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

by Gerard Prunier

  112. This account of Kisase’s death is based on two separate interviews, one with a Mukongo CRND member who deserted from AFDL after Kisasu’s murder (Kampala, April 1997), the other with Kisase’s former cameraman, a Mushi from Bukavu (Kampala, January 2000).

  113. Kabila was also glad to see Kisase get shot because he had begun to resent his popularity. As for the Rwandese, they wanted him, their obedient ndiyo bwana, in charge of the now unified AFDL without having to deal with the dangerous nationalistic competition Kisase Ngandu represented.

  114. Le Monde, January 4, 1997.

  115. Braeckman, L’enjeu congolais, 265.

  116. These dated back to early 1993, when Savimbi gave $1 million to the RPF. For him it was a small amount, but for the then impoverished Tutsi guerrilla force it was a small fortune. The gift was typical of Savimbi’s strategy of buying himself potentially important friends all over the continent. The January 1993 RPF offensive had attracted his attention and he was willing to bet some money on the newcomers. Interview, Kigali, April 1997.

  117. Kennes, “La guerre au Congo,” 262. The Tigres, or Tropas de Infanteria e Guerrilla Revoluçionaria, were the descendants of the famous Gendarmes Katangais who had fought for Tshombe before seeking asylum in Angola, where they fought for the Portuguese against Holden Roberto’s FNLA. After 1976 they switched allegiance and served the MPLA against UNITA. They invaded Shaba in 1977 and 1978 on Luanda’s orders. Although by now Portuguese speakers, they still considered themselves at least partly Congolese and in any case fully Katangese.

  118. Radio Kampala, in BBC/SWB, January 31, 1997.

  119. It was the first operation in which the new Angolan-Katangese Tigers took part.

  120. Two American mercenaries fighting for the Alliance were killed on the Osso River in late January. The French army, which had a secret Commandement des Opérations Spéciales commando unit on the other shore of the river for observation purposes, discreetly returned the bodies of their dead “enemies” to the United States. Interview with ESO officer, Kampala, November 1997. The Economist, February 8, 1997, wrote in an article entitled “Fashoda Revisited,” “By African proxy France and the U.S. are at war.”

  121. Agence France Presse dispatch, Kampala, January 31, 1997.

  122. New Vision, January 2, 1997.

  123. New Vision, January 22, 1997.

  124. Uganda National Rescue Front II (UNRF II, since the original UNRF had fought against Obote in the 1980s) was a small West Nile Muslim guerrilla group drawn from the Aringa tribe.

  125. Two months later 746 of them were tried in a mass trial and released after a symbolical condemnation. New Vision, April 23, 1997. Most of them eventually joined the Ugandan army.

  126. Le Monde, February 19, 1997.

  127. One of the POWs was Capt. Jean-Marie Magabo, of the former Rwandese FAR. He said that about five hundred ex-FAR entered Sudan in late December 1996 and were now incorporated in the Sudanese forces fighting the SPLA. New Vision, May 7, 1997.

  128. New Vision, March 17, 1997.

  129. Libération, March 14, 1997.

  130. IRIN Bulletin, no. 130 (March 18, 1997).

  131. At his funeral on March 24, in the presence of Cooperation Minister Jacques Godfrain and all the Françafrique barons, all those present had the feeling they were witnessing the passing of an era.

  132. Everybody followed suit, and by late April there were 2,500 Belgian, British, U.S., and French troops in Brazzaville, all ready to evacuate a smaller number of civilians from Kinshasa.

  133. He went to France again, on January 9, for cancer treatment.

  134. Kakudji was Kabila’s cousin who had spent the past twenty-five years in Brussels doing menial labor; Bizima Karaha, a South Africa–trained medical doctor, introduced himself as a Munyamulenge but was in fact the son of 1959 Rwandese Tutsi refugees who had fled to South Kivu.

  135. President Chirac had one weakness: he always found it difficult to arbitrate between collaborators who were fighting each other. Dupuch had tried many times to get rid of Wibaux, who was an old Foccart associate, but without success. Chirac had kept both: Dupuch at the official desk at 2 rue de l’Elysée, his rival a hundred yards away as “special adviser” at 14 rue de l’Elysée. The arrangement was a source of consternation in RPR circles and of amusement for the Socialists.

  136. Libération, March 27, 1997.

  137. Le Monde, March 29, 1997. Mukamba was nevertheless arrested and sent to Goma. Jean-Pierre Moritz, the MIBA general administrator, paid $3.5 million in ransom into the Brussels account of an old PRP front company Kabila was still using. La Lettre Afrique Energie, July 16, 1997.

  138. The problem came from his Tutsi ancestry; he was accused by street demonstrators of having “sold the country to the foreigners.”

  139. Interview with Aubert Mukendi, Paris, June 2000.

  140. By now there were almost four thousand “Tigers” operating in Zaire. They were mostly the children of the Gendarmes Katangais operating together with some Angolan Lunda in the 36th FAA regiment. They were serving under the orders of Rwandese officers, with whom they often had a difficult relationship. Interview with Adonya Ayebare, Washington, DC, October 1999.

  141. For a picturesque description of Lubumbashi’s last days under Mobutist rule, see Crispin Bakatuseka, La libération de Lubumbashi (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999).

  142. In a paradoxical development typical of the general confusion, Brig. Delphin Muland, the Tigers’ commander-in-chief, found himself faced with thousands of Hutu refugees streaming down toward the Angolan border as he and his troops were coming up by way of Luachimo. The refugees were being chased by RPA elements, and because they were obviously harmless civilians Muland fired on the RPA to let the refugees flee. This caused him to be imprisoned for six months in Kinshasa after the war was over on orders from the RPA officers, who were furious at having lost their quarry. Interview with Deogratias Symba, Washington, DC, March 2000.

  143. La Lettre du Continent, April 17, 1997. This could be seen as an interesting case of the sorcerer’s apprentice premonition since that fear only anticipated what was going to happen a little more than fifteen months later.

  144. Quoted in Le Canard Enchainé, May 21, 1997.

  145. Jonas Savimbi, interview in Politique Internationale, no. 85 (Autumn 1999): 365–366.

  146. Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa (1993–1999) (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), 94. Well documented and fully paranoid, this book is an entertaining example of conspiratorial history in which the U.S. government roughly plays the role of the devil.

  147. Although, given the simultaneous French fascination for anything American, it might be more fitting to adapt here again the concept forged by Ali Mazrui to describe Gen. Idi Amin’s feelings toward the British and to talk in this case about “aggressive americanophilia.” See chapter 3, note 128.

  148. In the late 1980s, before statistics became very unreliable, the valuof private foreign investment in Zaire was estimated at $800 million for the Belgians, $200 million for the Americans, $60 million for the British, and only $10 million for the French. Economist Intelligence Unit, Zaire Country Report, 1994.

  149. Cluff Mining was an Anglo–South African company 65 percent owned by South African mining giant AAC (Anglo-American Corporation); Banro was Canadian.

  150. Although Zaire was considered Francophone, its economic orientation had traditionally been toward Belgium, not France. This made it a very different case from that of the West African former French colonies.

  151. Reading S. E. Katzenellenbogen, Railway and the Copper Mines of Katanga (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973) is an absolute must for anybody who wants to understand the complex alliances and rivalries of the Belgian and South African mining interests in the Congo since the late nineteenth century. Their structures and effects remain astonishingly relevant for our times.

  152. This is the 1995 figure from the French Ministry of Industry (oil excluded). This corres
ponds to value actually produced and sold, not to the unexploited Congolese reserves, which are enormous. But putting them into production presupposed a minimum of political stability, a working legal structure, and a minimum of $10 billion to $15 billion in investments over the next ten years. As a point of comparison, in 1995 the biggest mineral seller (excluding oil) worldwide was Australia, with 13.2 percent of the market, followed by South Africa with 8 percent. In 1988 Zaire’s share of the world market was still nearly 7 percent.

  153. This rough overview is the product of discussions with Zaire expert Willet Weeks and diamond expert François Misser and of perusing a variety of printed sources, all invariably described by specialists as unreliable.

  154. There was one in 1995, a bizarre scheme concocted by Prime Minister Kengo to put the whole Zairian mining industry into the hands of the Swiss-based company SWIPCO. It was vetoed by the World Bank and by the HCR/PT because there was no public tendering and the whole thing seemed unfeasible. See J. C. Willame, L’odyssée Kabila (Paris: Karthala, 1999), 79.

  155. Africa Analysis, November 15, 1996.

  156. This brief portrait of Jean-Raymond Boulle is based on Marc Roche, “Le triomphe de Jean-Raymond Boulle, l’homme d’affaire financier des rebelles,” Le Monde, May 18–19, 1997, on conversations with African mining expert Antoine Glaser in Paris, and with Congolese mining expert friends in Lubumbashi.

  157. Much was made of the fact that former president Bush and former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney were members of Barrick Gold’s board of directors. But Barrick acquired Kilomoto perfectly legally from the Mobutu government and did not need to start a war to steal its own property. And not only did it not try to have any dealings with Kabila (apart from giving him $7 million, according to La Lettre du Continent, May 8, 1997), it even had to close up its mining operation later due to war damages and generalized theft.

  158. It is interesting to note that earlier (December 26, 1996) Kabila had issued an “ultimatum,” ordering the mining companies back to work in AFDL-controlled areas and threatening them with cancellation of contracts if they did not show up. At the time nobody moved or even answered him.

  159. Tenke Mining was the first company to actually come up with cash, giving $50 million to Kabila in March 1997.

  160. Mawampanga, who had done a PhD in economics at Penn State University, was one of the so-called ANACOZA recruits into AFDL. The All North American Conference on Zaire (ANACOZA) was created in April 1996 on the basis of the Internet site Zaire List, which had existed since August 1994. Kabila was so short of trained personnel that he began to scan the ANACOZA Internet site to pick up interesting prospects for his staff.

  161. International Herald Tribune, May 10–11, 1997.

  162. New Vision, April 18, 1997.

  163. Africa Confidential 38, no. 9 (April 25, 1997).

  164. La Lettre de la CADE, no. 19 (April 1998).

  165. For a clear map of the refugee movements, see Sadako Ogata, The Turbulent Decade (New York: Norton, 2005), 205.

  166. Remark made to the author, Paris, November 1996.

  167. See chapter 2.

  168. At the time the Mayi Mayi still considered the Hutu to be the main enemy. The next day they killed many more refugees in Nyakatariba. Both villages were in the Masisi area. AZADHO (Association Zairoise des Droits de l’Homme), Nord Kivu: Existence de charniers et de fosses communes, March 1, 1997.

  169. Human Rights Watch Africa/Fédération Internationale des Ligues des Droits de l’Homme, Attacked by All Sides: Civilians and the War in Eastern Zaire, March 1997, 10. This poses an important moral and historical question: Were the refugees fleeing willingly or unwillingly? The question is obscured by the partisan choices of pro-Tutsi (they were compelled to flee by the Interahamwe and ex-FAR) and pro-Hutu (they were fleeing because they feared returning to Rwanda) authors. The reality is mixed; I discuss it in the section titled “Struggling for the Moral High Ground” in chapter 10. My impression is that in November 1996 most refugees did not want to go back to Rwanda; this is also the feeling one gets from the only developed account of the refugees’ flight: Béatrice Umutesi, Fuir ou mourir au Zaïre: Le vécu d’une réfugiée rwandaise (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000). It is true that the Interahamwe tried to dissuade, often by force, those who wanted to return. But in the massive confusion, forcing the flight of over half a million people west would have been beyond the capacity of the representatives of the former regime if the refugee population had been really desirous to go back.

  170. A U.S. military mission came back to Kigali after spending one week in Kivu, declaring that there were “175,000 refugees left in Eastern Zaire while 600,000 had returned.” Radio Rwanda, in BBC/SWB, November 23, 1996. The fact that this left a gap of over 300,000 people unaccounted for did not seem to worry anybody.

  171. French Foreign Affairs Minister Hervé de Charrette, The Times (London), November 26, 1996.

  172. Le Soir, November 25, 1996.

  173. James MacKinley, “How the Refugee Crisis Wound Down,” International Herald Tribune, November 28, 1996.

  174. The Guardian (Dar-es-Salaam), November 26, 1996.

  175. Fund 19, Records of Regional Bureaux, Sub-fund 7, Dar-es-Salaam Office, November 27, 1996, UNHCR Archives, Geneva.

  176. Although the Tanzanian camps were not as politicized as those in Zaire refugees did not want to go back: there were only 6,427 voluntary returns in 1995 and 3,445 in 1996 out of a total of 472,811 refugees. UNHCR Statistics.

  177. Report by W. R. Urasa, UNHCR representative in Kigali, Fund 19, Sub-Fund 7, Kigali Office, December 30, 1996, UNHCR Archives, Geneva.

  178. IRIN Bulletin, no. 95 (February 6, 1997); Le Monde, February 7, 1997.

  179. IRIN Bulletin, no. 98 (February 11, 1997). The Guardian (London) remarked in an article (February 13, 1997), “The goal of the Rwandese government is to exterminate the Hutu fighters for fear that one day they would come back for revenge.” For an eyewitness account of the massacres, see Anonymous: “Massacre des réfugiés Hutu à Shabunda,” Dialogue, no. 221 (March–April 2001): 75–82.

  180. They were the ones the Angolan Tigers were to come across in April, still being chased by the RPA.

  181. IRIN Bulletin, no. 89 (January 29, 1997).

  182. He was soon going to be in Brazzaville, where the deteriorating political situation would provide him with another window of opportunity.

  183. It is this group that was soon going to bolster the insurgency in northwestern Rwanda (see chapter 5).

  184. This and many following details are taken from the excellent Médecins sans Frontières USA report Forced Flight: A Brutal Strategy of Elimination in Eastern Zaire, May 1997.

  185. The fate of that group of refugees who eventually stumbled all the way to Mbandaka, 2,000 kilometers on foot across Zaire, losing thousands of dead in their wake, is the one described in Umutesi, Fuir ou mourir au Zaïre. Ogata, the UNHCR high commissioner, assessed the situation by simply saying, “What was unfolding in the field was really a story of terror and killing.” The Turbulent Decade, 242.

  186. Pro-tutsi groups treated the situation as if all the refugees were génocidaires, while pro-Hutu circles were, on the contrary, trying to talk about the refugees as if the ex-FAR and Interahamwe had never existed.

  187. USIA dispatch, Geneva, April 1, 1997; Le Monde, April 3, 1997.

  188. IRIN Bulletin, no. 140 (April 1, 1997).

  189. Libération, April 20–21, 1997.

  190. Which was false: the 2,000 to 3,000 ex-FAR left behind after the main body of the former army had gone on toward Mbandaka moved to Opala, 140 kilometers to the west of Ubundu, in late February. Médecins Sans Frontières USA, Forced Flight, 3.

  191. Interview with an Ubundu camp survivor, Nairobi, March 1998. This is a man whom I had known previously in Rwanda, who was a PSD member and who had barely survived the genocide. For a similar testimony, see véronique Parqué and Filip Reytjens, “Crimes contre l’humanité dans l’ex-Zaïr
e: Une réalité?” in Reyntjens and Marysse, L’Afrique des Grands Lacs 1997–1998, 285–286. Karenzi Karake, later Congolese army chief of staff and RPA second in command, was said to have been in command of the hit team.

  192. Not everybody was dead because some of the refugees had managed to hide in the jungle, coming back later when UNHCR and NGO workers were allowed to return. But since only about 40,000 refugees made it to Mbandaka, a minimum of 40,000 to 45,000 must have been slaughtered in Kasese and Biaro. As for the Mbandaka survivors, at least 340 (IRIN Bulletin, no. 181 [May 26, 1997]) and possibly up to 2,000 (Robert Block, “Congo Villagers Describe Horrific Killings of Refugees,” Wall Street Journal, June 6, 1997) were killed on May 13 by the RPA, at the very end of their run. Mbandaka residents remember to this day the scenes of carnage in the streets of their town.