Date: Thu, 5 Dec 96 01:23:42 UT
From: "Ang " <uls-AT-msn.com>
Subject: M-TH: SEX   (No, it's really Part 1 of 4 - on Rwanda/Zaire, etc)


Jukka and other interested readers,

This is a very long article on Rwanda/Zaire etc.
but well worth it.  I divided it into 4 posts.  
You get the stories behind
who the real players are & understand how the
situation was/is really a struggle for state 
power between opposing political forces.
Here's the WWW site where I got the article:
http://www.africa2000.com/INDX/rwanda1.htm 
which has a last modified date of 11/12/96.
If these posts are difficult to read because
of any line wrapping problems, please go to the
web site above or e-mail me and I'll make
the lines shorter and send it back to you.  
If you agree that the article is valuable, feel
free to repost it elsewhere on the internet
or link to it on your web pages.
(I wrote the author's website & got permission)
or if you are associated with any written
publications, ask them to reprint it.
By the way, you'll see a lot of mention of
Uganda in the article.  Currently, Uganda
has gone into Zaire & the Zairean `gov't'
"rejected claims by Uganda that it was simply 
exercising its right to pursue Zaire-based rebels. 
They penetrated Zairean territory to come to the 
aid of their Rwandan allies, not to pursue Ugandan 
rebels," the spokesman said. 

Additionally, "Zairean rebel leader Laurent Kabila 
has said the territory under the control of his forces 
would soon be named Democratic Congo, Associated 
Press reported on Saturday. Upon independence in 1960, 
the former Belgian Congo was renamed Republic of the 
Congo. Mobutu changed the name to Zaire in 1971." 

& the last update before the article (all taken, by the 
way, from U.N. Emergency updates No. 45 & 46 on this
web site:
http://www.afnews.org/ans/central/ANScentral.html#Zaire)
 
"Expressing concern at the nomination of General 
Baramoto Kpama Kata, the former head of the
feared civil guard, as armed forces Chief of Staff, 
Berger added that: "Zairean authorities have created a
climate of intimidation, where questions demanding the 
truth about the role of the authorities in the current
crisis are repressed".  (Berger is Amnesty's Deputy 
Secretary-General)
                                       Ang
& finally, part 1 of the article follows:
                     
          RWANDA: MYTH AND REALITY 

Since April 1994 there have been two Rwandas. The first is the real Rwanda,
a country in Africa, the second is the mythical Rwanda, a Western
caricature.

The Rwanda in Africa has experienced the most debilitating war in its
history. That war reached its peak following the assassination of president
Habyarimana on 6 April 1994 and culminated in the Rwandese Patriotic
Front's seizure of the capital Kigali in July. But this war is not over,
only suspended, because its cause remains unresolved. That cause is the
power shift initiated by Western governments in their relationships with
sections of Rwanda's elite.

The country has been completely dislocated as vast numbers of its
population have been turned into refugees. Large numbers have died as a
result of the fighting and subsequent disease created by the squalor of the
refugee camps.

The largest sector of the country's economy -- coffee -- has been
devastated. The new government, formed by the Rwandese Patriotic Front
(RPF) after its military wing, the Rwandese Patriotic Army (RPA) seized
power, lacks the support of the majority. Furthermore, the members of the
ousted regime have formed a government in exile which derives support from
many refugees, mainly in the camps in Zaire.

The return of refugees and the reconstruction of Rwanda are obstructed by
two things: the contest for control over the camps, and the mass arrests of
genocide suspects for trial by either Rwandan courts or the International
Tribunal for Rwanda (hereafter referred to as 'the Tribunal'). Both
developments ensure the continued polarisation of Rwandan society and sow
seeds for yet more bloodshed.

The other, mythical Rwanda is a caricature created by Western foreign
policy-makers, non-governmental organisations, and the Western media. In
the mythical Rwanda, all the different social conflicts are reduced to one
terrible fact: genocide. The tale says that the genocide was planned and
conducted by self-styled 'Hutu extremists' and executed against the ethnic
Tutsi population in order to destroy the possibility of a democratic Rwanda
once and for all.

In the mythical Rwanda, the scale of the genocide is due to the refusal of
the 'international community' (de, Western governments) to meet their moral
and legal responsibility to militarily intervene and end it. Credit for
bringing the genocide to an end goes to the RPF. The return to normality in
this Rwanda is frustrated by a lack of political will on the part of
Western powers to provide the Tribunal with its required resources so that
justice can be seen to be done. This is held to be the precondition to
healing the mythical Rwanda's ills.

Two powerful prejudices underpin the caricatured version of Rwanda.

The first is about the nature of the 'Hutu extremist.' Many Rwanda analysts
-- even some of those who consider the massacres to be a 'genocide' --
rightly assert that a centuries-old Hutu-Tutsi enmity cannot account for
what happened last year. Many have pointed out that the very terms 'Hutu'
and 'Tutsi' have taken on different meanings at different times, and are
political and social categories more than they are real ethnicities. It is
also clear that, at the village level, the two groups. however constituted,
have been socially integrated for a very long time. Peaceful cohabitation
has been the rule, violence the exception.

For the period from the early colonial days through independence to the end
of the Cold War, a fair degree of consensus exists about the meaning of
these ostensibly ethnic terms. The demarcation line under Belgian
colonialism was based on the number of cattle owned. This formed the basis
for Tutsi privilege and Hutu oppression.

After the Hutu uprising which followed independence, Tutsi by and large
meant the ousted educated elite.

When Hutu leader Juvenal Habyarimana assumed power in 1973, the focus of
state patronage shifted from the southern to the northern section of the
Hutus, based at Gisenyi. Consequently, a north-south distinction emerged
within the Hutu polity. As a result, the differences between southern Hutus
and the Tutsis became increasingly less significant. Both had lost out to
an emerging northern Hutu elite. Increasingly. the term 'Tutsi' was
becoming indistinguishable from the southern Hutu.

But in the caricature of Rwanda, the caricature of a country dominated by
genocide, there are 'Hutu extremists' and 'Hutu-moderates.' It is as if the
political outlook of Hutus was determined solely by how strongly they feel
about their Hutu identity. The battle lines were in fact politically
demarcated, with the 'moderate Hutus' being individuals who did not
identify with the faction around the besieged regime and were therefore
viewed as political opponents, potential or actual. In fact the divisions
were already established in the consolidation of a northern-based Hutu
elite.

The war against the Tutsis was actually a war against the RPF and perceived
RPF supporters, in the face of its Western-supported invasion. That
civilians were largely the object of attack does not contradict the
political rationale behind the fighting.

By describing all these different social conflicts in terms of 'Hutu
extremism', or 'genocide', their real character is obscured. All further
investigation of the forces at work in Rwanda is arrested: asserting the
collective psychosis of the Hutus is deemed a sufficient explanation.

The second assumption that underpins the caricature of Rwanda is that,
while they may have made mistakes in the past, Western powers are now
perceived to have turned a new leaf It is widely recognised that during the
Cold War, the Western powers backed a variety of corrupt and murderous
regimes. But today, Western policy towards Africa is assumed to be shaped
by concern for democracy and 'good governance'. This assumption leads to
the perception that through the 1993 Arusha Accords, which imposed a
compromise leadership that combined RPF supporters and the Habyarimana
government, the West was exercising a benign influence over events in
Rwanda. The only fly in the ointment was the resistance of forces
unsympathetic to this Western-imposed deal which, by definition within the
caricature, are therefore hostile to democracy.

The carnage unleashed by the militias, notably the Interahamwe and
Impuzamugambi, was a last ditch attempt to stave off the rise of the RPA,
which was being facilitated through the Arusha Accords. The ferocity of
their attacks reveals the all-or-nothing character of the situation. The
progressive undermining of Habyarimana's government by its erstwhile
backers, Belgium and France, along with America, Britain and Germany, as
well as the consolidation of Western backing for an RPF takeover, made war
inescapable. Arusha was not a process of democratization -- ordinary
Rwandans played no part in it. Instead, it was a mechanism for implementing
a Western-imposed restructuring of Rwanda's elite. The fact that
Habyarimana's men eventually reacted against being arm-twisted into
relinquishing power, and took up machetes and whatever else came to hand,
should surprise nobody.

Indeed, the report of the Economist Intelligence Unit on the first quarter
of 1994, anticipated what was about to unfold with remarkable accuracy:

'If the president stubbornly refuses to concede to the pressure to use the
original nomination lists [of members of the transitional government team,
a stipulation of the Arusha Accords]. hostilities between the Rwandan army
and the RPF, particularly in Kigali, will resume. The ensuing violence will
inevitably lead to politically- motivated ethnic massacres in the
countryside, as have been seen in Burundi. The peace monitors are likely to
withdraw under this scenario because their mandate is to implement the
peace process, which will be nonexistent. The struggle will involve
Burundian Hutu refugees, and will likely spread to Burundi.'

The obsession with genocide obscures all of these conditions that led to
the massacres. It goes further than mere media sensationalism and
exaggeration of the scale of the slaughter. By lifting the massacres from
the context of war altogether, and attributing them to a plan of evil.
masterminded by 'Hutu extremists', those who insist on characterising the
conflict in terms of genocide expose their own preoccupations. Rather than
attempt a rational explanation for the war, their objective is to demoniac
a section of African society in order to justify a Western moral crusade.
This is the nineties version of Rudyard Kipling's call to take up 'the
White Man's burden'. Africa needs civilising, they are saying, and at
gunpoint if needs be. Archbishop George Carey's pronouncement that the
carnage shows Rwanda's Christianity to be only 'skin deep' makes the point
explicit. Evidently, no amount of missionary work can remove the beast from
the Rwandan.

The violent upsurge unleashed in April 1994 was not an enactment of a
preconceived plan of genocide. Whatever the cause of the plane crash which
killed president Habyarimana and Burundian president Ndadaye, everyone
understood that the point of no return had been reached. The talks were
over and the question of state power could only be resolved by war.

To understand why war had become inevitable at this point, it is not
necessary to investigate ethnic relations in the region over the centuries.
Nor is it useful to attempt a psychoanalysis of the 'Hutu extremist.' What
is needed is an examination of the tensions in Rwandan society at the end
of the eighties, and how dynamics specific to the termination of the Cold
War impacted on them.

The making of war

For sub-Saharan Africa, the 1980s has been dubbed the 'lost decade',
because of the region's economic decline. Rwanda's experience of the decade
was typical.

Rwanda's high degree of dependence on coffee exports, a legacy of
colonialism which the country has been unable to overcome, was exacerbated
by pressures to boost exports further in order to meet escalating import
bills. Coffee receipts accounted for 80 per cent of foreign exchange
holdings. In 1989 the world price of coffee plummeted to half its 1980
level. Until then, the government had been able to assure its coffee
producers a guaranteed price of 125 Rwandan Francs a kilo. It responded to
the crash by increasing subsidies. This practice became unsustainable, and
with a currency devaluation of 67 per cent in 1990, the average coffee
farmer found himself producing 45 per cent more, yet earning 20 per cent
less. In 1989 real gross domestic product fell by 5.7 per cent. bringing it
below the 1983 level.

At this critical juncture, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) imposed a
structural adjustment programme, and the RPF invaded northern Rwanda.
Although these were unrelated developments, their combined effect was to
set off a downward economic spiral. According to the IMF, Rwanda's economy
deteriorated in the last quarter of 1990 because of the war, by which time
the GDP had fallen by a further two per cent (Economist Intelligence Unit
Country Report, No. 2, 1991). The slide continued and, in 1993 alone, GDP
fell by eight per cent (EIU Country Report, No. 1, 1994). By 1993 Rwanda's
debt was estimated at S941m, having been $189m in 1980 (EIU Country Report,
No. 1, 1994) It was estimated that 85 per cent of the population lived in
poverty, with a third of all children malnourished (see L Martens 'Genocide
in Rwanda' in N. Abdullai, (ed.), Genocide in Rwanda: Background and
Current Situation). Rwanda's economic prospects had never seemed so bleak.

The RPF invasion precipitated a wave of refugees, and the sharpening of the
polarisation of Rwandan society. For the majority of Rwandans, the RPF was
seen as an exile Tutsi force hostile towards them.

Where did the RPF come from? It was not formed in Rwanda but in Uganda by a
group of Rwandan Tutsi exiles, who were fighting as part of the Ugandan
National Resistance Army (NRA). The NRA overthrew the regime of Milton
Obote in 1986, installing its leader Yoweri Museveni as Uganda's president.
These Tutsi exiles, most of whom had settled in Uganda in the wake of the
uprising accompanying Rwanda's independence, played a significant role in
the NRA's accession to power. Many RPF leaders had occupied senior
positions in the Ugandan state apparatus. For example, Paul Kagame was NRA
head of intelligence between November 1989 and June 1990; Fred Rwigyema was
a major general; Peter Baingana was head of NRA medical services; and Chris
Bunyenyezi was former commander of the notorious 306th Brigade (Economist
Intelligence Review, August 1994). According to a US Committee for Refugees
paper (February 1991), the RPF was founded in 1979 as the Rwandese Alliance
for National Unity. It operated clandestinely until 1983, recruiting
Rwandans for the Ugandan NRA.

>From 1986 onward. after the NRA had seized power in Uganda, the Rwandese
Patriotic Front operated openly. The large presence of Rwandans in the
military became a focus of resentment among Ugandans, who regarded them as
unfairly privileged foreigners. In addition, the size of the military was
also attracting local and Western criticism. particularly after the threat
to state security posed by northern dissident movements had largely been
contained. As part of a Western-funded demobilisation exercise, distinct
RPF battalions were created.

Rwandan soldiers. along with their Ugandan counterparts. received military
training from the British at their base in Jinja. The Americans began
training the RPF leadership, which also held top positions in the Ugandan
military. Kagame received training at the US army and staff college at
Leavenworth, Kansas.
(Parts 2-4 of this article follow in separate posts)


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