Kagame’s Hidden War in the Congo
More by Howard W. French
Africa’s World War: Congo, the
Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe
by Gérard Prunier
Oxford University Press, 529 pp., $27.95
The Dynamics of Violence in
Central Africa
by René Lemarchand
University of Pennsylvania Press, 327 pp., $59.95
The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and
Reality
by Thomas Turner
Zed Books, 243 pp., $32.95 (paper)
Government troops sheltering from
the rain after a night of battles against rebel forces led by the warlord
Laurent Nkunda, near Goma,
eastern Congo, November 12, 2008; photograph by Marcus Bleasdale
from The Rape of a Nation
Although it has been strangely
ignored in the Western press, one of the most destructive wars in modern
history has been going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s
third-largest country. During the past eleven years millions of people have
died, while armies from as many as nine different African countries fought
with Congolese government forces and various rebel groups for control of land
and natural resources. Much of the fighting has taken place in regions of
northeastern and eastern Congo that are rich in minerals such as gold,
diamonds, tin, and coltan, which is used in
manufacturing electronics.
Few realize that a main force
driving this conflict has been the largely Tutsi army of neighboring Rwanda,
along with several Congolese groups supported by Rwanda. The reason for this
involvement, according to Rwandan president Paul Kagame, is the continued
threat to Rwanda posed by the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda
(FDLR), a Hutu militia that includes remnants of the army that carried out
the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Until now, the US and other Western powers have
generally supported Kagame diplomatically. And in January, Congo president
Joseph Kabila, whose weak government has long had limited influence in the
eastern part of the country, entered a surprise agreement with Kagame to
allow Rwandan forces back into eastern Congo to fight the FDLR. But the
extent of the Hutu threat to Rwanda is much debated, and observers note that
Rwandan-backed forces have themselves been responsible for much of the
violence in eastern Congo over the years.
Rwanda’s intervention in Congo
began in 1996. Two years earlier, Kagame’s Rwandan
Patriotic Front (RPF) had invaded Rwanda from neighboring Uganda, defeating
the government in Kigali and ending the genocide of some 800,000 Tutsis and
moderate Hutus. As Kagame installed a minority Tutsi regime in Rwanda, some
two million Hutu refugees fled to UN-run camps, mostly in Congo’s North and
South Kivu provinces. These provinces, which occupy an area of about 48,000
square miles—slightly larger than the state of Pennsylvania—are situated
along Congo’s eastern border with Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi and together
have a population of more than five million people. In addition to containing
rich deposits of minerals, North and South Kivu have, since the precolonial era, been subject to large waves of migration
by people from Rwanda, including both Hutus and Tutsis. In recent decades
these Rwandans have competed with more established residents for control of land.
Following Kagame’s
consolidation of power in Rwanda, a large invasion force of Rwandan Tutsis
arrived in North and South Kivu to pursue Hutu militants and to launch a war
against the three-decade-long dictatorship of Congo (then known as Zaire) by
Mobutu Sese Seko, whom
they claimed was giving refuge to the leaders of the genocide. With Rwandan
and Ugandan support, a new regime led by Laurent Kabila was installed in
Kinshasa, the Congolese capital. But after Kabila ordered the Rwandan troops
to leave in 1998, Kagame responded with a new and even larger invasion of the
country.
Kabila’s hold on power was saved
at this point by Angola and Zimbabwe, which rushed troops into Congo to repel
the Rwandan invaders. Angola was motivated by fears that Congolese territory
would be used as a rear base by the longtime Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, following the renewed outbreak of that country’s
civil war. Zimbabwe appears to have been drawn by promises of access to
Congolese minerals. The protracted and
inconclusive conflict that followed has become what Gérard
Prunier, in the title of his sprawling book, calls
“Africa’s World War,” a catastrophic decade of violence that has led to a
staggering 5.4 million deaths, far more than any war anywhere since World War
II.1 It also has resulted in one of the largest—and least
followed—UN interventions in the world, involving nearly 20,000 UN soldiers
from over forty countries.
Throughout this conflict, Rwanda—a
small, densely populated country with few natural resources of its own—has
pursued Congo’s enormous mineral wealth. Initially, the Rwandan Patriotic
Front was directly operating mining businesses in Congo, according to UN
investigators; more recently, Rwanda
has attempted to maintain control of regions of eastern Congo through various
proxy armies. Among these, none has been more lethal than the militia led
by Laurent Nkunda,
Congo’s most notorious warlord, whose record of violence in eastern Congo
includes destroying entire villages, committing mass rapes, and causing
hundreds of thousands of Congolese to flee their homes.
Nkunda is a Congolese Tutsi who is believed to have fought in
both the Rwandan civil war and the subsequent war against Mobutu. In 2002, he
was dispatched by the Rwandan government to Kisangani—an inland city in
eastern Congo whose nearby gold mines have been
fought over by Ugandan and Rwandan-backed forces. Nkunda
committed numerous atrocities there, including the massacre of some 160
people, according to Human Rights Watch. In 2004, Nkunda
declined a military appointment by Congo’s transitional government, choosing
instead to back a Tutsi insurgency in North Kivu near the Rwandan border. He
claimed that his actions were aimed at preventing an impending genocide of
Tutsis in Congo. Most observers say that these claims were groundless.
Nkunda’s insurgency was put down, but
clashes between his rebels, government forces, and other groups continued to
foster ethnic tensions in eastern Congo, including widespread sexual violence
against women; in 2005, the UN estimated that
some 45,000 women were raped in South Kivu alone.2
And in the fall of 2008, Nkunda—apparently with Kagame’s
encouragement—led a new offensive of Tutsi rebels in North Kivu that uprooted
about 200,000 civilians and threatened to capture the city of Goma, near the Rwandan border.
In January 2009, however, the Rwandan government made a
surprise decision to arrest Nkunda. Kagame’s willingness to move against Nkunda
appears to stem, in part, from increasing international scrutiny of Rwanda’s
meddling in eastern Congo. The
arrest took place just after the release of a UN report documenting Rwanda’s
close ties to the warlord, and concluding that he was being used to advance
Rwanda’s economic interests in Congo’s eastern hinterlands. The report stated
that Rwandan authorities had “been complicit in the recruitment of soldiers,
including children, have facilitated the supply of military equipment, and
have sent officers and units from the Rwandan Defense Forces,” while giving Nkunda access to Rwandan bank accounts and allowing him
to launch attacks on the Congolese army from Rwandan soil.
Following Nkunda’s arrest, Congo
president Joseph Kabila agreed to allow Rwandan forces to conduct a five-week
joint military operation in eastern Congo against Hutu rebels.3 But attacks against civilians have increased precipitously
since the joint operation, and with Hutu and Tutsi militias still active it
remains unclear whether there will be a lasting peace between Rwanda and
Congo.
Africa’s World War is the most ambitious of several remarkable new books
that reexamine the extraordinary tragedy of Congo and Central Africa since
the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Along with René Lemarchand’s
The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa and Thomas Turner’s The
Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality, Prunier’s
Africa’s World War explores arguments that have circulated among
scholars of sub-Saharan Africa for years. Prunier
himself, who is an East Africa specialist at the University of Paris, has
previously written a highly regarded account of the genocide. But these books
will surprise many whose knowledge of the region is based on popular accounts
of the genocide and its aftermath. In
all three, the Kagame regime, and its allies in Central
Africa, are portrayed not as heroes but rather as opportunists who use
moral arguments to advance economic interests. And their supporters in the
United States and Western Europe emerge as alternately complicit, gullible,
or simply confused. For their part in bringing intractable conflict to a
region that had known very little armed violence for nearly thirty years, all
the parties—so these books argue—deserve blame, including the United States.
The concentrated evil of the
methodical Hutu slaughter of Tutsis in 1994 is widely known. For many it has
long been understood as a grim, if fairly simple, morality play: the Hutus
were extremist killers, while the Tutsis of the RPF are portrayed as avenging
angels, who swooped in from their bases in Uganda to stop the genocide. But Lemarchand and Prunier show
that the story was far more complicated. They both depict the forces of Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front as steely, power-driven
killers themselves.
“When the genocide did start,
saving Tutsi civilians was not a priority,” Prunier
writes. “Worse, one of the most questionable of the RPF ideologues coolly
declared in September 1994 that the ‘interior’ Tutsi”—those who had remained
in Rwanda and not gone into exile in Uganda years earlier—”deserved what
happened to them ‘because they did not want to flee as they were getting rich
doing business’” with the former Hutu regime. He also notes that the RPF
“unambiguously opposed” all talk of a foreign intervention, however unlikely,
to stop the genocide, apparently because such intervention could have
prevented Kagame from taking full power.
Moreover, slaughter during the one
hundred days of genocide was not the monopoly of the Hutus, as is widely
believed. Both Lemarchand and Prunier
recount the work of RPF teams that roamed the countryside methodically
exterminating ordinary, unarmed Hutu villagers.4
This sort of killing, rarely mentioned in press accounts of the genocide,
continued well after the war was over. For example, on April 22, 1995, units
of the new national army surrounded the Kibeho
refugee camp in south Rwanda, where about 150,000 Hutu refugees stood huddled
shoulder to shoulder, and opened fire on the crowd with rifles and with 60mm
mortars.5
According to Prunier, a thirty- two-member team of
the Australian Medical Corps had counted 4,200 corpses at the camp before
being stopped by the Rwandan army. Prunier calls
the Kagame regime’s use of violence in that period “something that resembles
neither the genocide nor uncontrolled revenge killings, but rather a policy
of political control through terror.”
Some commentators in the United
States have viewed Kagame as a sort of African Konrad
Adenauer, crediting him with bringing stability and rapid economic growth to
war-torn Rwanda, while running an administration considered to be one of the more efficient in Africa. In the nine years
he has led the country (after serving as interim president, he won an
election to a seven-year term in 2003), he has also gotten attention for the
reconciliation process he has imposed on villages throughout Rwanda.
Firmly opposed to such views, the
three authors reviewed here characterize Kagame’s
regime as more closely resembling a minority ethnic autocracy. In a recent
interview, Prunier dismissed the recently
much-touted reconciliation efforts, calling post-genocide Rwanda “a very
well-managed ethnic, social, and economic dictatorship.” True reconciliation,
he said, “hinges on cash, social benefits, jobs, property rights, equality in
front of the courts, and educational opportunities,” all of which are heavily
stacked against the roughly 85 percent of the population that is Hutu, a
problem that in Prunier’s view presages more
conflict in the future. In his book, Lemarchand, an
emeritus professor at the University of Florida who has done decades of
fieldwork in the region, observes that Hutus have been largely excluded from
important positions of power in Kagame’s Rwanda,
and that the state’s military and security forces are pervasive. “The
political decisions with the gravest consequences for the nation…are
undertaken by the RPF’s Tutsi leadership, not by the political
establishment,” he writes.
Mike King
Those concerns are shared by human
rights groups, which have documented the suppression of dissent in Rwanda.Freedom House ranked Rwanda 183 out of 195
countries in press freedom in 2008, while Amnesty International and Human
Rights Watch have also described the Rwandan government as imposing harsh and
arbitrary justice—including long-term incarceration without trial and life
sentences in solitary confinement. Other Western observers and human rights
activists have noted that the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has
never properly investigated atrocities committed by Tutsis. In June, more
than seventy scholars from North American and European universities wrote an
open letter to the UN secretary-general, President Barack Obama, and Prime
Minister Gordon Brown expressing “grave concern at the ongoing failure” of
the tribunal to bring “indictments against those soldiers of the Rwandan
Patriotic Front (RPF) who committed crimes against humanity and war crimes in
Rwanda in 1994,” and warning that this omission may cause the tribunal “to be
dismissed as ‘victor’s justice.’”
On the question of Rwanda’s
principal motive for seeking to control or destabilize eastern Congo, the
books broadly agree: Kagame and his government want, as Lemarchand
writes, “continued access to the Congo’s economic wealth.” Lemarchand says that within Congo itself the FDLR poses a
“clear and present danger to Tutsi and other communities.” Like Prunier, though, he concludes that the threat the Hutu
group poses to Rwanda’s own security is “vastly exaggerated,” noting that its
fighters “are no match” for Rwandan and Rwanda-backed forces amounting to
“70,000 men under arms and a sophisticated military arsenal, consisting of
armored personnel carriers (APCs), tanks, and helicopters.”
Thomas Turner draws parallels between
the exploitation of Congo by Rwanda and Uganda and the brutal
late-nineteenth-century regime of King Leopold of Belgium, whose thirst for
empire drove his acquisition of what became known as the Congo Free State.
Citing a 2001 United Nations investigation of the conflict, Turner concludes:
Resource extraction from eastern
Congo, occupied by Uganda and Rwanda until recently, would seem to constitute
“pure” pillage…. Much as in Free State days, the Congo was financing the
occupation of a portion of its own territory. Unlike Free State days, none of
the proceeds of this pillage were being reinvested.
According to a 2005 report on the
Rwandan economy by the South African Institute for Security Studies, Rwanda’s
officially recorded coltan production soared nearly
tenfold between 1999 and 2001, from 147 tons to 1,300 tons, surpassing
revenues from the country’s main traditional exports, tea and coffee, for the
first time. “Part of the increase in production is due to the opening of new
mines in Rwanda,” the report said. “However, the increase is primarily due to
the fraudulent re-export of coltan of Congolese
origin.”
When Rwanda moved to invade
Mobutu’s Zaire in 1996, Prunier says, the country’s
administration “was so rotten that the brush of a hand could cause it to
collapse.” Since the 1960s, Congo had remained relatively stable by virtue of
a confluence of circumstances, which suddenly no longer held. After backing
the wrong side during the Rwandan genocide, France had lost its will or
interest in playing its longtime part as regional patron to several client
regimes. Following the removal of Mobutu, who often did the bidding of
Western powers, there was no longer any clear regional strongman to mediate
disputes. The allegiance of African states to the idea of permanently fixed
borders, which had held firm since independence, was being challenged. And
finally, the vacuum created by Mobutu’s overthrow unleashed fierce
competition for Congolese coltan and other
resources and led to what Turner calls the “militarization of commerce” by
both foreign governments and rebel groups.
In allowing the Rwandan invasion
of Zaire, the United States had two very different goals. The most immediate
was the clearing of over one million Hutu refugees from UN camps near the
Rwandan border, which had become bases for vengeful elements of the defeated
Hutu army and Interahamwe militia, the agents of
the Rwandan genocide. In Prunier’s telling:
When Assistant Secretary of State
for African Affairs Susan Rice came back from her first trip to the Great
Lakes region [of East Africa], a member of her staff said, “Museveni [of Uganda] and Kagame agree that the basic
problem in the Great Lakes is the danger of a resurgence of genocide and they
know how to deal with that. The only thing we [i.e., the US] have to do is
look the other way.”
The gist of Prunier’s
anecdote is correct, except that participants have confirmed to me that it
was Rice herself who spoke these words.
In fact, getting the Hutu militia
out of the UN camps was rapidly achieved in November 1996 by shelling them
from Rwandan territory. Thereafter, the war against Mobutu dominated
international headlines, overshadowing a secret Rwanda campaign that targeted
for slaughter the Hutu populations that had fled into Congo. Here again,
Washington provided vital cover.
At the time, the American
ambassador to Congo, Daniel Howard Simpson, told me flatly that the fleeing
Hutus were “the bad guys.”6
One of the worst massacres by Kagame’s Tutsi forces
took place at the Tingi-Tingi refugee camp in
northeastern Congo, which by 1997 contained over 100,000 Hutu refugees. But
on January 21, 1997, Robert E. Gribbin, Simpson’s
counterpart in Rwanda, cabled Washington with the following advice:
We should pull out of Tingi-Tingi and stop feeding the killers who will run
away to look for other sustenance, leaving their hostages behind…. If we do
not we will be trading the children in Tingi-Tingi
for the children who will be killed and orphaned in Rwanda.
There was a grim half-truth to Gribbin’s assessment. The Hutu fighters traveling amid
the refugees were often able to avoid engagement with their Tutsi pursuers by
fleeing westward into the Congolese rain forest. The genuine refugees, who by
UNHCR’s estimate accounted for 93 percent of the Hutus in flight, could not.
The best evidence suggests that they died by the scores of thousands in their
flight across Congo, in what Lemarchand calls “a genocide of attrition.” Prunier
estimates the number killed in this manner at 300,000.7
In August 1997, the UN began to
investigate Tutsi killings of Hutu civilians and, as Turner recounts, “a
preliminary report identified forty massacre sites.” But the investigators
were stonewalled by Kabila’s Congo government—then still backed by Rwanda—and
received little support from Washington. Roberto Garreton,
a Chilean human rights lawyer who headed the UN investigation, was barred
from the Rwandan capital of Kigali and his team was largely kept from the
field in Congo. Garreton later wrote:
One cannot of course ignore the
presence of persons guilty of genocide, soldiers and militia members, among
the refugees…. It is nevertheless unacceptable to claim that more than one
million people, including large numbers of children, should be collectively
designated as persons guilty of genocide and liable to execution without
trial.
Rwanda’s designs on eastern Congo
were further helped by the Clinton administration’s interest in promoting a
group of men it called the New African Leaders, including the heads of state
of Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, and Rwanda. As Clinton officials saw it, these
New Leaders were sympathetic and businesslike, drawn together by such
desirable goals as overthrowing Mobutu, by antagonism toward the Islamist
government of Sudan, which shares a border with northeast Congo, and by talk
of rethinking Africa’s hitherto sacrosanct borders, as a means of creating
more viable states.
Then Assistant Secretary of State
Rice touted the New Leaders as pursuing “African solutions to African problems.”
In 1999, Marina Ottaway, the influential Africa
expert of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the Senate
Subcommittee on Africa:
Many of the states that emerged
from the colonial period have ceased to exist in practice…. The problem is to
create functioning states, either by re-dividing territory or by creating new
institutional arrangements such as decentralized federations or even
confederations.
In fact, the favored group of African leaders were also authoritarian figures
with military backgrounds, all of whom had scorned democratic elections.
According to Turner, support for the New Leaders “apparently meant that the
USA and Britain should continue to aid Rwanda and Uganda as they ‘found
solutions’ by carving up Congo.”
As in the case of the Rwandan
genocide, Lemarchand suggests, the policies of the
United States and other Western powers toward the conflict in Congo have been
misguided in part out of ignorance of Central Africa’s complicated
twentieth-century history. Episodes of appalling violence in this region have
occurred periodically at least since 1959, and cannot be remedied without
first understanding their deeper causes. As Lemarchand
writes:
From the days of the Hutu
revolution in Rwanda [in 1959–1962] to the invasion of the “refugee warriors”
from Uganda [under Kagame’s leadership] in 1994,
from the huge exodus of Hutu from Burundi in 1972 to the “cleansing” of Hutu
refugee camps in 1996–97, the pattern
that emerges again and again is one in which refugee populations serve as the
vehicles through which ethnic identities are mobilized and manipulated, host
communities preyed upon, and external resources extracted.
Some will always quibble with
where to begin this story, whether with colonial favoritism for the Tutsis by
Belgium in the first half of the twentieth century, or with Brussels’s flip-flop in 1959 in favor of the Hutus on the
eve of Rwandan independence, which led to the anti-Tutsi pogroms that sent Kagame’s family and those of so many others of his RPF
comrades into exile in Uganda. These events in turn had far-reaching effects
on Rwanda’s small neighbor Burundi, a German and later Belgian colony that
gained independence in 1962 and, like Rwanda, has a large Hutu majority and
Tutsi minority. In 1972, an extremist
Tutsi regime there, driven by a fear of being overthrown, carried out the
first genocide since the Holocaust, killing 300,000 Hutus.
In the West, the Burundi genocide is scarcely remembered, but its consequences
live on in the region. Terrorized Hutus streamed out of Burundi into Rwanda,
helping to set Rwanda onto a path of Hutu extremism, and priming it for its
own genocide two decades later. The final instigator of the Rwandan tragedy
was the mysterious shooting down of a presidential plane on April 6, 1994,
which killed presidents Juvénal Habyarimana of
Rwanda and Cyprien Ntaramyira
of Burundi, who were both Hutu. This precipitated the horrific massacre of
Rwandan Tutsis, but also a broader Hutu–Tutsi conflict, which by 1996 had
begun to tear apart large swaths of eastern Congo.
The events that have followed
Rwanda’s arrest of the warlord Nkunda in January of
this year suggest that Congo and Rwanda have finally found reasons to sue for
peace. Congo’s weak government and corrupt army are powerless to fight Rwanda
or its proxies, and there is desperate need to rebuild the state from
scratch. Rwanda, meanwhile, is seeking to placate important European aid
donors, who account for as much as half of Rwanda’s annual budget and who,
for the first time since its initial invasion of Congo in 1996, are asking
difficult questions about its behavior there.
As part of the deal that gave
Rwandan forces another chance to fight Hutu militias in eastern Congo last
spring, Kagame agreed to withdraw Rwanda’s support for the Tutsi insurgency
in eastern Congo while at the same time pressing Congolese Tutsis to
integrate into Congo’s national army. Kagame
hopes now to find a legal means to sustain Rwanda’s economic hold on eastern
Congo, for example by promoting civilian business interests in the area.
These are often run by ex-military officers or people with close ties to the
Rwandan armed forces. In interviews, both Prunier
and Lemarchand say that the direct plunder of
resources by the Rwandan military has ceased, but that a large “subterranean”
trade in minerals has continued through corrupt Congolese politicians and
local militias.
For its part, the United States
has begun to acknowledge the scale of the problem in eastern Congo. In
August, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton paid a two-day visit to the
country, during which she described the conflict as driven by “exploitation
of natural resources” and announced a $17 million program to help women who
have been raped in the fighting.
Notwithstanding these developments,
the conflict in the east has been surging again, as the UN-backed Congolese
army pursues a new campaign against Hutu rebels.8
It is hard to dispute Lemarchand’s logic. Without
addressing the problems of exclusion and participation, whether in a Rwanda
ruled by a small Tutsi minority or in heavily armed eastern Congo, where
contending ethnic groups want to get hold of the region’s spoils, it will be
impossible to end this catastrophe.
—August 25, 2009
Letters
The Debate over Rwanda December 3, 2009
The Debate over Rwanda
E-mail
Print Share More by Howard W. French,
Noam Schimmel
In response to:
Kagame's
Hidden War in the Congo from the September 24, 2009 issue
To the Editors:
Howard French’s characterization of Rwanda’s government as consisting of
“a small Tutsi minority” is incongruent with the facts [“Kagame’s
Hidden War in the Congo,” NYR, September 24].
Rwanda’s prime minister, Bernard Makuza, is Hutu.
Marcel Gatsinzi, Rwanda’s minister of defense, is
also Hutu. Hutus serve at the highest levels of government, in every branch
of government, and in every level of government from local and provincial
leaders to national authorities and ambassadors.
The Rwandan government has made extraordinary efforts to improve the
standard of living of all Rwandans, Hutu and Tutsi alike. Major investments
in a universal health care system, classroom building for improved
educational access and quality, and business development to increase employment
opportunities and promote poverty alleviation have had tangible results that
have been deservedly recognized by a range of governments, NGOs, and
multilateral organizations.
Efforts to tackle corruption and government waste place Rwanda at the top
of African nations with regard to transparency, accountability, and integrity
of governance. These projects to improve human development and the
achievement of the UN Millennium Development Goals do
not discriminate on the basis of ethnic identity. Hutus benefit from them
just as much as Tutsis and deliberately so as a matter of government policy,
which places the equality of Rwandans at the heart of its principles and
policies.
It has become popular among some in academia to delegitimize Rwanda’s
current government. There are legitimate reasons for criticizing it. But such
criticisms need to be grounded in fact and sensitive to the context of
Rwanda’s post-genocide situation. From 1959 to 1994 massacres against
innocent Rwandan civilians took place every ten years and sometimes with
greater frequency. Tens of thousands of Tutsis were killed in these
massacres, culminating in the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis, in which one
million Tutsis were killed as were tens of thousands of Hutu moderates who
stood for the values of freedom, democracy, and equality and were murdered by
the Hutu supremacist regime as a result.
Since the RPF ended the genocide and liberated
Rwanda in 1994 and formed a stable government of national unity, no such acts
of government-sanctioned mass violence have taken place in Rwanda, not
against Tutsis, and not against Hutus. This is a stunning achievement, and
one that is too often overlooked. It represents a radical paradigm shift in
how Rwanda is governed for the better of all of its citizens alike. It is
Rwanda’s current government that has guaranteed this peace and broken the
pattern of violence against innocents. It deserves recognition.
Noam Schimmel
London School of Economics and Political Science
London, England
Howard French replies:
Real power in Rwanda is not only held by a small Tutsi minority, a reality
that Mr. Schimmel would dismiss, but by a minority
within that minority: a new elite drawn largely from the English-speaking
Tutsis who returned to Rwanda from exile in Uganda and elsewhere during and
following the 1994 victory by Major Paul Kagame’s
Rwandan Patriotic Front.
The existence of Hutus with impressive-sounding titles sprinkled here and
there in government does nothing to change that fact. Indeed, the cosmetic
nature of Hutu representation in Rwanda has a history that goes back to the
earliest days of the post-genocide era, when Pasteur Bizimungu,
a “moderate Hutu,” was named president, and Kagame, a Tutsi, vice-president.
It is widely known that Kagame wielded effective power under this
arrangement. Bizimungu was replaced by Kagame as
president in 2000, and when he tried to form an opposition party the
following year, it was promptly banned. In 2002, Bizimungu
was placed under house arrest for his political activity, and subsequently
spent three years in prison.
The writer goes on to speak of achievements that have been overlooked in
Rwanda, but in doing so proceeds to embrace the prevalent narrative of Tutsi
victimhood, according to which we should discount any missteps taken under
Kagame, even if they involve the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Hutus
in the Congo, or the death of millions of that country’s citizens during
Rwanda’s pursuit of war next door.
The books I reviewed in my article relate a history that is much more
complex than the one offered by Mr. Schimmel,
challenging our understanding of many important questions about Central
Africa. They offer none of the moral clarity of the Holocaust analogies that
remain popular in accounts of the Rwandan genocide, but rather show a region
of multiple, interlocking genocides in which Hutus and Tutsis have repeatedly
taken turns as perpetrator and victim. Such complexity may be difficult to
embrace, but doing so is essential to ending the horrible cycle of impunity and
revenge that bedevils Africa’s Great Lakes region.
- According to the International
Rescue Committee, whose epidemiological studies in Congo use methodology
similar to that of studies it has carried out in Iraq and elsewhere.↩
- See Adam Hochschild's
account in these pages, "Rape of the Congo," August 13, 2009.↩
- Nearly simultaneous
permission was granted to Uganda and South Sudan to send their forces into
Congolese territory to pursue factions of the Lord's Resistance Army,
one of Africa's most vicious rebel groups.↩
- Reports of RPF killings first
surfaced, briefly, in a 1994 report by a UN investigator, Robert Gersony, who concluded that RPF insurgents had
murdered between 25,000 and 45,000 people. Under pressure from the United
States, the Gersony report was never released.↩
- In his recent book, Journey
into Darkness: Genocide in Rwanda, Thomas Odom, a former US military
attaché to Kigali, writes that the Kibeho
massacre did not undermine US support for the Rwandan government.
"The bottom line was a difficult operation had gone bad, and people
had died. I put the casualties at around two thousand," he wrote.
"Yet the United States did not suspend foreign assistance—just
barely restarted—as did the Belgians, the Dutch, and the European Union.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Vince Kern passed word to me that
our report had saved the day." See Journey into Darkness
(Texas A&M University Press, 2005), pp. 229–230.↩
- Howard W. French, A
Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (Knopf,
2004), p. 142.↩
- In his self-published
manuscript on the events, In the Aftermath of Genocide: The US Role in Rwanda (iUniverse,
2005), Gribbin discounts this number, writing
that "some would die in fighting, some would succumb to their
terrible living conditions and to abuses by rebel forces, but 300,000
killed? Never." Nonetheless Gribbin acknowledges
that serious efforts at investigation were blocked.↩
- See Stephanie McCrummen, "A Conflict's Deadly Ripple
Effects," The Washington Post, August 2, 2009.↩
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