Introduction

The end of the ideological Cold War viewed by some as the “ultimate triumph of Western liberalism,”¹ created a hope among many that it signalled an end to the history of global hostilities and marked the beginning of peace in the world.²

The most optimistic ironically went as far as arguing that the human race might be witnessing, not just the end of the Cold War but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.³

Unfortunately this hope very soon proved to be based on a total misconception of realities, as triumph in political liberalism which was central to the end of the Cold War did not necessarily bring real peace to govern the material world in the long run. It therefore soon became clear that, although the end of the Cold War brought various changes in the types and nature of global conflicts, violence persists.⁴ In reality, the vacuum left by the cessation of Cold War conflicts was immediately filled up by different other forms of threats to international peace and security.⁵ Included in this list of new threats are civil wars, terrorism with its associated response to contain the “existence of weapons of mass destruction,”⁶ a response used disingenuously as a justification for the hegemonic invasion and destruction of Iraq by the US, and recent threats in the form of nuclear weapons.⁷

Civil wars or internal armed conflicts are presently the major challenge to international peace and security.⁸ The outbreak of civil wars, starting from the bloody conflict in the South Balkans, (particularly within the former Yugoslavia), Somalia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, Sudan (Darfur)

1 See Fukuyama, F. (1989). ‘The End of History’ in The National Interest, vol. 16, pp. 3–18.

2 See also Airas, M (Ed.) ((1998), The Role of the International Cooperation in Conflict Prevention in Africa, Helsinki:

KATU, p.10.

3 Fukuyama, supra note 1.

4 Eriksson, M (2002), ‘Armed Conflict 1946-2000: A New Dataset’ in Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 39 No.5, pp.615-637.

5 Para 4 of preamble to the UNSC Res No. 48/84 of 16 December 1993, on the Maintenance of International Security, in which the UN expressed its serious concern over new threats to international peace and security, the persistence of tensions in some regions and the emergence of new conflicts.

6 Mohan, R (2005), ‘Fractured Ideologies: Westernization, Globalization and Terrorism’ in International Journal of Contemporary Sociology, Vol.42 No.2 (2005), p.251

7 The Iran and North Korea are cases in point.

8 See UN Secretary General’s Report (2001), Prevention of Armed Conflicts, A/55/985–S/2001/574, available at

<http://www.reliefweb.int/library/documents/2001/un-conflprev-07jun.htm,>,last visited, September 8, 2009.

and Africa’s Great Lakes conflicts created a level of violence and human suffering greater than any Cold War crises.⁹

Although many factors led to the root causes of the conflicts in the Africa’s Great Lakes region, this study is concerned specifically with a few of such factors, namely colonial history with its effects on ethnicity, combined with the post independence global economic and political relation with the Western world, the 1994 Rwandan genocide and human rights violations as discussed below in this chapter.

The Africa’s Great Lakes conflict has attracted international and regional attention in recent years in terms of news, academic analysis and humanitarian intervention concerns.¹⁰ The attention has resulted from the complexities of the conflicts taking place and the volatile political environment in the region.¹¹ The major determinant of the recent conflict and instability in the Great Lakes region is the decay of the state and its instruments of rule of law in the Congo. For it is this decay that has made it possible for smaller states the size of Congo’s smallest province, such as Uganda, or even of a district, such as Rwanda, to take it upon themselves to impose rulers in Kinshasa and to invade, occupy and loot the territory of their giant neighbour. According to Nzongola, such a situation would have been unthinkable if the Congolese state institutions were functioning in a normal way as agencies of governance and national security, rather than as Mafia-type organizations, serving the selfish interests of Mobutu and his entourage, particularly his generals.¹²

The Congo under a capable and responsible government could have stopped the genocide of 1994 in Rwanda, the second major determinant of instability in the region, or at least prevented the genocidal forces from using Congolese territory to launch raids into Rwanda. This disintegration of the Mobutu regime and the state decay associated with it made both possibilities academic while Kabila’s sponsorship by Rwanda and Uganda made it possible for these countries to feel entitled to determine the Congo’s destiny. The power vacuum created by the state decay reinforced neighbours’ determination to fish in troubled waters and to maximize their resource extraction from the Congo.

9Peck, C. (1998), Preventing Deadly Conflict, a Final Report of the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, New York/Oxford, p.22

10 Hawkins, V. (2004) ‘Stealth conflicts: Africa’s World War in the DRC and International Consciousness’, The Journal of Humanitarian Assistance (January 5, 2004): 1 – 18.

11 Mpangala, G (2000), Ethnic conflicts in the Region of the Great Lakes: Origins and Prospects, DUP, DSM, p.vii

12 Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2003) The Congo from Leopold to Kabila, London: Zed Books, p. 215.

The region entered the twenty-first century still embroiled in a major war unleashed in 1998 and involving all of the countries comprising it, except Tanzania, with some countries pretending to protect themselves against rebel incursions, while they were actively involved in looting the Congo’s natural resources.

The primary focus of the chapter is to attempt to make both a regional and a country-by-country analysis of the Africa’s Great Lakes Conflicts. The importance of such an analysis cannot be overemphasised. A long-term resolution of conflicts will greatly depend on the clear understanding of the causes and nature of the conflicts. The emphasis of the chapter is therefore to provide an analysis, however brief, of a number of cross-cutting issues relating to the conflict in the region, including its features; the historical, socio-political background; and the long-standing interests of external forces in plundering the region’s riches.¹³ The impacts of colonial legacy in the region and the role of the West in the intensification of conflicts are discussed. The chapter then sets out to analyze the extent to which human rights violations, in particular discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, has contributed to ethnic reactions, hence violent conflicts.

However, I hasten to point out here that besides the general overview of the regional nature of the conflict, the country-by-country analysis will concentrate in only three countries of the Africa’s Great Lakes region. These are Burundi, the DRC and Rwanda. As the whole study puts much emphasis on the Congo conflict as the regional case study, the chapter provides a much-detailed analysis of the Congo conflicts compared to the other two countries. The internal causes to the conflict in the DRC, including the nationality question for the Banyamulenge ethnic minority, authoritarianism, human rights abuses together with external causes, especially foreign interventions to the conflict situations in the DRC are all analysed.

This chapter, in the context of human rights, looks closely at the citizenship question for the Banyamulenge ethnic minority, authoritarianism, and foreign interventions in the conflict situations in the DRC. Time and space do not allow analyzing these three countries from the time of their independence, so the scope of the study is limited to the conflict timeline: the 1990s to the present.

Nevertheless, the chapter contends that the countries singled out are representative of others in the region. Because of its strong connections with the intensification of internal armed conflicts in the region, the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda will be studied. The region actually comprises six

13 Ibid.

independent states, but not all have been directly involved in the civil wars, although obviously they are not spared by the effects of the crises in their neighbourhoods.¹⁴