Belgian Africa. Briefly stated, the central pattern that recurs time and again is one in which ethnic polarization paves the way for political exclusion, exclusion eventually leading to insurrection, insurrection to repression, and repression to massive flows of refugees and internally displaced persons, which in turn become the vectors of further instability. The involvement of external actors, as we shall see, is inseparable from the perceived threats posed by mobilized refugee diasporas to their countries of origin, as well as to specific communities within the host country.
Historical Backdrop
Let us begin with a brief reminder of basic historical facts.
RANKED SOCIETIES, EXCLUSION, AND INSURRECTION
In the context of ranked societies like Rwanda and Burundi, where a two-tier structure of ethnic domination tended to vest power and privilege in the hands of the Tutsi minority, political exclusion was the rule for roughly 80 per cent of the population, consisting essentially of Hutu peasants. In Rwanda, the Hutu revolution of 1959–62—powerfully assisted if not engineered by the Belgian authorities—brought to a close the era of Tutsi hegemony.5 While opening the way for the enthronement of the representatives of the Hutu, an estimated 200,000 Tutsi were forced into exile in neighbouring and other countries between 1959 and 1963—approximately 70,000 to Uganda, 25,000 to the Congo and 50,000 to Burundi.6
In Burundi, by contrast, where the “premise of inequality” was far less institutionalized and social relations more complex, ethnic polarization proceeded at a slower pace, allowing the Tutsi elites to consolidate their grip on the government and the army long before they faced the challenge of a servile insurrection. Every attempt made by Hutu leaders to overthrow the government—in 1965, 1969, and 1972—ended in dismal failure, each time resulting in extremely brutal repression, culminating in 1972 with the genocidal massacre of anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 Hutu.7 Not until 1993, with the election of a Hutu to the presidency, Melchior Ndadaye, were the Hutu given to believe that they would soon control their political destinies, only to be robbed of this opportunity on October 21, when a radical faction within the all-Tutsi army killed the newly elected president, the speaker, and deputy-speaker of the National Assembly and overthrew the government. Six months later, after three and a half years of bitter civil war, opposing the predominantly Tutsi troops of the RPF against the FAR, Rwanda became the scene of one of the biggest genocides of the last century: between 600,000 and 800,000 people, mostly Tutsi, were sent to their graves by Hutu militias (interahamwe) and army men.8
THE BANYARWANDA OF EASTERN CONGO
Until then, the principal victims of political exclusion were the Tutsi of Rwanda and the Hutu of Burundi. Their closest analogs in eastern Congo were the “Banyarwanda,” a label that belies the diversity of their ethnic and regional origins.9 Included under that rubric are three distinctive communities: (a) Hutu and Tutsi who had settled in the Kivu region long before the advent of colonial rule, including a group of ethnic Tutsi indigenous to south Kivu (located in the Mulenge region) known as Banyamulenge; (b) descendants of migrant workers, mostly Hutu, brought in from Rwanda in the 1930s and 1940s under the auspices of the colonial state; (c) tens of thousands of Tutsi refugees who fled Rwanda in the wake of the 1959 Hutu revolution, and hence referred to as fifty-niners.
By 1981, following the promulgation of a retroactive nationality law, the Banyarwanda were for all intents and purposes denied citizenship because none could possibly meet the legal requirement of proof of ancestral residence before October 18, 1908, when the Congo Free State formally became a Belgian colony. By 1990, at the time of the RPF invasion of Rwanda, Banyarwanda resentment of Mobutu's exclusionary policies were matched by their growing sympathy for the cause of the RPF. Many did in fact join the ranks of the RPF and fought alongside their Ugandan kinsmen. By then both groups shared the deepest anxieties about their future in their respective countries of asylum. They would soon become critically important actors in the regional political equation.10
The devastating ripple effects of the Rwanda cataclysm were felt immediately in eastern Congo. The sudden influx of over a million Hutu refugees across the border, accompanied by the fleeing remnants of the FAR and interahamwe, brought a major environmental and human disaster to the region, while at the same time triggering a drastic reordering of ethnic loyalties. Almost overnight the Banyarwanda community split into warring factions, pitting Hutu against Tutsi.11 Meanwhile, in the interstices of the Hutu-Tutsi tug-of-war, emerged a shadowy constellation of armed factions, the Mai-Mai. Drawn from ethnic groups indigenous to the region—Hunde, Nande, Nyanga, Bashi, and so forth—to this day, the Mai-Mai are notorious for the fickleness of their political loyalties, the fluidity of their political alignments, and their addiction to violence. Swiftly responding to changing circumstances, they first turned against Hutu elements, then against local Tutsi, and ultimately against the Rwandan invaders and their Congolese allies.
1996: THE TURNING OF THE TIDE
The destruction of the refugee camps by units of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), in October 1996, marks a turning point in the tortured history of the region. It signals the meteoric rise to power of Laurent-Desiré Kabila as the deus ex machina imposed by Museveni upon Kagame to lead the anti-Mobutist crusade under the banner of the AFDL. While the AFDL and its Rwandan allies fought their way to Kinshasa, forcing Mobutu to throw in the sponge in May 1997, the shooting up of the camps released a huge flow of refugees across the Congo, fleeing the RPA's search-and-destroy operations. The attack on the camps also marks the entry of new international actors in the Congolese arena, most notably Rwanda and Uganda. For a brief moment, the surge of popular enthusiasm caused by the overthrow of the Mobutist dictatorship seemed to submerge factional and ethnic divisions—but only for a while. With a substantial presence of Rwandans on the ground acting in military and administrative capacities, anti-Tutsi feelings rapidly spread among a broad spectrum of the Congolese population in North and South Kivu, in the Katanga, as well as in the capital city. Unable or unwilling to discriminate between Rwandan Tutsi, on the one hand, and Banyamulenge and fifty-niners on the other, for the self-styled “Congolais authentiques,” anyone with the looks of a Tutsi would be fair game when push came to shove in July 1998.
1998: THE TURNING OF THE TABLES
The next and most critical stage in the Great Lakes saga came in August 1998 when, sensing the liabilities involved in his dependency on Tutsi “advisors,” the new king of the Congo took the fateful step of turning against the kingmakers, thus paving the way for a replay of 1996. Yet the state of the play on the ground was now very different from the quasi-unanimous crusade of 1996. As 1998 drew to a close, no fewer than six African armies were involved, albeit to a greater or lesser extent, on the side of Kabila (Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Chad, Congo Brazzaville, and the Sudan). Against this formidable coalition stood the fragile alliance of Rwanda and Uganda and their Congolese client faction, the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD), soon to break up into two rival groups, while a third rebel faction emerged in northern Congo, Jean-Pierre Bemba's MLC.
The 1998 crisis brought to light an immediate hardening of anti-Tutsi sentiment throughout the Congo, and particularly in North and South Kivu, where it was now the turn of the Congolese “autochtons” (i.e., non-Banyarwanda) to pay the price of exclusion. Denied all possibility of political participation, economically exploited by Rwandan interlopers, and trampled underfoot by foreign occupying forces, their most salient common characteristic is their visceral hatred of all Tutsi, whether of Rwandan or Congolese origins. Little wonder that today the Mai-Mai are increasingly training their gun sights on RPA units operating in the Kivu—and in the process, unleashing a terrible retribution upon civilian populations—as well as on the Banyamulenge, even though the latter fully qualify as “autochtons.” Evidently, their deep historic roots in South Kivu do not exonerate them of the suspicion of being in league with the Kagame government. The truth is that the Banyamulenge and the ethnic Tutsi, in general, are anything but united in their attitude toward Kigali. Many Banyamulenge resent the
