Kabila Army's Mass Murder of Rwandan Hutu Refugees

	.	No. 3, September-October 1997 After 1994 Genocide of Tutsis Kabila Army's Genocidal Mass Murder of Rwandan Hutu Refugees As the rebel forces of Laurent Kabila moved rapidly across Zaire, conquering in seven months a huge country the size of West Europe or the United States east of the Mississippi, the army of the dictator Mobutu melted before them. There was little actual fighting, as government troops concentrated on looting before fleeing. But there was a lot of killing, not of combatants but of tens of thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees. A number of leftist groups have tried to deny, justify or ignore this fact, some because of their support for Kabila, others because they are suspicious of the way that the imperialists have used the question of Rwandan refugees to try to pressure the new Congo regime. The Congolese government has accused UN special investigator Roberto Garreton of bias in his February 1997 report of mass killings by the AFDL forces. But there is irrefutable documented evidence that a genocidal massacre has been under way. Conservative estimates of the numbers of refugees who were murdered outright or were driven into the jungle to die range from 150,000 to 230,000. As Western governments mouth platitudes about human rights, it is in fact the imperialists who are at the origin of this barbarism. When the first rebel units appeared in October 1996, their first act was to disperse and kill Rwandan refugees from camps in South Kivu province west of the city of Uvira on Lake Tanganyika. The South African Mail & Guardian (21 July) reported after visiting the area: “Among the main killing fields is Shabunda, where there are eye-witness accounts of Rwandan-led squads carrying out summary executions of Hutu men. A Rwandan officer, known to UN officials as Commander Jackson, identifies himself as ‘The Exterminator.’... “Credible witnesses report at least three mass graves in the Shabunda area, thought to contain the corpses of thousands of people, including children and babies. “Aid agencies say they were duped into laying a trap for refugees around Shabunda by encouraging them to come out of the forest for food.” Also in South Kivu, hundreds of refugees were killed, mostly women and children, in a machine-gun attack on a camp in the village of Kasese. A bulldozer was used to bury the victims. Near Minova, South Kivu, a container was found stuffed with Hutus who were locked inside and suffocated. In North Kivu province, outside Bukavu, several hundred Hutu refugees were killed at the Chimanga camp. At least eleven mass graves have been identified in the area. In some cases, local people were later press-ganged into digging up the bodies to be burned in order to destroy evidence. Around the city of Goma, at least 20 mass graves have been found. A local association charged with removing corpses along the main roads collected 6,537 cadavers in December 1996. The UN High Commission for Refugees reported 1,515 bodies collected at Kibumba camp and another 300 bodies at Katale camp in the same area. On 15-17 November 1996, the “rebels” launched a pincer attack on the huge refugee camp of Mugunga, which at the time held an estimated 500,000, many of them having fled from camps to the south. As a result of the slaughter, a huge mass of hundreds of thousands fled to the east, reentering Rwanda. U.S. spokesmen declared that this put an end to the refugee problem in eastern Zaire and numbered the returnees at over 700,000. However, aid workers on the spot who attempted to count the crowd put the number at no more than 450,000 (Goma/Bukavu: Temoignage Direct, January 1997). Of the 1.1 million Hutu refugees in camps before the attacks, this left perhaps 650,000 who did not go back to Rwanda. Eventually approximately 200,000 to 250,000 arrived at camps to the west, notably Tingi-Tingi on the road to Kisangani. In March and April, these makeshift camps were then brutally “cleared” of their hapless inhabitants. At Kasese, villagers whipped up by the rebel army tore into the Hutu refugees with spears and pangas (machetes), hacking and stabbing hundreds to death. By early May several thousand Rwandan Hutus made it west to the Congo River at Mbandaka across from the Congo Republic. But there the AFDL forces caught up with them. The Philadelphia Inquirer (5 June) reported: “Moments after the rebels arrived on May 13 to the cheers of grateful townsfolk, the troops horrified the residents by systematically exterminating Rwandan Hutu refugees.... The troops shot and beat to death at least 550 Hutu men, women and children who were attempting to escape on a barge by the river....” The accounts could be continued indefinitely. In a follow-up report in July, UN investigator Garreton listed 134 sites where mass killings of Hutu refugees took place. Only in a very few cases is any armed resistance reported. So when the Communist Party U.S.A., for example, sneers about “the ‘plight’ of Rwandan refugees” (People’s Weekly World, 15 May), they are apologizing for death squads. This was not a matter of random casualties, or a few rebel units running amok, it was a deliberate, systematic policy carried out by the AFDL forces. Those refugees they didn’t kill were bundled onto planes and sent to Rwanda where as many as 200,000 Hutu men are stuffed into jails that are bursting at the seams, charged with participation in genocide although in fact no judicial action or even investigation is underway. They are being held there to die. Like the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis, the present genocidal mass murder of Hutu refugees is a horrendous crime. It is important for communists to explain why such monstrous events have taken place. The slaughter in the eastern Congo was a spillover resulting from the war in Rwanda in 1994, in which the previous Hutu chauvinist regime was defeated by the Tutsi-dominated RPF forces. As they were going down to defeat, the reactionary Hutu chauvinists unleashed a massive genocide of Tutsis living inside Rwanda. Estimates of the number of Tutsis killed range from 500,000 to 800,000. The remnants of the old regime maintained an armed presence in the refugee camps in Zaire, from which they launched periodic raids into Rwanda during 1995-96. In response, and in revenge, the RPF regime in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, decided to disperse the camps and wipe out the Hutu refugees. There is no doubt that this was done as a conscious policy, and where individual AFDL commanders who ordered the killings are known, a remarkable number of them have English names (Colonel Wilson, Colonel Richard). It is thus likely that they are Tutsi refugees who grew up in English-speaking Uganda and who are the hard core of the RPF regime. They are disciplined, professional, and ruthless mass murderers. The genocide against the Tutsi population of Rwanda was the result of a whole course of history, which it is important to understand. The relation of Tutsis and Hutus was one of domination and subjugation before the European colonizers arrived, and this was greatly intensified during the colonial period. Lately, particularly following the 1994 genocide, it has been fashionable to treat the two groups as ethnic groups, similar to tribal divisions in other parts of Africa. This suggests a vertical division between two peoples living in close proximity. There are ethnic elements to the differences between these two social groups, and according to historic tradition, the Tutsi herders migrated from the north to settle in the upland area of the Great Lakes where there was a settled agriculturalist population of Bantu origin, the Hutus. There are prototypical differences in physical appearance between Tutsi and Hutu, although as a result of intermarriage such differences are far from uniform. But the fundamental social fact is that Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda and Burundi were part of the same people. They speak the same closely related languages (Kinyarwanda and Kirundi), have a common culture, are part of a common political economy in a common territory and were ruled over by the same political systems. The tendency of the media and current bourgeois academics to reduce most social divisions to ethnicity only serves to obscure and confuse the origins of the violent Hutu-Tutsi clashes in recent years. It is more accurate to refer to the Hutus and Tutsis, as was done in earlier studies, as castes, albeit ones which are not as rigidly separated or laden with religious significance as the Hindu Indian origin of this term. Socially, economically and politically, the Tutsi population was a dominant caste in the pre-colonial period. Between individual Hutus and Tutsis there was generally a relation based on the institution of ubuhake (clientship) traditionally sealed by the lending of cattle by the Tutsi patron to the Hutu client. This led to descriptions of the Tutsi-Hutu relation as one of “feudality,” or an early stage of feudalism. There are important regional variations, but the fundamental division of society in Rwanda and Burundi is into horizontal layers, that is, between a dominant Tutsi layer (about 15 percent of the population in both countries) living in part off of surplus product from the subordinate Hutu majority (roughly 85 percent). Much of the ambiguity surrounding Hutu-Tutsi relations is a result of the fact that they were part of social formations in the process of consolidation at the time colonial rule was imposed early in this century. Unlike much of Africa, states have existed in the Rwanda/Burundi region for centuries. Out of numerous small “kingdoms” presided over by Tutsi rulers of different lineages, a single kingdom was gradually formed in Rwanda headed by the mwami (king), with outlying areas ruled over by what amounted to princes. The extension of rule by the Tutsi monarchy over Hutu principalities was continuing when the European colonizers arrived. The colonial rulers, briefly Germany and then Belgian, opted to rule exclusively through the Tutsi, setting up a system of chiefs. By 1959 on the eve of independence, some 43 out of 45 chiefs in Rwanda were Tutsi, as were 549 out of 559 subchiefs. The power of the chiefs was increased, Tutsi economic exactions were intensified, and the colonial authorities introduced onerous forced labor on state projects (e.g., building roads) and forced cultivation of cash crops such as coffee. On top of this, the colonial rulers promoted the Tutsis as a “superior race.” The result of this sharply increasing oppression was ultimately an explosion of resentment among the Hutu population at the time of independence. In Rwanda there was a so-called “Hutu Revolution” in 1959-61, and the resulting republic drove some 130,000 Tutsis into exile. In Burundi to the south, the Tutsi aristocracy remained dominant, although after a few years the monarchy was replaced by military rulers. But the new bourgeois Hutu rulers of Rwanda were hardly revolutionaries. They represented a layer of upwardly striving petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, educated in the Catholic Church missions and ideologically close to their priests, who in turn were tied in with the conservative Christian Democratic parties in Europe. In many respects, Rwanda during 1961-1994 resembled right-wing clericalist regimes such as Salazar’s Portugal. The rule of General Habyarimana, who took over in 1973, spawned a fascistic fringe, linked to European paramilitaries, which launched the anti-Tutsi genocide as the end approached. What this showed is that under capitalism, even many movements of the oppressed will be turned in a reactionary direction unless they are given leadership by the revolutionary proletariat. The “Hutu republic” buttressed its rule with openly racialist ideology. The 1959 “Bahutu Manifesto” declared: “The problem is basically that of the political monopoly of one race, the Mututsi” (quoted in Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide). In the last months before independence, the Belgian colonial administrators suddenly switched from their traditional support to the Tutsi monarchy and chiefs and began favoring the Hutu parties. And when violence broke out in 1960, in the extreme it took the form of Hutu mobs massacring Tutsis in acts of indiscriminate killing. A March 1961 UN Trusteeship Commission Report stated: “The developments of these last eighteen months have brought about the racial dictatorship of one party.... An oppressive system has been replaced by another one.... It is quite possible that some day we will witness violent reactions on the part of the Tutsi.” And that is precisely what happened two decades later. Because of the horrendous nature of the genocide unleashed by the fascistic Hutu “racialists” (in league with Belgian paratroopers and South African mercenaries, with the genocidal Interahamwe militia trained by the French military), public opinion in the West, including the bulk of the left, has been largely uncritical of the Tutsi-dominated Rwandese Patriotic Front which drove out the genocidalists. The RPF was seen as the representatives of an oppressed population. Yet the leaders of the RPF were not pursuing social liberation but the establishment of a Tutsi ascendency in the region. Rwanda’s new strong man, Paul Kagamé, was once a Maoist, but he is also related to the Tutsi monarchy. Among the RPF leadership are other more open Tutsi supremacists. Some of them are not even Tutsis themselves. The fighting in Zaire is supposed to have started when Mobutu’s governor of the South Kivu province ordered the expulsion of the local Rwandan-derived population, predominantly Tutsi, known as Banyamulenge. This was actually just a pretext seized upon by Rwandan leader Paul Kagamé, whose army had for months been training displaced Zairean Tutsis among many others to lead an attack on the Hutu refugee camps. Moreover, at the very beginning of the fighting, Rwandan president Pasteur Bizimungu, a Hutu front man for the overwhelmingly Tutsi regime, called in the diplomatic corps, representatives of non-governmental organizations and the press and gave them a lecture about the historic wrongs done to Rwanda. In his statement he asserted that “since 1540 the region of the Banyamulenge was part of Rwanda,” and “the ancient nation of Rwanda was dismembered by colonial boundaries” (quoted in David Newbury, “Irredentist Rwanda: Ethnic and Territorial Frontiers in Central Africa,” Africa Today, Vol. 44:2, 1997). This was indeed a classic case of “irredentism,” on the lines of the Italian nationalists in the 1870s who demanded annexation of Italian-speaking communities in Austrian-held Trieste, Trentino, Istria and south Tyrol, which they called Italia irredenta (unredeemed Italy), and which Italy won after switching sides in World War I. Bizimungu even distributed a map (see above) outlining the areas of “Rwanda irredenta” or Greater Rwanda he was laying claim to (which, interestingly, didn’t include the areas where Banyamulenge lived in South Kivu, but did include a big swath of North Kivu in Zaire and a chunk of Uganda). Despite the rather spectacular nature of this presentation, the international press largely ignored it and continued to present Rwanda’s pro-forma claims that it had “no territorial claims.” Meanwhile, in the course of driving out the remnants of the Hutu bourgeois regime, the RPF itself carried out massive killings of Hutus. This is also true of the Tutsi rulers in neighboring Burundi, who butchered an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Hutus in 1972, and tens of thousands more in 1993. Gérard Prunier, whose 1994 book on the Rwandan genocide was quite positive toward the RPF, has written a postscript to a second edition stating that there is a high likelihood that the numbers of Hutu killed by the RPF victors could be “up to 100,000.” A report by a UN consultant that 30,000 Hutus had been killed in northwestern Rwanda was suppressed, even though the personnel who compiled the report thought its estimates were low. In April 1995, RPF military men gunned down over 4,000 Hutus in the Kibeho refugee camp inside Rwanda in full view of foreign aid workers, but there was hardly a ripple of protest from the regime’s international backers, notably the U.S. Prunier comments that the RPF massacres were “less ambitious and seem to have been much more tactically oriented.” Others have argued that it is impossible for the Tutsi rulers to carry out a genocide against Hutu because they are vastly outnumbered. There is a difference, but it is this: The fascistic Hutu chauvinists tried to wipe out the Tutsis as a whole, while in the rural areas they were joined by envious peasants trying to grab Tutsi-held lands. The Tutsi bourgeois rulers, on the other hand, as a dominant minority have attempted to exterminate the Hutu military, political and professional cadres, so that the bulk of the Hutu population will be a leaderless mass available for brutal exploitation. On top of this “tactically oriented” mass murder, they have now undertaken a deliberate campaign to liquidate the remaining Hutu refugees, on the grounds they will necessarily be enemies for life. Up to 800,000 Tutsis indiscriminately slaughtered by Hutu reactionaries in Rwanda; 100,000 Hutus murdered by the Tutsi rulers in Rwanda, and another 100,000-200,000 by the Tutsi regime in Burundi; and now something on the order of 200,000 Hutu refugees exterminated by the Tutsi army supplied to Kabila in Congo-Zairewhat we have here is mutual genocide. It comes to a head in a place like Rwanda/Burundi, where the social and economic pressures are the greatest: with a population density of 270 people per square kilometer in 1989, Rwanda has one of the highest rural concentrations of population in the world. Add to this the dramatic impact of the fall in coffee prices in the 1980s and ’90s, affecting what was once Rwanda’s sole major export, and this is a recipe for a social explosion. However, in the absence of revolutionary leadership and a strong proletariat, what has taken place is not a struggle for social progress but an outbreak of the virulent social pathology of decaying capitalism. The genocide in central Africa is usually blamed on “ancestral tribal hatreds,” although in fact, the Hutus and Tutsis are not tribes at all. It has been compared to ethnic mass murder in Yugoslavia. In that case, the blame has been placed on the Stalinist regimes, in addition to supposed age-old Balkan animosities. In reality, less than a century ago there was relatively united struggle by the south Slavic peoples against the Habsburg and Ottoman empires which divided and ruled over them. The Stalinist regimes managed to keep a lid on overt nationalist hostilities, but because they were nationalists claiming to build “socialism is one country,” they could not supersede the nation. That required advancing toward socialism, a classless society based on the highest development of productive forces instead of persistent scarcity. Today we witness the revolting spectacle of supposed socialists apologizing for genocidal mass murderers in the Congoin the name of “human rights,” no lessbecause these reformists accept the national limits inherent in capitalism. In the advanced capitalist countries reformism ultimately leads to support for imperialist war, as the assorted social democrats did in voting war credits to “their” bourgeoisie in World War I and social democrats and Stalinists did in backing the “democratic” Allies (the ones who nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki and firebombed Dresden) in World War II. In the countries dominated by imperialism, the reformists end up supporting colonialism (as they did in Vietnam and Algeria, for example) and apologizing for ethnic slaughter and genocide, as the Stalinists did over Biafra in the mid-1960s and as is the case with a host of pseudo-socialists over the Congo today. Those who support capitalismin the name of “reforming” it, of courseend up supporting the slaughter of the exploited and oppressed. To contact the Internationalist Group and the League for the Fourth International, send e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com Return to THE INTERNATIONALIST GROUP Home Page

No. 3, September-October 1997

After 1994 Genocide of Tutsis

Kabila Army's Genocidal Mass Murder
of Rwandan Hutu Refugees

As the rebel forces of Laurent Kabila moved rapidly across Zaire, conquering in seven months a huge country the size of West Europe or the United States east of the Mississippi, the army of the dictator Mobutu melted before them. There was little actual fighting, as government troops concentrated on looting before fleeing. But there was a lot of killing, not of combatants but of tens of thousands of Rwandan Hutu refugees. A number of leftist groups have tried to deny, justify or ignore this fact, some because of their support for Kabila, others because they are suspicious of the way that the imperialists have used the question of Rwandan refugees to try to pressure the new Congo regime. The Congolese government has accused UN special investigator Roberto Garreton of bias in his February 1997 report of mass killings by the AFDL forces. But there is irrefutable documented evidence that a genocidal massacre has been under way. Conservative estimates of the numbers of refugees who were murdered outright or were driven into the jungle to die range from 150,000 to 230,000. As Western governments mouth platitudes about human rights, it is in fact the imperialists who are at the origin of this barbarism.

When the first rebel units appeared in October 1996, their first act was to disperse and kill Rwandan refugees from camps in South Kivu province west of the city of Uvira on Lake Tanganyika. The South African Mail & Guardian (21 July) reported after visiting the area:

“Among the main killing fields is Shabunda, where there are eye-witness accounts of Rwandan-led squads carrying out summary executions of Hutu men. A Rwandan officer, known to UN officials as Commander Jackson, identifies himself as ‘The Exterminator.’...
“Credible witnesses report at least three mass graves in the Shabunda area, thought to contain the corpses of thousands of people, including children and babies.
“Aid agencies say they were duped into laying a trap for refugees around Shabunda by encouraging them to come out of the forest for food.”

Also in South Kivu, hundreds of refugees were killed, mostly women and children, in a machine-gun attack on a camp in the village of Kasese. A bulldozer was used to bury the victims. Near Minova, South Kivu, a container was found stuffed with Hutus who were locked inside and suffocated.

In North Kivu province, outside Bukavu, several hundred Hutu refugees were killed at the Chimanga camp. At least eleven mass graves have been identified in the area. In some cases, local people were later press-ganged into digging up the bodies to be burned in order to destroy evidence. Around the city of Goma, at least 20 mass graves have been found. A local association charged with removing corpses along the main roads collected 6,537 cadavers in December 1996. The UN High Commission for Refugees reported 1,515 bodies collected at Kibumba camp and another 300 bodies at Katale camp in the same area.

On 15-17 November 1996, the “rebels” launched a pincer attack on the huge refugee camp of Mugunga, which at the time held an estimated 500,000, many of them having fled from camps to the south. As a result of the slaughter, a huge mass of hundreds of thousands fled to the east, reentering Rwanda. U.S. spokesmen declared that this put an end to the refugee problem in eastern Zaire and numbered the returnees at over 700,000. However, aid workers on the spot who attempted to count the crowd put the number at no more than 450,000 (Goma/Bukavu: Temoignage Direct, January 1997).

Of the 1.1 million Hutu refugees in camps before the attacks, this left perhaps 650,000 who did not go back to Rwanda. Eventually approximately 200,000 to 250,000 arrived at camps to the west, notably Tingi-Tingi on the road to Kisangani. In March and April, these makeshift camps were then brutally “cleared” of their hapless inhabitants. At Kasese, villagers whipped up by the rebel army tore into the Hutu refugees with spears and pangas (machetes), hacking and stabbing hundreds to death. By early May several thousand Rwandan Hutus made it west to the Congo River at Mbandaka across from the Congo Republic. But there the AFDL forces caught up with them. The Philadelphia Inquirer (5 June) reported: “Moments after the rebels arrived on May 13 to the cheers of grateful townsfolk, the troops horrified the residents by systematically exterminating Rwandan Hutu refugees.... The troops shot and beat to death at least 550 Hutu men, women and children who were attempting to escape on a barge by the river....”

The accounts could be continued indefinitely. In a follow-up report in July, UN investigator Garreton listed 134 sites where mass killings of Hutu refugees took place. Only in a very few cases is any armed resistance reported. So when the Communist Party U.S.A., for example, sneers about “the ‘plight’ of Rwandan refugees” (People’s Weekly World, 15 May), they are apologizing for death squads. This was not a matter of random casualties, or a few rebel units running amok, it was a deliberate, systematic policy carried out by the AFDL forces. Those refugees they didn’t kill were bundled onto planes and sent to Rwanda where as many as 200,000 Hutu men are stuffed into jails that are bursting at the seams, charged with participation in genocide although in fact no judicial action or even investigation is underway. They are being held there to die.

Like the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis, the present genocidal mass murder of Hutu refugees is a horrendous crime. It is important for communists to explain why such monstrous events have taken place. The slaughter in the eastern Congo was a spillover resulting from the war in Rwanda in 1994, in which the previous Hutu chauvinist regime was defeated by the Tutsi-dominated RPF forces. As they were going down to defeat, the reactionary Hutu chauvinists unleashed a massive genocide of Tutsis living inside Rwanda. Estimates of the number of Tutsis killed range from 500,000 to 800,000. The remnants of the old regime maintained an armed presence in the refugee camps in Zaire, from which they launched periodic raids into Rwanda during 1995-96. In response, and in revenge, the RPF regime in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, decided to disperse the camps and wipe out the Hutu refugees. There is no doubt that this was done as a conscious policy, and where individual AFDL commanders who ordered the killings are known, a remarkable number of them have English names (Colonel Wilson, Colonel Richard). It is thus likely that they are Tutsi refugees who grew up in English-speaking Uganda and who are the hard core of the RPF regime. They are disciplined, professional, and ruthless mass murderers.

The genocide against the Tutsi population of Rwanda was the result of a whole course of history, which it is important to understand. The relation of Tutsis and Hutus was one of domination and subjugation before the European colonizers arrived, and this was greatly intensified during the colonial period. Lately, particularly following the 1994 genocide, it has been fashionable to treat the two groups as ethnic groups, similar to tribal divisions in other parts of Africa. This suggests a vertical division between two peoples living in close proximity. There are ethnic elements to the differences between these two social groups, and according to historic tradition, the Tutsi herders migrated from the north to settle in the upland area of the Great Lakes where there was a settled agriculturalist population of Bantu origin, the Hutus. There are prototypical differences in physical appearance between Tutsi and Hutu, although as a result of intermarriage such differences are far from uniform. But the fundamental social fact is that Hutus and Tutsis of Rwanda and Burundi were part of the same people. They speak the same closely related languages (Kinyarwanda and Kirundi), have a common culture, are part of a common political economy in a common territory and were ruled over by the same political systems.

The tendency of the media and current bourgeois academics to reduce most social divisions to ethnicity only serves to obscure and confuse the origins of the violent Hutu-Tutsi clashes in recent years. It is more accurate to refer to the Hutus and Tutsis, as was done in earlier studies, as castes, albeit ones which are not as rigidly separated or laden with religious significance as the Hindu Indian origin of this term. Socially, economically and politically, the Tutsi population was a dominant caste in the pre-colonial period. Between individual Hutus and Tutsis there was generally a relation based on the institution of ubuhake (clientship) traditionally sealed by the lending of cattle by the Tutsi patron to the Hutu client. This led to descriptions of the Tutsi-Hutu relation as one of “feudality,” or an early stage of feudalism. There are important regional variations, but the fundamental division of society in Rwanda and Burundi is into horizontal layers, that is, between a dominant Tutsi layer (about 15 percent of the population in both countries) living in part off of surplus product from the subordinate Hutu majority (roughly 85 percent).

Much of the ambiguity surrounding Hutu-Tutsi relations is a result of the fact that they were part of social formations in the process of consolidation at the time colonial rule was imposed early in this century. Unlike much of Africa, states have existed in the Rwanda/Burundi region for centuries. Out of numerous small “kingdoms” presided over by Tutsi rulers of different lineages, a single kingdom was gradually formed in Rwanda headed by the mwami (king), with outlying areas ruled over by what amounted to princes. The extension of rule by the Tutsi monarchy over Hutu principalities was continuing when the European colonizers arrived. The colonial rulers, briefly Germany and then Belgian, opted to rule exclusively through the Tutsi, setting up a system of chiefs. By 1959 on the eve of independence, some 43 out of 45 chiefs in Rwanda were Tutsi, as were 549 out of 559 subchiefs. The power of the chiefs was increased, Tutsi economic exactions were intensified, and the colonial authorities introduced onerous forced labor on state projects (e.g., building roads) and forced cultivation of cash crops such as coffee. On top of this, the colonial rulers promoted the Tutsis as a “superior race.”

The result of this sharply increasing oppression was ultimately an explosion of resentment among the Hutu population at the time of independence. In Rwanda there was a so-called “Hutu Revolution” in 1959-61, and the resulting republic drove some 130,000 Tutsis into exile. In Burundi to the south, the Tutsi aristocracy remained dominant, although after a few years the monarchy was replaced by military rulers. But the new bourgeois Hutu rulers of Rwanda were hardly revolutionaries. They represented a layer of upwardly striving petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, educated in the Catholic Church missions and ideologically close to their priests, who in turn were tied in with the conservative Christian Democratic parties in Europe. In many respects, Rwanda during 1961-1994 resembled right-wing clericalist regimes such as Salazar’s Portugal. The rule of General Habyarimana, who took over in 1973, spawned a fascistic fringe, linked to European paramilitaries, which launched the anti-Tutsi genocide as the end approached.

What this showed is that under capitalism, even many movements of the oppressed will be turned in a reactionary direction unless they are given leadership by the revolutionary proletariat. The “Hutu republic” buttressed its rule with openly racialist ideology. The 1959 “Bahutu Manifesto” declared: “The problem is basically that of the political monopoly of one race, the Mututsi” (quoted in Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide). In the last months before independence, the Belgian colonial administrators suddenly switched from their traditional support to the Tutsi monarchy and chiefs and began favoring the Hutu parties. And when violence broke out in 1960, in the extreme it took the form of Hutu mobs massacring Tutsis in acts of indiscriminate killing. A March 1961 UN Trusteeship Commission Report stated:

“The developments of these last eighteen months have brought about the racial dictatorship of one party.... An oppressive system has been replaced by another one.... It is quite possible that some day we will witness violent reactions on the part of the Tutsi.”

And that is precisely what happened two decades later. Because of the horrendous nature of the genocide unleashed by the fascistic Hutu “racialists” (in league with Belgian paratroopers and South African mercenaries, with the genocidal Interahamwe militia trained by the French military), public opinion in the West, including the bulk of the left, has been largely uncritical of the Tutsi-dominated Rwandese Patriotic Front which drove out the genocidalists. The RPF was seen as the representatives of an oppressed population. Yet the leaders of the RPF were not pursuing social liberation but the establishment of a Tutsi ascendency in the region. Rwanda’s new strong man, Paul Kagamé, was once a Maoist, but he is also related to the Tutsi monarchy. Among the RPF leadership are other more open Tutsi supremacists.

Some of them are not even Tutsis themselves. The fighting in Zaire is supposed to have started when Mobutu’s governor of the South Kivu province ordered the expulsion of the local Rwandan-derived population, predominantly Tutsi, known as Banyamulenge. This was actually just a pretext seized upon by Rwandan leader Paul Kagamé, whose army had for months been training displaced Zairean Tutsis among many others to lead an attack on the Hutu refugee camps. Moreover, at the very beginning of the fighting, Rwandan president Pasteur Bizimungu, a Hutu front man for the overwhelmingly Tutsi regime, called in the diplomatic corps, representatives of non-governmental organizations and the press and gave them a lecture about the historic wrongs done to Rwanda. In his statement he asserted that “since 1540 the region of the Banyamulenge was part of Rwanda,” and “the ancient nation of Rwanda was dismembered by colonial boundaries” (quoted in David Newbury, “Irredentist Rwanda: Ethnic and Territorial Frontiers in Central Africa,” Africa Today, Vol. 44:2, 1997).

This was indeed a classic case of “irredentism,” on the lines of the Italian nationalists in the 1870s who demanded annexation of Italian-speaking communities in Austrian-held Trieste, Trentino, Istria and south Tyrol, which they called Italia irredenta (unredeemed Italy), and which Italy won after switching sides in World War I. Bizimungu even distributed a map (see above) outlining the areas of “Rwanda irredenta” or Greater Rwanda he was laying claim to (which, interestingly, didn’t include the areas where Banyamulenge lived in South Kivu, but did include a big swath of North Kivu in Zaire and a chunk of Uganda). Despite the rather spectacular nature of this presentation, the international press largely ignored it and continued to present Rwanda’s pro-forma claims that it had “no territorial claims.”

Meanwhile, in the course of driving out the remnants of the Hutu bourgeois regime, the RPF itself carried out massive killings of Hutus. This is also true of the Tutsi rulers in neighboring Burundi, who butchered an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 Hutus in 1972, and tens of thousands more in 1993. Gérard Prunier, whose 1994 book on the Rwandan genocide was quite positive toward the RPF, has written a postscript to a second edition stating that there is a high likelihood that the numbers of Hutu killed by the RPF victors could be “up to 100,000.” A report by a UN consultant that 30,000 Hutus had been killed in northwestern Rwanda was suppressed, even though the personnel who compiled the report thought its estimates were low. In April 1995, RPF military men gunned down over 4,000 Hutus in the Kibeho refugee camp inside Rwanda in full view of foreign aid workers, but there was hardly a ripple of protest from the regime’s international backers, notably the U.S.

Prunier comments that the RPF massacres were “less ambitious and seem to have been much more tactically oriented.” Others have argued that it is impossible for the Tutsi rulers to carry out a genocide against Hutu because they are vastly outnumbered. There is a difference, but it is this: The fascistic Hutu chauvinists tried to wipe out the Tutsis as a whole, while in the rural areas they were joined by envious peasants trying to grab Tutsi-held lands. The Tutsi bourgeois rulers, on the other hand, as a dominant minority have attempted to exterminate the Hutu military, political and professional cadres, so that the bulk of the Hutu population will be a leaderless mass available for brutal exploitation. On top of this “tactically oriented” mass murder, they have now undertaken a deliberate campaign to liquidate the remaining Hutu refugees, on the grounds they will necessarily be enemies for life.

Up to 800,000 Tutsis indiscriminately slaughtered by Hutu reactionaries in Rwanda; 100,000 Hutus murdered by the Tutsi rulers in Rwanda, and another 100,000-200,000 by the Tutsi regime in Burundi; and now something on the order of 200,000 Hutu refugees exterminated by the Tutsi army supplied to Kabila in Congo-Zairewhat we have here is mutual genocide. It comes to a head in a place like Rwanda/Burundi, where the social and economic pressures are the greatest: with a population density of 270 people per square kilometer in 1989, Rwanda has one of the highest rural concentrations of population in the world. Add to this the dramatic impact of the fall in coffee prices in the 1980s and ’90s, affecting what was once Rwanda’s sole major export, and this is a recipe for a social explosion. However, in the absence of revolutionary leadership and a strong proletariat, what has taken place is not a struggle for social progress but an outbreak of the virulent social pathology of decaying capitalism.

The genocide in central Africa is usually blamed on “ancestral tribal hatreds,” although in fact, the Hutus and Tutsis are not tribes at all. It has been compared to ethnic mass murder in Yugoslavia. In that case, the blame has been placed on the Stalinist regimes, in addition to supposed age-old Balkan animosities. In reality, less than a century ago there was relatively united struggle by the south Slavic peoples against the Habsburg and Ottoman empires which divided and ruled over them. The Stalinist regimes managed to keep a lid on overt nationalist hostilities, but because they were nationalists claiming to build “socialism is one country,” they could not supersede the nation. That required advancing toward socialism, a classless society based on the highest development of productive forces instead of persistent scarcity.

Today we witness the revolting spectacle of supposed socialists apologizing for genocidal mass murderers in the Congoin the name of “human rights,” no lessbecause these reformists accept the national limits inherent in capitalism. In the advanced capitalist countries reformism ultimately leads to support for imperialist war, as the assorted social democrats did in voting war credits to “their” bourgeoisie in World War I and social democrats and Stalinists did in backing the “democratic” Allies (the ones who nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki and firebombed Dresden) in World War II. In the countries dominated by imperialism, the reformists end up supporting colonialism (as they did in Vietnam and Algeria, for example) and apologizing for ethnic slaughter and genocide, as the Stalinists did over Biafra in the mid-1960s and as is the case with a host of pseudo-socialists over the Congo today. Those who support capitalismin the name of “reforming” it, of courseend up supporting the slaughter of the exploited and oppressed.

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