Security Dynamics in Africa's Great Lakes Region (review)

This is the latest of a series of edited volumes that grew out of four conferences on the security challenges faced by sub-Saharan Africa's major regions held between December 2000 and December 2003 at the initiative of the International Peace Academy (IPA), and with funding from several Northern European countries, Canada, and two major U.S. foundations.¹

Since initiating its Africa Program in 1992, shortly after Olara Otunnu assumed its stewardship (from 1990 to1998), the IPA, originally founded in 1970, has sponsored country-specific studies in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Western Sahara, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and has continued to produce thematic, cross-continental reports on such issues as peace-building, the role of NGOs in armed conflict, the resource dimensions of civil war (including the "greed and grievance" debate), conflict prevention, and UN capacities, negotiated settlements in civil wars, sanctions, the fate of civilians in war, humanitarian emergencies, and intervention and international law. Under the circumstances, and given the IPA's close, though informal, links to the United Nations and major regional organizations, one might expect this (and similar) volumes to reflect theoretical continuity and consistency in weltanschauung. This is mostly displayed in the introductory and concluding chapters contributed by Khadiagala, and by the editors of the other three volumes in the series. Khadiagala's opening and final sections focus on security, peace, and (more tentatively), governance, with some useful considerations on the discrepant nexus between society and state.

Bracketed by these largely theoretical sections, with the inevitable degree of disembodied jargon implied by the genre, are eight chapters of variable merit, all providing specific "case studies"—and thus with analysis, rather than synthesis. The first is titled "Regional Actors and Issues," and the second is titled "The Role of External Actors."

By far the best of the lot are the opening contributions by Filip Reyntjens ("Governance and Security in Rwanda") and René Lemarchand ("Burundi at the Crossroads"). Noting that "Rwanda has been at the core of the [Great Lakes] region's instability since the attack by the RPF on October 1990," Reyntjens observes: "Although security concerns were initially the driving force for war, the economic exploitation of Rwanda's rich and vast but weak neighbor eventually became the main, though never acknowledged, reason" (p. 30). He goes on to dissect the increasingly oligarchic and authoritarian nature of the Kagame regime, its manipulation of the media, and its exploitation of the "genocide credit" to browbeat domestic dissenters and external critics, or to mine Western guilt to ensure the uninterrupted flow of foreign aid, a large portion of which, supplemented by the looting of the DRC's resources, serves to feed a huge military budget. Commenting on the charade of Rwanda's so-called "democratic transition," Reyntjens concludes that "the donor community, having abandoned Rwanda a first time in 1994, attempted to redeem itself" by becoming "complicit in the installation of a new dictatorship"—a complacent attitude, which has "incrementally contributed to a situation that may well be irreversible and that contains the seeds for new massive violence in the medium/long run" (p. 33).

Lemarchand's superb and incisive analysis of the Burundi situation, covering developments through the end of 2005, draws on his extensive writings and his unparalleled familiarity with that country—spanning some four decades—to offer a masterly summation of its political and ethnic dynamics. Lemarchand briefly reminds us that Burundi has "the sad distinction of having experienced the first genocide in Central Africa" (in 1972) and the highest rate of assassination of heads of state or government (p. 41). While there was, he argues, "nothing in the historical record to warrant the view that Hutu and Tutsi identities were creations of the colonizer, or that the removal of colonial control may have released long dormant hostilities between them," he tracks the significance of developments in neighboring Rwanda and of their cross-border reverberations at three critical junctures. The 1959...