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

by Gerard Prunier

  Hard to put it more clearly. But by August 1996, as Burundi was heating up and Kagame’s resolve to deal with the camps had reached the decision point, this grand anti-Mobutu design was still somewhat hazy. On July 7, when Issayas Afeworki and Meles Zenawi stopped in Entebbe to have pre-OAU talks with Museveni, the connection between the Burundi situation that was to be discussed in Yaounde and the grand plan for Zaire was discussed, but only in a most general way.131 General Kagame could not afford to wait for these plans to coalesce, especially since he was soon going to be handed a perfect casus belli, courtesy of a totally blind Zairian political class. His decision to act alone had been made, and he practically said so to his U.S. hosts during a late August trip to Washington, DC: “I delivered a veiled warning: the failure of the international community to take action would mean Rwanda would take action… . But their response was really no response at all.”132 Meanwhile the conflict in Masisi that I described in the section on North Kivu had rekindled the latent tensions around the citizenship question of the South Kivu Banyamulenge, especially at a time when President Mobutu was planning his 1997 election strategy to satisfy the donors and still maintain power. In North Kivu he was in the process of creating a Hutuland in collaboration with Gen. Augustin Bizimungu and the Rwandese refugees. Their gratitude would be translated into votes. But in the South he knew that the main tribes, Babembe, Barega, Bashi, Bafulero, strongly disliked him and had supported the Simba rebellion in the 1960s. But these same tribes were also hostile to the Banyamulenge, both as “foreigners” and as former supporters of Mobutu himself during the 1960s civil war. Mobutu’s tactics then were to try to use one of these hatreds against the other and to reap the benefit. In other words, the Banyamulenge had to be used as a sacrificial goat for his electoral plans. He had several good local tools. First, there was Anzuluni Bembe, a Mubembe delegate to the Conférence Nationale Souveraine and later president of the Haut Conseil de la République/Parlement Transitoire, who had betrayed his constituency by siding with the government when in Kinshasa and who got stoned by villagers when he went back home in 1991. He learned his lesson and was now ready to turn against the Banyamulenge so as to satisfy both his tribesmen and the government. Anzuluni had teamed up with Mobutu’s young vice prime minister in charge of foreign affairs, Jean-Marie Kititwa Tumansi,133 a Murega, who knew that his fellow tribesmen would appreciate getting their hands on the cattle of the Banyamulenge. Everybody in South Kivu knew that it was only a question of time before the Banyamulenge would be hit. The Banyamulenge themselves were aware of it, and they had started acquiring weapons. They got weapons from Kigali of course, but they also got them from a rather unexpected source: the Zairian “government” itself. The FAZ and Gen. Eluki Monga Aundu started to sell to the Banyamulenge the weapons President Mobutu had just acquired to reinforce the FAZ garrisons in the east. In July 1996 Kongolo Mobutu, one of the president’s sons, had gone to Bukavu and up to the Itombwe to sell the Banyamulenge the arms then stored at Panzi Military Camp. When asked if he did not think that this was a dangerous thing to do in the present context, he shrugged his shoulders and said that for years he had sold FAZ weapons to the União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA), so why should there be a problem?134

  As part of his contingency planning, General Kagame had started to infiltrate Banyamulenge RPA veterans in civilian clothes into South Kivu in early July,135 and they picked up the weapons hidden for them on the plateau. The first RPA commando sent to support them was infiltrated during the night of August 31 to September 1 from Cibitoke in Burundi and clashed with the FAZ at Businga, losing three men.136 The timing was perfect because the other side seemed totally blind to reality and the governor of South Kivu, Lwasi Ngabo Lwabanji, and his commissaire in Uvira, Shweba Mutabazi, had just decided to make their move. On September 14 a group of 286 Banyamulenge civilians showed up at the Rwandese border in Cyangugu, telling tales of terror and massacre. For the past two weeks groups of armed Babembe and Barega thugs sponsored by the local Zairian authorities had been killing and looting the Banyamulenge at random. More refugees soon showed up, telling the same grim stories.137 Symmetrically, the Banyamulenge militia, largely made up of RPA veterans, moved in to surround Bukavu. On September 9 the city closed down with a general strike and the population marched “against the Rwandese invaders” while the FAZ clashed around Lemera with unidentified armed elements;138 117 Banyamulenge took refuge inside the UNHCR office in Uvira. On September 12 a strong motorized RPA contingent from Ndenzi camp near Cyangugu crossed at night into Burundi and then into Zaire through the Gatumba border post.

  In a note typical of the total confusion then prevailing in the area Zairian Foreign Minister Kamanda wa Kamanda complained that the UNHCR was “collaborating with a plan of invasion of South Kivu by Banyamulenge elements infiltrated from Rwanda.”139 There was in fact a real basis for what sounded like a paranoid delusion. When the UNAMIR forces departed from Rwanda in September 1995 they had left behind over two hundred vehicles in running order as a “gift to the people of Rwanda.” These included sixty-four troop carriers, which had of course been snapped up by the RPA and which were used in the Gatumba invasion. Because they had been poorly repainted, the large UN markings on their sides were still showing through, leading eyewitnesses to think that the UN was ferrying the invading troops into Zaire.140

  Meanwhile more Banyamulenge refugees were fleeing to the Rwandese borders while their armed brothers skirmished with the FAZ. General Kagame, quite unperturbed, coolly flew down to South Africa for four days (September 18–22), where he met Thabo Mbeki, Foreign Minister Alfred Nzo, and Vice Minister for Defense Ronnie Kasrils. One of his main concerns was to make sure that the large arms contracts he had signed with Armscor on his previous visit would be honored, and it seems he got reassurance on that point.141 As soon as he returned, heavy artillery fire was directed at Bukavu from Cyangugu,142 the purpose being to keep FAZ forces pinned down in their positions while more RPA troops crossed the border.

  The Kigali government kept saying that it had nothing to do with what was going on in South Kivu. But the Rwandese press was not so coy. In its September 23 issue, the magazine Imvaho Nshya editorialized, “Zaire is only reaping the harvest of what it sowed yesterday when it gave asylum to the Rwandese and Burundese refugees.” Some local geopoliticians were even giving a clear idea of what the government had in mind: “As a new fact, it would now be more interesting for Rwanda to cooperate with a Kivu Republic than with big Zaire.”143 The refugees were certainly the cause of the attack, but General Kagame was already considering the next steps.

  The pace soon quickened. While the FAZ and the Banyamulenge militia were skirmishing around Fizi and Mwenga between September 30 and October 5, President Bizimungu invited all the press and diplomatic community in Kigali to an extraordinary briefing at the former Méridien Hotel, renamed Umbano, on October 3. He pulled out a map of Rwanda that purported to show that large areas of North Kivu and smaller parts of South Kivu had been tributaries of the former Rwandese monarchy.144 He then said, “If Zaire gives back its Rwandese population, then it should also give back the land on which it lives.” Probably fearing that he had gone too far, he quickly added, “Rwanda has no territorial claims and respects the intangibility of national borders.”145 Part of the irony is that on the map he showed, the Banyamulenge area does not appear and is definitely not drawn as a former tributary area of the kingdom of Rwanda, something that is clear from all historical accounts.

  But history was being made and, as is often true, it had rather rough edges. On October 6 the Banyamulenge militia attacked the Lemera hospital, killing thirty-four patients and three nurses, which caused Sadako Ogata to declare the next day that there was now “a very dangerous security situation.” By then this was already an understatement. South Kivu Governor Lwabanji ordered all the Banyamulenge to leave the country, passing through a “corridor,” or else “be treated as rebels.” Gen. Monga Aundu arrived in Kivu
on October 10, and the next day Firmin Ndimira, Burundi’s prime minister, said that his country was not involved. General Aundu declared a state of war in South Kivu, identifying the RPA as the enemy. Ideological fantasies were running wild; the South Kivu Parliamentary Group denounced “a plot by the international community, hatched by foreign powers and the United Nations against Zaire in order to fulfil the expansionist ambitions of Rwanda and Burundi,” adding that the aggression was carried out by “Rwandans, Burundians, Ugandans Somalians and other Ethiopians,”146 a strange mixture of political fact and racial fiction. The broadcast ended with a call to “support the self-defence actions undertaken by the local people,” which in clear language meant “Kill the Banyamulenge.”

  But it was already too late for that because the Banyamulenge themselves were now on the offensive. On October 13 they had attacked the Runingo Burundian refugee camp near Uvira, killing four, injuring nine, and causing nineteen thousand to flee headlong into the hills.147 The South Kivu clashes had changed dimension and turned into a major conflict. Rwanda had crossed that magical imaginary line the colonialists had called a border. A taboo had been broken and nothing would be the same any more. But if the international community had been caught floundering about helplessly, the Rwandese themselves had made a move into the unknown whose importance they did not realize at the time. They had moved into that immense soft underbelly of the African continent called Zaire, and they did not even begin to realize the twin fragilities of that world and of the continental environment in which it was enmeshed. This double ignorance was to have enormous consequences. What many Africans were later to dub “Africa’s First World War” was about to begin.

  3

  THE CONGO BASIN, ITS INTERLOPERS, AND ITS ONLOOKERS

  When General Kagame sent his army across the Zairian border in September 1996 he had a clear main purpose: countering the military threat posed to the new Rwandese regime by the remnants of the former regime who were rearming under the cover of the refugee camps. Conceivably this could have been a limited operation in the manner of the Israeli army hitting Hezbollah across the border into Lebanon. But the regional environment into which this move was going to take place was radically different from that of the Middle East. Borders were porous, populations were highly heterogeneous, and their distribution did not correspond to the border limits; conflicts overlapped and intermingled in ways that made them influence each other even when they were of a completely different nature. Central to the whole gathering storm was the huge sick blob of Zaire. Zaire was so “soft” in the 1980s and early 1990s that practically anybody could walk in and do whatever he liked in its territory; it took only bribes paid to the border guards. Any amount of military equipment could travel anywhere over Zairian territory with a minimum of problems. In the past Mobutu had had “policies” that he was relatively able to promote, such as supporting the Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola (FNLA) in the Angolan civil war. But after the democratization process began in 1990 his capacity to control territory shrank radically and his capacity to project his influence beyond Zaire’s borders disappeared. He was able only to act passively, for example, by giving the Sudanese government a right of passage through Zairian territory to bypass Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA) positions in western Equatoria and attack Ugandan territory. This created two categories of proto-actors in the future “Congolese wars,” categories that I have called here “interlopers” and “onlookers”: those who stepped inside Zaire in order to act and those who stood outside looking in, trifling with the margins, permanently on the verge of falling in.

  The interlopers were of two types: the “official” interlopers, those who had been invited in by President Mobutu, and the “unofficial,” those whom Mobutu did not like but about whom he could do little given the sorry state of the FAZ.

  Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s the official interlopers had been represented mainly by the Angolan guerrilla movement União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA), which had been supplied, courtesy of the CIA, from the Kamina base in Katanga.1 UNITA could freely use Zaire as a rear base in its conflict with the ruling Movimento Popular de Libertaçao de Angola (MPLA). Later also welcome was the much smaller National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (NALU), started by Obote’s secretary of state, Amon Bazira, in the foothills of the Ruwenzori Mountains to fight Yoweri Museveni’s new regime installed in Kampala since January 1986. The West Nile Bank Liberation Front (WNBLF), another anti-Museveni movement, created in the 1990s, later also carried out hit-and-run attacks on Uganda’s northwestern province of West Nile. Then, after the 1993 murder of Burundian president Melchior Ndadaye in Bujumbura, Léonard Nyangoma found ready asylum for his CNDD (Conseil National de Défense de la Démocratie) rebel movement in the Uvira-Bukavu area, from where he could attack Burundi. The latest addition to this collection was the Rwandese refugees, who, after August 1994 and with the implicit toleration of UNHCR and the quasi-official blessing of Mobutu, could rearm and plan to attack Rwanda.

  In the “invited guests” category one should also add the Sudanese army. The reason for tolerating Sudanese troops operating against the SPLA on Zairian territory was that Ugandan President Museveni sympathized with the SPLA, that Mobutu disliked and feared Museveni, and that the enemy of my enemy’s friend was regarded as my friend, making Khartoum’s forces welcome on the Zairian side of the border.

  But this toleration of armed groups fighting various enemies of Mobutu automatically brought about a reaction, with all the adversaries of these armed guests also entering Zairian territory to battle it out with their foes. For Angola this meant that MPLA troops were periodically crossing the border in hot pursuit of UNIT A guerrillas. It also meant that in 1977 and 1978 the Angolan government attempted to overthrow Mobutu by providing logistical support to the former Gendarmes Katangais,2 who set out to invade Shaba.

  In the Sudan the SPLA considered that, since the Sudanese army was free to operate through Zaire, it had no reason to refrain from doing likewise. And because after 1993 Uganda started to give the SPLA support, as a service to Museveni SPLA combatants would chase the Zaire-based antigovernment Ugandan guerrillas into their own rear bases, something the Ugandan army was loath to do for fear of the international consequences.

  The only regional fighting groups that had never invited themselves into Zaire were the Burundian and Rwandese armies. But when they decided to cross into Zaire in September 1996, their much broader political agenda turned the former hide-and-seek operations of the 1980s and early 1990s into a thing of the past. The sudden Rwandese assault on the refugee camps was frontal and it was total. But it soon became apparent that it would not be limited to its initial target. The Rwandese invasion was taking place in a regional environment already undermined by years of complex and largely unnoticed conflicts. Force of habit caused the Western powers to consider the Mobutu regime as perhaps unpleasant but something that could stagger on for a while yet. There was still, lingering from the 1960s, the specter of an enormous zone of chaos at the heart of Africa.3 The Rwandese assault had thus a dual effect: on the one hand, it exploded the myth of Mobutu as the only possible ruler of Zaire; on the other hand, it brought tumbling down into the vast Congolese basin a multiplicity of particular conflicts, each with its own logic, its own history, and its own independent actors. Once they had all rolled in and meshed with local Congolese problems, disentangling them from their involvement in order to return home became a daunting task. The RPF military elite, with its view of the continent mostly limited to the Great Lakes region and a highly militarized conception of politics, completely failed to realize the size of the Pandora’s box it was cracking open.

  Into the Zairian vortex

  The huge land mass successively called the Congo Free State (1885–1908), the Belgian Congo (1908–1960), the Congo Republic (1960–1971), and now Zaire was not a nation-state but an arbitrarily cut chunk of the African continent. Almost 60 percent of its 2.3 milli
on square kilometers (905,000 square miles) is covered with thick tropical forest; the rest is savannah, with the exception of the mountainous Kivus in the east, whose physical and human geography is part of the Great Lakes highlands. Bordering on seven different countries, the Zaire-Congo is the heart of the continent, but a weak heart, that was faintly pumping its life fluids into an oversize and flabby body. There was a simple reason for this: both the climate and the human-to-land occupancy ratio were and always had been unfavorable. In addition, the ruthless private economic exploitation of this huge space by King Leopold II of Belgium in the late nineteenth century had resulted in a quasi-genocide that had durably traumatized the population.4

  Later Belgian colonization was a strange affair. A mixture of state capitalism, colonial anthropology run amuck, Church-sponsored paternalism, and forced labor, it was a unique blend that both protected the natives and brutalized them, made enormous amounts of money and ran progressive social protection programs, did everything and its opposite, but that always followed the beacon of a single idea: Africans were children whom you could spank or reward, depending on the circumstances, but whom you should never trust or treat seriously.

  Apart from South Africa, the Belgian Congo was the most industrialized and “developed” territory on the continent. By 1958, on the eve of independence, 35 percent of all adults were in salaried employment, a proportion unknown elsewhere in Africa.5 But this “development” was deceptive: out of the whole salaried workforce, barely fifteen hundred could be termed “professionals,” while the others were unqualified workers, farm laborers, petty clerks, and assorted fundi (artisans and repairmen). By the time of independence in 1960 there were only seventeen university graduates out of a population of over twenty million. The Belgian paternalistic system needed disciplined, semiqualified drones; it did not need people who could take responsibility: the whites were there for that. The problem came when Brussels, suddenly shoved forward by the strong winds of British and French decolonization, shifted from total denial of any “native problem” to a hurried flight from both colonization and any form of responsibility.6 Improvised elections in May 1960, the only real elections to be held in the Congo before those in 2006, produced a fractured Assembly wherein twenty-six “political parties,” which were in fact tribal coalitions, tried to negotiate a democratic regime. The almost immediate secession of the mineral-rich province of Katanga followed by four years of civil war led to a CIA-sponsored coup in 1965 which brought to power a former colonial army sergeant, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu.