Read an Excerpt
Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa
From Tragedy to Useful Imperial Fiction
By Robin Philpot Baraka Books
Copyright © 2013 Robin Philpot and Baraka Books
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-926824-94-9
CHAPTER 1
Invasion? What Invasion?
The vanquished always has a better memory than the victor, who tries to make us forget.
René Lévesque
The official narrative would have it that the Rwandan Patriotic Front under the brilliant military and political leadership of current Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who along with many fellow officers was trained in the best American and British military academies, ended the genocide by taking Kigali on the fourth of July 1994 and by forming a new government on July 19, 1994. A patriotic liberation movement with the right friends puts an end to the worst crime imaginable, similar to the Holocaust, and all that happens on the fourth of July.
The first problem with this part of the tale is that Kigali was not taken on the fourth of July. The decisive battle that allowed the RPF to take the capital city of Rwanda was fought on July 2. Paul Kagame marched into Kigali on July 3. Wasn't Paris liberated when Charles de Gaulle marched in on August 25, 1944? Nobody changed that date to make others happy. But for Rwanda, important people in influential positions preferred the fourth of July. So that day was chosen. It was also important not to be too close to July 1, which had been Rwandan Independence Day since 1962 and was a powerful symbol of the social revolution that now had to be erased from people's memories. The victors then just had to declare the fourth of July the new Rwandan National Day and then the pipers could play the tune. Everybody knows of course which tune was to be played.
The second problem is that the massacre of civilians did not end with the victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Civilians have been massacred in Rwanda steadily ever since, and massacres have continued even more seriously in the neighbouring Congo where millions have been killed.
The choice of the fourth of July may be a minor point, but in politics nothing is left to chance, especially not symbols. Hopefully, it will be like an alarm bell that might lead people to reread the right and proper tale with an eye out for those optical illusions so often used to distort and misinform.
The army led by Paul Kagame was never a liberation army. Most people knew that from the beginning. The Rwandan Patriotic Front and its leader were more like the paid arsonists masquerading as firemen than patriots who saved the people from the fire, which is what the official story would have us believe.
* * *
Until October 1, 1990 the troops that invaded Rwanda were uniformed soldiers in the Ugandan National Army who marched to the orders of Yoweri Museveni, President of Uganda and Commander-in-Chief of the Ugandan Army. The invading troops consisted mainly of Rwandans who had lived in Uganda since the social revolution and independence of Rwanda in 1962. They had been at war in Uganda since 1981 as part of the guerrilla forces known as the National Resistance Army until it took power in Uganda in 1986 and its leader, Yoweri Museveni, became president.
On September 28, 1990 four thousand Ugandan soldiers and officers, including former army Commander and Ugandan Defence Minister Fred Rwigyema, left their barracks fully equipped with weapons and vehicles. They travelled hundreds of kilometres in Uganda to the Rwandan border and attacked the few Rwandan guards stationed there on October 1. They then advanced some seventy kilometres into Rwanda and by October 4 the invading troops were within seventy kilometres of the Rwandan capital Kigali.
Everywhere in the world, that attack on October 1 would be described as an invasion of one country by another. It was not an incursion, nor a civil war, nor an increase in ethnic tension. The right word is invasion. In legal terMs and according to principles established at the Nuremberg trials, so often referred to in the Rwandan tragedy, that invasion was no less than the worst war crime because it was a crime against peace. Yet that invasion has been, at best, trivialized ever since it happened and, at worst, omitted altogether from the tale of events. One of the worst examples was a long article in the New York Times Magazine on September 15, 2002, entitled "The Minister of Rape." Not a word is mentioned about the invasion. We only learn that "tensions increased in 1990."
A crime of that magnitude should normally have provoked a sharp international reaction, especially considering that when Ugandan troops invaded Rwandan President Habyarimana and Ugandan President Museveni were both attending a UNICEF meeting in New York. Moreover, two days earlier, on September 28, 1990 President Habyarimana told the United Nations General Assembly that his government would offer citizenship and travel documents to all Rwandan refugees wherever they were and that it would repatriate all those who wanted to return to Rwanda.
International reports on the invasion hinted that the invading army had taken or was about to take Kigali. American authorities jumped suspiciously quickly to offer President Habyarimana political asylum in the United States. According to a story that is surely not very right and proper, but stubbornly tenacious, the late Rwandan president met the United States Ambassador in Kigali before leaving the country and asked him if the United States had any information about an invasion by Uganda. The Ambassador offered to make some intelligence inquiries — the CIA — and then informed President Habyarimana that there was no such information and that he could safely go to New York.
On learning of the invasion, the Rwandan president immediately returned home but stopped off in Belgium where, suspiciously, he received another offer of political asylum. Belgian news reports amplified the invaders' military success. Meanwhile, Ugandan President Museveni remained in the United States even though his army had just suffered the worst mutiny in its history, involving troops, officers, and military materiel. Though he is an army man to the core and the champion of professional and disciplined armies that Africa supposedly needed so badly, the president of Uganda decided to sit back in New York while a whole section of his cherished army revolted and invaded another country wearing their Ugandan uniforms.
The same Yoweri Museveni had become the darling of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and United States diplomacy since the middle of the 1980s. He was another of the former leftist guerrilla leaders who came over to the gospel of good governance, structural adjustment, privatization and, judging by the turn of events, the remodelling of African geography. The United States saw Uganda as a rampart against Islamic fundamentalism in Sudan, and its president, Yoweri Museveni, as a trustworthy ally to aid United States covert operations in Southern Sudan. Former President Jimmy Carter described Museveni as "one of Africa's most important leaders." Madeleine Albright spoke of him as "a beacon of hope for Africa," whereas Philip Gourevitch of the New Yorker, promoted him for years as the "éminence grise of the new leadership in central Africa."
President Museveni unconvincingly distanced himself from the invasion by pleading ignorance and surprise and by complaining about how his officers and comrades-in-arms, who became the commanders of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, had tricked him in October 1990. Though totally disingenuous, Museveni's excuses satisfied his friends in the "international community." "The truth of the matter is," he declared in a 1991 address, "that these people conspired, took us by surprise, and went to Rwanda, which was not particularly difficult. ... We had some information that the Banyarwanda in Uganda were up to something, but we shared it with the Rwandan government. They actually had, or should have had, more information because, after all, it was their business, not ours, to follow up who was plotting what."
The eminent President Museveni would like us to believe that the intelligence agency of one country — Rwanda in this case — should spy and monitor all the movements and actions of entire regiments of another country's army — Uganda — and take the necessary action to prevent mutiny, revolt, and aggression against neighbours. Let's apply his infallible logic to other countries on other continents. What would happen if Cuba or Mexico did to the United States what Museveni said Rwanda should have done to Uganda? And what if they took action to protect against U.S. interference? What if Ireland did the same in the United Kingdom? Or Algeria in France? France in Canada? India in Pakistan? China in Vietnam? It is obviously ridiculous. Are we expected to believe him just because it is in Africa?
Countries that spy on each other, as Museveni suggested Rwanda should have done, are asking for war. Yet we are invited to believe that the Rwandan government made a serious mistake by not spying on the Ugandan army and by not intervening to prevent it from invading Rwanda. That error was so serious that the "new éminence grise of Africa," Yoweri Museveni, was justified in not punishing the mutineers in his army.
The man who refused to punish the senior officers who mutinied in his own army is the same man that United States diplomacy, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund adored, particularly because of his unbending leadership and his vision of a professional and disciplined army in Africa. All of Museveni's speeches convey the message of a professional and disciplined army. He talked that way before and after he took power in Uganda, before and after the invasion of Rwanda in 1990, before and after the Rwandan Patriotic Front took power in Kigali. Museveni knew what he was talking about. He took power in 1986 after a long guerrilla war, and then, between 1986 and 1990, he mercilessly suppressed revolt in his army.
In his address five years after taking power and four months after the invasion of Rwanda Museveni left no doubt about his views on military discipline. "As you know, we have dealt very harshly with discipline. There is a very strict code of conduct for the National Resistance Army and a mechanism for dealing with wayward soldiers. No soldier is spared, whatever his rank may be."
One month before the invasion of Rwanda, in August 1990, President Museveni addressed Ugandan army officers who undoubtedly included those who were preparing to invade Rwanda. His subject was combating counterrevolutionary insurgency and his main message was the importance of discipline, loyalty, military training, unity, and the size of the army. He also made a plea in favour of using military intelligence however it may be obtained. All these elements converge in the fight against insurgency.
A month after making this speech the strict disciplinarian, raised and trained in a world of conspiracies and rebellion, sat passively watching his own troops mutiny and invade Rwanda, thereby threatening peace and security throughout Central Africa. These were not a few low-ranking officers; entire regiments invaded, led first by Uganda's former Defence Minister Fred Rwigyema, killed in the invasion, and then by the Ugandan Chief of Military Intelligence, Paul Kagame, who quickly returned from the United States where Museveni had sent him for military training. The invading Ugandan troops that would soon be known as the Rwandan Patriotic Army comprised many senior officers, one hundred and fifty middle level officers, and even some of President Museveni's own bodyguards.
In the next three and half years, Museveni continued to watch "passively" as his former troops went in and out of Uganda as they liked. Uganda became the conveyor of men, munitions, and materiel to an army dedicated to overthrowing the Rwandan government. Despite Uganda's obvious implication in this war, no imperial power ever once threatened to punish President Museveni or cut off support to his country and every power has studiously avoided calling the invasion by its real name ever since.
Yoweri Museveni's August 1990 address to the officers of the Ugandan National Resistance Army on "How to fight a Counterrevolutionary Insurgency" reads like a blueprint for the invasion and war that some of his officers were soon to conduct in Rwanda against President Habyarimana. The difference is that Museveni's officers would soon be calling themselves Rwandan "insurgents" or "rebels."
"We had to reject the concept of 'a small but efficient' army ..." he told his officers on August 17, 1990. "This notion is nothing but suicidal. Insurgents do not have to do much, but they will have succeeded in their devices if they simply terrorize the population, stop them from producing wealth for the country, dismantle the network of civil administration and block communications. Once the state does not stop insurgents from doing this on a large scale, the country will rapidly lose income and find it impossible to support the army ... Insurgents will be in a position to create a situation of strategic stalemate or even to launch a strategic counteroffensive to seize state power."
That is exactly what happened between 1990 and 1994 in Rwanda. Moreover, shortly after the Ugandan officers led the October invasion of that country, President Museveni demanded that Rwanda agree to a cease-fire and negotiate with the insurgents, now called the Rwandan Patriotic Front. That was the "strategic stalemate" he had talked about in his August 1990 address. If we move forward to the many "insurgencies" in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1994 (i.e., 1996, 1998-2003, and the many other so-called rebellions that followed until the M23), we see exactly the same pattern described by Yoweri Museveni in August 1990.
* * *
Rwanda is so tiny. What in the world would the United States want in such an insignificant remote place?
The notion that Africa is, at best, on the fringe of the international community, at worst, completely cut off from it, has been common currency for centuries. Africa is supposedly of no interest to major powers, except as a means to soothe guilty consciences or receive charity and benefit from those altruistic powers. That idea is deep-rooted. Former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien echoed it in April 2002 shortly before the G8 Summit at Kananaskis when he announced that Africa would become part of the international community in the twenty-first century. It appears to have escaped Mr. Chrétien that most African countries have belonged to the United Nations since the 1960s.
In 1885, when Europe was set to pounce on Africa, the official British position was that of the "reluctant empire" compelled to leave its hallowed isles to look after Africa. Historians consolidated this idea. In a famous address first published in 1883, J.R. Seeley observed that the expansion of England in America and Asia was perceived to be almost accidental. It was "an empire acquired in a fit of absence of mind." Historians subsequently showed that England was not as selfless as it let on and that expansion of the empire closely followed British commercial expansion — the flag followed commerce.
The same image of the "reluctant empire" prevails in all descriptions of the United States in Central Africa at the end of the twentieth century, and now in the twenty-first. Did not the United States claim that it led the invasion of Libya from behind? The reluctant empire. Moreover, the United States State Department carefully and successfully cultivated that image, which could be summed up as follows: We don't want to be there, we don't want to be forced to intervene, we have no interests there, we are only the honest broker working for the good of humanity.
The proof that the United States succeeded in imposing that image was the virtual absence for many years of publications dealing critically with the United States' strategic goals in Africa. Except for a limited number of left-wing publications, discussion of the American role has been couched in talk of democracy, human rights, good governance, trade, and the American determination not to repeat the Somalia fiasco when eighteen U.S. soldiers were killed. Moreover, it would seem now that the mere mention of "another Rwanda" can justify military intervention in Africa or elsewhere and bring on board most of the Western human rights organizations. As Max Forte wrote in Slouching Towards Sirte," Everywhere is Rwanda for the humanitarian imperialist, which makes one want to know what really happened there in 1994."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa by Robin Philpot. Copyright © 2013 Robin Philpot and Baraka Books. Excerpted by permission of Baraka Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
