UNSOUND OF BODY—his prostate cancer spreading—in his final days as President of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Seko was incontinent. Trophy seekers who scoured the military camp where he played out his endgame in Kinshasa found little of greater interest than the Big Man’s diapers. It was said that Mobutu’s mental grip was also rather weak. Several people who boasted impeccable access to the gossip of the old court assured me that by the end he was barking mad—pharmaceutically and characterologically unmoored, sometimes maundering and sometimes vivid with rage—and steadfast only in his delusion that he was on the brink of battering Laurent Kabila’s rebel Alliance, which had in fact conquered his immense land almost to his doorstep in just seven months.
And yet, Mobutu’s last completed act as President suggested that, at least in broad terms, he grasped what was happening. On May 11, 1997, he ordered that the remains of Rwanda’s assassinated Hutu Power President, Juvénal Habyarimana, be exhumed from their mausoleum on his estate at Gbadolite and brought to Kinshasa aboard a transport plane. Mobutu was said to fear that Kabila’s cohort might rip Habyarimana from his rest and make mischief with him, and he wanted the Rwandan disposed of. Through four days and four nights, the dead President of Rwanda
remained in the plane, on the tarmac at Kinshasa, while the dying President of Zaire made his satraps scurry, one last time, to figure out what to do with the ghoulish cargo. The verdict was cremation, not a normal Congolese rite. Improvising a little over the body of a man who had been a practicing Catholic, Mobutu’s fixers impressed a Hindu priest into service, and Habyarimana went up in smoke. The next morning, Mobutu, too, had flown away—to Togo, then Morocco, where he soon died—and within twenty-four hours of his departure the first soldiers of the RPA marched into the capital of Zaire at the head of Kabila’s Alliance.
IN FRETTING OVER Habyarimana’s last rites, Mobutu had really staged a funeral for a generation of African leadership of which he—the Dinosaur, as he had long been known—was the paragon: the client dictator of Cold War neocolonialism, monomaniacal, perfectly corrupt, and absolutely ruinous to his nation. Six months earlier, when the Rwandan-backed rebel Alliance first captured Goma, I had driven directly to Mobutu’s lakeside palace at the edge of town. The gates stood open and unguarded. The Zairean flag lay in a lump in the driveway. Munitions abandoned by Mobutu’s Special Presidential Division littered the grounds—heaps of assault rifles and cases marked “TNT” packed with sixty-millimeter mortar rounds. Five mint black Mercedes sedans, a shiny Land Rover, and two ambulances were parked by the garage. Inside, the house was a garish assemblage of mirrored ceilings, malachite-and-pearl-inlaid furniture, chandeliers, giant televisions, and elaborate hi-fis. Upstairs, the twin master bathrooms were equipped with jacuzzis.
Goma was largely a shantytown. Its poverty was extreme. One day I stopped by the house of an acquaintance who had gone away, leaving his dogs. Their snouts stuck out beneath the locked gate. I was feeding them some United Nations high-protein biscuits when three men came around the corner and asked for some, too. I held out the box to the first man, who was clad in rags, and
said, “Take a few.” His hands shot out, and I felt the box fly from my grip as if it were spring-loaded. The man’s companions immediately pounced on him, tussling, cramming biscuits into their mouths, snatching biscuits out of one another’s mouths, and along what had seemed a deserted street people came running to join the fray.
Mobutu’s Jacuzzis were lined with bath oils and perfumes in bottles of Alice in Wonderland magnitude; they must have held about a gallon apiece. Most were quite full. But one appeared to have enjoyed regular use: a vat of Chanel’s Egoïste.
He bathed in the stuff.
That was Zaire, and in the spirit of Louis XTV’s “L’état c’est moi,” Mobutu was fond of boasting, “There was no Zaire before me, and there will be no Zaire after me.” In the event, Kabila—who used to call Zaire “le Nowhere”—made Mobutu’s word good; on May 17, 1997, he declared himself President, and restored to the country the name Mobutu had scrapped: the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The speed with which he had swept to victory owed much to the fact that, as a rule, the Zairean army had preferred to flee than to fight, raping and looting its way through town after town ahead of the rebel advance. The only forces that truly made a stand for Mobutu were tens of thousands of fugitive fighters of Rwanda’s Hutu Power and a couple of dozen French-recruited Serbian mercenaries.
Kabila, too, had required foreign help to accomplish his march so efficiently, and not only from Rwanda. Behind his Alliance there had formed a pan-African alliance representing the political or military enthusiasm of at least ten governments across the continent. After the initial rebel victories in North and South Kivu, as Congolese recruits flocked to Kabila’s cause, support also poured in from neighboring states—Angola, Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia—and from as far afield as Eritrea, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.
Had the war in the Congo happened in Europe, it would
probably have been called a world war, and to Africans the world was at stake. For this was the war about the Rwandan genocide. As Uganda’s President Museveni told me shortly after Kabila was sworn in: “The big mistake of Mobutu was to involve himself in Rwanda. So it’s really Mobutu who initiated the program of his own removal. Had he not involved himself in Rwanda, I think he could have stayed, just like that, as he had been doing for the last thirty-two years—just do nothing to develop Zaire, but stay in what they call power, by controlling the radio station, and so on.”
Mobutu had certainly been warned, and not only by those who dethroned him. In the study of his abandoned palace in Goma, I found a long memorandum about the Rwanda conflict addressed to Mobutu by one of his counselors. From its contents it appeared to have been written in 1991, not long after the RPF first invaded Rwanda, at a time when Mobutu was presiding over the negotiation of a series of short-lived cease-fires. The memo described Habyarimana’s court as “composed for the most part of intransigent extremists and fanatics,” and predicted that the RPF rebels would “in one manner or another realize their final objective, which is to take power in Rwanda.” The memo urged Mobutu to serve as “a moral umbrella” and “the Spiritual Father of the negotiation process” without alienating the RPF or Uganda’s President Museveni, and above all to protect the “primordial interests of Zaire” regardless of who should prevail in Rwanda.
Standing there—as a looter, really—in Mobutu’s “liberated” study, reading this banal document that had been rendered remarkable only by the enormity of intervening events, I was struck again to think how completely the world was changed by the genocide in Rwanda. It wasn’t necessarily a nicer or a better world, just a few years and a million deaths ago, before the genocide. But in central Africa it was a world in which the very worst was still unknown.
In 1994, during the height of the extermination campaign in
Rwanda, as Paris airlifted arms to Mobutu’s intermediaries in eastern Zaire for direct transfer across the border to the génocidaires, France’s President François Mitterrand said—as the newspaper Le Figaro later reported it—“In such countries, genocide is not too important.” By their actions and inactions, at the time and in the years that followed, the rest of the major powers indicated that they agreed. Evidently, it did not occur to them that such a country as Rwanda can refuse to accept the insignificance of its annihilation; nor had anybody imagined that other Africans could take Rwanda’s peril seriously enough to act.
The memory of the genocide, combined with Mobutu’s sponsorship of its full-scale renewal, had “global repercussions, wider than Rwanda,” Museveni told me, “and here in Africa we were determined to resist it.” Just as Mobutu was what Museveni called an “agent” of his Western puppeteers, so the Rwandan génocidaires, who had once again threatened to reduce the entire region to blood, owed their sustenance to the mindless dispensation of Western charity. The West might later wring its hands over the criminal irresponsibility of its policies, but the nebulosity known as the international community is ultimately accountable to nobody. Time and again in central Africa, false promises of international protection were followed by the swift abandonment of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the face of extreme violence. Against such reckless impunity, the Congolese rebellion offered Africa the opportunity to unite against its greatest homegrown political evil and to supplant the West as the arbiter of its own political destiny.
I OFTEN FOUND it helpful to think of central Africa in the mid-1990s as comparable to late medieval Europe—plagued by serial wars of tribe and religion, corrupt despots, predatory elites and a superstitious peasantry, festering with disease, stagnating in poverty, and laden with promise. Of course, a key process that
had helped European peoples pull toward greater prosperity and saner governance was colonialism, which allowed for the exporting of their aggressions and the importing of wealth. Ex-colonies don’t enjoy such opportunities as they tumble into the family of modern nation-states; whatever forms of government they come up with, in their struggles to build sustaining political traditions, are likely to be transitional.
Long before Rwanda became a case study in international negligence, Museveni once said, “A little neglect would not be so bad. The more orphaned we are, the better for Africa. We will have to rely on ourselves.” And the extent to which the Congolese revolution took the outside world by surprise exposed a stubborn misconception that had dominated Western attitudes toward post-Cold War Africa—that Africans generate humanitarian catastrophes but don’t really make meaningful politics.
Appeasement had been the wrong policy toward Nazi Germany, and so it had been in Goma, too. Yet the very vacuum of responsible international engagement at Goma had created an unprecedented need and opportunity for Africans to fix their own problems. Although Kabila’s foreign backers were openly skeptical about his capacities to serve as more than a temporary leader of the Congo—and even in that role he would quickly disappointment them—the Alliance’s swift sweep to victory inspired Uganda’s President Museveni, speaking at Kabila’s inauguration, to proclaim that the war had “liberated not only the Congo but also all of Africa.”
As the political godfather of the new central African leadership, Museveni was listened to closely. He called for national and international solidarity, and for economic order and physical security as the basis for political development. Hearing him, one could almost forget that central Africa’s prospects remained terribly bleak. What was left of much of the region looked a lot like this:
The infrastructure of the country, especially the roads, had almost totally collapsed. Most of the country was inaccessible … There was a critical shortage of trucks … Utilities, such as water and power supply, had severely deteriorated … Manufacturing plants were either closed or operating at very low rates … There was a total lack of basic consumer goods such as sugar, soap, and paraffin. Goods were being smuggled into and out of the country, and sold on the parallel (“black”) market. The economy had become completely informal and speculative.
This passage from Museveni’s autobiography described Uganda in 1986, when he installed himself as President after more than a decade of armed struggle. When I told him I thought I was reading about the Congo—or, for that matter, much of Rwanda after 1994—he said, “Same situation, exactly.”
Uganda’s annual economic growth in the early 1990s averaged close to five percent, and in 1996 it exceeded eight percent. Decent roads laced the country. There were good state schools, improved medical care, an independent judiciary, a rather feisty parliament, a boisterous and often contrarian press, and a small but growing middle class. Insecurity remained, especially in the rebellion-plagued north and west of the country. But Uganda, a decade after the ravages of Idi Amin and Obote, set a standard of promise that had to make anyone who called the Congo or Rwanda “impossible” or “hopeless” think again.
MUSEVENI WAS A heavy-handed manager, technocratic, pragmatic, accustomed to having things very nearly his way. He was a man of enormous energy, not only as a politician but also as a cattle breeder, and he possessed a frontiersman’s inventiveness. On the morning that I visited him, the state-owned New Vision newspaper announced: “Yoweri Museveni has disclosed that a local
grass species he recently introduced to Egyptian researchers has been processed into a highly effective toothpaste which has been called Nile Toothpaste.”
The item about the toothpaste unfolded as a classic Musevenian parable of African self-reliance. As a child in the bush, Museveni had learned to chew a grass called muteete and found that it left his teeth perfectly clean and smooth. Then, at a British colonial secondary school, he was introduced to Colgate, to cure him of his bumpkin ways. “But,” he said, “when you use this Colgate and you pass the tongue over your teeth you feel these ‘roadblocks.’” The white man’s toothpaste was inferior. As President, he remembered the muteete, and modern science confirmed his memory. The grass, he said, possessed “the best toothpaste agents ever found.” Nile Toothpaste would soon be on the market, and Uganda would collect royalties. Museveni urged his compatriots to pursue similarly market-oriented research. He thought banana juice might make a hit in the soft-drink industry. He noted that Ugandan flower exports to Europe were soaring, and exporters elsewhere were running scared. The message was clear: seek the value in a devalued Africa; we are on a roll.
Uganda’s capital, Kampala, was just an hour’s flight north of Kigali, near the shore of Lake Victoria, yet it seemed another world entirely: a boom town with an air of promise. Of course, it was easy to find people who complained about the government, but the problem that animated them most—whether the regime was moving toward becoming a liberal democracy too slowly, too quickly, or not at all—was the sort of problem that Rwandans, whose chief preoccupation was their physical security, could only yearn to discuss without fear.
Museveni received me in a pavilion on the immaculate grounds of State House, at the end of Kampala’s Victoria Avenue. He sat behind a desk on a plastic lawn chair, wearing an untucked brown plaid short-sleeved shirt, corduroys, and sandals. Tea was served. On a shelf beneath his desk were a book on the Israeli war
in Sinai, the Washington journalist Bob Woodward’s book The Choice, about Bill Clinton’s election campaign, and a volume called Selected Readings on the Uses of Palm Oil. Museveni appeared tired; he did not try to hide his need to yawn. Even in the official portrait photographs that hung in most shops and offices around the capital, his round face and nearly shaved pate had an uncharismatic, everyman look that was part of his appeal. His speech, like his writing, was lucid, blunt, and low on bombast.
Toward the end of the war in the Congo, when Kabila’s victory appeared inevitable, The New York Times ran an editorial headed “Tyranny or Democracy in Zaire?”—as if those were the only two political possibilities, and whatever was not one must be the other. Museveni, like many of his contemporaries among the leaders of what might be called post-postcolonial Africa, sought a middle ground on which to build the foundations for a sustainable democratic order. Because he refused to allow multiparty politics in Uganda, many Western pundits were inclined to join with his Ugandan critics in withholding admiration for his successes. But he argued that until corruption was brought under control, until a middle class with strong political and economic interests developed, and until there was a coherent national public debate, political parties were bound to devolve into tribal factions or financial rackets, and to remain an affair of elites struggling for power, if not a cause of actual civil war.
Museveni called his regime a “no-party democracy,” based on “movement politics,” and he explained that parties are “uniideological,” whereas a movement like his National Resistance Movement or the Rwandese Patriotic Front is “multi-ideological,” open to a polyphony of sensibilities and interests. “Socialists are in our movement, capitalists are in our movement, feudalists—like the kings here in Uganda—are members of our movement,” he said. The movement was officially open to everyone, and “anybody who wants” could stand for election. Although Museveni, like most African leaders of his generation, was often described as a
former Marxist guerrilla, he was a staunch promoter of free enterprise, and he had come to favor the formation of political groupings along class lines, in order to produce “horizontal polarization,” as opposed to the “vertical polarization” of tribalism or regionalism. “That’s why we say, in the short run, let political competition not be based on groups, let it be based on individuals,” he told me, adding, “We are not likely to have healthy groups. We are likely to have unhealthy groups. So why take this risk?”
Museveni’s complaint was with what might be called cosmetic democracy, in which elections held for elections’ sake at the behest of “donor governments” sustain feeble or corrupt powers in politically damaged societies. “If I have got a heart problem and I try to appear healthy, then I will just die,” Museveni told me. We were speaking of the way that the West, having won the Cold War and lost its simple template for distinguishing bad guys from good guys around the world, had found a new political religion in promoting multiparty elections (at least in economically dependent countries where Chinese is not widely spoken). Museveni described this policy as “not only meddling but meddling on the basis of ignorance and, of course, some arrogance also.” He said, “These people seem to say that the developed parts of the world and the undeveloped parts of the world can all be managed uniformly. Politically this is their line, and I think this is really rubbish—to be charitable. It’s not possible to manage radically different societies exactly in a uniform way. Yes, there are some essentials which should be common, like universal suffrage, one person one vote, by secret ballot, a free press, separation of powers. These should be common factors, but not the exact form. The form should be according to situations.”
IT ANNOYED MUSEVENI and Kagame equally that Rwanda’s RPF-led government was widely viewed as a puppet regime of Uganda’s, and that Kabila had in turn been tagged by opponents
as a pawn of “Rwando-Ugandan” imperialism. “They were puppets of the French,” Museveni said of his Rwandan and Congolese critics, “so they think that everybody else is looking for puppets or masters.” He considered it obvious that other countries in the region should look to Uganda’s example. “When Martin Luther published his criticism of the papists, it spread because it struck a chord in different places,” he said. “And when the French Revolution happened there were already local republican elements in different European countries. So when there were changes in Uganda against the dictatorship of Idi Amin—yes, there was some attraction to those ideas.”
That Museveni should present himself in the light of early modern European history was a measure of his determined optimism. He was a student of how the great democracies emerged from political turmoil, and he recognized that it did not happen quickly, or elegantly, or without staggering setbacks and agonizing contradictions along the way. I often heard it said, even by Museveni’s admirers, that he was, alas, no Jeffersonian democrat. But the traditions and particular circumstances which produced Jefferson are unlikely to be found afresh in Africa, and it’s doubtful that those who yearn for such a man again would be prepared to tolerate the fact that Jefferson’s leisure to think and write as grandly as he did was financed in large measure by his unrepentant ownership of slaves.
Still, in addition to the stories of Luther and the French Revolution, Museveni had no doubt also read about the American Revolution, which required eight years of fighting, four more years to get the Constitution ratified, and another two years before elections were held—a total of thirteen years after the Declaration of Independence proclaimed, with “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” not only the causes of the anticolonial struggle but also the divine, and universal, legitimacy of waging such struggles by force of arms. The story would appeal to Museveni. The Yankee
general who had led the Revolutionary army in from the bush won America’s first two presidential elections.
Museveni got himself elected for the first time in 1996, a decade after taking power, and could run for another five-year term in 2001. But until Uganda experienced a smooth transfer of power to an elected successor, “no-party democracy” could not be said to have met the ultimate test of its institutions. In the meantime, nearly everything depended on the goodwill and the capacities of the leader—but not, Museveni assured me, on the wishes of the international community. The Euro-American architects of the old postcolonial order were welcome to work with Africa, he said, but on Africa’s terms, as joint-venture investors both of capital and of technical expertise. “I really don’t think the Europeans have the capacity to impose their will again. I don’t think that America or anybody will dominate Africa anymore,” he told me. “They may cause destabilization, but they cannot reverse the situation if the indigenous forces are organized. By the sheer force of Africa we shall be independent of all foreign manipulation.”
A FEW WEEKS after Mobutu’s abdication, Bill Richardson, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, flew to the Congo to see President Kabila. His presence, he told me, reflected a “renewed U.S. interest in Africa,” sparked by the awareness that the countries that had formed the alliance behind Kabila’s Alliance constituted a “regional strategic and economic power bloc, through shared experience,” that “needs to be dealt with seriously.” He spoke of the attraction of market economies, and “a lot of improvement” in social and political conditions, and he expressed admiration for both Kagame and Museveni.
But Richardson had come to the Congo not only to offer American help but also to threaten to withhold it. Since midway through the war, international aid workers, human rights activists, and journalists in the eastern and northern Congo had been reporting that Rwandan Hutus who fled into the jungle after the
breakup of the UN border camps were being killed, piecemeal and in massacres, by Kabila’s forces. The UN wanted to send a human rights investigation team, and Kabila was stonewalling. Richardson’s message was: Let the team come, or face international isolation and forget about the foreign aid you desperately need.
Kabila’s people were understandably prickly about the question of massacres. On the one hand, they denied the charges; on the other hand, they insisted that any killings of Hutus had to be placed in the proper context. A great many Rwandans from the camps who had remained in the Congo were not only fugitive génocidaires but active-duty fighters for Mobutu. Even during the pitch of battle, these combatants had, as always, kept themselves surrounded by their families and followers—women, children, and the elderly, whom they used as a human shield and who suffered accordingly. What’s more, the Hutu Power fighters themselves were reported to have committed massacres of Congolese villagers and of their own cohorts as they retreated westward. (I saw the aftermath of such a massacre at the Mugunga camp during the mass return in November of 1996: two dozen women, girls, and babies, chopped to death and left to rot in the middle of the camp—“because they came from another camp, looking for food,” according to a Mugunga resident, who seemed to think such killing unremarkable.)
At times, the UNHCR had managed to establish temporary camps for tens of thousands of Rwandan Hutus as they fled westward. One of the largest was at the village of Tingi-Tingi, in the eastern Congo. On television, it looked like any camp for war-dispossessed refugees, but offscreen it was also a major Hutu Power military installation. Disgusted aid workers and bush pilots later told me that the ex-FAR and interahamwe maintained a regime of terror in the camp, killing noncombatants seemingly at random. The same forces controlled the airfield, where, mingled in among genuine aid agency flights, planes plastered with the
logos of aid organizations regularly landed arms and took off carrying prominent génocidaires to Nairobi. Of course, much of the aid that did get through was appropriated and consumed by Hutu Power forces.
In mid-April of 1997, the front page of The New York Times carried an unusually ambivalent article about the refugee crisis in the Congo, which described a camp for Rwandan Hutus near the city of Kisangani: “While thousands of small children in the camps have distended bellies and limbs like twigs and seem near death by starvation, there are also a considerable number of strapping young men who look fit and healthy and well-fed.”
“When we get food, I eat first,” a “husky thirty-five-year-old father of three starving children” told the Times, and “aid workers said his situation was not uncommon.”
It was strange to read such a story, and at the same time to hear that Emma Bonino, the European Union’s Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, was accusing Kabila’s troops of committing genocide against the refugees, in part by obstructing “humanitarian access.” Even as she spoke, the UN was flying daily planeloads of Rwandan Hutus—many of them fit young men—to Kigali, for repatriation and resettlement, in a program sanctioned by Rwandan and Alliance officials. At least fifty thousand former camp residents were brought back to Rwanda in this fashion, while as many made their way over the borders to areas of Angola held by Mobutist-backed rebels, to the Central African Republic, and to the other Congo—the Republic of the Congo—where they were once again accommodated in camps, which were once again heavily militarized.
On the other hand, many Rwandan Hutus were clearly disappearing in the Congo, and many of the killings that were being attributed to Kabila’s backers appeared to have occurred in noncombat situations. Several appalling death-squad-style massacres were reported in detail. These killings dominated the international
coverage of the Congo war and its aftermath, and the blame was directed primarily at Tutsi troops from the Congo and from Rwanda. Not long after the Times article about killer refugees at Kisangani appeared, the camp it was reported from was attacked and disbanded by a mixture of Alliance forces and local Zaireans. Stories circulated that thousands of its residents had been massacred—but nobody could be sure exactly what had happened because Kabila’s forces barred access to investigators.
AMBASSADOR RICHARDSON EMERGED from his meeting with good news: Kabila had promised to give the UN human rights probe unlimited access. In high spirits, Richardson flew on to visit a camp for Rwandan Hutus at Kisangani, not far from where some of the largest refugee massacres were reported to have occurred. The people in the camp were mostly women and children who had been straggling through the jungle for months, and they were in bad shape, some barely alive—crumpled skin clinging to skeletons. After a leisurely tour, Richardson stood near the camp gate, surrounded by camp residents, and read a prepared statement, which described the “humanitarian crisis in the Congo” as “a tragedy that dates back to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.” What’s more, he said:
The failure of the international community to respond adequately to both the genocide and the subsequent mixing of genocidal killers with the legitimate refugee population in the former eastern Zaire only served to prolong the crisis. This climate of impunity was further exacerbated by ethnic cleansing and conflict in the [North Kivu] region—and also by former President Mobutu’s policies of allowing these genocidal forces to operate, recruit and resupply on his territory. Tragically, this chapter is not yet closed. Reports of widespread killings continue. All of
us, the new government of the Democratic Republic of Congo, its neighbors and the international community, have the responsibility to stop the killing of innocent civilians. We must also protect legitimate refugees, continue repatriation efforts and work to bring the genocidal killers to justice.
This was the highest-level official acknowledgment of reality and responsibility by an international statesman to date, and it was delivered before reporters of The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and several international television, radio, and wire services. Yet not one of those papers reported it. General Kagame later told me that he’d seen a typescript of the statement and wondered if it was a hoax. When I assured him that Richardson had really said those words, he called it an “important admission” and “something great in the whole situation,” adding, “Maybe somebody should slip it into the Internet or something.”
A few weeks after Richardson’s visit, the UN massacre investigation team arrived in Kinshasa, right on schedule. But it was never able to go about its business. Kabila threw up one hurdle after another, and even after Secretary-General Kofi Annan agreed to find a new team leader and to expand the investigation’s scope to cover not only the eight months of the Congo war but the preceding four years—since Rwanda’s génocidaires first began filling the eastern Congo with mass graves—Kabila continued to stonewall. A great many African heads of state closed ranks behind him. Their feeling was that after sitting out the Rwandan genocide, the so-called international community had little credibility as moral referees in the war against the génocidaires.
Such was the mood on much of the continent in the early summer of 1997. In July, Kenya’s aging strongman, Daniel arap Moi, who had broken off relations with Rwanda after the genocide, received General Kagame for a state visit. Two days later, Kenya arrested and turned over to the UN tribunal at Arusha seven of
the most-wanted masterminds of the genocide. Moi denounced these former friends of his as “foreign spies and criminals,” and arrests continued. Among those caught were General Gratien Kabiligi of the ex-FAR, who had until recently commanded the Hutu Power forces in the Congo; Georges Ruggiu, the Belgian broadcaster for the genocidal radio RTLM; and Hassan Ngeze, who had published the Hutu Ten Commandments and forecast President Habyarimana’s death in the newspaper Kangura.
ONCE, WHEN WE were talking about the genocide and the world’s response to it, General Kagame said, “Some people even think we should not be affected. They think we are like animals, when you’ve lost some family, you can be consoled, given some bread and tea—and forget about it.” He chuckled. “Sometimes I think this is contempt for us. I used to quarrel with these Europeans who used to come, giving us sodas, telling us, ‘You should not do this, you should do this, you don’t do this, do this.’ I said, ‘Don’t you have feelings?’ These feelings have affected people.” Kagame aimed a finger at his skinny body and said, “Maybe that’s why I don’t put on a lot of weight—these thoughts keep consuming me.”
In early June of 1997, just after Richardson’s visit to the Congo, I went to Kigali for a day to see Kagame, and ask him about the reported massacres of Rwandan Hutus in the Congo. “I think there is a bit of exaggeration,” he said, “in terms of systematic extermination, systematic killings of refugees, or even possible involvement of high authorities of different countries.” Then he added, “But let’s go back a little bit, if people are not to be hypocrites … . First of all, again, I want to bring out the involvement of some countries in Europe. Remember the Zone Turquoise?”
Kagame spent more than an hour describing the resurgence of Hutu Power after the RPF’s victory in 1994, starting with the arrival of French forces during the last weeks of the genocide, and running through the activities of the génocidaires in the camps—
the rearming, the training, the alliance with Mobutu, the killings and expulsions in North Kivu, the constant attacks against Rwanda, and the campaign to eradicate the Banyamulenge Tutsis from South Kivu. He rattled off the names of towns in the Congo where major battles had been joined during the Alliance’s march to Kinshasa, and described the massive troop involvements of Hutu Power forces. “It becomes extremely difficult for me to imagine that the whole world is so naive as not to see that this was a real problem,” he said. He could only conclude, he added, that “there was some high-level conspiracy” in the international community to protect the killers and, perhaps, to assist them toward an ultimate victory.
But why would any of the major powers have pursued such an insane policy? “To fight off their guilt after the genocide,” Kagame said. “There is a great amount of guilt.”
This was the same conversation in which, at the outset, Kagame told me that Rwanda had had no troops in the Congo, as he had been telling everyone for eight months, and in which he wound up telling me that in fact he had initiated the whole campaign, and his troops had been there all along. The total reversal surprised me more than the information, and I was left to wonder why one of the shrewdest political and military strategists of our times was taking credit for the war at just the moment when he was being heaped with blame for war crimes.
Reviewing the tapes of our conversation, I realized that Kagame’s reasons were clear. He was not denying that many Rwandan Hutus had been killed in the Congo; he told me that when revenge was the motive, such killings should be punished. But he considered the génocidaires responsible for the deaths of those they traveled with. “These are not genuine refugees,” he said. “They’re simply fugitives, people running away from justice after killing people in Rwanda—after killing.” And they were still killing.
The brief period of calm in Rwanda that followed the mass
return from the UN camps at the end of 1996 had quickly broken down, and since February the systematic killing of Tutsis had been steadily on the increase. Much of the northwest was in a state of low-level war. The eastern Congo, too, remained in turmoil, and sizable concentrations of Hutu fighters who had refused every chance for repatriation continued to operate across the area. Kagame was especially concerned about the tens of thousands of génocidaires who had fled to the Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, and rebel-held areas of Angola.
“Even now, these fellows are crossing our borders, ex-FAR and militias, mixed with maybe some of their family members,” Kagame said. “They are armed with rocket-propelled grenades, with machine guns, they are killing people as they move, and this is nothing to the international community. What is a thing is that Tutsis were killing refugees. There’s something extremely wrong here. This is why I think there’s this terrible guilt on the part of some people, which they are trying to fight off by always painting a picture of Tutsis being on the wrong side and Hutus being victims. But there is no amount of intimidation or distortion that can defeat us on this. It will cause us problems, but we are not going to be defeated.” He sounded angrier than I had ever heard him. “There are a lot of them left,” he said of the génocidaires, “and we will have to keep dealing with that situation for as long as it lasts. We are not really tired of dealing with that at all—it’s they who will get tired, not we.”
A grim prospect, but Kagame was trying to explain why the war in the Congo had happened as it had happened—in order, he said, that Rwanda should not “be rubbed off the surface of the earth.” That was how he saw his choice, and it explained the startling coolness of his speech. But although his voice and his manner were as contained as ever, he was clearly indignant to find his troops accused of destroying what he regarded as an army bent on Rwanda’s annihilation. Kagame’s defiance and his sense of injury
added up to an Ahab-like wrath. He didn’t just want the world to see things his way; he seemed to believe that the world owed him an apology for failing to accept his reasoning.
Ideally, he told me, an investigation would be the best way to clear up the story of massacres in the Congo. “But,” he said, “because of this background, which I have already described to you, because of this partisan involvement, because of these politically motivated allegations even at the high levels in the international community, you see here that we are dealing with judges who cannot be judged. And yet they are terribly wrong. This is the bad thing about the whole thing. I have lost faith. You see, the experience of Rwanda since 1994 has left me with no faith in these international organizations. Very little faith.
“In fact,” Kagame went on, “I think we should start accusing these people who actually supported the camps, spent a million dollars per day in these camps, gave support to these groups to rebuild themselves into a force, militarized refugees. When in the end these refugees are caught up in the fighting and they die, I think it has more to do with these people than Rwanda, than Congo, than the Alliance. Why shouldn’t we accuse them? This is the guilt they are trying to fight off. This is something they are trying to deflect.”
It was true that the victory of the pan-African alliance Kagame had put together in the Congo had constituted a defeat for the international community. The major powers and their humanitarian representatives had been pushed out of the way, and, he said, “they are angered, and the guilt is exposed by the defeat.” He said, “they have not determined the outcome, so again this is something they cannot stomach.” He said, “Kabila emerges, alliance emerges, something changes, Mobutu goes: things happen, the region is happy about what is happening, different people have had different ways of supporting the process. And they are left out, and everything takes them by surprise. They are extremely annoyed by that, and they can’t take it like that.”
As Kagame understood it, “The African and the Western worlds are so many worlds apart.” Yet he seemed to recognize that a defeat for the international community could not be translated into a victory for anybody. He had spent his life in central Africa, not fighting against what used to be called the “civilized world,” but fighting to join it. Yet he had concluded that that world was trying to use “the refugee issue” to destroy his progress. “That really is their purpose,” he said. “It’s not so much the human rights concerns, it’s more political. It’s ‘Let’s kill this development, this dangerous development of these Africans trying to do things their own way.’”