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Big
Gamble in Rwanda Shake Hands with the Devil: The
Failure of Humanity in Rwanda The Rwanda Crisis: History of a
Genocide Imagined Olympians: Body Culture
and Colonial Representation in Rwanda Silent Accomplice: The Untold
Story of France’s Role in Rwandan Genocide An Ordinary Man: An Autobiography One morning last summer, while
staying at the Hôtel des Mille Collines
in Kigali, Rwanda, I heard a great commotion below my first-floor window. I
looked out, and saw a crowd of about one hundred distraught people pressing
around a man who was dressed in a Canadian army uniform and wore the blue
beret of a United Nations peacekeeper. Desperation was etched on their faces
as they shouted at him in various languages. “This hotel is under the
protection of the United Nations!” the officer barked. “There’s no danger!” I walked quickly downstairs, and
as I passed the officer, I saw the name on his uniform: Dallaire.
A few steps away, just outside the hotel gate, crude roadblocks made of logs
and wrecked cars had suddenly appeared. Crazed-looking young men with bulging
eyes clustered around them, waving clubs and machetes. They eyed the gate
menacingly, looking ready and eager to kill. These figures were all actors in a
film that is being made of the book Shake Hands with the Devil, an
impassioned account of the United Nations’ pathetic response to the 1994
genocide written by General Roméo Dallaire,1
who was then commander of the UN peacekeeping force. Even though I knew I was
witnessing a recreation of events that unfolded twelve years earlier, the
scene was a powerful reminder of how far Rwanda has come since the enormous
horror that was visited upon it. After the slaughter of 1994, which
ended when the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front overthrew the Hutu
government and seized power, Rwanda seemed likely to become either a Tutsi
dictatorship or a failed state torn apart by ethnic warlords. Instead, it is
stable and full of ambition. The central figure in its rebirth, President
Paul Kagame, has emerged as one of the most intriguing leaders in Africa. He
preaches a doctrine of security, guided reconciliation, anti-corruption, and
above all a drive toward self-reliance that he hopes will free his country
from its heavy dependence on foreign aid. This program has produced economic
growth rates of 5 percent a year, and has won Kagame a fervent base of
support among some development experts in the United States. Josh Ruxin,
the former director of a health program at the John F. Kennedy School of
Government, is so enthusiastic about Rwanda’s prospects that he has pulled up
stakes and moved here. He runs a “Millennium Village” project in a rural part
of the country that serves as a laboratory for the development strategies of
Columbia University economist and anti-poverty expert Jeffrey Sachs. “I’ve worked in fifty countries,”
he told me, “and I think this is the only country on the planet that stands a
chance of migrating from extreme poverty to middle income in the space of the
next fifteen years.” Yet at the same time, the Rwandan
government has been criticized by human rights groups and other observers for
restricting free speech and political action. Before the 2003 presidential
election, the man who would have been Kagame’s
principal opponent was jailed on corruption charges. Political parties may
not appeal to group identity, and public statements promoting “divisionism”
are forbidden. The authorities have used these limitations to imprison
critics. This contrast is striking in
today’s Rwanda. Many outsiders believe that no other poor country is embarked
on such a promising campaign to improve itself, and are thrilled with what
President Kagame is doing. Others, however, are deeply skeptical. On a
continent where development efforts have failed so spectacularly for so long,
and where vast multitudes live in seemingly hopeless poverty, Rwanda’s
contradictions embody a great conundrum. With a dense population and few
natural resources, Rwanda must rely on human development if it is to prosper.
Kagame and other government leaders looked to top-down Asian models,
especially Singapore and China, as they designed their ambitious anti-poverty
plan. It rests first of all on security. The government keeps close watch on
people it considers suspicious, limits their access to big towns, and
periodically picks up street children and requires them either to return to
their villages or accept vocational training in courses sponsored by the Red
Cross. As a result of these and other measures, Kigali is probably the safest
city in Africa today, and Rwanda one of the safest countries in the world.
That makes foreign investors and entrepreneurs confident about moving to
Rwanda. So many have arrived that this year an international school opened
for their children. Kagame believes Rwanda can rise to
prosperity by becoming the trade and commercial hub of East and Central
Africa, regions awash in economic resources including gold, diamonds, and a
spectacular variety of minerals but plagued by inefficiency, corruption, and
poverty. His strategy is to build a
modern network of road, rail, and air connections; improve the education
system, especially in science and information technology; encourage private
investment; and oversee all of this with a state that is honest, impartial,
and transparent. Rwanda is still wretchedly poor,
and tensions between its Hutu and Tutsi citizens still simmer beneath the
surface. But some aid and development specialists have begun to see the
country as a possible African success story. They are streaming in to build
schools, open businesses, and organize development projects. “Go to the Congo, and every time
you want to do anything, you have to pay under the table,” said Cathy Emmerson, a Canadian woman who runs a souvenir store and
a small development project in the northern town of Ruhengeri.
“Here you not only have a government that isn’t going to put its hand in your
pocket, it actually encourages you.” Other Americans are drawn to
Rwanda through religious conviction. They see it as a place where people who
have been through a devastating tragedy are now being redeemed by an almost
unfathomable process of reconciliation. Rick
Warren, the influential evangelical preacher and author of the Christian
best seller The Purpose-Driven Life,
is encouraging his followers to support projects in Rwanda; he has embraced
Kagame (who does not attend church regularly) as a “wonderful Christian
leader” and asserted that Kagame’s energy is proof
that “God is blessing Rwanda.” Others, including a group that raised $5
million in Arkansas for a bank that will lend money to poor Rwandans, were
attracted by the country’s most prominent clergyman, Bishop John Rucyahana, a charismatic, American-trained Anglican who
says that God sent Kagame “to heal this nation and make it an example for all
of Africa.” “The genocide deeply touched our
hearts,” said Reverend Ian Cron, the pastor of
Trinity Church in Greenwich, Connecticut, which has sent about one hundred of
its four hundred parishioners on missions to Rwanda. “Kagame has done a good
job of putting that country back together, so it’s fertile ground for
transformation in ways that a lot of other poor third-world countries are
not.” While I was in Rwanda last summer,
Bill Clinton dropped in to visit a
hospital that his foundation runs near the village of Rwinkwavu.
President Kagame told me that Clinton “feels some kind of guilt that he did
not help Rwanda as much as he should have at the time he had the means and
capacity to do that.” A few days later, Bill
Gates showed up and announced that his foundation would spend $900,000 to
build a medical center where doctors and technicians from across the region
will be trained in treating infectious diseases. This constellation of support has
opened doors for Kagame in Washington. He has visited the White House three
times in the last four years, and heard President Bush call him a “man of
action” who can “get things done.” Rep. Donald M. Payne of New Jersey,
chairman of the House subcommittee dealing with Africa, recently praised him
as “a moral leader” who “has done an outstanding job of moving Rwanda
forward” and “is well loved by the people of his country.” Amid this enthusiasm for the new
Rwanda, however, there is also doubt. According to Amnesty International, human rights advocates in Rwanda have
been “forced to flee the country for fear of being persecuted or arbitrarily
arrested”; journalists “face intimidation and harassment for articles
criticizing government policy”; and thousands of Rwandans suspected of war
crimes have fled to neighboring countries “because of suspicion of the
authorities and rumors of politically motivated ‘disappearances.’” Human
Rights Watch asserts that the government has “equated ‘genocidal ideology’
with dissent from government policy” and “continued to detain persons without
charge in violation of Rwandan law.” Freedom House says “transitional justice
has been largely one-sided in Rwanda,” and sees a “downward trend” in respect
for civil liberties. The human rights analyst Samantha Power has written in
these pages that while pursuing justice against Hutu extremists, the
government has made it difficult for witnesses to testify against Tutsi
soldiers indicted for war crimes by the UN tribunal in Arusha,
Tanzania.2
Reporters Without Borders, which ranks countries according to their level of
press freedom, places Rwanda 122nd out of 167 countries surveyed. Three years ago, Noël Twagiramungu ran the Kigali office of a private human
rights group, Ligue des Droits
de l’Homme dans la Région des Grands Lacs. Today he lives near Boston. By his own account, he
fled Rwanda after being told that intelligence agents were plotting to kill
him in order to stop his investigations. “Kagame
is governing the country as a strongman,” he told me. “His will is law.
Everyone is fearful, afraid of him.” Twagiramungu
asserted that the Rwandan Patriotic Front has not lived up to the promises of
democracy that its leaders made while they were fighting for power in the
early 1990s: You have to put this into context
and go back to Rwanda in the period before the war…. We were told, “We’re
working and committed to the development of the country, but we cannot open
democratic space because that will create a vacuum we cannot manage.” …In 1990, Kagame’s
guys started a war. They said they were fighting for free, democratic speech
and human rights values. How can you understand that the same guys who fought
for democratic freedoms now have to develop the same argument as their
predecessors? “No freedom of speech or democratic space, that’s not possible
in our country because what matters is security and development.” It’s really
a step back. Rwanda, as the French historian Gérard Prunier writes in his
book The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide,3
“is not an ‘ordinary’ African country, supposing that such a thing exists.” It is very small, with 8.8 million people
packed into a land about the size of Maryland. Its climate is moderate,
it has few jungles, and slave traders never penetrated into its territory. Rwanda is landlocked, and for much of its
history it was isolated from the world; the first European did not arrive
until 1892. It has neither great mineral wealth nor space for large-scale
agriculture. Early European explorers found in Rwanda a highly
organized, monarchical society governed by a class of people who seemed so
clever and sophisticated that they did not fit existing stereotypes of
Africans. These were the Tutsi, who made up about 15 percent of the population and
ruled a land where the large majority was of another group, the Hutu.
Europeans took this as proof of
primitive racial theories that were then in vogue. They were, Prunier writes, “quite smitten with the Tutsi,” finding
them a “superior race” of people who were “meant to reign,” possessed “a
refinement of feelings which is rare among primitive people,” and had “an
absolutely distinct origin from the negroes.” The Hutu, by contrast, were
seen as “less intelligent, more simple, more
spontaneous, more trusting…extroverts who like to laugh and lead a simple
life.” Ignorant of the complex web of mutual obligation that had bound Tutsi
and Hutu together for generations, European colonizers placed one group in
direct control of the other. Rwanda was a German colony from 1897 to 1916, and then
fell under Belgian rule. The Belgians used finely marked rulers
and calipers to measure the height of foreheads, width of noses, and other
facial features that they believed would allow them to place every Rwandan in
a category. In 1933 they made the fateful decision to issue identity cards classifying every
Rwandan as Tutsi or Hutu (a very small number belong to a third group, the Twa). In 1994 these cards helped Hutu to identify
hundreds of thousands of Tutsi and kill them. In the 1950s, as the decolonization of Africa was approaching, the
Belgians changed their Rwanda policy. Moved in part by new egalitarian
impulses that made them see Tutsi domination as undemocratic, and also by
fears that educated Tutsi were turning toward Marxism, they encouraged a
rising sense of Hutu grievance. Finally they decided, in the words of John
Bale, author of Imagined Olympians, “to switch their support to the educated Hutu.” After ruling for
generations through the Tutsi, they reversed themselves and made the Hutu
masters of Rwanda just before granting the country independence in 1962. Bale
writes: Hutu militancy increased, as did
opposition to the monarchy. The existing system of Tutsi advantage was
challenged. It was now Hutu who increasingly felt they could re-write
history…. They represented Tutsi as Aryan “immigrants” or “invaders.” …The
power base had shifted to the Hutu elite. This was a turning point in the
political history of Rwanda…. One can thus view the subsequent ethnic
cleansing and genocide as horrendous extensions of the trend that began in
the 1950s. After independence, government-sponsored Hutu gangs
carried out periodic massacres of Tutsi. Many Tutsi fled the country. Those
who remained were given a subservient status much like that imposed on blacks
in South Africa. They became second-class citizens
and were denied full rights to education, employment, and travel. Whenever
extremist or corrupt Hutu politicians needed a scapegoat, or wished to divert
attention away from their misdeeds, they attacked the Tutsi minority. More than 80,000 Tutsi took refuge in Uganda, which is across Rwanda’s northern border. By the 1980s,
many found themselves trapped by two suffocating realities: exile in a
hostile country was intolerable, but return home was impossible. A group of
them formed an army called the Rwandan
Patriotic Front, and on October 1, 1990, this army crossed into Rwanda
and launched a guerrilla war. Paul Kagame, whose parents had fled with him to
Uganda when he was two years old and who grew up in refugee camps, emerged as
the RPF leader. The insurgency gained strength,
and President Juvénal Habyarimana felt compelled to
accept a peace accord under which Hutu and Tutsi would share power. This
enraged many militant Hutu, and on April
6, 1994, Habyarimana was assassinated
when his plane was shot down near the Kigali airport. The killers have never
been identified. Most suspicion is focused on radicals within the ruling Hutu
group, but some suspect Kagame’s rebels. Kagame has
denied involvement. “I did not do it,” he replied when a Canadian interviewer
asked him, “and I had no reason to do so.” In November 2006, a French
antiterrorism judge, Jean-Louis Bruguière, issued a
stunning accusation that Kagame and nine of his associates had planned the
attack on the plane. Although Kagame, as a head of state, has immunity under
French law, the public prosecutor’s office in Paris approved the judge’s
request for international arrest warrants for the nine others. Bruguière, who had been investigating the downing of the
aircraft on behalf of the families of the plane’s French crew, based his
charges on the testimony of former members of Kagame’s
Rwandan Patriotic Front. He did not consider other suspects or visit Rwanda.
After he issued his charges, Rwanda broke diplomatic relations with France. Judge Bruguière’s
charges came just a few weeks after Kagame’s
government opened an official inquiry into France’s role in the 1994
genocide. French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy
insisted that filing the charges was a “judicial decision” and not “the
result of a political decision by the French government.” The two
governments, however, are deeply hostile. Kagame is defying France by leading Rwanda out of the Francophone
sphere and toward membership in the British Commonwealth, and has never
forgiven France for its support of the old regime. In a damning new book
called Silent Accomplice: The Untold Story of France’s Role in the Rwandan
Genocide, the British journalist Andrew Wallis asserts that France was
“supporting a regime of killers for four years,” and that it bears “a great
responsibility for the genocide.” Judge Bruguière’s
charges, which have been admitted as evidence at the International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda, may be the latest volley in this diplomatic war. Within an hour after President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down in 1994, the genocide
began. Over the next one hundred days,
at least 800,000 Rwandans, the great majority of them Tutsi, were slaughtered
in an orgy of violence directed by the country’s senior leaders. The UN
peacekeeping force was pitifully weak and unable to prevent the slaughter.
Its failure haunted General Dallaire, who suffered a breakdown and attempted suicide
several times after returning home. In mid-July 1994, Kagame’s RPF
finally routed the Rwandan army and put an end to the genocide. It
proclaimed a new government in which the president and prime minister, along
with fourteen of the other twenty ministers, were Hutu. For much of the next six years, Kagame and his comrades concentrated
on suppressing a powerful Hutu counterinsurgency. Slowly, however, they
lost patience with what they saw as the government’s loose ethics and
plodding, business-as-usual approach to the urgent challenges of national
development. After a series of clashes, President Pasteur Bizimungu
resigned in 2000. Kagame, who had been vice-president, replaced him on an
interim basis. In 2003, he took over as president following an election in
which he won more than 95 percent of the vote. The constitution allows him
two seven-year terms. Post-genocide Rwanda faces an
enormous challenge. The government
estimates that two million Hutu are guilty of participating in mass murder. They
could not possibly be investigated and tried within a reasonable time, nor would there be space to imprison them. Survivors cry out
for justice, but justice could exacerbate group hatreds and even set the
country back on the path toward apocalypse. The Kagame government has settled on a system by which it
classifies génocidaires according to their
level of alleged guilt. Organizers and coordinators of the genocide face
conventional trials, either in Rwanda or at the International Criminal
Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha. Lesser criminals,
those who killed in their villages or guided death squads, may serve limited
prison terms or none at all if they confess before local assemblies and show
credible remorse. Political and religious leaders are urging people to
forgive those who attacked them. An amazing number say they have. In a remote and dusty village in Mbyo district, near the border with Burundi, I met a man
and woman who were longtime neighbors. In 1994 the man, Xavier Nemeye, hacked to death the husband and four children of
the woman, Rosaria Bankundiye. He tried to kill her
as well, but she escaped with machete wounds in her skull. She told me that
an itinerant Protestant pastor convinced her to forgive him. “Through God, we had the blessing
of being able to reconcile with those who committed these acts,” she said,
speaking slowly and with evident pain. “I don’t wish anything bad for him. If
someone kills him, it will not be me.” There was a long silence after she
finished. Then her assailant began his account. “Considering what I did, if I
had to sentence myself, even killing me would not be enough,” he said. “This
was collective crime. I am guilty, and the government was guilty. The
government planned the killing. I killed.” Kagame’s government is counting on
community trials, private acts of forgiveness, and growing prosperity to ease
group tensions. Some doubt that will be enough.
They warn that restrictions on political expression are feeding Hutu
resentment and may lead to future conflict. Edward McMahon, a University of
Vermont professor who makes assessments of East African countries for Freedom
House, told me that while he recognizes “the deep-rooted political
polarization that occurred as a result of the genocide,” he believes Kagame’s government has “created more the appearance of
democratic institutions than their reality.” The Kagame government, he
continued, “has continually used the legacy of genocide as a justification”
for restrictions on political opposition and civil liberties. McMahon worries
that these restrictions could eventually undermine Rwanda’s recent recovery: Over the medium to longer term you
are likely to see increased corruption, the kind of political mistakes that
occur in the absence of open dialogue, and the question of succession and
political alternance not being resolved. Given this
situation, there’s a very strong likelihood of renewed instability in the
country. Kagame’s defenders respond that too much
democracy too soon will split Rwanda apart again. One who told me this was Tim Schilling, an agronomist from
Texas who has spent the last four years in Rwanda organizing coffee
cooperatives. “It’s necessary to have
a little repression here,” he told me, “to keep the lid on” while Kagame’s economic development program takes hold: There’s still a lot of bad feeling
in this country. People never say anything, but it built up inside them for
so many years, and that doesn’t just disappear overnight. If you let things
go rampant here, genocide could happen again. There must be four million
people out there who are ready to do something, given the right incentive and
organization. Many Rwandans feel this way. The
editor of an independent newspaper, Shyaka Kanuma, who is the only Rwandan to win a Nieman fellowship to study journalism at Harvard, told me
that for years he saw Kagame as “a power-hungry, self-serving guy,” but has
now changed his view. “He has weaknesses, he has authoritarian tendencies,
but he’s good for our country,” Kanuma said. “Some
of the things he did to suppress opposition were necessary. We have people in
our country who would do absolutely anything to get
power.” The Rwandan best known in the
United States is probably Paul Rusesabagina, hero of the film Hotel Rwanda,
which shows him sheltering terrified refugees inside the Hôtel
des Mille Collines during the 1994 genocide. The
film has made him something of a celebrity, and in 2005 President Bush
awarded him the Medal of Freedom. There is considerable debate over whether Rusesabagina actually saved the lives of people hiding at
the hotel—even he says that he did no more than “help people”—but he has
seized his opportunity. He has written a book, An Ordinary Man,
asserting that there is “widespread injustice” in Rwanda, and calling Kagame
a “classic African strongman” who governs “for the benefit of a small group
of elite Tutsis.” It is true that ultimate power in Rwanda is in the hands of
Kagame and a small group of his Tutsi comrades, which creates an obvious
political opportunity for ambitious Hutu like Rusesabagina.
I visited him in Brussels, where he has lived for the last ten years, and
came away with the sense that he wants to return to Rwanda and challenge
Kagame, perhaps in the presidential election scheduled for 2010. “Any Hutu who can be an opposition
leader, any Hutu who can plan, any Hutu who can implement a plan, any Hutu
who is an intellectual or a businessman—always this is seen as a threat,” he
told me. “I don’t see myself getting old in Belgium, being an old man here,
with a small dog as my only friend.” If President Kagame hopes to win a
free election in 2010, he must persuade voters that old categories have no
meaning in the new Rwanda. This may be a formidable challenge, as one
diplomat in Kigali told me: The official line is, “We are all Rwandans. Nothing else
matters.” Many people accept that, but many others do not. Hutus are
without power. They are the big majority, and they always held power before,
so naturally they feel that something is not right. They feel excluded. They
see this as a Tutsi regime, a regime of the small minority. During my stay in Rwanda, I had
several conversations with Kagame. People told me that although he is an
indifferent public speaker, he is impressive in private, and I found that
true. Physically he is tall and very thin—a legacy, he told me, of his
childhood as an ill-fed refugee. He speaks softly and without much
expression, but conveys a sense of controlled impatience and frustration: Rwanda cannot have the majority of
its people living on less than one dollar a day. It is simply unacceptable.
You cannot have progress or a future when most of your people are just barely
living. Yet apart from the mistakes of governance, leadership and politics,
we have within us what it takes to develop. We aspire to be like others, like
the developed world. There are countries we see that forty or fifty years ago
were at the same level of development as our country. They have moved forward
and left us behind. Why can’t we achieve that? That’s a question I constantly
ask myself and other Rwandans. In order to crush Hutu forces
which had fled to the Congo (then Zaire) following their defeat in 1994, some
of whom were waging cross-border war against his regime,
Kagame ordered two large-scale attacks on refugee camps they dominated inside
the Congo during the late 1990s. The first eventually resulted in the
overthrow of the long-ruling tyrant Mobutu Sese Seko and his replacement by Laurent Kabila, who seemed
more willing to crack down on Hutu militants in refugee camps. Kabila,
however, did not deal with them as harshly as Rwanda had hoped, and that led
to a second attack. These invasions
resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. They also helped
set off a decade-long conflict that has involved half a dozen countries and
cost a staggering three million lives or more. When I asked Kagame if he
regretted his actions in the Congo, he told me he had invaded only because
the world community had refused to disarm Hutu militants or close their camps
in the Congo: We said to them, “Solve this
problem for us. We have had genocide. Here is a situation that is going to
repeat. We are going to see genocide taken to its completion. Help us.” …Not
a single person, country or institution stood up against this with us…. My advice is that when you have problems, try to sort them
out, because the international community never comes, or if it comes, it
comes in the wrong way, at the wrong time. Kagame was scornful when I asked
him about charges that his government is repressive. Courts have banned some
opposition parties, he insisted, only because they stirred up group hatred,
not because they posed a political threat. As for former officials who are
now in prison, including his predecessor, he insisted that every one was guilty of corruption. He argued that some
Westerners define “human rights” too narrowly, defending rights of personal
expression but underestimating the importance of stability and economic
progress: For me, human rights is about
everything. Even languishing in poverty as a result of colonization and other
situations of the past, violated human rights. If you solve that, you resolve
the human rights issue. People in the West shy away from that, and don’t even
want to talk about it. They run away from the significant blame that would be
put on their shoulders. This is not just one person here or there. This is
the killing of societies or nations we’re talking about. This constitutes the
greatest violation of human rights. The plunder of Africa has proceeded
under a variety of names: slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism, structural
adjustment and neoliberalism. Kagame and his RPF
believe they have found a way to escape from this cycle. The course they have
chosen is at least as full of risk as it is full of promise. Over the next
few years, it will be one of the most closely watched experiments in Africa. —February
28, 2007 Letters Rwanda: An Exchange
May 31, 2007
Rwanda: An ExchangeMay 31, 2007Elliott Green and Everard O’Donnell, reply by Stephen KinzerIn response to:Big Gamble in Rwanda from the March 29, 2007 issue To the Editors: Stephen Kinzer’s hagiography of President Paul Kagame of Rwanda [“Big Gamble in Rwanda,” NYR, March 29] is troubling for several reasons, but none more so than its almost total omission of Rwandan policy in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). To suggest that Kagame’s invasion of the DRC was merely a result of the failure to crack down on génocidaires is highly misleading, especially considering that the Rwandan army and the Hutu militants rarely ever met in battle. Rather, as noted in several UN reports, Rwandan forces were heavily involved in the exploitation of the DRC’s mineral resources, including diamonds, coltan, and gold. Rwandan forces and their local allies were responsible for mass rape, torture, theft, and killings, and fought the Ugandan army several times in the city of Kisangani, effectively destroying the city—the third largest in the DRC—in the process. The result of all of this was the mass displacement of Congolese civilians, including 1.5 million in March 2001 alone, and the subsequent deaths of several million people. In light of the above, it is ironic that Kinzer writes that “Kagame believes Rwanda can rise to prosperity by becoming the trade and commercial hub of East and Central Africa, regions awash in economic resources including gold, diamonds, and a spectacular variety of minerals but plagued by inefficiency, corruption, and poverty.” Rather than turning to Kagame to provide regional stability, many Congolese might correctly blame the “inefficiency, corruption, and poverty” in their country on Rwanda. Elliott Green Stephen Kinzer replies:The Rwandan army intervened twice in the Congo during the 1990s to attack tens of thousands of soldiers and militiamen who had fled there after committing the 1994 genocide, and who were organizing a counterinsurgency. If this threat to Rwanda’s stability had not arisen, there would have been no interventions. Once in the eastern Congo, according to many investigators, Rwanda prospered by exploiting the region’s mineral wealth, as armies and warlords have done for generations. The Congo had descended into chaos, however, long before the 1990s. It began to emerge from its long nightmare only after the overthrow of the Mobutu dictatorship, which was a product of Rwanda’s 1996 invasion. Contrary to what Mr. Green asserts, Rwandan forces in the Congo repeatedly engaged military and paramilitary units from the defeated genocidal regime. Some of those units fought independently, but others were integrated into the Congolese army. Rwandan leaders took this alliance as proof that a potent threat was developing across their border. That threat provoked their interventions. |
