Uganda pays DRC for war damages: remembering Rwanda’s 1994 genocide and Africa’s First World War (1998-2003)

Uganda pays DRC for war damages: remembering Rwanda’s 1994 genocide and Africa’s First World War (the Congo 1998 – 2003)

In sharp contrast to the column last month, that dealt with dialogue between the east and west, as encouraged by Mohammad Khatami, Iranian President in 1999… like a bull crashing into a China shop, this Blindspot column takes you on a rough and genocidal ride through blindspots in recent African history. 

During September news broke that went mostly unnoticed, being that the International Court of Justice, ordered Uganda to pay US $325 million, as war reparations, for its role in what has come to be known as Africa’s (first) World War – 1998 to 2003. 

Madison Moulton, writing on the History Guild platform, argues that, ‘5.4 million people died in the deadliest war in modern African history. Yet, the event remains overlooked and understudied. A spill over war resulting from the Rwandan Genocide, fighting continued between the Hutu and Tutsi people, backed by Uganda. The First and Second Congo Wars caused the largest loss of life that has occurred since World War 2.’

The significance of this can only be understood by rewinding in time to a period, the mid to late 1990s, that saw ruthless bloodthirsty barbarism unleashed on the unsuspecting heads of millions of citizens of Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. At the time, for South Africans, news of this genocide was a peripheral occurrence in the midst of our Madiba-induced, dawn of democracy, euphoria. In a strange way the Rwandan genocide is the absolute inverse of what occurred in South Africa, in 1994. The world had always expected South Africa to be, potentially, the one nation that will fall into bloodletting and violent ethnically induced race-based extermination wars. 

To understand why the Congolese conflict, post-1994, is referred to as Africa’s First World War, it has to be recalled that in 1999, the Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement, that tried to bring hostilities in the Congo to an end, was signed by no less than seven African nations, with active military forces deployed into the layer cake conflict, by countries including Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, Rwanda, and Uganda. 

The latter qualifies the Congo war as a multi-national war. And, do not for a moment underestimate the importance of control over critical natural resources, as driver and motivation not just for regional states to enter the fray, but, for significant global powers to clandestinely fuel the flames of Africa’s World War I. 

But how did it all start? It is no coincidence that a civil war erupted in what was then still called ‘Zaire,’ in 1996. At that time, the country, now called the Democratic Republic of Congo, was still the fiefdom of Mobutu Sese Seko. The start of the First Congo War in 1996, is to a large extent directly tied to the fall-out of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. More on that in a moment. 

On a personal note, once on a research journey to Rwanda, I visited the Rwandan Genocide memorial, in Kigali. If memory serves, on the site of this ‘museum’ it is said that several hundred thousand bodies of slaughtered Tutsi’s are buried in mass graves. It does not take an overly ‘sensitive’ or ‘spiritual’ person to leave this site feeling the need for a significant cleansing: evil has a face, a name, and a number, and may just be your neighbour. In total the Rwandan genocide took about a million people out of circulation (if you think of it, this is a full sixth of the claimed number of Jews slaughtered in Nazi extermination camps by Ubermench Hitler, during WWII). 

The exhibition hall, filled with art exhibit installation-style photographic and video displays of corpses piled up on streets, in churches, and on school playgrounds, with necessary macabre skeletal grimaces for photogenic effect, brings the message of grand-scale horror home. It tells the story of how on the night of 6 April, 1994, the plane of President Habyarimana of Rwanda, and his Burundian counterpart, president Cyprien Ntaryamira, was destroyed en-route to Kigali, leaving no survivors. It is still claimed that this incident was carefully planned and orchestrated by Hutu militias, in collaboration with senior military commanders. 

In a matter of hours, coordinated acts of mass murder, instigated by the Presidential Guard, the Rwandan Armed Forces, and the Interahamwe (Hutu militia groups) commenced in the capital city, Kigali. In a matter of days the killing spree spread across the country with national radio stations encouraging citizens to fall on, and kill their neighbours, if they so happen to be of non-Hutu origin. And please ignore any Hollywood movies on this topic, like Black Hawk Down, concerning Somalia, it is mere US deep state propaganda to control the ‘narrative,’ and imprint a western sanitised version of history on the ‘silver indoctrination screen’. 

The Rwandan genocide can be likened to a Christian Bible, Old Testament inspired order from Yahweh: kill each, and evaporate from the privilege of earthly existence, every false god and idol, dog, cow, cat, chicken, camel, sheep, goat, baby, child, adult, and elderly person, of some so-called ‘heathen’ nation. Take the territory, and to hell with the rest! 

But, meanwhile back at the ranch in what is to become the DRC. Between 1994 and 1996 it is estimated that more than 2.5 million refugees fled into the eastern DRC, from slaughterhouse Rwanda. The latter thus exports the Rwandan conflict into an already unstable failing Mobutuist state, with a frail army to boot. 

Meantime, armed forces, led by General Paul Kagame, backed by M7 (Yoweri Museveni – President of Uganda), stormed Rwanda to put the horror show of Hutu led mass destruction under military heel and steel. This sets the mass exodus of Hutu refugees, and armed groups, from 1994 to 1996, into the DRC, as noted above, in motion. 

As the Rwandan chaos spilled across the Congo’s borders from 1994, the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the liberation of Congo (AFDL), became one of the most significant armed opposition groups to the regime of Mobutu. It is claimed that the AFDL was formed with the backing of Rwanda and Uganda, led Laurent-Désiré Kabila. 

Here comes the moment where knowledge of contemporary African history is critical. To cut a long-war story short. Laurent Kabila was not trusted, respected, or accepted as President of the newly minted DRC. While his war effort to gain control of the Congo was successful due to backing from Rwanda and Uganda, this military-industrial relationship soon turned sour. 

In order to gain support, and a semblance of ‘the emperor wears no clothes’ legitimacy, inside the country, it is claimed Laurent Kabila turned on his erstwhile supporters, and forced Rwandan forces (still pursuing Hutu militias and perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, in the Eastern Congo), to leave the country. The withdrawal of Rwandan and Ugandan forces allowed Hutu militias to regroup, and even stage attacks, in an effort to re-enter Rwanda, with the aim of re-capturing Kigali, and to continue with the agenda of ethnic cleansing by means of machete.  

With the Rwandan and Ugandan strategies for influence in, and control over, vast swathes of DRC territory, scuppered by Kabila turning his back on M7 and Kagame, it can confidently be said that the Second Congo War began when Rwanda and Uganda decided to retaliate, and launch military operations into the DRC from 1998, against the forces of Laurent Kabila. In this case Uganda and Rwanda plotted an invasion, and actively supported a new rebel group, called the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RDC).

The latter is then, additionally, the foundation of the claim, laid by the DRC, against Uganda, at the International Court of Justice, for war reparations to be paid to the DRC for Uganda’s military adventures inside the DRC, from 1998. 

For the Rwandans, the joint 1998 offensive into the DRC also opened the door to renewed military action with the aim of destroying remnants of Hutu militias still sharpening their machetes against Tutsis, and a Rwandan state, not under their ethnically cleansed control. 

A critical moment in the conflict illustrates why the Congo war can be referred to as Africa’s ‘own’ first world war: by August 1998, the RDC seized strategic Congolese ports in Ketona, in the West of the country (on the Atlantic Ocean). This resulted, additionally, in Hutu uprisings in Kinshasa, and the mass killing of Tutsis in the capital of the DRC – removed by thousands of kilometres of dense tropical African rainforest from slaughterhouse Rwanda. This is the moment where one observes how the Rwandan genocide was exported into the Congolese civil war, and became a major feature of the conflict. 

In response to this utter chaos and mayhem erupting in the DRC, the governments of Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Angola, deployed armed forces to prop up President Kabila’s overwhelmed, disorganised, demoralised forces.

The history of the Congo goes much deeper, and the sources of historical and contemporary conflicts in the proverbial ‘heart of Africa’ remain mostly under-investigated, and hence, completely misunderstood. 

The moment in the month of September, 2022, when the Ugandan government actually paid a ‘first instalment’ of US $65 million to the DRC, of the $325 million the International Court of Justice charged it to pay to the DRC for war reparations, marks a major moment in African geopolitics. 

It forces us to be reminded of the hidden wars, the clandestine conflicts, and the murderous insurgencies occurring across the continent as we speak, with very little attention, or investigation, or in-depth research into the why, the what, the where, and the consequence, of these conflicts tearing through the fabric of African society.