General Paul Kagame tells Mahmood Mamdani that he had to reveal the truth about his army’s involvement in the overthrow of Mobutu Sese Seko
The day before I took the Air Rwanda flight from Entebbe to Kigali on July 11, both major dailies in Kampala had carried reports of The Washington Post interview with Rwandan Vice-President and Minister of Defence Major General Paul Kagame, also carried in the Mail & Guardian.
The Rwandan army, he had confirmed, had played the major role in the six-month rebellion that deposed president Mobutu Sese Seko in neighbouring Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Kampala was awash with speculation: why had the Rwandan leader made admissions which seemed to implicate his government in the overthrow of Mobutu and raised questions about the independence of Laurent Kabila’s Alliance of Democratic Forces?
When I met Kagame the next day at his residence in Kigali, I put the same question to him: why make admissions which would normally be the stuff of a newspaper expos?
“I wanted to tell the truth. I did not always want to be in the position of lying, of denying things,” he said.
Perhaps recognising that truth-telling is not normally considered an attribute of politicians, he went on: “First, truth would allow us to put forth our own point of view, even demand that our point of view be heard on issues like the killing of refugees, and thereby relieve pressure on Kabila and the alliance.
“Another reason for coming out on that was to free Kabila, so they cannot restrain him from making progress.”
Given the international concern, I asked, what was the official Rwandan view about the killing of refugees?
“We have to look at the problem in a broader context,” he said. “Among them are people who committed genocide, in Rwanda, then in Masisi and Rukuru and then with the Banyamulenge. When the conflict started, they got involved on the Zairean side. They were armed in broad daylight in Tingi Tingi [refugee camp] in the presence of the United Nations and non-governmental organisations.
“In such a situation, the innocent and the guilty are mixed up. The first blame lies on those who allowed them to be openly armed. If you have a background of some refugees killing unarmed people, as in Musisi, then you should not be surprised that some die.”
He neither took responsibility nor denied that the killings could have included acts of revenge by members of the Rwandan army: “The insinuation that Rwanda or the alliance got involved to go and kill refugees is not true. Secondly, the killing was by individuals and not organisations.”
From the Rwanda Patriotic Front point of view, many refugees were simply members of the Interahamwe, the militia who had organised the genocide of the Tutsi population. Under cover of refugee status, they kept hostage those whom Kigali considered genuine refugees.
“You had camps of refugees that were really bases for military preparation, bases that were funded by the international community,” said Kagame. “The international community” was a phrase he seemed to spit out with contempt.
I tried to understand the frame of mind of the survivors of the 1994 genocide. It was highlighted by phrases that one had learnt to associate with the outlook of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust: never again, trust no one but yourself and especially not the international community which reeks of nothing but hypocrisy.
“We were not going to make the same big mistake twice,” Kagame said. “Our first big mistake was to give the UN information on how a genocide was being planned in 1994 and think that they would act on it. Their presence here provided a false sense of security. Even those Rwandese we advised said they will stay put since the UN was here.
“I would share information with UN commanders, about thousands of militia being trained in the eastern part, and machetes and arms being imported. They would check, verify, and nothing.
“I was not going to do that again. I was not going to make the same mistake. I returned from the United States last July, briefed my colleagues and said, either we solve it or face another catastrophe.”
What happened in the US? “I delivered a veiled warning: the failure of the international community to take action would mean Rwanda would take action.”
Kagame found the US response confusing: “My purpose in my June [1996] trip was to make sure they would not be taken by surprise. Their response was really no response. And yet, I was not disheartened by it.”
Did Rwanda have any differences with the Americans? “Later on, when the idea of an international force to help refugees arose, I read it as an attempt to stop the political process or to direct the political process as they wanted to. I opposed it …
“When the Canadians came here, we told them off. We said there were two issues: the problem of refugees, and that of a rebellion aimed at changing the situation in Zaire. Let us handle the situations separately. You don’t have the mandate to separate armed groups from refugees, only to open corridors for all. That won’t solve the problem. So, they changed the headquarters from here to Entebbe.”
He summed up: “The problem was not of assuring safe passage. It was that the refugees were really hostages in camps.
“When we were lukewarm to Americans and Canadians, William Perry [then US secretary for defence] called me to hear my views directly. I said refugees and the Zaire rebellion were two separate problems, and the refugee problem had two sides to it: there were armed refugees and genuine refugees.
“I said there could be no progress without separating the two groups of refugees. The problem was not of assuring a safe passage. It was that the refugees were really hostages in camps. So, the Americans began to lose appetite for the operation.”
While this Kigali-centric view may have underplayed the extent of the US support, it was clear that, once assured of that backing, the Rwandese could afford to ignore the other actors – the Canadians and the French.
“The Canadians had a pride in the operation and wanted it to go on even if it achieved no purpose. The French continued to demand that it be established. We left the battle to be fought between them … I didn’t want to disagree, just to air differing views. I knew the situation on the ground was developing. I was happy to push it on and let differences be in the air. I knew they would be brought down to the ground some day.”
If the Rwandese did recognise that the question of armed refugees was separate from that of the armed rebellion against Mobutu, why then did they move so easily from disarming refugees to becoming a part of the rebellion? “The Zaire situation was linked to our security situation; it was creating a perpetual political threat to the whole region.
“So we said, let us support total change, even if it meant being directly involved … How else could the situation have changed in Zaire? Left on their own, these groups – as it has been clear since the 1960s – would not have changed anything.”
Who shouldered the cost of the war? “The war was totally regional in its cost- bearing. Not many resources were used. The problem was solved in the cheapest way possible. The International Monetary Fund/World Bank sent a team here [during the war], examined our books, but never saw any increase in our defence expenditure.
“We asked the Ugandans and the Angolans to share. There was actually a sharing of the burden, though we bore the main burden.”
It is the linkage between the two issues, the problem of armed refugees and the anti- Mobutu rebellion in Zaire, that led to the most serious differences with allies in the region. The most serious objections to direct involvement in the anti-Mobutu rebellion came from Uganda.
The Ugandan view was shaped very much by the experience of direct Tanzanian involvement in the war that removed Idi Amin in 1979. The situations were comparable. If Mobutu had acquiesced in turning border camps for Rwandese refugees into armed training camps for proponents of “Hutu Power”, Amin had invaded the Kagera region in Tanzania.
When Tanzanian forces pushed him out, the question arose, what next? Should the next step be to push forward to Kampala, thus overthrowing the dictatorship? Or should it be to leave things to Ugandan groups opposed to Amin, giving them as much material and political assistance as the situation called for; but desisting from any further direct Tanzanian involvement?
But this alternative involved a risk: if you hit the dictator but still let him recover, would you not just be inviting a second and more lethal strike from him?
Such was the logic that tipped the argument in favour of the first option. But the very weakness of Ugandan forces, a fact that in the first place had convinced Tanzanians they had no choice but to finish the task at hand, got them involved in Uganda’s internal affairs even after Amin was gone.
That involvement continued right up to and including the rigged elections that brought Milton Obote to power for the second time in 1980. And the rationale was always the same: on the one hand, Tanzania found its Ugandan allies too weak to be left on their own, but on the other, it found that having got involved in the first place, it had too much at stake to withdraw.
It was a logic that would not appeal to President Yoweri Museveni or those around him who had had to fight a six-year guerrilla struggle to remove the Obote II dictatorship that Tanzanians had helped install. But it was a logic that Rwanda could not escape.
Referring to his decision to get directly involved in the anti-Mobutu rebellion, Kagame said: “Of course, this has its own dangers. For us to have left it alone would have been worse. For
us to have left it half-way would have been even worse; it would have been like disturbing a bee-hive and leaving it alone. We had to take it full-length.”
The Ugandans, on the other hand, kept on looking for a solution short of Mobutu’s total removal, closer to the US-backed South African proposal for a “transitional authority” other than Kabila and the alliance.
Kagame made clear his disapproval: “Not only the Americans, but also other people in the region developed doubts. Even some otherwise very wise people wanted Mobutu to remain with a negotiated settlement. We thought it best for Mobutu to go.
“At one time I went to Uganda and met Museveni. There was a delegation from Zaire headed by an intelligence officer. The talk was about accommodating others to avoid friction with the French. In my view not everyone has to be accommodated; some may have crossed the mark.”
From the post-genocide perspective of the Rwanda Patriotic Front, power-sharing can pose a dilemma if it truly involves the sharing of power. “To create a broad base for government is OK, but not a broad-based government. You can fragment authority with different parts pulling in different directions.”
The Ugandans remain sceptical of what has been achieved beyond the ousting of Mobutu. Referring to Kabila’s alliance, a close aide of Museveni said to me in Kampala: “They had hardly any struggle, any fights. Only Unita fought. Without a Luwero [referring to the Luwero Triangle, the site of Museveni’s 1980 to 1986 guerrilla war against Obote], they have no cadres, no comradeship, no cohesive group.”
At the same time, he emphasised, they lack any experience in running affairs of state.
Kagame is aware of this, as are other leaders in the region. This, perhaps, was why the pro-alliance members of the Organisation of African Unity got together at the recent Harare summit to decide what kind of assistance the new government in Kinshasa needed and who among them would help out where.