121. Pottier, “Relief and Repatriation,” 423.
122. From that point of view the massive UN official document on Rwanda, The United Nations and Rwanda 1993–1996 Books Series vol. 10 (New York: UN Department of Public Information, 1996), makes for fascinating reading. Everything is there: all the proper procedures, all the careful wording. And everything repeatedly fails.
123. The following account is directly based on Robert Gersony’s experience.
124. The information given was confusing enough so that the journalists either did not believe the story (Michel Bührer, “Rwanda: Massacres, rumeurs et vérité,” Le Journal de Genève, october 8–9, 1994) or when they did, they saw it as a tale of revenge (“revenge,” Economist, october 8, 1994).
125. Un Commission of Expert Report, October 3, 1994.
126. From Mrs. Sadako Ogata, UNHCR high commissioner.
127. Boutroue, Missed Opportunities, 45.
128. Radio France Internationale in BBC/SWB, December 6, 1994.
129. The camps were permanently teeming with rumors that kept interfering with the humanitarians’ work. See Amnesty International, Rwanda and Burundi: The Return Home: Rumours and Realities, London, January 1996.
130. Economist, March 23, 1996.
131. For different reasons, there were no problems with either Tanzania or Burundi.
132. Boutroue, Missed Opportunities, 28.
133. Following limited humanitarian involvement after the genocide, the U.S. Army had started a training program for the RPA and several U.S. officers were quite impressed by the professionalism of their counterparts. Maj. (later Lt. Col.) Rick Orth, the U.S. military attaché in Kigali, played a key role in that warming relationship between RPA and the U.S. Department of Defense.
134. Radio Tanzania in BBC/SWB, April 4, 1996.
135. Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, 355.
Chapter 2
1. Kinyamateka, no. 1425 (July 1995).
2. Economist, June 17, 1995.
3. Marie-laure colson, “Rwanda: Des veuves laissées pour compte,” Libération, May 6, 1996.
4. Randolph Kent, “The Integrated Operations Centre in Rwanda: Coping with Complexity,” in J. Witman and D. Pecock, eds., After Rwanda: The Coordination of United Nations Humanitarian Assistance (London: Macmillan, 1996), 66.
5. Ibid., 73.
6. Ibid., 64.
7. Manuel Da Silva, Personal UNREO End of Mission Report, New York, January 1996. Christine Omutonyi, the RPF stalwart who ran the NGO circus from the government side, was quite good at keeping a tight rein on what she saw either as worthless youngsters or, in the case of the more seasoned humanitarians of Médecins Sans Frontières and Oxfam, as dangerously nosy quasi-spies.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid. All this would come in very handy later to give detailed reports of the massacre.
10. Anonymous IOC memo, April 12, 1995.
11. Kent, “The Integrated Operations Centre in Rwanda,” 78.
12. IOC Situation Report, April 5, 1995. In another report dated April 10, UNREO was writing that “the population of Kibeho, Ndago and Kamana camps has grown substantially of late… . The population of Kamana camp has grown by over 4,500 people in the week since 5 April.”
13. Col. P. G. Warfe [Australian Army], “Address on the Kibeho Massacre,” Australian Red Cross Conference on Humanitarian Law, Hobart, Australia, July 22–23, 1999.
14. Interview with Seth Sendashonga, Nairobi, April 1997.
15. The figure was widely disputed, with estimates ranging from 50,000 to 150,000. This is due to the fact that numbers had to be subtracted for people running away to Zaire or Burundi in anticipation of the catastrophe, and added to for refugees coming from Burundi fleeing the violence there, for more IDPs either returning from repatriation or making a dash for the camp after a massacre in the hills, and so on. The best estimate from an IOC staffer who followed the situation day by day is between 80,000 and 100,000 (interview in Paris, June 1999).
16. There were about eighty Zambian soldiers from UNAMIR at Kibeho.
17. Linda Polman, “The Problem Outside,” Granta, no. 67 (September 1999).
18. Interview with former UNREO member, Washington, DC, October 1996.
19. Ministère de la réhabilitation et de l’Intégration Sociale, Kigali, Closure of Displaced People’s Camps in Gikongoro, April 25, 1995.
20. IOC Situation Report, April 23, 1995, 2330 hrs.
21. Jean-Philippe Ceppi, “60.000 déplacés disparus au Rwanda,” Libération, June 23, 1995. Sixty thousand might be a high figure, but it is likely that between 20,000 and 30,000 IDPs were killed after they left Kibeho.
22. This was totally false. When the so-called hard core (i.e., 311 men, 581 women, and 954 children) were finally evacuated from Kibeho on May 8, what was found behind were two assault rifles (one AK-47, one G-3), two half-empty boxes of ammunition, five machetes, and one grenade. Radio Rwanda quoted in BBC Summary of World Broadcasts (henceforth BBC/SWB), May 9, 1995.
23. T. E. S. Kleine-Ahlbrandt, The Protection Gap in the International Protection of Internally Displaced Persons: The Case of Rwanda (Geneva: Institut Universitaire des Hautes Etudes Internationales, 1996).
24. Kigali Public Prosecutor François-Xavier Nsanzuwera, who had already been frustrated at the way justice was handled, quietly left the country on April 26, finally pushed over the brink by the Kibeho horror.
25. Interview with Seth Sendashonga, Nairobi, April 1997.
26. Jean-Pierre Mugabe, Le Tribun du Peuple, no. 48 (April 1995). Although an RPF veteran, Mugabe was an “interior” Tutsi and a francophone. As such he quickly became aware of the monopoly of power exercised within the RPF by the small group of anglophone Tutsi nicknamed “the Gahini mafia,” from their common place of origin in Kibungo prefecture. See chapter 1, note 53.
27. Radio France Internationale, in BBC/SWB, April 28, 1995.
28. The prison population, which stood at 9,000 in February 1995, had jumped to 44,000 by June.
29. Radio Rwanda, in BBC/SWB, May 26, 1995.
30. Radio Rwanda, in BBC/SWB, May 15, 1995
31. Radio Rwanda, in BBC/SWB, June 8, 1995.
32. Major Kabuye was quite close to Kagame. During the war she had been the one taking care of all his domestic needs, and later she tried to run Kigali as a prim governess, closing down the discos that did not respect her restrictive hours of business, running the prostitutes out of town, and so on. Kagame liked this virtuous approach.
33. Le Monde, June 15, 1995.
34. Stephen Smith, “Le Rwanda passé au crible du renseignement militaire,” Libération, July 18, 1995. It was Seth Sendashonga himself who had leaked the memo to Stephen Smith.
35. Radio Rwanda, in BBC/SWB, August 12, 1995.
36. Sendashonga’s brother Abel Furera had been bourgmestre of Rwamatamu commune in Kibuye prefecture at the time of the genocide and was accused of having some responsibility for the slaughter. In fact he had been in Kigali when the massacres started and he had returned to Rwamatamu on April 17, only to be an impotent witness to the liquidation of three thousand Tutsi by the gendarmerie. When the calumny campaign started he had asked his brother to get him out of the country. Sendashonga refused and Furera was arrested in December 1994, after a perfunctory two-hour inquiry. The story was dug up in the summer of 1995 and Sendashonga was accused of having tried to illegally protect his brother. See “Les frères [sic] du ministre Sendashonga sont coupables,” Imboni, no. 13 (July 1995).
37. Interview with Seth Sendashonga, Nairobi, April 1997.
38. Radio Rwanda, in BBC/SWB, August 28, 1995.
39. Radio Rwanda, in BBC/SWB, August 29, 1995
40. I consider the presence of the Rwandese refugees in Burundi (270,000 in late 1994) in the next section.
41. Since the failure of the Conference Nationale Souveraine (CNS) at the national level and since the end of the cold war, Mobutu’s standing with his former supporters abroad (Belgium, the United states, F
rance to a degree) had deteriorated considerably (see chapter 3).
42. Something that nobody had forgotten locally and everybody seemed to have forgotten internationally (see chapter 3).
43. The Rwenzururu movement in Uganda started as an anticolonial rebellion which extended all the way into the 1990s and contributed to the anti-Museveni Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) guerrillas. For its origins and up to the birth of the ADF, see A. Syahuku-Muhindo, “The Rwenzururu Movement and the Democratic Struggle,” in M. Mamdani and J. Oloka-Onyango, eds., Uganda: Studies in Living Conditions, Popular Movements and Constitutionalism (Vienna: JEP Books, 1994), 273–317.
44. The three crucial steps of that process of neglect are perfectly documented in the excellent study on the genocide by Human Rights Watch Africa, Leave None to Tell the Story, 1999.
45. This is a colonial term meaning “local tribes.” Still commonly used today, it has acquired deeply racist undertones.
46. Roland Pourtier, “La guerre au Kivu: Un conflit multidimensionel,” Afrique Contemporaine, 4th quarter (1996): 20.
47. The Banande, the largest autochthon tribe, held its ground better and felt less threatened, and as a result was initially less hostile toward the Kinyarwanda speakers.
48. Johan Pottier and James Fairhead, “Post-Famine Recovery in Highland Bwisha, Zaire,” Africa 61, no. 4 (1991): 444. See also James Fairhead, “Fields of Struggle: Towards a Social History of Farming Knowledge and Practice in a Bwisha Community, Kivu, Zaire,” PhD diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 1990.
49. This was the so-called Kanyarwanda (Sons of Rwanda) rebellion of 1965, mostly a fight between the Banyarwanda and the majority Banande autochthon tribe.
50. Down from 2.16 hectares (5.4 acres) in 1958. J. C. Willame, Banyarwanda et Banyamulenge (Brussels: CEDAF, 1997), 44.
51. This decree was appended to the MPR statutes and voted on with them, later to be turned into Law 72-002.
52. For a good discussion of the new law, see Oswald Ndeshyo-Rurihose, La nationalité de la population zaïroise d’expression kinyarwanda au regard de la loi du 29 juin 1981 (Kinshasa: CERIA, 1992). The author, a former dean of Kinshasa University Law Faculty, remarked, “Since Zaire has nine borders with other countries and that many tribes are divided by these borders, this law puts the country in a dangerous situation for future security.” These were prophetic words indeed.
53. The Banyarwanda were running very profitable smuggling operations with Rwanda. Up to 1990 there was no Tutsi-Hutu split in those operations, many Zairian smuggling bosses being Tutsi and most of their over-the-border counterparts being Hutu.
54. Médecins Sans Frontières, “Des conflits fonciers aux luttes inter-ethniques dans la zone de santé de Masisi,” Goma, April 1993.
55. See Aloys Tegera, “Les réconciliations communautaires: Le cas des massacres au Nord Kivu,” in Les crises politiques au Burundi et au Rwanda (Villeneuve d’Ascq, France: Université des Sciences et Technologies de Lille, 1995), 395–402; Faustin Ngabu, “Massacres de 1993 dans les zones de Walikale et de Masisi,” Dialogue, no. 192 (August–September 1996): 37–46.
56. Willame, Banyarwanda et Banyamulenge, 76.
57. For an introductory view of this much talked-about group, see G. Weis, Le pays d’Uvira (Brussels: ASRC, 1959); J. Hiernaux, “Note sur les Tutsi de l’Itombwe,” Bulletin et Mémoires de la société d’anthropologie de Paris 7, series 11 (1965).
58. Alexis Kagame, Abrégé de l’ethno-histoire du Rwanda, vol. 1 (Butare: Editions Universitaires du Rwanda, 1972). Kagame mentions the fact that some troops of Mwami (king) Kigeli II Nyamuheshera had settled across the Ruzizi. But Kagame has a tendency to exaggerate the power of the old Rwanda kingdom.
59. Catherine Newbury, The Cohesion of Oppression (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 48–49. Mwami Kigeri “Rwabugiri” was a great conqueror who unified Rwanda by force and brought many noble lineages into submission to the new centralized royal power. He died in 1895.
60. Simba (lions) was the name the pro-Lumumba anti-Western Congolese rebels gave themselves in the 1960s.
61. A few younsters had joined the rebels on a personal basis. This limited participation does not prevent munyamulenge author Joseph Mutambo from writing, “The Banyamulenge, like the Bafulero and the Babembe, massively joined the rebellion.” Les Banyamulenge (Kinshasa: Imprimerie Saint Paul, 1997), 83. It is false, but it shows the Banyamulenge as good anti-Mobutu “patriots,” like their neighbors, a useful stance at the time the book was written, and even more later.
62. For a scholarly assessment of these events, see Muzuri Gasinzira, “Evolution des conflits ethniques dans l’Itombwe des origines à 1982,” BA thesis, University of Lubumbashi, History Department, 1983. For a more militant one by an actor in the 1990s conflicts, see Müller Ruhimbika, Les Banyamulenge du Congo-Zaïre entre deux guerres (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001).
63. Between 1970 and 1984 the population of Uvira grew from 14,000 to 138,000.
64. See the interview with the Belgian geographer Georges Weis: “Ils sont devenus les Banyamulenge en 1973,” La Libre Belgique, October 30, 1996.
65. Quoted in Willame, Banyarwanda et Banyamulenge, 87.
66. See Baraza la Kivu, Open Letter to Mr Kumar Rupeshinge, Secretary General of International Alert, Montreal, October 25, 1996.
67. This is the figure given by Mutambo, Les Banyamulenge, 23–26.
68. These and other similar points of ideology will be discussed in more detail in chapter 10.
69. After the war this was to be the ideological underpinning of the 2006 rebellion by Gen. Laurent Nkunda.
70. During the Clinton administration, when the U.S. government was keen to have people forget its disgraceful role in the Rwandese genocide. Without the same burden of guilt, the Bush administration was later to prove much more even-handed.
71. Rather than “pro-anything,” since its supporters are a mixed bag, from devious revisionist ideologues to honest Zairian civil society backers.
72. For this episode, see Gérard Prunier: The Rwanda Crisis (1959–1994): History of a Genocide (London: Hurst, 1995), 299–305.
73. Joël Boutroue to Kamel Morjane, November 21, 1994, UNHCR Archive 19/7. The archive also contains copies of the memos exchanged during the following days.
74. By this the authors of the memo meant the local Zairian Hutu.
75. Letter from Mrs. Sadako Ogata, UNHCR high commissioner, to UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali, August 30, 1994, in the high commissioner’s private archive.
76. See chapter 1.
77. UNHCR Goma Situation Report no. 22, April 20, 1995, UNHCR archive 19/7, Geneva.
78. The old grand master of France’s African policies under Gen. de Gaulle had returned to the position of political adviser to Jacques Chirac, first behind the scenes in 1993 and then officially when Chirac was elected to the presidency in 1995.
79. Interview with a high-ranking French civil servant, Paris, March 1998.
80. A. Glaser and S. Smith, “Le retour en grâce négocié de Mobutu,” Libération, September 2–3, 1995; “Expulsions Part of Mobutu’s Master Plan,” Africa Analysis, September 8, 1995; “Zaire: En direct de l’Elysée,” La Lettre du Continent, September 21, 1995.
81. W. R. Urasa to A. Liria-Franch, December 13, 1995, UNHCR archive 19/7, Geneva.
82. Colonel Bizimungu was then moving freely around Zaire and was a frequent guest at Mobutu’s palace in Gbadolite. Interview with a Belgian former close confidante of President Mobutu, Brussels, October 1999. Nevertheless Mobutu promised Jimmy Carter everything he wanted when they met at Faro, Portugal, in September 1995.
83. Mrs. Sadako Ogata to UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali, May 9, 1995, UNHCR archive 19/7, Geneva.
84. From a confidential UN memo excerpted in La Lettre du Continent, June 22, 1995.
85. Sunday Times (London), November 10, 1996.
86. Washington Post, November 10, 1996. The camps received eight thousand
to nine thousand tons of food per month, plus a lot of medicines, which meant good contracts for the suppliers.
87. Radio France Internationale, in BBC/SWB, May 9, 1996.
88. On October 22, 1995, he met President Museveni at the UN in New York and agreed both on Carter’s continuing mediation and on elections for May 1997.
89. In early April an Air Zaire Boeing 737 was forced to land in Cyangugu by bad weather while on a Bukavu–Goma flight. It was found to be carrying weapons. Radio France Internationale, in BBC/SWB, April 9, 1996.
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