The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa. Rene Lemarchand

referent perceived as a meaningful identity marker. The phrase, as Jean-Pierre Chrétien reminds us, is evocative of “the German tradition of a Volkgeist, as if a kind of common soul had emerged from the proximity of these lakes.”³ Though encompassing many of the shared cultural traits identified by the French historian—a high population density, the agropastoral tandem, the heritage of kingship, a tendency for outsiders to look at these societies through the lens of race, and so forth—in the end, he adds that what links these peoples and cultures together is “a kind of connivance born of multiple confrontations and countless encounters.”⁴ Since these words were written (1986), most of these encounters have been extremely bloody and their after-effects, devastating.

      At the root of these confrontations lies an array of forces and circumstances of enormous complexity. Most are the product of human decisions made during the colonial and postcolonial eras, but these must be seen in the perspective of the drastic changes that have taken place in the regional environment. Politics and geography intersect in different ways at different points in time, but the key variables remain the same. The potential for conflict is inscribed in the discontinuities in population densities, the availability of land, the cultural fault lines discernible in different language patterns, modes of social organization, and ecological circumstances. None of the above were fixed from time immemorial. As has been noted time and again, most recently by Michael Mann, modernity has gone hand in hand with eruptions of ethnic violence.⁵ Societies that were once held together by hierarchies of birth, rank, and privilege have been subjected to profound disruptions of their social fabric, ushering in “masterless men,”⁶ marginalized youth, and warlords in search of gold, diamonds, and coltan. Today's demographic explosion in Rwanda, resulting in a population density of 300 per square kilometer, is without parallel elsewhere, causing a drastic shrinking of cultivable land; areas where land hunger was almost unknown at the inception of colonial rule (as in Rutshuru and Masisi) are now saturated; deforestation has denuded large tracts of land, accelerating soil erosion and reducing crop cultivation;⁷ almost everywhere wildlife is fast disappearing, most notably hippos, elephants, and mountain gorillas, with profoundly negative effects on the region's ecosystem.⁸ Once described as a tourist paradise,⁹ today's Great Lakes region shows many of the symptoms of a Hobbesian universe.

      Convenient though it is to speak of the crisis in the Great Lakes in the singular, it makes more sense to think in terms of a multiplicity of crises, which, though historically distinct and occurring in specific national contexts, have set off violent chain reactions in neighboring states. The Hutu revolution (1959–62) in Rwanda was one such crisis. Another was the 1994 genocide. Both have sent shock waves through the region the first creating the conditions of a “partial genocide” of Hutu in Burundi in 1972, the second unleashing ethnic cleansing, population displacements, and civil war through many parts of the Congo, resulting in human losses far greater than in either Burundi in 1972 or Rwanda in 1994. To these we shall return in a moment, but before going any further, a note of caution is in order about some of the misconceptions surrounding the region's recent agonies.

      Challenging Received Ideas

      The belief that nowhere in the continent has violence taken a heavier toll than in Rwanda, with nearly a million deaths, overwhelmingly Tutsi, is one of the most persistent and persistently misleading ideas about the region. It may come as a surprise, therefore, that four times as many people have died in eastern Congo between 1998 and 2006. Although the exact number will never be known, a recent survey by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) shows that nearly four million people were killed from war-related causes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) since 1998, “the largest documented death toll in a conflict since World War II.”¹⁰ Citing the IRC survey, the British medical journal The Lancet recently drew the right conclusion: “It is a sad indictment of us all that seven years into this crisis ignorance about its scale and impact is almost universal, and that international engagement remains completely out of proportion to humanitarian need.”¹¹

      Ignorance in this case is largely a reflection of public indifference in the face of a situation that, however unfortunate, is generally seen by outside observers as African-made, rooted in the incorrigible greed of rival warlords and therefore, the responsibility of Africans. But this is only partially true. This is how a British journalist sees the other side of the coin in his coverage of “the most savage war in the world”: “it is also the story of a trail of blood that leads directly to you: to your remote control, to your mobile phone, to your laptop and to your diamond necklace…it is a battle for the metals that make our technological society vibrate and ring and bling.”¹² Western economic interests are indeed deeply involved in the conflict through their participation, direct or indirect, in the illicit trade in arms and mineral resources. Both span a wide network of companies, brokers, money changers, and facilitators. European companies—Belgian (Cogecom), Swiss (Finmining, Raremet), German (Masingiro), Dutch (Chemie Pharmacie)—figure prominently in the war economy of the region, a fact conclusively demonstrated by several outstanding investigative reports.¹³ Among various forms of the involvement of the United States, passing reference must be made to the joint venture between the American corporation Trinitech and the Dutch firm Chemie Pharmacie, in which the U.S. embassy in Kigali may have played a “facilitating” role. As reported by one well-informed observer, “the economic section of the U.S. embassy in Kigali has been extremely active at the beginning of the war in helping establish joint ventures to exploit coltan,” a fact carefully expunged from all official reports, leaving only Africans to be incriminated.¹⁴ Though seldom brought into the public domain, the share of responsibility of Western corporate interests in supporting a war economy that has resulted in the deaths of millions, cannot be ignored.

      Frequent reference to confrontations among warring factions as a “resource war” points to yet another misconception, for which Paul Collier deserves full credit.¹⁵ This is not to imply that “greed” is not a factor in sustaining the bloodshed; the point rather is that it never played the central role that Collier would like us to believe in setting in motion the infernal machine leading to interethnic and interstate violence. As recent academic research has shown, instead of invoking the logic of self-serving enrichment, the denial of economic opportunities, more often than not as a result of political exclusion, emerges as the critical factor in the etiology of conflict.¹⁶ The basic distinction here is between exclusion as the initial motive and greed as a propelling force at a later stage of intergroup violence. The passage from exclusion to greed is not automatic; it implies major changes in the regional field of politics that also point to basic shifts in identity patterns.

      Map 1. Ethnic map of North and South Kivu. Reproduced from Roland Pourtier, “Cong-Zaire-Congo: Un itinéraire géoplitque au coeur de I'Afrique,” Hérodote, nos. 86/87 (1997): 22, by permission of the author.

      Deconstructing Social Identities

      Tempting as it is to view ethnic diversity as the central determinant of violent behavior in the region, the evidence shows otherwise. To the extent that it does provide a meaningful point of reference, ethnicity is not a throwback to primeval enmities. Whether socially constructed, manipulated, invented, or mobilized, it is a recent phenomenon, even when its roots are sometimes traceable to precolonial times (as in the case of the Banyamulenge). Its contours, moreover, are constantly shifting, as are the human targets against which it is directed. Communities seen as allies one day are viewed as enemies the next. New coalitions are built for short-term advantage, only to dissolve into warring factions when new options suddenly emerge. In this highly fluid political field, conflict is not reducible to any single identity marker. It is better conceptualized as involving different social boundaries, activated at different points in time, in response to changing political stakes.

      HUTU VERSUS TUTSI: THE REDUCTIONIST TRAP

      No serious analyst of the recent history of the Great Lakes would deny the central significance of the Rwanda genocide on the polarization of Hutu-Tutsi identities throughout the region. Nonetheless, to reduce every conflict at every stage of its evolution to a straight Hutu-Tutsi confrontation is unconvincing. Such a dualism overlooks