organization of the host communities, most notably the Hunde. Not content to expel many Hunde clans from their traditional homelands, the Belgian authorities proceeded to create a Banyarwanda chiefdom in the heart of Hunde domains, the so-called Gishari enclave (Bwisha), headed by a Tutsi chief.33 The Gishari take-over was only the thin edge of the wedge. By 1959 in Rutshuru, the Hutu and Tutsi were ten times as numerous as the indigenous Hunde population (10,193); in Masisi almost two thirds of the population were immigrants from Rwanda.34
Unlike the early migrant laborers who settled in Bwisha and Masisi under the wing of the Mission Immigration Banyarwanda (MIB), the “fifty-niners”, so-called because they fled Rwanda during the revolution of 1959–62, were overwhelmingly Tutsi; they were incomparably better off in terms of material wealth and education than their Hutu predecessors; and they could count on the unfailing support of a leading émigré figure, Barthélemy Bisengimana, who by 1970 wielded considerable power as Mobutu's chief of staff. What Bisengimana could not achieve, bribery usually did. Bribing the local authorities to acquire land became standard practice.
The result has been to set in motion a massive process of land alienation. The extent of the holdings acquired by wealthy Tutsi speaks for itself: Kasungu received 10,000 hectares, Ngizayo 2,000, Bisengimana himself received one of the biggest ranches in the region, over 5,000 hectares.35 The expropriation of native lands was further facilitated by the Bakajika law of 1966, which converted all public land into the domain of the state, followed by the Zairianization measures of 1973. Instrumental as it was in operating massive land transfers into Tutsi hands, the effects of “étatisation-cum-zairianization” were by no means limited to North Kivu. At the root of the Hema-Lendu conflict in Ituri lies a very similar phenomenon. As Thierry Vircoulon has shown, the accumulation of land in Hema hands, with the Lendu often reduced to the status of day laborers, occurred largely at the expense of the Lendu communities, who, like many Hunde and Nyanga in North Kivu, eventually found themselves facing a subsistence crisis.36
While exacerbating anti-Banyarwanda sentiment, land expropriation has had a profoundly disruptive impact on indigenous societies. This is a point of crucial significance to an understanding of the next phase in the regional dynamics of violence. As Vlassenroot has convincingly argued, the cumulative effects of the repeated violations of customary land rights, the break-up of patron-client ties, and the erosion of chiefly authority have created a critical mass of marginalized youth, many of whom later joined the warlords.37 And just as the warlords can be seen as surrogate patrons for their deracinated followers, fighting for gold and diamonds and coltan is perhaps best understood, in David Keen's words, as “a way of creating an alternative system of profit, power and even protection.”38
Another consequence of the land issue has been to give added urgency to the citizenship problem. The land problem and the nationality problem are but two sides of the same coin. Access to land presupposes access to citizenship; withdrawal of citizenship rights from the Banyarwanda meant the end of their security in land rights. But it would also mean, for many, the end of their physical security as residents of eastern Congo.
THE NATIONALITY QUESTION
A turning point in relations between immigrant and indigenous communities came in 1981, with the adoption of a new nationality law. By a stroke of the pen the Legislative Council repealed the 1972 law that gave citizenship rights to “persons originating from Rwanda-Urundi who were residents of the Kivu before January 1, 1950,” and instead adopted the notoriously restrictive ordonnance-loi of March 28, 1981, which stipulated that citizenship could only be conferred on persons “who could show that one of their ancestors was a member of a tribe or part of a tribe established in the Congo prior to October 18, 1908,” when the Congo formally became a Belgian colony.39 The dismissal of Bisengimana in 1977, for reasons that remain unclear, thus paved the way for the virtual denial of citizenship rights to all Banyarwanda, irrespective of their date of arrival.
Although the 1981 law was never implemented, it nevertheless provided official justification for further discriminatory moves. Candidates suspected of “foreign” origins were systematically prevented from running during the 1982 and 1987 elections on grounds of “dubious nationality.” Despite great hopes among the Banyarwanda that the National Conference (1991) would resolve the nationality issue to their satisfaction, this was not to be the case. The party delegations representing their interests were refused admission to the conference. Civil society delegates did not fare much better. Given their well-established claims to citizenship, the Banyamulenge of South Kivu were especially resentful of such exclusionary measures. After the candidacies of two leading Banyamulenge were declared invalid in 1987, their constituents destroyed the ballot boxes. Many were arrested. When in October 1993 the news reached South Kivu that the newly elected Hutu president of Burundi, President Ndadaye, had been killed by Tutsi officers, several Banyamulenge were stoned to death in the streets of Uvira.40
The worst was yet to come. While the victory of the FPR in Kigali was greeted with mixed feelings in eastern Congo, the report of the so-called Vangu commission—a parliamentary commission charged with investigating the identity of the refugee populations—declared the Banyamulenge “foreign migrants” (“immigrés étrangers”). On the basis of this palpable absurdity, the transitional parliament adopted a resolution on April 28, 1995 demanding the repatriation to their countries of origin of “all Rwanda and Burundi refugees and immigrants, without condition and without delay,” including the Banyamulenge, henceforth categorized as foreigners.41 From then on, the Banyamulenge came to be seen increasingly as Rwandan Tutsi in disguise. As the weekly paper Munanira, published in Uvira, commented, “this sly Zairwa [sic] is but a Rwandan whose morphology and ideology is identical to that of Paul Kagame.…The Banyamulenge are quite simply, Tutsi, and Rwandans at that.”42
As happened elsewhere in the history of the Great Lakes, the stage was set for a self-fulfilling prophecy—grounded in self-protection—that inevitably led the Banyamulenge to become Kigali's staunchest allies during the AFDL rebellion leading to the undoing of the Mobutist dictatorship.
Interlocking Crises
As the history of the region makes clear, its social upheavals are closely interconnected. An obvious example is the murderous, cross-border tit-for-tat behind the ethnic crises in Rwanda and Burundi: the Hutu revolution in Rwanda generated a powerful backlash in Burundi, steadily raising the ethnic temperature until some 200,000 Hutu were killed by Tutsi in 1972, in what can legitimately be called a partial genocide. In Rwanda, the blow-back effect of the Burundi carnage took the form of violent anti-Tutsi pogroms, which paved the way for the rise to power of Juvénal Habyarimana in 1973. We also noted how in Uvira the news of Ndadaye's death triggered a brutal retaliation against Banyamulenge civilians. It is in Rwanda, however, that Ndadaye's assassination had its most dramatic impact as it ushered an immediate and drastic radicalization of anti-Tutsi sentiment, via the “Hutu Power” faction, that played directly into the hands of the génocidaires.
None of the above, however, carried consequences as devastating and wide-ranging as the 1994 genocide. The fallout has been little short of seismic. The litany of cataclysms is all too familiar: over a million Hutu refugees pouring across the border into Rwanda, creating chaos and penury in many parts of North and South Kivu; repeated cross-border raids into Rwanda by remnants of the Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR) and interahamwe (“those who stand together”), accompanied in parts of North Kivu by wholesale massacres of ethnic Tutsi, causing many to seek refuge in Rwanda; growing evidence of humanitarian aid diverted to extremist hands and of Mobutu's military assistance to the Hutu refugee leaders. All of which raised deep anxieties among Rwanda's new leaders.
The critical turning points came in 1996 and 1998.43 The destruction of the refugee camps in October 1996, followed by the killing of tens of thousands of civilian refugees by units of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF; now known as the Rwanda Defense Forces [RDF]), was only the first stage of a grand politicomilitary strategy
