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Conflict and resources in post‐genocideRwanda and the Great Lakes regionHelen Hintjens aa Institute of Social Studies , PO Box 29776, 2502 LT The Hague,The Netherlands E-mail:Published online: 26 Jan 2007.

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International Journal of Environmental Studies,Vol. 63, No. 5, October 2006, 599–615

International Journal of Environmental StudiesISSN 0020-7233 print: ISSN 1029-0400 online © 2006 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journalsDOI: 10.1080/00207230600963817

Conflict and resources in post-genocide Rwanda and the Great Lakes region

HELEN HINTJENS

Institute of Social Studies, PO Box 29776, 2502 LT The Hague, The Netherlands.Email: hintjens@iss.nl

Taylor and Francis LtdGENV_A_196287.sgm

(Received 16 August 2006)10.1080/00207230600963817International Journal of Environmental Studies0020-7233 (print)/1029-0400 (online)Original Article2006Taylor & Francis0000000002006HelenHintjenshintjens@iss.nl

The legacy of the genocide of 1994 has spread from Rwanda to the wider Great Lakes region, and itsmost damaging effects have been felt in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), formerZaire. Here an economy based on pillage and force of arms has been organized by local elites, andthe Rwandan state, ensuring also on behalf of the West that it is not excluded from the scramble toextract rare mineral deposits, obtain forest products and otherwise exploit the resources of the DRC.The most noticeable after-effect of the genocide has been mass refugee movements and internaldisplacement. The damage to environments throughout the region has been dramatic, and has beenexacerbated by patterns of growing social inequality. In addition, social institutions that might beable to both manage resource use and resolve conflicts, have all but collapsed under the weight of aviolent form of ethnic politics. The main hope for the future lies in reviving some of these commu-nity-level institutions in ways that can overcome some of the more poisonous effects of racial iden-tity politics throughout the Great Lakes region. The necessity for political solutions to environmentaland resource problems is very clear; what is less clear is how such solutions can be formulated andimplemented.

Keywords: Rwanda; Great Lakes region; Conflicts; Racial identity politics; Resources

Introduction: what is at stake?

The main question in this article is how the apparent deterioration of the natural resource basein the African Great Lakes region can be related to the genocide of 1994 in Rwanda and itssequels in the form of refugee movements and warfare. The current conflicts in the region, andpredatory patterns of resource extraction in Eastern DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo),formerly Zaire, have a long history. This article will be unable to explore colonial legacies andthe Mobutu era, important as these may be for understanding conflicts involving both ‘identitypolitics’ and resources in the region [1]. The main focus is on the period since 1990.

There is wide agreement that environment and conflict are related; for instance, at a recentconference on the Great Lakes region of Africa, the eminent political historian of Rwandaand Burundi, Rene Lemarchand, suggested that environmental factors had to be included inthe analysis if conflict in this region was to be explained [2]. Behind environmental damagelie processes of despoliation, warfare, and above all the dramatic inequalities between thefew wealthy people and the desperate mass. Beyond this, however, there is little agreement

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among researchers about how cause and effect operate between conflict, identity politics andresource management. One view holds that the advent of refugees fleeing conflict, forexample, in Tanzania in the mid-1990s, means environmental disaster. In this context, it isargued that: ‘…access to land, water, pasture and mineral resources … [is] increasinglybecoming a primary source of conflicts’ [3, p. 116]. On the other hand, after conducting areview of the literature on ‘environmental refugees’, another study notes that: ‘… in conflict… it is difficult or impossible to isolate particular causes, outside the broader context …’, andgoes on to conclude that: ‘a simple causal link from environmental degradation to conflict …is hardly likely to be found’ [4, p. 11]. We may have to make do with circular causality, in theform of ‘feedback loops’ or vicious cycles. Typically, in this form of analysis: ‘… it may behypothesised that environment is both a cause and a ‘‘victim’’ of armed conflicts and forcedmigration’ [5, p. 8].

With so many intricate micro-climates, distinct ecological niches and a huge variety ofsophisticated and potentially highly adapted methods of resource use and farming, it is not bepossible to do justice to the sheer diversity of even the narrowly delimited Great Lakes regionfocused on in this article (i.e. Burundi, Rwanda, Eastern DRC, and, to a lesser extent, Uganda).Micro-level and national studies provide insights into the rich diversity of resource politics andconflict situations in the region. Recent studies under the auspices of the African Centre forTechnology Studies have been particularly rich in insights, bringing together experts inconflict and land for both the Great Lakes region and for other parts of the African continent[6]. The paucity of macro-level and comparative data on environmental conditions is a prob-lem that has been aggravated by the continuing wars in Eastern DRC in particular [7,8].

The vexed question of explaining connections between conflict and resources in the GreatLakes is returned to at the end of the article. The task of analysis is quite perplexing, since:‘as usual, in systems totally out of balance … many of our rational or academic concepts nolonger fit’ [8, p. 17]. How then can the interactions of mechanisms of human survival in theGreat Lakes region with processes of resource depletion be understood? How do both relateto the context of prolonged conflict and displacement, which have engendered such massivefatalities? People’s own battles against hunger, disease, and despair, will of course affect theresource base; but does the destruction of people’s lives run in parallel to the destruction ofthe resource base, or not?

Another important question to address, however modestly, is how Eastern DRC, Burundiand Rwanda can emerge out of the nightmare of endless warfare and cross-border violence,directed mainly at civilians. This article suggests that certain forms of peace promotion andpractices of environmental protection are linked. Integrating them is vital; very often thesame community-level institutions that resolve conflicts also serve to regulate access tonatural resources. The legacy of genocide and warfare is that most of these institutions havebeen damaged or destroyed. Given this, it is hard to imagine how functioning regulatorymechanisms might be restored, but this is one of the challenging issues the article seeks tocomment on.

The inter-lacustrine ecosystem is managed by a huge diversity of types of authority struc-tures and state systems, from relatively strong public authority structures in Rwanda, to thestudied ungovernability and chaos of Eastern DRC. Across these systems, competing mili-tias backed by different neighboring states, conduct their business, sometimes through kill-ings and warfare, but also for commercial ends, without any special interest in warfare.Between the two poles of extreme order (Rwanda) and utter chaos (Eastern DRC), Burundiis in an intermediate position, with elements of both. Some regions, and some military andpolitical elites, have done better out of the recent conflicts than others. The social fabric and

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production systems of Rwanda have been almost irreparably damaged by the genocide, butthe war in the DRC which came after the genocide brought some very substantial benefits tothe Rwandan ruling class and their allies.

In the context of such upheaval of social relations and values, with the exception of thegreat apes, concentrated in the Virunga range of mountains that spans Eastern DRC andRwanda, the natural environment in the Great Lakes region has received relatively littleattention until quite recently. Since 2001 the World Bank has become involved, grantingalmost US$2 billion in ‘emergency lending’ during the years up to 2005 [9]. The valuableminerals of the DRC include diamonds, gold, cobalt, as well as a rare mineral used in mobilephones, coltan for short, and cassiterite [10] (coltan is the short name for the metal tantalumwhich is extracted from the rare mineral columbite tantalite. An estimated 15% of the world’sdeposits of this mineral, used in the manufacture of mobile phones, are located in EasternDRC). As a UN Panel has made clear, the trade in minerals from the DRC involves many ofthe world’s most established companies, based in over 25 countries of the world, from USAand UK to Israel and South Africa [11: Annex III lists 85 companies ‘considered by the Panelto be in violation of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises’, including Anglo-American, African Mineral Fields, Bayer AG, Ashanti Goldfields, de Beers, Fortis Bank,Sogen (Belgian Coltan trading company) among others]. In this wider context, the removal oftree cover and logging is just one of many causes for concern in terms of resource exploita-tion in Eastern DRC [12]. After dealing briefly with the course of events that led to thepresent state of affairs, some evidence is presented of the damage to the resource base in theGreat Lakes region, in relation to Rwanda, Burundi and Eastern DRC.

A chain of events

Things really fell apart in the Great Lakes region as a whole from the mid-1980s onwards. Achain of events that led to genocide in Rwanda included mass killings in Burundi in 1993,following the killing of President Ndadaye, and prior to that the RPA (Rwandan PatrioticArmy) invasion of Rwanda in 1990. The start of civil war in Rwanda coincided with struc-tural adjustment, which started just a few months before the RPA military campaign. Prior tothat, a turning point was the collapse of world coffee prices in 1986; the consequence forBurundi, Rwanda and the coffee-growing areas of the Kivus were unprecedented. Fiscal defi-cit resulted in Rwanda, for the first time, as hunger pushed farmers throughout the region toliterally rip up coffee bushes and plant food crops.

The politics of conflict between ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ was aggravated (though not caused) bythe sharp economic recession of the late 1980s. The invasion of Rwanda included many ofthose whose parents had been exiled since the revolution in Rwanda which overthrew themonarchy, dispossessing many Tutsi and also some Hutu. Known as the ‘59ers, the returningarmy of refugees included many top military personnel previously in the Museveni regime[13]. This time they returned in order to govern Rwanda, and indeed the present governmentis largely composed of this group. In a real sense, the present human disaster in EasternCongo and the wider region is a politically engineered disaster. It is not natural, inevitable orspontaneous; it is very much about the politics of resource pillage, regime consolidation (inRwanda and Uganda) and regime collapse (in former Zaire and Burundi).

Coordinated through Rwanda and Uganda, the extractive business involves mining andtrade in gold, diamonds and other minerals, including coltan, which is found in significantquantities in the Ituri region of Eastern DRC. This trade involves many of the largest mining

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companies in the world, as we have already shown [11,14]. Significantly, the effects of thegenocide of 1994, and subsequent mass refugee resettlement and flight were all the moredamaging given the virtual collapse of state authority in Eastern Zaire. ‘By the end of theeighties this regime not only lost its distributing capacities [but] … its legitimacy and stateauthority were subject to intense challenge, finally ending in its implosion’ [1, p. 166]. Tele-commanded from Rwanda, the recent history of Eastern DRC has been structured from muchfurther afield, in particular reflecting the ‘renewed interest by mining transnationals inAfrica’s minerals’ [14, p. 235].

The scene was set for regime change through force of arms, assisted by Rwanda’s supportfor Kabila, who came to power in 1996. Two years later, Rwanda invaded again, and this timemet intervention by countries of the region, from Zimbabwe and Angola to Chad, in a war thathas been likened to Africa’s First World War. The end of the Cold War thus set in motionprocesses of rapid economic destruction that started up a renewed scramble for resources,especially mineral resources, and set the scene for a contemporary form of recolonization ofthe entire Great Lakes region.

War, structural violence and the resource base

Not surprisingly, the available evidence suggests that war – and particularly mass refugeemovements in situations of violent conflict – is bad for the natural environment, and for treecover in particular. According to figures collected on the reputable Mongabay.com website,Rwanda suffered a particularly rapine depletion of its forest resources since 1990, a loss ofalmost 51%. However, between 2000 and 2005 the annual reforestation rate was around 7%,representing a dramatic increase of 867% on the rate of the 1990s. The end of civil war andrefugee-related conflicts across borders, especially in Virunga, has made it possible to reversethe dramatic loss of biodiversity in some areas. Other areas, such as Akagera national park,have been all but decimated by the influx of cattle that returned after 1994 with the Rwandandiaspora returning from Uganda and elsewhere. Most forest areas in Rwanda are plantations;there is almost no primary forest remaining except in parts of Virunga National Park, home ofmountain gorillas (the information in this paragraph is from the website of Mogabay, a regu-larly updated website that bases its information on data from Google Earth, MDA EarthSet,FAO, and the World Resources Institute among other sources [15]). In 2005, forest productsgenerated an estimated US$35 million of revenue for Rwanda, making it worthwhile for thegovernment (which owns almost all the land) to ensure that replanting continues [15].

The picture in the DRC (we are constrained to use statistics for the DRC as a whole andnot just its Eastern part) are of little change overall, which may seem surprising. The defores-tation rate was estimated to be just 0.2% in 2005. However, when it is considered that thereare 133 million hectares of forest, covering almost 60% of the surface area of the country,compared with just under half a million hectares in Rwanda, covering less than 20% ofRwanda’s surface area, the significance of even 0.2% should become apparent. The defores-tation rate in DRC rose by 37.6% between 2000 and 2005 compared with the previousdecade, and this is almost certainly an underestimate of the position in Eastern DRC, whichhas been hardest hit by refugee movements, internal displacement and violence. The govern-ment aims to increase reserved park areas in DRC to 10–15% compared with 8% at present,and has been supported in this aim by the World Bank. One mitigating factor that may haveoffset the damage in Eastern DRC, is that ‘… parks in DR Congo have been well-managedcompared to protected areas in surrounding countries’, such as Rwanda [15].

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The situation in Eastern DRC is not typical of DRC as a whole, especially in the Kivus,where population densities are historically closer to that of Rwanda and Burundi than the restof former Zaire. A survey in North Kivu, conducted in the mid-1980s, showed a picture inmany ways similar to Rwanda, with around 90% of land holdings under one hectare, the levelconsidered by FAO to be the minimum required to support a family through farming [12].This is comparable with data for Rwanda, which shows even higher density of inhabitants persquare kilometres; in 2001 an estimated 60% of Rwandan households had plots of less thanhalf a hectare [16].

In Burundi, the picture is particularly bleak, with under 6% of the land (152,000 hectares)still covered in forest. Here too, as in Rwanda, around half of the total forest area has beenlost since 1990 (47.4%). As in Rwanda and DRC, during the civil war most governmentconservation personnel fled protected lands, which became open to poaching and logging, aswell as being cleared for farming and grazing. As in Rwanda also, a significant problem hasbeen erosion of hillside farming land due to removal of trees, the lack of terracing, or failureto maintain terracing, and resultant run-off of topsoil into valley bottoms [16].

It is certain that the end of fighting does not automatically mean that environmental protec-tion can be restored and the damage undone. In Burundi and Rwanda, restoring forest areaswill require some coercion and exclusion, given the sheer density of subsistence farming onthe land. In Burundi there is no primary forest cover left, and little large wildlife or biodiver-sity. This also describes the situation in the most intensively cultivated areas as Eastern Kivu,and in southern Rwanda. People living on the land would have to be displaced massively ifreserved areas or reforestation plantations were to be created in these regions. Intensifieddeforestation can produce heightened conflict and the risk of violent confrontation over landuse, but reforestation is also likely to generate patterns of exclusion and a sense of injustice.

The grabbing of land by armed or controlling elites for speculative purposes, for ranchingin particular, is taking place in various parts of the Great Lakes region. Land dispossession isa general and widespread pattern, and is reinforced when civilians flee their homes followingethnic violence, and leave their farms behind. Before nature has a chance to claim back thehuge tracts of abandoned farm land, for example, in war-torn areas like Kisangani or Ituri, theland has been taken over by senior officials, military leaders and businessmen [12]. Cattleranching is particularly demanding of space, and has recently emerged on quite a large scalein Eastern DRC. Some suspect this is under the control of the Rwandan ‘politico-militaryestablishment’, who may be exporting environmental damage, as well as arms and fighting,to their neighbors [12].

People on the move, such a refugees or soldiers, forced laborers or fleeing peasants, land-less people and itinerants, need food and are likely to raid crops, slaughter wild animals, andgenerally pillage what they can simply in order to stay alive [17]. Illegal logging is inevitablywidespread in areas of violent conflict, population displacement and refugee movements. Inthis context, one of the major donors to the DRC, USAID, expresses its priorities as follows:‘to reduce the rate of forest degradation and loss of biodiversity through protected areamanagement, improved logging policies, sustainable forest use by local inhabitants, andimproved environmental governance’ [18]. Donors large and small have little trouble agree-ing to stop the bush meat trade, but there is little said by the World Bank and USAID, forexample, about the damaging environmental and political costs of mineral exploitation andranching, for example.

During times of violent warfare and displacement, farming becomes a hurried affair,consisting mostly of the planting of a few root crops, less vulnerable to marauding militiamembers, thieves and grazing cattle than either maize or beans. Crops other than root crops

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are often abandoned during the most insecure times, as being far too easy to pillage. InRwanda during the period between 1990 and 2000, coffee production halved, and beans andmaize production shrank, whilst the potato harvest quadrupled and cassava production tripledin volume [19]. The problem that has arisen as a result is the low price of potatoes and othertubers on local markets, because of over-supply. Similar problems of insecurity, and similarresponses by farmers, have also been noticed in Eastern DRC over the past decade or two [12].

Violent conflict and heightened insecurity mean that depletion of forest resources canbecome an attractive proposition; charcoal, timber and bush meat can become vital sources ofrevenue for people on the move with no other base or capital assets. This takes its toll on thenatural environment. There is little doubt that perpetual cycles of violent conflict anddisplacement are despoiling the natural environment of the Eastern DRC in a possibly irre-versible manner. Some donors insist on environmental concerns being made a priority, butthis tends to be a low priority for the World Bank, with its emphasis on opening up themining sector to foreign investment, and good working relations with the government ofJoseph Kabila in Kinshasa [9]. According to the World Bank, joint forest management is thesolution, and the Congolese government has already accepted the need for a more proactiverole in conservation policies.

A strong link in the chain: Rwanda

The lawlessness of DRC regions initially proved an obstacle to its reconnection with globalchains of finance and commodity movements. These chains now link the entire African GreatLakes region intimately into the global economy. In the absence of a state authority thatcould be negotiated with in former Zaire, the post-genocide Rwandan state emerged as aconvenient partner of international capital and mining companies. With tight control over itsdomestic national territory, and the military capacity to project itself into Eastern DRC, ahighly organized army and intelligence service (as well as fluent and sophisticated English-language skills), the post-genocide Rwandan republic became the ideal partner linking thelocal and the global in the spreading chains of relationships tying Eastern Congo into globalcircuits of trade and capital.

So long as it played a vital role as intermediary, Rwanda’s crimes in Eastern DRC werealmost entirely ignored (from the period 1996 until around 2002). After this point, the UnitedNations was enabled to establish a Special Committee to investigate the economic and mili-tary occupation of Eastern DRC by Rwanda and other regional states, as well as the opera-tions of multinationals and business people in the region [11: Annex 1 on Companies onwhich the Panel recommends placing financial restrictions, which include Belgian, Rwandan,DRC and Zimbabwean companies, including many small diamond companies operating fromBelgium, with close ties to senior Rwandan military, many of whom are mentioned in Annex2 on Persons for whom the Panel recommends a travel ban and financial restrictions. Theseindividuals include, among others, James Kaberebe, a top man in the RPA, Edward Gatete,Officer on the Congo Desk of the Rwandan army, and senior intelligence personnel anddiplomats from Zimbabwe and Uganda, among others]. Meanwhile, Rwanda takes the moralhigh-ground through constant references to the genocide; last year it sent troops to Darfur ona peacekeeping mission, no doubt including many experienced in anti-guerilla tactics fromtheir stationing in DRC [20].

Amidst a ‘… new scramble for mining concessions and exploration rights’ in the post-Cold War era [14, p. 236], UN and other sources confirm that the extractive, ‘militarized

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patrimonialism’ in place in Eastern DRC, is systematic, organized, and involves not onlyRwanda and Uganda, but many of the largest international mining companies in the world[11]. Mineral sales were officially channeled through the ‘Congo desk’ of the Rwandanarmy, which has been interpreted by at least one journalist as evidence of the tendency of theregime to think itself above the law, exercising ‘Victim’s License’ to do as it pleases [21:‘Our fairytale version of Rwanda’s genocide has allowed us to overlook the government’sown crimes against humanity’. Monbiot also comments that up to 2002 at least, ‘Kagame’speople … had a near-monopoly’, not on coltan production, as he claims, but at least on coltanexports from Eastern DRC, which were being channelled through Rwanda to companies inthe UK, South Africa, Belgium and elsewhere]. Without resources from Eastern DRC,mineral exports from Rwanda would be nil. Table 1 was provided to the UN Panel ofExperts, charged with investigating mineral and other forms of resource exploitation in theGreat Lakes region. It was provided by the Rwandan government, and the evidence of tradein minerals is therefore official, and possibly an under-estimate [11, pp. 14–19 providedetails of the way in which Rwanda organized the trade in coltan and diamonds in particular,and documents the impacts of armed conflict on the civilian population, including in terms ofmortality and malnutrition].

Wealth and resources accumulated by the Rwandan political elite have thus become almostcompletely divorced from the weak and declining agrarian economy within Rwanda itself.This delinking of wealth from production within Rwanda is a dangerous path for the regimeto take; it changes their whole ideological and political outlook and delinks them from theirown constituency, the majority of rural Rwandans [23]. In order to secure continued access tovaluable commodities, they have become enmeshed in trans-border chains of coercive rela-tions involving militias and forced labor. This seems to be an example of what has been termedthe ‘criminalization of the state’, introducing ‘insecurity … criminal gangs, racketeering’ intothe Great Lakes region as almost a normalized form of public administration [2, p. 3].

The high costs of military intervention in the DRC were thus more than offset – at leastuntil 2002, and possibly in the present, by the considerable economic gains from mineralexploitation see [11]; The Report of the Panel of Experts, showed Rwanda suddenly becamea major producer of gold after intervening in the DRC, former Zaire. ‘The Panel estimatesthat the Rwandan army could have made $20 million per month, simply by selling the coltanthat, on average, intermediaries buy from the small dealers at about $10 per kg. According toexperts and dealers, at the highest estimates of all related costs (purchase and transport of theminerals), RPA must have made at least $250 million over a period of 18 months. This issubstantial enough to finance the war. Here lies the vicious circle of the war. Coltan haspermitted the Rwandan army to sustain its presence in the Democratic Republic of theCongo. The army has provided protection and security to the individuals and companiesextracting the mineral. These have made money which is shared with the army, which in turn

Table 1. Rwanda: mineral production, 1995–2000 [22].

Year Gold (kg) Cassiterite (tons) Coltan (tons)

1995 1 247 541996 1 330 971997 10 327 2241998 17 330 2241999 10 309 1222000 10 437 83

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continues to provide the enabling environment to continue the exploitation. The lastillustration of how Rwanda finances its war deals with the financial transactions involvingRwandan banks, RPA suppliers and RCD institutions. In these particular cases, Rwanda hasused BCDI and SONEX to pay RPA suppliers.’ (Paragraph 103 of the report.) This is a clas-sic example of ‘circular causation’ in action, of the type referred to in the Introduction to thisarticle. By the late 1990s, according to this report, this trade was generating up to 80% of theRwandan military budget, making it the lucrative equivalent of the triangular trade [21]. ‘Inan increasingly globalized and interconnected world, the drivers of resource exploitation areincreasingly multinational companies’ [5, p. 7], and the priorities of these major players, forthe most part unable to intervene openly in war-torn areas like Eastern DRC, appear to havebeen transmitted, conveyer-belt like, via the key link in the global mineral chain, Rwanda’smilitary Congo Desk. There has also been significant collaboration with Ugandan state struc-tures, albeit to a lesser extent than with Rwanda.

The impact of this shift of wealth generation to the DRC and to mineral extraction isdevastating for many parts of Rwanda and Burundi. It means that the wealth base of the elite,including the military and most political leaders, has shifted, resulting in a certain indiffer-ence to local production. The elite’s priorities are more than ever removed from those of ordi-nary subsistence farmers. The latter’s problems and poverty may even become a matter arelative indifference to decision-makers. The present Rwandan government proposes toremove all peasants from plots under one hectare, something that could throw at least half,possibly even two-thirds of all Rwandan farmers off their land. Social polarization is alreadyquite acute in Rwanda, and land distribution has becoming hugely unequal in the past decadeor so. Estimates for 2005 suggest that around 50% of the population (and 55% of the ruralpopulation) lived below the extreme poverty level, compared with around 40% (to 46%)three years earlier. At this level of poverty, ‘… one’s entire budget must be allocated to food’[24, p. 6]. For 2001, poverty levels were close to 70% nationally, with some variationbetween regions [7; the author also shows that the main vectors of inequality in Rwanda areprovince, the number of adults in the household; education levels of the head of household].Average land holdings declined from 2 ha in the 1960s, and 1.2 ha in the 1990s to just 0.7 haby 2000 or so, with half of farmers cultivating less than 0.5 ha by 2005 [25,26].

If government plans are implemented, not only will the poorer peasants cease to grow foodfor their own subsistence needs, but under the proposed national plan for land, cash cropswould be grown on consolidated plots of over 2 hectares. Concentrating land holdings alsoseems to have been part of the agenda, in both Burundi and Rwanda, of the villagizationprograms, which emerged after the end of genocide and civil war. In Rwanda these policieswere implemented between 1995 and 2000, and regrouped rural people previously living indispersed housing, moving them into villages. In some areas, this worked reasonably well.Elsewhere people were forcibly moved into settlements, which were often constructed forsecurity rather than developmental purposes [27].

Land reform in Rwandan is based on the premise that larger scale farms would be moreefficient. However, much research shows quite the opposite – and suggests that smaller farmsare often more productive than larger ones. Research conducted in Rwanda has suggestedthat resettlement schemes have hampered farmers’ productivity rather than promoting it (seethe research on small scale farming productivity conducted at the University of Butare inRwanda, cited in [26]. See also [19]). Distress sales of land, and land scarcity within largefamilies, mean that many rural poor need help to access land for subsistence. However, theland law introduced in Rwanda in 2005 recognizes as landless only ‘old caseload’ refugees,returned from the Rwandan, mainly Tutsi, diaspora, in Uganda and elsewhere [26].

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Generally highly urbanized, and officially disgusted with the peasantry with theirmachetes and ‘weeding’, the political, military and economic elite which more or less runsRwanda does not seem to care much about landlessness and destitution in the country. Thegovernment has been informed of the research that shows the: ‘… rational nature of … diver-sified cropping patterns’, which mean that farmers can cultivate between five and 10 plots,spread around somewhat over different kinds of land and topography [26, p. 3]. Yet it seemsunwilling to take this evidence on board in its new land policies.

Identity politics and resource politics

The seizure and reallocation of land, which is taking place across the entire Great Lakesregion, and especially in Eastern DRC, is ‘being used as one of the elements in the ‘‘recon-struction’’ of identity’ along ethnic or race lines [28, p. 384]. The result is a polarization oflocalities into distinct ‘ethnically’ separate enclaves, each isolated, and in many cases forcedto arm themselves in self-defense.

In some cases, violent conflict emerged between people who had previously shared landand other natural resources; the discovery of gold deposits in Ituri, for example, seems tohave ‘triggered’ the fighting between Hema and Lendu in recent years [5]. Since the end ofthe Mobutu regime in former Zaire, it has been the Banyarwanda in DRC that have perhapssuffered most from their past association with the Mobutu regime, as well as indirectly fromtheir assumed position as ‘favored partners’ of the Rwandan post-genocide regime [12,14].They were persecuted very much as Tutsi had been persecuted in Rwanda, following officialencouragement to the non-Banyarwanda population by the Congolese public authorities atnational and local levels [12].

In language reminiscent of the euphemisms of genocide in Rwanda, the Banyarwanda inthe Kivus were described as ‘snakes’. The point is that snakes are chased out of farmlandareas with pangas, or knives. Identity labels based on race and ascription were thus becomingas fatal in Eastern DRC as they had been for some time in Rwanda and Burundi [29]. The so-called Banyamulenge (previously also called Banyarwanda) have been particularly affectedby ethnic politics and problems of identity construction along racial lines. As a relativelywell-off group, the Banyarwanda, later given the general label Banyamulenge, were firstrecruited by the RPA to move back to Rwanda and settle. But they were abandoned in 2003or so, when it suited Rwanda’s government. What was seen as an unholy alliance betweensome Banyamulenge from Kivu with the RPA, the occupying force in Eastern Congo, led to‘… indiscriminate violence against innocent Banyamulenge and other Congolese Tutsi whohave nothing to do with Rwanda’s invasion and occupation of our country’ [14, p. 243]. Theinvention of a new form of identity went hand in hand with the seizure of land previouslyoccupied by the Banyarwanda or Banyamulenge. ‘Whether it happens in the Kivus or inRwanda, the re-labelling of social identities is a powerful device for economic exclusion andpolitical domination’ [28, p. 386].

As the 1994 genocide spilled over into Eastern DRC, communal antagonisms were recastin racialized terms, so that the ‘Hutu-Tutsi antagonism was extended into something muchbroader, … (Nilotic or Hamitic against Bantu)’ [1, p. 274,14]. The politicization of race hashad lethal effects both inside Rwanda and throughout the Great Lakes region [29]. As ‘old’and ‘new’ caseload refugees returned to Rwanda, the former Rwandan army and militias andtheir human shields were hunted down and died in forest areas. After 1998, competing localfactions, like the Hema and Lendu, were armed by competing regimes, mainly Rwanda and

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Uganda. In the film Kisangani, produced by Hubert Sauper in 1998, the horror of finding80,000 people on the run along a disused railway line is depicted. Fearing attacks by theRPA, the people filmed had been on the move for three years, and were dying as they fledthrough the forests of North Kivu. The images in the film are so wretched it is almostunwatchable.

Indeed, such images are one of the few honest depictions in the western media of the scaleof the terrible outcomes of the Rwandan genocide in neighboring DRC. The racialization ofconflict in all parts of the region has resulted in mass killings of innocent civilians, facilitatedby the almost complete destruction of state institutions in Eastern DRC. Rwanda and Burundihave also experienced a prolonged crisis of resource use systems, manifested by land-grab-bing and resultant endemic food insecurity for the poor [26,28]. Periodic mass killings inBurundi since independence have had almost as devastating an impact on conflict situationsin the region as the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Race ideology can be likened to a poisonthat infects relations between groups of people who previously lived, if not in harmony, atleast not in a state of war and perpetual violence.

The rapine destruction of mineral and forest wealth in Eastern DRC has been likened to anew form of colonial conquest, in which global mining companies, based in the West, sharethe spoils with local states, especially Rwanda, and their warlord clients, who in turn find itconvenient to mobilize people along ethnic or pseudo-racial lines. The rational side of suchrace politics can be emphasized, since: ‘In periods of intensified political conflict oreconomic competition, ethnicity offers a perfect instrument for local entrepreneurs’, includ-ing politicians and the military [1, p. 274]. Race and ethnic identity politics thus becomesboth sources of conflict and the way in which people respond to attacks in the present.

Institutional collapse and zero-sum politics

The search for cultural identity, far from promoting peace, has promoted violent conflict andnew kinds of social distance, undermining habits of reciprocity and resource management.Warfare, genocide and economic crisis have had a devastating impact on the carefullyconstructed social institutions of the inter-lacustrine populations, involving practices ofresource management elaborated over decades or even centuries. These have all butcollapsed following genocide in Rwanda, constant violence and massive population displace-ments. Pre-existing systems of ‘community-level societal protection, which were beingeroded prior to the genocide, were destroyed by it’ [25, pp. 16–17].

Such pre-existing systems of mutual protection were of course far from perfect, but theydid serve to reduce risks, especially for small farmers. By controlling pastoral grazing rights,producing organic inputs that could enhance soil fertility and ensuring there was labor able torespond to priorities for soil protection and public works, such social cooperation helpedreduce soil erosion through terracing and other similar measures. In the past, social institu-tions – including the state – also set some conditions on the use of wildlife and forestresources, conditions that were broadly adhered to. Intensive agriculture of the kind practicedin parts of the Kivus, and in most of Rwanda and Burundi (as opposed to slash and burn agri-culture) requires a high degree of security and reciprocity to work well. This is because of thepainstaking practices that it involves, many of which are gradually developed over decades,and needing periodic high labor inputs to be properly maintained. Many such practices(which include terracing, weed clearing, treating soil with animal dung and so forth) havedeclined under the pressure of land hunger and as a result of fighting and insecurity.

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The choices faced by local communities in many parts of Burundi, Rwanda and EasternDRC are dire. In the Kivus, civilians can join one of the armed groups, and seek their protec-tion, knowing that another army or militia may soon replace them and seek revenge. Orcommunities may remain steadfastly unarmed, and are then highly vulnerable to raids fromall armed groups. Alternatively, they can arm themselves, like the FAP (forces d’autodefencepopulaires) in Eastern Zaire, the Mai Mai and Simba among others. Their weapons of choicecan include holy water and prayers as well as weapons, and their fight is mainly to protecttheir land and fellow community members rather than to loot or pillage under cover ofconflict as is more generally the case [14]. These are not the kinds of choices civilians shouldbe forced to make on a daily basis, but this is the reality. If a group is labeled as aliens, or asundeserving for some other reason, and targeted for removal from their land, they will haveto fight or flee unless they want to suffer heavy casualties.

A zero-sum mode of politics poisons relations between what are seen by many as twodiasporic nations now lodged within the Great Lakes region: the Hutu – or Bantu- and Tutsi– or Nilotes. That the perception of Hutu and Tutsi as different races is flatly refuted bylinguistic and archaeological evidence makes little difference to the practices of poweraround issues of race. As Goyvaerts puts it: ‘… like it or not, both Hutu and Tutsi are ofcourse indigenous Bantus’ [30, p. 302]. Even so, the myth of Tutsi as invaders from thenorth conquering the indigenous Bantu Hutus has persisted and spread and has becomeentrenched in the minds and attitudes of many Rwandans, Eastern Congolese and evenfurther afield.

As Mamdani reminds us, ‘The continuing tragedy of [the African Great Lakes region] …is that each round of violence gives us yet another set of victims-turned-perpetrators’ [31,p. 268]. Whenever one side wishes to justify its attacks on the other, past wrongs inflicted onone’s own ‘people’ throughout the region are brought to the fore. Wrongs committed byone’s own ‘side’ are forgotten or justified as self-defense, in line with colonial policies ofdivide-and-rule in the region. ‘Taught new ways to hate by Europeans, central Africans havelearned the lesson only too well, becoming the authors of their own repetitive tragedy’ [32,p. 29; see also 13]. Violence comes to be conceived as justified ‘pre-emptive self-defence’,so that ‘(a)t a grassroots level, there seems to be no other option than to learn to survive in anenvironment of predation and in a local economy based on plunder’, something Vlassenrootterms the ‘militarization of patrimonialism’ [1, pp. 285, 283].

Environmental impacts of this process have been devastating throughout the Great Lakesregion, from Eastern DRC, especially North and South Kivu, to parklands in Rwanda, and asfar east as the border areas of Tanzania, especially Kagera and Kigoma. Here the mass influxof refugees in the mid-1990s from both Rwanda and Burundi was assessed as very damagingto the environment as well as the local populations [17,28].

As in other complex cross-border areas, in the ‘new wars’ in the Great Lakes region,armies and militias blur, factions allying with their enemies’ enemies in order to mount cross-border raids and counter-attacks. Only rarely are there just two sides. More often there arethree, four or more, and the violence is played out over land, minerals and over humanbeings, who are both sought out as cheap labor, in some cases as virtual slaves, or removed asobstacles to the seizure of land, whether for ranching, mineral deposits or other economicopportunities [33].

Whilst inside Rwanda, there is relative security in military terms, and the state is more orless in control of the national territory and the population is mostly disarmed, in EasternDRC, the system of warfare has involved an expanding economy based on forced labor, landseizures, killings of civilians, looting and rape. These are some of the uncontrollable aspects

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of state collapse, but also part of deliberate policies that create chaos which provides aconvenient cover for outside interests to intervene in Eastern DRC. Frontier society worksbecause of the creation, over the past 20 years or so, of an entire generation of landless ruraldwellers dislocated from rural social structures and therefore open to promises of wealth andmodernity. They are attracted to small-scale gold and mineral mining and trading, loggingand bush hunting, as well as recruitment into ethnically defined militias [1].

Mineral-rich areas in the Kivus, including areas of gold mining, attracted men who hadbeen made landless by increasing pressure on farming areas. Destitute people compose agroup that can be easily used to work for others in a variety of ways, including on the land. InEastern DRC, mining activities have involved virtual slave conditions in many locations.Structural violence interacts with military violence, since: ‘… the majority of the populationis extremely poor and faces high levels of personal and group insecurity’ [28, p. 387].

In this ‘… wild frontier in which everyone can fetch whatever they can’, there is moremodernity than tradition; only it is a modernity that brings only the costs and so far few of thebenefits of that condition [14, p. 235]. Economic globalization, with its instantaneous moneytransfers and offshore investment zones, has made ‘… crisis areas such as the Great Lakesopportunity zones for arms merchants, money launderers … out to make quick profits’ [14,p. 235].

In the DRC, the dominant values today are not that far removed (except that the rewardsare generally far less) from the acquisitiveness, organized crime, inequality and repressionthat characterize the US economy. Not for nothing is Eastern DRC described as frontier terri-tory, as Africa’s Wild West. The tragic history of the Congo has lain in its natural andmineral wealth, which instead of benefiting the majority of Congolese ‘… have made it aprime candidate for imperial ambitions, and the envy of adventurers, mercenaries and lootersof all kind’ [14, p. 258].

Just as in the Wild West and other frontier societies, the pillage is systematic, and is notconfined to the desperate or ruthless. Systems of extraction recruit landless labor, which maybe involved in the work of mining, killing or despoiling natural resources, or all three. Usingtheir own weapons or hired guns, local cliques, business people and soldiers compete fortheir share of the loot. At the regional level, this economy of pillage and competition forland, minerals and control, extends to the central authorities of two regional states: Rwandaand Uganda, and involves sectors of the Burundian military and political elites also. Increas-ingly, during the 1990s, these state authorities started to depend for their revenue, especiallyfor military operations, on the systematic pillage of Congolese resources of all kinds. Fromthe regional level, the chain of profit ends up at the global economy level, especially withlarge mining companies like Anglo-American, Barclays Bank, Bayer AG, de Beers andothers [11].

Arms and incivility

One major change in the Great Lakes regions since the Rwanda genocide, which merits atten-tion is what one author has termed ‘the seemingly unstoppable flow of small arms and lightweapons into the region’ [34, p. 29]. Arms are stockpiled in silos instead of food. Small armshave rapidly become the common currency throughout the Great Lakes region. A gun may bethe means to obtain concessions or seize land. The killing can stop, following negotiations,for a month, a week, or until papers are signed and mining operations resume. The build-upof arms made the genocide in Rwanda possible; it also made it possible for 50,000 people to

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be killed in just one week in neighboring Burundi, when the elected President Ndadaye waskilled by soldiers [34]. Rwanda did not have an arms embargo imposed on it until thegenocide was almost over [34]. By that time this tiny country had imported enough weaponsto kill every Rwandan man, woman and child several times over. Weapons continue to betraded throughout the region, concealed as fish or even as aid:

… some of the cargo companies based in Europe, South Africa and China that havebeen involved in the shipments of military equipment to governments or sub-state actorsin the Great Lakes area have also been contracted to carry humanitarian relief suppliesfor some of the international aid agencies. [34, p. 39]

Ugandans, Rwandans, and Zimbabweans, among others, know that their military, politicaland economic elites have grown fat, often literally, on the pickings of former Zaire. Appro-priation of mineral resources and of timber despoils the natural environment, of course, butthe rare and precious minerals end up for sale in jewelers across the globe, and the preciousminerals that go into coltan reach companies that put it in our mobile phones. The slippagebetween guns and fish is replicated in the slippage from the local-level illegal economy tolegitimate global businesses, the ostensibly respectable companies that refine and sell theproducts produced in Eastern DRC.

The militarization of Eastern DRC has resulted from the priorities of global capitalism,from the intervention of Rwanda and Burundi as predatory neighboring states, and from thecollapse of the former Zairean state. This unhealthy mix has been made more deadly by thegrowth of a lucrative trade in small arms. The consequent attacks and counter-attacks, wherethe logic of insecurity invariably leads to ‘… a greater demand for and use of arms’ mightwell be described, for once, as a vicious cycle [3, p. 109].

Causality and alternative scenarios

As the introduction to this article suggested, patterns of causation between conflict, politicsand the environment are very complex, and can be both mutually reinforcing and divergent,as the case may be. We should not overlook that people can have some control, even in themost difficult conditions. Their daily battles against hunger, disease, and despair meanpeople can be creative even in the most unpromising circumstances. (This idea of humanagency is an important one to remember in a situation as depressing as that of the GreatLakes region today. For treatment of another war zone that stresses the role of agency, see[35].)

In his review of the literature on ‘environmental refugees’, Richard Black notes that thereis often little empirical evidence for views that are nonetheless strongly held, for example, bythe UNHCR, which seems convinced of the refugee-environment connection. Despite theapparent lack of evidence, the popular ‘notion that environmental degradation is increasinglyat the root of conflicts that feed back into refugee movements’ is hard to counter, because sooften repeated [4, p. 9]. Resource depletion, and environmental degradation, on the one hand,and violent conflict on the other, are not necessarily causally linked at all, at least in EasternDRC. They are more likely to be related to a third common cause, namely what Nzongola-Ntalaja has called the ‘Somalization of the Congo’. The creation of a lawless, frontier societyis perhaps the single factor that has done the greatest systematic damage both to peace and tosustainable development in Eastern DRC and the wider Great Lakes region.

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The lamentable state of the region is because of its integration into the global economy, sofurther integration is hardly likely to improve things at all. The neoliberal model which hasbeen implemented in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and the DRC as in most of the rest of theworld, has literally been fatal for many poor people. The policies recommended generallyamount to what Nederveen Pieterse calls the politics of hopelessness, or ‘betting on thestrong, without providing for the losers’ [36, p. 100]. In his masterly study on the Congo,Nzongola-Ntalaja concludes that:

… the economic, social and moral decay of the Congo is … a logical outcome of thecountry’s integration, however imperfect, in the political economy of imperialism, onthe one hand, and its rulers’ insertion in the transnational networks of pillage andcorruption on the other. [14, p. 2]

There is perhaps therefore a need, if anything, to disconnect somewhat from the ties that bindthe Congo to the West. These ties literally strangle many people trying to survive throughtheir wits, with little land and no security. Stronger state structures are among the firstrequirements of any lasting peace in Eastern DRC and Burundi in particular and any mean-ingful investment in the rural sector. In addition, those who have obtained their positions inEastern DRC through militias need to be disarmed and held accountable for the atrocitiesthey have committed against civilians. The arrest of Thomas Lubanga, first militia leaderfrom Eastern DRC to come before the ICC Tribunal, is one small step in this direction,although it remains an isolated step (for details of his arrest and charges against him, see thereport shortly after his arrest and transfer to The Hague [37]).

Dispute resolution, moreover, cannot be based on more funding solutions from majorwestern donors, whose track record does not inspire confidence in the efficacy of theirinterventions in the past. Customs in relation to natural resource use and land rights are nomore traditional, no more authentic in the Great Lakes region than elsewhere. Such customshave been altered time and again, reinvented, legislated over and left unimplemented, gone topot, and been revived or reinvented over successive generations from colonial conquest topost-colonial neglect and now in predatory violence that views land as one of the key spoilsof war. It is therefore quite misleading to assume that ‘… local customary systems are neces-sarily legitimate and appropriate’ [28, p. 387]. Yet such customs and cross-community prac-tices are one of the few institutions that might conceivably be able to combine some form ofconflict-resolution with an awareness of the need for cooperation for sustainable resource useand management among local populations. Two close observers of local realities andconflicts, including environmental and land degradation issues, and conflicts over land use,have made a modest suggestion for how to fund efforts to promote peace and sustainableresource use in the Great Lakes region. They propose: ‘… careful, strategic support at thegrass-roots level. In many cases there are structural links between institutions managing localland issues, and those mandated to resolve disputes’ [28, p. 388].

Since there is no agreement on the most basic questions of cause and effect in terms of therelationship between conflict and resources and the natural environment we can ask why thereis so much concern with conflict and environment today. An interesting thought is that byKibreab, whose research is cited in Black’s review article. Kibreab wonders whether thewhole debate about environmental refugees might not be interpreted as having much more todo with donors’ own domestic preoccupations than with development policies, for example inthe Great Lakes region. He suggests that since labeling refugees as environmental puts themoutside the terms of the Geneva Convention, the whole debate can serve as a distraction,

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which has the consequence of undermining efforts to protect the rights of asylum seekers inthe West [38].

More generally, of course, there is in Great Lakes societies the usual tension between adrive towards racial or ethnic unity and fixity on the one hand, and the reality of increasinglyhybrid, polyglot communities which are emerging round production systems and cross-border movements, on the other. If hybrid identities could find political expression alongsidethe desire for unity in new forms of Great Lakes regionalism, it might then be possible for allpeople in the region to ‘move beyond fixed identities … (and) advocate a more generous andpluralistic vision of the world, where the possibilities for oppressive identity claims areminimized’ [39, p. 207].

In the present circumstances, this seems to be the only way out for Rwandans, Burun-dians and Eastern Congolese from the curse of politicized race-based identity politics[29]. The necessary counterpart to this re-imagining of political identities and state-society relations is global reform of price and trade structures, and debt write-off. Thefull range of basic human rights also needs to be much more central to donors’ prioritiesin future, including the rights of those in vulnerable natural environments. Otherwise thepeople of the Great Lakes region will continue to be sacrificed on the altar of globaldebt and rapine economics, and will continue to be imprisoned by killings and war.

Concluding thoughts

The environment, like the local population of poor people, has the job of simply absorbinginto itself all the ‘externalities’ the international and regional economy imposes on it throughlocal intermediaries. It is not so much environmental degradation that is at stake in theconflicts in the Great Lakes region, as a particularly racialized politics combined with an‘already or potentially-rich natural resources’ situation [4, p. 9]. As we have suggested, thepillage of mineral, natural and forest wealth of the DRC involves chains of exploitation thatrun from the hillsides and forced labor in small mines, from porters carrying goods throughforest clearings and farmers forced into uprooted settlements, through local militarycommand structures, both public and private, all the way to other parts of Southern andCentral Africa, and directly and indirectly into the global headquarters of some of the largestmining and logging corporations in the world, in Toronto, Atlanta or London.

Most devastating for peace and the natural environment, is the loss of human solidarities,social norms and regulatory practices that have operated in some form or other in the Afri-can Great Lakes region for centuries. Violent conflict has made it hard to sustain institutionsof land allocation and protection, indigenous forest management has collapsed, and environ-mental risk-reduction strategies have had to be abandoned by populations in flight and atwar. Community-based institutional structures capable of promoting resource protectionhave been undermined by the constancy of violence as both mode of politics and aid toeconomic extraction. The discussion here has not been able to do justice to the wider anddeeper origins of present-day environmental problems, having focused on the post-1990period, but on the other hand, colonial legacies are apparent in the poisonous ideology ofrace which infects discourses and practices in the entire region, consolidating weak integra-tive civic structures vital for both promoting conflict resolution and environmental protec-tion. Challenging race ideologies is part and parcel of ending the perpetual violence andresource despoliation that have both resulted from and underpinned the latest phase of theglobalization of the African Great Lakes region.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to the editors for their patience and for comments on this article. It is dedicated to mycolleagues at the ISS, Rachel, Donna and Karin for all their help. But it is also dedicated to allwho suffer in a region that above all now needs justice, peace and prosperity.

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