of Zaire and Mwinyi of Tanzania called separate summit conclaves. All external parties wanted the fighting in this poor, overpopulated country to end quickly.
The journey to a ceasefire, however, went along a circuitous path. This chapter explores that journey by first looking at the issues that any search for a ceasefire confronts and then recounting the failed summitry of the first two years. After considering how cooperation between France and the United States and between the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and Tanzania ushered in a durable ceasefire on June 13, 1992, I ask what lessons we learned from the exercise.
Issues at Stake
Although the initial fighting in Rwanda had come to a temporary lull in October 1990, settling the conflict proved a lengthy exercise in diplomatic negotiation and political opportunism. The October hostilities presented a classic spectrum of questions.
What is the nature of the conflict? Was the 1990 RPF attack on Rwanda, for example, an invasion or an insurgency? An invasion across the border of a sovereign state is in international law “aggression” and a matter for UN Security Council consideration. The incursion into northeast Rwanda originated from Uganda with troops who had taken leave from Uganda’s National Revolutionary Army. The Rwandan government characterized the incursion as a cross-border aggression sponsored by the Ugandan government, requiring a collective response by the international community. But the Ugandan leadership insisted that the attackers left Uganda without the authorization or knowledge of Ugandan authorities.
If this was a cross-border attack, it was also without question an insurgency, a battle by Rwandans to find place and power within the Rwandan state.6 Having launched the war, the RPF now sought to legitimize its status as an internal insurgency. The Rwandan government, however, was not interested in bilateral talks or a ceasefire, which would recognize the RPF as the opposite party and change the asymmetry of the government/rebel equation.7
Does a conflict warrant international attention, or should local wars be allowed to flame out?8 In the Rwandan case, the care of refugees, the war-born impediments to trade and humanitarian aid, and especially this ethnic struggle for ascendency that found its echo in eastern Zaire, southern Uganda, and Burundi all constituted threats to regional peace and security.9 The nature of the conflict also determined the applicability of international humanitarian law to the Rwandan case.10 Thus, international interveners came to see the conflict between the Rwandese Patriotic Front and the Rwandan government as an internal insurgency with external repercussions that threatened international peace and merited an international intervention.
Who are the contenders and how cohesive are their organizations? It would seem at first glance that the battle in and around Gabiro was between the Rwandese Patriotic Army (RPA), fighting for the exiled Tutsi, and the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), defending the state of Rwanda and the people within it. However, the RPF/RPA was but one of many groups vying for influence among the Tutsi diaspora. Indeed, the RPF had launched the attack preemptively to forestall an agreement of exiles to a UNHCR plan for programmed repatriation.11 In addition, expatriate Tutsi businessmen were attracted to possible business opportunities in Rwanda under a peaceful, negotiated return.12 Early days of battle showed a force divided in terms of vision, strategy, and operations.
On the other hand, the Rwandan Armed Forces no longer represented a unified country. After over twenty years of one-party rule, Rwandan elites joined in demanding an end to autocratic control and an opening to a democratic, liberal order.13 On July 5, 1990, the seventeenth anniversary of his coup, President Habyarimana promised a new economic and political order. A year later, under a new constitution, the legislature approved a law authorizing multiple political parties.14 Some sixteen parties filed for recognition. Whatever their regional base or ideological perspective, the new parties sought to distinguish themselves from Habyarimana’s rule.15 Thus, even before the RPF invasion, an opening to multiparty politics brought to the fore the north-south chasm in Rwandan politics. Eventually, under a coalition government led by Prime Minister Dismas Nsengiyaremye of the opposition Democratic Republican Movement (MDR), Rwandan politics and the war effort became a contest with multiple stakeholders.16
Are parties external to the conflict part of the problem or part of the solution? Conflicts draw in interested partners. In this asymmetrical confrontation between an incipient insurgency and an established state force, each side could claim interested neighbors and external supporters.17 France, Belgium, and Egypt had military assistance programs in Rwanda, while China was a regular supplier of arms. Libya built the Meridien Hotel and partnered with the government in joint enterprises. Zaire, linked formally to Rwanda in the Economic Community of the Great Lakes Countries (CEPGL) and impelled by close personal bonds between the two presidents, had responded to the October 1990 crisis with the immediate dispatch of several hundred troops from the Special Presidential Division.18 Germany, the United States, Canada, and Switzerland all had significant assistance programs supporting a regime in a poor, small country that, during the early 1980s, was thought to model effective techniques of rural development.19
On the other hand, after a 1988 international conference, in Washington, DC, on Rwandan refugees, the RPF began to build up financial support among the Tutsi diaspora and moral support from sympathetic foreigners. Most important, in launching its adventure into Rwanda, the RPF had expropriated armaments from Ugandan army connections and continued to receive support from elements within the government sympathetic to the Front’s cause, perhaps even from President Museveni. The smuggling of gold and diamonds along the Zairean border provided funds for weapons purchased on the international arms market. Thus, both contenders in the Rwandan crisis depended on support from states and third parties outside of Rwanda’s borders.
Are the contenders ready for a settlement? Has a culture of peace prevailed over a culture of war? The 1990 incursion had quickly evolved into a rhetorical confrontation, with skirmishes along the border, but not into a “mutually hurting stalemate.” Since both sides felt they could ultimately win, the conflict was hardly “ripe for resolution.”20 As the RPF tactics changed to guerrilla raiding, the conflict settled into a protracted, irregular war, all the more disturbing to external third parties who wanted to quickly restore peace.
If third party intervention becomes possible, who should mediate in the dispute? The Rwandan conflict was of immediate concern to neighboring states and a source of long-range anxiety for donors vested in large development programs and now burdened with humanitarian assistance within the Rwandan state. Who should mediate this troublesome conflict, and under what auspices? The Africans wanted an African mediation, but which personality or which state should lead?
Zaire’s president Mobutu was a dominant figure among African chiefs of state but had hostile relations with Uganda’s Museveni. As friend and protégé of Habyarimana, Mobutu would hardly be evenhanded in this matter. Finally, he was a sick man whose influence was fading abroad and whose rule was being challenged by “democratic” forces at home. Mobutu’s capacity to sustain a mediation seriously engaging both sides was very much in question.
On the other hand, an insurgency launched and sustained from the southern reaches of Uganda into a landlocked neighboring state must have had Museveni’s nod of approval. Moreover, Museveni and Habyarimana neither liked nor trusted one another. Museveni was in no position to mediate between the insurgents and the Rwandan government.
Burundi was the neighbor to the south whose history, politics, and social divisions mirrored those of Rwanda. However, Rwandans of all stripes considered themselves superior to their traditional enemies in Burundi. Additionally, by 1990, Burundi’s military president, Pierre Buyoya, had recently put out the fires of a major ethnic blowup in Burundi’s north and was too enmeshed in his own ethnic difficulties to provide mediation in Rwanda’s conflict.
The
