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

by Gerard Prunier

  33. Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002). A good part of the American unease toward the Rwandese genocide is the sneaking suspicion that such horrible phenomena might not be safely sealed away in the distant past (i.e., the first half of the twentieth century) but could linger on, throwing into doubt the naïve optimism born out of the Post-Reagan Era of Triumph.

  34. This was in direct continuation of his aberrant reaction to the genocide, when, according to Power, the president’s only concern seems to have been with the physical safety of Rwandese human rights activist Monique Mujawamaliya, whom he had met personally. When he learned that she was all right, he lost interest, “as if she had been the only Rwandese in danger.”

  35. Confidential interview, Washington, DC, October 1997.

  36. Conversation with Peter Rosenblum, Washington, DC, March 2000.

  37. When I asked about U.S. Department of Defense official policy toward Africa, the answer was that it ranked seventh in the list of its concerns in the world. Interview with Department of Defense official, Washington, DC, October 2000.

  38. See Connell and Smyth, “Africa’s New Bloc.”

  39. James Walsh, “Shaking up Africa,” Time, April 14, 1997.

  40. Ottaway, “Africa’s New Leaders.”

  41. Ethiopia and Eritrea in May 1998, Rwanda and Uganda against Kabila in August 1998, and then against each other in May 1999. I remember the dismay of John Prendergast in 1998 as he was trying to use Kagame to reconcile Issayas Afeworqi and Meles Zenawi: “They are completely obstinate, they don’t want to understand any form of reason” was his comment. The impression he gave was that he perceived the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments as nasty obstinate children who could not see the light of good logical American theories.

  42. John Prendergast, “Building Peace in the Horn of Africa: Diplomacy and Beyond,” USIP, Washington, DC, June 1999. The Oxford Dictionary of the English Language defines cachet as “a characteristic feature conferring prestige, distinction or high status.”

  43. See chapter 8, note 11.

  44. Just as the young Alex Laskaris, who was accompanying him on the tour, was mooted to be the next under-secretary for African affairs.

  45. On February 16, 2000, in a speech wherein he approved Clinton’s lack of response to the Rwandese genocide, although he judged it “something which we would not have liked to see on our TV screens.” The comment was typical. Blood off-screen hardly exists at all.

  46. Interview at the U.S. State Department, Washington, DC, late September 2001. At the time Snyder was simply an aide to Assistant Secretary Walter Kansteiner.

  47. The Africa Growth and Opportunity Act of 1996 was supposed to save Africa economically by relying on “trade, not aid.”

  48. Although there remained some lingering traces of the pro-Kigali attitude for a long time, such as when National Security Council member Cindy Courville remarked in February 2005, “I would understand it if Rwanda felt compelled to reoccupy the Congo again.” Interview with MONUC personnel, Kinshasa, November 2006.

  49. Quoted by Eric Fottorino in Le Monde, July 25, 1997.

  50. The first item is a perfectly sensible geopolitical goal, whereas the second, spreading a thin cordon of U.S. troops, supplies, and instructors from Mauritania to Djibouti in a latter-day echo of Truman’s containment policy, is a largely fantastical one. Both will be briefly discussed further on.

  51. For a discussion of this syndrome, I refer the reader to my Rwanda Crisis, 100–106.

  52. For a witty and not unsympathetic assessment of this worldview, see the review by Tony Judt of Hubert Védrine’s Les cartes de la France à l’heure de la mondialisation (Paris: Fayard, 2000) in the New York Review of Books, April 12, 2001. Védrine loves to refer to the United States as “the hyper power.”

  53. Hence the French obsession with a still hoped-for “Great Lakes Conference.” Nobody seemed to know very well what purpose it would serve beyond an aggrandizement of French diplomacy, but its mere mention around the Quai d’Orsay was enough to make French eyes gleam.

  54. There have been ample writings on the subject, which François-Xavier Verschave and the advocacy NGO Survie have turned into their stock in trade. The notorious trial of a number of former Elf-Aquitaine top executives in 2002–2003 showed that government-sponsored corruption interlinking arms, politics, and oil in Africa had consistently operated at the highest levels of the state during the past forty years.

  55. The tragedy was quite real on the ground. But what was felt in Paris was not the reality of the gushing blood, it was another symbolic reality of political, cultural, and diplomatic decadence.

  56. A few months before the report came out, Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine wrote in Le Débat, no. 95 (May–august 1997), “Abominations have been written about François Mitterrand and Rwanda… . If one could make a criticism it would be of not having been conservative enough, of having ignited the La Baule fire near the Rwandese powder keg.” Since the La Baule speech in 1990 was made by Mitterrand in support of democratization in Africa, what Védrine reproaches the late president for is an excess of democratic feeling.

  57. The African Unit at the Elysée was another locus of incestuous relations. When I worked there (as a volunteer activist of the Socialist Party) in the 1980s I saw staff having to deal with such matters as the shopping needs of an African president’s wife, the police arrest of another president’s kleptomaniac daughter, and the slow dying from AIDS of a third president’s son.

  58. “Pourquoi la france lâche l’Afrique?” (Why is France abandoning Africa?), Jeune Afrique, April 2, 2000. It is symptomatic that Jeune Afrique, a typical product of the 1960s Gaullist “respectful anticolonialism,” considered questions about human rights and democracy to be “cold-blooded” intrusions into the supposed privacies of African regimes. Jeune Afrique’s founder-director Beshir Ben Yamed had long had a soft spot for African and Arab dictatorships, particularly “progressive” (and generous) ones.

  59. The expression was invented by Ivory Coast President Houphouët-Boigny in the 1960s. In his mind this was a highly positive slogan, implying fruitful cooperation. But in recent years the word has acquired a distinctly sinister connotation in French political parlance.

  60. The morally repulsive neglect of the Darfur crisis since 2004 is a further case in point. See Gérard Prunier, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide (London: Hurst, 2005).

  61. For particularly telling examples of the international concerns of that time, see Madeleine Kalb, The Congo Cables (New York: Macmillan, 1982); Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington and Africa (1959–1976) (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

  62. James Wolfenson’s interview with IRIN in Dar-es-Salaam, July 18, 2002.

  63. French troop strength in Africa had gone down from 8,000 to 5,000 in 1996–1997. See Ph. Vasset, “The Myth of Military Aid: The Case of French Military Co-Operation in Africa,” SAIS Review 7, no. 2 (Summer 1997).

  64. See “Tangled Web of Alliances Makes the SADC a Poor Regional Peacekeeper,” www.stratfor.com, posted August 2000. This is one of the few commentaries bold enough to mention the politically incorrect South African support for UNITA that the African National Congress had inherited from the apartheid regime.

  65. Economist, September 18, 1999.

  66. AFP dispatch, New York, June 16, 1999.

  67. It was the British and the Americans who opposed the very notion of a deadline that the secretary-general had requested. This constant unacknowledged support for Rwanda and Uganda was rooted in the guilt feelings I outlined earlier (Great Britain had been one of the most vocal advocates of UN nonintervention during the genocide) and in a lingering hope that Museveni and Kagame, the “modern leaders,” would somehow “set things right” by eliminating Kinshasa’s embarrassing human anachronism.

  68. The Present Sudan crisis (2007) is an interesting case in point. Khartoum having mobilized rea
l resources through its Chinese alliance can dispense with having a good image.

  69. “Professionals” and “specialists” are two different things. “Specialists” are esoteric folklorists with a recognized competence in certain exotic areas. They are “consulted” by the international community for purposes of intellectual legitimization, but their advice is hardly ever followed. “Professionals,” on the other hand, have a competence in a certain field deemed to be universally applicable to any part of the world; they need not know the country it is applied to. Some rise to the level of actually influencing policies. I am a “specialist,” not a “professional.”

  70. John Prendergast, Frontline Diplomacy: Humanitarian Aid and Conflict in Africa (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996).

  71. For a sample of the first type of criticism, see P. Dauvin and J. Siméant, Le travail humanitaire: Les acteurs des ONG, du siège au terrain (Paris: Presse des sciences Politiques, 2001). For an example of the second, see D. Sogge, ed., Compassion and Calculation: The Business of Private Foreign Aid (London: Pluto Press, 1996).

  72. See, for example, Michael Maren, “A Different Kind of Child Abuse,” Penthouse, December 1995, remarking that the Save the Children Fund spent only $35.29 out of every $240 pledged for child support on actually supporting the child itself, the rest going to administration, general expenses, and fund raising.

  73. A typical media treatment is the long article by John Pomfret, “Aid Dilemma: Keeping It from the Oppressors,” Washington Post, September 23, 1997, describing how Mobutu’s army used UN planes to fly weapons to retreating génocidaires in March 1997 while Kabila’s men appropriated UN fuel to ferry supplies to the Lubumbashi front.

  74. See the UN Report by Charles Petrie, Goma, June 16, 1998, describing how, for New Year’s Eve 1995, a large international NGO organized a party attended by many expatriate workers at which a famous Hutu singer close to the Interahamwe performed and sang songs composed during and in support of the genocide without anybody in the audience realizing what was going on.

  75. Old-style left-wingers found it hard to adapt and kept looking for “imperialist” remnants in the oddest places. See, for example, some of the polemics in the European press in late 1992 trying to explain U.S. intervention in Somalia by claiming supposed oil interests there.

  76. See my Rwanda Crisis, 299–304.

  77. United Nations/OCHA, Impératifs Humanitaires en RDC, Kinshasa, March 2000. This short document is one of the best summaries of the problems and contradictions of humanitarian action during the second phase of the conflict.

  78. The number of affected persons (i.e., IDPs and refugees) in the Congo went from one million in 1998 to three million at the beginning of 2003, with over two million more war-related cases in the neighboring countries (Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania).

  79. United Nations, Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, New York, August 2000, 1.

  80. Stealth and lying are always at the core of the genocidal phenomenon, as if the perpetrators knew deep down that their acts were evil and had to be hidden from view. One should keep in mind that no clear, firm order for the genocide of the Jews has ever been found (the closest thing to it being the minutes of the Wansee Conference), in spite of the meticulously organized nature of the German bureaucracy.

  81. The accused Laurent Semanza, arrested in March 1996, was not indicted until October 1997. In the case of the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic ideologue Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, this allowed the accused to get the Appeals Chamber of the tribunal to throw his case out of court in November 1999 because “the accused’s rights to a speedy trial have been violated.” Barayagwiza was ordered to be set free, thereby precipitating a major crisis between the Rwandese government and Prosecutor Carla del Ponte. Barayagwiza was later rearrested under a confused pretext, and at the time of this writing (December 2007) remains detained in a kind of judicial limbo.

  82. I have had long conversations on that point with my friend and colleague, the Great Lakes historian Jean-Pierre Chrétien, who, in spite of his willingness to help the court, finally got completely discouraged by its confusion, contradictions, and absolute lack of professionalism.

  83. Judges would leave abruptly for personal reasons, leaving a position vacant for months afterward. At least one refused either to attend the proceedings or to resign, and personal quarrels blocking the work were constant.

  84. To realize how far the ICTR was from understanding (or even being willing to understand) the history and politics of the region which gave the inescapable counterpoint to the trials, refer to Alison DesForges’s testimony in the notorious “Media Trial” (www.diplomatiejudiciaire.com, June 2002) in which the witness, one of the very best specialists of recent regional history, was bullied, suspected, and almost accused by the defense, without any reaction from the court.

  85. When I contacted the ICTR through an intermediary in March 2000 to ask whether they would be interested in discussing the topic, even off the record, I got the answer that this was not desirable.

  86. Other arguments were used (i.e., the difficulty of running two tribunals—for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda—at once, or Del Ponte’s frequent stays in The Hague). But these were pretexts; it was well-known that what led UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan not to renew her contract was his reluctance at supporting her announced desire to prosecute RPF crimes.

  87. IRIN Press Agency, “Focus on the UN Tribunal,” Dar-es-Salaam, February 3, 2004.

  88. Le Monde, June 8, 2001. Gasana had lost his mother, one sister, and one brother. He could hardly be accused of being a génocidaire since he had left Rwanda almost a year before the slaughter and, during his time as a minister, had steadily tried to fight the growing influence of his permanent secretary Col. Théoneste Bagosora.

  89. Hirondelle Press Service dispatch, Arusha, March 13, 2002. Lawyers were paid by the ICTR to the tune of $80 to $110 per hour and they were allowed to charge up to $175 per hour per month.

  90. Interview with former ICTR investigator Ibrahima Dia, Paris, March 2001. Since many of the staff exploiting the situation for their benefit happened to be West Africans, Prosecutor Louise Arbour was accused of “racism” when she refused to renew their contracts. See Hirondelle Press dispatch, Arusha, May 21, 2001.

  91. The best book on the tribunal is probably Thierry Cruvelier, Le tribunal des vaincus: Un Nuremberg pour le Rwanda (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2006).

  92. Le Monde, September 4, 2002.

  93. Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, 354–355.

  94. Hence the taste of the media for playing up the Franco-American rivalry, which could be mooted as a kind of poor man’s substitute for the old scary attention-catcher.

  95. “We used communication and information warfare better than anyone. We have found a new way of doing things.” General Kagame in an April 8, 1998, interview with Nick Gowing.

  96. This is well reflected in the captivating study by Nick Gowing, Dispatches from the Disaster Zones, OCHA, London: May 1998.

  97. The African Catastrophe Book has become a kind of minor literary genre of its own. For some of the most recent additions, see (in English) R. Kapuscinski, The Shadow of the Sun (New York: Knopf, 2001); (in French) S. Smith, Négrologie (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2003).

  98. The parallel with the Jewish Holocaust, the state of Israel, and the price the Palestinians have had to pay for a crime they did not commit is hard to escape. Kigali immediately understood the media advantage it could bring and did all it could to develop good relations with Israel. This led the U.S. Jewish community, particularly Jewish academics, to show a systematic partiality toward the RPF regime.

  99. See Nexis, Index of Major World Publications, 2006.

  100. Before that there were simply plain wars and massacres. The Idi Amin regime in Uganda and the Red Terror in Ethiopia (I lived through both) were not “emergencies.”

  101. There were few. The Great Lakes were looked upon as a kind of intellectual backw
ater up to the 1990s, compared with “hot” parts of the continent such as South Africa, Angola, or Zaire.

  102. There was no mention of Che Guevara because his Congolese adventures remained a secret until the 1990s.

  103. See the various polemics between Jean-Pierre Chrétien, Filip Reyntjens, and René Lemarchand around the concept of “the Franco-Burundian historical school” in 1988–1990.

  104. The exceptions were Mr. and Mrs. Newbury, who proved largely reluctant to enter the media circus, and Alison DesForges, who, before shooting to the forefront of the mediatized experts as a member of Human Rights Watch, had also had a discreet career. But in the immediate aftermath of the genocide French-speaking academics enjoyed a quasi-monopoly over the discourse on Rwanda and the Great Lakes.

  105. Often with fresh and dubious claims to “expertise,” especially in the case of the journalists.

  106. With the lone exception of the German academic Helmut Strizek.

  107. For a good assessment of the phenomenon, see Léon Saur, Influences parallèles: L’Internationale Démocrate-Chrétienne au Rwanda (Brussels: Luc Pire, 1998).