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

by Gerard Prunier

  On Tuesday 18 April at 0300 hrs two battalions of RPA soldiers surrounded Kibeho camp. The RPA used the expedient measure of firing shots in the air to move the IDPs along. One woman was shot in the hip and ten people, mostly children, were trampled to death. . . . [The soldiers] torched many of the huts so that the IDPs would not return. At 1630 hrs the RPA fired warning shots and nine more IDPs were killed in the resulting stampede.13

  The same evening Jacques Bihozagara, the Tutsi RPF minister of rehabilitation, gave a press conference, where he declared, “Today’s operation is an integrated operation based on the strategy elaborated by the Integrated Task Force,” adding in a dismissive way, “There are rumours that if the IDPs return home they will be killed… . If that were the government’s intention then it would have gone ahead and killed the people within the camps. After all, the camps are still within Rwandan territory.” The last part was very revealing of the RPF’s train of thought: national sovereignty had to be reestablished over this former Turquoise nest of génocidaires, and since this was their territory they could kill whomever they wanted to. Eighteen months later, the question of the borders was not to stand in the way of repeating the operation on a much wider scale in Zaire.

  In striking contrast, Minister of the Interior Seth Sendashonga, another RPF member but a Hutu, rushed to Kibeho the next day to try to stop the catastrophe from getting worse. Upon his return to Kigali, he called an emergency meeting of the UN and NGOs to get means of transportation quickly because he knew that the RPA could not be restrained much longer. He also briefed Prime Minister Twagiramungu, President Bizimungu, and Vice President Kagame on what had happened. Kagame told him with a straight face that in his capacity as defense minister he would make sure that things remained under control.14 The next day the soldiers opened fire again, killing twenty and wounding sixty. Then they surrounded Kibeho camp. What happened next has been graphically described by an eyewitness:

  [There were] about 150,000 refugees15 standing shoulder to shoulder on a mountain plateau the size of three football fields… . For the last sixty hours the refugees have been forced to relieve themselves where they stand or where they have fallen. The stench takes my breath away… . The refugees do nothing, say nothing, just stare at the Zambians.16 . . . The two roads winding through the mountains to Kibeho have been closed. Food and water convoys from aid organisations are being stopped and sent back. The government has forbidden all refugee aid… . The first time I witness the consequences of the UN non-intervention policy I fly into a rage… . A group of refugees, about six of them, break away from the crowd and start running into the valley. Rwandan troops start firing immediately. We see the refugee fall dead. I scream at Capt. Francis [Zambian officer] “Stop them! Do something!” . . . He answers: “We have been ordered to co-operate with the Rwandan authorities, not to shoot at them.” “Even if they kill innocent people before your eyes?” “Yes,” he answers. 17

  In fact, this was only the beginning. At noon on Saturday, April 22, the soldiers opened fire on the massed crowd, first with their rifles and later with 60mm mortars as well. They slowed down for a while after lunch, then resumed firing until about 6 p.m. In the words of Linda Polman, a journalist who was still with the Zambian Blue Helmets, “All we could do was to drag away the corpses.” But they were beaten to it by the RPA, which started burying the corpses during the night of April 22–23. At daybreak the Australian Medical Corps, which had thirty-two men on the spot, started counting the bodies. They were up to forty-two hundred before being stopped by the RPA. In their estimate, there were still about four hundred to five hundred uncounted. Adding to that figure what the RPA had buried during the night, a not unreasonable estimate would stand at over five thousand casualties. There were many wounded, but not as many as in a combat situation because the RPA troops had bayoneted or shot many at close range.18

  Seth Sendashonga rushed back to Kibeho on the morning of the April 23. Although he was a minister, albeit a Hutu one, he was turned back by the army; more corpse removal work had to be done before the civilians were allowed in. President Bizimungu arrived in the afternoon and was told that there had been about three hundred casualties, something he accepted without discussion, even showing displeasure when a Zambian officer tried to give him the figure computed by the Australian medical team.

  Back in Kigali some of the NGOs, such as Médecins Sans Frontières and Oxfam UK, complained to the UN. To no avail. The Ministry of Rehabilitation issued a short report saying that “casualty estimates which were confirmed by some UNAMIR commanders stand at about 300… . The cause of the incident which resulted in the deaths of so many was traced to the criminal gangs in the camps who were determined to make the [repatriation] process fail.”19 This line of argumentation was to be strictly adhered to by the RPF. The “three hundred” deaths were “unfortunate,” but they had been caused by a génocidaire hard core who had used the “ordinary” IDPs as a human shield. The proof was that this armed hard core was still holed up in Kibeho, refusing to move. The army would have to clear out the sixteen hundred people still in the camp.

  But what had happened to the others? They were being “repatriated” rather forcefully, mostly on foot, beaten and attacked on the way by angry civilian crowds, falling dead by the roadside due to dehydration and exhaustion.20 How many survived this grueling ordeal? It is hard to say since the IOC figures on this point are totally out of kilter. On April 24 the IOC announced that there were 145,228 IDPs who had returned to the Butare prefecture. But on April 26 the figure had fallen to 60,177. Even if we take the lowest estimate of the precrisis Kibeho population, that is, around 80,000, this means that at least 20,000 people “vanished” after the massacre. Some journalists picked up on the discrepancy in figures, which became even bigger as time went on and as all the other camps were closed by force in the wake of the Kibeho slaughter.21

  What followed was even more shameful. Interior Minister Sendashonga had asked for an international commission of inquiry, only to be severely rebuffed by Kagame. General Kagame wanted a tame commission, and he got it. After Bizimungu went with the press to Kibeho and publicly dug up 338 bodies, that figure became “official.” The “independent” commission of inquiry was made up of nine handpicked lawyers and diplomats from France, Canada, Belgium, Pakistan, the United States, and Holland under the sharp leadership of Christine Omutonyi. They met and talked in Kigali between May 3 and 8, never doing any field inquiry. Their conclusions followed the government line absolutely. There had been “a fear of rearming” and “military training had been observed to take place… . There [was] evidence that firearms were captured.”22 The loss of control had come when “there had been firing from the IDPs and the RPA suffered casualties… . The RPA responded by firing into the crowd.” And finally, as a conclusion: “Due to logistic and time constraints, it was not possible to determine the exact number of fatalities.” Yet a year later, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry Report could be quoted with approval in a Swiss academic study on the international protection of displaced persons.23 and to this day the figure of 338 fatalities has never been officially questioned, although everybody knows it to be false. In fact, the Kibeho tragedy stood as a kind of dress rehearsal for much bigger things. As usual, the lack of response to one crisis was bound to lead to a bigger crisis further down the road.

  The collapse of the national unity government

  Kibeho was the beginning of the end for the government of national unity created in July 1994. Its guiding principle, born out of the war, the Arusha Agreement, and the genocide, was that power should be shared among the various components of the Rwandese society, Tutsi and Hutu, francophones and anglophones, survivors from the interior and returnees from abroad. The social and political makeup of the cabinet, which had been picked on July 19, 1994, was a fair approximation of that ideal. But there was a steady struggle to maintain the high hopes of the beginning in the face of the growing bad faith of the RPF, which forma
lly pretended to respect the letter of the Arusha Agreement while repeatedly violating its spirit. Whether it was on justice,24 on dealing with the problem of illegally occupied properties, on physical security, or on the reorganization of the economy, the RPF did not even act as the biggest fish in the pond: it acted as a shark, imposing its solutions, furthering the material interests of its members, and chewing up whoever swam in the way. The Kibeho crisis, and especially its aftermath, was to prove too much of a strain for the fragile remnants of “national unity.”

  Seth Sendashonga, the pugnacious RPF interior minister, had bombarded Kagame with memos about killings and “disappearances” for the previous nine months, always hoping against hope that somehow things would be brought under control. In a few days Kibeho shattered any remaining hope that Kagame himself and the military nucleus surrounding him were perhaps rough but ultimately had good intentions. During the Kibeho crisis no effort was made to sort out the guilty from the innocent, the Hutu being collectively treated as murderers deserving to be shot without trial. When Sendashonga tried to obtain some redress, not only for the sake of justice but also to preserve the very notion of a government of national unity, he was dryly told to mind his own business. Contrary to President Bizimungu, who clung to his seat for the next five years in the elusive hope of giving weight and content to his paper-thin presidency, Sendashonga realized after Kibeho that the constitutional avenues for a progressive democratization of the regime existed in theory but were closed in practice.25 The RPF “Ugandan” Tutsi hard core wanted full power, would tolerate only patsies, and was ready to use any tactics, including mass killings, to achieve this purpose. For a liberal Hutu who had staked everything on the reforming and democratic views proffered by the RPF in its guerrilla days, the blow was hard. Still, both Sendashonga and Twagiramungu tried to salvage what they could from the ruins of their democratic efforts. There was still a faint glimmer of hope in the fact that the political divide did not follow purely ethnic lines. Some Tutsi, especially among the francophone Tutsi who found themselves systematically marginalized by the “Ugandans,” were beginning to have second thoughts about the new regime. Thus the journalist Jean-Pierre Mugabe, himself an RPF veteran, could write in his newspaper almost exactly at the time of Kibeho,

  There are many Tutsi extremists. They are everywhere in the civil service and we have decided to denounce them. They have arbitrarily arrested many Hutu, as if all Hutu were Interahamwe. For these extremists even the Tutsi survivors of the genocide are Interahamwe. Today many of the Tutsi are just as vulnerable as the Hutu.26

  Those were brave words indeed, and the future was to show how true they were. But in April 1995 this was definitely a minority opinion within the Tutsi community. The genocide was still fresh in everybody’s minds, there were still hollow-eyed children in the hills playing with skulls and bones, imitima yarokomeretse was the common ocean of suffering in which everybody was trying to swim, and the Tutsi community still mostly trusted the RPF.

  In the short run, Sendashonga decided to stop the arrests. Fifteen prisoners had suffocated to death in the days following Kibeho after being brutally shoved inside the tiny cells of the Rusatira detention center.27 He went public about his decision, declaring on the radio, “Of late many criminals have been arrested following the closure of the Kibeho camp, thus making the prisons full beyond their capacity.28 . . . Due to prison overcrowding many inmates are now dying of suffocation.”29 Even if Sendashonga had prudently used the word “criminals” to talk about the new detainees, his declaration was in direct contradiction to a speech made by General Kagame a few days earlier, when he said, “Over 95% of the former Kibeho people have returned to their homes and are in good shape… . The few who were arrested were arrested because of their crimes.”30 Kagame was furious, and the tensions within the cabinet rose one notch further. They soon got even worse when Maj. Rose Kabuye, the RPF mayor of Kigali, decided to create residency permits for all city dwellers.31 Not only was it announced that the permits would be delivered “only to blameless persons,” but it was also decided that the permits would be green for the old residents and blue for the returnees from Zaire. This set off a panic in the Hutu population and crowds stampeded the offices to try to get the precious document. Sendashonga canceled the whole exercise, thereby provoking Kagame even further.32 A few days later, Jean-Damascène Ntakirutimana, Twagiramungu’s chief of staff, resigned and fled the country, declaring,

  The RPF bases its policies on the domination of one ethnic group by the other, as if the painful experience of the fallen regime had served for nothing… . The situation is getting worse: arbitrary killings, arrests, tortures, a stalled justice, double talk on the refugee question, repression of the press… . Pressures should be applied on the regime by those countries that support it to bring it to its senses.33

  By then, the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI), which took it upon itself to monitor all aspects of Rwandese society, looked on every Hutu member of government as a potential traitor and defector. In a memo leaked to the press, the DMI wrote that it was “keeping under scrutiny opposition politicians, especially those of MDR and other extremist forces,”34 a rather paradoxical statement since the MDR was Faustin Twagiramungu’s party and a leading signatory of the Arusha Agreement. The memo explicitly wrote that Sendashonga, Minister of Finance Marc Ruganera, and Vice Prime Minister and Minister for the Civil Service Col. Alexis Kanyarengwe were all being watched constantly. All three were Hutu.

  Since “disappearances” and assassinations went on unabated, Sendashonga took the drastic decision to disband the so-called Local Defense Forces (LDFs). Set up after the genocide in theory to replace the almost nonexistent police, the LDFs had soon turned into groups of thugs controlled by the local RPF abakada. Many of the arbitrary arrests, disappearances, and murders could be traced to them, something even Radio Rwanda admitted.35 But they were the RPF’s eyes and arms in the hills and Kagame was incensed. A campaign of calumnies developed against Sendashonga, who was seen by the RPF hard core as the soul of resistance to their undivided control. Because nothing could be said against him directly, the calumnies concentrated on his brother.36 It was in that poisoned atmosphere that Prime Minister Twagiramungu decided to call for an extraordinary council of ministers on security matters. The council met on August 23 and went on for three days, soon turning into a stark confrontation between Kagame and Sendashonga. The minister of the interior received the backing of Twagiramungu and Ruganera, which was to be expected, and more surprisingly of the Tutsi minister of women’s affairs, Aloysia Inyumba. This had to do with Inyumba’s old idealism and also with the fact that she was keenly aware, as a minister, of the deep concern of women, Tutsi women included, about the mounting violence. Sensing that he had nothing more to lose, Prime Minister Twagiramungu reproached Kagame for choosing 117 Tutsi out of the 145 newly appointed bourgmestres. This was clearly overstepping the unspoken agreement never to mention ethnicity in the cabinet in an aggressive way. But it was too late. Sendashonga stood his ground on the disbanding of the LDF, saying that it would not lessen but would, on the contrary, improve security. This was on the third day of the cabinet meeting and everybody knew that the showdown had come. Kagame said ironically to Sendashonga that since he seemed to know more than he about security, perhaps he could take over the Ministry of Defense, or even the whole government. He then got up and left the room, bringing the meeting to an end.37

  After mulling over the events for two days, Prime Minister Twagiramungu announced his resignation. President Bizimungu, furious and not wanting to allow him the moral advantage of resignation, came to Parliament on August 28 and asked for a public vote to fire Twagiramungu. Fifty-five raised their hand in support, six abstained, and none voted against.38 The next day Sendashonga, Minister of Transport and Communications Immaculée Kayumba, Minister of Justice Alphonse-Marie Nkubito, and Minister of Information Jean-Baptiste Nkuriyingoma were all fired.39 Sendashonga’s and Nkubito’s firi
ngs were politically crucial, but the firing of Nkuriyingoma, a relatively junior figure, was simply due to his being candid about the crisis when speaking to the media. As for Immaculée Kayumba, the only Tutsi of the lot, she was fired for three reasons: she personally got on Kagame’s nerves; as minister for communications she had not managed to cut off the telephones of the sacked ministers quickly enough, allowing them to speak freely to the international press; and it seemed like a good idea to fire a Tutsi minister, to avoid making the global sacking look ethnically motivated. Sendashonga and Twagiramungu were placed under house arrest and their personal papers ransacked. Nevertheless they were able to get out of it alive, finally managing to leave the country toward the end of the year. The government of national unity was dead, even if its pretended existence was going to be carried over with diminishing credibility for another five years, until the April 2000 presidential crisis.

  The refugees and the Kivu cockpit

  As the government of national unity collapsed in Rwanda, the problem of masses of refugees sitting practically on its borders and controlled by the forces of the former government went on without any hope for a solution. Although there were over 470,000 Rwandese refugees in Tanzania, for a number of reasons the main problem centered around those in Zaire.40 One reason was the position of Marshal Mobutu, who, although largely reduced to practical impotence in the Kivus, still tried to manipulate the situation, both for purposes of local and national politics and for reinstating himself to his former international position through blackmail.41 Another reason had to do with the terrain itself, in the geographical, demographic, and political senses. The Kivus, North and South, were not simply two provinces of Zaire. They had been an essential factor in the 1960s revolt against the Leopoldville government;42 they were an extension of the ethnic and political problems of Rwanda itself; they were a zone of high-density population with demographic and tribal contradictions of their own; they were connected with the Rwenzururu conflict in Uganda;43 and they were the backyard of the civil war then going on in Burundi. It was easy to predict the impact of one and a half million refugees with an extremist political leadership, plenty of weapons, and a history of recent genocide when they suddenly burst upon this fragile human environment.