Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (11 page)

People who met Kagame and his RPF colleagues during this time were impressed by the rebels’ dedication. The refugee camps and years in exile had steeled them and made them rely on each other. This ethic was not new to their culture. The precolonial Rwandan kingdom had been forged over centuries of warfare, leading to a central, Tutsi-led royal court with large standing armies. Stories of great Tutsi warriors were embellished and passed down through the generations. The most famous Rwandan dance,
intore
, was a war dance that the RPF themselves sometimes practiced around the campfire, stamping their feet and mimicking cows’ horns with their arms.

Kagame’s exploits and discipline earned him praise from around the world. General John Shalikashvili, the American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, studied Kagame’s military tactics and praised him as one of the best guerrilla leaders in decades.
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“Kagame is an intellectual figure. I would rate him as a firstrate operational fighter,” a former director of the U.S. Army School for Advanced Military Studies said. “He understands discipline. He understands speed. He understands mobility.”
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After the overthrow of the Habyarimana regime, RPF leaders celebrated victory in Kigali; Ugandan
waragi
—a strong gin made out of millet—was a favorite. Mixed with Coca Cola, it was dubbed “Kigali Libre” by RPF officers.

Kagame, however, was typically reserved. The war was not yet over, he told his army colleagues. There was merely a truce enforced by an international border with Zaire. A third of the population was still living in camps outside the country, and rebels were regularly caught with grenades and disassembled weapons in the main market in Kigali. Every month brought assassinations of local officials and attacks on army camps.

In the meantime, Rwandan frustrations with international donors stewed. Not only had they failed to intervene during the genocide, but they were now feeding the
génocidaires
and allowing them to rearm. Despite an arms embargo on the government-in-exile, arms traders flew over $8 million in weapons to the defeated Rwandan army in Goma and Bukavu in the months just after the genocide. Hundreds of new recruits were being trained on soccer pitches next to the refugee camps, often within sight of Zairian soldiers. Despite the hand-wringing and horror at the Rwandan genocide that had finally gripped western capitals, the international community was once again abandoning Rwanda. Kagame fulminated to the press: “I think we have learned a lot about the hypocrisy and double standards on the part of people who claim that they want to make this world a better place.”
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In early 1995, Kagame, usually known for his cool, deliberate style, began to lose his temper. “Whenever we brought up the issue of the refugee camps, he would raise his voice and bang his fist on the table,” a former government advisor recalled.

Kagame was briefed every day by his intelligence services on the situation in Zaire. Rwandan operatives had infiltrated the camps and Mobutu’s army, providing blow-by-blow details about arms shipments, troop movements, and political developments.

In February 1995, Kagame traveled to his home commune of Tambwe, where he told gathered villagers, “I hope with all of my heart that they do attack! Let them try!” Several weeks later, he told journalists in Kigali that his government would pursue any criminals who attacked Rwanda by attacking the country where they were found.
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“We had told Mobutu publicly to move the camps from the border. He refused. We told the UN to move the camps. They refused. So we told them we would find a solution ourselves,” Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni said.
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Within a year of the genocide, Kagame began planning military action against the camps. But he knew that he would have to proceed carefully, and he couldn’t go it alone. In a region where international donors supply on average half of government budgets, and where the legacy of French, U.S., and Russian power politics was apparent, blatant violations of sovereignty had to be planned carefully.

Fortunately for Kagame, it wasn’t difficult to find allies. Mobutu had angered enough governments to spawn a broad alliance of African states against him. By 1995, an alphabet soup of rebel movements had taken advantage of Zaire’s weak security services and Mobutu’s willingness to support his neighbors’ enemies, creating a complex web of alliances and proxy movements in the region that could confuse even close observers:

REBEL GROUPS BASED IN ZAIRE

Unfortunately for Mobutu, he had become ideologically outdated. The political leadership of Africa was changing as a new generation of leaders, most of whom had themselves once been rebels, came to power. Between 1986 and 1994, ideologically inspired rebels ousted repressive regimes in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, and Rwanda. Coded cables sent to European and American capitals from embassies spoke of a new breed of African leaders, apparently different from the corrupt and brutal dictators who had ruled much of Africa since independence. Although they all had begun their careers as socialists, after coming to power they initially endorsed the principles of free markets and liberal democracy and were enthusiastically greeted by western leaders. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright swooned: “Africa’s best new leaders have brought a new spirit of hope and accomplishment to your countries—and that spirit is sweeping across the continent.... They share an energy, a self-reliance and a determination to shape their own destinies.”
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Kagame’s most obvious ally was Uganda. He had fought side-by-side with President Museveni for seven years, and then had served as his chief of intelligence for another four. The two had attended the same high school in southern Uganda, and Kagame had stayed with Ugandan military officers when he took leave from the front lines during the Rwandan civil war. Many other Rwandan commanders had also been born and raised in Uganda.

More than just personal links were involved, however. By the early 1990s, President Museveni was becoming embroiled in a low-scale proxy war with his neighbor to the north, Sudan. In 1993, Museveni had begun providing military support to Sudanese rebels, known as the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, as part of a regional strategy (endorsed by the United States) to destabilize the Sudanese government. The government in Khartoum reciprocated by funding and arming half a dozen Ugandan rebel groups, as well as the Rwandan ex-FAR.
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In addition, Museveni, who was celebrating his first decade in power, had been looking around the region for economic opportunities for his government. For years, he had been dreaming about fostering business between northwestern Zaire and Uganda—much of the lucrative timber, diamonds, and palm oil from that region had to pass through Uganda to get onto the international market, and the burgeoning Ugandan manufacturing sector could peddle its soap, mattresses, and plastics to the millions of Zairians living there.

Kagame began to talk to his colleagues and friends about taking action. He traveled frequently to State House in Kampala and to safari lodges in southern Uganda to speak to his former mentor and boss, Museveni. The Ugandan president, more used to the intrigues and pitfalls of international politics than Kagame, warned him not to act brashly. He worried particularly about the French government, which still had ties to the Rwandan government-in-exile and could use its power to undermine their attack. The older man warned Kagame: You need to have the backing of the world powers—the United States, South Africa, the United Kingdom—to succeed in dramatically changing the constellation of power in Africa. As both Museveni and Kagame had learned in their own insurgencies, the international community was inherently hostile to foreign invasions but turned a blind eye to domestic rebellions that called themselves liberation struggles.

Go look for Congolese rebels, he told Kagame, who could act as a fig leaf for Rwandan involvement. He introduced him to a veteran Congolese rebel leader based out of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s business capital on the Indian Ocean, whom he had met in the 1980s, a talkative and corpulent man called Laurent Kabila.
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Next on the list was Angola. This former Portuguese colony to the south of Zaire had been fighting an insurgency backed by the United States and South Africa for over two decades: the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), led by Jonas Savimbi. Since the end of the cold war, U.S. support for Savimbi had disappeared, but he continued his rebellion, sustained by huge diamond mines close to the Zairian border. Mobutu was Savimbi’s main remaining lifeline. He had allowed the Angolan rebels to traffic diamonds through Zaire for many years, skimming handsomely off the deals. When the international community imposed an arms embargo against UNITA in 1993, Mobutu provided fake paperwork to military providers in eastern Europe to allow Savimbi to buy weapons.
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The bearded rebel appeared regularly in Kinshasa, landing his aircraft at the international airport and meeting with Mobutu in full military regalia.