Right man to end the genocide, wrong man to build a democracy
By CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO (email the author)
Posted Monday, July 26 2010 at 00:00
The genocide of 1994, and the fact that the RPF and some in the international community saw France as complicit, took away any moral justification for a large-scale military intervention by Paris to stop the rebels. Photo/FILE
Rwanda goes to elections on August 9. President Paul Kagame is billed as favourite to win, although sections of the opposition have called for a boycott, saying that it will not be fair.
Today, because Kagame is settled in power and his ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) is deeply entrenched, it is easy to forget that in many ways, he is an accidental president.
When the Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA) struck out from Uganda on October 1, 1990, Kagame was one among many soldiers behind the scenes.
The star of the Rwanda refugee and exile community was a dashing officer, Fred Rwigyema, who was a Major General in President Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army, which he joined when it was in the bush fighting a guerrilla war.
Rwigyema was killed on the second day of the attack.
To this day, it remains unclear how he was killed. One version has it that dissent broke out the day the rebels crossed into Rwanda, and a faction led by Dr Peter Baingana killed Rwigyema.
Another goes that he was standing on a hilltop when he was shot in the head by a Rwanda army sniper.
In any event, these events, and the fact that the RPA rebels, in a fatal bout of hubris, had underestimated the Rwanda Armed Forces, left the insurgents on the ropes.
In late October 1990, I was in a group of three journalists who witnessed as the Rwanda Army finished off the holdouts of the RPA at the Kagitumba border point.
The government soldiers later paused for photographers to record their moment of triumph.
They probably did not imagine that those moments would not last forever.
In nearby Mirama Hills lay the demoralised and wounded mass of RPA survivors.
Shortly afterwards Kagame, who was then on a military course at Fort Leavenworth in the USA, returned to take over the leadership.
In his grim no-drama fashion, Kagame took the RPA rump up the peaks of the inhospitable misty mountains of Muhabura to regroup and plan the future.
Muhabura was hell. Many RPA soldiers died from disease, and quite a number simply froze to death.
It was usual to find rebels posted on guard duty frozen in their sitting positions clutching their rifles in the morning.
Stories are told of how, sometimes, axes had to be used to cut the guns out of their dead fingers.
The advantage of Muhabura was that once the rebels sneaked through and went up, it was all but impossible for the government troops to get to them without being wiped out.
When the hardened surviving rebels eventually came down the mountain after almost a year, nothing could stop them.
In early 1994, I was travelling in a rickety mini van that used to ferry journalists around in rebel-controlled areas with Maj Gen Frank Mugambagye, now Rwanda’s High Commissioner to Uganda, back then RPA Political Commissar, to a forward base where Kagame was.
We came up a very steep hill and the mini van failed to make the climb.
Mugambagye ordered his bodyguards to disembark.
With a lighter load, the van slowly went up the hill. As it struggled, a group of RPA rebels who looked barely 14 years of age, came running up the hill and overtook the van.
They were carrying huge metal boxes of ammunition on their heads! “These boys are mean and tough,” Mugambagye turned and told me proudly.
That is what the Muhabura mountain had done.
At that point, the RPF would long have been in Kigali.
In February 1993, claiming that the Kigali government was violating the peace accord the two sides had signed in Arusha, the RPA resumed its military advance and was closing in on Kigali.
The French, then close allies of Rwanda President Juvenal Habyarimana, sent word out that they would not let the RPA overrun Kigali, and that they would help the government forces fight back the rebels.
In Uganda, President Museveni came under international pressure to lean on the RPA to back off and return to the negotiation table.
Museveni was concerned that if France got more directly involved in the war than it already was, the RPA risked suffering the debacle of October 1990.
When he asked the RPA to stop their advance, they refused.
So Museveni upped the stakes, and Uganda seized a large consignment of weapons that was on its way from Eastern Europe to the rebels, and threatened to squeeze the RPA supply lines.
The RPA could not take Kigali without the arms and supplies.
It stopped the advance, gave up the territory it had captured, which was then declared a demilitarised zone under the control of the UN Force in Rwanda (UNAMIR).
If the war had ended in 1993, the story of Rwanda might have been different.
The RPF might have felt less self-righteous than it did when it eventually took power in July 1994 after the genocide in which nearly a million people were killed.
It would also have been forced to share more power than it eventually did.
But mostly, because the genocide would not have happened, opinion would be less radicalised on both the (Tutsi-dominated) RPF side, and the (Hutu-led) opposition.
The genocide of 1994, and the fact that the RPF and some in the international community saw France as complicit, took away any moral justification for a large-scale military intervention by Paris to stop the rebels.
Shortly after the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) had taken power in July 1994, I interviewed Kagame in a remote place outside the city.
I asked him what, beside the killings and the destruction, had surprised him most about the Rwanda they had conquered.
He told me that little had surprised him, because for many years while he was a refugee in Uganda, he would cross into Rwanda and travel around the country mostly by bus.
He was not detected, because he was a little skinny innocuous boy who didn’t attract attention. He was in his teens.
If this says anything, it testifies to the fierce nationalism that drives Rwandans and people like Kagame.
It explains why they can be so motivated to succeed, but also why they can be driven to murderous passion.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is Nation Media Group’s executive director for Africa & Digital Meida. E-mail: cobbo *** nation.co.ke
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