When African politics becomes personal: The legacy of war and genocide in Rwanda, Uganda and Congo

President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, former comrades in arms, have fallen out again. It is strategic, personal — and dangerous. Never slow to pick up the gun — Kagame in particular — both of them have large armies and also control and supply militias in the region. This dispute could destabilise it.

Museveni, now 74, and Kagame, 61, go back a long way. The two men came together during the chaotic years after 1979, when the notorious Ugandan President Idi Amin was overthrown. After the Tanzanian army drove Amin out of Uganda, the politicians squabbled among themselves. Two presidents were rapidly deposed and Milton Obote, who had been Uganda’s first President after independence, was re-installed.

Obote was a northerner and the army was essentially a northern army. The southern Ugandans resisted and several armed groups took to the forests to fight guerrilla campaigns against him. In 1985 Obote was overthrown again, this time by General Tito Okello, the head of the army and an Acholi, another northerner. That did not stop the civil war.

While the politicians in Kampala continued to bicker, Museveni stayed away from Kampala and began to build a guerrilla movement in southern Uganda to overthrow Okello. He recruited young southern Ugandans — including many child soldiers under 14 — to fight a Maoist-style guerrilla war. It was motivated and highly disciplined. The Kidogos (“little kids”) were taught guerrilla tactics and fought well, but they also followed the curriculum in bush schools.

The leadership of Museveni’s movement was from western Uganda and included several exiled Rwandese Tutsis. Among them were Paul Kagame, his spy-master, and Fred Rwigema, his charismatic frontline general. In the late 1950s and early 1960s their families had fled to Uganda to escape the periodic mass killings of Tutsis by the majority Hutus in Rwanda. They grew up in refugee camps and poor areas of Uganda, but they never lost their dream of going home to Rwanda.

On January 26 1986, Museveni’s bush army captured Kampala. After years of chaos Uganda — at least the south — was liberated. It really felt like a new beginning. Museveni did not go in for theatrical rule. He was the quiet man. In the early days he would frequently come to London. Africa journalists would get a call from Professor George Kiyria, the High Commissioner, and we would meet him in some modest hotel for a press conference. He seemed to enjoy the conversations, often asking us how he was doing. Most African presidents travel with a substantial entourage. Museveni would have only one or two assistants.

He knew he could not rule the whole country with people from his own district in western Uganda. That meant he could not employ too many Tutsis from Rwanda, such as Kagame and Rwigyema. So they decided to go back to their own country. One night they raided the Ugandan arms stores and set off. Museveni seems to have turned a blind eye; maybe he gave them the keys to the armouries.

But when Rwigyema crossed into Rwanda he seems to have abandoned the probative strategy they had used in the Uganda guerrilla campaign. He crossed the border in force and attacked the French-trained and well-supplied Rwandan army. Rwigyema was one of the first to be killed, almost certainly by French special forces. Who fired the fatal missile is still disputed. On the death of Rwigyema, Paul Kagame left America and flew to Rwanda to take command of the rebel army. Rwigyema’s death stopped the invasion for a while and peace talks began.

Most French and British diplomats and analysts saw this as a re-occurence of the Hutu-Tutsi bloodlettings that had afflicted Rwanda and Burundi for decades. In 1993 few people expected a well-organised attempt to exterminate the Tutsis. But on April 6 1994 Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was killed when his plane was shot down near Kigali airport. The Hutu population, already indoctrinated by propaganda about the “foreign” Tutsis, turned on them. They killed anyone who looked like a Tutsi. They used bullets, axes, knives, stones and sticks. Tutsi women and children were raped and then slaughtered. Some had their legs cut off and were left to die. Many were forced into their huts and burned alive. It is estimated that between 800,000 and a million died in the Rwandan genocide. At the time, the world looked the other way. One reason was that the world’s press was in South Africa reporting the country’s first democratic election.

Kagame’s highly motivated army — battle-hardened by the civil war in Uganda — defeated the Rwandan army and drove them, along with the French military contingent, out of the capital and the country. The remnants of the Rwandan army they had trained, as well as hordes of Hutu killers, with their families, were chased westwards into the Democratic Republic of Congo, looting and killing as they went. They walked all the way in their trademark green wellington boots and on May 19 1997 they hit Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, and drove out the sick and dying Mobutu Sese Seko. In his place they put Laurent Kabila, a man who had once been an opponent of Mobutu, but had become a bar owner in Tanzania. Kagame pulled out his army, leaving a contingent of child soldiers in Kinshasa to guard President Kabila. But once in power Laurent Kabila tried to escape Rwandan control. When he refused to obey orders from Kagame, his Rwandan guards killed him. Kagame replaced him with his son, Joseph.

The conflict began as personal, became political and evolved into Africa’s first continental war. The second victims of the Rwandan genocide were the Congolese. The Congo, the rich heart of Africa, became a carcass, torn to pieces by 13 African “peace-keeping” armies led by the Rwandans and Ugandans. Other neighbouring African countries began to see the opportunities and sent in their armies under the guise of peacekeeping. The wealth of Congo, from timber to minerals, was at their feet and they grabbed it — especially the Rwandan and Ugandan presidents and their generals. The loot began to be taken out eastwards to Uganda and Rwanda, while the weapons came westwards, deeper into Congo. The further the armies went into Congo, the slower they moved and the longer the supply chains — loot going eastwards, weaponry westwards.

Rwanda’s looting was state controlled. Uganda’s engagement was more personal and chaotic. All the individual generals from the African armies were shipping minerals and timber across the border and selling them internationally.

In 1998 Kisangani, the country’s second city, was where Museveni and Kagame finally fell out. The city became their battleground. According to UN observers, 6,000 shells landed in the residential areas of the city, killing hundreds of civilians. The survivors fled as their homes were bombed, looted and wrecked. Neither Kagame nor Museveni would back down. The battle was personal. No one knows the exact figures, but most experts on the region estimate that both should have been sent to the International Criminal Court. Instead the US and Europe looked the other way while diplomatically supporting them.

There are paradoxes here. Uganda’s generals became immensely wealthy and built themselves palaces, while Rwanda became a darling of the aid donors. Partly because of their guilt at not stopping the genocide and partly because of Kagame’s clarity and decisive leadership, they did not question his aims or methods. Kagame spent well, building a new city for the capital as well as substantial health and education systems. He “re-educated” the population, forcing everyone to confess their guilt and crushing any dissent. If anyone questioned his rule, they were locked up or disappeared. Hill by hill the entire population was taught about the genocide. Kagame also created a formidable spy network that watched every Rwandan.

The 1994 Rwandan genocide is still commemorated globally every year. That is quite right. But where is the memorial to the estimated 5 million people who were killed or died of hunger or disease after Rwanda’s invasion of Congo, between 1994 and 2003?