I know; and this is why I wanted it to be included. But many people told me “This is just a way of giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” Gérard, I am afraid we still have a long way to go before they understand that the enemy are not the Tutsi but the RPF or rather what Kagame has turned it into.
Seth went on with his political activity for another year and the regular FRD communiqués were among the most informative elements to document the increasingly violent drift of Rwandese politics. Seth had called for help for the Rwandese refugees in Zaire in 1996, warning against any gross amalgam along the then often fashionable line of refugees = génocidaires. And like everybody else he had watched helplessly as the refugees were butchered or starved and walked to death through the jungle. By late 1997, as the situation was decomposing further in the “new” Congo, he was again a frustrated witness as the former génocidaire leadership managed to coerce or seduce disenfranchised young Hutu peasants into the growing ranks of ALIR. He knew all of them, the Nkundiye, the Mpiranya, the Kibiligi, the Rwabukwisi, and, as he said: “They are just old vampires trying to get new blood. Their only political program is to kill Tutsi.” He was also aware of Kagame’s remark about the Hutus at the end of January 1998: “We don’t have to kill them all. It is enough to beat them hard enough so that they don’t bite, so that all the dogs remain sitting.” It had been reported to him by some of his former RPF Tutsi associates who wanted to keep him informed. They felt that he would be needed at some point, when the violent solutions would have finally failed. This is what made Seth a dangerous man because he embodied a recourse, an alternative to the twin parallel logics of madness that were developing and feeding each other in Rwanda. But Seth was fed up with always playing the good guy and of always finishing last.
“I have got to make my move,” he told me in early 1998 during one of our meetings in Nairobi. “Everybody uses a gun as a way of sitting at the negotiation table one day. If I always refuse to use guns, I’ll be marginalized when the time comes. But then should I do it? There has been so much blood spilt and so few results to show for it. Should I take the responsibility to add to that?”
About six hundred men and around forty officers of the ex-FAR had gathered around him. They were ready to follow him into battle because they could bear neither the RPF regime in Kigali nor its ALIR challengers, both representing in their eyes opposite but symmetrical forms of violent racism. Tanzania had agreed to host his training camps but he wanted support from what he felt to be the only decisive and progressive force in the region, that is, the Museveni regime in Uganda. He asked for my help in talking to Kampala and I arranged the necessary contacts. On Sunday, 3 May 1998, he met in Nairobi with Salim Saleh, President Museveni’s brother. Things were far from rosy between Kampala and Kigali, and Salim was quite open to the idea of helping a new moderate force enter the game. A few days later Seth met Eva Rodgers from the U.S. State Department and briefed her on his intentions. The reply was noncommittal but not hostile. It is probably then that some people in Kigali decided that he had crossed the danger line.
On Saturday 16 May at 5:00 p.m., as he was being driven home along Nairobi’s Forest Road in his wife’s UN car, Seth was shot, together with his driver Jean-Bosco Nkurubukeye, by two unknown assailants firing AK-47s. Both victims were dead within minutes. The subsequent Kenyan police inquiry was a sad joke. Three men were arrested: David Kiwanuka, Charles Muhaji, and Christopher Lubanga. The first was supposed to be a Rwandese, in spite of his typically Ugandan/Muganda name while the two others were indeed Ugandans. All three had been arrested after being denounced to the police by a Kenyan cab driver called Ali Abdul Nasser who said they had contacted him to hire him as a paid killer because Sendashonga had stolen $54m from Kiwanuka’s father. The theft story, obviously fed by rather untalented Kigali security operatives, gained a bit of flesh in the next few days when the Nairobi police organized a ridiculous press conference (22 May 1998) during which Kiwanuka said that Seth, then Interior Minister of the Rwandese government, had stolen the money in cahoots with his father who had been at the time Kigali’s Director of Immigration Services and that he had later killed him to defraud him of his share of the loot. The problem was that the man in question, called Charles Butera, surfaced a few days later to say that not only was he quite alive but that he had no son called Kiwanuka, that he had only known Sendashonga superficially and that nobody, either him or the late minister, had ever stolen $54m, an absurdly high amount in 1994 Rwanda.1 Everybody in Nairobi knew that Seth was basically surviving on his wife’s UN salary. The theft-cum-murder story died down but the three accused remained in jail. The case dragged on and on. In December 2000 during a hearing Seth’s widow, Cyriaque Nikuze, declared to the court that the Kigali government was guilty of her late husband’s murder and she added two supplementary motives for his killing: he was due shortly to testify before both the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the French Parliamentarian Commission of Inquiry. In both cases, she said, the Rwandese government feared what he could reveal. She named a Rwandese Embassy official called Alphonse Mbayire as the organizer of the assassination. Mbayire, a high-ranking Secret Service operator who often used the aliases “Alphonse Mbabane” and “Ernest Neretse,” was Rwanda’s acting ambassador at the time of the assassination. Prosecution witness John Kathae, a police officer with the Kenyan Criminal Investigation Department (CID), testified under cross-questioning that he had not found the accused’s story credible and that he felt that the murder had political motivations. He added that the pistol proffered in court was not the murder weapon. He also revealed that a Rwandese Embassy diplomat, Alphonse Mbayire had had frequent contacts in the past with the accused Kiwanuka, but that when he had wanted to question Mbayire for the inquiry, he had been forbidden to do so.2 Alphonse Mbayire was recalled by his government in January 2001, shortly before the Sendashonga murder case was supposed to come up again for a new hearing.3 He returned to Rwanda only to be shot dead by two unidentified gunmen in a Kigali bar on 7 February 2001. The trial re-started in Nairobi five days later and the defence lawyers argued that the real killers were not in court. On 31 May 2001, more than three years after the murder, the three accused men were finally released after the court had decided that “the State has failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the accused had committed the offence.” Justice Msagha Mbogoli added that in the court’s opinion the murder was political and that it was linked with the deceased “having fallen out with the government of Rwanda.”4
NOTES
Introduction
1. Robert Klitgaard, Tropical Gangsters: One Man’s Experience with Development and Decadence in Deepest Africa (London: Basic Books, 1990). The book is centered on Equatorial Guinea, perhaps the worst-case African scenario, and the tone is harsh. But the contents are painfully familiar for people intimately plunged into the real Africa.
2. The father of slave emancipation during the 1848 revolution, he is buried in the Pantheon in Paris.
3. P. Chabal and J.P. Daloz, Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument (Oxford: James Currey, 1999).
4. This is the title of a key World Bank document published in 2000.
Chapter 1
1. Since I started writing this book in 1998, a huge body of work on postgenocide Rwanda has been published. For a good overview, see Phil Clark and Zachary Kaufman, eds., After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post-Conflict Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond (London: Hurst, 2008).
2. For this episode of the conflict, see Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis (1959–1994): History of a Genocide (London: Hurst, 1995), chapter 8; Olivier Lanotte, “L’Opération Turquoise au Rwanda,” Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of Louvain, 1996.
3. Mahmood Mamdani, “Rwanda in a Dilemma,” New Vision, September 6, 1995.
4. Foreign terms can be found in the glossary.
5. Lettre du CLADHO, no. 4 (August–September 1995).
6. Private communication from a relative,
Brussels, November 1999.
7. Rwanda Rushya, no. 62 (August 1995).
8. Private communication, Nairobi, January 1995. Being a member of the single-party MRND was almost a requirement for any businessman in prewar Rwanda, whether he was Tutsi or Hutu.
9. Private communication, Kigali, February 1995.
10. Human Rights Watch Africa, Rwanda: A New Catastrophe? New York, December 1994.
11. Private communication, Kigali, February 1995.
12. For a very honest picture of these tragic complexities by an eyewitness, see Charles Karemano, Au-delà des barrières: Dans les méandres du drame rwandais (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003).
13. See African Rights, Rwanda, Killing the Evidence: Murder, Attacks, Arrests and Intimidation of Survivors and Witnesses, London, 1996.
14. Joseph Matata, “Au Rwanda, des syndicats de délateurs,” Dialogue, no. 186 (October—November 1995).
15. See Anne Moutot, “Au Rwanda, la diaspora tutsie contre les rescapés,” Libération, November 28, 1995; Vincent Hugeux, “Les démons du Rwanda,” L’Express, December 7, 1995.
16. This in no way changes the fact that the vast majority of the victims were Tutsi. But the marginalization of the Hutu victims changed the meaning of the phenomenon.
17. The following section on immediately postgenocide Rwanda is based on my visit to the country in January 1995, my first after the genocide.
18. For a strong indictment of the Catholic Church’s behavior during the genocide, see Groupe Golias, Rwanda: L’honneur perdu de l’Eglise (Villeurbanne, France: Editions Golias, 1999). For more dispassionate but still damning research, see the work of Timothy Longman, notably “Church Politics and the Genocide in Rwanda,” Journal of Religion in Africa 31, no. 2 (2001): 163–186.
19. Lettre d’un groupe d’Abbés à Sa Sainteté le Pape, Goma, August 2, 1994.
20. See Rev. Roger Bowen [CMS], “Rwanda: Missionary Reflections on a Catastrophe. J. C. Jones Lecture 1995,” Anvil 13, no. 1 (1996). See also C. Rittner, J. K. Roth, and W. Whitworth, eds., Genocide in Rwanda: The Complicity of the Churches (New York: Paragon House, 2004), which constitutes an effort at objectively assessing the role of all the Christian churches in the genocide.
21. See Patrick de Saint-Exupéry, “Loin de Biarritz, le Rwanda,” Le Figaro, November 8, 1994; author’s interviews with several cabinet members, Kigali, January 1995.
22. Africa Analysis, September 30, 1994; “Abandoned Rwanda,” Economist, November 26, 1994.
23. “L’Union Européenne débloque une aide de 440m de francs,” Le Monde, November 27–28, 1994.
24. Mouvement Démocratique Républicain, Position du parti MDR sur les grands problèmes actuels du Rwanda, Kigali, November 6, 1994.
25. See, for example, the criticism of democracy by Privat Rutazibwa, one of the regime’s leading ideologues, in La crise des Grands Lacs et la question tutsi (Kigali: Editions du CRID, 1999).
26. See “The Black Hole of Rwanda,” Economist, March 25, 1995; Human Rights Watch Africa, Rwanda: The Crisis Continues, New York, April 1995.
27. Afsané Bassir Pour, “Rwanda: Le gouvernement ne souhaite plus la création d’un tribunal international,” Le Monde, November 1, 1994.
28. Colette Braeckman, “Rwanda: Le temps du révisionnisme,” Esprit, December 1994.
29. Radio Rwanda as reported by the BBC Summary of World Broadcasts (henceforth BBC/SWB), December 8, 1994.
30. See “Le débat public entre le Premier Ministre et le Vice Président sur le problème de la sécurité,” Umukororombya, no. 3 (January 9, 1995).
31. Paul Kagame with Colette Braeckman, “A propos de la sécurité et de la réconciliation au Rwanda,” Le Soir, April 7, 1995.
32. For an early overview of the tribunal and its problems, see J. F. Dupaquier, ed., La Justice internationale face au drame rwandais (Paris: Karthala, 1996). D. Patry, Rwanda: Face à face avec un génocide (Paris: Flammarion, 2006) gives the point of view of a defense lawyer at Arusha, while T. Cruvelier, Le tribunal des vaincus (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2006) analyzes the later developments of the tribunal’s functioning.
33. For an overview of the justice situation, see “La justice rwandaise au banc des accusés,” a special issue of Dialogue, no. 186 (October/November 1995).
34. “Le Premier Ministre rwandais veut faire juger au moins 30.000 personnes,” Le Monde, August 4, 1994.
35. Abakada is the Kinyarwanda transformation of the French word cadre. These were young men recruited by the RPF to be its eyes and ears in the rural areas. Their power was largely unchecked.
36. Radio Rwanda in BBC/SWB, March 9, 1995.
37. Personal communication, Paris, May 1995.
38. Radio France Internationale in BBC/SWB, July 5, 1995.
39. For a description of the conditions of detention, see Fédération Internationale des Droits de l’Homme, Conditions mortelles de détention à la prison de Gitarama, July 6,1995; “The Black Hole of Rwanda,” Economist, March 25, 1995.
40. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) spent $53 million in Rwanda during 1994–1995, that is, 20 percent of its budget for the whole of Africa.
41. To understand the state of underprofessionalization of the Rwandese justice system even before the genocide, one must read F. X. Nsanzuwera, La magistrature rwandaise dans l’étau du pouvoir exécutif (Kigali: CLADHO, 1993).
42. Human Rights Watch Africa, Rwanda: The Crisis Continues.
43. François Misser, “Searching for the Killers,” New African, April 1995.
44. “Kenya, base arrière des Hutus rwandais,” La Lettre de l’Océan Indien, April 1, 1995; “Kenya Harbours Rwanda Killers,” New African, September 1995.
45. Human Rights Watch Africa, Rwanda: the Crisis Continues; Amnesty International, Concerns and Recommendations for Fair Trials in Rwanda, London, March 1996.
46. F. X. Nsanzuwera, “Pour l’indépendance de la magistrature rwandaise,” Dialogue, no. 186 (November 1995). Nsanzuwera, a magistrate well known for his personal integrity under the former regime, had been made procuror general of Kigali by the new government. Faced with the impossibility of discharging his duties and fearing for his security, he chose to go into exile in May 1995.
47. For example, former minister Casimir Bizimungu, himself one of the leading génocidaires, said that more Hutu were killed by the Tutsi during the genocide than vice versa and that he was ready to stand in court to testify to this. Radio France Internationale in BBC/SWB, January 27, 1995. Some “academics” (Helmut Britzke, Christian Davenport) later tried to give some respectability to this criminal fallacy.
48. For a broader debate on the issue of moral responsibility and contradictory forms of propaganda concerning the genocide and the forms of violence that followed it, see the section in chapter 10 titled “Struggling for the Moral High Ground.”
49. There is an abundant literature of varying interest on the political convulsions of Uganda between 1979 and the mid-1990s. Among the most interesting works, one could mention C. P. Dodge and M. Raundalen, eds., War, Violence and Children in Uganda (Oslo: Norwegian University Press, 1987); A. B. K. Kasozi, the Social Origins of Violence in Uganda (1964–1985) (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1994); R. Gersony, the Anguish of Northern Uganda (Kampala: USAID, 1997); Ondoga ori Amaza, Museveni’s Long March (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1998); Sverker Finnström, Living with Bad Surroundings: war and Existential Uncertainty in Acholiland, Northern Uganda (Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University Press, 2003); Pecos Kutesa’s lively Uganda’s Revolution (1979–1986): How I Saw It (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2006). These should be contrasted with the ideologically sanitized version of the same events given by General Kagame in his book of interviews with François Misser, Vers un nouveau Rwanda? Entretiens avec Paul Kagame (Brussels: Luc Pire, 1995), chapters 3–5.
50. During the Ugandan civil war, since Museveni was a Munyankole Muhima, Obote’s thugs of the Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) Youth Wing attacked and killed Rwandese Tutsi
refugees in Ankole whom they assimilated to their Bahima cousins.
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