for an estimated 70,000 men under arms and a sophisticated military arsenal, consisting of armored personnel carriers (APCs), tanks, and helicopters. Even though it is not immediately threatened by rebel forces, Rwanda's maintenance of its armed forces is heavily dependent on free access to its neighbor's wealth.
Exactly how much of the mineral pie goes to Rwanda and how much to its local allies is impossible to tell because of the secrecy surrounding these transactions and the number of intermediaries and joint ventures involved. A rough indication of the profits going to the RCD was disclosed by Adolphe Onusumba, a key RCD figure, who is reported to have declared in 2000, “We raise more or less $200,000 per month from diamonds.…Coltan gives us more: a million dollars a month.”72 This is probably a fraction of the overall profits going into Rwandan pockets.73 Whether or how far discords over the sharing of the Congo's wealth have contributed to the RCD's declining fortunes is moot. What is beyond doubt is that the RCD is no longer Kagame's most dependable ally in eastern DRC. In the words of one observer, “the Rwandan government has progressively relegated the national RCD leadership to a secondary tool of influence in Kinshasa and focused instead on creating and strengthening autonomous power bases in areas of the DRC it considers to be within its sphere of influence.”74
Rwanda's principal ally in eastern DRC is the multifaceted NGO Tous pour la Paix et le Développement (TPD), headed until 2000 by the all-powerful North Kivu governor, Eugene Serufuli Ngayabaseka. It was founded in 1998, ostensibly “to assist Congolese refugees in Rwanda to return to the DRC,”75 meaning essentially those Tutsi elements indigenous to North Kivu who fled the violence in 1995 and 1996. Of far greater significance, however, are TPD's “latent” functions. Its aims are to expand and strengthen Kigali's grassroots “constituencies” politically, militarily, and economically. This is how Dennis Tull describes its activities: “[to help] the RCD establish a strong power base on both an elite level as well as on the ground by forging close links between Kigali, the RCD and a Banyarwanda group consisting of rich landowners and repatriates in North Kivu…to address Rwanda's security concerns by reinforcing military recruitment among the Banyarwanda repatriates…thirdly, by supposedly promoting humanitarian concerns, the repatriation network might have tapped resources provided by international agencies, thus contributing to the financing of this alliance.”76 The emphasis placed on the recruitment of Hutu participants in the TPD is the most arresting—and potentially risky—aspect of Kigali's new strategy.
That Serufuli happens to be a Hutu, and a Hutu from Rutshuru at that, is of course indicative of the new course being charted by Kigali. No longer is the aim to assemble a group of potential supporters from various ethnic and regional horizons around a core of Banyamulenge faithful, as was the case during the early years of the RCD, but to reach out to Hutu elements indigenous to North Kivu. In a fascinating exploration of the TPD's historical antecedents, Bucyalime Mararo shows its curious pedigree, traceable to the pro-Hutu Mutuelle agricole des Virunga (MAGRIVI) and the more “ecumenical” Mutuelle UMOJA. TPD, in short, has deep roots in the social landscape of the region. In one significant respect, its settlement policies are ominously reminiscent of the colonial era, when Hutu migrants gradually pushed the Hunde out of their traditional domains in Masisi, thus creating lasting enmities between them. As Hutu chiefs are once again replacing Hunde authorities, and appropriating their landholdings, the stage is set for a renewal of tension.77 Whether their shared awareness of being up against a common ethnic enemy can help forge closer ties between Hutu and Tutsi remains to be seen.
In brief, in the short term, the menace posed by Rwanda's new course lies in the challenge it poses to the transition to multiparty democracy. It stems from the support network put in place on behalf of its client faction and the possibility that should the RCD lose the electoral battle, the patron state would not hesitate to use bullets against ballots, directly or indirectly. In the longer term, the threat is economic because the continuing siphoning off of minerals inevitably translates into huge opportunity costs for the Congolese people. However, the political and economic sides of the coin are intimately related. Only by nurturing and manipulating a vast array of vested interests among the host communities of eastern Congo can Rwanda hope to meet the twin challenges of its foreign policy, namely, make eastern Congo safe for ethnic Tutsi and extract the resources needed to meet the demands of its formidable military establishment.
Looking back at the violence that has swept across the Great Lakes, future historians will ponder the analogy with the Thirty Years War. In both instances, we are dealing not with one war but an aggregation of wars; in each instance the logic of the unforeseen lies at the root of the endless and violent episodes generated by the initial event; and ultimately, leaving behind nothing but waste and destruction in its wake. This is how C. V. Wedgewood, in her classic account, summed up the chaos and bloodshed unleashed through Europe from 1618 to 1648: “Morally subversive, economically destructive, socially degrading, confused in its causes, devious in its results, it is the outstanding example in European history of meaningless conflict.”78
What better epitaph for a conflict that has taken four million lives—and nearly six, when the losses in Rwanda and Burundi, are added to the toll—displaced hundreds of thousands, raised ethnic hatreds to unprecedented levels, and made a wasteland of many parts of the environment?
Chapter 2
The Road to Hell
If the fate of the African continent evokes hopelessness, nowhere is this sense of despair more evident than in former Belgian Africa. No other region has experienced a more deadly combination of external aggression, foreign-linked factionalism, interstate violence, factional strife, and ethnic rivalries. Nowhere else in Africa has genocide exacted a more horrendous price in human lives lost, economic and financial resources squandered, and developmental opportunities wasted. The scale of the disaster is in sharp contrast with the polite indifference of the international community in the face of this unprecedented human tragedy. What has been called Africa's first world war has yet to attract the world's attention.
The marginal ranking of Africa in the scale of international priorities is one obvious explanation for this generalized lack of interest in the Great Lakes crisis. Another is the sheer complexity of the forces involved. When one considers the multiplicity of political actors—domestic and foreign—the fluidity of factional alliances, the spillover of ethnic violence across boundaries, and the extreme fragmentation of political arenas, it is easy to see why the international community should have second thoughts about the wisdom of a concerted peace initiative. No other crisis on the continent seems more resistant to conflict resolution.
Adding to the confusion is the plethora of competing explanatory models that come to mind. How much credence should one give to Paul Collier's recent thesis that “it is the feasibility of predation which determines the risk of conflict”?1 Is the crisis in the Great Lakes an extreme example of the “criminalization of the state”?2 Or should one turn instead to Jeffrey Herbst's demographic argument and look for evidence of low population density, combined with the weakness of state boundaries, as an explanation for Kabila's inability to effectively broadcast the power of the Congo state?3 If Samuel Huntington's “clash of civilizations” model hardly applies, what of his contention that the “kin country syndrome” is the key to an understanding of regional instability?4 To these questions we shall return.
This chapter offers a different prism to view the roots of the crisis. The key concept around which much of this discussion revolves is that of exclusion. Political, economic, and social exclusion are seen as the principal dimensions that must be explored if we are to grasp the dynamics of domestic and inter-state violence in the Great Lakes. This is not meant to minimize the significance of external aggression. The capacity of Rwanda and Uganda to effectively project their military force into eastern Congo, albeit with mixed results for both, is unquestionably a major contributory factor to regional instability. External intervention, however, must be seen in the broader historical context of the forces
