The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa. Rene Lemarchand

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СКАЧАТЬ have been instrumentalized by Kagame, that they have become mere pawns in the regional poker game. Most of them, however, privately admit that Rwanda's military presence in eastern Congo is their sole protection against another genocidal carnage.

      To sum up: exclusion does not just suddenly materialize out of the primeval fissures of the plural society; its roots are traceable to the rapid mobilization of ethnic identities unleashed by the democratization of societies built on the “premise of inequality” and to the profoundly discriminatory implications of public policies directed against specific ethnic communities. In all three states, however, refugee flows were the crucial factor behind the rapid polarization of ethnic feelings in the host countries. Everywhere, refugee-generating violence has produced violence-generating refugee flows.

      Dimensions of Exclusion

      In the context of this discussion, political exclusion means the denial of political rights to specific ethnic or ethnoregional communities, most notably the right to vote, organize political parties, freely contest elections, and thus become full participants in the political life of their country. Obvious cases are the Tutsi in post-revolutionary Rwanda and the Hutu in Burundi until the 1993 aborted transition to multiparty democracy (some might argue that relatively little changed since then), to which must be added the Banyarwanda of eastern Congo, after being disenfranchised by the 1981 nationality law, as well as the Tutsi refugee diaspora of Uganda, for whom naturalization was never envisaged. Admittedly, political exclusion is a relative concept, both in terms of the range of disabilities suffered by the excluded communities, and the context in which it occurs. It is easy to see why, for example, in the context of Mobutu's dictatorship, the withdrawal of citizenship rights from the Banyarwanda did not produce the same violent reaction as the refusal of the Burundi authority to recognize the victory of the Hutu at the polls in 1965. Again, it is one thing for a minority to be politically excluded and quite another for a group representing 80 percent of the population to be reduced to a silent majority, as is clearly the case today for the Hutu of Rwanda.

      Economic exclusion, on the other hand, refers first and foremost to the denial of traditional rights to land. Given that land is the principal economic resource of peasant communities, denial of access to land use inevitably implies economic impoverishment or worse. Here again contextual factors are important. Although rising population densities and environmental degradation are everywhere a fundamental aspect of the land problem, nowhere is the problem more acute than where land has been redistributed to meet the needs of machine politics (as in pregenocide Rwanda), or reallocated to new claimants (as happened in North Kivu in the 1970s when tens of thousands of acres of land were bought off by Tutsi fifty-niners), or where rural insecurity becomes a pretext for massive population transfers in regroupment camps (as in Burundi and northern Rwanda).

      Social exclusion goes hand in hand with the erosion of traditional social networks and the collapse of the safety nets that once supported the traditional social order of peasant communities. The result is a growing marginalization of rural youth. Deprived of the minimal economic security and coping mechanisms built into the customary social nets, yet denied the opportunity to make their mark in life through alternative channels, their life chances are almost nil.

      To be sure, political exclusion does not always imply economic exclusion. If there is little doubt that the 1959 Hutu revolution in Rwanda received its impetus from the political exclusion of Western-educated Hutu elites, it is equally clear that economic exclusion had relatively little to do with the Hutu-Tutsi conflict. One might even argue that in some instances, withdrawal of political rights translates into rising levels of economic achievement for the excluded community, as shown by the large number of relatively well-to-do Tutsi entrepreneurs in pregenocide Rwanda. Nonetheless, processes of political, economic, and social exclusion are closely interconnected: just as refugee diasporas have exacerbated the problem of natural resource scarcities in the host countries, most conspicuously in eastern Congo and to a lesser extent in Uganda, the resultant shrinkage of land capable of cultivation, along with the dislocation of traditional social networks, must be seen as major contributory factors to the marginalization of youth and the rise of armed militias. The cumulative effect of these phenomena is nowhere more potentially disruptive than where specific ethnic communities bear the full brunt of economic and social exclusion.

      Refugee flows provide the conceptual link among all three forms of exclusion. Not that refugees are always on the losing side economically, although in most cases they are. The more important point is that the side effects of large numbers of refugees moving into any given country of asylum translates into severe economic and social hardships for the host society. Rising commodity prices, the rapid depletion of environmental resources, and the frequency of petty crimes within and outside the camps, not to mention the systematic raiding of cattle, crops, and vehicles (as happened in eastern Congo in 1994), are all part of the catalogue of deprivations inflicted on the host communities. In such circumstances, refugees become an easy target for politicians eager to translate diffuse grievances into political capital. In different circumstances, however, they also can be mobilized by opposition groups to strengthen their hand against domestic foes, as indeed happened in Uganda in the 1980s and in Burundi in the 1960s. Refugee populations, in short, have served as a major political resource, either as foil or as a source of support.

      The Politics of Mobilized Diasporas

      Since 1959 the multiplicity of crises experienced by Rwanda and Burundi have generated four major refugee flows: (a) between 1959 and 1963 an estimated 150,000 Tutsis fled Rwanda in the wake of the Hutu revolution, the majority seeking asylum in Uganda, Burundi, and eastern Congo; (b) the second major exodus involved approximately 300,000 Hutu from Burundi fleeing the 1972 genocidal massacres of Hutu by the Tutsi-dominated army, most of them headed for Tanzania and Rwanda; (c) the next wave of Hutu refugees from Burundi, numbering perhaps as many as 400,000, of whom more than half ended up in Rwanda, followed the reciprocal massacres of Tutsi and Hutu, triggered by the assassination of President-elect Melchior Ndadaye on October 21, 1993, adding tens of thousands to the refugee camps in Tanzania, Rwanda, and South Kivu; (d) in 1994, the fourth and largest outpouring of refugees involved approximately two million Hutu from Rwanda fleeing the avenging arm of the FPR. Over a million settled in eastern Congo, the rest in Tanzania.

      All of the above qualify as mobilized diasporas, in that they shared specific political objectives, were politically organized, and made a sustained effort to consolidate their grip on the refugee population. This is still the case for the Hutu diaspora from Burundi and what little is left of its counterpart from Rwanda. Ultimately, their overriding goal was to return to their homeland as citizens, by force if necessary. So far only the Tutsi refugees, under the banner of the FPR, after thirty-five years of exile were able to do so.

      But if the saga of the Tutsi diaspora is a success story of sorts—but at what price!—its early history is a tale of consistent failure—political and military—causing enormous bloodshed inside Rwanda, a situation for which there are tragic recent parallels among the Hutu diasporas from Burundi and Rwanda.

      Refugees are first and foremost an object of humanitarian concern; only at a later stage, after metamorphosing into a mobilized diaspora, do they emerge as a source of political concern for domestic, regional, and international actors. The obstacles in the way of effective political mobilization cover a wide gamut: the material and emotional costs of uprootedness, the geographical dispersal of the camps, the inadequacy of communication facilities, factional rivalries, and the constraints on political activities imposed by the host country are the usual handicaps faced by refugee diasporas. These disabilities vary enormously over time, however, and from one setting to another. The single most important conditioning factor, however, lies in the receptivity of the host country to the political goals and organizational efforts of refugee communities.

      THE FIFTY-NINERS IN EASTERN CONGO: INYENZI AND MULELISTES

      A brief comparative glance at the record of the first Tutsi diaspora, in the early sixties (the fifty-niners), with that of the second generation of refugee СКАЧАТЬ