The devastating ripple effects of the Rwanda cataclysm were felt immediately in eastern Congo. The sudden influx of over a million Hutu refugees across the border, accompanied by the fleeing remnants of the FAR and interahamwe, brought a major environmental and human disaster to the region, while at the same time triggering a drastic reordering of ethnic loyalties. Almost overnight the Banyarwanda community split into warring factions, pitting Hutu against Tutsi.11 Meanwhile, in the interstices of the Hutu-Tutsi tug-of-war, emerged a shadowy constellation of armed factions, the Mai-Mai. Drawn from ethnic groups indigenous to the region—Hunde, Nande, Nyanga, Bashi, and so forth—to this day, the Mai-Mai are notorious for the fickleness of their political loyalties, the fluidity of their political alignments, and their addiction to violence. Swiftly responding to changing circumstances, they first turned against Hutu elements, then against local Tutsi, and ultimately against the Rwandan invaders and their Congolese allies.
1996: THE TURNING OF THE TIDE
The destruction of the refugee camps by units of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), in October 1996, marks a turning point in the tortured history of the region. It signals the meteoric rise to power of Laurent-Desiré Kabila as the deus ex machina imposed by Museveni upon Kagame to lead the anti-Mobutist crusade under the banner of the AFDL. While the AFDL and its Rwandan allies fought their way to Kinshasa, forcing Mobutu to throw in the sponge in May 1997, the shooting up of the camps released a huge flow of refugees across the Congo, fleeing the RPA's search-and-destroy operations. The attack on the camps also marks the entry of new international actors in the Congolese arena, most notably Rwanda and Uganda. For a brief moment, the surge of popular enthusiasm caused by the overthrow of the Mobutist dictatorship seemed to submerge factional and ethnic divisions—but only for a while. With a substantial presence of Rwandans on the ground acting in military and administrative capacities, anti-Tutsi feelings rapidly spread among a broad spectrum of the Congolese population in North and South Kivu, in the Katanga, as well as in the capital city. Unable or unwilling to discriminate between Rwandan Tutsi, on the one hand, and Banyamulenge and fifty-niners on the other, for the self-styled “Congolais authentiques,” anyone with the looks of a Tutsi would be fair game when push came to shove in July 1998.
1998: THE TURNING OF THE TABLES
The next and most critical stage in the Great Lakes saga came in August 1998 when, sensing the liabilities involved in his dependency on Tutsi “advisors,” the new king of the Congo took the fateful step of turning against the kingmakers, thus paving the way for a replay of 1996. Yet the state of the play on the ground was now very different from the quasi-unanimous crusade of 1996. As 1998 drew to a close, no fewer than six African armies were involved, albeit to a greater or lesser extent, on the side of Kabila (Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Chad, Congo Brazzaville, and the Sudan). Against this formidable coalition stood the fragile alliance of Rwanda and Uganda and their Congolese client faction, the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD), soon to break up into two rival groups, while a third rebel faction emerged in northern Congo, Jean-Pierre Bemba's MLC.
The 1998 crisis brought to light an immediate hardening of anti-Tutsi sentiment throughout the Congo, and particularly in North and South Kivu, where it was now the turn of the Congolese “autochtons” (i.e., non-Banyarwanda) to pay the price of exclusion. Denied all possibility of political participation, economically exploited by Rwandan interlopers, and trampled underfoot by foreign occupying forces, their most salient common characteristic is their visceral hatred of all Tutsi, whether of Rwandan or Congolese origins. Little wonder that today the Mai-Mai are increasingly training their gun sights on RPA units operating in the Kivu—and in the process, unleashing a terrible retribution upon civilian populations—as well as on the Banyamulenge, even though the latter fully qualify as “autochtons.” Evidently, their deep historic roots in South Kivu do not exonerate them of the suspicion of being in league with the Kagame government. The truth is that the Banyamulenge and the ethnic Tutsi, in general, are anything but united in their attitude toward Kigali. Many Banyamulenge resent the fact that they have been instrumentalized by Kagame, that they have become mere pawns in the regional poker game. Most of them, however, privately admit that Rwanda's military presence in eastern Congo is their sole protection against another genocidal carnage.
To sum up: exclusion does not just suddenly materialize out of the primeval fissures of the plural society; its roots are traceable to the rapid mobilization of ethnic identities unleashed by the democratization of societies built on the “premise of inequality” and to the profoundly discriminatory implications of public policies directed against specific ethnic communities. In all three states, however, refugee flows were the crucial factor behind the rapid polarization of ethnic feelings in the host countries. Everywhere, refugee-generating violence has produced violence-generating refugee flows.
Dimensions of Exclusion
In the context of this discussion, political exclusion means the denial of political rights to specific ethnic or ethnoregional communities, most notably the right to vote, organize political parties, freely contest elections, and thus become full participants in the political life of their country. Obvious cases are the Tutsi in post-revolutionary Rwanda and the Hutu in Burundi until the 1993 aborted transition to multiparty democracy (some might argue that relatively little changed since then), to which must be added the Banyarwanda of eastern Congo, after being disenfranchised by the 1981 nationality law, as well as the Tutsi refugee diaspora of Uganda, for whom naturalization was never envisaged. Admittedly, political exclusion is a relative concept, both in terms of the range of disabilities suffered by the excluded communities, and the context in which it occurs. It is easy to see why, for example, in the context of Mobutu's dictatorship, the withdrawal of citizenship rights from the Banyarwanda did not produce the same violent reaction as the refusal of the Burundi authority to recognize the victory of the Hutu at the polls in 1965. Again, it is one thing for a minority to be politically excluded and quite another for a group representing 80 percent of the population to be reduced to a silent majority, as is clearly the case today for the Hutu of Rwanda.
Economic exclusion, on the other hand, refers first and foremost to the denial of traditional rights to land. Given that land is the principal economic resource of peasant communities, denial of access to land use inevitably implies economic impoverishment or worse. Here again contextual factors are important. Although rising population densities and environmental degradation are everywhere a fundamental aspect of the land problem, nowhere is the problem more acute than where land has been redistributed to meet the needs of machine politics (as in pregenocide Rwanda), or reallocated to new claimants (as happened in North Kivu in the 1970s when tens of thousands of acres of land were bought off by Tutsi fifty-niners), or where rural insecurity becomes a pretext for massive population transfers in regroupment camps (as in Burundi and northern Rwanda).
Social exclusion goes hand in hand with the erosion of traditional social networks and the collapse of the safety nets that once supported the traditional social order of peasant communities. The result is a growing marginalization of rural youth. Deprived of the minimal economic security and coping mechanisms built into the customary social nets, yet denied the opportunity to make their mark in life through alternative channels, their life chances are almost nil.
To be sure, political exclusion does not always imply economic exclusion. If there is little doubt that the 1959 Hutu revolution in Rwanda received its impetus from the political exclusion of Western-educated Hutu elites, it is equally clear that economic exclusion had relatively little to do with the Hutu-Tutsi conflict. One might even argue that in some instances, withdrawal of political rights translates into rising levels of economic achievement for the excluded community, as shown by the large number of relatively well-to-do Tutsi entrepreneurs in pregenocide Rwanda. Nonetheless, processes of political, economic, and social exclusion are closely interconnected: just as refugee diasporas have exacerbated the problem of natural resource scarcities in the host countries, most conspicuously in eastern Congo and to a lesser extent in Uganda, the resultant shrinkage of land capable of cultivation, along with the dislocation of traditional social networks, must be seen