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TWO

Law

In a ceasefire agreement hammered out in the early morning hours of July 12, 1992, the Rwandan government (GOR) and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) decided that political negotiations should include the “establishment of the rule of law that is based namely on national unity, democracy, pluralism, and respect for human rights.”¹

International participants in the negotiations applauded the wisdom of this intention. After all, since ancient days, law has been linked to state founding, whereas in modern times, the rule of law has been seen as a fundamental building block of international peace and domestic tranquility. The Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) built its ethos on the notion that “societies based on the rule of law are prerequisites for . . . the lasting order of peace, security, justice, and cooperation.”² Boutros-Ghali saw the rule of law as intrinsic to peacekeeping. “There is an obvious connection between the rule of law and the achievement of true peace and security in any new and stable political order.”³ Kofi Annan considered the rule of law and fair administration of justice as essential to the consolidation of peace in a postconflict situation.⁴ “A government of laws and not of men,” John Adams’s prescription for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, has become a formulaic mantra of numerous governmental and nongovernmental agencies seeking to promote stability and order.⁵

This chapter will first review the issues confronted in negotiations on the rule of law. Since this was the first session of the political negotiations, I also look at the context of the policies and strategies being developed on both sides before considering the physical space across which the negotiations were conducted. For the international interveners buttressing the talks, the questions under debate took on curious twists of meaning, but the signing of the first protocol raised hopes for future success. However, postscripts to the talks—ethnic violence within Rwanda, diplomatic jockeying, and a signal lack of focused attention by international partners—were harbingers of difficult times ahead.

Issues at Stake

If there is anything in political negotiations that contending parties might agree on, it surely ought to be the creation of a regime of law that would channel conflict into peaceful, political engagement. It is seldom so simple. The issues at stake in negotiations on law entail several questions:

Should political negotiations first deal with foundational principles of law or brace into the complexities of power sharing and military integration? Can agreement on first principles generate a fundamental understanding on which to build subsequent negotiations?

What is the understood purpose of negotiated principles? Are these understandings to reform existing institutions, or are they to establish a revolutionary new order?

How do the perspectives on legal order that delegations brought with them affect the course of the negotiations? Do perspectives from different legal traditions and political circumstances lead finally to shared understandings, or do they cover over profound differences of view and approach?

What was the significance of the agreed principles? What did democracy, participation, rights, equity, or good governance mean to each party? The language in agreements usually comes out of different contexts and points toward different objectives.

Whose Rule? Which Law?

Like many descriptors in the public arena, the rule of law is a more complicated and ambiguous prescription than it seems.⁶ Which legal order is being invoked? A legal system may be nothing more than the maintenance by accepted authority of traditional customs and sanctions.⁷ It may be, in the continental tradition, a codification of fundamental principles, derived from a universal normative order. Or it may be the compilation of particular decisions of law courts using previous precedent to establish “common law.”⁸ Changing legal systems can radically restructure society. In transitional situations especially, law becomes an instrument of power rather than a hedge against it.⁹

The Rwandan government delegation was schooled in code law, a good part of it directly taken from Belgian criminal and civil law at the time of independence. The RPF’s experience, at least for the leadership that came from Uganda, was in the common law tradition, combining precedent from British courts with local custom. Within Rwanda, Rwandan citizens had experienced the administration of law under a de facto single party from 1962 to 1973 and a de jure single party from 1978 to 1991. The president ruled, and the law was his instrument.

Outside of Rwanda, refugees and exiles that made up the RPF had lived in quasilegal status. Theoretically they were under the protection of the international refugee regime, but they were without guarantee of life or property and thus at the mercy of local and national politics. In 1982–83 for example, thousands were forced off land they had bought in southwest Uganda and harried back to refugee camps or into Rwanda with great suffering and hardship. Moving from one part of the host country to another was sometimes necessary to avoid local animosities. Under these conditions, law was arbitrary; refugees made up their own rules for survival. Security became the lodestar of any legal undertaking.

UNIVERSAL NORMS OR POSITIVE LAW?

In the particular case of Rwanda, it was also a question of what international understandings of law were at play. Was the Rwandan dispute a matter of international province or local jurisdiction? Emphasizing the external nature of the insurgency, the Rwandan government tended to appeal to international law on intervention, whereas the RPF generally held that this was an internal argument to be resolved between the parties themselves. Rwandan authorities believed that civic rights and social status were internal matters for the government to control, whereas the RPF appealed to universal standards of human rights.¹⁰

In its formulation, the amended N’sele ceasefire agreement described the rule of law in terms (national unity, democracy, pluralism, and respect for human rights) that bespoke late night wrangling over such differences of approach, bridged by a grab-bag definition of multiple and sometimes contradictory notions.¹¹ Could the rule of law undergird the national unity objectives of the N’sele ceasefire agreement? As Kritz points out, the rule of law is fundamentally a conservative principle, unless one is seeking to replace an existing legal system with another. The “respect for human rights,” however, is a liberal principle, often challenging—on the basis of universal norms—the particular application of existing law.¹² Positive law and innate rights may often conflict.¹³ In the Rwandan negotiations, the government tended to emphasize existing law and local custom, whereas the Patriotic Front appealed to immutable, universal rights.

WHICH FOUNDING PRINCIPLES?

The appeal both to democracy and pluralism had its ambiguities as well. As Aristotle long ago made clear, democracy has within it a bias toward anarchy or tyranny. His preferred option was a “mixed regime,” incorporating the strengths of several political interests within the body politic. This view has its champions in contemporary proponents of pluralistic republicanism.¹⁴ In Rwanda, since the revolution of 1959, Hutu elite had ruled under the banner of majoritarian democracy. But the Hutu regimes excluded, either arbitrarily under Kayibanda or by announced policy under Habyarimana, a significant part of the population from effective representation in the institutions of government and the occupations of state. The leadership of the RPF, on the other hand, had been trained in the “no party” politics of Museveni’s National Resistance Movement, inclusive of various ethnic groups but holding to a vision dictated from the top, not to a consensual agreement on law. What would be the constitutional foundation underlying the establishment of political order in Rwanda?

A TRADITIONAL RWANDAN VIEW?

Was there, behind the scrim of these modern interpretations, a traditional understanding of judicial relations in Rwanda? There did exist in precolonial Rwanda a formal judicial mechanism mediated by the army system into which each Rwandan male was integrated. Assisted by his local military chief, every Rwandan had the right to appeal directly to the court of the king (mwami). In disputes with land chiefs or cattle chiefs, the army chief became the designated protector of his clients’ interests. Although the king was surrounded by guardians of ritual custom (abiru) and by a council of chiefs (abatware b’intebe), he ruled by virtue of his divine origins, gave account to no one, and passed judgment as he saw fit.¹⁵

The import of this traditional system of justice is fourfold. First, there was an institutionalized system of justice in precolonial Rwanda with a direct route from local grievance to the king’s court. Second, the mediator for that justice was the local army chief, and thus justice was tied directly to military representatives of royal authority. Third, the king was not circumscribed in his right to judge; the system of justice was thus hierarchical and autocratic, untrammeled by institutional limitations. Finally, with the president’s close control of the judicial system, the pattern of judicial administration under the Second Republic replicated in modern garb this traditional model. The first agenda item at Arusha—negotiations on the rule of law—implied a direct challenge to the prevailing judicial ethos and to a traditional Rwandan understanding of judicial administration. Would negotiations on the rule of law lead to a separation of powers and judicial autonomy, or would the old system of personalized but autocratic justice prevail?

If autocracy and autonomy, law and rights, democracy and plurality are problematic in any contemporary polity, how much more were they salient in troubled Rwanda?¹⁶ The ruling regime, the newly established political parties, and the “armed opposition” all invoked the norm of “democracy” and the process of “democratization.” All would have, as well, upheld a national unity that allowed some form of diversity. All would have, in principle, supported “human rights” as constitutionally defining the place of citizens within the national polity. All, no doubt, sought a regime in which “political relations between the state and its citizens feature broad, equal, protected and mutually binding consultation.”¹⁷ But what, concretely, did these ideals mean for determining the parameters of “law” and for structuring the other items on the negotiation agenda: “establishment of power sharing” and “formation of a national army”?

Preparing to Negotiate

The difficulties of answering that question became apparent in the weeks leading up to the opening of political negotiations in Arusha. Jockeying for advantage threatened to undo the goodwill and understandings that brought contenders to the arena. On the government side, the weakness of the negotiating team during ceasefire talks demonstrated the imperative of building a solidly reasoned government position that had the support of all major parties. In the face of significant political resistance to the ceasefire terms, this was not an easy task. On the RPF side, concern that the government might back away from positions already conceded led to a steady stream of media invective and continuing thrusts and parries on the battlefront.

As the State Department geared up for the upcoming negotiations, Assistant Secretary Cohen asked me to be the US Observer at the negotiations, which were to begin in Arusha on August 10, 1992, and conclude with a peace agreement on October 10. I would have to delay reporting to my next assignment and so arranged a short leave. Thus I would become the first of four US Observers in what ended up being a yearlong wrangle.¹⁸

GOVERNMENTAL DISCORD—THE ANTI-ARUSHA FORCES

My route to Arusha took me through Kigali, where I met with the prime minister, party leaders, and the team working on drafting instructions for the Rwandan delegation. They briefed me on the difficulties of bridging differences in Rwanda’s fissured body politic. The problems were threefold. First, there was the split between the old regime represented by the president’s party (The Republican Movement for National Development, or MRND) and the emerging political parties legitimized by promulgation of a new constitution and the Political Parties Law in June 1991. The MRND youth wing (Interahamwe) and party allies, especially the Coalition for the Defense of the Republic (CDR), had protested the terms of the Arusha ceasefire and led unauthorized demonstrations in an attempt to delay the peace negotiations.¹⁹

Nor was the protest to the course of peace talks confined to political demonstrations. As the Arusha talks commenced, the American embassy noted that “internal insecurity has increased in parallel with each significant step forward in the democratization and the peace processes and subsided as internal political forces reached a new level of common understanding.”²⁰ The violence had included massacres in Bugesera, random land-mine explosions, interparty dustups, military mutinies, political assassinations, and grenade and car-bomb explosions.

Along the political track, MRND ministers had been boycotting sessions of the multiparty government over what they considered to be arbitrary decisions of the prime minister on internal administrative reform. The MRND was less than enthusiastic about negotiating with the RPF and actively challenged the leadership of the coalition government; opposition leaders in turn looked to the negotiations as a means to effect regime change within Rwanda. Bringing the broad-based coalition government together on a comprehensive negotiating strategy was a Sisyphean task.

GOVERNMENTAL DISCORD—THE MDR

Second, a split within the largest opposition group undercut the cohesiveness of the government delegation. Prime Minister Dismas Nsengiyaremye’s party, the Democratic Republican Movement (MDR), was a revived successor to MDR/Parmehutu, the party that brought Hutu leaders to power in 1960. The party still suffered from a regional and ideological split between those who favored a Hutu-centered polity and those who favored national reconciliation, those who were from the north and those who represented the center-south. Whereas the prime minister, who was from the center of the country in Gitarama, seemed to anchor the geographic and ideological core of this party, Faustin Twagiramungu, a businessman from the southwestern town of Cyangugu and son-in-law of former president Kayibanda, led the progressive wing. Donat Murego, a historian and renowned orator, led the northern, pro-Hutu faction. Another Kayibanda son-in-law, Emmanuel Gapyisi, also from the central party stronghold of Gitarama, was another party leader.²¹

In the insecurity that surrounded the response to the Arusha ceasefire and the workup of political negotiations, Twagiramungu was accused by his political opponents of destabilizing the country. He had, they claimed, sought to capture the youth wing of his party, the Democratic Republican Youth (JDR), by stirring them up against elders within his own party and co-opting the appointment of new local mayors with newly minted MDR partisans of his own choice. For a while, Twagiramungu and the prime minister publicly encouraged the forceful takeover of mayoral offices in communes where the MDR was dominant. Twagiramungu worked closely with Justin Mugenzi, the fiery founder of the interethnic Liberal Party, in raising popular opposition to the Habyarimana regime.²²

MDR politics thus complicated the position of Rwanda’s chief negotiator, Foreign Minister Boniface Ngulinzira. A northerner, he was nonetheless of the Nsengiyaremye political clan, which drew its support from the center of the country. As foreign minister, he led the breakthrough to ceasefire talks by reaching out to the RPF, a move that won him enmity of the pro-Hutu right, even within his party. Moreover, Ngulinzira had replaced Dr. Casimir Bizimungu, a stalwart of the president’s party, as minister for foreign affairs; having begrudgingly ceded this key post, presidential supporters could find little good to say about the new foreign minister. As leader of the government negotiating team, the foreign minister was developing networks and building a consensus among political leaders that challenged the “progressive” alliance that Twagiramungu had built with the Liberal Party. Thus, the Rwandan government’s chief of delegation and principle negotiator was on ambivalent political ground within his own political party and fiercely contested from without.

GOVERNMENTAL DISCORD—THE CND

Finally, Rwandan polity was beset with an encumbering institutional oddity. When the new constitution and party law were adopted in June 1991, members of the national legislature, or the National Development Council (CND), voted themselves incumbency as a transitional legislature until new parliamentary elections could be held, presumably in April 1993. Members of the CND were all elected under the old single-party slate drawn up by the Habyarimana regime. While some had political and regional loyalties that made them favorable to a new political order, most were oriented toward the status quo. In the lead-up to the peace negotiations, Rwanda’s only elective institution found itself sidelined; political negotiations were within parties, among parties, and between party leaders and the presidency. Nonetheless, after the government’s negotiating strategy had already been drawn up, the CND belatedly made its views known, delaying finalization of the project.²³

DISCORD OVERCOME

The regime establishment hardly wanted to negotiate, the opposition was badly split, and the people’s representatives were making new claims on the policy process. What brought this inchoate mix of historic parties and self-appointed politicos together were two principle dynamics. First, the war was draining the nation’s resources and the expanded army had stopped fighting. The people and their political leaders were tired of the war. Second, the forces of democratic change had swept over Rwanda. Within a couple of years, Rwanda had gone from a single-party system based on “democratic centralism” to a multiparty government with several centers of power. Opposition political leaders saw “democratization” as their key to political control. That was why the government delegation chose to negotiate “within the framework of existing laws and institutions.”²⁴

Continuity and evolution, not revolution, was the Rwandan government’s negotiating strategy. Intrinsic to this democratic evolution was the prospect of nationwide elections, established by protocol as prior to April 16, 1993, when the terms of office of the CND would end. Parties would have to contest for legislative and mayoral offices, thus confirming for the first time their true political weight. The prime minister insisted on the agreed timetable. Difficulties that the communes were facing over appointed mayors prompted the foreign minister to comment, “Officials need the legitimacy of elections.”²⁵ How to incorporate the Patriotic Front into the framework of the existing political process—to let it function as a political party and participate in a defining electoral tally—was the challenge of political negotiations as the Rwandan government saw it.

INSURGENT VISION

The Rwandese Patriotic Front did not accept the government’s notion that existing institutions were sacrosanct or that the democratization timetable had explicitly to be observed. For the Front, “Peace, reconciliation and national unity are the overriding objectives which the RPF is determined to achieve.”²⁶ There was a remarkable consistency to the position the RPF put forward in the years between its invasion of Rwanda and the formal opening of peace negotiations. National unity required the eradication of barriers to the return of refugees, to equal opportunity, and to full participation of all in Rwandan society and politics. Reconciliation of Rwandans to each other would come through the elimination of “sectarian and antagonistic regional divisions.” In this process, democracy would gestate through grassroots change. Elections under conditions of instability and sectarianism would “throw the country into another wave of bloodshed.”²⁷ In a presentation to the May 1991 African Leadership Forum, the Patriotic Front summed up its principles as follows:

• To bring about and cement national unity

• To institute a genuine democracy from the grassroots to the legislative level

• To promote an integrated and self-sustaining economy

• To eradicate corruption in all its forms

• To guarantee the security of persons and property

• To promote social welfare for the benefit of all the citizens

• To promote peace and cooperation between our neighbors and all the peace-loving nations of the world²⁸

INSURGENT STRATEGIES

These goals implied a long-term process. In a March 8, 1992, letter to the Department of State, the RPF attempted to explain the failure of the meetings in Paris the previous January as a premature attempt by the French and the Rwandan government to put forward issues that were short-term and self-serving, such as the distribution of ministerial portfolios. The Front called rather for “a just and durable solution to the problem of peace,” to be discussed after a ceasefire was in place and its monitoring was effective.²⁹ As RPF statements over time show, such a durable solution would include the right of return of all refugees, a constitutional and governmental revolution that ensured a democratic process and fostered national unity, the integration of the two contending armies, and a national debate on the future of the country, all before elections could take place.³⁰

The same documents make it consistently clear that the RPF considered the Habyarimana regime to be oppressive, corrupt, and delinquent in upholding the rights of the Rwandan people. Already at the 1991 Kampala Forum, the RPF document noted that “President Habyarimana and his clique . . . continue upholding the principles akin to Nazism of Germany.”³¹ On an interim basis, the RPF wanted the Habyarimana regime replaced by an organ of national will and action patterned after Museveni’s National Resistance Movement. In its proposals tabled at the June 1992 ceasefire talks, the Front insisted that “there should be a national council which is broad-based and which has full executive and legislative powers. This national council should preside over the interim period.”³²

INSURGENT TACTICS—MILITARY INITIATIVES

For all its evocation of national unity and peace, the RPF pressed for tactical ascendency in field operations, media coverage, and negotiating positions. First, the RPF intentionally used the force of arms to make political points. The initial thrust into Rwanda came when the Habyarimana regime had accepted a UNHCR plan for the programmed return of refugees, a presumed RPF goal. But the RPF wanted an untrammeled right of return to a Rwanda rid of Habyarimana’s control.³³

Thereafter, the RPA punctuated negotiating strategy with military tactics: witness the January 1991 attack on Ruhengeri when Habyarimana stalled on ceasefire negotiations in Goma, the quick investment of Byumba right before the June 1992 ceasefire negotiations in Paris, the temporary RPF offensive immediately before the political negotiations opened in August 1993, and, especially, the February 1993 push toward Kigali after the government reneged on negotiated protocols.

The RPF claimed its actions were defensive. Its theme became, “We are not yet in a situation of ceasefire and we have only responded to offensives of governmental forces.” As regards the attack on Byumba, the RPF explicitly laid the blame on efforts of the president and his party to block the peace process. “Thus, the investment of the city of Byumba by the combatants of the RPF was a response to the provocations trying to check the process of peace that had been initiated.”³⁴ In fact, war tactics were the sharp instruments of policy, the means to negotiating preeminence.

INSURGENT TACTICS—MEDIA

In communiqués and press releases, the Patriotic Front fought for media advantage. In an increasingly sophisticated approach, RPA publicists used French and English according to the intended audience. RPA concern for the Visoke gorillas, for example, was published in English for an American audience.³⁵

Where the government was claiming victory, the RPF claimed, on the contrary, the capture of strategic positions.³⁶ Press releases gave details on “defensive operations” in which government positions were overrun and government materiel captured.³⁷ After the Kibuye massacres that followed negotiations on the rule of law, a press release gave data gleaned from Rwandan human rights organizations and excoriated the shelling of an RPA position as a violation of agreements already reached.³⁸ A press release analyzing the “rout of governmental troops” claimed that “the ambition of Major General Habyarimana to resolve by arms the conflict which opposes the Rwandese Patriotic Front to the Kigali regime shows itself today to be an impossible mission.”³⁹

What for the RPF was the outcome of these back-and-forth raids? RPA commander Kagame, with a modesty that belied some press release claims, summarized the RPF battle strategy to a BBC reporter: “I do not think we have been fighting to capture territory. We have been engaging the government troops and we have done a very good job of crippling that army, and that is the army that is being used to keep the dictatorship in place. I think we can even use one square kilometer to do that job very successfully.”⁴⁰

Even as the Rwandan political complexion changed with the institution of a multiparty government, the RPF condemned it with faint praise. A press release noted that Prime Minister Nsengiyaremye’s April 16 speech on the installation of the interim government “seemed to reflect a willingness and commitment to tackle the many problems facing Rwanda.” But it also found that “despite the apparent goodwill, it is doubtful whether the prime minister has the means to effect the changes he envisages.”⁴¹

INSURGENT TACTICS—NEGOTIATIONS

As Rwanda’s coalition government staked out positions and engaged partners in between the meetings with the RPF in Kampala in May and in Paris in June, the Rwandese Patriotic Front returned to a negative and cautionary tone. A June 23 communiqué questioned whether the new government had changed its goals and whether a process of negotiation for a return to a durable peace remained on the agenda of the prime minister and the minister of foreign affairs. The RPF concluded that the prime minister and the ministers of the internal opposition, in general, “operate under the pressure of President Habyarimana, of the party-state MRND, and of the military forces of the regime.”⁴²

What had stirred the RPF riposte were calls from the prime minister to bolster Rwandan government troop deployments, presidential criticism of a Brussels meeting between the RPF and the Forces démocratiques pour le changement (FDC, the loose coalition of internal opposition parties), and open discussions by the foreign minister on modalities for carrying out the Paris agreements with France, the United States, and Belgium, including a Rwandan request for Belgian facilitation of the next meeting. As far as the RPF was concerned, the war continued until there was a ceasefire, and ceasefire talks had not yet taken place.

While the commitment to peace had been affirmed in Paris, the modalities of how to put it in place had yet to be discussed; the next meeting on African soil would initiate those discussions. In sum, the only acceptable discussions for the RPF were those that strictly followed the negotiating schedule and strategy that formed the basis of the Paris communiqué and had been buttressed by a sidebar meeting with opposition parties. Moreover, having drawn up the draft text that Facilitator Diria used as a working document in the July ceasefire talks at Arusha, the RPF had shown its superior strength in negotiating tactics. The Patriotic Front seemed to take negotiation as war by another means, and it was determined to win. Observers, noting RPF continuing dominance in the July ceasefire negotiations, counseled behind the scenes on a more flexible and compromising approach. This was a negotiation in which both sides should take away something of value, not a “winner-take-all” scenario.

Negotiating across the Divide

On August 11, a multicentered government delegation and a highly focused RPF team gathered on either side of the negotiating forum under the eyes of international Observers and the guidance of Tanzanian foreign minister Diria as Facilitator.⁴³ Other than the distance across the room, there was not a lot separating the parties, or so it seemed. Though they spoke formally in English or French at plenary sessions and required documents in both languages, the parties were, in fact, of the same culture, speaking the same language, sharing the same history, and given to the same habits of life. Ethnic, regional, and physical stereotypes failed to explain their separation at the negotiating forum. Observers, even African neighbors, would have been hard-pressed to tell who belonged to which supposed ethnic group.

More important, the parties had covenanted at the July ceasefire talks on the logic of peace: “the cessation of all hostilities for the purpose of dialogue and serious negotiations between the two parties.” They had agreed on the structure of that peace: “establishment of the rule of law; formation of a national army; and, establishment of power sharing within the framework of a broad-based transitional government.” What remained for the time allotted to political negotiations, from August 10 to October 10, was to work out the “modalities” of the interim order.⁴⁴

It was not to be that simple. The parties came at those principles from very different perspectives. It was fundamentally a question of what kind of change was necessary to build the Rwanda of the future and who should control that change. Habyarimana and his cohorts in the MRND wanted to preserve the institutions of state, a political culture that still in large part reflected the ethos of the one-party state. They would accommodate enough change to end the war and to secure the presidential and MRND supremacy within the transitional order. In this regard, they were for quick elections, before the party grip on the hinterland eroded.

The internal opposition wanted to use the democratic process and the threat of RPF arms to break down MRND power and circumscribe the president, to whose role each political leader no doubt aspired. The parties’ role in the political game, however, was determined by the 1991 constitution and the interparty protocol of March 13, 1992. The institutions and arrangements within those documents were intrinsic to their political survival. As the Rwandan political parties had agreed in developing a common position for the political negotiations, the government would, at the negotiating table, seek to preserve the democratic gains of the previous two years and negotiate within the framework of existing laws and institutions. As Foreign Minister Ngulinzira explained it to Kigali’s diplomatic corps, “The RPF must accept to integrate into the existing system and into the democratization process already underway in Rwanda.”⁴⁵

The RPF, on the other hand, wanted revolutionary change. The constitution, the CND, the judiciary, appointments to the bureaucracy, and the pattern of local government all reflected the design and the power of the Habyarimana regime. Encamped on a small sliver of northern Rwanda, the RPA had repeatedly proved its capacity to move forward at will and to counter any effort to dislodge its positions. Observer states like France, which was training and supplying government forces, or Tanzania, which was the purportedly neutral Facilitator, recognized RPF military prowess.⁴⁶ The Front hoped to use its military capacities to force change and its political skills to win over the FDC to a radical remake of Rwandan polity. Thus, in spite of a common culture, a mutual commitment to peace, and an engagement in a diplomatic process of negotiation, the parties were deeply divided in perspective, purpose, and quest for power.

LAY OF THE LAND

The two contending parties were to gather at the old East African Community headquarters in Arusha along with the official Mediator of the ceasefire (Zaire), the Facilitator of the ceasefire talks (Tanzania), and the Convener of political negotiations (the Organization of African Unity, or OAU). Also present were representatives of the official Observer nations: Senegal (representing the chair of the OAU), Burundi, Uganda, France, Belgium, Germany, and the United States.