In the spring of 1994, the impoverished country of Rwanda, hitherto unknown to wider society, suddenly became international front-page news with the outbreak of state sponsored genocide. Rwanda is a small, rural, landlocked country in the Great Lakes region of central Africa with few natural resources and minimal industry, primary exports being that of coffee and tea. The same is not true of its near neighbour, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which is rich in raw materials.
Historical background
Unlike the majority of African countries, pre-genocide Rwanda had only one tribal people who shared the indigenous Kinyarwandan language. The population were however divided into three social groups, namely the Twa (0.5%), Hutu (87%), and Tutsi (12.5%). Historians know little about the division of power between these social categories prior to 1860, however substantive research does reveal that in the latter half of the nineteenth century, King Rwabugiri of the Tutsi royal court in Rwanda either began, or reinforced, a process of ethnic polarisation of Hutu and Tutsi in the country. Such tyranny led to the oppression of the peasant classes but most particularly the Hutu peasantry.
The arrival of Rwanda’s post WWI Belgian colonisers exacerbated Tutsi domination of the Hutu since the Belgians perceived the Tutsi to have Caucasian features and, as such, naturally superior people to the ‘less-evolved’ and ‘more African’ Hutus. The Belgians thus conferred on the Tutsi, ideological, political, and economic status. In 1933 the Belgians undertook an exhaustive census using physical characteristics to determine who was a Hutu and who was a Tutsi. Based on this system of classification every Rwandan was issued with an identity card that detailed their societal position of Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa, as dictated by the Belgian colonisers. This ‘scientific’ classification and its political institutionalization had a profound effect on Rwandan culture and produced an indelible ‘reality’ of Tutsi hegemony.
When decolonization came to Rwanda in 1959, it arrived in the form of a violent Hutu revolt. Communal elections were held in 1960 that resulted in a massive transfer of power to Hutu elements visible at the local level however the following year an all-Hutu provisional government came into being. Hutu militancy resulted in thousands of Tutsi fleeing Rwanda to take refuge in surrounding countries, the majority exiling to Uganda. Those fleeing included ex-soldiers who would form the core of Tutsi imperial revisionism who planned numerous unsuccessful attacks on Rwanda.
Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Patriotic Front
In 1986, a rebel guerrilla organisation was formed by the Tutsi Rwandan Diaspora in Uganda. Its military wing became known as the Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA) whilst the political section was referred to as the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The majority of RPA members, including Paul Kagame, the current President of Rwanda, were also rebel soldiers of Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA) who toppled the government and took power in Uganda in 1986 . In his capacity as Uganda’s head of military intelligence from November 1989 until June 1990, Kagame received training in advanced military tactics and intelligence methods at the U.S. Army’s Fort Leavenworth Command and General Staff College in Kansas. He received further advanced strategic training from British military personnel.
The events and activities of the Ugandan based RPA/RPF from1990 until early 1994 are complex yet critical to ones understanding of the genocide.
On October 1 1990, Tutsi exiles under the banner of the Rwandan Patriotic Army invaded the north of Rwanda from southern Uganda. Evidence suggests that the order for the invasion was with the full knowledge, approval and active assistance of the Pentagon’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Britain’s Secret Service (SIS) commonly referred to as MI6. This incursion, albeit repelled by the Government of Rwanda, triggered almost four years of American and British supported civil conflict between the Hutu-dominated government of Rwanda and the Tutsi-dominated guerrilla rebels of the RPA, led by Paul Kagame. The final three months of the civil war coincided with the period of the Rwandan genocide which was brought to an end by the ultimate triumph in July 1994 of the refugee RPF rebels over the state sponsored ‘genocidaires’.
The catalyst to genocide
The civil violence that swept Rwanda throughout the early 1990s culminated on the evening of 6 April 1994 with the launch of a surface to air missile that struck the plane carrying the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi as it descended into Kigali airport. The plane crashed killing all onboard. There is no disagreement amongst scholars and commentators that the assassination of President Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda was the critical turning point in the sequence of events that lead to genocide and an exodus of refugees from Rwanda. Despite being pivotal to the such tragedy, no official investigation has been launched in relation to the attack on the plane or the death of its occupants, and as such no individual, group or organisation, has been convicted of responsibility. Alternate versions, rumours and speculation have thrived in the years since the attack on the plane. Current international legal consensus suggests however that the RPA were responsible for the attack that set the wheels of genocide in motion. In the three months following the plane crash, hundreds of thousands of Tutsi and moderate Hutu became victims of genocide perpetrated by the Government of Rwanda Army, the Presidential Guard, Rwandan police, and Hutu paramilitary organisations known as the Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi. In addition, a wealth of evidence is available illuminating massacres and other atrocities committed by the RPA in Rwanda during the period of the genocide. Such crimes have yet to be addressed by the International Criminal tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) or other pertinent legal body.
The international media and the RPF
In the aftermath of the genocide and Rwanda’s civil war, the RPF established a Government of National Unity headed by Pastor Bizimunga, a moderate Hutu, but to the objective observer it soon became obvious that the RPF had no real intentions of power sharing. Within a short time Bizimunga was arrested for voicing criticisms of Kagame and the rebel leader himself took over the leadership of the post-genocide government of the RPF, a political party skilful in the art of public relations and techniques of disinformation.
As the Tutsi ‘victors’ who brought an end to genocide, the RPF were romanticised by the media, with certain journalists acting as scribes for the RPF’s carefully orchestrated rewriting-of-history project. Journalist’s lack of knowledge of Rwandan society and pre-colonial history also stretched to an ignorance of the quality of scholarly research since the end of colonisation, and many journalists were vulnerable to the partisan historical interpretations of the RPF. With no prior knowledge of the Great Lakes region these ‘sympathetic outsiders’ were, and some remain, easily seduced, flattered, and manipulated by the Kagame regime who encouraged their academic and journalistic ‘sympathetic outsiders’ to embrace and spread ‘the Front’s idyllic, harmonising perspective on pre-colonial society and history’ thereby discounting three decades of post-independence scholarship on Rwanda and lending authenticity and legitimisation of a history with ideological underpinnings to the outside world.
Such oversimplifications by partisan academics and journalists ensures the development of a mythical historical account that is easily digested by the reader who is unfamiliar with the complex history of the Great Lakes region of Africa, and readily pathologizes the Hutu as the bad guys and Tutsi as the good guys. The extent to which such partisan academics and journalists, and indeed the wider public in general, are aware of the continuing and current extreme violence perpetrated by the current Rwandan government, both within Rwanda’s borders and the borders of Eastern DRC is questionable.
The export of violence
The genocide in Rwanda of 1994 acted as a catalyst for the implosion of the Congo basin and its periphery, precipitating a crisis that had been dormant for many years but later reached far beyond its original focus, namely that of the whole Great Lakes Region. Such impact was inevitable to many. One may therefore conclude that the Rwandan genocide has been both a product and a further cause of an immense African crisis. Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International documented mass rape, murder and other gross human rights abuses as a resu lt of the Rwandan presence in the then Zaire from November 1996 until May 1997. They also, documented the involvement of the government of Paul Kagame in the deposition of Zairean President Mobutu Sésé Seko, to allow the swearing in of Laurent Kabila, a front man for the Rwandans, who renamed the country the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
In August 1997, a United Nations team launched an investigation into the disappearance of those Hutu refugees who had fled westwards into the interior of the Congo rather that returning to Rwanda when the refugee camps were evacuated the previous year. A preliminary report identified forty massacre sites.
A Rwandan soldier carries his weapon through the village of Pinga in eastern Congo, 5th February 2009 Photo: Reuters - Finbarr O’Reilly, courtesy of alertnet.org
Rwanda and the Second Congo War
On 2 August 1998, the Second Congo War began and the DRC was again invaded by Rwanda aided by Uganda. As was the case in the First Congo War of 1996, vast quantities of the DRC’s wealth flowed across its borders into Rwanda, Uganda and other countries. Substantive reports evidence that Rwanda was from 1998 onwards actively involved in handling Angola’s ‘blood diamonds’ on route to Antwerp .
Once again, the international media and some non-governmental organisations (NGO) unquestioningly accepted and promoted RPF propaganda in relation to its presence in the DRC. Skilful misinformation described the Second Congo War as a civil war to which Rwanda was simply providing support to Congolese rebels thereby ensuring security on its own borders. This was a myth; there was no civil war in the Congo prior to the invasion by Rwanda and Uganda on 2 August 1998 . The true purpose of the Rwanda/Uganda invasion was a result of Kagame’s frustration and disappointment in President Mobutu’s successor who was not as amenable to pressure from Kagame as anticipated. Kagame’s 1998 incursion into the DRC was to seize power in Kinshasa and install a regime that would be more manageable from the standpoint of Rwandan and Ugandan interests. Laurent Kabila was assassinated in 2001 and replaced by his son Joseph who was more acquiescent to manoeuvring by Rwanda’s President Kagame.
Documentation reveals that aggression against the DRC, sanctioned by both Kagame and Museveni, has received the support of the governments of the United States and Britain and their respective corporate interests since 1996. At stake in these military operations in the Congo were the extensive mining resources of Eastern and Southern Zaire, including strategic reserves of cobalt which is of crucial importance for the US defence industry. United Nations Security Council reports released in 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2008, evidence that the US and Britain backed the Rwandan and Ugandan incursions into the Congo since 1996 for the purposes of the unlawful removal of valuable raw materials in the Congo. Such illegal incursions have resulted in many of the current Rwandan elites becoming wealthy on the resources of the Congo at the expense of at least 6 million African lives. For many years, Rwanda denied any involvement in the DRC’s civil war until the evidence became overwhelming.
A woman carries her belongings through the bush after fleeing her home village in eastern Congo, 5th February 2009. Civilians have fled their villages ahead of several thousand Rwandan troops advancing westwards Photo: Reuters - Finbarr O’Reilly, courtesy of alertnet.org
The Rwandan elections
The United Kingdom is one of President Kagame’s staunchest allies and currently provides British military support and is the highest financial donor to the country annually. Several other donor countries have withdrawn assistance to the country in protestation at the instigation and involvement of President Kagame in the ongoing civil wars and gross violations of human rights in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
After several years researching and closely monitoring political events in Rwanda, it appears that the country is experiencing not democracy and reconciliation, but dictatorship and exclusion. It is a country where journalists and indeed international lawyers face arrest, intimidation, harassment and violence and human rights advocates are forced to flee the country for fear of persecution or arbitrary arrest.
The six month period prior to Rwanda’s presidential elections of August 9, 2010, witnessed a concerning pattern of intimidation, harassment and other abuses, ranging from killings and arrests, to restrictive administrative measures against opposition parties, journalists, members of civil society and other critics. Such political repression and prevention of freedom of speech ensured that Kagame faced no serious opposition in the elections and a landslide victory for his second term in office. The recent crimes of the Rwandan state have however produced new negative attention in the international media. This has led Kagame to mastermind a public relations drive, headed by the London PR firm Racepoint, in an effort to negate critical attention and thereby ensure the continued good will of international donor countries including that of the British government.
Links
'e-library' of searchable documents relevant to the International Criminal tribunal Rwanda (ICTR) initiated by defence attorney Professor Peter Erlinder.
"The goal of the Project is to collect and make available primary source materials from international and national agencies, governments, and courts that relate to the political and social history of Rwanda from 1990 to the present."
State Studies 
