CHAPTER 2: BEFORE THE GENOCIDE
2.5. Rwandan identity after colonialism
2.5.4. The Diaspora and the RPF
“I was reminded of the tale the RPF liaison officer, Commander Karake Karenzi, had told to Brent to describe the Tutsi experience in Rwanda.
Karenzi had said that when the hunter and the dog are after the prey, they are equals. But once the prey is caught, the hunter gets the meat and the dog the bones. And that is how the Tutsis in Uganda, who had served under difficult conditions in combat for the NRA [Ugandan army], felt after Museveni came to power. The realization that they would always be the dogs in Uganda had been the impetus behind the formation of the RPF.
They wanted to go home and be treated as equals in their own country”
(2003, 155).
In 1987, RANU became the RPF, an offensive political party dedicated to the return of exiles to Rwanda, by force if necessary (Prunier, 1995, 73). They started high-level political negotiations around their return to Rwanda which included several violent attacks on the country in the early 1990’s. Initially, the RPF was led by Rwigyema but he was killed during the first attack by the RPF on Rwanda on 1 October, 1990 and Kagame took over command. In Stephen Kinzer’s biography of Kagame, he writes how, following the defeat during this first attack, Kagame strategically led his troops into the Virunga mountains in northern Rwanda where they built their strength unbeknown to the Rwandan government (2008, 79).
During this time, there was an official cease-fire as mediated negotiations between the RPF and the Rwandan government ensued in Tanzania to discuss the return of the refugees to Rwanda.
“On February 8, 1993, the RPF violated the July 1992 cease-fire and launched a massive attack all along the northern front and rapidly drove back the government troops”, writes Des Forges (1999). Kinzer describes how the RPF leadership was certain that the negotiations with the Rwandan government were merely games and that there was no real intention of allowing the refugees to return. Apart from this, during the many years of planning their return the refugees had decided that the only way was to overthrow the Habyarimana regime. “Fighting to go back was the only way. If you negotiate with the dictatorship and then go back, they would put you in prison or worse. ‘No, we have to remove the dictatorship in Rwanda.
Only through that can we have peace. It will serve nothing to go back while there
is a dictatorship in power that is ethnic and anti-Tutsi”, Kinzer quotes an early leader of RANU as saying (2008, 49). Not only did the RPF want the right to return to a free Rwanda, they also believed that conditions in Rwanda needed to change. Kinzer quotes Kagame as saying that the level of oppression and
injustice in Rwanda ‘was simply unacceptable’ but that many Tutsi in Rwanda had learnt just to ‘bow their heads, keep their opinions to themselves and do whatever was necessary to placate their Hutu masters’ (2008, 99).
The RPF was described as the best-educated guerilla army in history (Prunier, 1995, 117). Behind the army fighting in Rwanda was a far larger ‘army’ of civilians who were raising awareness and support for the cause throughout the world. As the Tutsi diaspora, some six hundred thousand people living in exile, began to hear of the RPF in the Virunga mountains, they started to come in their thousands to join the cause. Many of these were educated in East Africa, Europe, North America and even Australia (Kinzer, 2008, 35). Apart from being well-educated, the RPF was highly politicized. Kinzer says this is something Kagame learnt from his years of experience fighting in the Ugandan bush; people who know what they are fighting for are motivated and committed, prepared to suffer harrowing
circumstances for what they believe in and are less likely to dessert when the going gets tough (2008, 84). The RPF troops were constantly being educated by their Political Department with regards to the situation in Rwanda and why they were fighting.
Behind the RPF’s offensive in northern Rwanda in the early 1990s lay decades of talking, debating, organizing, planning and strategizing. Kinzer follows the story from the 1980s, where Tito Rutaremara, a revolutionary theoretician living in Paris, took leadership of RANU. He immediately began to train and educate others in the belief that an ‘educated army committed to a cause has an innate advantage over a nonpolitical enemy’ (2008, 49). ‘Political cadres’ were trained in RPF ideology and then educated the refugee communities in Uganda (2008, 50).
This political ideology was, according to Kinzer, founded in “Anglophone
traditions, revolutionary passion and African socialism” (2008. 103). The emphasis on political education continues to be part of the Rwandan governments’ strategy of leadership today. Understanding the formation of the RPF and its particular
political ideology gives significant insight into the thinking of the current government, and its approach to leadership.
Together with a high level of education and political education in particular, the RPF was called on to be highly disciplined. “In the way we fight, in the way we conduct ourselves, we must always be different from those we are fighting
against”, Kinzer quotes Kagame as saying (2008, 84). The RPF disciplinary code held eleven capital offenses, including murder, rape, violent robbery and
desertion. And it listed twenty-four other crimes that would result in corporal punishment, such as the use of alcohol and drugs, being idle and disorderly, not paying for goods in villages, having sex with anyone other than a lawful spouse and spreading harmful propaganda (Kinzer, 2008, 83). This ensured that all the actions by the RPF remained focused on the carefully worked out strategic plan by Kagame to take over power in Rwanda.
However, Beatrice Umutesi, a Hutu who became a refugee after the genocide, writes that the RPF committed unmentionable atrocities in Byumba. Although Umutesi initially doubted it was the RPF, her doubts were overcome by countless stories from family members who themselves were the survivors of terrible acts of violence. The wife of her cousin shared the story of finding her dead husband “tied up by his own entrails to a post in his store. The rebels had disemboweled him, pulled out his guts and used them for a rope” (2004, 24). She further describes the systematic way people (including women and children) were “herded into houses, locked them from the outside, and then attacked them with grenades.
The survivors were finished off with knives” (2004, 26). Counter to these claims is the theory that the RPF committed no such crimes but that these crimes were staged by the Habyarimana government to turn the Rwandan population against the RPF. Lee Anne Fujii describes these attacks as ‘staged’ by the former government to incite fear in the population (2004, 99).
On the one hand, one reads of the RPF as a well-disciplined army where any person stepping out of line, or committing what would be termed as a crime against humanity, was immediately punished (Prunier, 1995; Dallaire, 2003). On the other hand, evidence is surfacing of many atrocious crimes having been committed by the RPF between 1990 and 1994, having been well hidden from
outside observers. These instances of violence, whether stemming from the RPF or staged by the Rwandan government, brought fear amongst many Rwandans that the RPF were a cruel and bloodthirsty military movement that was seeking control of the country. Kinzer describes how even Tutsi living in Rwanda would flee before the RPF (2008, 98). “’You want power?’ a Tutsi who lived in Ruhengeri asked one of the inkotanyi who raided the town in 1991. ‘You will get it. But here we will all die. Is it worth it to you?’” (Kinzer, 2008, 99). It was this violence taking place in certain parts of Rwanda, particularly between the border of Uganda and northern Rwanda that, amongst other things, has been said to have precipitated the genocide.