Democratic
Republic of Congo, Rwanda & Burundi
Without a doubt, the central African region of Eastern Congo, Rwanda,
and Burundi represents one of the great basket cases of the
world. The "Heart of Darkness" has long served as a cauldron of
ethnic hatred, bubbling over at times into unfathomable
bloodletting. The 1994 Rwandan genocide was preceded by ethnic
clashes long before colonization and Belgian mismanagement, and the
consequences of the genocide are still very much felt today in all of
these countries plus Uganda, which has been dragged into the conflict
too. And it would seem that barring a miraculous turn of events,
they will be condemned to repeat their grisly history, sooner or
later. The four primary factors causing poverty cited by Paul
Collier in his book The Bottom
Billion are epitomized in this part of the world: armed
conflict, resource wealth, landlocked economies and bad governance.
While the battleground of what has been dubbed the African World War
has shifted to Congo and Uganda these days, the ethnic animosities in
Rwanda and Burundi still simmer beneath the veil of signed peace
accords. The Interahamwe genocidaires of Rwanda are still on the prowl
in Congolese jungles fighting for control of mineral wealth. The
rebel Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda ostensibly fights to uphold the
Ten Commandments, though they systematically violate all of the
commandments themselves. A renegade Congolese Tutsi general backed by
the Rwandan government physically controls the Kivu provinces of the
Congo, bullying the Congolese national army and flouting the impotent
UN peacekeepers who have instructions to avoid fighting.
This is normal life in this part of the world.
And it's a shame because there's a lot to see in this part of the
world, with some of the most beautiful volcanic landscapes in the world
and arguably the most dynamic and thoughtful people in Africa. I
was impressed at how easy it was to hold interesting conversations
about almost any subject with locals. They are educated, informed, and
love to discuss and disseminate current events. The Congolese in
particular are fun loving and sharply witty with a twinkle in their
eye. Hard to believe they represent the embodiment of the
archetypal failed state. For tourists, the big draws in Eastern Congo,
and most specifically the North Kivu province, are gorillas and
volcanoes. Each border province in eastern Congo controls their
own immigration and visas, which indicates how loose the ties are with
western Congo and the capital Kinshasa. Indeed, it's all but
impossible to cross the country overland from east to west, and there
are no electronic financial links between the eastern hub of Goma with
Kinshasa. The Democratic Republic of Congo runs on US dollars and
the best mobile phone network in Goma not only is a Rwandan run
company, it actually IS in the Rwandan network, country code and
all. During the occupation of Goma in the late 1990s by the
Rwandan army, Rwandan MTN (a South African telecom company) built cell
towers on Congolese soil that are still in operation. So Goma is
effectively covered by both Congolese and Rwandan national network and
most Goma locals carry both a Congolese phone and a Rwandan
phone. East Congolese businessmen usually use Kigali (Rwanda) or
Bujumbura (Burundi) airport to travel outside the region.
The mountain gorillas, of course, are magnificent as anyone who has
visited them will tell you. Though the regulations which they
announce clearly before the visit state that you can only approach to
within 7 metres of the apes, in reality you're face to face with them
at times at 2 metres distance, and they brush past you even
closer. The dominant silverback males are surprisingly agile and
fierce looking in its false charges. Gorilla tours are big money
in this part of the world (US$500 for a viewing license in Rwanda and
Uganda and a "discount" $300 in Congo because they have trouble
attracting tourists scared to cross into the Congo) and so they have
become objects of conflict. Before and after I visited the
gorillas in the DRC, there were killings of gorillas by Congolese
villagers disgruntled with the central government's refusal to share
the tourism proceeds with neighbouring villagers. Indeed, I heard
that some tourist cars heading to the gorilla zones were pelted with
fruit or stones on their way through these villages. Rwanda has
implemented a model system now that is worthwhile for everybody and
they are reaping the benefits now with rapid growth in gorilla-fuelled
tourism. Combined with political, military and economic
stability in recent years, the resurrection of Rwanda as a hot
destination has been stunning.
The volcanoes are the other big draw to eastern Congo.
Nyarigongo, pictured above, erupted in 2002 devastating the city of
Goma and half covering it with molten lava rock, which is still
theretoday. Nyarigongo is continually active, the top of the cone
glowing red at night from the magma pools inside the crater. A
popular overnight trek takes you to the lip of the volcano at night
from where you can peer down into the glowing red pools, the only place
in the world where this is possible. The gorilla visits in Congo
and Rwanda are more scenic than the ones in Uganda because you have to
climb up the majestic chain of Virungas volcanoes to reach the mountain
families, and that's a lovely little hike in and of itself.
A defunct filling station in Goma. On the road, a kid on a wooden
bike shuffles past. I never really understood these contraptions,
which are neither practical nor functional, but they look pretty cool
and I've never seen them anywhere else in the world.
The Congolese are party animals, as these dancing women demonstrate at
a pre-wedding event in Goma.
The tone is much more sober on the Rwandan side of the border.
Much less festive than the Congolese and less light hearted than the
Ugandans, recent history weights heavily on the Rwandan psyche.
You may not recognize the lobby seating of the Hotel des Milles
Collines pictured above, because the film Hotel Rwanda was shot in
South Africa. There is no memorial plaque in the hotel, not even
a trace of anything even hinting at the events of 1994. Rwandans
do not talk about the genocide with outsiders and they sidestep oblique
references to it when you bring it up. It is still too fresh and
too many have died. The government has opened up and admirably
confront their history, as postwar Germans did, but then again, the
winners always write the history and the winners of this war (Tutsis
and their general Paul Kagame, now president) were also the
victims. Kagame has done a good job, spurring the economy with
considerable US and British aid, rebuilding infrastructure and tourism,
invoking locally run war crime tribunals, and abolishing ethnic labels
on official documents. But in my opinion the proof will be in the
pudding of the next change of power back to the hutu majority.
Hutu-tutsi conflict is still taking place in parts of Congo, Uganda and
Burundi and ethnic warring has always had a tinderbox effect in central
Africa.
Genocide victims at the Gikongoro memorial in southern Rwanda.
Ten thousand tutsis were gathered into the rooms of a technical college
and then systematically massacred by machetes. These are the real
bodies left in the position they were found and preserved with lime
powder. You can still smell the corpses as you walk into these
rooms. You can see the machete wounds on the skull of the child
in the middle picture. The clothing on the baby in the bottom
picture has not been touched. This memorial is as graphic and
powerfully emotional as any that I've ever seen. When you arrive
at the school, a guard motions for you to follow him to the school
rooms, and without saying a word, he unlocks the doors one by one and
you walk inside to spend as much time as you want.
The clothing from many of the victims had been stripped off before the
murders and stored in this room. It is really a shame to show
these pictures of Rwanda because the mountain scenery is, along with
Ethiopia, as breathtakingly beautiful as anywhere in Africa, but the
genocide remains the focal point of Rwandan identity and existence to
this day. Such displays are reminders that it can happen again
and one of the benefits of globalization is that someone should be out
there watching all of our backs. There might have been a US
intervention in Rwanda, had the "Black Hawk Down" military fiasco not
taken place in Somalia just months prior and soured the White House
administration to unpopular foreign policy initiatives with no domestic
interests involved. The French government, colonial overseers of
Rwanda who had taken over from Belgium during decolonization, even
abetted, armed and trained the genocidaire army and defended that
government even after revelations about the genocide surfaced,
apparently in an attempt to resist losing a "francophone" country to
anglicization. These kind of pivotal events in history
allow us to hold a mirror to our souls and force us to decide what
exactly we aspire to be as human beings.
If you see men in pink shirts being led around the streets of Rwandan
villages, then it's probably the weekly gacaca day. I happened to
be in Kibuye, western Rwanda, on a Thursday and I was incensed that all
public transportation out of town had been halted that morning for
these weekly war crimes tribunals. But in retrospect I was very
fortunate to be able to attend and witness the gacaca (pronounced
"gatchatcha") proceedings in person.
In Kibuye, the gacaca is held in the town stadium. All transport
and commerce is closed by law on gacaca mornings (and yes I was hungry
and thirsty too!) in order to encourage as many adults as possible to
attend the gacaca, which have been held every week in every town since
shortly after the war. Every week, a different prisoner is
interrogated by a small local tribunal in his own home town. He
is forced to talk about the events of the genocide directly to the
families of the victims and to those who knew him personally and
witnessed his actions. More than just a Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, the gacacas have the eventually responsibility of
convicting the war criminals, though the therapeutic effects of the
gacacas surely outweigh the legal ones in the long run. Few of
these prisoners are the professionally trained Interahamwe genocidaires
who led the slaughter and then fled to Congo, but they are rather the
local citizens who abetted and participated in the genocide during
those days of living dangerously. There were so many of these
defendants around Rwanda, that the formal legal systems could not
rigorously try all of them, so the gacaca system was instituted,
similar to town meetings or the Afghan loya jirgas.
Here, a prisoner responds to interrogation at the gacaca. At one
point a member of the audience stood up emotionally and made some of
kind of quivering accusation to the defendant, who in turn replied
dispassionately. I couldn't understand a word of anything said
but it was fascinating to be there taking part in living history.
Only very recently has it been safe to visit Burundi, and even then
only along the main roads, so there's little information that
circulates about the tiny mountainous country. A politicoethnic
mirror image of Rwanda, it was the tutsis who undertook ethnic
cleansing of dissident hutus here as a consequence of the Rwandan
genocide. Thus, the civil war played out in Burundi later than in
Rwanda, and visitors today see what it may have been like in Rwanda
shortly after the genocide. In the capital Bujumbura, pictured
above, the older generation of Europeanized Burundais are polite,
elegant, graceful and speak an impeccable French. The younger
generation who grew up during the war are rough, rude, confrontational
and uneducated. At night, Bujumbura is one of the more unsavoury
capital cities in Africa, along with Nairobi. One pack of young
kids swarmed around me in broad daylight, not even backing away when I
hit their arms away. I suspected they were out to rob me until I
went to a police station to call an officer and then they all
scattered. The cafes in Bujumbura are a real trip, a timewarp
from 1950s France, where you order a cafe au lait and croissant in the
morning from a dashingly uniformed waiter (at practically 1950s prices
too).
There used to be a prominent Greek community in Bujumbura but this
Greek orthodox church was locked up when I passed up and seemingly not
in service. The mountains surrounding Bujumbura are scenic like
in Rwanda and has a potential to open up to tourism one day. But
reports I've read since I was there suggest that fighting has restarted
in Burundi so don't hold your breath.