Preparing to Negotiate
The difficulties of answering that question became apparent in the weeks leading up to the opening of political negotiations in Arusha. Jockeying for advantage threatened to undo the goodwill and understandings that brought contenders to the arena. On the government side, the weakness of the negotiating team during ceasefire talks demonstrated the imperative of building a solidly reasoned government position that had the support of all major parties. In the face of significant political resistance to the ceasefire terms, this was not an easy task. On the RPF side, concern that the government might back away from positions already conceded led to a steady stream of media invective and continuing thrusts and parries on the battlefront.
As the State Department geared up for the upcoming negotiations, Assistant Secretary Cohen asked me to be the US Observer at the negotiations, which were to begin in Arusha on August 10, 1992, and conclude with a peace agreement on October 10. I would have to delay reporting to my next assignment and so arranged a short leave. Thus I would become the first of four US Observers in what ended up being a yearlong wrangle.18
GOVERNMENTAL DISCORD—THE ANTI-ARUSHA FORCES
My route to Arusha took me through Kigali, where I met with the prime minister, party leaders, and the team working on drafting instructions for the Rwandan delegation. They briefed me on the difficulties of bridging differences in Rwanda’s fissured body politic. The problems were threefold. First, there was the split between the old regime represented by the president’s party (The Republican Movement for National Development, or MRND) and the emerging political parties legitimized by promulgation of a new constitution and the Political Parties Law in June 1991. The MRND youth wing (Interahamwe) and party allies, especially the Coalition for the Defense of the Republic (CDR), had protested the terms of the Arusha ceasefire and led unauthorized demonstrations in an attempt to delay the peace negotiations.19
Nor was the protest to the course of peace talks confined to political demonstrations. As the Arusha talks commenced, the American embassy noted that “internal insecurity has increased in parallel with each significant step forward in the democratization and the peace processes and subsided as internal political forces reached a new level of common understanding.”20 The violence had included massacres in Bugesera, random land-mine explosions, interparty dustups, military mutinies, political assassinations, and grenade and car-bomb explosions.
Along the political track, MRND ministers had been boycotting sessions of the multiparty government over what they considered to be arbitrary decisions of the prime minister on internal administrative reform. The MRND was less than enthusiastic about negotiating with the RPF and actively challenged the leadership of the coalition government; opposition leaders in turn looked to the negotiations as a means to effect regime change within Rwanda. Bringing the broad-based coalition government together on a comprehensive negotiating strategy was a Sisyphean task.
GOVERNMENTAL DISCORD—THE MDR
Second, a split within the largest opposition group undercut the cohesiveness of the government delegation. Prime Minister Dismas Nsengiyaremye’s party, the Democratic Republican Movement (MDR), was a revived successor to MDR/Parmehutu, the party that brought Hutu leaders to power in 1960. The party still suffered from a regional and ideological split between those who favored a Hutu-centered polity and those who favored national reconciliation, those who were from the north and those who represented the center-south. Whereas the prime minister, who was from the center of the country in Gitarama, seemed to anchor the geographic and ideological core of this party, Faustin Twagiramungu, a businessman from the southwestern town of Cyangugu and son-in-law of former president Kayibanda, led the progressive wing. Donat Murego, a historian and renowned orator, led the northern, pro-Hutu faction. Another Kayibanda son-in-law, Emmanuel Gapyisi, also from the central party stronghold of Gitarama, was another party leader.21
In the insecurity that surrounded the response to the Arusha ceasefire and the workup of political negotiations, Twagiramungu was accused by his political opponents of destabilizing the country. He had, they claimed, sought to capture the youth wing of his party, the Democratic Republican Youth (JDR), by stirring them up against elders within his own party and co-opting the appointment of new local mayors with newly minted MDR partisans of his own choice. For a while, Twagiramungu and the prime minister publicly encouraged the forceful takeover of mayoral offices in communes where the MDR was dominant. Twagiramungu worked closely with Justin Mugenzi, the fiery founder of the interethnic Liberal Party, in raising popular opposition to the Habyarimana regime.22
MDR politics thus complicated the position of Rwanda’s chief negotiator, Foreign Minister Boniface Ngulinzira. A northerner, he was nonetheless of the Nsengiyaremye political clan, which drew its support from the center of the country. As foreign minister, he led the breakthrough to ceasefire talks by reaching out to the RPF, a move that won him enmity of the pro-Hutu right, even within his party. Moreover, Ngulinzira had replaced Dr. Casimir Bizimungu, a stalwart of the president’s party, as minister for foreign affairs; having begrudgingly ceded this key post, presidential supporters could find little good to say about the new foreign minister. As leader of the government negotiating team, the foreign minister was developing networks and building a consensus among political leaders that challenged the “progressive” alliance that Twagiramungu had built with the Liberal Party. Thus, the Rwandan government’s chief of delegation and principle negotiator was on ambivalent political ground within his own political party and fiercely contested from without.
GOVERNMENTAL DISCORD—THE CND
Finally, Rwandan polity was beset with an encumbering institutional oddity. When the new constitution and party law were adopted in June 1991, members of the national legislature, or the National Development Council (CND), voted themselves incumbency as a transitional legislature until new parliamentary elections could be held, presumably in April 1993. Members of the CND were all elected under the old single-party slate drawn up by the Habyarimana regime. While some had political and regional loyalties that made them favorable to a new political order, most were oriented toward the status quo. In the lead-up to the peace negotiations, Rwanda’s only elective institution found itself sidelined; political negotiations were within parties, among parties, and between party leaders and the presidency. Nonetheless, after the government’s negotiating strategy had already been drawn up, the CND belatedly made its views known, delaying finalization of the project.23
DISCORD OVERCOME
The regime establishment hardly wanted to negotiate, the opposition was badly split, and the people’s representatives were making new claims on the policy process. What brought this inchoate mix of historic parties and self-appointed politicos together were two principle dynamics. First, the war was draining the nation’s resources and the expanded army had stopped fighting. The people and their political leaders were tired of the war. Second, the forces of democratic change had swept over Rwanda. Within a couple of years, Rwanda had gone from a single-party system based on “democratic centralism” to a multiparty government with several centers of power. Opposition political leaders saw “democratization” as their key to political control. That was why the government delegation chose to negotiate “within the framework of existing laws and institutions.”24
Continuity and evolution, not revolution, was the Rwandan government’s negotiating strategy. Intrinsic to this democratic evolution was the prospect of nationwide elections, established by protocol as prior to April 16, 1993, when the terms of office of the CND would end. Parties would have to contest for legislative and mayoral offices, thus confirming for the first time their true political weight. The prime minister insisted on the agreed timetable. Difficulties that the communes were facing over appointed mayors prompted the foreign minister to comment, “Officials need the legitimacy of elections.”25 How to incorporate the Patriotic Front into the framework of the existing political process—to let it function as a political party and participate in a defining electoral tally—was the challenge of political negotiations as the Rwandan government saw it.
INSURGENT VISION
The Rwandese Patriotic Front did not accept the government’s notion