Rwandan refugees adrift as alliances shift
Barney Jopson, Financial Times, February 18, 2009
The last time Yvonne Mukana, 28, saw Rwanda was nearly 15 years ago, when a tenth of the population of the country where she was born was killed in a genocide that claimed 800,000 lives.
Last week, amid the white tents of a United Nations refugee centre in Goma, in eastern Congo, she was preparing to return home with her baby daughter.
Ms Mukana’s migration is part of a broader realignment in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as its military dynamics change, new population movements begin and the future of its economy is thrown up in the air.
The changes stem from a deal forged by two former adversaries in the last three months of 2008, under which Joseph Kabila, the unassuming president of huge Congo, agreed to let Paul Kagame, his authoritarian counterpart in tiny Rwanda, send his troops to hunt militia men on Congolese soil.
In a region long beset by land and identity conflicts, which were super-charged by the genocide in 1994, the agreement has the potential to end waves of violence that have buffeted civilians around the North and South Kivu provinces of eastern Congo. But the deal could backfire – triggering fresh cycles of atrocities by Hutu and Tutsi militias that have continued Rwanda’s ethnic conflict in Congo and left Mr Kabila’s government in Kinshasa looking increasingly impotent.
“The importance of it is that it’s a new dynamic, which offers some hope,” said Sir John Holmes, the UN’s humanitarian chief, on a visit to eastern Congo this month. “It may prove to be a false dawn. It’s a big risk for both sides, no doubt. But there is a possibility of real progress.”
Eastern Congo is isolated from Kinshasa by vast tracts of rainforest, a cultural divide and the absence of state institutions and control. It was the area from which Africa’s 1998-2003 continental war spread but its votes helped Mr Kabila clinch his 2006 election triumph.
Leaving the region behind her, Ms Mukana says: “I want to go back to Rwanda. It’s my country.” She and 2,167 other refugees who the UN says trickled back into Rwanda in the first half of this month have been caught up in a Rwandan assault on two ethnic militias terrorising eastern Congo. One was founded by Hutu extremists who fled Rwanda in 1994 after taking part in the genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus. They hid among 1m refugees moving in the same direction, including a teenage Ms Mukana, herself a Hutu.
The other, the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), was set up to protect and advance the interests of Tutsis and led by Laurent Nkunda, a charismatic Congolese Tutsi preacher.
Mr Nkunda’s last offensive in October displaced 250,000 civilians and, with a presidential election due in 2011, Mr Kabila was threatened both by the rebel leader’s ability to control territory in the void left by the Congolese state and by his growing national political ambitions.
Mr Kabila took a huge risk by inviting in as many as 6,000 troops from a country reviled in Congo but the deal paid off when Mr Nkunda was caught by Rwandan troops.
Western diplomats say Rwanda was partly shamed into neutralising the rebel by a UN experts’ report in December that shone a light on the CNDP’s use of Rwandan territory and Rwandan finance.
Some members of the CNDP are being integrated into the Congolese army but others remain at large. One of thousands of displaced people still living in camps outside Goma since the October offensive is Damien Nyandaba. “We sleep outside like animals,” he says. “But how can I go back home when there are Rwandans all over the place?”
For Rwanda, the disbandment of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), the Hutu extremist militia, would be an obvious victory.
When the Rwandan offensive began the FDLR’s fighters fled deep into the bush and sent their wives and children to return to Rwanda via the refugee centre where Ms Mukana was waiting, according to one UN military official.
But in a sign that a new cycle of atrocities could be starting, Human Rights Watch, the New York based monitoring group, said last week the FDLR had slaughtered at least 100 civilians in the course of its retreat.
Some analysts, however, ask whether Rwanda’s final objective is something other than eradicating the FDLR, given that its existence as a threat to Rwandan security has helped the Kagame regime justify its authoritarian approach.
Michel Kassa, who heads ILCCE, a non-governmental organisation working to reconcile Congolese armed groups, says Mr Kagame is “looking to get a multiple entry visa” to Congo for his army.
Rwandan politicians and businesses have extensive interests in Congo’s raw materials, which originate mainly from Rwanda’s 1998 invasion, and Mr Kigali is keen to protect them.
“If there’s peace, Rwanda can control the region economically. But after the UN experts report, they’ve got to do it legally,” says another western diplomat in Kinshasa.
While Ms Mukana travels home in one direction, the influence of her country over Congo looks set to expand in the other.