The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa. Rene Lemarchand

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the region.

      The creation in mid-1998 of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD), under Rwandan sponsorship, was meant to provide the Banyamulenge with a vehicle for the defense of their interests—and of anyone else's who cared to join—but as it evolved into an instrument for the defense of Rwandan interests in eastern Congo, many felt aggrieved and alienated. The feeling that they have been “instrumentalized” by Kagame is shared widely among them. As we shall see, this sense of grievance against Rwanda is in large part responsible for the internal strains and divisions suffered by the community. All this, however, does not detract from the fact that as a group, the Banyamulenge are profoundly aware of their cultural distinctiveness. Few people have been dealt a harsher blow by history: many argue, with justice, that they have been twice victimized; first by Kagame, who used them as cannon fodder for the defense of Rwanda's strategic interests; and then by Congolese extremists, as happened in Bukavu in June 2004 when in the wake of an abortive Banyamulenge-led coup, hundreds perished. Today Bukavu is virtually “free” of Banyamulenge.

      OTHERNESS

      What defines the “other” as an ally or an enemy? Several objective criteria come to mind: language (e.g., “Rwandophones” or Kinyawanda speakers), country of origin (“Banyarwanda”), place of settlement (“Banyamulenge,” the people of Mulenge), ethnicity (Hutu and Tutsi), to which must be added morphologie, or body maps, a reference that increasingly crops up in newspaper articles in Goma and Bukavu. None of the above, however, tells us why one set of criteria should be more relevant than another at any given time: why, for example, Hutu and Tutsi generally were lumped together as the embodiment of a “Banyarwanda” menace from 1963 until 1994, when the label quickly dissolved into Hutu-Tutsi enmities; or why the term Banyamulenge, as distinct from Tutsi, carried such threatening overtones among other communities from 1996 onward.

      Otherness has less to do with objective identity markers than with the perceived threats posed by one community to another. Whether real or imaginary, such threats do not materialize out of thin air. They are intimately related to changes in the national and regional political environments. Political murder (Ndadaye in 1993), genocide (Rwanda in 1994), refugee flows (predominantly Tutsi in 1959–63, Hutu in 1994), ethnic cleansing (of Hutu refugees in eastern Congo in 1996–97), and the approach of elections (2005–6)—these, as we shall see, are the events and circumstances that have crystallized group identities.

      Several phases can be identified in the redefinition of group identities:

      1. From the so-called “Kanyarwanda war” in 1963 until 1994, the tendency among “native” Congolese was to view all Banyarwanda living in eastern Congo as the incarnation of a multifaceted menace.

      2. After the Rwanda bloodbath, the Hutu-Tutsi conflict metastasized through much of North and South Kivu, causing untold casualties among long-time Tutsi residents and set the stage for the 1996 Rwandan-led and Rwandan-inspired invasion of the Congo by the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo (AFDL).²⁴ From then on, the Hutu-Tutsi frame of reference became the dominant identity marker and a powerful tool of propaganda for extremists at both ends of the ethnic spectrum.²⁵

      3. Yet by 1998, with the second Congo war, as an ever greater number of actors comes into view, the political equations became more complicated, and the straight Hutu-Tutsi cleavage frame somewhat less relevant. A more complex cognitive map emerged causing Hutu and Tutsi to fragment into factions, and enter new patterns of alliances at home and abroad.

      4. Not the least intriguing of the mutations undergone by the regional identity prism is the emergence in recent times of language as the principal yardstick for lumping together Hutu and Tutsi under the “Rwandophone” label, a strategy clearly inspired by the provincial authorities of North Kivu to expand their grassroots constituency on the eve of elections.

      To grasp the significance of these episodes, something must be said of the long-term social and economic forces that have reshaped regional identities.

      Multilayered Conflicts

      The theme of exclusion runs like a red skein through the history of the Great Lakes. It lies at the heart of the 1959–62 Hutu revolution in Rwanda; thirty years later it served as the propelling force behind the 1990 invasion of Rwanda by the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF).²⁶ Barely concealed by the ban on ethnic labels, ethnic discrimination has since emerged as the hallmark of the Kagame regime, to an extent unprecedented in the history of Rwanda. Burundi is another case in point: political exclusion is the obvious explanation behind the Hutu insurrection of 1972, in turn leading to the first genocide recorded in the annals of the Great Lakes.²⁷ Nor is eastern Congo an exception. Where it does stand as a special case is that the groups targeted for political exclusion are not always the same as those affected by economic and social discrimination. In the 1970s and 1980s, the former were generally of Rwandan origins,²⁸ whether Hutu or Tutsi; the latter included those “native” Congolese communities who insistently denounced the “Banyarwanda” as the main source of economic oppression. Out of this situation has emerged a rich potential for intergroup violence.

      THE THREAT OF BANYARWANDA DOMINATION: “KANYARWANDA,” 1963–66

      The little-known “Kanyarwanda war” was the first public display of anti-Tutsi sentiment in post-independence Zaire. It lasted from 1963 to 1966 and resulted in large-scale massacres of Hutu and Tutsi. Its focus was the newly created “provincette” of North Kivu, one of the three entities that once formed Kivu province. The decision to carve smaller entities out of the pre-existing province was in large part inspired by the growing fears of Congolese “tribes,” notably the Hunde, that the Banyarwanda were about to tighten their grip on provincial institutions and thus threaten the autonomy of their ethnic neighbors. The geographical focus of the anti-Banyarwanda revolt was Masisi, and it involved, in essence, an alliance of Hunde and Nande elements against Hutu and Tutsi, with the Bashi generally supportive of the Banyarwanda. One of the first moves of the Hunde insurgents, according to one observer, was to reduce to ashes the local administrative archives so as to prevent the identification of the Banyarwanda otherwise than as refugees or foreigners.²⁹ That the insurrection should have had its point of ignition in Masisi—where large tracts of land had long been appropriated by Banyarwanda elements—is no less significant than the burning of provincial archives: in whipping up anti-Banyarwanda feelings, the Kanyarwanda uprising was meant to call into question their claims to the land, as well as their citizenship, as much as their dominant position at the provincial level.

      THE LAND PROBLEM

      Thirty years after the Kanyarwanda war, Masisi would flare up again in an orgy of anti-Banyarwanda violence. In March 1993, like a bolt out of the blue, armed groups of Nande, Hunde, and Nyanga youth suddenly turned against all Banyarwanda in sight. The intervention of Mobutu's army, code-named Operation Mbata, though intended to restore order, in fact generated further violence. From May to September 1996, Zairian troops lived up to their reputation as a rabble, plundering much of the rural areas south of Bwisha, along the Rwandan border.³⁰ By the time violence died down, an estimated 14,000 people had been killed, most of them Banyarwanda. Although the precipitating factors remain unclear,³¹ there can be little doubt that the underlying causes of the insurrection lay in the growing scarcity of land, which drove the local peasant communities to the edge of starvation. For this situation the insurgents did not hesitate to hold the Banyarwanda responsible.

      One need not go too far back into the past to realize that the colonial state also bears much of the blame. The story has been told many times of how, in the 1930s, Belgian authorities embarked on a vast resettlement scheme designed to encourage the influx of Banyarwanda (essentially Hutu) from Rwanda to North Kivu, the aim being to provide Belgian planters with a cheap labor force and create an outlet for the growing population pressure in Rwanda.³² What is not always realized СКАЧАТЬ