Gen Byiringiro Victor is the current supreme political leader of one FDLR factions. His other names: IYAMUREMYE Gaston; Rumuli; Victor Rumuri; Michel Byiringiro
Are all FDLR rebels genocide suspects? NOT entirely! Does Rwanda really want to solve the FDLR issue? Facts point to a very complex situation. Celebrity Congolese officer Colonel Mamadou Ndala was killed in January 2014 – and the suspects will shock you. Did you know which global NGOs operate in FDLR areas and why are they there? How many Rwandan refugees are in DR Congo? The figure will leave you breathless. How did Joseph Kabila end up as President of DRC? Belgian veteran freelance journalist Marc Hoogsteyns has visited and shared meals with FDLR for years and was also there recently. He reveals what he saw. He is the first journalist to do it. We publish PART I of the narration in his own words:
The FDLR, or the ‘Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Rwanda’ , is a rebel movement that was founded around the year 2000 in the DRC in an attempt to unify all that was left of the former Rwandan Interahamwe militias and the former Rwandan army (FAR). They had a very bad reputation for killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people and they were trying to give their movement a new and a more moderate élan.
Several well stuffed papers and articles have been written and published about this organization so I’ll cut the history of the movement very short. But in most of these I could not find back some of the impressions and personal experiences I had with these people over all those years when I was covering the wars in Rwanda and in the DRC. This is the reason why I wanted to go back to the DRC and talk to them. I wanted to know their side of the story, check out how strong they still are and how they look at the future. I soon found out that the region in which they are hiding had changed a lot since the last time that I visited it and that a special preparation of this trip would be necessary to guarantee a safe passage.
The FDLR is not the only militia that is active in this region and to unravel the puzzle which of these militias are collaborating with each other or fight with each other I first had to plunge myself in the small circle of people who are following up the events in the field. Nobody seems to have a real clear and objective look on the ongoing situation in both of the Congolese Kivu provinces. Or even in Burundi where some of the FDLR are also still active. And this certainly is the case for most of the protagonists and the people involved. Others have to justify their own presence and the local population is just busy surviving from day to day and they passively undergo the events. Many things have changed since the war in Rwanda in 1994 and the outbreak of the AFDL war in the DRC. And a lot of outsiders, especially in Europe and in the US, have a hard time admitting that their former analyses do not correspondent any longer with the reality in the field. When I send my footage to Europe it sometimes frustrates me that the journalists in the newsrooms of the television stations that will broadcast it fall back on several years old cliché’s to sell the story to the bigger audience. And sometimes I read articles in European newspapers, about the ongoing events in the African Great Lakes Region, that frustrate me a lot !
Most of the time we are already happy that our pictures get at least some play and that we are able to recuperate some of the expenses we put into these stories. The DRC and the African Great Lakes Region have become an enormous side show. While writing this paper I based myself on facts that I discovered myself, on my numerous encounters with the FDLR, their enemies and their past and present allies. I might be wrong about some of the details. I have no problem to admit that. But I hope that my findings might help others to see more clear in this Rwandan-Congolese mess that is still causing the deaths of several and the misery of thousands other people every day !
I wrote this paper in English and that is not my native language. I tried to convince some of my Anglophone colleagues to re-write my findings a bit and mold it into better prose but this text is very long. I can’t blame them for not helping me and I do not have enough money for a professional copywriter. One of them told me that this article is a wall of words that will scare off potential readers. He’s probably right but I just want to share my views with others who are truly interested in the region.So please take it as it comes !
1990
My first encounter with extremist Rwandan Hutu’s goes back to 1990 when I was covering the first invasion of Tutsi rebels in the north of Rwanda. I had visited the country a couple of times in the 80-ies but this time we found several bodies in front of our lens. The Tutsi’s had attacked Gabiro and at that time that village was still part of the Akagera Park. They were pushed back by the DSP, the ‘Division Spéciale Présidentielle’ of the former president of Congo-Zaïre, Mobutu Sese Seko, who was on very good terms with the Rwandan government at that time (in fact both Mobutu and Habyarimana were members of Opus Dei). They showed us the corpses of the rebels of the Patriotic Front who had come from Uganda to attack their trenches around the hotel.
Some of these rebels wore no shoes, others had attacked with two barrel shotguns and the few prisoners the DSP was able to take were too afraid to talk. But it was while driving back to Kigali that the seriousness of the situation became clear to us: most of the rugo’s (traditional huts and kraals of the Tutsi’s who were living in this region) were empty, others were littered with the bodies of their inhabitants. Most of them were women, children and elders. They had their throats slit and some of them had been executed at very close range. We were able to ship out this footage and these were probably the first ever pictures of a conflict that would soon put the whole region in flames. While driving back to Kigali we also crossed several villages where roadblocks had been put up and most of these roadblocks were manned by people with machetes and knives. They were inoffensive towards us. They were listening to the radio that was informing them form Kigali and telling them to watch out of ‘inyenzi’ or cockroaches, the name that was already given at that time to the Tutsi rebels.
In Kigali we were allowed access to the infamous ‘1930’ prison that was full of arrested Tutsi’s. A couple of shots had been fired at a hotel in de city center – it was later found out that this had been done by some elements of the Rwandan army – and the responsibility for that was put in the shoes of the Tutsi rebels. This increased the paranoia and most of the foreigners were evacuated to their countries in Europe. We asked the politicians on the spot what would happen next and most of them just answered that the time had come to finish with these rebels and their supporters once and for all. The tone of the conflict had been set, for them it was out of the question to allow the minority of the population to participate in the governance of their country. The same logic seemed to pass through the minds of the Tutsi rebels in Uganda; they did not trust the Rwandan authorities either. We were surprised to find a very dynamic and rather well disciplined rebel group in Uganda that was composed of Tutsi fighters who had previously fought for Yoweri Museveni, others had come from Congo, Burundi and even from Europe. The international community tried to respond with several peace meetings in Arusha and in other places to bring the two parties together but that did not work. The tone had been set in 1990 and this would not change.
When I visited the country again in 1991, in 1992 and in the beginning of 1994 the unwillingness to talk to each on both sides only grew. In the Congolese Kivu provinces pogroms had taken place against Congolese Tutsi’s and in Burundi the future of the Tutsi community became also very uncertain. Many Congolese and Burundian Tutsi youngsters, whose parents had fled to these countries in the 50-ies and the 60-ies joined know the ranks of Paul Kagame, the man that had taken over the leadership of the Patriotic Front. Other Congolese Tutsi, who’s families and clans had been living for centuries in Congo joined the ranks of Kagame to revenge the slaughter of their families by the Magrevi, a movement of Congolese Hutu’s that was sponsored by the Rwandan government. What struck me often in those days was the sheer unbelieve of the Rwandan Hutu that their kingdom might come to an end and that they soon would have to talk to the ethnic minority of the country: the Tutsi’s.
Kigali in those days still looked like a very peaceful village with a couple of crowded suburbs. But underneath this peaceful blanket the kettle was already boiling at full speed, young Hutu’s were lured into the Interahamwe militia and several hatred radio’s such as the RTLM (Radio et Télevison des Milles Colines) were spitting out hatred messages. The simple translation of the word ‘interahmwe’ should explain everything: ‘those who have to work together’. I leave it up to You what they were meaning with that. These hatred machines were nourished by the fact that Kagame’s rebels were – bit by bit – taking control over the north of the country. As most of the villages they occupied were mainly Hutu most of these people fled to camps in the government controlled area. But even at that time nobody could suspect that very soon the general killings would start; killings that were well prepared with lists of Tutsi civilians and moderate Hutu’s, with thousands of machetes that were being imported from overseas (even some of them were being produced locally) and the Interahamwe who were getting more aggressive and verbal by the day. A totally other atmosphere reigned in the ranks of the Patriotic Front; the rebels were listening as well to the Hutu powered hatred radio’s but they were taking a much less radical stand. Their idea was to take power of the country and to force the Hutu power parties into negotiations.
The majority in power wanted to exterminate the rebel minority like cockroaches, the minority wanted to take over power in a less radical way. While having beers with these Interahamwe leaders we were sometimes told in detail how the rebels and their families would be dealt with but we thought that all this was bluff and we did not pay enough attention to this. They also told us that killings were taking place in the area that was already controlled by the Patriotic Front but these allegations were mostly false and exaggerated. RPF members who were caught killing civilians without the consent of their superiors were severely punished. The so called crimes of the RPF – before and after de genocide – against Hutu civilians became a real hot potato during the past couple of years. Some of Kagame’s officers were accused in Spain of crimes against humanity but so far no real evidence has been produced to back up these allegations.
Most of the accusations come from former Kagame allies who lost their privileges in Rwanda and others where formulated by conservative lobby groups that might have had their own reason to discredit the RPF. All wars are dirty business and it cannot be excluded that some revenge acts took place but we never witnessed or got news from mass killings that were being perpetrated by the RPF in this period. We also checked these allegations afterwards and we found no evidence to back up these theories. Some guy even send me some hatred messages on FB telling me that we were undergoing the whole genocide adventures with our eyes closed but my they were wide open. The same allegations against the RPF were made in the BBC feature ‘Rwanda, the untold story’. But this film was also very one sighted. But this is my opinion. They failed to put things into their perspective and they were only listening to several bells in the anti-Kagame side.
Another hot potato nowadays is the answer on the question who actually shot down the plane of president Habyarimana. To me this question is less important: the genocide was already in the making, the machetes had been sharpened. In the whole discussion about WW I the killing of crown prince Ferdinand has also become an anecdote. It was just a pretext to trigger of a war- and a killing machine that at that time could not be stopped any longer. The machine of the Interahamwe had been boiling for several years at full speed and this kettle simply had to explode.
The Hutu power period, genocide
The true nature of the Hutu power movement and their followers became clear during the genocide. The killings started minutes after the plane was shot down. Those who were killing innocent Hutu moderates and Tutsi were convinced that they were doing the right thing. They had been molded into that belief by their leaders and some of them still stick to that opinion today. One can ask himself or herself the question how this can be possible but for me history was just repeating itself in Rwanda: I had encounters – before Rwanda – with ex-Nazi’s who were still convinced that Hitler was widely misunderstood, Khmer Rouge officials who kept on believing in Pol Pot until he was killed, Palestinian terrorists who told me that blowing up Jewish diamond shops in Antwerp was the only way to proceed, etc.
I had witnessed the horrors of wars in other countries but nothing and nobody had been prepared for this disaster. We were journalists and nobody had asked us or forced us to be present in Rwanda when the shit hit the fan ! We shook hands with the devil more than once and that didn’t change after the genocide when we continued to be in contact with these radicals in the refugee camps in Congo-Zaïre. I was often invited in the camps of the Hutu extremist leaders, I had more beers with them and I talked again with them. I wanted to understand what made them do all this, what their plans were for the future, etc…
They tried to downgrade what happened during the genocide, they were talking openly about a possible political solution in which they would go back to Rwanda and share power. For them it was a normal thing that some many people were killed in Rwanda, they did not even blink an eye when they were saying that. They were bolstered in their convictions by the fact that they received openly support from the international community who was pampering them in their refugee camps at the border. And had the French army not protected them during the genocide in the Turqouise area ? Some of their most known hatred singers were even giving concerts in Goma for foreign NGO staffers who did not understand what they were singing but who were applauding them loudly. In the meanwhile Rwanda had become a ghost country: we often drove up to Goma from Kigali without even meeting one car and nearly all the villages were empty. I stopped meeting these radicals after they discovered that my wife was a Tutsi and after receiving death threats by phone in Kigali. The attack on Iwawa island in which more than 300 Interahamwe were killed showed the outside world that their treat was still real. This incident showed clearly that they wanted to return to Rwanda in a violent way. I could not visit the hardliners any longer in their camps but I still kept seeing a couple of them in Goma. In 1995 the UN developed a plan with the Congolese government to send most of the Rwandan refugees back to their home country.
My contacts within the Interahamwe community were fiercely against this and they told me that the necessary steps would be taken to prevent this. It is in this period that I first heard the rumors of a possible ‘Green March’. President Mobutu had announced that all the refugees would have to go back to Rwanda, he dispatched his DSP ( ‘Division Special Presidentielle’) to Goma to push the refugees back to Rwanda. One of my Interahamwe contacts, a guy who had worked for a radical newspaper before the genocide and who had a bar in Remera-Kigali, had revealed the principle of the Green March to me: all the refugees would go back together and ‘en masse’, the Interahamwe and the ex-army would mingle with them fully armed and fully equipped (most of their weapons were still hidden in and around the camps) and they would attack the Rwandan Patriotic Front once they entered Rwanda. I told him that this would possibly provoke a lot of casualties since the Rwandan army of Kagame would have to retaliate. I also told him that this would put their civilians in big danger and that using them as a shield would not be considered very clean. But he laughed and he told me that this would be the only way to deal with the Patriotic Front, it would provoke them into killing a lot of civilians and discredit the cause of the Kagame government.
Furthermore the Interahamwe and the ex-Far would then be able to create a bridge head inside the country and provoke a new intervention from the French or the UN to protect them. The French had already done that at the end of the genocide in the southern part of Rwanda with the Turquoise operation. Again the Interahamwe were willing to sacrifice a lot of their own civilians to obtain their goal. Two days later I was able to meet general Bizimungo, the commander in chief of the ex-FAR, in a hotel in Goma. We had a beer together and when I asked him whether the strategy of the Green March would be applicated in case of a forced return he started laughing. But he did not deny it. I also talked about it with the UNHCR but they told me that this was bluff. I did not believe them: I had heard these guys talking in bars in Kigali before the genocide and I knew they would be capable to set up a devilish plan like this. When the day arrived that the refugees would have to go back nothing happened: the DSP abandoned its positions around the camps and the UNHCR dropped the whole plan. Did Mobutu change his opinion because he was afraid for a new massacre in Rwanda ? Possibly !
But what strikes me about this story is the fact that nobody ever relates to it in articles and research reports. The true nature of the Interahamwe spirit had shown itself once again but instead of dealing with it most of the refugees were still living peacefully in their camps. They were fed, sheltered and pampered by the international community They were capable now to extend their influence in Congo and they started to loot and to attack the Tutsi community in the hills of Masisi. The Tutsi’s that tried to flee from this violence had to cross the camps to reach the Rwandan border and a lot of them were killed on the spot. The big international aid agencies stood by and watched all this happen but again nothing happened. To me it was clear that this situation would degenerate in a much bigger conflict very soon. In Bukavu we also received news that some of the FDLR had joined Burundian rebels groups such as the CNDD-FDD. The leaders of this organization were openly fraternizing with the Rwandan Hutu extremist leaders in Bukavu. In the hills of northern Burundi a lot of Interahamwe gained their first real combat experience. The Burundian army was much less organized than the Patriotic Front in Rwanda. This was another signal that very soon something much bigger and violent would erupt.
In Masisi most of the Congolese Tutsi’s, mainly Bagogwe, had already fled to Rwanda. Their cows were rounded up by the Interahamwe and slaughtered in the refugee camps outside Goma (with equipment that was provided to them by NGO’s such as ‘Veterinaries without Borders’). In discussions with Interahamwe leaders in Bukavu it also became clear to me that the presence of the Banyamulenge, a Tutsi clan that was living in the plains of Uvira and on the Minembwe plateau, became a nuisance to them. So they would probably become their next target. This was the last sign that strengthened my conviction that very soon something was going to happen. The Banyamulenge and the Bagogwe had send their sons and their daughters to fight for Kagame and to liberate Rwanda. It would be very unlikely that the Tutsi community would let their brothers in Congo unprotected. I posted myself in Uvira and when they attacked. I was in pole position to cover these events. The new born rebels called themselves AFDL (Alliance of Democratic Forces to Liberate Congo) . I withdrew with Mobutu’s army to Bukavu and I witnessed the chaos. It was now the Interahamwe and not the Congolese army who were going to defend the city. Most of the Rwandan refugees were already on the move to Walikale and to Kisangani. The AFDL had planned to move them back into Rwanda but the Interahamwe had told them that they would be eaten alive there by the Tutsi’s. So they moved out to Kisangani. And the Interahamwe and the ex-Far were, once again, using them as a shield to protect themselves. Returning to Rwanda was not an option for these refugees; those who wanted to do that were executed on the spot by the radicals. The ease with which the AFDL pushed forward – to their big surprise the Congolese army was so weak that they did not put up any resistance – made it possible for them to take Goma a couple of weeks later.
In Goma the chaos was total and a big number of Hutu refugees were taken in by the rebels and the Rwandan troops. Most of them returned to Rwanda. But others were on the march to the dark interior of Congo. It had never been the plan of the Rwandans to push further than the Kivu’s. They only wanted to stabilize the border and solve the refugee problem. But Mobutu had proven so weak that the possibility of getting rid of him once and for all was now becoming a serious option that was even cherished by the Americans who were now organizing troop transports and logistics for the rebels. Most of the Hutu refugees – who were pushed forward by their own Interahamwe – had now reached the outskirts of Kisangani were they ended up in new refugee camps such as Tingi Tingi. I visited that camp twice and I met several Interahamwe there that I knew from Goma and Bukavu. It was their plan to set up their last stand in and around Tingi Tingi. The dark shadow of the ‘Green March’ principle was hanging over the camp. Some of the refugees knew this and wanted to flee but most of them were killed by the Interahamwe. Others who did flee soon ran into the AFDL rebels. Some of these were killed and other were being brought back to Rwanda. The advancing rebels send several ultimatums to the Intarahamwe leadership to surrender but they refused. What happened next is one of the darkest moments of the AFDL war. I was not there when this happened but thousands of refugees died. The discussion of who is to blame for all this remains an open question. The big thing in this that the passivity of the international community had allowed the extremists to push their own population into the Congolese interior and use them as a shield. The international community had not done anything either to protect the Congolese Tutsi’s against the violence of the Interahamwe. And this had triggered off the invasion of the Rwandan army. What happened in Tingi Tingi and after that in other places like Lubutu broke the Hutu power spirit completely. I saw some of them arrive in Kinshasa; rag tag as they were and totally disorientated. Their last hopes of recapturing Rwanda had left them and they were now nearly finished. A lot of their civilians had died under enemy fire but most of them had perished during the grueling march through the Congolese heart of darkness. Others ended up in Congo-Brazzaville and in the Central African Republic.
And those who survived had learned that their own leaders had been using them as human sand bags. The Interahamwe would have to change their strategy. After the AFDL war finished it became fairly easy for the UNHCR to convince the Hutu refugees to return to Rwanda. Thousands of them were picked up in several spots in the country that was now called DRC, or the Democratic Republic of Congo. Most of them were very weak and staying behind in the jungle was not an option for them. And most of them had lost confidence in their own leadership. Their return to Rwanda was well documented and covered. Those who committed crimes during the genocide were put on trial , others returned safely to their villages and picked up their lives again. There were no reports of big abuses although some of them were killed because of unsettled bills. But the Rwandan authorities always tried to prevent this. Even most of my contacts within the structure of the UN told me that they were surprised that this operation went so smoothly.
In the meanwhile most of the hard core Interahamwe leadership had fled to countries such as Cameroun, to Europe but also to Congo-Brazzaville and to Angola. In order to survive they’ll needed to forge new alliances and render services to people most of them never heard of before all this happened. They were now on the run and they often had to rent themselves out as mercenaries in order to survive. This part of their history is not well documented and needs our extra attention. But I’ll try to reconstitute it based on discussions I had with these people over the years. It is important to know what happened to them in this period because it will influence their thinking and acts in the coming years.
On the run, hired guns for warlords and presidents
That the alliance between Joseph Kabila and the Rwandan government would be very short lived became already clear to me on the day that Kabila declared himself president in Lubumbashi, in the days before the final assault on Kinshasa. Kabila had not been their first choice to lead the AFDL, the sweep through the Congo and the push on Kinshasa had gone too fast for all the parties involved and they all knew that they would still need each other to consolidate their positions in Kinshasa. The biggest and most important contender for Kabila’s take over was a very popular general in Kinshasa, General Marc Mahélé. Mahélé was Mobutu’s last chief of staff and he had always remained loyal to his boss. The Rwandans had approached him to lead the rebellion but he had always refused. But they still planned to ask him after the fall of Kinshasa to reconsider his earlier decision. The Rwandans knew Mahélé well and they trusted him more than Kabila and most of the other leaders of the AFDL, a bunch of Mobutu deserters and fortune seekers that had chosen Kabila’s side to avoid losing everything. Other Kabila collaborators had been chosen in the ranks of the Congolese Tutsi community but the Rwandans understood well that a Tutsi would never be accepted by the Congolese population to lead the country.
But Kabila got lucky: Mahélé was gunned down by Mobutu’s son on the doorsteps of the Ministry of Defense in Kinshasa. I filmed the short ceremony in which Kabila proclaimed himself as the new president of the DRC and I asked one of the Rwandan advisors who was sitting in the back of the room what he was thinking about this. The guy sighted and told me bluntly that this whole mascaraed would turn out to be very ugly. I think the Rwandans already understood at that moment that the Congolese guys they put in charge of the AFDL were already dancing on their heads. The whole project had grown out of its proportions and things were going too fast for everybody. But again: they would still need each other for a while and for the time being this dispute would be kept safely under the carpet. It was a Rwandan who was in command of the new Congolese army and that was already a good guarantee for the Rwandans to set things straight once they would arrive in Kinshasa. But Mahélé died and other candidates to replace Kabila never reached their destination. For most of the Rwandans who had never experienced the luxury and the grandeur of the capital Kinshasa the city soon became a death trap. They were overwhelmed by Congolese wannabees who tried to buy their ways into the new system and they did not understand all this. In the meanwhile a new war had broken out in Congo-Brazzaville between de Ninja’s and the Cobra’s, two militia’s that where heavily sponsored by two big oil companies.
A big part of the Interahamwe who had been able to reach Kinshasa and/or the border with Congo-Brazzaville fled to Brazzaville when Kabila’s troops arrived. In exchange for hospitality they would soon be fighting for their new sponsor: the leader of the Cobra militia, the president of the country Sassou Nguesso. The war in Congo-Brazzaville was extremely violent and the fact that a lot of the militia men were of Rwandan origin is only known by a small minority of Congo watchers. One of these militia’s even tried to lure the new DRC into the conflict by lopping shells on Kinshasa’s suburbs. A lot of Interahamwe and ex-Far elements had now become mercenaries. Some of them did not like that but they had to accept their faith to survive. It is also known that another part of the remaining Interahamwe joined other rebel groups in other neighboring countries such as the Angolan rebel group of Jonas Savimbi, a good friend of the former Congolese president Mobutu. Later on the FDLR would also be involved in the war in the Central African Republic.
The Rwandan generals knew this but as far as they were concerned the Interahamwe had been brushed out of the DRC and their jobs were done. But they were wrong again. As the tensions rose in the ranks of the new Congolese army between the former Mayi Mayi elements who were loyal to Kabila and the Banyarwanda soldiers and the Rwandan troops president Kabila started looking for new allies to counter the Rwandans. The Mayi Mayi, mainly ex militia men from the region between Fizi and Baraka, were Kabila’s old comrades but they were no match for the better equipped and more disciplined Rwandan soldiers or the Congolese Tutsi’s that were now all part of the new Congolese rebel army. So Kabila reached out again to the ex-Interahamwe who were living just at the other side of the river in Congo-Brazzaville. The rupture between the Rwandans and Kabila’s group became total when a group of Banyamulenge soldiers mutinied in Bukavu. The Rwandan generals retreated from Kinshasa and went back to Rwanda. Kabila understood that a new war with Rwanda would not be far off and therefore he reached out immediately to all the Interahamwe and the ex-Far who were living in the neighboring countries. He needed good and motivated soldiers who were not afraid to fight the Tutsi’s. He promised them to fly them (and their families) back to the Kivu’s where they would be able to pick up their old dream to recapture Rwanda. They were brought back to the Kivu region on a red carpet. This is where the remnants of the old Hutu power movement found their second breath.
If Kabila would not have done this the issue of the Rwandan Hutu extremists in the DRC would have been solved already years ago. And this also triggered of the second Congo war. As soon as the Interahamwe were flown back to the east of the country (others were integrated in the army of Kabila) they started infiltrating Rwanda. These insurgents were very soon called ‘muchengesi’ or infiltrators. Their idea was to infiltrate the northern part of Rwanda, to convince their former brothers in arms who had already returned to the country previously to pick up their weapons again and to create a new bridge head in the heartland of the old Hutu government. But they failed; their actions were extremely brutal, they forced Hutu civilians to set up road blocks for them to kill passengers of busses and cars, they butchered thousands of Tutsi’s in refugee camps near Gisenyi. I witnessed and covered a lot of these attacks and I even drove through a muchengesi road block outside Ruhengeri. I had to do this, otherwise I could have been killed on the spot. The cars behind me fell into the ambush and most of the drivers and the passengers in these cars died. Some of them were burned alive. But the muchengesi failed to convince the local Hutu population to collaborate. One should not forget that the Rwandan army on the spot had a firm grip on most of the villages. Villagers who helped the rebels were severely punished. For most of the Hutu’s in this region a new war was not an option: they had found their villages practically untouched upon their return from Congo, they were cultivating their fields again and their kids were going back to school.
Second Congolese war, FDLR
The pro-Rwandans in the Kivu’s had organized themselves in an new movement, the ‘Rassemblement Congolais pour la Democratie’ , or RCD. The organization soon was able to brush out Kabila’s troops of the region but was never able to recapture the capital Kinshasa or Lubumbashi. At one moment they were very close: they managed to airlift some of their crack troops to Kitona, at the Congolese coast. Kabila was still holding a lot of former Mobutu soldiers there – a lot of them had died of hunger there in the previous year – and when the big planes arrived nobody put up any resistance. Kagame had received the green light to launch this operation from the Angolan president Dos Santos. The army base of Kitona, just outside of Muanda, was taken in a couple of minutes and more and more RCD troops were flown in.
They took Boma, Matadi (and also the Inga dam who is producing the electricity for Kinshasa) and they finally made it to Kinshasa where they regrouped for the final assault on the city center near the Ndjili airport. But Dos Santos suddenly turned his back on the rebels and he ordered his air force to attack them with Migs and helicopter gunships. Very few of the rebels were able to make it back to the border with Rwanda.
As the second Congo war raged on a lot of the Interahamwe and the ex-Far were gradually integrated in the FARDC, the Congolese army. Many of them were trained by foreign instructors; Chinese, North-Koreans, Zimbabweans, etc. Those foreigners often had big problems distinguishing Rwandan Hutu’s from Congolese and or other militia members of other ethnical groups. The FARDC had become a garbage bag in which several ex militia members were ‘reprogrammed’ into regular troops. The French and the Belgians also started training FARDC soldiers later on. They would tell me that it was very difficult to reprogram these ill-disciplined and bandit like rebels into real soldiers. Those Rwandan Hutu fighters who were not integrated in the army were left behind in the eastern parts of the country. And they stayed there when the RCD rebel movement merged with the Kabila lobby in 2002. It is also in this period that the Hutu power fighters and their civilians created a new organization: the FDLR.
‘The Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda’ , or the FDLR, was formed in September 2000 for several reasons and the group has been fighting in the DRC ever since. It was composed mainly of Rwandan Hutu’s to fight the Tutsi influence in the region. But that was not all: the group wanted to create a new image for itself. In 2003 the FDLR created its new military wing the so called ‘Forces Combattantes Abacunguzi’ or FOCA. According to several sources the FDLR-FOCA consisted of three brigades: one in the southern part of South-Kivu, one around the Kahuzi Biega Park and another one in North-Kivu. They wanted to put pressure on the Rwandan government and force them into a dialogue but Kigali always refused and told them that they should comply with the UN to bring them back home through the official channels. They were also told that those FDLR members and cadres who committed crimes during the genocide would be judged accordingly upon their return. The FDLR also appointed a new leader: a Rwandan Hutu living in Germany was given that job. But the guy was quickly jailed. Germany did not want to have anything to do with him.
Since 2000 a lot of very good and documented papers have been written about this organization. But most of these papers are only referring in a couple of phrases where these people come from. I do not want to copy this information. Researchers such as Jason Stearns, the people of the Small Arms Survey-group and some others did a great job while mapping their activities and the areas where they were active. A German colleague who, is living in Kampala even wrote a very good and very detailed book about the FDLR. The US put the FDLR on her ‘terrorist list’. In the meanwhile the FDLR was fighting, in FARDC uniforms, in places like Pwetu and Moba, Kole and Dekese and other hot spots in the DRC where the FARDC could not stop the troops of RCD-Goma. After the RCD-Goma rebellion merged with the government in Kinshasa the FDLR lost several hundreds of their men who returned to Rwanda. Most of them were quite well received there.
But in 2004 the total number of FDLR fighters was still estimated at 5000 to 8000. In this year the Rwandan and the Congolese government also talked to each other to bring the FDLR back to Rwanda. But this merely provoked several very violent reactions of the FDLR who started killing Congolese civilians at random. Later on the FARDC and the Rwandan army would even organize joint military actions against the FDLR but these all failed. Probably due to the fact that they were rather small scale and that there was little or no trust between de Congolese and the Rwandan troops. Some foreign international lobby groups even organized joint talks between the FDLR and the Rwandan government in Italy but nothing came out of that. The FDLR was ready to abandon its armed struggle and to return to Rwanda. But that also did not work.
Third Congolese war
In the meanwhile another factor started influencing the future of the movement: a renegade RCD officer had pulled himself back in the Masisi region. His name was Laurent Nkunda and he was a native Tutsi. He fell in disarray with the RCD-leadership and his former friends in Rwanda for having badly managed his tour of duty in Bukavu where he and his men were accused of looting and other crimes. After that he withdrew with a couple of hundred of his men to Masisi where he started recuperating lots of former local defense soldiers who had been trained previously by Rwandan forces. Other Tutsi soldiers deserted the ranks of the RCD and the Congolese army to join Nkunda. At first the Rwandans did not back him but they quickly changed their minds. The new organization of Nkunda and his new army were the only ones who could counter the growing pressure of the FDLR. For the Rwandan government the CNDP was used as a buffer to prevent the FDLR to enter Rwanda. But indirectly this triggered off another revival of the latter: the Congolese army was in no position to counter Nkunda’s rebels who rapidly overtook a big part of the region.
Once again the FDLR was saved by the bell. In 1998 Nkunda was forced to abandon Masisi. Most of his men where re-integrated of integrated in the FARDC, others fled to Rwanda and Uganda. In exchange for dropping their aid to Nkunda the Rwandans agreed again to join forces with the Congolese government to chase out the remaining FDLR. But this initiative failed again. Probably for the same reasons as the previous one. The presence of Rwandan troops was not appreciated at all by the local population, behind their backs the FDLR was still receiving aid of the Congolese government (most of the time this was done via the ANR, the ‘Agence National de Renseignements’, Kabila’s secret service). And the Congolese soldiers who were involved in the new offensive where not motivated at all. This resulted in the fact that the FDLR radicalized once again: in 2009 the hard liner Mudacumura took over the command of the group. The fighting force of the group had dwindled to 3000 to 4000 men. They resorted to taking money from people on road blocks, in the Walikale region they controlled a couple of coltan mines, they controlled the charcoal or ‘makala’ production in the Virunga Park and they were still receiving aid from the Congolese government.
During those years another, rather strange, and much better hidden coalition was taking form: as the FDLR saw it’s fighters and its civilians returning to Rwanda and as it became more and more difficult to recruit youngsters in their own ranks they started forging alliances with other local militia’s such as the Mayi Mayi and local Congolese Hutu groups. Some of these groups had been collaborating with Nkunda before and some of them where affiliated to former leaders of the RCD who were now having big jobs in Kinshasa. Masisi and other parts of the province North-Kivu had now become a kind of a soccer pit in which politicians in Kinshasa could manipulate the groups they were sponsoring. These groups could be activated by them at random to put pressure on the political scene or, if necessary, to create unrest and violence to divert the attention of the public. This became clear when general Sultan Makenga and his followers started up the M23 movement. To my understanding – but I can be wrong in this – the creation of the M23 was the direct result of all this. Several sources told me that some of these lobbies wanted to kill Makenga. He fled to the Masisi plateau with a couple of his loyalists and in the weeks that followed he was joined by several hundreds of other fighters who had been integrated before in the FARDC but who were starting to feel very unsecure there. Once again the FDLR was used by the local authorities to counter this rebellion. The government had no confidence in the UN soldiers on the spot and the UN did not trust the government. In fact the MONUSCO (this is the name of the UN operation in the DRC) did not have a mandate to react without the consent of the Congolese government. Too many Congolese Monusco was and is a money slandering elephant without tusks. The Tutsi population was in danger. There was no government or army worthy that name to protect them and a lot of Makenga’s men joined him to protect their families.
They also felt betrayed by the Rwandan government who had left their former commander Laurent Nkunda in the cold. With the actions of Makenga the FDLR was once again saved by the bell. Mudacumura received new weapons and he was now protected for nearly 100 percent by Kabila’s ANR. The UN was useless and indecisive in the field but they sure put up a fierce PR battle to discredit the M23 movement and its Rwandan backing on the international scene. Reports were being published on the Rwandan involvement in the DRC and their links to several rebel groups such as the CNDP and it was first and for all the Rwandan government that had to cash in on harsh criticism. Some of the facts the UN brought out were true: the M23 movement and the CNDP of Laurent Nkunda had made big mistakes and committed crimes. But some of the crimes they were accused off had been committed by the FARDC or by other militia’s. One example was very flagrant: in one of the reports Rwanda was accused of having delivered artillery pieces to the M23. But in fact these were guns that the Tutsi rebels had found in the harbor of Goma and put to their own use. In these reports a lot of attention was also put on the Rwandan refugee debacle in the 90-ties. It created and bolstered the perception that most of the Hutu refugees that had fled into the Congolese interior were killed by Rwandan or Rwandan backed troops.
The analysis of the UN was very one sighted and had failed to put things into their real perspective. The international public opinion had now turned itself against the Rwandans. So Rwanda had no other choice than to stop helping Makenga. The Monusco was given the permission to attack the rebels with gunships and heavy artillery. The rebels did not put up a fight and just left. Leaving behind large stocks of arms caches and leaving their own population unprotected. Makenga’s M23 rebels passed into Uganda nearly unscratched. The Congolese army and the Kabila government saw this as a big victory and Kabila’s reputation inside the DRC got a real boost. But the popularity he received with this was only short lived, very short. I had followed these events for years and I knew most of the key players and the way they were thinking. When the M23 was chased out of their strongholds I happened to be in Goma on a completely different assignment. I stayed in the hotel where most of the Monusco generals and journalists were staying and I overheard the discussion they had in the restaurant. For Martin Kobler it was clear: they were chasing out the M23 and the FDLR would be next. The hotel was so full that we even had breakfast together at the same table. I told him that Kabila would never allow Monusco to finish off the FDLR completely because this group had served him so well in the past and was his last line of defense given the fact that his own troops were useless. But he laughed that argument off. For most of the journalists who were present it was clear that the M23 was not a Congolese rebel group but a kind of a satellite organization of the Rwandan army. I told them that this might be true for a small part but that the bigger picture showed a complete different story. Some of them did not even seem to understand or to know the difference between a Munyamulenge (a member of the Bagogwe clan) and a Mugogwe (a member of the Bagogwe clan).
Both clans are truly Congolese and their ancestors lived in Congo for centuries. But the Banyamulenge always lived in South-Kivu and the Bagowe always lived in North-Kivu. The Monusco operation against the M23 had solved nothing and had left another unsettled bill on the table. It had also sharpened the distrust between the Banyamulenge – a lot of them fought on the FARDC side against Makenga – and the Bagogwe. And it sharpened the distrust between the Banyamulenge and the Congolese army. Some of the Bayamulenge soldiers and officers had been executed at random on the battle field by the FARDC without any reason. The Congolese troops – mainly ex-Mayi Mayi fighters and former members of Hutu militias – distrusted them because they were also Tutsi’s. It is very sad to say but the actions of the UN only worsened the situation in the Kivu’s. But where did all that leave the FDLR ?
PART II of the narration will be published next week. This research was sponsored partially by the journalismfund.eu.