Nexus between Rwandophones and the Congo war

The tension and anxiety that builds up as one enters rebel held Rutshuru territory in northern Kivu in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo rapidly evaporates at the Bunagana border crossing with Uganda. 

There is no overt presence of security. The commercial traffic of cross-border traders and trucks continues with ease. The immigration staff sit in their cubicles waiting for travellers who might want to cross into Uganda from the DRC. 

During a heavy downpour a woman arrives in a public passenger van. She has three little children, a television, two mattresses, two large bags, a cooking pan, several household items and some merchandise. She says she’s from Goma, the besieged capital of restive North Kivu, and is going to Kampala. 

There have been rumours of the military building up there, and her baggage suggests she’s running away from impending trouble, but she insists, “I always move with my things wherever I go.” 

A short distance away, in a dimly lit room in this town that has no electricity, Francis Tuyihimbaze Rucogoza, the third highest ranking official in the M23 rebel movement, now calling itself the Congolese Revolutionary Army, finds time to read one of his favourite books.  

His collection includes the autobiographies of global personalities: South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, India’s Mahatma Gandhi, America’s Barack Obama, and Argentine-Cuban revolutionary hero Ernesto Che Guevara, which appears to be new. 

Incidentally, Che, as Guevara is better known, has a personal history with the DR Congo, having participated in revolutionary struggles there in the mid-1960s alongside former President Laurent Kabila, father of current President Joseph Kabila. 

Rucogoza’s pile also includes autobiographies of Pecos Kutesa, a key commander in the 1981-85 guerrilla war that propelled Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni to power; and Henry Kyemba, author of an insider’s account of the eight-year regime of Idi Amin, Uganda’s third president. 

There’s an Oxford English Learners’ Dictionary in the collection, a sign, perhaps, of the realisation among this group of the linguistic alignment taking place within the region. This influence is emphasised 29 kilometres away in Rutshuru, where the rebels have erected anti-corruption signboards, which are written in three languages: Kinyarwanda, Kiswahili and English.  

The relaxed atmosphere inside Rucogoza’s simply furnished office reflects the calm that prevails over the entire 200 square kilometre-plus territory that M23 controls in eastern DRC. It captured much of it from government forces in July. 

Save for the disruption to large scale commerce when foreign traders left DR Congo, civilians live in an easy co-existence with the rebels. On the verdant slopes, farmers have planted all manner of crops and look forward to harvesting them in a few months.

Rucogoza says: “If people have enough confidence to cultivate their farms, then it cannot be that the same people fear for their lives in our hands. In fact, it shows the high level of trust between the local population and the movement.” 

The lush green that has sprouted and covered the landscape supplies instant evidence of not only a good yield, but Congo’s agricultural potential that, sadly, is obscured by the exaggerated emphasis on its mineral endowment. Moreover, the farmers will struggle to get their produce to any major Congolese market and will most likely sell it in neighbouring Uganda. 

Here’s why; with the poor state of roads it takes at least an hour to travel the 29 kilometres from Bunagana to Rutshuru, the nearest urban centre in the DRC. Hardly anybody remembers the last time they saw any significant road works. A guide says the road is maintained by regular communal work known locally as Umuganda. In contrast, it would take the same farmer just a few minutes to travel the 10 kilometres to Kisoro, Rutshuru’s equivalent in Uganda, with the recent completion of the road.

To get to Goma, which lies 99 kilometres from Bunagana, is at least half a day’s journey. Once a well paved road, years of neglect mean that only parts of the tarmac remain. To cover a similar distance into Uganda — that is to Kabale — would take about one hour. 

Hardly anybody talks about Bukavu, Goma’s equivalent in South Kivu, which lies some 305 kilometres from Bunagana. To get there, the guide says, would take days.  

Celebrating life

On the evening of October 17, the noises of a group of five women dressed in brightly coloured tunics, banging pans, basins and anything they could find to complement their ululations, rent the air of the quiet Bunagana town. 

The reason for their excitement, our guide told us, was that one of their friends had given birth. It was an event worth celebrating and one can understand why. In an area with no functional health care system, if the new mother had developed complications, there could have been defects or even death for the mother, or the baby, or both.  

After five hours of dancing, the entourage went into a nearby hotel where senior military officials meet with their families, since they are not allowed to have them in the barracks. 

“We’ve given birth, our friend has successfully given birth,” a slender, light skinned woman, who appeared to be the group’s leader, shouted in Kiswahili as she danced and cheered. 

“We have produced an M23, now let’s go to Hadija’s and celebrate with some alcohol,” she said, and as quickly as they had entered, they dashed out into the pitch darkness. 

At Hadija’s, a club a few metres from the senior officers’ mess, loud music blared from a television connected to Star Times digital provider. Officers sat in a corner swigging their Tusker beers and Ugandan Waragi, while another played a game of pool.

The night was not busy. An officer notorious for his enforcement of discipline, sternly reprimanded a young soldier for leaving his guard post to come to the pub. After the commander harangued him, the young soldier saluted and returned to his post.   

Hadija, the proprietor of the club, left briefly when skirmishes broke out in April, but now believes the situation is fine. 

“They will sort out their problems,” says the woman who comes from Mbarara District, a major urban centre 236 kilometres away in western Uganda. 

For the past five months, the M23 rebel group has rejuvenated international interest in the DR Congo, particularly in the restive east that has all but become synonymous with instability.

While there has been growing international condemnation against M23, including allegations that they are committing war crimes, which they deny, there has been little focus on the reasons the group walked out on the government that they had been integrated into in 2009. 

Rucogoza, who is M23’s executive secretary or prime minister, says the rebels are not fighting to partition Congo, but rather for better governance and the right of all Congolese to be recognised as citizens. He says the root of the conflict in eastern Congo is sociological and political, stretching as far back as the time the Congo nation, as it is known today, was formed, and how the country has been managed.

“Rwandophones are not only in Congo — they are also found in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. But why is it only in Congo where they are considered outsiders?” Rucogoza asks before answering his own question. “It is all about political expedience. Denying Rwandophones their right to citizenship diverts attention from the real issues of the failure of governance.”

Divisive borders

Like other African countries, the DR Congo’s borders were drawn arbitrarily. This instantly partitioned communities that had long lived together, and rendered their inhabitants foreign to each other. Whereas this new reality introduced tensions across the newly drawn borders, the disputes were largely intermittent and non-fatal, until the early 1990s when they were infused with negative ethnicity. 

“In 1994, when Congo received Rwandese refugees, the refugees transferred the problem of negative ethnicity to Congo. But before that, there was a problem of discrimination against Congolese who spoke Kinyarwanda, especially Tutsis,” says Rucogoza, a former minister of Justice and Human Rights in the provincial government of North Kivu. 

The fleeing Interahamwe militias and former Rwandan government soldiers, who collectively had executed the most horrific genocide of the 20th century in Rwanda in a record 100 days, accused ethnic Congolese Tutsi of backing the Rwanda Patriotic Front, which had defeated them. They saw their hosts as no different from the Tutsi they had attempted to exterminate in Rwanda. As such, they had unfinished business at hand. 

From the protective shelter of refugee camps that the world provided them in eastern DR Congo, the Interahamwe regrouped, marked out their new targets and continually launched deadly attacks both inside Rwanda and on ethnic Congolese Tutsi communities, forcing many to flee and seek refuge in Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda.

The conflict subsequently fed into future  conflicts when exiled Congolese Tutsi youth, seeing an opportunity to solve their problems and return home, eagerly joined the ranks of the anti-Mobutu war in the mid-1990s that propelled the senior Kabila to power.

Rwanda, fed up with the inaction of the “international community” to stop refugee camps in Congo from being used as recruitment and training grounds by extremist Hutu militia, launched into the eastern Congo to neutralise elements threatening its security from across the border. This mission quickly evolved to target the man who was perceived to be encouraging the fighting — then president Mobutu Sese Seko, a close friend of then Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana whom they had deposed. 

Mobutu, like the Belgians before him, had turned Congo into a personal estate so much so that he had even renamed it Zaire. Many people in the world were happy to see him go, by any means necessary, but since they couldn’t bring themselves to inspire the needed change, they supported Rwanda when it did so. 

For Congolese refugees who struggled with the same issues of identity and the right to citizenship that had fuelled the RPF struggle, the latter’s success in Rwanda drew many of them into the armed struggle against Mobutu in 1996, hoping to gain what Rwandan refugees had achieved just two years before.

Rucogoza says this was inevitable for many Tutsi youth, on both sides of the border, whose families had been separated when Hutu extremists forced them to flee.

Thankless task

Despite their contribution to the ousting of Mobutu, barely a year after they had installed him into power, Kabila senior ordered “Rwandese” to leave Congo and go back to their country, triggering yet another war for the right to belong.

President Joseph Kabila who succeeded his father after the former was assassinated in the presidential palace in Kinshasa in early 2000, has more or less followed in his father’s footsteps. With a demoralised army that flees whenever the M23 rebels attack, President Kabila has struck unholy alliances with various tribal militia that have unleashed a reign of terror in eastern Congo. In self-defence, other groups have sprung up to protect themselves from the excesses meted out by the Congolese army and its allied militias, turning eastern Congo into a blood bath where only the best marksman or those that can flee the fastest, survive. 

With Western commentators often simplifying the conflict into a resource war, attention has been diverted from the real cause of the fighting in much the same way that Kabila’s assertions that Uganda and Rwanda are the real power behind M23 do.

There is no active mining or known mineral deposits in the areas M23 control, and as for their war supplies, the rebels say they depend on the bounty from the battle field and the corruption in the Congolese army that allows them to buy anything from assault rifles to uniforms from Kabila’s stores.

Meanwhile, the conflict feeds itself and 16 years later, ethnic Congolese Tutsi who fled blood baths as early as 1995 remain holed up in refugee camps in Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi with little or no hope of ever returning to their motherland. Some who tried to return were attacked and forced back and some even died.

Next week: Life in Congolese refugee camps in Rwanda, and the cycle of war.