Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe
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104. South African aircraft carried out the evacuation after a personal conversation between President Mkapa and not-yet-president Thabo Mbeki. Author’s interview with a French diplomat, Paris, January 2000.
105. Colette Braeckman, “Les opposants rwandais ne manquent pas d’armes,” Le Soir, October 8, 1998.
106. Personal interview with Seth Sendashonga, Nairobi, April 1998. (See Annex One.)
107. UNHCR registered 350,000 Burundian refugees in Tanzania, but the total population was huge, possibly up to 800,000, and many had been settled there for over twenty years, slowly retreating into their own world. On this, see Lisa Malkki’s wonderful book Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
108. It went back to August 1985, when Moi tried to act as a peacemaker between the Ugandan Military Council of Basilio Okello and Museveni’s guerrillas after the overthrow of Obote. Museveni played along with Moi, used him, ridiculed him, and then went back to war, eventually upsetting the Kenyan peace arrangements. Moi never forgave him and tensions eventually led to border clashes in 1987, followed by grudging but never honestly felt reconciliation. Author’s personal reminiscences from 1985 to 2000 in Nairobi and Kampala.
109. See chapter 3. To understand the political evolution that brought about the Brazzaville-Congo creeping violence, see Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga, Les voies du politique au Congo: Essai de sociologie historique (Paris: Karthala, 1997).
110. For the very complex meaning of the word tribal used in relationship to Brazzaville tribal militias, see Elizabeth Dorier-Apprill, “Guerre des milices et fragmentation urbaine à Brazzaville,” Hérodote, no. 86/87, 4th quarter (1997): 182–221; Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga, “Milices politiques et bandes armées à Brazzaville: Enquête sur la violence politique des jeunes déclassés,” Etudes du CERI, no. 13 (April 1996).
111. Nord Sud Export, May 29, 1998. Lissouba had declared somewhat undiplomatically on French TV M6, “Elf has helped me in the war effort because I asked them.” But the tactic was hardly convincing because Lissouba had earlier tried to sue Elf for supporting Sassou Nguesso against him. See Stephen Smith, “La plainte de Lissouba contre Elf irrecevable,” Libération, January 15, 1998.
112. Fédération Internationale des Ligues des Droits de l’Homme, Congo Brazzaville: L’arbitraire de l’Etat, la terreur des milices, June 1999, 7.
113. IRIN Bulletin, no. 204 (July 2, 1997).
114. Agence France Presse dispatch, Brazzaville, November 10, 1998.
115. Because it feared the Congo-based FDD rebels and tried to court Rwanda’s favor against them.
116. In spite of its problems with Chad, with the Republic of Congo, and with Congo itself once the war got to the Central African Republic border.
117. Until extremely late in the game (July 2003), when it sent a peacekeeping force to Kindu, to help the Mission des Nations Unies au Congo (MONUC). The peacekeeping force sent to Burundi in 2001 does not count since it always remained strictly limited to that country, where it did not achieve much anyway.
118. This was to change later in the war.
119. The best (or worst) anecdote at this level was told to me by Ugandan Foreign Minister Eriya Kategaya, who had once been asked by South African Foreign Minister Alfred Nzo, “I can’t remember: the country where the Tutsi have always been in power: is it Rwanda or Burundi?”
120. S. E. Katzenellenbogen, Railways and the Copper Mines of Katanga (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) is the best introduction to the interlocking complexities of the South African, Rhodesian, and Katangese economies.
121. “Kenya Wary of SA Link in Africa Rail,”East African, October 26, 1998.
122. Afrique Energies, November 18, 1998.
123. IRIN Bulletin, no. 494 (September 3, 1998).
124. Quoted in La Croix, September 18, 1998.
125. Stephen Smith, “La partition de l’ex-Zaïre semble inévitable,” Libération, September 9, 1998.
126. IRIN Bulletin, no. 497 (September 8, 1998).
127. The few Rwandese remnants in the West crossed over into Angola and joined UNITA forces, which unsuccessfully attacked Maquela do Zombo in early September.
128. The central basin, with its thick forest cover, absence of roads, and limited population was not a preferred axis. In early 1999 RPA-RCD forces eventually made their way to Ikela, where they clashed inconclusively with the Zimbabweans for months, leaving the central front something of a backwater.
129. “Records of the Regional Bureaus (Great Lakes),” Fund 19, Sub-fund 7, UN-HCR Archives, Geneva. The refugees joined the war anyway.
130. REC Bulletin, no. 10/98 (October 30, 1998).
131. The other country was very likely Rwanda.
132. Jean-Philippe Rémy, “Rébellion-business au Congo,” Libération, August 13, 1999.
133. Jean-Pierre Bemba had been sent to Belgium by his father at a very young age and had spent more time in Europe than in Africa. He was more at ease speaking French than Lingala.
134. New Vision, November 4, 1998.
135. Agence France Presse dispatch, Kisangani, November 13, 1998.
136. IRIN Bulletin, no. 541 (November 9, 1998). To explain these large losses one should keep in mind that the Chadians were fighting in a very unfamiliar environment and for a cause they did not even understand.
137. This is part of the ambiguity of the boy-soldiers phenomenon. Unnatural as it may seem to a Western mind, we should remember that most child-soldiers are volunteers. A taste for adventure and an almost total lack of opportunities, especially at the educational level, explain the phenomenon. To condemn it without working for serious alternatives is merely moralistic, not practical. It would also be honest to remember the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, in which children of fifteen and sixteen commonly fought, partly because they were press-ganged and partly because of the excitement of the times.
138. Interview in L’Autre Afrique, October 28, 1998.
139. On October 10 the RCD shot down a Congo Airlines Boeing 737 with forty passengers on board. IRIN Bulletin, no. 521 (October 12, 1998).
140. Both Angolan and Zimbabwean planes were involved.
141. IRIN Bulletin, no. 566 (December 12–14). It was the ZNA that bore the brunt of the fighting, and it got severely mauled in Pweto, losing several tanks, one Alouette helicopter, one jet fighter bomber, and over a hundred men.
142. IRIN Bulletin, no. 634 (March 22, 1999). The ZNA got hit again, with one “Mig” shot down and many soldiers killed. Communiqués routinely described the Zimbabwean Air Force fighter bombers as “Migs,” while the force had none on strength. In fact they were probably old Hawker Hunters or possibly more modern Bae Hawks.
143. IRIN Bulletin, no. 637 (March 25, 1999).
144. Interview with Agence France Presse, Lisala, January 14, 1999.
145. Bemba had more success in recruiting in the Central African Republic than Kinshasa did because many of the riverine tribes, such as the Sango, Yakoma, and Buraka, were close relatives of the Congolese Equateur tribes. Bemba’s own Ngbaka actually lived on both sides of the Ubangui.
146. Xinhua Press Agency dispatch, Harare, February 16, 1999.
147. In fact about 130 of them were Rwandese ex-FAR integrated into the ZNA. Interview with a former FAC officer, Paris, February 2000.
148. Agence France Presse dispatch, April 20, 1999.
149. Interview with an American intelligence operator, Washington, DC, September 1999.
150. Joseph Kabila was to remain only briefly as army head. He was replaced on October 20 by Col. Eddy Kapend, a Lunda officer linked to Angolan politics through his Katangese “Tiger” connections.
151. Working for the French oil company Elf in Angola had made him a rich man and left him with a wide-ranging network of connections.
152. When the cabinet was reshuffled in March 1999, this amounted largely to a game of musical chairs.
153. Interview with
a former AFDL member, Paris, March 1999.
154. Mail and Guardian, August 27, 1998.
155. IRIN/UNHCR Report, February 12, 1999.
156. These were the words used by Rwanda’s foreign minister Anastase Gasana, who added, “The DRC is a den of armed groups who are bent upon destabilising the region.” IRIN Bulletin, no. 540 (November 6, 1998). Given the position of the Clinton administration at the time, this was a pretty effective line of talk.
157. See IRIN Bulletin, no. 502 (September 15, 1998) and no. 508 (September 23, 1998). In those early days of the war the Mayi Mayi exclusively fought against the Rwandese forces and left the Ugandans alone. This was an important sign both of the differential perceptions of the two invading armies and of the eastern ethnic imbroglio in which the Banyarwanda were caught, whereas the Ugandans did not have any significant split ethnic groups on the border, the Alur factor in Province Orientale being negligible.
158. Rwandese propaganda systematically tried to equate the Mayi Mayi with the Interahamwe both because of the opprobrium the word carried with it and because recognizing the Mayi Mayi as nationalist guerrillas would have seriously undermined the “rebel” claims of the Rwanda-supported RCD. As for the reality of the claim it was quite variable. In some areas the Mayi Mayi would ally themselves with ex-FAR and Interahamwe (and even more frequently with Burundian FDD in South Kivu); in others they would go their separate ways; and in some instances, particularly in Masisi, Walikale, and Buternbo, they even fought each other. Interviews with Mayi Mayi supporters, Paris and Brussels, 1999 and 2000.
159. Such as when the Zimbabweans said they had taken Fizi in December. In fact Fizi and Bataka were briefly occupied in late December and early January by a gaggle of Mayi Mayi and FDD guertillas under the command of ex-FAZ colonel Njabiola. IRIN Bulletin, no. 581 (January 6, 1999). The same group later unsuccessfully attacked Bukavu, which was defended by the RPA.
160. This one was particular in that it was not a mass killing of civilians but the machine-gunning to death of over one hundred Mayi Mayi fighters who were trying to surrender. Interview with an RCD deserter eyewitness, Kampala, January 2000.
161. Many of these horrors are chronicled in the Human Rights Watch Report DRC: Casualties of war: Civilians, Rules of Law, Democratic Freedoms published in New York in February 1999.
162. Part of it could be attributed to the Mayi Mayi or to the Interahamwe. But in spite of Kigali’s claim to “keep order” in the Kivus, all the large-scale massacres and many of the “ordinary” crimes could be attributed to the RPA forces and their RCD allies.
163. For glimpses of these grisly circumstances, see some of the reports produced by local NGOs in South Kivu: Chronique d’une guerre injustifiée (anonymous), Bukavu, November 1998; SOS Droits de l’Homme, Rapport sur la situation des droits de l’hommes dans les zones d’Uvira et de Fizi, Uvira, July 1999. For the role of the Catholic Church, see Gérard Prunier, “The Catholic Church and the Kivu Conflict,” Journal of Religion in Africa 31, no. 2 (2001): 139–162.
164. Marie-Laure Colson, “Dans l’ex-Zaïre la stratégie de la terreur gagne du terrain,” Libération, January 15, 1999.
165. Agence France Presse dispatch, Kinshasa, April 20, 1999.
166. La Référence Plus, April 24, 1999.
167. From which he got a limited amount of military aid in exchange for exploration rights for uranium.
168. SWB/Radio Télévision Nationale Congolaise, April 2, 1999.
169. IRIN Bulletin, no. 528 (October 21, 1998).
170. Given the rapidly eroding value of the Congolese franc, about 80 percent of all gold and diamond deals were done in U.S. dollars. L’Obseruateur (Kinshasa), March 31, 1999.
171. This was particularly easy in Equateur, where the MLC had soon infiltrated its agents into Mbandaka, where they were in contact with the government side. This was much less common in Katanga and Kasaï, where the fighting was more setious.
172. IRIN Bulletin, no. 593 (January 22, 1999).
173. This atmosphere of tragic fun, of desperate enjoyment, is vividly illustrated in the remarkable collection of popular paintings gathered in B. Jewsiewicki and B. Planksteiner, eds., An/Sichten: Malerei aus dem Kongo (1990–2000) (Vienna: Museum für Völkerkunde, Sptinger Verlag, 2001).
174. See “Angola: Les banquiers contre l’UNITA,” Nord-Sud Export, June 26, 1998.
175. Africa Confidential 39, no. 16 (August 7, 1998).
176. They included the former secretary-general Eugenio Manukavola and the former minister of tourism Jorge Valentim.
177. For a good assessment of Angola’s oil-driven predatory economy, see Tony Hodges, Angola from Afro-Stalinism to Petro-Diamond Capitalism (Oxford: James Currey, 2001), particularly chapter 6, “Oil and the Bermuda Triangle.”
178. IRIN, January 25, 1999.
179. IRIN, May 12, 1999. What he actually meant was that UNITA wanted a revision of the 1994 Agreement, with supplementary security guarantees.
180. SWB/Radio Lisbon, May 26, 1999.
181. SWB/Lusa Website, May 25, 1999. The remarks about “international observers” had to do with the fact that in January dos Santos had asked the UN not to renew MONUA’s mandate when it expired on February 26. But MONUA had a $1.5 billion budget, which was sorely needed to face the massive IDP problem. Dos Santos wanted the money, but not the prying eyes.
182. SWB/SAPA News Agency, May 18, 1999. This was partly disingenuous because, although the smuggling to UNITA was indeed private and decentralized, the smugglers had enough government contacts to make sure that they would not be bothered by the police. It was often the same people, using the same airstrips, who supplied weapons to Rwanda. Diamonds were smuggled out of Angola by the same circuit.
183. IRIN, June 8, 1999.
184. UNITA was aware of the problem, and as its forces were nearing Soyo, the oil industry supply base on the coast, its secretary-general Paulo Lukamba (“Gato”) declared, “Foreign oil interests will not be harmed.” La Lettre Afrique Energies, May 19, 1999. But it was too late because the oil industry remembered the taking of Soyo in January 1993 and Savimbi’s threats to “renegotiate” the oil contracts.
185. Economist, October 24, 1998.
186. La Lettre Afrique Energies, October 7, 1998.
187. Banto had closed down in the east and Tenke Mining declared force majeure for its Fungurume operation in Katanga in February 1999. IRIN Bulletin, no. 620 (March 2, 1999).
188. IRIN Bulletin, no. 524 (October 16, 1998).
189. IRIN Bulletin, no. 598 (January 29, 1999). The insurgents were as brutal as the government. They periodically slaughtered not only their Tutsi enemies (as when they killed fifty-three people at the Nyarutovu camp for Congo refugees on April 10, 1998) but even their Hutu supporters when they proved reluctant. On the very day of the Nyarutovu massacre they decapitated twenty-four villagers (including children) in Musambira. Government forces had no more humanity, but they had much better firepower and organization.
190. Imidugudu was the name given to the new housing program supposedly designed to make up for the genocide’s destructions. It was in fact closer to the Ethiopian villagization program of the 1980s, caused by the same security obsession and equally indifferent to the people’s welfare. For an overall view, see Human Rights Watch, Uprooting the Rural Poor in Rwanda, New York, 2001.
191. IRIN Bulletin, no. 635 (March 23, 1999).
192. IRIN Bulletin, no. 517 (October 6, 1998).
193. IRIN Bulletin, no. 643 (April 6, 1999). To give his words a heavier propaganda impact, Kagame gave that speech during the ceremonies of the genocide’s fifth anniversary, complete with the spectacular reburial of thousands of corpses.
194. IRIN Bulletin, no. 645 (April 8, 1999). Gahima was responding to a critical memo addressed by Michel Moussali of UNHCR to the UN Human Rights Commission.
195. IRIN Bulletin, no. 674 (May 19, 1999). With Paris taking a back seat in matters Rwandese, criticism of the RPF regime was left to Belgium and G
ermany. But such criticism always remained muted and could not stand up to Clare Short’s moral bulldozing.
196. He was alluding to the internal RPF “elections” which had brought him to the direction of the front in February 1998.
197. Colette Braeckman, Le Soir. February 5, 1999.
198. For a good study on the Kisangani diamonds, which were to become the main apple of discord between Rwanda and Uganda, see Jean Omasombo Tshonda, “Les diamants de Kisangani,” in L. Monnier, B. Jewsiewicki, and G. de Villers, eds., Chasse au diamant au Congo/Zaïre (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 77–126.