by hilzoy
From the South Africa Broadcasting Company:
“Rwanda’s main Hutu rebel group announced yesterday they were ending their war against Rwanda and for the first time denounced the 1994 genocide of Tutsis that has been blamed on many of their members. A delegation representing the rebel organization, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), made the announcement after secret negotiations at the Sant’Egidio religious community in the heart of Rome. “The FDLR condemns the genocide committed against Rwanda and their authors,” Ignace Murwanashyaka, FDLR President said, reading from a statement. “Henceforward, the FDLR has decided to transform its fight into a political struggle.”
Hutu rebels are accused of taking part in the massacre of 800 000 Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994. Until yesterday, many FDLR fighters had denied genocide occurred, calling the killings tit-for-tat attacks. Murwanashyaka said his group was ready to cooperate with international justice and would lay down its arms in a bid to end the “catastrophic humanitarian” situation in the region.
The Hutu rebels were chased out of Rwanda following the genocide, taking refuge in the jungles of neighboring Congo. Since then they have been at the center of tensions in the vast country’s eastern region where violence, hunger and disease have killed millions of people. A representative of the Democratic Republic of Congo hailed the FDLR move, saying it was an historic moment for Africa.”
Background and context below the fold.
The FDLR is a group of Rwandan Hutus based in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, across the border from Rwanda. It includes “key members of the 1994 genocide, plus Hutu members of the former Rwandan army, as well as a mix of displaced Rwandan Hutus.” According to Alison Des Forges, “The original group of soldiers and militia chased from Rwanda in 1994 has been much reduced by death and desertions over the last decade. But it has been joined by new Rwandan recruits not involved in the 1994 genocide but opposed to the current Rwandan government.” The FDLR’s army is thought to have between 8,000 and 15,000 troops. The BBC writes:
“According to a well-informed military analyst in this region, the Hutu FDLR, far from being the ragtag marauding militia they are sometimes portrayed as, are in fact a well-organised unit with impressive military command and control.
“They’re one of the most effective armies in this region” said the military analyst, who asked not to be named.”
As usual with private militias who take up residence in obscure parts of the world, the FDLR has brought misery to the people in whose land they have set up camp, people who were poor even before the FDLR started looting and pillaging. Moreover, as noted, they include perpetrators of genocide, so they are more than usually revolting. But they are important for one additional reason. The Democratic Republic of Congo is trying to emerge from two horrible civil wars, during which an estimated 3.8 million people were killed.
Three million, eight hundred thousand people. Think about it. It’s hard to remind oneself of this too often, especially since most news organizations hardly remind us of it at all.
Both of these civil wars started when Rwanda invaded the Congo. And both times what precipitated the Rwandan invasion was the presence of the FDLP just over the border, launching raids into Rwandan territory and plotting to invade Rwanda and overthrow its government. Rwanda’s actions have, in my view, been truly irresponsible, but the fact that they were taken in response to a group that had committed genocide only a few years previously, and that was plainly interested in retaking the country, makes the Rwandan government’s actions a lot more comprehensible than they would have been otherwise.
There is a peace agreement in place, but it is very shaky:
“As it approaches the end of its second year, the Congo’s transition risks breaking apart on the unreconciled ambitions of the former civil war belligerents. Inability to resolve political differences in Kinshasa have been mirrored by new military tensions that the parties, as well as Rwanda, have stirred up in the Kivus, the birthplace of both wars that ravaged the country in the past decade. June 2005 national elections are imperilled, and 1,000 are dying daily in the ongoing political and humanitarian crisis. To reverse these ominous trends, the international community needs to use the leverage its aid gives it to rein in the spoilers in Kinshasa, and it needs to do a better, quicker job of training the new Congolese army. And the UN Mission (MONUC) needs to get tougher in dealing with the Rwandan insurgents, the FDLR, who provide Kigali with a justification for dangerous meddling. (…)
Any peace initiative in the east must address the presence of the 8,000-10,000 Hutu rebels of the Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Rwanda (FDLR). They have been severely weakened and are no longer a strategic threat to Kigali but they are still able to conduct raids into Rwanda, and are a serious threat to civilians in the Congo, where they constitute a liability for the transition. The new Congolese army has ultimate responsibility for dealing with the FDLR but the army will remain weak and disorganised for the foreseeable future.”
Just a few months ago, history seemed to be repeating itself: Rwandan troops seem to have entered the Congo again, citing provocation by the FDLR. Luckily, this time the incursion did not lead to a third civil war. However, given the faltering peace process, the weakness of the DRC’s government and its army, the presence of the FDLR in the eastern Congo and its raids into Rwanda, and the continued interest of outside parties in perpetuating instability in the area, the prospects for long-term stability were not looking good.
This is why it would be really significant if the FDLR does, in fact, admit to genocide, renounce military struggle, and return to Rwanda. This would mean that the single most likely trigger for a third Congo civil war had been removed, and it would make the prospects for peace much brighter. There are still a lot of questions — most notably, what the Rwandan government will offer in the way of guarantees that the FDLR fighters can return safely, and whether what they offer will satisfy the FDLR. From SABC:
“Diplomats in Rome said it was now up to the Rwandan government to provide guarantees that disarmed rebels could return home safely and be awarded full legal rights. Returning former FDLR fighters to the killing grounds of 1994 would not pose a problem, Sezibera [an advisor to the Rwandan President] said. “We’ve had a long process of integrating these groups. They don’t pose an insurmountable challenge. The important thing is that they cease to be a security threat to Rwanda,” he said.
However, FDLR fighters suspected of involvement in the genocide would be investigated and tried, he added. UN and government officials in Kinshasa said there would be a follow-up meeting in Rome tomorrow at which the different groups, including the United Nations, would discuss the methods and timing of the disarmament and repatriation.”
Still, it’s a hopeful sign in a region that could use one.
***
While I’m writing about Rwanda, I should also note that HBO is showing an original movie about the Rwandan genocide, called ‘Sometimes in April’. It’s very good, and (for a change) focuses on Rwandans themselves. I recommend it.
That is good news, of a rather bitter kind. Any upturn in that heartbreaking story is welcome. Let’s hope it lasts, and stabilizes.
Three million, eight hundred thousand people. Think about it. It’s hard to remind oneself of this too often, especially since most news organizations hardly remind us of it at all.
One of the greatest lies is the lie of distortion. When something small happens to you, it is the end of the world. So despite the infamies of genocide in the twentieth century, that sad parade never slowed down its parade into this one. We say 9/11 changed everthing.
Nice work.
No, only our awareness of what the world is like changed. Because what happens to the rest of the world every day finally happened to us. As we look at our wounded face of pride in the mirror, we never notice the dead behind us from other parts of the world. Is there hope for the American Narcissus?
The Heretik believes always there is hope. One must find the will to endure, to endure all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to see that glimmer of light that is the prevailing dawn.
One of the greatest lies is the lie of distortion. When something small happens to you, it is the end of the world.
You’re also missing the single greatest problem in this regard: the human inability to comprehend events beyond a certain magnitude. [And this coming from a mathematician whose job consists of trying to comprehend the infinite!] See, as the example par excellence, “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.”
Anarch, I too think of that famous Stalin quote. However, I suggest that the advent of nuclear weapons has given us a way to consider, though perhaps not truly comprehend, death on a large scale.
Approximate prompt deaths at Hiroshima: 130,000. Approximate force of the bomb: 13 kilotons. A similar bomb ignited in Manhattan on a work day might kill as many as 1,000,000.
Anarch,
you call it a bug, I call it a feature. If we could really comprehend the death (and suffering) of that many people, we’d probably end it all right there.
Of course, this is different than wilful blindness, but I suspect that those whose arguments are oblivious are actually more sensitive and therefore create these sorts of defenses. Or at least hope that’s true.
“Hutu rebels”
What?!
Now the South African BC may simply be guilty of imprecise phrasing here, but the massacres in 1994 were not carried out by “Hutu rebels,” but by the government of Rwanda, the established “Hutu Power” government, in purported retaliation for the assasination of President Juvenal Habyarimana (probably a palace coup, but surely not a rebellion). Government forces participated in the slaughter, and the government issued explicit proclamations instructing the Hutu population to slaughter their Tutsi neighbors; government pronouncements even gave explicit instructions on how to swing the machetes most effectively, and warned the killers not to dispose of bodies in sources of fresh water. The genocide was finally stopped when the RPF, a Tutsi insurgent force, invaded from neighboring Zaire and Uganda and eventually defeated the Hutu army (while the UN troops stood by and shrugged at the carnage). The Hutu government and army fled largely intact across the border to the Congo, where the UN was waiting to set up vast refugee camps and abet the Hutu strategy of rewriting history with the Hutus as the victims. The RPF has cooperated in this victimology experiment by perpetrating several massacres of their own, notably at Kibeho, where they “closed” a refugee camp by machine-gunning everyone in it. Nothing the RPF did aproached the scale or type of the government-sponsored attepted extinctions perpetrated by the Hutus, but they were enough to allow the narrative to shift somewhat to a story of mutual retaliation. Thus the statement “the genocide committed against Rwanda” – if you scratch that, I’ll warrant that you will find the FDLR is talking about much more than the Tutsi extermination.
But what the hell, maybe that’s what is necessary, for history to be rewritten just a little bit, to loosen the strictures of the facts and let everyone move on. Of course it’s good news. Sigh.
What’s your schedule for completing that, I wonder?
Odd. I’ve seen basis for 130k total casualties, but not deaths. There’s an interesting treatment of this subject here. There’s also an extensive background discussion that uses the same data over at the Avalon Project.
st: It’s conceivable that someone started out using the term ‘Hutu rebels’ to describe them now (since it’s accurate now), and either kept on using the term during the historical part of the piece, or else considered using ‘Hutus’ plain and simple, but thought, that would make it unclear that it’s these same Hutus we’re talking about, not Hutus in general. (Personally, I would have rewritten the whole thing, but if for some reason I couldn’t, I would have gone with something like: ‘The FDLR fighters were chased out of Rwanda …’ — it’s completely anachronistic, since the persons in question were not FDLR fighters at the time, but at leat the anachronism is more obvious, and thus less likely to mislead.)
At any rate, I’d rather think of it as an editing glitch than as an attempt to rewrite history.
Slarti
I believe that ‘prompt’ means within a year of the bombing. I also think that estimate is based on the rice ration records for the city to determine the number of people. This record doesn’t count Korean slave laborers, military personnel, and POWs, concerning whom no notification was made until 1983. (obviously, the 20 listed are not going to make up all the difference, but just to note the another source of problems) This is not to say which is wrong or right, just to note that there are other factors that would suggest a higher death toll.
Slarti,
Source for the 1,000,000 estimate on Manhattan: Garwin, Nuclear and Biological Megaterrorism.
130,000 may be high, perhaps 100,000 is right. No one has an exact count of course.
Of course not. I read “prompt” as right away, which was rather at odds with the 70k or so immediate deaths estimated elsewhere. I’m not all that much bothered by the slave-labor discrepancy, mostly because no one really has any idea. I’ve seen some estimates that use pre-evacuation population as a basis, which seems flawed.
I didn’t have any issue with the 1 million number. I don’t necessarily buy their analysis (in truth I haven’t thought about it long enough to form any sort of thoughtful opinion), but I’d believe that at minimum 100k people would die, which is far, far too many.
What’s your schedule for completing that, I wonder?
Effectively infinite.
Slarti,
I’m not trying to quibble about numbers. Rather, I’m trying to offer an approach for appreciating a huge tragedy as something other than just a statistic.
An alternative, one that moved me profoundly, is to visit the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington, D.C. It is a powerful example of the number 58,245, or approximately 1/2 of Hiroshima (please be kind to me regarding the comparison and the rounding).