Rwanda outside Rwanda: the world of the refugee camps
The end of the war and the end of the genocide were accompanied by a massive wave of Rwandese refugees fleeing their country toward Zaire, Tanzania, and even conflict-torn Burundi.92 They did not run far, settling with UN and NGO assistance in enormous refugee camps located almost directly on the border with Rwanda. Contrary to other refugee exoduses from countries at war, this was not the flight of individuals wishing to escape danger; rather, just as the genocide had been, it was an organized system of mass mobilization for a political purpose. The refugees settled in their camps in perfect order, under the authority of their former leaders, ready to be used for further aims. As Joël Boutroue wrote from his experience as senior UNHCR staff member in the camps, “Discussions with refugee leaders . . . showed that exile was the continuation of war by other means.”
With about thirty-five camps of various sizes, Zaire was at the core of the problem. The most formidable locations were the five enormous camps of Katale, Kahindo, Mugunga, Lac Vert, and Sake around Goma, the administrative capital of North Kivu province. Together they held no fewer than 850,000 people, including the 30,000 to 40,000 men of the ex-FAR, the army of the genocide, complete with its heavy and light weapons, its officer corps, and its transport echelon. To the south of Lake Kivu, around Bukavu and Uvira, thirty smaller camps held about 650,000 refugees. There were also 270,000 people in nine camps in Burundi, and another 570,000 in eight camps in Tanzania.93 But apart from the large Benaco camp in Tanzania, practically all the politicians and military men had gone to Zaire, where President Mobutu’s sympathy for their fallen regime afforded them greater freedom of movement.
From the beginning these camps were an uneasy compromise between genuine refugee settlements and war machines built for the reconquest of power in Rwanda. The majority of the people were in a state of shock and, as good Rwandese, were waiting for orders. As one refugee told a French journalist,
Very clever people have pushed us into fleeing two months ago. FAR troops were opening the way with a lorry and we had to follow them, forced from behind by other soldiers with guns. They pushed us like cows… . Anyway, we do not know what to think because our leaders are not around just now. We are waiting for a new burgomaster to give us our orders.94
They did not have to wait long. As soon as UNHCR tried to organize the first repatriations it had to stop because both the refugees and the aid workers came under threat from these “leaders” through their Interahamwe henchmen. About 140,000 people managed to return, mostly on their own, during the first two months. But by September 1994 rumors of the violence inside Rwanda had combined with political intimidation inside the camps to turn the limited returnee flow to a trickle. By early 1995 it had stopped altogether.
The first aim of the political leadership was to gain control of the food supply, knowing it to be the key to their constituency’s fidelity. Through a system of” electing popular leaders” who could front for the real, hidden political leadership, the former administrators gained control of humanitarian aid without exposing themselves.95 Thus they could punish their enemies, reward their supporters, and make money through ration overcounting and taxation. Even a writer politically sympathetic to the refugees could not but remark, “There is a form of dictatorship in the camps.”96 First pick for food and health treatment was given to the former elite and to the ex-FAR soldiers.97 The political order was ironclad, and those who disagreed or wanted to return to Rwanda or were too frank with the humanitarian aid workers were subject to intimidation, even murdered.98 This led at first to strong reactions from the humanitarian establishment, which found it extremely difficult to work under such conditions. In November 1994 fifteen NGOs, including CARE, Oxfam, and Médecins Sans Frontières, published a joint communiqué denouncing the situation. But the funding was good and it was always possible to rationalize one’s presence with the idea that this was where the emergency was and that the people who would really suffer in case of agency withdrawal would be the ordinary peasants and not their criminal leaders. In the end, only Médecins Sans Frontières withdrew, first from the Zaire camps (November) and finally even from those in Tanzania (December).
Within their long orderly rows of blindés,99 the refugees tried to rebuild some semblance of a normal life. Too normal perhaps. In the five camps around Goma there were 2,324 bars, 450 restaurants, 589 shops of various kinds, 62 hairdressers, 51 pharmacies, 30 tailors, 25 butchers, five ironsmiths and mechanics, four photographic studios, three cinemas, two hotels (including one two stories high, built entirely from scrap material), and one slaughterhouse, which was regularly supplied with locally purchased or stolen cattle.100 There were camp information bulletins and even newspapers. And, of course, there were the soldiers.
The first armed infiltrations back into Rwanda had started almost from the beginning.101 The former leaders were quite open about their intentions. Former MRND secretary-general Mathieu Ngirumpatse declared that the army was at present being trained and redeployed and was just waiting a while before launching a full-scale invasion. This was empty boasting at the time since the defeat had been severe. But training was indeed taking place,102 and military operations had resumed at a low level. On October 31, 1994, ex-FAR soldiers infiltrated from Zaire had killed thirty-six people near Gisenyi, starting a cycle that would not stop. In a blind continuation of the genocide, the infiltrators would target any Tutsi civilian they could find, but they would also kill Hutu civilians, almost at random, including in an area (the northwest) where they were popular, just to make sure the population was terrorized into helping them. Caught between RPF violence and ex-FAR terror, the northwest was going to be a small hell on earth for the next four years.
Did this militarization of the camps put the former regime in a position to seriously threaten the RPF in Kigali? Yes and no. In the short run, the ex-FAR did not have the military capacity to seriously challenge the recent victors. But the future was much more uncertain, as the ex-FAR had started a process of rearming, practically in full view of the international community. The génocidaires had taken with them all of the Rwandese government’s official financial resources, and they kept making money out of the camps themselves.103 In addition they could call on the private resources of corruption money stashed away by their leadership in better times. They also went to their former arms suppliers, particularly in South Africa, and asked for completion of the partially fulfilled contracts they had signed while in power.104 New suppliers were also found, such as when President Mobutu kindly took along Mrs. Habyarimana and her brother Séraphin Rwabukumba on a state visit to China in October 1994. They visited Chinese arms factories during their trip and were able to acquire five million dollars’ worth of equipment at extremely competitive prices.105 Off the record, a Chinese official later told a British journalist, “China practices a policy of allowing people to solve their own problems.”106
The simplest way was still to buy from private arms merchants who were able to supply a whole array of cheap weapons from former Soviet bloc countries, no questions asked. The main suppliers seem to have been Bulgaria and Albania, through a variety of dealers107 using Nigerian-, Ghanaian-, Russian-, and Ukrainian-registered planes.108 Contrary to many rumors, France does not seem to have belonged to the dubious Rwanda génocidaires military suppliers club. The accusation was reasonable, however, since the French government had staunchly supported the former Rwandese regime and had even very likely violated the UN embargo during the last months of the war.109 But it seems that by the time Operation Turquoise was over, authorities in Paris had decided that all was lost and that the génocidaires were both too compromising and too inefficient to be supported anymore.110
In spite of the danger the refugees represented for its eastern provinces, Zairian complicity in continued politicization and militarization was obvious. I will come back to the question of the refugee impact on the Kivus proper,111 but the Zairian decisions concerning the refuge
es came from Kinshasa, from President Mobutu himself He did not care much for the Kivus, an area that had been generally politically hostile to him since the civil war of the 1960s, and he saw in the refugees’ arrival a multilayered political opportunity. It enabled him to blackmail the international community into reaccepting him into the mainstream diplomacy from which he had been excluded during the past few years;112 it also allowed him to put proxy military pressure on his enemies in Kigali and Kampala; and finally he might use the refugees in local Kivu politics by distributing voter cards to them if he was forced to live up to his promise of a national ballot in 1997.113 To achieve these diverse and complex objectives, Mobutu played one of the cat-and-mouse games he was notorious for: he announced repatriation deadlines and then dropped them; he promised to disarm the ex-FAR and helped them rearm on the sly;114 he offered to help police the camps and did not do it; he promised to move the camps away from the border and forgot his word the next week. The former Rwandese leadership had free run of the country, and Gen. Augustin Bizimungu, former commander in chief of the FAR, often met with President Mobutu in Kinshasa or Gbadolite to coordinate strategies with him. He was actually in the company of the Zairian president when Mobutu went through the motions of a refoulement (forced repatriation) in August 1995. Far from being a threat to the refugees, even if fifteen thousand were actually pushed over the border and a few killed, the whole exercise was designed purely to panic the international community by showing how messy things would be if Zaire actually decided to kick the refugees out. The blackmail was quite successful, and Mobutu became again a major player in the eyes of the UN and the Europeans, and to a lesser degree of the Americans.
For the génocidaire leadership, Mobutu was an essential factor. Zairian protection enabled them not only to rearm and to keep harassing Rwanda militarily from their safe havens in the camps, but it also helped them pretend they were still a major actor to be reckoned with, a not so obvious proposition once the iron discipline of the camps was discounted. The ex-FAR were largely a spent force, still capable of murdering civilians (they did it on a regular basis during their cross-border operations) but not really capable of fighting a well-organized army. Their poor military performance when the moment of truth came in October and November 1996 is proof of that. Among the refugee rank and file there were widely diverging attitudes. Some intellectuals, mostly southern abanyanduga, were conscious of being caught in a dead-end situation with no choice but a potentially ineffective military option and were desperately trying to find help in creating a political alternative.115 They were bitterly disappointed when former commerce minister Francois Nzabahimana created the Rassemblement Démocratique pour le Retour (RDR) at Mugunga camp in early April 1995. Although Nzabahimana himself had not been directly involved in the genocide, he was fully in sympathy with the former leadership’s ideology, and the RDR was just an attempt at regaining a modicum of international respectability by pretending to be “new.”116 It did not work too well, especially because General Bizimungu immediately declared his support for the “new” organization. But UNHCR was so desperate for decent refugee leadership it could talk to that for a while everybody went through the motions of pretending it was in fact new. The new-old leadership knew that the political initiative had slipped out of its hands and desperately wanted the support of the international community to achieve some kind of negotiation. But the positions of the two sides were light years apart. On the same day Joseph Kalinganire, the information minister of the Rwandese Government in Exile, declared, “If the international community is not willing to put pressure on the RPF to negotiate with us we will have to come back by force,”117 while General Kagame was saying, “One cannot say that the one million or so Rwandese outside the country were all killers.”118 His army had recently attacked Birava camp on April 11 and Mugunga on April 26, killing thirty-three, just to show that cross-border raids could work both ways. Both sides were angling for the support of the international community in their contradictory endeavors. But the difference was that although this support was vital for the former regime, which did not have it, the new government, which did, could actually do without, thus retaining a much wider margin of decision.
The international community’s attitudes
The international community considered the Rwandese genocide with a complex mixture of shock and indifference. On the one hand, intellectuals, the humanitarian community, journalists, and politically aware sections of the general public were shocked that the solemn promise made after World War II and embedded in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention of Genocide could be violated in full view of the United Nations and the world’s TV cameras. But on the other hand, Rwanda was a small and strategically unimportant country, the cold war was over, there were no economic interests involved, and for many of the ordinary men in the street Africans were savages from whom one could expect nothing better anyway.
But this was also the time when the rich post–cold war world was trying to convince itself that it was building a “new world order.” The Gulf War of 1991 had not been too convincing, since the protective concern displayed for a small invaded country might not have been so vigorous if that country had not been rich in oil. The Somalia experiment had definitely been more altruistic. It had also been much less successful,119 and its failure was a major cause of the weak international response to the Rwandese genocide, wrongly perceived as “another case of a failed state in Africa.”120
So when the genocide was actually over and when the immensity of the horror became visible, the international community rushed into humanitarian aid with guilty relief, never-too-late-to-do-good, thus greatly helping the perpetrators of the very crimes it had done nothing to stop. The whole thing would have been funny if it had not been tragic. The only mitigating circumstance was that there was nobody else around who could be helped so quickly and effectively and there was a desperate feeling that something needed to be done. The financial cost of maintaining nearly two million refugees in camps was staggering; it was much higher than the cost of helping Rwanda itself, in which there were two and a half times as many people as there were refugees.
Cost of Humanitarian Refugee Aid
Cost of Humanitarian Aid to Rwanda
1994
$705m
$386m
1995
$592m
$362m
1996
$739m
$149m
TOTAL
$2.036b
$897m
Source: UNHCR. The refugee aid figures are multidonors and multiagencies. They should be considered approximate because of the problem of geographical breakdown. Total cost is calculated by computing Great Lakes humanitarian disbursements (on some items given as aggregates) + Zaire disbursements + Tanzania disbursements + one-third of Burundi figures to allow for the separate emergency in Burundi itself. Rwanda figures reflect humanitarian aid, not economic aid, which was much higher ($598.8 million in bilateral aid and $773.2 million in multilateral aid pledged in Geneva in January 1995).
When looking at the data in the table, we must keep in mind that there were around two million refugees, as opposed to over five million people in Rwanda proper. Thus these figures represent about $1.40 per capita per day in the camps against only $0.49 per capita per day in Rwanda itself, typical of the quantitative meltdown and the political vacuum that kept dogging the whole period. The joke in Kigali was that HCR stood for Hauts Criminels Rassasiés (“well-fed high criminals”). This massive financial effort did not even earn the international community any sympathy from the refugees, who felt that UNHCR was on the side of Kigali. A moderate refugee leader interviewed by Johan Pottier said, “Repatriation is not just a question of logistics, of trucks and leaflets. No, it is deeper than that. But HCR does not seem to understand.”121 How could it? The game was always seen, at least from the side of the heavy battalions of donors, as a number of quantitative and technical problems. Some NGOs of course tried to remind
the international community that there were many qualitative and political problems as well, and that they were probably at least as important as, if not more important than the ones that were considered worthy of attention by the donors and the UN bureaucracy. Their efforts proved largely useless.
In many ways, the pattern of approaching the problem was similar to the one used before the genocide, when the international community was pushing for peace during the Arusha negotiations. The international community had been so obsessed with its preferred goal that it totally neglected the various factors that could run counter to it, including the preparation of the genocide. Now repatriation had to be achieved at all cost, the first casualty of that policy being truth, when Robert Gersony was effectively silenced for having uncovered the “wrong” facts.
Then the magic word had been peace; now it was repatriation. Every technical effort was made to achieve this predefined goal without pausing to think about what the various actors actually meant when they apparently agreed to it. But just as in the peace negotiations, it was the context that finally prevailed and completely submerged the technicalities, rendering them irrelevant.122 The attitude toward the 1994 Gersony Report is an edifying case in point.123 The U.S. government got wind of it and decided that showing the RPF as probably guilty of crimes against humanity would be bad for the United States, since it had done nothing about the genocide and would then be seen as partial to the side of the génocidaires. Under-Secretary of State for Global Affairs Tim Wirth was asked to rubbish the report as much as he could. Wirth went to Kigali and New York, reassured the RPF, attacked Gersony’s methodology, hinted at a Hutu conspiracy, and leaked carefully chosen tidbits of information to the press. It worked. And an embarrassed UN press conference did not help.124 Secretary-General Boutros Ghali decided to put the report into the hands of the UN Commission of Experts on Human Rights, which was then directly briefed by Gersony in Geneva in October 1994. To no avail. The commission went to Rwanda, stayed for a few days in quasi-tourist conditions, and gave its expert advice: although there was some evidence of “killings by Tutsi elements of Hutu individuals . . . they were not committed to destroy the Hutu ethnic group as such within the meaning of the 1948 Genocide Convention.”125 This was both substantially true and incredibly cynical: what it basically said was that, short of an attempted second genocide, limited killings were all right. The key elements the international community wanted to skirt were organization and intent because organized RPF killings at the time would have embarrassed everybody and threatened “quick repatriation.” Therefore these elements did not exist, even if a duly commissioned independent expert had found out about them.
Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe Page 8