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Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong (2021)

‘Paul Kagame is without doubt the most ruthless politician operating in Africa today.’
(US Ambassador to Uganda, Johnnie Carson, quoted on page 321)

‘The entire country is a spying machine.’
(exiled Rwandan economist David Himbara, quoted on page 422)

This is a major, comprehensive and blistering attack on a contemporary African regime.

In a nutshell, the West and the international community for many years regarded the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) as heroes for invading Rwanda and bringing to a halt the 1994 genocide of Tutsis being carried out by the psychopathic Rwandan government dominated by advocates of the extremist Hutu Power ideology.

Not only that, but the RPF and its leading figure – tall, ascetic intellectual Paul Kagame – were also praised for going on to invade eastern Congo where they 1) sorted out the problem of the massive refugee camps holding over 2 million Rwandans refugees where the Hutu genocidalists were regrouping, and then 2) pressing this invasion on to the capital of Congo, Kinshasa, where they overthrew the rotten old dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997.

In the years that followed the West, the UN and the international community fell over themselves to lavish aid on Rwanda and fête its intense, driven president, Kagame, who presided over a peaceful multi-ethnic government and promoted his intention of turning Rwanda into a highly educated, high-tech economy, ‘the Singapore of Africa’.

For many years Financial Times and Reuters journalist Michela Wrong went along with this version of events and this highly favourable view of Kagame, ignoring the rumours and scattered reports which threw doubt on this image. Now she realises she was completely wrong. She has completely changed her tune.

This book is a comprehensive rubbishing of the historical record of Rwandan Patriotic Front (the political wing), the Rwandan Patriotic Army (the military wing) and President Kagame himself. It’s what Sun editor Kelvin Mackenzie used to call a monstering, an exhaustive, scathing demolition of all the RPF’s claims; an indictment of its behaviour before, during and after the genocide; and a terrifying depiction of a paranoid, controlling, vindictive and murderous regime, which is still in power, still holding its population in a climate of fear, and extending the threat of assassination to exiles and dissidents around the world. Here are the key points.

Wrong’s indictment

The 1990 RPF invasion of Rwanda was naive and destructive. Having contributed up to a quarter of the rebel army which brought Marxist leader Yoweri Museveni to power in neighbouring Uganda in 1985, long-term Tutsi emigrants from Rwanda and children of the refugees from anti-Tutsi pogroms conceived the idea of invading Rwanda and reclaiming their heritage.

This was a mistake. The Rwanda they wanted to return to, the ones their parents told them about, no longer existed. Instead, the invasion revived all the paranoid fears of the Hutu majority (Hutus make up 85%, Tutsis 14% of Rwanda’s population) that these violent invaders wanted to return Rwanda to the bad old days when a Tutsi monarchy and aristocracy lorded it over a subjugated Hutu peasantry. This paranoia was egged on by media outlets including Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines which was to play such a key role during the actual genocide (p.228).

The conventional view is that the Tutsi exiles just wanted to reclaim their heritage. The revisionist view is that the RPF invasion wasn’t about reclaiming anything, they wanted to seize absolute power, which is why the invasion marked the start of a four-year civil war, throwing the entire country into a state of crisis and edginess.

In other words, far from invading to stop the genocide in 1994, the RPF invasion in 1990 created the hysterical paranoid environment in which the genocide could take place.

The RPF made lots of mistakes from the start. First off was something which remains a mystery to this day, which is the unexplained death of their most charismatic leader, Fred Rwigyema. Wrong considers the two main versions of his death, plus the numerous minor variations, in great detail, but doesn’t come to a definite conclusion (pages 207 to 213). A few weeks later two other RPF leaders, Peter Bayingana and Chris Bunyenyezi, were dead.

These unexplained deaths paved the way for the rise of Paul Kagame. Kagame was out of the country at the time, undertaking, of all things, a training course at Fort Leavenworth in the USA, so he is generally exonerated of these unexplained deaths, but they were very convenient, as was his swift elevation to strategic leader on his hurried return to the rebels base.

Anyway, these deaths were indicative of the failure of the RPF’s initial incursion into Rwanda. Not only did they meet stiff resistance from the Rwandan army but were dismayed to discover how much the ordinary Hutu peasants feared and disliked them.

The conventional story is that Kagame was a military genius who led the battered remnants of the RPF into the remote Virunga mountains where they regrouped and studied guerrilla tactics. Wrong’s debunking version is that most of these decisions were taken by people lower in command and that Kagame’s main contribution, then as right through to the present day, was to instil a regime of fear.

Ugandan journalist Sheila Kawamara, a frequent visitor to Mulindi (RPF headquarters), registered the staff changes taking place. ‘We heard about a policy of extermination of all the officers who had supported Fred. When you were with them you could sense this climate of fear. Those who were more ruthless rose through the ranks at that stage.’ (p.229)

Wrong goes out of her way to quote contemporaries, former members of the RPF, eye witnesses, who one and all testify that Kagame was a controlling, spiteful, sadistic man who used terror to control all around him.

In the revisionist version the holed-up-in-the-mountains phase is transformed from a glamorous Che Guevara idyll into a death camp where hundreds of new recruits would be taken off and killed in the middle of the night for the slightest reasons, sometimes simply because they spoke French which the Anglophone Ugandan Tutsis suspected. Wrong dwells on the way the kafuni or common farmer’s hoe was the weapon of choice used to kill suspects and undesirables.

When the RPF did come down out of the mountains in 1991 and fought their way through north Rwanda to within 50k of the capital, Kigali, it was not only the official Rwandan army they fought but many of the Hutu peasants whose land they passed through. Upset to discover the peasants didn’t welcome them with open arms, the Tutsi RPF got used to massacring entire Hutu villages if it was convenient. The accounts of massacres are disputed but no-one disputes that Hutu peasants retreated before the advancing PDF forces. Eventually as many as 950,000 people were uprooted by the RPF invasion and turned into internal refugees, 15% of the population (p.230).

The RPF’s advance, the civil war as a whole, was suspended by the Arusha Accords of August 1993 which gave the RPF representation in a new national government.

Then Wrong makes her biggest accusation, which is that it was the Kagame-led RPF, and not Hutu Power extremists in his own government, who shot down the plane carrying Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana. This was the trigger for the genocide which followed and which commended within minutes of news of the plane crash.

The shooting down of the plane carrying the Hutu president was the trigger for the start of the genocide so it’s always been a deeply contested event. It’s the ‘Who Shot JFK?’ of Central Africa. Amid hundreds of theories, three main ones:

White men did it, either Belgians, French or Americans. But why?
Conventional explanation: Hutu Power hardliners within the government did it because they feared Habyarimana was giving too much away by signing the Arusha Accords, and had the extermination plans ready to go.
Revisionist explanation: the RPF did it because they knew the elections demanded by the Arusha Accords would consolidate Habyarimana’s government in power, whereas chaos and confusion would allow them to continue their military conquest and seize power.

As you’d expect, Wrong leans heavily towards theory 3, assembling a raft of evidence but, more to her style, numerous interviewees who all claimed the RPF and Kagame planned it. Western investigators charged the RPF with it throughout the 2000s, for example in 2006 a French judge accused Kagame and his allies of then shooting down. Then in 2011 a leading RPF exile, Theogene Rudasingwa, from 2000 to 2004 Chief of Staff to Kagame, posted a frank admission of the RPF’s guilt on Facebook (p.375). In 2012 another former RPF top gun, General Kayumba, went public with the accusation. In 2013 ex-RPF intelligence officer Jean-Marie Micombero joined the chorus (p.376). In 2014 the BBC broadcast a documentary, Rwanda’s Untold Story, which contained the accusation.

So, again, Wrong’s pressing of RPF guilt is not exactly new, and nowhere does Wrong find a smoking gun. Like the controversy around JFK it will rumble on forever.

There’s no doubt that Hutu Power ideologues had a fully worked-out plan for exterminating the country’s Tutsi population in its entirety, and were responsible for passing orders and instructions for mass murder down through the chain of command to the remotest parishes. But Wrong’s accusation is that:

the RPF invasion created the unstable, feverish atmosphere in which many, maybe most of the Hutu population felt threatened by a Tutsi takeover
and that the RPF was responsible for downing the plane and so triggering the genocide

The conventional view is that the plane shooting and the abrupt start of the genocide triggered the RPF to restart their paused invasion and that they swept through the country in order to stop the genocide. Wrong counters that the actual route of the RPF was calculated not on the basis of saving Tutsi lives but purely with a view to securing power (p.242). The notion that the RPF heroically intervened to stop the genocide is treated as a joke by one of the RPF’s own diplomats (p.350).

The conventional view is that the RPF established law and order wherever they went and protected what Hutus remained, like the conquering allied forces established law and order in 1945. The revisionist view is that on the contrary, wherever they went the RPF massacred Hutu communities but that these massacres went unrecorded or unreported in the context of the wider holocaust.

The conventional view is that the RPF begged for outside help. The revisionist view is that when the UN discussed reinforcing its small demoralised force in Kigali the RPF objected, repeatedly claiming that all the Tutsis were dead and the genocide over. This was because they knew a major UN intervention would end up preserving the existing Hutu regime, albeit with new leadership, whereas the RPF was set on securing complete military control. In other words, senior RPF figures were prepared to let the killing go on and tens of thousands more Tutsis to die, if it meant securing power (p.243).

The conventional view is that once the RPF had secured control of the entire country, Kagame then established an enlightened government of national unity in Kigali, ensuring key posts went to Hutus to ensure balance and trust. The revisionist view is this was the case for a very limited period, 12 months at most, into 1995, before these Hutu ministers started being sacked or forced to quit, in all instances replaced not just by Tutsis but by Tutsis loyal to Kagame personally (p.251).

The conventional view is that this enlightened RPF government then begged the international community and the UN to do something about the Hutu genocidalists who had taken refuge in the huge Hutu refugee camps just across the border in eastern Congo, repeatedly asked the West to intervene but, eventually, being goaded beyond endurance by Hutu militias crossing the border and carrying out little village massacres, reluctantly invaded into eastern Congo, killing the genocidalists and shepherding the 2 million or so Hutu refugees back into their own country.

The revisionist view is that the RPF planned to invade Congo all along.

The revisionist view is that, in the process, the RPF themselves carried out numerous massacres of Hutu civilians, men, women and children. In fact some scholars estimate the total number killed at 300,000, well on the way to matching the 800,000 killed in the genocide.

The conventional view is that the RPF wanted the Hutu refugees to return to Rwanda and to their abandoned properties, guaranteeing them safety if they did so. The revisionist view is that in the meantime tens of thousands of Tutsi exiles returned to the country and seized vacant Hutu properties, farms and houses, urban businesses, thus feeding into the Hutu narratives of conquest and grievance (pages 260, 270, 285).

The conventional view is that the genocide was a one-off event with a datable beginning and ending (7 April to 15 July 1994). The revisionist view is that the genocide was just a kind of wild upsurge in an environment where ethnic killing had been going on as far back as the overthrow of the Tutsi monarchy in 1959, with the most recent surge starting not in April 1994 but with the initial invasion of the RPF in October 1990.

‘The troubles between Hutus and Tutsis didn’t start in 1994. The genocide was part of a process which began much much earlier.’ (Robert Higiro, quoted on p.269)

And continuing long after. The conventional view is that the RPF brought peace. The revisionist view is that massacres within Rwanda, and then in Congo, continued on after the genocide.

Wrong details important evidence suggesting an RPF policy of systematic violence and intimidation which carried on after the genocide, but which was hushed up or downplayed at the time:

the Gersony Report (pages 269 to 271)
the Kibeho massacre (p.273)

The conventional view is that the RPF pursuit of genocidalists who fled west slowly, reluctantly changed a temporary incursion into eastern Congo into a campaign to carry on west as far as the capital, Kinshasa, and overthrow rotten old Mobutu, installing a nice new democratic regime, much to the applause of the west.

The revisionist view is that the RPF invasion of Congo 1) continued to be marked by RPF massacres, now not only of defenceless Hutus but often of Congo civilians too, 2) overthrowing Mobutu had always been the core aim of Kagame (and his ally, Uganda’s Museveni). Gérard Prunier calls it the first imperialist invasion by one African country of another, a sentiment echoed here by Polish journalist, Hrvoje Hranski:

‘They were colonisers, pure and simple, but we were sympathetic.’ (quoted page 301)

On this reading it was not just an incursion to stabilise a border region but a deliberate attempt to establish colonial control over an entire country, to take over Congo via Kagame and Museveni’s puppet ruler, Laurent-Désiré Kabila. Wrong quotes her hero Patrick Karegeya as saying:

‘We weren’t looking for a rebel leader. We just needed someone to make the whole operation look Congolese.’ (p.297)

The RPF atrocities inside Rwanda were difficult to document in the chaos of the genocide, but there were many more witnesses to their behaviour in Congo. In 2010 the UN brought out a 550-page report which ‘detailed 617 separate incidents in which Hutu refugees were bludgeoned, macheted, bayoneted, shot or burned to death’ (p.300).

By 1998 Mobutu was overthrown, Kabila was installed as puppet ruler of Congo, the Hutu refugee camps had been emptied, and the prolonged security crisis was over. In February Kagame was elected RPF chairman, to go alongside his posts of Minister for War and Vice President.

The RPF regime claimed that relations only deteriorated with Kabila when he began reaching out to remnants of the Hutu regime and the Interahamwe. The revisionist view is that relations deteriorated when Kabila began ruling for himself and kicked his Rwandan advisers out of Congo. It was then that Rwanda and Uganda began planning a second invasion and only then that Kabila reached out to the genocidalists as a desperate resort.

In April 2000 Kagame arrived at the acme of power, being elected president (p.319). The Rwanda-Uganda alliance completely collapsed and the two armies fought a vicious urban battle in Kisingani. Kabila made the mistake of abandoning his child warriors, even ordering them to shoot fallen comrades. Thus it was an aggrieved former child soldier, Rashidi Kasereka, who shot him at point blank range in the presidential palace. Later, Wrong claims that Patrick freely admitted that Rwandan intelligence were behind the assassination (p.323).

By the time the Ugandans and Rwandans fell out, many of the journalists who’d been sympathetic to the RFP had fallen out of love with them. What had started as an attempt to hunt down the genocidalists had turned into a naked grab of land and resources. Wrong gives a fascinating account of Rwanda and Uganda’s blatant looting of Congo’s resources and then moving to the ‘active extraction’ phase i.e. controlling the mines, the extraction and export of precious minerals (p.328).

It was a great revelation and shock to the regime’s western supporters when a UN report revealed that this systematic looting and theft was carried out by a Rwandan state body called the Congo Desk (p.329). And guess who was in charge of the Congo Desk? The Zelig of central Africa, Patrick Karegeya.

When it was set up the RPF devised a solemn oath of loyalty which all members had to sear. By the end of the Second Congo War, this had mutated into a mafia with its oath of Omertà i.e., you talk, you die (p.331).

After the war

Kagame has been able to string along and play the international community and western donors (chief amongst whom is the UK) for several reasons:

the conventional view is that Kagame is a visionary New African Leader, committed to democracy and developing Rwanda into a modern, high education, hi-tech nation, ‘the Singapore of Africa’
western guilt about not doing enough to prevent the genocide, particularly afflicted Bill Clinton and Tony Blair

Clinton later delivered fulsome apologies for America’s failure to act quickly enough or acknowledge the killings amounted to a genocide.

The revisionist view is that throughout the post-genocide period and right up to the present day, Kagame, far from being a western-style democrat and visionary, was establishing a terrifying surveillance dictatorship.

Precisely how he did that is revealed by the central thread of the book, the life, career and murder of Colonel Patrick Karegeya.

Patrick Karegeya as central theme

This summary gives the impression that the book is a logical or chronological account of the historical events but it isn’t, at least not to start with. The first hundred pages are something completely different.

Wrong opens her narrative, and thereafter uses as a repeated reference point, the murder of Patrick Karegeya, former head of external intelligence in the RPF regime and, at one time, a key member of Kagame’s close-knit RPF elite. The idea is that Karegeya was murdered because he had become a critic, and then an outspoken critic, of Kagame and, in 2010, helped set up an alternative Rwandan political party, the Rwanda National Congress (RNC).

Karegeya was murdered on New Year’s Eve 2013 in a room at the Michelangelo Hotel in the Johannesberg suburb of Sandton. But Wrong doesn’t just give an extended description and forensic analysis of the days and weeks leading up to the murder, then of the crime scene and the probable cause of events. Three things:

1. Wrong interviews everyone who ever knew Patrick Karegeya – his wife, his mother, his children, his friends from school days, his colleagues in the RPF, and those who joined him in exile and set up the RNC. And not once, but repeatedly.* Their eye witness accounts of Karegeya’s life and personality and career are quoted very liberally on every page. In fact we learn that Wrong met and got friendly with and interviewed Karegeya on numerous occasions from 1994 till his death. There’s so much about him that the first hundred pages or so of this book amount to almost a biography of the man, but also, there’s so many memories of him at home with his family, at bars laughing and chatting, so many of which are Wrong’s own memories, that at many points it feels like a personal tribute.

This would probably be my main criticism of the book. What with the tearful testimony of his loving wife, his adoring daughters, his admiring colleagues and the often gushing testimony of lots of other journalists who met and liked Karageya, quite regularly the book is in danger of turning into a hagiography. I was struck when she described a 5-page personal statement he wrote out for his daughter’s application for US citizenship as ‘precious’ (p.304). What, like the Turin Shroud or the Rosetta Stone? The tone of voice often verges on the gushing:

Someone with a bigger ego might have staged a sustained sulk. Not Patrick. (p.352)
And so, mulish, steadfast, defiant, Patrick served out his sentence [in prison] (p.361)

When Patrick is reduced to shaking rage by a journalist accusing the RPF of shooting down Habyarimana’s plane, his anger is explained away because he is under pressure to nobble the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (p.369). When a journalist jokily asked why Kagame won the 2003 election with ‘only’ 95% of the vote and Patrick threatens to have a journalist killed next time he visits Rwanda, this is excused as a joke (p.348)

But the man was a killer. He was head of RPF intelligence all through the 1990 invasion and civil war, through the genocide. He was paid to deceive journalists and the international community about the RPF’s own massacres and their ulterior motives in invading Congo, paid to lie to the world’s press about the failed attempt to capture Congo with Rwandan troops flown into the Kitona airport near Kinshasa (p.312). He continued to justify the regime even as he knew it was committing mass murder, charming and schmoozing foreign journalists while more and more RPF comrades were assassinated, fled the country or were thrown in prison.

He was ‘implicated up to the hilt’ (p.342). He was a highly paid part of the killing machine, and was rewarded with a big house, lots of cars, a jetsetting lifestyle, plasma TV when they were an unheard-of luxury, his kids sent to private school in South Africa or America, his wife forgiving him his multiple sexual partners (‘all part of the job’), liked for his high-living and charm by even the most sceptical journalists. So while we read another tearful tribute from his loving wife, my criticism of the book would be that Wrong lets Karegeya off very lightly and regularly risks sentimentalising him.

2. Anyway, amid the great sea of blood which was 1990s Rwanda, why such extravagant focus on just one man, when well over a million men, women and children died in terror or misery as a direct result of the actions of the government of which he was a key member and which he assiduously defended for so long?

Because Wrong uses her super-detailed profile of Karegeya as a tool, as a way into exploring the world of fear and paranoia which political exiles from the Kagame regime work under. And once this is established, Karegeya’s entire career becomes a scaffold or structure on which to hang a historical account of the RPF, going right back to its roots in the Rwandan Tutsi emigre or refugee communities in Uganda in the 1980s.

Rhus, in Wrong’s hands, Patrick emerges as a kind of Zelig figure, popping up at all the right places. He was the lynchpin middle-man between Kagame’s government and all manner of outsiders, whether journalists or NGOs or UN leaders, or heads of intelligence from neighbouring countries. He played a key role in the First Congo War, accompanying the clumsy tactless Kabila everywhere, acting as his press and PR supervisor, the central liaison between Kabila and Kagame, as well as liaising with all the governments in the coalition which had invaded Congo (p.301).

3. It dawned on me that ‘Patrick’, as he is referred to pretty quickly and then throughout, has another key advantage for a journalist like Wrong. People were prepared to talk about him. Half way through the book it dawned on me that Patrick’s story gives Wrong far more access to events than if she had chosen the more conventional route of writing a biography of Kagame. Kagame doesn’t talk, his friends and family don’t talk, lots of people interviewed, even the ones who worked closely with him, said they never really knew what was going on in his head. By contrast, Patrick was famously outgoing, chatty, had hundreds of friends and acquaintances, all of whom were happy to go on the record for this book. Their collective memories and anecdotes are far more free and effective at building up a kind of collage history of the RPF then any attempt at a biography at the notoriously tight-lipped Kagame could ever have been.

In other words, the more the book progresses, the more you realise what a clever strategic move it was to make Patrick the star and use him to shed light on the entire regime and Rwandan history from the 1980s right up to the present day.

After the Second Congo War drew to an ignominious close in 2002, Wrong’s narrative reverts, for the book’s last 100 pages, to the approach of the first hundred i.e. using a detailed look at Patrick’s career, his growing misgivings, how he was sidelined by Kagame, with extensive quotes from friends, family, colleagues, journalists and commentators, to shed light on Kagame’s growing paranoia and vindictiveness, and the slow enmeshment of the regime in more and more assassinations, scandals and accusations.

* Interviewees

In fact the book is jam packed with interviewees, its main feature, as a text, is the number of quotes on every page. Wrong must have put in what feels like thousands of hours of interviewing and annotating, then careful selection and ordering of hundreds and hundreds of quotes. At one point Wrong lists the types of people she interviewed for this book, which extends far beyond the friends and family of Patrick Karegeya. She lists: ‘serving and dissident members of the RPF, Rwandan and western journalists, diplomats, intelligence officers and military attachés’ (p.341).

Mossad assassination technique

Karegeya not only defected from the RPF but, in exile, set up the RCN. The implication of the whole book is that this kind of thing is not permitted by the tightly-controlled and vengeful Kagame regime, so he was targeted and assassinated using methods perfected by the Israeli security service, Mossad.

What is this Mossad assassination technique? Have your target approached by someone they know and trust, in this case a friend of the family. Make appointment for drinks and a chat in their hotel room. Let in two strangers, one of whom holds everyone up at gunpoint, while the other injects the target with a quick-acting tranquiliser. Then one assassin holds a pillow or towel over the target’s face, while the other strangles him with rope. The point of all this is it is completely silent, causing no fuss or attention. Then quietly leave the room, careful to leave a ‘Do not disturb’ sign on the door, check out of your own hotel, drive to the nearest airport, and be far away by the time anyone realises anything is wrong (p.29).

Do not disturb. The book is named after the sign the killers hung on Karebeya’s hotel door. But is also a wider indictment of the wish of western donors, the international community and Rwanda’s supporters, even up to the present day, not to rock the boat, not to reveal uncomfortable truths, not to ask difficult questions, not to disturb.

One among many state-sponsored murders

General Kayumba Nyamwasa

Wrong gives a similarly detailed account of the attempted assassination of former General Kayumba Nyamwasa. Nyamwasa had been Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army as well as head of Rwandan intelligence from 1998 to 2002 i.e. during the Second Congo War. He became increasingly critical of Kagame’s authoritarianism until he fled into exile in South Africa. Wrong describes the bungled attempt to shoot him in his car on 19 June 2010. This attack crystallised the General’s decision to join with Karagey and others to found the opposition Rwanda National Congress in December 2010 (p.69).

Seth Sendashonga

Wrong devotes an entire chapter to the career of moderate Hutu Seth Sendashonga, recruited into the RPF government with lots of promises of reconciliation, then witnessing the Tutsis takeover of everything, the scales falling from his eyes with the notorious massacre of unarmed Hutus at the Kibeho refugee camp. Soon afterwards he quit the government, then left Rwanda, going into exile. Two years later he was shot dead by assassins (p.277).

No other nation in Central or East Africa has witnessed an exodus of former insiders to rival Rwanda’s and their flight speaks volumes for an entire political class’s understanding of the regime’s capacity for violence. (p.277)

Other examples

Rwandan diplomat Alphonse Mbayire was recalled to Kigali and a month later a soldier with a grudge shot him twenty times
David Kiwanuka’s body was found in a car trunk in Nairobi, shot in the head (p.280)
Assiel Kabera, President Bizimungu’s adviser, assassinated (p.318)

Wikipedia:

Wikipedia article about political assassinations associated with Paul Kagame

She gives more examples and details of Rwanda’s policy of overseas assassination (p.432). Many more opponents simply fled, becoming exiles like Patrick. The general name for the several escape routes from the country was ‘taking the subway‘ (p.318).

Wrong has two long sections devoted to detailed description of two separate assassination conspiracies where the middlemen hired to cosy up to the targets in preparation for hits admitted to the targets what was going on. This resulted in the targets taping the numerous phone calls from the minders back in Kigali to their agents in the field. Wrong explains the setups, introduces the characters, and quotes from the incriminating tapes, which in both cases were handed over to the local police as well as key western embassies, the FBI and so on (pages 395 to 401).

These cases amount to powerful evidence that the Kagame regime operates extensive assassination projects and teams to eliminate dissident and ex-RPF officials.

Buyer’s remorse

This book, then, is a case of buyer’s remorse, or an example of a western liberal fan of a third world political party, government and its leader, slowly coming to realise she’s been had.

The enthusiastic support of the West, and especially Western journalists, for an underdog rebel militia with a noble cause fighting a brutal stronger power reminds me of the decade I spent watching BBC and ITV journalists on location with the mujahideen in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, singing the praises of these plucky Davids fighting the Soviet Goliath. Only after the Soviets left and the country collapsed into a ruinous civil war from whose ashes arose the Taliban did those western journalists reconsider their decade of enthusiastic support for Islamic extremists.

Wrong has form here because her book about Eritrea’s long war for independence describes how western journalists such as herself were entranced by the commitment of the rebel Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), young zealots who built an entire town in mountain caves, had daily education and self-criticism sessions in the best Maoist fashion.

Wrong says these western journalists wrote glowing accounts and counted themselves as ‘true believers’ in the cause. But, as so often happens, when the ELF zealots finally won independence and came to power, the intensity of their commitment and the harsh judgement of anyone in any way questioning the Party morphed into the paranoid dictatorship of ELF leader, Isaias Afwerki. Afwerki has been president of Eritrea for thirty years, during which he has turned it into one of the most repressive one-party states in the world, and all those ‘true believers’ and western supporters from back in the 80s…not so vocal now…

The moral of the story? It’s easy to be persuaded that one side in a foreign war, particularly if they’re the cool rebel underdogs, is standing up for justice and freedom, young and inspiring in their commitment and readiness to make the ultimate sacrifice etc. Wrong herself describes this psychological tendency as ‘the storyteller’s need to identify Good Guys and Bad Guys’ (p.299), the tendency I’ve ascribed to the influence of Hollywood movies on American foreign policy, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But wars are never simple. War is always brutal. All sides in a war are compromised. The Good Guys-Bad Guys dichotomy comes from the Second World War when the Nazis unambiguously were Very Bad Guys. But most wars since haven’t had the same moral clarity. In general there are no Good Guys, just less absolutely appalling guys. That kind of childish moral simplicity has to be left behind in order to engage with the horrible, cynical complexities of the real world. The moral of the story is – don’t take sides in foreign wars. Gaza-Israel.

Disillusion with the RPF regime is not new

Disillusion may be new to Wrong but not to many other commentators.

In 2008 the Economist questioned received opinion about Kagame.
In 2010 the UN brought out a 550-page report which ‘detailed 617 separate incidents in which Hutu refugees were bludgeoned, macheted, bayoneted, shot or burned to death’ by the RPF (p.300).
A 2011 article by Human Rights Watch lays out the case against Kagame.
A 2012 article in the Guardian observed that America was having second thoughts about supporting the Kagame regime and predicted that Britain would, too.

The HRW article gives the tone of the revisionist, critical point of view. The author is phoned by a journalist enquiring into the UK’s ongoing support of the RPF regime in Rwanda, ‘a fragile country ruled by fear’:

We began by talking about the 2010 elections, in which President Paul Kagame was re-elected with 93% of the vote after three opposition parties had been excluded from the race; one opposition leader had been imprisoned; another opposition party member and an independent journalist were murdered; and a prominent government opponent narrowly escaped assassination in exile.

(Wrong describes the sinister and farcical events surrounding the same election on pages 67 to 68).

In other words, Wrong’s book isn’t a drastically new and stunning revision. Specialist reports and general opinion (of the specialists who care about the subject) have been heading in this direction for 15 years or more. What Wrong’s book does is pull together all the evidence, rewrite the history in the most damning way possible and, above all, use hundreds and hundreds of quotes from eye witnesses, from interviewees who were in at the formation of the RPF, of its successes in Uganda, its 1990 invasion, its role during and after the genocide, candid interviews with people who’ve worked closely with Paul Kagame and the regime’s other leading figures – to build up into an extraordinarily powerful, thorough and blistering indictment.

In the last hundred pages the comparison Wrong keeps reaching for is Stalin, a megalomaniac who spent all his time scheming, playing subordinates off against each other, organising random arrests, holding show trials, issuing random periods of imprisonment to anyone he even suspected of holding independent opinions, then demanding complete obeisance, ritual humiliation (pages 343 (Beria) and 356).

By the end of the book the reader is left thinking that Paul Kagame is the devil in human form:

The ultimate class freak has created a state in his own image: introverted, suspicious, unaccountable and a prey to sudden violence. (p.418)

The last few chapters

The last few chapters address more recent events:

Chapter 18: Do not disturb

Explains in detail why ‘the West’, ‘the international community’ and foreign donors continue to support and donate generously to Rwanda, despite the mountain of evidence about its wicked ways. 1) Residual guilt, even after all these years, about letting the genocide happen. 2) Generalised guilt of Western governments that the terrible plight of Africa continues to stem from the European colonial era (p.383).

Above all 3) the Kagame regime has brought peace and stability to Rwanda, and its defenders, such as former DFID minister Andrew Mitchell, emphasise that this is the first requirement of any government and so how, in that part of the world, it is to be supported (compare and contrast South Sudan’s recent collapse into ruinous civil war).

On many of the metrics used by western governments and international institutions, the Kagame regime has been a remarkable success, notching up unprecedented economic growth lifting one million Rwandans out of poverty between 2008 and 2011, improvements in metrics in public health and education, support for gender issues (for example, in 2010 64% of Parliamentary MPs were women) and so on.

Diplomatically speaking, Kagame has successfully positioned himself as maybe Africa’s most high profile statesman. In 2014 Kigali hosted the African Development Bank’s annual general meeting. In 2016 the World Economic Forum chose it for an ‘African Davos’. The 2022 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) was held in Kigali.

So the continued support of western donors is explained by the way they focus on these positive achievements. And so the World Bank has invested more than $4 billion in Rwanda since the genocide (p.430) and the British government has given the Rwandans £200 million without, so far, sending a single refugee there.

Chapter 19: Song of the stool pigeon

The chapter explaining the setups, introduces the characters, and quotes from the incriminating tape recordings made of senior figures in Rwandan intelligence recruiting then managing Rwandan emigres into assassinating outspoken critics in exile (pages 395 to 401). And the disappointing lack of response from western agencies and governments when presented with this evidence.

Chapter 20: The inquest

The long delay of the South African authorities in carrying out a proper investigation of or inquest on Patrick’s murder, the implication being they were leaned on by Rwanda. Progress only came when the case was taken up by campaigning lawyer Gerrie Nel of not-for-profit AfriForum leading to an inquest in 2019. Complex machinations amid which the South African state prosecutor justifies the decision not to prosecute those suspected of murdering Patrick because of the ties that exist between them and the Kigali regime (p.412). In August a verdict of death by strangulation i.e. murder, was returned.

The lost leader

The critics, obviously, say that all the achievements catalogued in chapter 18 (if they’re even true) could just as well have been achieved without the creation of a Stalin-level surveillance state and climate of fear based on arbitrary arrests, imprisonment and murder of political opponents.

You can see why so many of them still mourn the unexplained death of charismatic, caring Fred Rwigyema right back in 1990, the ‘lost leader’ that so many weave legends around. Wrong ends her book with a visit to her hero, Patrick’s, grave, but the very last paragraphs are a hymn to beautiful, innocent Fred, inexplicably dead before the civil war let alone the genocide took place, the lost leader so many dissident Rwandans mourn.

But that was 33 years ago, and we are where we are.

Thoughts

I know I should care about the minutiae of every one of the killings and assassinations, the tape recordings, precisely which RPF heavweight was implicated in which massacres or killings, but after a while it’s difficult to follow all the details. The overall impression is of a dazzling, long, immensely researched revelation of the RPF’s corruption and brutality.

But, when you put it like that, corruption and brutality, it sounds uncannily like most of the other African regimes I’ve been reading about for the last few years. Which African nation in the 60 years since independence has not had at least one murderous dictator, at least one civil war, elements of pogrom and massacre?

That’s a fairly trite thought but it leads onto a more interesting one which is how, stepping back, you can see how the uniqueness of the Rwandan genocide has dazzled many commentators and politicians into thinking Rwanda stands outside history, a special and unique case.

Wrong highlights (as does Prunier and other commentators) how lingering guilt about their inactivity during the genocide has led international bodies and western nations to give Kagame the benefit of the doubt despite the, by now, tsunami of evidence about the regime’s malfeasance.

Not unlike Israel, the Rwandan government has used the unspeakably horrific crime at the centre of its modern history to overawe commentators and silence critics (Wrong makes this point numerous times), to obscure the more everyday oppressions and dubious policies which are the stuff of most governments.

But considering the Rwandan genocide as a somehow one-off, unique, unparalleled and inexplicable mystery – as writers at the time like Fergal Keane and Philip Gourevitch did – removes it from history, erases the troubled history which led up to it; which, of course, explains it; and the continuum of wars and further atrocities which has followed on from it. Focusing solely on the genocide in effect helps prop up a dictator and a terrifyingly repressive regime.

Overpopulation

A leitmotiv of the narrative is how packed, cramped and overpopulated Rwanda was and still is (pages 238, 293, 417). Wrong claims it was and is Africa’s most crowded country (p.239, 280). In an economy based on agriculture you either own enough land to make a living farming or you don’t. Every inch of fertile land is staked out and assigned so, in order to acquire more land you must dispossess someone else.

Decades of land shortage have reduced agriculture to a grim battle for survival. (p.417)

If you learn of an invasion by the enemy tribe that is driving people like you off the land, then your natural reaction will be to fear for yourself, your land, your family and, if ordered by the government and the local authorities, be prepared to kill in order to protect your own.

I wonder if, in a way, the overpopulation of Rwanda and the demented, pest-control killing of the genocide is an allegory of our species – or maybe a vision of its future, packed like rats into a limited space, driven by mounting crises into hysterical psychopathy, the mass murder of our neighbours, quickly, before they murder us.

Day after day I read in the liberal press hand-wringing articles about the apparently unstoppable rise of authoritarian regimes around the world (China, Russia, India, Brazil) and right-wing anti-immigrant parties across Europe (in Germany, Italy, France, Holland).

Liberal commentators are at a loss to explain these phenomena but I wonder if there’s a simple explanation. There are too many of us, us humans, and we are turning against ourselves like rats in dungeon.

Credit

Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong was published in March 2021 by Fourth Estate. References are to the 2022 4th Estate paperback edition.

Recent Rwanda news

Michela Wrong reviews

African reviews

Africa reviews

Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gérard Prunier (2009)

The most murderous conflict since World War Two.
(Africa’s World War, page 352)

‘The incompetence of most [Congolese] politicians is only rivalled by their determination to keep their privileges.’
(French ambassador Raymond Césaire, describing the chaos of Congo-Brazzaville in 1995, page 169)

This is said to be the definitive book on the subject and it feels like it, a large-format, massive, heavy Oxford University Press edition, printed on beautiful high quality paper. It’s surrounded by impressive scholarly apparatus consisting of:

a glossary of African terms (49 entries)
4 maps
an impressively long list of acronyms (11 pages, 161 entries)
extensive notes (99 pages)
a huge bibliography (45 pages including not only books and articles, but reports from numerous official bodies and charities, plus films and works of fiction)
a long index

The great war

I’ve summarised the war, with maps, in my review of the relevant section of David Van Reybrouck’s great book, Congo: the epic history of a people. This is the briefest I can get it:

Rwandan Tutsis driven by low-level pogroms had fled during the 1980s into neighbouring Uganda
some of these served in the insurgent army of Yoweri Museveni during the Ugandan Bush War and helped him overthrow the dictatorial rule of Milton Obote in 1985
emboldened by their experience, some of these Tutsi exiles set up the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)
in 1990 the RPF began small-scale incursions into northern Rwanda, fighting the army of the Hutu-majority government of Juvénal Habyarimana
after 4 years of civil war the parties were brought to a peace accord which Habyarimana signed and was about to implement when a plane carrying him was shot down in mysterious circumstances; most people think it was shot down by elements in the Hutu army and government which a) rejected the peace deal with the RPF b) wanted to implement the genocidal policy of the so-called Hutu Power group, which said that Rwanda would never be at peace until the Tutsis (about 15% of the population) were exterminated
they organised the Rwanda genocide, 7 April to 15 July 1994
as soon as the genocide started, the RPF recommenced military action, and successfully defeated the Hutu government forces, driving them into the south and west of the country and then over the border into Zaire
but it wasn’t just the Hutu leaders who fled; as cover and part of their ideological program, they forced up to 2 million Hutu civilians to flee, too, terrifying them with rumours of Tutsi massacres
having completely failed to prevent the genocide or halt it as it was carried out, the international community now over-compensated by flooding the refugee camps with aid
however aid agencies, UN officials etc quickly realised these vast camps were completely in the control of the extremist Hutu leaders and génocidaires
the génocidaires used some of the western aid to rearm and regroup and, as soon as possible, began raids back across the border into Rwanda, killing Tutsis and Hutu they accused of being collaborators
they also attacked, and caused others to attack, the Banyamulenge, ethnic Tutsis living in eastern Congo, particularly the province of South Kivu
the new Rwandan government of national unity which had been set up after the RPF victory protested loud and long about this anti-Tutsi violence and asked ‘the international community’ to stop it and properly police the camps but to no avail
eventually, the RPF, along with forces from neighbouring Uganda, invaded Zaire and seized the camps; they a) forced the hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees to return to Rwanda and b) pursued the génocidaires who, reasonably enough, fled deeper into Zaire, often taking large groups of refugees with them as cover
before the RPF embarked on their campaign they and their Ugandan allies realised ‘the international community’ would react badly to a straightforward invasion and so came up with the plan of covering their actions by using a native, Congolese rebel group and their leader, as a front man for the invasion, to make ‘a foreign invasion look like a national rebellion’ (p.115)
the figure they chose was Laurent-Désiré Kabila, not very effective leader of the People’s Revolutionary Party (PRP), who in reality spent most of his time smuggling gold and running a brothel
so the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL) was invented, with Kabila as its supposed leader; Prunier remarks that Kabila’s subservience to ‘the tall ones’ (as everyone called the Tutsis) earned him the Swahili nickname Ndiyo bwana, meaning ‘yes sir’ (p.124) (cf David van Reybrouck’s account, ‘Congo: The Epic History of a People’, p.418)
as the RPF-led alliance forces experienced success which surprised even them, the idea developed to permanently cut off Zaire’s support for Hutu extremists by the simple expedient of overthrowing its long-standing President, Mobutu Sese Seko, who had been friends with Habyarimana and had supported the Hutu génocidaires running the camp
and so the border incursion developed into a full-scale march on the capital of Zaire, Kinshasa, which Mobutu and his cronies fled in panic (16 May 1997) and where Kabila, much to his own surprise, was installed as third president of independent Congo (which now changed its name back from Zaire to Democratic Republic of Congo)
Prunier says this incursion could be seen as the first postcolonial imperial conquest of one African country (Zaire) by another (Rwanda), ‘the first case of clear-cut African imperialism’ (p.333)
the period from the invasion to the new regime became known as the First Congo War (October 1996 to May 1997)
trouble was Kabila found himself in a tricky position: he had to please his Rwanda-Uganda masters who had put him in power, but he now had all the political factions and the general population of Congo to please as well
to please these new constituencies, in July 1998, Kabila ordered all Rwandan and Ugandan forces to leave Congo, they were widely perceived as an invading and occupying force (p.178)
but Kabila’s masters back in Kigali (capital of Rwanda) and Kampala (capital of Uganda) were understandably miffed at their puppet’s ingratitude and so they launched a second invasion, this time to overthrow Kabila
Prunier explains that it was support from Angola and Zimbabwe which saved Kabila’s ramshackle regime, along with some support from Sudan, Libya and Chad;
it was this second incursion which came to be known as the Second Congo War, which commenced in August 1998 but which then unravelled into a wider conflict, eventually drawing in forces from half a dozen other African countries, and degenerating into the armed chaos which came to be known as the Great War of Africa, which dragged on until (supposedly) ended by peace treaties in July 2003, a five-year war in which some 350,000 people died in fighting and as many as 5 million died from massacres, disease and famine
and it is this, the Great War of Africa, whose complex origins and tangled course that this book sets out to explain

Prunier’s critical attitude

I associate serious history with a serious, professional tone so I was surprised from the start by Prunier’s tone of blistering cynicism and withering criticism, above all of the ‘so-called’ international community, in particular of the West and the ‘so-called’ international community, which he sees as behaving with stunning ineptitude at every stage of the crisis:

‘Western incompetence and vacillation’ (p.23)
western ‘guilt, ineptitude’
‘the Western world reacted with stunned incompetence’
‘the West…was caught napping at every turn’ (p.24)
‘nobody in the international community had done anything to stop the genocide (p.33)
‘the utter spinelessness of the international community before, during and after the genocide’ (p.35)
‘the cowardice of the international community’ (p.35)
‘stunned impotence of the international community in the face of violence’ (p.38)
‘of course the international community remained totally passive’ (p.57)
‘the international community did not understand the nature of the problem’ (p.225)
‘the United Nations, that supposed repository of the world’s conscience…frantically doing nothing and avoiding any responsibility in the third and last genocide of the twentieth century…’ (p.331)

Humanitarian aid instead of political solutions

Prunier blames the spiral down to war on the international community’s failure to address the political causes of the Rwanda civil war, then the genocide in Rwanda, then the refugee crisis in Zaire, then the armed invasion of Congo. In all instances the West preferred to offer humanitarian solutions i.e. to send in the aid agencies and NGOs, but consistently ignored the political roots of the crisis. Sending loads of tents and emergency food is easier than trying to address the political problems. And so the fundamental political issues were left unresolved, festered and spread.

The international community rushed into humanitarian aid with guilty relief, never-too-late-to-do-good, thus greatly helping the perpetrators of the very crimes it had done nothing to stop. (p.30)

And:

‘The West treated what was essentially a political problem as a humanitarian crisis.’ (p.58)

cf p.347.

Critical of the RPF

Prunier is far more critical of Paul Kagame’s RPF than other accounts I’ve read, accusing the regime of developing into a dictatorship, and of its military wing, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) of carrying out numerous massacres of Hutus in Congo.

Prunier explains this by going back to the RPF’s origins in Uganda in the 1980s to describe the atmosphere of violence in which it was born and flourished a) fleeing anti-Tutsi pogroms in Rwanda and then b) getting caught up in Uganda’s Bush War. When the Rwandan exiles helped Museveni win this war and come to power, it clinched their experience that disciplined violence works.

Prunier goes on to describe the RPA’s violent ethos more unforgivingly than other accounts. In particular he is at pains to emphasise, right from the start, that as it fought its way across Rwanda during the genocide, the RPA a) carried out its own massacres of Hutus and b) didn’t plan its campaign in order to stop the violence i.e. target the worst areas, but was more focused on eliminated the Rwandan army and securing complete control of the country.

He discusses the report drawn up by Robert Gersony for the UN which conclusively proved the RPA was carrying out massacres of its own and claims this report was suppressed by the UN and western nations (pages 31 and 350) because of its accusations against a force the West was championing as a solution to the genocide. The report was suppressed and Gersony was instructed to never discuss the findings, and has kept silent to this day. We are in the world of conspiracy theory. Mind you, it fits Prunier’s withering view of the United Nations generally:

As to the UN human rights operation, it was a sad joke. (p.18)
[The United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda was] despised by everybody in Rwanda as the embodiment of arrogant powerlessness. (p.33)

A key event was the Kibeho massacre, April 1995, in which up to 4,000 refugees were killed by RPA soldiers. Prunier describes it in detail and how it led to the collapse of the government of national unity which had been running Rwanda since the RPF victory. He draws the same jaded conclusion which he applies to the genocide and then the invasion of Congo as a whole:

Non-treatment of the consequences of genocide, well-meaning but politically blind humanitarianism, RPF resolve to ‘solve the problem’ by force, stunned impotence of the international community in the face of violence, and, finally, a hypocritical denial that anything much had happened.

It was one of what Prunier calls ‘massive human rights violations’ by the RPA (p.126). Much worse were the mass killings in and around the refugee camps in November 1996. Prunier cites the report of Father Laurent Balas (p.124) and of Roberto Garreton, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights whose work was blocked by Kigali (p.157). At the end of the chapter dealing with the Alliance’s swift advances through Congo, and accusations of widespread massacre, Prunier calculates that as many as 300,000 of the refugees disappeared, died of starvation, disease, lost in the jungle or were murdered by RPA forces (p.148).

(Cf David van Reybrouck’s account of the RPF carrying out ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘massive carnage’, ‘Congo: The Epic History of a People’, pages 423 to 425, where he estimates that between two to three hundred thousand Hutus were murdered.)

Very broadly speaking, the idea is that ‘the West’, specifically America but others too, tried to downplay the massacres out of a) guilt at letting the genocide take place and b) the wish to believe that a clean, democratic new regime existed in Kigali. The massacres were embarrassing. It left the UN and others on a hook, not knowing how to react: so they consistently downplayed them (p.159).

Prunier makes this point, that Western guilt over having stood by and done nothing to stop the genocide, explains why the West gave large amounts of aid to Rwanda even as it was fighting an extensive war, and obstinately overlooked all evidence that RPF forces were carrying out large-scale massacres of their own (e.g. pages 246, 273). Rwanda was able, for years, to ‘surf’ on western guilt (pages 266, 350, 351).

And Prunier details the internal developments in Rwanda, namely the persecution of critics and the inevitable rise to power of Paul Kagame at the head of ‘a dictatorial minority government’ (p.273), his:

ruthless determination, his capacity to fine-tune white guilt as a conductor directs an orchestra’ (p.332)

and his creation of ‘an airtight authoritarian state’ (p.294).

[The enthusiastic support of the West, and especially Western journalists, for an underdog rebel militia with a noble cause fighting a brutal stronger power reminds me of the decade I spent watching BBC and ITV journalists in Afghanistan with the mujahideen singing the praises of these plucky Davids fighting the Soviet Goliath. Only after the Soviets left and the country plunged into civil war from which arose the Taliban were those western journalists forced to change their tune. Moral of the story: don’t take sides in foreign wars; neither side is ever as squeaky clean as we childishly wish them to be. All sides in a war are compromised.]

Encyclopedic complexity

As early as page 40 the text has got so complicated that it becomes difficult to follow. Everything Prunier describes he does so in immense, encyclopedic detail. The events in Rwanda I have a rough handle on, having read half a dozen accounts. I found it more challenging to read his long, detailed explanation of the civil war in neighbouring Burundi, his examination of the political and ethnic roots going back to the colonial period, starting with the fact that there were four different Hutu guerrilla groups, moving through dense complexity to the killing of Burundi president (Hutu) Cyprien Ntaryamira by Tutsis soldiers in an attempted coup in April 1994.

A contemporary journalist summed up the resulting situation in a quote I include not so much to clarify but as an example of the sheer number of entities the reader has to get clear in their heads, along with their changing motivations and policies.

The present situation in Burundi is largely a result of Zairean support for PALI-PEHUTU and CNDD. The final attack on Burundi would be a catastrophe for Rwanda because the plan is to allow Nyangoma to take power in Bujumbura and to bring the Interahamwe back in Rwanda. (quoted page 68)

Even more so his hyper-detailed explanation of the complex ethnic situations in the eastern Congo provinces of North and South Kivu, which also have long, very complicated ethnic histories. You’d have thought it would be difficult for anyone else to ever go into as much detail or display such scary erudition as Prunier. The situation in the Kivus is important because they form Congo’s border with Rwanda and therefore played a key role in the escalating crisis which eventually led to the Rwandan invasion, but the histories of ethnic rivalries, conflict, massacres, numerous parties and militias – for example the key role played by the Banyamulenge – are mind boggling.

And then he has a chapter titled ‘The Congo basin, its interlopers and its onlookers’ (pages 73 to 112). This is where Prunier slowly and painstakingly goes round all the countries which border Congo and explains why many of them were already infiltrating armed forces across its borders or through its territory in order to achieve a kaleidoscope of military and political goals. Featured countries include Congo and Rwanda (obvz), Uganda, Sudan, Tanzania and Angola, each of which themselves hosted complex civil wars, generally going back decades, as far as independence.

A feature of all these conflicts is the extraordinary number of military groups they give rise to, all of which have grand titles and imposing acronyms, hence the 161 acronyms listed at the start of the book. I found myself referring back to it on every page. Just the 5-page backgrounder on Congo includes:

Mobutu’s Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (MPR)
Étienne Tshisekedi’s Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS)
the Conférence nationale souveraine (CNS) set up in 1990
replaced by the Haut Conseil de la République-Parlement de Transition (HCR-PT)
the FAZ or Forces Armées Zaïroises

By about page 75 the book was feeling less a history than a degree course in the history, politics, ethnography and sociology of half a continent. I think you’d have to read it at least twice, probably three or four times, stopping to consult histories of all the other countries mentioned, to stand a chance of getting your degree.

I particularly enjoyed the background sections on countries we don’t hear so much about in post-imperial Britain, such as Angola and, even more so, the Francophonie countries which you rarely read about, Central African Republic, Chad and Congo-Brazzaville.

Initially, I was surprised at the jaded bitterness of Prunier’s tone but after a while I began to realise that only the blackest of black humour can do justice to a continent whose rules have spent 60 years doing their damnedest to utterly destroy.

Angola is a much richer country than either the Sudan or Uganda, which allowed its process of national destruction to be carried out with an impressive array of military means quite unknown in other parts of the continent, apart from Ethiopia. (p.88)

The guts of the war are described in a chapter graphically titled ‘Sinking into the quagmire’. It’s challenging keeping track of all the state-backed militias and armed forces, but when these start splintering and fighting amongst themselves, it becomes almost too complex to understand. On page 201 Prunier humorously asks whether his exasperated reader is ready to give up, and he’s got a point:

Does the reader at this point want to throw in the towel and give up on the ethnopolitical complexities of the region? I would not blame him, although I can assure him that I am honestly trying to simplify the picture. (p.201)

The importance of Angola

The single biggest cause of the Great War of Africa is that Eduardo dos Santos’s MPLA government in Angola went to the defence of Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s regime in Kinshasa.

I’ve explained how Kabila was installed as a puppet ruler by the alliance of Rwanda and Uganda to replace Mobutu, who both countries wanted removed from power, but how, after a year, he then turned on his own backers and ordered all Rwandan and Ugandan forces out of the country. And how this triggered those two countries to make a second invasion and remove Kabila.

For a start, Prunier adds much more detail to the story by explaining that Kabila was a terrible leader, stuck in a Marxist timewarp from the 1960s, but also just shambolic, chaotic and unpredictable, managing to insult or irritate all the neighbouring regimes and running his own one in a deeply unpredictable way, arresting his own ministers on a whim etc. So when Rwanda-Uganda began their second incursion to remove him many were keen.

Kabila had sacked his (Rwandan) chief of the army staff, James Kabarebe, who returned to the east of the country and, in Goma, hijacked three commercial freight planes, filled them with RPA troops, and flew them to the government base of Kitona on the Atlantic coast where they quickly turned Kabila troops to their side. Towns around Kitona fell, as did the diamond centre of Kisangani. The rebels seized the Inga hydroelectric station that provided power to Kinshasa as well as the port of Matadi through which most of Kinshasa’s food passed. In other words, Kabila’s regime looked doomed.

Then Angola intervened to save it. Why? The answer has to do with conditions inside Angola. The Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) government based the capital Luanda had been fighting a civil war against Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola) since independence in 1975. In 1994 the Lusaka protocol tried to broker a ceasefire and in 1995 UN peacekeepers arrived. But Prunier explains in detail why, by 1998, the truce had broken down and fighting began again.

The point is that the MPLA had, originally, in the 1970s, been a Marxist movement and Savimbi had presented himself as a business-friendly ally of the West, meaning America. In the simple binary of the Cold War, the MPLA were supported by the Soviet Union and the Cubans, UNITA by America and South Africa. And because Mobutu, ruler of Zaire/Congo, was also a creature of the CIA, supported by America, Mobutu had, for 15 years or more, offered UNITA bases and sanctuary in south Congo/Zaire.

Therefore, as Rwandan forces and Congolese forces backed by Rwanda closed in on Kabila’s regime, the MPLA, after some delay, finally gambled that supporting Kabila and having the gratitude of his weak regime, would guarantee that he would not support the MPLA’s enemy, UNITA. Angola threw itself behind Kabila as part of its ongoing civil war. And the key fact? Angola had one of the largest economies in Africa, based on its huge oil wealth. It had lots of planes, helicopters and a well-trained battle-hardened army, which it now sent to start supporting Kabila. The MPLA’s support for Kabila ensured he would stay in power and that the war would continue for three long, bloody, increasingly chaotic years.

Five layers of conflict

Prunier suggests the war had five layers (pages 201 to 203):

Layer 1: Core conflict: the RPF regime in Rwanda trying, with partner Uganda, to overthrow the puppet ruler, Kabila, who they’d installed.

Layer 2: Powerful players: Angola, Zimbabwe, with Namibia along for the ride, who had no interest in the Hutu-Tutsi conflict but wanted Kabila to remain in power (for Angola, to prevent UNITA taking refuge in Congo; for Zimbabwe, to continue mineral contracts made with Kabila; Namibia just went along with its big powerful neighbour, Angola).

Layer 3: Secondary actors: Libya, Chad, the Sudan, no interest in Congo but it was a zone to sort out relations between themselves and core players, mostly Uganda, which was more or less at war with Sudan.

Layer 4: bordering countries: Burundi which sent a small number of soldiers into the conflict; Central African Republic which tried to stay out.

Layer 5: South Africa: had no military or political interest and never sent troops to the war, but had a strong economic motive in infiltrating the economy of collapsing Zimbabwe and consolidating its hold on Congo’s huge mineral reserves so, on the whole, supported the rebels as being more desperate to turn the assets (mines etc) into cash i.e. let South Africa get bargains. This changed when Joseph Kabila came to power and, unlike his father, let it be known that he was open to business. South African banks and mining corporations suddenly packed his diary (p.262).

From all this you can see why Prunier calls it:

a war fought among foreigners on Congolese territory for reasons of their own. (p.274)

The shift to economic motivation

Why did so many of the countries neighbouring Congo get involved in the conflict? Prunier explains the motivation in the chapter titled ‘The Congo basin, its interlopers and its onlookers’ (pages 73 to 112). This has the added benefit of giving fascinating brief profiles of the countries involved, from Congo itself, through Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Congo-Brazzaville and so on.

Then there are the two increasingly mind-boggling chapters describing the chaotic conflict itself, ‘A continental war’ (181 to 226) and ‘Sinking into the quagmire’ (227 to 255).

He makes a vital point: the war might have started out from geopolitical considerations but as it went on it became increasingly economic i.e. about seizing Congo’s mineral resources:

What mattered more and more as the war went on were the economic interests. (p.234)

And this had a big military-strategic consequence. The first war had been fought to overthrow Mobutu and gain control of the country, so the key battlezone, the target, had been the capital, Kinshasa. But in the Great War the motivation increasingly became to seize Congo’s assets and so the target areas were provinces like Kasai and Katanga, in which the warring parties disintegrated into ever-smaller entities, sometimes fighting over just one mine. These had nominal ties with other groups in other areas, or with various outside parties, then again often went independent. Hence the unravelling complexity of the conflict which eventually nobody understood or could contain.

A useful recap

In the chapter describing the beginning of the end, ‘Not with a bang but with a whimper’, he gives a useful recap of why they got involved in 1998 and what had changed by 2001 to make many want to withdraw. In other words, why did the war ramify out so disastrously in 1998, and what allowed it to be dragged to an end in 2001/2? Here’s a list of key intervening countries, giving their initial motivation and what changed:

Kabila supporters

Angola supported Kabila to ensure Congo wouldn’t give safe havens for UNITA. In 1998 Savimbi was still a threat. But by 2001 he was a spent force, militarily and financially, struggling to survive. The MPLA had achieved its aims.

Zimbabwe had allied with Kabila in order to protect the investments and commercial deals it had made with him on his rise to power, and also to block South Africa’s slow rise to economic dominance of the whole of southern Africa. By 2001 Zimbabwe’s economic plight had significantly worsened while South Africa’s commercial ascent continued unhindered, and Mugabe was coming under increasing internal pressure. While peasants starved Mugabe was blowing tens of millions of dollars on an unpopular war. Time to pull out.

Namibia had supported Kabila at the bidding of South Africa and Zimbabwe, but the latter was pulling out and the former never committed men or resources.

Anti-Kabila

Burundi a minor player, had always been most concerned with securing its Congo border and never taken part in the wider invasions.

Uganda was under strong donor pressure to reduce its military budget if it wanted to continue receiving Western aid. Senior members of the army and the regime had done very well out of the war, not least from illegal smuggling of diamonds, gold etc. But Uganda never had the urgent internal political pressure to sort out the Hutu / génocidaire issue that Rwanda did.

In addition, one aspect of the general chaos was the slow falling-out of Uganda and Rwanda. Museveni came to really dislike Kagami’s ‘arrogance’ (p.241). Their forces ended up coming to blows, specifically in several different episodes of street fighting in Congo’s main north-eastern city, Kisangani (p.242). This queered the relationship between Uganda and Rwanda.

Rwanda By 2001 the international situation had changed. The Clinton administration, crippled with guilt, had passively supported Rwanda and been accused of fine rhetoric about a New Africa but no practical follow-through (p.338). However, George W. Bush’s new US administration commenced on 1 January 2001 and took a much tougher line on Rwanda, condemning its ‘grave human rights violations’ (p.266).

By the start of 2002 all the main parties had reached the same conclusion: withdrawal was a certainty, it was just a matter of agreeing schedules (p.267).

Laurent Kabila’s assassination

Arguably, the single most important event – certainly the easiest to grasp because one very specific event – was the assassination of the man at the centre of the conflict, Laurent Kabila, on 16 January 2001. He was shot at point blank range in his office by one of his bodyguards.

Now, since he was the man at the centre of a huge and ruinous war, conspiracy theories have abounded. It’s a kind of African version of Who Killed JFK? The (fairly) straightforward answer is that, while running his guerrilla group out east Kabila recruited lots of boys, young boys, thousands of them, called kodogo (‘little ones’). Kabila trained them to become fighters, and they in turn looked up to him as their Father or Mzee, Swahili for ‘elder’. But once in power he betrayed them. In lots of ways, which Prunier details. He let some be massacred, some ended up on opposing sides and fighting each other. The bodyguard was one of these former boy soldiers.

Then again, Prunier thoroughly describes all the other conspiracy theories, which wander off into huge conspiracies, involving enemy countries, the CIA, the Rwandans, or the dark and shadowy forces which lots of people like to think are behind any disaster or assassination. The likeliest is that Kabila had done a deal with the MPLA’s enemy, UNITA, to smuggle diamonds through northern Angola.

135 people were arrested, tried and convicted, some given the death penalty although no-one, in the end, was executed (pages 249 to 255).

(cf van Reybrouck’s account, ‘Congo: The Epic History of a People’, pages 465 to 466.)

The key point is that, after a few days of confusion, the senior figures in the administration decided a compromise candidate who everyone could agree on temporarily was Kabila’s son, Joseph, a shy taciturn man who had, however, been moved by his father through the ranks until he was number two in the Congo army, and had helped with various diplomatic and administrative tasks.

In the event Joseph Kabila was to prove a very shrewd operator, the complete opposite of his chaotic unpredictable father. He outwitted all his superiors and peers, serving as president of Congo from January 2001 to January 2019.

From the point of view of the Great War, he was open to savvy negotiations and deals, and it was this new spirit of compromise and negotiation, combined with the war weariness of the key allies, namely Angola, which allowed the war to stumble to an end, sort of. Well, certainly for a peace treaty to be signed in 2002.

Peace, or conflict control

Prunier gives a fascinating summary of the year-long negotiations which eventually, reluctantly, ended with the signing of an inclusive peace treaty on 17 December 2002. Prunier humorously quotes a commentator who wrote that the deal offered the Congolese people the show of a government which was really made up of:

‘a coalition of people who looted their own country, predatory rebels and corrupt civil servants.’ (quoted page 277)

By the time of the treaty maybe 3.5 million people had died, 90% from the collateral effects of war. Agriculture had collapsed. 64% of the population was underfed. Maybe 33% were malnourished (p.278).

Massacre

Three days after Kabila’s murder Ngiti and Lenu warriors attacked Bunia, killing about one hundred Hema. The next day the Hema militia took revenge on Lendu civilians, killing about 25. (p.281)

Hardest to keep track of is the number of Africans killed by Africans. Every one of the 364 pages records Africans murdering other Africans, generally armed men killing defenceless civilians. A continent-wide abattoir. Thus in Prunier’s fascinating background to Angola‘s involvement in the war (pages 88 to 99), he describes the failed democratic elections of 1992 which led to panic on the streets of Luanda where MPLA soldiers killed about 1,500 UNITA soldiers and cadres (p.96). When UNITA took the strategic oil town of Soyo, the fall of the city was blamed on the Bakongo tribe and so about 1,000 unarmed Bakongo civilians were massacred in the streets of Luanda, Bloody Friday (p.97).

There’s killing on every page. The suffering of the population of Congo is beyond words. For the most part Prunier lets the facts of massacre after massacre convey the enormity of the horror to the reader.

In the period October 1992 and December 1993 the UN estimated civilian deaths at 450,000 to 500,000. In mid-1993, the UN counted about 1,000 war-related deaths per day. (Tufts University mass atrocities website)

Towards the end of the book he cites research by the US International Rescue Committee which suggested that between August 1998 and April 2000 there were some 1.7 million excess deaths in Congo (p.242). Of these only around 200,000 were directly due to fighting, the rest being due to:

frequent forced population displacement
overexposure to the elements
near collapse of the health system
disease
impossibility to carrying out agriculture, obviously leading to starvation
plain despair

(p.242, cf p.338).

Your life in their hands. 2015 photo of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) fighters. The FDLR is the latest iteration of Rwandan Hutu army and Iterahamwe militia génocidaires who fled Rwanda in 1994, plus other Hutus who’ve signed up since. Gang rape and mass murder a speciality.

The colonial borders

Prunier calls his final chapter ‘Groping for meaning’. You can draw all kinds of conclusions. The one that impressed itself on me was the old chestnut about Africa’s colonial borders. More than any other book about Africa this one shows how the borders the colonial powers drew had little or nothing to do with tribes on the ground and how most Africans’ sense of identity, especially in rural areas i.e. most of the continent, remained based on tribe, clan, religion and family, complex multi-levelled identities, with ‘nationality’ an evanescent Western invention (p.360).

This really reinforces Prunier’s criticism that western models don’t work on ‘nations’ which are nothing like the western concept of a ‘nation’. If the traditional definition of a ‘state’ is an entity which has a monopoly of legitimate violence over a defined territory, then Congo isn’t a state at all, as there were and still are areas where numerous other groups carry out systematic violence (p.305). As you read this:

‘There are more than 120 different armed groups active in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’ (Kivu conflict Wikipedia article)

Just because an African leader wears a suit and tie and has a ‘cabinet’ made of ‘ministers’, Western leaders and bankers shake his hand and think he’s like them, has the same mindset, comes from the same background, is managing the same kinds of problems. But they’re really not. African leaders are trying to run ‘states’ which often barely exist or only exist in patches, across territories which aren’t states in the way we in the West are used to them, lacking infrastructure, modern economies, integrated populations, a high level of education and so on.

Hence the repeated point Prunier makes about the ‘reality gap’ between the fine words of the international community – the lovingly worked-out details of various peace accords, with their withdrawal of forces and integration of troops and civil society and so on – and the generally chaotic, anarchic, often incomprehensible situations on the ground (p.225).

One aspect of this is the point I made at length in my reviews of books about the West’s attempts to impose ‘democracy’ in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is that the attempts revealed the complete lack of understanding, in the West, of what democracy actually is, where it came from, and what sustains it, in the advanced, economically developed nations.

Democracy as a form of government presupposes a certain degree of social integration, the existence of a political class with some concept of the national interest, and a minimum of economic development (p.xxxii)

All of which are as absent in a country like Congo as they are in Iraq and Afghanistan, probably most of the Middle East and Africa. Lacking the social and economic prerequisites for full democracy, undeveloped countries tend to adopt democratic window dressing, which conceals simple power grabs by ethnic or religious or tribal groups. Thus Prunier commenting that, ahead of the first free elections in Congo in 2006, dozens of new political parties sprang up across the country, but that:

These were parties in name only, since they were mostly tribal or regional gatherings around the name of one or two well-known local politicians. (p.309)

With the recurring result that as and when governments are formed, they are more often than not little more than:

a coagulation of groups operating out of completely mercenary interests (p.315)

(Prunier explains the arbitrary nature of the borders right at the start, pages xxix to xxx, and then gives a concentrated summary along with the characteristics of weak states and strong tribal identities which will plague Africa for the foreseeable future, on pages 360 to 362.)

The Kivus

Throughout the narrative it becomes ever clearer that the hotspot, the trouble spot, the recurring source of conflict, is the two small territories known as the Kivus, North and South Kivu, both of which have complex ethnic, political and military conflicts. This troubled little area turned out to be the hardest to fully pacify after the 2002 peace agreement, then trouble flared up all over again in the mid-2000s which had to be fought to a standstill by UN and government forces.

Kivu conflict Wikipedia article

At the time of writing the Kivu conflict constitutes the largest UN peacekeeping mission anywhere in the world, deploying some 21,000 soldiers.

Will the war happen again?

No. The conditions were unique, being:

the flight of the génocidaires and the refugees into eastern Congo provided a one-off motivation for the RPF government to invade, repatriate the refugees and wipe out the remaining génocidaires
– that whole crisis situation has disappeared
instead it turned into a mission to overturn the decrepit dictator Mobutu and then, in the sequel, to overthrow the unpopular puppet ruler Kabila – but Congo has had much more stable and effective leaders for 20 years
guilt over their role in the Rwanda genocide meant the West and the UN turned a blind eye to the RPF’s abuses and massacres – that wouldn’t happen again, indeed already with the arrival of the George W. Bush administration in 2001 the RPF had to start moderating its behaviour
but the key thing that turned it into a continental war was the decision by Angola to intervene and support Laurent Kabila in order to prevent their enemy, Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA, from using southern Congo as a base: but Savimbi died 20 years ago and the civil war ended with him, all parties are concerned with maintaining their grip on power and corrupt money, and any kind of war would only jeopardise that

So Congo will, like most African nations, continue to be a weak state for the foreseeable future; and violence may flare up in some its territory, especially the ever-troublesome Kivus. But a war on the same scale is extremely unlikely to be repeated. it was the result of one-off geopolitical forces which won’t recur.

Further issues

France’s shame

France sees all foreign affairs as a conspiracy of the Anglophone countries (mostly America and Britain) to undermine French glory and the superiority of French culture. Therefore, the French government stood by the genocidal Hutu regime in Rwanda even as the genocide was underway because they spoke French and the incoming Tutu forces, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, having been raised in former British colony Uganda, spoke English. Simple as that. The French supported the third great genocide of the twentieth century because its perpetrators spoke French (pages 341 to 343).

Viewing the war through European paradigms i.e. the Holocaust

The West could understand the genocide because they viewed it through the prism of European history and the Holocaust. This led to the tendency to blindly support the RPF, to regard the Tutsi regime as black Israelis, as a people who had suffered an appalling crime and so could be forgiven any behaviour in retaliation. The West tended not to understand the Congo conflict in its own right, for what it was, an imperialist attack by one African country (Rwanda) on another (Congo) which drew in a range of neighbouring countries who used the Congo as a battleground to fight their own conflicts (predominantly Angola).

Genocide narrative easy; Congo war narrative hard, complicated, sometimes impenetrable. Hence a) prolonged support for Rwanda and Kagame, whatever they did, b) long, long delay getting to grips with the political issues underlying the war.

Good guys

As remarked in my reviews about Iraq and Afghanistan, American foreign policy is plagued by a Hollywood simple-mindedness or regarding all foreign situations in terms of the good guys and the bad guys, consistently failing to understand complexities and shades of grey (p.340). Prunier sees this tendency to simplify situations and players into good guys/bad guys as distinctively American (p.357).

Credit

Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gérard Prunier was published by Oxford University Press in 2009. All references are to the 2010 OUP paperback edition.

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Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gérard Prunier (2009)

The great war

Prunier’s critical attitude

Humanitarian aid instead of political solutions

Critical of the RPF

Encyclopedic complexity

The importance of Angola

Five layers of conflict

The shift to economic motivation

A useful recap

Kabila supporters

Anti-Kabila

Laurent Kabila’s assassination

Peace, or conflict control

Massacre

The colonial borders

The Kivus

Will the war happen again?

Further issues

France’s shame

Viewing the war through European paradigms i.e. the Holocaust

Good guys

Credit

More Africa reviews

Share this:

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