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

by Gerard Prunier

  Last but not least were the massive corruption problems at the tribunal. Even if we overlook the freewheeling ways in which some of the ICTR staff treated their professional expense accounts, there were even more damaging practices, such as fee splitting, by which lawyers kicked back from $2,500 to $5,000 a month to their clients to be allowed to work for them.89 This did not make for a speedy treatment of the files. “Go slow” was the prevailing attitude; those ICTR investigators who worked too fast were accused by their colleagues and superiors of spoiling the game.90

  The case seems to be clear: if we add up all these dysfunctionalities the net result is that the ICTR is a nonperforming asset.91 But was it ever an asset at all? This is far from certain. After long experience of working with the tribunal, the court expert André Guichaoua wrote, “Having in a way managed to unite all Rwandese sensibilities against itself the ICTR has finally lost even the support of the democratic elements in Rwanda which were attached to its existence, thus freeing the way for the extremists.”92 Western concepts of justice can be extremely foreign to an African culture, especially one that has just been so thoroughly traumatized by such a violent event as the genocide. Unintended paradoxes abound: for example, the survivors’ associations complained that women infected by HIV during the rape sessions of the genocide had not received any form of medical help, while the accused in Arusha had benefited from full medical care. In many ways Arusha is seen as providing creature comforts for criminals by people who live on less than $1 a day, and very few of them really care about that Muzungu justice. For the RPF regime this is not a bad deal: fast, expeditious justice would have weakened its capacity not only to play on the guilt feelings of the foreigners but to keep the Damocles’ sword of collective guilt hanging over the heads of the Hutu.

  In the conclusion of my book on the genocide I wrote:

  The immensity of the crime cannot be dealt with through moderate versions of European criminal law made for radically different cases… . Only the death of the real perpetrators will have sufficient symbolic weight to counterbalance the legacy of suffering and hatred which will lead to further killings if the abscess is not lanced [emphasis in the original]… . This is the only ritual through which the killers can be cleansed of their guilt and the survivors brought back to the community of the living… . If justice does not come, then death will return—and will duly be covered by an eager media for the benefit of a conventionally horrified public opinion which will finance another round of humanitarian aid.3

  I am not trying to give myself the benefit of prescience, but after all, this is pretty much the way things have gone.

  International media coverage of the conflict years in central Africa varied enormously. It was intense in the wake of the genocide, as there was questioning about what had just happened. It receded considerably during 1995 (the only stories were about the refugee camps, a rather dull topic for nonspecialists), only to flare up wildly during the 1996–1997 “Mobutu war,” which was rightly seen as the ultimate consequence of the cold war in Africa.94 The secrecy, the deception, the cleverness of RPF media manipulation,95 the fact that for the first time the combatants were clearly media-conscious, the lingering effects of the genocide—all these factors helped make the conflict a major “media event.”96 Interest dropped as soon as the new government was installed in Kinshasa and tended to limit itself to specialized publications on Africa. There was a brief flare-up in August 1998, when the rebels attempted to take the capital by storm and failed, and then the media coverage sank to fourth-page status for the next three years, with brief surges of interest at the time of the Lusaka conference in 1999 and later of the Sun City Power-Sharing Agreement, although its protracted character did much to dilute media interest. The net result was that the most murderous conflict since World War II remained seen (if at all) through the prism of the Rwandese genocide.

  This variable treatment of the events is more a reflection of the priorities and interests of world opinion than of the importance of the events themselves. The 800,000 victims of the Rwandese genocide were news because they threw the developed world back to the memories of some of the ugliest pages of its own recent past. The nearly four million victims of the “Congolese” conflict were not really news because they belonged (together with Angola, Uganda, Ethiopia, Somalia, the Sudan, Burundi, Liberia, and Sierra Leone) to the abominable and hardly comprehensible world of African civil wars.97 That particular war was simply a bit bigger than the others, but it did not mean anything more. Apart from linking it to the Rwandese genocide, the only twist that would catch readers’ attention was the dark and sinister allusions to Congo’s mineral wealth, which were often used as a kind of catch-all explanatory device.

  This poverty of media coverage throws us back on a major fact: everything that happened in central Africa had to be measured by its relationship to the genocide phenomenon because this was the way the outside world could understand it. It was also definitely the way the Rwandese government wanted it to be seen for maximum media effect. The Congolese, who of course saw it differently, had to fight a permanent uphill battle to remind the media that it was not they who had killed 800,000 Tutsi in 1994, and that they had to pay the price for that abomination was fundamentally unfair.98 Any discussion of Rwandese violence in the Congo was immediately countered by reminders of the horrors of the genocide (and of the fact that the West had done nothing about it) in order to block any objective examination of the situation. But by late 2000 the Rwandese claim to be in the Congo purely to fight the evil Interahamwe had begun to wear thin. The end of the Clinton administration, whose guilt largely allowed the success of RPF media tactics, also put an end to that simplified view of the war. Later, as the war receded into confused postconflict civil violence, coverage practically disappeared. From that point of view Darfur, which is a perfect example of the fact that nothing seems to have been learned, had a disastrous media effect on coverage of the Congo. While specialized NGOs such as the International Rescue Committee still noted that in late 2005 (i.e., one year before the Congolese elections) over thirty thousand people died every month of war-related causes, media coverage of the Congo practically disappeared. During 2005 1,600 articles were published on the Darfur crisis; only 300 were published on the DRC.99 Which means that media coverage of the Darfur crisis was over five times that of the Congo, though the Congo situation killed over three times as many people as Darfur. Some corpses are more media-sexy than others, not in the absolute but within a certain time frame. After thirty-seven years of studying Africa, I remember the sexy emergencies: Ethiopia in 1985–1986, which was the mother of all emergencies100 and set the ground rules for all those that followed; Somalia in 1992; Rwanda in 1994; Zaire in 1994–1995; and Darfur since 2004. And then the unsexy ones: the Ugandan civil war (1981–1986), southern Sudan from day one in 1983 to the present, the whole 1998–2003 “Congolese” continental war, and Somalia after 1995.

  Intellectually the hegemonic position of the Rwandese genocide as a global frame of explanation was all the more tragic because it was almost impossible to achieve a reasonable modicum of objectivity on the topic. I have often asked myself why it was that there could be so many white Hutu and white Tutsi, so eager to prove the virtue of their adopted camp and the evil of the opposite one. The reasons are quite complex and mostly anterior to the genocide, although the genocide was to bring them to a boiling frenzy.

  Prior to 1990, practically all those interested in the Great Lakes101 were pro-Hutu, with the lone exception of Jean-Pierre Chretien. There were several reasons for this:

  • The Hutu were perceived as the “little guys,” victims of the aristocratic Tutsi oppression for centuries. They had courageously freed themselves through the 1959 “revolution,” whose ambiguities were usually glossed over.

  • For the Western camp in the cold war, the Hutu were the allies who had fought against the Tutsi “Red aristocrats” linked with Beijing.102

  • After the 1960s the Tuts
i also turned to a pro-West diplomatic stance, thereby losing any previous claim to the sympathy of the “socialist” camp.

  • Hutu-led Rwanda was virtuous (the 1959–1963 massacres were glossed over), whereas Tutsi-led Burundi was evil (the 1972 “selective genocide” was remembered by some, and the corruption and authoritarianism known by many).

  • The Catholic Church, which likes to always be right (”infallibility” dies hard), tried to have public opinion forget its half-century of pro-Tutsi prejudice in line with the colonial oppression to regain an ideological virginity by supporting the allegedly “anticolonial” Hutu movement.

  With Jean-Pierre Chrétien holding out as the lone expression of sympathy for the Tutsi, the lines of ideological battle were sharply drawn.103 The polemics would have remained buried within the pages of scientific publications if the genocide in Rwanda had not suddenly propelled its actors (all of them remarkably competent academics, even if at times savagely opposed to each other) to the forefront of the world’s media. Apart from one or two cases, Rwanda and Burundi had largely remained a French-speaking academic preserve.104 But as soon as the area of “expertise” widened the new “experts”105 joined with gusto the ethnic battle lines. Given the horror of the genocide, almost all of the newcomers were pro-Tutsi.106 The pro-Hutu “old guard” either remained limited to the Christian Democratic circles close to the Catholic Church107 or else recruited new marginal adepts with exotic ideological axes to grind.108 Later, the old pro-Hutu academics mellowed out into much more balanced positions. Given what I mentioned earlier about the importance of image building for diplomacy, these Western ideological quarrels were of the utmost importance for the contenders in the war. Foreign academics, journalists, and NGOs were either “friends” or “enemies.” They themselves clung desperately to the idea of their own “objectivity” in order to better support what they saw as the “right” position.109 But finding the “right” and “objective” position was not always so easy. Rather than point at the partisanship of some of my colleagues (a process that would make my future social life rather unpleasant), I will use my own case as an example of the difficulty of attaining objectivity and academic detachment. And of the consequences of failing to do so.

  Take two precise points: in my book The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide I offered certain interpretations of the story of Fred Rwigyema’s death and the problem of the so-called Gersony Report.110 Fred Rwigyema, the first commander of the RPF, was killed on the second day of the attack on Rwanda. In my previous work I mentioned the fact that a French diplomat in Kampala had told me the story of his being murdered by Peter Banyingana, only to immediately discount this fact as unlikely. Nevertheless I established later from incontrovertible evidence (including an interview with an eyewitness to the killing) that this story was true. Why did I discount it at first? For two reasons: my sympathy for the RPF at the time and the fact that the person telling me the story was a French official whom I suspected of feeding me a slanted line. Pretty much the same goes for the Gersony Report story: although I met people who told me about its contents I decided that “it did not exist.”111 There again, the reason for “selecting facts” was my sympathy for the RPF and my refusal at the time to believe that it could be cold-bloodedly killing people. This of course gained me the status of “friend of the RPF,” something of a mixed blessing in academic and political terms.112 When I came to realize that the RPF was not the White Knight I had expected it to be and when I talked about its violations of human rights, there were no reactions, and Kigali concentrated instead on the evil intent of the journalist Stephen Smith.113 Reactions started to come when I published a second edition of The Rwanda Crisis with an additional chapter called “Living in a Broken World,” which attempted to describe life in postgenocide Rwanda and which contained a critical assessment of the first two years of the RPF government.114 But the reactions were muted and there seemed still to be a hope that I would come back to a “better position.”115 That position slipped further away in 1997, after a confidential report written for UNHCR116 was put by mistake on that organization’s website. The blast came from the boss of the Rwandan Office of Information, Maj. Wilson Rutayisire.117 It would be tedious to review here the various points used in this clumsy character assassination, but suffice it to say that to call this text “a eulogy for genocide” requires a rather creative stretch of the imagination. The final break came in 2000, after I had collaborated with the African Union in the publication of its report on the Rwandese genocide.118 A communiqué from Kigali accused me of “having revised [my] book and [my] points of view on the genocide . . . to reinforce [my] newly acquired revisionist ideology and [my] position of solidarity with the authors of the genocide.” This is typical of the relentless Manichaean tone surrounding the Rwandese genocide and, by extension, the Congo war. In such a context any examination of the RPF’s human rights violations is described as “revisionist ideology” and seen as support for the genocide.119 This line of argumentation was used liberally, not only against me, but against anybody who constituted a target for the RPF at any given moment. The advocacy NGO International Crisis Group was thus denounced publicly120 and some of its employees accused of being secret agents of the French government. This relentless pressure was clumsily mirrored by the (much less efficient) work of the pro-Hutu negationists trying to deny that the genocide had ever occurred.121 Swamped by this frantic struggle for the moral high ground,122 outsiders were seized by a kind of moral vertigo, which led to the growth of the “double genocide” theory. Some tenants of the “double genocide” theory were perfectly aware of what they were doing: “There has been in Rwanda a double genocide: the one against the Tutsi committed after 6 April 1994, which has caused 500,000 victims, and the one against the Hutu since October 1990 . . . whose victims amount to around one million.”123 This emanated from the Vatican’s highest authorities,124 trying to show that there were twice as many Hutu killed as there were Tutsi. In addition it gave October 1990 (i.e., the beginning of the Rwandese civil war) as the starting point of an alleged genocide against the Hutu, none of which was a historically tenable position. But the mention in the same article of the arrest of Monsignor Misago, saying that “this is part of a strategy by the Rwandese government to deny the pacifying role the Church has had in Rwandese history, both in the past and today,” shows what lay behind this distortion of history: the recurrent defense of the Church as an institution. For many other weary bystanders, the “double genocide” theory (which I find absolutely unacceptable for reasons ranging from historical evidence to intellectual coherence) was just a convenient shelter in a situation of moral overkill.

  Interestingly, while the passion slowly died out in the rest of the world, it remained quite intense in France, where the charges proffered by Judge Bruguière against President Kagame, whom he accused of having shot down Habyarimana’s aircraft, have kept the wounds (relatively) open.125 Since the end of the war no fewer than fourteen “political” books on the Rwandese genocide have been published in France, ranging from anguished soul searching126 to ideologically motivated distortions-cum-personal attacks.127 The tone is polemical, violent, and ad hominem, very different from the efforts at ideological evaluation produced in the English-speaking world.128

  Why so much misguided passion? And especially by academics who could have been expected to be more objective on such a foreign topic? I am tentatively tempted to identify three different lines of causality. The first one is touched upon in a book on the Kennedy years reviewed by Gary Wills, who stresses what he calls “abusive simplification”:129 “[Hersh] does not see how specific incidents fit into larger patterns or respond to competing pressures. He personalizes situations as if each actor he studies has complete control of the situation he is in. Whole structures disappear while his villains act in a vacuum.” There is a tendency of the human mind to strive for coherence. Many writers routinely warn about “complexity” and “contradictions” and then immediately p
roceed to re-create a coherence that contradicts the wise warnings they have just uttered. And the situation in the Great Lakes is so horribly complex, so contradictory that one does not have to be American to fall victim to the syndrome of desperately wanting to find “good guys” and “bad guys” who could restore meaning and clarity to such moral gloom.

  A second line of thought has to do with why people choose a particular side rather than another. Timothy Garton Ash gives us a useful tip on how to find the logic of what Jean-Paul Sartre used to call engagement:

  Political perception, like treason, is a matter of date. If you want to judge anything written by a foreigner about a country, you need to know when the writer first went there. Was it in the bad old days? Or perhaps for him they were the good old days? Was it before the revolution, war, coup, occupation, liberation or whatever the local caesura is? Of course the writer’s own previous background and current politics are important too. But so often the first encounter is formative. Emotionally and implicitly, if not intellectually and explicitly, it remains the standard by which all subsequent developments are judged.130

  This does apply to me. Getting to know the Tutsi exiles in Uganda during 1986–1989 was my “formative experience,” later reinforced by visiting the RPF front in Byumba in June 1992. My friend Lieve Joris, a person of impeccable honesty, admitted that at first she did not like the Tutsi “because I first came to the Kivus in 1998.” Later, when she was writing L’heure des rebelles,131 which can loosely be described as the biography of a Muyamulenge RCD commander, a new empathy emerged. I could easily extend that chronological explanation to several of my colleagues.