Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe

by Gerard Prunier

  There is no reason for people to be afraid… . There are more than a million victims, so there must be culprits: where are they? International opinion should be understanding of us. It is hard for justice to get started again… . Trials have to be well-prepared… . It is also certain that the arrest of high-ranking genocide suspects who live abroad, especially in Europe, would help appease tensions here… . How can we forget and forgive? If we did, everything would blow up sooner or later. You don’t bury the feelings of people whose relatives lie in mass graves… . There are many criminals in those camps and our patience is nearing its end. We have waited a long time but there is no end in sight. Innocents must go home and the guilty be arrested. Nobody seems to want to put all that in order and so we are going to have to do it on our own.31

  Everything is here. First, the denial of the problem (“There is no reason . . . to be afraid”), coupled with an explanation of why survivors are furious. Then, a plea for the understanding of the West about the lack of justice (“Trials have to be well-prepared”); anger at the sloth and indifference of the West about génocidaires who are still free and about the Western-supported open sores of the refugee camps; pressure; tensions. And finally, the grim resolve that, once again, as in 1990 and 1994, “We are going to have to do it on our own.”

  Justice and the killings

  Many foreigners have tended to see the need for justice in the Rwandese genocide as mostly the problem of an international tribunal dealing with high-powered criminals. This is partly true; an international tribunal was indeed created in November 1994, the small town of Arusha in Tanzania being chosen as its seat in February 1995.32 But because this tribunal belongs more to the domain of the international community’s paradoxical policies toward postgenocide Rwanda than to the domain of justice, I will deal with it in its proper place.

  The true problem of justice, once the international community had flunked the test of speed and efficiency that could have put it on the reality track, had to do with what went on inside Rwanda.33 And that was more than what the international community cared to know. From the beginning it was obvious that the situation was going to be hard to control. Prime Minister Twagiramungu had created an initial stir by saying that there should be at least thirty thousand people put on trial.34 A few months later the figure, which initially had looked enormous, sounded understated. Through the gutunga agatoki system thousands were arrested: a mixture of genuine killers, hapless hangers-on, victims of property quarrels, cuckolded husbands, and common criminals. The RPF abakada had the run of the hills and they did as they pleased.35 By early 1995, when the momentum really got going, 100 to 150 people were arrested every day, and the numbers kept growing: 44,000 in June 1995, 55,000 in November, 70,000 in February 1996, 80,000 in August, without any due process and without any prospect of achieving it. The conditions of detention became insane, with densities reaching 5.7 prisoners per square meter in the jail at Gitarama. In March 1995 twenty-two prisoners choked to death in an overcrowded room of the Muhima gendarmerie brigade,36 and the same number were later beaten to death by their drunken jailers in a makeshift prison near Kibuye.37 In Gitarama, where 6,750 prisoners crowded a jail with a capacity for 600, Médecins Sans Frontières witnessed a thousand deaths between October 1994 and June 1995.38 It was common for prisoners to develop ulcers or even gangrene of the feet from days of not finding enough room to sit down.39 Of 183 places of detention listed by the Red Cross.40 only sixteen were actual jails. The rest could be anything, including holes dug into the ground, covered with corrugated iron sheets weighted down by cement blocks. There were only thirty-six judges left, together with fourteen prosecutors, of whom only three had had any sort of legal training.41 In February 1995 in the central jail of Kigali, only 1,498 out of 6,795 detainees had had a chance of seeing a magistrate at any point since their arrest.42 Most prisoners’ files were empty or nonexistent. But trying to free even innocent detainees was a perilous exercise. In October 1994, when Judge Gratien Ruhorahoza attempted to free forty people who had no files, he was kidnapped by the military and later murdered. Twenty-six of the 270 magistrates left after the genocide (out of about 800) were arrested as génocidaires when they tried freeing detainees they considered innocent. The Liberation Commission created by the Justice Ministry in October 1994 reviewed about one hundred cases between its creation and April 1995, freeing only fifty-eight prisoners. In any case, former prisoners were in danger because in the popular mind arrest was often equated with guilt; several prisoners were murdered after their liberation.

  When considering this justice disaster, the most ironic aspect of the situation was that the main perpetrators of the genocide remained free.43 Most of them were just over the border in Zaire and in lesser numbers in Tanzania. Many of the key political actors of the former government were living in Nairobi, where President Daniel arap Moi had given them tacit protection because of his strong dislike for Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, a close ally of the new regime in Kigali.44 The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) had drawn up a list of about four hundred genocide suspects in April 1995 but had not managed to enforce its search warrants. This apparent toleration of the intolerable acted as a permanent irritant both on ethnic relations inside Rwanda and on the relations of the new regime with the international community. It also helped reinforce two different feelings the RPF had about the outside world: “We are alone and we have to rely purely on ourselves,” and “These foreigners are so weak and incoherent that they are unlikely to react no matter what we do.” It is unfortunate that both feelings were not far from the truth.

  But it did not seem that the regime was really willing to improve the justice situation. Given the incredible pileup of untried cases and the pitiful state of the Rwandese justice system, the obvious answer would have been to bring in outside legal resources, a suggestion that was made by several human rights organizations and by the ICTR.45 But in July 1995 the Rwandese government adamantly refused even a temporary loan of foreign judges, deeming it to be “unconstitutional and a breach of the sovereignty of the Rwandese people.”46 The government never changed its position, even when the number of detainees passed the 100,000 mark in 1997. The feeling of many Hutu collaborators of the new regime was that the RPF did not want the situation to be resolved. As long as gutunga agatoki remained the rule, as long as jail was an ever present threat hanging over the whole Hutu community, guilt and fear combined to keep everybody in line, and the growing RPF monopoly on power was unlikely to be challenged by people who could at any time be accused of being génocidaires. Moreover, any serious attempt at a global settlement of the justice situation would have had to examine more closely the growing body of allegations made against the RPF itself. And this was something that was definitely not wanted by the new regime.

  The problem of the RPF killings is probably one of the most controversial in the vastly conflicting body of writing and studies on the Rwandese genocide. Among the supporters of the RPF regime it is an infamous accusation spread by former génocidaires intent on sullying the good name of an otherwise respectable government. Indeed, one cannot but wince when one hears some of the most outrageous statements made by members of the former regime.47 But although the notorious theory of a “double genocide” does not stand up to serious inquiry, a simple display of moral indignation is not quite sufficient to dismiss the notion of the RPF committing horrendous crimes since it started moving toward absolute power with the onset of the genocide.48

  To understand the violence of the RPF, it is necessary to go back a bit to its Ugandan origins. The hard core of the RPF was made up of men who were young boys in Uganda in the early 1980s. They grew up as refugees in the violence of the Ugandan civil wars.49 Their first experience of blood came with the Idi Amin massacres of the 1978–1979 war with Tanzania, then with the 1979–1980 countermassacres committed by the so-called wakombozi. Later they suffered from the anti-Rwandese pogroms of 1982 and joined Museveni’s guerrilla forces.5
0 There they not only fought, but they also witnessed the government army massacring civilians in the Luweero region. Once they won the war they were quickly pressed again into combat, this time in the north, against the troops of the “prophetess” Alice Lakwena. Now the tables were turned; this time they were the “forces of law and order” and it was the local population who were the insurgents. They in turn committed massacres, to such an extent that President Museveni had to send special military judges to the north to curb his own army. One of these judges was Paul Kagame, and some of the men he had to judge were later his subordinates in the RPF. The whole life history of these men even before they set foot on Rwandese soil had been full of the sound and the fury of civil war, with its attendant atrocities and civilian massacres, committed against them, around them, or by them. For them violence was not exceptional; it was a normal state of affairs.

  And the violence did not let up once they started fighting in Rwanda, as their beloved charismatic leader, Fred Rwigyema, was murdered by his own comrades within days of the attack.51 Since I got this crucial event wrong in 1995, some elaboration is called for.52 The RPF had attacked Rwanda from Ugandan territory on October 1, 1990, under the leadership of Fred Rwigyema, the Rwandese Tutsi former chief of staff of the Ugandan army and long-time personal friend of Yoweri Museveni. Rwigyema had known Museveni since their student days together and their involvement in the revolutionary movement in Mozambique in the 1970s. On the third day of the offensive, Rwigyema held a staff conference with three of his close associates, Commanders Peter Banyingana, Chris Bunyenyezi, and Stephen Nduguta. A strong argument soon developed between Rwigyema and two of his aides, Nduguta remaining a silent bystander. The reasons for the argument were multiple. Rwigyema was a highly politicized and competent guerrilla strategist. He was keenly aware of the deadly potential of the Hutu-Tutsi identity split and wanted to proceed slowly, politicize the Hutu peasantry, wait for the government to make mistakes, and gradually get the rural masses on his side. Not so for Banyingana and Bunyenyezi, who wanted power and wanted it quickly, without giving much thought to the problems they would encounter later. The argument became heated, and Banyingana drew out his pistol and shot Rwigyema in the head. In the resulting confusion Nduguta slipped away, went back to Uganda, and told President Museveni what had happened. Museveni was shocked and sent his trusted brother Salim Saleh to Rwanda, where he found Rwigyema’s body in a swamp, buried it properly, arrested the two culprits, and brought them back to Uganda for interrogation and eventual execution.

  But there is more to that story. Paul Kagame had had a close relationship with both Peter Banyingana and Chris Bunyenyezi since he had spared their lives in 1988 when he was a roving army judge in northern Uganda and they had been detained for committing atrocities against the civilian population. Besides, he was a cool and collected type of person, in direct contrast to the more volatile personalities of the other two. Kagame belongs to the Bega clan, which is famous in Rwanda for having usurped power through the Rucunshu coup d’état; his own great-grandfather, Kabare, killed young King Rutarindwa in December 1896.53 Fred Rwigyema, on the contrary, was a Muhindiro, a member of the purest royal lineage of the Nyiginya dynasty. Although remote in time, these events are still vividly present in the minds of most Rwandese today, and many friends of Rwigyema now living in exile believe that the hapless Banyingana and Bunyenyezi were manipulated in order to murder their leader. There is of course no concrete proof for this Shakespearean betrayal of a much-loved man by his comrades-in-arms, only some circumstantial evidence that would not stand up in a court of law. Yet many are the former members of the RPF who remain persuaded that Rwigyema’s murder was a carefully contrived plot to eliminate a brilliant man whose combination of royal legitimacy and revolutionary charisma made him a probable future national leader.54

  So violence dogged the steps of the former National Resistance Army guerrillas as they moved into Rwanda. Of course, during the four years of the war the movement recruited large numbers of young fighters who came from different backgrounds. But the top level of the officer corps remained “Ugandan.” And there is quite strong evidence that the “Ugandan” officers did not hesitate to kill a number of young francophone Tutsi recruits, especially those coming from the refugee community in Burundi, because they felt that, as the recruits were better educated, they could threaten the officers’ future control of the movement.55 Moving from that background into the genocide was a quantum leap into witnessing even more massive horrors and hardening the RPF’s culture into the use of casual instrumental violence. Direct population control by such a force after July 1994 was unlikely to resemble anything like the workings of a civilian administration.

  The first rumors of RPF violence started during the genocide itself, when NGO and UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) workers in Tanzania were told by fleeing refugees about massacres committed by advancing RPF forces.56 These and other cases were later corroborated by research for the massive report on the genocide written by Human Rights Watch Africa.57 Shocking as these stories may have been, they had to be seen in the context of the war and of the genocide. But what is in a way more interesting was the apparent global disdain of the RPF for the safety of the Tutsi victims. RPF soldiers of course helped Tutsi civilians threatened by Interahamwe when they would chance upon them, but they never planned their military operations so as to try saving as many as possible. And when there was talk of a foreign intervention force to stop the genocide, although it was a very dim possibility, the RPF unambiguously opposed it, to the dismay of some longtime human rights activists who had fought for the lives of the Tutsi civilians since 1990.58 I will return to this point at the end of this section, where I discuss the patterns and meaning of the RPF killings.

  What finally brought these massacres to light was the Gersony Report episode. Robert Gersony, an experienced American freelance consultant who had done extensive work in combat zones in Africa, particularly in Mozambique and Somalia, was hired by UNHCR to do a refugee survey in the hope of facilitating refugee return.59 He and his assistants started their work with broad sympathy for the RPF, as was common among those who had been confronted by the horror of the genocide.60 Between early August and late September 1994 Gersony conducted about two hundred interviews inside Rwanda at ninety-one different sites located in 41 of the country’s 145 communes, mostly in the Kibungo, Gisenyi, and Butare areas. He also did interviews in nine refugee camps. He ended up having to face a terrible reality: the RPF was carrying out a massive campaign of killings, which could not be considered simply as uncontrolled revenge killings even if some of the murders belonged to that category.61 His informants all told the same story: the first RPF soldiers they saw were nice and cheerful and there was no problem with them. But a day or two later other soldiers came. These, obviously selected killer teams, assembled the people for a “peace and reconciliation meeting,” which they attended without fear and during which they were indiscriminately slaughtered. Gersony’s conclusion was that between early April and mid-September 1994 the RPF had killed between 25,000 and 45,000 people, including Tutsi.62 The UNHCR, which had commissioned the study for quite a different purpose, was appalled. The news went all the way up to UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali, who ordered Kofi Annan, then assistant secretary-general, and Kamel Morjane, UNHCR director for Africa, to rush to Kigali. Annan briefed President Bizimungu, Vice President Kagame, Prime Minister Twagiramungu, and Interior Minister Sendashonga and gave each of them a copy of the report. He told them that he personally believed in its general validity but hoped that the killings were not deliberate. He also promised that the UN would embargo the document to give the new government a chance to stabilize.63 The report was indeed embargoed: its very existence was denied and Gersony was instructed never to talk about it publicly. Although he was called to Kigali and asked to personally brief the Rwandese cabinet, he has kept his word to this day, giving his suppressed report an almost mythical dimension. The United Nat
ions Assistance Mission to Rwanda (UNAMIR) tried some desultory investigations but was either prevented from going when mass graves were revealed (September 1994 in Butare) or operated in such a clumsy way that it did not manage to “discover” what everybody else knew about. My own uneasiness about the Gersony Report spurred me into some direct research when I went back to Rwanda for the first time after the genocide in January 1995. It was unfortunately not very difficult to meet massacre witnesses, even if one had to go through a wall of lies. Apart from the understandable RPF denials, there were also quite a few hopeful lies by Hutu who desperately wanted the government of national unity to work in spite of everything.64 But testimonies were plenty, both in Rwanda and abroad, and many were heart-rending because they involved getting hit by both sides. For example, a mixed-parentage doctor who had lost nine Tutsi members of his family to the machetes of the Interahamwe then lost eighteen members of his Hutu family when they were killed by the RPF on April 15, 1994, in the Kanazi sector of Sake commune (Kibungo prefecture).65 Then there were the frequent stories of people who had been called to a meeting by the RPF and who, when they expected in typically Rwandese fashion to be told what the new power wanted them to do, would be slaughtered indiscriminately. The practice had started very early, with the Kigina massacre (Rusumo commune, Kibungo prefecture) on May 15, 1994, and its pattern was followed quite regularly, including probably the biggest massacre of the early period at the Arboretum in Butare.66 This led the population to joke with typical gallows humor that kwitaba inama (“answer the call to a meeting”) was in fact kwitaba imana (“answer the call of God”). Liberal Hutu who had fought the dictatorship and seen their families engulfed in the genocide were not spared. Many who managed to go to Byumba in the hope of getting protection from the RPF were killed within days of their arrival.67 But not all were killed, and the reasons for surviving could be puzzling. I met a former PSD militant from Cyangugu who had lost her family in the genocide, who then managed to cross the border into Zaire, went up to Goma, and from there reentered Rwanda to join the RPF forces in Byumba. She started to work with the new authorities and discounted as slander the rumors of killings she had heard. But one day she had a puncture late at night while driving an RPF military vehicle and she asked an old Hutu peasant to help her change the tire. Taking her for an RPF fighter (she was dressed in a uniform), he asked her why they killed people. She asked him what he meant, so he took her to a banana plantation and showed her many dead bodies roughly covered with banana leaves, saying that this was the work of her friends. Shaken by the experience, she started to investigate the rumors she had heard and discovered many burial sites around Byumba. After the fall of Kigali she was transferred to the capital and from there went abroad to a Rwandese diplomatic mission and eventually into political exile. Asked why she thought she had been spared in Byumba, she said that it was because she knew Prime Minister Twagiramungu well (he hails from Cyangugu, like her) and that the RPF did not want to create a scandal by killing somebody close to a man it still needed at the time.68