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Chapter 1

The Geopolitics of the Great Lakes Region

In common usage the Great Lakes region refers to Central Africa's Great Rift valley, stretching on a north-south axis along the Congo-Nile crest, from Lake Tanganyika in the south to Lake Edward and the legendary Mountains of the Moon in the north. But where exactly does it begin, and where does it end? Should it include western Tanzania and southwestern Sudan? Should the Maniema and north Katanga be factored in as well? The answers are anything but straightforward. There is general agreement, however, that a minimal definition should include Rwanda, Burundi, eastern Congo, and southwestern Uganda as the core area of what once was called the “interlacustrine” zone of the continent, covering an estimated 300,000 square miles. This is the sense in which we shall use the phrase.

The interlacustrine metaphor, though still fashionable among geographers, suggests too much in the way of uniformity and too little about the diversity of peoples, cultures, and subregions subsumed under this label.¹ There is a fundamental truth in the observation that “the extent to which people are attached to their native turf (terroir d'origine) is still highly developed among the people of the Great Lakes.”² To this day, group loyalties continue to cluster around precolonial terroirs. Whereas many readily identify with places like Nduga, Kiga, Bwisha, Bwito, Masisi, Rutshuru, Beni-Butembo, to name only a few, nowhere among Africans is the Great Lakes referent perceived as a meaningful identity marker. The phrase, as Jean-Pierre Chrétien reminds us, is evocative of “the German tradition of a Volkgeist, as if a kind of common soul had emerged from the proximity of these lakes.”³ Though encompassing many of the shared cultural traits identified by the French historian—a high population density, the agropastoral tandem, the heritage of kingship, a tendency for outsiders to look at these societies through the lens of race, and so forth—in the end, he adds that what links these peoples and cultures together is “a kind of connivance born of multiple confrontations and countless encounters.”⁴ Since these words were written (1986), most of these encounters have been extremely bloody and their after-effects, devastating.

At the root of these confrontations lies an array of forces and circumstances of enormous complexity. Most are the product of human decisions made during the colonial and postcolonial eras, but these must be seen in the perspective of the drastic changes that have taken place in the regional environment. Politics and geography intersect in different ways at different points in time, but the key variables remain the same. The potential for conflict is inscribed in the discontinuities in population densities, the availability of land, the cultural fault lines discernible in different language patterns, modes of social organization, and ecological circumstances. None of the above were fixed from time immemorial. As has been noted time and again, most recently by Michael Mann, modernity has gone hand in hand with eruptions of ethnic violence.⁵ Societies that were once held together by hierarchies of birth, rank, and privilege have been subjected to profound disruptions of their social fabric, ushering in “masterless men,”⁶ marginalized youth, and warlords in search of gold, diamonds, and coltan. Today's demographic explosion in Rwanda, resulting in a population density of 300 per square kilometer, is without parallel elsewhere, causing a drastic shrinking of cultivable land; areas where land hunger was almost unknown at the inception of colonial rule (as in Rutshuru and Masisi) are now saturated; deforestation has denuded large tracts of land, accelerating soil erosion and reducing crop cultivation;⁷ almost everywhere wildlife is fast disappearing, most notably hippos, elephants, and mountain gorillas, with profoundly negative effects on the region's ecosystem.⁸ Once described as a tourist paradise,⁹ today's Great Lakes region shows many of the symptoms of a Hobbesian universe.

Convenient though it is to speak of the crisis in the Great Lakes in the singular, it makes more sense to think in terms of a multiplicity of crises, which, though historically distinct and occurring in specific national contexts, have set off violent chain reactions in neighboring states. The Hutu revolution (1959–62) in Rwanda was one such crisis. Another was the 1994 genocide. Both have sent shock waves through the region the first creating the conditions of a “partial genocide” of Hutu in Burundi in 1972, the second unleashing ethnic cleansing, population displacements, and civil war through many parts of the Congo, resulting in human losses far greater than in either Burundi in 1972 or Rwanda in 1994. To these we shall return in a moment, but before going any further, a note of caution is in order about some of the misconceptions surrounding the region's recent agonies.

Challenging Received Ideas

The belief that nowhere in the continent has violence taken a heavier toll than in Rwanda, with nearly a million deaths, overwhelmingly Tutsi, is one of the most persistent and persistently misleading ideas about the region. It may come as a surprise, therefore, that four times as many people have died in eastern Congo between 1998 and 2006. Although the exact number will never be known, a recent survey by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) shows that nearly four million people were killed from war-related causes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) since 1998, “the largest documented death toll in a conflict since World War II.”¹⁰ Citing the IRC survey, the British medical journal The Lancet recently drew the right conclusion: “It is a sad indictment of us all that seven years into this crisis ignorance about its scale and impact is almost universal, and that international engagement remains completely out of proportion to humanitarian need.”¹¹

Ignorance in this case is largely a reflection of public indifference in the face of a situation that, however unfortunate, is generally seen by outside observers as African-made, rooted in the incorrigible greed of rival warlords and therefore, the responsibility of Africans. But this is only partially true. This is how a British journalist sees the other side of the coin in his coverage of “the most savage war in the world”: “it is also the story of a trail of blood that leads directly to you: to your remote control, to your mobile phone, to your laptop and to your diamond necklace…it is a battle for the metals that make our technological society vibrate and ring and bling.”¹² Western economic interests are indeed deeply involved in the conflict through their participation, direct or indirect, in the illicit trade in arms and mineral resources. Both span a wide network of companies, brokers, money changers, and facilitators. European companies—Belgian (Cogecom), Swiss (Finmining, Raremet), German (Masingiro), Dutch (Chemie Pharmacie)—figure prominently in the war economy of the region, a fact conclusively demonstrated by several outstanding investigative reports.¹³ Among various forms of the involvement of the United States, passing reference must be made to the joint venture between the American corporation Trinitech and the Dutch firm Chemie Pharmacie, in which the U.S. embassy in Kigali may have played a “facilitating” role. As reported by one well-informed observer, “the economic section of the U.S. embassy in Kigali has been extremely active at the beginning of the war in helping establish joint ventures to exploit coltan,” a fact carefully expunged from all official reports, leaving only Africans to be incriminated.¹⁴ Though seldom brought into the public domain, the share of responsibility of Western corporate interests in supporting a war economy that has resulted in the deaths of millions, cannot be ignored.

Frequent reference to confrontations among warring factions as a “resource war” points to yet another misconception, for which Paul Collier deserves full credit.¹⁵ This is not to imply that “greed” is not a factor in sustaining the bloodshed; the point rather is that it never played the central role that Collier would like us to believe in setting in motion the infernal machine leading to interethnic and interstate violence. As recent academic research has shown, instead of invoking the logic of self-serving enrichment, the denial of economic opportunities, more often than not as a result of political exclusion, emerges as the critical factor in the etiology of conflict.¹⁶ The basic distinction here is between exclusion as the initial motive and greed as a propelling force at a later stage of intergroup violence. The passage from exclusion to greed is not automatic; it implies major changes in the regional field of politics that also point to basic shifts in identity patterns.

Map 1. Ethnic map of North and South Kivu. Reproduced from Roland Pourtier, “Cong-Zaire-Congo: Un itinéraire géoplitque au coeur de I'Afrique,” Hérodote, nos. 86/87 (1997): 22, by permission of the author.

Deconstructing Social Identities

Tempting as it is to view ethnic diversity as the central determinant of violent behavior in the region, the evidence shows otherwise. To the extent that it does provide a meaningful point of reference, ethnicity is not a throwback to primeval enmities. Whether socially constructed, manipulated, invented, or mobilized, it is a recent phenomenon, even when its roots are sometimes traceable to precolonial times (as in the case of the Banyamulenge). Its contours, moreover, are constantly shifting, as are the human targets against which it is directed. Communities seen as allies one day are viewed as enemies the next. New coalitions are built for short-term advantage, only to dissolve into warring factions when new options suddenly emerge. In this highly fluid political field, conflict is not reducible to any single identity marker. It is better conceptualized as involving different social boundaries, activated at different points in time, in response to changing political stakes.

HUTU VERSUS TUTSI: THE REDUCTIONIST TRAP

No serious analyst of the recent history of the Great Lakes would deny the central significance of the Rwanda genocide on the polarization of Hutu-Tutsi identities throughout the region. Nonetheless, to reduce every conflict at every stage of its evolution to a straight Hutu-Tutsi confrontation is unconvincing. Such a dualism overlooks the presence of alternative forms of identification and wrongly assumes the salience of the Hutu-Tutsi dichotomy to be a permanent feature of the political landscape.

The danger of Hutu-Tutsi reductionism is all the more evident when one considers the ethnographic composition of the region. Rwanda and Burundi, after all, are not the only countries whose ethnic maps reveal the existence of Hutu and Tutsi. Kinyarwanda or Kirundi-speaking people also are found in eastern Congo, southern Uganda, and western Tanzania. According to the best estimates, the region claims roughly twelve million people speaking Kinyarwanda, and nearly twenty million if Kirundi, a language closely related to Kinyarwanda, is included. Although many migrated from Rwanda and Burundi to neighboring states during and after the colonial period, the presence of Hutu and Tutsi in eastern Congo reaches back to precolonial times. What needs to be underscored is that migrations from Rwanda or Burundi did not occur only one time but were staggered through the centuries. Length of residence, ecology, and history have shaped identities in ways that defy simple categorizations such as Hutu and Tutsi. It is with reason, therefore, that some analysts, in coming to grips with the politics of North Kivu, insist on drawing distinctions between the Hutu from Bwisha, those from Rutshuru, and those from Masisi and Kalehe.¹⁷

Map 2. Areas of confrontation in North Kivu. Reproduced from F. Reyntjens and S. Marysse, eds., L' Afriquw des Grands Lacs: Annuaire 2005–2006 (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006), p. 37, by permission of the editors.

Such nuances went largely unnoticed by Belgian civil servants. In its effort to make more “legible,” the complex ethnic configurations of the region, the colonial state contributed significantly to formalizing and legitimizing the Hutu-Tutsi polarity. Thus the 1959 census figures for what was then the Kivu region (now divided into North and South Kivu and Maniema) designate, oddly enough, as “Bantous Hamites” and “Hamites,” respectively, the 184,089 Hutu and 53,233 Tutsi registered, thus making the “Banyarwanda” the third-largest group after the Banande (390,704) and the Bashi (382, 572).¹⁸ Time and again historians have drawn attention to the perverse effects of the colonizer's recourse to Hamitic and Bantu labels, as if to impose its own normative construction on Hutu and Tutsi.¹⁹ Equally striking is the phenomenon described by James Scott in Seeing Like a State, namely, “the state's attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions.” These state simplifications, he adds, “did not successfully represent the actual activity of the society they depicted, nor were they intended to…they were maps that, when allied with state power, would enable much of the reality they depicted to be remade.”²⁰

Nonetheless, such attempts at remaking social realities did not obliterate all distinctions within Hutu and Tutsi. Nor did they erase the persistent tension between them, on the one hand, and the so-called “native” Congolese on the other. Many Kinyarwanda speakers, Hutu and Tutsi, trace their families' origins to precolonial times and have every right to claim the status of Congolese citizens. This is certainly true of the Banyamulenge (“the people from Mulenge”) established in the high plateau area of South Kivu since the nineteenth century if not earlier,²¹ and of the Hutu of Bwisha, many of whom lived in this area long before the onset of colonial rule, whereas others came as agricultural laborers from Rwanda in the 1930s to supply the European plantocracy of North Kivu with cheap labor. In short, as social categories, the terms “Hutu” and “Tutsi” cannot do justice to the registers of historical experience that lie at the heart of these many subloyalties.

THE CASE OF THE BANYAMULENGE

A rather unique case of ethnogenesis, the Banyamulenge are a perfect example of how geography, history, and politics combine to create a new set of identities within the larger Banyarwanda cultural frame.²² Heavily concentrated on the high-lying plateau of the Itombwe region of South Kivu, estimates of their numerical importance vary wildly. The figure of 400,000 cited by the late Joseph Muembo is grossly inflated.²³ A more reliable figure would be between 50,000 and 70,000. Their name derives from the locality (Mulenge) whence they are said to originate. The term, however, has been the source of much controversy because it became increasingly used in the late 1990s as an omnibus label to designate all Tutsi living in North and South Kivu. It came into usage in 1976 as a result of the efforts of the late Gisaro Muhoza, a member of parliament from South Kivu, to regroup the Banyamulenge populations of Mwenga, Fizi, and Uvira territories into a single administrative entity. Although his initiative failed, the name stuck, and by 1996 it was often used by ethnic Tutsi and Congolese to designate all Tutsi residents of North and South Kivu.

Though much of their history is shrouded in mystery, most historians would agree that the Banyamulenge are descendants of Tutsi pastoralists who migrated from Rwanda some time in the nineteenth century, long before the advent of colonial rule (a fact vehemently contested, however, by many Congolese intellectuals). They are culturally and socially distinct from the long-established ethnic Tutsi of North Kivu and the Tutsi refugees of the 1959–62 Rwanda revolution. Many do not speak Kinyarwanda, and those who do, speak it differently. Their political awakening can be traced back to the eastern Congo rebellion of 1964–65. Many initially joined the insurgency, only to switch sides when they saw their cattle being slaughtered to feed the insurgents. Their contribution to the counterinsurgency did not go unnoticed in Kinshasa. Many were rewarded with lucrative positions in the provincial capital, and more and more of their children flocked to missionary schools. From a primarily rural, isolated, backward community, the Banyamulenge would soon become increasingly aware of themselves as a political force.

It is impossible to tell how many joined the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) in the 1990s. What is beyond doubt is that they formed the bulk of Kabila's Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo (AFDL) in 1996 and after the fall of Bukavu, they filled most of the administrative positions vacated by the Congolese, some of whom were ardent Mobutists. Equally clear is that they suffered very heavy losses during the anti-Mobutist crusade, as well as during the 1998 crisis when many were massacred by Kabila's supporters in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi. It was said that in the late 1990s, Bukavu claimed a larger number of Banyamulenge widows than any other town in the region.

The creation in mid-1998 of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD), under Rwandan sponsorship, was meant to provide the Banyamulenge with a vehicle for the defense of their interests—and of anyone else's who cared to join—but as it evolved into an instrument for the defense of Rwandan interests in eastern Congo, many felt aggrieved and alienated. The feeling that they have been “instrumentalized” by Kagame is shared widely among them. As we shall see, this sense of grievance against Rwanda is in large part responsible for the internal strains and divisions suffered by the community. All this, however, does not detract from the fact that as a group, the Banyamulenge are profoundly aware of their cultural distinctiveness. Few people have been dealt a harsher blow by history: many argue, with justice, that they have been twice victimized; first by Kagame, who used them as cannon fodder for the defense of Rwanda's strategic interests; and then by Congolese extremists, as happened in Bukavu in June 2004 when in the wake of an abortive Banyamulenge-led coup, hundreds perished. Today Bukavu is virtually “free” of Banyamulenge.

OTHERNESS

What defines the “other” as an ally or an enemy? Several objective criteria come to mind: language (e.g., “Rwandophones” or Kinyawanda speakers), country of origin (“Banyarwanda”), place of settlement (“Banyamulenge,” the people of Mulenge), ethnicity (Hutu and Tutsi), to which must be added morphologie, or body maps, a reference that increasingly crops up in newspaper articles in Goma and Bukavu. None of the above, however, tells us why one set of criteria should be more relevant than another at any given time: why, for example, Hutu and Tutsi generally were lumped together as the embodiment of a “Banyarwanda” menace from 1963 until 1994, when the label quickly dissolved into Hutu-Tutsi enmities; or why the term Banyamulenge, as distinct from Tutsi, carried such threatening overtones among other communities from 1996 onward.

Otherness has less to do with objective identity markers than with the perceived threats posed by one community to another. Whether real or imaginary, such threats do not materialize out of thin air. They are intimately related to changes in the national and regional political environments. Political murder (Ndadaye in 1993), genocide (Rwanda in 1994), refugee flows (predominantly Tutsi in 1959–63, Hutu in 1994), ethnic cleansing (of Hutu refugees in eastern Congo in 1996–97), and the approach of elections (2005–6)—these, as we shall see, are the events and circumstances that have crystallized group identities.

Several phases can be identified in the redefinition of group identities:

1. From the so-called “Kanyarwanda war” in 1963 until 1994, the tendency among “native” Congolese was to view all Banyarwanda living in eastern Congo as the incarnation of a multifaceted menace.

2. After the Rwanda bloodbath, the Hutu-Tutsi conflict metastasized through much of North and South Kivu, causing untold casualties among long-time Tutsi residents and set the stage for the 1996 Rwandan-led and Rwandan-inspired invasion of the Congo by the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo (AFDL).²⁴ From then on, the Hutu-Tutsi frame of reference became the dominant identity marker and a powerful tool of propaganda for extremists at both ends of the ethnic spectrum.²⁵

3. Yet by 1998, with the second Congo war, as an ever greater number of actors comes into view, the political equations became more complicated, and the straight Hutu-Tutsi cleavage frame somewhat less relevant. A more complex cognitive map emerged causing Hutu and Tutsi to fragment into factions, and enter new patterns of alliances at home and abroad.

4. Not the least intriguing of the mutations undergone by the regional identity prism is the emergence in recent times of language as the principal yardstick for lumping together Hutu and Tutsi under the “Rwandophone” label, a strategy clearly inspired by the provincial authorities of North Kivu to expand their grassroots constituency on the eve of elections.

To grasp the significance of these episodes, something must be said of the long-term social and economic forces that have reshaped regional identities.

Multilayered Conflicts

The theme of exclusion runs like a red skein through the history of the Great Lakes. It lies at the heart of the 1959–62 Hutu revolution in Rwanda; thirty years later it served as the propelling force behind the 1990 invasion of Rwanda by the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF).²⁶ Barely concealed by the ban on ethnic labels, ethnic discrimination has since emerged as the hallmark of the Kagame regime, to an extent unprecedented in the history of Rwanda. Burundi is another case in point: political exclusion is the obvious explanation behind the Hutu insurrection of 1972, in turn leading to the first genocide recorded in the annals of the Great Lakes.²⁷ Nor is eastern Congo an exception. Where it does stand as a special case is that the groups targeted for political exclusion are not always the same as those affected by economic and social discrimination. In the 1970s and 1980s, the former were generally of Rwandan origins,²⁸ whether Hutu or Tutsi; the latter included those “native” Congolese communities who insistently denounced the “Banyarwanda” as the main source of economic oppression. Out of this situation has emerged a rich potential for intergroup violence.

THE THREAT OF BANYARWANDA DOMINATION: “KANYARWANDA,” 1963–66

The little-known “Kanyarwanda war” was the first public display of anti-Tutsi sentiment in post-independence Zaire. It lasted from 1963 to 1966 and resulted in large-scale massacres of Hutu and Tutsi. Its focus was the newly created “provincette” of North Kivu, one of the three entities that once formed Kivu province. The decision to carve smaller entities out of the pre-existing province was in large part inspired by the growing fears of Congolese “tribes,” notably the Hunde, that the Banyarwanda were about to tighten their grip on provincial institutions and thus threaten the autonomy of their ethnic neighbors. The geographical focus of the anti-Banyarwanda revolt was Masisi, and it involved, in essence, an alliance of Hunde and Nande elements against Hutu and Tutsi, with the Bashi generally supportive of the Banyarwanda. One of the first moves of the Hunde insurgents, according to one observer, was to reduce to ashes the local administrative archives so as to prevent the identification of the Banyarwanda otherwise than as refugees or foreigners.²⁹ That the insurrection should have had its point of ignition in Masisi—where large tracts of land had long been appropriated by Banyarwanda elements—is no less significant than the burning of provincial archives: in whipping up anti-Banyarwanda feelings, the Kanyarwanda uprising was meant to call into question their claims to the land, as well as their citizenship, as much as their dominant position at the provincial level.

THE LAND PROBLEM

Thirty years after the Kanyarwanda war, Masisi would flare up again in an orgy of anti-Banyarwanda violence. In March 1993, like a bolt out of the blue, armed groups of Nande, Hunde, and Nyanga youth suddenly turned against all Banyarwanda in sight. The intervention of Mobutu's army, code-named Operation Mbata, though intended to restore order, in fact generated further violence. From May to September 1996, Zairian troops lived up to their reputation as a rabble, plundering much of the rural areas south of Bwisha, along the Rwandan border.³⁰ By the time violence died down, an estimated 14,000 people had been killed, most of them Banyarwanda. Although the precipitating factors remain unclear,³¹ there can be little doubt that the underlying causes of the insurrection lay in the growing scarcity of land, which drove the local peasant communities to the edge of starvation. For this situation the insurgents did not hesitate to hold the Banyarwanda responsible.

One need not go too far back into the past to realize that the colonial state also bears much of the blame. The story has been told many times of how, in the 1930s, Belgian authorities embarked on a vast resettlement scheme designed to encourage the influx of Banyarwanda (essentially Hutu) from Rwanda to North Kivu, the aim being to provide Belgian planters with a cheap labor force and create an outlet for the growing population pressure in Rwanda.³² What is not always realized is that this sudden influx of immigrants played havoc with the traditional organization of the host communities, most notably the Hunde. Not content to expel many Hunde clans from their traditional homelands, the Belgian authorities proceeded to create a Banyarwanda chiefdom in the heart of Hunde domains, the so-called Gishari enclave (Bwisha), headed by a Tutsi chief.³³ The Gishari take-over was only the thin edge of the wedge. By 1959 in Rutshuru, the Hutu and Tutsi were ten times as numerous as the indigenous Hunde population (10,193); in Masisi almost two thirds of the population were immigrants from Rwanda.³⁴

Unlike the early migrant laborers who settled in Bwisha and Masisi under the wing of the Mission Immigration Banyarwanda (MIB), the “fifty-niners”, so-called because they fled Rwanda during the revolution of 1959–62, were overwhelmingly Tutsi; they were incomparably better off in terms of material wealth and education than their Hutu predecessors; and they could count on the unfailing support of a leading émigré figure, Barthélemy Bisengimana, who by 1970 wielded considerable power as Mobutu's chief of staff. What Bisengimana could not achieve, bribery usually did. Bribing the local authorities to acquire land became standard practice.

The result has been to set in motion a massive process of land alienation. The extent of the holdings acquired by wealthy Tutsi speaks for itself: Kasungu received 10,000 hectares, Ngizayo 2,000, Bisengimana himself received one of the biggest ranches in the region, over 5,000 hectares.³⁵ The expropriation of native lands was further facilitated by the Bakajika law of 1966, which converted all public land into the domain of the state, followed by the Zairianization measures of 1973. Instrumental as it was in operating massive land transfers into Tutsi hands, the effects of “étatisation-cum-zairianization” were by no means limited to North Kivu. At the root of the Hema-Lendu conflict in Ituri lies a very similar phenomenon. As Thierry Vircoulon has shown, the accumulation of land in Hema hands, with the Lendu often reduced to the status of day laborers, occurred largely at the expense of the Lendu communities, who, like many Hunde and Nyanga in North Kivu, eventually found themselves facing a subsistence crisis.³⁶

While exacerbating anti-Banyarwanda sentiment, land expropriation has had a profoundly disruptive impact on indigenous societies. This is a point of crucial significance to an understanding of the next phase in the regional dynamics of violence. As Vlassenroot has convincingly argued, the cumulative effects of the repeated violations of customary land rights, the break-up of patron-client ties, and the erosion of chiefly authority have created a critical mass of marginalized youth, many of whom later joined the warlords.³⁷ And just as the warlords can be seen as surrogate patrons for their deracinated followers, fighting for gold and diamonds and coltan is perhaps best understood, in David Keen's words, as “a way of creating an alternative system of profit, power and even protection.”³⁸

Another consequence of the land issue has been to give added urgency to the citizenship problem. The land problem and the nationality problem are but two sides of the same coin. Access to land presupposes access to citizenship; withdrawal of citizenship rights from the Banyarwanda meant the end of their security in land rights. But it would also mean, for many, the end of their physical security as residents of eastern Congo.

THE NATIONALITY QUESTION

A turning point in relations between immigrant and indigenous communities came in 1981, with the adoption of a new nationality law. By a stroke of the pen the Legislative Council repealed the 1972 law that gave citizenship rights to “persons originating from Rwanda-Urundi who were residents of the Kivu before January 1, 1950,” and instead adopted the notoriously restrictive ordonnance-loi of March 28, 1981, which stipulated that citizenship could only be conferred on persons “who could show that one of their ancestors was a member of a tribe or part of a tribe established in the Congo prior to October 18, 1908,” when the Congo formally became a Belgian colony.³⁹ The dismissal of Bisengimana in 1977, for reasons that remain unclear, thus paved the way for the virtual denial of citizenship rights to all Banyarwanda, irrespective of their date of arrival.

Although the 1981 law was never implemented, it nevertheless provided official justification for further discriminatory moves. Candidates suspected of “foreign” origins were systematically prevented from running during the 1982 and 1987 elections on grounds of “dubious nationality.” Despite great hopes among the Banyarwanda that the National Conference (1991) would resolve the nationality issue to their satisfaction, this was not to be the case. The party delegations representing their interests were refused admission to the conference. Civil society delegates did not fare much better. Given their well-established claims to citizenship, the Banyamulenge of South Kivu were especially resentful of such exclusionary measures. After the candidacies of two leading Banyamulenge were declared invalid in 1987, their constituents destroyed the ballot boxes. Many were arrested. When in October 1993 the news reached South Kivu that the newly elected Hutu president of Burundi, President Ndadaye, had been killed by Tutsi officers, several Banyamulenge were stoned to death in the streets of Uvira.⁴⁰

The worst was yet to come. While the victory of the FPR in Kigali was greeted with mixed feelings in eastern Congo, the report of the so-called Vangu commission—a parliamentary commission charged with investigating the identity of the refugee populations—declared the Banyamulenge “foreign migrants” (“immigrés étrangers”). On the basis of this palpable absurdity, the transitional parliament adopted a resolution on April 28, 1995 demanding the repatriation to their countries of origin of “all Rwanda and Burundi refugees and immigrants, without condition and without delay,” including the Banyamulenge, henceforth categorized as foreigners.⁴¹ From then on, the Banyamulenge came to be seen increasingly as Rwandan Tutsi in disguise. As the weekly paper Munanira, published in Uvira, commented, “this sly Zairwa [sic] is but a Rwandan whose morphology and ideology is identical to that of Paul Kagame.…The Banyamulenge are quite simply, Tutsi, and Rwandans at that.”⁴²

As happened elsewhere in the history of the Great Lakes, the stage was set for a self-fulfilling prophecy—grounded in self-protection—that inevitably led the Banyamulenge to become Kigali's staunchest allies during the AFDL rebellion leading to the undoing of the Mobutist dictatorship.

Interlocking Crises

As the history of the region makes clear, its social upheavals are closely interconnected. An obvious example is the murderous, cross-border tit-for-tat behind the ethnic crises in Rwanda and Burundi: the Hutu revolution in Rwanda generated a powerful backlash in Burundi, steadily raising the ethnic temperature until some 200,000 Hutu were killed by Tutsi in 1972, in what can legitimately be called a partial genocide. In Rwanda, the blow-back effect of the Burundi carnage took the form of violent anti-Tutsi pogroms, which paved the way for the rise to power of Juvénal Habyarimana in 1973. We also noted how in Uvira the news of Ndadaye's death triggered a brutal retaliation against Banyamulenge civilians. It is in Rwanda, however, that Ndadaye's assassination had its most dramatic impact as it ushered an immediate and drastic radicalization of anti-Tutsi sentiment, via the “Hutu Power” faction, that played directly into the hands of the génocidaires.

None of the above, however, carried consequences as devastating and wide-ranging as the 1994 genocide. The fallout has been little short of seismic. The litany of cataclysms is all too familiar: over a million Hutu refugees pouring across the border into Rwanda, creating chaos and penury in many parts of North and South Kivu; repeated cross-border raids into Rwanda by remnants of the Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR) and interahamwe (“those who stand together”), accompanied in parts of North Kivu by wholesale massacres of ethnic Tutsi, causing many to seek refuge in Rwanda; growing evidence of humanitarian aid diverted to extremist hands and of Mobutu's military assistance to the Hutu refugee leaders. All of which raised deep anxieties among Rwanda's new leaders.

The critical turning points came in 1996 and 1998.⁴³ The destruction of the refugee camps in October 1996, followed by the killing of tens of thousands of civilian refugees by units of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF; now known as the Rwanda Defense Forces [RDF]), was only the first stage of a grand politicomilitary strategy aimed at the overthrow of the Mobutist dictatorship and its replacement by a Tutsi-led protectorate. The 1997 war, nominally fought by Laurent Kabila's AFDL, with critical support from Rwanda, Uganda, and Angola, successfully achieved each of these objectives. As Kinshasa fell to the AFDL “rebels,” Kabila emerged as the ideal candidate to play the role of a compliant head of state—which he did until August 1998—when he turned against the kingmakers, thus triggering the second Congo war.

Rather than retelling the story of the 1998 crisis, let us at this point shift our focus and consider the case of RCD Commander Laurent Nkunda: his trajectory is illustrative of a range of experiences that help uncover the links between certain crucial episodes in the history of the region.

AGENCY: A SPOILER NAMED NKUNDA

Commander Laurent Nkunda's main claim to fame is to be among the most persistent “spoilers” of the precarious peace that loomed on the Kivu horizon after the 2002 Global and Inclusive Agreement.⁴⁴ He has fought in two theaters, in Rwanda and in the Congo, and is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Congolese—and indirectly, of the many Banyamulenge murdered in Gatumba (Burundi) in August 2004.

A reliable source describes him as “the son of a Tutsi cattle herder in Masisi,” who spent time “teaching in a local school before joining the RPF in the early 1990s.”⁴⁵ Although there is every reason to believe that he must have fought in Rwanda during the civil war, exactly where and in what capacity remains unknown. He eventually surfaced in eastern Congo as a member of the AFDL and after 1998, joined the RCD, “where he was an intelligence officer and held various key positions in the military leadership.”

His reputation for brutality is well established. So is his role in organizing the bloody repression of the Kisangani mutiny in May 2002. When a group of soldiers and police officers of the DRC mutinied against their RCD officers, Nkunda was serving as commander of the seventh brigade in Goma after completing a military training program at Gabiro in Rwanda. Along with several Kinyarwanda-speaking officers, including the notorious Gabriel Amisi, and 120 troops, Nkunda was sent to Kisangani to restore peace and order. He did so with exemplary cruelty, carrying out scores of summary executions. According to Human Rights Watch, “RCD officers had been responsible for the deaths of more than 160 persons.”⁴⁶

After the installation of the transitional government in 2003, he was appointed regional military commander of Kasai Oriental. He declined the offer, however, “saying that it would not be safe for him to travel to Kinshasa and Mbuji-Mayi.” He resigned his position in the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC), presumably to make himself available for other missions. One such mission occurred in May 2004, in Bukavu, when a Banyamulenge colonel, Jules Mutebutsi, also trained in Rwanda and subsequently integrated into the FARDC, mutinied against his commanding officer (General Mbudja Mabe, commander of the tenth military region) and seized control of the provincial capital of South Kivu. It was Nkunda, however, who provided the much needed military assistance to overcome the resistance of the FARDC. Although the mutiny proved short-lived, more enduring were its aftereffects. After the army retook control of the city, scores of Banyamulenge were killed by mobs of enraged Congolese, while thousands found refuge in the Gatumba refugee camp in Burundi. It was in Gatumba, in August of the same year, that over a hundred perished at the hands of Hutu extremists affiliated with the Burundi-based Forces Nationales de Libération (FNL) and Mai-Mai elements from the DRC.

Determined to live up to his reputation, Nkunda's next port of call was Kanyabonga, near the border with Rwanda, where in December 2004 he took on several units of the FARDC, presumably with logistical assistance from the Rwandan army, bringing relations between Rwanda and the DRC near the breaking point. More recently, in January 2006, Commander Nkunda made another show of military prowess when he attacked the town of Rutshuru, causing the displacement of tens of thousands of panic-stricken villagers.

One hesitates to make too much of the Nkunda vignette, but it is emblematic of how at certain critical junctures, the choices made by individual actors have triggered one crisis after another. Once this is said, the regional context in which decisions were made is no less worthy of attention.

CROSSBORDER TIES: THE KIN COUNTRY SYNDROME

What Huntington refers to as the “kin country syndrome”⁴⁷ —where communities sharing similar cultural ties are mobilized across national boundaries, in support of, or against, a government—draws attention to an obvious dimension of the Great Lakes crises. Although the phenomenon is not unique to the region, in no other part of the continent has it played a more decisive role in projecting ethnic hatreds from one national arena to another.

Kin country rallying was indeed a critical vector in the diffusion of ethnic enmities from Rwanda into Burundi in the early 1960s and back from Burundi into Rwanda in 1973. So, also, among ethnic Tutsi in eastern Congo during the early stages of the civil war in Rwanda, when hundreds were recruited into the ranks of the FPR. And when they found themselves in the crosshairs of Congolese and refugee extremists in 1996, Rwanda did not hesitate to reciprocate the favor. While the FPR acted as the senior partner, many Banyamulenge served as auxiliaries in the destruction of the refugee camps and in subsequent “cleansing” operations. Much the same coalescence of ethnic affinities presided over the emergence of the solidly Hutu Forces Démocratique pour la Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) in eastern Congo, notwithstanding the bitter rivalries currently tearing its leadership.⁴⁸

Again, consider the case of the Nande of North Kivu (known as Bakonjo in Uganda): for years Nande involvement in the wide-ranging trade networks, linking their core area of Butembo-Beni to East Africa and beyond, helped strengthen Nande-Bakonjo ties, but the connection became politically significant in the 1990s when, in his effort to weaken the Museveni regime, Mobutu did everything he could to bolster the Bakonjo-led National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (NALU), a move which elicited a fair degree of sympathy among the Nande.⁴⁹ Parts of North Kivu became a privileged sanctuary for NALU militants. According to one observer, armed with weapons sent from Kinshasa and Khartoum, on November 13 they launched a major offensive against Uganda, which temporarily brought under NALU its control much of the Kasese district and the town of Mbarara.⁵⁰

Such “fault line conflicts,” Huntington notes, “tend to be vicious and bloody, since fundamental issues of identity are at stake. In addition, they tend to be lengthy; they may be interrupted by truces or agreements but these tend to break down and the conflict is resumed.”⁵¹

REFUGEE FLOWS

In the absence of massive outpourings of Hutu refugees to neighboring states—with vivid memories of the violence they experienced or inflicted—it is a question whether kinship ties could have been mobilized so quickly and so effectively, and whether the security concerns of neighboring states would have assumed the same urgency. Much of the history of the region is indeed reducible to the transformation of refugee-generating conflict into conflict-generating refugees, or as Myron Weiner puts it, “conflicts create refugees, but refugees also create conflicts.”⁵² From the days of the Hutu revolution in Rwanda to the invasion of the “refugee warriors” from Uganda in 1994, from the huge exodus of Hutu from Burundi in 1972 to the “cleansing” of Hutu refugee camps in 1996–97, the pattern that emerges again and again is one in which refugee populations serve as the vehicles through which ethnic identities are mobilized and manipulated, host communities preyed upon, and external resources extracted. The net result, as one observer noted, has been to “create domestic instability, generate interstate tension and threaten international security.”⁵³

The view that “refugees are potentially a tool in interstate conflicts”⁵⁴ is nowhere more cruelly demonstrated than by the fate that befell the Hutu refugees—numbering over a million. Manipulated by their own leaders, as well as by Mobutu and ultimately by Laurent Kabila, they paid a heavy price in the retribution visited upon them by the FPR. Beatrice Umutesi's searing account of her grueling trek across two thousand miles bears testimony to the refugee's agonies in the course of the relentless manhunt conducted by the Rwandan army assisted by AFDL units.⁵⁵ There is no need to speak of a “humanitarian hysteria”⁵⁶ to describe the concern of the international community in order to recognize the self-destructive consequences of the disastrous policies pursued by Hutu extremists and their Zairian allies. There can be no denying that Hutu leaders did organize armed raids into Rwanda. Nor is there any doubt about the diverting of humanitarian aid, presumably to use it as a bargaining chip with civilian refugees, or about Mobutu's role in arming refugee factions. Just how serious were the risks thus posed to the host country became clear after the Rwandan military began a series of attacks against the camps on October 18, 1996.

Arming refugees is one thing; disarming them is a far more difficult undertaking. Thus, if Laurent Kabila found it expedient in 1998 to arm Hutu refugees in his campaign against the Rwanda-backed RCD, disarming them after they have outlived their strategic usefulness was only one of the many headaches facing his son on the eve of multiparty elections.

As the foregoing suggests, strategies based on a calculus of short-term advantages may entail heavy costs a few years down the road. Similarly, alliances that seem perfectly logical one day may turn out to be utterly counterproductive the next. Kagame's experience with his less than obedient AFDL ally is just one example of the inherent fickleness of political clients.

A Fluid Landscape

The 1997 anti-Mobutist crusade did little more than replace one dictatorship with another. The 1998 war, on the other hand, marks a sharp break in the region's history. It ushered in one of the bloodiest wars recorded in recent times, the effects of which are still tragically visible in many parts of the country. Much of this violence, however, has gone un-reported. It unfolds not along a well delineated battle line but in oil-slick patterns in separate provincial and subprovincial arenas. Each episode has its own logic, each its own set of actors. And each is in some measure traceable to the reversal of alliances that followed in the wake of Kabila's decision to challenge the overrule of his Tutsi “protectors.”

SWITCHING SIDES

How the Kigali-sponsored attack against the refugee camps morphed into a full-scale, externally supported invasion aimed at the overthrow of Mobutu is beyond the scope of this discussion.⁵⁷ Suffice it to note that the AFDL could not have reached Kinshasa with such speed and relative ease without the critical support it received from Rwanda, Uganda, and Angola. Their shared dislike of Mobutu, based on a realistic assessment of their respective interests, proved a fragile glue in the face of the new challenges raised by Kabila's revolt. Thus, if Angola remained Kinshasa's most trusted ally and would soon be joined by Zimbabwe—whose mercenary motives are well established—Rwanda and Uganda needed little prodding to turn against their renegade client. And whereas Burundi displayed, in Lanotte's felicitous phrasing, a “tolerant complicity” in the fight against Kabila,⁵⁸ eventually Namibia, the Sudan, and Chad all joined Luanda in giving their half-hearted support to Kinshasa.

Basically, the old axiom according to which “the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and the friend of my enemy is my enemy” provides the essential logic behind the making and unmaking of alliances during the 1997 and 1998 wars.⁵⁹ This applies to interstate as well as domestic alliances. In each case, the pattern is one in which friends and enemies reverse roles in response to their changing perceptions of the other's motives. What Rwanda and Uganda saw as a betrayal, Angola perceived as a legitimate move. Uganda's support of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) made it a matter of realpolitik for Khartoum to join hands with Kinshasa. In sending 2,000 troops to battle against Jean-Pierre Bemba's Mouvement de Libération du Congo (MLC), Chad felt obligated to heed Khartoum's prodding (until the cost in human losses proved too onerous) in recognition of Sudan's past support to Idriss Déby.

Of the many alliances of convenience formed during the first and second Congo wars, none seemed more durable than the one between Rwanda and Uganda. Both viewed Mobutu with equal distaste, and both saw treasonable behavior in Kabila's volte-face. Yet by late 1999, the alliance had all but disintegrated. The bitter infighting that erupted in Kisangani in 1999, 2000, and 2001 over access to the rich mineral deposits of Bafwasende and other localities did more than spell the end of a friendly relationship. It brought the former allies to the brink of a full-scale war.

Much the same switching of partnerships can be seen at the domestic level. As long as he owed fealty to his Rwandan patrons, Kabila thought nothing of covering up the murder of Hutu refugees; nor did he shrink from blocking the work of the UN forensic investigation team in 1997, even demanding the sacking of its president, Roberto Garreton, “after he produced a preliminary sixteen-page report that identified forty sites where Kabila's AFDL was suspected of having committed atrocities.”⁶⁰ A year later, however, those refugee leaders who managed to survive the carnage had become Kabila's best friends in his fight against Rwandan “rebels.”

The mixed fortunes of the RCD are another case in point. Despite or because of its murky origins—having been conceived, created, nurtured, and supported by Kigali to defend its interests in eastern Congo—the RCD today is a weak version of its former self. In addition to its core constituency, made up of Banyamulenge,⁶¹ it was able at first to recruit a number of influential politicians of different ethnic and provincial origins. Many have since left the movement. The old-guard Mobutists, Lunda Bululu, Lambert Mende, and Alexis Thambwe have joined other parties; Arthur Zaidi Ngoma has founded his own political formation (Camp de la Patrie), and so has Mbusa Nyamwezi (Forces du Renouveau); Wamba dia Wamba—whose early defection led to the first of many RCD clones, the so-called RCD-Kisangani, as distinct from the RCD-Goma—has resumed his academic career after a calamitous series of setbacks. What is left of the party is something of an empty shell, with its formal head, Azarias Ruberwa, in Kinshasa, desperately trying to stem the tide of dissidence.

Of the many defections suffered by the RDC, perhaps the least expected was initiated by a leading Banyamulenge personality, Manasse Ruhimbika. His short-lived Forces Républicaines Fédéralistes (FRF) made plain the lack of internal cohesion among the Banyamulenge and the growing resentment harbored by many, including Ruhimbika, over Rwanda's dominance of the RCD. The FRF break-away was only the harbinger of a far more serious split, which by 2002 had turned into a full-scale rebellion against the RCD. Led by a former RCD commander, Patrick Masunzu, the insurrection quickly spread through the Itombwe plateau, the traditional homeland of the Banyamulenge, and for a while reportedly coalesced with the FDLR and Mai-Mai elements. Masunzu's forces fought pitched battles against RCD troops, resulting in heavy losses on both sides, and some 40,000 displaced.⁶² Reflecting on the lessons of the insurrection, one observer commented, “Banyamulege opinion is now profoundly divided. Some still back the RCD; many feel it has abandoned their interests.”⁶³ This is as true today as it was in 2003.

Thus, if fragmentation is indeed the most salient characteristic of Congolese politics, this is in part due to the persistence of highly divisive issues, having to do with disagreements over the extent and legitimacy of the Rwandan connection, the sharing of resources among allies, the choice of tactical alliances, and so forth. But this is only one aspect of a more complicated reality.

PATTERNS OF FRAGMENTATION

The political vacuum created by the sudden collapse of the Mobutist state must be seen as a key factor in the rapid fragmentation of the political arena. On the debris of the state, overnight a host of civil society organizations and militias mushroomed, of which the Mai-Mai militias are the most notorious for their propensity to fragment and proliferate. Pinning them down long enough to analyze their contours is not easy. Nonetheless, the political dynamic behind the surge of armed factions seems reasonably clear.⁶⁴

Unlike what can observed in the case of the RCD, where fragmentation starts at the top, the efflorescence of Mai-Mai factions is a locally rooted phenomenon. It stems in part from the Mobutist legacy of playing one ethnic community off against another—sometimes referred to as the “géopolitique” argument—and in part from the persistence over time—through youth groups, civil society organizations, and church groups⁶⁵ —of recruitment strategies based on ethnoregional ties. Describing the state of the play in South Kivu in 2000, Ruhimbika notes that “there are five major Mai-Mai axes which reflect local ethnic configurations”: the Fizi axis (Dunia), the Uvira axis (Bidalira), the Kizuka high plateau area (Mulemera), the Ruzizi axis (controlled by Hutu militias), and the Lubumba axis (also controlled by Bidalira).⁶⁶ Although the ethno-regional dimension is a common characteristic of most Mai-Mai factions, their members, as Ruhimbika's description suggests, come from different horizons: some, like “the old general Louis Bidalira,” are veterans of the 1964 Simba rebellion in eastern Congo; others are Hutu refugees from Burundi, as in the Ruzizi valley; and others are recycled interahamwe or their offspring. Viewed from a broader perspective, however, the Mai-Mai can best be seen as the political manifestation of the social exclusion affecting a growing number of marginalized youth. As Vlassenroot and Van Acker perceptively note, “the formation of the Mai-Mai must be understood as a social process which creates its own rationality, it is dictated by their rejection of the institutional order, and shaped by an environment which offers ample opportunities for creating and exploiting illicit trade networks and invites warlord types of activities.”⁶⁷

In their early phase of development, the Mai-Mai were not so much motivated by greed as by the need to protect their communities against the threats posed by newcomers; first the Hutu refugees in 1994 and then, the Tutsi after the AFDL insurrection. Beginning in early 1997, after the assassination of a leading Mai-Mai personality, the main thrust of their activities was directed against the Rwandan occupying forces and their local allies. By the late 1990s, however, access to mineral wealth loomed increasingly large on their agenda. In a pattern that has repeated itself again and again, the quest for gold and diamonds has gone hand in hand with the procurement of weapons. The picture drawn by Vlassenroot and Van Acker in 2001 is still relevant today: “Since the militia leaders control the bulk of economic activities in the mineral-rich areas, the Mai-Mai, along with the interahamwe and FDD, have created their own war economy and are riding a wave of prosperity, which in turn brought about a decline in security in the mining districts.”⁶⁸ The shift from “protection” to “greed” has been accompanied by a proliferation of armed factions, including Mai-Mai, in what looks increasingly like a free-for-all competition for loot.

An extreme but not untypical case is that of Ituri: since 2003, no fewer than eight armed factions have been involved in the scramble for gold and diamonds. Closer scrutiny suggests that greed was not the only motive behind this situation of intense competitiveness. In the words of one non-governmental organization (NGO) report, “the conflict which was over land at the beginning, has taken on multiple dimensions. Ethnicity is not a sufficient point of reference to understand what is going on in Ituri. Perpetrators of violence are at once and the same time ethnically based politico-military groups (UPC, PUSIC, FNI and FRPI), heterogeneous armed groups (FAPC and FPDC) and states (Uganda, Rwanda and RDC). The facts also demonstrate that the motives for confrontation are not always dictated by ethnic hatred, but by other considerations having to do with efforts at political positioning, the quest for material gain, the struggle for local, national or sub-regional leadership.”⁶⁹

The story of how the original RCD broke into warring factions reveals much the same plurality of motives, albeit with ethnic and sub-ethnic cleavages looming increasingly large as a source of division. Personal and political grudges were certainly instrumental in causing Wamba-dia-Wamba's decision to form his own party in Kisangani (RCDK), but the choice of Kisangani was not made at random. The prospects of easy access to the area's rich mineral deposits were just as crucial for the dissident leader as they were, a few months later, in triggering the violent confrontation between Rwanda and Uganda, at which point he had few other options than to move to Bunia, the capital of Ituri. This is where the seeds of his undoing were sown. Quite aside from the greed factor, in the context of a growing ethnic polarization between Hema and Lendu, his decision to side with the Lendu immediately sealed a Nande-Hema alliance against him, bringing together Mbusa Nyamesi (Nande) and Tibasima (Hema) as the key players, identified with the RDC-Mouvement de Libération (RCD-ML). With Uganda firmly behind the Hema, Wamba eventually bowed to Museveni's pressure to leave Bunia, thus paving the way for the next round, between Nande and Hema. Eventually the Hema-Gegere group decided to break away from the RCD-ML in hopes of getting the exclusive benefit of the Kilo-Moto gold mines and under the leadership of Thomas Lubanga, formed the Union des Populations Congolaises (UPC). In time, however, intra-Hema rivalries would prompt the culturally distinct southern Hema to set up their own group, the Parti pour l'Unité et la Sauvegarde de l'Intégrité du Congo (PUSIC), led by chief Kahwa, whereas the northern Gegere-Hema remained under Lubanga's wing. Meanwhile, unable to hold his ground against the Hema's UPC, Nyamwesi retired to his solidly Nande fiefdom of Beni-Butambo, while Ituri sank inexorably into an ever more bloody factional strife. Ethnicity, greed, and political ambitions were all involved, though not always in equal proportion, in the unraveling of the original RCD.

And so were external actors, most notably Uganda and Rwanda. A detailed discussion of their involvement in Ituri politics would take us too far afield. Suffice it to note that both share a large part of responsibility in the factional strife that engulfed a large section of the province. First, by supporting the Hema against the Lendu, then switching sides while Rwanda threw its weight around the Hema, Uganda has played a major role in intensifying the conflict. And the same applies to Rwanda, even though Kigali made every effort to create the illusion that assistance to UPC was the initiative of the RCD-Goma. In truth, the UPC entered into an alliance with the RCD-Goma in January 2003, which provided for political and military assistance, but as early as June 2002, Rwanda was already delivering large quantities of arms and ammunition to the UPC. In trying to grasp the dynamic of violence in eastern Congo, one is reminded of Tilly's pithy formula, “someone who produces both the danger and, at a price, the shield against it, is a racketeer.”⁷⁰ Nurtured by foreign patrons, and relayed by local warlords, the racketeering shows no sign of coming to an end any time soon.

The Rwandan Menace

In terms of size and potential wealth, there is no greater contrast than between minute, overpopulated, resource-poor Rwanda and its “scandalously” well-endowed, giant neighbor to the west; the anomaly lies in the overwhelming military superiority of Rwanda's RDF, one of the most experienced, disciplined, and efficient armed forces in the region.

The threats posed by Rwanda to its Congolese neighbor were cruelly revealed during the 1997 and 1998 wars, and by the repeated forays of the RDF into the DRC from 1998 to 2002, as far south into the interior as north Katanga and Kasai and Beni-Butembo in the north. Following the 2002 Pretoria accords, the bulk of Rwanda's army formally withdrew from the DRC; nonetheless, writes Reyntjens, “[it] later maintained a covert presence both directly and indirectly through its proxy, the RCD-Goma.”⁷¹ Just how serious is the challenge of its proxy was made clear during the May 2004 offensive on Bukavu, the border attacks on Kanyabonga in December 2004 and in Rutshuru in January 2006.

Ironically, Rwanda was the first to feel threatened by the presence of armed Hutu refugees in eastern Congo; its security concerns made it mandatory to “neutralize” the camps from which originated the raids against its national territory. Expansion quickly followed preemption and with the power vacuum created by the fall of the Mobutist state, the need to fill it with trustworthy allies backed by effective military force became all the more urgent. This is where a radical shift occurred in Rwanda's policy goals. Security meant, in essence, continuing access to mineral resources, not only to reward local allies but to strengthen its military establishment. No longer is Rwanda's security imperiled by Hutu rebels but, if anything, by rebels within its own military establishment. This is not to underestimate the nuisance potential of the radical, Hutu-led Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Rwanda (FDLR), consisting mainly of remnants of the interahamwe and ex-FAR. Although these constitute a clear and present danger to the civilian populations of North and South Kivu and parts of Maniema, Rwanda's allegation that they pose a mortal threat to its security is vastly exaggerated; nonetheless, the FDLR offer a convenient pretext for Kigali's military incursions into North Kivu. The FDLR are no match for an estimated 70,000 men under arms and a sophisticated military arsenal, consisting of armored personnel carriers (APCs), tanks, and helicopters. Even though it is not immediately threatened by rebel forces, Rwanda's maintenance of its armed forces is heavily dependent on free access to its neighbor's wealth.

Exactly how much of the mineral pie goes to Rwanda and how much to its local allies is impossible to tell because of the secrecy surrounding these transactions and the number of intermediaries and joint ventures involved. A rough indication of the profits going to the RCD was disclosed by Adolphe Onusumba, a key RCD figure, who is reported to have declared in 2000, “We raise more or less $200,000 per month from diamonds.…Coltan gives us more: a million dollars a month.”⁷² This is probably a fraction of the overall profits going into Rwandan pockets.⁷³ Whether or how far discords over the sharing of the Congo's wealth have contributed to the RCD's declining fortunes is moot. What is beyond doubt is that the RCD is no longer Kagame's most dependable ally in eastern DRC. In the words of one observer, “the Rwandan government has progressively relegated the national RCD leadership to a secondary tool of influence in Kinshasa and focused instead on creating and strengthening autonomous power bases in areas of the DRC it considers to be within its sphere of influence.”⁷⁴

Rwanda's principal ally in eastern DRC is the multifaceted NGO Tous pour la Paix et le Développement (TPD), headed until 2000 by the all-powerful North Kivu governor, Eugene Serufuli Ngayabaseka. It was founded in 1998, ostensibly “to assist Congolese refugees in Rwanda to return to the DRC,”⁷⁵ meaning essentially those Tutsi elements indigenous to North Kivu who fled the violence in 1995 and 1996. Of far greater significance, however, are TPD's “latent” functions. Its aims are to expand and strengthen Kigali's grassroots “constituencies” politically, militarily, and economically. This is how Dennis Tull describes its activities: “[to help] the RCD establish a strong power base on both an elite level as well as on the ground by forging close links between Kigali, the RCD and a Banyarwanda group consisting of rich landowners and repatriates in North Kivu…to address Rwanda's security concerns by reinforcing military recruitment among the Banyarwanda repatriates…thirdly, by supposedly promoting humanitarian concerns, the repatriation network might have tapped resources provided by international agencies, thus contributing to the financing of this alliance.”⁷⁶ The emphasis placed on the recruitment of Hutu participants in the TPD is the most arresting—and potentially risky—aspect of Kigali's new strategy.

That Serufuli happens to be a Hutu, and a Hutu from Rutshuru at that, is of course indicative of the new course being charted by Kigali. No longer is the aim to assemble a group of potential supporters from various ethnic and regional horizons around a core of Banyamulenge faithful, as was the case during the early years of the RCD, but to reach out to Hutu elements indigenous to North Kivu. In a fascinating exploration of the TPD's historical antecedents, Bucyalime Mararo shows its curious pedigree, traceable to the pro-Hutu Mutuelle agricole des Virunga (MAGRIVI) and the more “ecumenical” Mutuelle UMOJA. TPD, in short, has deep roots in the social landscape of the region. In one significant respect, its settlement policies are ominously reminiscent of the colonial era, when Hutu migrants gradually pushed the Hunde out of their traditional domains in Masisi, thus creating lasting enmities between them. As Hutu chiefs are once again replacing Hunde authorities, and appropriating their landholdings, the stage is set for a renewal of tension.⁷⁷ Whether their shared awareness of being up against a common ethnic enemy can help forge closer ties between Hutu and Tutsi remains to be seen.

In brief, in the short term, the menace posed by Rwanda's new course lies in the challenge it poses to the transition to multiparty democracy. It stems from the support network put in place on behalf of its client faction and the possibility that should the RCD lose the electoral battle, the patron state would not hesitate to use bullets against ballots, directly or indirectly. In the longer term, the threat is economic because the continuing siphoning off of minerals inevitably translates into huge opportunity costs for the Congolese people. However, the political and economic sides of the coin are intimately related. Only by nurturing and manipulating a vast array of vested interests among the host communities of eastern Congo can Rwanda hope to meet the twin challenges of its foreign policy, namely, make eastern Congo safe for ethnic Tutsi and extract the resources needed to meet the demands of its formidable military establishment.

Looking back at the violence that has swept across the Great Lakes, future historians will ponder the analogy with the Thirty Years War. In both instances, we are dealing not with one war but an aggregation of wars; in each instance the logic of the unforeseen lies at the root of the endless and violent episodes generated by the initial event; and ultimately, leaving behind nothing but waste and destruction in its wake. This is how C. V. Wedgewood, in her classic account, summed up the chaos and bloodshed unleashed through Europe from 1618 to 1648: “Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its results, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.”⁷⁸

What better epitaph for a conflict that has taken four million lives—and nearly six, when the losses in Rwanda and Burundi, are added to the toll—displaced hundreds of thousands, raised ethnic hatreds to unprecedented levels, and made a wasteland of many parts of the environment?