Democratising Africa: 10 years on
In October 1990 the expeditionary force of the Rwandan Patriotic Front into Rwanda was shattered by the superior forces of President Juvenal Habyarimana. The RPF's popular Commanding Officer Fred Rwigyema was killed early in the fighting, by a stray bullet, or executed by jealous rivals. RPF leader Paul Kagame cut short a visit to Fort Leavenworth in the USA to take command of the forces in the field. But in the next 10 years Kagame's RPF not only took power in Rwanda, but swept across central Africa, overthrowing the ancien regime in Congo. Just three years ago, Kagame was feted by the West as one of a new generation of African leaders including his old friend, Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni and the newly installed Congolese president Laurent Kabila. Just this year, though, the Kagame regime looked exhausted and threadbare, rent by defections, condemned by human rights activists and locked in a protracted war of succession in the Congo, fighting both Kabila and Museveni's forces.
It is unlikely that the RPF and its allies would have enjoyed any success without the influence of the West. At the end of the Cold War, the United States and the former colonial powers of Europe all reworked their foreign policy with very specific consequences for a number of African regimes. As long as the Soviet Union was willing to provide assistance to radical nationalists, the West backed local strongmen, like Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko and Rwanda's Juvenal Habyarimana to stem the nationalist tide. As the challenge of radical nationalism ebbed, the West took the opportunity to destabilise its former allies in a policy euphemistically called 'democratisation'.
In Uganda, the United States already had a useful ally in Yoweri Museveni, whose rebellion had overthrown the democratically elected independence leader Milton Obote. Museveni suspended party politics in Uganda, but he did know how to play up to the rhetoric of democratisation. A large part of Museveni's US-trained officer corps were exiles from Rwanda, part of the persecuted Tutsi minority. Rwigyema had been Commander-in-Chief of Museveni's army, Kagame head of military security. The RPF was effectively the high command of the Ugandan army.
Meanwhile in Rwanda, the creaking dictatorship of Habyarimana was put under massive pressure by its European sponsor, France, to recognise opposition parties. At the time social progress in health and education was being reversed by a collapse in coffee prices, and the International Monetary Fund offered loans on conditions which included democratisation. But democratisation did not include elections, only 'opposition parties', that owed their influence to Western sponsorship. Further, Hayarimana's new cabinet was obliged to negotiate with the defeated RPF in Arusha, Tanzania, while it was still raiding across the border.
The destabilisation of Rwanda was all the more pointed given the ethnic divisions between the different protagonists. Historically, Rwanda's Tutsi minority had provided the country's ruling elite (as it still did in neighbouring Burundi). But in 1959 the soon to be independent country launched a 'social revolution' in which the Tutsis were victimised for their excessive wealth and power. A deeply conservative, overwhelmingly catholic one-party state displaced popular resentment onto the former Tutsi elite, with successive persecutions. Now the exiled Tutsis were invading the country as leaders of the RPF, and the West was demanding that they be given a leading role in the cabinet.
Habyarimana bought time by letting his imposed cabinet negotiate away his authority at Arusha, while galvanising opposition to the deal at home - which meant stirring up hostility to the Tutsi invaders on ethnic grounds. Despite the best efforts of the RPF to garner support from Hutus opposed to Habyarimana, they remained not only predominantly a Tutsi force, but predominantly an exile army as well.
The RPF kept up the pressure, making ever more extravagant demands in Arusha - half of the army to be RPF, Kagame to hold the interior ministry with the president shorn of all powers. Outside the RPF broke the ceasefire in March 1991, February 1992 and August 1993 (Prunier 135, 174, 196). Tanzanian authorities recorded president Yoweri Museveni commanding the RPF soldiers 'Don't sign the peace agreement. I want you back [on the battlefield] immediately' (Tanzanian newspaper The Mirror, No 126, second issue, May 1994).
The fateful step taken by the RPF was to seek to destabilise the back- sliding Habyarimana regime. In neighbouring Burundi, where the first ever Hutu president Melchior Ndadaye had just been elected, Tutsi officers allied to the RPF assassinated him on 23 October 1993, and took refuge with the RPF in Uganda (Prunier, 202). Widescale slaughter of Burundian Hutus by the Tutsi-dominated military followed, giving their Rwandan neighbours a fearful image of the RPF's writ. Then on 6 April 1994 an RPF hit team assassinated Habyarimana. For years the RPF tried to blame Habyarimana's assassination on Hutu extremists. A United Nations investigation that named Kagame as ordering the killing - suppressed at the time by Justice Louise Arbour - was unearthed by a Canadian newspaper, the National Post earlier this year. At first the United Nations denied authorship, and then later acknowledged it (http://www.unfoundation.org/unwire/archives/UNWIRE000303.cfm#20). Interviewed about the charges, Kagame declined to refute them, only accusing the United Nations of trying to undermine his government (Kigali, 7 April 2000).
In Rwanda in April 1994, as the state collapsed under pressure from the RPF and the West, government officials, church leaders and hastily convened militias set about a wholesale slaughter of Tutsis as well as those Hutus considered disloyal. Eight hundred thousand Tutsis were massacred.
As the regime collapsed into depravity the RPF swept into power, to assume responsibility for a society where its roots were negligible. In the West, however, Kagame was lauded as the hero who had stopped the genocide that they had ignored.
Punishing the genocide against Tutsis became the state's defining purpose. All opposition to the RPF was criminalised, as any Hutu leader who had been in Rwanda in 1994 was automatically suspect. Hundreds of thousands of Hutus were detained in barbaric conditions - hundreds required amputations because they were packed so tight that their limbs became gangrenous (Gourevitch, 247). Under the auspices of the United Nations a special war crimes court was set up to try those guilty of killings, but RPF atrocities were studiously excluded from the court's terms of reference. At one refugee camp, sarcastically described by Kagame as 'the famous Kibeho', 8,000 refugees were gunned down by RPF soldiers, while desperate mothers threw their infant children over the barbed wire into the United Nations compound (Gourevitch, 207).
Even Tutsis in Rwanda found the Ugandan-raised Tutsis of the RPF alien. Prospects of widening support among the 80 per cent of the population that was Hutu were non-existent while all Hutus were perceived as complicit in genocide. The RPF's desire to ignore the ethnic question has drawn admiration from the West, but all it really means is that the regime would prefer not to consider its isolation from the populace. Certainly Kagame has never submitted his government - a product supposedly of the democratisation of Africa - to a free election.
Instead the RPF regime maintained forward momentum in the one way it knew how, through its considerable military prowess. When supporters of the old regime tried to regroup in neighbouring Zaire (since renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Kagame launched an audacious new war against them, before marching on the ailing dictator Mobutu's capital Kinshasa. Seizing the opportunity to rid themselves of an embarrassing ally, the West left Mobutu to his fate. Kagame used Laurent Kabila a veteran of the Congo War fought against Mobutu by Che Guevara in the sixties as his front man.
In less than a decade the new generation of African leaders Kagame, Museveni and Kabila had transformed the region. In the West they were lauded as the end of clientelism and corruption in Africa's one-party states. In fact they each had less of a popular base than the dictators they evicted.
All three banned political parties from contesting elections, in the name of rooting out tribalism. Kagame's Hutu frontmen like Prime Minister Faustin Twagiramungu and President Pasteur Bizimungu resigned in succession, accusing the RPF of being a Tutsi-supremacist organisation. Kabila, broke with his Rwandan sponsors, making peace with the Hutu exiles. Museveni survives largely through the extraordinary aid extended to his regime.
Kagame had already decided that having made Kabila he could break him and launched a second war to overthrow his protégé - only to be checked by intervention from nationalist states like Zimbabwe. Kagame even managed to fall out with Museveni over who the next president of the Congo should be, leading to hostilities between the Rwandan and Ugandan armies, fought in the Congo.
What was called democratisation turned out to be its opposite: the construction of regimes that, in the name of resisting tribalism, have isolated themselves from any popular base of support, leaving only military adventures to give them any sense of purpose.
Reading: Gerard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, Hurst 1995; Philip Gourevitch, 'We wish to Inform You', Picador, 2000; Barrie Collins, Obedience in Rwanda: A Critical Question, Sheffield Hallam University Press -- James Heartfield