Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998), the extremely violent methods of conquest during Leopold’s reign were integral to his strategy of territorial domination and control, designed to maximize the exploitation of rubber, ivory, and copper. These foundations of violent, extractive rule established an approach to governance that continues to this day.14
Between 1885 and 1908, an estimated eight to ten million people died as a result of disease, famine, and torture. These atrocities were documented by George Washington Williams, an American journalist who was also a lawyer, minister, and former soldier. Williams had traveled to the Congo in 1890, and what he saw was an outrageous affront to the supposedly humanitarian enterprise that King Leopold II was claiming to lead. In a letter addressed to the king, Williams reports that the Congolese people he met “everywhere complain that their land has been taken from them by force; that the Government is cruel and arbitrary, and declare that they neither love nor respect the Government and its flag. Your Majesty’s Government has sequestered their land, burned their towns, stolen their property, enslaved their women and children, and committed other crimes too numerous to mention in detail.”15 Williams goes on to decry the forced labor system, including the subjugation of migrant workers brought from other parts of the continent. He provides a list of abuses that he witnessed firsthand: “Your Majesty’s Government is excessively cruel to its prisoners, condemning them, for the slightest offences, to the chain gang, the like of which cannot be seen in any other Government in the civilized or uncivilized world. Often these ox-chains eat into the necks of the prisoners and produce sores about which the flies circle, aggravating the running wound; so the prisoner is constantly worried. These poor creatures are frequently beaten with a dried piece of hippopotamus skin, called a ‘chicote,’ and usually the blood flows at every stroke when well laid on.”16 Williams recounts slave-hunting raids, razing of villages, maiming of hands, murder, and acts of cannibalism. These grotesque expressions of violence were later documented by many others, including European and American missionaries.
The knowledge of these atrocities eventually reached Europe, spurring activists to mount what some consider the world’s first global human rights campaign.17 As documented in Hochschild’s history, men such as Edward Morel and Roger Casement, and the Congo Reform Association they would establish, labored tirelessly to raise awareness among European leaders about the atrocities under way in the Congo Free State. The great writers of the day joined the cause, including Joseph Conrad with Heart of Darkness, Mark Twain with King Leopold’s Soliloquy, and Arthur Conon Doyle with The Crime of the Congo.
Although this violence was moderated by the Belgian state when it took over administration of the territory in 1908, the priority on extracting natural resources continued. Great wealth was generated not only from rubber, copper, diamonds, and gold but also from agriculture. Forced migration of laborers fueled the economy and was practiced especially in the eastern regions. In the decades from 1920 until independence, more than a hundred thousand people were brought to the Kivus to labor on the farms and dig in the mines. Additional migration occurred from the neighboring Belgian colony of Ruanda-Urundi—modern-day Rwanda and Burundi—with laborers eventually settling in the territories of Rutshuru and Masisi.18
These newly settled “people of Rwanda,” also known as Banyarwanda, were Rwandaphones and were administratively designated as “nonnative” Congolese by the colonial authorities. Local populations felt threatened by these newly arriving people. Rwandaphone “foreigners” could not own land and did not fall under the customary systems that had been co-opted by the Native Authorities. Without local protection, the laborers from Ruanda-Urundi found themselves in a precarious position, unprotected by the state and vulnerable to attack. It is these historic beginnings that laid the foundations for the conflicts over land and belonging that continue to reverberate today.
From this early period, possession of land and accordance of citizenship became tightly linked with identity politics, and regularly contested through violence. The first identity-based wars of the postindependence era occurred in 1964 in South Kivu and in 1965 in North Kivu. These conflicts pitted the Rwandaphone population against those who considered themselves autochthons. Uncertainty, fear, and resentment became some of the most effective tools for political and economic manipulation, including by President Mobutu Sese Seko, who would eventually become one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most notorious leaders, and one of Western governments’ greatest allies. In the Kivus, Mobutu was astute in deploying the threats of contested identity to his political advantage. By fomenting competition over land and decreeing unstable citizenship policies, Mobutu maintained his influence over the restive eastern provinces.
In 1972, Mobutu passed the Citizenship Decree, according citizenship based on identity group presence in Congolese territory before 1960. This reversed the colonial legislation that had designated citizenship based on identity group presence in the territory as of 1885. Subsequently, Mobutu’s Bakajika land reforms of 1968–73 led to the passage of the 1973 General Property Law in which all land formerly owned by private Belgian interests was nationalized. This land, primarily in Masisi and Rutshuru territories, was sold to individuals favored by Mobutu, who were at that time mostly Kivu-based elites of Tutsi identity who had previously been excluded from landownership. In this way, Mobutu gained much-needed political loyalty in the Kivu periphery, helping to consolidate his rule over the vast Zairian nation.19
By the early 1980s, however, the power balance again shifted. Non-Rwandaphone Zairians who considered themselves the only legitimate owners of the land pressed Mobutu to repeal the citizenship rights of anyone who could not prove their identity group presence in Congo prior to 1885. Without citizenship, land could not be held. This 1981 Citizenship Law excluded a large proportion of the Rwandaphone population settled in the Kivus, which led to a fission in the Banyarwanda population: Rwandaphone Congolese living in the Hauts Plateux of South Kivu declared their Banyamulenge identity (Banyamulenge translating as “people of Mulenge,” the hills of the Itombwe, South Kivu), and the Congolese Hutu of Rutshuru distinguished themselves from other Rwandaphones by claiming a longer historical presence in the Kivus.
The identity-based political violence that had simmered in the 1960s and 1970s worsened in the 1980s and 1990s as the process of “democratization” imposed on Mobutu by Western governments gained momentum. The Conférence Nationale Souveraine, or Sovereign National Conference, convened by Mobutu in 1991–92, provided a forum for further mobilization and division along ethnic lines, rallying autochthonous Congolese against “Rwandan foreigners.” To distract his opponents and divide any credible opposition, Mobutu increasingly relied on identity-based political strategies.20
Interethnic violence was particularly virulent in the Kivus, where fears of the demographic strength of Banyarwandans led other ethnic groups to mobilize along identity lines. Particularly concerned with the democratic weight of the large Hutu population in the planned 1993 local elections, the North Kivu governor encouraged ethnic Hunde and Nyanga youth militia to kill Banyarwanda Hutu in Walikale, Rutshuru, and Masisi. Up to 10,000 people were killed during this phase of the conflict, and an estimated 250,000 others were displaced in North Kivu.
MILITARIZED VIOLENCE
It was into this highly charged conflict dynamic that, in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, an estimated one million Rwandan Hutu refugees arrived in the Kivus. Although contemporary narratives of conflict in the Kivus often begin with the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the genocide only fed into an already tense and specifically Congolese political situation in which identity-based politics had long served as a powerful tool for further mobilization to violence.21 Prior to the genocide, approximately half of the four million people living in North Kivu were of Banyarwandan descent, with most of the Hutu population living in the territories of Masisi and Rutshuru. With the arrival of the Rwandan Hutu refugees, the tenuous ethnic balance in the Kivus was further destabilized.
Among the refugees arriving in eastern DRC were approximately thirty to forty thousand elements of the former Forces Armées Rwandaises
