Meanwhile, the Rwandan government’s position on internal politics seemed to soften. That March, the government, under pressure from the international community and from its own jurists, released eight thousand suspected RPF sympathizers who had been detained since January.26 In June, the president promulgated a new constitution that allowed multiparty political competition. On June 18, the legislature, the National Development Council (CND), passed the Political Parties Law and the race to establish political parties took off.27 By the end of the year, the CND finally passed two amnesty laws, one for refugees and exiles and one for persons within the country convicted of infractions of the law short of violent crimes.
THE OAU PROMOTES ANOTHER SUMMIT
At the OAU Summit in June, pressure built for another try at peacemaking. The OAU chiefs of state directed the secretary general of the organization to convene another regional summit to continue the mediation process. Accordingly, Mobutu hosted a meeting at Gbadolite to work out the terms of a new ceasefire. With the witness of the president of Nigeria, as new chairman of the OAU, the parties signed on September 16 a ceasefire agreement, seen as a revision of the understanding reached at N’sele six months earlier. The major change was in the makeup of the military observer group; this time it was to be composed of Nigerian and Zairean officers. Political dialogue was also initiated at Gbadolite, but the mediator broke it off in ten days, exasperated at RPF intransigence.
Absent a ceasefire reinforced by political dialogue, renewed fighting broke out in December and January, allowing the RPF to demonstrate its capacity to attack and leaving it with a permanent foothold in northern Rwanda, thus confirming its status as an “internal” insurgency. Back in Kigali, negotiations to install a multiparty government under the June constitution stalled; in frustration, a new government was finally sworn in on December 30, naming Sylvestre Nsanzimana as prime minister and including only one minister who was not from the president’s party. In response to renewed fighting in the north, the government increased the size of the army fivefold, turning the usually balanced budget into deep deficit.
RESULTS OF SUMMITRY
A year and a half after the October 1990 RPF attack, the regional chiefs of state had little to show for their considerable efforts to stop the fighting and arrange a peace through summit agreements. Undertakings at the summits did move the parties closer to recognizing each other as antagonists with whom to negotiate. The chiefs of state laid out quite early the elements of a putative peace process: ceasefire, political dialogue, military observer group, and peacekeeping force. The implication was that goals of peace and security required an international intervention that was both political and military in nature.
But the summit discussions were based on faulty assumptions, namely, that the issues at stake were subject to presidential decision; that the contending parties ultimately wanted peace; and that ceasefires, military observer groups, or peacekeeping deployments could be created ex nihilo by spoken agreement. But neither the respective states nor the Organization of African Unity had the capacity to organize and operationally structure the peace process or ensure the compliance of the parties. Finally, intrinsic to summitry is failure continually to attend to the problem. Interveners responded to violent outbreaks rather than systematically addressing root causes of the conflict.28 Clearly, if peace was to return to Rwanda, the levels of international engagement would have to be broadened.
Donors Respond
France and Belgium, the top two states engaged in assistance to Rwanda, reacted immediately to the October 1990 RPF incursion. President Habyarimana stopped by Paris and Brussels on his way home from New York and secured the promise of military assistance from President Mitterrand and King Baudouin. Both sent troops to Kigali, presumably to protect the capital city and the expatriates living there but obviously reinforcing the Rwandan military’s capacity to carry the battle to the field. While France dealt directly with the Rwandan government and was an observer of the summit talks held under Mobutu’s auspices, the Belgian approach was to send a high-level delegation to all capitals of the region to seek out regional African views and encourage a more vigorous African response to the crisis. Belgians seemed skittish about any direct engagement; the very fact that the Belgian foreign minister was visiting the region in regard to the Rwanda crisis raised an outcry in the Belgian press and in parliament. Once the situation on the front seemed stabilized and the capital city no longer threatened, Belgium withdrew its combat forces but left in place a military training mission working with the gendarmerie. By act of parliament, Belgian military assistance was limited to training, technical assistance, and nonlethal military materiel. Thereafter, Belgium settled into a watching brief, ready to demarche the Rwandan or Ugandan governments as interests required, but with no intention to mediate. Recognizing that the French, because of their troop presence in Rwanda, had the larger say and the larger headaches, Belgium tended to support French initiatives in the region.29
After the failures of regional initiatives, the French director of African affairs, Paul Dijoud, offered to mediate in August 1991, and in October he tried to bring the Rwandan government and the RPF together in Paris. Because high-level RPF representation was absent, Rwandan foreign minister Bizimungu declined to participate. In November, France sent an observer mission to the Rwandan-Ugandan frontier to assess the nature of cross-border incursions. As 1992 opened, Dijoud tried again to organize direct negotiations between the Rwandan government and the Rwandese Patriotic Front. By mid-February, the French foreign ministry admitted that the initiative had been a failure. The problem was twofold: first, the internal situation in Rwanda was “explosive and deteriorating,” with Hutu hardliners in the president’s entourage actively opposing moves toward democratization. Second, neither the Rwandan government forces nor the RPF had shown the capacity to prevail militarily, but the RPF seemed determined to fight on until Habyarimana was removed. In the French foreign ministry’s view, the RPF would continue to secure supplies and establish safe haven north of the border; Uganda would not prevent the use of its territory as a springboard for RPF operations.30
VIOLENCE AND DIPLOMACY
The fragile internal situation became evident in March 1992 in another outbreak of ethnic violence, this time in the southeastern area of Bugesera, a region of new settlement that had attracted Tutsi pushed out of more populous zones to the west and north. The attacks occurred as political parties pressured Habyarimana for a coalition national government in Kigali and for changes in communal and regional (prefecture) governance. Although young thugs, presumably in political hire, led the attack, local authorities were slow to intervene, and some even encouraged the violence. Eventually the National Gendarmerie had to stop the fracas in which some one hundred persons died and twelve thousand were displaced from their homes.31 France, Belgium, Germany (also representing the president of the European Community), Switzerland, Canada, and the United States joined in a vigorous demarche that reminded the Rwandan president of his government’s responsibility to stop killings and destruction and to ensure peace and security.32
Both the donors and the government cast the demarche in the larger context of Rwanda’s political evolution. The demarche called for the creation of a multiparty government “with the least possible delay” and urged moderation in media broadcasts. Inaction by Rwandan authorities, the ambassadors warned, could jeopardize the future of cooperative programs. The president said he shared the ambassadors’ preoccupation but blamed, in part, the rabble-rousing rhetoric of opposition leaders. In his brief on the security situation, the interior minister noted that the onset of violence