Just as Gérard Prunier’s Africa’s World War, also published this year by Oxford University Press, Lemarchand’s book is an important scholarly milestone, a reference book in understanding the multilayered and intertwined conflicts in the African Great Lakes region. Both books have the merit of explaining a complex set of sociopolitical phenomena in plain language.
In addition, both of these books dispel some “science-fiction explanation[s]” (Lemarchand’s expression) that pass as investigative research in the region—including claims in some reports by the well-respected International Crisis Group (ICG) or this outright lie in Time magazine in explaining the onset of the 1998 war in the Congo: “In 1998, after [Laurent] Kabila got too friendly with the interahamwe, Uganda and Rwanda invaded the Congo again, triggering what became known as Africa’s world war.”
Like Prunier, Lemarchand regional approach is motivated by the fact that the synergies between these three former Belgian territories (Burundi, Congo and Rwanda; as well as, incidentally, Uganda) make it inescapable to analyze them as a unit: “Only through a regional lens can one bring into focus the violent patterns of interaction that form the essential backdrop to the spread of bloodshed within and across boundaries.”
For instance, one can’t begin to have an understanding of the 1994 Rwandan genocide without an understanding of the impact in the region of the 1972 “first recorded genocide [of Hutus in Burundi] in independent Africa.”
Again, just as Prunier’s book, The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa warns against making the “misleading” “analogy” between the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. For one, “Jews never invaded Germany with the assistance of a neighboring state for the purpose of bringing down the government.”
Additionally:
“Drawing the line between the good guys and the bad guys is easy enough in the case of Nazi Germany; in Rwanda, the distinction is far more problematic, if only because it defies the simplistic equation between Hutu murderers and Tutsi victims. This inherently complex dimension is one that is systematically shoved under the rug in official Rwandan historiography. The watchword in Rwanda today, symbolized by the moving memorial to Tutsi victims, is ‘Never forget!’—but there is an unspoken subtext: ‘Never Remember!’ Never remember the 1972 genocide of Hutu in Burundi, the massacre of Hutu refugees in eastern Congo, or the systematic elimination of Hutu civilians during and after the 1990 invasion of Rwanda by Kagame’s soldiers. Above all, never remember Kagame’s onus of responsibility in the shooting down of the plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi to Kigali, the detonator that ignited the genocide.”
What's more, the ethnocracy in place today in Rwanda is a “Tutsi dictatorship”; and it is described as what it is: “Barely concealed by the ban on ethnic labels, ethnic discrimination has since emerged as the hallmark of the Kagame regime, to an extent unprecedented in the history of Rwanda.”
A sad development indeed, as it somehow vindicates the ideology of those who perpetrated the 1994 genocide—a claim of Prunier in his book, and whom Lemarchand quotes from an article: “Commenting on the ‘ultimate and horrible paradox’ of post-genocide Rwanda, Gérard Prunier recently observed that although the genocidaires lost the battle, in a sense they have won the war. ‘The atrociousness of their ideology has tainted the victors,’ he wrote in Le Monde Diplomatique. ‘It has contaminated all social relations and perverted political calculations.’”
Lemarchand’s take on the Kabila’s regime in Kinshasa is also bleak. What caught my attention in the Preface is Lemarchand's catastrophic prospective on the Congo: “…by far the worse-case scenario is one where the army might dissolve in the midst of factional rivalries, leaving the government in a state of utter impotence in the face of widespread outbreaks of violence.”
I also found very fascinating the debunking of two received ideas about the region, which, I must admit, I held as axioms:
1) Greed as the motive for violence (misconception): “The basic distinction here is between exclusion as the initial motive and greed as a propelling force at a later stage of intergroup violence. The passage from exclusion to greed is not automatic; it implies major changes in the regional field of politics that also point to basic shifts in identity patterns.”
2) Africans and western rogue companies started blood coltan trafficking (misconception): “Among various forms of the involvement of the United States, passing reference must be made to the joint venture between the American corporation Trinitech and the Dutch firm Chemie Pharmacie, in which the U.S. embassy in Kigali may have played a ‘facilitating’ role. As reported by one well-informed observer, ‘the economic section of the U.S. embassy in Kigali has been extremely active at the beginning of the war in helping establish joint ventures to exploit coltan,’ a fact carefully expunged from all official reports, leaving only Africans to be incriminated.”
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