IN THE FALL OF 1996, I was called to active duty and sent to Uganda to work with the defense attaché there. There was a war across the border in Zaire in which Rwandan troops fighting alongside their Zairian ethnic brethren (the Banyamulenge) were battling the Zairian Army (known as Les Forces Armées Zairoises—the FAZ) and Rwandan Hutus living in Zairian refugee camps.
Many of the Hutus lived in a place called Mugunga, a few kilometers west of the border town, Goma. The thing is, the people on the Mugunga plain weren’t all refugees. I tried to think of them as refugees, but it was difficult to do so. They had fled from Rwanda, at a rate of about ten to twelve thousand a day, and crossed the border into Zaire in mid-July 1994 after the Rwandan Patriotic Front rebels had finally captured Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, and put a stop to the genocide.
They arrived with pots and jerry cans and with what food they could carry. Women with infants strapped onto their backs, older children walking barefoot and carrying whatever they could lift, a lucky few leading a goat or holding a chicken. Some came with their pangas, the machetes used to kill eight hundred thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutus in the hundred days after April 6 when President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down. They had committed genocide. They weren’t refugees; they were génocidaires.
No one knows who shot down Habyarimana’s plane; well, someone certainly knows, but I don’t. You could make a plausible case for either side pulling the trigger. But either way, within hours after Habyarimana died, the Hutu Power militias had erected barricades and were roaming the streets killing Tutsi.
They had been well prepared by their political leadership. “The Tutsi are coming back to steal your land,” the Hutu Power radio, Radio Libre des Milles Collines, announced. “Make lists of the nasty Tutsi,” the Hutu Power leaders urged. “We are the Interahamwe, the people who struggle together.” Soon the radio hissed, “Kill the inyenzi.” To the Interahamwe, the Tutsi weren’t even people, they were inyenzi, cockroaches, vermin to be exterminated.
Many of the Hutu women waited at home while their sons and husbands went out day after day to the barricades or around the towns and villages, then came home in the evening after having killed innocent Tutsi men, women, and children. When they started running out of Tutsi to kill, they killed other Hutus—someone wrote that at that point the Hutus without shoes were killing the Hutus who had shoes.
Often men and boys were killed while women and girls were raped, then told, “Now you will give birth to a Hutu baby.” Bullets were expensive, but five thousand Francs Rwandaises could buy a bullet to the head instead of a machete. When the killers were too tired to kill, they would cut the Achilles’ tendons of their Tutsi victims to preclude any escape, then return after a rest and a meal to finish them off.
The killing went on for a hundred days. The UN did not intervene. The European powers did not intervene. America did not intervene. In Gitarama and Ruhengeri, in Cyangugu and Butare, in the capital city of Kigali and in villages almost too small to have a name, Hutu killed Tutsi; Rwandan killed Rwandan. By the time the genocide was over, eight hundred thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutu were dead at the hands of the Interahamwe. It was the most efficient mass killing in history. Nearly a million people murdered in a hundred days. Not even Hitler managed that.
The 1994 genocide wasn’t the first such outbreak of violence between the Rwanda Hutu and Tutsi. In 1959, just before the country’s independence, Hutus killed Tutsi. One hundred and fifty thousand Tutsi were killed, and half a million were driven out of the country into refugee camps in Uganda, Tanganyika (now called Tanzania),and Zaire. In Uganda, many young Tutsi refugees became part of Yoweri Museveni’s rebellions against Idi Amin and Milton Obote. When Museveni took power in 1986, his military chiefs of operations and intelligence were Rwandan Tutsis from the camps. Four years later they led the Rwandan Patriotic Front across the border into Rwanda in an attempt to overthrow the Hutu government. They fought the French-supported army, the Forces Armées Rwandaises—the FAR, to a stalemate, and were implementing a negotiated powersharing agreement when Habyarimana’s plane was shot down and the genocide ensued.
Since no one else was coming, the Rwanda Patriotic Front had to fight the Rwandan army and the Interahamwe alone. As the fighting ended, the RPF drove the Interahamwe and their families out of Rwanda into Zaire and Tanzania. The French finally showed up, authorized by the UN to create Opération Turquoise, and set up a safe area for the exodus of Hutu into Zaire. Bodies of genocide victims lined the roads and the fields, bloated in the equatorial sun. The Interahamwe dumped thousands of victims into the Kagera River at Rusumo Falls, blocking the river just as tens of thousands of Hutu were crossing the bridges over the falls into Tanzania. Eight hundred thousand killed; over one million fleeing.
But the killing didn’t stop once the Interahamwe had left Rwanda. Zairian strongman Mobutu Sese Seko protected them and, despite an arms embargo and the fact that they were granted refugee status (which precludes being armed), weapons and munitions arrived. Many of the men in the camps had taken part in the genocide. Many of them continued to take part in violent attacks on Zairian Tutsi in the hills west of Lake Kivu, and even back into Rwanda to kill more Tutsi there. The Rwandans and their ethnic brethren the Banyamulenge began to fight back, moving north from Uvira, driving the army and the refugees from the camps ahead of them. That was in the summer of 1996. In September, the UN brokered a ceasefire.
But in October, the cease-fire collapsed when Goma was hit with mortar fire. The rounds came from the west, from Mugunga, from the refugee camps. Rebel alliance forces, mostly Zairian Banyamulenge and Rwandan Tutsi, moved up the main road from Goma toward Mugunga. Chaos ensued. Incredible brutality was commonplace as the Banyamulenge tried to move up the road but collided with hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees. The Interahamwe pushed civilians forward to act as a shield to cover their escape. Thousands of civilians were killed on the road in the first hours. The war was back on.
When the cease-fire was first broken, rebel leader Laurent Kabila had closed the roads between Goma and Mugunga to all non-military traffic. Things quickly got desperate. There were too many people and not enough food or water or sanitation. Aid workers reported cholera. Some said that by keeping aid from reaching the refugees the rebel leader, Laurent Kabila, and his Rwandan backers were trying to cause “genocide by starvation.” Was Kabila committing genocide by starvation by blocking food aid to the génocidaires? Such are the politics of aid.
The war in Zaire, later re-named the Democratic Republic of the Congo, really began in Rwanda in 1990 when the Rwandan Patriotic Front rebels crossed the border from Uganda in an attempt to overthrow the Hutu-led regime. The genocide in Rwanda in 1994 is a part of it. The Banyamulenge War is part of it. As this book goes to press in early 2014, the war still continues, with millions of people dead. Most of my work in Central Africa between 1996 and 2002 focused on this war and these people.