An Escape from Africa and its Consequences

Translation from: Helmut Strizek, Clinton am Kivu-See. Die
Geschichte einer afrikanischen Katastrophe. Frankfurt/Main 2011,
Peter Lang Publishing Group. 408 pages; ISBN 978-3-631-60563-9.
(pp. 12-16)

Summary of Events

An Escape from Africa and its Consequences


The 3 October 1993 will go down as a fatal date for American policy in
Africa. Eighteen Americans and a Malaysian lost their lives in the twelve-hour
Battle of Mogadishu, and over 1,000 Somalis became victims of the wild
shootouts that ensued after the Americans had been surrounded. However, the
worst for Washington, was to have the cameras of the international press
witness a (white) dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of
Mogadishu by Aidid’s militia.

Bill Clinton was furious and single-handedly made a decision that would
have far-reaching consequences. He decided to withdraw all American soldiers
from UN peacekeeping missions in Africa within the next six months. In the
future, American forces would only be deployed where American interests were
clearly at stake.

If Clinton had believed that this “Escape from Africa” would keep the loud
voices of foreign policy at bay, then he was to be severely mistaken. The move
triggered entirely unexpected reactions. The intended disengagement quickly
developed into a new, clandestine engagement that would result in a six-phase
political and human tragedy of the first order in the Great Lakes Region of
Africa to the east and west of Lake Kivu. The final decade of the 20th century
saw the former Belgian colonies of Congo-Kinshasa, Rwanda and Burundi
descend into a turmoil and chaos that would also define the first decade of the
21st century.

From 1897-1916, the post-colonial states of Rwanda and Burundi were administrative
districts of the German East Africa colony – with the special status of so-called
residences. After the First World War, the League of Nations granted Belgium the
mandate to administer them.

The First Phase: Rwanda must be Conquered

The first ramification of the “Escape” would come on 5 October 1993
when, contrary to its earlier promises, the White House instructed Madeleine
Albright, the US Representative to the United Nations Security Council, not to
offer the prospect of American soldiers for the “United Nations Assistance
Mission for Rwanda” (UNAMIR).

An assurance that had been granted only two months earlier on 4 August
1993 within the framework of the Arusha power-sharing agreement signed and
brokered, between the Rwandan State and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)
rebel organization, under the pressure of the Americans. The promise now fell
victim to the “Escape from Africa” brought about by the events of Mogadishu.
However, there were elements on the American political-military scene
that simply did not want to withdraw from the region. After all, this retreat
would have meant no longer being able to participate on a military level in the
strategically vital “Sudan game”. The hour had come for Yoweri Museveni, the
Ugandan Head of State who, ever since the 1989 military coup of General Omar
al-Bashir and his “Guardian of the Islamic Revolution”, Hassan al-Turabi, in
Khartoum, had become an increasingly important ally of the United States in the
region.

Museveni made it clear to the Pentagon that in the interest of
strengthening his position as a bastion against Islamism, it was not power
sharing that lay in the interests of the Americans in the Rwandan Civil War, but
rather the military victory of the Rwandan Tutsi rebels living in Ugandan exile.
His country would be relieved of the growing exile problem and a “new
Rwanda” under his control would be an important bridge to Congo-Kinshasa,
from whose north-east, Zaire’s Head of State, Mobutu, had long since been
allowing the support of the southern Sudanese rebel, John Garang. In order to
ensure the long-term realization of this goal, one would have to exempt
Museveni, as well as Mobutu, from the burdens of the democratization process
that United States Secretary of State James Baker and French President
François Mitterrand had “dictated” to their old Cold War allies after March
1990.

Of course the Clinton Administration, which drew its support from the
more progressive spectrum of the American voters, would not be able to openly
admit this turning away from the democratization process and the “grace
period” granted to Mobutu, who would still be needed for the new strategy.
However, at the Pentagon, they were sure that they would be able to mobilize
some clandestine “helpers” to take care of this “dirty business”, and it would
occur in plain sight of the media. And then, lo and behold, a plane fell out of the
skies over Kigali on 6 April 1994, “coincidentally” killing all the important
people that stood in the way of the victory of the Tutsi rebels from the
“Rwandan Patriotic Front” (RPF). The advance of the RPF began on the very
same evening and they were able to celebrate the military victory of the “brave”
rebel leader, Paul Kagame, on 17 July 1994.

The world was subsequently informed that unfortunately, the determination
of the “Hutu extremists”, who were also given the blame for the cunning
downing of the presidential jet on 6 April 1994, had made it impossible to
prevent the genocide on the inner-Rwandan Tutsi population and mass exodus
of over two million Hutus to the neighbouring countries of Congo/Zaire,
Burundi and Tanzania.

The Second Phase: Securing of the Congo Flank


The strategists in Washington soon realized that there was absolutely
nothing that could persuade the almost two million Hutu refugees living mainly
in eastern Congo to voluntarily return to a Rwanda controlled by RPF soldiers,
and this made them an obstacle on the way to achieving the goals linked to the
victory of the RPF. From the end of 1995 it began to become clear that the
intended solution to the refugee problem, which could still pose a threat to the
stability of the new Rwanda, even with the voluntary return of the Hutu refugees,
was a military one. The First Congo War was already casting a shadow. At the
time, one may have been unaware as to whether the armed dissolution of the
refugee camps would suffice to achieve the strategic goals; however, when the
incurable cancer of Mobutu became known, it posed a question as to the
reactions that would follow with the foreseeable vacuum of power. For whatever
reason, Etienne Tshisekedi, the head of the democratic UDPS party, who would
have been a suitable successor to Mobutu, found no lobby in Washington.
Therefore as next goal the U.S. felt the necessity to install an appropriate
“proxy” government in Kinshasa and to link the “solution of the refugee
problem” to the “liberation of the Congo”.

“It was later revealed that the American government provided Buyoya with $145,000
in US AID funds while he was out of power.” Wayne Madsen, Genocide and covert
operations in Africa, 1993-1999. Lewiston, N.Y. 1999, p. 227.
3 Buyoya spent some time in Bonn in the house of the German section of the Prayer
Breakfast movement, “Vereinigung zur Förderung der Völkerverständigung e.V.”
(cf. note on Prayer Breakfast movement in Appendix 2).

The Third Phase: Precautionary Measures in Burundi


In order to secure the southern flank of this “solution to the refugee
problem”, the former military ruler of Burundi, Pierre Buyoya had already
arrived in Bujumbura on 25 July 1996 from the United States via Bonn, to
re-seize the power that he had lost in the democratic elections4 of 1993 with the
help of an “invisible hand”. He could now again consolidate the power of the
Tutsi-dominated Burundian army and prepare it, among other things, for its role
alongside Kagame’s soldiers in the Congo. This move would not be decisive for
the war, but it allowed Buyoya to prevent any unwelcome support from
Burundian Hutus for the “wrong side”.

The Fourth Phase: Laurent Kabila is carried to Kinshasa


The Congo War began in October 1996 with the Rwandan attacks on the
Hutu refugee camps. In order to cause confusion in the world, part of the
Banyamulenge, a Tutsi ethnic group in the South Kivu Province had been
encouraged to form a Congolese liberation movement. On 16 October 1996,
these rebels became part of the “Alliance of Democratic Forces for the
Liberation of Congo” (AFDL), founded by the former Lumumbist
Laurent-Désiré Kabila and the Rwandan army. This alliance was presented to
the general public as a movement to “liberate” the Congo/Zaire. The actual
military advance started at the beginning of November 1996 and ended on
17 May 1997 with the victory of the Rwandan army under the leadership of
James Kabarebe and the “enthronement” of Laurent Kabila as the head of state
of what would now again be called the Democratic Republic of Congo. The over
400,000 Hutu refugees, who were murdered by Rwandan RPF soldiers or died
in misery in the forests of the Congo, would go down as the “collateral
damage” of this war of conquest. The rumours that the Clinton Administration
promised the two Kivu provinces in eastern Congo to Rwanda as “spoils of
war” refuse to be silenced.

The Fifth Phase: Next Stop Khartoum

After the establishment of the Laurent Kabila military dictatorship in
Kinshasa, the time came for the preparations to achieve the most complex, and
until today, well-concealed objective of the war: To militarily install John
Garang in Khartoum in order to remove the potential threat posed by the
existing Sudanese regime to the American Middle East policy. On 25 March
1998, Clinton held a “council of war” in Entebbe and gave his blessing to the
planned “regime change” in Khartoum. However, this war never happened; it
had to be cancelled when all of a sudden in the summer of 1998, the Eritrean
and Ethiopian armies of the “axis of good” decided to go to war against each
other over a little piece of desert.

4 Robert Krueger, the earlier American Ambassador in Bujumbura, is firmly convinced
that Buyoya was responsible for the murder on 21 October 1993 of President Melchior
Ndadaye who had been elected in July 1993. cf. Krueger and Krueger, From
Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi, Austin, Tex. 2007, p. 266.

The Sixth Phase: “Cleaning up” in the new Congo

The continued implementation of the plan to install John Garang in
Khartoum was now definitely off the table, especially when now Laurent Kabila,
who had anyhow been distrustfully eyed by Clinton in Entebbe5, also “turned his
back on the flag”, and Rwanda and Uganda had to be encouraged to lead yet
another Congo War on 2 August 1998 – this time against Laurent Kabila.
Despite a failed attempt to re-conquer Kinshasa by General Kabarebe, and the
military support given to Laurent Kabila by his former brothers-in-arms, Dos
Santos, Robert Mugabe and Sam Nujoma, the classic attack from the east by the
Rwandan and Ugandan troops was nevertheless very successful, with Rwanda
on the verge of conquering the Katanga Province. However, this went too far for
certain friends of the United States, and on 7 July 1999, the Kosovo War and the
Southern African Development Community (SADC) put pressure on Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright, and her colleagues Susan Rice and Gayle Smith, to
agree to a ceasefire agreement in Lusaka that envisaged the withdrawal of the
Rwandan and Ugandan troops from the Congo. The Pentagon had no real
interest in this move and it would not be realized during the Clinton era. A few
days before the term of the Clinton Administration ended, the political
landscape in central Africa was reshaped again following the murder of Laurent
Kabila on 16 January 2001. Dos Santos and Mugabe had grown weary of
Laurent Kabila and switched sides. And so it was on 20 January 2001, that an
entirely powerless young man aged 29, by the name of Joseph Kabila was flown
in from Harare. Angola and Zimbabwe helped the United States, to install the
“younger Kabila” and maintain control over Kinshasa.

George Bush Jr. and the Legacy of Bill Clinton

When he left office on 20 January 2001, Clinton left central Africa in utter
chaos. All the countries and regions that had allowed themselves to be recruited
to the American cause after “Clinton’s Escape” from Somalia now formed a
“democracy-free” zone ruled by military dictatorships. Washington honoured
them as a “new generation of African leaders”. However, peace was still a
distant prospect for the region and the goal that the Clinton Administration had
hoped to achieve with the war, to install a “chosen” government in Khartoum,
had also not been accomplished.

The Bush Jr. administration was shaped by 9/11 and the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. Washington was unable to deal with the turmoil that the
Clinton era had left behind in Africa, particularly as the “younger Bush”
5 cf. according to Gerard Prunier, Africa’s World War, London 2009, p. 160. Clinton
supposedly told him that his administration was unhappy (“We are fed up”) with his
style of government. The event is described in Chapter VIII (“The New Congo”).
depended on the support of the Clintons to justify his war in Iraq. The Bush
Administration’s relationship with the Bashir regime in Sudan improved
following its rapprochement with Washington after 9/11 and Washington
refrained from any forceful attempts to implement regime change. In the Congo,
they blocked all attempts by Kagame to annex the Kivu provinces; however, they
were unable to prevent the Third Congo War launched by Kagame in 2004. And
thus when Barack Obama took over from Bush Jr. on 20 January 2009, he too
faced the severe consequences of Clinton’s legacy in central Africa.

cf. according to Gerard Prunier, Africa’s World War, London 2009, p. 160. Clinton
supposedly told him that his administration was unhappy (“We are fed up”) with his
style of government. The event is described in Chapter VIII (“The New Congo”).