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The DRC crisis proves that the world has learned nothing from the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda

Peace is not possible as long as the threat of genocide hovers over a section of the Congolese population
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On 21 March 2024, I was invited to participate in a discussion on the topic “An Elusive Peace: Thirty Years after the Rwandan Genocide – Lessons Learned and Future Scenarios for the Great Lakes.”  The event, which took place in Kampala (Uganda), was organised by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS), a German political foundation affiliated with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), whose regional programme, Security Dialogue for East Africa (RP SIPODI EA), deals with security policy and international relations in the region.

It is worth mentioning that I was expected to give the Rwandan perspective on the topic. I believe, however, that the Rwandan perspective on the topic of genocide should actually become the world’s perspective. Indeed, reflections on genocide as a crime against humanity should have a human perspective that centres the victims’ experience, with the world standing in solidarity with the victims and acting as a shield against the recurrence of genocide. Yet, we live in a world where people who were abandoned to die in 1994 now bear the additional burden of having to contend with perspectives that deny, revise and justify the tragedy that befell them. That the region, the continent and the global community at large remain reluctant to wholly embracing Rwanda’s perspective on an issue that it has successfully dealt with at home is the primary reason why peace beyond Rwanda’s western and southern borders remains elusive 30 years after the genocide against the Tutsi. This reluctance also demonstrates that the region, the continent and the global community have learned nothing from this tragedy, or from the success story of Rwanda’s response to it.

Reducing genocide to a tribal war

It is quite astonishing that despite the avalanche of documentary evidence, as well as the recorded testimonies of victims and remorseful perpetrators, the stubborn belief that the genocide against the Tutsi was a tribal war continues to thrive. It needs no saying that this belief is extremely dangerous in many respects, and so must be confronted until it fizzles out.

Those who promote this misleading belief de facto deny the existence of a state-promoted ideology to exterminate the Tutsi. To put it in a manner that is accessible to a Western-educated audience, it is like saying that the ideology of Nazism, for instance, had no connection with anti-Semitism and the extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust. Imagine then if Europeans were asked to reflect on the Holocaust and craft measures to prevent recurrence without identifying Nazism and anti-Semitism as root causes of the extermination of the Jews. This would be unacceptable and repugnant for Europeans. Yet, when it comes to Rwanda, it becomes acceptable.

Moreover, the belief that this was a tribal war continues to fuel genocide denial. The reluctance of many to use the correct terminology “Genocide against the Tutsi” as adopted by all members of the international community, excluding the United States, allows deniers to argue that all Rwandans were victims of genocide. Since there is no ideology to speak of, this particular genocide, unlike the Holocaust, has no specific victims beyond a vague reference to Rwanda. Yet, the Genocide Convention requires that we specify the protected group that was targeted for extermination when we speak of genocide.

We ought to ask ourselves why misleading terminologies that would not be tolerated in the case of the Holocaust are promoted when it comes to the genocide against the Tutsi.

Belittling African lives and preserving genocide ideology

In her series of articles titled “Que fait le Rwanda au Congo?” (What is Rwanda doing in Congo?), Jessica Mwiza, a scholar and activist fighting for the preservation of the memory of the genocide against the Tutsi, discusses the obvious reason: the fact that racism divides human life into categories of importance. For racists, she argues, Africans have not evolved to the point of having ideologies, let alone having ideologically driven genocides. Hence, ideology cannot be the primary cause of genocide; tribal wars are the cause. The subtext of the message sent to Rwanda and genocide victims is that the quest for “Never again” is vain since tribal wars are a normal feature of the African condition. It is as if the world subscribes to the view expressed by former French president Francois Mitterand (a key supporter of the genocidal regime), who said that “genocide in that part of the world doesn’t matter”. After all, tribal wars amongst “savages” are to be expected.

It is not surprising then that those who conscientiously or otherwise subscribe to the idea that African lives don’t matter in the quest for “Never Again” want to reduce what happened in Rwanda to a tribal war. Those who promote this revisionism of history are asking Rwandans and Africans at large to see themselves as warring tribes driven by atavistic fears of the “other” and the urge to exterminate the “other” – who is defined in ethnic terms. They believe that such fears and urges are not driven by an ideology.  As a consequence of this narrative, we are asked to focus all our energy on a few known perpetrators and move on while ignoring the ideology, which continues to live on and which is now being promoted by figures who present themselves as either Rwanda’s opposition or critics of Rwanda.

Denying the responsibility of the state                                                           

The belief that this was a tribal war also denies the responsibility of the state in orchestrating the 10 stages of genocide, namely classification, symbolisation, discrimination, dehumanisation, organisation, polarisation, preparation, persecution, extermination, and denial. Here again, racism plays a key role in explaining why a truth that was evident in the Holocaust case (that is, the responsibility of the state) is challenged in the Rwandan case. Once again, it is as though Nazi Germans, who racists consider more human, can leverage the state machinery – its organizational capacity – to execute genocide but Africans, being considered less human, cannot.

Accordingly, the Habyarimana regime was held to such a low standard of accountability that it could present incompetence (that is, its alleged inability to control the militias and extremist groups it created) as a legitimate defence against those who pointed to the responsibility of the state in the killings.

So, we are told that the genocide was caused by the shooting down of the plane carrying President Habyarimana, and that it was a spontaneous initiative led by ordinary people seeking to avenge a president they barely knew. We are asked to completely ignore the decades of dehumanising teachings, the multiple warnings of an impending genocide sent by UNAMIR officials months before the plane incident, and the indifference of the world as it watched the different stages of genocide unfold in Rwanda. The plane is the cause, we are told. Of course, this preposterous argument provides no explanation for the killing of over a million Tutsi who had no hand whatsoever in the assassination of Habyarimana, or the successive anti-Tutsi pogroms that marked Rwanda’s history from the 1959 Hutu “Revolution” to the final solution in 1994.

At this point, some may ask: “What is genocide ideology?”

In Rwanda, the 10 stages of genocide rested on the ideological foundation of the Hutu Ten Commandments, first published in the late 1950s. They were republished in the December 1990 edition of Kangura newspaper in Kigali, Rwanda, as a means to mobilise support for the extremist regime against the RPF liberation struggle that started in October of the same year. The commandments revived the ideological ground set in 1957 by the Bahutu Manifesto. The manifesto was basically a call to end “the Tutsi colonisation of Rwanda,” as its promoters (the miseducated and resentful Hutu extremists) put it. In other words, decades before the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, both the Bahutu Manifesto and the Hutu Ten Commandments laid the ideological ground for the final and permanent solution to what was perceived by the extremists as a recurrent Tutsi problem.

Among other things, the commandments forbade Hutu men from marrying or employing Tutsi women, who are described as deceitful and working for the interest of their ethnic group. They also forbade Hutu from making any business partnerships with Tutsi, including borrowing money from or lending money to Tutsi, because they are inherently dishonest. Here, the starkly clear parallel of this ideology with the vilification campaign targeting the Jews prior to the Holocaust and portraying them as greedy and dishonest people cannot be understated.

The Hutu commandments also demanded that all strategic positions (political, administrative, economic, military, and security) should be entrusted only to the Hutu. The commandments demanded that the Hutu, wherever they were, display unity and solidarity against their common Tutsi enemy and, most notably, that adherents to the ideology constantly look inside and outside Rwanda for friends and allies who support the “Hutu cause”.

On the last measure, one could argue that the proponents of this ideology have succeeded beyond their own expectations.

The spread of the genocide ideology in the Great Lakes region and beyond

As we speak today, genocide ideology is alive and well in the Great Lakes region. It has found new life in a war that is described by Kinshasa supporters as one between “Bantus versus Nilotics”. Echoing the racism introduced by colonial missionaries on the African continent through the Hamitic theories (which claim that anything of value found in Africa was brought there by the Hamites, who were allegedly a branch of the Caucasian race),  this ideology describes the Tutsi as oppressors, looters of minerals and foreign invaders in the Bantu land – which is a heresy, given that the Hutu and the Tutsi in Rwanda, Congo and Burundi all speak the same Bantu languages, Kinyarwanda and Kirundi. But genocide ideologues don’t bother with facts.

The Tutsi are believed to have Abyssinian origins and the ambition to establish a Hima-Tutsi empire in the Great Lakes region despite the absence of objective evidence to support these claims. Once again, as was the case with the RTLM radio in the lead-up to the genocide in Rwanda, there are calls on social media platforms to exterminate the Tutsi or send them back to wherever they supposedly came from (Egypt or Ethiopia). In other words, the past is here with us again. Today, the same arguments used to exterminate the Tutsi in Rwanda are recycled in Congo because the ideology was preserved and resurrected. The world is watching again as the ten stages of genocide are being unfolded, proving that we have failed to learn from the Rwandan experience.

The genocidal alliance

Unsurprisingly, the alliances birthed by the spread of this ideology extend beyond the region itself into Europe, from where this racism originated. From Congo to Burundi in the Great Lakes region to Europe, Canada, and the US, the spread of the ideology is a phenomenon that should worry us.

In Congo, the ideology is promoted by prominent public figures, including Congolese Member of the National Assembly Joseph Bitakwira, who peddles racist tropes about the alleged deceitful and evil nature of the Tutsi, and Congolese opposition figure Martin Fayulu, who repeatedly denounces in French media the presence of Tutsi foreign infiltrators in the Congolese army.

In Burundi, the “Bantu versus Nilotics” framing of ethnic tensions was widely promoted on national television during the 2015 political crisis by the current President of the National Assembly, Gelase Ndabirabe. At the time, Ndabirabe was pushing back against the condemnations of state repression emanating from Burkina Faso’s civil society movement, Le Balai Citoyen. In successive communiqués issued by Burundi’s ruling party (Cndd-Fdd) from November 2015 to January 2016, he denounced an alleged alliance between Burundi’s opposition and the Burkinabe civil society movement inspired, as he put it, by a supposedly Nilotic figure – the former Burkinabe president, Thomas Sankara.

On the African continent, the promoters of this ideology include public figures such as the French-Cameroonian Charles Onana, who repeatedly denies the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi and peddles the myth of double genocide theory. He is regularly invited by Congolese authorities to speak to the Congolese public. Another of their ilk is the anti-Semite and self-styled pan-Africanist French Beninois Kémi Seba, who promotes the myth of the greedy and deceitful Tutsi invaders hell-bent on pillaging Congo’s natural resources.

In the West, this ideology and its attendant features of revisionism, denial, and justification of genocide were first promoted by genocide fugitives and their ideological heirs, some of whom are descendants of the 1994 genocide perpetrators who are determined to rehabilitate their parents’ names. They brand themselves as Rwanda’s exiled opposition. They have their political bases in Belgium, the former colonial power. They are also supported by prominent Belgian and American political leaders. Notable figures in this movement are Paul Rusesabagina, who, in his recorded call for war against Rwanda, claimed that there was an urgent need to liberate the “natives.” Here, the coded language, a characteristic of the genocide ideology, depicts the Hutu as “natives” and the Tutsi as “settlers” or “invaders.”

Their supporters in the West also comprise French political leaders (such as Hubert Vedrine) who have continued to deny France’s obvious complicity in the genocide against the Tutsi. These French political figures have long advocated for dismembering Rwanda into two states: Hutuland and Tutsiland. This is the solution that French operation Turquoise failed to implement when it established control over western Rwanda in 1994. At the time, French leaders claimed that the operation was meant to stop the genocide but, as history proved, it only facilitated the retreat of the genocidal government to former Zaire.

Prominent Western media platforms, as well as journalists and academics (such as the Belgian Filip Reyntjens, the Canadian Judi Rever and the British Michela Wrong), are among the supporters of this ideology. They use their purported ‘expertise’ on Rwanda to revise, outright deny or justify the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. For instance, in an article titled Paul Kagame: The Hidden Dictator, which was published by the British magazine The New Statesman, Michela Wrong justifies the genocide in these terms, “In this instance, it was a history of Tutsi aggression against Hutus and the recent incursion of Kagame’s Tutsi-dominated militia, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), from Uganda into northern Rwanda. The Hutus feared for their own safety. ‘Kill or be killed’ is a motivation most of us can grasp.”

Examples of media support to the denialist movement comprise the 2014 BBC infamous revisionist documentary, “Rwanda’s Untold Story,” which argued that the majority of the victims of the 1994 genocide were actually the Hutu. The documentary fuelled the denialist movement all over the world and was later removed from BBC platforms without any formal apology to Rwanda and the victims of the genocide.

Then, there is the most stubborn of all actors behind the campaign to rehabilitate genocide ideology as a legitimate political ideology: Human Rights Watch (HRW). The destructive work of this entity was best described in the “Travesty of Human Rights Watch on Rwanda” – a thorough analysis of the work of HRW over 20 years made by Richard Johnson, a former Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Department of State. Johnson described HRW’s attempts to, among other things, a) minimise the relevance and scale of the genocide, b) to reduce the importance of post-genocide accountability, and c)to rehabilitate genocide ideology in Rwanda’s politics as a “political advocacy which has become profoundly unscrupulous in both its means and its ends.”

Suffice it to say that all these actors – who support the rebirth of genocide ideology and are vigorously leading the denialist, revisionist and justification campaigns – have at least two things in common. One, they despise Rwanda’s political system, which is at odds with their firm belief that only an ethnic majority rule, which happens to be the political objective of genocide ideology, can bring lasting peace to Rwanda. For them, anything other than ethnic majority rule is not democracy.

Two, they also believe in the racist Hamitic theories that pitted the colonially reengineered Hutu and Tutsi categories against one another during the independence struggle and the post-colonial period in both Rwanda and Burundi. Accordingly, they perceive any initiative that affirms the primacy of national identity over any other subnational identity as a threat to their project of reinstituting ethnic politics in Rwanda.

For these reasons, they support regime change in Rwanda. And just like the promoters of the so-called 1959 revolution, they frame their regime change project as the liberation of the Hutu majority against Tutsi oppressors.

In parallel, something troubling is happening in Congo. We can clearly see in the UN group of experts’ reports the attempts to justify the killings of Congolese Tutsi by willfully omitting to mention the ideology driving the killings. We are told that “Incidents of violence, including the killing of Tutsi civilians, had coincided with the resurgence of M23.” In other words, the implicit message from UN experts is that these killings are not the result of state-sponsored hate speech and the spread of genocide ideology; they are mere reactions to M23 territorial expansion. As we saw in the Rwandan case in 1994, nothing is said about the reasons behind the presence of Congolese Tutsi refugees in neighbouring countries and their inability to go back to their country for close to three decades. Instead, UN experts are trying to lend credence to the same rhetoric that justified the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda: that it was a consequence of the RPF military campaign. Then and now, the world outside Rwanda is debating the symptoms (i.e. resistance to genocide ideology) of a widespread disease without addressing the cause of the disease (i.e. genocide ideology). If we are serious about peace and truly want a “Never again” in the region, this attitude must change.

Why Congo, Burundi, and the world must take a leaf from Rwanda’s approach to dealing with genocide ideology

Many wonder why Rwanda has so far defied all prophecies of doom since the military victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) and the end of the genocide in July 1994. The country continues to make remarkable progress in social and economic aspects, as well as other developmental indices. Undeniably, it has become a beacon of political stability in the Great Lakes region and across Africa. Beyond the country’s visionary leadership, there are many reasons for this progress. I believe the most important one was the decision by the RPF leadership, the post-genocide political establishment, and the post-genocide Rwandan society to take an uncompromising stance against genocide ideology. This ideology was banned and outlawed, much to the dismay of HRW who denounced an attack on freedom of speech.

This uncompromising stance was also visible from the outset of the liberation struggle; for instance, the RPF rejected ethnic quotas in political representation as a cure to the disease. As a testament to this resolve, and contrary to what was prescribed in 2000 as a solution for Burundi’s civil war, the 1993 Arusha Peace Agreement for Rwanda did not include ethnic quotas in power-sharing arrangements. This decision, which was made at RPF’s request, was a game-changer. For one thing, as former Tanzanian President Mwalimu Nyerere once argued, ethnic identities amongst people who share the same language, culture, land, and the belief in one God made little scientific and logical sense beyond cementing the colonial teachings of colonial missionaries. For another, ethnic quotas would have inevitably created a fertile ground for political competition around identity, thereby relegating the most pressing issues affecting the people of Rwanda to secondary considerations, as has been the case in post-civil war Burundi. By this decision, the RPF somewhat demonstrated that the reconnection of the Rwandan people to their country’s millennial history was the path to Rwanda’s rebirth as a united nation.

In A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It, Stephen Kinzer narrates a telling episode of the decolonial vision that Major General Paul Kagame had for Rwanda.

Kinzer describes how, after months of frustration and tedium but convinced that they could take Kigali even if it meant fighting French soldiers, RPA soldiers prepared to charge through the artillery cauldron surrounding the capital and claim their prize in 1992. But the order to attack never came. Instead, to the bewilderment of RPA commanders, Kagame ordered his troops to retreat out of artillery range.

“We had made our way to the edge of Kigali,” the commander of one of RPA units later recalled. “A lot of our people had been killed just getting there. Then we got the order to go back. Everyone was shocked. We asked, why can’t we go ahead? We’re practically in Kigali. Why go back?

Kagame told us, “Capturing Kigali is not an end in itself. We can take it, but what would we do on the next day?”

He said to us: “Why did we start this war? Is it for us or for Rwanda? If, as the French say, we are fighting for the Tutsi, we can fight, win and then say we won our right to take over. But our philosophy is that we were thrown out of the country, and we want every Rwandan to be able to live here peacefully.

Kagame and, indeed, the post-genocide government in Rwanda would go on to remain faithful to this vision even after the genocide against the Tutsi. This wasn’t easy! As Kagame once said, “You can’t lose one million people in one hundred days without an equal number of perpetrators. But we also can’t imprison an entire nation. So forgiveness was the only path forward. Survivors were asked to forgive and forget. The death penalty was abolished. We focused our justice on the organizers of the genocide. Hundreds of thousands of perpetrators were rehabilitated and released back into their communities. These decisions were agonizing. I constantly questioned myself.  But each time I decided that Rwanda’s future was more important than justice. It was a huge burden to place on the survivors. And perhaps the burden was too great.”

Beyond this burden placed on survivors, other difficult decisions had to be made. For instance, there was an urgent task to repatriate millions of refugees scattered in neighbouring countries, especially those trapped in refugee camps in former Zaire, which were under the control of genocidaires. Rwanda’s efforts to create the conditions for repatriation were rewarded in 2017 by the invocation of the cessation clause, which holds that “the reasons that led to people fleeing the country no longer exist, and that all those who fled should be able to return.” Remarkably, unlike in Burundi and Congo, repatriation efforts continue to date, with Rwandan embassies consistently engaging Rwandan communities in their countries of residence to facilitate their return, including through the issuance of Rwandan passports. The philosophy of “Come and see, go and tell” around these repatriation efforts has remained unchanged.

Moreover, any bad decisions made with regard to land distribution in a densely populated country like Rwanda and with many returnees from successive waves of refugees since 1959 could have potentially led to a civil war. Rwandans chose to share the land. Similarly, in 1995, Rwanda’s decision to reintegrate former members of the FAR army and some FDLR members who had not participated in the genocide was resisted at first. But at every turn, Rwandans chose to compromise for the overall good of the country. They chose unity over a context-free vision of justice. All these difficult decisions were taken and implemented because the Rwandan government chose to act as a pacifier and an arbiter whenever intercommunal disputes arose. Post-genocide Rwanda, unlike its Western and Southern neigbours, never conceived any ethnic group as an enemy to be exterminated. Instead, it focused on fighting genocide ideology and its promoters.

Meanwhile, there is little to no effort on the part of the governments of Burundi and Congo to reassure and incentivise refugees to return to their respective countries. In the Congolese case, this situation has led to the resurgence of M23. In parallel, land disputes continue to fuel intercommunal tensions. Corruption and tribalism continue to characterise the government’s approaches to conflict resolution. In Congo, where the government’s reach is very limited, intercommunal (land-related) disputes and insecurity have led to the emergence of hundreds of armed groups, most of whom claim to fight for their communities’ rights. The state legitimacy crisis is compounded by the choice of successive governments to become active belligerents in these decades-old communal disputes instead of acting as an arbiter. By singling out the Congolese Tutsi community and rallying all armed groups against them, after labelling them enemy, alien, or Rwanda collaborators, the Congolese government has again forfeited its responsibility to protect.

Worst still, by embracing genocide ideology and by recruiting and incorporating a foreign genocidal group, the FDLR, in the Congolese national army, Kinshasa has now positioned itself as an existential threat to neighbouring Rwanda.

Is peace still possible in the Great Lakes region?

The current dynamics indicate that the prospect of peace remains far-fetched. The military setbacks suffered by the Congolese army and its allies seem to have little to no effect on the intensification of hate speech, the denial of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda (which usually reaches its peak during the commemoration period), and, most importantly, the persecution of Congolese Tutsi. Once again, there is little desire, if any, on the part of the international community to confront genocide ideology head-on. As was the case in pre-genocide Rwanda, western powers are not willing to hold the government accountable for the daily harassment, arbitrary arrest, and lynching of Congolese Tutsi and the destruction of their property and livestock. Occurrences of cannibalism are hardly covered in UN and media reports as if to say that these were normal and expected in “savage” lands. Thirty years after the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, those who denounce the state’s responsibility in promoting the hate ideology driving these killings are once again told that the government in Kinshasa cannot control the militias it integrated in the national army. Hence, it cannot be held accountable. Instead, the competent and mature Rwandan government must take the blame.

Meanwhile, the threat posed by genocide ideology could prompt the M23 to further expand its territorial gains towards the South Kivu, where Banyamulenge communities face the same existential issue. Obviously, peace is not possible as long as the threat of genocide hovers over a section of the population. Under this threat, the only deterrence is the capacity of the members of the targeted group to organize and defend themselves. And since the only alternative is to perish, armed resistance becomes a natural reflex for members of this group. In other words, if nothing is done to bring extremists under control, we are heading towards further escalation of the conflict in eastern Congo.

Worst still, there are credible reports indicating that some Congolese armed groups were allowed to cross into Burundi and position themselves at the border with Rwanda. This, along with military buildup on both sides of the border between the two countries, could lead to the emergence of a second front in what would then become a regional war involving multiple regional and international actors. In response to this genocidal threat, President Kagame has recently declared that Rwanda will fight like it has nothing to lose if the need arises.

Western powers, if they genuinely wish to contribute positively to peace efforts, must desist from their willful blindness regarding the threat posed by the resurgence of this ideology in the Great Lakes region. Providing diplomatic support to a government that creates the conditions for – and attempts to execute – genocide is the wrong approach.

Yes, avoiding the recurrence of genocide requires a comprehensive approach that addresses governance challenges and the root causes of insecurity and conflicts in both Congo and Burundi. The cosmetic solutions, which consist of integrating former rebel groups into national armies and appointing rebel leaders in government positions without decisively addressing the issue of genocide ideology, have time and again reproduced instability in these countries. And it is time to end this vicious circle.

But more importantly, it is paramount for political leaders in both countries to craft new visions of nationhood that are not built on hatred of the “other.”

As the Rwandan scholar, Alphonse Muleefu, put it, “the DRC needs to make peace with itself. It will, in turn, produce regional peace.” The same observation can be made for Burundi.

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