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Rwanda - The Division of the Land of a Thousand Hills

The New Times (Kigali)
OPINION
December 1, 2006
Posted to the web December 4, 2006

By Andrew Wallis
Kigali
THE UNTOLD STORY OF FRANCE'S ROLE IN RWANDAN GENOCIDE, Le pays des mille
collines, the land of a thousand hills, is one of Africa's treasures. Unlike
its neighbours Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), Tanzania and
Uganda, Rwanda is a tiny country, the size of Wales, insignificant at first
sight on the African and, indeed, world stage. Bordered by Lake Kivu and the
Volcano National Park to the north and west, most of its eight million people
survive their daily battle with poverty by relying on agricultural subsistence.
Its only claim to fame before the 1994 genocide was through the highly
dedi­cated and eccentric naturalist Dian Fossey and her attempts to save
mountain gorillas in the beautiful northern rain forest.
Life in Rwandan villages is often short and always hard for the average 48
years each man can hope to live, or for the 'more fortunate' women who can
expect to survive an extra two years of toil. The small huts that dot the lush
green valleys and hills, with scarcely a flat plateau in sight, are a picture
of the world of yesterday. No televisions, no cars, no computer games for the
children who instead run around playing happily with discarded tyres. Water is
more often than not carried up from the valleys to homes on the slopes by a
mixture of the old and young. There is no retirement here and no social
services to bail out the sick or elderly. Banana groves provide each family
with its staple food, eked out perhaps with a chicken or rabbit on special
occasions. These are cooked in charcoal fires as electricity is still a
wonderment of the future. While the population has grown in the urban areas -
the capital Kigali in the centre of the country, Ruhengeri and Gisenyi in the
north and the university town of Butare in the south - Rwanda is primarily a
rural economy. It relies on its tea and coffee plantations for commerce and on
the occasional tourist coming to see the gorillas. It has no mineral or diamond
riches with which its neighbour the Demo­cratic Republic of Congo has been
blessed, or some may say cursed.
To add to the mix of poverty and deprivation, Rwanda has become synonymous with
the myth of ethnic division. Most Europeans who know anything about the
genocide will venture the statement 'that was something between Tutsi and Hutu
wasn't it?' as a catch-all summary of the disaster. While Rwanda is made up of
three ethnic groups, the Hutu majority of around 85 per cent, the Tutsi
minority of roughly 12 per cent and the Twas, about 3 per cent, the reality is
that there is no intrinsic difference between them. It took the introduction of
identity cards bearing a person's ethnic grouping by Belgian colonizers in the
1930s to distinguish accurately between Hutus and Tutsis. And this was for
political reasons - part of the classic 'divide and rule' tactic so beloved of
colonizers everywhere. While the European stereotype places the majority Hutu
people as short and stocky and the Tutsis as tall and lean, outside ancient
anthropological and racial theory text­books such distinctions are meaningless.
A trip to any Kigali or Butare market will quickly prove that years of
intermarriage have blurred any easy distinctions. Instead, the Rwandan people -
Hutu, Tutsi and Twa - have been bound together for centuries, speaking their
own language, Kinyarwanda, tilling the same soil or breeding cattle and
worshipping the same ancestral deities - or more recently the Christian God.
Colonization by Germany in the 1890s, then by Belgium after the First World War
until independence in 1962, had a devastating effect on dividing Rwandans. A
country that until 1880 was ruled by a king
(Mwami), with the help of a village hierarchy and ancestral tradition, was
split apart 100 years later by a 'modern' world in pursuit of geo­strategic,
economic and political ambitions.
The Belgian rulers favoured the Tutsi, who took advantage of the imbalance to
gain increased land and local prestige. Shortly before Belgium pulled out of
the country and independence was declared on 1 July 1962, the legacy of its
policy of ethnic partiality became apparent. Belgium and the Catholic Church
switched their hand to supporting the majority Hutu 'underclass', thereby
creating a counter elite. Recognizing the political expediency of allowing the
majority to be in control once the state became independent, Belgium stood idly
by as its former colony was bathed in a frenzy of killing from 1959 to 1962.
Hutus 'settled scores' with their Tutsi masters who had been given control
under the colonial system. Hundreds of thousands were killed or fled to
neighbouring Uganda, Tanzania and Burundi, a problem that was to return to
haunt Rwanda in 1990. An estimated 700,000 Tutsis ended up in or around refugee
camps.
After Belgium's withdrawal in 1962, there was a slow but steady incorporation
of Rwanda into la Francophonie, the loose collection of former French colonies
now part of a 'French-African commonwealth'. With its former colonizers now
more interested in a pure economic aid relationship than in political and
military links, France moved in to take advantage of the cultural and
linguistic roots already in place.
The French Cultural Centre and embassy in Kigali encouraged con­tinued reliance
on Paris for all areas of life - language, arts, finance and military. Basic
areas of society became saturated with the trappings of the richer Western
country. Like other such African countries, Rwanda became 'a little island of
France, where French papers are available on the day they are printed, and
everything else, from telephone systems and tanks to pate, are French'. The
pre-1990 Rwandan army took part in training exercises with French legionnaires
and relied on its Western counterpart for support should a war break out. In
almost every aspect of Rwandan life, France made sure it was present. It was
classic neocolonialism - the tiny African state becoming a 'victim of an
indirect and subtle form of domination by political, economic, social, military
or technical means'.
On 20 October 1962 President de Gaulle and Rwandan headof state Gregoire
Kayibanda signed an agreement of 'friendship and cooper­ation', which was
broadened to include civil cooperation clauses (economic, cultural and
technical) by the end of that year. The Rwandan president, a former teacher
turned journalist whose anti-Tutsi pogroms had already caused some horrific
massacres that con­tinued until he was overthrown in 1973, made an official
visit to France in 1962, where he was effusive in his praise of de Gaulle. A
French ambassador to Rwanda was appointed in 1964 and, within ten years of
independence, Rwanda had become a fully-fledged Parisian suburb.
French intervention in Rwanda in the late 1980s and early 1990s was first and
foremost an attempt by Paris to keep its beloved francophonie intact. It was
symptomatic of 30 years of military intervention by Paris on the continent.
Despite appalling human rights abuses by its 'client' African governments,
France has continued to support dictators and regimes whose murderous policies
towards their own people have been well documented. The continuity of this
policy is as striking as its longevity through Presidents de Gaulle, Pompidou,
Giscard d'Estaing and Mitterrand, and has survived changing times, values and
world politics. Indeed, the term Francois-Xavier Verschave coined to highlight
the connection between France and its 'client' African states ­la Francafrique
- is not without irony, with 'fric' being French slang for money. Speaking in
1996, a diplomat in the Ivory Coast summed up the equation, 'You could talk
about the French presence for hours and hours but it comes down to two things -
prestige and business.
A number of different government departments in Paris, not all advo­cating the
same strategy, worked out French policy towards Rwanda and other client
francophone countries. Institutional competition was endemic in the politics of
African affairs. The ministries of defence, foreign affairs, cooperation and
the General Directorate for External Security (DGSE) - the secret service - all
vied for their own budgetary and bureaucratic well-being and influence in
policy making. The Ministry of Cooperation had been set up precisely to decide
on and to implement policy towards the newly independent states. Known somewhat
sarcastically as the 'Ministry of the African Neo-Colonies', its decisions
seemed to reflect the interests of French politicians rather than the good of
the states in which it operated. In fact, the real power behind African policy
lay with the president at the Elysee. Decisions were based on his judgement or
that of his personally appointed adviser at his special consultative body, the
secret Africa Cell, also embedded at the Elysee Palace. This 'individualistic'
diplomacy was given a public display of openness at the francophone political
sum­mits, when the French president invited friendly African heads of state to
a show of unity and hospitality.
French policy in Africa has always been based on personal ties between
respective presidents, their ministers and business leaders. In Rwanda it was
these personal ties that were to lead Paris into the heart of genocide. The red
carpet welcome that greeted the Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana on his
many visits to the French capital, with banquets, shopping trips and business
deals to cement relations, was symptomatic of how policy was made. Mitterrand's
son, Jean-Christophe, made personal links with African elites when his father
appointed him head of the Africa Cell. Such high level 'cronyism' gave the
president a secure, uncritical voice in African affairs. Jean-­Christophe, now
with the rather appropriate nickname papa m'a dit (daddy told me to), claimed
that the difference between the French and Anglo-Saxon way of dealing with
Africa was down to the hot-blooded Gallic nature. 'The French culture
corresponds better with the Africans' than the English culture does - it's our
Mediterranean side. Our ties are so much more personal.' His successor in the
Africa Cell office, Bruno Delaye, romantically reflected, 'France and Africa
are like an old couple. We argue, we disagree, but in the end we cannot
separate. We have too much, too many friends, in common.' For both men, and
indeed the whole edifice of francophone Africa, personal ties, deals done over
bottles of wine and contacts made in Paris clubs and Brazzaville mansions were
the way to unlock the many benefits that such close relationships had to offer.
The personal, political, military and economic justification for intervening in
this far-off region was to be found in a cultural and linguistic heritage. In
the Rwandan tragedy Paris was fearful not just of losing a client government
with which it could do business, but of having it replaced by that most
vilified of projected rivals 'les anglais'. The anxiety that French Africa is
under constant threat from the Anglo-Saxons pushing a zone of influence from
Ethiopia to South Africa has become almost pathological. It is an area of
policy that continues to unite socialist and Gaullist political groups and
seems to override all other political, military and strategic viewpoints and,
in the case of Rwanda, human rights and morality as well. .
This latter-day fear of Anglo-Saxon encroachment had its origins in the fiasco
at Fashoda a century earlier. In 1898, rather than risk war with Britain over
its African dependencies, the French government had faced a humiliating climb-
down by withdrawing its garrison under Commander Marchand from the Sudanese
town of Fashoda in the face of Kitchener's British expedition. Since then a
sense of 'never again' has motivated the policy of the Elysee, the French
foreign office at Quai d'Orsay and the military. It is a mindset, not official
policy, but it cannot be ignored. Central Africa was a francophone zone and
Rwanda, the perceived border of this French-speaking area, became in French
official thinking a 'Rubicon' that might allow an entry into la Francafrique
for perfidious Albion, and more importantly the United States.
This rivalry, born in the colonial era, has been exacerbated by French military
defeats in Indo-China and North Africa and the systematic march of American
culture and the English language around the world. Francois Mitterrand, as
minister of justice in 1957, declared, 'All problems that we French have had in
West Africa are not to do with a desire for independence, but with a rivalry
between French and British areas. It is British agents who have made all our
difficulties.' Rwanda became a 'linguistic Maginot line'. One French
commentator com­pared France with:
a large hen followed by a docile brood of little black chicks. ... The casual
observer imagining that money is the cement of the whole relationship would
have the wrong impression. The cement is language and culture. Paris's African
backyard remains its backyard because all the chicks cackle in French. There is
a high symbiosis between French and francophone African political elites. It is
a mixture of many things: old memories, shared material interests, delusions of
grandeur, gossip, sexual peccadilloes, in short a common culture.
A French journalist commented wryly, 'In Africa, France does not have a policy,
only bad habits.' In Rwanda's case, this 'bad habit', which politicians and the
public in Paris shrugged off, resulted in corpses decomposing outside Nyambuye
and throughout the tiny insignificant country. Ten years after the killing
Sister Ignatia still sits in her convent, reliving daily the screams of the
murdered. 'I don't understand how people can hate each other so much,' she
sighs. 'God created all men equal.'
The series continue tomorrow


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