IN the five years before 2002, no fewer than three million people were slain in a genocidal conflict between Hutus and Tutsis. The battles raged in the triangle made up of Burundi, Rwanda and the eastern border country of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The enormity of this savagery which began with the wholesale massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda is still almost impossible to grasp. Yet despite the intervention of the United Nations and agreements between the three governments to end the massacres, the killing goes on. Most recently, 160 Congolese Tutsi refugees in Burundi were massacred by Hutu thugs from the Congo. In West Africa, the carnage in Liberia and Cameroon and Sierra Leone seems to have been halted, at least for the present but the region remains chronically unstable. Diplomats remain concerned that whatever peace exists in those brutalized societies may not last.
All of these conflicts are notable for the merciless incoherence of the terrorists. The humane instinct of the outside world to do something, anything to help, most honorably takes the form of providing aid and shelter to the victims of these wicked crimes.
This upsurge of petty but bloody conflicts has occurred since the end of the Cold War. When the United States and the Soviet Union were fighting out their conflicts by proxy in the developing world, there was a pattern and a degree of control to the actions of the men of violence. The long and awful conflict in Angola was a prime example. Moscow used Cuban troops to sustain the left-wing MPLA government in Luanda while the Americans and the apartheid regime in South Africa backed the UNITA rebels under Jonas Savimbi. It was in the interests of both Moscow and Washington to maintain as much control as possible over their client armies who were reliant upon the foreigners for money and weapons and so generally went along with their paymasters’ wishes. The Cold War has ended and with it the Americans and Russians who used client armies as pawns in their own Great Game. All that has been left behind are the conflicts that they fostered and more importantly, the millions of weapons that they poured in to keep those conflicts alive.
Moscow and Washington may now be on the friendliest of terms but the African animosities that they fostered for their own purposes remain. In societies wracked by illiteracy, poverty, disease and famine, the M16 and the Kalashnikov have become passports to power. In the bloodstained jungles of Central Africa, there is no big picture, no overarching ambition — just the sordid working out of blind hatred. Men who can hack and ax and shoot to death members of another tribe purely because they are seen as rivals are probably lost to any appeal to their humanity. Genocide leaves all morality behind. Its perpetrators are beyond decency, beyond reason. However though they are directly responsible for these terrible crimes, those foreign colonial and postcolonial powers who once promoted and armed the rival camps should now hang their heads in shame.
