By Norm Dixon
The campaign being waged by western governments, the international media and aid agencies against the rebel Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire and its leader Laurent Kabila has little to do with the welfare of the remaining Rwandan refugees in Zaire. Rather, it is intended to apply maximum pressure on the ADFL to agree to share power with the remnants of the brutal Mobutu dictatorship.
The US government, the United Nations, and belatedly France and Belgium, have insisted that the rebels unilaterally halt their advance and enter negotiations with the Mobutu regime to establish a "transitional" government. The formula favoured by Washington and the UN is a power-sharing arrangement between the ADFL, remnants of the regime and the tame-cat opposition of Etienne Tshisekedi.
Washington and Paris are nervous that a government led by Kabila will align with the people of Zaire, not foreign corporations. As the April 28 Financial Times observed: "The US and other Western powers are anxious for Kabila to win control of Kinshasa as part of a negotiated settlement ... rather than at the head of an all-conquering rebel force, answerable to no one".
The ADFL has repeatedly refused to call a cease-fire until Mobutu resigns, and insisted that talks must be with Mobutu directly and limited to the dictator's departure. The ADFL is not prepared to share power with figures identified with the Mobutu regime or with the discredited opposition "political class" in Kinshasa.
On April 23, UN secretary general Kofi Annan urged all governments to use their diplomatic influence to get Kabila to agree to a one-year transitional government. He suggested that once a cease-fire between Kinshasa and the ADFL is signed, a UN military force might enter Zaire.
Annan's suggestion points to the real role of the more than 4000 heavily armed combat troops from the US, France, Belgium, Britain and Portugal gathered across the Zaire River in Brazzaville under the pretext of being ready to evacuate westerners.
One contingency obviously being considered is an invasion of Kinshasa before the ADFL arrives. The western forces are conducting frequent training manoeuvres on the Zaire River to show they mean business.
After the fall of Kisangani in March, when it was clear the ADFL insurgency had snowballed into a country-wide rebellion, accusations of human rights abuses and massacres began. Without a shred of evidence, claims were made of mass graves. The only credence given to these claims came from Mobutu's French and Belgian allies and sections of the UN and aid agency bureaucracies.
The new accusations coincide with Annan's call for pressure to be applied to the ADFL. "I am shocked and appalled by the inhumanity of those who control eastern Zaire. I don't think that the international community can stand by as thousands of innocent women and children are starved to death", Annan told the UN Security Council on April 22.
While the evidence is still flimsy, this time the claims have been accepted and spread with a vengeance by the international media, western governments and aid agencies.
The Washington Post on April 26 pointed to why attitudes have changed: "Leverage to bring about talks may be gained by foreign powers' mounting suspicions about the rebels' alleged mistreatment of Rwandan refugees ... [Kabila] is under immense pressure from US, European, African and UN leaders to show himself to be 'pragmatic'."
It is claimed that rebels have refused to allow the UN to fly 80,000 Rwandan refugees, camped south of Kisangani, back to Rwanda and that the ADFL has blocked humanitarian aid to the refugees and committed massacres.
In the thousands of column-inches and kilometres of videotape, the reality that a civil war is raging in Zaire has been forgotten. The ADFL is being blamed for the crimes of the enemies of the Zairean and Rwandan peoples.
The refugees who remain in Zaire are the last of more than 1.3 million members of the Hutu ethnic group who fled to Zaire from Rwanda after a Hutu-chauvinist government ordered the murder of more than 500,000 minority Tutsis and anti-government Hutus in 1994.
A mass uprising led by the Rwandan Patriotic Front overthrew the government and forced it and its genocidal armed forces from the country. The refugee camps in eastern Zaire became virtual concentration camps controlled by the Hutu-chauvinist army and militia — the interahamwe.
Innocent Hutu refugees were held hostage in the camps until freed by the uprising, begun last September, of Zaireans fed up with the vicious attacks of the interahamwe, allied with Mobutu's army. More than a million refugees streamed home to Rwanda after the interahamwe's control over the camps was broken.
Those most responsible for the genocide, together with their families and tens of thousands of innocent refugees still held captive, moved deeper into Zaire as the ADFL advanced west. The camps that housed the 80,000 refugees near Kisangani remained firmly under the brutal rule of the interahamwe.
The UN and aid agencies continued to turn a blind eye to the control of the camps by mass murderers, as they had done for the two years after the expulsion of the interahamwe from Rwanda.
The rebels agreed to allow the UN to repatriate the refugees but asked that it be done by road, not by air. An airlift on the scale envisaged by the UN would have taken months and completely clogged the Kisangani airport, severely hampering the campaign to overthrow Mobutu.
The ADFL did not want thousands of armed opponents camped within striking distance of the strategic Kisangani airport and Zaire's second largest city. For the UN and aid agencies to demand this was tantamount to siding with the interahamwe and Mobutu in the civil war. As the refugees' condition worsened, the UN and aid agencies refused to shift them by road.
The UN, the media and aid agencies hysterically denounced the ADFL's decision to "seal off" the camps on April 21, but glossed over the reasons for it. Since the refugees arrived in the area, local villagers have suffered continual armed raids from the interahamwe, stealing food and destroying crops.
Incensed villagers retaliated by attacking the refugee camps with machetes. Survivors spoke of "hundreds" being killed. Some claimed rebels had fired on refugees from a passing train. Journalists repeated these claims but could find only 20 injured people and a dozen corpses — all had machete, not bullet, wounds.
ADFL forces moved in to stop the bloodletting and were ambushed by interahamwe hiding in the camps. As happened many times before, the interahamwe ordered the refugee camps cleared. Under fear of death, the refugees marched en masse into the jungle.
Journalists, the UN and aid agency spokespeople developed collective amnesia and refused to report that this has been a pattern since the start of the civil war. Nor did they report that it is not unusual for the interahamwe to execute refugees too sick to move or who attempt to escape. Instead, the rebels were blamed.
On April 29, the refugees began to emerge from the jungle in their tens of thousands. Kabila agreed to the UN airlift from Kisangani as long as it is completed within 60 days, yet this too drew criticism from the UN and aid agencies. The first flights reached Rwanda on April 30.
Meanwhile, ADFL fighters are within 390 kilometres of Kinshasa, having liberated Kikwit on April 29. Reuters reported jubilation in the city after most government troops fled before the rebels arrived. Rebels are approaching the capital from the north, the east and south. ADFL leaders predict they will be in Kinshasa by mid-May.