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return; leaders in the camps wanted to maintain high numbers of refugees to justify the continued food

and medical relief provided by international organizations (Minear and Guillot 1996, 107). The former

Rwandan authorities who controlled the refugee camps in Zaïre hoarded international relief

assistance; ordinary Rwandan refugees received very little medical or food aid, existing on “a little

oil, some sugar and biscuits” (interviews 2006). In the immediate postgenocide period (1994–96), the

RPF-led government in Kigali did not want these refugees to return home and made it difficult for

them to do so. The government’s attitude had shifted by mid-1996 when it began to forcibly return the

Rwandan refugees living in camps along the border with Zaïre. The regime saw the refugee camps,

particularly those in Zaïre, as sites where Hutu Power forces could regroup and rearm, since these men

were hiding among the general refugee population (UNHCR 1997).

Just as domestic politics in Uganda forced the RPF decision to invade Rwanda in October 1990,

domestic politics in the Kivu regions of western Zaïre facilitated the forcible repatriation of Rwandan

refugees. The mass influx of refugees from Rwanda in late 1994 reignited tensions between the

Banyamulenge and the Banyarwanda living in the Congo. The Congolese Banyarwanda (meaning

those from Rwanda) have lived in the Kivus for several hundred years. Hutu live mainly in northern

Kivu, while Tutsi live in the south. But the distinctions between them were regional, not ethnic. It was

not until the 1990s, when political tensions again emerged in Rwanda, that the identity of the

Banyarwanda as Kinyarwanda speakers of a particular locale shifted to an ethnic one of being either

Hutu or Tutsi. The Banyarwanda of the Congo comprise three distinct groups: (1) nationals who were

resident in the Congo before the Belgian colonizers arrived, (2) migrants who crossed into the Congo

during the colonial era under compulsion or in search of a livelihood, and (3) refugees who arrived in

the postcolonial periods as a result of political instability in their home countries (Burundi, Rwanda,

and Uganda). Before the arrival of mainly Hutu refugees in 1994, nationals and migrants outnumbered

refugees.

When the RPF was organizing to invade Rwanda in 1990, it reached out to Tutsi in the diaspora and

connected with the Banyamulenge of southern Kivu, not the Banyarwanda community in the Congo

more generally (Vlassenroot 2002, 502). The term Banyamulenge (those who live in Mulenge) gained

political meaning after Rwandan Tutsi arrived between 1959 and 1962 as a way to distinguish them

from the newly arrived Banyarwanda. This had the effect of changing the identities of Banyamulenge

from territorial and class-based ones to a predominantly ethnic one, as Tutsi from Rwanda and

Burundi arrived following political upheaval at home. When the Hutu power extremists arrived among

the 1994 refugees, they militarized the camps and “made life hell for Tutsi in North and South Kivu”

(Mamdani 2001, 255). Soon, Banyamulenge became a generic term for all Kinyarwanda-speaking

individuals living in the Congo, whether they were Congolese Tutsi or Hutu refugees who arrived in

1994 (Willame 1997, 78–83). This is in contrast to the original use of the term Banyamulenge, which

referred to the fifty thousand or so inhabitants of the Mulenge plateau, south of Bukavu in the eastern

part of the Congo, who were considered to be Tutsi. During the war that began in 1996, the

Banyamulenge expanded the meaning of the term to include other Tutsi from other areas of the

eastern Congo, including north Kivu, increasing their number to about four hundred thousand. In

January 1972 Zaïrian president Mobutu Sese Seko signed a decree giving Zaïrian citizenship to all

natives of Rwanda and Burundi who had settled in Zaïre before 1950. Mobutu reversed this decision in

1981, meaning that only those Banyarwanda who had obtained legal naturalization actually held

Zaïrian citizenship (Nzongola-Ntalaja 1996, 2).

Hutu Power elements living in the refugee camps incited attacks on Tutsi living in the Kivus. Local





and regional Zaïrian authorities did not intervene to stop these attacks; in fact, they silently

encouraged them in hopes that the Rwandan refugees would return home on their own (Makombo

1998, 53). In September 1996 the deputy governor of South Kivu announced on local radio that if the

Banyamulenge (now meaning all Rwandans in the eastern Congo, not just those from South Kivu) did

not leave Zaïre within a week, they would be imprisoned in the camps and killed (Nzongola-Ntalaja

1996, 2). Perhaps ironically, this announcement provided the necessary pretext for the RPF to attack

and dismantle the refugee camps. The RPF again asked the international community to disarm the

Hutu Power forces and their Zaïrian counterparts. When the request went unheeded, the RPF and local

Banyamulenge took matters into their own hands in attacking their attackers. Throughout August and

September 1996, the Banyamulenge rebels attacked Interahamwe and Zaïrian army forces stationed in

the refugee camps. Indeed, seventeen of the thirty-seven Rwandans who participated in my research

reported directly experiencing either forced displacement or physical violence at the hand of the RPF

in the camps in late 1996. Joseph B., a destitute Hutu man, was just sixteen years old in 1996. He

reports that the RPF targeted “young men like me [resident in the camps]. Anyone who was young got

harassed, beat up and even killed when questioned by RPF officials. There was no authority in the

camps and the RPF killed, but then so did Interahamwe. When I saw someone in a uniform or with a

weapon, I really feared for my life” (interview, 2006).

By November 1996 the Banyamulenge rebellion had acquired a name, Alliance des forces

démocratiques pour la libération du Congo/Zaïre (AFDL), and a leader, Laurent-Desiré Kabila,

handpicked by the RPF to give a Zaïrian face to it all. Tens of thousands of refugees—ordinary

Rwandan Hutu and Tutsi—were caught up in the melee; many lost their lives (Umutesi 2004, 138–63).

Orchestrated and assisted by the RPF regime in Kigali, the AFDL rebels quickly moved from south to

north, gaining control of the three hundred miles of Zaïre’s eastern frontier in a series of attacks

between October 1996 and May 1997 (HRW 1997, 16). In February 1997 AFDL rebels and their allies

attacked the makeshift camps of fleeing refugees at Tingi-Tingi and Amisi. Tens of thousands of

ordinary Rwandans and Congolese died (Umutesi 2004, 164–94). The international community stood

by and watched as RPF-aided AFDL rebels repatriated most of the refugees to Rwanda in 1997

(Chaulia 2002). Some six hundred thousand refugees began to make the dangerous and arduous trek

back into Rwanda. Approximately four hundred thousand refugees went in the opposite direction and

fled deeper into Zaïre. AFDL rebels massacred thousands of civilian rebels in the process; tens of

thousands of deaths were caused by inhumane camp conditions and diseases such as cholera,

dysentery, and malaria. The AFDL blocked international humanitarian assistance to the refugees

(IRIN 1998).

In an unfortunate turn of events, the Tanzanian government announced shortly after the forcible

closures of the camps in Zaïre that all Rwandan refugees in Tanzania must leave by the end of

December 1996 (Human Rights First 2002; UNHCR 1997). Tanzanian security forces began to

forcibly remove refugees, ignoring their right to return to Rwanda voluntarily. Nearly three hundred

thousand of the five hundred thousand Rwandans resident in Ngara camp fled western Tanzania to

avoid being sent home (USCRI 2004). For many, the flight was in vain as Tanzanian forces

intercepted them and channeled them toward the Rwandan border where UNHCR struggled to register

and process them. Instead, these refugees walked back to their home communities “under the direction

of Rwandan Patriotic Army soldiers,” many of them to find that their fields had been planted and their

homes occupied or destroyed by genocide survivors or Tutsi returnees (Pottier 1997, 405). Tanzanian

soldiers arrested thousands of these refugees on suspicion of genocide. Genocide survivors and

returnees often made false accusations of participation in genocide against Hutu who returned from





Tanzania in order to prevent these new returnees from reclaiming their homes and other property

(field notes 2006).

internal security situation. By mid-1997, the UN and international NGOs stopped all of their activities

in the northwest—emergency reconstruction projects and human rights monitoring alike. The internal

political situation in Rwanda was simply too unstable for these organizations to safely and

productively carry out their work. Most of the northwest region of the country (Kibuye, Ruhengeri,

and Gisenyi provinces) was off limits to foreigners because of the UN’s stringent security controls for

internationals living in Rwanda (field notes 2006). The RPF forbade internationals working in Rwanda

to travel to the northwest, citing the “obvious” security concerns associated with the unregistered

return of Hutu refugees who “participated in the genocide. Why else would they flee then resist

returning home?” (interview with senior RPF official 2006). Reyntjens contextualizes this quotation in

his analysis of Rwandan politics in 1997–98: “Convinced of its ‘due right,’ the regime implements its

security policy in a unilateral, aggressive and arrogant manner: it presents itself as a victim of the

genocide which the world would not or could not stop and thus has no obligations to the international

community, which has no moral authority to teach lessons in the field of human rights or any other

field” (1999, 26). Giving credibility to such strong statements among international donors and aid

workers alike was the fact that some ex-FAR, Interahamwe militia, and other Hutu Power elements

did indeed use the cover of mass refugee flows to return to Rwanda to attack civilians in an effort to

destabilize the RPF-led government.

The RPF identified the Hutu Power forces as abacengezi (infiltrators), just as the Habyarimana

regime had done with the RPF incursions into the country in 1990–94. Ordinary people were once

again caught in the crossfire both in Rwanda and in camps in neighboring Zaïre as the RPF countered

to eliminate the Hutu Power insurgency that “threatened Rwanda’s present and future peace and

security” (interview with senior RPF official 2006). In suppressing this insurgency, RPF troops killed

tens of thousands of unarmed civilians, a slaughter that the government justified by citing its need for

security (HRW 2001a, 2). Joseph N., a Tutsi survivor of the genocide who returned to southern

Rwanda in December 1996, shared that by the summer of 1997 indiscriminate killings were

commonplace. He said, “The Rwandan Patriotic Army had its boys [soldiers] everywhere. Even small

children were unable to move around without fearing for their lives. They would kill anyone who

disobeyed them. But we [the population] did not know how they expected us to behave. Me? I hid

most of the time, not even going out to cultivate. My sisters went because the RPF did not kill women

as easily [presumably meaning as readily as it did men]” (interview 2006).

Both sides adopted a “deliberate strategy of confusion so as to be able to blame attacks on each

other” (Amnesty International 1997). Ordinary Rwandans became targets of arbitrary violence by one

side or the other. Ordinary Hutu and Tutsi perceived by the RPF as sympathetic to the abacengezi

were subject to arbitrary arrest, ill treatment, and prolonged detention in life-threatening conditions,

as well as death. Tactics used by the RPF to control its population included routine searching of

peasants’ homes to identify those who were hiding or feeding abacengezi infiltrators—the same

tactics that FAR forces had used to identify those who were hiding RPF rebels during the civil war of

the early 1990s. Hutu Power insurgents targeted ordinary people, burning their houses, slaughtering





their livestock, and killing those who did not help them fight the RPF (Amnesty International 1997).

Fierce fighting raged between the two sides for much of 1997 and 1998. Crops went unplanted, and

famine affected hundreds of thousands of civilians in both eastern Zaïre and northern Rwanda (FAO

1998).

oust Laurent Kabila following a souring of relations between the RPF and Kabila’s AFDL. The RPF’s

presence in the eastern Congo disrupted the ability of the Hutu Power infiltrators to organize and

invade Rwanda and eliminated their supply routes. The RPF urged ordinary Rwandans to move from

their homesteads into displacement camps to protect them from the insurgent raids. Individuals

suspected by the RPF of aiding the Hutu infiltrators were imprisoned on suspicion of genocide,

forcibly located to the displacement camps, or killed by RPF soldiers. Many ordinary Rwandans felt

that their greatest risk now was not from insurgents but from local authorities charged with protecting

them (HRW 2001b). Marie Claire, the sole participant in my research who lived in the northwest

during the insurgency, highlights the extent of the insecurity among ordinary Rwandans:

them soldiers. Girls got to stay with their families, then the infiltrators would

come and violence [rape] that girl. Maybe they heard that the RPF visited that

family. It was almost like both sides knew who was supporting which side and

how to violence them. Orphans had it the worst because they had no choice but

to go to the [displacement] camps. Every boy orphan that I know, even single

orphans [having lost one parent], got recruited to the RPF once those camps

opened. For the rest of us, we lost our crops and our homes and everything

really. They called it the postgenocide period, but really it felt like the genocide

continued right up until the abacengezi got chased back. My young sister lives in

[community], so I left as soon as I was able to live with her. I don’t go back up

north because I am a Hutu. I might get accused of something just for visiting!

(Interview 2006)


In the rest of the country, ordinary Rwandans lived in fear that the RPF’s rule was just the reverse

image of Habyarimana’s oppressive and exclusionary dictatorship. Ordinary Hutu were particularly

vulnerable as the RPF, under the newly passed Organic Law for punishing genocide and crimes against

humanity, continued to target them, particularly adult Hutu men, for their presumed participation in

the genocide. In October 1996 there were an estimated ninety thousand detainees incarcerated on

suspicion of genocide, of whom two thousand were identified as Category 1 accused (LIPRODHOR

2001). When the law was passed, human rights organizations noted a dramatic increase in arbitrary

arrests (IRIN 1997, 4). Those Hutu not under suspicion of participating in the genocide were sent to

ingando (reeducation camps) to “learn how to live as neighbors with Tutsi” (interview with senior

RPF official 2006). The RPF saw the mass corralling of Hutu as necessary to plant the seeds of

reconciliation while providing a structured environment in which to disseminate its ideology through

political indoctrination (Mgbako 2005, 202). During my own ingando experience with released

prisoners in 2006, “the men around me said that they found the structure of the [reeducation] to be ‘no

different than being in prison’” (Thomson 2011d, 335).

The RPF continued its drift toward authoritarian rule, the concentration and abuse of power in the

hands of RPF loyalists, and continued human rights abuses (Reyntjens 2004, 2006, 2011). Throughout

community, silenced journalists, and marginalized the independent civil society that had emerged

before the genocide. The RPF continued to engage in assassinations and arrests of political rivals. The

most notable exile of the time is Joseph Sebarenzi of the Parti libéral, Speaker of the National

Assembly, and a genocide survivor who “suddenly resigned [in January 2000] under pressure from

groups within the RPF” (Reyntjens 2004, 181; Sebarenzi 2009). Simmering tensions between Tutsi

returnees, notably those from Uganda, and Tutsi survivors emerged. Returnees were often suspicious

of Tutsi and Hutu who grew up inside the country, assuming they must have collaborated with the

killing squads to have survived the genocide (interviews 2006; see also Burnet 2009). Conflict among

returnees was common, as differing experiences of exile shaped their interactions. Returnees from

Uganda, where the RPF was founded, saw it as “their army,” as many of them had organized fund-

raisers to fund the rebel movement (field notes 2006). These returnees saw themselves as having more

of a right to return to Rwanda than others, particularly those who “decided” to flee to Burundi or the

Congo (interviews 2006). Conflict along language lines was also common, with Anglophones