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Tutsis, Hutus Oppose Increased International Presence

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Nyamiagbe, Rwanda — How to curb the violence in Rwanda and Burundi is the question facing the United Nations Security Council and others. No one has offered a viable plan. The two countries have been fighting civil wars since the early 1990s but have been involved in internecine warfare for centuries. For Burundi, the Security Council has proposed deploying a U.N. peacekeeping force to be paid by permanent member states and composed of soldiers from African nations.

But its Hutu rebels and Tutsi-led army are hostile to the idea, with Tutsi students even taking to the streets to protest in the capital, Bujumbura. In Rwanda, Tutsi leaders are no more eager to see an expanded international presence. They are already leery of U.N. and other human-rights observers who, in addition to monitoring rebel abuses, have recently begun denouncing government abuses.

The rising tide of instability has alarmed both countries’ neighbors, with Tanzania leading an African economic embargo against Burundi over its coup last month. Demonstrating that there are limits to even ethnic alliances, Rwanda unexpectedly signed on, although Defense Minister Paul Kagame initially waffled. Joining the embargo makes him look like a Democrat, thereby lessening the chance that Rwanda, too, might some day become the target of sanctions.

But although the embargo may help persuade Burundi’s leaders to accept some form of accommodation with Hutu politicians, free elections in both countries are still ruled out. Tutsi army leaders talk about interethnic reconciliation, even emphasizing that most Hutus in each country are innocent of participation in past abuses. Yet they remain unwilling to relinquish control of their armies, or to allow a process that is certain to elect Hutu candidates.

Neither are the leaders in either country willing to negotiate with Hutu rebels. Shortly after Burundi’s newly installed leader, Pierre Buyoya, said that he wanted a “frank and honest national debate” with opposition groups including rebel leaders, he announced that his military government plans to stay in power for at least three years.Rwanda’s military leaders are not even willing to talk with the rebels. “What would be the terms of negotiations? ” Lt. Col. Kayizali Caesar asked. “Now the rebels are killing survivors of the genocide. So where is the basis for compromise?”

Instead, both countries’ leaders want the Hutu rebels shut down. Indeed, international observers agree that the military organization the rebels have built in and around refugee camps in eastern Zaire should be dismantled.
The camps from which they operate are well known, and include the ones near Goma at Mugunga and Lac Vert, with about 200,000 people combined. The rebel leadership has even established a headquarters just west of Lac Vert blatantly known as the Etat Major, or High Command.

Farther south near Bukavu, the rebels dominate 100,000 refugees in the camps at Kashusha and Inera. Even farther south near Uvira, Burundian rebels operate among 21,000 refugees in Kanganiro camp.But no one is sure who should break up those armed rebel organizations. The United Nations and its member states have yet to volunteer for the job. Some international observers think Zaire should do it, even though its corrupt and ill-disciplined forces hardly seem up to the task.

Nor has the government led by President Mobutu Sese Seko demonstrated much will to act. Mobutu has threatened since last year to close the camps and expel the refugees, but their presence has made him a key player in the region, and he is using them to obtain favors including foreign aid.

Another problem would be how to separate the perpetrators of Rwanda’s past genocide and other abuses from the other refugees. Even among those who did not participate in the slaughter of Tutsis in 1994, many nonetheless stood by and watched. “On some level everybody” is guilty, one international official said. “But on another, so many of these people are brainwashed about what Tutsi forces would do to them if they were to go home. ”

Grim Testimony from the Dead of Two Years Ago

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Nyamiagabe, Rwanda — Sights, sounds and even the smell of violence frequently remain etched in memory long after they have occurred. The stench of rotting cadavers will stay with you a good while after you’ve turned away. The surroundings had given no hint of the remains laid out inside the cinder-block classrooms: a hilltop breeze passing through eucalyptus trees, and fields of black earth planted with sorghum, sweet potatoes, and corn.

Two years after the government says they were slain, the victims’ fragile-looking skeletons and skulls have withered to a dusty gray in what was once a village school, permanent testimony to their brutal killing. Bits of flesh, tufts of thick black hair and strips of clothing cling to some. They lie frozen in final gestures: Some are curled up in a fetal ball as if cowering or nursing wounds; others have both arms around their heads, finger bones clenched in defiance; here a child clings to its mother.

Some skeletons are well over 6 feet long, fitting the image of East Central Africa’s tallest people, the Tutsis. In Rwanda’s genocide, more than 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus perished. Roughly half the Tutsi population was killed. Thousands of others fled to neighboring countries.

Now they are returning.

Many Tutsis Are Strangers in Their Own Homeland

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Most of Rwanda’s new Tutsis hardly know the country they call their homeland.

After Hutus first seized power in Rwanda during the early 1960s amid the region’s transition to independence (in Burundi, the Tutsis never lost power), more than 150,000 Tutsis fled to Uganda and other countries. There they eventually grew to more than 1 million.

Minorities in foreign lands, they were made scapegoats by dictators including Uganda’s Milton Obote and Idi Amin. That led many Tutsis to join forces with Ugandan guerrillas led by Yoweri Museveni, who seized power there in 1986.

Some Tutsis, including Paul Kagame, the leader of Rwanda’s new army, and Kayizali Caesar, one of his most respected field commanders, served as senior officers in Museveni’s army.

In October 1990, after almost 30 years in exile, both men returned to Rwanda, leading an invasion force of Tutsi guerrillas armed with Ugandan weapons. They won their battle in July 1994.

Caesar is now the field commander for southern Rwanda, bordering volatile Burundi and anarchical Zaire. His enemies are the Rwandan Hutu rebels who operate among 1.7 million Hutu refugees throughout the region, about one-fourth of Rwanda’s pre-genocide Hutu population, who two years ago fled the country in the face of advancing Tutsi fighters.

The rebel leaders are the same men who during the genocide encouraged Hutus to put aside their differences and exterminate the “cockroaches” (Tutsis).

Central African Conflict: Rwanda and Burundi Sink into Abyss of a Long War

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Nyamiagabe, Rwanda — Recent killings by Hutu rebels in Rwanda and Burundi, and retaliatory attacks by the Tutsi-dominated army in each country indicate that the combatants are digging in for protracted war.

Such a development would scuttle efforts by African leaders and international mediators to bring stability to the East Central African region and prevent widespread bloodletting.

In recent months, Hutu rebels in Burundi and Rwanda have begun making the successful transition from a conventional to an insurgent force, increasingly hiding among the local populations rather than returning to camps in Zaire after attacks, observers say.

They are battling Tutsis who control the government and military in both countries, yet make up only 15 percent of each country’s population. The rebels sometimes coordinate efforts from their respective bases across both countries’ borders in eastern Zaire.

Last month, Hutu rebels massacred more than 300 Tutsi civilians in Gitega province in the heart of Burundi, leading to a coup.

Amnesty International accused the Tutsi-led army of retaliating by killing more than 200 Hutu civilians in the same region during a military operation lasting several days.

Similarly in Rwanda, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reports that Hutu rebels have killed more than 100 witnesses and other survivors of Hutu-led genocide in Cyangugu, Gisenyi and Ruhengeri provinces near the border with Zaire. In Gisenyi and Ruhengeri, the Tutsi-controlled army has killed at least 132 people suspected of supporting the rebels, the U.N. says.

“Civilians are completely caught in the middle,” said one international observer in Gisenyi. “If they report rebel activity, the rebels will kill them. And if they don’t, the government may kill them. ”

Most of the victims in Rwanda since 1990 have been Tutsis, although its president is a Hutu. More than 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by Hutus there in genocide that began in April 1994.

In Burundi, more than 150,000 Tutsis and Hutus have been killed since 1993, after Tutsi army officers assassinated the country’s first elected Hutu president.

The slaughter shows no sign of a letup as the rebel forces move from camps in Zaire to the provinces and assume the role of an insurgency. In recent months, Hutu rebels have infiltrated farther into each country, stoking Tutsi fears and cries for vengeance for the recent genocide, U.N. officials say.

More than 500,000 Tutsis who fled the Hutu regime in Rwanda have also returned, protected by an army of Tutsis that was unable to prevent the genocide against their brethren who never left Rwanda, but who, three frenzied months after it started, overthrew the Hutu government that was responsible for their deaths.

Changing their name from the Rwandan Patriotic Front guerrillas to the Rwandan Patriotic Army, these Tutsi fighters and their military commanders rule Rwanda today.

But deep distrust remains between the government and the governed.

A Tutsi going by the name “Francois” said he never left Rwanda and claimed to get along now with his Hutu and Tutsi neighbors.

As a truckload of soldiers drove by, toward Zaire and the site of recent fighting, Francois was asked what he thought of Rwanda’s new army.

“Bad,” he said in French, immediately raising his hands and extending his fingers as if he were holding a rifle: “They shoot too much. ”

And what about the Hutu rebels?

“No, I’m not with them,” he responded quietly without animation.

Hutus and Tutsis have a long history of enmity.

From the 16th century until independence, Tutsi kings and lords dominated the East Central African region, owning most of the land and cattle and treating the Hutu masses not unlike serfs in medieval Europe.

Tutsi kings had their own ways of dealing with resisters. One was to hang the genitals of their vanquished enemies on a symbol of divine power known as the Kalinga, or sacred drum.

Now the coals of hate are hot again.

People in the Mist

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Well over six feet tall, Louis Nzeyimana has long arms and legs, a strong build and high cheekbones. A veterinary scientist who worked with Rwanda’s mountain gorillas until the country imploded in April, Nzeyimana is an obvious Tutsi, like the vast majority of the 300,000 to 500,000 Rwandans killed in recent months in this Central African nation. But he’s not. He’s a Hutu, generally shorter than Tutsis, but not always. In the madness of Rwanda, Nzeyimana’s Tutsi-like features made him a marked man by his own people, as Hutu government soldiers and rampaging militia men set out to kill anyone remotely resembling a Tutsi.

He was in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, on April 6 when the country blew up with its president, Juvenal Habyarimana, shot down by Hutu extremists in a palace coup. While gunfire and screams filled the air and tens of thousands of corpses stacked the streets, Nzeyimana and his family hid inside their home for 10 days. When he finally got permission to leave the country, he had to drive through a gauntlet of roadblocks where his Tutsi looks put him at the mercy of every gun-toting soldier and goon squad. It was only a 60-mile trip to the Zairean border, but he had to go through 65 checkpoints. At each one, soldiers sticking rifles and machetes in his face demanded to see the governor’s writ of safe passage and the apartheid-like identity card that all Rwandans are required to carry.

“We had to give the identification cards every time,” says Nzeyimana, safe for now in Gloucester, England. His card, like his wife’s, is stamped “Hutu.” His trip was three days of Russian roulette, never knowing which lunatic might not buy his story. The last few roadblocks before Zaire were the most difficult, soldiers scrutinizing his papers incredulously. “I look like a Tutsi,” he admits, still shaken from the ordeal.

Nzeyiniana, who has a Ph.D in Veterinary Science, was the first Rwandan scientist hired by the Karisoke Research Center, which was set up by Dian Fossey, the American researcher, to protect Rwanda’s few remaining mountain gorillas. Fossey’s exploits, portrayed in the film Gorillas in the Mist, brought worldwide fame to the mountain gorillas of Rwanda. The gorillas became a prime adventure tourism attraction and an international cause. But the people in the rnist — just as endangered by war, poverty and starvation — were ignored. A year before Rwanda’s present crisis broke out, a dominant male silverback named Mrithi was killed during fighting between the (Hutu) Rwandan army and the (Tutsi) Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The gorilla’s death attracted headlines, but there was no mention of the fact that one out of eight people had been displaced by the civil war at that time, eight of nine Rwandans were poor and one of eight were on the verge of starving. It took a slaughter of apocalyptic proportions for Rwanda’s people to finally receive more attention than its gorillas.

The upheaval began on April 6 when the plane carrying President Habyarimana was shot down near Kigali airport, precipitating a killing frenzy in the nation. “I was at home when it started,” says Nzeyimana. “Some friends called at midnight to say the president’s plane had been shot down. At 5 a.m. the shooting started.”

According to Belgium’s Foreign Minister, William Claes, Belgian troops saw who did it. The rocket that struck the plane came from the area of the Kanombe army base on the eastern border of Kigali airport; farther east are the Presidential Guard headquarters. The Presidential Guard was created by a group of men known, in Kinyarwanda, as the Akazu or “Little House” around the president.

President Habyarimana was a Hutu like them. But more moderate, he had agreed to share power with both Hutu opposition leaders, led by interim Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, and Tutsi RPF guerrillas. in Rwanda (and neighboring Burundi), Hutu are an 85 percent majority, while there were an estimated 800,000 Tutsi in Rwanda.

At five in the morning, a Presidential Guard unit came looking for Prime Minister Uwilingiyimana at her home. She was being guarded by 10 U.N. peacekeepers from Belgium, but it didn’t matter. Uwilingiyimana and three of the peacekeepers were found three blocks away, shot down. A Canadian general found the remaining peacekeepers at Kanombe army base, hacked to death by machete.

The vast majority of victims, however, were Tutsi. Months before the bloodbath, Radio de Milles Collines in Kigali, controlled by the Little House, had incited Hutu listeners against Tutsi: “The grave is half full, who is going to fill it up?” Such taunting fanned Hutus’ historical fear and resentment of Tutsis. Their Mwami kings had ruled over Hutus from the 16th century until this one. While Tutsi comprised the ruling class and owned most of Rwanda’s cattle, the Hutus lived under them as subsistence farmers, like serfs in Europe.

Radio propaganda also reminded Hutu listeners of how they were treated by Belgium, which governed Rwanda as a colonial protectorate from 1917 until its independence in 1962. Belgium’s policy was explicitly racist, educating only the sons of Tutsi. Because the two ethnic groups were often hard to tell apart, Belgian authorities also instituted apartheid-like identity cards that were stamped Tutsi, Hutu or Twa (pygmies, about one percent of the population), still in use today.

But by 1959, Hutus began to revolt and kill Tutsi, with bloodshed continuing for another five years. Philosopher Bertrand Russell called the overthrow and its aftermath “the most horrible and systematic massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.” Historian Alison Des Forges, one of the most quoted experts on Central Africa, believes that up to 20,000 Tutsis perished — a fraction of the present death toll.

Pogroms against Tutsi continued, with the worst massacres in 1990. While the Rwanda army fought the RPF guerrillas, Rwanda’s Hutu leaders directed the slaughter of a few thousand Tutsi civilians. The situation was aggravated further by the abundant supply of arms available to both sides in the war, with hardware flooding Rwanda from around the world. While Uganda armed the RPF, France backed Rwanda’s government, providing weapons, in addition to financing its ability to buy even heavier equipment from Egypt. South Africa also sold Rwanda arms. Much of the weaponry, including hand grenades and automatic rifles, was used this April when Rwanda’s present crisis began.

Within 10 minutes of the president’s plane going down, militiamen known as the Interahamwe or “Those Who Attack Together” began to set up roadblocks in Kigali, and later on all roads leading out of the capital. They slaughtered Tutsi men, women and children and anyone suspected of being one. What was the point of all this carnage? By murdering the Hutu opposition and exterminating the Tutsi as a people, the Little House sought to eliminate all their enemies and to form a pan-Hutu alliance against Tutsi. In particular, they sought to renew the war between the primarily Hutu army and the Tutsi RPF guerrillas, hoping that the Rwandan army, with French backing, would win. But France closed its embassy in Kigali the day that RPF forces began to attack the capital. Six weeks later, the RPF was in control of Kigali airport and the Kanombe army base, while Tutsi guerrillas were photographed lounging triumphantly on late President Habyarimana’s bed.

While the Little House’s plan fell short of its goal concerning the RPF, it did succeed in murdering nearly all of Rwanda’s Hutu opposition leaders along with their spouses and children, and in wiping out perhaps a quarter, perhaps half, of Rwanda’s resident Tutsi population. Even in a world accustomed to wholesale violence, the speed and brutality of Rwanda’s bloodletting has few parallels in modern times.

Beyond politics, the underlying tension that drives hatred between Hutus and Tutsis is the struggle over land. The most densely populated nation in the world, Rwanda is the size of Maryland with a population density just shy of New Jersey. Although the Parc National des Volcans, the gorillas’ habitat, is relatively small with less than 30,000 acres, its rich, black topsoil is among the most fertile in the country.

Within the park, there are about 325 mountain gorillas that sometimes travel into Zaire, with another 320 living in a park in Uganda. But all of them are crowded and live in a closed, genetic pool. And for people living around gorilla habitats, there is not one acre of land to spare. “It’s the same ecosystem,” Nzeyimana told me in Kigali in June, 1993 during a tense cease-fire in the civil war. “In the long-term, to protect the gorillas, we have to find a balance between them and people.”

Dian Fossey recognized the same problem in her autobiography, published in 1983. “The fertile soil adjacent to the park contains 780 inhabitants per square mile,” she wrote. “The people freely cross back and forth into the park to collect wood, set illegal traps for antelope [which sometimes catch gorillas by mistake, especially infants, who often die from gangrene in their wounds], collect honey from wild bee hives, graze cattle, and plant plots of potatoes and tobacco. Encroachment upon this terrain may be responsible for the mountain gorilla becoming one of the seven or so other rare species both discovered and extinct within the same century.”

But unlike Nzeyimana, Fossey’s solution was force. She helped create a team of park guards to keep people out. In addition to using them against families living around the park, Fossey also employed them as frontline troops in a heroic campaign against gorilla poachers, who sold captured infants to zoos, and murdered adults for trophies. In 1985, she was murdered for her efforts. The order came from a Little House official who had been involved in poaching, Rwandan army officers say. But while the film depicts Fossey’s murder as the product of an ongoing struggle with gorilla poachers, the fact is that she was killed after she won an outright victory. By 1984, as a result of Fossey’s efforts, the market for direct gorilla poaching had been entirely wiped out.

Dr. Nzeyimana is no fan of Fossey, who advocated force against gorilla poachers and impoverished Rwandans alike. “For many years, they tried to stop the invasion of the park by people, but it’s not possible,” he said. The best method is to educate people about conservation.”

With millions of people dead, dying or starving now, the situation has grown far more critical. But even before the present crisis, many Rwandans resented what they saw as the West’s disproportionate concern for primate preservation. “We have eight million people here,” said an aid worker a year ago in Kigali, “and all you Americans care about are those damn gorillas.” Now, desperate just to survive, Rwandans have little, if any, reason to support efforts to save the mountain gorilla.

The world, slow to act before and during the cataclysm, has lost its credibility with Rwandans, and, to a large degree, so has the Karisoke Center. Nzeyimana says it’s time for a new direction that fully takes into account the issues that created Rwanda’s crisis. To help both people and gorillas, Nzeyimana says education must replace force as a way to encourage people to stay out of the park. But to make it work, education must be coupled with incentive and human development projects. “The people must be convinced that the gorillas are a valuable resource they can count on.”

Despite his harrowing escape, Nzeyimana is anxious to return to his work in Rwanda. But after the horrors of recent months, it’s unclear what he would be returning to. The question remains whether the Karisoke Center will continue to use Nzeyimana to merely educate Rwandans, or also support his proposals for human development. “This is definitely a new area for us,” says Craig Cummings of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund that raises money for the Karisoke Center, by telephone from London. “But it is essential to the overall program.”

If there’s any lesson that can be drawn from the horrors of Rwanda, it’s that there are endangered people as well as animals and habitats. Ignoring Rwanda’s human needs will lead to more tragedy, says Nzeyimana, and the guarantee of a quick extinction for the mountain gorilla.”

Arming Genocide in Rwanda

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Read the original article here.

The high cost of small arms transfers

Rwanda is only the latest example of what can happen when small arms and light weapons are sold to a country plagued by ethnic, religious, or nationalist strife. In today’s wars such weapons are responsible for most of the killings of civilians and combatants. They are used more often than major weapons systems in human rights abuses and other violations of international law. Light conventional arms sustain and expand conflict in a world increasingly characterized by nationalist tensions and border wars. Yet the international community continues to ignore trade in those weapons, concentrating instead on the dangers of nuclear arms proliferation.

In the post-Cold War era, in which the profit motive has replaced East-West concerns as the main stimulus behind weapons sales, ex-Warsaw Pact and NATO nations are dumping their arsenals on the open market. Prices for some weapons, such as Soviet-designed Kalashnikov AKM automatic rifles (commonly known as AK-47s), have fallen below cost. Many Third World countries, such as China, Egypt, and South Africa, have also stepped up sales of light weapons and small arms. More than a dozen nations that were importers of small arms 15 years ago now manufacture and export them. But most of this trade remains unknown. Unlike major conventional weapons systems, governments rarely disclose the details of transfers of light weapons and small arms.

The resulting costs of such transfers are apparent. Small arms and light weapons have flooded nations like Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, not only fanning warfare, but also undermining international efforts to embargo arms and to compel parties to respect human rights. They have helped undermine peacekeeping efforts and allowed heavily armed militias to challenge U.N. and U.S. troops. They raise the cost of relief assistance paid by countries like the United States. Yet the international community has no viable mechanism to monitor the transfer of light and small weapons, and neither the United Nations nor the Clinton administration has demonstrated the leadership required to control that trade.

Rwanda’s war

No tragedy better illustrates the need for controls than Rwanda, where the U.S. contribution to the present relief effort is expected to reach $500 million, or about two dollars for every U.S. citizen. Rwanda’s genocide, which began in April 1994, was preceded by a war launched in October 1990 by Tutsi guerrillas of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) against the Hutu-led government. Rwanda was already one of the poorest nations in Africa. Although both the government and guerrillas had limited resources with which to buy arms, and their combined 45,000 combatants never comprised a very large market, arms suppliers rushed to both sides like vultures to a carcass.

The war’s origins go back, in part, to a wave of violence from 1959 to 1966, when the Hutu overthrew the Tutsi monarchy, which had ruled for centuries. Between 20,000 and 100,000 Tutsi were killed in a slaughter that the British philosopher Bertrand Russell then described as “the most horrible and systematic massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.” The violence drove about 150,000 Tutsi exiles, known as Banyarwanda, to Uganda, Burundi, Tanzania, and Zaire.

In Uganda, Banyarwanda and their descendants suffered under the tyranny of dictators, including Milton Obote and Idi Amin. In the early 1980s at least 2,000 of them joined a guerrilla movement led by a former defense minister, Yoweri Museveni. In 1986 Museveni and his men took power. In 1990, when the RPF invaded Rwanda across its northern border with Uganda, more than half its initial guerrillas and most its officers were drawn from Uganda’s army. Uganda also provided an array of small arms and other weapons systems, including recoilless cannons and Soviet-made Katyusha multiple-rocket launchers.

To counter the invasion, the Hutu government drew from its existing stock of Belgian automatic rifles and French armored vehicles. But Rwanda was understocked and under siege. Until then, Belgium, Rwanda’s former colonial ruler, had been its main military patron. But Belgium had an explicit policy against providing lethal arms to a country at war. Following the invasion, Belgium continued to provide military training, boots, and uniforms to the Rwandan army, but no arms. France, however, rushed in 60-mm, 81.-mm, and 120-mm mortars and 105-mm light artillery guns. France, which was committed to keeping Rwanda within the bloc of 21 Francophone African nations, also provided seasoned advisers and four companies of 680 combat troops at a time.

An arms race was under way. More than a dozen nations helped fuel the Rwandan war, and both sides appear to have purchased considerable weaponry through private sources on the open market. By its own admission, the Rwanda government bankrupted its economy to pay for those weapons. Former Warsaw Pact countries appear to have supplied both sides, seeing opportunity in Rwanda less than one year after the Berlin Wall fell. It remains unclear how long it took ex-Warsaw Pact equipment to reach Rwanda, but eventually most RPF guerrillas carried Kalashnikov AKM automatic rifles, many manufactured in Romania. Among the rebels who had uniforms, most wore distinctive East German rain-pattern camouflage.

Russians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Czechs, Slovaks, and others are aggressively promoting arms sales. The collapse of Moscow’s central control has given governments and the officials left in charge of existing stockpiles a free hand. With the Russian ruble devalued and East European nations in need of hard currency, their governments are likely to try to sell even more small arms in the future. The CIA reports that Russian crime syndicates are also involved in nongovernmental weapons sales.

By 1993, Rwanda’s Hutu government had begun to look to Russia to buy arms, especially Kalashnikov AKMs. But the key suppliers for government forces were France, Egypt, and South Africa. A $6 million contract between Egypt and Rwanda in March 1992, with Rwanda’s payment guaranteed by a French bank, included 60-mm and 82-mm mortars, 16,000 mortar shells, 122-mm D-30 howitzers, 3,000 artillery shells, rocket-propelled grenades, plastic explosives, antipersonnel land mines, and more than three million rounds of small arms ammunition.

South Africa also supplied small arms, including R-4 automatic rifles, 7.62-mm machine guns, and 12.7-mm Browning machine guns. In October 1992, on the heels of the Egyptian deal, Rwanda made a $5.9 million purchase from South Africa: 100 60-mm mortars, 70 40-mm grenade launchers with 10,000 grenades, 20,000 rifle grenades, 10,000 hand grenades, spare parts and 1.5 million rounds of ammunition for R-4 rifles, and one million rounds of machine gun ammunition.

South Africa developed its arms industry in response to the U.N. embargo against it. Its conventional weaponry is considered to be among the most durable and reliable in the world — a fact Rwanda quickly learned. By late 1993, within a year of its $5.9 million purchase, Rwanda had decided to standardize its infantry forces with South African arms. These purchases from South Africa were in contravention of U.N. Security Council Resolution 558 opposing importation of weapons from South Africa. The import prohibition was voluntary, unlike the U.N. ban on arms exports to South Africa, which was lifted in May.

Who is responsible?

The proliferation of weapons in Rwanda expanded the conflict, displacing, last year, one out of eight Rwandans — one million refugees who went unnoticed internationally. The arms flows also facilitated violations of international law (both the army and RPF engaged in direct attacks on civilians and indiscriminate attacks in civilian areas) and increased human rights abuses. Regrettably, that turned out to be a tragedy of minor proportions compared to what came next.

Relief groups estimate that 200,000 to 500,000 people have been killed in the genocidal carnage that began in April, although some U.S. intelligence experts estimate the death toll at one million or more. Much of the killing was carried out with machetes, but automatic rifles and hand grenades were also commonly used. Their wide availability helped Hutu extremists carry out their slaughter on a horrendous scale. The huge piles of Tutsi bodies massacred in Rwanda since April are now juxtaposed with the huge piles of rifles in Goma, Zaire, that were confiscated from fleeing Hutu.

Rwandan authorities distributed large numbers of firearms to militia members and other supporters months before the genocide began, and again after most foreigners left Rwanda at the beginning of the carnage. One example is sufficient to demonstrate the impact of small arms in the hands of those capable of crimes against humanity: Human Rights Watch/Africa reports that 2,800 people gathered in a church were slaughtered by militiamen using automatic rifles, machine guns, grenades, and machetes. As people fled, it took the militia four hours to kill them all.

Governments that supplied weapons and otherwise supported those forces bear some responsibility for needless civilian deaths. In March 1993, following the release of a report detailing the massacre of several thousand unarmed Tutsi civilians between 1990 and 1993, Belgium withdrew its ambassador, Johan Swinnen, for two weeks to protest the abuses. In contrast, France apologized for them. Said French Ambassador Jean-Michel Marlaud, “There are violations by the Rwandan Army, more because of a lack of control by the government, rather than the will of the government.” Hutu leaders got the message that they could get away with genocide facilitated by foreign arms.

Perhaps if more had been known about the flow of light weapons and small arms into Rwanda, if the international community had the opportunity to stop the arms influx or at least to pressure suppliers into conditioning arms supply on human rights performance, the outcome would have been different. Yet to this day France, South Africa, Egypt, and Uganda have not fully disclosed the nature and extent of their military assistance and arms transfers.

For Rwanda, international scrutiny came too late. In the future, human rights organizations may continue to disagree with governments about the impact of the transfer of light weapons and small arms. But a democratic debate over whether such transfers conflict with human rights requires knowledge of the transfers themselves. This is something that any democratic republic, including France and the new South Africa, should understand.

The problems of control

On every continent, trade in light weapons and small arms — both legal and on the black market — is rapidly expanding, although there are no reliable statistics. This contrasts with the global trade in heavy weapons systems, which, according to most statistics, has actually declined in dollar value in recent years.[1] Both trends reflect the high demand for light weapons and small arms in regional conflicts. Most observers agree that those arms have never before been so easily obtainable.

It is increasingly clear that the proliferation of light weapons is a destabilizing force throughout the world. Pistols, rifles, machine guns, grenades, light mortars, and light artillery are the weapons used most often in repressing civilian populations. Included in their toll is the suffering of refugees, and the corresponding costs of international humanitarian relief efforts. Small arms raise the cost of international peacekeeping and peacemaking operations. Thus, they endanger not only internal, but also regional and international stability.

Nonetheless, conventional arms trade control remains a secondary issue for most nations. Almost no effort is being made to monitor and control trade in light weapons and small arms. Governments and independent analysts alike focus almost exclusively on major weapons systems.

Disclosure of arms transfers is in the interest of the United States and the international community. Therefore, the first and essential element of any control mechanism should be to compel as many states as possible to make their transfers public. Some states, however, will oppose any attempt to compel transparency for fear that disclosure of their buyers might invite competition. Even more states, those that sell arms to human rights abusers, would fear that disclosure would subject them to stigma. But both concerns should be overridden by the collective international need for transparency.

The dynamics of the arms market give rise to another obstacle. Clearly, any control mechanism would be imperfect. The leakiness of existing and past arms embargoes on individual nations is ample evidence of the difficulties involved. A major reason those embargoes have been difficult to enforce is that without any mechanism to control transfers, states can easily buy arms through second- and third-party transfers, without the knowledge of the original producer.

There is also the huge problem presented by the voluminous covert trade in light weapons, which some observers believe may amount to billions of dollars each year. In one incident in 1993, 150 tons of assault rifles, mortars, rocket launchers, land mines, and ammunition, mostly of Chinese and Czech manufacture, were found in a warehouse in Slovenia, intended for Bosnian Muslims. Clearly, private arms dealers would seek ways to illegally circumvent any control mechanism. “Yet the biggest regular suppliers of weapons to the covert arms trade are not freelancing private arms dealers, but governments themselves,” reports The Economist. “The main motive is cash.”

The international community has never established a viable mechanism for controlling the transfer of conventional arms. Attempts at control have largely consisted of a patchwork of often ineffective arms embargoes against perceived rogue nations and failed international discussions, notably the Conventional Arms Transfer Talks during the Carter administration and the U.N. Security Council “Perm 5” talks following the Persian Gulf War. Many nations have domestic legislation regulating arms trade, but such regulations tend to be weak and susceptible to duplicity by such means as false end-user certificates. And, in general, there is far less official scrutiny and regulation of the trade in small arms and light weapons than in major weapons. Most troublesome, nations rarely have meaningful control over how their weapons are used once transferred.

The most significant international initiative to date has been the establishment of the United Nations Register on Conventional Arms. The register was made possible by the end of the Cold War, which created a more sympathetic environment for conventional arms trade control, and Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, which convinced many nations of the dangers of excessive arms transfers. The U.N. register is a voluntary mechanism, designed not as a control measure but as a confidence-building procedure. Data is requested on the export and import of seven categories of major weapons systems: battle tanks, armored combat vehicles, large-caliber artillery systems, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, naval warships, and missiles and missile launchers. The U.N. established the register in 1991, and states made their first entries in 1993 for the previous calendar year.

The U.N. register has been a qualified success. Some previously unknown information was reported, while some critical and otherwise known transfers were not.[2] Fortunately, most arms exporters participated, including a number of countries that have traditionally been secretive about their arms trade, such as France and the United Kingdom. But only two-thirds of arms importers participated; some key nations in the Middle East and Asia did not.

These shortcomings stem partly from fundamental problems with the register itself. It does not include light weapons and small arms; it requests reporting only after the completion of a calendar year; and it requests states to participate on a voluntary basis. Rwanda is a case in point. Despite the heavy flow of arms into that country in 1992, the only entry listed in the register is Egypt’s provision of six 122-mm howitzers. These problems are readily recognized by people responsible for developing the register, but they point out that the collective political will necessary to correct the problems does not exist at this time.

Still, the premise of the U.N. register is sound. Increased transparency enhances peace and stability. A register for trade in light weapons and small arms is needed more than one for major weapons systems, as far more about trade in the latter is already known. The addition of light weapons and small arms to the register, even if unevenly reported, would be a major step forward. Transparency can also be a crucial tool in the much-needed effort to demand accountability for weapons misuse by the supplier as well as the recipient.

Whatever control mechanism is used, to be effective it must seek to compel rather than merely request disclosure, and disclosure should be within a reasonable period. A nation’s willingness to cooperate should be a prerequisite for its acceptance by the international community. The nurturing of such a climate would, of course, take time. The first step should be expanding the register to include light weapons and small arms.

Many states will be opposed to controls on trade in light weapons and small arms, and reasonable questions will be asked about the feasibility of constructing a verifiable or enforceable export control regime. Nevertheless, this is an opportunity for the Clinton administration to show leadership on an important but largely ignored threat to international peace and stability.

America’s role

No discussion of conventional arms exports should omit the fact that the largest conventional arms exporter is the United States. The Clinton administration has trumpeted the increased threat of the spread of weapons of mass destruction as the foremost danger facing the United States. Yet it has issued hardly a word on conventional arms — the real killer — except to assert their importance to U.S. defense manufacturers. For almost two years, the administration has labored to develop an official arms transfer policy. According to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, “Regrettably, the evidence clearly indicates that the administration has sought to promote arms sales, rather than to reduce them.”

The United States, as the world’s number one arms merchant, should take the lead in proposing new ways to control the flow of light weapons and small arms. An administration that is struggling to deal with crises in Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia, and elsewhere should recognize its own need to check this type of proliferation.

To its credit, the U.S. government has taken action on light weapons in two notable instances. In a precedent-setting action earlier this year, the United States announced that it would no longer provide small arms to Indonesia in recognition of its government’s use of such weapons in human rights abuses in East Timor. The U.S. Congress has incorporated a similar ban into this year’s foreign aid appropriations bill.

Even more noteworthy is the leadership the United States has exercised in prohibiting the export of a particularly egregious light weapon — the antipersonnel land mine.’ With strong encouragement from a broad coalition of human rights, humanitarian, arms control, development, and environmental organizations, the United States, at the initiative of Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Representative Lane Evans (D-Ill.), enacted a one-year moratorium on the export of all antipersonnel land mines in 1992 and extended the moratorium for another three years in 1993. The U.N. General Assembly subsequently passed a resolution calling for a worldwide moratorium on land mine trade, and to date about a dozen nations have announced an export ban. The U.S. State Department and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency are developing a framework for an international export control regime for antipersonnel land mines. This could provide a model for limiting the trade in light weapons and small arms.

While the vast majority of the United States’ major weapons transfers are public, most of its transfers of light weapons and small arms are not. For this trade no regular reporting is made to Congress in classified or unclassified form.[3] Many sales are private commercial transactions, and attempts to get detailed data on them through the Freedom of Information Act are routinely denied on proprietary grounds. But since the United States has perhaps the most transparent arms transfer system of any arms-producing nation, it has little to lose and much to gain by compelling competitors to move toward an equal or higher standard.

Transparency would not translate into control. But it is a necessary starting point in coming to grips with the nature, scope, and effects of the trade in light weapons and small arms. The costs to the world of this uncontrolled trade are so great that urgent action is needed. Nations need to devote more resources to monitoring and assessing the impact of the light arms trade. The international community needs to do some serious and creative thinking about how to design a control regime. To preclude more killing fields, the world begs for leadership now.

1. See, for example, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers 1991-1992, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994; U.S. Congressional Research Service, “Conventional Arms Transfers to the Third World 1986-1993,” CRS Report to Congress, #94-612F, July 29, 1994; Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook 1994, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

2. See Edward J. Laurance, Siemon T. Wezeman, and Herbert Wulf, Arms Watch: SIPRI Report on the First Year of the U.N. Register on Conventional Arms, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

3. For several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a useful and detailed annual report was publicly released to Congress that contained comprehensive data on the U.S. trade in light weapons and small arms — the “Annual Report on Military Assistance and Exports, as required by Section 657, Foreign Assistance Act.” Resuming publication of this report would be the singly most important step the U.S. government could take to increase transparency in arms transfers,

The Horror: Rwanda, a history lesson

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Original article can be found here.

For most of the world, Rwanda’s dark spasm of violence seemed to come out of nowhere. It didn’t. Though the bloodiness of the killing fields is unprecedented, the country, at least in its post-colonial existence, has been subject to a number of massacres: some took place more than thirty years ago; others occurred just last year.

In any analysis of Rwanda’s tortured modern history, all roads lead to Belgium, which governed the East-Central African country as a protectorate after Germany’s defeat in World War I. Until the late 1950s Belgium allied itself with the minority Tutsi, who had ruled over the rival Hutu for centuries. Since Rwanda’s independence in 1962, Belgian officials claim to have pursued a policy of neutrality; Rwanda’s Hutu leadership disagrees. They accuse Belgium of playing a role in the April death of Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana, which sparked the current fighting. Hutu-controlled Radio des Milles Collines in Kigali has gone so far as to claim that Belgian troops shot down the president’s plane. According to The Washington Post, Belgian peacekeepers were in such danger of attack that they stripped their uniforms of Belgium’s flag-patch and “traveled in undershirts so they could be mistaken for French.”

For Belgium, Rwanda has never been much of a prize. “In the darkest days of World War I,” Time magazine reported in 1959, “about the only consolation that fell to the Belgians was the capture in Africa of two small and scenically beautiful German territories”: Rwanda and Burundi. Belgium ruled “Rwanda and Burundi through a master tribe of willowy African giants named the Watutsis. The Watutsis had been for four centuries the lords of the Land of the Mountains of the Moon, and there seemed little reason why they should not continue to be so.”

Nomadic pastoralists, the Tutsi did not come in a sudden invasion to the area southwest of Lake Victoria, but slowly in search of land to graze cattle on. The Hutu were already there farming the same land. By the sixteenth century the Tutsi monarchy was established. The Mwami king was said to be the eye of God: his children were born in the heavens but, by accident, had fallen to earth. The king’s symbol of divine power was the kalinga, or sacred drum, upon which the genitals of vanquished enemies were hung. The Tutsi dynasty lasted eighteen generations. “They are proud, sophisticated and not particularly energetic. Several times we saw Watutsi lords sitting on bicycles and being pushed by their Vassals,” wrote historian John Gunther in 1953. “‘They value women highly, almost as highly as cattle and live on milk and peas.”

Although Tutsi and Hutu have distinct origins as people, with time they came to speak the same language, Kinyarwanda. They also evolved into different classes of the same society. According to historian Alison Des Forges, the Hutu and Tutsi were not so much “tribes or even ethnic groups [but] … amorphous categories based on occupation: Hutu were cultivators and Tutsi, pastoralists.” The distinction had much to do with status: a rich Hutu who owned cattle could become a recognized Tutsi, while a Tutsi who lost cattle could wind up being labeled Hutu. But it also had to do with physical appearance: unlike Hutu, Tutsi tend to be tall, with high cheekbones and sharp facial features. “They are not Negroes even though they may be jet black,” wrote Gunther. “In any case, tallness is the symbol of racial exclusiveness and pure blood.”

In governing the Rwanda protectorate, Belgium’s policy was explicitly racist. Early in its mandate, Belgium declared: “The government should endeavor to maintain and consolidate traditional cadres composed of the Tutsi ruling class, because of its important qualities, its undeniable intellectual superiority and its ruling potential.” Belgium instituted apartheid-like identity cards, which marked the bearer as Tutsi, Hutu, or twa (pygmy). And Belgium educated only male Tutsi.

Schooling for Hutus was generally undertaken by private Catholic missions. Eventually, “the Hutus began to counter Tutsi notions of superiority with a Christian-based liberation movement. This trend was given further impetus by the growing African demand for independence from Europe. By 1957 the Hutu began to organize politically. Fearful. Rwanda’s Tutsi rulers wanted Belgium to give them autonomy quickly, before they lost control.

The Tutsi were too late. In 1959 the Hutu rose up in rebellion. Time reported: “Though the Muhutus left the Watutsi women and children alone, they showed no mercy to the males: those they did not kill they maimed by chopping off their feet. They put banana plantations to the torch, set dozens of villages afire, left some helpless old people to burn to death in their own huts.”

From then until 1964, it only got worse. The philosopher Bertrand Russell described the Hutu rebellion as “the most horrible and systematic massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.” According to Des Forges, as many as 20,006 Tutsis perished. An estimated 150,000 Tutsi exiles — known as Banyarwanda — fled to Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda and Zaire. Most went to Uganda, where they suffered under the tyranny of Milton Obote and Idi Amin.

This repression eventually drove some Banyarwanda to join a guerrilla movement started in 1981 by Yoweri Museveni, a former defense minister under Obote. At least 2,000 Banyarwanda, including a tall Rwandan by the name of Paul Kagame, fought with him. After five years of fighting, Museveni and his men took power. Over time at least 2,000 more Banyarwanda joined Uganda’s army. In October 1990 these Banyarwanda, with Museveni’s silent blessing, declared themselves members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and, with Ugandan weapons, invaded Rwanda. (Uganda insists the weapons were stolen.) At the time of the invasion Kagame was Uganda’s military intelligence chief, he now commands the RPF.

Until the RPF invaded in 1990, Belgium had been Rwanda’s main provider of military assistance and training. But Belgium is unique among former colonial states in that its laws now prohibit it from providing lethal aid to a country at war. After Rwanda’s war started Belgium continued to provide boots, uniforms and training, but no arms. Consequently, President Habyarimana turned to France, which had signed military cooperation pacts with most of Africa’s twenty-one Francophone regimes. (Because Rwanda is an ex-Belgian protectorate, French is an official language along with Kinyarwanda.) Spurred on by the fact that the RPF was English-speaking and backed by English-speaking Uganda, France rushed in weapons, munitions, paratroopers and advisers to keep Rwanda’s government from falling.

While France helped the predominately Hutu Rwandan army repel the 1990 invasion. Rwanda’s hard-line Hutu leaders responded by overseeing the killing of Tutsi civilians. Although fighting was limited to northern Rwanda, soldiers staged a battle in Kigali and used it as a pretext to arrest up to 8,000 people, mostly Tutsi. There were beatings, rapes and murders. Rwandan intelligence distributed Kalashnikovs to municipal authorities in selected villages. They gathered with ruling party militants, most of whom carried staves, clubs or machetes. Sometimes holding cardboard placards of Habyarimana’s portrait above their heads, they went field-to-field in search of Tutsi, killing thousands.

Of course, the RPF wasn’t innocent. An international human rights commission report found them responsible for abuses, including executions of up to several hundred Hutu civilians and military prisoners. In response, supposedly pro-Tutsi Belgium withdrew its Ambassador, Johan Swinnen for two weeks in March 1993. “When I returned we put pressure on [all sides] to react to the report,” he said last June in Kigali, “because the future of the country … depends on it.”

At the same time, however, France continued to defend the Hutu regime. “Civilians were killed as in any war,” said Col. Bernard Cussac. France’s ranking military commander in Kigali. Ambassador Jean-Michel Marlaud was more diplomatic. “There are violations by the Rwandan army,” he said. “[But] more because of a lack of control by, the government rather than the will of the government.” But Belgian officials said that the French were undermining collective diplomatic efforts to influence the regime. “If they would only use their military presence as a lever.” said one. “I would like to see them take a more outspoken policy on democracy and human rights.” France never did

Nevertheless, two months later, in August 1993, President Habyarimana and RPF Commander Kagame signed an agreement to end the war. Habyarimana had already begun to share power with Hutu leaders outside his party. Until then he had run the country with a small group of men, most of whom were related to either him or his wife. Known as the Akazu or “Little House” (as in: the house that surrounded the president), these men controlled the elite Presidential Guard and Radio des Milles Collines. When Habyarimana let opposition members into his Cabinet in 1992, the Little House countered by forming militias called Interahamwe, or “Those Who Attack Together” and Impuzamugambi, or “Those Who Have the Same Goal.”

Soon after, several Hutu opposition leaders were assassinated and terrorist attacks became common. Bombs exploded in public markets, land mines were placed on roads away from fighting. Though no group ever claimed responsibility, all non-French Western diplomats in Kigali suspected the Little House. “We told them it is in your interest to respect human rights,” said one Belgian diplomat, “and if you don’t, we will not be silent.”

France and Radio des Milles Collines, however, blamed the RPF. Col. Cussac said his staff had traced the serial numbers of land mines used in attacks to Belgium, which had sold them to Libya, which in turn had sold them to the RPF. Cussac said Belgium could verify these facts. Belgian officials in Kigali declined comment, referring the query to the Belgian Foreign Ministry in Brussels. There, its spokesman, Ghislain D’Hoop, said that Belgium had sold no land mines to Libya in decades.

In Rwanda now, Belgium and France are even more at odds. Belgium’s foreign minister, William Claes, says Habyarimana was killed by Hutu extremists upset at his liberalizations. The rocket that struck his plane came from the Kanombe army base just east of the Kigali airport; further east are the Presidential Guard headquarters. In April, Paris received two of the “extremists,” Brussels denied them visas.

After the president’s plane went down, one of the first things Hutu Presidential Guard soldiers did was come looking for Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, also a Hutu. Hours later, Uwilingiyimana and three of the peacekeepers were found three blocks away, shot dead. A few hours later, at the Kanombe army base, a Canadian general found the remaining seven peacekeepers. They had been hacked to death by machete.

Belgians are upset at their loss of men in Rwanda, and many blame France. They have a point. In arming the Hutu government, France pursued its own linguistic vision while ignoring Rwanda’s history; along with Tutsi and Hutu victims, Belgium paid the price. “Is there tension now;” repeated Brig. Gen. Andre Desmet by telephone from the Belgian Embassy in Washington. “I will be very cautious in the answer.” He paused. ‘There are maybe different approaches.”

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Frank Smyth is the author of Arming Rwanda, a Human Rights Watch/Arms Project report.