As the end of the Cold War drew near, the plight of the Tutsi refugees finally came to the attention of the West, which began pressuring Rwanda’s government to allow the refugees to return. At first, Rwanda’s President Juvenal Habyarimana refused. Rwanda was among the most densely populated countries in the world, and its people, dependent upon peasant agriculture, needed land to survive. The population had grown since the refugees left, and Rwanda was now full, Habyarimana said. However, by August 1990, international pressure had forced him to agree, in principle, to a negotiated return of the refugees. Unfortunately, the Tutsi refugees, dreaming of their lost dominion, were no longer interested in negotiation. They wanted power, not just passports. They invaded Rwanda two months later.
During the three and a half year civil war that preceded the genocide, Ugandan operatives supplied the RPF with weapons in violation of the UN Charter, Organization of African Unity rules, a UN Security Council Resolution, various Rwandan ceasefire and peace agreements, and Museveni’s own promises.
The U.S. embassy in Kampala monitored the traffic in weapons and personnel between Uganda and the RPF inside Rwanda but did nothing to stop it; nor did the George H. W. Bush or Clinton administrations impose sanctions on Uganda such as foreign aid cuts or an arms embargo. On the contrary, U.S. foreign aid to Uganda nearly doubled during this period. In 1991, Uganda purchased ten times more U.S. weapons than in the preceding forty years combined.
As Rwanda’s increasingly weak Hutu-dominated government reluctantly acceded to the RPF’s demands for power, Hutu extremists who had long feared a Tutsi onslaught from Uganda roused the population using the specter of a return to a time, still fresh in the memory of older people, when the Tutsis made them feel like slaves in their own country. Four months before the genocide, the CIA accurately predicted that panicked Hutus could unleash extreme violence, resulting in up to half a million deaths. By then, the Rwandan government had been rightly subjected to an arms embargo. However, the Clinton administration continued to arm Uganda, which continued to arm the RPF.
By July 1994, hundreds of thousands of people had been killed, the vast majority of them innocent Tutsis who had nothing to do with the RPF, including children and even infants. The hatred the Hutu extremists unleashed represents the worst that human beings are capable of. But in considering what led to this disaster, it’s important to bear in mind that the violence wasn’t spontaneous. It emerged from a century or more of injustice and brutality on both sides, and although the genocidaires struck back against innocents, they were provoked by heavily armed rebels, supplied by Uganda, while the U.S. looked on as tensions mounted. In the years that followed, President Clinton has repeatedly apologized for failing to support a UN force to end the genocide; neither he nor President H.W. Bush have ever apologized for allowing Uganda to create the conditions that their own CIA maintained could lead to genocide.
The Rwandan army was no match for the RPF, and as the rebels advanced on the capital, more than a million Rwandan Hutus fled into neighboring Zaire—now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo—and settled in enormous refugee camps only a few miles from the Rwandan border. Most were women and children, but at least 30,000 of them were members of the former Rwandan army and militia groups that had carried out the genocide. With help from Zaire’s President Marshal Mobutu Sese Seko they began arming themselves to re-take their country. Because the genocidaires blamed Uganda for their problems, they also formed alliances with Sudan-backed anti-Museveni rebels camped in eastern Zaire.
Tensions between Uganda and Rwanda on one side, and Zaire and Sudan on the other had been building for years, and a crescendo was not long in coming. In 1996, the new Rwandan army, now known as the Rwandan Patriotic Army, or RPA, invaded the camps and herded most of the refugees back to Rwanda, where they live under Tutsi domination to this day. Hundreds of thousands of others fled deeper into Zaire and on to other countries. In the years that followed, Rwanda’s largely Tutsi army tracked thousands of them down in the jungles of Congo, and even on the streets and slums of other countries, and killed them in cold blood. We’ll never know who was innocent and who was an ex-genocidaire. The aim was vengeance, not ethnic extermination, but there’s little doubt that the killings amount to war crimes.
When Comrades Go to War, a detailed account of the Congo conflict by political scientists Philip Roessler and Harry Verhoeven, describes how U.S. Special Forces provided advanced training for the lethal commandos that would carry out these attacks only a few months later, but there is no evidence that the Americans knew what the commandos were about to do. Then the RPA, along with the Ugandan army and a new rebel group known as the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (or AFDL), which had been created, trained and armed by Uganda and Rwanda, marched to the Zairean capital Kinshasa, toppled Mobutu, and installed their own man, an addled Marxist and former kidnapper and gemstone trafficker named Laurent Kabila as president of Zaire. He renamed the country Democratic Republic of Congo and quickly fell out with his Rwandan and Ugandan backers, and war resumed in 1998. Kabila was assassinated in 2001 and replaced ten days later by his son Joseph. Although atrocities continue even now, the worst of the war was more or less over by 2003, by which time hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of people had died in what scholars now refer to as Africa’s Great War.
For five years, Museveni’s army occupied a huge mineral-rich swathe of Congolese territory, where his generals looted some $10 billion worth of gold and other natural resources while backing proxy militias who massacred and raped thousands of Congolese.
In addition to the mayhem he created in Rwanda, Congo, Sudan and northern Uganda, Museveni also provoked or worsened at least two other African conflicts. In 2006 Museveni helped persuade the Bush administration to assist Ethiopia’s brutal invasion of Somalia that nearly flattened the capital Mogadishu, causing more than half the Somali population to flee. The invasion provided the notorious terrorist group Al-Shabaab, until then a relatively small band of thugs, with the moral fervor to attract massive Gulf support, expand its ranks and metastasize into a full-fledged member of the Al Qaeda terrorist network.
Then in 2014, Uganda joined the South Sudan civil war on the side of the nation’s ruthless president Salva Kiir Mayardit, greatly prolonging that conflict, at the cost of thousands of lives. Humantiarian groups and UN diplomats called for an arms embargo that would have effectively censured Uganda’s intervention, but they were overruled by President Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice. Kiir eventually won the war and his army then proceeded to “eliminate” pockets of resistance around the country. Anyone suspected of disloyalty was in severe danger, and innocent men, women, and children were massacred. As famine loomed in 2016, the UN Human Rights Commission warned that the country was on the brink of genocide.
Museveni’s contacts with Washington began early. Between 1987 and 1989, he met with President Ronald Reagan three years in a row, visited Reagan’s California ranch, and hired a public relations firm run by Reagan’s son-in-law Dennis Revell. Such close and frequent intercourse with U.S. presidents is unusual for any African leader, let alone a greenhorn, as Museveni was then. He has since had far more contact with high-level American and British officials than any other living African leader, and Western policymakers continue to publicly applaud him as a peacemaker, even as his army wreaks havoc in much of eastern and central Africa.
What explains this strange infatuation with Museveni? Is it just “Muddling in Bumbledom,” as British historian Christopher Hamlin calls policymakers’ all-too-human tendency to make mistakes when faced with situations they don’t understand?
Or is it something else?
Here’s what I think: all across Africa, elders still entertain children with fables about the powerful elephant, the angry lion, and the dopey hyena. The principal hero is always a weak but shrewd little creature—usually a hare or small antelope—who outsmarts them all with cunning and trickery. The stories are rooted, wrote the distinguished Africanist Alice Werner, in a deep conviction that the strong must not always win; the underdog must also have his day. When it comes to post–Cold War U.S.–Africa relations, Museveni has modeled himself