Dispatches from a fragile Congo, the death arena 

The recent deaths in Paris shocked the world. But how does one death compare to another? Is a death in Kenya’s Mandera region equal to one in Malindi?

The deaths in Paris rightly brought humanity together, so why the apathy on the death of 200 people in northern Nigeria in the same period? Why didn’t the global media focus on the Boko Haram atrocities with the same energy they accorded the siege in Paris?

Boko Haram has attacked army camps in Cameroon, as well.

These deaths should worry us a lot, for deaths in Africa don’t seem to matter much globally.

How many Kenyans know that over five million Congolese have died as a result of unending conflicts in the Great Lakes region in the past two decades? If you doubt this, read Gerard Prunier’s From Genocide to Continental War: The ‘Congolese’ Conflict and the Crisis of Contemporary Africa (2009/2011). Prunier’s is a sad book; a book that horrifies. But before you read it, read The Rwandan Crisis: History of a Genocide (1995).

The Rwandan Crisis came out in the aftermath of the 1994 killings. It was probably the first book to tell in detail — it is over 400 pages long — the origin of a brief spell in the history of modern Rwanda that remains shockingly unimaginable even today, 20 years later. There are tens of books on the “state of Rwanda” — its pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial histories. There are tens of explanations on the tribal matrix that created animosity between the Hutu and Tutsi. Much of this theory is mere bigotry to support political positions and interests.

But in The Rwanda Crisis, Prunier shows there is a long history to the violence that has haunted the country. He, however, recalls that in the pre-colonial times the divide between the Hutu and Tutsi wasn’t as prominent. “Administrators, government anthropologists and missionaries, all contributed, at times unwittingly, to an intellectually brilliant ideological reconstruction of Rwanda’s past and, from that artificial past, of the present.

This revival of a false past, in which one group was supposedly racially superior, as aristocrats, and the other inferior, as subjects, created an evil force whose outcome was the 1994 killings.

It isn’t as if there hadn’t been massacres before in Rwanda . The majority of those who supported and fought for the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) had been exiled from 1959; and again from 1972. They started families in neighbouring countries but mainly in Uganda, integrating in their new homes but always living as foreigners. It was their children who formed the foot soldiers and returned as members of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) from October 1990.

When RPF removed the remnants of the Hutu regime from Kigali, millions of Hutus spread into the neighboring states, mainly the Democratic Republic of Congo. These Hutus, especially the genocidaires known as Interahamwe, where the mass killers of Tutsis.

In the post-1994 period, the government in Kigali was seating uneasily. It mainly felt that the international community had abandoned the Tutsis in their moment of need; the Hutu killers were living comfortably across the border with the Congo, having forced thousands of fellow common Hutus as a bulwark against attacks by the Kigali regime; and desired to reconstruct the country on new terms. War was inevitable and it continues to rage.  

 There are constant incursions into Rwanda by the Interahamwe, forcing the Rwandan army to venture into the Congo. This is a volatile mix whose consequences impact eastern, southern and central Africa.

It is this war that has led to what could be called an African genocide, if we stretch the meaning of genocide. Various groups, including the United Nations, acknowledge that more than five million Congolese have died in about 15 years from marauding militias, foreign soldiers, diseases, hunger, rape and abandonment.

Prunier traces the origins of the Congolese conflict to age-old problems in the DRC, a country that has never really enjoyed true peace even under Mobutu Sese Seko. There were refugees, who Rwanda wanted repatriated. But the ex-FAR and the genocidaires didn’t want the Hutu refugees back in Rwanda for they were a source of recruits and a shield against RPF attacks. Then there was Mobutu, who saw the ex-FAR as potential associates in the fight against the Banyamulenge militia, then supporting Kabila senior.

Of course, there was the impotent UN, France, America and other global geopolitical players, hamstrung by a moral deficit for not having acted to stop the 1994 genocide.

Westerners and even AU could not accuse Kigali of revenge killings — as reflected in the Gersony Report. Then the Kibeho tragedy happened and a decision was made to (re)solve the refugees issue once and for all.

What followed the incursion into Congo by Rwanda to repatriate refugees was an unending war. It doesn’t seem like it will end soon. All shades of militia — some with a political agenda, others with economic intentions, and yet others mere adventurers — are roaming these parts with impunity.

In From Genocide to Continental War, Prunier argues that the Congo isn’t just a victim of its troubled postcolonial history but that it is caught in a trap of shockingly poor leadership, international manipulation or abandonment, commercial exploitation by multinationals chasing its mineral weath

But the tragedy of the Congo has also spawned tens of NGOs, Congo/Great Lakes specialists, research groups etc, all milking the misery of ordinary Congolese to mint dollars in aid and other support.

These groups are hardly interested in discussing the deaths.

Even the noisy AU that feins intetrest in a local court to try such atrocities, is disinterested.

The writer teaches literature at the University of Nairobi