The Rwandan Genocide & The Congo Wars

The Rwandan Genocide, Mobutu’s Fall, and the Congo Wars

Mobutu’s use of Zaire’s funds and resources led to a decayed state that was incapable of stopping genocide on its eastern border. A stable and healthy state may have been able to. On 6 April 1994, Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down by surface-to-air missiles over Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. This event allowed Hutu extremists to take control of the Rwandan government and place the blame for the assassination on the Tutsi population of Rwanda. The genocide that followed was the result of long-established discrimination, divisionism, and ideologies of hatred.[1] Over the course of one hundred days, nearly one million people, mostly Tutsi, were killed in attacks with machetes carried out on street corners, churches, and living rooms.[2] The government’s role was not to directly carry out the killings but to enrage the population through constant barrages of radio propaganda broadcast by stations like the infamous Radio Television Libre des Mille Collines, comparing Tutsis to an invasive species of insects to be exterminated. Tens of thousands of Hutus were also massacred in the Rwandan genocide who were either dissident, refused to kill Tutsis who were friends or spouses, or were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.[3]

The Rwandan genocide was the culmination of a civil war that was the result of the Tutsi diaspora looking to reclaim land rights in Rwanda that were lost during the collapse of the monarchy and independence in the 1950s. The division and subsequent hatred that fueled the events after independence, the civil war, and the genocide can be directly attributed to Belgian colonization. Belgium administered the Rwandan colony midway through World War I when it took over for Germany, until Rwandan independence in 1962. During this period, Belgian colonial officials took advantage of existing social structures to administer and rule over the native population and, in the process, made those social structures more rigid and uncompromising than they had been before colonization.[4] This colonial bureaucracy reinforced ethnic divisions that created a permanent underclass and laid the foundation for genocide.[5]

In the precolonial era, three social groups coexisted in the area that would become Rwanda: The Tutsi, the Hutu, and the Twa. These groups were partially identifiable by physical characteristics and lived under a Tutsi monarchy.[6] The class structure contained degrees of fluidity and was not confined by European racial and ethnic ideologies. There was a social hierarchy, but clan lineage and family ties were more important. The Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa shared culture and language, were socially cohesive, and frequently intermarried. The Hutu were primarily agriculturists, and the Tutsi were mainly pastoral, with the minority hunter/gatherer Twa traditionally at the bottom of the social structure.[7] Through intermarriage and the accumulation of wealth, both Hutu and Twa had opportunities for social mobility, and although there were cleavages, they were never rigid.[8]

Belgian colonizers mistook these socioeconomic stratifications and reclassified the Rwandan people into ethnic groups according to the Hamitic racial theory.[9]  This theory saw any form of civilization in Africa as the work of the ancient European race of children descended from Ham, the son of the biblical Noah. Ruling tribes were black-skinned Caucasians ruling over inferior races in the eyes of colonial officials.[10] This theory and the colonial desire to reinforce existing power structures removed any checks and balances on Tutsi power.[11] The Belgians saw the Tutsis as natural leaders and treated the Hutus and the Twa as a subservient underclass. Hutus and the Twa no longer had opportunities for social mobility, received inferior educations, and were denied access to higher-paying jobs. The issuance of identity cards by the Belgians in the 1930s created ethnic tables that separated the Hutus and Twa and would engrain colonial discrimination against the colonized.[12]

When Rwanda gained independence from colonial rule, power fell to a newly emerged Hutu elite class. This caused a majority of Tutsis to flee into the neighboring country of Uganda, and the children of those fleeing in the early 1960s would grow into adults looking to return to their homeland by forming the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in the 1990s.[13] The continued refusal to let these Tutsi return sparked the civil war in Rwanda that began in 1990. Rwandan president and Hutu extremist Juvenal Habyarimana ignored repeated requests to address the issue and chose to spread propaganda about the Tutsis coming back to Rwanda to re-enslave the Hutus. It is not surprising that the worst violence in post-colonial Africa was directed at former ruling peoples from former subject ‘races’: the Tutsis in Rwanda, the Arabs in Zanzibar, and the Asians in Uganda.[14]      

Mobutu's Fall and the Congo Wars

The aftermath of the Rwandan genocide saw the Hutu government fall from power, and the Tutsi-led RPF took control of the Rwandan government, with Paul Kagame at the head. The former Hutu-led government fled across the border into Zaire with all of the government’s money from the country’s Central Bank.[15] They also herded over two million people across the border into exile out of a total Rwandan population of seven million. Due to the lack of international intervention, this massive herding of refugees provided the fallen Hutu government a human buffer against retaliatory forces and as a bargaining chip against any international agencies seeking justice.[16] In addition to the dead and wounded, over three hundred thousand children were left without parents, making them prime targets for conscription in militias for the conflicts to come.[17] The influx of refugees into the eastern portion of Zaire and the subsequent attacks from militia groups organizing in refugee camps are primary contributors to the continued instability and conflict the DRC faces today.

         The Rwandan genocide was also the catalyst for the downfall of Mobutu. The Cold War had ended, and a massacre of dozens of college students in Lubumbashi signaled the end of Mobutu’s value to the United States and its allies.[18] Hutus who fled across the Rwandan border into the eastern DRC were organizing and launching attacks with military aid provided by Mobutu. Mobutu was a close friend and staunch ally of the deceased Juvenal Habyarimana and continued support for the Hutus who found themselves refugees in the DRC. RPF officials sought out a Congolese Tutsi, Laurent Kabila, to head a coalition of anti-Mobutu groups that would come to be known as the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL).[19] Kabila and his allies marched from the eastern DRC to Kinshasa (Figure 7.8), where Mobutu had already fled into exile in Morrocco. Mobutu died shortly after that, on 7 September 1997, of prostate cancer. Kabila was officially installed as the head of the government on 17 May 1997, and the country's name was changed from Zaire to the DRC on the same day. This ended the First Congo War.

For twenty-two years, Laurent Kabila and his son, Joeseph, would rule the DRC as “an extension of Mobutuism.”[20] Laurent Kabila quickly worked to consolidate and increase his power, which led to souring relations with the Rwandan and Ugandan benefactors who aided in his toppling of Mobutu. Under the guise of security concerns, Rwanda and Uganda invaded the eastern DRC with the aid of Burundi to overthrow Kabila. This sparked the Second Congo War, also known as Africa’s World War. Kabila was saved by the mercenaries, militias, and armies sent by Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe to aid his fight against his former allies (Figure 7.11). The resulting stalemate kept Kabila in power but left a quagmire of fractured forces that continues to define the DRC today. The amount of civilian suffering was immense, with estimates of four to six million dead.[21] These deaths were mainly from disease and starvation brought on by the conflict. Later, U.N. reports concluded that Rwanda and Uganda’s primary objectives in the invasion were to plunder resources rather than security concerns.[22] Kabila was assassinated on 18 January 2001 by one of his bodyguards, who was a former child soldier.[23] Joseph Kabila rose to the position of President in his father’s place mainly because there was no comprehensive succession plan.[24] Joseph would continue the presidential tradition of ensuring patron-client networks of corruption that enriched a few elites remained in place. The Sun City peace accords ended the Second Congo War, but hostilities never stopped. Since the end of the Second Congo War, the DRC has experienced a “prolonged period of neither war nor peace” and is a haven for local and foreign armed groups who clash over resources to fund their operations.[25]