The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa. Rene Lemarchand
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the short term, the menace posed by Rwanda's new course lies in the challenge it poses to the transition to multiparty democracy. It stems from the support network put in place on behalf of its client faction and the possibility that should the RCD lose the electoral battle, the patron state would not hesitate to use bullets against ballots, directly or indirectly. In the longer term, the threat is economic because the continuing siphoning off of minerals inevitably translates into huge opportunity costs for the Congolese people. However, the political and economic sides of the coin are intimately related. Only by nurturing and manipulating a vast array of vested interests among the host communities of eastern Congo can Rwanda hope to meet the twin challenges of its foreign policy, namely, make eastern Congo safe for ethnic Tutsi and extract the resources needed to meet the demands of its formidable military establishment.
Looking back at the violence that has swept across the Great Lakes, future historians will ponder the analogy with the Thirty Years War. In both instances, we are dealing not with one war but an aggregation of wars; in each instance the logic of the unforeseen lies at the root of the endless and violent episodes generated by the initial event; and ultimately, leaving behind nothing but waste and destruction in its wake. This is how C. V. Wedgewood, in her classic account, summed up the chaos and bloodshed unleashed through Europe from 1618 to 1648: “Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its results, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.”78
What better epitaph for a conflict that has taken four million lives—and nearly six, when the losses in Rwanda and Burundi, are added to the toll—displaced hundreds of thousands, raised ethnic hatreds to unprecedented levels, and made a wasteland of many parts of the environment?
Chapter 2
The Road to Hell
If the fate of the African continent evokes hopelessness, nowhere is this sense of despair more evident than in former Belgian Africa. No other region has experienced a more deadly combination of external aggression, foreign-linked factionalism, interstate violence, factional strife, and ethnic rivalries. Nowhere else in Africa has genocide exacted a more horrendous price in human lives lost, economic and financial resources squandered, and developmental opportunities wasted. The scale of the disaster is in sharp contrast with the polite indifference of the international community in the face of this unprecedented human tragedy. What has been called Africa's first world war has yet to attract the world's attention.
The marginal ranking of Africa in the scale of international priorities is one obvious explanation for this generalized lack of interest in the Great Lakes crisis. Another is the sheer complexity of the forces involved. When one considers the multiplicity of political actors—domestic and foreign—the fluidity of factional alliances, the spillover of ethnic violence across boundaries, and the extreme fragmentation of political arenas, it is easy to see why the international community should have second thoughts about the wisdom of a concerted peace initiative. No other crisis on the continent seems more resistant to conflict resolution.
Adding to the confusion is the plethora of competing explanatory models that come to mind. How much credence should one give to Paul Collier's recent thesis that “it is the feasibility of predation which determines the risk of conflict”?1 Is the crisis in the Great Lakes an extreme example of the “criminalization of the state”?2 Or should one turn instead to Jeffrey Herbst's demographic argument and look for evidence of low population density, combined with the weakness of state boundaries, as an explanation for Kabila's inability to effectively broadcast the power of the Congo state?3 If Samuel Huntington's “clash of civilizations” model hardly applies, what of his contention that the “kin country syndrome” is the key to an understanding of regional instability?4 To these questions we shall return.
This chapter offers a different prism to view the roots of the crisis. The key concept around which much of this discussion revolves is that of exclusion. Political, economic, and social exclusion are seen as the principal dimensions that must be explored if we are to grasp the dynamics of domestic and inter-state violence in the Great Lakes. This is not meant to minimize the significance of external aggression. The capacity of Rwanda and Uganda to effectively project their military force into eastern Congo, albeit with mixed results for both, is unquestionably a major contributory factor to regional instability. External intervention, however, must be seen in the broader historical context of the forces that have shaped the tragic destinies of former Belgian Africa. Briefly stated, the central pattern that recurs time and again is one in which ethnic polarization paves the way for political exclusion, exclusion eventually leading to insurrection, insurrection to repression, and repression to massive flows of refugees and internally displaced persons, which in turn become the vectors of further instability. The involvement of external actors, as we shall see, is inseparable from the perceived threats posed by mobilized refugee diasporas to their countries of origin, as well as to specific communities within the host country.
Historical Backdrop
Let us begin with a brief reminder of basic historical facts.
RANKED SOCIETIES, EXCLUSION, AND INSURRECTION
In the context of ranked societies like Rwanda and Burundi, where a two-tier structure of ethnic domination tended to vest power and privilege in the hands of the Tutsi minority, political exclusion was the rule for roughly 80 per cent of the population, consisting essentially of Hutu peasants. In Rwanda, the Hutu revolution of 1959–62—powerfully assisted if not engineered by the Belgian authorities—brought to a close the era of Tutsi hegemony.5 While opening the way for the enthronement of the representatives of the Hutu, an estimated 200,000 Tutsi were forced into exile in neighbouring and other countries between 1959 and 1963—approximately 70,000 to Uganda, 25,000 to the Congo and 50,000 to Burundi.6
In Burundi, by contrast, where the “premise of inequality” was far less institutionalized and social relations more complex, ethnic polarization proceeded at a slower pace, allowing the Tutsi elites to consolidate their grip on the government and the army long before they faced the challenge of a servile insurrection. Every attempt made by Hutu leaders to overthrow the government—in 1965, 1969, and 1972—ended in dismal failure, each time resulting in extremely brutal repression, culminating in 1972 with the genocidal massacre of anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 Hutu.7 Not until 1993, with the election of a Hutu to the presidency, Melchior Ndadaye, were the Hutu given to believe that they would soon control their political destinies, only to be robbed of this opportunity on October 21, when a radical faction within the all-Tutsi army killed the newly elected president, the speaker, and deputy-speaker of the National Assembly and overthrew the government. Six months later, after three and a half years of bitter civil war, opposing the predominantly Tutsi troops of the RPF against the FAR, Rwanda became the scene of one of the biggest genocides of the last century: between 600,000 and 800,000 people, mostly Tutsi, were sent to their graves by Hutu militias (interahamwe) and army men.8
THE BANYARWANDA OF EASTERN CONGO
Until then, the principal victims of political exclusion were the Tutsi of Rwanda and the Hutu of Burundi. Their closest analogs in eastern Congo were the “Banyarwanda,” a label that belies the diversity of their ethnic and regional origins.9 Included under that rubric are three distinctive communities: (a) Hutu and Tutsi who had settled in the Kivu region long before the advent of colonial rule, including a group of ethnic Tutsi indigenous to south Kivu (located in the Mulenge region) known as Banyamulenge; (b) descendants of migrant workers, mostly Hutu, brought in from Rwanda in the 1930s and 1940s under the auspices of the colonial state; (c) tens of thousands of Tutsi refugees who fled Rwanda in the wake of the 1959 Hutu revolution, and hence referred to as fifty-niners.
By 1981, following the promulgation of a retroactive nationality law, the Banyarwanda were for all intents and purposes denied citizenship because none could possibly meet the legal requirement of proof of ancestral residence before October 18, 1908, when the Congo Free State formally became a Belgian colony. By 1990, at the time of the RPF invasion of Rwanda, Banyarwanda resentment of Mobutu's exclusionary policies were matched by their growing sympathy for the cause of