THE 1994 RWANDAN GENOCIDE in which about one million Tutsis and their Hutu sympathisers were massacred triggered a chain of events which plunged the entire Great Lakes region of East-Central Africa into turmoil on a scale never witnessed before.
This chapter attempts to comprehend the complex web of events and interrelated forces that led to the upheaval and shaped the context in which the future of the region will be determined for many years, as the countries involved remain trapped in a vicious cycle of violence and a chronic state of instability.
Just before the remaining Tutsis in Rwanda were to be wiped out, their brethren in the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) – an army of Tutsi exiles and some Hutus – invaded the country from their bases in Uganda and seized power from the genocidal Hutu regime which instigated the massacres. The remaining Tutsis were saved. But the violence continued.
The collapse of the Hutu ethnocracy whose army was routed by the RPF triggered a massive exodus of Hutus who feared reprisals at the hands of the new Tutsi rulers. About 2 million Hutus fled to neighbouring Zaire (renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo) and Tanzania.
Most of them sought refuge in Zaire which soon became the scene of more massacres of genocidal proportions; this time, directed against the Hutu refugees who perished at the hands of their Tutsi conquerors exacting retribution for the atrocities perpetrated against their kinsmen in the Rwandan genocide. They went in hot pursuit of the Hutus.
Thus, what started out as a genocidal campaign by the Rwandan Hutu regime and its extremist supporters to exterminate the Tutsi also led to a genocidal rampage against hundreds of thousands of innocent Hutu civilians including the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide and plunged the entire region into chaos.
Regional Imbroglio
The root cause of all this violence and regional instability is exclusion from power of one group by the other, mostly the Hutu by the Tutsi.
Hutus constitute the vast majority of the population (at least 85%) in both Rwanda and Burundi where the two groups have been in conflict at different times during the past 400 years even when some of the conflicts have not escalated into violence or full-scale war.
Yet, in spite of their minority status, it is the Tutsi who have held power in both countries except for 32 years in Rwanda where the Hutu ruled from 1962 – when the country won independence from Belgium – until 1994 when they were ousted by the invading force of the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). And the regional dimension of the conflict can be directly attributed to the security threat posed by the Hutu rebels to the Tutsi-dominated states of Rwanda and Burundi, and by Ugandan insurgents trying to overthrow the government of their country.
The conflict also assumed regional proportions because of the expansionist ambitions of both Rwanda and Uganda, and to a smaller extent Burundi, to annex parts of eastern Congo ostensibly to create a buffer zone and secure their borders. But the creation of such a “security corridor,” if successful, would only perpetuate conflict and take the war deeper into Congo.
The conflict in the Great Lakes region assumed a much wider dimension when neighbouring countries – Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi – supported a rebellion launched by a coalition of forces to oust Zaire's long-ruling dictator Mobutu Sese Seko from power.
The insurgency was spearheaded by Tutsi-led forces whose nominal head was Laurent Kabila, a member of the Luba ethnic group from the northern part of Shaba Province which was renamed Katanga.
The rebel army was organised by Rwandan leaders. They are also the ones who chose Kabila to be the leader of the rebel movement, hoping that he would be more friendly to them than Mobutu was, once he became president of Zaire.
Kabila seized power in May 1997 and renamed the country the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
During his first months in office, Kabila worked closely with Rwandan and Ugandan leaders, mostly out of sheer necessity. He owed his rise to power to the leaders of those two countries. And he remained in power because of the protection provided to him by Rwandan Tutsi soldiers who masterminded the military campaign that ousted Mobutu and remained in Kinshasa, Congo's capital, to help him consolidate his rule.
But Kabila did not become the kind of leader Rwanda and Uganda thought they would have. They thought they would be able to control and manipulate him. Like any true nationalist, he resented outside control. And there was strong resentment across Congo against Rwandan Tutsis whose presence in the capital Kinshasa was interpreted by many Congolese as a violation of their sovereignty, with Rwandans being seen as an occupation army on conquered territory. It was the ultimate insult.
Both Rwanda and Uganda, as well as Burundi which was ruled by the Tutsi like Rwanda, also became disillusioned with Kabila even in the early months of his rule because he failed or simply refused to restrain – it was actually a combination of both – the Hutu rebels and Ugandan insurgents based in eastern Congo from attacking them.
It was this security threat which prompted Rwanda and Uganda, with the assistance of Burundi, to organise a rebellion and directly intervene in Congo in an attempt to overthrow Kabila and replace him with a more friendly Congolese government which would take the security interests of the three countries into account.
The rebellion started in August 1998 when President Kabila expelled Rwandan Tutsi soldiers from Kinshasa. Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi intervened immediately, although they denied such involvement until later when they admitted that.
Kabila got a lot of help from his allies to resist the invasion. Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Chad, and Sudan sent troops and weapons to bolster Congo's fragile army and got directly involved in combat against the rebels who were supported by Rwanda and Uganda. Burundi also supported the insurgents although it was Rwanda which played the biggest role.
None of that would have happened had the Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi agreed to share power – on meaningful basis – with the Hutu majority in those two countries.
There would have been no Hutu rebels operating from Congo in an attempt to dislodge the Tutsi minority from power, and therefore no need for Rwanda and Burundi to try and neutralise them by invading Congo where the rebels were based; an invasion which drew in other national armies in what came to be Africa's most internationalised conflict which had its origin in the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Burundi. The conflict came to be known as “Africa's World War.”
The Rwandan genocide itself – instigated by Hutu leaders and the academic elite who, considering their history of hundreds of years of Hutu domination by the Tutsi, did not want and were afraid to share power with their “historical enemies” – can be traced back to the mass uprising by the Hutu against their Tutsi aristocratic rulers in November 1959; and to the repeated attempts by the Tutsi during most of the next 35 years to regain the power they lost in that peasant uprising which could even be called a peasant revolution since it led to fundamental change in terms of who later ruled Rwanda after the Tutsi were ousted. The Hutu finally seized power.
Compounding the problem is the centuries-old hatred or mistrust between the two groups – whether some people want to admit it or not – which, like the desire to monopolise power on an ethnic basis, contributed to the genocide. As many Hutu leaders publicly stated just before and during the 1994 massacres of the Tutsi, the biggest mistake that the Hutu made during the 1959 mass uprising was that they did not wipe out the Tutsi; a job they urged their followers to finish in 1994.
During the 1959 Hutu uprising, more than 100,000 Tutsis were massacred in what was indeed a genocide but whose magnitude was overshadowed 35 years later by the 1994 holocaust.
Many Hutus, probably the majority, never regretted the massacre of the Tutsi. As Professor Leon Mugesira, a renowned Hutu historian at the Rwandan National University in Butare, told a Hutu extremist gathering in November 1992 almost exactly 33 years after the 1959 mass uprising by the Hutu against the Tutsi:
“The fatal mistake we made in 1959 was to let the Tutsi get out....We have to act. Wipe them all out!”1
Calls for Tutsi extermination were also made in newspapers, on the radio and on television – but mostly by word of mouth – to incite Hutus across the country to isolate and kill their Tutsi neighbours, friends and any other Tutsis including their own relatives and children who were half-Tutsi or who had any identifiable Tutsi lineage. For example, Kangura, a Hutu newspaper edited by Hassan Ngeze, listed the “Hutu ten commandments” which included isolating the “evil” Tutsis and condemned intermarriage with them as a pollution of “pure Hutu.”2 And the Hutu-edited La Medaille, a magazine, stated in its February 1994 edition, not long before the massacres started in April, that “the Tutsi race could be extinguished.”3
But the most virulent and effective campaign was carried out by Radio/Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) because of its wide coverage across the country and its ability to transmit its message of hate and incitement to every Hutu including illiterates who could not read the newspapers. And educated Hutus played a critical role in this campaign of genocide. As Kenyan Professor Michael Chege stated:
“The radio's intellectual braintrust was made up of Ferdinand Nahimana, a professor of history at the Rwandan National University at Butare, and Casimir Bizimungu, the articulate multilingual foreign minister of a former government, and the manager of this 'independent' radio station.
Indeed, so strong was the academic input...that, after the massacres, Emmanuel Bugingo, the new and irreproachable rector of the Butare campus, confessed that 'all the killing in Rwanda was carefully planned by intellectuals and those intellectuals passed through this university.'”4
Coincidentally, but in a chilling way, the nearly one million Tutsis who were exterminated in 1994 were “replaced” by one million Tutsis who returned from exile in Uganda.
Other returnees came from Burundi and Tanzania. But most of them came from Uganda. They included many who were born in exile, returning with their parents who fled Rwanda in 1959 as adults or as children. One of the exiles was Paul Kagame, Rwanda's vice president and defence minister and the country's de facto ruler, who fled to Uganda with his parents when he was two years old.
The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) ousted the murderous Hutu regime in July 1994, only to institute another tyranny; this time, an ethnocracy dominated by the Tutsi who went on to launch their own campaign of terror against the Hutu majority.
It was systematic, yet indiscriminate, in its retaliation against the Hutu for the extermination of one million Tutsis and their Hutu sympathisers.
Countless innocent Hutu civilians were murdered during the following years. They included innocent women, children and the elderly, ostensibly in a search-and-destroy mission directed against the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide.
The retaliatory campaign continues today, cold and calculated, pursued with malicious vindictiveness. The result of this government-sponsored terror and exclusion of the Hutu majority from power is increased polarisation between the two ethnic groups that are already divided by intense hatred and deep mistrust in Africa's most densely populated country; with the two “historical enemies” living side by side as they have for the past 400 years in a feudal relationship dominated by the Tutsi.
Exclusion of the Hutu majority from power, again by the Tutsi, also explains Burundi's descent into chaos including the 1972 genocide against the Hutu.
Burundi, Africa's second most populous country, is almost an exact mirror image of Rwanda – its neighbouring twin state to the north – both in terms of ethnic composition and troubled history.
Oppression of the Hutu by the Tutsi in Burundi led to a Hutu uprising in 1972 – 1973 which claimed 10,000 Tutsi lives. The Tutsi retaliated and massacred more than 200,000 Hutus within three months.
In an attempt to eliminate the Hutu threat to their hegemonic control of the country, they also killed every Hutu who had secondary school education, a government job, and money. Most of them were killed in 1972, the year of the biggest uprising.
Yet hardly anyone talks about this genocide by the Tutsi against the Hutu in Burundi which took place 22 years before Rwanda's 1994 genocide, and was just one among several massacres of genocidal proportions perpetrated by the Tutsi against the Hutu through the years including the massacre of more than 200,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees in the late 1990s in Zaire whose fate was inextricably linked to what had been going on in both Rwanda and Burundi. As Professor René Lemarchand states in “The Fire in the Great Lakes”:
“Today the 1972 Burundi genocide has fallen into virtual oblivion – except among the Hutu masses – yet its significance is crucial to understanding subsequent events in both Burundi and Rwanda.
Although the magnitude of the Rwanda holocaust is without precedent – it is estimated to have caused the deaths of a million people – the killing of tens of thousands of Hutu refugees at the hands of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA, the armed forces of the RPF government) in eastern Congo in 1996 and 1997 can be considered a third holocaust (after Burundi's 1972 and Rwanda's 1994 genocides)....
As many as 200,000 Hutu refugees may have been killed by RPA troops and Kabila's rebel army...(and) as many as 300,000 must have died of starvation and disease...in Zaire....And to this might be added the Kibeho killings, perpetrated inside Rwanda in April 1995, when at least 5,000 Hutu refugees were killed in cold blood by RPA units.”5
A discussion of Hutu massacres by the Tutsi is not in any way intended to justify or provide an excuse of the extermination of nearly one million Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. It is, rather, an attempt to understand why that genocide took place by putting it in the broader context of the volatile ethnic politics of the region (in both Rwanda and Burundi whose fates are inextricably linked) and the long history of antagonism between the two groups.
Traditionally, the Hutu and the Tutsi in both countries have had a lord-serf relationship for centuries, with the Hutu tending the farmlands and cattle owned by the Tutsi. The imposition of this overlordship on the Hutu by the Tutsi still rankles the vast majority of the Hutu who have been relegated to an inferior status in their own homeland and have worked for the Tutsi as virtual slaves for 400 years.
Any attempt to ignore or gloss over this unsavoury part of history makes it impossible for anybody to comprehend the enmity and deep mistrust between the two groups which has surfaced in recent years; and why the Hutu revolted against their Tutsi aristocratic rulers in Rwanda in November 1959; also why the Tutsi in Burundi have slaughtered hundreds of thousands – probably one million Hutus since 1972 alone; and why the 1994 Rwandan genocide – in which nearly one million Tutsis were exterminated – took place.
A look at the massacre of the Hutu by the Tutsi in both Rwanda and Burundi, and in what was then Zaire, through the years is also intended to show that the 1994 Rwandan genocide, tragic as it was, did not occur in a vacuum and is not the only large-scale massacre which has taken place in this highly combustible region. It is also intended to show the combustible elements, and the context, which led to that explosion.
It is true that the near-extermination of the entire Tutsi population in the Rwandan genocide is unprecedented in its magnitude although not in its motives. But simply because it is unprecedented in terms of magnitude does not mean that we should lose proportional perspective on reality, out of lopsided sympathy for the victims of that holocaust, while ignoring or overlooking the suffering of others, the Hutu, and the atrocities committed against them by the Tutsi in both Rwanda and Burundi through the years, and why they are fighting.
To ascribe ulterior motives – or of a bestial nature – to their struggle for inclusion in the political process, however excessive some of the means they have employed in pursuit of their goal, does not portray them or their enemies fairly; nor does it facilitate the quest for peace and stability in the region. For example, Philip Gourevitch who is the author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families which is otherwise a well-balanced account, stated in his article, “The Psychology of Slaughter,” in The New York Times:
“The killers...are usually described as 'Hutu rebels,' a label that suggests they are fighting for something. In fact, these terrorists have no identifiable cause, no idea other than rape, pillage and mass murder....
The prospect of overcoming the Hutu terrorist scourge remains remote. According to United Nations estimates, as many as 30,000 of these terrorists remain active in Central Africa.
The vast majority of them...are based in Congo, under the patronage of President Laurent Kabila...(who) has made these forces into a cornerstone of his defense forces.
Yet there is no great international outcry against him, or his many allies – including South Africa – for being in league with the most horrific political criminals on the continent....
And as Rwanda prepares to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the start of the genocide, on April 6, one can't help wondering whether the end is in sight.”6
It is interesting to note that although Gourevitch contends that these Hutu fighters have no identifiable cause which they are fighting for, and are no more than outright rapists, pillagers and mass murderers, he contradicts himself – obviously inadvertently – when he goes on to describe them as “political criminals,” thus implicitly admitting that their crimes are politically motivated. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for almost 30 years as a political prisoner. He and his compatriots were a even described by the apartheid regime and its supporters as a terrorists. Yet they had an identifiable and just cause they were fighting for.
If the crimes of the Hutu rebels are indeed politically motivated, as most of them are, in order to bring about fundamental political change contrary to what Gourevitch says, then the label “rebels” is appropriate in this context as a way of describing them since they have rebelled against authority and are fighting for something: to overthrow the Tutsi-dominated governments which are oppressing Hutus in both Rwanda and Burundi.
It is, of course true, as Gourevitch contends, that we can't help wondering whether or not the end to these massacres is in sight; not only in Rwanda but also in Burundi; and not only of the Tutsi by the Hutu but also of the Hutu by the Tutsi – probably even more so.
The brutal excesses committed by the Hutu rebels – and by the Tutsi-dominated armies and security forces against Hutu civilians in both Rwanda and Burundi – can not be excused or condoned; although, depending on the context, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter: from Menachem Begin and Moshe Dayan in Israel to Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki in South Africa; from Dedan Kimathi in Kenya to Josiah Tongogara, Edgar Tekere, Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo in Zimbabwe; from Amilcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau to Samora Machel in Mozambique. The list goes on and on.
The fundamental question that should be addressed is: Why are tens of thousands of Hutus fighting in both Rwanda and Burundi? Just to rape, loot and kill as Gourevitch and others contend?
Is that why they risk their lives and those of their families?
Is that why they seek international support for their struggle and understanding of their cause?
And is that the reason why hundreds of thousands of Hutus, most of them civilians, have fled their home countries and sought refuge in Congo and Tanzania through the years?
Is there no other motive behind the Hutu rebel attacks? Is the armed struggle by the rebels not being waged in pursuit of political objectives?
Wasn't the assassination of the first democratically elected president of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu, in October 1993 by Tutsi soldiers who bayoneted him to death, enough reason to provoke many Hutus even some of the most timid ones – “enough is enough” – into violence in retaliation for the murder, given their history of oppression by the Tutsi?
Would the 1994 Rwandan genocide have taken place had the Hutu not been oppressed and exploited, virtually enslaved, by the Tutsi for 400 years in both Rwanda and Burundi?
Would it have occurred if the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) did not invade Rwanda from Uganda for the first time in October 1990, posing a threat to the Hutu?
In the late 1990s, President Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania once described the attacks by the Hutus rebels as “military expressions of political intent.” By saying so, he was not trying to justify the attacks but was trying to explain what motivated the rebels in many – if not in most – cases to launch such attacks against the dominant group, the Tutsi, who were the rulers of both countries.
There probably were some Hutu rebels who had no political agenda and were motivated purely by ethnic hatred in attacking Tutsis, although even such attacks can not in all cases be attributed to sheer hatred of the Tutsi without any political motivation.
To dismiss all Hutu rebels as nothing but a bunch of killers without any political agenda or aspirations is being utterly simplistic.
In many cases, Rwanda is Burundi, and Burundi is Rwanda. It is a tangled web. What happens in one country very often affects the other. The conflicts feed on each other. As Lemarchand states:
“The 1972 genocide (in Burundi) had 'cleansed' the country of all educated Hutu elites – including secondary school and university students – allowing the rise of a solidly entrenched Tutsi ethnocracy.
It is thus easy to see why the assassination of Burundi's Hutu President Ndadaye in 1993 was viewed by many Tutsi hard-liners as the quickest way to ward off the threat posed to their hegemony; what was not anticipated was the outburst of rage that seized the Hutu population in the face of an event that conjured up memories of 1972.
After killing thousands of Tutsi civilians in October 1993, some 300,000 Hutus fled to Rwanda to escape an extremely brutal repression by the (Tutsi) army. It is reasonable to assume that a great many joined hands with the Interahamwe during the 1994 (Rwandan) genocide, before seeking refuge in Congo or Tanzania, or returning to Burundi.”7
Many of these tragedies through the years in both Rwanda and Burundi could have been avoided – or at the very least they could have been mitigated – if the ruling Tutsis had agreed to genuine power sharing with the Hutu majority on the basis of proportional representation; taking into account legitimate fears and concerns of the Tutsi minority that they would be exterminated (in retaliation for their oppression and exploitation of the Hutu for centuries, although that is something the Tutsi would not admit but would instead contend that the Hutu would exterminate them simply because they hated them); and accommodating the interests and genuine aspirations of the Hutu majority who have been denied the right to participate in the political process on democratic basis.
And the 1994 Rwandan genocide could have been avoided if the Hutu – who were in power for 32 years from July 1962 to July 1994 – had agreed back in the 1960s, soon after independence, to share power with the Tutsi on meaningful basis instead of excluding them and consigning them to subordinate status.
Democracy on the basis of majority rule is totally out of the question in that context. It will exclude the Tutsi minority from power – they will never win a democratic election against the Hutu majority – and will guarantee hegemonic control of both Rwanda and Burundi by the Hutu forever.
That is what the Hutu attempted to do in Rwanda in the mass uprising of November 1959 (assume full control of the country), with tragic consequences for the entire region during the following decades, which culminated in the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi.
The Rwandan holocaust in turn led to a wider conflict that engulfed the entire Great Lakes region and the heart of Africa, Congo, involving national armies from nine African countries: Congo itself, Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Chad, and Sudan, and at least 20 rebel and militia groups including the Angola rebels of UNITA, a Portuguese acronym for National Union for the Total Independence of Angola.
But even before the multinational conflict erupted in 1998, with Congo as the battleground, the Great Lakes region had already been the scene of massive bloodshed between the Hutu and the Tutsi since 1962 when both Rwanda and Burundi won independence from Belgium. While the Tutsi in Burundi thwarted attempts by the Hutu majority to become the rulers of the newly independent nation on democratic basis – given their numerical preponderance, victory for the Hutu was a foregone conclusion – and therefore remained in control; their kinsmen in Rwanda had been sidelined since the 1959 Hutu mass uprising and never even had the initiative to position themselves in an advantageous position to assume power at independence.
Therefore, when independence came, the Hutu automatically became the new rulers of Rwanda, with tens of thousands of Tutsis and their aristocratic elite having fled into exile. And every major political event in the region during the next three decades was, in one way or another, linked to the 1959 Hutu uprising:
“Each event of political significance in the region during those 32 years (1962 – 1994) was related to the (1959) Rwandan revolution: the fall of two monarchies – Rwanda in 1962, Burundi in 1966; the assassination of two leading Hutu personalities in Burundi – Prime Minister Pierre Ngendadumwe in 1965, and President Melchior Ndadaye in 1993; several military takeovers – the 1973 coup in Rwanda and the 1965, 1976, 1987, and 1996 coups in Burundi; the 1972 Burundi genocide of Hutus; the rural uprising in North Kivu (Zaire) in 1993; the 1990 invasion of Rwanda by RPF (the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front from its bases in Uganda), and the 1994 genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus; and the transformation of North and South Kivu (provinces in eastern Zaire) into a privileged sanctuary for Hutu-sponsored border raids into Rwanda – and ultimately, into a killing ground for fleeing Hutu refugees (by Rwandan Tutsi soldiers and Zairean Tutsi rebels allied with their Rwandan kinsmen).”8
Another Hutu prime minister of Burundi, Joseph Bamina who succeeded Ngendadumwe, was assassinated later in 1965 after an uprising by the Hutu against Tutsi domination failed. Bamina was a member of the Tutsi political party, UPRONA (Union pour le Progrès national – the Union for National Progress) which dominated the country.
The success of the 1959 mass uprising by the Hutu in Rwanda raised hope among the Hutu in both Rwanda and Burundi that they had the capacity to free themselves from their Tutsi oppressors, and that they would one day become the rulers of the two countries as they indeed succeeded in doing in Rwanda from 1962 to 1994.
The 1959 peasant revolution also inspired a significant number of Hutus to take bold initiatives to achieve their goals and radicalised many of them into a potent political force ready to take up arms to end Tutsi supremacy.
But it also frightened the Tutsi minority who feared that they were about to be dominated and possibly exterminated by the Hutu majority whom they knew they had been oppressing for centuries, unless they did something to stave off the Hutu onslaught.
To ward off this danger, the Tutsi resorted to brutal repression and large-scale massacres of the Hutu in Burundi where the Tutsi were still in control. The country won independence on 1 July 1962 under an absolute Tutsi monarchy and changed its name from Urundi to Burundi.
The situation was different in Rwanda. There, the rise of the Hutu to power at independence, also on 1 July 1962 – the country was until then called Ruanda, not Rwanda – triggered another exodus of the Tutsi, following the first one in 1959 when the Hutu emerged victorious in a mass uprising which toppled the Tutsi aristocracy.
But there were also similarities. In Burundi, consolidation of power and increased repression by the Tutsi aristocratic rulers and the Tutsi army in the early 1960s led to an exodus – reminiscent of the 1959 Tutsi exodus from Rwanda – of tens of thousands of Hutus to Rwanda which was then under Hutu leadership, and to Tanganyika which was renamed Tanzania on 29 October 1964 after uniting with Zanzibar on 26 April in the same year.
Many Hutu politicians in Burundi dreamt of transforming that aristocratic state into a republican one like neighbouring Rwanda where their kinsmen were firmly entrenched and exercised virtual absolute power over the Tutsi.
But prospects for such fundamental change remained bleak. The Tutsi were in full control in Burundi. And their fear of Hutu majority rule was heightened when their brethren, tens of thousands of them (at least 100,000), fled Rwanda and sought refuge in Burundi in the wake of the 1959 mass uprising which effectively ended about 400 years of Tutsi aristocratic rule and replaced it with a Hutu-dominated republican form of government at independence in 1962. Their fear was also compounded by the exclusion of their kinsmen from power in Rwanda where the Hutu assumed full control of the country soon after the Belgian colonial rulers left.
The fleeing Tutsis recounted horror stories of what happened to them in Rwanda at the hands of the Hutu in the 1959 revolution, inflaming passions among their kinsmen in Burundi. Burundi's Tutsis vowed they would never allow that to happen to them and welcomed their brethren with open arms.
In due course, Burundi was to become a launching pad for military raids into Rwanda by these Tutsi exiles who were determined to overthrow the Hutu and regain power in their homeland which they lost in 1959. Naturally, the incursions provoked a retaliatory response by the Hutu against the Tutsi who remained in Rwanda, forcing more to flee to Burundi, Uganda, Congo, and Tanzania.
But it was a flight – into forced exile – which also had combustible elements. For example, the 20,000 Tutsi refugees from Rwanda who settled in eastern Congo in the early 1960s inflamed passions among the members of the local tribes who were hostile to immigrants from Rwanda – Tutsis as well as Hutus (there even some from Burundi) – who had lived in the region since precolonial times.
Rwandan Tutsis first settled in the area – what came to be known as eastern Congo – in the 1700s. And the 1959 revolution in Rwanda only made things worse for them by forcing them into exile in some places where they were not welcome, especially eastern Congo and Uganda.
Hostility towards them only intensified through the decades. In 1982, Rwanda appealed for international help when Uganda uprooted about 25,000 Rwandan – mostly Tutsi – immigrants, burning their homes and stealing their cattle. Thousands fled back to Rwanda, pleading for help – food and shelter.9 And through the years, the Tutsi government of Burundi also accused the Hutu government of Rwanda of massacring Tutsis.
In turn, the Rwandan government accused Burundi of harbouring Tutsi guerrillas who were trying to overthrow it and re-institute a Tutsi ethnocracy in Rwanda.
Both were credible charges.
Besides attempting to overthrow the Hutu government in Rwanda from their bases in Burundi, the Tutsi refugees from the 1959 Rwandan Hutu mass uprising also got involved in another major political struggle and military activity. These were the refugees who settled in eastern Congo, and their involvement had to do with a rebellion going on in that country against the central government.
But unlike their kinsmen who settled in Burundi where fellow Tutsis were in control of the country, the Rwandan Tutsis who had sought refuge in eastern Congo found no indigenous ethnic constituency comparable in stature and power to the Tutsi ethnic base in Burundi which could provide them with shelter and help them pursue their objectives, in spite of the fact that many Tutsis – mostly from Rwanda – had been living in Congo since the 1700s.
Although they had lived there for a long time, they still were in a precarious position. They were not powerful. And the local tribes had always been hostile towards them, although they themselves were, historically speaking, native to the region, having lived there for about 200years after they migrated from Rwanda. As Vincent Gasana and Alfred Ndahiro stated in their report, “Zaire Crisis Provokes Tribalism,” in Africa Analysis:
“Long before the conflict in eastern Zaire developed into a full-blown war, the little-known Banyamurenge (also known as Banyamulenge) had been trying to make their point: they want to go on living quietly as they have done for centuries, away not from the rest of the world, but from the rest of the Zaireans....
Their story starts in the 16th century, when King Kigeri Nyamuheshera of Rwanda sent a group of Rwandan families to occupy the newly-conquered area of Bunyabungo, present-day Uvira.
There was a second wave and a third followed in the 19th century.
As Batutsi, the Banyamurenge were pastoralists. They moved and settled in the high altitude area of eastern Zaire to protect their cattle from disease and themselves from local Zairean hostility. They evolved a highly organised, inter-linked community. To this very day, their adherence to traditional forms of communication, means that no sooner does a stranger arrive in their area than his presence is communicated throughout the while community.
The modern state of Zaire never acknowledged them as Zaireans. They asked and got nothing from the Zairean government....
There have been periodic attempts by their Zairean neighbours to dislodge them from their lands. These were always repulsed by force of arms. Their martial prowess and skilful use of bows and arrows has long been passed into the region's folkrole.
Every Zairean, Rwandan and Murundi child will tell you how the Banyamurenge can shoot a fly off you with an arrow and leave you unscathed.
Such fairy tales bolstered by frequent victories against their attackers enabled the Banyamurenge to live unmolested until recently.
Following the first ethnic massacres in Rwanda in 1959, large numbers of Batutsi fled to neighbouring countries, including Zaire (then known as Congo). Though sympathetic, the Banyamurenge wanted to keep their distinct identity. But the Zaireans lumped them together and refused to recognise any distinction. The 1990 – 94 Rwandan civil war further complicated the situation.”10
Although the Tutsi refugees who settled in eastern Congo after they fled Rwanda in the wake of the 1959 Hutu uprising found no large ethnic constituency of fellow Tutsis who could provide them with sanctuary in Congo and forge links with them in pursuit of a common cause, they did find a different ally: the followers of the late Congolese prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, who were fighting a guerrilla war in an attempt to oust the central government installed by the CIA which masterminded Lumumba's assassination.
The rebellion in eastern Congo was known as a Mulelist insurgency which started in 1964. It was named after Pierre Mulele, Lumumba's 35-year-old education minister and heir-apparent, although he did not lead this particular insurrection in the east. He led an insurgency in Kwilu Province in western Congo from 1963 – 1968, while the eastern insurrection was led by Gaston Soumialot who was assisted by Nicolas Olenga and Laurent Kabila.11
The Tutsi refugees from the 1959 Rwandan uprising allied themselves with the pro-Lumumbist rebels in eastern Congo out of necessity in order to secure the support which they hoped they would get one day and enable them to regain power in their homeland. But it was a matter of expediency on both sides.
Many of those rebels in the eastern part of Congo were Tutsi. They were led by Joseph Mudandi who was trained in guerrilla warfare in China together with several other Rwandan Tutsis who had fled their homeland.
China had also intervened in Burundi's ethnic conflict by supporting the Tutsi. In 1963, the Chinese trained a number of Tutsis in guerrilla warfare in China. The massacres that followed, mostly of the Hutu by the Tutsi in Burundi, were thus facilitated by China, earning the Chinese a bad reputation in African circles beyond Burundi.
The Chinese committed the same blunder in Rwanda when in the same year, 1963, they supported Tutsi guerrillas who invaded their homeland in an attempt to overthrow the Hutu-dominated government. The Tutsi guerrillas killed more than 20,000 Hutus, mostly civilians, in that invasion which they launched from their bases in Burundi.
In eastern Congo, hundreds of Tutsis fought pitched battles alongside the Congolese insurgents of the People's Liberation Army (APL) against the Congo National Army in South Kivu which was supported by the CIA and anti-Castro Cubans (recruited by the United States government), as well as by Belgium and South African white mercenaries.
The pro-Lumumba nationalist forces were backed by China, the Soviet Union, Cuba which sent Che Guevara and hundreds of troops, and by a number of African countries, especially Tanzania, Ghana, Egypt, Algeria, Guinea and Mali whose leaders – Nyerere, Nkrumah, Nasser, Ben Bella, Sekou Toure and Modibo Keita – constituted what was known within the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) as The Group of Six.
In an interview in Geneva, Switzerland, on 4 November 1995 with Jorge Castañeda, the author of Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara, Ben Bella said the six leaders worked secretly among themselves on a number of African issues, excluding other African leaders. One of the most urgent subjects they dealt with during that period was the Congo crisis.
Recalling those days, Ben Bella said in the same interview: “We arrived in the Congo too late.”
He was talking about the progressive African countries including his, Algeria, which intervened in Congo to help pro-Lumumbist forces.
One of those countries was Tanzania, Congo's neighbour, which, under Nyerere's leadership, served as a conduit for material assistance to Lumumba's followers fighting the puppet central government. Che Guevara and Cuban troops also went to Congo through Tanzania.
Tutsi guerrillas in eastern Congo were some of the most important players on the Congo scene during that turbulent period. While the Tutsi guerrillas played a significant role in spreading the rebellion to the south and into northern Katanga Province together with the Congolese nationalist rebels, they also launched many cross-border raids into Rwanda in an attempt to destabilise and overthrow the Rwandan Hutu-dominated government.
As expected, those incursions, which failed to dislodge the Hutu from power, triggered a vicious retaliatory response by the Rwandan army and other Hutus against the Tutsi living in Rwanda; the majority of them still lived in Rwanda, their home country. Those who fled into exile constituted a minority of the Rwandan Tutsi population, although a significant one.
Thirty years later, the Hutu genocidal murderers – known as Interahamwe, which means “those who kill together” – employed some of the same strategies and tactics to try and dislodge the Tutsi-dominated government of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) which ousted the Hutu regime in July 1994 and stopped the genocide. Again, like the Rwandan Tutsi refugees who fled to eastern Congo during the 1960s, the Hutu perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide also sought refuge in eastern Zaire (renamed Congo in May 1997), together with hundreds of thousands of other Hutus. They also used eastern Congo as their operational base from which they launched raids into Rwanda in an attempt to remove the Tutsi-dominated RPF government.
But there were also some differences between the two. Hundreds of Rwandan Tutsi refugees fought as guerrillas in the 1964 Congolese rebellion against the Congolese national government. In contrast to that, an even much larger force of tens of thousands – no fewer than 30,000 – of Hutu rebels (including the Interahamwe and remnants of the defeated Hutu army who also sought refuge in eastern Zaire after losing to the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) of the RPF in Rwanda) were actively involved in the insurgency against the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan government. The insurgency was launched in 1995 from the Hutu refugee camps in eastern Zaire and went on for years.
The Hutu rebels operating from eastern Zaire during the 1990s and thereafter also had perfect cover, hiding and moving freely among their kinsmen in the refugee camps. The Rwandan Tutsis launching cross-border raids against the Hutu regime in the sixties had no such sanctuary in eastern Congo.
The Hutu insurgents also controlled the refugee camps. And President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, who was hostile to the Tutsi regimes in both Rwanda and Burundi – he was also hostile to the Ugandan government of President Yoweri Museveni – supplied the Hutu rebels with a lot of weapons and ammunition which they used to wage war against the Rwandan government, dominated by Tutsis, making them an even bigger threat to Rwanda's and even to Burundi's security.
And unlike in 1964 when there was a rebellion in eastern Congo which some of the Rwandan Tutsi refugees joined, there was no such uprising in eastern Zaire in 1995 when the Rwandan Hutu rebels launched their first raid into Rwanda. When one started in October – November 1996, it was with the full support of the Tutsi Rwandan army in order to destroy the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide – the Interahamwe and the remnants of the Hutu Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) – and oust their ally, Mobutu Sese Seko, from power. The rebellion was also under Rwandan control.
The 1996 rebellion was launched and spearheaded by the Tutsi in eastern Zaire against Mobutu's regime which stripped them of their citizenship in 1981 – and in fact insisted that they had never even been citizens before then. But when it gained momentum rolling across the country towards the capital Kinshasa to oust Mobutu, it was Tutsi army officers from the Rwandan national army who provided the leadership; with Laurent Kabila, anointed by Rwanda's de facto ruler Paul Kagame, as the nominal head of the rebellion.
The 1996 – 1997 Congolese (Zairean) insurgency succeeded in ousting the central government, while the 1964 insurrection fail to accomplish the same objective.
After the end of the Cold War, Mobutu became an expendable commodity. He was no longer seen by the United States as an asset; it was the Americans and their allies who installed him in power to use him in their struggle to contain Soviet expansionism in Africa.
By contrast, the pro-Lumumbist forces failed to dislodge him from power during the sixties for exactly the opposite reason. The West saw Mobutu as an indispensable ally against the Soviet Union right in the heart of Africa where the Soviets and their satellites in the Eastern bloc, including the anti-Soviet and anti-West People's Republic of China, were trying to gain a foothold. And both the Congolese nationalist rebels and their Rwandan Tutsi allies in the 1964 uprising were regarded by the United States and other Western powers as the vanguard of communist penetration into the heart of the African continent.
That was one of the reasons why the CIA actively intervened to neutralise the insurgency. And it succeeded in doing so.
But the main reason for the intervention – even if the Soviet Union and China had never existed – was continued domination and exploitation of Africa the United States and other Western countries, especially the former colonial powers, saw as their sphere of influence they had been entitled to since the advent of colonial rule.
Although the two rebellions – in 1964 and 1996 – had little in common in terms of ideology and objectives besides the desire to overthrow the central government even if for different reasons, they had one thing in common: Tutsi involvement. The Tutsi played a major role in both uprisings. They also had one actor on the political scene who provided a historical link between them. And that was Laurent Kabila.
Before he became the leader of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (ADFL) which ousted Mobutu from power, Kabila had been active at different times in the Fizi-Baraka area along Lake Tanganyika in eastern Zaire as the head of a small group – a continuation from the sixties' pro-Lumumbist rebellion – fighting to overthrow the regal autocrat, Mobutu, who rose to power with the help of the CIA. In fact, during his tenure as president of Zaire for 32 years, the largest CIA station in Africa was in Kinshasa.
But the group Kabila led in the Fizi-Baraka area was handicapped by its ethnic base, small membership, diminishing revolutionary stature, and by its inability to wage war even against the decaying Zairean state which had only a rag-tag army incapable of defending the country.
Kabila's group further compromised whatever stature and status it had when its members kidnapped four American students from Stanford University doing research in Kigoma Region in western Tanzania, across Lake Tanganyika from the rebel base on the lake's western shore in Zaire. They took them across the lake to their base in Zaire. As Professor Crawford Young stated in “Zaire: The Unending Crisis,” in Foreign Affairs:
“One insurgent movement within the country lingers from the 1964 – 65 wave of rebellions.
Localized in the Fizi-Baraka area by Lake Tanganyika, this group – known in recent years as the Parti de la Révolution Populaire (PRP) – achieved notoriety in 1975 by kidnapping four Stanford students from a zoological research station in Tanzania.
Its composition is ethnically restricted to Bembe, though its leader, Laurent Kabila, is a Shaba (formerly Katanga) Luba.
The movement now has only a few hundred followers, and has no possibility of enlarging its base of operations.”12
Kabila himself had lost some credibility because of his frequent long absences from his operational base in eastern Zaire preferring, instead, to live in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's capital, which became his home for more than 20 years.
Even his revolutionary credentials during the 1960s were questionable. He did not spend as much time in Congo as he should have, leaving his soldiers alone. As Che Guevara, who went to Congo to help the guerrillas, stated about Kabila's leadership: “I always thought that he did not have enough military experience; he was an agitator who had the stuff of a leader, yet lacked seriousness, aplomb, knowledge, in short this innate talent that one senses in Fidel the minute you meet him.”13 And as Che stated in another assessment of Kabila and the other Congolese rebel leaders including Soumialot in his letter from the shores of Lake Tanganyika in eastern Congo to Fidel Castro in October 1965:
“Sumialot and his companions have sold you an enormous bridge. It would take us forever to enumerate the huge number of lies they told you....I know Kabila well enough to have no illusions in his regard....
I have some background on Sumialot, like for example the lies he told you, the fact that he has not set foot on this godforsaken land, his frequent drinking bouts in Dar-es-Salaam, where he stays in the best hotels....
They are given huge amounts of money, all at once, to live splendidly in every African capital, not to mention that they are housed by the main progressive countries who often finance their travel expenses....The scotch and the women are also covered by friendly governments and if one likes good scotch and beautiful women, that costs a lot of money.”14
When Che Guevara sent the letter to Castro, the Congolese rebel leaders had just been received in Havana, Cuba, like true revolutionaries and were treated with great respect, with Castro and other Cuban leaders who were backing them, unaware of their true characters.
Thirty years later during the the 1996 – 1997 rebellion which finally toppled Mobutu, most people still did not know much about Kabila. He had just been plucked out of obscurity and made the leader of the insurgency, riding on a wave of anti-Mobutu sentiments prevalent across the nation. He also had one major asset in a rebel movement whose driving force was Tutsi, an ethnic group hated not only in eastern Zaire where the rebellion started in 1996, but also in the rest of the country. He was not a Tutsi.
He was a member of the Luba tribe from northern Shaba Province (the former Katanga Province), an ethnic group accepted by the other tribes in Congo as native to the country unlike the Tutsi who were considered to be foreigners in spite of the fact that they have lived in Congo for more than 200 years. The Luba are also one of the largest ethnic groups in Congo.
Kabila's stature among his fellow countrymen, after Rwanda's de facto ruler General Paul Kagame chose him to lead the 1996 uprising against Mobutu, was enhanced by his own revolutionary credentials during the 1960s, however dubious those credentials were; by his political base as head of the small but resilient Afro-Marxist People's Revolutionary Party he founded in northern Katanga Province in 1967 which was now based in the Fizi-Baraka area on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika in South Kivu Province; and by his virulently anti-Mobutist stand as well as his credentials as a disciple of Patrice Lumumba.
But all those advantages were not enough to form a solid foundation on which to build a cohesive anti-Mobutist alliance.
The Anti-Mobutu Coalition
As we learned earlier, the fighting in eastern Zaire started in October – November 1996.
That was when Mobutu's rag-tag army and members of different tribes made a move against the Banyamulenge Tutsis – so named because of the mountainous Mulenge area in which they settled in South Kivu Province – whom they did not consider to be citizens.
The Banyamulenge fought back to protect their rights, especially the land which their enemies wanted to seize and force them to flee to Rwanda and Burundi to live with their fellow Tutsis.
Opposition to Mobutu's brutal kleptocratic rule by different groups in and out of Zaire led to the convening of a national conference in 1991 in the capital Kinshasa to address the nation's problems across the spectrum. After 30 years of chaos, anarchy and dictatorship during which all institutions of civic organisation and democratic tradition collapsed and were pulverised by the vampire state, the conference was willing to discuss any political or social problems facing the nation.
Such frank discussion was undoubtedly democratic. But it also had potential for catastrophe in the context of Zaire's toxic ethno-regional politics, given the intense tribal hostilities in some parts of the country, especially in North and South Kivu provinces.
The delegates from Kivu competed against each other as they articulated conflicting ethnic interests, each tribe promoting its own. But they agreed on one thing: the Tutsi had to go.
It was, however, a broad agenda, calling for the neutralisation of all Kinyarwanda speakers (hence Hutus as well) – Kinyarwanda is the national language of Rwanda spoken by Hutus and Tutsis – in the two Kivu provinces and, as a final solution, possibly their expulsion from Zaire, forcing them to “go back” where they “came from,” Rwanda, a place most of them had never been to, and which they knew about only from historical ties.
But the primary target of the campaign was the Tutsi, citizens of Zaire, yet not “citizens.” They were not considered to be citizens even by the national government of Mobutu, let alone by their fellow countrymen.
Although their migration from Rwanda to what came to be known as Congo started in the 16th century when King Kigeri Nyamuheshera sent a number of Tutsi families to settle in the newly conquered area of Bunyabungo in what is Uvira today in South Kivu Province in the eastern part of the country, it was the latter migrations – including the second and third waves in the 1800s – which drew more attention because of their cumulative impact.
Others followed, and a larger part of them, including the previous ones, settled mainly in what is now North Kivu Province across the border from Rwanda. As Gérard Prunier stated in “The Great Lakes Crisis”:
“There were many layers of Rwandan immigration in eastern Zaire, especially in North Kivu.
The first group of Rwandans had arrived there probably over 200 years ago. These were both Tutsi and Hutu.
Many – mostly Hutu – were later 'imported' by the Belgians, who were short of manpower in the Congo during the colonial years while their mandate territory of Ruanda-Urundi (now Rwanda and Burundi) was overpopulated....
Rwanda and Burundi were parts of German East Africa (Tanganyika which is now Tanzania); they were conquered by the Belgian army in 1916 and later given to Brussels as mandate territories by the League of Nations....
A third and purely Tutsi layer was made up of refugees who had fled the 1959 to 1963 massacres and the imposition of a Hutu ethnic state at the time of Rwanda's independence in 1962. And a fourth and exclusively Hutu group had arrived in August 1994, fleeing the RPF (the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front) takeover in Rwanda.”15
Delegates to the 1991 national conference in Kinshasa resorted to a legal manoeuvre to strip the Banyarwanda of their citizenship by selective implementation of citizenship laws to enforce the 1981 decree which revoked their status as citizens of Zaire.
President Mobutu himself supported the move by the delegates which helped divert some attention from his rotten dictatorship by mobilising nationalist sentiment against these “foreigners.”
It was a tactic typical of Mobutu: divide and rule.
Earlier, he had used the Banyarwanda in Kivu provinces to help contain and neutralise local opposition to his rule from other tribes. It was one of the reasons why these ethnic groups became even more hostile towards the Banyarwanda (mostly Tutsis) and towards Mobutu himself.
Members of these tribes in eastern Zaire proceeded to disenfranchise “outsiders” by launching a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
The campaign had a broad mandate – to expel all non-indigenes including non-Banyarwanda – but was specific in intent, and selective in its application, by targeting the Banyarwanda.
By early 1993, tribal militia groups were ransacking villages and killing the Banyarwanda in North Kivu Province which borders Rwanda. The victims included Hutus but the primary target was Tutsis because of the intense hostility towards them by the local tribes and other Zaireans.
In the past, the Tutsi and the Hutu in Congo had, collectively as Banyarwanda, formed a united front against their common enemy: the other tribes in eastern Congo who did not want them there. But with the civil war in Rwanda between their kinsmen, Hutu versus Tutsi, they also turned against each other in Congo (Zaire). No longer were they fellow Banyarwanda, with a shared identity based on common national origin, Rwanda; they were simply Hutus and Tutsis. Each to his own.
In 1993, North Kivu became a battleground and witnessed some of the most violent conflicts between different tribes in recent times. Hutus fought Tutsis, and vice versa; and members of the other tribes fought both.
The influx of the Hutu Rwandan refugees into the region in mid-1994, fleeing from Rwanda after the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) took over the country and stopped the genocide of Tutsis, aggravated the situation.
Among the Hutu refugees were tens of thousands of well-armed and virulently anti-Tutsi elements who had participated in the massacre of almost one million Tutsis in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide.
The result was ethnic cleansing in eastern Zaire reminiscent of what had just taken place across the border in Rwanda. Thousands of Tutsis were killed, and the rest fled to Rwanda where the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front had just seized power.
The ethnic conflict had overflown national boundaries with dire consequences, adding a new dimension to the genocide against the Tutsi.
The situation in South Kivu Province was somewhat different. Like their counterparts in North Kivu Province, the leaders of South Kivu had also decided to disenfranchise the Banyarwanda. However, the division between the Hutu and the Tutsi was not as pronounced as it was in North Kivu.
The Banyarwanda who had settled in this region (South Kivu) are the ones who were named Banyamulenge by the members of the other tribes in the region. They were mostly Tutsi who settled in the area in the early 1800s after losing in intra-tribal feudal wars with fellow Tutsis in Rwanda. They were accompanied by their Hutu servants who became assimilated into the larger Tutsi community, “losing” their Hutu identity in the process. Like their Tutsi masters, they simply came to be known as Banyamulenge, or just “Tutsis.”
In 1993 and 1994, the Banyamulenge witnessed with horror the ethnic cleansing of fellow Tutsis in North Kivu Province and prepared for the worst. By mid-1996, when provincial leaders of South Kivu with the full support of the central government in Kinshasa began to target them, they decided to take decisive action. And they got immediate help from Rwanda where their kinsmen were now in control.
They also sought help from Burundi, which was under under Tutsi leadership like Rwanda, and from Uganda whose president, Kaguta Yoweri Museveni, was himself identified as a Tutsi, although he identified himself as a Munyankole, a member of the Banyankole ethnic group in southwestern Uganda who are related to the Tutsi.
But among all their supporters, it was Rwanda, their original homeland, which was their patron.
By November 1996, eastern Zaire was engulfed in civil war. As the fighting intensified between the Banyamulenge Tutsis and the Zairean army with its anti-Tutsi local supporters, the Tutsi won the support of other Zairean opposition groups which wanted to oust Mobutu from power. It was a marriage of convenience. According to Africa Analysis:
“[The opposition groups include] the Popular Revolutionary Party of Shaba Province, the Revolutionary Liberation Movement and the National Democratic Resistance from the Kasai region.
These have now joined the Banyamurenge to form an umbrella organisation, the Alliance of Democratic Liberation Forces of Zaire and Congo.
It aims to oust the ailing President Mobutu Sese Seko from power. Even more ominously, Rwandan troops have reportedly joined the fighting. Zaire claims some fighters captured in the country belong to Rwanda's 7th infantry battalion and also accuses Ugandan and Burundian forces of aiding the rebels.”16
Other countries besides Rwanda which joined the anti-Mobutu coalition included Angola, Tanzania, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, and Zambia.
The Banyamulenge, whose oppression ignited the rebellion, were no longer an isolated group in their campaign against Mobutu.
Ironically, in the late 1960s when Pierre Mulele led Congo's longest uprising, the “Kwilu” rebellion from his operational base in his home Kwilu Province in the western part of the country, it was the Banyamulenge who helped Mobutu fight the pro-Lumumbist rebels.
It was he who first armed them with modern weapons, enthusiastically embracing them as fellow Congolese in his hour of need. Before then, the Banyamulenge had depended on bows and arrows.
Thirty years later, they switched sides and fought to overthrow the very same man they once helped to keep in power. They also formed an alliance with the pro-Lumumbist forces of Laurent Kabila, the same forces they fought thirty years before, helping Mobutu to neutralise them.
The advance by the insurgents across Zaire during the 1996 – 1997 rebellion was directed by the military leaderships of Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi. And there was evidence from the beginning showing that Rwanda had been arming the Banyamulenge in the same way that Uganda had armed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) fighters who went on to seize power in Kigali, Rwanda's capital. In fact, Rwanda's ruler Paul Kagame conceded later that the war was planned primarily by Rwanda, and that the plan to topple Mobutu also originated in Kigali.
He disclosed in an interview with The Washington Post, 9 July 1997, that “the Rwandan government planned and directed the rebellion that ousted the long-time dictator and that Rwandan troops and officers led the rebel forces.”17
The prominent role played by the Banyamulenge in overthrowing Mobutu in May 1997 was deeply resented by the members of the other tribes in eastern Zaire where the rebellion started. Those with deep resentment included the Babembe, the Bahunda, the Banande, and the Bashi. The Banyamulenge were also resented by others across the country, including the Baluba, Laurent Kabila's tribe in Shaba (Katanga) Province.
The resentment got even deeper when several Banyamulenge Tutsis assumed key positions in the national government in Kinshasa under President Laurent Kabila who was seen by many of his fellow countrymen as a puppet of Rwanda, and their giant nation a virtual colony of their tiny neighbour: Rwanda. And the contrast is glaring. Congo which is the size of Western Europe or the entire United States of America east of the Mississippi River is about 90 times the size of Rwanda.
And the role played by Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi in overthrowing Mobutu and in installing a new government in Kinshasa raised speculation of a concerted effort by the leaders of the three countries to create a Tutsi empire in East-Central Africa, from the Great Lakes region to the Atlantic Ocean.
Rwanda and Burundi were clearly Tutsi-dominated states. In the case of Uganda, Tutsi leadership of that country centred on President Kaguta Yoweri Museveni, a member of the Hima branch of the Tutsi from the southwestern part of Uganda bordering Rwanda and Tanzania. Also, there were those who contended that Museveni was actually a Tutsi from Rwanda. And they have maintained the same position through the years.
Expansionist ambitions of the three countries could not be ruled out. And they were directed at Congo ostensibly for security reasons to secure the borders of those countries against incursions by rebel groups based in Congo who were trying to overthrow the governments of the three countries.
But even if they had territorial ambitions to annex parts of Congo, directly or indirectly, there is no question that security of their borders also figured prominently in their decision to intervene in Congo.
Of the three countries, Rwanda was most vulnerable because of the tens of thousands of armed Hutu extremists – including members of the former Hutu Rwandan national army who were defeated by the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) of the RPF in 1994 – who had fled the country after the Rwandan genocide and found sanctuary just across the border in Congo. But whether or not such concern about security was of paramount importance, eclipsing everything else, in Rwanda's intervention in Congo is a matter for argument.
Rwanda's Strategic Initiatives in Congo
Rwanda intervened in Congo for several reasons and in a vengeful mood: to kill, indiscriminately, hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees – including innocent men, women and children and the elderly – in retaliation for the 1994 genocide in which one million Tutsis perished at the hands of Hutu extremists and, in fact, succeeded in massacring more than 200,000 of those refugees in only a few months.
Rwandan Tutsi leaders also intervened in Congo to hunt down the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide who were hiding among the refugees in refugee camps, making it almost impossible to identify them when they were mixed with other people in the camps. To kill them, Rwandan Tutsi soldiers also had to kill innocent Hutu refugees, virtually sparing none, to make sure the perpetrators of the genocide hiding among them were dead.
Rwanda also went into Congo to install a puppet regime in Kinshasa it could manipulate at will in pursuit of its national interests; to secure its borders by any means at its disposal; to create a buffer zone, in effect, a de facto autonomous state inhabited by Congolese Tutsis, along the Rwandan-Congolese border ostensibly as a security measure but in fact as an expansionist move to create a Tutsi federation or confederation of the two Tutsi political entities: Rwanda and the newly created Tutsi state in the “security corridor.”
Rwanda also intervened in Congo for economic reasons: to extract Congo's mineral resources and agricultural products, including gold, diamonds, coffee, and timber; and if possible, to annex parts of eastern Congo in pursuit of its hegemonic ambitions in East-Central Africa as a power broker in the region despite its small size. Rwanda is one of the smallest countries in Africa and in the entire world, yet one of the most influential in the Great Lakes region of East-Central Africa.
But foremost among all those objectives was security for this tiny, highly vulnerable, desperately poor and landlocked nation in the hinterland of Africa. Even its expansionist ambition may be justified by the “imperial” authorities in Kigali in terms of security concerns, although it can not be defended on rational grounds. Rwanda's security can not be guaranteed in Congo but in Rwanda itself, especially by treating all its citizens equally without discrimination across the spectrum.
Yet there were grounds for such intervention in Congo by Rwanda.
The immediate cause of Rwanda's intervention was the persecution of the Banyamulenge Tutsi in eastern Congo – then known as Zaire – by the other tribes in South Kivu Province; a persecution which led to armed conflict in August 1996 between the Banyamulenge and the other ethnic groups supported by Mobutu's national army.
It was, at first, seen as a local conflict. But it assumed larger dimensions when it became clear that the two Tutsi-dominated states of Rwanda and Burundi intervened to help their kinsmen.
The conflict escalated even further when Uganda intervened in November 1996, forming a tripartite alliance with Rwanda and Burundi which went on to overthrow Mobutu and later plunge Congo into a much bigger war involving armies from nine African countries.
All three – Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda – intervened in eastern Zaire ostensibly to secure their borders because Mobutu's government was harbouring rebel groups fighting to overthrow their governments. Yet the threat to Uganda was not as serious as the Ugandan authorities claimed it was.
It came mainly from northern and northwestern Uganda where the West Nile Bank Liberation Front, linked to the remnants of Idi Amin's regime, and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), were operating.
The Lord's Resistance Army was made up of members of the Holy Spirit Movement, a millenarian cult mostly composed of Acholi tribesmen indigenous to northern Uganda.
Both groups were armed by the Sudanese government in retaliation for Uganda's support of the black African rebels of the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) in southern Sudan fighting against the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum in pursuit of autonomy and ultimately independence. And both had operational bases in Zaire, in addition to those in Sudan, and within Uganda itself.
But neither posed a serious threat to the Ugandan government because they operated mainly in northern Uganda far from the capital Kampala which is in the south. Also, both groups were weak. And they were severely compromised by their ethnic appeal in the region – northern Uganda – which is ethnically heterogeneous, a diversity which made it very difficult, if not impossible, for them to broaden their support.
The threat to Burundi from the Hutu rebels operating from Zaire, although very serious, was not enough to oust the government because of the entrenched Tutsi ethnocracy which had consolidated its power since independence in 1962 by systematically destroying the Hutu elite and massacring hundreds of thousands of Hutus through the years.
Its firm grip on power is attested to by the fact that Burundi's capital, Bujumbura, is only 10 miles from the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire. Yet, in spite of such proximity making Burundi even more vulnerable to attack, Burundian Hutu rebels operating from their bases in Congo and within Burundi itself have not been able to threaten the capital seriously, let alone oust the Tutsi from power.
The situation was different in Rwanda by mid-1996 when the regime in Kigali intervened in Zaire.
Devastated by the 1994 holocaust, the country was still in a daze. The economy was in ruins, and institutions of governance and civic organisation had also been destroyed.
The victorious Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) – which ousted and replaced the genocidal Hutu regime and assumed power as Rwanda's “legitimate” government although without electoral mandate – was mostly Tutsi and therefore not trusted by the Hutu majority who were excluded from the government in terms of meaningful representation besides token leadership.
And the new Tutsi rulers knew that they could not trust most Hutus – who also constitute the vast majority of the population – because there was no guarantee that they disassociated themselves from or turned their backs on the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide.
Distrust of the new Tutsi rulers among the Hutu deepened when Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu and Interior Minister Seth Sendashonga, both Hutus, were forced to resign in August 1995. The remaining Hutu government ministers were also forced out shortly thereafter, leaving the RPF regime, already Tutsi-dominated, ethnically isolated, despite its earlier promises to form an inclusive government.
Such politics of exclusion could guarantee only one thing: perpetual conflict between the two groups. And that is exactly what happened during the following years.
Compounding the problem for the Tutsi-dominated government was the fact that more than 2 million Rwandan Hutu refugees, many of whom – if not the majority – were hostile to the new rulers and other Tutsis in Rwanda, had found refuge just across the border in eastern Zaire and western Tanzania.
Among them were 50,000 soldiers of the former Hutu-dominated Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), routed by the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in July 1994. They were Hutu and most of them were camped in Zaire together with civilian Hutu refugees. And they were in the process of rearming themselves in the refugee camps and getting ready to invade Rwanda.
It was in this context that Rwanda decided to act. Its intervention to protect the Banyamulenge in eastern Zaire was indeed a prime motive. But it was linked to the greater security concerns of Rwanda, important as ethnic solidarity was.
Therefore even if there had been no Tutsis – the Banyamuluenge – who were being persecuted in Zaire, the Tutsi-dominated government of Rwanda would have intervened, anyway, to go after the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide who were hiding among the rest of the Hutu refugees in the refugee camps in eastern Zaire and who were preparing to invade Rwanda and oust the Tutsi from power.
The Rwandan government also intervened in Zaire out of malicious vindictiveness to exact retribution for the extermination of about one million Tutsis during the Rwandan genocide by massacring hundreds of thousands of Hutus, including women and children, who had sought refuge in Zaire.
The distrust and hatred between the two sides was mutual.
Hutu rebels were already launching raids into Rwanda from their bases in Zaire, killing and planting mines and trying to destabilise the Tutsi-dominated government before the Rwandan authorities intervened in Zaire. President Mobutu supplied them with weapons. He also gave them a lot of money. He hated the Tutsi regime in Rwanda which he also derisively dismissed as a puppet of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, his nemesis.
But even if Mobutu had wanted to restrain the rebels, he probably would not have been able to do so. The best he could have done would have been to deny them assistance, money and weapons, thus limiting their capability to attack Rwanda.
The Zairean state over which he presided was no more than an empty shell, crumbling and falling apart, pulverised from within due to neglect during his 30 years in office. Yet Zaire was potentially one of the richest countries in the world, in fact richer than South Africa in terms of mineral wealth. And the national army itself, the Zairian Armed Forces (FAZ), was in disarray and in tatters. It was no more than a rag-tag army of thugs, undisciplined, poorly trained, and underpaid solders who survived on robbery and looting, to pay themselves.
The Hutu rebels in Zaire were a formidable force, not only impossible to dislodge, but constantly replenished with weapons. They were also well-funded by other patrons besides Mobutu.
In addition to the weapons and ammunition they took when they fled Rwanda in 1994 and the supplies they got from President Mobutu, these former members of the Hutu Rwandan national army and the country's political leaders who were also among the refugees in Zaire or lived elsewhere while supporting the rebels had also looted Rwanda's national treasury when they fled their homeland.
They used the money to buy more weapons on the international black market, especially from the People's Republic of China, a country which also had a history of meddling in the Hutu-Tutsi ethnic conflicts since the early 1960s when it first intervened in both Rwanda and Burundi.
Towards the end of 1995 and in early 1996, Hutu incursions into Rwanda had escalated to the point where they posed a serious threat to the nation's security. But the attacks also triggered a brutal retaliatory response from the Tutsi Rwandan national army directed against Hutu civilians in Rwanda, most of whom were poor peasants living in villages across the country.
Such indiscriminate violence and brutal tactics, which amounted to state-sponsored terror, against the Hutu peasants probably the majority of whom were innocent, only aggravated the situation in a country where relations between the two ethnic groups were already bad. It also helped the Hutu rebels recruit even more fighters, driven into the rebels' arms by the terror campaign conducted by the Tutsi army against Hutu civilians.
The decision by many Hutus to join the rebels was understandable. It is only when you are in another man's condition that you may be able to understand his predicament. As Ehud Barak confessed in 1999 before being elected prime minister of Israel, had he been born a Palestinian, he would have joined the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).18
Had the Tutsi been Hutus, they probably would be doing the same thing Hutu rebels are doing today.
However, that does not mean Rwanda under Tutsi leadership never had legitimate security concerns, as Hutu insurgents continued to launch cross-border raids into the country. For several months, Rwanda's ruler Paul Kagame had warned against such attacks from Zaire and complained that the refugee camps in Kivu provided cover for these rebels, enabling them to attack Rwanda with impunity.
He asked the international community to intervene and stop such subversive activities in the camps which had been set up with UN assistance and were under UN supervision. But his plea went unheeded.
Yet he also knew that an invasion of the refugee camps by his army to neutralise the rebels would tarnish Rwanda's image – breaking international law was the least of his concerns as he clearly demonstrated when he invaded Zaire shortly thereafter – by killing innocent civilians without even eliminating the threat from the insurgents hiding among them.
However, this humanitarian concern was also later ignored by Kagame, as was international law about the sanctity of national borders, when he invaded Zaire shortly thereafter.
Yet pursuit of the rebels was justified, the rationale behind it reminiscent of what Tanzania did in 1979 in response to Idi Amin's invasion of her territory. Tanzania fought back and crossed the border in pursuit of the invaders and forced Amin to flee Uganda after the capital Kampla fell to Tanzanian and anti-Amin forces on 10 April. From Tanzania's standpoint, it was a matter of national security.
That was also the case with Rwanda whose leader, Kagame, was also a great admirer of Tanzanian president, Julius Nyerere and his doctrine of justified intervention in other countries – although he never explicitly said so – who authorised the counterattack against Idi Amin's forces when they invaded Tanzania in October 1978 and annexed 710 square miles of her territory in Kagera Region in the northwestern part of the country bordering Uganda.
Of paramount importance was Rwanda's security when the Rwandan army intervened in Congo. As Kagame himself stated in an interview with The Washington Post, 9 July 1997:
“They were insensitive. We told them (the United Nations and world powers) that either they do something about the camps or they face the consequences.”19
It was time to intervene. The Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front Army (RPA) then began training fellow Tutsis, the Banyamulenge, who went to Rwanda for the training, and also established contacts with other groups in Zaire opposed to Mobutu's regime in order to form a united front against one of Africa's most notorious tyrants.
On 18 October 1996, the opposition groups joined forces with the Banyamulenge Tutsis and formed the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (ADFL). The ADFL included four main anti-Mobutu groups, divided by ideology, but united in their opposition against a common enemy. They were:
The People's Democratic Alliance whose French acronym was Alliance Democratique des Peuples (ADP) led by Deogratias Bugera, a Banyamulenge Tutsi; the National Resistance Council for Democracy (Conseil National de Resistance pour la Democratie – CNRD) founded in 1993 by Andre Kisase Ngandu of the National Congolese Movement (Mouvement National Congolais – MNC/Lumumba); the Revolutionary Movement for the Liberation of Zaire (Mouvement Revolutionnaire pour la Liberation du Zaire – MRLZ) led by Masasu Nindaga; and the People's Revolutionary Party (Parti de la Revolution Populaire – PRP) led by Laurent-Desire Kabila who went on to become head of the anti-Mobutu coalition.
In early October 1996, Rwanda learned that the Hutu rebels in Zaire were going to attack the Banyamulenge. Rwandan leaders also learned that the insurgents planned to invade Rwanda with about 100,000 Hutus including 40,000 militiamen.
The threat triggered a joint response from the Rwandan Tutsis and their Congolese kinsmen, the Banyamulenge.
After repeated attacks by Mobutu's soldiers and their local allies (members of tribes including Hutus hostile to the Tutsi), the Banyamulenge fought back. And they won. After routing Mobutu's rag-tag army, they attacked the Hutu refugee camps in eastern Zaire, triggering a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Hutus who returned to Rwanda. Hundreds of thousands of others fled west, deeper into the Congo forest, where at least 300,000 of them perished in addition to the 200,000 killed by Tutsi soldiers. The rest fled to Burundi.
In addition to the Hutu threat from Zaire, Rwanda was also deeply concerned about the situation in Burundi, its twin in the south.
Burundi's neighbours had imposed an economic embargo on the country because of a Tutsi-led military coup by Major Pierre Buyoya who ousted constitutionally chosen Hutu President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya in July 1996.
Earlier, Buyoya also orchestrated the abortive attempt to overthrow the government in October 1993 in which President Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu, was assassinated.
The Tutsi government in Rwanda worried that if the Tutsi lost power to the Hutu in Burundi as a result of economic sanctions and Hutu guerrilla attacks, the Rwandan Hutu rebels would be welcomed by their kinsmen in Burundi who would provide them with a major operational base from which they could launch raids into Rwanda. And if Burundi fell and came under Hutu leadership, it would be only a matter of time before Rwanda did, with the Tutsi government in Kigali collapsing under a combined massive military attack by the Hutu in both countries. In fact, Rwandan and Burundian Hutu rebels have been coordinating their attacks against the Tutsi in both countries for years.
There was also great concern among the Tutsi leaders and their kinsmen in Rwanda that should Burundi fall into Hutu hands, a massacre of genocidal proportions directed against the Tutsi in that country was a very strong possibility, and probably on a scale reminiscent of what happened in Rwanda in 1994, if not worse. To avert such a catastrophe, Rwanda would have to throw its gates wide open to save fellow Tutsis fleeing Burundi before being exterminated.
Some of Burundi's Tutsi leaders, for example former President Jean-Baptiste Bagaza, a hardliner, believed that Rwanda was the only country where fleeing Tutsis could expect to be welcomed, now that it was again under Tutsi leadership after the 1994 genocide.
But it is an assessment not borne out by facts. Rwanda is not the only country where Tutsis could expect to be welcomed if they had to flee Burundi.
Tens of thousands of Tutsi refugees, not just Hutus, from both Rwanda and Burundi, have been welcomed in Tanzania through the years. And tens of thousands of them have acquired Tanzanian citizenship.
They have also been given refuge by other African countries including Uganda. For example, it was from Uganda that the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) launched its first – although abortive – invasion of Rwanda on 1 October 1990, including its last and successful one from 8 April – 4 July 1994.
Kenya also has welcomed Tutsi refugees as much as it has Hutus.
But the mere prospect of a massive Tutsi exodus from Burundi, should the Tutsi be ousted from power in that country, was enough to be a matter of serious concern to the Tutsi leadership in neighbouring Rwanda. Such a huge influx would simply lead to another explosion in Rwanda, with Hutus and Tutsis slaughtering each other while fighting over limited space and scarce resources, not even to mention the total collapse of the nation's already overburdened and fragile economy in such a small, desperately poor and overpopulated country.
Therefore, the survival of the Tutsi government in Burundi was seen by the Rwandan Tutsi leaders as critical to the survival of Rwanda itself as a Tutsi ethnocracy and as a safe haven for its dominant ethnic group.
So, it was not just a question of Tutsi ethnic solidarity with their kinsmen in Burundi which motivated the Rwandan leaders to help them stay in power, although ethnic loyalty to each other has always figured prominently in the calculations of both states. It was also a question of Rwanda's survival as a Tutsi ethnocracy, vital to the survival of the Tutsi as a people, that was at stake, as much as Burundi's survival under Tutsi domination was seen as critical to the survival of Tutsis in both countries bound by common destiny.
The Rwanda leaders felt that the threat to their country's security could be best dealt with by supporting the Banyamulenge in their war against their common enemies: the Hutu operating from Zaire, and President Mobutu and his local allies – different tribes – in the eastern part of the country who were equally hostile to the Tutsi in Zaire, Rwanda, and Burundi.
It is true that Rwanda's support for the Banyamulenge and other anti-Mobutist forces – who collectively constituted the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire – led to the ouster of Mobutu. But it did not lead to the establishment of a friendly regime in Kinshasa – Kabila turned out to be only a temporary ally of convenience – or neutralise the threat to Rwanda's or Burundi's security coming from the Hutu rebels based in Congo.
Security of the two countries can be guaranteed only when the dominant Tutsi minority – in control of both Rwanda and Burundi – agree to share power with the Hutu majority on the basis of a mutually acceptable compromise. And that includes proportional representation in the government and other areas of national life where power sharing is critical to the survival, wellbeing and prosperity of both groups.
Prospects for Peace
Prospects for a lasting peace in the Great Lakes region are bleak, to say the least. And that will continue to be the case as long as the leaders of Rwanda, Burundi and Congo remain adamantly opposed to devolution of power; and as long as different tribes continue to fight each other and dominate one another.
The twentieth century came to an end without any of the conflicts – in Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, and even in less troubled Uganda – being resolved.
Rwanda and Burundi remained mired in escalating ethnic warfare, with the Hutu vowing to overthrow the Tutsi, and the Tutsi refusing to share power with the Hutu except on their own terms.
Peace in Congo remained elusive even after a peace agreement was signed by all the countries and rebel groups involved in that multinational conflict.
And in Uganda, the government continued to fight its own rebels.
And despite professions to the contrary, Rwanda and Burundi continued to be ruled by quasi-military, not civilian, governments, as the twentieth-first century began; so did the Democratic Republic of Congo whose name is a misnomer in a country without democracy. And all three countries remained deeply divided along ethnic lines.
It is these ethnic rivalries, among other reasons, which African soldiers have always used to justify military coups, claiming that they are trying to inculcate a truly national ethos among the people, while at the same time they continue to maintain the status quo of tribal and regional loyalties. And it is the same ethnic hostilities which have helped to ignite and fuel civil wars in the Great Lakes region through the years in the struggle for power and resources among different groups.
Seizure of power by the military has proved to be the fastest and probably most effective means to achieve this goal, of tribal supremacy, but with dire consequences for the countries involved as the history of military rule in Africa tragically demonstrates.
Military rule has led to institutionalised ethnocracy: for example, by the Kabye in Togo where President Gnassingbe Eyadema, Africa's longest-ruling autocrat in power since 1967, virtually excluded the country's largest ethnic group, the Ewe, and members of other tribes from power and filled the army with members of his tribe – more than two-thirds of the soldiers and army officers were Kabye – from northern Togo; by the Amhara in Ethiopia where Mengistu Haile Mariam seized power in 1977, perpetuating Amharic rule which had gone on for years even before him; by the Tutsi in both Rwanda and Burundi; and by the Hutu in Rwanda since independence in 1962 until they were ousted from power following the 1994 genocide.
Military rule has also led to entrenchment of dictatorship and institutionalisation of corruption as a national virtue, as has been the case under civilian leadership in most African countries. There are many case studies which document this abuse of power across the continent,20 as the history of military and civilian rule in Africa clearly shows.
Rwanda and Burundi are some of the best case studies of military and civilian dictatorship in Africa whose tyranny plunged the two countries into full-scale civil wars. They also have been the scene of some of the bloodiest conflicts on the continent in the post-colonial period.
We are going to look at both in much more detail starting with Burundi.