These newly settled “people of Rwanda,” also known as Banyarwanda, were Rwandaphones and were administratively designated as “nonnative” Congolese by the colonial authorities. Local populations felt threatened by these newly arriving people. Rwandaphone “foreigners” could not own land and did not fall under the customary systems that had been co-opted by the Native Authorities. Without local protection, the laborers from Ruanda-Urundi found themselves in a precarious position, unprotected by the state and vulnerable to attack. It is these historic beginnings that laid the foundations for the conflicts over land and belonging that continue to reverberate today.
From this early period, possession of land and accordance of citizenship became tightly linked with identity politics, and regularly contested through violence. The first identity-based wars of the postindependence era occurred in 1964 in South Kivu and in 1965 in North Kivu. These conflicts pitted the Rwandaphone population against those who considered themselves autochthons. Uncertainty, fear, and resentment became some of the most effective tools for political and economic manipulation, including by President Mobutu Sese Seko, who would eventually become one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most notorious leaders, and one of Western governments’ greatest allies. In the Kivus, Mobutu was astute in deploying the threats of contested identity to his political advantage. By fomenting competition over land and decreeing unstable citizenship policies, Mobutu maintained his influence over the restive eastern provinces.
In 1972, Mobutu passed the Citizenship Decree, according citizenship based on identity group presence in Congolese territory before 1960. This reversed the colonial legislation that had designated citizenship based on identity group presence in the territory as of 1885. Subsequently, Mobutu’s Bakajika land reforms of 1968–73 led to the passage of the 1973 General Property Law in which all land formerly owned by private Belgian interests was nationalized. This land, primarily in Masisi and Rutshuru territories, was sold to individuals favored by Mobutu, who were at that time mostly Kivu-based elites of Tutsi identity who had previously been excluded from landownership. In this way, Mobutu gained much-needed political loyalty in the Kivu periphery, helping to consolidate his rule over the vast Zairian nation.19
By the early 1980s, however, the power balance again shifted. Non-Rwandaphone Zairians who considered themselves the only legitimate owners of the land pressed Mobutu to repeal the citizenship rights of anyone who could not prove their identity group presence in Congo prior to 1885. Without citizenship, land could not be held. This 1981 Citizenship Law excluded a large proportion of the Rwandaphone population settled in the Kivus, which led to a fission in the Banyarwanda population: Rwandaphone Congolese living in the Hauts Plateux of South Kivu declared their Banyamulenge identity (Banyamulenge translating as “people of Mulenge,” the hills of the Itombwe, South Kivu), and the Congolese Hutu of Rutshuru distinguished themselves from other Rwandaphones by claiming a longer historical presence in the Kivus.
The identity-based political violence that had simmered in the 1960s and 1970s worsened in the 1980s and 1990s as the process of “democratization” imposed on Mobutu by Western governments gained momentum. The Conférence Nationale Souveraine, or Sovereign National Conference, convened by Mobutu in 1991–92, provided a forum for further mobilization and division along ethnic lines, rallying autochthonous Congolese against “Rwandan foreigners.” To distract his opponents and divide any credible opposition, Mobutu increasingly relied on identity-based political strategies.20
Interethnic violence was particularly virulent in the Kivus, where fears of the demographic strength of Banyarwandans led other ethnic groups to mobilize along identity lines. Particularly concerned with the democratic weight of the large Hutu population in the planned 1993 local elections, the North Kivu governor encouraged ethnic Hunde and Nyanga youth militia to kill Banyarwanda Hutu in Walikale, Rutshuru, and Masisi. Up to 10,000 people were killed during this phase of the conflict, and an estimated 250,000 others were displaced in North Kivu.
MILITARIZED VIOLENCE
It was into this highly charged conflict dynamic that, in the wake of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, an estimated one million Rwandan Hutu refugees arrived in the Kivus. Although contemporary narratives of conflict in the Kivus often begin with the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the genocide only fed into an already tense and specifically Congolese political situation in which identity-based politics had long served as a powerful tool for further mobilization to violence.21 Prior to the genocide, approximately half of the four million people living in North Kivu were of Banyarwandan descent, with most of the Hutu population living in the territories of Masisi and Rutshuru. With the arrival of the Rwandan Hutu refugees, the tenuous ethnic balance in the Kivus was further destabilized.
Among the refugees arriving in eastern DRC were approximately thirty to forty thousand elements of the former Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR) and Interahamwe militia responsible for carrying out the genocide. Importing their Hutu-power ideology from Rwanda, they were able to gather local support for their attacks against the Congolese Tutsi population living in Rutshuru and Masisi territories. The ex-FAR reorganized itself first as the Armée de Liberation du Rwanda (ALiR) and then as the Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR), which would become the most entrenched of all rebel groups operating in eastern DRC.22
The resource-rich provinces of North and South Kivu consequently became the launching grounds in 1996 for “Africa’s World War,” which was effectively two consecutive wars that drew in nine countries and lasted for seven years.23 At the culmination of the first war (1996–97), the Forces Armées Zairoises (FAZ) of Mobutu Sese Seko fell to the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo (AFDL), which was led by Laurent Desirée Kabila. Kabila, a long-term revolutionary known to have met with Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Tanzania in 1965, would take over the Congolese presidency. In 2001, Laurent Kabila was assassinated, then succeeded by his son Joseph Kabila, who remained in control throughout the period covered in this book.
The Second Congo War (1998–2003) resulted in an effective split of the country, with the eastern provinces, including the Kivus, coming under the control of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD), essentially a proxy government for Rwanda. At the local level, Congolese Mayi-Mayi forces mobilized to protect local interests and to gain control of land and resources. Initially a product of the 1960s autonomy movements, Mayi-Mayi groups resurged during the 1996–2003 wars. Usually monoethnic, their political claims formed along identity-based lines, and their discourse generally decried the presence of foreigners, in particular Tutsi Rwandaphones.
International UN peacekeepers arrived in 1999, establishing the Mission de l’Organisation des Nations Unies en République démocratique du Congo (MONUC), which would become the largest UN peace operation at the time and would eventually transform into the Mission de l’Organisation des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en République démocratique du Congo (MONUSCO). By 2003, the national armed forces had been reconfigured into the FARDC through a continuing process of brassage, or integration, of the former rebel groups into one national army.
Although formal peace was finally negotiated at a national level in 2003, conflict continued in eastern DRC. The 2006 presidential elections—the first in the DRC since 1960—officially ended the “postconflict transition” period and legitimized Joseph Kabila’s leadership, but they resulted in renewed political violence in the Kivus. Military offensives continued in the following years, despite various iterations of Kinshasa-led, UN-supported, and Kigali-influenced negotiations. The Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP), a reconfiguration of the former RCD armed wing, eventually won its military offensive against the DRC government.24
The Goma Peace Accords