The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (92 page)

RWANDAN GENOCIDE

Death toll:
937,000

Rank:
53

Type:
ethnic cleansing

Broad dividing line:
Hutu vs. Tutsi

Time frame:
100 days in 1994

Location and major state participant:
Rwanda

Who usually gets the most blame:
Belgium, France, and American President Bill Clinton
*

Another damn:
African civil war

The unanswerable question everyone asks:
Why didn’t anybody stop this?

Background

Many centuries ago, tall Nilotic cattle herders from Sudan drifted south, about the same time that stocky Bantu farmers from the western hump of Africa were migrating eastward. They crashed and mingled in the Lake Region, and after struggles and adjustments across unrecorded generations, the Nilotic Tutsi aristocracy ended up ruling over the Bantu Hutu peasantry. This was the situation that the first European explorers discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century. In the colonial Scramble for Africa, the region was split between the Germans and the Belgians.

After the First World War, the overseas German colonies were quickly divvied up among the winners. Two inland bites of German East Africa adjacent to the Belgian Congo were handed over to the Belgians as a League of Nations mandate, which, by the terms of the treaty, had to be administered separately from the rest of Belgium’s colonies. Both the Germans and the Belgians relied on the local Tutsi nobility to help them rule, and in exchange granted them privileges that were denied the Hutu, such as an exemption from the sixty days of free labor that all natives owed the state. Because centuries of interbreeding and coexistence had worn away the physical and cultural differences between the two groups, the Belgians issued identification cards that clearly labeled each person as one or the other so the authorities would know who was entitled to preferential treatment. Those of mixed or uncertain ancestry were arbitrarily assigned their ethnicity based on the whim of the colonial officials. Hutu and Tutsi usually identified one another by subtle class differences rather than anything immediately obvious to outsiders. Both groups spoke the same language and were mostly Catholic by the time of independence.
¹

In 1962, the League of Nations mandates became the independent countries of Burundi and Rwanda. Unfortunately, this twofold split in ethnicity created an inherently unstable situation. Chronic suspicion and ill will between Hutu and Tutsi led to endemic civil war, punctuated by occasional mind-numbing massacres. For a time, the worst such massacre in memory occurred in 1972, when a ruling Tutsi regime in Burundi slaughtered some 100,000 to 150,000 Hutu and sent thousands of bitter Hutu refugees streaming over the border into Hutu-dominated Rwanda.
²

Foreground

A later generation would see even worse. On April 6, 1994, the Hutu presidents of Burundi and Rwanda were flying back from negotiating a peace treaty with Tutsi rebels when their plane was shot down by surface-to-air missiles. No one knows by whom. Hutu leaders blamed Tutsi rebels and immediately launched retaliatory massacres, but others claim that Hutu extremists manufactured an excuse to crack down on the Tutsi by assassinating a couple of presidents who had sold them out.
*

Regardless, by the next day, infuriated Hutu militias, the Interahamwe (“Those who work together”), began to massacre Tutsi all across Rwanda. The genocide was masterminded by Defense Minister Theoneste Bagosora, and it was terribly efficient. Within two weeks—before the international community even had a chance to flinch—a quarter of a million men, women, and children had been hacked apart, often with the genocide’s characteristic weapon, the machete.
³

Among the first to die was Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a moderate Hutu woman who was raped with bayonets and killed. The Belgian soldiers of her UN bodyguard were under orders not to provoke the locals by fighting back, so they surrendered without a fight, only to be castrated, gagged with their own genitalia, and killed anyway.

All across the country, in attacks coordinated and encouraged by radio propagandists like Ferdinand Nahimana, Hutu turned against their Tutsi neighbors. Teachers killed their students. Hutu babysitters killed Tutsi children left in their care. Reluctant Hutu were taken aside and threatened with death if they didn’t join the killing. They were swept up by gangs, handed machetes, and ordered to kill or die. The guilt of killing was deliberately spread as widely as possible by a whole gang taking turns hacking and slashing.
⁴

The hatred went so deep that there was no place the Tutsi were safe. A week into the genocide, the mayor of Nyarubuye led 7,000 militia to his local Catholic church and its adjacent convent to massacre 20,000 Tutsi taking refuge in the building complex.
⁵
At the Catholic church in Nyange, the priest ordered workmen to bulldoze the building on top of the 1,500 refugees gathered inside.
⁶
Several convents also gathered refugees together and then gave them up to the militias. At a convent in Sovu, the nuns not only locked some Tutsi in the convent’s garage but also provided the gasoline to burn it down.
⁷

The Interahamwe made a special effort to rape and humiliate female victims before cutting them apart. Sometimes the victims were killed immediately after the rape; sometimes they were left to die of grotesque mutilations; sometimes they were caged for another round of rape later. On one occasion, a woman was pinned to the ground with a spear thrust through her foot while her attackers ran a quick errand before returning to rape her again. Witnesses could see the proof of these atrocities months later, “even in the whitened skeletons. The legs bent and apart. A broken bottle, a rough branch, even a knife between them. . . . They died in a position of total vulnerability, flat on their backs, with their legs bent and their knees wide apart.”
⁸

Finally, after three months of killing, Tutsi rebels under Paul Kagame broke through the front lines and raced to rescue their surviving kinsmen. Hutu by the millions fled into neighboring countries to avoid retaliation. About the same time, the world community finally intervened for humanitarian purposes, which stopped the killing but also allowed many of the Hutu militia and armed forces to escape justice (or revenge—take your pick).

Shortly afterward the United Nations estimated that 800,000 Rwandans had been killed in just three months. The Rwandan government eventually set the official death toll of the genocide at 937,000.
⁹
It was the worst single episode of pure genocide in decades—five times as swift as the Holocaust.
¹⁰

Justice, Sort Of

The Rwandan Genocide is one of the few atrocities in this book to be followed by a systematic effort to judge and punish the culprits by means of fair trials. A surprisingly stable government under Paul Kagame returned to Rwanda within a few years, but the sheer magnitude of the crime made justice difficult. Four years after the genocide, 130,000 Interahamwe were locked in filthy, overcrowded prisons, still awaiting trial. By the end of the year, tribunals had tried 330 of them.
¹¹

By 2005, the Rwandans had decentralized the process and established village courts to pass judgment. In their first eight months of operation, these courts heard over 4,000 cases and convicted 89 percent of the defendants. By this time, however, most prisoners had already spent years in jail awaiting trial. Any sign of contrition would be enough to get them sentenced to time-served and then released.
¹²

Although around 650 prisoners had been sentenced to be shot, Rwanda abolished the death penalty before very many executions had taken place. This was the only way the Rwandans could get their hands on almost 45,000 fugitive suspects who lived in countries that wouldn’t extradite prisoners if they faced the death penalty.
¹³

SECOND CONGO WAR

Death toll:
3.8 million

Rank:
27

Type:
hegemonial war

Broad dividing line:
Hutu vs. Tutsi, no matter who else gets in the way

Time frame:
1998–2002

Location:
Congo Major

Major state participants:
Democratic Republic of the Congo vs. Rwanda and Uganda

Minor state participants:
Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Chad (on Congo’s side), and Burundi (on Rwanda’s side)

Major non-state participants:
Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire, Allied Democratic Forces, Congolese Rally for Democracy, Interahamwe, Mai-Mai, Movement for the Liberation of Congo

Who usually gets the most blame:
Paul Kagame (Rwanda), Laurent Kabila (Congo), Yoweri Museveni (Uganda)
*

Another damn:
African civil war

Economic factors:
coltan, diamonds, timber

The unanswerable question that everyone asks:
This was only a few years ago. Why didn’t I hear anything about it?

T
HE SECOND CONGO WAR LIES AT THE END OF A CHAIN REACTION THAT
began in the distant mists of time and bounced around randomly until it ended up destroying millions of lives that had nothing at all to do with the beginning. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda scattered millions of refugees around the Great Lake region of Africa. Ironically, these refugees were not the Tutsi victims of the genocide, but rather the Hutu perpetrators who had lost control of Rwanda and were now fleeing the vengeful Tutsi rebels who had taken over the government. Over a million of them were holed up in refugee camps in Congo Major.

Exit Mobutu

During the Rwandan Genocide, the larger of the two Congos (the former Congo Free State—see that chapter) was called Zaire and ruled by Mobutu Sese Seko, a thuggish old tyrant who had been systematically plundering his country for three decades, amassing a personal fortune estimated to be among the world’s largest. He had survived the usual assortment of coups, border raids, and civil wars that beset every African dictator, but this massive flood of refugees pouring over the border was too much for the cancer-addled old man. He lost control of the situation, and these border provinces became, for all practical purposes, no-man’s-land. While international aid agencies traveled in armed convoys and struggled to keep the refugee camps livable, the Hutu militia used them as bases to rebuild their organizations to retake Rwanda. They kept in practice by fighting with the local Tutsi of Congo Major, known as the Banyamulenge.

Fearing a Hutu resurgence, Paul Kagame’s Tutsi government of Rwanda wanted to disarm the Hutu and arrest their ringleaders, but Mobutu wouldn’t cooperate, so he had to be replaced. The Rwandans needed a Congolese front man to lead the charge, so they scouted out an unemployed Congolese rebel, Laurent Kabila, who had been drifting aimlessly around East Africa hoping something would turn up.

Kabila had lurked in the shadow of more charismatic men during the Congo Crisis—a collection of civil wars that immediately followed independence in 1960. He began as an associate of the beloved leftist president of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba. After Lumumba’s assassination at the hands of rebels in 1961, Kabila helped to detach an eastern Congolese province as a Marxist enclave. Che Guevara himself, the legendary Latin American revolutionary, dropped in to fight on behalf of this new Communist nation, but he quickly became disillusioned. As he notes in his diary, “Every day it was the same old story; Kabila did not arrive today, but he will be here tomorrow, and if not, then the day after tomorrow.”

“Kabila has not laid foot since time immemorial at the front,” Che complained. Instead, he was spending much of his time in Paris, Cairo, and Dar es Salaam, staying “in the best hotels, issuing communiques and drinking Scotch in the company of beautiful women,” or simply bouncing from “saloon to whorehouse.”
¹

Then, after this enclave fell to the Zairian army in the 1970s, Kabila disappeared and was widely presumed dead. There were occasional sightings, usually involving a kidnapping or a shady business deal, but no one paid much attention to Kabila until he befriended President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, who suggested him to the Rwandans as a possible president of Congo.
²

Safely legitimized by Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL), Rwandan and Ugandan troops crossed the border in October 1996, to drive Mobutu from power and scatter the Hutu even farther afield. The 1.4 million Hutu refugees registered with aid agencies in Zaire fled in every direction from this onslaught, and when the region calmed down enough for the aid agencies to resume operations, over 200,000 Hutu refugees had vanished in the confusion.
³
God only knows what happened to them, but they were probably dead. Amnesty International reported that the AFDL and Rwandan army massacred many of them.
⁴

Mobutu fled the capital in May 1997 and died of stomach cancer in Morocco a few months later. Kabila entered Kinshasa and victoriously proclaimed the new Democratic Republic of the Congo. This ended the First Congo War.

Africa’s World War

Once he was established in the President’s Palace, Kabila quickly drove away his friends. In his dying days, Mobutu had been forced to ease up restrictions on human rights and political opposition, but now Kabila reversed these tiny improvements. He tried to establish his independence from his Rwandan backers by removing the Rwandan general who now served as Congo’s chief of staff and by dismissing his Rwandan bodyguard. In July 1998, he finally ordered all foreign troops from the country.

It’s not certain whether Rwanda actually complied with this order or merely pretended to comply, but it didn’t matter, because on August 2, 1998, two units of the Congolese army stationed along the border mutinied, starting the Second Congo War. As Kabila moved against them, Rwandan forces came to their assistance. To prevent additional outbreaks, Tutsi units of the Congolese army stationed near the capital of Kinshasa were ordered to disarm. They refused, but Congolese army units of other ethnicities attacked and wiped them out. A general pogrom against Tutsi of all kinds—soldiers, civilians, men, women, and children—erupted all across Congo.
⁵

On August 4, a planeload of Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers flew completely across the country to the western tip of Congo, where they landed at an army base that held 10,000 to 15,000 former Mobutu loyalists as POWs from the First Congo War. The prisoners were freed, armed, and formed into a new strike force that set out for the capital to overthrow Kabila. Meanwhile, the whole spectrum of Congolese politicians, from former cronies of Mobutu to former enemies of Mobutu, formed the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD). After a couple of weeks, Kabila appeared doomed, but then, on August 28, the Mobutist-Rwandan-Ugandan expeditionary force in the west was attacked and destroyed by troops from neighboring Angola, which had endured too many border wars and intrigues with Mobutu to let his followers resume control. Zaire had interfered in Angola’s civil war (1975–94), so now Angola would return the favor.
⁶

Let’s back up a bit. How did Uganda come into this conflict? Uganda, like so many sub-Saharan countries, had a bad case of insurgents. The Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) operating in the borderlands of Uganda and Congo were not the largest or the worst rebels in Uganda, but Ugandans realized that they would have a shot at crushing the ADF by joining the Rwandan invasion. In February 1999, Uganda organized cooperative Congolese into the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), composed mostly of former Mobutists in Mobutu’s home province of Equateur. Uganda put the MLC in charge of the nearby Congolese provinces in exchange for them cracking down on the ADF.

Kabila meanwhile mobilized support among the exiled Rwandan Hutu militias, and accepted troops offered by several neighboring countries that were eager to restore stability to the region.

By mid-1999, all of the armies were in place, and there were no surprises left. Congo settled down into a painful threefold partition: Uganda held the northeast, Rwanda held the southeast, and Kabila held the west. A big scar ran down the middle of the country where the various armies raided, patrolled, and looted each other’s territory.

There were at least twenty attempts by international organizations to arrange a cease-fire before one finally took hold. The Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement was signed in July 1999, which solidified the partition until something better could be arranged.

The negotiations dragged on, of course. The warring parties were in no hurry to quit since they were all making a lot of money from the war. The breakdown of law and order allowed them to plunder their occupied territories of diamonds, gold, timber, and coltan, a rare ore essential to the manufacturing of cell phones and computers. As the Congo supplies 80 percent of the world’s coltan, the price skyrocketed from $30 to $400 per pound, and illegal mines popped up all across the war zone, with miners shooting endangered gorillas and elephants for food.
⁷
Ugandan troops and their rebel allies seized the northeast’s entire stock of wood and coffee, which they hauled away to Uganda for very profitable export.
⁸

Exit Kabila

On January 16, 2001, one of Kabila’s bodyguards assassinated him. At first, the government denied that anything bad had happened to the president, and his chief aide appeared on television to beg the nation to remain calm. Finally, after days of speculation, they had to admit that Kabila was indeed dead. Two years later, this same chief aide was convicted of having planned the assassination as part of a failed coup, probably in cooperation with the Congolese Rally for Democracy and the Rwandans.
⁹

Kabila’s son, Joseph Kabila, took over as president, and (as of this writing) he seems to be an improvement over his father. He opened the government to opposition voices and began serious peace negotiations. In October 2006, nationwide elections, which outside observers generally called free and fair, confirmed Kabila as president. As the BBC declared, “Congo’s war led to shady business deals, but Mr. Kabila has not been directly implicated in any.”
¹⁰
That’s a pretty good definition of honest in this part of the world.