Because there were many dead bodies and because the RPF did not wish to attract attention.69 disposal areas were set up in a variety of places to incinerate the corpses. Several of the men who worked in two of these centers in Masaka and Gabiro have testified to several people, giving precise and believable details about the corpse disposal process.70
All this begs several questions. First, what about the reactions of the Hutu cabinet ministers while all this was going on? I have discussed the massacres at length with Faustin Twagiramungu and Seth Sendashonga, probably the two main Hutu political actors of the period, and the answers are complex. They believe there was a certain amount of necessary toleration of the massacres, the feeling that they were caught in a horrible but unavoidable logic: the Tutsi had lost three-quarters of a million of their people and the situation could not be settled without some blood on the other side. They were resigned to some blood but started getting worried when there seemed to be no end in sight. Then there was also a feeling of powerlessness: to stop the killing they had to set a new political agenda and it might take some time; in the meantime they had to be realistic. Since they were kept well informed by their own parallel intelligence network this did not prevent them from protesting to Kagame. Sendashonga wrote him over four hundred memos on the killings and insecurity during his thirteen months in the cabinet, but Kagame was careful never to answer in writing.71 At first he kept wavering between partial admission, feigned surprise, and blunt denial, and then later he simply stopped answering. The Hutu ministers were so conscious of the potential catastrophe their eventual resignations could cause that they swallowed it all in the name of national unity. Until the Kibeho slaughter pushed them over the brink.72
Then there is the vexing question of the foreigners: Were they all blind, deluded, or accomplices? This is a complex issue that I discuss in more detail in the section on the international community’s attitudes. But suffice it to say here that it was a bit of all three plus a lot of material problems. There were 154 NGOs in Rwanda in 1995, and the least one can say is that their display of foolishness was amazing. Of course some of them, such as Médecins Sans Frontières and Oxfam, gave quite a good account of themselves. But on the international NGO scene Rwanda was the place to be if you wanted to get funding, just like Ethiopia in 1985 or Somalia in 1992. So everybody rushed to Rwanda, whether or not they had something to contribute. The NGOs were there “for purely humanitarian purposes” and carefully kept away from the local politics, which they did not understand anyway.
As for the UN human rights operation, it was a sad joke.73 Underfunded and staffed with largely incompetent young people, most of whom spoke no Kinyarwanda or Swahili or even French, it did practically nothing. I met in Kibuye a group of “human rights monitors” who seemed to spend most of their time swimming in Lake Kivu and sunbathing, their only French-speaking member being then on leave. The monitors who spoke French and were eager to work were usually prevented from doing so by their director, who seemed to mostly fear rocking the boat in any way. He was not the only one. In January 1995, when trying to visit a dubious mass grave site near Kibungo while on an unofficial UNHCR visit, I was prevented from doing so by the UNHCR country director, who accused me of “wanting to create problems with the government.”74 With such attitudes the RPF did not have to worry too much about being found out.
There was also a major problem of logistics and administration, which partly explains why foreign workers could not at times see what was going on literally under their noses. To quote from a contemporary report about Byumba prefecture,
Apart from the main paved road leading to Kigali, secondary roads are generally in poor condition, thus hampering easy access to the communes situated furthest from the Field Office. Modern communication means are virtually nonexistent. As is the case in most of the country local authorities are mostly “old caseload returnees”75 who have spent the last thirty years outside the country.76
Finally, there was the problem of the RPF itself Were these killings attempts at a “second genocide,” as the former génocidaires and their friends were trying to say? Or were they only the unavoidable revenge killings that one could expect after such a horror? Or was it something else altogether? I personally tend to think that it was something else for a number of reasons. First, there was the callous indifference to the fate of the Tutsi civilians “from inside,” which did not fit well with a simple ethnic reading of the situation. The RPF had known since 1992 that the resolve of Hutu Power ideological extremism was such that maybe not a full-scale genocide but at least numerous massacres were a distinct possibility. Yet, as we have already seen, when the genocide did start, saving Tutsi civilians was not a priority. Worse, one of the most questionable of the RPF ideologues coolly declared in September 1994 that the “interior” Tutsi deserved what happened to them “because they did not want to flee as they were getting rich doing business with the MRND.”77 During the very early days of the massacres, RPF soldiers often did not distinguish Tutsi from Hutu when they killed people, seeming to assume that the remaining Tutsi were “collaborators” of the Interahamwe. Which brings us back to the brutal military culture of the RPF. The mainly Tutsi RPF had decided to “liberate” Rwanda and to create a “new democratic Rwanda” free from ethnic domination. Around 1992–1993 this goal seemed genuine enough to bring a limited number of liberal Hutu to its side. But what actually happened later bore no resemblance to these theories. The theories were thrown to the winds and what remained was used only for window dressing, barely hiding brute force and cold-blooded political calculations.
Then there is the style of the killings. Unlike the killings carried out during the genocide, these new massacres were decentralized, secret, limited, and fluctuating. If we bring these characteristics together with the callousness displayed toward the internal Tutsi population we have something that resembles neither the genocide nor uncontrolled revenge killings, but rather a policy of political control through terror. The RPF seemed to trust nobody in Rwanda, not even the Tutsi survivors who were felt to be “contaminated.” Thus the killings do not appear to be separate from other aspects of RPF policies, such as building a national unity front (later discarded), keeping the judicial process as a Damocles’ sword above all Hutu heads, or carefully designing a propaganda line to exploit the outside world’s guilt. These policies are coherent, and their focal point is undivided political control.
During the first period of violence (April to September 1994), the killings were rather indiscriminate; some genuine revenge killings took place together with the programmed terror killings. After that there was a period of relative calm which seemed a response to fears of negative Western reactions.78 When those were dispelled and the killings resumed in January 1995,79 there were fewer and they were more focused. The victims mostly belonged to four categories: (1) friends and family of the génocidaires, (2) educated people, (3) old PARMEHUTU80 members, and (4) ibipinga, that is, opponents, people who did not think and behave “right.” What these people had in common was their constituting an actual or potential elite, capable of giving shape to a politically amorphous peasant mass. Whether the victims had actually intended to act in a political way was completely beside the point. The point was that they had some capacity to do so. The RPF vision of the Hutu masses seems to have been that of a permanent danger to be kept at bay by random mass killings to instill fear and to be defanged by neutralizing real or potential leaders. Death was the preferred method during the first period, but later marginalization became sufficient once the emergency period was over. Terrorizing a group into submission does not require annihilating it. Therefore there was not even an attempt at a second genocide. The point was simply to get a compliant Hutu mass that would do agricultural work and keep minding its simple business without any ideologues, génocidaires or not, putting ideas into their heads. Some members of the Hutu elite came to realize the situation, which was clearly articulated by Gen. Léonidas Rusatira, a democrat
ic former Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR) officer who had opposed the genocide and later joined the RPA. After his flight into exile in November 1995 he wrote in an open letter:
I joined the RPA on 29 July 1994 in the hope of enabling all my fellow countrymen to live together . . . but instead I went on a deadly obstacle course for the next sixteen months81 and this finally convinced me that the present regime in Kigali deserves no confidence and does not want a genuine reconciliation between Tutsi and Hutu… . It only wants to consolidate its power without any form of sharing and hopes to keep it forever. The plan of the elite in Kigali is to decapitate through any available means the Hutu elite, and to let live a voiceless mass of peasants only good enough to toil the earth for their masters.82
Then there is another key question: Were these killings systematically organized? Given the size of Rwanda, the discipline of the RPA, and the RPF’s tight political control, it is almost impossible that they were not. Work parties to bury bodies and the use of crematoria in several areas hardly suggest improvisation. The evidence points to an original tactical pattern. Apart from the early kwitaba inama killings, which were large and systematic, the later killings were small and decentralized. A “bad” family would be blown up with grenades or burned alive in their house, a civil servant would be ambushed on the highway and shot, a man would be kidnapped and his body would later be found in a banana grove. The killings were routinely attributed to Interahamwe cross-border raids, and there were indeed a lot of such attacks. It was often quite difficult to tell if people had been killed by Interahamwe or by the RPA, and popular wisdom would usually look at the personality of the victims to try to decide from which side the blow came. Contrary to the former regime, the RPF never boasted about its violence, even indirectly, and it denied any responsibility unless caught red-handed. And then excuses were made, often quite convincingly.83 After the initial period of kwitaba inama the further killings felt more tolerated than instigated, although they were not random. It was almost like an adaptation of free market economics to political assassination. The top RPF leadership only had to tacitly condone a variety of killings (“dangerous people,” professionals, independent-minded civil servants, Hutu businessmen) for those to happen automatically in the tight economic situation, with the returnees’ need for jobs in the monetarized sector. With their culture of conflict the RPF officers were men for whom violence was a profession and who took it to be an integral part of their daily lives, a “solution” to many problems.
The key question was whether there was any resolve to punish their crimes. Obviously there was none. Or rather, there was the usual window dressing; some RPA privates and NCOs were arrested, tried, and even condemned but exclusively for what could be proved beyond any doubt to be common crimes: murdering a man to steal his motorbike, shooting people in a bar while drunk, and so on. The visible perpetrators were always at the bottom of the social or military scale, and so were their victims. When important people such as the prefect Pierre-Claver Rwangabo,84 the businessman Gervais Birekeraho,85 or the banker Aloys Karasankwavu86 died, nobody was ever arrested. Similarly, no important perpetrators were ever brought to justice, or when they were, only symbolic sentences were passed.
The final question concerning the killings is speculative: Were they useful, even from the point of view of cold-blooded realpolitik and Tutsi security? In other words, was the choice of control through calculated violence the only workable option for the political arm of the Tutsi minority after the genocide? It is very doubtful. Because even if the vast majority of the Hutu were not supportive of the new regime they were not automatically opposed to it. There was a sullen semi-acceptance of change depending on a variety of factors: real justice, the economic situation, the refugee problem, army behavior, national reconciliation, and the fate of the government of national unity. If those elements had progressively evolved in the right direction, the former génocidaire regime would slowly but surely have lost its appeal, even if fantasies about Hutu Power were probably bound to linger in the collective mind for some years.
Then why kill? The answer seems once more to come from the peculiar culture developed by the RPF since its Ugandan days. The RPF Tutsi were soldiers, good soldiers but only soldiers. And General Kagame was probably the epitome of the RPF soldier.87 As soldiers they knew only the gun, and the gun had worked well for them in the past. Whatever they had set out to do by force of arms—fighting Idi Amin, overthrowing Obote, overthrowing the Hutu Republic in Rwanda—they had eventually achieved. Their self-confidence was strong, their political vision embryonic, and they had a limited but efficient bag of tricks to deal with the international community. As General Kagame boasted to a British journalist, “We used communication and information warfare better than anyone. We have found a new way of doing things.”88 This might have been slightly exaggerated, but it was not altogether wrong. The UN had not been able to stop a genocide; how would it dare interfere with “the victims” who were now “restoring order”? From that point of view the difference of tone between speeches given in Kinyarwanda in the hills and speeches made in English within earshot of foreigners in Kigali is revealing. The RPF calculated that guilt, ineptitude, and the hope that things would work out would cause the West to literally let them get away with murder. The calculation was correct. Thus “national reconciliation” came to take on a very peculiar coded meaning. It meant in fact the passive acceptance of undivided Tutsi power over an obedient Hutu mass. Above that mass the Tutsi were in theory supposed to all be equal, but, to borrow from Orwell’s formula in Animal Farm, the RPF Tutsi were more equal than the others. A number of compliant but hopeful Hutu kept acting as intermediaries, greasing the wheels of the system and providing the foreigners with the edifying picture of national reconciliation in progress. But all those who believed that their collaboration with the regime had provided them with sufficient credentials to act in a politically autonomous way eventually fell foul of the RPF power structure, which could not tolerate any independent political activity.89
Belonging to a culture in which obedience to authority is a long national tradition, the Hutu peasant masses complied.90 But their compliance was superficial: minds and souls were not won and the future remained fraught with dangers.
And of course, there was no way for the moderate Tutsi to dissociate themselves from this strategy. With the smell of death still in the air, the decomposed bodies carefully husbanded by the new regime in nerve-straining ceremonies,91 the pain of having lost whole families, the fear that it could happen again, the knowledge that among the Hutu many were totally unrepentant and hoped for a new occasion to kill again, how could even the most liberal-minded Tutsi criticize “his” regime?
Here we may pause and generalize a bit because understanding this process brings us to the very center of the whirlpool that was later to suck in a massive chunk of the African continent and to set in motion a radical new questioning of the whole postcolonial order. If we stand back, we see a group of victorious military men who forcibly brought an apparent “solution” to a monstrous crisis (the genocide) in the face of Western incompetence and vacillation. Subsequent Western guilt turned their might into right regardless of what they were actually doing. So when another massive problem followed (the refugee camps in Zaire), for them the “obvious” way to solve it was once more through the resolute use of force. Again the Western world reacted with stunned incompetence. And it “worked.” By then the conclusion for those who were later nicknamed “Soldiers without Borders” was unavoidable: they could “solve” more and more of their problems in the same manner and the international community would only stand by. So they removed President Mobutu, whose absolute decay only required a slight push; tried to gain control of Zaire/Congo; then tried to overthrow their own Mobutu replacement when he did not prove pliable enough, all the while hoping to solve their own overpopulation and poverty by further conquests. But what the rough Rwandese men of war did not realize was that Zaire/Congo was at
the heart of a soft continent. It was the epitome of a world rendered fragile by thirty years of postcolonial neglect and exploitation. And the West, which was the implicit guarantor of that postcolonial order, rotten as it may have been, was caught napping at every turn. From Burundi to Sudan and from Angola to Brazzaville, many different forms of conflict pathologies had developed around the rim of the Congo basin, ready to blend in. It would not have mattered if Rwanda had been isolated in a neutral corner of Africa. But the space into which these increasingly brutal military “solutions” were playing themselves out was (and remains) so vitally connected to the rest of the continent that, as in Berlin in 1885, the whole of Africa’s future was now at stake. But by then, contrary to nineteenth-century imperialist Europe, the post–cold war Western world was only marginally interested. In spite of the usual diplomatic platitudes, Africa was now increasingly on its own, whether moving toward further decay or toward yet unforeseen recomposition and reorganization.
Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe Page 7