NYT: The Dark Underside of Rwanda’s Model Public Image

DO NOT DISTURB
The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad
By Michela Wrong

In 1996, when I was a Times reporter in Africa, an insurrection broke out in the eastern stretches of a country twice as large as Western Europe and then known as Zaire. Like almost every journalist based in the capital, Kinshasa, in the country’s far west, I struggled to understand how a rebel group that no one had heard of three months earlier could have morphed into the army that would soon march across the country and drive from power its dictator and longstanding American client, Mobutu Sese Seko. Making the story all the stranger, this force was supposedly built from an ethnic community considered marginal even in its home region.

The explanation, which began to emerge only after the “rebellion” was well underway, was that this was no local uprising that had snowballed in popularity and momentum as it swept westward — the cover story backed by American diplomats and initially conveyed unquestioningly by many journalists or depicted as a positive development. It was a carefully disguised invasion by tiny, neighboring, post-genocide Rwanda of a country 90 times its size.

The details of Rwanda’s role in that war, and in a second invasion less than two years later of what by then had been renamed the Democratic Republic of Congo, have been minutely chronicled by historians and specialists of the region, including the millions of deaths. Yet these events, and Rwanda’s continuing economic exploitation and military dominance over the border, have left remarkably little trace on its gilded reputation under the leadership of a man named Paul Kagame, who remains a darling of the international donor community and the Davos crowd.

Much the same can be said of Rwanda’s record on human rights, which under Kagame has included a campaign of assassinations targeting his exiled critics. After the most famous of these killings, that of his former spy chief Patrick Karegeya, in 2013, a smiling Kagame told a national prayer breakfast: “Whoever is against our country will not escape our wrath. The person will face consequences.”

“Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad,” by the longtime Africa specialist Michela Wrong, stands out as perhaps the most ambitious attempt yet to tell the dark story of Rwanda and the region’s deeply intertwined tragedies for a general audience. Wrong’s account unfolds on two separate planes. The first is an efficient history of the region. Most readers know little about East Central Africa’s past other than the Rwandan genocide, whose intensity and scale, Wrong notes, rank it among the greatest horrors of the 20th century. But as she makes abundantly clear, that tragedy was but one piece in an interlocking puzzle of ethnic atrocities and military gambits in the region.

This cycle of tragedy began under European rule, when first Germans and then Belgians began formalizing ethnicity in what are now Rwanda and Burundi. The Europeans spun racial fantasies about the colonies’ two main ethnic groups, conjuring distant origins for the often tall and long-legged Tutsi, pastoralists who represented around 14 percent of the population. Tutsi were thus set apart from the shorter, stouter Hutu farmers, who made up 85 percent of the populace. In fact, the two groups share a language and a history of intermarriage, and their identities were traditionally somewhat fluid. Under Belgian rule, the divide was further sharpened with the introduction of ID cards that specified one ethnicity or another, along with that of a third group, a minuscule minority known as the Twa.

The Belgians strongly preferred the admission of Tutsi in modern schools and in the colonial administration. Then, in 1959, three years before independence, as Wrong recounts, the colonizers abruptly reversed course. Fearing Marxist radicalization among the Tutsi, they began to favor the Hutu. As Hutu swept to power in Rwanda’s 1961 elections, scattered Hutu pogroms against the Tutsi broke out. With Belgian approval, the newly empowered Hutu abolished the Tutsi monarchy, traditionally the most important political institution in the land. Threatened and marginalized, Tutsi began pouring into neighboring countries, especially Uganda.

The violence between the two groups escalated monstrously in 1972, with a coup attempt in Burundi, whose ethnic composition mirrors that of Rwanda. Little heed was paid to it at the time, and Wrong mentions it only in passing, but the coup turned into one of the worst ethnic killing sprees of the 20th century. Hundreds of thousands of Hutu were slaughtered by a Tutsi army, and thousands of others streamed into Rwanda, where tales of their persecution further radicalized the Hutu majority. Twenty-two years later, the much larger genocide against Rwandan Tutsi took the world by surprise, but the Burundi coup had set the stage.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com