How can the invasion of Congo by the Rwandan Popular Front (RPF) be understood as an outcome of the citizenship crisis on both sides of the Rwanda-Congo border? This chapter, from the book ‘When Victims Turn Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda’, tackles this question and traces the history of the Kinyarwanda-speaking minority in the Kivu region of Congo and their struggle for citizenship rights.
From the pre-colonial period onwards, Rwandans and some Ugandans migrated to North and South Kivu in successive waves. The colonial authorities distinguished between indigenous and non-indigenous people, and the indigenous majority was divided into different ethnicities with its own ‘customary’ home, law and authority. This meant access to certain social and economic rights, notably land rights. The non-indigenous minorities were denied such an authority and treated as strangers. They also had to pay tribute to local authorities to gain access to land. This customary arrangement continued in the post-colonial period, although citizenship in the civic sphere has been deracialised.
Denied an ethnic space to express themselves, after independence the Banyarwanda in North Kivu turned to the civic sphere, winning collegial elections in 1958. The local elite reacted by hounding Banyarwanda from positions of influence and asserting their status as landlords over the immigrant tenants. This led to ‘La Guerre du Bayarwanda’ in 1963-4. There subsequently occurred a spiralling crisis of citizenship:
- The 1972 Citizenship Decree extended citizenship to refugees from Rwanda who arrived in 1959-63, and was followed in 1973 by a land reform that put masses of land into Banyarwanda hands, causing alarm in the local majority.
- However, the 1981 Citizenship Law stipulated that only those with an ancestral connection to the region dating to 1885 would be allowed citizenship. This proved difficult to implement and to solve. The Banyarwanda were allowed to vote, but blocked from standing for office.
- In the following period the politics of indigeneity gathered force, and tensions grew between Hutus and Tutsis within the non-indigenous minority.
- In South Kivu the minority question has a shorter history. In the 1970s they renamed themselves the ‘Banyamulenge’, after the place they had settled, to distance themselves from the explosive world of Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Uganda. This alarmed the ‘indigenous’ population, who feared it was a strategy for immigrants to claim land.
- In 1993, a bloody land conflict in North Kivu began between the Hutus and the indigenous Bahunde.
It is in this context that over a million refugees from Rwanda poured into Kivu in 1994. These were armed Hutus, who set up armed camps, whose presence made life extremely difficult for the Tutsi in Kivu.
- The armed camps had the effect of militarising ordinary life: The Tutsi of south Kivu, the Native Authorities and political parties all began to arm themselves.
- After the success of the first rebellion against Mobutu the ethnic situation deteriorated drastically. There were many revenge killings, especially by Congolese and Rwandan Tutsis of Hutus in North Kivu.
- The crisis in Kivu can only be understood as the result of the distinct processes of the social crisis of post-genocide Rwanda, and the citizenship crisis in the entire region.
- The post-genocide state in Rwanda is diasporic: It has an overwhelming sense of responsibility for the survival of all remaining Tutsi, and there is a conviction that power is the condition for Tutsi survival.
- The internal aspect of the crisis in Kivu was generated by the incomplete reform of the colonial state. As long as the customary sphere is not de-ethnicised as part of a wider reform, there will be spillovers of ethnic conflict into the civil sphere.
