The Mwami of Kitchanga, the hereditary Hunde chief, a stout man in a brown velvet shirt, wire-rimmed spectacles, and a white baseball cap, agreed. “Truly,” he said, “the Hutus want to exterminate all the Tutsis.” His own people, too, were having a hard time protecting themselves: their fighters included boys of six and seven, and their arsenal consisted largely of spears, bows and arrows, and homemade rifles that fired nails. “It’s not an automatic,” the Mwami said of such a gun, “but it kills.” Kitchanga, which was formerly home to a mixed population of about two thousand people, was now an exclusively Hunde stronghold whose ranks had been swollen by an influx of thirty-six thousand displaced people. The Red Cross and the UN estimated that about half the population of Masisi, some three hundred thousand people, were displaced from their homes. Even the Mwami was living in temporary housing; his estate five miles out of town had been destroyed. I found him drinking banana beer in his “office”—a gazebo made of UN plastic sheeting—and he told me that Kitchanga was a very hospitable place, but that by giving shelter to Tutsis, it was making itself a magnet for a Hutu attack. He wanted the Tutsis out of there.
The Tutsis had to be evacuated or they would be killed. The problem was that the way to the Rwandan border ran through Hutuland and past the camps. The word in Kitchanga was that the International Organization for Migration, an intergovernmental agency, had promised to come with a convoy of trucks, accompanied by hired Zairean soldiers for security, to take the Tutsis away. But nobody really trusted that this would happen.
DURING THE NIGHT in Kitchanga, I heard the distant pop of gunfire, and in the morning heavy fighting between Hutus and Hundes was reported north of the village. I was told to return to Goma. As I left, three fat pillars of smoke were rising across the valley where Hunde fighters were sacking a Hutu village. Along the road, displaced Hundes were marching toward Kitchanga—women with armchairs bound to their backs, men toting troughs for brewing banana beer, and a slender young man with a spear in one hand and a double bed on his head.
On my return to Goma, I learned that it was true that the International Organization for Migration had planned an evacuation convoy to rescue the Tutsis in Kitchanga, but the plan had been scrapped. The IOM mandate did not permit it to assist “internally displaced” people in crossing international borders. The UNHCR and dozens of other humanitarian organizations that had the lucrative catering contracts for the camps in Goma all had similar limitations in their mandates, which prevented them from saving the Mokoto survivors. Most aid organizations prohibited themselves from transporting anybody anywhere, and could provide relief only on the spot; many refused to conduct operations that involved armed security, lest their “neutrality” should be compromised; still others maintained that it would violate their humanitarian principles to further the aims of “ethnic cleansing” by removing Tutsis just because Hutus threatened them. Individual aid workers I spoke with agreed that it was more humane to “ethnically cleanse” people than to leave them to be murdered. But it became clear that their organizations’ first commitment was not to protecting people but to protecting their mandates. “Everything is lies here,” Father Victor, the Mokoto monk, told me in Goma. “All these organizations—they will give blankets, food, yes. But save lives? No, they can’t.”
Twelve days after the Mokoto massacre, Rwanda’s ambassador to the United Nations called on the Security Council to “take immediate action to prevent genocide in eastern Zaire.” Rwanda’s request referred specifically to Mokoto and to the Tutsis who remained at Kitchanga. The Zairean mission to the UN countered that the conflict in North Kivu was “a completely internal situation” and was therefore none of the Security Council’s business. The government of Zaire denied any problem pertaining to “Kinyarwanda-speaking Zairean nationals,” maintaining, absurdly, that “of the languages spoken in Zaire, Kinyarwanda is not one of them.” Zaire also advised the Council that “the word ‘genocide’ is not a part of Zaire’s political landscape.” The Security Council did nothing; it didn’t even register one of its boilerplate “expressions of concern.”
When I returned to Kigali, I learned that some Tutsi businessmen in North Kivu were organizing an evacuation to rescue the Mokoto survivors at Kitchanga, and at the end of May more than a thousand of them were brought to the Rwandan border. Throughout June and July, Tutsi refugees continued to arrive in Rwanda, and as the fighting spread in eastern Zaire, Tutsis from much farther north began fleeing to Uganda. By late August, the eradication of Tutsis from North Kivu was believed to be nearly complete.
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ON MY RETURN to Kigali from visiting the survivors of the Mokoto massacre in May of 1996, I had asked Kagame what he thought would become of the Tutsi refugees who were being expelled from Zaire into Rwanda. “Perhaps, if the young men have to fight, we shall train them,” he said. A year later, he told me that the training had already been under way. Kagame had concluded that he could not fully dismantle the threat of the Hutu Power camps in Zaire unless “the kind of support they were getting from the Zairean government and the international community” was also brought to an end.
The world powers made it clear in 1994 that they did not care to fight genocide in central Africa, but they had yet to come up with a convincing explanation of why they were content to feed it. The false promise of protection represented by the camps placed Hutu civilians, as well as Tutsis and everyone else in the region, in mortal peril, and it was no comfort that this state of affairs was not brought about by a malevolent international policy in central Africa but by the lack of any coherent policy. In Washington, where 1996 was a presidential election year, one Clinton administration official was reported to have told a meeting of the National Security Council that the main policy concern in Rwanda and Zaire was that “we don’t want to look like chumps.” In Kigali, where the main concern was the threat of a Hutu Power invasion, Colonel Joseph Karemera, Rwanda’s Minister of Health, asked me, “When the people receiving humanitarian assistance in those camps come and kill us, what will the international community do—send more humanitarian assistance?” Sometimes, Karemera said, he couldn’t help feeling that “this international community is looking at us like we’re from a different generation of human evolution.”
In July of 1996, General Kagame visited Washington and explained once again that if the international community could not handle the monster it was incubating in the camps, he would. It was assumed that Kagame was bluffing; the thought of Rwanda invading Zaire was a bit like Liechtenstein taking on Germany or France. Mobutu sponsored invasions of his neighbors, not the other way around, and Mobutu was still Washington’s hope for the region. “Occasionally,” an American diplomat explained to me, “you have to dance with the devil to do the Lord’s work.” And in this, at least, Paris agreed. France remained Hutu Power’s biggest advocate. The attitude toward Kagame’s warnings among the Africa hands at the Quai d’Orsay seemed to be: let him try. (In 1995, the new French President, Jacques Chirac, had refused to invite Rwanda’s new President, Pasteur Bizimungu, to an annual conference of Francophone African leaders in Biarritz, which opened with Chirac presiding over a moment of silence to honor the memory of President Habyarimana—and not the dead of the genocide that had been committed in Habyarimana’s name.)
Shortly after Kagame’s visit to Washington, Burundi’s army moved to close all the camps for Rwandans on its territory. The UNHCR protested, but when Burundi refused to back down the refugee agency began to cooperate. Soon the refugees were jockeying to get on the trucks that shuttled back and forth across the border. In the course of a few weeks, two hundred thousand people were sent home, and the UN even took to describing the repatriation as voluntary. The Rwandan government broadcast the message that the returnees were to be welcomed in their communities and that they should get their homes back—and, as a rule, that was what happened. UN observers told me that arrest rates were lower than anticipated; in some cases notorious génocidaires were even denounced by fell
ow returnees.
I spent several days watching the convoys rolling in from Burundi. When I asked returnees if the repatriation was forced, they all said no. But when I asked why they had suddenly volunteered to come home, they said they’d had no choice. The answer was almost always the same: “Everybody was coming. We left together, so we returned together.” One man, a bricklayer, who stood barefoot in ragged clothing amid his six children, said, “There are superiors”—he turned his eyes skyward—“who concern themselves with politics and affairs of humanity, and there are the simple people like us”—his eyes rolled down to stare at his feet—“who know nothing of politics and merely work with our hands to eat and live.” The mass return from Burundi made it clearer than ever that the only obstacle to a comparable repatriation from Zaire was Hutu Power’s ability to intimidate not only the camp populations but also the entire international community.
“I think we’ve learned a lot about the hypocrisy and double standards on the part of the people who claim they want to make this world a better place,” General Kagame told me. “They turn it into a political problem, and say we cannot have the refugees back unless we forgive these fellows who committed the genocide.” Kagame was indignant. “I say to them, ‘We told you to separate those groups. You have failed. If you—the whole world put together—are unable to do this, how can you expect us to do much better? You hold us to a standard that has never existed on this earth. You want us to wake up one morning and have everything right—people walking hand in hand with one another, forgetting about the genocide, things moving smoothly. It sounds nice to talk about it.’”
At first, Kagame told me, he had assumed that dealing with “people who had committed serious crimes against humanity” would be “the responsibility of the entire international community.” He still thought it should be. “But that hasn’t happened,” he said. “So what remains is to turn around and fight another war.
SHORTLY AFTER THE RPF took Kigali in 1994, Kagame’s old associate, President Museveni of Uganda, had introduced him to a Zairean named Laurent Desire Kabila, who had been an anti-Mobutu rebel throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and who hoped to revive that struggle. Kagame, Museveni, and Kabila began establishing networks with Zaireans and other Africans who regarded Mobutu as a menace to stability and progress on the continent. “We used to say to the Zaireans, ‘We know you are brewing trouble for us, but we shall brew trouble for you,’” Kagame told me. “We said, ‘You need peace, we need peace, let’s work together, but if you do not work with us—well.’”
Of course, there was no peace and no prospect of it, and by the middle of 1996, Kagame started assembling a seed force to mount a rebellion in Zaire. Zairean Tutsis, faced with the immediate threat of elimination, were ripe for recruitment, and they offered the added convenience of appearing and speaking enough like Rwandans so that if RPA soldiers mingled with them it would be difficult to tell them apart. But soldiers and political cadres were sought from throughout Zaire, and Kigali soon became the clandestine hub for all sorts of anti-Mobutists eager for armed struggle in Zaire.
After the destruction of the Tutsi communities of North Kivu, Kagame assumed that South Kivu would be the next target of the Mobutist–Hutu Power alliance, and he was not mistaken. About four hundred thousand Zairean Tutsis lived in South Kivu; they were known as the Banyamulenge—the people of Mulenge—because Mulenge was the place where their ancestors first settled after migrating from Rwanda in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Since the establishment of the UN camps for Rwandan Hutus in 1994, the Banyamulenge had fallen prey to extensive cattle raids and to a mounting campaign of harassment and hostile propaganda. Before long Zairean officials were speaking openly of the Banyamulenge as “snakes” and taking measures to strip them of their land; local radio stations and newspapers sounded more and more like the Hutu Power media of Rwanda.
Programmatic violence against the Banyamulenge began in early September of 1996. Hutu Power and Mobutist forces, working together with locally recruited militias, sacked Tutsi homes, businesses, and churches and attacked their residents—arresting or executing some and expelling others to Rwanda. When Banyamulenge were lynched in the streets, government officials expressed approval. Although the UN and humanitarian agencies had teams throughout the area, there was no international outcry. But unlike the Tutsis of North Kivu, who went to their deaths and into exile without resistance, many Banyamulenge were armed and they fought back when attacked, inflicting substantial damage on their attackers. At the same time, hundreds of newly trained and well-equipped resistance fighters began to filter into Zaire from Rwanda. As the fighting intensified and spread, aid workers fled from much of South Kivu, abandoning those they had purported to protect to their own devices.
Then, on October 8, Lwasi Ngabo Lwabanji, deputy governor of South Kivu, proclaimed that all Banyamulenge residents of the province had one week to get out. He didn’t say where they should go, only that those who remained would be considered to be rebels in a state of war with Zaire. No doubt Lwasi was a bit overexcited; even in Zaire, deputy governors did not customarily declare war. But the spirit of his ultimatum was firmly in line with official Zairean attitudes and practices. Although Mobutu himself had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer and was undergoing treatment in Switzerland, he had been running Zaire as an absentee landlord for so long that his court continued to function as ever. Two days after Lwasi’s decree, a government spokesman in Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire, announced, “It’s true that we all want the Banyamulenge to leave.”
Kagame had been preparing for just such a moment. “We were ready to hit them,” he later told me, “hit them very hard—and handle three things: first to save the Banyamulenge and not let them die, empower them to fight, and even fight for them; then to dismantle the camps, return the refugees to Rwanda, and destroy the ex-FAR and militias; and, third, to change the situation in Zaire.” He was only waiting for the sort of massive provocation from Zaire that he presumed was inevitable. “And of course,” he said, “this stupid Zairean deputy governor gave us the opportunity.”
So tiny Rwanda hit enormous Zaire; the Banyamulenge rose up; RPA commandos and Laurent Kabila’s rebel seed force—the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo/Zaire (ADFL)—swept into South Kivu and began pushing north; Mobutu’s famously cowardly army fled ragtag; aid workers were evacuated, and the camps were dispersed. On November 2, 1996, three and a half weeks after Deputy Governor Lwasi had declared civil war, the ADFL and the RPA marched into Goma, and Kabila proclaimed an area of at least a thousand square miles to be “liberated territory.” (While the Rwandan government was openly enthusiastic about these developments, it categorically denied that any RPA troops had entered Zaire until early June of 1997, several weeks after the ADFL forces took Kinshasa and drove Mobutu from power, at which point Kagame told me, “Everywhere it was our forces, our troops—they’ve been walking for the last eight months.”)
Thousands of Rwandans from the camps returned to Rwanda during the first weeks of fighting in Zaire, but by early November the great mass of them—at least three-quarters of a million people, from both North and South Kivu—were assembled on the vast lava field in and around the Mugunga camp, about ten miles west of Goma. They had been herded there by the ex-FAR and the interahamwe, by the pressure of the advancing Alliance, and even, incredibly, by some UNHCR officers, who had directed them away from Rwanda and toward Mugunga before themselves fleeing the country. After capturing Goma, Kabila declared a cease-fire, and called on the international humanitarian community to come and get the refugees out of his way so that he could continue his advance westward. Of course, Mugunga was completely inaccessible, behind a powerfully armed front line composed of tens of thousands of Hutu Power and Mobutist fighters. And that was precisely the point that Kabila and his Rwandan sponsors were trying to make: to get the refugees out of harm’s way, you had to be prepared to fight. What was needed was not a relief mission, but a
rescue mission, because the noncombatants at Mugunga weren’t so much refugees as hostages, being held as a human shield.
It was another very strange time. During the first nine and a half months of 1996, the fact that the Mobutist–Hutu Power alliance in eastern Zaire was slaughtering thousands of people and forcing hundreds of thousands more from their homes did not seem to excite the international press. During that period, exactly one dispatch on the subject, reported from Rwanda, appeared in my local paper, The New York Times, and in its competition, The Washington Post, coverage had been limited to two freelance “opinion” pieces. Perhaps the idea that people called refugees not only suffer and require aid but also are capable of systematic crimes against humanity, and may require direct confrontation by military force, was considered too technical or confusing in an age of radically reduced foreign coverage. But, in early November, the prospect of three-quarters of a million refugees dying en masse, under siege or in battle on the lava fields, once more drew a pack of hundreds of reporters to the Rwanda-Zaire border. Goma was again the world’s leading international story—and nothing was happening.
Nobody could get to Mugunga, and nobody knew what condition the people gathered there were in. Relief agency press officers assured reporters that the refugees had to be suffering from mass starvation and cholera. Possible death tolls were invented and announced—tens of thousands of dead, perhaps a hundred thousand. It was terribly upsetting to be sitting at a lakefront hotel in the Rwandan border town of Gisenyi, surrounded by reporters, and to think that just a dozen miles to the west, out of sight and out of reach, people were dying the most preventable sorts of deaths at a record-breaking clip. And it made one feel even worse to wonder if maybe the situation over there wasn’t really so bad. If you asked the relief agency press officers when, in history, previously well-fed people had starved to death in a few weeks, you either got no answer or you were told that most of the people at Mugunga were women and children.
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