Secondly, President Mobutu was considered by the RPF to be unwilling or unable to disarm militias and secure the border with Rwanda. Firstly, the presence of Rwandan refugees intermixed with perpetrators of genocide posed a continuing threat to the Rwanda government and Rwandan Tutsi more broadly. Rwanda’s involvement in the first DR Congo war was therefore a response to two interlinked issues. By 1996, recognising that UN and Zairian authorities would not act to disarm genocide perpetrators or separate them from other refugees, the Rwandan regime acted to neutralise the threat. These refugee forces conducted regular raids and attacks, both within Zaire on local Tutsi and across the border into Rwanda. It has only the bullets we have the population” (Martin, 1998: 159). Martin describes how the leader of a Rwandan Hutu nationalist party boasted in exile “even if the RPF has won a military victory it will not have the power. The UN and international agencies were unable to separate ordinary Hutu refugees from the genocidal militias, who used the structures of these camps to organise, train and sustain their forces, planning an armed return to Rwanda (Barber, 1997). Though the RPF had ended the genocide with its capture of Kigali in July 1994, it remained insecure as long as large numbers of Hutu, up to a quarter of the Rwandan population, were based in refugee camps on its border with Zaire. The influx of refugees after the genocide therefore put further pressure on an already fragile region. As Tutsi faced renewed violence and persecution in Rwanda from 1990, Zaire’s own Tutsi minority in the east, the area bordering Rwanda, also faced increasing marginalisation from political and public life. Prior to the 1994 genocide Zaire’s President Mobutu Sese Seko had been a close ally of Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana. Under cover of the French ‘Operation Turquoise,’ which established a ‘safe zone’ for civilians close to the Zairian border, over a million Hutu fled to Zaire, with hundreds of thousands of others fleeing to Uganda and Tanzania. However, the Hutu military and political leaders who had organized the genocide terrified Hutu civilians by claiming the RPF would seek revenge upon them if they stayed in Rwanda. In the face of UN and international inaction, the armed wing of the RPF fought the genocidal militias (known in Kinyarwanda as Interahamwe) and ended the genocide. The RPF were taking part in a peace process to negotiate their entry into Rwandan politics when the genocide began. The killings were eventually halted by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a mainly Tutsi rebel group that had been engaged in a civil war with the Government since 1990. The United Nations force in Rwanda at the time (UNAMIR) failed to protect civilians or to challenge the killers. Over the course of three months in 1994, members of the majority Hutu ethnic group (which make up around 85% of the population), organized and led by political and military leaders, killed over 800,000 members of the minority Tutsi group. It will also briefly outline the international response to the recent allegations and Rwanda’s involvement in DR Congo more broadly.Īt the root of Rwanda’s involvement in DR Congo is the experience which defines the Rwandan Government’s approach to both domestic and foreign policy – the 1994 genocide. This short essay will explain the current crisis by putting these latest developments in a historical context. The most recent episode in this saga was sparked by a UN Group of Experts report accusing Rwanda of providing weapons, recruits and military leadership for the ‘M23’, a Congolese rebel group which seized the town of Goma in November 2012. Relations between the two are rocky to say the least, characterised since 1996 by Rwandan intervention and involvement, both overt and covert, in its much larger neighbour. This vast territory borders nine states, including Rwanda. It was renamed Zaire after decolonisation and, in 1997, became the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo). At the centre of Africa lies the continent’s third largest state.
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