Africa's World War: Congo, The Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe, and: Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda (review)

Gérard Prunier's considerable contributions to the study of Africa's Great Lakes region have elicited some controversy. His landmark study of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, The Rwanda Crisis (1997), was criticized by some for its overly sympathetic assessment of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). Prunier's latest contribution, Africa's World War, is both more critical and ambitious, placing the genocide in the broader context of the First and Second Congo Wars of September 1996-May 1997 and August 1998-July 2003. Prunier's premise is that "the perception gap between the international community and what was happening in Rwanda was enormous" (p. 37), a view applicable to much of Rwanda's modern history.

The "trouble," as Prunier stresses, did not begin in 1994 any more than the modern history of Rwanda itself can be grasped by narrowly focusing on the cataclysmic events that claimed approximately 800,000 to one million Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa. The post-genocide crisis in the Great Lakes region, sparked by the mass movement of refugees, "must be seen as the last link in a chain of events . . . triggered by a very precise and localized upheaval back in 1959" (p. 330). The Hutu Revolution (1959-1961) generated the first wave of Tutsi refugees, the birth of a diaspora whose large Ugandan component was dominated during the 1980s by the RPF and its military wing, the Rwandan Patriotic Army. Closely allied to Yoweri Museveni's Uganda, the "whole life history" of the RPA "even before [it] set foot on Rwandese soil had been full of . . . the fury of civil war, with its attendant atrocities and civilian massacres, committed against them, around them, or by them. For them violence was not exceptional; it was a normal state of affairs" (p. 13).

Prunier still acknowledges the central role of the RPF/RPA in ending the 1994 genocide, but he now presents a catalogue of RPF offenses: a "global disdain for the safety of the Tutsi victims during the 1994 genocide" (p. 15); extensive war crimes prior to and during the genocide, followed by extensive massacres in post-1994 Rwanda and Zaire, including creation of "disposal areas" to incinerate corpses, some of them Tutsi (a brutality aimed at eliminating any potential alternative elite) (pp. 17, 19, 20); and a cynical policy of "national unity" and "reconciliation" cloaking plans for an "ethnic dictatorship" (pp. 23, 35) that would mask divisions between Tutsi and Hutu, Francophone and Anglophone, those who survived in Rwanda and those who fled and returned (p. 42). The leaders projected a reassuring image of their regime to an outside world that had failed to stop the genocide (p. 331).

Prunier castigates the international community for relapsing into "moralism" when political resolve and "hard analysis" might have prevented the genocide. Paradoxical policy initiatives abounded. During the pre-genocide Arusha negotiations, the international community pushed for peace "at all costs" but failed to address the factors leading toward genocide. Afterwards, despite evidence of large-scale massacres by the RPA, the international community demanded repatriation of two million mainly Hutu refugees, again "at all costs" (p. 31). Failure to prevent genocide and subsequently to institute an expeditious and effective judicial response was compounded by "humanitarian condescension and diplomatic bickering" (p. 47). Neither the RPF/RPA abuses nor disarming ex-National Armed Forces (FAR) fugitives in Eastern Zaire had priority.

The rapid destabilization of Zaire's North and South Kivu provinces coincided with the influx of Hutu refugees manipulated by "a highly ideological political and military leadership" dominated by the ex-FAR and Interahamwe (the genocidal Hutu militia) (p. 54). This threat on Rwanda's western border provided the RPF...