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

by Gerard Prunier

  1993

  1994

  1995

  1996

  1997

  Great Lakes Region

  8.29

  446.74

  317.14

  613.68

  307.99

  Zaire

  18.11

  154.47

  166.20

  104.40

  56.57

  Tanzania

  11.27

  61.23

  79.51

  11.88

  19.57

  Burundi

  18.76

  133.24

  72.44

  37.69

  28.67

  Source: UN/OCHA. Figures are in U.S. $ millions. The Great Lakes global figures are not a sum of the various geographical figures but a separate line for multinational attributions disbursed together.

  With these figures, we can compute a ratio of about 60 percent of Zaire-directed disbursements against 40 percent of disbursements for Tanzania and Burundi. Thus, if we add 60 percent of the global Great Lakes figures to the specific Zaire disbursements, we arrive at the total expenditure for refugees in Zaire, still in millions of U.S. dollars.

  1993

  1994

  1995

  1996

  1997

  23.08

  422.51

  356.48

  472.61

  241.36

  The pattern is clear. Figures leap upward with the 1994 emergency, settle a bit during 1995, jump again with the 1996 “war of the camps,” and settle down again, albeit at a rather high level, after the mass of refugees go home, flee westward, or die. But the financial impact was devastating, especially at the local level. It contributed to disorganizing the local economies, whetting dangerous appetites, and, through aid theft and resale, to financing the “Hutuland” war.

  In addition, there is a fourth and major point to remember: the refugees had a heavily disruptive impact on the environment, whether we take the word in its social, political, economic, or ecological sense. This had been obvious from the very beginning, even as soon as the August 1994 cholera epidemic was over.72 The refugees behaved as if in a conquered country, cutting firewood without authorization, stealing cattle, plundering crops, setting up illegal roadblocks, and, this not in an anarchic, disorganized way, but, on the contrary, clearly responding to the directives of a sinister and powerful political leadership. In a letter addressed to Kamel Morjane at UNHCR Headquarters in Geneva, the local envoy, Joël Boutroue, wrote worriedly, “Neither our mandate nor the means at our disposal match the requirements needed to address the regional crisis.”73 There were two documents appended to Boutroue’s letter. One was a collectively signed memo from the Goma branches of all the Zairian opposition parties (Union pour la Démocratie et le Progrès Social [UDPS], Parti Démocrate Social Chrétien, and others), written on October 28 and complaining about the refugees:

  [They have] destroyed our food reserves, destroyed our fields, our cattle, our natural parks, caused famine and spread epidemics, who benefit from food aid while we get nothing. They sell or give weapons to their fellow countrymen,74 commit murders both of Tutsi and of local Zairians… . They must be disarmed, counted, subjected to Zairian laws and finally repatriated.

  The second memo was written by members of the civil society on November 18 and was even graver. It recommended a December 31, 1994, repatriation deadline and focused expressly on the security aspect of the situation. It gave the precise locations of nine ex-FAR training centers and an arms depot and denounced the local assistant director of the Service National d’Intelligence et de Protection (SNIP), a certain Muhuta, as a paid accomplice of the ex-FAR who trafficked in weapons with them. As early as August 1994 the UNHCR had written to New York to ask for a number of emergency measures:

  1. Totally disarm the ex-FAR troops, collect all arms and military equipment and gather them in a secure place far from the border.

  2. Isolate and neutralise the civilian leaders.

  3. Set up a mechanism to deal with the perpetrators of crimes.

  4. Ensure maintenance of law and order in the camps through the deployment of police.75

  The creation of the Zaire Camp Security Contingent76 was a partial fulfillment of recommended measure 4, but none of the other measures were ever even attempted. Repatriation started well, as long as the refugees did not fully realize what was going on inside Rwanda. A total of 215,312 refugees returned between July 1994 and January 1995. But then, according to a UNHCR report, “the repatriation movement grounded to a halt.”77 There were only 3,770 repatriations in May, none in June, and 1,900 in July. At the same time, 11,248 new refugees flowed out of Rwanda. The killings that had resumed inside Rwanda were having their effect on refugee choices.

  This was the time President Mobutu chose to implement his Operation Rehabilitation. It had been carefully planned with the French from way back. Jacques Foccart78 had discussed it with the Zairian president when he went to Kinshasa during the genocide, in April 1994.79 They met again when the veteran of the French geopolitical games in Africa invited Mobutu in private to his Cavalaire country home on August 17, 1995. They went together to Mobutu’s neighboring residence at Cap Martin, where they received a phone call from President Jacques Chirac. The French president persuaded Mobutu to accept all the points former president Jimmy Carter was then mediating between him and Secretary-General Boutros Ghali: stop the “hate” radio broadcasts, stop the weapons deliveries to the ex-FAR, move the camps away from the border area, and accept more UN observers. In exchange Mobutu would be reinstated in his old role of central African kingpin with French backing. Mobutu agreed to everything, then went on to brutally push fifteen thousand refugees over the border on August 19, just to give proof of his nuisance capacity. After five days of panic he drew back his claws and proclaimed his desire to cooperate.80 The French were somewhat taken aback by his methods but said nothing.

  Meanwhile the security situation had gotten totally out of control. The ex-FAR had tried to needle the new regime, but the RPA retaliated and then went on the offensive. The Kigali UNHCR office counted fifty-two armed incidents in August 1995, forty in September, thirty-one in October, and only eighteen in November, showing a progressive decrease in the combat capacity of the former regime’s troops.81 They tried to make up inside Zaire for the war they were losing on the Rwanda border. Given the extremely tense situation, as sketched in the preceding section, they did not find it difficult to again set fire to the Masisi and Walikale areas. The idea was simple: they might be in this for longer than they would wish and should therefore develop a secure territorial base. They could use the local Hutu population both against the Tutsi and against the autochthon tribes to carve out a territory for themselves. The military operations were under the command of the former FAR chief of staff Gen. Augustin Bizimungu and they had the blessing of President Mobutu, who, in spite of his promises to the French government, had no intention of relinquishing his one trump card in the Kivus.82 The result of these manipulations was a renewed explosion of violence in North Kivu.

  The war restarted in October 1995 and immediately produced new refugees, this time Zairian Tutsi fleeing the Interahamwe and ex-FAR into Rwanda. By February 1996, according to UNHCR, there were thirty-seven thousand Tutsi refugees in Rwanda, half of them native Zairians and the other half refugees of the 1959 massacres who had once sought asylum in the Belgian Congo. The situation was paradoxical because many of the expulsees had been thrown out of their own country, while many other “refugees” were citizens of their country of asylum. But the RPF government had no intention of letting these potentially useful refugees simply melt into Rwandese society, and it forced UNHCR to accept, albeit with some reluctance, opening camps almost directly on the border, practically within shooting distance of the Hutu camps on the other side. Sadako Ogata complained to the UN secretary-general that the situation was slowly becoming intolerable:

  The recent influx
from Masisi to Rwanda now stands at 9,000 persons. The Government of Rwanda insists that these persons are Zairians and is determined to keep them at the Petite Barrière camp site, 800m from the border… . The repatriation program remains at an impasse. As you know, 25% of the refugee camps in Zaire are within five kilometres while the rest are less than 30 kilometres away from the Rwandan border. Confronted with these worrying developments the international community should consider urgent measures to prevent a further deterioration in the security situation.83

  Of course, the international community remained totally passive. Secretary-General Boutros Ghali knew that the Americans were not happy with him and that he needed French and francophone African support if he wanted to get reelected. Getting in the way of Jacques Foccart and President Chirac’s plans was not the best way to achieve that, and he remained prudently silent. Which does not mean that he was not aware of the situation; as early as May 1995 he had confided in a meeting with Emma Bonino, European commissioner for humanitarian affairs:

  I have no confidence in the Rwanda government… . They want revenge… . As for the Hutu they are preparing their military return to Rwanda from the refugee camps… . We would need to intervene militarily but nobody is ready to do it… . It would be cheaper than to feed them for the next ten years. Aid helps women and children but also those who are rearming and preparing to go to war… . I can’t say it publicly but we should impose a political conditionality on aid, it is the only language they will all understand.84

  In the meantime the Hauts Criminels Rassasie’s kept getting their rations, their fuel, their health care, and the benign neglect they needed to keep operating. In the words of a later commentator, “The West treated what was essentially a political problem as a humanitarian crisis.”85 Some of the NGOs did not mind because, as Samantha Bolton from Doctors without Borders USA was to admit after the catastrophe, “Everybody made a lot of money in Goma. We were on TV all the time. It was a good fund-raiser to say you were working in Goma.”86

  By early May the fighting in Masisi had spread to the adjoining Rutshuru territory and there were now nearly 220,000 IDPs.87 In early April a contingent of the Forces Armées Zairoises (FAZ) had carried out Operation Kiama, fighting the Bahunde and Banyanga side by side with the ex-FAR and the local Hutu militiamen. There were rumors that President Mobutu wanted to install the Rwandese Hutu durably in North Kivu, give them bogus papers, and get them to vote in the planned May 1997 elections.88 In the meantime he was bringing in more guns.89 On May 14, 1996, a group of Tutsi IDPs was caught in a fight between local Hutu and Bahunde militiamen at the Mokoto Trappist monastery: 110 of them were slaughtered in full view of the Belgian monks, which caused a bit of a stir internationally.90 Kinshasa was beginning to worry, not about the Kivu war, which it tolerated, but about its possible resulting backlash. The UNHCR was “irresponsible” and the camps it had opened in Rwanda were “sheltering bogus Zairian refugees; they are in fact teeming with RPA elements,” complained Gen. Eluki Monga Aundu, the FAZ chief of staff.91 This was not altogether wrong because if the refugees were not RPA, their young men were in fact being quickly militarized by the RPA through a crash training course. There were now 18,000 Tutsi refugees who had come from North Kivu into Rwanda in addition to the 37,000 who had already fled during 1995.92 There was some concern in New York about the situation, and on May 29 a mission of information was dispatched to Goma. It produced no tangible results. There were some isolated independent warnings from NGOs,93 but nobody seemed to realize the extent of the impending catastrophe.

  At that point two elements were still missing for a general conflagration to take place: a cause that would push one of the main actors over the brink and a mediatized event that could be used as an acceptable casus belli to neutralize the international community. Burundi was to provide the first element and the Banyamulenge crisis of mid-1996 the second one.

  The Burundi factor

  Burundi had been in a state of upheaval since the murder of President Melchior Ndadaye on October 22, 1993. The failed putsch that led to his death had started a general crisis of all the institutions. The army, of course, because it was half within the putsch and half outside it. and the civil service as well since many civil servants were appointees of the Front pour la Démocratie au Burundi (FRODEBU) who were accused of having organized the massacres of Tutsi that followed the assassination.94 This resulted in a triple political struggle in the months following the failed coup: the Tutsi-dominated army kept undermining the still FRODEBU-dominated civilian government; Tutsi civil society extremists who were bent on bringing down what they saw as a génocidaire government kept organizing strikes and demonstrations; and Hutu extremists who considered Hutu moderates still in the government as “stooges” took up arms against it.

  There were four different Hutu guerrilla groups. The oldest one was Parti pour la Libération du Peuple Hutu (PALIPEHUTU), created in 1980 by Rémy Gahutu and led after his death in 1990 by Etienne Karatasi, who lived in exile in Denmark. In 1993 PALIPEHUTU split on the support of President Ndadaye. The “historical” nucleus wanted to collaborate with the Hutu president, but some radical members with racist agendas disapproved of Ndadaye’s ethnic collaboration policies. PALIPEHUTU’s military chief, Kabora Kossan, split from the organization to create his own Forces Nationales de Libération (FNL). In the south of the country a former schoolteacher, Joseph Karumba, created a locally based guerrilla group in Nyanza-Lac called the Front de Libération Nationale. And finally, when the government collapsed after the failed October 1993 putsch and the murder of President Ndadaye, former interior minister Léonard Nyangoma fled to Zaire and created a political movement in exile, the Conseil National de Défense de la Démocratie (CNDD), which had a military arm, the Forces de Défense de la Démocratie (FDD), led by a young intellectual, Jean-Bosco Ndayikengurukiye.95 Although all these groups were out to overthrow the formerly Tutsi-dominated Burundi government, they diverged widely on a number of points. Some, like CNDD and even PALIPEHUTU, accepted the principle of negotiation. Not so with Kabora Kossan’s men, who chose a totally military option. The split was different on the question of ethnic tolerance: apart from CNDD, which had a relatively mature political view of ethnicity,96 the other groups were militantly racist and dreamed of treating the Tutsi the way the Rwandese Interahamwe had done during the genocide.

  But as the level of guerrilla actions slowly increased during 1994, new armed groups sprang up within the towns as well, including in the capital, Bujumbura. The Tutsi militias were at times linked to political parties, like the Imbogaraburundi (“those who will bring Burundi back”) who worked for the Parti du Renouveau National (PARENA) of former President Jean-Baptiste Bagaza, or the Sans Echec (”those who never fail”), who were close to Mathias Hitimana’s Parti pour la Réconciliation du Peuple. Others, like the Sans Défaite (“the undefeated”), the Sans Pitié (“the pitiless ones”), and even the Sans Capote (“those who never wear condoms”) were loose cannon, ready to hire themselves to the highest bidder among the small Tutsi extremist parties. On the Hutu side FRODEBU had its Inziraguhemuka (“those who did not betray”), while the FDD had infiltrated militants called Intagoheka (“those who never sleep”). In the poor and mostly Hutu Kamenge section of Bujumbura, Pascal Gashirabake, a roughneck former mechanic nicknamed Savimbi for his resemblance to the Angolan leader, raised a small army out of the former youth street gang called the Chicago Bulls. Actually, street gangs were often the raw material from which the politicians carved out their militias. Many youth gangs were biethnic before the violence started, but after October 1993 they found it profitable to split along ethnic lines and to start working for “the big men.” They got guns from the politicians and demonstrated or killed for them.97 On the Tutsi side the militias were at times reinforced by young men (and even young women) from good families, especially when the university became a battlefield for the factions.98

  The violent death of President Cyprien Ntaryamira on Apri
l 6 1994,99 did not result in a general explosion for a number of reasons, which also explain why there was not a genocide in Burundi. First of all, there were still a lot of moderates left on both sides, even if at times they looked like an endangered species. These moderates often worked discreetly at defusing crises while their more extremist colleagues vociferated. Also, contrary to the fears of both ethnic groups, there was no systematic genocidal planning on either side, and no prepared means of carrying it out. And finally, daily violence has a way of undercutting itself. In a country that had been provocatively termed by two British journalists “the land that lost its head,”100 there simply were not the means, the organization, nor the resolve to carry out a genocide. Instead there were “small massacres which kept bubbling on,”101 a kind of settling down to a life of daily fear, of occasional violence, of perpetual tension. Delivery trucks were ambushed, peasants bringing their produce to the market were shot at, grenades were tossed, often at random, in places of worship, in bus parks or in bars, and guerrillas, as well as killing Tutsi, mercilessly killed those Hutu who did not want to cooperate with them. Then, more often than not, the army came right after them, accused the peasants of helping the guerrillas, and killed some more. Ahmedou Ould Abdallah, the former UN special representative in Burundi between September 1993 and October 1995, declared tiredly at the time:

  The extremist elements do not want any solution. They play for time, one does not know what for… . I did not see any good will in June when the government [FRODEBU] was dragging its feet and I did not see it either in July when it was the turn of certain fractions of the opposition [Union pour le Progrès National (UPRONA) hard-liners and small Tutsi parties] to drag their feet. Currently [late July 1994] there is a deadlock… . This is childish behaviour when the population is in such a desperate situation. The security forces are tired. Since October 1993 they have been trying to hold the floodgates; they have to provide security in the country and ensure security at the border. And in the meantime all the politicians are just sitting at the Hotel Novotel, talking.102