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

by Gerard Prunier

  Did the international community actually act? Well, yes and no. It all depends how one defines acting. In the new, politically correct age ushered in by the demise of the “Evil Empire,” actual action is not as important as its representation. What matters is image perception. Therefore the international community tried to offer the picture of (virtuous) action, in the same way that the United States wanted to be seen as recuperating a clean soul and France as shoring up its tottering grandeur. It is my contention that none of the state actors actually cared about what was really happening.60 This does not apply of course to civil society actors and NGOs. But the various states making up the amorphous body of the “international community” were happy to go through the motions of aggrieved concern, without any of the urgency that was so obvious during the cold war period, when actual physical involvement, financial and military, was essential.61 Actually, a large part of the misreading of the situation by the Congolese themselves was due to their mechanical projection of obsolete cold war patterns onto the new dispensation of the 1990s. “Classical” imperialism was dead, replaced by media diplomacy. The reasons were simple: there were no more “real” (i.e., strategic or economic) stakes, and in the wake of the Rwandese horror, image juggling was the paramount preoccupation. There was of course a vague concern about “destabilization,” but, as September 11 was soon to show, this was an “Islamic” problem, never taken very seriously as far as Africa was concerned.

  A special passing mention has to be made of “African diplomacy,” as this was the period of a growing fashion for “African solutions to African problems,” actually an elegant way of passing the devalued buck of African geopolitics from those who could to those who could not.62 The Great Lakes crisis exploded just as this new “policy” started to develop. Washington had dreamed up its African Crisis Response Initiative just as the French paralleled their military disengagement from the continent63 with their RECAMP program. Neither of the two initiatives ever worked, and the sick baby was left in the hands of the African actors themselves, particularly the regional organizations. If we forget about the (O)AU, whose absolute impotence had by then become legendary, this meant the Southern African Development Community in the case of the Congo. But the SADC was a house divided against itself, with Zimbabwe and Angola siding with Kinshasa while South Africa could not be expected to cooperate with its geopolitical rivals.64 The result was endless meetings about “peace” that did not change anything in the way the conflict was unfolding. In the meantime the United Nations was left in its usual thankless position of having to manage what member states did not want to touch directly. The UN was sliding into complete insolvency as its Department of Peacekeeping Operations had over thirty-eight thousand troops deployed worldwide by 2000 (with many in Africa) at a cost of $2.2 billion per year, while at the same time the United States owed it $1.69 billion and other member states $1.21 billion.65 Starting with the December 11, 1998, Security Council statement on The Situation in the DRC, UN pronouncements on the conflict were the ultimate experience in toothlessness. After failing so miserably to stop the genocide in Rwanda and to solve the resulting refugee crisis, the UN did not feel it could condemn outright the invaders of the Congo who had looked as if they were righting the UN wrongs in 1996–1997 and who still surfed on their anti-Mobutu credentials. Kofi Annan kept asking for “thousands of troops,”66 knowing very well that the member states had neither the will to intervene nor the courage to say so. Resolution 1291 of February 24, 2000, authorized the deployment of 5,537 men for MONUC, which would not actually be deployed for over two years, and Resolution 1304 of June 16, 2000, asked foreign troops to leave the Congo, but without specifying a deadline.67

  For the actors of the war, in line with the image diplomacy of postmodern times, the stakes in dealing with the international community were essentially media-oriented. This should be understood restrictively. Contrary to some past African horrors (the Biafran war, apartheid, the Ethiopian famine of 1984–1985, and finally Somalia in 1992), the Congolese continental conflict was never a “hot topic” for the media. Thus media positioning by its actors did not angle for the massive international aid which was unlikely to ever materialize, particularly in military terms. Rather, the parties to the war aimed more modestly at a “good image” among a select circle of specialists in order to receive “development” international aid, which would then enable them to channel their own resources into fighting the war while the foreign Good Samaritans would foot the domestic bills. As we saw earlier, Uganda and Rwanda were way ahead in that game, whereas Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s Congo never understood how to play it and even thought they could do without it. It is largely the economic results of this image gap that enabled the two rather poor countries of the east to keep chewing away at their giant neighbor for four years. With a dash of exaggeration one could say that the game was over the moment the old Marxist the international community loved to hate got killed and was replaced by a young, lean, smooth operator who understood the rules of postmodern diplomacy. Since the end of the cold war reality has become a poor second to image. But fighting a war still means mobilizing resources, and image manipulation has turned into the new way for the poor to mobilize the resources they do not have.68

  Regardless of the various capacities at image formation, international mobilization in the widespread African conflict always remained far below what was devoted to other, more important parts of the world. If we take, for example, 1999, the core year of the African conflict as well as the year of the Kosovo crisis, the following summary is quite eloquent.

  Great Lakes Region

  Kosovo

  Population (millions)

  86

  3

  UN Consolidated Appeal ($m)

  314

  471

  Foreign troop deployment

  0

  30,000

  A discreet unspoken racism could always be rephrased as “a question of strategic priorities.”

  It is interesting to see that MONUC, which, under Bill Swing’s leadership, eventually became a serious factor in the postwar transition period, had to wait until South African diplomacy had leveled the ground before it could take off. International involvement was still too timid to be pioneering.

  Moral indignation in lieu of political resolve

  The media treatment of the Rwandese genocide was largely dealt with in moral terms. Involving as it did a complex mixture of anthropology, history, geography, African politics, and colonial guilt, the political analysis of what happened was abandoned to “specialists.” The still largely unexplained tragedy was soon left behind, officially attributed to the evils of human nature and, perhaps more subjectively, to the “darkness” Europeans tend to perceive in Africa. Meanwhile the serious business of dealing with the consequences was contracted out to “realistic” professionals.69 But because these practitioners were left to face a gaping intellectual and political black hole, “moral” formulas were called on to explain away the gap. This is why the next three subsections of this chapter are in fact arbitrary and can be seen as three different aspects of a constant interplay between morality, efficiency, and understanding, with “moralism” too often used as an excuse for a lack of hard analysis and a weak political resolve.

  In a book written when only the first part of the Great Lakes tragedy had unfolded,70 the professional and practitioner John Prendergast could call his first chapter “The Seven Deadly Sins” and the second one “Good Intentions on the Road to Hell.” After being overglorified in the 1970s and 1980s, humanitarian organizations were criticized in the 1990s as naïvely romantic at best and self-serving business concerns at worst.71 Criticism has tended to concentrate on three areas, and all three came to the fore during the Congo war:

  • Humanitarian organizations are not what they are touted to be, and too much of their budget goes into administration, publicity, and fund raising.72

  • They are either blind or complicit when their resour
ces are hijacked by the fighting parties in a conflict.73

  • They are naïve and don’t even understand what is going on under their noses.74

  Paradoxically the demand for their services had grown exponentially at the same time as criticism piled up. The reason was simple. As the cold war waned so did strategic interest in what used to be called “the Third World.” But local conflicts did not recede; far from it. As a result humanitarians had to fill in for delinquent politicians. Even diplomacy tended to turn away from being an extension of politics to internationally furthering charitable concerns.75 This mushrooming moral treatment of politics tended to obscure issues rather than clarity them.

  In central Africa it had started even before the genocide crisis was completely over. The two main political problems—how to stop the genocide and how to deal with its perpetrators—were both left hanging. While completely unwilling to intervene militarily the international community kept asking for a cease-fire, without realizing that this amounted to an incitement to finish the genocide. And it did nothing about the retreating génocidaires because as hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees were fleeing into Zaire and a cholera epidemic had broken out, the instinctive international response was charitable.76 This set the stage for the next catastrophe: the direct confrontation between triumphant military adventurers and unrepentant génocidaires. There was a sharing of tasks. The pure humanitarian component of the international community fed indiscriminately the refugees and their evil minders in Goma, while the diplomats brought their moral embarrassment with them to Kigali. This added to two parallel mistakes: on the one hand, neglecting the degree of control the former regime still had over the refugees and the degree of militarization of the camps, and on the other hand, not analyzing the nature of the new Rwandese government and promoting General Kagame as a kind of Rwandese Konrad Adenauer bent on peace, reconciliation, and extirpating the evils of ethnicism. Both camps, for different reasons, were deemed worthy of “humanitarian” help, and both were prepared to use it for their political and military ends. But rushing into humanitarian action had four advantages for the international community: (1) it allowed it to do what it knew best; (2) it was the cheapest alternative to any form of durable military commitment; (3) it was the most consensual course of action, apparently value-free—Who could be against feeding starving children?—thus avoiding unpleasant arguments about the political responsibilities of some major UN members before and during the genocide; and (4) it was highly visible for the media and could provide world public opinion with a low-cost alternative to real political action. This is of course not to say that humanitarian action was not needed. The situation both in Rwanda and in the camps was atrocious and deserved to be dealt with. But what was not acceptable was the role of political substitute that humanitarianism was asked to play. To their honor some (not all) of the humanitarian NGOs present in the camps understood this and withdrew from a crooked game. Those working in Rwanda never looked twice, the horror of the genocide acting as a kind of magic screen, hiding any further reality. As for the UN agencies that did not have a choice, their situation got progressively worse as time went on. Sadako Ogata’s struggle with New York to obtain some kind of political commitment became tragic. The anti-Mobutu war of 1996–1997 pushed humanitarian schizophrenia to new heights when the partial return of the Hutu refugees to Rwanda became enough to exonerate the international community from any further concern about their fate.

  Compared to that first period, humanitarian action was much more muted during the second conflict of 1998–2001, precisely at a time when it was needed more than ever because “civilian losses and the destruction of infrastructures [had] become military objectives as such and [were] not any more simply collateral damages of the war.”77 Part of the problem was that as the humanitarian situation got progressively worse,78 the Congolese reaction to it grew more defensive, not to say paranoid. The January 2, 1999, decree on the state of siege severely curtailed humanitarian activities in the noncombat zones, while the fighting put at least one-third of the county practically off-limits to humanitarian organizations. Apart from the ICRC, humanitarian agencies found their work severely hampered in the areas where they were most needed. This demonstrated the tragic limitations of the humanitarian approach to what were coyly termed “complex emergencies.” The same absence of political will that had replaced politics by humanitarianism after the worst of the crisis in 1994 was powerless to support humanitarian work at the height of another crisis, which was largely the product of the nontreatment of the previous one. Faced with this the international community could only utter truisms, such as the central message of the Brahimi Report: “The key conditions for the success of future complex operations are political support, rapid deployment with a robust force posture and a sound peace-building strategy.”79 Who could quarrel with that? But equally truly, who was ready to do it?

  Set up by a UN resolution dated November 8, 1994, the ICTR has been plagued by monumental problems from day one. To be fair, how could it be otherwise for an international court manned by people of eighty-seven nationalities whose mandate was to investigate in agreement with modern legal standards a massive genocide organized largely by word of mouth?80 But even if we accept the technical premises, there were numerous difficulties in both conception and functioning. First of all, the tribunal’s mandate was limited to acts committed between January 1 and December 31, 1994. At the time of its creation that period seemed reasonable. But nobody foresaw that December 31, 1994, would be far from the end of the story and that hundreds of thousands more were still to die in events related to the genocide.

  The ICTR was conceived of as a neat tool that would bring a messy and ambiguous situation to a tidy conclusion by 2008 at the latest. But reality refused to let itself be penned up in that convenient enclosure. To make matters worse, the court soon combined three different evils: it was an embodiment of the worst aspects of UN bureaucratic inefficiency; a muted, closed arena for jousting over all the unacknowledged political contradictions of the genocide; and a swamp of nepotistic and corrupt practices. The first aspect is perhaps the most visible because it reduced the pace of the trials to a crawl. Every single type of bureaucratic malpractice that can be imagined has been present at the court: lengthy procedures lasting at times nearly two years, endless indictments,81 the hiring of suspected génocidaires as investigators for the tribunal, the hiring of staff who did not know French when 80 percent of the documents made available to the court were in that language, no simultaneous translation in the chambers until 2001 although the majority of the witnesses spoke nothing but Kinyarwanda, a thoroughly insufficient and largely incompetent translation service, files getting lost, experts and witnesses being discouraged from working with the court because of its sheer confusion and incompetence,82 and completely erratic behavior at the highest levels.83 The result was that, whereas it had taken the Nuremberg Tribunal one year (from November 1945 to November 1946) to judge twenty-four Nazis and hang ten, the ICTR had managed to carry out only twenty procedures in ten years at a cost of around $700 million.

  The second failing of the ICTR, its role in confusing politicomoral issues even further, is perhaps graver. From the beginning Kigali said that it wanted quick and expeditious justice. The sincerity of this claim can be questioned, and I will do so further on. But at least the public intention was there and, in the aftermath of the genocide, it was difficult to dispute it. But the display of public confusion and bickering at the ICTR was such that the first two prosecutors (Judge Richard Goldstone of South Africa and Judge Louise Arbour of Canada) did not fulfill their mandate. For Kigali this was a godsend. In 1996, at the time of the attack on Zaire, and then later at a variety of junctures (the 1997 northern infiltration-cum-repression, the Garreton inquiry into the fate of the disappeared Hutu refugees, the 1998 invasion of the Congo), it was most useful diplomatically for General Kagame to be able to keep playing on the guilt feelings of the Western countries, and partic
ularly of the United States. The ICTR mess gave him a clear line of fire: you (meaning the international community) cannot give us justice; therefore we have to take justice into our own hands. The fine line between self-administered justice and violent military action thus became conveniently blurred. This put the Rwandese government indirectly in control of the ICTR: because 80 percent of the casework for the accusations rested on the use of witnesses, Kigali would fine-tune the release or blocking of testimonies according to what it needed from the tribunal. This was, diplomatically speaking, a magnificent piece of work, with the Rwandese literally running circles around a clumsy and incompetent ICTR that, being largely ignorant of the long and complicated history of the region,84 most of the time did not even understand that it was being manipulated. The main fear of the Kigali regime was that it itself would be accused of the massacres it had committed after the genocide. Because the ICTR was not supposed to look at facts posterior to December 31, 1994, the bulk of those massacres would not fall under its mandate anyway. But this posed the question of reopening the Gersony Report file, something the UN was most unwilling to do, given the fact that it had suppressed the facts unearthed by Robert Gersony in September–October 1994, that is, well within the court’s mandate. This would have put into question the moral and political stance of both Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali and then Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Thus the UN found itself in a de facto alliance with Kigali in not looking any further into RPF crimes against humanity, even if only a very small portion of those would fall under the ICTR mandate.85 In late 2003 this was to be at the heart of the controversy about renewing Carla del Ponte’s mandate.86 The relationship between Kigali and the ICTR was best described by the Human Rights Watch researcher Lars Waldorf: “Rwanda has the Tribunal over a barrel. They can hold it hostage because they know that it needs witnesses to come and testify in important cases in the genocide.”87 And talking publicly about certain things could be a very risky business: “Each time I say something a member of my family is either killed or put in jail,” declared former defense minister James Gasana, who is living in exile in Switzerland, “and my case is only one among many.”88