90. Victor Bourdeau, “Mokoto en exil,” Dialogue, no. 192 (August–September 1996): 95–102.
91. A. Akodjenou to K. Morjane, notes on a meeting with Gen. Elukia Monga Aundu, May 29, 1996, UNHCR archive 19/7, Geneva.
92. Human Rights Watch Africa, Forced to Flee: Violence against the Tutsi in Zaire, Washington, DC, July 1996.
93. U.S. Committe for Refugees, Masisi down the Road from Goma: Ethnic Cleansing and Displacement in Eastern Zaire, Washington, DC, June 1996; Human Rights Watch Africa, Forced to Flee.
94. For a good overview of the events of October 1993 and their immediate consequences, see Human Rights Watch Africa, Commission internationale d’enquête sur les violations des droits de l’homme au Burundi depuis le 21 octobre 1993, Brussels, July 1994, 14–53.
95. FDD-CNDD received strong support from some top Zairian officers. Generals Baramoto and Eluki Mpondo Aundu sold them, through the agency of the notorious Mrs. Goolam Ali, a large quantity of the weapons the ex-FAR had brought into Zaire when they fled Rwanda. See Kisukula Abeli Meitho, La désintégration de l’armée congolaise de Mobutu à Kabila (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 65–69. This was an added irritant in the relationship between Kinshasa and the new regime in Kigali.
96. Vice President Christian Sendegeya was a Tutsi opponent of the so-called Bururi mafia. Since independence all the presidents of Burundi and many of their close associates had come from the same area around Bururi. This caused hostility among the erstwhile high lineages of northern Muramvya province, who considered the Bururi people uncouth. The result was a steady tradition of northern Tutsi opposition that could even in some cases go as far as allying itself with the Hutu.
97. Jean-Philippe Ceppi, “Dans un maquis Hutu du Burundi,” Libération, January 19, 1995; François Misser, “Terreur à Bujumbura,” La Cité, February 9, 1995.
98. On June 12, 1995, Tutsi Sans Echec militiamen killed thirty Hutu students in one night in their dormitories. FDD retaliated on July 21 by infiltrating a commando which managed to kill eight Tutsi students before being flushed out of the university by the army on the next day.
99. He was traveling in President Habyarimana’s plane and was killed with him. He was replaced by Sylvestre Ntibantunganya.
100. This was the title of an article on Burundi by John Edlin and Colin Legum in The New African, February 1994.
101. “Tutsis and Hutus: More Blood to Come,” Economist, July 22, 1995.
102. Radio France Internationale, in BBC/SWB, July 30, 1994.
103. Filip Reyntjens, Burundi, Breaking the Cycle of Violence, London, Minority Rights Group, March 1995.
104. Radio Burundi, in BBC/SWB, February 18, 1995.
105. For the continuing Tutsi-UPRONA dominance of the civil service, justice, and diplomacy, see FRODEBU, Un Apartheid qui ne dit pas son nom, Bujumbura, August 1997.
106. Barnabé Ndarishikanye, “Quand deux clientélismes s’affrontent,” Komera, no. 3 (March–April 1994).
107. Ibid.
108. See Jacqueline Papet, “La Presse au Burundi,” Dialogue, no. 180 (January–February 1995): 75–77; Reporters Sans Frontières, Burundi: le venin de la haine, Paris, June 1995.
109. In its issue no. 32 (May 27, 1994).
110. In its issue no. 47 (October 28, 1994).
111. The Catholic paper Ndongozi, the independent La Semaine, and the government papers Le Renouveau and Ubumwe tried to save journalistic honor in Burundi in those years.
112. “Burundi: Bubbling over,” Economist, January 6, 1996.
113. Colette Braeckman, “Hantise du génocide au Burundi,” Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1996; Cyrus Vance and David Hamburg, “A Move to Stop Burundi’s Spiral,” International Herald Tribune, March 11, 1996.
114. Africa no. 1 (Libreville), in BBC/SWB, March 16, 1996.
115. “Des Hutus contre une intervention étrangère au Burundi,” Le Monde, July 3, 1996.
116. See “UN Ponders Burundi Force,” UPI dispatch, New York, July 24, 1996.
117. Private communication, Washington, DC, October 1996.
118. USIA dispatch, Washington, DC, 9 August 1996.
119. Bagaza played a key role in the last stages of Museveni’s war in 1985, when he allowed Libyan weapons to be flown to Bujumbura and then transported by truck through Zaire to NRA-occupied western Uganda. Author’s field notes, Kampala, February 1986.
120. Interview with FDD cadre, Bukavu, February 1995.
121. Whether he later changed his views is unclear. His reluctant adoption of multiparty elections in 2005 felt more like a grumpy bending to donor pressure than a genuine conversion to open democracy.
122. In an internal PARENA memo dated July 8, 1995 (in the author’s possession), former president Bagaza wrote, “If we lose the war we will not be able to carry out guerrilla warfare inside Burundi because the Hutu are everywhere and you cannot fight a guerrilla if you cannot melt in the population… . We will have to evacuate all the women and the children to Rwanda, the only country with which we have a common border and which is not hostile to us.”
123. In June 1995, thirty thousand desperate refugees tried to flee the camps toward Tanzania to escape these attacks. Radio Burundi declared, “The cause of departure of those refugees is not known.” In BBC/SWB, June 17, 1995.
124. See eyewitness accounts in Archidiocèse de Bukavu, Bureau diocésain de Développement, Enquête auprès des réfugiés burundais au Zaïre, Bukavu, August 1996.
125. Fifteen thousand were expelled in July. The UNHCR could only accompany the move, which, compared to the fate of IDPs inside Rwanda itself, was not too rough.
126. Radio France Internationale, in BBC/SWB, August 31, 1996.
127. The Gendarmes Katangais were there, but Laurent-Désiré Kabila had not been invited. James Kazini was in charge of the military follow-up. Ugandan political source, Kampala, March 1998.
128. And that included dealing with Zanzibar’s maverick island government.
129. This was so at the time, of course. Since then they went back to it, and the situation is still not resolved at the time of this writing (end of 2007).
130. Jean-Marie Mutandikwa, “Le Burundi, le Rwanda et le Zaïre au seuil de la guerre?” Rwanda Libération, no 17 (July 31, 1996).
131. Interview with a high-level Ugandan politician, Kampala, March 1998.
132. Interview with M. Mamdani in Weekly Mail and Guardian (South Africa), August 8, 1997.
133. He later became minister of the interior when Gérard Kamanda wa Kamanda was given the foreign affairs portfolio.
134. Interviews with Congolese civil society members, including eyewitnesses, Paris and Brussels, September and October 1999. Some of these weapons were destined for the Hutu militias in North Kivu, who took a very dim view of the fact that these were sold to “the enemy.” On November 11, 1995, they tried to blow up Gen. Eluki Monga Aundu’s plane in Goma. Crazy as this behavior may seem, it was not new in Zaire, and the FAZ had indeed sold their equipment to the enemy in 1977, during the invasion of Shaba Province by the Gendarmes Katangais.
135. Interview with Banyamulenge RPA veterans, Kampala, January 2000.
136. HCR-ZRE-UVI memo 0372, UNHCR Archive 19/7, Geneva.
137. F. Swai to W. R. Urasa, Cyangugu, September 16, 1996, UNHCR Archive 19/7, Geneva. This was of course playing into the hands of General Kagame, who later admitted with a smile to Colette Braeckman, “In a way we were lucky. They even gave us a pretext for this war.” L’enjeu congolais (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 27.
138. A. Mahiga to L. Franco, September 19, 1996, UNHCR Archive 19/7, Geneva.
139. Aliou Diallo, UNHCR representative in Kinshasa, to Boutros Boutros Ghali, September 14, 1996, UNHCR Archive 19/7, Geneva.
140. Confidential note by W. R. Urasa, ref. RWA/MSC/HCR/1561 of September 17, 1996, UNHCR Archive 19/7, Geneva.
141. The arms embargo on Rwanda was lifted by the UN on August 17, 1995, and Kagame went down to South Africa three weeks later with a $100 million lett
er of credit countersigned by the Ugandan government to purchase weapons. Confidential information from the arms trading milieu, Geneva, September 1995. After denying the contracts, South African Minister of Defense Joë Modise finally admitted to them publicly (Agence France Presse dispatch, Pretoria, October 30, 1996) before officially “suspending” them on November 6, 1996.
142. Radio France Internationale, in BBC/SWB, September 23, 1996.
143. Casimir Kayumba, “Le Zaire en voie de désintégration: Quel est le rôle du Rwanda?” Ukuri, no. 11 (September 1996). This was only the latest in a long series of similar warning signs. See Filip Reytjens, “La rébellion au Congo-Zaïre: Une affaire de voisins,” Hérodote, no. 86/87, 4th trimester (1997): 69.
144. This map was initially drawn from indications from Abbé Alexis Kagame for his Abrégé de l’ethno-histoire du Rwanda (Butare: Editions Universitaires du Rwanda, 1972). The eminent historian was also a fierce nationalist who always tended to exaggerate the outreach of the old kingdom. See D. Newbury, “Irredentist Rwanda: Ethnic and Territorial Frontiers in Central Africa,” Africa Today 44, no. 2 (1997): 211–222. Later the same map was reproduced unquestioningly in Atlas du Rwanda, published in Paris in 1981 by Editions du CNRS. It is this particular reprint that President Bizimungu brandished on October 3, 1996.
145. Khassim Diagne to Liria-Franch, October 4, 1996, UNHCR Archive 19/7, Geneva; Radio Rwanda, in BBC/SWB, October 3, 1996; interviews with eyewitnesses.
146. La Voix du Zaire (Bukavu), in BBC/SWB, October 6, 1996.
147. UN Integrated Regional Information Network, bulletin, October 14, 1996.
Chapter 3
1. The First Angolan political movement supported by Zaire was the FNLA. But the FNLA could hardly be characterized as an “interloper” since it was born and bred on Zairian territory.
2. In 1977 the communist regime in Angola used the surviving combatants of the Katangese independence movement of the 1960s to invade Zaire and try to overthrow the pro-U.S. Mobutu regime. They were defeated with the military assistance of France, Belgium, and Morocco.
3. This statement has to be qualified: there was a whole spectrum of beliefs in the West about the necessity of Mobutu’s survival, running from the French at 100 percent to the United States at 10 percent. Ultimately, just as his career had been made by foreigners, his downfall was to come from the withdrawal of their support.
4. The best overall presentation of this horror remains Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghosts (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
5. Michel Merlier, Le Congo, de la colonisation belge à l’indépendance (Paris: Maspéro, 1962), 166. Michel Merlier was the pseudonym of the left-wing and anticolonialist Belgian colonial civil servant André Maurel. His book was later (1992) reissued by the Paris publisher L’Harmattan under his real name.
6. African dissent had traditionally been dealt with by massive shooting. When the Belgian reformist Van Bilsen wrote his Thirty Years Plan for the Emancipation of Belgian Africa in 1956 he was greeted with derision and called a communist. Less than five years later the Belgians abandoned the Congo, with hardly any planning about what to do.
7. There is a very rich literature on the man and his regime. Among the best overall scholarly treatments are Thomas Callaghy, The State Society Struggle: Zaire in Comparative Perspective (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); C. Young and T. Turner, The Rise and Decline of the Zairian State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Jean-Claude Willame, L’automne d’un despotisme (Paris: Karthala, 1992). Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo (London: Fourth Estate, 2000) is a most perceptive literary essay on a phenomenon that transcends normal scholarship. The documentaries of Belgian film director Thierry Michel (see bibliography) are remarkable works.
8. See next section.
9. The construction of his “Versailles-in-the-jungle” palace at his native town of Gbadolite had only increased that tendency.
10. They had been banned during the Zairianization program of 1973.
11. See P. Digekisa, Le massacre de Lubumbashi (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993). The students had roughed up a number of secret service informers the day before and beaten up or raped the daughter of General Baramoto, a Mobutu crony, who had been a student there.
12. The nickname was bestowed by Colette Braeckman in her book Le dinosaure (Paris: Fayard, 1992).
13. For a detailed description of the period, see G. de Villers, Zaïre: La transition manquée (1990–1997) (Brussels: CEDAF, 1997).
14. Ironically the worst-behaved unit was perhaps the 31st Paratroops Brigade which the French colonel Matthiote had reformed and retrained after its poor showing during the second Gendarmes Katangais invasion.
15. Although close cousins who share the same language, the Luba from Kasai (their original home) are perceived by the Luba from Katanga as unwanted interlopers. But they were the key actors in many businesses.
16. Kasaï revolted when Prime Minister Birindwa had tried to impose the new devalued currency on the province, which continued using older notes to keep inflation at bay, and violence broke out in Kivu between autochthons and Banyarwanda.
17. For this section, see G. Prunier, “Rebel Movements and Proxy Warfare: Uganda, Sudan and the Congo (1986–1999),” African Affairs 103, no. 412 (2004): 359–383. For a good assessment of the Sudanese nationalist movement and the early days of independence, see Muddathir Abd-er-Rahim, Imperialism and Nationalism in the Sudan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); Mohamed Omar Beshir, Revolution and Nationalism in the Sudan (London: Rex Collings, 1974).
18. For Sudanese political life of the 1960s and 1970s, see Peter Bechtold, Politics in the Sudan (New York: Praeger, 1976). For Uganda during its years of strife, the best book is A. B. K. Kasozi, The Social Origins of Violence in Uganda (1964–1985) (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1994). For the first Sudanese civil war (1955–1972), see Dunstan Wai, ed., The Southern Sudan: the Problem of National Integration (London: Frank Cass, 1973); Dunstan Wai, The African-Arab Conflict in the Sudan (New York. Africana Publishing, 1981).
19. The best introduction to the complex political problems that resulted in the civil war and in Museveni’s victory can be found in T. V. Sathyamurthy’s The Political Development of Uganda (1900–1986) (London: Gower, 1986), a near encyclopaedic compendium (781 pages) of Uganda’s politics since colonization. Though suffering the handicap of being a president’s memoir, Yoweri Museveni’s Sowing the Mustard Seed (London: Macmillan, 1997) is refreshingly candid about the civil war.
20. The SPLA did not need Uganda because at the time it could rely on solid support from communist Ethiopia.
21. This did not prevent the theory’s being revived in 1996, this time by western journalists who were trying to explain the logic behind the sudden appearance of an anti-Mobutu alliance. To make things intellectually more tidy, Laurentdésiré Kabila, who was almost old enough to be Museveni’s or Garang’s father, was also said to have been a student at DSM University in the 1960s.
22. Author’s field notes, Kampala, October 1990.
23. This should have (but has not) buried the often-heard bizarre notion that Museveni was put in power by the United States to stop Muslim fundamentalism in Central Africa, a triple error because (a) in 1986 the Reagan administration looked upon Museveni’s left-wing record with extreme distaste; (b) in 1986 the NIF was not in power in Khartoum; and (c) in 1986, within the framework of their collaboration with CIA activities in Afghanistan, the United States was on excellent terms with Hassan al-Turabi and the NIF.
24. The clearest English-language overall assessment of the NIF regime’s rise to power can be found in Abdel Salam Sidahmed, Politics and Islam in Contemporary Sudan (London: Curzon, 1997).
25. And at the time, in the somewhat exaggerated words of a covert operation specialist, “Uganda was America’s African beachhead.” Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa (1993–1999) (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Pre
ss, 1999), 37. The U.S. turnaround toward Museveni had occurred gradually after Uganda’s 1987 monetary reform and embrace of free-trade economics.
26. There was even the hope of a worldwide Islamic revolution that would extend to the West; see Hassan al-Tourabi, Islam, avenir du monde: Entretiens avec Alain Chevalérias (Paris: J. C. Lattès, 1997).
27. The Acholi and Langi Nilotic tribes of northern Uganda were the ethnic base of the Obote II regime.
28. See Gérard Prunier, “Alice Lakwena: Un prophétisme politique en Ouganda,” in J. P. Chrétien, ed., L’invention religieuse en Afrique (Paris: Karthala, 1993), 409–419. For a more anthropological approach to the Alice phenomenon, see Heike Behrend, Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits (Oxford: James Currey, 1999)
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