A Life Half Lived

by Andrew MacLeod

  Paul Kagame was then Rwandan Vice President, Chief of the Defence Force, Head of Military Intelligence and an ethnic Tutsi. President Pasteur Bizimungu was a puppet president and ethnic Hutu, in the position partly for his outspokenness against Hutu extremists, and also to give a show of ethnic unity at the start of Rwanda’s journey to post-genocidal reconciliation. It was Kagame who was the real power in the country.

  The West is still trying to come to terms with the events surrounding the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Why did the 85-per-cent majority Hutu massacre up to a million minority Tutsis in 100 days? How was it that the West did not know that 1994 was not Rwanda’s first genocide? In fact, there had been three that century – 1959, 1972 and 1994. Why did the West not understand the on-going genocidal attacks from eastern Congo would be seen as a threat to Rwanda? Why didn’t the West see that failure to preserve Rwanda’s border security would mean that Rwanda, led by a Tutsi general, would have to respond?

  To begin to understand the events that led to the invasion on that steamy night in Gisenyi and the importance of Kagame’s role in the rescue of the country, one needs a quick revision of Rwandan history.

  Rwanda has three ethnic groups, roughly divided into 85 per cent Hutu, 14 per cent Tutsi, and 1 per cent central African Twa Pygmies. The Tutsis were said to descend from the cattle-herding nomads of Somalia, and shared the same tall, slim Somali characteristics. Hutus descended from Central African Bantu farmers and shared the shorter and more robust physical appearance. In reality things were not that simple and the Hutu/Tutsi differentiation is a strange mix of ethnic background and wealth.

  Like many areas of Africa today, in pre-colonial Rwanda wealth was measured in livestock. A generalisation, I was once told, is that if you had ten cows, tradition said you were Tutsi, and if you did not have ten cows you were Hutu. It was possible to be born into one group, but through acquiring or losing wealth, you could die as a member of the other group. In many ways the Hutu/Tutsi differentiation was part ethnic and part economic.

  Pre-colonial Rwanda had a monarchy and the kings were Tutsi. Known as the Land of a Thousand Hills (Pays des Mille Collines) Rwanda’s society was organised around each hill. The cattle-owning Tutsi gentry of each hill ruled over that hill’s Hutu farmers.

  At the Brussels conference of 1890, the European powers gave Germany colonial authority over Rwanda but Germany took little real interest. Following World War I, Germany lost her colonial territories and Rwanda was added to the territory of the Belgian Congo as part of the political and diplomatic post-war manoeuvrings. The Belgians, seeking to expand their interests in Africa, took a much more hands-on approach to Rwanda, ruling through Tutsi elites. One early decision of the Belgians was to issue identity cards, and critically, these cards listed each person’s ethnic group. Two things resulted from this decision. Firstly, the fluid ethnic group now became fixed, at least as far as the identity card was concerned. Secondly, as the Tutsis were responsible for implementing the card system it was in their interest to keep the Tutsi grouping as small as possible to limit the power of the ruling class to the smallest possible elite. Some people who could lay claim to being Tutsi under the partly flexible pre-colonial system now found themselves defined as Hutu.

  When people now talk of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus being killed in the 1994 genocide, what is really meant is 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and others who had Hutu written on their identity card, but who were really Tutsi, died.

  In 1959, as African countries began their push for independence, Rwandan ethnic tensions broke out, resulting in around 100,000 Tutsis being killed (the first genocide), with many surviving Tutsi families fleeing to neighbouring countries – particularly Uganda. Hutus now took control of Rwanda. As an infant, the two-year-old Paul Kagame was part of the exodus into Uganda. The 1959 refugees grew up to become the backbone of Yoweri Museveni’s rebel army that eventually took power in Uganda in the mid-1980s, bringing relative stability to Uganda in the post-Idi Amin days. Growing up in a former British colony, these largely anglophone Tutsis spoke no French (the governing language of their former Belgian colonial homeland) and often struggled with their native ethic tongue: Kinyarwanda.

  In 1990, descendants of the 1959 refugees invaded Rwanda to attempt to re-take the country for the Tutsis. A civil war followed. Around half to one million Tutsis still lived outside Rwanda at this time. Ruling upperclass Hutus spoke French and the less educated spoke Kinyarwanda. Tutsi invaders from Uganda spoke English with little or poor Kinyarwanda, and Tutsi returnees from Burundi and Congo spoke a mix of Kinyarwanda and French. To add to the complication of war, there was no common language to unite all Rwandans.

  A UN-monitored ceasefire held Rwanda in a stalemate in the early 1990s, until President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down in 1994, which was taken as the signal for Hutu extremists, who had formed into genocidal gangs, led by the ‘Interahamwe militia’, to start 100 days of genocide. To this day there remains doubt as to who actually shot down the plane. What followed was brutal in its ruthlessness. Bodies littered the streets and choked the Akagera River as machetes provided by the UN under an agricultural reform program were wielded by everyday people to butcher their neighbours.

  Control of this massacre was simple. In a mix of pre- and post-colonial command regimes, one representative of the government (be it pre-colonial tutsi-led, colonial Belgian-led or post-colonial Hutu-led government) was assigned to every 10 households: the Chef du dix maisons. It remained a constant aspect of Rwandan culture that there was a government representative right down to the most local of levels. In a stroke of ruthless organisation the Chef du dix maisons would deliver to each household the list of people that the household was to kill, and householders largely complied. People complied because local cultural norms, built over centuries, required one to do what one is told – particularly if it is by a representative of government. It took me some time to understand this phenomenon. It wasn’t until I visited Gitarama prison in central Rwanda that I really understood. Part of the ICRC’s role was to conduct on-going prison censuses, leading us to spend plenty of time in these hellholes. Originally built for 1500 prisoners, this prison held more than 10,000 people and recorded high rates of death from malnutrition, suffocation, beatings and rape in an environment that was heavily infected with HIV. Yet here there were only two guards at the front ‘gate’ and that gate was merely a string of rope.

  “Why don’t people escape?” I asked.

  “Because they are told not to,” was the answer. They were told this by the other ex-government Hutu prisoners held on suspicion of perpetrating the genocide. The aspect of control by government was replicated in informal structures in the prison system led by the prisoners themselves. This may seem strange until you realise that in a country like Rwanda, where every person on a hill knew all others, there would be no place to hide and you would be subject to reprisal attacks if you were to escape back to your home village anyway. If someone escaped and went to another village, they would immediately be suspected as an interloper. In other words, you couldn’t escape prison because there was nowhere to escape to.

  I wasn’t completely convinced of this until, during the census at Gitarama prison, a prisoner, named Andrew, was allocated to me as one of the few people who could translate from Kinyarwanda to English as opposed to French.

  Andrew and I got on well, and joked and chatted freely during the routine census. “Why are you in here?” I asked.

  “Because I killed 10 children,” he answered. When I asked why, he simply replied, matter-of-factly, “Because I was told to.” The longer I stayed in Rwanda, the more I realised that the more you learned, the less you understood.

  The culture of Rwanda had evolved so that people simply did what they were told. So when the Chef du dix masons delivered instructions to kill then those instructions were followed. If they weren’t, then the Interahamwe would pay a visit. It was kill or be killed.

  To this day, many in
Rwanda believe that the French Foreign Legion actively participated in the genocide of 1994 speculating on the on-going desire by the French to continue to dominate foreign influence in central Africa. UN Peace-keeping Commander Canadian General Roméo Dallaire had, as early as January 1994, uncovered the plot to launch the genocide and requested additional support to stop the killing. The French had, as a Permanent Member of the Security Council, made it clear that the French government would veto any attempt to expand the size and mandate of the UN forces in the country. An expansion of the mandate would very well have stopped the genocide from taking place. Dallaire’s request was refused by the UN Department of Peace-keeping Operations, then headed by Under Secretary General, and later Secretary General Kofi Annan.

  What would you have done if you were Annan, a career UN staffer? Would you have defied a Permanent Member of the Security Council and risked your job? Annan later conceded that this was his greatest regret in life.

  Gerard Prunier, the adviser to French President Mitterrand at the time, suggested in his book History of a Genocide, that the one main reason the French continued to back the Hutus, even during the genocide, was to protect French linguistic influence in Africa. The Hutus spoke French, the invading Tutsis spoke English. For some in the Élysée Palace, genocide was bad, speaking English was worse. Indeed, the plane that the former Hutu President had been shot down in was a gift from the family of President Mitterrand. Prunier’s book was initially banned in France and was originally published in English.

  It is a big call to say the French were involved, but in my 18 months in Rwanda, I found no evidence to disagree with the presumption that the French played an active role.

  It is worth noting that geopolitical events also influenced the decision of the international community to keep out of Rwanda. In the late 1980s and beginning of the 1990s the world saw the end of Communism, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the hope for a New World Order. The United States reaffirmed its claim to be the ‘world policeman’, a notion that many Europeans, particularly the French and Germans, found discomforting. In 1991 Operation ‘Restore Hope’ (the US operation against Somali warlords, went terribly wrong, ending with the bodies of US marines being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. In addition, at this time the wars in Yugoslavia began with European powers insisting to the United States that this was a ‘European problem that Europeans could fix’.

  By the time the 1994 genocide began in Rwanda the US had little appetite to be involved in Africa, the Europeans were shown to be inconsistent and dysfunctional when it came to dealing with the Yugoslav wars, which is why no-one really argued with the French not to expand peace operations in Rwanda. If the French wanted to solve the problem, who else would intervene in that climate?

  In terms of casualties, the failure to intervene in Rwanda cost far more lives than the 2003 intervention in Iraq and the 2002 intervention in Afghanistan combined. The genocide of 1994 could have been prevented, but was not. The failure to intervene is perhaps the greatest foreign policy failing of the last 60 years. General Dallaire never emotionally recovered and to this day a large amount of bitterness and resentment is felt in Rwanda for both the French and the UN. He ultimately wrote; “I know God exists as in Rwanda I came face to face with the Devil”.

  In 2010, during a visit to Rwanda, French President Nicolas Sarkozy acknowledged that France made “mistakes” during the genocide, although, according to a BBC report, he “stopped short of offering a full apology”. Many people often say that if only the world had better intelligence services that uncovered plots we could stop some of the world’s atrocities. The truth is, the political community has almost always known in advance of such plots. Rwanda was just the best example. Darfur in 2002 was another. I wrote a UN report in 2003 naming Darfur as ‘Genocide’. What stops the world preventing atrocity is not a lack of knowledge; it is a lack of will.

  The 1994 genocide was halted, not by the international community, but by the Paul Kagame-led Rwandan Patriotic Front. With the commencement of the genocide and the clear breakdown of the ceasefire in the 1990–94 war, the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front, somewhat understandably, took up arms again to stop the genocide and also to take power in the country. Upon victory in late 1994, Kagame quickly realised that to secure long-term peace, there had to be reconciliation between the ethnic groups, and one of his first acts was to remove the ethnic designation from identity cards.

  Unfortunately, immediate post-genocide policy of the West was no better than the pre-genocide policy. BBC journalist Nik Gowing, in his 1998 conference paper, ‘Dispatches from Disaster Zones’, reported that the arrival of the international media in Rwanda came one news cycle too late, and created flawed foreign policy decisions through 1996 and 1997, which ultimately contributed to the 1998 invasion of the Congo, which I witnessed that evening in Gisenyi. In his paper Gowing said:

  …given the trends…neither the Humanitarian Agencies (HAs) nor the Non-Governmental Organisations emerge with much credit. Too often what they said, reported or claimed was simply wrong. Their reporting was unreliable. So were many of their assumptions and hypotheses. They were caught out by the issue of information and how to handle it well.

  The poor handling of information by the humanitarian community and media was exacerbated by a complacency and arrogance based on assumptions that they knew best and had the technology to outsmart fighters wrongly portrayed as a “rag-tag force of African rebel” in a “tin-pot war”. Instead the political and military strategists showed great cunning and ingenuity. They wrong-footed the international community.

  The culture of information control was first developed earlier through the Habyarimana regime before April 1994, and then by those who committed the mass genocide. Evidence amassed in the refugee camps of Eastern Zaire confirms that like Rwandan and Alliance forces, the Interahamwe and Hutu soldiers also had a well-developed I-warfare strategy (information warfare

  – control over public relations) that relied extensively on infiltration of the UNHCR and humanitarian community.

  Gowing had grasped the essential impact of information control in the Great Lakes Refugee Crisis. The warring factions, far from being “semiliterate rag-tag military forces” had very sophisticated information strategies and set out to, and succeeded in, deceiving the West, the aid agencies and the media. White man’s arrogance is a theme that still lives in Africa. Gowing again:

  Through the later stages of war in former Yugoslavia and right up to the last stage of the Great Lakes [refugee] crisis, most large media organisations

  – especially the technology-rich international TV news organisations – believed they had the upper hand on information.

  They assumed a new level of omnipotence. They believed that increasingly the lightweight satellite technology for telephone, text and video transmission had created a new information transparency in zones of conflict. Experience showed how technology was helping news organisations and the humanitarian community defy the instincts of governments, the military, warring factions and war lords to impose controls on information.

  However, in the Great Lakes, both the humanitarian community and media were deceived comprehensively. By and large they did not perceive accurately the hidden military campaign that was unfolding beyond their reach. As a result they never gained the usual upper hand on information that they had come to assume in recent years. They were outsmarted.

  When the journalists arrived in 1994, they often reported about many refugees “fleeing the violence into Zaire” (now Democratic Republic of the Congo). What was not well understood by the journalists was that many of those fleeing were ethnic Hutus, and within them were a large number of the perpetrators of the genocide, including the feared Interahamwe militia. Consequently, the refugee camps established in Eastern Zaire on the border with Rwanda contained not only genuine refugees, but many militia groups that used the refugee camps as bases, fed by the international community, to continue genocidal attacks i
nto Rwanda for years to come.

  To understand the wars in central Africa, it is necessary to understand the driving demand for Rwandan border security and the need to stop on-going ethnic tensions and genocidal attacks launched from refugee camps in Congo into Rwanda’s western regions. Kagame had called on the international community to control borders and close refugee camps from 1994 through to 1998. In part, the 1998 invasion of Congo by Rwanda on that August 1998 evening, was to deal with the camps as the West had completely failed to address Rwanda’s legitimate concerns on border security.

  By the time I arrived at the start of 1998, the death toll recorded in cross-border genocidal attacks measured hundreds per week. The Rwandan Patriotic Front had restyled itself the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) and was, by its own admission, a guerrilla army in the process of becoming more professional. There was no functioning police force, no judicial system, but there were 110,000 prisoners awaiting trial on suspicion of taking part in the genocide, housed in a prison system built for 10,000. The major cause of death in the prisons was suffocation overnight, as the air quality dropped so low that people simply died.

  There was no real functioning economy or trade to speak of and half the country was still off-limits for security reasons. White people were hated by many as a result of the blame attributed to the French. Small children threw stones at passing land cruisers while yelling ‘mzungu’ – a word that can have similar connotations, positive and negative, to ‘nigger’ – but used against white people. It is strange to be in a minority and suffer violent racial-based vitriol.