by a Special Correspondent
The aftermath of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, four years of creeping civil war in Burundi between Hutu and Tutsi extremists, and the upsurge of ethnic persecution and fighting in Eastern Zaire, has led to the massive return of hundreds of thousands of Rwandese refugees abandoned in their squalid Zairean camps by international humanitarian agencies.
Hundreds of thousands more, however, roam the hills and forests of North and South Kivu without food or water, many afflicted with disease. This agonizing and continuing crisis now threatens the entire region with potentially catastrophic destabilization.
It is a sad reflection of how low President Mobutu Sese Seko has dragged Zaire that, as he languishes in luxury in France’s Riviera, most residents of the North and South Kivu towns of Uvira, Bukavu and Goma feared the Tutsi rebels less than the looting Zairean troops.
There is no escape. The carnage of the region – in the making since German and Belgian colonizers played off the Tutsi minority against the Hutu majority — is spreading and significant parts of Southern Africa can no longer distance themselves from the blight that has already spread into non- SADC countries like Uganda, Kenya and Sudan. Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa, unwillingly and unwittingly perhaps, are now directly involved.
The callous neglect exhibited by Western nations and the so-called international community of humanitarian agencies who seem powerless to intervene, despite the speedy and coherent pleas of. the Organization of African Unity, is reaping a whirlwind of violence.
Fighting has spread to Uganda where Zairean troops and Ugandan rebels were facing off against the army of President Yoweri Museveni, the main backer in Central Africa of the Tutsi-dominated regime in Kigali. Kenya, the unofficial headquarters of the
former Hutu extremist government of Rwanda who launched the genocide of 1994, is in the throes of a violent crime wave which the government attributes to instability and refugee unrest among Burundian and Rwandan refugees.
Thousands of Hutus have crossed Lake Tanganyika into Tanzania and others fled overland through Burundi into areas already jammed with 450 000 refugees from the 1994 genocide. These camps have always contained some of the most hardline Hutu extremist leaders.
Burundian military leader, Pierre Buyoya, who staged a coup a few months ago to establish a Tutsi dominated military government, has charged that Hutu bases are being set up along the Burundi and Rwanda borders with Tanzania and that some “leading Tanzania officials” are making “unfriendly speeches” against Burundi.
These allegations are strongly rejected by Tanzania. A senior foreign ministry official said that the 20,000 refugees who have entered through the Lake Tanganyika town of Kigoma in the last three weeks were civilians and were carefully screened to make certain there were no militant Hutus entering the country.
Further south, more than 2 500 Hutu refugees have made their way into Zambia either across Lake Tanganyika to Mpulungu Port or overland into Luapula province on the border with Zaire. Zambia already has one refugee camp and will probably have to establish a second in Northern Province. With its ailing economy, Zambia can ill afford to host more refugees. There are even unconfirmed reports of refugees crossing on foot from Zaire through Burundi, Tanzania and into northern Mozambique. The murky and corrupt politics of Rwanda, Burundi and Zaire have caused serious embarrassment for the government of President Nelson Mandela. South Africa. As South Africa prepared to se troops as part of an oft-delayed UN humanitarian and peace-keeping mission to Eastern Zaire, questions about its decision to sell US$17 million worth of weapons to the Kigali regime have been raised. As a result, the contract has been temporarily suspended, although some weapons and armored personnel carriers have already been delivered.
Mandela rejected the criticism, which came from France, a long-time supporter of Zaire’s Mobutu and the former Hutu regime, President Daniel arap Moi of Kenya, a close personal friend of the late Rwanda President Juvenal Habyarimana, and Zaire, which has provided a haven for the Hutu extremists, known as the interahamwe.
Mandela pointed out that the extremists had killed a million people in 1994. The extremist government and its army which fled Zaire under cover of France’s “Operation Turquoise” took hundreds of millions of dollars, arms and thousands of trained troops and militias into the camps of Zaire and was being, Mandela said, resupplied with arms to invade Rwanda by certain African countries he did not name.
The stakes are high for SADC. Despite the fact that Zaire has twice been rejected for membership in SADC, it is a member of the Southern African Power Pool, making it a crucial element of a sub-continental power grid linking South Africa with Zambia and Zaire.
The situation temporarily eased this week when the innocent Hutu refugees suddenly broke free of the interahamwe who had been holding them hostage with the tacit connivance of the international aid agencies, during the recent civil war in the North and South Kivu regions of Eastern Zaire.
The current crisis has its immediate roots in the ethnic convulsions that swept Rwanda in 1994 when Hutu extremists murdered about a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Fearing revenge, about two million fled their homes to Zaire’s Kivu region, a stunningly beautiful holiday resort area known as the Great Lakes where Mobutu maintains an opulent palace which he has used once in 10 years. The region has long been a hotbed of anti-Mobutu sentiment.
Among the refugees were thousands of extremists from the Habyarimana regime trying to avoid punishment for the genocide and determined to rearm and achieve their final solution.
The crowded camps provided a base to wage the struggle to overthrow the Tutsi government installed after the civil war. For its part, Rwanda wanted to root out the interahamwe. Zaire’s long-time support for the Hutu extremists and the arms inflow through Kinshasa and Goma created a situation of extreme tension and fear in the squalid camps, preventing the return of almost 2 million innocent Hutus to their homes in Rwanda.
Enter the Banyamulenge, a group of ethnic Tutsis who have lived in Eastern Zaire for more than 250 years where they had become wealthy through mining and other ventures, earning them the envy of local Zairean officials who used their ethnicity to whip up resentment and pogroms against them.
The Zairean officials in the Kivu provinces responded eagerly to the tensions, their eyes cast covetously on the Banyamulenge’s wealth. The deputy governor of North Kivu gave them six days to leave Zaire because they were “foreigners”.
Rwanda, ever ready to support Tutsi causes in the volatile Great Lakes region, armed and trained Banyamulenge militias. On 17 October, they rebelled and seized Uvira on the border with Burundi and then marched north through the hills and banana plantations to Bukavu, scattering thousands of Hutu refugees.
The disorderly and unpaid Zairean troops, looted the homes of those they were supposed to protect and then retreated, leavingthe way open for the rebels to head for Goma at the north end of Lake Kivu which was also easily captured, along with its strategic airport.
With Mobutu being treated for prostate cancer in a plush Swiss clinic costing US$2, OOO-a-day, Zaire, the second largest country in Africa, seems in danger of imploding while the Hutu extremists’ plan of re-taking Rwanda was suddenly in severe disarray.
Meanwhile the refugees were in desperate straits as expatriate aid workers fled, leaving them without food, water or medicine and caught between the retreating Zaire army, the interahamwe and the victorious Tutsi Banyamulenge.
One last-ditch effort by the interahamwe, hidden among 700000 refugees in Mugunga camp – the largest refugee concentration in the world- failed dismally in its attempts to defeat the Banyamulenge, at which point the refugees headed for home to face an extremely uncertain future…
As the UN Security Council struggled to put together a peace-keeping mission of 10.000 troops led by Canada to open humanitarian corridors for the sick and starving refugees, the US kept delaying a final decision even though African nations had made it clear at a meeting in Nairobi that they would send soldiers and participate fully in ending the catastrophe, if it is an African or UN initiative and not US-driven. There were few winners and many losers.
Zaire’s condition appears nearly as terminal as that of its president, the shrewd and rapacious despot who played the Cold War game masterfully, then allowed regional chiefs to plunder their fiefdorns as long as his share of their loot flowed upward making him one of the richest men in the world. Other separatist provinces such as Shaba in the south of his disintegrating country were talking of joining North and South Kivu to overthrow the Mobutu regime and form a new Congo (Zaire’s colonial name).
It is not lost on political observers that Mobutu, with an illicit fortune of at least US$S billion salted away in foreign banks, verbally supports the UN peacekeeping force in Eastern Zaire while taxpayers from the 10 nations must foot the bill to restore a semblance of stability. France, a vocal supporter of the international intervention, wants the rebels’ grip on the Kivu provinces broken, especially the two airports at Goma and Bukavu and is relying on the UN force to achieve this.
More important even, to France, is that it continue to play a major role in policy-making in the region despite strong opposition from Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia and Uganda. France is concerned that Mobutu’s weakness will result in a military coup or the disintegration of Zaire, or both. Mobutu has asked for mercenaries to help his ill-trained and unmotivated army. France is giving strong public support to Mobutu arguing he is not as sick as everyone else thinks and that he is the only person who can hold Zaire together.
Rwanda has achieved a short term goal of getting many of its refugees home, but it has few friends in the region and the long-term future is grim. Hutus and Tutsis will be forced to deal with their deep hatred of one another in a situation where the justice system does not function and the former regime is still intact, if battered, and ready to take advantage of the regional chaos.
Burundi faces an increasingly well-organized Hutu resistance movement, also based in Zaire and the huge camps of western Tanzania, called the Force for the Defence of Democracy (FDD).
Nearby countries such as Uganda. Sudan, Tanzania and Kenya, themselves host to many refugees, with civil wars raging within or nearby their borders are fearful the entire region could implode. Some diplomats and political analysts in East Africa are discussing the taboo subject of African borders and suggest some kind of UN-sanctioned transitional protectorate for the Great Lakes region of Rwanda. Burundi and Eastern Zaire, possibly under SADC and Franco-African joint management.
That Zaire, instead of holding a peaceful electoral transition next year as planned, could break up violently leaves the entire region fearful and means that SADC may need to take a more active role in the Central and East African regions.
The international community and the humanitarian industry have failed miserably in their inability to separate killers from genuine refugees and have allowed, by their inaction and complicity, the turbulent situation in Central Africa to erupt once again into a massive human catastrophe.
Meanwhile, death stalks the civilian populations. Fear is unending and the only winners are the arms merchants. (SARDC)
