The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa. Rene Lemarchand

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 integrated into the FARDC, mutinied against his commanding officer (General Mbudja Mabe, commander of the tenth military region) and seized control of the provincial capital of South Kivu. It was Nkunda, however, who provided the much needed military assistance to overcome the resistance of the FARDC. Although the mutiny proved short-lived, more enduring were its aftereffects. After the army retook control of the city, scores of Banyamulenge were killed by mobs of enraged Congolese, while thousands found refuge in the Gatumba refugee camp in Burundi. It was in Gatumba, in August of the same year, that over a hundred perished at the hands of Hutu extremists affiliated with the Burundi-based Forces Nationales de Libération (FNL) and Mai-Mai elements from the DRC.

      Determined to live up to his reputation, Nkunda's next port of call was Kanyabonga, near the border with Rwanda, where in December 2004 he took on several units of the FARDC, presumably with logistical assistance from the Rwandan army, bringing relations between Rwanda and the DRC near the breaking point. More recently, in January 2006, Commander Nkunda made another show of military prowess when he attacked the town of Rutshuru, causing the displacement of tens of thousands of panic-stricken villagers.

      One hesitates to make too much of the Nkunda vignette, but it is emblematic of how at certain critical junctures, the choices made by individual actors have triggered one crisis after another. Once this is said, the regional context in which decisions were made is no less worthy of attention.

      CROSSBORDER TIES: THE KIN COUNTRY SYNDROME

      What Huntington refers to as the “kin country syndrome”⁴⁷ —where communities sharing similar cultural ties are mobilized across national boundaries, in support of, or against, a government—draws attention to an obvious dimension of the Great Lakes crises. Although the phenomenon is not unique to the region, in no other part of the continent has it played a more decisive role in projecting ethnic hatreds from one national arena to another.

      Kin country rallying was indeed a critical vector in the diffusion of ethnic enmities from Rwanda into Burundi in the early 1960s and back from Burundi into Rwanda in 1973. So, also, among ethnic Tutsi in eastern Congo during the early stages of the civil war in Rwanda, when hundreds were recruited into the ranks of the FPR. And when they found themselves in the crosshairs of Congolese and refugee extremists in 1996, Rwanda did not hesitate to reciprocate the favor. While the FPR acted as the senior partner, many Banyamulenge served as auxiliaries in the destruction of the refugee camps and in subsequent “cleansing” operations. Much the same coalescence of ethnic affinities presided over the emergence of the solidly Hutu Forces Démocratique pour la Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) in eastern Congo, notwithstanding the bitter rivalries currently tearing its leadership.⁴⁸

      Again, consider the case of the Nande of North Kivu (known as Bakonjo in Uganda): for years Nande involvement in the wide-ranging trade networks, linking their core area of Butembo-Beni to East Africa and beyond, helped strengthen Nande-Bakonjo ties, but the connection became politically significant in the 1990s when, in his effort to weaken the Museveni regime, Mobutu did everything he could to bolster the Bakonjo-led National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (NALU), a move which elicited a fair degree of sympathy among the Nande.⁴⁹ Parts of North Kivu became a privileged sanctuary for NALU militants. According to one observer, armed with weapons sent from Kinshasa and Khartoum, on November 13 they launched a major offensive against Uganda, which temporarily brought under NALU its control much of the Kasese district and the town of Mbarara.⁵⁰

      Such “fault line conflicts,” Huntington notes, “tend to be vicious and bloody, since fundamental issues of identity are at stake. In addition, they tend to be lengthy; they may be interrupted by truces or agreements but these tend to break down and the conflict is resumed.”⁵¹

      REFUGEE FLOWS

      In the absence of massive outpourings of Hutu refugees to neighboring states—with vivid memories of the violence they experienced or inflicted—it is a question whether kinship ties could have been mobilized so quickly and so effectively, and whether the security concerns of neighboring states would have assumed the same urgency. Much of the history of the region is indeed reducible to the transformation of refugee-generating conflict into conflict-generating refugees, or as Myron Weiner puts it, “conflicts create refugees, but refugees also create conflicts.”⁵² From the days of the Hutu revolution in Rwanda to the invasion of the “refugee warriors” from Uganda in 1994, from the huge exodus of Hutu from Burundi in 1972 to the “cleansing” of Hutu refugee camps in 1996–97, the pattern that emerges again and again is one in which refugee populations serve as the vehicles through which ethnic identities are mobilized and manipulated, host communities preyed upon, and external resources extracted. The net result, as one observer noted, has been to “create domestic instability, generate interstate tension and threaten international security.”⁵³

      The view that “refugees are potentially a tool in interstate conflicts”⁵⁴ is nowhere more cruelly demonstrated than by the fate that befell the Hutu refugees—numbering over a million. Manipulated by their own leaders, as well as by Mobutu and ultimately by Laurent Kabila, they paid a heavy price in the retribution visited upon them by the FPR. Beatrice Umutesi's searing account of her grueling trek across two thousand miles bears testimony СКАЧАТЬ