But these four disasters, which so excite the attention of the international community when it tries to “help Africa,” were in fact secondary; they were tools, they were consequences of a deeply rotten social, political, and economic landscape; they were not the causes of the war. I will return in the last chapter to this touching humanitarianism that thinks it can prevent forest fires by banning the sale of matches.
Fifth and finally, the regional involvement looked almost mild compared to the previous factors. Yes, ex-DSP troops fought for Lissouba while his Rwandese Tutsi friends in Kinshasa tried to help him; yes, Chadians and ex-FAR Rwandese Hutu fought for Sassou; yes, in the end it was the massive Angolan military intervention that brought the fighting to an end, and that intervention, in turn, was triggered, at least partly, by the steady worsening of the relationship between UNITA and the MPLA in Angola itself, where the pretence of peacemaking looked every day more flimsy.106 But none of these interferences were in themselves sufficient to cause the conflict. The Brazzaville fighting left massive humanitarian scars in southern Congo107 and a legacy of bitterness and tension that resulted in protracted guerrilla fighting over the next few years, causing even more suffering than the urban clashes of 1997. As for the October Angolan invasion, it inaugurated a new era of Angolan military projection beyond its borders in an elusive search for “national security.” But security was a commodity in increasingly short supply in the region.
The unquiet East: the Kivus and their neighbors
As we saw in chapter 2 the Kivus, both North and South, were densely populated and ethnically fragmented provinces where access to the land had created major political problems in the past.108 The evolution from traditional patterns of land control to modern systems of land ownership had been accompanied by swindling and manipulations on the part of some members of the Kinyarwanda-speaking populations, who took advantage of their close relationship with the Mobutu regime in its early and middle years, thus creating durable anti-Banyarwanda feelings. Later, the political wind changed with the 1981 citizenship law, which was slanted against the Banyarwanda. Things became worse when the so-called géopolitique of the Conférence Nationale Souveraine (CNS) nearly totally blocked the Kinyarwanda speakers of eastern Zaire from entering the political debate of the late Mobutu years.109 Even worse, the “ethnic feudalization” of the late Mobutu years drove the autochthon tribes into mutually hostile camps, even going as far as splitting some of them into hostile intratribal subgroups.110 The result of this political decomposition between the 1960s and the 1990s was the endless fragmentation of an already fragmented political landscape. Because the dangerous Kivu tinderbox lay next to the burning braziers of Rwanda and Burundi from which ethnic sparks constantly flew, it was only a question of time before the conflagration spread. We saw in chapter 2 that the arrival of over one million refugees in mid-1994 created an insufferable situation, which the Rwandese government proceeded to “solve” by invading the Kivus and, from there, pushing clear across the continent, toppling Mobutu and installing in his place what looked like the perfect puppet regime.
So if we take the 1994 Rwandese genocide to be the initial match tossed in the (relatively) quiet postcolonial landscape, the individual fires of the refugee exodus, the nonpolitical treatment of the crisis by the international community, the refugee camps war, and the fall of Mobutu all fit as a series of logical consequences. Because the key geographical link for this spreading fire was the Kivus, simply swearing in Kabila as president of a “new Congo” was not enough to magically solve the eastern problem.111
This became obvious even before the war was over. The Rwandese-AFDL westward push had been made possible by a relatively stable alliance with the eastern populations, providing the advancing forces with a quiet rear base. But keeping this “peace” in the Kivus for the new regime hinged on several delicate conditions:
1. Continued support of the new government by the Mayi Mayi militias after the collapse of the ex-FAR and Mobutu, who had been their main enemies.
2. Keeping a clear distinction between “foreign Tutsi forces” (the Kigali regime, the RPA) and Congolese Kinyarwanda speakers.
3. Steering clear of the ethnic and subethnic factions playing among autochthon tribes.
4. Keeping six or seven of the main eastern “big men”—first among them Anselme Masasu Nindaga—happy and busy in Kinshasa.
5. Staying on the good side of the highly sensitive “civil society” and the Catholic Church.
All these things were easier said than done, and achieving them would have required remarkable diplomacy indeed. But Kabila paid little attention to this problematic periphery, choosing instead to remain embroiled in the confused handling of power at the center, described earlier.
As early as June 1997 the Babembe in South Kivu had created “self-defense” militias under the leadership of a man calling himself “Charles Simba,” in distant homage to the Lumumbist rebels of the 1960s. They attacked Fizi, with the support of Burundian FDD fighters, claiming that “Laurent-Désiré Kabila had been sent by the Tutsi to attack Zaire.”112 Within weeks armed “Mayi Mayi” groups had sprung up everywhere among various tribes, all the way from Masisi to the Fizi-Baraka area. In late August five thousand Masisi Tutsi who had come under attack from Nande Mayi Mayi sought refuge in Goma under the protection of the RPA and the Forces Armées Congolaises (FAC).113 On September 5 the army commander of Bukavu Airport was shot dead by Mayi Mayi.114 In North Kivu the fighting was particularly sharp because a number of Tutsi pastoralists had moved over from Rwanda and Uganda with their cows and tried to settle in the Masisi-Walikale area. Local Congolese chiefs were deposed and replaced with Tutsi, causing massive retaliation. The fighting led to more than one thousand civilian casualties during September alone.115 By then the situation was completely enmeshed with what was happening in northwestern Rwanda: thousands of Tutsi refugees fleeing the violence in North Kivu had crossed into Gisenyi prefecture, where they were put in large refugee camps. The fact that these camps were themselves very vulnerable became evident when the largest one at Mudende was hit on August 21 by an abacengezi commando coming from Kivu that killed 148 refugees while losing seventeen of their own.116 The whole late part of 1997 and the early months of 1998 were filled with a monotonous litany of attacks and counterattacks by shadowy armed forces with all too clear purposes. The men attacking Rwanda from the Congo had three clear aims: kill as many Tutsi as possible, push the local Hutu population into open insurrection, and disorganize the Kigali administration to the point of making at least part of the country ungovernable. On the other side the RPA tried to do two things: militarily to contain the insurgency and politically to terrorize the civilian population into submission. The result was perfectly summed up by a peasant woman from Gisenyi: “Those who are not killed by the soldiers of the former army are killed by those of the new army. It is always the innocent ones who are the victims.”117 The United Nations Human Rights Field Operation for Rwanda (UNHRFOR), which was created after the 1994 genocide, practically stopped operating in early 1997. Its presence would have been useless anyhow since the UN had accepted a Rwandese government overview of its reports which had been systematically bowdlerized since January 1997.118 This wave of violence had a massive effect on Rwanda’s internal politics, reinforcing the hard-liners, and on March 28, 1997, the Rwandese cabinet was reshuffled, eliminating the last vestiges of independent Hutu political presence in the government.119 In addition, the controversial policy of compulsory villagization, which had been decided on at a December 1996 cabinet meeting, was pushed into implementation, although its effect on the security situation seems to have far from offset its rather catastrophic socioeconomic impact.120
In Kinshasa President Kabila was still largely under the control of his Rwandese minders and had to try to carry out their policies in the Kivus. He did so at times with blind violence, such as in late September 1997, when large numbers of Mayi Mayi fighters who had surrendered to the AFDL force
s were killed in North Kivu,121 or when his forces swept more than two thousand refugees back into Rwanda and Burundi in November.122 The new chiefs appointed by the government tried to enforce the “antigénocidaires” policy inspired by Kigali, which resulted in increased violence, because when they tried to block the movements of armed ex-FAR units they ended up in clashes with the local populations, who had often agreed to help the former Rwandese army out of hostility toward the RPA presence. Clashes with the local populations then favored the further recruitment of Mayi Mayi militias.123 The situation ended up being so tense between the Congolese and Rwandese elements of the AFDL that the Kivu problems were bound to reverberate all the way to the top and affect the balance of power in Kinshasa itself
This is what finally happened in November 1997 with the violent arrest of Anselme Masasu Nindaga.124 Masasu Nindaga was in many ways emblematic of the Kivu conundrum. Born from the union of a Mushi father and a refugee Rwandese Tutsi woman, half-educated, flamboyant and immature, he was positioned at the crossroads of revolutionary politics and the “civil society” organizations of South Kivu. His hopping on the AFDL bandwagon in October 1996 suddenly propelled him to national importance and added a touch of warlordism to his profile. But being more of a Kivu homeboy than anybody else in the AFDL, he was more keenly aware than the purely Tutsi members (Bugera, Bizima Karaha) of the unpopularity of the AFDL back home. He had gone back to Bukavu in November for an extended visit and concluded that he had to strike an independent course, both as a matter of local political necessity and to further what he believed to be his own personal destiny.125 He was arrested soon after returning to Kinshasa and his support within the AFDL led to armed clashes directly inside the presidential palace.126 In typical Kabila fashion his arrest was later justified by saying that he had “kept a private militia, planned a coup and smoked hemp.” The first accusation was true, the second unproven, and the third irrelevant. What was certain was that his arrest triggered a whole chain of consequences. First, the Rwandese commander James Kabarebe was declared to be the “real” chief of staff of the newly born Forces Armées Congolaises, and Masasu, who had previously been described as chief of staff, was derided as “a mere Rwandese corporal.”127 In the Kivus this violent switch of the army command from the hands of a local boy to those of a foreigner did not go down very well. The governor of South Kivu had to warn the population not to go on strike in support of Masasu, and clandestine leaflets attacking the government were distributed.128 This gave a tremendous boost to the Mayi Mayi militias, who gained enough strength to attack Bukavu itself on December 11. Committees sprang up everywhere, trying to think up ways of “bringing back peace”129 while violence increased. The situation appeared to have slipped sufficiently out of hand for Kabila to undertake a special trip to the east and make a public speech to a large audience in Bukavu on January 25, 1998. Unfortunately the speech proved to be more incendiary than soothing:
There is the Mayi Mayi phenomenon. People say it is an expression of popular discontent. This is absolutely false. It is in fact an insurrectional movement against the established power and not a way of signalling the popular desiderata to the government. Mayi Mayi works in cahoots with the outside, with foreign powers. You want proofs? There are plenty. Even the Vatican is involved in this through Caritas and other similar stuff.130
What I wanted to do yesterday and could still do is to proclaim a State of Emergency. 24-hours curfew. Every house searched to look for proofs of belonging to Mayi Mayi. Whoever is caught will be shot on the spot. You might be crying. But you know me. I am a tough guy.131
In the same speech Kabila tried to defend the Banyamulenge, who were experiencing greater and greater difficulties in their relationship with the other Kivu ethnic groups. Actually supporting them in that way did more harm than good because Kabila looked like a puppet for the Kigali ventriloquists and therefore tended to draw the embattled Banyamulenge even further into a symbolic association with the hated Rwandese Tutsi.
In several ways the Banyamulenge situation was a concentrate of all that was wrong in the Kivus: prejudice, bad faith on both sides, conflicting historical rights, ethnicization of local politics, struggle for economic survival, and innocent civilians caught between the devil and the deep blue lake. The contradictions manifested themselves more acutely at the level of the newly forming army. Since the AFDL victory in April, former FAZ soldiers had been regrouped in various camps, supposedly to be “reeducated.” In fact, the conditions of detention were atrocious and many died.132 But the new army being born (the FAC) was riddled with tensions and contradictions. There were three basic sociological recruitment pools that contributed troops to the AFDL: the Banyamulenge of South Kivu; the so-called kadogo, child soldiers originating from various eastern tribes; and the mostly Lunda Katangese Tigers of the former FNLC. To these were added dashes of former FAZ just coming out of the hell holes of Kitona or Kamina, eager to regain some of their lost advantage and quite hostile to their former enemies. The mix was explosive. On February 23, 1998, when the new officers wanted to break up a mostly Banyamulenge unit in Bukavu to disperse its men into various regiments at the four corners of the Congo, the soldiers mutinied.133 Their feeling was that they were abandoned by Kabila to the attacks of local Mayi Mayi militias, the Burundian FDD, and Rwandese ex-FAR and Interahamwe and that now, on top of everything else, the former FAZ were coming up inside the new FAC units for what they sniggeringly called “a return match.” To make matters still more intractable, local units of the Forces Armées Burundaises sided with the Banyamulenge mutineers.134
The situation was also deteriorating sharply in North Kivu. Between February 20 and March 1 Butembo was the scene of fierce and confused fighting between local Mayi Mayi and mostly Katangese FAC troops supported by Ugandan soldiers. The Kivu cauldron was threatening to explode, with far-reaching consequences.135 The final death toll was anywhere between fifty and three hundred. A few weeks later the new FAC 10th Brigade, which had been sent especially to the Kivus to try to restore order, attacked Ugandan ADF rebels near Beni. Between April 14 and 18 a combined force of six thousand FAC, UPDF, and RPA soldiers operated between Beni and Butembo, but the ADF rebels managed to evade them and most of the victims were Nande civilians. This did not contribute to a cooling off of tempers, and North Kivu Governor Kanyamuhanga, a rather mild person, was made responsible for the whole mess because he was a Tutsi.
This growing risk of conflagration in the east, although expressing itself in myriad complex confrontations, could nevertheless be subsumed under a general heading: Did the local population agree to be ruled by a government in Kinshasa not really independent but largely in the hands of a foreign state, that is, Rwanda, which was highly suspected of harboring expansionist views? People like the Banyamulenge, who, by being both Tutsi and Congolese, fell in between the hard choices, tended to be squeezed by both sides. Congolese opposed to the new regime of Laurent-Desire Kabila, mostly people from the northern tribes who had lost power with Mobutu’s fall or non-Baluba Katangese who had missed the boat when the power shift took place, began to jockey for the next round of confrontation.136 Enemies of the Kigali and Bujumbura regimes discreetly accelerated their courtship of Kinshasa. As we saw, the protection of former refugees slowly blended into recruiting former FAR and Interahamwe into the new FAC, as the type of troops who, given their past, were most likely to be loyal to whoever rescued them and steadfast in their opposition to whatever Kigali chose to sponsor. As the likelihood for confrontation drew closer those FAC officers who did not like President Kabila started to manipulate the troop mix of the famous 10th Brigade in the east: fewer kadogo (they had a reputation for being faithful to “Papa” Kabila137), more disgruntled Tigers, more North Kivu Banyarwanda Tutsi, more Banyamulenge, more ex-FAZ with a chip on their shoulder.138 By early May there were sixteen thousand FAC soldiers between the two Kivus, all with uncertain loyalties. A local UN expert correctly summed up the government’s conundrum: “The danger
is that the government’s attempt at proving its own independence from those who assisted it in taking power will, if successful, provoke unrest in the East and, if unsuccessful, lead to further fragmenting of the DRC as other ethnic groups turn against the central authority.”139 It was obvious by that time that an explosion was becoming unavoidable.140 The only question was the location of its fault lines since the extremely fragmented nature of the ethnopolitical landscape made them uncertain. After taking part in the UN secretary-general’s DRC Resource Group Meeting in New York (May 1–3, 1998), where all the region’s specialists were able to share their views, I came back to Paris perfectly sure that war was imminent. I then proceeded to issue strong warnings whose absolute uselessness made me once more seriously question the oft-vaunted concept of “conflict prevention.”141 The actors themselves tried to deny until the last moment that anything was amiss, as shown in this amusing little excerpt from Congolese radio and television:
Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe Page 28
