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

by Gerard Prunier

  Finally comes the genocide phenomenon itself. Citizens of postmodern times cannot accept the radical heterogeneity of their world. Phenomena have to fit within the parameters of a “filtered” experience, preferably Western. The result is a constant comparison with Germany and the genocide of the Jews, which is why what happened in the Congo is often literally “not seen” because it does not fit such a format. The view of many observers (and this includes seasoned diplomats, politicians, and NGO activists) is limited as to whether or not an element of the situation can be linked to pro- or antigenocide formations, even fantasized ones, meaning “Nazi” or “anti-Nazi.” Since the word Nazi has acquired in modern times the moral equivalence of the Devil in medieval parlance, it acts as a kind of intellectual anaesthesia in any attempt at analyzing the specifically complex present rather than reaching for a parallel with a more familiar past.

  To conclude this last part, and perhaps to sum up the chapter thus far, I would like to comment briefly on what could be called the “feel-good factor.” It is a factor common to diplomacy, to humanitarianism, to the need to impose a legal order upon chaos, and to what I called “the struggle for the moral high ground.” It is the need to make the world pleasant, or at least understandable. We wish for things that are good to hear. We wish to restore our surroundings to some kind of predictability. We wish to believe that we are good upright human beings, doing the right thing and (hopefully) better than the brutes out there doing those other things. Most of the social, political, judicial, intellectual, and humanitarian devices used in dealing with the “Congolese” conflict from the outside have tended toward that smoothing out of the world. The whole thing was too awful; better to not really get into it.

  I do not mean that we did not care about the populations involved. But I contend that the factor that was predominant in the way we dealt with them was our own peace of mind. Thus the most vicious ad hominem attacks on colleagues, researchers, and assorted writers are perhaps motivated less by a desire to crush the adversary than by a preoccupation with keeping or regaining our own internal balance. The violence of what has happened in eastern and central Africa has left few of those who looked at it from up close completely intact.

  An attempt at a philosophical conclusion

  Having reached this point, what can I say about the consequences of the central African situation as the clouds of war have largely melted away but left looming masses of further uncertainties behind them?

  The “Congolese” conflict has, in many ways, been the last gasp of the dying order of the cold war. Communism was no longer part of the cognitive map, and democracy, up to then an empty word on the continent, had begun a life of its own since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Along with the removal of the apartheid regime in South Africa, it had created a new readiness to challenge the injustices of the past, real or imagined, but along fault lines the international white establishment was unfamiliar with, especially because democracy in Africa meant taking everything back to the drawing board: regimes, tribes, nations, borders, economic networks, the states themselves. The 1993 failure at establishing a democratic regime after free and fair elections in Burundi was a warning shot. Without communism and away from colonialism, African problems would now have to be taken seriously, for themselves and in themselves. And African problems were enormous.

  This is why later efforts at “bringing things back to normal” cannot be taken seriously. Things were not normal in the first place. By 1996 the Zairian core of the continent had become a hologram flickering on the brink of its own extinction. The United States was fed up with its old accomplice of so many years and dreamed of nothing better than to see him go and be replaced by—who knows, a “democracy” perhaps. But how? Did anybody in Washington really see the reality of Zaire in 1996, apart from a few old Africa hands who were often dismissed as doomsayers? As for Rwanda, Burundi, and the two Kivus, the ghosts of genocide, past or future, real or fantasized, were all conveniently attributed to an evil and conveniently overthrown regime. “Democracy” would take root there too. How? The answer remained fuzzy, and asking the question too forcefully brought about suspicions of sympathies for the génocidaire regime. General Kagame was an African Adenauer who would commit the tropical Nazis to oblivion. Uganda, which had barely recovered from its own civil wars, was seen as the new bulwark of a specifically African form of quasi-democratic government; its connection with Rwanda was perceived as benevolent and its own internal contradictions were attributed to negligible holdovers from an obscure “tribal” past. Sudan’s civil war was systematically blamed on the new radical Muslim regime that had taken power in 1989, conveniently forgetting that Sadiq al-Mahdi’s “democracy” had fueled it and that it had been started in the early 1980s by the destructive policies of that great friend of the West, President Jaafar al-Nimeiry. Further south, Angola had been involved in a titanic struggle between good and evil. But since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the good ones had become evil and vice versa. After the cold war logic did not apply any more; a new oil-based economic logic now came into play. But the real sociological and cultural nature of the two well-funded entities that wanted ultimate triumph even at the cost of their nation’s survival was never seriously looked into.

  But once we have surrounded Zaire with such a ring of pain and uncertainty, does it all add up to some coherent whole, to some kind of a geopolitical interlocking of conflicts? Not really. Many Africans have called the conflict that was about to begin over the Congo Basin “our first World War.” It is not an altogether false comparison because of the automatic state loyalties linking regimes. But this multiple interlocking nature hides a basic difference: the treaty-bound rivalries of competing European imperialisms around the Balkans before 1914 were different because popular loyalties, everywhere, went centrally to the states. Not so here. Contrary to Europe in 1914, loyalties did not go to the states as such but were divided among myriad cellular identities, among which citizenship in the formal sense was only one.

  Nevertheless some lines are now beginning to take shape. First of all, if we start with preconflict situations, one thing is certain: the African states that became involved were not nations. All were at varying degrees of integration, from fairly homogenized (Zambia) to split in two (the Sudan, Angola) by way of low-intensity rivalries (Central African Republic) capable of suddenly bursting into flames if properly fanned for external reasons (Congo-Brazzaville). But no state was internally safe. Any form of outside subversion could always find internal helpers for several different and cumulative reasons:

  1. Boundaries were arbitrary and tribal identities crossed them. Though not overly preoccupying in some cases (the border between the Central African Republic and Congo-Brazzaville, for example), it could be a major cause of conflict, such as when considering “persons of uncertain identity” in eastern Zaire. Everybody politely acknowledged the 1963 OAU Charter principle on the intangibility of borders inherited from colonization. But now that communism was dead and the Western enforcers were not really willing to stand for African abstractions anymore, everybody violated it in practice.

  2. These states were universally weak because they lacked both legitimacy and money. Legitimacy was the biggest problem because even those states that did or could have money, such as the mining states, were also weak. Loyalty to the state is not an internalized feeling in today’s Africa. Which does not mean that nationalism is unknown, but that nationalism is essentially reactive. In a difficult economic environment the “hated foreigner” is simply the uninvited guest at somebody’s poorly served table. Internally states are seen as cows to be milked. But because there is little milk and the cow can go dry at any time, it would perhaps be better to say that the state is a cow to be bled quickly before it slips into somebody else’s hands. The state is an asset for the group in power, but that asset is fragile, there are no commonly accepted rules for future devolution of power, and things have to be grabbed while they last. The notion of a common good t
o which everybody contributes and which deserves respect for that reason is very dim. The state is always somebody’s state, never the State in the legal abstract form beloved of Western constitutional law. It is the Museveni dictatorship for the Acholi, the Arab state for the southern Sudanese, the mestiço state for UNITA, or the Tutsi state for the Hutu. When tribes are not the main problem, pseudo-tribes or other groupings will do. So much for tribalism as a “resurgence of the past”; it is in fact more of a raw material for the transformations of the present.

  3. The reason the political struggles were not primarily state struggles (although the states did play enormous roles in them) is due to the combination of point 1 and point 2. The state is weak, whereas identities are strong but multiple and overlapping. And behind all these we increasingly find individuals. Individualism has grown exponentially in postcolonial Africa, and individuals did play a tremendous role in the conflicts. But not independently. Individuals belong to a state. They also belong to tribes, religious groups, regions, age groups, economic networks, without any monocausality. So powerful individuals will try to use the state for the group’s benefit (and also for their own personal benefit), and groups perceived rightly or wrongly as powerful will try to instrumentalize one another and together will try to instrumentalize the state. The notion of an “objective” state above the melee is a touching Western ideological construct. Hence the later difficulties of diplomats, who, by definition, are used to dealing with relatively autonomous states and not with weak but voracious multifaceted entities.

  4. Why do we have such a process? Because of economics. The poverty is so massive, so grinding, that anybody with a minimum of perception can be relied upon to activate his or her identity segments into some kind of a militant pseudo-globality if it brings economic rewards. This is why it is always easier to recruit militias in towns and in cities than in the countryside: city people know they are poor because they have the means (radios, TVs, cinemas, newspapers) and the references (rich people, foreigners) that tell them about their poverty. Deep in the bush poverty can still be experienced as “traditionalism,” at least for some of the people and for some of the time, for lack of a vantage point. The international community is often in the position of the well-meaning charitable passerby offering a sandwich or a few coins to aggressive slum dwellers violently demanding an end to their misery. To its horror the charitable international community will discover that this can very well mean killing most of the people they see as responsible for their own dire situation. The international community usually does not know how to react to such crude prejudices and tries to keep the situation in a polite limbo, where the myth of a possible future consensus can be entertained. The economic distress and instinctive exclusion of the competitors are often the unspoken background of the outwardly polite “peace negotiations.” This is often explained off the record as “ethnic hatred,” as if ethnicity were a structurally given fact, like a geological structure, and not the product of dynamic historical interaction.

  5. Finally, the very substance of the new African international politics that unfolded with the war freely remained radically different from politics in the West, even if the same “democratic” vocabulaty has now been widely put in use. Power is both more tangible and more magical than what Western countries expect it to be. Here too their own past could be a guide. But their own past has been forgotten in two steps, the first one in 1945, the second one in 1989. OECD countries often seem to act as if they had always lived under a legal-bureaucratic system, a rather amnesic attitude if one still remembers the first half of the twentieth century. In Africa charismatic leadership is the rule, not the exception. The magic component of that charisma is never far from the surface. And the routinization of charisma is difficult due to a lack of both funds and internalized shared values. As for the legal-bureaucratic governments that rich donor countries talk about, it is a possible future ideal, but in the present it is largely an abstraction. Nevertheless, actions will often be undertaken “as if” it were a reality.

  This leaves us with an essential question: Could it all happen again? One of the unintended consequences of the war has been the mushroom-like proliferation of a conflict-oriented cottage industry. Hundreds of NGOs, think tanks, and “conflict resolution centers” have sprung up all over, both in Africa and in the developed world. Staffed by hordes of eager young graduates under the guidance of seasoned para-academic entrepreneurs, they churn out enormous amounts of rather colorless and uncontroversial material which seems mostly designed to ensure future funding from that revered target audience of the business, the “donors.”132 The business is doing fairly well, but because the number of conflicts in Africa over the past ten years has steadily decreased, the sector’s activity is now increasingly geared toward more abstract categories, such as “good governance,” “security reform,” “conflict prevention” (rather than just plain old “resolution”), or even, more ambitiously, “genocide prevention.” HIV, gender-based politics, and child soldiers are frequently mined sidelines. What is the impact of that industry on the reality of African conflicts? Not huge, it seems. At the level of actual existing conflicts it is largely an ammunition provider. The conflict actors bombard each other with reports, variably described as “authoritative,” “controversial,” or (more rarely, since the war of words is muted) “questionable.” The UN and various governments have entered this paper game, but their documents are only marginally more influential than those of the NGOs. As for conflict prevention, this seems a little bit like planning for the prophylaxis of a disease you do not know how to cure.

  But once this paper fog is seen for what it is, as more of an ideological smokescreen than a real determining factor, there are a number of real parameters that have changed if we compare today’s situation with that of fifteen years ago:

  • First of all, there are some stirrings of economic development in Africa. These should not be exaggerated, since the six “economic dynamos” of the continent (i.e., those with 5 percent or more of yearly economic growth) are all mining economies, with the exception of Mozambique.133 And then the rate of growth has of course to be seen as calculated in relation to an often incredibly low baseline. But this is a small change, and hopefully the beginning of a bigger one.134

  • The end of the cold war has deprived dictatorships of the excuse of being allies of the “Free World” in order to secure their regimes against the danger of democratization. There are now worrying signs that the “war on terror” so beloved of Washington’s strategists is beginning to play the same role.135

  • The general political Zeitgeist has changed to a point where naked violence in the exercise of power à la Idi Amin is not permissible today. It has to be somewhat hidden from view, and even “protected” regimes like Equatorial Guinea or Chad have to help their protectors through concerted efforts at believable hypocrisy. But even if we agree with Oscar Wilde that hypocrisy is the homage rendered by vice to virtue, it remains better than the naked displays of violence that were tolerated in the 1970s and 1980s. Hypocrisy puts its purveyor in the ambiguous position of having to permanently justify himself, which is better than being able to shamelessly flaunt his violence.

  • African economies are getting more internationalized and therefore more conscious of their overseas link.136 This is of course counterbalanced by the growth of a Chinese influence which is not particularly interested in human rights and which can be used as a shield against the West.137

  Are these finally relatively small changes sufficient to prevent a recurrence of the monstrous conflict that tore up one-third of the continent between 1996 and nearly now? The answer is probably not. Does it mean that such a violent conflict could happen again? Here again, the answer is probably not. The death (and rebirth) of Zaire is a unique case. No other country in Africa today, probably not even Nigeria or South Africa,138 has the potential of creating such a continentwide upheaval. Existing conflicts, such as in the Sudan, Chad, and Somalia,
are structurally circumscribed. This does not make them less tragic, but their potential for contamination is much more limited.

  It is in this way that “Africa’s First World War” will probably remain a unique phenomenon, but one that was, here again like the Thirty Years’ War in Europe, a transforming moment in the history of the continent. Albeit in ways that are quite far from the international community-approved ways, Africa has now entered the modern age. Following its own rocky road.

  APPENDIX I

  SETH SENDASHONGA’S MURDER

  The first attempt on Seth Sendashonga’s life (1951–1998) took place in February 1996, in Nairobi, where he had been living in political exile after being fired from his position as Minister of the Interior in the National Unity Cabinet of Rwanda on 29 August 1995 (see Chapter 1). Seth was called at home by a fellow Rwandese exile who offered to give him documents proving that there had been an attempted mutiny within the RPA. He went to the appointment only to fall in an ambush where two men repeatedly shot at him with pistols. Two bullets, which did not endanger his life, hit him but his young nephew who had gone with him was seriously wounded. Before falling unconscious he had recognized one of his would-be killers as one of his former bodyguards when he had been a minister. The other gunman was Francis Mugabo, a staff member of the Rwandese Embassy in Kenya who was caught with the proverbial smoking gun in the toilet of a service station where he was trying to dispose of the pistol used in the attack. The Kenya government asked Rwanda to lift Mr. Mugabo’s diplomatic immunity, which Kigali refused. This led to a major row between the two countries, resulting in the closure of the Rwandese Embassy in Nairobi and a break in diplomatic relations. When the attempt on Seth’s life had been carried out he was just about to fly to Brussels to launch his new opposition movement, the Forces de Résistance pour la Démocratie (FRD) with his old friend and colleague, former Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu. He carried out his plans after recovering from his wounds and FRD was officially launched in April 1997. A sizable portion of the party’s political platform was given to a detailed and unsparing analysis of the Rwandese genocide. “You cannot imagine the difficulty I had to convince my friends to include that analysis in the document,” he later told me when I visited him in Nairobi. When I remarked that this part of his party’s platform was on the contrary a very valuable contribution because it was an honest and realistic assessment of the genocide from a mostly Hutu political group he answered me with a sigh: