Rwanda's Hutu Extremist Insurgency: an Eyewitness Perspective
Rwanda’s Hutu Extremist Insurgency: An Eyewitness Perspective Richard Orth1 Former US Defense Attaché in Kigali Prior to the signing of the Arusha Accords in August 1993, which ended Rwanda’s three year civil war, Rwandan Hutu extremists had already begun preparations for a genocidal insurgency against the soon-to-be implemented, broad-based transitional government.2 They intended to eliminate all Tutsis and Hutu political moderates, thus ensuring the political control and dominance of Rwanda by the Hutu extremists. In April 1994, civil war reignited in Rwanda and genocide soon followed with the slaughter of 800,000 to 1 million people, primarily Tutsis, but including Hutu political moderates.3 In July 1994 the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) defeated the rump government,4 forcing the flight of approximately 40,000 Forces Armees Rwandaises (FAR) and INTERAHAMWE militia into neighboring Zaire and Tanzania. The majority of Hutu soldiers and militia fled to Zaire. In August 1994, the EX- FAR/INTERAHAMWE began an insurgency from refugee camps in eastern Zaire against the newly established, RPF-dominated, broad-based government. The new government desired to foster national unity. This action signified a juxtaposition of roles: the counterinsurgent Hutu-dominated government and its military, the FAR, becoming insurgents; and the guerrilla RPF leading a broad-based government of national unity and its military, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), becoming the counterinsurgents. The current war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DROC), called by some notable diplomats “Africa’s First World War,” involving the armies of seven countries as well as at least three different Central African insurgent groups, can trace its root cause to the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
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