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

by Gerard Prunier

  The war as an African phenomenon

  The purely East African origins of the conflagration

  Global as they later appeared, the workings of the Congolese continental crisis must be seen as the last link in a chain of events that were triggered by a very precise and localized upheaval back in 1959. For it is in that year that the muyaga1 brutally splintered Rwandese society, causing several years of civil disturbances that sent a sizable number of Tutsi into exile. These Tutsi went into exile in various African, and non-African, countries but kept in touch with each other as an organized diaspora. Their efforts at a homecoming and/or regaining power proved fruitless, and they stopped trying after 1963. But this left unfinished business with a potential for future problems which was not perceived at the time.2 In 1981 civil war broke out in Uganda after the rigging of an election that had been designed to give the country a proper democratic government after the fall of Gen. Idi Amin’s dictatorship. Because President Milton Obote, the spurious “victor” of these rigged elections, manipulated ethnic contradictions in western Uganda to undercut the guerrilla movement fighting his regime, the Rwandese refugees living there found themselves involuntarily caught in the repression and joined the guerrillas in self-defense. By January 1986 they found themselves sharing a certain amount of power in Kampala, but not automatically welcomed by native Ugandans, who resented their often overbearing presence in the new Museveni regime. Disenchanted with the results of their victory, they gradually started to question their “Ugandan” identity3 and to look at the country of their parents as a promised land. They reorganized in exile and invaded Rwanda in October 1990.4 The war lasted nearly four years and ended up precipitating the genocide of the “interior” Tutsi (April to June 1994), who were seen by the Hutu extremist elements of the Kigali regime as a fifth column ready to side with the invaders.

  Up to then these conflicts had remained penned up in one little corner of the Great Lakes area of eastern Africa. Their causes and lineaments were known only to specialized academics, a handful of diplomats, and a few spies who had not made it to front-line cold war assignments. The genocide brutally changed all that, first by causing worldwide emotional shock and then by involving an uncomprehending international community in an obscure local problem that had suddenly exploded into universal relevance. France was the first external power involved in Rwanda, without understanding the true nature of its involvement. It acted there in the same way as it had in other parts of French-speaking Africa since the 1960 decolonization, propping up an authoritarian regime it believed was sympathetic to Paris. But because the place had been a Belgian rather than a French colony, the actors of that policy in Paris were largely ignorant of the history and the problems of the region. They thought they were dealing with a little war they could fight not too expansively in terms of either money or diplomatic exposure.5 And then they suddenly found themselves sitting on top of a heap of 800,000 corpses they had not seen coming. They were horrified and tried to deny any responsibility. But meanwhile the United Nations, that supposed repository of the world’s conscience, had joined them in opprobrium by frantically doing nothing and avoiding any responsibility in the third and last genocide of the twentieth century, although they had a military force deployed in the country at the time. By then millions of politically embarrassing Rwandese refugees had crossed the border into Zaire, and it was obvious that the situation could no longer remain a parochial east African affair.

  Antigenocide, the myth of the “new leaders,” and the spread of democracy in Africa: the world projects its own rationale on the situation

  When a number of African countries, spearheaded by Rwanda, invaded Zaire two years later in September 1996, two different sets of variables found themselves in competition to try to make sense of the now growing storm. First there was the explanation that regional Africa specialists derived from a historical appreciation of the facts. For reasons of cold war expediency the West had tolerated, even supported, a monstrously inefficient and predatory regime in the Congo/Zaire. The result was a catastrophe waiting to happen, an enormously mismanaged blob of a country, in the very heart of the African continent but without shape or capacity to handle itself. In a dangerous paradox, this sick monster was potentially one of the richest countries in the world, the repository of immense mineral wealth which could not be rationally exploited because the polity “owning” it was by then incapable not only of doing the job for itself but even of ensuring the necessary conditions for somebody else to do it. With the end of the cold war this monstrous system suddenly appeared for what it was: an anachronism waiting for some kind of a (probably brutal) overhaul. Facing this dying monster was a bevy of energetic regimes led by mostly former communist sympathizers who secretly rejoiced at the idea of taking revenge on their old cold war foe; were groping for some kind of a new, continentwide, post—cold war dispensation; and carried the smelly luggage of all kinds of former unresolved conflicts which they hoped to solve all at once in one decisive action.

  On the other side of the paradigmatic divide were the foreigners looking at this suddenly convulsing Africa. The foreign vision of the continent was dominated by two broad ideas: economic retardation and the existence of a dangerous breeding ground for communist subversion. In the euphoria following the end of the cold war, which Western egocentrism was mistaking for the End of History,6 the second view suddenly appeared obsolete. The West, buoyed by its own generosity at supporting the end of apartheid in South Africa, felt that it had to cheer the continent along as it finally joined the rest of the world in a kind of reconciled modernist, capitalist, humanrightist democratic utopia.7 The link between these grandiose views and the somewhat grimmer African realities was the very group of “New Leaders” and their associates8 who were then attacking Zaire. Thus in the Western world and in the diplomatic view, the war against Mobutu appeared as a kind of holy crusade of the new against the old, of virtue against vice, an epic of reformed communists who had seen the light of capitalism and were going to bring free trade and the computer revolution to Africa. Ugly Mobutu and his bloody génocidaire cohorts provided the perfect Darth Vaders to these lightly cavalcading Luke Skywalkers. The show was on.

  The real actors of that fantasmatic soap opera immediately realized the advantages that could accrue to them from playing along with this exciting new scenario. And they understood that the link between the old and the new had to be that existential continental divide: the Rwandese genocide. The words genocide and genocide prevention became a mantra through which the West would atone for all its Africa-related sins, past and present, and by means of which Africa would tragically access modernity, in the same way the West had done in 1945 after purging the Nazi evil.9 The New Leaders were to be Moses ushering Africa into that Brave New World, and antigenocide was to be their miraculous rod.10

  Paul Kagame was probably in the best position as the main communicator from the African side. As the leader of the exemplary victims, his intelligence, his ruthless determination, his capacity to fine-tune white guilt as a conductor directs an orchestra put him miles ahead of his lesser associates. He presented the West with a very convincing storyboard: prevent a supposed genocide of the Banyamulenge11 and remove the border threat created by armed elements of the former génocidaire Rwandese government. Both suggestions fit well with the Western view of the situation and had a reasonable relationship to the reality on the ground. The first target, which was the most ambiguous, was quickly achieved; the second one was successfully completed by December 1996. But then the attackers, emboldened by their success, did not stop; they moved on to another and larger agenda: the removal of the Mobutu regime itself. This, although a bit more daring, could be seen as an extension of the virtuous cleaning of the African Augean stables that had just been launched. But how truly reformist was that second stage of the New Leaders’ enterprise? Could not another, perhaps “imperialistic” element be detected in their endeavor? By early 1997 a certain uneasiness was beginning
to develop around the perception and explanation of what was happening.

  The “New Congo”: between African renaissance and African imperialism

  For people who had known the situation for a long time, the “new” dispensation was simply the (astonishing) triumph of certain components of the regional problem. Just as Museveni’s assumption to power had been less of the “new dispensation” that he pretended it to be,12 Kagame’s victory in Rwanda was the return under a new guise of something that had been known before. But the extension of these two phenomena, in partnership with a number of others, eventually led to something truly new, although it was far from the ideological dreams of the West: the first known instance of postcolonial imperial conquest in Africa by an African country.

  There had of course been many cross-border conflicts in Africa since the end of colonization, but straight open warfare had been rare,13 and most of the other cases were cross-border subversions rather than invasions, and the support of the subverting states was routinely denied even if everybody knew it to be true.14

  The Rwanda-Congo conundrum that was producing the first case of clear-cut African imperialism was quite different. It was neither subversion nor straight foreign invasion; it was Trojan-horsing. Although cross-border tribal interlocking is an extremely common situation all over the continent, the case of the Congolese Kinyarwanda speakers was special in that they were not a tribe shared between two countries15 but a national group from a nation-state extending into the territory of a neighboring multiethnic state. Thus the Congolese Banyarwanda of what was known as “uncertain nationality” were in a particularly controversial situation because they had both strong state and nonstate loyalties and because one of their segments had just been massacred by the other, turning support for the non-génocidaire group into a matter of politically correct transborder commitment. In such a context, the new regime in Kigali could claim to be the guarantor of its non-Rwandese (but Banyarwanda) brothers’ safety. This was an infrequent configuration worldwide and without any parallel in Africa.16

  But the Banyarwanda whom Kigali claimed to defend were impacted in what was probably the weakest state in a continent of weak states, even though this weakest of weak states was buoyed by an extremely strong feeling of nationalism.17 Given the pride of the Zairian Congolese, the sorry economic state of the country drove this nationalism to higher and more abstract levels, akin to those of a religion.18 In the difficult Zairian economic environment of the late Mobutu years, the “hated foreigner” was the uninvited guest at the native’s poorly served table. As a result, political representation for the Kivus at the Conférence Nationale Souveraine in 1990 was highly contentious.19 The Rwandese civil war had only made matters worse, since the Habyarimana regime on one side and the RPF on the other had both tried to use the Hutu and Tutsi segments of the Congolese Banyarwanda communities.20 Thus the genocide argument used by Kigali in relation to the Kivus was a powder keg, since its consequences could potentially irradiate the whole of the Great Lakes area, down into Burundi and up to Uganda’s Bufumbira region. As for the “dangerous refugee” argument, which drew on a completely different body of justification, that is, the rational-legal one used by the international community, it provided the necessary international camouflage for the operation. It meant that even if it began to have second thoughts, the embarrassed international community was hard put to challenge something it had so enthusiastically supported shortly before.

  In many ways Africa was—and remains—the bad conscience of the world, particularly of the former colonialist powers of the Western world. They entertain a nagging suspicion, played upon by the Africans themselves, that perhaps the continent wouldn’t be in such a mess if it hadn’t been colonized.21 So in the ten years that followed jettisoning the heavy African baggage of apartheid, the international community was only too happy to support the so-called African Renaissance, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, the New Millennium Goals, and the Peer Review Mechanism of the newly revamped African Union. Within this new paradigm the continental war began as a seemingly bright illustration of the new trend, but then began to evoke an embarrassing reincarnation of some very old ghosts. Caught in the web of its own tangled guilt—that of having long supported the gross Mobutu regime, combined with the more recent sin of not having helped the Tutsi in their hour of need—the international community tried to hang on to the image of the new Tutsi colonizers of the Congo as basically decent men devoted to making Africa safe for democracy. Of course, there was a bit of a problem factoring in the personality of the leader they had put in power as their Congolese surrogate. It was difficult to smoothly include Laurent-Désiré Kabila in the New Leader movement because the others were reformed communists whereas he was an unreformed one and his democratic credentials were hard to find. So, in a way, when the break occurred in 1998 and the Rip Van Winkle of Red African politics sided with the surviving génocidaires, it was almost a relief: the good Tutsi could go on incarnating Africa’s decent future while the fat Commie could symbolize its refusal to change.22 The massacre of a number of Tutsi in Kinshasa and the obliging incendiary remarks of Yerodia Ndombasi helped the international community integrate the new war into its pro-democracy and antigenocide ideology. But there were lots of contradictions, and it was going to be a harder and harder conjuring trick to pull off as time went on.

  From crusading to looting: the “new leaders” age quickly

  August 1998 in Africa resembled in some ways August 1914 in Europe: the same mindless automatism in acting militarily on previous diplomatic engagements, the same bad faith, and the same brandishing of supposed moral wrongs as thin covers for grossly material interests. The only thing that was lacking was the nationalistic fervor that inebriated the European crowds on the eve of the First World War. Except for two countries: Rwanda and the Congo. For these core actors of the conflict it was a fight to the death. As I noted at the beginning of the previous chapter, the other countries involved in the war were there because of elite choices that had no real grounding in the population. Thus the best image one can give of what happened is that of a geographical hollow, the Congo Basin, entirely surrounded by a chain of otherwise unconnected storm clouds which were all drawn toward the low-pressure zone that had suddenly developed. Was this a product of typical characteristics of the controversial “African state”? Yes and no. The traits usually attributed to African states—their authoritarianism, their lack of democratic control, the monopolization of power by a small and corrupt elite, their patrimonial structures—all played key roles in involving Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and even little Burundi into the global confrontation. And the same goes for the peripheral actors who either did not fight directly or fought only for a brief duration. But the core conflict was of a different nature and was absolutely specific to its geographical and cultural theater. Which is also why it is the core that is proving so intractable and why the eastern Congo is still, if not in a state of open warfare, at least in a situation of very high insecurity six years after the conflict officially ended. This is also one reason why a correct diagnosis was so difficult: the problem was (and remains) rooted in history, an element that the West looks upon as irrelevant and tries to evacuate through the abstract bureaucratic language of “peace and security,” while the local actors manipulate it with furious alacrity. The gap between the two approaches has been enormous.23

  In a situation wherein the new war was a decision by elites fought by poor countries but in which the core actors were at the same time fighting about essential gut feelings that made the conflict intractable,24 looting and ultraviolence became the normal tools of the conflict. The notion that wars can be regulated by certain moral principles began in Europe in the thirteenth century, when the Church tried its hand at the first forms of violence control, even if they remained an ideal that was not much adhered to. The creation of the Red Cross after the horrors of the Crimean War and the later signing of the Geneva Convention were fu
rther steps in the same direction. But World War II, with the Nazi death camps and the indiscriminate bombing of civilians by both sides, was a major setback. Contrary to popular perception, most African wars, both precolonial and postcolonial, were not worse from the humanitarian point of view than wars in other parts of the world. At first this was the case with the new conflict. But things soon degenerated, largely because this was a real war and not a military walkover, like the 1996–1997 conflict that had toppled Mobutu. African wars can be carried out only part time. The “total war” concept invented by Germany during World War I and since then seen to apply to many conflicts worldwide25 cannot apply in Africa because the means are simply not available. Military action is largely disconnected from the rest of socioeconomic life and cannot be sustained relentlessly. Thus, if war can be carried out only part time because of financial constraints, the combatants sooner or later tend to privatize their action. And if looting can at times be supervised by the state, as in the case of Rwanda, it is a “natural” tendency for all the combatants to practice it on a large scale, particularly for those belonging to nonstate militias, who are usually left without pay for long periods of time.