Dancing in the Glory of Monsters

by Jason Stearns

  The RPF, who were already disgusted by international inaction during the genocide, watched in despair. “By early 1996, it was clear to us that the international community would not take action,” Patrick Karegeya, Rwanda’s intelligence chief, remembered. In August 1996, Vice President Paul Kagame visited Washington, DC, where he spoke with the secretary of defense and the head of the National Security Council, warning them that he would be forced to act if the international community did not. A State Department advisor who attended the meetings said: “We didn’t fully grasp what he was trying to tell us. We didn’t realize they would invade.” Despite their remonstrations, it is difficult to believe that Washington officials, who had deployed a military training and de-mining team to Kigali to provide nonlethal assistance to the new government, were in the dark. “We knew what was up,” Rick Orth, the U.S. defense attaché in Kigali, said. “But I don’t think we ever gave the Rwandan government the thumbs-up.”

  Finally, in October 1996, the Rwandan army invaded in force under the guise of a homegrown Congolese rebellion in order to stave off criticism. Journalists and aid workers deployed in the refugee camps along the eastern Congo border began to report attacks by “Banyamulenge rebels,” Congolese Tutsi who had been in conflict with Mobutu’s government. Their first targets were the refugee camps in the Rusizi plain, a broad, hundred-mile-long expanse of savannah and rice paddies where the borders of Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi meet. Some 220,000 refugees were in camps there, protected by a few hundred soldiers on hire by the United Nations from Mobutu’s army. The invading troops quickly broke up these camps, driving some refugees into Burundi, while probably a majority fled further in the Congo. By October 22, the town of Uvira at the tip of Lake Tanganyika fell without much fighting to the Rwandan-backed coalition. The troops then marched northwards along the Great Rift Valley that connects Lake Tanganyika to Lake Kivu and that separates the Congo to the west from Rwanda and Burundi. By the end of October, they had taken control of Bukavu at the southern end of Lake Kivu, dispersing some 300,000 refugees, who had no choice but to flee into the hills, away from Rwanda.

  Humanitarian officials were alarmed as the sickly refugees they had been feeding for the past two years fled into the inhospitable hinterlands. Emma Bonino, European Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid, warned that, “500,000 to a million people are in danger of dying.”22 Diplomats rekindled the idea again of sending in an international force to create “humanitarian corridors” to allow refugees to return home and to protect aid workers. However, the debate soon got bogged down in a new diplomatic, Franco-Anglo spat. French foreign minister Hervé de Charette pushed for the deployment of the force, focusing on the plight of Hutu refugees: “We are looking after our national interests ... but there are people in danger, there are a million.”23 The French exhorted the United States to “stop dragging its feet.” The British minister for Overseas Development, Linda Chalker, called the French position “daft.”24 Among French government officials, the rumor mill was in full gear, with senior policy advisors suspecting there was an Anglo-Saxon plot to delay intervention to allow the Rwandan-backed invasion to make headway.

  In Goma, on the northern end of Lake Kivu, the Rwandan army crossed the border on November 2, pushing over 600,000 refugees into the Mugunga camp, located a dozen miles away from the border on the lakeside, making the makeshift camp into the largest city in the region. The Canadian government said it would take the lead of a multinational task force to help protect the refugees and aid workers; the United Kingdom put a special forces battalion on stand-by.

  Finally, on November 16, as the Rwandan army and the rebels prepared to attack Mugunga, the United States agreed to pass a UN Security Council resolution authorizing 3,000 to 4,000 international troops to deploy in the Kivus, the eastern region of the country that borders on Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi.

  The following day, Rwanda attacked Mugunga from the west and the lake, corralling most refugees toward the eastern road back to Rwanda. Half a million people returned home in just three days. At the UN headquarters on the western shore of the East River in Manhattan, Peter Swarbrick wryly recalled the reaction of Canadian general Maurice Baril, who had just been named to lead the military intervention: “It was relief, absolute relief. The international community was off the hook.”

  Meanwhile, as the Canadian and American military reconnaissance teams began to pack their bags, anywhere between 400,000 and 600,000 refugees were fleeing into the jungles of the eastern Congo.

  3

  A COUNTRY IN RUINS

  Africa has the shape of a pistol, and Congo is its trigger.

  —FRANTZ FANON

  KIGALI, RWANDA, JULY 1994–SEPTEMBER 1996

  The few visitors to Rwanda in the months after the genocide found a smoldering, destroyed landscape. A third of the country had fled to Tanzania, Zaire, and Burundi, running from the Rwandan Patriotic Front—the Tutsi rebellion led by Paul Kagame—and shepherded on by the army and militia that had carried out the genocide. In Kigali, the capital, the insides of houses had been gutted, spilling clothes, toilet paper, stuffed animals, and trash onto the sidewalks. Not knowing when they would come back, or perhaps out of spite for the advancing rebels, fleeing militiamen and civilians had stripped doors off their hinges, removed glass panes from windows, and unearthed sewage pipes and miles of electric cable. Empty bullet casings littered the streets, which were patrolled by UN cars—the only ones apart from a few RPF pickups and civilian cars still on the roads.

  In the countryside, crops rotted in the field for want of workers to harvest them, and thousands of bodies choked the country’s waterways, filling the air with the cloying stench of rotting flesh for months. Red Cross and aid workers trekked the hills on foot, dousing the corpses with lime to prevent disease, pending burial.

  The new rulers of the country drearily inspected the shell-pocked government buildings. In the ministry of justice, filing cabinets floated in a soup of sewage and documents. The hallways of Parliament were littered with debris, bricks, and dangling electrical wires. For the meantime, the RPF’s offices were located in the Meridien Hotel, where the plumbing didn’t work and sandbags still lined the lightless reception area and the poolside, and RPF officials, UN workers, and journalists worked side-by-side.

  The new government faced bleak days ahead. Not a cent was left in the Central Bank. There were no cars, computers, or telephones left for the new government to use; even the stationery and paper clips were gone. There was no electricity or running water in much of the country; generators in the hospitals were turned on just several hours a day for surgery and emergency operations. An estimated 114,000 children had been orphaned by the genocide and needed looking after; 150,000 houses had been destroyed.

  The most striking absence was people. Kigali had turned into a ghost town: 40 percent of the population was dead or in exile. In the capital, the numbers had shrunk from 350,000 to 80,000, and many of those were the RPF and their families or members of the Tutsi diaspora returned after decades in exile.

  Amid the rubble, the new rulers tried to craft a sort of normalcy. The RPF named a government with a diverse cabinet. The president and prime minister were both Hutus, and many ministers were from political parties other than the RPF, although the military and Vice President Paul Kagame still wielded the most power. All across the country, teams of civil servants and volunteers set about cleaning up the debris, burying bodies, and rebuilding key installations.

  No family was spared by the violence. Over 90 percent of children and youths had witnessed violence and believed they would die; only slightly fewer had experienced a death in their family. A study published in a psychiatric journal estimated that one-fourth of all Rwandans suffered from posttraumatic stress syndrome.1 They called these people ihahamuka, “without lungs” or “breathless with fear.” They would walk through town, catatonic, jumping when a bus honked or someone came up behind them unannounced. Many families adopted orphans of the genocide or
took in distraught relatives. Paul Kagame himself took in five children.2

  The genocide formed the grim backdrop to the preparations for the RPF’s invasion of the Congo. It was the starting point for everything that followed in Rwanda: politics, culture, the economy—everything. It transfixed society and dominated the government’s vision for the future. More importantly, the empty houses and abandoned villages reminded the country’s leaders that the war was not yet over. On the radio in the west of the country, on the border with Congo, one could hear the government in exile broadcasting from the refugee camps, claiming to be Rwanda’s legitimate government. For the survivors of the genocide, many of whom had lost members of their families, the génocidaires’ presence in the camps was a living insult.

  Rwanda’s unquestionable ruler was Paul Kagame. Officially, the thirty-seven-year-old was vice president and minister of defense, but he had led the RPF since the early days of the rebellion and had firm control over the government. A gaunt, bony man with wire-rimmed spectacles and a methodical style of speaking, Kagame left an impression on people. He didn’t smoke, drink, or have much time for expensive clothes or beautiful women. He wasn’t given to flowery speech or elaborate protocol. His wardrobe apparently only contained drab, double-breasted suits that hung loosely from his thin frame, plain polo shirts, and combat fatigues. The only entertainment he apparently indulged in was tennis, which he played at the Sports Club with RPF colleagues and diplomats. Passersby would be alarmed by the soldiers standing guard with machine guns.

  Kagame’s obsessions were order and discipline. He personally expropriated his ministers’ vehicles when he thought those public funds could have been used for a better purpose. He exuded ambition, browbeating his ministers when they didn’t live up to his expectations. He complained to a journalist: “In the people here, there is something I cannot reconcile with. It’s people taking their time when they should be moving fast, people tolerating mediocrity when things could be done better. I feel they are not bothered, not feeling the pressure of wanting to be far ahead of where we are. That runs my whole system.”3

  This asceticism had been forged in the harsh conditions of exile. Kagame’s first memories were of houses burning on the hills and his panicked mother scrambling into a car as a local mob ran after them. This was in 1961, when anticipation of independence from Belgium had led to pogroms against the Tutsi community, which had been privileged by the colonial government. Around 78,000 Tutsi had fled to Uganda, with another 258,000 going to other neighboring countries.4 Like many RPF leaders, Kagame grew up as a refugee in Uganda, living in a grass-thatched hut while attending school on a scholarship.

  “You will always hear me talking about the importance of dignity,” he later commented.It is really the key to people’s lives, and obviously for me it relates back to the refugee camp, the lining up for food every day, the rationing. When we started primary school, we used to study under a tree. We used to write on our thighs with a piece of dry, hard grass, and the teacher would come over and look at your thigh, and write his mark with another piece of dry grass. You develop some sense of questioning, some sense of justice, saying, “Why do I live like this? Why should anybody live like this?”5

  The squalid conditions of the refugee camps and the animosity of their Ugandan neighbors were constant reminders that this was not his real home. His mother was from the royal family in Rwanda—his great-aunt had been the queen—and their stories of royal grandeur and authority were a far cry from the UN handouts they lived on in the camps. When his schoolmates went to play, he preferred to sit with former Tutsi guerrilla fighters and listen to stories about their battle against the Hutu-dominated regime in the 1960s.6

  After he finished high school, Kagame ventured across the border to see for himself what his fabled homeland had become. He was harassed for being a Tutsi, but he felt exhilarated by being among his people on his land. He sat in bars, sipping a soft drink and listening to conversations. He spent several afternoons walking by the presidential palace in Kigali, drawn magnetically to the seat of power that was at the root of his exile in Uganda, until security guards got suspicious and told him to scram.

  Back in Uganda, fellow refugees told him about a Ugandan rebellion that was being formed in Tanzania to overthrow the dictator Idi Amin, who had discriminated against the refugees for years. Led by Yoweri Museveni, the National Resistance Movement (NRM) recruited heavily among the Tutsi refugees. It seemed perfect for the twenty-two-year-old Kagame, who was itching to rise up out of the squalor of the camps. His stern and disciplined temperament drew him to work in military intelligence, a branch that shaped his outlook on politics. He received training in Tanzania, in Cuba, and, much later, at Fort Leavenworth in the United States.

  When the NRM took power in 1986, Kagame’s fierce discipline earned him a position at the head of the military courts, investigating and prosecuting soldiers’ breaches of discipline. Among detractors and supporters alike, he became known as “Pilato,” short for Pontius Pilate, because of the harsh way he dealt with any violation of the military code. Soldiers who stole from civilians or embezzled fuel from military stocks would be locked up; more serious violations could earn a place in front of a firing squad. “He can’t stand venality or indiscipline—it provokes an almost physical reaction of disgust in him,” a Ugandan journalist who knew him during this time, remembered.7

  Kagame was soon promoted to become the head of Ugandan military intelligence, a position that provided a perfect vantage point from which to pursue his true ambition: overthrowing the Rwandan government. He plotted together with other Rwandan refugees who had risen to leadership positions in the Ugandan army, positioning stocks of weapons and secretly recruiting other Rwandans to their cause.

  In 1990, they attacked.

  The guerrilla struggle in Rwanda was marked by self-sacrifice and harsh conditions. In the early years of the rebellion, the RPF was beaten back into the high-altitude bamboo forests of the volcanoes in northwestern Rwanda, where temperatures at night dropped to freezing and there was little food or dry firewood. Kagame enforced draconian discipline, executing soldiers suspected of treason or trying to desert.8 He perfected his hit-and-run guerrilla tactics, harrying the enemy, attacking convoys, but never engaging in large, conventional battles.

  People who met Kagame and his RPF colleagues during this time were impressed by the rebels’ dedication. The refugee camps and years in exile had steeled them and made them rely on each other. This ethic was not new to their culture. The precolonial Rwandan kingdom had been forged over centuries of warfare, leading to a central, Tutsi-led royal court with large standing armies. Stories of great Tutsi warriors were embellished and passed down through the generations. The most famous Rwandan dance, intore, was a war dance that the RPF themselves sometimes practiced around the campfire, stamping their feet and mimicking cows’ horns with their arms.

  Kagame’s exploits and discipline earned him praise from around the world. General John Shalikashvili, the American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, studied Kagame’s military tactics and praised him as one of the best guerrilla leaders in decades.9 “Kagame is an intellectual figure. I would rate him as a firstrate operational fighter,” a former director of the U.S. Army School for Advanced Military Studies said. “He understands discipline. He understands speed. He understands mobility.”10

  After the overthrow of the Habyarimana regime, RPF leaders celebrated victory in Kigali; Ugandan waragi—a strong gin made out of millet—was a favorite. Mixed with Coca Cola, it was dubbed “Kigali Libre” by RPF officers.

  Kagame, however, was typically reserved. The war was not yet over, he told his army colleagues. There was merely a truce enforced by an international border with Zaire. A third of the population was still living in camps outside the country, and rebels were regularly caught with grenades and disassembled weapons in the main market in Kigali. Every month brought assassinations of local officials and attacks on army camps.

/>   In the meantime, Rwandan frustrations with international donors stewed. Not only had they failed to intervene during the genocide, but they were now feeding the génocidaires and allowing them to rearm. Despite an arms embargo on the government-in-exile, arms traders flew over $8 million in weapons to the defeated Rwandan army in Goma and Bukavu in the months just after the genocide. Hundreds of new recruits were being trained on soccer pitches next to the refugee camps, often within sight of Zairian soldiers. Despite the hand-wringing and horror at the Rwandan genocide that had finally gripped western capitals, the international community was once again abandoning Rwanda. Kagame fulminated to the press: “I think we have learned a lot about the hypocrisy and double standards on the part of people who claim that they want to make this world a better place.”11

  In early 1995, Kagame, usually known for his cool, deliberate style, began to lose his temper. “Whenever we brought up the issue of the refugee camps, he would raise his voice and bang his fist on the table,” a former government advisor recalled.

  Kagame was briefed every day by his intelligence services on the situation in Zaire. Rwandan operatives had infiltrated the camps and Mobutu’s army, providing blow-by-blow details about arms shipments, troop movements, and political developments.

  In February 1995, Kagame traveled to his home commune of Tambwe, where he told gathered villagers, “I hope with all of my heart that they do attack! Let them try!” Several weeks later, he told journalists in Kigali that his government would pursue any criminals who attacked Rwanda by attacking the country where they were found.12