The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa. Rene LemarchandЧитать онлайн книгу.
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