Peace in Rwanda and Congo?
Can we even begin to trust this good news? It’s mostly being covered by the press in Europe rather than the US, but it caught my eye [my emphasis]:
Congo and Rwanda have submitted a draft peace proposal as part of a process meant to end fighting in eastern Congo and attract billions of dollars of Western investment, U.S. President Donald Trump’s senior adviser for Africa said on Monday.
It is the latest step in an ambitious bid by the Trump administration to end a decades-long conflict in a region rich in minerals including tantalum, gold, cobalt, copper and lithium. …
The two countries’ foreign ministers agreed last month, at a ceremony in Washington alongside U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, to submit the draft proposal by May 2.
But neither Kinshasa nor Kigali has publicly confirmed doing so, and Rwandan Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe said on Saturday on X that the two sides’ contributions “have not yet been consolidated.”
Massad Boulos, who is Trump’s senior adviser for Africa and the Middle East, said on X on Monday that he welcomed “the draft text on a peace proposal received from both DRC and Rwanda,” describing it as “an important step” towards peace. …
The hope is that all three agreements can be signed in about two months, and on the same day, at a ceremony attended by Trump, Boulos said.
Those minerals again.
The two countries have a long, tragic, and bloody history. Here’s a portion of it.
The Trump administration has been very busy indeed, hasn’t it?
I remember vividly as a kid being shocked by the movie Africa Addio. I guess not much has changed in central Africa since then.
If Trump can out maneuver the Chinese on African minerals, so much the better.
Busy and effective.
The most peace seeking president of my lifetime.
There has been so much mass murder in Central Africa for so long, and, the saddest thing is that no one really seems to care.
It’s like the tens of millions of deaths in China’s Great Leap Forward. No one cared that tens of millions of Chinese peasants were starved to death. After all, they were just peasants and China had tens of millions more where they came from.
There are days that I hope there isn’t a Hell, and I certainly hope not to be in it. But, when I think of the political leaders who presided over these mass murders, I hope that that there’s a deep level of Hell reserved just for them, and that they are forced to re-live the suffering that they put each and every one of their victims through for all eternity.
Yes the current leader for life in rwanda started the massacre when he was a rebel leader in the congo
A blood feud like the maronites and fatah (karantina and damour) but a thousand fold encouraged by the french and the belgians similar to the anfal campaign that saddam waged in the north and against the marsh arabs in the south
One statistic will tell you all you need to know about Africa. The average life expectancy for African men is 58 years and for women is 61 years. It’s interesting to visit but you don’t want to live there,
One statistic will tell you all you need to know about Africa. The average life expectancy for African men is 58 years and for women is 61 years. It’s interesting to visit but you don’t want to live there,
==
Fairly similar to the life expectancy at birth in this country the year my uncle was born. My uncle died in 2023.
Seems like minerals are the new ivory. Or, to quote Mr. Kurtz, “The horror! The horror!”
Trump believes in developing resources that are useful to humanity. He’s also a believer in stopping wars and senseless killing. Just common sense and practicality.
Unfortunately, these sorts of tribal wars are very difficult to end because common sense has nothing to do with the reasons for the fighting.
If he’s successful, it will be a very good thing for Rwanda, the Congo, and the world. I pray that he’s successful.
Life expectancy *at birth* is greatly influenced by infant mortality. A child dying before the age of 1 takes the average down a lot more than someone dying a few years earlier late in life.
“If he’s successful, it will be a very good thing for Rwanda, the Congo, and the world. I pray that he’s successful.”
Not to worry, JJ, he still will not only get no credit for it but all the “right people” will continue to call him a “white supremacist”.
It’s not an original argument, but an underlying problem in Africa (and some other parts of the third world), is that some of them are “nations” only on paper. They’re regions which contain separate and competing groups, which sometimes have very little in common except that they live within borders which were in many cases imposed by European colonizers. Under those circumstances conflict is almost inevitable, and the reason why no one seems to care is that no one knows any way to stop it – except possibly by re-imposing colonialism, which no one wants to do.
I hope that Trump succeeds, but I’m not optimistic about it.
@Miguel Cervantes
There is so much wrong with this it isn’t even funny, to the point where it almost but not quite inverts reality. So I’m going to need to take this apart.
No, no he did not. I do not have to be an apologist for Paul Kagame (the aforementioned “current leader for life in Rwanda”) in order to write this. While I may be more favorably disposed to him than is ideal due to my time in Rwanda and my contacts with his regime; there’s a reason why the hero of Hotel Rwanda lives in exile and condemned Kagame’s dictatorship and said he only keeps Hutus around in his government as puppets, while the anti-genocide Hutu Opposition leaders he once partnered with overwhelmingly went on the run. I will never stop calling him the dictator he is. I think Romeo Dallaire and his analysis captures the essence of Kagame well in his ruthlessness, lust for power, and grandiose posturing about “sacrifices” (made overwhelmingly by unarmed people, including his kin) for the “cause”. I believe he is overwhelmingly responsible for this latest war. If he is one of the more able statesmen in the world today, that is a sad commentary on the state of the world rather than on anything else, and does not do much to burnish his moral character.
But to claim he started the massacres “when he was a rebel leader in the Congo” is just daft.
For one, He like most of the Tutsi rebels that became the RPF Operated from Uganda and Tanzania on the OTHER SIDE OF RWANDA from the Congo. You can see this in almost any even cursory analysis of the RPF or his career, as well as in the fact that in the military campaigns for Rwanda during this time the RPF would overwhelmingly cross the border from Uganda (and less frequently Tanzania) and advance from East to West or retreat from East to West. Conversely their opponents would advance West to East or when being beaten retreat from East to West (ultimately out of the country into the Congo in 1994-5). Just about the only major Tutsi rebel invasion of Rwanda from the Congo happened in 1963, and it was only one of four venues of advance in a failed invasion, the rest coming from the East.
But more importantly, he absolutely did not start the spates of massacres in Rwanda and the Great Lakes. While he was never a particularly great humanitarian and the RPF was not noted for being spectacularly ethical in war, the RPF was never committed to genocide for its own sake and indeed tried hard to get support from Hutus early on (to generally little success both due to the unpopularity of Tutsi minority rule in general and the repression of the government). At the time Rwanda was dominated by a rather ruthless Hutu Supremacist dictatorship, and moreover one that was under pressure from even more radical Hutu Supremacists for being too “soft” because while willing to imprison and kill its opponents en mass it never had a genocidal program of totally exterminating the Tutsi or the Twa (in part due to how badly this would have gone with the French and Belgian interests the dictatorship needed to remain in power). It was mostly the government and at-the-time-pro-government paramilitaries that started systematic killings, largely in response to the RPF invasions (and to be fair also failed Tutsi attempts to maintain or re-establish a dictatorship in neighboring Burundi, though that was thwarted by the refusal of the bureaucracy to go along with their ethnic kin to go along with the military coup against the mostly-Hutu elected government).
But things came to a head in 1993-4 when it became clear the Rwandan dictatorship could not repulse the RPF without Western support (including direct French military assistance), and the Belgians and French pushed for a peace deal and some level of democratization (helped by various domestic Hutu and Tutsi opposition groups). When the dictator began to bend under this pressure and attended the peace conference, he was scapegoated and attacked as being weak by many Hutu Power radicals (including many he had previously sponsored to shore up support for his regime, as well as his own wife), who over these two years really hardened their ideology into a coherent call for the exclusion of all non-Hutu from Rwandan Life as well as Hutu “Traitors”.
When the dictator actually signed the peace deal at Arusha in 1994 in which he actually gave some various concessions to the domestic opposition and the RPF in terms of incorporating former rebels into the government and making a coalition government, he and the Burundian President suddenly have their flight shot down with all aboard killed by an AA Missile fired from an area utterly inaccessible to the RPF but which is from the Presidential Guard. Within hours you have a new junta taking power with the blessings of the widow of the former dictator and a radio broadcast to “Cut Down the Tall Trees.” The dictator’s legal successor gets surrounded by Hutu Power extremists and is murdered along with her Belgian peacekeeper guards and many others, and the genocide of all Tutsi, Twa, and “Traitor Hutus” is on.
Kagame is many things, including a real son of a biotch. But he did not do this. Indeed, frankly he could only have wished to have had these results, as it utterly discredited the new dictatorship, made it impossible for the Belgians and French to openly aid it against his army as they had done so with the old order, and ultimately so disorganized the actual combat capabilities of his enemies the RPF could quickly advance when it finally chose to, not unlike how the mass killings of the Holocaust and others helped undermine the Japanese and Nazis.
Once Kagame took power and chased the main Genocidaires out, he acted like the dictator he was with his own spates of massacres but quickly gained international and local support by the wonders of *NOT being a genocidal mass murderer who authorized nationwide slaughters of anyone in his way with machetes.* Hence the early co-opting of moderate Hutus who having just escaped near certain death when many of their peers did not were just happy to be alive, only realizing how little say they would have later.
True to a point, though the Hutu-Tutsi split was less deeply rooted than the Maronite v Falestinian split and was less on sectarian lines (indeed what tends to get ignored – but which I have tried to emphasize – is how many of the priority targets for the genocidal coup plotters were those Hutu deemed not radical enough).
I don’t have a lot good to say about the Belgians and French in this case (Mitterrand in particular) and the Belgians did probably worsen the situation more than they helped it with their blinkered ID papers, but the genocidaires were never openly encouraged by either. Indeed Belgium and France had played a fairly key role in negotiating the rise of the Hutu majority through “democracy’ and then later when the full scale civil war kicked off in the 1980s and 1990s in pressuring the government to make peace and democratize. And the Belgians in particular tried and ultimately failed to protect the would-be-Presidential successor to the murdered dictator, only to have her and their guards be gruesomely murdered by the genocidal coup plotters.
Their governments’ actions and attitudes were mediocre at best and often craven, shameless, and disgraceful, but they did not actually encourage the genocides or sectarian violence and indeed were baffled by it.
Honestly Anfal does not even go far enough. At least al-Anfal was directed against regions and populations with a long history of resisting central rule, especially by the Iraqi Sunni Arab government. I have no love whatsoever for Saddam and his ilk and al-Anfal is one of his key crimes, and the US, France, and many others (especially the Soviets) played a major role in enabling it, but the 1994 genocide was overwhelmingly targeted against populations in areas the RPF had never held, against people who had never been RPF fighters or associated with them.
And years later Kagame and co are still trying to exert their power in the Eastern Congo both for its own resources and imperial control, and to try and hunt down the now-exiled former genocidaires. Which is part of what we see here. Some kind of attempt at a Greater Rwanda is also possible, since for all of his MANY sins and prejudices Kagame has done more than basically anyone to try and create an idea of a united Rwandan nation that goes beyond Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa, and is quite open about propaganda to that effect and to develop the country.
https://www.ktpress.rw/2024/06/i-am-tutu-hutsi-and-much-much-more-besides-lets-be-rwandans-kagame/
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/gallery/2024/apr/16/we-do-not-call-ourselves-tutsi-or-hutu-the-new-rwandans-three-decades-after-the-genocide-in-pictures
https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2019/03/28/how-well-has-rwanda-healed-25-years-after-the-genocide
The reality of course is way less rosy (and even if it wasn’t that would not justify the things he is doing to try and carve out an empire in the Eastern Congo) but still significantly better than most of Africa. And it’s important to assess the problems accurately in order to deal with him.
@richf
I’d say that only goes so far. After all, we’ve seen what can happen or be done in a lot more established and coherent “nations.” Looking at you Germany, Russia, and Frence.
That’s true to a point but I think it overstates it, and in particular is a bad fit for Rwanda. The truth is, Rwanda’s one of the countries in Africa where colonialism did the least to change its overall structure or borders. The colonials did plenty in Rwanda, much of it bad or counterproductive, and were (and are) a common scapegoat for various people trying to explain things like the sectarian politics and the genocide, but the truth is that Rwanda was already a colonizing, imperial presence in its own right (people reaaalllyy underestimate how dense Central Africa and the Great Lakes are), under an authoritarian royal government dominated by a Tutsi dynasty that was increasingly centralizing ala Louis XIV or Frederic the Great or Pytor the Great, and which introduced a lot of the mainstays of Rwandan culture and politics such as the client system while hardening the tribal/caste divide. First the Germans and then the Belgians basically came in and stomped their power on top of the system without doing that much to change it until very late, though they did stop the expansion of the Rwandan kingdom (if only because of their own ambitions) and did things like develop the region and deepen the identification of Tutsi/Hutu/Twa with things like ID Cards.
Ironically the Belgians probably did some of their worst damage at the very end due to good intentions, since late in the game they actually began giving more a damn about this whole “democratization” thing and began taking steps to reform Rwandan society to transform into into a constitutional monarchy or (as it turned out) a Republic, both of which would have given power to the Hutu that for various dumb reasons caused by both them and the former (German and Tutsi Rwandan Royal) governments were essentially ID’d as the underclass. Which helped give rise to Hutu grievance movements and the ultimate move to ethnonationalist dictatorship.
Moreover there are quite a few countries in Africa with competing or different groups that get along decently well, Namibia, Tanzania, Gabon, and even South Africa come to mind to one degree or another. I also think people underestimate how practical and learned many of the Western colonials could be in ironing out the borders, even if the actual benefits for the locals were generally far down the list of priorities, while in Rwanda the big problems were fundamentally home grown even if influenced and worsened by the colonial powers (and in particular Rwanda’s borders have really changed very little over the past century, though Kagame might be trying to change that now). Not so true in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where “Draw lines on map” and the problems there really do manifest, but even then much of the problem owes to the fetishization of centralized non-Federal rule by many of the early post-independence groups.
Agreed.
There’s “Peace” and then there’s Peace, and Congo has struggled badly with that for a whole host of reasons. But we can hope.