Then, in 1994, came the trigger: The civil war in neighboring Rwanda escalated, resulting in the genocide of 800,000 Hutu and Tutsi at the hands of Hutu militia and the army. When the incumbent Hutu regime crumbled, the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebels, led by Paul Kagame, took power, and over a million Hutu fled across the border into Zaire, along with the soldiers and militiamen who had carried out the massacres. The defeated Rwandan army was not the only displaced group seeking refuge. In his Machiavellian bid to become a regional power broker, Mobutu had come to host over ten different foreign armed groups on his territory, which angered his neighbors to no end. By 1996, a regional coalition led by Angola, Uganda, and Rwanda had formed to overthrow Mobutu.
Finally, in addition to national and regional causes, there were local dimensions to the conflict, which resulted perhaps in the greatest bloodshed. The weakness of the state had allowed ethnic rivalries and conflicts over access to land to fester, especially in the densely populated eastern regions on the border with Rwanda and Uganda. During Mobutu’s final years, he and other leaders cynically stoked these ethnic tensions in order to distract from challenges to their power and to rally support.
This book tells the story of the conflict that resulted from these regional, national, and local dimensions and that has lasted from 1996 until today. The war can be divided into three parts. The first Congo war ended with the toppling of Mobutu Sese Seko in May 1997. After a brief lull in the fighting, the new president, Laurent Kabila, fell out with his Rwandan and Ugandan allies, sparking the second Congo war in August 1998, which lasted until a peace deal reunified the country in June 2003. Fighting, however, has continued in the eastern Kivu region until today and can be considered as the third episode of the war.
The book focuses on the perpetrators more than the victims, the politicians and army commanders more than the refugees and rape survivors, although many of the protagonists oscillate between these categories. Rather than dwelling on the horror of the conflict, which is undeniable, I have chosen to grapple with the nature of the system that brought the principal actors to power, limited the choices they could make, and produced such chaos and suffering.
What is this system? As a Congolese friend and parliamentarian told me as I was finishing this book: “In the Congo, in order to survive, we all have to be a bit corrupt, a bit ruthless. That’s the system here. That’s just the reality of things. If you don’t bribe a bit and play to people’s prejudices, someone else who does will replace you.” He winked and added, “Even you, if you were thrown into this system, you would do the same. Or sink.”
There are many examples that bear out his sentiment. Etienne Tshisekedi, the country’s former prime minister, insisted so doggedly that the government had to respect the constitutional order before he stepped back into politics and stood for election that he briefly moralized himself out of politics. Wamba dia Wamba, a former rebel leader who features in this book, was so idealistic about what a rebellion should be that he marginalized himself to irrelevance. It would have been an interesting experiment to drop a young, relatively unknown Mahatma Gandhi into the Congo and observe whether he, insisting on nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience, would have been able to change anything, either. The Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara spent almost a year in the Congo in 1965 fighting with rebels in the east before he abandoned the struggle. Malnourished and depressed, he concluded they “weren’t ready for the revolution.” The Congo has always defied the idealists.
Even Laurent Kabila, who as president would be stereotyped by many as the quintessential Congolese big-man politician, was acutely aware of how deeply entrenched in society the Congolese crisis had become. An inveterate lecturer, he often turned his speeches into morality lessons. “Vous, Zairois ... ,” he would begin, a finger thrusting upward, berating the crowd for having put up with the country’s moral decline for so long. “Who has not been Mobutist in this country?” he asked during one press conference. “Three-quarters of this country became part of it! We saw you all dancing in the glory of the monster.”6
Papy Kamanzi7 is an example of how easy it is to be drawn into the deepest moral corruption. A thirty-year-old, mid-level army commander from the minority Tutsi community, he had fought for four different armed groups. I interviewed him almost a dozen times over two years to try to understand his experience. We became friends, and he took me home to meet his young wife and two children. Finally, in one of our last interviews, he broke down and started telling me about how he had worked for a Rwandan death squad in the eastern border town of Goma in 1997. Together with sixty other soldiers, they had been tasked with rounding up dissidents; often the definition of “dissident” was stretched to include any Hutu refugee. Papy could kill up to a hundred of these dissidents—sometimes old women and young children—a day, usually using a rope to crush their windpipes and strangle them.
“Why did you do it?”
“I had to. If I hadn’t, it would have been suspicious,” he replied, but then looked at me. “You know, you can’t really explain these things. For us soldiers, killing comes easy. It has become part of our lives. I have lost five members of my family during the war. You have to understand that. You have to understand the history of my family—how we were persecuted, then favored by Mobutu, how we were denied citizenship and laughed at at school. How they spat in my face. Then you can judge me.” But it was clear that he didn’t think I could ever understand.
Nevertheless, this book is an attempt to do just that: to explain the social, political, and institutional forces that made it possible for a family man to become a mass murderer. Kamanzi, and all those like him, were not inherently predisposed to evil. Some other explanation is called for.
PART I
PREWAR
1
THE LEGACY OF GENOCIDE
Between April and June 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days. Most of the dead were Tutsis—and most of those who perpetrated the violence were Hutus.
—“RWANDA: HOW THE GENOCIDE HAPPENED,” BBC
GISENYI, RWANDA, JULY 17, 1994
To the east of the Congo, in the heart of the African continent, lie the highlands of Rwanda. The country is tiny, the size of Massachusetts, and has one of the highest population densities in the world. This is not the Africa of jungles, corruption, and failed states portrayed in movies. Temperatures fall to freezing on some hilltops, cattle graze on velvety pastures, and the government maintains a tight grip on all aspects of society. On the thousands of hills—in between tea plantations and eucalyptus groves—millions of peasants eke out a living by farming beans, bananas, and sorghum.
The conflict in the Congo has many causes, but the most immediate ones came across the border from Rwanda, a country ninety times smaller. In 1994, violence unfolded there that was many times larger than anything the modern African continent had ever seen, killing a sixth of the population and sending another sixth into refugee camps. This genocide helped create the conditions for another cataclysm in neighboring Congo, just as terrible in terms of loss of life, albeit very different in nature.
Paul Rwarakabije, a lieutenant colonel in Rwanda’s police force, fled across the border into Zaire on July 17, 1994. He was dejected; after four years of civil war, the Hutu-led government had been defeated by soldiers of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). At the beginning of the war, he had sworn to himself that he would never surrender or accept defeat. Now he was sitting in an army truck, crossing the border into the Congo with his wife, children, and a few belongings. He was not alone: It was one of the largest population movements of modern times; over half a million people packed into a two-lane highway forty miles long. The air was filled with the rumble of thousands of flip-flops and bare feet on the hot tarmac.
While Rwarakabije and the elite moved in a fleet of hundreds of cars—they had taken with them every functioning vehicle they could find—the peasantry trudged sullenly with children strapped to their backs
and bundles of clothes and mattresses on their head, moving in lockstep with panic written on their faces. Government trucks with loudspeakers brought up the rear, warning that “anybody who stays will be massacred by the RPF.” Army soldiers fired salvos into the air to keep the crowds moving. The roadside was littered with the old and sick, unable to continue.
The masses were leaving one of the largest, quickest slaughters of humankind at their backs. On April 6, 1994, Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down just before landing in the capital Kigali, ending the fragile cease-fire that had halted the civil war.1 Preying on the population’s fear of the Tutsi insurgents, Hutu extremists in the Rwandan government deployed killing squads and popular militias, who rallied others, saying they must kill or be killed.
The two largest and most notorious of these youth militias were the Interahamwe and the Impuzamugambi, ragtag bands made up mostly of unemployed young men, which were affiliated with two radical Hutu political parties. They drew up hit lists and manned roadblocks, checking identity cards for ethnic identity or just looking for stereotypical Tutsi features: a slender frame, high cheekbones, an aquiline nose. It mattered little that the Hutu and Tutsi identities themselves were historically as much class-based as morphological and that a rich, cattle-owning Hutu could be promoted to become a Tutsi. Or that there had been extensive intermarriage between the ethnicities, meaning that in many cases the physical stereotypes had little meaning.
In just one hundred days, between April and July 1994, over 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed. Unlike the holocaust of World War II, which had been carried out by a select group of state officials and army officers, largely away from the view of the population, Rwanda’s genocide was organized by the elites but executed by the people. Between 175,000 and 210,000 people took part in the butchery, using machetes, nail-studded clubs, hoes, and axes.2 The killing took place in public places: in churches, schools, and marketplaces, on roads, and in the fields. The entire population was involved in the drama, either as an organizer, a perpetrator, a victim, or a witness.
It was paradoxically the Hutu, who made up around 85 percent of Rwanda’s population, who fled during the violence, even though the genocide mainly targeted the minority Tutsi community. This was because the genocide spelled the end of the government’s resistance against the Tutsi-led RPF. It was one last, final paroxysm of violence as the government’s army and police fell apart. A million Hutu civilians streamed across the border into Zaire, accompanied and driven along by 30,000 government soldiers and tens of thousands of militiamen.
The army’s flight across the border did not end the civil war in Rwanda but constituted a hiatus in the hostilities. The Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), as the Hutu-dominated army was called, used the protection provided by the border to regroup, rearm, and prepare to retake power in Kigali. One of their leaders, Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, said in an interview that they would “wage a war that will be long and full of dead people until the minority Tutsi are finished and completely out of the country.”3
Crucially, they enjoyed the support of Zaire’s ailing president, Mobutu Sese Seko, who had sent troops to support the FAR against the RPF, and who had been close friends with President Juvénal Habyarimana. In part, what was to play out over the next decade in the Congo was a continuation of the Rwandan civil war, as the new government attempted to extirpate the génocidaires and the remnants of Habyarimana’s army on a much broader canvas.
Between 1994 and 2003, Paul Rwarakabije continued fighting the Rwandan civil war. He eventually took command of the remnants of those Rwandan soldiers and militiamen who had fled to Zaire, commonly known as the ex-FAR and Interahamwe. Under Rwarakabije, they became one of the most feared militia in the region.
I met Rwarakabije in Kigali in 2004. After spending a decade fighting a guerrilla war against the Rwandan government, he had surrendered and had been given a high-ranking, if somewhat ceremonial, job in Rwanda’s demobilization commission.4 Even though he had led a brutal insurgency that had claimed the lives of thousands of Rwandan civilians, he had not been involved in the 1994 genocide, and the government had chosen not to press charges.
Over the years, I met the general a dozen times, always in his sparsely decorated office. He is a short, avuncular man with a proud gut undercut by his tight belt, always available for a chat, always polite and friendly. He told me he had diabetes, and he took short, deliberate steps when he walked, but otherwise looked as if he were in good health; he had put on forty pounds since he had deserted the rebellion and returned home. His reintegration into the army had gone without problems, he said. He was a major general, the same rank as President Paul Kagame. He lived in a house provided by the government and had an official car and guard (although it wasn’t clear if they were protecting him or keeping tabs on him). He now taught lessons on counterinsurgency and gave advice on how to deal with the remaining Hutu rebels across the border.
When I asked him about the flight into Zaire after the genocide, all Rwarakabije could remember was “the confusion.” There was little hint of remorse or distress, just the military man’s disdain for disorder. He was a career officer who talked about past wars in terms of strategy, battle plans, and clinical figures. He made it seem there was little ideology at play; he had fought against the RPF, lost, and now here he was, taking orders from his former enemies.
“The anti-Tutsi propaganda was part of our military tactics,” he said, smiling affably. “We didn’t believe it, but in a guerrilla war you have to motivate soldiers and indoctrinate the population.”
Even though the general had far less blood on his hands, his attitude reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s description of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi officer who ordered the transport of countless Jews to their death in concentration camps, as someone who had never been a Jew-hater and had never willed the murder of human beings. His guilt came from his obedience, his mindless desire to please his hierarchy.5 There were, however, far more differences than similarities between Eichmann and Rwarakabije. In the case of the Rwandan commander, there was little formal law and no dehumanizing bureaucracy to justify his actions. Rwarakabije was not just a cog in a machine whose nature he did not question. So what drove him?
Rwarakabije was from the Kiga community in northern Rwanda, home of “the mountain people,” who had fought annexation by the central Rwandan court and colonial rulers well into the twentieth century. Warrior folklore ran deep in his family, and he had grown up on tales of his ancestors’ heroism and exploits. Rwarakabije’s father had told him how, when he was a child growing up, their community had risen up numerous times against the German and then Belgian rulers who tried to impose forced labor and taxes on the peasants there. Later, colonial administrators sent Tutsi, considered by the European clergy and rulers as genetically superior, to replace the Kiga chiefs. Slowly, the Kiga were assimilated into Rwandan culture. On colonial identity cards, they were classified as Hutu, as they met the stereotype of short, broad-nosed farmers. Like the Hutu, their ambitions were stymied by the colonial government’s ethnic prejudice.
All that changed with independence in 1962. Rebelling against Tutsi domination, a new Hutu elite took power in the wake of pogroms, in which tens of thousands of Tutsi and many others fled. Over 300,000 Tutsi refugees emigrated to neighboring Uganda, the Congo, and Burundi, where many lived as refugees and second-class citizens.
Given this political turbulence, Rwarakabije saw little sense in going to university. Power was in the hands of the army, a fact driven home by the 1973 military coup that brought Juvénal Habyarimana to power. Rwarakabije was twenty, and he promptly signed up for officer training in the prestigious High Military Academy. Immediately after graduating, he was sent to a special forces training run by Belgian officers in Kota-Koli, in the heart of Zaire’s rainforest, where he was taught survival techniques, abseiling, and basic tactics. Upon his return to Rwanda, he was placed in the gendarmerie, a souped-up police force that dea
lt with internal security as well as matters of law and order. He was a career soldier who took pleasure in describing military tactics and logistics to me, but steered away from questions about politics.
“It is strange to think this given everything that has happened in this country,” he told me, “but the army when I joined was a place of discipline and order, where people were not swayed so much by identity as by professionalism.”
In late 1990, the political situation in the country deteriorated rapidly. A range of factors contributed to this: The price of Rwanda’s main exports, tin and tea, had collapsed over recent years, leading to a contraction of the national budget by 40 percent. The same year, after seventeen years of one-party rule, Habyarimana decided to open his country to multiparty democracy, prompting a proliferation of political parties with affiliated radio stations and newsletters, some of which resorted to explicit ethnic hate-mongering.
The trigger for the conflict was the decision by the Tutsi diaspora—through the Rwandan Patriotic Front—to launch a civil war to reclaim their rights as Rwandan citizens. The war provoked many hardships, especially for the population in northern Rwanda, where the RPF was based. Up to a million people were displaced. The RPF’s abuses of local villagers were reciprocated with virulent pogroms against Tutsi throughout the country, test runs for the cataclysm that would ultimately unfold. The peasantry was subjected to rumors of ghastly massacres committed by RPF troops, propagated by the new, rabid press, most famously the Hutu extremist Radio Télévision Libre Mille Collines.
All of these factors fueled the ethnic tensions, which Rwarakabije saw seeping into his barracks. “There were older officers who thought we had to blame the whole Tutsi community for the crimes of their soldiers. It was a throwback to independence, when similar Tutsi guerrillas had killed civilians and vice versa.” He shook his head. “Indiscipline crept into the army.”
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters Page 2
