The Great Lakes
Legacy of genocide
The revolution in Congo should have helped bring peace to Africa’s Great Lakes region, but in Rwanda and Burundi, where it all began, the wars go on
NO FEAR was visible in Jeremiah's
The Great Lakes
Legacy of genocide
The revolution in Congo should have helped bring peace to Africa’s Great Lakes region, but in Rwanda and Burundi, where it all began, the wars go on
NO FEAR was visible in Jeremiah's homecoming. It was all shrieks and smiles and embraces. He looked fit and well in his Hawaiian shirt, not like the televised image of a Rwandan refugee. But, officially, that is what he is, brought home like thousands of others by the UN refugee agency in planes and lorries after three years in exile. He admitted to Rwandan officials that he had been in the army and had fled to Zaire (as it then was) in 1994 after the genocide. He had done no wrong, he said. If the officials suspected otherwise, they kept silent. But on his way to his village Jeremiah passed two improvised jails crammed with hundreds of men and women accused of taking part in the 1994 killings. One of them was his brother.
The numbing horror of the genocide—800,000 people, most of them Tutsis, slaughtered in three months—hangs over the region. It triggered the takeover of Rwanda by the Tutsi-dominated RwandesePatriotic Front (RPF), sending hundreds of thousands of Hutus fleeing to eastern Zaire, now renamed Congo, where they settled in camps along the border. From there, the defeated Rwandan army and its allied militiamen started launching guerrilla raids across the border. By last October, those raids had spurred Rwanda's RPF government to get Laurent Kabila's army to clear the refugee camps. That task completed, Mr Kabila went on to conquer Congo.
His victory was welcomed by the governments on Congo's eastern rim, the presidents of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi showering him with praise. It would bring the region, said Paul Kagame, Rwanda's ruler, “more stability than ever before”. Really? While the world's attention has been fixed on Mr Kabila's triumph in Kinshasa, the Great Lakes region is suffering from an upsurge of fighting and killing.
Rwanda, Burundi and parts of eastern Congo remain under the shadow of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict. The governments of Rwanda and Burundi are both dominated by Tutsis (a minority in both countries) and both are under threat from Hutu militia groups. Uganda, too, is having difficulties. The sealing of its western border should have meant that Ugandan rebels, backed by Sudan, could no longer retreat through Congo to Sudan to rest or obtain supplies. Instead, there has been renewed fighting in northern Uganda.
In Rwanda, the collapse of the Mobutu regime has meant the return of over 1m Hutu refugees. Officially, the government welcomes them back. But it also knows that many of them join armed Hutu gangs on their return. The authorities watch the young men who come back, such as Jeremiah, carefully. Gangs ambush military vehicles and attack government offices and even schools. Two UN workers were murdered this week. The army, already stretched, is unable to contain the attacks, but claims to have killed many militiamen. It also kills civilians suspected of helping them.
The pattern is similar in Burundi where a more explicitly Tutsi—and military—government seized power in a coup last July. Its East African neighbours demanded a return to constitutional rule and imposed sanctions. This encouraged Burundi's Hutu militia armies: by the end of last month, their attacks had got dangerously close to the capital, Bujumbura.
Burundi's military ruler, Pierre Buyoya, is feeling the effects both of the guerrillas and of a sanctions-produced shortage of fuel, food and medicine. He has made secret contact with the militia leaders and knows that in the long term he will have to settle with them. But his short-term tactics are hardly conciliatory: the army clears areas where the guerrillas are operating and resettles by force the (mainly Hutu) population into camps. In both Burundi and Rwanda the armies respond to guerrilla attacks by taking revenge on civilians.
The isolated Mr Buyoya is trying to obtain support from Rwanda and Uganda, pointing out that their rebels are fighting alongside the militias attacking his government. But he was rebuffed when he recently approached Rwanda for help—showing that, at least officially, there is no Tutsi solidarity between the governments. Mr Kagame cannot be seen to be supporting the military Tutsi regime in Burundi, even though there is collaboration between the Hutu militias in both countries.
In eastern Congo, Mr Kabila has left a mess. He had already swapped sides in a local ethnic feud, and when his best fighters went off to win the rest of the country, they left behind indisciplined troops of low calibre. The local population is growing tired of them and there is a danger of dissidents making common cause with Rwandan and Burundian rebel militias: Mr Kabila's soldiers are already skirmishing with Rwandan militias in the area.
Aware of these problems, Mr Kabila on June 13th 