President Thabo Mbeki and Deputy President Jacob Zuma knew this week’s Great Lakes Summit in Dar es Salaam would give them a headache. Nights of sleepless negotiations with a backsliding Tutsi minority take more than a couple of aspirins can mend.
By the time they reached the Tanzanian capital, however, they, along with other participants in the talks, experienced a full-grown migraine.
The massacre of about 160 Tutsi refugees in Burundi last Friday threatens to plunge the troubled region back into the mire of conflict from which South Africa’s facilitation efforts so painstakingly extricated it.
The victims of the massacre were Congolese Tutsis, known as Banyamulenge. They fled into Burundi two months ago to escape fighting in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Banyamulenge leaders said they faced genocide by Hutu Interahamwe and ex-FAR (Rwandan armed rebels) members who have been hiding in the DRC since participating in the 1994 genocide of up to a million Tutsis in Rwanda.
What happened at the United Nations-run Gatumba refugee camp last Friday has taken the pressure off Uprona and other Tutsi political parties in Burundi to knuckle down to the power-sharing agreement they have effectively accepted.
It has turned the searchlight back on the Forces for National Liberation (FNL) of Agathon Rwasa — the only Burundian rebel group still fighting.
The FNL admits it attacked the refugee camp. It says this happened in the course of a rebel hit on a military base 500m from Gatumba, during which FNL fighters took fire from the refugee camp. Soldiers fleeing the military base went into the camp and continued shooting from there.
The FNL says the government forces have not explained what happened during the six-hour delay between the incident and it being reported.
The Burundi army claims DRC soldiers were involved in the attack on the refugees. Burundian sources say Interahamwe, ex-FAR and Mai Mai cadres were with the FNL fighters attacking the military base.
The upshot is that both Burundi and neighbouring Rwanda have reserved the right to re-enter the DRC to hit at the Hutu rebels hiding there if they are not controlled.
The consequences of resurgence of conflict in the region are too ghastly to contemplate.
The dynamic has certainly changed for the better, with UN peacekeeping forces in both the DRC and Burundi. But if things turn nasty, no fewer than 3 000 South African soldiers in these two UN forces would be in the firing line.
Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame still blames the international community for not reading the warning signs in his country at the time of the 1994 massacre. He is determined not to repeat this error and so has rushed to contribute to the African Union protection force in Sudan and offered to send as many as 1 500 peacekeeping troops there if necessary. His Local Administration Minister, Christophe Bazivamo, warned last weekend that Rwanda was not prepared to be a spectator of genocide and would intervene in the DRC if necessary.
This warning should not be taken lightly, given the fact that Rwanda has attacked the DRC twice (in 1996 and 1998) to get at what it calls the ”genocidaires” and has killed far more Hutus in that country than could possibly have been involved in the genocide.
The massacre has affected the DRC’s tenuous transitional government, where one of the four vice-presidents, Azaria Ruberwa, is a Banyamulenge. His constituents are now asking what value there is in participating in the government if it cannot protect its most vulnerable citizens.
Judging from the briefing by South African Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Aziz Pahad, it would appear that the South African team went into Dar es Salaam with blood in its eyes. As chief facilitator in the Burundi peace process, Zuma has little patience with the FNL.
The threat of declaring it a terrorist organisation is rather shopworn. Zuma used it several times to get the larger rebel movement — the Forces for the Defence of Democracy of Pierre Nkurunziza — aboard in the transitional process.
This tactic has not worked with the FNL, which wants to call the Tutsis to account for decades of oppression before going into talks.
Pahad told reporters this week that if the FNL is responsible for the massacre it will be consigned to the same role of shame as Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge and the Renamo bandits in Mozambique.
”How can it call itself a liberation movement if it kills babies and children?” he asked. ”This would indicate that it doesn’t really want a settlement, and we will call on the international community to declare it a terrorist organisation — with all that that implies.”
The UN has indeed suspended negotiations with the FNL. But it has also called for a full-scale inquiry into what exactly happened at Gatumba before taking any further action.