to cooperate go beyond the allocation of portfolios to a wide array of coalition partners. To the extent that the Burundi state is becoming less hegemonic and more open to the demands of the Hutu majority, it has gone a long way towards promoting a climate of trust. Nor has the international community faltered in its efforts to reward cooperative behavior, as shown by the promise of a generous aid package from the European community ($440 million).
Despite efforts to widen the scope of Hutu-Tutsi cooperation, the Arusha framework faces an uncertain future. Inclusionary strategies so far have failed to convince the leaders of two extremist Hutu rebel groups, the FDD and the Palipehutu-FLN, to lay down their arms. That their obduracy is in part motivated by the financial and military support they have come to expect from external actors—whether from Zimbabwe or Congo-Kinshasa or from their ethnic kinsmen in the Congo or Tanzania—is reasonably clear. Equally plain is that Hutu extremism is bound to generate a response in kind from Tutsi hard-liners. Expectations of strategic assistance from external actors are not limited to any one group. They constitute major incentives for extremists at both ends of the ethnic spectrum not to cooperate in power-sharing arrangements.
If so, there are compelling reasons for encouraging the full implementation of the Lusaka accords (1998), especially as regards the withdrawal of foreign armed forces, the disarming of the so-called “negative forces” (the interahamwe militias and Mai-Mai factions), and the resumption of an inter-Congolese dialogue. The success of the Arusha accords is intimately linked to a global settlement in the Congo. Only if the rebel factions in Burundi are deprived of the support of secondary level participants (i.e., Zimbabwe or Congo-Kinshasa) will they join in the peace process or at least desist from violence. The same is true of the rebel RCD factions in the Congo, currently supported by Uganda and Rwanda.
Given the considerable economic stakes they have in the conflict, neither Rwanda nor Uganda are likely to envisage a withdrawal of their armies unless faced with vigorous pressure from the international community. Though providing convenient justification for their presence in eastern Congo, security concerns are of secondary importance for Presidents Kagame and Museveni; far more significant as a policy imperative are the enormous profits derived from the wholesale plunder of the Congo's mineral wealth. This is where a major reappraisal of strategic priorities is needed from donors, specifically from the World Bank, the United States, and Great Britain. By turning a blind eye to the “imperial” designs of Rwanda and Uganda in eastern Congo, while at the same time rewarding their economic performance, donors are in effect subsidizing their war effort. The time has come to recognize the fundamental contradiction involved in the pro forma support of the Lusaka accords and assistance policies designed to undermine their full implementation.
A more fundamental contradiction exists between the ethos of participatory politics and the exclusionary implications of the foreign-linked clientelism operating in much of the Great Lakes region. Reinforcing the neopatrimonial features of their domestic politics, Rwanda and Uganda have developed multiple linkages—economic, military, and political—with their respective client factions, but these linkages extend far beyond the boundaries of the Great Lakes. Corporate interests in the West and elsewhere in the world also have stakes in the rents generated through the illicit exploitation of the Congo's resources. The unpalatable truth is that the multiplicity of interests in support of the regional status quo far exceed the pressures of the United Nations for implementing the Lusaka accords. Nonetheless, no matter how daunting the obstacles ahead, Lusaka is the only roadmap for charting a new course towards peace. From all the evidence, this basic truth has yet to sink in among certain key members of the international community.
Part II
Rwanda and Burundi: The Genocidal Twins
Chapter 3
Ethnicity as Myth
Ethnicity is never what it seems. What some see as ancestral atavism, others see as a typically modern phenomenon, anchored in colonial rule. Where neo-Marxists detect class interests parading in traditional garb, mainstream scholars unveil imagined communities. And whereas many see ethnicity as the bane of the African continent, others think that it could provide the basis for a moral social contract and that it contains within itself the seeds of openness and accountability.
So overwhelming is the evidence that points to the demonic face of ethnicity that it is tempting to forget its more benign traits. Yet not everything about ethnicity translates into bloodshed and genocide or into frenzied ethnic cleansing. Ethnic communities also generate responsible, civic-minded leaders, anxious to speak on behalf of their constituents and willing to protect them against the abuses of the state. The sense of belonging to an ethnic community need not be synonymous with conflict and competition. John Lonsdale's argument about the significance of “moral ethnicity” readily comes to mind. Drawing a distinction between “political tribalism” and “moral ethnicity,” he defines the former as “the use of ethnic identities in political competition with other groups” and the latter as “a positive force which creates communities from within through domestic controversy over civic virtue.”1 Moral ethnicity, he wrote, is an expression of “the common human instinct to create out of the daily habits of social intercourse and material labor a system of moral meaning and ethical reputation within a more or less imagined community.”2
Ethnicity does not necessarily mean conflict, nor is conflict everywhere traceable to politicized ethnicity. Illustrating this point are the violent struggles in Somalia, one of the most conflict-ridden states anywhere in the continent, and the class-based intra-Zulu confrontations that have punctuated the recent history of Natal. Similarly, the recent war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo cannot be reduced to ethnic polarities. Even where mass murder is clearly aimed at a specific ethnic community, as in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, it is not easy to pin the blame on ethnicity. What, indeed, does ethnicity mean when the groups in conflict share the same language, the same national territory, the same customs, and have for centuries lived more or less peacefully side by side?
Clearly then, ethnicity can be many things, both good and bad. The crucial question, therefore, for anyone attempting to understand its role in conflict is, What causes it to become a force for evil? What, in other words, accounts for the transformation of moral ethnicity into political tribalism, and tribalism into genocide? What are the mechanisms through which peaceful ethnic cohabitation gives way to death and destruction?
John Lonsdale gives us a clue: “Tribalism,” he writes, “remains the reserve currency in our markets of power, ethnicity our most critical community of thought.”3 In the market place of electoral competition, tribalism is the bad currency that drives out the good currency, in a kind of Gresham's law of ethnic politics. Moral ethnicity is the first casualty of the inflationary spiral of ethnic claims and counterclaims. Nonetheless, to invoke political tribalism in an attempt to explain genocide leaves out a crucial dimension of ethnicity. Ethnicity has a capacity to be manipulated for the pursuit of preeminently immoral goals, to profoundly alter collective perceptions of the “other.” It can be distorted using images whose purpose it is to draw rigid boundaries between good and evil, civic virtue and moral depravity, freedom and oppression, and foreigners and autochthons.
This chapter focuses on the effect of mythmaking on ethnic strife in the Great Lakes region of Africa. After an examination of the meaning of ethnicity, attention is given to the origin and development of myths in central Africa, especially to the traditional Rwandan myths of origins and the so-called Hamitic hypothesis, a myth started by the Europeans. The last part of the chapter is devoted to a consideration of how and why these myths were turned to genocidal purposes. It is my contention that the history—in whose name hundreds of thousands of innocent Tutsi men, women, and children were slaughtered—is, in large part, myth. So is the view of the past that lies behind Rwanda's claims to huge chunks of North and South Kivu. And so, also, is the reading of history implicit in the construction of new
