now surfaced: the Interahamwe (those who attack together) emerged as one of the extremist militias drawn from the ranks of the MRNDD; and a second group, the Impuzamugambi (those with a single purpose). They came from
the extremist wing of the MRNDD, the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic (CDR). These groups had been in training prior to 6 April. A private radio station owned by members of the President’s inner circle had begun a campaign against the Tutsi and Hutu opponents of the President and after 6 April its campaign became more virulent. In a sense two parallel wars were taking place: the RPF war against the government to give control of the country to the returning Tutsis; and the Hutu extremist actions against all Tutsis as well as Hutu moderates. By June an estimated 500,000 people had been killed. On 19 July the RPF, which by then controlled Kigali and most of the towns, announced that it had won the civil war and would form a government according to the 1993 Arusha Agreement but excluding the former ruling MRNDD. France of the major powers intervened in June with an initial force of 150 men (expected to rise to 2,000) and used them to relieve beleaguered Tutsi communities and to establish a safe haven for the displaced population in the south-west. By this time one million Hutu refugees were pouring into Zaïre near the town of Goma. Although they claimed to be strictly neutral, the French were regarded as rescuing the Hutu government or enabling it to escape the retribution of the Tutsis. The French withdrew in September by which time the UNAMIR had been increased to 2,500 troops. As the RPF established its control over the country, the UN Security Council established (8 November 1994) the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) to prosecute those responsible for genocide. The Security Council (as we shall see) had denied genocide was taking place when to admit it would have meant sending a force to stop it. By the end of 1994 the RPF government was pushing a policy of reconciliation although through 1995 a quarter of the population remained outside the country as refugees. At the same time militant Hutu guerrillas infiltrated the country to destabilize the new regime. While the prisons and detention centres were full of people suspected of involvement in the genocide, the Interahamwe militants were busy in the cross-border refugee camps, recruiting. RPF relations with UNAMIR were poor because the UN body appeared to be more concerned with possible violations of human rights by the RPF than with bringing those responsible for genocide to justice. Problems continued through 1996 for though the RPF was highly efficient it only represented the Tutsi minority and there was little indication of any Tutsi-Hutu rapprochment. By August 1997 most of the two million refugees had returned home and large numbers of them, especially from the north-western provinces of Ruhengeri and Gisenyi, had taken up arms and joined the Interahamwe, which had been recruiting, training and arming sympathizers in the refugee camps in eastern Zaïre. There were a growing number of incidents in the northwestern provinces during 1997 and, as a visitor said, it was ‘like a volcano’. Violence continued through 1998 and it was clear by then that the RPF had no solution to Hutu-Tutsi confrontation; rather, the RPF government ‘controlled’ a country seething with antagonisms and discontent.