The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa. Rene Lemarchand
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 By a stroke of the pen the Legislative Council repealed the 1972 law that gave citizenship rights to “persons originating from Rwanda-Urundi who were residents of the Kivu before January 1, 1950,” and instead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