[Militant International Review, No. 58, August 1994, p. 8-12]
The Rwandan horror, argues Martin Cock, is a symptom of a wider African crisis.
Within the space of a few horrific months, the image of Rwanda has changed from Gorillas in the Mist to blood-letting, massacres and tribalism. Up to 500,000 people have been killed since the assassination of president Habyarimanha in April, Over two million refugees have fled to neighbouring countries, Zaire, Tanzania and Burundi – Rwanda’s ‚twin sister‘ – since the civil war re-ignited.
To the capitalist media, it is all very simple: the bloodshed provides ‚proof‘ of the inevitability of ‚tribal‘ warfare in Africa, But it was the intervention of imperialism – Germany from 1890 to 1916 and Belgium from 1916 to independence in 1962 – which exacerbated and intensified ethnic divisions. The Belgian colonialists, in particular, very quickly learnt how to divide and rule the population. Historically, the antagonisms between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi tribes in East Africa were based on social status. The Tutsi have historically been the elite, cattle-owning part of the population (Tutsi, in fact, means ‚rich‘ in the common language of Kinyarwanda), while the Hutus (meaning ‚poor‘) comprised the masses of poor peasants. The Tutsis, who ruled through absolute monarchies, were picked out to be educated and trained by Belgium to act as their administrators and organisers.
The tidal wave of revolutions, revolts and uprisings which marked the colonial world after 1945 led to the eviction of Belgium from their ‚Ruanda/Urundi‘ trust territory, but not before they had split the nation in two. In November 1959, the ‚peasants revolution‘ gave effective control to the Hutu majority in Rwanda, which was consolidated in elections held in September 1961. The Tutsis were left with a dominant position in the government and military in Burundi.
Massacres of both Hutus in Burundi and Tutsis in Rwanda continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s – 150,000 Hutus were massacred in Burundi during two months in 1972 after launching a rebellion. In Rwanda itself, after Habyarimanha seized power in a 1973 coup, the Tutsis were forced out as refugees into the surrounding territory, creating explosive material for the future.
Habyarimanha’s vicious dictatorship was backed by the Western powers as a bulwark against the possible spread of Soviet influence from Ethiopia. The regime received arms from Egypt, South Africa and France. Human Rights Watch recently reported that France provided weapons, armoured cars, helicopters, military advisors and up to 680 troops to help the dictatorship in their fight against the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in the civil war of the early 1990s.
The RPF, formed by exiled Rwandan Tutsi officers in the Ugandan army in 1979, launched an invasion of Rwanda in 1990, leading to a three-year civil war and very nearly taking power. A peace agreement was signed in August 1993, but was never implemented. Instead, Habyarimanha used the opportunity to create the Hutu militias which eventually became the killing machines of the Interahamwe (‚Those who attack together‘).
The first to be massacred were not Tutsis but Hutu members of the opposition Liberal and Social Democratic parties. The press at the time commented that the fighting was „among Hutu factions which are either for or against negotiations to establish a multi-ethnic democracy with the Tutsi opposition“. (Guardian, 13 April 1994), Having dealt with the opposition, the militias then moved on to a systematic massacre of the indigenous Tutsi population, egged on by rump government and army forces and the state-owned radio, whose chilling phrase ‚when you kill rats, you don’t leave the pregnant ones‘ will go down alongside the Nazi ‚Holocaust‘ and Pol Pot’s ‚Year Zero‘ in the Pantheon of modern horror.
In contrast the RPF is generally recognised as having refrained from involvement in massacres of civilians (although there have been reports of some units carrying out such attacks). Based on a much more efficient and better-trained army, they rapidly won control of the country outside the so-called ’safe zone‘ occupied by French troops.
The French forces have been forced to recognise the RPF’s victory.
The French forces are already seen as a foreign invasion force by the RPF. From an initial position of attempting to prop up the ‚rump‘ government and maintain some French influence in the region, they have been forced to recognise the reality of the RPF’s victory. Their efforts to ‚protect‘ the fleeing Hutus, including a number of members of the militias, could well end in even greater ignominy than the US’s similarly ‚humanitarian‘ adventure in Somalia.
It appears from recent reports that the character of the RPF has changed from its original ethnic basis, with up to 40% of its fighters now ethnic Hutus. Its leader, Kanyarengwe, (who was actually the minister of the interior in Habyarimanha’s cabinet during the 1970s and is a former head of internal security) is a Hutu and the RPF-installed ’national unity‘ government is headed by two Hutus, president Bizimungu and prime minister Twagiramungu.
Nonetheless, the events in Burundi, where the Tutsi-dominated army have continued to dominate politics and carry out massacres of the Hutu majority, provide a warning about the future course of the RPF-led government. In the absence of a clearly socialist programme to resolve the crushing problems of Rwandan society, despite verbal commitments to democratic and ethnic rights, RPF rule could slip into a similarly ethnic-based government and the communalism and dictatorial rule that the previous ‚liberators‘ of the majority Hutu population in Rwanda did.
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Intervention by the imperialist powers will not solve any of the economic, social or national problems of the continent – which are the legacy of imperialism in the first place. As The Financial Times recently put it, in a masterly understatement, „It is not Africa’s fault that boundaries are arbitrary, that former nation states were divided, or several nations encompassed within newly created territories“. (18 March 1994).
Alongside the forced and artificial creation of states by imperialism went the pressure to concentrate economic resources on commodity production and gear agriculture to the Western market – often by ripping up the crops traditionally used to grow food for local people and re-planting the land with coffee, cocoa or other cash crops for the Western market.
The environmental consequences have been disastrous – the lack of crop rotation and intensive farming methods have done untold damage to the ecosystem. African deserts are advancing at an alarming rate as soil salinity increases and trees are felled 30-times faster than they are planted.
Economically, this policy has meant that the majority of African states now rely almost entirely on one or two commodities to sustain their economy. Rwanda itself relies on coffee for over 80%. of its total export earnings.
The majority of Africans have experienced an absolute fall in living standards over the past two decades.
This leaves the economies of the whole of the ex-colonial world at the mercy of the international speculators on the world commodity exchanges. One of the major factors behind the ‚boom‘ in the advanced capitalist countries of the 1980s was the worsening of the terms of trade for primary producers – a remorseless driving down of the cost of third-world commodities in relation to the cost of the advanced countries‘ finished industrial products. During the 1980s, the overall export prices of primary products fell by one-third. Africa lost $5.6bn from the fall in commodity prices in 1991 alone. Added to that are the crippling costs of repayment of loans – Africa’s debt mountain now equals 93% of its total annual production of all goods and services.
Of course, the decline in the terms of trade and the crippling burden of debts faces the whole of the ex-colonial world. But what is different about Africa is that it is also declining in relation to other similar regions. Africa’s share of exports of agricultural products from the ex-colonial world halved from 17% in 1970 to 8% in 1990. It bas been completely overtaken by its former competitors: in 1965, Indonesia’s GDP was lower than Nigeria’s, now it is three times greater. South Korea and Thailand were once compared with Ghana and Uganda. Now they are in a completely different economic league.
The overwhelming majority of Africans have experienced an absolute fall in living standards over the past two decades – the boom not only passed the continent by, but actually made the situation worse. A recent report for the African Development Bank explains that the average African today is „worse off than 30 years ago, with poverty, ill-health and famine threatening large and growing numbers of people. Africa’s real per capita incomes fell by more than 15% in the 1980s and have slumped further since“. AIDS threatens to ravage the economically-active population – a quarter of young women in the Ugandan capital of Kampala, for example, have the HIV virus.
Open any ‚quality‘ European and North American newspaper and you can find articles about the ‚lost continent‘ – the stockpiling of economic and environmental devastation and human misery has led to an increasing feeling of hopelessness on the part of world imperialism. The outflow of capital has been dramatic – $30bn left the continent between 1986 and 1990. But the more long-sighted international institutions, particularly the World Bank, which spends its time producing increasingly surreally optimistic reports, are desperately trying to restore the ‚economic credibility‘ of Africa as a whole: they simply cannot afford, economically, politically or militarily, a continent of 500 million people ‚falling off the map of world capitalism‘.
Jesse Jackson, at a recent meeting in Libreville, the capital of Gabon, told 11 African leaders that „they used to use the bullet or the rope (to keep Africans down) … they now use the World Bank and the IMF“. The collapse of Stalinism and the potential for alternative sources of economic or military aid, has opened the way to a wave of ‚privatisation advisors‘, ‚enterprise consultants‘, talking of ‚greater flexibility‘, ‚more openness to market forces‘ and the rest of modern capitalist jargon, to move into Africa. Adam Fleming, a British merchant banker, one of these vultures moving in, told The Sunday Times, 15 May 1994: „They really have only one place to go now and that’s the World Bank and the IMF, and he who pays the piper calls the tune. They are going to have to conform to Western-style, capitalist, open-market philosophies, which is hugely exciting“. You bet it is – but not for 99% of Africans!
But the asset-strippers are already complaining at the slow progress in privatisations – the value of Nigerian privatisations, for example, between 1988 and 1992, was less than 1% of those in Argentina, Malaysia or Mexico. Only tiny Mauritius, on the fringes of Africa with a population of one million, has experienced faster economic growth on the basis of these new ‚free market‘ techniques, with 6.7% growth a year from 1984 to 1992 and a big reduction in inflation and unemployment. But their tax breaks for big companies, lifting of restrictions on the repatriation of profits, abolition of tariffs etc., could never be transferred to even the majority of smaller African nations, let alone the economies of Nigeria, with 125 million people, or the more developed nations. Country after country – from Algeria in the north to Mozambique in the south – have dropped all previous ‚anti-imperialist‘, ’socialist‘ and even ‚Marxist-Leninist‘ rhetoric in the face of this onslaught from the institutions of world capitalism and gone over lock, stock and barrel to the side of capitalism, accepting much of the ‚advice‘ and austerity programmes. In the face of this ideological confusion and collapse, the masses have embraced the idea of ‚liberal democracy‘, in the abstract, as the only way to kick out some of the most corrupt and vicious regimes. A huge wave of ‚pro-democracy‘ movements swept the continent in the early part of the 1990s in the wake of the movements in the former Stalinist states. In the four years after 1990, 34 of the 45 states south of the Sahara had introduced multi-party democracy, held elections or undergone other major political changes.
But elections and parliaments in and of themselves, while representing a step forward for the Masses, cannot solve the fundamental economic and social problems. Many of the most popular movements, based as they were on a confused mixture of ‚democracy‘ and illusions in capitalism, very quickly ran into the sand. In Zambia, for example, a mass movement in 1991 against Kaunda’s corrupt regime brought a spectacular victory for an opposition trade union leader, Chiluba, who then preceded to embark upon a draconian privatisation programme, increased the price of the staple food of maize meal by 500% and declared a state of emergency in the face of riots and strike threats!
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As in Eastern Europe, the emergence of ‚democracy‘ has also led to the re-emergence of national and ethnic conflicts. But the history of colonialism in Africa; which stoked up conflicts based on language, religion, tribe and kinship, makes the situation more volatile even than the Balkans.
The talk in the learned journals of capitalism now is less about the ‚miracle of democracy‘ but its ‚dangers‘. As The Independent (11 April 1994) put it: „Democracy alone is not the universal answer;majority rule too often means the domination of one tribe, religion or ethnic group by another‘.
Already Zaire, which has effectively ceased to exist as a national state, together with the bloodshed in Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia and Liberia, provide the first taste of what may be to come. The growth of radical Islamic fundamentalism has become a major factor in the northern Muslim states – Algeria, Egypt and so on – and is threatening to spill over into a number of more southern nations.
There are somewhere in the region of 1,000 different national groups and languages in Africa, so the potential for conflict is huge. But it would be crude and over-simplistic to ascribe the insecurity and tensions that have broken out in many parts of Africa to ‚tribalism‘ alone. In the absence of major class struggles, or even of trade union and workers‘ organisations, opposition to poverty, hunger and dictatorship can often take on a national or ethnic tinge, but the underlying problems are economic and political. As even The Times (22 May 1993) was forced to recognise, „while the mismatch of people to frontiers is a problem to be reckoned with everywhere in Africa, closer observation reveals that the breakdown of civil order under brutal dictatorships is at the roots of these revolts“. As the European spokesman for the RPF recently told Militant, „the RPF was formed in exile. The people in exile tended to be predominantly Tutsi … but our movement is cross-ethnic“. (1 July 1994).
It cannot be overstressed that it was the intervention of imperialism, and its creation of many false and artificial states, which lies at the the root of the national and ethnic question. However the problem was compounded by the post-independence African leaders, both capitalist and Stalinist, who were prepared to take whatever measures were necessary to maintain their own areas of power and privilege. The so-called ‚Organisation of African Unity‘ based itself on a pact to maintain the disunity of Africa along the lines of existing borders. As long as the ethnic questions were not addressed, it became inevitable that, simmering away in the background for decades, they would explode at some point as an outlet for discontent and rebellion.
Both the Western bourgeois and the African leaders themselves are now desperately rooting around trying out all sorts of different methods of, at best, partially and temporarily defusing the most explosive of these questions.
The growth of COSATU points to how workers‘ class interests can cut across national and ethnic lines.
At one end of the scale, in Ethiopia, the regime which came to power after the overthrow of the Stalinist Mengistu regime in 1991, has emphasised ethnic differences and adopted a policy that has been dubbed ‚ethnic federalism‘, creating 14 regional governments. Full independence has been granted to Eritrea. But, even this cannot prevent a further resurgence of national conflict in a country with over 80 widely different languages, so long as poverty and famine stalk Ethiopia.
At the other end of the scale, in Uganda, ethnic differences have been ‚abolished‘. After the deaths of around one million people in an almost constant series of civil wars since 1962, Museveni, who took power in 1986, has instituted ’non-party democracy. Elections take place to a constituent assembly, but all parties are banned from standing or campaigning, as this would ‚create divisions‘. Having burnt their fingers with both ‚multi-party democracy‘ and open dictatorship, this ‚experiment‘ is being closely watched by imperialism as a possible ‚third route‘. But no-one on the streets of Uganda even pretends to believe that the people standing for election aren’t connected to the parties or are ‚independent‘ of class or national Museveni will be forced to move to a policy of much more blatant repression against ethnic minorities in the future as the ‚experiment‘ is seen, for the charade that it, really is.
The only force capable of cutting across this potential ethnic blood bath is the working class – the predominant force in, at least, a number of the more developed and larger nations of Africa – together with the peasants and rural labourers. The growth of COSATU in South Africa in the 1980, in the face of enormous obstacles, points to how workers‘ class interests can and will cut across national and ethnic lines – Xhosas and Zulus came together with the coloured, and even some elements of the white, population in the strikes and demonstrations which marked the death knell of the apartheid regime.
Africa is not ’naturally‘ poor – it is potentially very rich. It has 90% of the world’s cobalt; 64% of its manganese; 50% of its phosphates; 50% of its gold; 40% of its platinum; 40% of the world’s potential hydro-electric power supply, the bulk of the world’s diamonds and countless other resources, It is a searing indictment of capitalism on a world scale, and its puppets on the continent, that it also has some of the most impoverished and down-trodden people.
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