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

by Gerard Prunier

  Concerning the refugees, there were three major parameters that were repeatedly neglected. The first and most obvious one was the militarization of the camps. The ex-FAR were there, in full view of everybody, doing their jogging and their calisthenics every morning, organizing, training, and marching. Their close association with the génocidaire leadership, whether original or slightly facelifted as the RDR, was public knowledge. Reports kept coming in about their efforts at rearmament. And practically nothing was done. In February 1995, after the camps had existed for six months, the UN finally succeeded in putting together an armed force to ensure a minimum of security. This force, called the Zaire Camp Security Contingent, was made up of soldiers from the Division Spéciale Présidentielle (DSP), the elite corps of the Zairian army. But in financially collapsed Zaire even the DSP was not paid regularly. The UN took fifteen hundred men, gave them new uniforms, and paid them. Nicknamed “Mrs. Ogata’s troops”126 (which they were not, unfortunately), after UN High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata, they behaved surprisingly well and brought back a measure of law and order to the camps. But their mandate did not include restraining ex-FAR activities. The ex-FAR general command was located on the Kivu lakeshore, in the bananeraie (banana grove) mini camp near Mugunga, and it would have been easy to surround it and to arrest the key military actors; without their officers, the men would have been easier to control. The idea was contemplated several times but never actually tried.127 Nothing serious was done to stop ex-FAR arms purchases either. In view of this, it was hard to disagree with General Kagame when he accused the UN and the NGOs of “help [ing] an army in exile.”128 Ironically this help to an army in exile was carried out alongside a deliberate refusal to see what the new army in power was doing.

  The second parameter was security in Rwanda itself, to quell the rumors and foster a feeling of security among the refugees.129 The now thoroughly discredited UNAMIR II force was still inside the country, in the vague hope that it would help achieve the peace it had so tragically failed to keep a few months before. Great importance was put on the level of the UNAMIR II military presence: 5,500 troops, 320 military observers, and 120 civilian police had been authorized by the Security Council, but in June 1995 the Rwandese government tried to get these reduced to 1,800 men and to have their presence shortened. The secretary-general counterattacked and decided that 1,800 men “were not enough to carry out the mandate outlined by the Special Representative.” After some haggling the UNAMIR II mandate was extended to December 8, 1995, and troop numbers were brought up to 2,330. This was felt to be an important diplomatic victory. The only problem was that UNAMIR II troops were, for all practical purposes, deaf, blind, and lame. Whether there were 1,800 or 2,330 of them was irrelevant. They were despised by everybody in Rwanda as the embodiment of arrogant powerlessness. Children laughed at the soldiers going into shops in full battle gear to obey UN regulations though they had not fired a single shot during the genocide. Interior Minister Sendashonga once remarked to me as a light UNAMIR tank was clanking by, “That is the only trace they will leave behind, their caterpillar tracks on the tarmac of our streets.” In theory UNAMIR II could have stopped or at least detected some of the worst human rights abuses then being committed by the RPF-led government. But just as had been the case for UNAMIR I before the genocide, it was not supposed to engage in intelligence gathering. It clumsily tried once or twice to find out about some of the most obvious massacres, but because it was always giving advance notice of its movements and “cooperated” with the RPA, it never found anything. When it finally left ingloriously in March 1996, Special Envoy Shaharyar Khan, who had had time to ponder the riddle of the UN presence, could only conclude, “What Rwanda needs is a mini Marshall Plan and the UN is in no position to provide one.”130

  The third parameter was diplomatic resolve in dealing with the governments of Zaire and Rwanda.131 Instead of appearing as a locus of international leadership, the UN looked like a cork bobbing up and down in a furious sea, barely able to react and totally unable to take the initiative. To be fair, one should keep in mind that the UN is weak when its strong members either do not support it or, worse, are in conflict over a given issue. This was the case over Rwanda: “Whenever France was ready to apply pressure on Rwanda . . . this was blocked by the U.S. Similarly whenever the U.S. wished to put pressure on Zaire this was blocked by France. Hence one could not expect much of the Security Council.”132 Why so? France’s position was relatively understandable. It had been defeated, and since it could not openly support its horrible former friends it vented its frustrations through obstructionist tactics, all the while hoping to “put Mobutu back in the saddle,” as a high-ranking French civil servant told me in early 1996. The U.S. position was more complicated. Although nobody in the international community had done anything to stop the genocide, the United States was probably the only country seriously embarrassed about that. This resulted from a variety of complex factors peculiar to U.S. politics, to the American psyche, and to America’s view of its place in the world. First there was the presence of a large and vocal Jewish lobby that felt terrible about the genocide and had an instinctive sympathy for the new Rwandese government; then there was a feeling of cultural shame that had to do with being “the land of the free, the home of the brave,” a role that did not stand out prominently during the terrible spring of 1994; and finally there was a notion that as the major world power the United States could not but have a great responsibility in such a momentous event. All this blended with the “good guys versus bad guys” preferred mode of American thinking; Department of Defense fascination for the RPA, which it was just then beginning to discover;133 and simplified geopolitical “game plans” for the future of eastern and central Africa. The end result was growing and almost uncritical support for the RPF regime. With the United States pulling on one side and France pulling on the other, the UN was rudderless. In addition, it was divided according to “UNHCR geopolitics”: the Goma UNHCR office pushed for early return because it was afraid of the destructive local impact of the camps and feared the highly politicized leadership; the Kigali office wanted staggered gradual returns because it was influenced by the security views of the Rwandese government; the Bukavu office wanted an early return but was less anxious than Goma because it was not in close contact with the noxious génocidaire circles; and the Special Unit for Rwanda and Burundi in Geneva preached caution because it had limited trust in the RPF promises. The result was inaction.

  Apart from the refugee situation, the second major area of concern where the international community’s attitude mattered was the question of justice. The ICTR had been created in November 1994 and installed in Arusha in February the following year. In April it had produced its own list of four hundred genocide suspects, supposed to be more neutral than the various lists produced in Rwanda itself. A year later it was still floundering about, complaining about “lack of means,”134 not having even produced any indictment, much less judgments.

  As I have argued elsewhere,135 “the magnitude of the crime required radical measures if justice had to have a symbolic impact. The problem was one of urgency. Hundreds of thousands had died, the culprits were known, and a fast-track process had to be used if we wanted to defeat the notorious “culture of impunity” so much talked about in international circles and about which so little had been done. If the whole exercise was to make sense for the ordinary Rwandese population, some people had to hang, and quickly. This was the only way to convince the Tutsi that the world cared about them in spite of its passivity during the genocide. It was also the only way to show the Hutu population that for once it was not the ordinary fellows who were going to pay the price, but the “big men.” Perhaps more important even for the chance of a better future it was the only way to stop the RPF from using the excuse of “uncontrolled revenge” to push forward its agenda of organization and ethnic dictatorship.

  Of course, if we keep in mind the utter spinelessness of the international
community before, during, and after the genocide, the ICTR was probably all that it could come up with; expecting an African Nuremberg was probably too much to ask. But even when the ICTR got on the road, the punishments it meted out to the génocidaires failed to impress the Rwandese population. For them letting killers live on, and live in much better physical comfort than anything the ordinary person in Rwanda had, was a form, if not of pardon, at least of toleration. And they knew that pardoning obviously guilty “high criminals” could only perpetuate the impunity-revenge-counterrevenge cycle so that hundreds of thousands more would die from the unchecked direct and indirect consequences of their actions. We chose to go by the book of our laws because we wanted to please ourselves more than we wanted to heal the wounds of Rwanda. Two years after the genocide, when talking to a young Tutsi student in Europe, I could not but remonstrate angrily (and stupidly) with him for the RPF crimes in Rwanda. “Sir, we have had no justice. So now we kill. What can we do?” was his almost desperate answer. Just as the Hutu had used the blunders of Belgian colonial policies to legitimize ethnic dictatorship, so now the Tutsi were free to use the cowardice of the international community to legitimize their violence. In a way the génocidaires had won their political argument, and we had helped them win through our nice legalistic view of the situation. Prim and proper international law had left unattended a gaping moral loophole, and the ethnic ideology of the génocidaires had slipped through. Because the real Hutu killers had not been sacrificially executed, all Hutu were now regarded as potential killers. And all Tutsi had become licensed avengers. Many Tutsi and many Hutu did not want to be either. But we had provided them with procedural squabbles instead of the biblical justice that would have been commensurate with the magnitude of the crime. And they were now, almost all of them, inmates or wardens, living in the stifling prison built by the defeated but triumphant racist ideology.

  2

  FROM KIBEHO TO THE ATTACK ON ZAIRE (APRIL 1995–OCTOBER 1996)

  The Kibeho crisis

  Somehow life went on in Rwanda at the beginning of 1995. Amid the ruins. With the killings and the “disappearances.” With the government of national unity staggering on, hoping to provide a modicum of leadership in this broken society. The Rwandese had coined an expression for what so many people felt: imitima yarakomeretse, “the disease of the wounded hearts.” The economy was in shambles; of the $598 million in bilateral aid pledged in January at the Rwanda Roundtable Conference in Geneva, only $94.5 million had been disbursed by June.1 Of that money, $26 million had to be used to pay arrears on the former government’s debt.2 The perception gap between the international community and what was happening in Rwanda was enormous. The international community talked about national reconciliation and refugee repatriation, but suspicion was pervasive. Gutunga agatoki (showing with the finger) denunciations were commonplace: survivors denouncing killers, actual killers denouncing others to escape punishment, bystanders denouncing innocents to get their land or their house. Women survivors tried to band together to help each other, but even then, some Hutu widows might be refused access to the support groups because of ethnic guilt by association, and Hutu orphans in orphanages would be roughed up by Tutsi kids as “children of interahamwe.”3 Some transport had restarted and the electricity supply was slowly becoming less erratic. Very few schools had reopened. The January 1995 public debate between Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu and Vice President Paul Kagame had not settled the matter of the violence, which everybody knew about but which the UN remained blind to.

  This violence eventually led to the Kibeho massacre of April 1995 and to the unraveling of the national unity government. The process leading to the massacre is worth describing in detail because it offers on a small scale all the characteristics of what was eventually to take place in Zaire eighteen months later: nontreatment of the consequences of the genocide, well-meaning but politically blind humanitarianism, RPF resolve to “solve the problem” by force, stunned impotence of the international community in the face of violence, and, finally, a hypocritical denial that anything much had happened.

  The problem initially stemmed from the existence of very large camps of internally displaced persons in the former so-called Safe Humanitarian Zone created by the French during Operation Turquoise in southwestern Rwanda. In late 1994 these camps had sheltered a population of about 350,000 persons,4 and the United Nations had created a special Integrated Operations Centre (IOC) to handle the situation. The IOC started rather well, managing to repatriate about eighty thousand IDPs between its creation in October 1994 and January 1995. But this had been during a window of opportunity, coinciding almost exactly with the period of caution on the part of the RPF after it was given a warning through the Gersony Report. In January, when the “fateful conference” syndrome had dispelled RPF fears of Western sanctions and the killings had resumed, the IDPs refused to go back to the insecurity of the hills. “By the third week of February, Operation Retour [Return] had come to a virtual standstill.”5 But the government still insisted on closing the camps. As the former director of the United Nations Rwanda Emergency Office (UNREO) wrote,

  The government’s hostility to the camps was profound, visceral. It stemmed from their link to the genocide. The camps were regarded as a product of Operation Turquoise… . A large portion of those who had taken shelter within Zone Turquoise were seen by the government as perpetrators of the genocide.6

  This was of course a biased view on the government’s part since the camps sheltered thousands of women and children as well as the men who might or might not have been génocidaires. But pressure was building rapidly on the government side to close down the camps, by force if necessary. The IOC, faced with the unwillingness of the IDPs to go back to what they knew to be a dangerous environment, kept wavering between appeals for more time, pleas to the IDPs to go back, and rather pointless bureaucratic “programs.” While the RPF “day after day accused, criticised and demanded more cars . . . making many NGOs feel unwelcome and even threatened,”7 the UNREO insisted on creating an expensive and cumbersome “integrated humanitarian computer database.” The sophisticated database kept breaking down and ended up “costing much and contributing little.”8 But it enabled the IOC to issue “nice high quality maps and graphs . . . making operational reporting clearer, swifter and more impressive.”9 Meanwhile the RPA threatened the use of direct military force against the camps. As an anonymous UN field worker wrote at the time, “We are only actors insofar as the military co-operate with us… . We will only be blamed when things will go wrong.”10 The field workers were caught in a terrible situation. On the one hand, the RPF establishment felt only contempt for them, tried to squeeze them to the utmost, and had no intention of going along with the politically correct schemes concocted in New York. On the other hand, their superiors insisted on computerized offices, proper procedures, and close cooperation with the government. But, as the former UNREO director was to write after the explosion, “The government was on board but never fully committed, allowing the humanitarian community to assume responsibility for an ‘integrated’ approach that in reality never existed.”11

  In fact, far from emptying, the camps were filling up with new arrivals fleeing from the terror in the hills. The IOC, caught between its desire for cooperation and the bloody reality, wavered between conflicting explanations, writing in the same report, “A deliberate campaign of disinformation continues to spread stories of harassment, arbitrary arrests and murder in the home communes,” and a few lines further on, “Unfortunately people return to the camps, fearing for their personal safety. There have even been reports that some people are fleeing the communes and entering the camps for the first time.”12 On April 6 1995, the ceremonies commemorating the first anniversary of the genocide were the occasion for the spectacular proper reburial of six thousand victims. Feelings were running high and the resolve to do something drastic was building up. On April 17 the préfet of Butare announced that all the IDP camps in
his prefecture were to be closed forthwith, and the next day the operation started. What happened then is best described in the clear cold language of the military: