In an e-mail, someone asked me what at first I thought was a simple question: “Why this bad blood between Rwanda and the West? You must be doing something vicious that the West should gang against you.”
However, given serious thought, the answer is not so simple. Is the bad blood between two parties? Personally, I can’t find anything bad that Rwanda has done except try to mind her business.
In fact, the only time that some Rwandans were bad, when they were dividing their compatriots, is the only time that Western countries have ever been good to them.
When Rwandans were minding their business at the close of the 1800s, as they’d done for millennia, the West came visiting and that was the last time they minded their business. At the close of the 1950s, after some Rwandans had swallowed whole lessons from the West, they tore up their society and the West showered the country with gifts. That’s when Western countries competed over Rwanda’s love until France beat them at it in the 1970s.
However, the dispossessed Rwandans belonged only to Rwanda and could not just vanish. To where, anyway? That’s how the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), today sometimes called the Rwandan Patriotic Front, came into being. And that’s how its military wing, RPA, launched an attack on 1st October 1990 to reclaim the rights of all dispossessed and marginalised compatriots in and out of Rwanda.
The aim was to negotiate an understanding that all Rwandans had equal right to their country and to enjoy all other rights.
But France would have none of this. And, of course, the rest of the West could not let down their Western ally – at least not openly. And so they rallied behind it.
It thus got a free hand to set about ‘reorganising’ Rwanda before she slipped through its hands. After RPF’s attack it mobilised all of Francophone Africa, some Anglophones, too, to repulse the attack. On 4th October, after getting the simulation of an RPA attack on Kigali it desired, it joined the fray by launching Opération Noroît, ostensibly to evacuate foreign nationals. In truth, it was a crack force that bolstered the Africans to wipe out the “cockroaches” (it didn’t shy away from using the term, too).
Unfortunately for the French, the “pests” were not going away any time soon. In fact, after months of this dogged effort, sometimes playing at withdrawing when abuses on the RPA and “their allies inside the country” (read a section of Rwandans) got noticed, France could see the RPA gaining ground. This was despite all its sophistication of satellite surveillance and bombardments with heavy machinery, topped with a diplomatic campaign.
Diplomatically and on the battleground, the RPF was winning over more attention. At the UN and in all countries, it was fast gaining favour. At the battleground, RPA fighters would lie low and let the French bombardments wear themselves out, only to spring out of their foxholes and surround the Habyarimana soldiers sent to mop them up.
Then would begin re-education for eventual reintegration into the RPF/A to swell up the ranks of its politicians and fighters. It’s a practice still prevalent in government with Rwandans in exile today, to swell up the ranks of united Rwandans.
Even as the RPF/A watched, however, the French were organising Rwanda for more horror; the horror of the government killing its citizens and the masses killing compatriots. That’s how Rwanda was plunged in the most horrendous genocide of the 20th century.
The RPF/A watched in utter stupefaction and dismay but wiped its tears and gathered its wits and picked its guns.
Rwandans had learnt the art of using the “spear that spits fire” that tore them apart at the close of the 1800s and were not going to let their respectable farm implements be used to disembowel their society.
By May 1994, as they were going to halt the genocide machine, France was in a panic; it was going to lose to a puny African setup – and one whose many languages included English.
On 20th June 1994 it presented a draft resolution to the UN Security Council and the Council quickly adopted it. In three days, the first contingents of a melange of French and some African troops camped on the western axis of Rwanda, with enough military hardware to blow the African continent to the four winds. This was Opération Turquoise, which followed in the footsteps of an Opération Amaryllis that had proved a miserable failure.
As Interahamwe militias did their mop-up job, France’d this tme send off these “multilingual pests” in such a way that they’d never see respite again.
This, however, it revised when a few days later the RPA captured some of its crack troops and traded them with a revision of the its troops’ mandate. By the end of June France had realised that the only available recourse was basing the offensive across the border, in Goma, DR Congo. But, even there, its effort came to nil.
The rest, as the cliché goes, is history.
History of a protracted campaign and intrigue to smear the RPF government with the littlest dirt available as you see today. Nothing is too cheap to resort to, in this sacred crusade.
So, even the hitherto authoritative BBC is rolling in the mud. Bruising a super power? Funds, and whatever else it takes, must be deployed. There must be no respite!
In a nutshell, the bad blood is one-sided. Will it ever end? Your guess is better than mine!
