Yesterday, President Obama hosted a luncheon with the leaders of 25 Sub-Saharan African leaders in New York. The lunch, which lasted nearly two hours, "focused on how we can forge stronger partnerships, create more opportunity for Africans ... looking beyond immediate emergencies and crises and out into the future," said White House Senior Director for African Affairs Michelle Gavin. In her comments on the issues discussed, Gavin highlighted the contributions of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, noting that Rwanda "was just named the world's top reformer in the World Bank's Doing Business report," and that Kagame "talked about what they're trying to do to create a favorable investment climate and how the U.S. could be more supportive of initiatives that will create long term growth."
According to Gavin, "No specific conflict situation actually came up in this particular event."
Over the last eleven years, the deadliest nation in the world has been Rwanda’s neighbor to the West, the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to the International Rescue Committee, a staggering 5.4 million people have died since 1998, a mortality rate 60% above the average for sub-Saharan Africa. They have died as part of a war which has claimed over six million lives since 1994, in what is believed to be the deadliest military conflict since the Second World War. This war has involved the armies of ten African nations, a dozen or more rebel groups, and over 17,000 UN peacekeepers, with a constant litany of shifting alliances between them. It results in the deaths of 45,000 Congolese a month. Despite being only 19% of the population, nearly half of the dead will be children.
Ten months ago in Frankfurt, Germany, Rose Kabuye, the Rwandan government’s Chief of Protocol, was arrested. A warrant had been issued for her arrest in France, where she is one of nine former members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front who are accused of "complicity in murder in relation to terrorism," related to the shooting down of an airplane in 1994 carrying Juvenal Habyarimana, the President of Rwanda, Cyprien Ntaryamira, the President of Burundi, and two French pilots. Shortly after this attack, the genocide of 800,000 members of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority by the majority Hutu supremacist government and population began. The genocide continued until the Rwandan Patriotic Front, led by Kagame, invaded the country from neighboring Uganda and defeated the government.
For a long time, to the eyes of most of the world, that was the end of the tragedy. Kagame has been hailed as one of the most promising leaders in Africa, and has garnered kudos for his efforts at reconciliation between the Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda. However, the events that followed have cast many doubts upon that reputation.
Following the victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Front over the Mouvement républicain national pour la démocratie et le développement, the Hutu-dominated party which conducted the Rwandan genocide, some two million Hutus fled westward, into the nation now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo but was known then as Zaire. Mostly, they fled into the regions of North and South Kivu, an area the size of Pennsylvania which is rich in mineral deposits. In 1996, the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko who had ruled Zaire for over three decades, largely with the support of the Western powers, declared that all Tutsis must leave Zaire under penalty of death. Rwandan and Ugandan forces invaded Zaire and joined forces with rebel groups to depose Mobutu, and he was replaced with Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who renamed the country the Democratic Republic of Congo. After Kabila consolidated his grip on power in the DRC, in July 1998, he ordered all Ugandan and Rwandan forces out of the Congo.
Instead, Rwandan and Ugandan forces invaded the DRC en masse. In response, the nations of Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Angola allied with Kabila against them, and were soon joined by Chad, Libya, and Sudan. This conflict has become known as the Second Congo War, and is also aptly called Africa’s World War. What ensued was the bloodiest conflict of the young 21st century, and one where war crimes have been liberally committed by many parties. Tens of thousands of women have been raped (in one center in Congo monitoring rape, nearly six thousand have been recorded since the start of 2009. The victims range in age from 65 to 2 years old). Half of all Congolese report having been forced laborers for various military forces. Officially, the war ended in December 2002. But hostilities continue throughout the DRC, particularly in North and South Kivu.
Kagame has challenged both the legitimacy and the intentions behind the French arrest warrants for Kabuye and other members of the RPF. And he has a legitimate grievance; the French were directly complicit in the Rwandan genocide and allies of Habyarimana (who was killed while returning from a meeting with Mitterand). There is good reason to believe that any justice for the Rwandan genocide will not be delivered in a French courtroom. But Kagame has also stonewalled the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which has had little success in bringing either justice to the perpetrators of the genocide nor in bringing the truth about what has happened in central Africa over the past two decades to light.
But what is coming to light is the criminal and immoral actions taken by Rwanda under Kagame’s leadership in the Congo.
Of all the people associated with the Rwandan genocide, perhaps the most famous is Paul Rusesabagina, the hotel manager who saved over one thousand lives and was memorably portrayed on film by Don Cheadle. Last week, Ruseabagina spoke to Ian Birrell of the Independent:
We know what happened in the past. But that does not mean we close our eyes to what is happening now. I did not keep silent in 1994 and I cannot keep silent now.
What Ruseabagina will not keep silent about is a war which continues largely for pillage in the Kivu regions. A 2005 report from the South African Institute for Security Studies showed that in particular, the pillage of coltan, a mineral used in the production of computer chips, was glaring:
Rwanda's officially recorded coltan production soared nearly tenfold between 1999 and 2001, from 147 tons to 1,300 tons, surpassing revenues from the country's main traditional exports, tea and coffee, for the first time. "Part of the increase in production is due to the opening of new mines in Rwanda," the report said. "However, the increase is primarily due to the fraudulent re-export of coltan of Congolese origin."
The war crimes and pillage that have taken place in the DRC over the last decade led to the recent suspension of aid to Rwanda by the Netherlands and Sweden. Ruseabagina spoke out about this in order to try to bring a stop to the £52 million which flows to Rwanda every year from Great Britain. But yesterday President Obama spent nearly two hours listening to Kagame, the World Bank’s top reformer, make economic proposals and ask for aid.
Recently, Howard French reported the remarks of the American Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs upon the 1996 invasion of Zaire by Rwandan forces. She said:
Museveni (of Uganda) and Kagame agree that the basic problem in the Great Lakes is the danger of a resurgence of genocide and they know how to deal with that. The only thing we have to do is look the other way.
The Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs who said those words was Susan Rice, President Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations.
The limits of American power and influence are many. But while the United States looked the other way, nearly six million African lives have been lost. It is time for the United States to face this deadly reality. I urge you to ask President Obama to join with other nations in denying aid to the Kagame government so long as the killing and pillage in the Democratic Republic of Congo continues.