Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (9 page)

Camp leaders resorted to more subtle measures, as well, to make money. They taxed the thousands of refugees who worked with humanitarian organizations in the camps. An aid worker estimated that they made $11,000 per month from staff of one organization in one camp alone.
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They also charged rent for land; controlled markets, bus routes, and hair salons; and ran a lucrative black market in Rwandan currency.

Between 1994 and 1996 the international community, Rwanda, and Zaire missed their best opportunity to nip the crisis in the bud. After failing to act to prevent a genocide in 1994, they now failed to separate the soldiers from the refugees, despite repeated threats from Kigali’s government, starting in February 1996, that they would take military actions against the camps. A UN official recalled: “It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion.”
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In retrospect, the only solution would have been to separate the military and civilians by force. Early on, in August 1994, the UN secretary-general, Boutros Boutros Ghali, began researching various options for securing the camps. The first proposal, drafted by military experts, suggested transporting 30,000 ex-FAR and their families to Zairian military camps hundreds of miles from the Rwandan border, thereby detaching them from the refugees. This relocation would have likely encountered resistance from the ex-FAR leadership and would have required at least 8,000 international troops deployed under a UN mandate, costing $90–$125 million. Once again, however, the initiative foundered on a lack of will: Boutros Ghali’s request was turned down. Find alternative solutions, Security Council members told him, even though the cost of such an operation pales in comparison with the billions the international community has spent on the conflict since the renewed outbreak of hostilities in 1996.
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What could have been done to solve the situation? A glimpse was provided on August 17, when, under pressure from the international community and domestic opposition, Zaire’s prime minister, Kengo wa Dondo, took matters into his own hands. The day before, donors had just lifted the arms embargo against Rwanda, and Kengo anticipated what was to come. He told diplomats that he was left with no choice but to begin the forceful repatriation of refugees. Over four days, Zairian soldiers brought 12,000 Hutu refugees to the border. The exercise went surprisingly well: Many refugees, glad to have an excuse to break free from the ex-FAR’s grip, voluntarily joined the convoys. Zairian local authorities, eager to see the troublesome guests go, helped ensure the operation went smoothly. Instead of a violent backlash by soldiers in the camps, 20,000 refugees, mostly youths thought to be militia members, fled into adjacent forests, fearing arrest by Zairian authorities. Against all expectations, there was no armed resistance. After four days, however, under pressure from Mobutu and diplomats, who denounced what they perceived as forced repatriation and a violation of international law, the operations ground to a halt.
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What constituted forceful repatriation was, however, up for debate. After all, given the ex-FAR’s control of the camps, was voluntary return even an option? Even the United Nations’ legal advisors, usually risk-averse, began asking whether the exceptional circumstances merited “bending the rules.” In April 1996, Denis McNamara, the UNHCR director of international protection, suggested that a forced return had become necessary as a result of pressure from Zaire, as well as a lack of money. He said, “We expect it to be highly criticized. But it’s a fact of life because it is unavoidable.”
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The response, as so often in the region, was to throw money at the humanitarian crisis but not to address the political causes. The spectacle was perverse, especially given the international community’s inaction during the genocide. The United States, which had refused to intervene in the Rwandan massacre and had even blocked the United Nations from doing so, sent 3,000 soldiers whose mandate was strictly limited to assist with the relief effort; France, who had helped train and arm the Rwandan army and had received an official delegation from the Rwandan government at the height of the genocide, also had several thousand soldiers in eastern Zaire left over from their humanitarian intervention in Rwanda, Operation Turquoise
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Fiona Terry, the head of Doctors Without Borders in the Tanzanian refugee camps, put it eloquently: “[It was] a dramatic, well-publicized show of human suffering in which the enemy was a virus and the savior was humanitarian aid. Paralyzed during the political crisis, military forces were suddenly mobilized for the ‘humanitarian’ disaster, transforming the genocide into a ‘complex emergency’ in which there was no good and bad side, only victims.”
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After the first year, during which both the new and the old Rwandan governments were busy taking stock and consolidating their power, the situation deteriorated rapidly. While the international community categorized the situation as a humanitarian crisis, in reality the Rwandan civil war continued to smolder underground, on the verge of exploding to the surface once more. By July 1995, Rwanda had launched three targeted strikes against refugee camps in Zaire, an open provocation.

Mobutu had no interest in disbanding and separating the exiled government’s various armed forces from the refugees. When the new Rwandan government demanded that Kinshasa hand over the state assets that Habyarimana’s government had fled with, Mobutu gave them a few containers of rusty ammunition, two unusable helicopters, and heavy artillery in equally irreparable condition.
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The refugee crisis had injected new life into his ailing regime. The French, who, having “lost” Kigali to English-speaking rebels, were eager to maintain their influence over Africa’s largest French-speaking country, needed Mobutu’s permission to launch Operation Turquoise, while the United Nations courted Kinshasa to set up their huge humanitarian operation along the Rwandan border. On September 15, the UN Special Representative to Rwanda called on him to discuss the refugee crisis; on November 8, Mobutu arrived in Biarritz for the Franco-African summit. The dictator had leveraged his way back into the favor of his western allies.

Mobutu’s relations with the Rwandan exile government were even more cordial. He had been a close friend of President Habyarimana, sending a battalion of Zairian troops to help defend Rwanda against the initial RPF invasion in 1990, and had quickly evacuated the dead president’s body to his hometown of Gbadolite. The dead president’s widow, Agathe Habyarimana, who had been a shadowy power behind the president, joined Mobutu in Gbadolite as well, using the jungle palace as her base during the genocide. In October 1994, she and her brother Seraphin Rwabukumba accompanied Mobutu on a state visit to Beijing; press reports suggest they secured $5 million in arms shipments from the Chinese government, circumventing the arms embargo by shipping the weapons to the Zairian government.
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The body of her husband lay refrigerated in Mobutu’s palace. Her host promised her that one day he would be buried in Rwanda.

Between July 1994 and November 1996, the UN Security Council issued ten statements and resolutions regarding the refugee camps in Zaire, “strongly condemning,” “expressing grave concern,” and making other remarks of diplomatic vacillation that stopped short of committing the world body from doing anything. Numerous UN planning teams visited the camps, with Canadian military advisors taking the lead on a possible intervention. The proposed force was jokingly called “the ‘No’ force” among staff in New York headquarters. “They would not go into the camps and would not disarm the militia by force,” Peter Swarbrick, an official at the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, told me. “It was a fig leaf.” By the end of 1995, Boutros Ghali had given up on military intervention and focused on alleviating the humanitarian situation.

The U.S. Congress had, in the wake of their botched deployment in Somalia in 1993, enacted legislation that forbid U.S. troops to be placed under UN command. In the run-up to elections in November 1996, President Bill Clinton did not want to engage troops in a complicated, unpopular quagmire in central Africa. A State Department official involved in the decision-making process, who wanted to remain anonymous, told me: “Securing the camps was just too difficult; there was no stomach here for that kind of operation. In retrospect, could more have been done? Definitely.” After all, more was done in Bosnia, where the United States and its European allies dispatched 60,000 troops in 1995.

Moreover, the U.S. government was at loggerheads with the French government on the issue. Leading members of the French government saw conflict in the Great Lakes
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as pitting their sphere of influence against an Anglo-Saxon one. Hadn’t the RPF, an English-speaking rebel movement, taken power in Kigali from a French ally, Juvénal Habyarimana, and wasn’t it now trying to overthrow another, Mobutu Sese Seko? As a senior French official was quoted anonymously as saying: “We cannot let anglophone countries decide on the future of a francophone one. In any case, we want Mobutu back in, he cannot be dispensed with ... and we are going to do it through this Rwanda business.”
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The French and Americans battled it out in the Security Council: Whenever Madeleine Albright pushed to get tough on Mobutu, France would threaten to veto; whenever Paris wanted to include strong language on human rights abuses committed by the RPF in Rwanda, the United States would soften it up.

The RPF, who were already disgusted by international inaction during the genocide, watched in despair. “By early 1996, it was clear to us that the international community would not take action,” Patrick Karegeya, Rwanda’s intelligence chief, remembered. In August 1996, Vice President Paul Kagame visited Washington, DC, where he spoke with the secretary of defense and the head of the National Security Council, warning them that he would be forced to act if the international community did not. A State Department advisor who attended the meetings said: “We didn’t fully grasp what he was trying to tell us. We didn’t realize they would invade.” Despite their remonstrations, it is difficult to believe that Washington officials, who had deployed a military training and de-mining team to Kigali to provide nonlethal assistance to the new government, were in the dark. “We knew what was up,” Rick Orth, the U.S. defense attaché in Kigali, said. “But I don’t think we ever gave the Rwandan government the thumbs-up.”

Finally, in October 1996, the Rwandan army invaded in force under the guise of a homegrown Congolese rebellion in order to stave off criticism. Journalists and aid workers deployed in the refugee camps along the eastern Congo border began to report attacks by “Banyamulenge rebels,” Congolese Tutsi who had been in conflict with Mobutu’s government. Their first targets were the refugee camps in the Rusizi plain, a broad, hundred-mile-long expanse of savannah and rice paddies where the borders of Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi meet. Some 220,000 refugees were in camps there, protected by a few hundred soldiers on hire by the United Nations from Mobutu’s army. The invading troops quickly broke up these camps, driving some refugees into Burundi, while probably a majority fled further in the Congo. By October 22, the town of Uvira at the tip of Lake Tanganyika fell without much fighting to the Rwandan-backed coalition. The troops then marched northwards along the Great Rift Valley that connects Lake Tanganyika to Lake Kivu and that separates the Congo to the west from Rwanda and Burundi. By the end of October, they had taken control of Bukavu at the southern end of Lake Kivu, dispersing some 300,000 refugees, who had no choice but to flee into the hills, away from Rwanda.