Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe

by Gerard Prunier

  To this second layer of explanation economists, cynics, and anthropologists will add a third one, equally deep, equally thick, and equally beyond the control of the politicians: the social impact of the contemporary African economic rout, with its corollaries of extreme poverty and corruption.

  Precolonial African economies were essentially subsistence economies, usually producing a small surplus that was used to trade in luxury goods for purposes of social prestige. Empire attempted to change all that. The natives were now supposed to work for two purposes: producing raw materials for the benefit of the centers and making money so that they could buy in their distant peripheries the manufactured goods produced by those same centers. As they were only moderately interested in fulfilling these foreign-imposed goals, the natives were deemed lazy and were brutally coerced into working. The end of empire did not basically change these “progressive” orientations, and the pattern imposed by today’s World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is not essentially different from the old colonial system except for two things: mass media cultural seductions have replaced the whip as an inducement to perform, and trade has been multilateralized away from the old empire monopolies. Apart from that, the old evils of deteriorating terms of trade, agricultural monoproduction, the lack of industrialization, and an abysmally low level of manpower qualification are still there. Infrastructures left by colonization have seldom been improved and in most places have greatly deteriorated. The elegant solution to all that used to be the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed masses; today it is called poverty alleviation through globalized free trade. In both cases the result is the same: very little.

  But Africa has had to go on living anyway. And year after year there are more and more young Africans trying to make a living out of a stagnant traditional agriculture and in a very slowly expanding urban job market. Abstract economic terms are translated every day into social and cultural hunger and frustration. Unemployment, underemployment, and make-believe jobs are politely subsumed under the heading “informal economy.” In such a context, the violent tearing of an already threadbare social fabric is bound to have enormous and unforeseen consequences. The Rwandese genocide provided just such a violent rending.

  Since 1960 France had played a disproportionate role in propping up the African theater of the cold war conflict. With or without U.S. help, France had been playing policeman at the four corners of the continent, taking the protection of its economic interests as a reward for its violent involvement. The Rwanda debacle took Paris by surprise. France had started in the good old spirit of propping up a friendly neighborhood dictatorship and it had wound up with 800,000 unexpected dead bodies. The shock felt by Paris was primarily cultural: How could France, the birthplace of Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Victor Schoelcher.2 the self-appointed best friend of Africa, be responsible for such a mess? The French power structure could understand neither its own errors nor the tremendous impact they were going to have in the post–cold war context.

  The catastrophe then reverberated clear across the continent under the eyes of a stunned and unbelieving audience, knocking down all the worn-out props in the process, including the central one, Mobutu himself. But given the state of Africa in the late twentieth century, such a radical change was bound to have effects not only at the visible state level but also at the deeper levels of identity perception and economic survival. The quasi-continentwide conflict was the logical consequence of that triple conundrum.

  It was thus impossible to analyze the conflict strictly in state-versus-state terms (or state-versus–nonstate villains), as the international community has tried to do. States of sorts do exist in Africa, and they are indeed part of that tragic game. But they are far from representing the whole story. It is within that gap in perception that the heart of the problem lies. Diplomats are by nature conservative, and they tend to strive for the fantasyland of a balanced status quo, all the while fearing the possible hell of a Kaplan-like “coming anarchy.” And although reality mostly tends to hover somewhere in between, they cannot resign themselves to the probability of a protracted crisis. International diplomacy is at present desperately trying to patch up a worn-out and contradictory social order in Africa, first by convincing itself that African states are “normal,” in the etymological sense, and then by convincing these states to make peace with each other while at the same time trying to format the nonstate elements into entities acceptable to the UN and the World Bank. The complicated patchwork of local contradictions blending into the general mess is either not perceived or is ritually dismissed as “African complexities.”

  This is probably due not to incapacity but to two other elements. First, there is a massive lack of genuine interest. Africa is too peripheral to the contemporary interests of the so-called world community to actually be part of it. The September 11 crisis and its vast consequences only accelerated the process of Africa’s international marginalization. As Senegalese president Abdou Diouf presciently said to a high-ranking French civil servant back in 1985, “Our last trump card is our capacity for nuisance.” African heads of state now periodically issue dark warnings about HIV-AIDS, illegal immigrants, and the terrorist-breeding potentialities of the continent. But even this feeble attempt at blackmail is seldom taken seriously. Compared to the Middle East, Africa carries only a limited fear factor.

  Second, there is the very low pain threshold of the economically developed Western world. This threshold is so low that we cannot even tolerate watching the pain of others on television. So one of the diplomats’ jobs—a rather thankless task, I should say—is to remove the visible signs of pain from the CNN broadcasts before they can prevent Western spectators from going about their familiar domestic pleasures. Humanitarian action is then resorted to as an adequate substitute for political decisions. High-protein supplementary feeding is brought in, a vaccination campaign is undertaken, reassuring shots of black babies with white nurses are displayed, and then the cameras roll off. Mission accomplished.

  These combined factors—a fatal attraction for what U.S. National Security Adviser Anthony Lake once called “a quick fix solution,” the lack of a genuine interest at the government level, and the short attention span of the general public—have given us the “Great Lakes crisis” storyboard of the past thirteen years:

  1994:

  Genocide in Rwanda. Horror.

  1995:

  Festering camps. Keep feeding them and it will eventually work out.

  1996:

  Refugees have gone home. It is now all over except in Zaire.

  1997:

  Mobutu has fallen. Democracy has won.

  1998:

  Another war. These people are crazy.

  1999:

  Diplomats are negotiating. It will eventually work out.

  2000:

  Blank

  2001:

  President Kabila is shot. But his son seems like a good sort, doesn’t he?

  2002:

  Pretoria Peace Agreement. We are now back to normal.

  2003:

  These fellows still insist on money. What is the minimum price?

  2004:

  Do you think Osama bin Laden is still alive?

  2005:

  Three million Africans have died. This is unfortunate.

  2006:

  Actually, it might be four million. But since the real problem is Al Qaeda, this remains peripheral.

  2007:

  They have had their election, haven’t they? Then everything should be all right.

  The result is rather strange. A situation of major conflict is reduced to a comic book atmosphere in which absolute horror alternates with periods of almost complete disinterest from the nonspecialists. Massive levels of physical violence and cultural upheavals are looked upon from a great distance by theoretically powerful international institutions who only dimly understand what is actually happening. There is a great use of stereotyped categories (“advance warning,” “failed st
ate,” “humanitarian emergency,” “confidence-building process,” “national reconciliation,” “negative forces,” “national dialogue,” “African ownership of the peace process”) which are more relevant to the Western way of thinking than to the realities they are supposed to address. The desperate African struggle for survival is bowdlerized beyond recognition, and at times the participant-observer has the feeling of being caught between a Shakespearian tragedy and a hiccupping computer.

  Which does not mean that African leaders are at all put off by this cognitive dissonance. Many have learned the new ropes. They know that if talked to with the proper, politically correct vocabulary the international community can be immensely useful. Never mind the fact that the international community hardly understands what is going on. This very ignorance is part of the African players’ basic tactical kit. Since 1994 gaining the moral high ground from where you can shell your enemies with UN supplies has been a routine part of every battle. Humanitarianism is seen as the mainstay of international diplomacy, and diplomacy becomes the pursuit of war by other means.

  At this point the situation begs an obvious question: What is going to come out of all this? Is Africa falling apart, or is it going through the pangs of some kind of rebirth? The answer is, probably both. The Rwandese genocide is an example of an atrociously violent leap into some form of modernity. The lack of previous economic and social modernization was not its cause, but it created the conditions of its feasibility. And the “Congolese” conflict that it spawned belonged to the same domain. In a totally different context, differential modernity is at work. The warlords, the peasants, the dashing instant neocapitalists, the refugees, the kadogos, the traders, the NGO employees, the satellite phone providers are all part of an enormous transformation whose historical consequences are still unknown. Diplomats, international bankers, humanitarians, and businesspeople are all by nature impatient with the erratic events strewing that dark and meandering path. Their impatience is understandable, but it is not realistic. History cannot be hurried along, and Africa is at present going through a major historical transformation. The present calls for an “African government” are unrealistic and premature. But they reflect a desire to jump-start an approved form of modernity. Change does not automatically mean either progress or decay because history is not teleological. But change is irreversible, and Africa is morphing: out of the old clichés and into an unknown future shape.

  This book is a modest effort at stating the problem correctly and more or less trying to understand it. Rarely have ground reality and diplomatic discourse been more at variance than in the case of today’s African crises. To cite a famous title, Africa works3 —but only in a queer sort of a way—and toward what is still unknown. The “Congolese” conflict, with its accompaniment of horrendous suffering, was part and parcel of that vast transformation. For the time being its most violent aspects have subsided, although many of the basic questions that had gone into its making have stubbornly refused to give way to the diplomatic blandishments: Will Joseph Kabila manage to keep his contradictory regime working? And if so, toward what end? Will Rwanda obligingly withdraw to its overcrowded rural slum, or will it manage its transformation into the African Singapore Paul Kagame is dreaming of? Will all the peripheral conflicts that for over four years globalized themselves into the Congolese cockpit accept deconstruction into separate cases amenable to a light diplomatic treatment?

  Whatever happens, one thing is certain: the relatively tame post- or neocolonial Africa of the cold war years is now definitely dead and something else is on the way to being born. This difficult birth will occur mostly outside the presence of an otherwise engaged international community. This leaves unresolved the enigmatic case of the “new” South Africa, winner by default of a conflict it did not fight. In a now largely indifferent world, almost nobody but South Africa has the combination of international weight, economic wherewithal, and emotional engagement with the continent. The two other imperialisms still playing themselves out in today’s Africa are much narrower. China’s is a blunter, cruder version of Leninist nineteenth-century imperialism, entirely designed around global resource exploitation. As for U.S. imperialism, it is selectively focused on siphoning off Gulf of Guinea oil, with a more recently added “war on terror” security sideshow in the Horn. Both China and the United States can live without Africa. South Africa cannot.

  Apartheid crumbled and the Rwandese genocide took place within the same time frame. Both events shook the world; neither was really understood; and both were later semi-forgotten in the wake of September 11. But African history stubbornly went on, and it is in that now disconnected history that the “Congolese” conflict marked a watershed. To what end is not yet clear, even if South Africa’s increasingly unavoidable presence is bound to be a part of whatever develops. The New Partnership for Africa’s Development, “African Union,” Can Africa Claim the 21st Century?4 —the world is now faced with the equally believable possibilities of an African Renaissance or an African Anarchy, neither of which will really engage its attention. An enormous and inchoate process is now at work, and may God help the men and women who are both its actors and its often powerless raw material.

  AFRICA’S WORLD WAR

  1

  RWANDA’S MIXED SEASON OF HOPE (JULY 1994–APRIL 1995)

  The immediate aftermath

  To live in Rwanda after July 1994 meant living with the consequences of the genocide. And the genocide in Rwanda could not be compared to other, similar crimes committed elsewhere because its massive horror had been carried out within the confines of a small, tightly knit community.1

  Other genocides have been committed by strangers killing other strangers, and their violence was often engulfed in the wider violence of large international wars or revolutions. Here, attempts by revisionist historians notwithstanding, reducing the phenomenon to a simple consequence of the war is impossible. It was a hill-by-hill and a home-by-home thing. And it is this neighborly quality, this grisly homespun flavor, that contaminated the world of the survivors after the killing had stopped. Western readers should beware of too close a parallel with the Jewish Shoah during World War II. To understand the complexity of the postgenocide situation in Rwanda, one should imagine a world in which many of the German SS would have had Jewish relatives and in which the postwar State of Israel would have been created in Bavaria instead of the Middle East. The following might help us feel how the complexity of the genocide in Rwanda created an almost insane world:

  • A Hutu couple, professors at the University of Rwanda, take into their home the sixteen-year-old son of a mixed Hutu-Tutsi family, hoping to protect him. The boy’s father, a Tutsi, is killed in the genocide. The couple run to Cyangugu with the boy, seeking the protection of the French army then involved in Operation Turquoise.2 After the war, the boy’s Hutu mother gets her son back and has his saviors arrested for “complicity in the genocide.”3

  • A Hutu trader hides his mixed-parentage relatives. To protect them, he gets a gun but never uses it. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) comes to power. He flees to Zaire, as do the local Interahamwe militiamen.4 They get back to Rwanda before him and occupy his land. Then they use his possession of an unauthorized gun to denounce him as a génocidaire, get him arrested, and keep his farm.5

  • A Tutsi man escapes being killed by the Interahamwe because he is a very popular fellow on his hill. He pleads with the killers for the lives of his wife and son. The militiamen grant him the life of his wife but murder his son “because he is an arrogant Tutsi.” Hearing of his miraculous escape, the man’s niece (also a Tutsi), whose whole immediate family has been wiped out, runs to him and begs him to save her. The Interahamwe return and, refusing to listen to the uncle’s pleading, kill the eighteen-year-old girl. After the RPF victory the man becomes the local bourgmestre (mayor). A few weeks later he goes to Kigali on administrative business. He gets arrested for “not having protected his niece,” in reality because some local peo
ple want his job. Five years later he was still in jail. 6

  • A Tutsi RPF soldier falls in love with a Hutu girl. Relatives try to stop the marriage by saying she was involved in the genocide and get her arrested. The young soldier frantically begs anybody who can help him save his beloved. Through the agency of one of his officers he gets the girl freed. He then gets arrested for “interfering with justice” and spends eighteen months in jail.7

  • Célestin Sebulikoko, a Tutsi businessman who used to finance the RPF during the war, runs to the RPF-held area of Byumba in May 1994 to flee the killers. He then gets killed by the RPF in obscure circumstances, probably over a business rivalry. The “official” excuse is that he was a member of the Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement (MRND).8

  • A young Tutsi from inside Rwanda joins the RPF during the war. His whole family is destroyed during the genocide. He comes back home and finds Tutsi émigrés from the diaspora in Burundi who have returned to Rwanda and occupied his farm. They get him thrown in jail as a génocidaire and he manages to get out only with the help of his commanding officer.9