Hutu Rebels: Exile Warriors in the Eastern Congo 9780812296327

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Hutu Rebels

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THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE Tobias Kelly, Series Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

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HUTU REBELS Exile Warriors in the Eastern Congo

Anna Hedlund

U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y LVA N I A P R E S S PHIL ADELPHIA

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Copyright 䉷 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-8122-5144-9

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CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations Preface

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Introduction. Conflict and Violence in the Congo 1 Chapter 1. Rwandan Rebels in the Congo War: Power, Politics, and Exile 40 Chapter 2. Rainbow Brigade: Life in a Rebel Camp 66 Chapter 3. Politics in the Forest: Retelling History in Exile 102 Chapter 4. Captivity and Commitment 135 Chapter 5. The Forest of Volcanoes: Rebel-Civilian Interactions 161 Chapter 6. From Bare Life to Bare Violence 191 Notes 209 References Index

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Acknowledgments 231

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ABBREVIATIONS

ADFL/AFDL

Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (Alliance des Forces De´mocratiques pour la Libe´ration du Congo-Zaı¨re) ALIR Arme´e pour la Libe´ration du Rwanda (Army for the Liberation of Rwanda) CNDP Congre`s National pour la De´fense du Peuple (National Congress for the Defense of the People) DDR Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegrating DRC Democratic Republic of the Congo ex-FAR ex–Forces Arme´es Rwandaises (ex–Rwandan Armed Forces) FAR Forces Arme´es Rwandaises (Rwandan Armed Forces) FARDC Forces Arme´es de la Re´publique De´mocratique du Congo (Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo) FDLR Forces De´mocratiques de Libe´ration de Rwanda (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda) FOCA Force Combatant Abachunguzi (Combatant Forces Abacunguzi) ICTR International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda MONUSCO Mission de l’Organisation des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Re´publique De´mocratique du Congo (United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the DRC) PARECO Patriotes Re´sistants Congolais (Coalition of Congolese Patriotic Resistance) PALIR Peuple en Armes pour Liberer le Rwanda (People in Arms to Liberate Rwanda Rwanda) PARMEHUTU Parti du Mouvement de l’Emancipation Hutu (Hutu Emancipation Movement

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viii Abbreviations

RCD RDF RPA RPF UNHCR

Rassemblement Congolais pour la De´mocratie (Rally for the Congolese Democracy) Rwanda Defense Forces (Forces Rwandaises de De´fense) Rwandan Patriotic Army Rwandan Patriotic Front United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

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PREFACE

My fieldwork in the eastern Congo (DRC) actually began in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, in the spring of 2010. At that time there were few commercial airlines flying into the eastern Congo and the easiest way was to cross the border from Rwanda. I was obliged to travel by minibus from Kigali to the Congolese border. The trip crossed the vast valleys and hills of Rwanda, and it was only after five hours that we finally reached Gisenyi, a small, scenic town on the Rwandan side of Lake Kivu that forms part of the Congo–Rwanda border. Shortly after my arrival I went for a walk to catch a glimpse of the eastern Congo situated on the far side of the lake. The landscape struck me as magically beautiful: green hills and high, mistswathed mountains surrounded the lake and, more distantly, I could see Mount Nyiragongo, a volcano with one of the largest active lava lakes in the world. The thick smoke from the lava lake rose toward the sky. From where I stood I had a partial view of Goma, the capital of the North Kivu province in the eastern Congo. Situated on the northern shore of the lake, and with about one million inhabitants, Goma is the epicenter of international aid as well as the center for the numerous commercial and political agencies active across the Congolese warscape; as such it played an important political and economic role during the wars from 1996 to 2003. The international media most commonly depict the regions of the eastern Congo as a perpetual conflict zone where child soldiers and rebel groups regularly kill and rape in the local communities; Goma itself is usually presented as a center of humanitarian disaster, endlessly beset by war and human suffering. Such narratives are, of course, oversimplified and misleading stereotypes. Like many other border towns in conflict areas around the globe, Goma is a city rife with contradictions. There is a complex mix of legitimate trade, contraband, international aid projects, and widespread corruption; war and humanitarian aid weave into one another.

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Throughout the years of war in the Congo, the city has been the channel for cross-border networks of goods and people: refugees, rebel forces, arms, and trade goods have crossed the border with little or no regulation. As Koen Vlassenroot and Karen Busher (2009) have pointed out, Goma has become a commercial center where anything is possible if you have money in your pocket. Such spots are magnets for entrepreneurs and profiteers as well as for politicians, including former rebels and army commanders. And Goma, like many other towns in the Congo, is a site of illegal trade in various natural resources, connecting the eastern Congo with international buyers and profiteers from all over the world. In Goma, the economic inequalities, post-conflict, are glaringly obvious. While the survivors of the war live in abject poverty, the expatriates, development workers, and local elites enjoy lives of luxury and pleasure. From my vantage point across the lake I was struck by the view of expansive beachfront villas and upmarket hotels, by the sight of people waterskiing while others relaxed with drinks at a beachfront bar. From a distance, the much vaunted “disaster zone” looked like a regular holiday paradise. Once across the border into Goma, I took a motorcycle taxi through the city. The road, which was in poor condition, was still gray with the ash and lava left by a volcanic eruption in 2002. The city was bustling with local food and vegetable markets, bars, opulent nightclubs, a casino, a Western Union, international banks, Lebanese bakeries, Indian supermarkets, and small shops stocked with plastic goods, skin-whitening lotions, and flipflops; others were replete with European food. We passed women carrying vegetables in baskets on their heads, while others sat outside the small shops selling SIM cards, biscuits, cigarettes, and lighters. Vendors hawked fruit and vegetables from makeshift stands. As we continued through the city center, we passed the headquarters of international organizations such as the United Nations, the International Rescue Committee, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, as well as grand hotels and restaurants for diplomats, foreign visitors, and journalists. The luxury villas belonging to international development staff, wealthy Congolese, politicians, and businessmen had private beaches; they had swimming pools, jeeps, security guards, and housemaids. On weekends, the international and local elites go waterskiing on the lake; they take leisurely hikes to volcanoes or recline with drinks by the pool at one of the luxury hotels. In the backyards of the city, Lebanese businessmen sit smoking water pipes, dining on Middle Eastern cuisine,

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and playing billiards. But Goma has its dark underside and the trappings of wealth and the ever-present NGOs, cannot hide the visible effects of the war around the city. The consequences of war in eastern Congo have been devastating. Hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people and refugees from the neighboring countries in the Great Lakes region subsist on the outskirts of Goma, seeking shelter and protection. Trucks carrying platoons of UN soldiers move through a motley cityscape of diverse religious congregations, refugee camps and shelters, orphanages, poorly maintained hospitals, the ruins of colonial administrative buildings, shelters to assist raped women, and demobilization camps for child soldiers. Interspersed among them are the Congolese military troops dispatched to Goma by the government in far-off Kinshasa. The conflict in the Congo is no different from many other wars being fought across the world today. It is a messy intrastate war characterized by convoluted transnational networks. It is not a straightforward engagement between two opposing forces, there are no clearly identifiable enemies, no defined battlefields, nor is there a recognizable war zone. The disputes are complex and there is no one explanation or apparent logic for the terrible brutality that takes place in the countryside of the Kivu provinces. Conflicts flare up between various rebel, militia, or ethnic groups both in the midst of communities and in very isolated and remote territories in the bush and the forest. It is not clear when the war began and to date there is no foreseeable end to the violence. The conflict in the Congo is like a volcano that lies dormant and suddenly erupts. Weeks and sometimes months can pass in relative peace and calm but, suddenly, without warning, a brutal attack will take place. The population continues to live under the constant threat of violence that could break out at any time. The inhuman assaults on civilians in the eastern Congo have been documented in multiple formal reports, in media coverage, and in academic research. A mass of available documentation provides evidence of vicious killings, mass rapes, wholesale massacres, and villages burnt down. And, until today, many people continue to die on a daily basis in the eastern Congo. How are we to understand this kind of conflict? Who is fighting whom and why? We have many, many accounts of how the victims perceive their situation, but the perspective of the perpetrator is less documented. As an anthropologist seeking to understand the war in the Congo, I began to realize that if I was to obtain insights into the lives and motivations of the armed groups themselves I needed to move out of the urban areas and

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engage with them directly on their own ground. Thus, when the opportunity arose I decided to move to the mountainous regions to conduct fieldwork with a rebel group living in an encampment in the Itombwe forest. This book is a result of that fieldwork. It is about how such a rebel group moves about in war. Above all it is about how some of the perpetrators of violence in the Congo perceive their own lives and why, year upon year, they continue to fight in a war without end.

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Map 1. Country map, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin.

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Map 2. Regional map, eastern Congo. Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin.

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INTRODUCTION

Conflict and Violence in the Congo

In 1961 Hannah Arendt, a German philosopher, traveled to Jerusalem to witness the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the main organizers of the Holocaust. Eichmann faced a court in Israel, charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes. During the Nazi period, Eichmann had been in charge of logistics for the mass deportations that sent hundreds of thousands of Jews to their death (cf. Stearns 2012a:6).1 The Eichmann trial received widespread attention. Journalists, academics, and the public all around the world closely followed the trial, waiting for Eichmann to explain the evil acts he had committed. During the proceedings, Eichmann showed little remorse for his crimes. He believed he had done nothing wrong and that he was acting morally by honoring the oath that he had signed with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. Eichmann argued that he was just a paper shuffler; he had only been following orders from his superiors. Eichmann’s refusal to take responsibility led to tense reactions among those witnessing the trial. They argued that Eichmann was a coldhearted man, the personification of evil. Why would he regret his actions? Hannah Arendt, observing the trial, argued that indeed, the crimes committed by Eichmann were evil and the consequences of his deeds were devastating. However, contrary to what other commentators said, Arendt claimed that Eichmann had none of the typical characteristics that made a personality evil or diabolic. She argued instead that Eichmann was a somewhat dull, conventional bureaucrat who lacked the ability to reflect on his own thoughts and actions. He was certainly not a passionate anti-Semite but an ordinary man who signed papers and followed orders without question. According to Arendt, the fact that Eichmann sanctioned his own actions as though they were quite normal was a demonstration of what she

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called the “banality of evil.” Evil, she said, is not radical but intrinsically banal. Many Nazis, just like Eichmann, did not willfully become evil. Rather, Arendt claimed, through a process of dehumanization, which during the Holocaust was made possible by bureaucratization, personal principles can be readily suspended. Obedience becomes the supreme virtue. Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1964), which was first published as a series of articles in the New Yorker in 1963, was controversial at the time. Her ideas were provocative simply because she argued that there are no clear distinctions between “us” and “them” or “good” and “evil.” In her book, Arendt looked beyond personal acts of brutality and tried to understand mass violence by exploring the political structures, and the bureaucratic duties assigned to ordinary individuals, that made the atrocities possible. Since the publication of her articles on the Eichmann trial, Arendt’s banality of evil theory has become widely cited in commentary on human behavior in conditions of war. Her theory has helped to show that when military power is consolidated and distributed among the masses, when a top-down administrative process coordinates duties, and when the victims become anonymous and dehumanized, any “ordinary” person’s ethics and morals might be set aside in favor of compliance—thus he or she may become an accessory to murder in the wider orchestration of war (see, for example, Bauman 2001; Browning 1992; Goldhagen 1997). While the conditions and political formation governing the war in the eastern Congo are very different from those that prevailed in Nazi Germany, the essential question provoked my interest: why do ordinary people commit brutal acts of violence, or, more precisely, how do ordinary people get caught up in extraordinary situations and structures that shape and reproduce an everyday routine of violence?

Fieldwork in the Congo A few days before I began my fieldwork in the volatile eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), I was in Kigali, the capital of neighboring Rwanda. While there I visited one of the places where massacres had taken place during the genocide in 1994. It was a hot day and the sun was beating down. I followed a shady path leading to a church at the Ntarama memorial site. Almost 23 years previously, a group of Hutu

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extremists’ called the Interahamwe (those who attack together) had attacked a church in which hundreds of civilians were hiding when the rebels entered the village. Following orders from high-ranking military commanders and bombarded with radio propaganda, the rebels’ goal was to eliminate the ethnic Tutsi population. Throwing grenades into the overcrowded church, the Interahamwe rebels massacred hundreds of the people seeking shelter there from the relentless mass slaughter. I went inside the remains of the church. It took a few seconds before my eyes adjusted to the dark, and then, by the light from a broken window, I saw the skulls and bones of victims who had been so brutally massacred there two decades ago. Hundreds of skulls had been set aside and arranged on shelves next to the walls. I walked across the church. The victims’ clothes and personal belongings—pots, pans, shoes—had not been removed from the floor but were left as they had been found the day after the attack. There were still bloodstains on the wall, and a damp and moldy smell filled the room. A few months later, I thought about the visit to the memorial site as I sat beside Colonel Frank, one of the senior rebel officers in a forest military camp of predominantly Hutu fighters belonging to the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), that was currently engaged in the Congo conflict. We were sheltering in the colonel’s bamboo hut in a rebel camp called Rainbow Brigade, which was located on a mountain peak deep in the Itombwe Forest of the South Kivu province of the eastern Congo, about five days’ trek from the nearest town. Colonel Frank was a Rwandan of ethnic Hutu origin. Like most of the fighters in the camp, he had arrived in the Congo in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He was also a known ge´nocidaire, a term used by the Rwandan government to identify the people responsible for organizing and perpetrating the genocide. As an Interahamwe rebel and member of the former Hutu army, the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), Colonel Frank and others in this group are held responsible for the mass killings of the genocide, a period of three months during which almost one million people were killed. After the establishment of the new Tutsi regime under its current president Paul Kagame, these Hutu extremists fled across the border from Rwanda and made the DRC their base of operations with the goal of recapturing power in Rwanda. More than 23 years have passed since the Rwandan genocide took place, yet for these Hutu fighters living in the Congo mountains, the Rwandan war is not over.

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By day the landscape surrounding the rebel camp was stunning, overlooking misty mountains, hilltops, and miles of thick forests. But now it was pouring with rain and water leaked in through the roof of leaves, bamboo, and grass. It was getting increasingly dark and chilly, and the only light we had came from our flashlights and from the fireplace in the middle of the hut. Colonel Frank wore a yellow jacket, a pair of blue jeans, and military boots. His personal belongings—a razor blade, a toothbrush, and a mirror—were hanging askew on the wall next to the small bamboo bench where he sat. On the wooden table in front of him were a Bible and a satellite phone. His Kalashnikov was propped against the wall next to him. From his vantage point, he reminded me, he could spot any approaching intruders. The colonel’s face was friendly and his body language vivid. He said that he had returned earlier that afternoon from a military operation and, on his way back, he had prayed in the bamboo church further down the slope where he served as one of the pastors for the military camp. Although he said he was tired, we continued to talk about his life as a rebel leader in the forest. When he spoke about his childhood memories of Rwanda, his face lit up and he talked with longing of his dream to return to his country of origin. Colonel Frank’s personal bodyguard, a young combatant, entered the hut carrying firewood. He said that his name was Ge´rome and that he was 29 years old. He wore a camouflage-colored military uniform, and a gold watch gleamed on his wrist; his boots were covered with mud. Kneeling down, he blew onto the embers of the fire. The flames came to life, crackled, and lit up the hut. Ge´rome went out again returning shortly carrying plastic cups filled with warm tea made of roots and sugar. Working quickly and efficiently, he served us the tea and then disappeared once more into the rain. The camp at which I was based is one of a number established by Hutu fighters who still circulate between the military camps and battlefields in the provinces of the eastern Congo. These rebels move from place to place in the remote and inaccessible mountainous regions together with their civilian dependents, many of them refugees from Rwanda. In the eastern Congo, the Hutu fighters have a long and complex history of violence. For over 20 years they have been a military force in the ongoing conflict, accused of attacking, raping, and killing the local civilian population (see, for example, Human Rights Watch 2009). They have fought alongside the Congolese army, known by the French acronym FARDC (Forces Arme´es de la Re´publique De´mocratique du Congo) but have fought against them

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as well; they have captured young boys and trained them to be soldiers; they have abducted and violated Congolese civilians; and they are accused of plundering entire communities in the North and South Kivu provinces. For many years, the Hutu fighters have been regarded as one of the most harmful groups operating in the eastern Congo (Human Rights Watch 2009; International Crisis Group 2009:1; Rodriguez 2011:176). While Adolf Eichmann was a functionary in the impersonal machinery of industrial warfare, the Hutu fighters have often killed their enemies and innocent civilians in more intimate fashion: using their bare hands, knives, machetes, or rifles to torture and maim them. The fighters have demonstrated a wide variety of violent means to attack, loot, and plunder. Numerous reports dating from the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 until today, and conducted by humanitarian agencies and scholars, have provided unequivocal evidence of the extremely brutal violence carried out partly, but not only, by the FDLR in the eastern Congo (UN OHCHR 2010). As I listened to Colonel Frank it was difficult to imagine him leading his soldiers in a relentless campaign of killing, rape, torture, and plunder in the Congolese villages and communities. On the face of it, Colonel Frank was a pleasant, cordial man. I was intrigued by his way of consciously reflecting on and analyzing his situation and the surrounding conflict. Why did he participate in atrocities? What made him, and the other FDLR fighters, persist in fighting and killing? What motivated them to participate in brutal acts of violence? When I first arrived in the Congo, these were the questions that drove my research, and they continued to do so throughout the whole process. However, the multiple stories and explanations I was given (including propaganda, denials, and deceit) were not always easy to make sense of. My road to understanding turned out to be difficult. Many pieces of history, memory, political, and cultural practices, and individual life strategies had to be included in the analysis to grasp the whole phenomenon of violence. While I could see the evidence of violence in Rwandan memorials, in settlements and villages, and on the bodies and in the experiences of refugees and civilians in Congolese society, as I stepped into the rebel camp it felt almost eerily calm and peaceful and everything seemed ordered, rational, and disciplined. There was little evidence of a fighting spirit. Over time I found the rebel camp to be a place where ordinary people explained how they were caught up in an extraordinary situation of refuge and displacement, where everyone spoke incessantly about returning home to Rwanda.

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Looked at from this vantage point it was hard to equate the lived experience of the camp with the reality of war, violence, and displacement in the forests of the Congo, the world’s largest refugee camp. And how best was one able to comprehend the banality, the everyday routines, and the relentless boredom of a rebel camp? In order to understand how violence is expressed in the most brutal and violent of actions, I would argue that we need to move beyond the stage of compiling catalogues of atrocities and start to explore the “ordinary life” and ideologies of the combatants. For theirs is an ordinary life in an extraordinary situation of war. While so many human rights reports, and so much media coverage, have documented violence in the Congo, and while this violence has persisted over several decades, we still have a poor political and cultural understanding of the perpetrators themselves—we know very little about their lives. We need to know much more about how these individuals themselves speak about the conditions governing their lives and about how they respond to questions about violence. By moving our focus beyond the narrative of atrocity toward an ethnographic approach that gives close attention to the daily life experience and narrative of the fighters and their family members, I believe that we can cast light on some of these perplexing questions. More broadly, I am convinced that further research on war, and specifically on those who operate actively in war, is crucial for understanding the various ways in which people deal with conflict and violence in times of pervasive instability and insecurity. As we all know, the world is an increasingly uncertain place. On an everyday basis, we read and hear stories about terror attacks, war, and violence. Recently we have seen a refugee crisis in Europe following civil wars in Syria. There have been terror attacks in France, Sweden, UK, and Belgium; suicide bombings in Afghanistan; killings of hundreds of civilians in Burundi, South Sudan, Iraq, and Yemen; drone strikes in Pakistan; continuing attacks by Al Qaida terrorists and the so-called Islamic State; and continuums of rebel and military violence in the eastern Congo. While these events have their own historical, political, and cultural complexities, they all typify the violence of our time through new forms of global warfare. Characteristically the strategic goals are often unclear or unfulfilled, or they could have been realized through less violent means; in most cases it is not easy to draw the line between a perpetrator, a victim, or a civilian. In today’s wars, violence is being perpetrated on many levels:

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not only by trained soldiers, militias, rebels, and paramilitaries but also by foreign mercenaries, and civilian populations drawn into conflicts. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that by the end of 2014 over 59.5 million people had been forcibly displaced around the world (an increase of 8.3 million persons since 2013), many of them because of war, and over 10 million people were refugees under the UNHCR mandate (UNHCR 2014). This situation increasingly raises new and difficult questions about economic insecurity, territory, citizenship, identity, belonging, and politics. A war zone is also a gray area. There is little regulation or border control, allowing for a boom in organized smuggling and illegal trade and for easy penetration by international criminal networks seeking lucrative business. At the same time, war zones are attractive spots for journalism and as workplaces for humanitarian organizations, peacekeeping operations, and private security firms. In this regard, the eastern Congo war zone is typical. The war in the DRC is not a local phenomenon; it is an international, even a global, one. While many rebel groups operate mostly in the outlying areas, far from the provincial towns such as Goma and Bukavu, they do not operate in isolation. They are part and parcel of a global capitalist world and global trade, and some armed groups work closely with the illegal traders living in luxury villas in these towns. The crises in the DRC demonstrate dynamics similar to many other conflict settings in the world. Conflicts are related to marginalization, exclusion, political competition, identity, ethnicity, unemployment, power relations, and access to basic resources. Hence, while the ethnographic descriptions in this book will tell us something about how a community of Rwandan rebel fighters mobilizes and responds to conflict and violence, the experience of “bare life” (Agamben 1998) in a community of Hutu fighters is also something larger. The Hutu rebel camp is just one scenario of violence in our time. It is bare violence as part of bare life. And as with so many war zones, the origins of conflict in the Congo and its neighbors can be traced back to the history of the region, rooted as it is in colonialism, early cultural destabilization, and fragmentation followed by decades of political turmoil.

War in the Congo: A Heritage of Exploitation and Violence The DRC is located in the heart of central Africa, with a population of roughly 70 million people. Although it is the second-largest country in

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Africa, the conflicts in the DRC are mainly confined to a relatively small area in the eastern provinces, also known as the Great Lakes region, that straddle the borders of Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. The epicenter of war lies in the two provinces of the Kivu territory—North Kivu and South Kivu—and these, along with the region of North Katanga and the district of Ituri, have been wracked by war for over two decades. The conflicts in the eastern Congo have generated one of the world’s most severe humanitarian crises since the Second World War (Beneduce et al. 2006). While the exact number of deaths cannot be established, Prunier (2009) estimates that over four million people have lost their lives through the war and its consequences. All levels of society have been badly affected. There has been devastating economic and social destruction, and in the absence of investment to rebuild the collapsed infrastructure, people in most parts of the region are without access to clean water, electricity, and basic healthcare. The wars have forced millions of people to evacuate their homes and the UNHCR estimates that over 2.7 million people were internally displaced in 2015 and that more than 460,000 Congolese refugees live in neighboring countries. One of the world’s largest refugee camps is situated in the eastern Congo; here people who were forced to leave the local communities and villages subsist together with a large number of refugees from neighboring Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi. The Congo has a long history of political instability, state fragmentation, and violence.2 Rich in natural resources, the DRC has been a target for exploitation since the first years of European global exploration and expansion (see, for example, Hochschild 1999; Wolf 1982:225–230). In the 1880s, King Leopold II of Belgium joined the Scramble for Africa and created the borders of what he named the Congo Free State, declaring the land to be his own property and establishing it as a fiefdom; he is notorious, even by the standards of nineteenth-century imperialism, for his particularly ruthless and inhumane treatment of the population. King Leopold and his colonial administrators implemented a system of rule based on torture, slavery, and mutilation. It is widely documented that, for example, a rebellious “native” could have his or her hands or ears cut off; women were used as sex slaves, and numerous forms of torture were deployed to instill terror in the local population (Anstey 1966:2–22). King Leopold’s regime was responsible for the death of about 10 million people; it also destroyed the old political, social, and cultural structures in the region (see, for example, Hochschild 1999). After a sustained intervention by the world’s first

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humanitarian campaign, the Congo Reform Association (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002:5), Leopold was forced to relinquish control of the country to Belgian administration in 1908; however, the colony, renamed the Belgian Congo, continued to suffer under tyrannical political control and from oppression and forced labor as a means to secure its valuable rubber, ivory, gold, timber and diamonds for Belgium in the lucrative European market (Anstey 1966). In 1960, the Congo finally achieved its independence from Belgium. But the near-century of colonial disruption had taken its toll; the resulting fragmentation together with continuing outside interference ensured that the years following independence were marked by political and civil unrest (see Young 1965 for a detailed description). After heading up a coup to depose and execute the first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, in 1961, Mobutu Sese Seko took power as president in 1965. Mobutu endeared himself to the West, particularly to the United States, becoming a US anti-communist ally during the Cold War (Gondola 2002:20). Renaming it Zaire, Mobutu established the country as a centralized bureaucratic state, governed by a one-party system and suffering under continued economic repression and high-level corruption (see, for example, MacGaffey 1987). Under Mobutu’s rule the country became embroiled in what later became known as the first and second Congo wars, also referred to as Africa’s World War (Prunier 2009). Although the two Congo wars (1996–1997 and 1998–2003) have formally been concluded, the eastern Congo region has remained a battle zone. More than 50 separate armed groups composed of government forces and various rebel factions are currently active in the contested area. Some of these armed groups are loosely linked to the current government under Joseph Kabila (the political landscape may change following the elections in 2018), while others are linked to political opposition groups, to the neighboring foreign powers of Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi, or to local territorial armed groups and warlords. In this setting, armed groups compete for territorial sovereignty over populations of villages and even small towns. In addition to the ethnic, local, and foreign armed groups, as well as the Congolese army, the territory is peppered with other “enclaves,” or “clusters,” of commercial agencies that have implanted themselves throughout the region and that, in an abstract sense, form part of the war zone (Beneduce et al. 2006:33). These enclaves are platforms for both local and global actors who, with varying political goals and seeking new and lucrative markets and resources, act within an

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environment of uncertainty, ruthless competition, conflict, and violence and enter into complex and unstable alliances with the armed groups. Alongside these international traders and commercial actors—such as Lebanese businessmen, Chinese entrepreneurs, foreign diamond smugglers, and others— there is a plethora of additional players: the staff of local and international aid and humanitarian organizations, Western and African journalists, and multinational UN peacekeeping forces from around the world. Armed groups, therefore, do not act in isolation but rather within a complex field of Congolese and external actors’ agencies representing a multitude of different interests. As a territory located in the midst of the Great Lakes region, the eastern Congo further experiences the impact of violence originating in wars in neighboring Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi, where refugees, goods, weapons, soldiers, and illegal trade have spilled over the borders for centuries. Officially, the eastern Congo is at peace.3 But despite attempts to establish accords between warring groups in eastern Congo, these have not succeeded in resolving the conflicts; political relations within the Congo and with neighboring countries remain tense. Rather than peace, a broad and general public insecurity of “neither-peace-nor-war” (Richards 2005; Sluka 2009) has remapped the region. Armed attacks continue to erupt in a climate now characterized by wide disorder, and physical violence is widespread, including sexual violence against women, girls, and boys (Amnesty International 1996, 2003, 2008; Dolan 2010). Some of the conflicts in the eastern Congo can be explained as a struggle for control over minerals and natural resources. Coltan, in particular, an important component in modern digital electronic devices like mobile phones and computers, is currently the foremost mineral of interest on the global market (Mantz 2008). Other highly sought-after natural resources of the eastern Congo include timber, gold, uranium, diamonds, and copper. Although the struggle for access to these resources is one important factor in the conflicts between the different interest groups based near the resource-rich areas, the conflict in the region cannot be traced to one unique explanation. Conflict in the eastern Congo is also related to struggles over political inclusion, ethnic identity, land, territory, and citizenship. And one of the most evident factors driving the small-scale conflicts is the widespread corruption in the economy and the consequent hardship that communities face on an everyday basis. In order to survive, many people are dependent on informal economic systems and sometimes illegal activities.

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Although many local and foreign actors benefit greatly from the “second economy” (MacGaffey 1987) of conflict and trade (see also, for example, Laudati 2013 for a longer discussion on war economy), decades of war, perpetuated by both local and global actors, have caused a severe and ongoing economic and social crisis for the majority of the local population. The UN Human Development Index in 2018 reports that the income per capita in the Congo remains the lowest in the world (UNDP 2018). Despite its wealth of natural resources, the Congo is one of the poorest countries in the world, and the majority of the population lives below the poverty line on less than one dollar a day (UNDP 2018). The war and its ensuing chaos have resulted in a lack of schools and health care—for most people, meeting even the most basic needs is difficult. Because of the war, farming activities are curtailed, leading to reduced production in agriculture and poor economic growth. The ravages of corruption and the rise of food prices are creating pressure on already scarce food resources, especially in areas where refugees seek shelter and in small towns. The socioeconomic situation is strained, the government weak, and the prevailing physical insecurity and massive displacement of populations has created an even more difficult situation for the majority of the people. As a result, many small-scale communities have established their own community grassroots militias, leading to the further militarization of a society in which many villagers are armed to defend their villages from surrounding groups.

A “Dirty” War for Our Times The conflict in the eastern DRC has much in common with other contemporary wars dating from the end of the Cold War. Since then, and from the start of the twenty-first century in particular, the world has witnessed a series of genocides and internecine wars: in Cambodia in 1975, in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995, in Rwanda in 1994, and more recently, in Syria, to name a few. These wars are characteristically messy and chaotic and are generally played out between people who know each other relatively well. The mass killings in these wars have taken place inside communities and between neighbors and families, and the distinction between victims and perpetrators is blurred. The violence takes place in the absence of an identifiable leadership; there is no clear consensus on who is responsible for the atrocities. Furthermore, these conflicts and violence take place in clear sight

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of the world. In Rwanda and Syria, for example, the international community has been able to observe the killings but, because of diplomatic or political relations or issues of UN mandates, can (or will) do little to intervene to protect the victims from ongoing atrocities. One consequence of these wars is the worldwide dramatic increase in the number of civilian casualties and refugees. The movement of refugees itself often creates new problems in the form of local hostility and struggles over identity, land, security, and access to resources in the host country. New types of conflicts rely not just on tactics and territorial gains but also on intimate physical violence, which uses small arms and physical confrontation (see for example Kaldor 1999). This can be partly explained as a feature of a wider societal breakdown and disorder (see, for example, Linke & Smith 2009). While many armed groups need the support of civilian communities and local populations to survive, the civilian population is also the main target of war in the twenty-first century. Direct personal violence becomes a military strategy with the objective of instilling fear among the people in the surrounding civilian landscape (Mu¨nkler 2005:81– 82). Civilians become primary targets. Intimidation and the spread of fear among local populations through random terror attacks, torture, rape, or sexual violence may be more effective than actual killing (Skjelsbaek 2001:69; Linke & Smith 2009). Scholars have adopted the concept of “dirty wars,” or “warscapes” (Nordstrom 1997) to identify the common traits of wars in the twenty-first century. Stephen C. Lubkemann also reminds us that in contexts where violence has spanned several generations, war and violence have come to modify the very fabric of social relations as a “social condition,” violence is always embedded in people’s lives, an integral part of their everyday existence, and it becomes just one project among other projects in life (Lubkemann 2008:13; Richards 2005:5). In this type of setting, violence has become the normal state of affairs. While typical of other wars of our time, the war in the DRC, however, has particular features of its own. There are not two interest groups at war with each other, there are multiple objectives at stake, and the assumptions that people have about the war differ between the state and the different political parties and fractions; between communities, ethnic groups, rebel groups, militias, movements; and between the various international players. The issues driving the conflicts in the Congo are “gray” rather than clearcut; it is not a war between forces that are identifiably bad or identifiably

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Conflict and Violence in the Congo 13

good. It is chaotic, involving multiple actors—local, regional, and international. Independent groups are fighting each other with shifting and conflicting alliances and tend to have different assumptions, methods, motives, and aims for their actions. They ascribe to different ideological, political, economic, and social interests. They interpret the situation differently from each other and apply different military strategies. When fighting occurs, it often takes place in very remote and inaccessible landscapes beyond a clearly defined battlefield, often hidden from the kind of media attention that would highlight atrocities, as, for example, in the terror attacks in Paris or Istanbul or the killing of civilians in Aleppo. The war in the Congo has to be understood from a long, historical and structural perspective involving political crises, refugee crises, spillover violence from neighboring countries, and the fragmentation of society. Equally, it cannot be understood in isolation from surrounding global, political, and economic processes in a world where global markets, including the market for war, penetrate the deepest forests of the country. However, this macroperspective comprises a multitude of individual actors, of small groups as well as large, who together form the tapestry of interests, concerns, and ideologies that create the wide experience of the Congolese war. Convinced that the subjective experience of the combatants is as relevant as that of the victim groupings, I made the decision to undertake a detailed empirical study of a particular local setting of war and violence: a rebel camp of Rwandan Hutu exiles living and fighting in the eastern Congo.

Approaching Violence I often have to answer the question of why I, a young white European woman, decided to conduct research among perpetrators of violence in a conflict area like the Congo, and how I became interested in questions of war and violence. Prior to my fieldwork in the eastern Congo, I worked as a research assistant for a UN project in the Pacific. At the time, I was part of a research team investigating warfare rape in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, and the Solomon Islands. Over several months, I collected hundreds of stories from rape victims. In the study, we provided detailed accounts of how victims perceived their own situation and dealt with their trauma (Gustafsson et al.

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2009). While this kind of documentation is very necessary, the study lacked the perspective of the perpetrators. We could not grasp the total phenomenon of violence unless we understood the motivations, strategies, and decisions—the voices—of those who carried out the violence. Throughout my period of work on the study, I often thought about the eastern Congo war zone as a site of comparison. Even though the setting in Africa is very different from that of the highlands of Papua New Guinea, the two areas are similar in the sense that conflicts have become rampant in society and violence has become commonplace in people’s everyday lives. When I began my research in social anthropology in 2009, I chose to conduct fieldwork in the eastern Congo with the explicit goal of enhancing our understanding of how perpetrators perceive their own situations and motives in conditions of war. I undertook to investigate the various mechanisms behind war and violence and to attempt to comprehend how and why ordinary civilians may become perpetrators. When I began my research, I initially traveled to the Congo to conduct research on warfare rape from the perspective of the perpetrators. After only a few weeks in the field, I could see that the approach was too narrow because it would tend to bypass the wider complexity of violence. In line with what Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern (2008, 2009, 2010) have argued, I found that a single-minded focus on rape could easily lead me to overlook the many other types of violence that occur simultaneously. I did not travel to the Congo with the intention of carrying out fieldwork inside the rebel military camps. I thought that such an undertaking would be too dangerous, even naı¨ve. However, when the opportunity arose, I decided to do so. For the past 10 years I have been interested in the DRC and I have made several fieldwork trips to the country. Between 2010 and 2012, I carried out 15 months of fieldwork in the eastern Congo, of which several months were spent inside an isolated Hutu rebel camp and surrounding territories in the South Kivu province. A couple of years later, in 2016, I returned to the eastern Congo for a further few months to carry out additional research. Now, after the fieldwork, I realize that some pieces are still missing to fully comprehend the diversity of human actions in situations of war. The social, political, and military reality in the DRC is still fragmented and the conflicts are still ongoing. Thus, for those I interviewed, there has been no break to allow for reflection and deeper thought; daily life is still predicated on continual conflict and struggle in the midst of an unpredictable region. Conducting fieldwork in such an environment was often confusing and

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full of contradictions, not only because of the constantly changing political situation and shifting alliances, but also because the history of the war was still in the making. The people I interviewed, like the rest of us, must function in a world that is insecure and uncertain. But for them, unlike most of us, insecurity and uncertainty could have fatal consequences. The wrong decision or assessment of their situation could lead to death and we need to understand their predicament. Violence is one way to respond to uncertainty and insecurity. I have therefore tried to document the realities experienced by a group of active fighters during the time that I conducted the research. I have tried my best to contextualize their narratives into a written text, even though I am aware that conflicts, military alliances, and personal narratives can quickly change and vary over time and space. My goal is to contribute to a deeper understanding of how fighters who are fighting a prolonged, asymmetrical war balance their life situations, and why, for them, violence has become both a resource and an integral part of everyday survival. There is, of course, no military or moral justification for the atrocities that my informants committed against the civilian population in Rwanda or in the eastern Congo. By any criteria, those who participated in these brutal actions are guilty of war crimes, even although those I interviewed firmly believed that they had been driven to violence by the structural and political circumstances of the war that were disempowering and unfair to them and their families. Extreme violence can never be justified, because the structural circumstances are disempowering for the actors. The situation of inhumanity in the Congo is a state of emergency; violence is extreme and pervasive and the civilian population lives under the most trying conditions. Yet this is even more reason to approach the issues and questions of violence and perpetrators as objectively as possible. It is vitally important to highlight the atrocities that the rebels have undoubtedly committed so that we can determine human rights violations and war crimes and to bring war criminals to justice. However, as social scientists, our task is to analyze the narratives and acts of violence as social practice and not simply to view them through the lens of criminal accountability or as legal frameworks. During my first months in the field, I confess that I was not always at ease with the situation. I was often insecure and afraid of all the things that could go wrong in the context of war. But the more time I spent in the region and in the rebel camps, the more confidence I gained in myself and the more trust I obtained from the fighters. Throughout the period of the

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fieldwork, I had a keen interest in the fighters’ lives, and I was truly interested in understanding their life conditions and their motivations from an anthropological perspective. As many anthropologists do, I also engaged with my informants’ lives and situations at a personal level. But it is also true that there were times when I found it difficult to trust the rebels and when I shied away from establishing close relationships. I always made it clear to my informants that under no circumstances would I find violence or brutality legitimate or acceptable. In turn, they never judged my approach. However, they did often try to convince me differently, and they tried to impose their political project and propaganda onto my research and to persuade me to choose sides. For my part I tried to listen seriously to their stories and to observe their daily life with care. My goal in treating the combatants as legitimate social actors has been to enhance our understanding of human conditions of violence in zones of social disorder.

The Need for an Ethnographic Perspective While anthropologists have a long history of researching the powerless, including the victims of personal and structural violence, there has been comparably less focus on researching the perpetrators of violence. Although there exist excellent ethnographies on violent groups and conflict and the lived experiences of violence by scholars such as Jeffery Sluka, Carolyn Nordstrom, Cynthia Keppley Mahmood, and Joseba Zuliaka, there are still few ethnographic studies based on direct encounters with active fighters. We do not lack information on the lived realities of conflict and violence, and recent studies by anthropologists such as, for example, Alcinda Honwana, Danny Hoffman, Mats Utas, and Henrik Vigh have provided knowledge of former soldiers, ex-combatants, and child soldiers, as well as insightful analysis of forced recruitment processes, socialization in armed groups, individual experiences of violence, motives for fighting, coping mechanisms, and reintegration processes. However, the discipline still lacks ethnographic studies on the actors directly implicated in making war. Although the number of studies on ex-combatants and violence is growing, it is the case, at least in the eastern Congo, that research on violence is often carried out by humanitarian agencies whose aim is bring about peace or to assist victims (cf. Utas 2003:49). Their methodological approach is often quantitative and consequently the existing literature lacks

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ethnographic perspective, usually reducing the question of violence to one of sheer numbers: the tally of people killed, raped, or wounded. One of the major problems of conducting research into the perpetrators of violence is, of course, the simple logistical difficulty of participant observation and of personal security in violent environments, as well as the reluctance of military groups to allow the presence of nonpartisan observers in their midst. As a result we have very few reliable ethnographic accounts of violence from active fighters living in rebel camps. As Paul Richards (2005) contends, experiences of violence are often mediated through the post facto commentary of victims or former combatants, and as a result we lack an adequate understanding of how people make war on a daily basis. This book tries to fill at least some of the gaps in our understanding of those who make war and of how those directly involved in war attempt to balance their lives in the midst of enduring conflicts. Its overall goal is to cast light on how a group of rebel fighters, caught up in the war together with their civilian dependents, operate and perceive their living conditions in a war zone. It also deals with the ordinary disciplinary routines and coping mechanisms of everyday life inside a rebel community and with how exile and identity construction, historical narrative, and religious practice go hand in hand with mundane routines of violence. The book explores how fighters, their military leaders, and their civilian dependents experience their life situations in the heart of one of the world’s most long-standing war zones. I also look at how a conflict zone and a rebel camp can become a “prison” to some combatants while at the same time opening fields of strategic benefit to others, and, more broadly, how brutal violence might be understood within a complex of multiple historical and cultural events and strategies emanating from the most insecure of circumstances. To understand how violence operates in the eastern Congo war, I made the decision to focus on one political-military rebel group that at the time was active in the war, the FDLR. These rebels are majority ethnic Hutus, which are originally from Rwanda. The group’s leadership has a history of genocide in Rwanda but has also been active in the Congolese conflict for more than 20 years, fighting both with and against Congolese forces and committing violent acts against local communities of various ethnic origins. It is important to point out here that this account does not purport to be reflective of the FDLR as a whole, given the long time the group has been active in the eastern Congo conflict and the diverse backgrounds and political and military positions among its members. My fieldwork was carried

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out among a relative small community of fighters and their family members, and the individual accounts and narratives that I documented do not necessarily represent the ideology of the group as a whole. For example, while those fighters I had contact with generally said that their goal was to recapture political power in capital Kigali in Rwanda, it is possible that not all members of the group necessarily share this position. The FDLR holds a specific role and place in the Congo conflict, and on many levels it is different from the Congolese armed groups. While many Congolese groups are grassroots community militias, the FDLR sees itself as an international organization, with some members still based outside of the Congo. As a group that fled the new regime in Rwanda and made the Congo its new base for operations, its history also makes it different, a “refugee rebel group” that moves from place to place together with a large population of refugees who are both civilians and former soldiers. The Hutu rebels are thus both a community and a military force. A large number of the group’s young members have grown up in the forest, disconnected from any kind of “normal” community, and the rebel camps in the forest are their home. While the leadership of FDLR may have changed, and its military strength weakened over the years, the group has persisted as a coherent military unit for nearly two decades. In contrast, many other local Congolese and foreign armed groups have been unstable with respect to leadership, ideology, and political intention. The FDLR has a clear political agenda, it controls several territories in the Congo interior, and its members perceive themselves as a full-time military organization rather than as “villagers with guns.” The group is currently in conflict with the government in Rwanda, and it fights both Congolese government troops and other armed groups, changing alliances constantly. In some areas in the Kivu territories, the fighters live together with Congolese civilians; in others, they occasionally carry out raids on civilians for supplies and to recruit new members. The FDLR is also active in smuggling as well as in other informal and illegal economic activities, as will be discussed in Chapter 1. While many Congolese groups could, in theory, disarm, repatriate, and return to a home community, the Hutu fighters I interviewed perceive themselves as an exiled group caught up in a political limbo between two governments. Many group members believe that they cannot return to Rwanda because they face charges for war crimes they have committed; at the same time, they are without refugee status or Congolese citizenship.

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Thus, they are more or less pushed to the margins. Here they try to hide but also, under certain circumstances, will carry out attacks; for example, to maintain control over surrounding villages and communities, to repel or engage with enemy forces in the region, or simply to obtain supplies. Against this background, the situation of the FDLR fighters resonates with many questions in ways that can help us to understand wartime violence: How is violence reproduced, remembered, dealt with, embodied, and strategically exercised? And how is it politically motivated and financed?

Trajectories of Violence It is essential to bear in mind that violence exists in many forms. As Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois (2005:1) have written, violence is “productive, destructive and reproductive.” To understand wartime violence in the eastern Congo, we must move away from the concept of violence a priori and look beyond the experience of physical violence. Research on violence now defines the term more broadly: it exists in physical and psychological forms; it can be embedded in state, political, and social structures; and it can be deeply rooted in the culture of society. To make sense of conflict-related violence, I align myself with scholars applying a structural approach to violence, that is, violence that arises from institutionalized forms of systematic inequality that are perpetrated by unequal power relations, political structures, and economic deprivation (Galtung 1969). From this perspective, structural violence and physical violence are interdependent. James Scott, for example, has shown how peasants in a Malaysian village revolted against a larger structure of capitalism imposed on their local economy as a response to injustice (Scott 1976; the example is cited in Lo¨fving 2005:78). Conflict and conflict-related violence in the Congo do not just occur out of spontaneous rage: acts of violence are the outcome of a long process. Violence in the Congo today is the product of prolonged historical and political crises. Violence occurs in the shadow of a dysfunctional state and in the absence of law and order and is related to social exclusion of certain groups, political competition, marginalization, and unequal access to resources and supplies. The conflicts are the result of a long process of fragmentation of society, militarization of villages and communities, and an overall general political and economic insecurity and uncertainty. In this

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setting of “bad surroundings” (Finnstro¨m 2008)—that is, a lack of peace and stability—structural violence can be seen to be rooted in the environment in the form of widespread corruption, illegal roadblocks, and illegal taxation of villages by rebel warlords or militias. Violence fills a vacuum when there are no schools, health care, or social institutions and where there is economic deprivation. On the other hand, many more people in the DRC die of disease than of bullets. In the context of political and structural violence, we can adopt the term “everyday violence.” As Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois (2005:21) emphasize, “Everyday violence . . . encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formation.” Violence in the DRC exists on many levels. It is visible in dead and wounded bodies and in the experiences of refugees and civilians, and it is visible in symbolic form: in military barracks, in uniformed soldiers patrolling the streets, and in the widespread use of weapons. Structural and symbolic violence interact with more brutal, physical violence in special ways; violence lurks below the surface and is brought into the open in different contexts and for various reasons, including military maneuvers, raiding, and looting. This is not to say that individuals do not have the capacity to act independently. Throughout this book, I will deploy Honwana’s definition of “tactical agency” to emphasize “a specific type of agency, that is devised to cope with the concrete, immediate conditions of their lives in order to maximize the circumstances created by their military and violent environment” (Honwana, in Honwana & De Boeck 2005:49).4 In the case of the FDLR, some are individuals who act from a position of weakness while others act from a position of power and dominance. Furthermore, we could talk about a trajectory of violence in which there are various peak periods of physical violence, such as the genocide in 1994, which was followed by periods of revenge and reciprocal violence, and then by periods of more peaceful structural violence, only to erupt again in the form of further physical attacks on civilians by military units.

Legitimating Violence: Competing Narratives Violence can be rationalized and justified through political ideology, historical memory, or religion or as a means of self-defense, to give only a few examples. In conflict areas, where there has been mass reciprocal violence

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for centuries and where there are multiple conflicting and competing narratives, violence is often a subjective experience that will be interpreted differently depending on whose version we hear. A child soldier will tell one story, an adult soldier will tell another, a warlord will tell the story differently, and all narratives and experiences will vary according to age, gender, social status, ethnicity, and so on (Nordstrom 1997). Some actors will find violence legitimate under certain circumstances—for example, for revenge or as protection—whereas others will find it illegitimate. David Riches’ (1986:8) definition of violence as “an act of physical hurt deemed legitimate by the performer and illegitimate by (some) witnesses” is useful to apply in this study, because, as the ethnographic chapters will show, from the perspective of the fighters in the Congo forests, the war against Rwanda is often held to be perfectly legitimate. Riches has developed a model he calls the “triangle of violence,” in which he distinguishes between the viewpoints of the performer, the victim, and the witness. He points out that the definition of an act of violence might also vary between viewpoints and can be contested. On the one hand, the performer, he contends, might find violence justified and right; the victim, on the other hand, will find violence unjust, and the observer or witness might have different viewpoints depending on his or her relation with either the performer or the victim (Riches 1986). My witnessing as an anthropologist, for example, is quite different from that of someone investigating war crimes. Riches’ model allows us to understand that violence is interpreted differently depending on whose narrative we have in mind. However, following Andrew Strathern and Pamela Stewart (2002), what it does not explain is that the relations between victims and perpetrators, and assumptions about who is which, are discursive and that the victim-perpetrator designation can also change over time. They develop Riches’ model further, expanding from subjective perspectives to plural perspectives and broadening the experience of violence from subjective understandings to collective actions. They argue that the categories are always more complex, and the role of a witness, a performer, or a victim might change over time: those who were victims can turn into performers and vice versa (2002:4) Further, they note that all performing sides in a conflict may regard themselves as victims of, for example, injustice or marginalization (ibid.). Such an approach allows us to understand that in the case of the FDLR, violence does not occur in a vacuum. It is a product of a long and complicated history and of political and social construction. In long-standing conflicts, the various sides in the conflict

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have their own versions and narratives of history and their own personal viewpoints of what is going on. Riches’ definition of violence as a subjective matter, legitimate from the viewpoint of those who carry out violence, leads us beyond a simplistic understanding of wars and violence in preconceived terms of “victims” and “perpetrators.”

Victims and Perpetrators—Beyond the Terminology At the start of my analysis of violence in the Congo, I habitually used the concept “perpetrator” to refer to the use of physical violence by the Hutu rebels. However, I soon found that such a term was unproductive. Contemporary wars are often described as “an ensemble” of victims and perpetrators in which the victims are those who suffer violence, perpetrators are those who carry out violence, and civilians are logically understood to be those who stand apart from battle (Shaw 2003:147–148). In the eastern Congo, using clear-cut designations such as “victims” and “perpetrators” is inadequate to describe a multi-actor conflict where there are more than just two counterparts. Chris Coulter (2009), for example, in her book, which is set in Sierra Leone, discusses how analyzing wars as if they were divisible into definitive categories tends to overlook other types of violence. For example, her female informants were the victims of violent incidents, such as rape and abduction, but such victimization should not obscure other roles that women had during war, such as their domestic work in rebel camps. By becoming a fighter, for example, Coulter argues, one also escapes falling victim to the violence of others (Coulter 2009:148, 2008; see also Utas 2005a and 2005b for a similar argument). In a critique of the global structures of human rights and the politics of “naming” social roles in war, Lubkemann points out in his study on the enduring war in Mozambique (2008), that although civilians, victims, and combatants perform a number of social roles, as, for example, neighbors, elders, or workers, the sole task for researchers and outside observers has become to write about how the inhabitants of a war zone are coping with violence, as if that was the only social role people have. He writes that those in war zones are often reduced to single categories; for example, “combatants” are those who perpetuate violence, “victims” suffer violence, and “refugees” flee violence. (Lubkemann 2008:12). Such categorization is particularly true of how the FDLR is

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portrayed in public debate and in the discourse of human rights as ge´nocidaires—as perpetrators and evildoers. Following Ivana Macˇek, I take the approach that people caught up in war can be both victims and perpetrators at the same time and that, as similarly pointed out by Strathern and Stewart (2002), roles are likely to change over time (Macˇek 2009:71). The conflict in the eastern Congo is confused and ambiguous, relations between “us” and “them” are blurred, and the civilian population is likely to be drawn into the politics of war or to be politically or violently exploited. Hence, while it may be unavoidable in a court of law, to use the label “perpetrator” is analytically unproductive if we seek to gain a more coherent anthropological understanding of war and violence. Furthermore, the term “perpetrator” was never used by those I spoke with themselves, which presented me with a major dilemma of representation. In order to understand how my informants perceived the world subjectively, I had to forget and ban (at least for a moment) the moral and legal framework. By adopting a local understanding of violence, I found that the fighters’ interpretation of the conflict was radically different from that of the international community or the Rwandan government, who regard them purely and simply as perpetrators. Neil Whitehead (2004, 2007) gives a telling example when he argues that violence must be explored from the local and cultural context in which it is carried out. For example, he writes, while a suicide bomber is often considered a religious fanatic and evildoer in the Western context, in another context the same suicide bomber who blows himself or herself up, often killing innocent victims, will find his or her position regarded as an act of sacrifice, and he or she will be acclaimed as a hero or a martyr (2007:48). Analogously, many Hutu fighters I spoke with rejected any claims of being perpetrators; they considered themselves the victims of a long history of violence in Rwanda and of being “pushed into exile” in the aftermath of genocide, forced to spend a lifetime in the forest. Hence their own subjective experience is that they suffer violence and are victims of a long history of marginalization by the Tutsis in Rwanda. To achieve the cultural and local understanding of the violence of the rebels, by moving outside of the framework of human rights and the discourse of peace enforcers on violence in the Congo, I would argue that exploring the rebels’ vision of themselves as exiles (alternatively as rebels, liberators, freedom fighters, or “saviors”) can provide a window for understanding other processes and experiences. These include their sense of exclusion and being

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pushed from their own country and how that led to feelings of marginalization, as well as to ways of understanding their identity and ethnicity as “Hutu rebels” who fight for “justice” rather than as “perpetrators” doing bad. Instead of defining the fighters as simply perpetrators, I would choose to analyze the FDLR as an exile military community, or as a “moving military base.” In this context, some of the members are identifiably war criminals—and hence are indeed perpetrators—but others are simply survivors in the forest. Women and children in this context are truly liminal. Using the rebels’ definition of themselves as “exiles” opens up an understanding of the diversity within the rebel group. While this study explores one rebel group and how they lead their lives through war, I want to emphasize that my informants were not simply a fighting force dedicated to the achievement of clear military goals. Rather, the rebel camp in which I carried out the fieldwork was a much more complex social space. The camp was formally a barracks for soldiers who had fought in the Rwandan war in 1994 and then in the Congo wars during the 1990s and who continued to fight. However, the camp was also a community of uprooted and displaced families, people who left their homes as refugees in the 1990s, women who married soldiers, teenagers who grew up in an armed rebel camp, and newborn babies. In the forests of the South Kivu province, this group formed an isolated enclave on a mountaintop. This disparate mix of kin groups and military organization had subsisted together in the Congolese mountains for over 20 years. While the hardliners of the military movement were (in their own words) connected to the genocide in Rwanda, the majority of the fighters were either very young or not even born when the genocide was carried out. They were essentially diasporic Hutus living in the Congo and fighting for justice in another country. Rejecting simplistic designations of perpetrators as evil by nature, I have sought to understand the lives of those I interviewed through their own self-definition as exiles trapped in political limbo. To examine violence through a lens of dislocation, displacement, and exclusion can help us to appreciate how the construction of identity and historical memory produce and reproduce shared understandings of meanings, including violence, in a liminal space. Inspired by Liisa Malkki (1992, 1995), Pamela Ballinger (2002), Paul Connerton (1989) and other scholars on identity, displacement, and collective memory, I explored how the rebel fighters and their families tried to erase their history completely and to build a new, shared,

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memory and commonly assimilated narrative of “what actually happened” during the genocide. By burrowing into such narratives more deeply, it became possible for me to develop a more nuanced perspective of how violence is constructed and lived inside the rebel camp. Although the Hutu fighters were one of the strongest and most powerful rebel groups currently operating in the eastern Congo during the time I carried out fieldwork, the majority of the soldiers believe that they cannot leave the region and that they are being hunted down as outlaws. Violence in this case is not only an expression of power or dominance, it is also a defensive response to a political reality.

Exile in the State of Exception This analysis has taken particular inspiration from the work of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, specifically from his ideas of “the state of exception” and “bare life.’ In his book, Homo Sacer (1998), Agamben recalls a metaphorical figure of Roman law from the ancient Roman Empire. This figure, homo sacer, is used as a metaphor to describe the relationship between power, law, and life. During the Roman Empire, homo sacer was a symbol or a figure of a man who had committed a crime. Anyone who had committed a crime lost legal rights as a citizen and was banned from society and as such, excluded from the law. Homo sacer could not be sacrificed in any kind of religious ceremony or ritual—he or she could be killed but not sacrificed (Agamben 1998:88; Sarat et al. 2007:158). Agamben uses the concepts zoe (life) and bios (political life) to describe the separation between animal life and political life. Agamben uses this figure to explore the sovereign power (belonging, in Roman times, to any ruler) of the Bush administration after the 9/11 terrorist attacks (2005:86). Agamben built a theory of the state of exception—a state of emergency in which the law can be suspended under legal and juridical orders. A state of exception in Agamben’s terms is a modern institution, a “paradigmatic form of governance” (Humphreys 2006:678). In this space, the law can be suspended for the preservation of the juridical order. Following Agamben, a state of exception is an extension of power, or “secrets of power” (Agamben 2005:86) at the cost of human and civil rights. He writes that “what is new about President Bush’s order is that it radically erases any legal status of the individual thus producing a legally un-namable and unclassifiable being”

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(Agamben 2005:3). For example, the USA could intervene in Afghanistan and capture any civilian “terrorist,” bring him to Guantanamo Bay, and strip him of legal rights and individual agency. Agamben argues that prisoners in Guantanamo Bay become figures, like homo sacer, who are excluded from the law (political life, bios) and reduced to a bare life (zoe). Prisoners have lost all legal rights; they can be killed under the suspension of the law. In his book State of Exception, he writes: “A theory of a state of exception is the preliminary condition for any definition of the relation that binds and, at the same time, abandons the living being to law. It is this ‘no-mans’-land between public law and political fact, and between the juridical order and life” (Agamben 2005:1). While Agamben explores in detail the relationship between political life, sovereignty, and global discourses of human rights, he uses the example of the refugee as a category. He argues that refugees entering refugee camp are reduced to a bare life within bio-political and legal structures; they enter a state of exception, in the sense that they fall out of juridical norms of society, and have no legal rights. As another example of this ambiguous zone, he cites the Nazi concentration camps as a “symbol of modernity” in order to argue that prisoners could be killed by German authorities because the law could be suspended under the preservation of the juridical order (Agamben 1998). In other words, a state of exception is a space where boundaries are blurred and there is no distinction between legal and illegal, law and violence, war and peace, life and death. Agamben’s work is often cited in refugee studies and in analyses of asylum/refugee camps as states (or places) of exception. They are spaces “of sovereign power and exception producing forms of ‘bare life’ that rule out political community” (Bulley 2014:65). In entering the camp, refugees enter a state of exception, stripped of their identity and reduced to bare life (see Bulley 2014:65 for a longer discussion). The critique of Agamben’s and other scholars’ use of the theory is that it tends to provide an overly simplistic characterization of places such as refugee or concentration camps as spaces where individual agency is often totally absent, and it tends to overlook the complexity of social relations even in the most marginalized social settings (e.g., Bulley 2014; Ramadan 2013). In anthropology, we might call these “gray zones,” and much social science research on informal, underground, violent, and marginal groups describes spaces that are gray enough to quality for Agamben’s state of exception. In the case of the Hutu fighters in the Congo forest,

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Agamben’s theories of a state of exception have been an important influence. The rebels can be seen as “political actors” operating in “the wasteland between exile and belonging, between life and death” (Nikolopoulou 2000:125). In this way, they are reduced to what Agamben has defined as bare life. Exiled in the mountains, they live in a state of exception, or a space we could call a wasteland, a gray zone, no-man’s-land, or a political limbo, not simply excluded from the wider society, but without any legal rights or citizenship.5 They dwell in a space where the boundaries between good and bad, legal and illegal, and peace and war, rather than being negotiated or contested, are simply dissolved. The Congo rebels are not prisoners in a camp and they cannot be defined simply as victims. However, they are “prisoners” of a structural conflict. While Agamben sees the concentration camps as a horrific symbol of brutal modernity, I see the many hundreds of bamboo military barracks located in peripheral hills and mountains in the eastern Congo as a reflection of structural violence. They are the physical symbols of political failure, state fragmentation, and mass reciprocal violence due to an unresolved historical past. The Hutu rebels live as outlaws, hunted down by enemy groups, hiding in mountain shelters without legal rights or a right of return back to their country of origin. Even in these barest and most exceptional conditions, even in the absence of law and citizenship, of rights and claims in the society in which they live (Congo), they still live in communities. Like other communities, they have norms, rules, practices, ideologies, relationships, trust, distrust, and individual agency. While philosophical considerations such as those of Agamben are helpful for rethinking conventional concepts, I would argue that we need to understand how people experience life in such liminal spaces. We need to understand how violence is produced, constructed, and endured in such a zone where boundaries are blurred. Perhaps violence is a consequence of being reduced to a bare life. But life is not as bare as Agamben would have it. It is the task of anthropology to reveal even the most extreme forms of human practice, including brutal violence, in all its complexity.

Working in a Conflict Zone This book is the result of 15 months of anthropological fieldwork in the eastern Congo. The fieldwork was carried out between 2010 and 2012 and

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again in 2016 and was divided into three different stages. The ethnographic data was gathered in various rebel camps, in demobilization centers for excombatants, and in territories controlled by militia and rebel groups. I am not the first to point out that research in conflict areas is difficult; scholars such as Elizabeth Wood (2006) or Koen Vlassenroot (2006), for example, have discussed the methodological and ethical challenges of doing fieldwork in conflict settings. The eastern Congo is a volatile region with sporadic violent outbreaks. Everyday life is under constant threat through instability, low levels of trust, and prevailing uncertainty. It is plagued by political insecurity, and corruption and poverty is deeply rooted and rampant. There are no functional social institutions, there is no social security, the Congolese police and military are weak, disorganized, corrupt, and involved in crimes and violence against the civilians they should be protecting. There are few reliable sources of accurate and unbiased information; the media and local journalists are suppressed, official data and statistics are often wrong and rumors are widespread. In such a setting, manipulation, even lies, are a part of everyday life. In this environment, it is difficult to plan beforehand how to move from place to place, and one is forced to be flexible in choosing how to do so. This was the case throughout the whole fieldwork process, and I think it is useful here to describe my research methods and how I gained access to the field in some detail, as well as outlining some of the limitations that I encountered. During the first weeks of my fieldwork, I was lucky to meet Ray. Ray was a short-haired man in his late thirties with a great smile and a fine sense of humor. He grew to become a dear friend and collaborator, and we came to work closely together in the time that followed. Ray and I met for the first time in his office in Bukavu, where he had been trying to set up a small research organization to document the relationship between armed groups and the mining industry. Through Ray’s working experience and local knowledge of rebel activity in the region, I was able to pinpoint a number of key actors inside armed groups. It was Ray who introduced me to Ce´dric. Ce´dric was a man in his late thirties and of Rwandan origin. He told me that prior to the Rwandan genocide, he had been employed as a bodyguard for the former Rwandan president, Juve´nal Habyarimana, but, at the time we met, he was working for the FDLR as an intelligence operative. His role there was to monitor the urban areas and provide updates to the organization—observing, documenting, and analyzing the political and security dynamics in the urban center, Bukavu, and then providing the

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information to the rebels operating out of the forest. Ce´dric became one of my coworkers and a gate-opener for access to the rebel camp. After consulting with a range of contacts, we decided to travel south to the Uvira region to talk to a number of armed groups based in the area. It was in this way that I made contact with one of the groups of Hutu fighters living in the mountainous region in the South Kivu province. The Hutu rebels have several military units positioned in both North and South Kivu, and my fieldwork, during the time that followed, was carried out in one of those military camps, deep in the Itombwe Forest, beginning at the foot of the Uvira Mountains in the South Kivu province. At that point, a Swedish documentary filmmaker, Mark, came to meet me—we had agreed to make an ethnographic film together to complement my research. We returned twice to the camp to conduct ethnographic fieldwork and to make the film. Together we relocated to a rebel unit located on a mountain peak in the forest. The rebel camp, which I call Rainbow Brigade, was an “intelligence unit” and home to about 150 soldiers and their wives and children, and it was here that I collected the most comprehensive data. When I stepped into Rainbow Brigade for the first time, I stepped into an unknown setting of soldier and rebel activity. While I had lived and worked in several war zones before, to be in a rebel camp among soldiers and their families was a novel experience for me. I had to learn about the hierarchy and about military order. I had to call soldiers by their rank rather than by name. And I soon learned not to question the officers’ authority. While my first days in the camp were characterized by mutual suspicion, I never experienced any actual hostility. The rebel leaders, the fighters, and their family members welcomed me to the camp and said they had positive feelings about having a visitor in their midst. They built me a very small, but neat, bamboo hut, close to where the leaders lived—they called it Hotel Forest—and that is where I lived while in the camp. The soldiers’ bodyguards brought me food, they washed my clothes and cleaned my house, and at night the officers made sure there were always bodyguards standing outside the hut where I was sleeping to protect me. I always felt safe in the camp; the soldiers and their wives consistently treated me with respect, curiosity, and friendly eyes. Fieldwork in the camp consisted of observation and participation in daily life, as well as formal and informal interviews, and I usually walked around in the camp with a pen and notebook. During the day, I joined in with the routine activities of the camp. I followed the fighters to the

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bamboo churches, to the fields to look for food, and spoke with them and their wives and children. During the evenings, I would sit at the fireside, speaking to the officers, commanders and other high-ranking soldiers living close to my house. By taking part in the daily life of the camp, I tried to acquire insights into how the fighters and their family members subjectively experienced the conditions of their lives, seeking to understand what it is like to live in the midst of insecurity and to fight an endless war, as well as how the rebels imagined their world and their future. I witnessed military performances, church ceremonies, and late-night prayers and attempted to comprehend the social organization and structure of the camp. At first, everything seemed to be going well. In anthropology it is generally accepted that if we establish trust and long-term relationships with our informants, we can expect to understand not only what they think is important but also why they think so. One of the goals of establishing lasting relationships with the people we study is to find out how they experience their world and to collect accurate data about how they perceive it. Building trust and rapport, anthropologists believe, will ultimately generate good data. However, this was not the case in the rebel camp. In a militarized setting, and in the midst of a group that habitually uses spying and deceit to collect information, I soon found myself in a tricky situation. After a couple of weeks, I realized that I was followed, even controlled, by a group of soldiers that the leaders had allocated and instructed to spy on me. This group monitored my interactions, taking notes on whom I had spoken to and who had said what. This attention was not confined to me alone. In the camp it was standard practice that everyone was subjected to the strict hierarchy, including surveillance by the leadership, and many lower-ranking soldiers, women, and children were afraid of speaking about sensitive topics in front of their superiors. I gradually began to notice that they were wary of speaking freely and would only open up about their personal lives out of earshot of the leaders. While I was increasingly accepted by the officers, the women, children, and lowerranking soldiers became more distant and quiet, simply because they were afraid to talk to me. Given this situation, most of my data was collected among the highranking rebel leaders and soldiers with middle-rank positions. However, while I had limited personal interactions with the other groups, my observations of their anxiety and reluctance to speak openly were in themselves a source of information about the general climate of fear in the camp, the

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prevailing gender and hierarchical inequalities, and how a military camp is organized and structured. Although my informants in general spoke little about their personal lives, they were quite prepared to speak freely about political topics and general considerations of the war. At times, it was very evident that the officers and other soldiers were actively promoting their own agenda and avoiding other, more revealing topics. The group were very well aware of how outsiders perceive them and of how they are depicted as ge´nocidaires, murderers, and evildoers. My presence in the camp was a chance for them to prove otherwise and they clearly intended to make use of me to spread their own political messages and propaganda: that outsiders are under a false impression about the genocide and that the political regime in Kigali, not the FDLR, was in fact the main motivator behind the genocide. When I began my fieldwork in the camp, I predicted that one problem would be to speak with the fighters about their personal experiences of war. I was right. However, they spoke freely about their living conditions, their histories, and their political ideology. They rarely requested anonymity but, rather, wanted their opinions to be widely known to the outside world. Hence, sometimes they tried to make me into their spokesperson—to take political sides and to adopt their version of the truth. At times I found it difficult to maintain a neutral position and struggled not to fall into the trap of “ethnographic seduction” (Robben 1996, 1995:83). Antonius Robben, for example, describes his first meeting with his informants (Argentinian high-ranking generals) to be quite different from what he expected. Based on what he knew about these men—that they had been accused of torturing civilians, of kidnappings, and of the disappearance of innocent people—it came as a shock for him to encounter their kindness, courtesy, and gentlemanly behavior. (1995:83; see also Sluka 2005: 280–290 for a longer discussion on the same subject). Robben soon found himself in a situation in which he met with officers whose politics he detested but for whom he felt a personal liking and attachment. This was very similar to my own experiences. From a self-reflexive perspective, I know that I was sometimes blinded by the friendly relationships I had with my informants; further, I had to struggle not to become biased or blinded by my own emotions.6 In the field situation, it was difficult for me not to become personally engaged in people’s suffering and miserable conditions. Now, and at a distance, however, I find it easier to allocate the responsibility that my informants must bear for their own actions.

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Another challenge to my objectivity was that my interaction with people in and around Rainbow Brigade was almost entirely limited to the inhabitants of the camp; I was therefore dependent on this relatively small number of fighters, their families, and civilians to inform me about the surrounding situation and about how the rebel camp might be perceived in the local communities or by their enemies. While trekking with the soldiers, for example, I had to trust their knowledge of the terrain and follow their advice, including that relating to hostile forces around us. Through my interviews with ex-combatants from various groups, townspeople, aid workers, local officials, and others, I was able to gain a fair idea of how other people perceive and are affected by the presence of armed groups. However, it remained impossible to capture a fully rounded picture of the situation and I made no attempt to do so. One dimension of fieldwork was the question of language and memory. Like the majority of the inhabitants of Eastern Africa, the rebels are multilingual. Although I made a serious attempt to learn Swahili, to my regret I was not able to learn Swahili or Kinyarwanda to the extent that I could even engage in day-to-day conversation without an interpreter. When Rwanda adopted linguistic reform, changing the official language from French to English, the Hutu community quickly followed. Most officers speak fluent English, and the ordinary soldiers practice English in the “English club” in camp. On the other hand, the older people and the soldiers’ wives and children did not speak fluent English. Between themselves, however, the rebels spoke mostly Kinyarwanda, a language that I never learned. It is unfortunate that these language barriers possibly led me to miss some important information. However, my second co-worker, Christopher, was a great help. Christopher, a 20-year-old man from Burundi, speaks Kinyarwanda, Swahili, French, and English fluently and helped me in very many ways to frame my understanding. Together we bounced around words, discussing their local meaning and the way they should be interpreted to fit the context. His knowledge of the conflicts in the Great Lakes region, his personal experience of the war in Burundi, and his Tutsi identity all contributed to our many challenging discussions. Christopher was able to identify his own history with that of the Hutu rebels, especially the younger ones. During the war in Burundi, he was forced to flee the violence in the streets of the capital Bujumbura, and for several years, he lived in a temporary refugee camp in the forest. Several years later, when the civil war in Burundi had calmed down, Christopher left the camp and

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found his way back to Bujumbura, where he learned that his mother had died. This personal background of war, violence, and loss, as well his personal experiences of rebel violence, enabled Christopher to befriend the combatants in the rebel camp and establish good relationships with them. Some of the interviews and conversations I had with the rebels were tape recorded or filmed and later transcribed. However, the high-ranking leaders refused to be recorded on tape, citing security reasons. It was also not always possible to use a tape recorder—there was no electricity in the camp, and when I ran out of batteries, I had to rely on pen and paper. Every night before I went to bed, I sat by the fire and wrote detailed field notes and added information to the notes I had taken during the day. Over and above the limitations I have described, my fieldwork in Rainbow Brigade was further circumscribed, perhaps self-evidently, by my own lack of experience of much of what my informants had been through. My informants had their memories, some of them memories of traumatic, violent, or confusing events. As Susan Sontag (2003) has written, in critical and traumatic events, language becomes even more difficult to translate into actual words. Thus, we can only gain an imperfect glimpse of what “really” happened; we cannot know how it was felt or experienced at that time and in that moment. I myself do not know what war-related pain, suffering, and grief feel like, nor, on the other hand can I understand what it feels like to plan and participate in brutal attacks against enemies or civilians, to kill, murder, rape or torture someone else. Nor can I completely grasp the feelings and memories that remain in the aftermath of such deeds. If acting on the world is agency, my informants sometimes acted on the world with brutal, and, on occasion, deadly agency. Such experiences exist beyond my knowledge; however, we can know how our informants talk about these experiences, giving us an understanding of how they experience the world and how they act on it. One final caveat about the fieldwork is necessary. It was difficult to stay in the camp for longer than a month at a time due to the surrounding instability and insecurity. Being close to one rebel group can pose a security risk, and I was not willing to jeopardize my own or my co-workers’ security. In total, I spent no more than three months with the rebels, of which one month was trekking—that is, walking in the mountains and sleeping in the forest or in villages. Although the time I spent inside the camp was relatively short, I believe that the material I gathered was thick, and given the hierarchy and the nature of control in the camp, I am not sure I would have

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been able to collect more comprehensive data simply by staying longer. Therefore, in addition to living in the camp with the rebels, I continued to conduct interviews with former soldiers in the demobilizing center. In retrospect, however, I believe that the ethnographic data I collected inside the camp provided me with the richest material.

Visual Material and Collaborations Part of the fieldwork in the camp was carried out in collaboration with a Swedish documentary filmmaker, using the video camera as an ethnographic tool. Working with a camera opened up a new way to document and collect data. Some of the high-ranking leaders were reluctant to reveal their faces and identities in the footage, although the younger combatants believed it was a good opportunity for them to speak out and communicate with the rest of the world. Yet almost everyone agreed to be recorded and videotaped. There were, however, other practical issues that had an impact on the material we gathered. Since there was no electricity in the camp, we had to rely on solar panels connected to motorcycle batteries to charge the batteries to the camera. It was not always sufficient. The rainy season lasts for months in this part of the Congo, and due to heavy rainfalls every day and lack of sun in the hills, we could not charge the batteries to the extent that we needed to; therefore, we only used the camera for a few hours a day. The rest of the time, we used a tape recorder to capture the sounds of the camp—to record interviews, songs, speeches, and ceremonies in the church. When we used the camera, at least in the beginning, it was clear that the rebels took advantage of being filmed. They used the opportunity to disseminate their propaganda, to discuss the political issues of the war, and to speak about the Rwandan president, Paul Kagame. The younger soldiers and the civilian population highlighted the bad living conditions in the camp and spoke about the ignorance of the international community in refusing to assist the Hutu refugees with help and support. Working subsequently with the footage from a distance, the visual material has been very helpful in terms of analyzing the data and as an empirical reference. In particular, it has helped to analyze group interactions, to remember people’s facial expressions and body language and to recall the public manifestation in the church, in the English club, and so on. The material also helped me to remember details, such as the number of people present, the

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setting, and what items they had, such as clothes, weapons, and so on. To collaborate in this way and carry out a mutual project had many advantages; however, although I benefitted greatly from the contributions and ideas of my co-workers, I alone bear the responsibility for the interpretation of the data in this book.

Reliability of Sources and Ethical Considerations It is important to say a few words on the reliability of sources and data. While there exists extensive research on the genocide in Rwanda and the spillover violence and conflicts in the eastern DRC, as well as numerous historical narratives of the Congo wars, there is comparatively very little research on the main Rwandan armed rebel force, the FDLR, and I have not been able to find any ethnographic or sociological study of the organization. Given the secrecy surrounding the group, the difficulty of accessing the rebel camps, and conducting firsthand interviews and observations with high-ranking leaders and active fighters, it was extremely difficult to obtain reliable information on this military grouping. Data does exist, however, on defectors, ex-soldiers, and other official sources.7 In the absence of academic studies, a number of UN reports and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) publications by local and international consultants have been published. But many of these reports also rely on interviews with excombatants, former members, and Rwandan and Congolese officials. The limited access to first-hand information has led to a situation in which much of the published information is predominantly anecdotal. Nevertheless, many reports are well written and are carefully analyzed, reflecting the voices of the civilian population as well as providing accurate information about the FDLR leadership and its military operations. Research by organizations such as Human Rights Watch (2009), the International Crisis Group (2003, 2005, 2009), the Pole Institute (2010), and the Enough Project (2008, 2013), the Peace Appeal Foundation (Hege 2009), and the World Bank (Romkema 2007, 2009) have provided informative reports on the origin of the group, its leadership and war alliances, as has the Usalama Project (2012b, 2012c, 2013),8 which produced a series of reports on armed groups in the region. Although there are few reports dedicated exclusively to the FDLR, the group is often included in content and analyses of conflict dynamics. In addition, the FDLR is mentioned in annual reports on the

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security and military situation in the Kivu regions compiled by the UN group of experts (United Nations Security Council 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018). To conduct research with a rebel group that tries to protect its military interests and identity and to promote its own agenda can be problematic. Previous research on the FDLR has often been conducted among excombatants, deserters, ex-officers, and other military staff who have a past history with the rebels, and much of it relies on the same sources of information. In other existing documentation, there is a pattern of similar kinds of data being repeated (also because the rebels themselves are often repeating the same “official narratives”) at the same time there is much about the group that is still missing. While I am aware of the missing information, my aim has not been to fill in the gaps about the group’s military function, leadership, operations or intelligence, nor was it to map the entire structure of the FDLR or document names of combatants, camps, or leaders. My focus was on the rebels’ experience of being part of an FDLR combat group and my fieldwork in the camp was an attempt to understand how these rebels live and act in a war zone and how they comprehend their own life situations and how violence is justified in their own words. While it is hard to obtain suitable and reliable data in a war zone, ethical considerations present another set of challenges. One of the main difficulties working in a war-torn society, especially with perpetrators and active fighters in war, is how to approach the question of ethics. To undertake fieldwork with rebels and others directly implicated in war crimes certainly challenged standard ethical codes. I have tried my best to follow the general ethical guidelines set up by anthropological ethics committees, including the protection of the confidentiality and identity of my informants by using pseudonyms for names and places unless they are widely known to the public, as is the case with known rebel leaders, warlords, and high commanders among others. To carry out the study I applied for permission from the Congolese authorities. These authorities, including the Congolese army and the National Intelligence Agency (ANR, Agence Nationale de Renseignements) in the South Kivu province provided me with the necessary permission to conduct research among a foreign armed group. All my informants in the camp were fully informed about the research and consented to participate in the study. Because the setting is a hierarchical and top-down controlled unit, consent was first negotiated with the rebel officers, who also gave permission on behalf of the lower-ranks, families, and civilians in the camp. While my informants were very well aware

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of their own need for protection and personal security, and regularly change names and speak in a coded language when communicating military logistics, I want to stress that even I do not know the real names of my informants. I also do not possess any kind of secret or hidden information; the leaders were adamant that I was not allowed to enter any of the militarized spheres of operations and logistics and furthermore that was never my intention. Where I refer to military capacity, structure of the system, and so on, I am using information that has been collected by organizations and agencies and is open to the public, often easy to access online, in reports, and in in journal articles. Where I interviewed ex-combatants from the FDLR, I firmly believe that my account of these interviews would not present any risk to them or jeopardize their security. An increasing number of ex-combatants are open to a dialogue with agencies such as the UN, and numerous NGOs and further data can be readily obtained in demobilization camps or in civilian communities controlled by the FDLR. Nevertheless, I have been confronted with many dilemmas in the writing process. For example, it was common for the leaders and soldiers to try to promote their own political agenda while avoiding discussion of other more compromising topics, and my informants may not have anticipated that I would also describe the more destructive sides of rebel activity. I also believe that some of the younger combatants were not fully alert to their own need for security and protection and may have revealed information that the leadership would not accept seeing spread. For example, many young combatants proudly performed in front of the camera and begged me to include their pictures in the book; they also provided information to me in confidence. In cases where I cannot fully ensure my informant’s security, I have chosen not to include such data or photographs. It goes without saying that in this setting, the leaders had good knowledge of who among their soldiers was talking to me and could no doubt determine what they were talking about. The best one can say here is that these informants chose to talk to me and decided what to say and that they are the best assessors of the risk of interacting with a foreign anthropologist.

How to Read the Book This book has six chapters. After the Introduction, I begin by providing a historical and political background of the wars and crises in Rwanda and the Congo. Since history plays a crucial role in my informants’ current life,

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it is necessary to explore the long political history and power struggles between the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda. The focus is on the events that eventually led to the genocide in 1994 and its aftermath. Writing a history of the Great Lakes region is a difficult endeavor. In this region, history is full of contested and competing narratives of what really happened. History has been used by all sides in the conflicts to manipulate and spread propaganda with consequences lived out in mass reciprocal violence. Building on previous research by historians, social scientists, and anthropologists, I trace the “official narrative” of history. As I come back to it in Chapter 3, this narrative is contested by members of the FDLR, who argue for a different version of historical “truth.” In Chapter 2, I explore the social and military organization and daily life of a rebel camp. Here I challenge the popular stereotype of rebel activity as chaotic and violent by providing a more nuanced ethnography of how the rebels and their families live in war. The focus here is on the everyday routines, the hardships, and the coping strategies in daily life—doing, knowing, acting, and reflecting on their current situation. As in many anthropological studies, a focus on ordinary everyday life can help to “get inside a (putative) culture and associated holistic assumption about cultural processes whereby understanding one set of practices . . . demands rooting them in other activities carried out by the same actors” (Ballinger 2002:9).9 By analyzing the daily routines of the camp—such as attendance at the bamboo churches, praying sessions, cleaning and the preparation of food, military training and performances and the orders of daily life—what people actually do, I believe that we can better understand the underlying webs of meanings and how our informants themselves make sense of the surroundings. The chapter demonstrates how routine tasks, decency, and boredom go hand in hand with the organization of security and the planning of military logistics. Life on a mountaintop in the midst of war is an insecure and difficult existence, and the chapter describes some of the ritualistic expressions of the community’s efforts to cope with violence and hardship. Some of my informants experienced violence partly through the verbalizing of it in the form of laments, stories, and narratives. They also used nonverbal expressions, such as religious ceremonies, celebrations, and other kinds of public manifestations, to make sense of their surroundings. In Chapter 3, I look beyond the legacy of the genocide and explore how a rebel community transmits, produces, and reproduces ideologies of violence in day-to-day interaction and various forms of performances. In

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the setting of isolation and desperation, I trace the reconfigurations of memory and identity and how concepts such as exile, dislocation, time, and space weave into real military and political action. In particular, I explore how memories and ideologies of the past give rise to current political decisions and a refusal to lay down arms until the rebels have achieved their goal of returning to their country, Rwanda. Chapter 4 examines the destructive rebel military system and how the camp becomes a “prison” to some combatants, while, at the same time, the leadership experiences it as a place to escape war crimes and find strategic benefit. It explores why soldiers and their families stay in the camp rather than lay down their weapons and repatriate. In this chapter I explore how the larger military system continuously erodes a combatant’s personal identity and how leaders construct “fighter” identities to maintain cohesiveness among soldiers. Overall, the chapter explores the paradox of living in a highly destructive system of terror and fear, while simultaneously transferring strong identities of loyalty and personal commitment to the group. In Chapter 5, I move away from the camp and explore how the rebels interact with the surrounding civilian communities. I explore interactions and relationships under conditions of war and how the rebels strategically exercise terror to maintain and balance power. Terror warfare is not only about acts of killing but also about a strategy to control every aspect of civilian life through humiliation and threats of violence. I also discuss how the soldiers navigate landscapes of (in)security, danger, and fear and how the fighters themselves balance on the thin line between making war and surviving it. In Chapter 6, I present concluding remarks and return to the discussion and explanation of understanding violence both as a state of exception and as a way of life and exile.

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CHAPTER 1

Rwandan Rebels in the Congo War: Power, Politics, and Exile

We tried to be invisible, tried to disappear into the green plywood walls, tried to blend in with the sound of falling rain on the corrugated iron roof, but we had grown too frightened to open our mouths, mute and fidgety patrons waiting for the brochettes. Soon the radio orator reached a climax in his speech, he wasn’t speaking anymore, he was screaming: “Hutu Powa, Hutu Powa, Hutu Powa.” Several voices in the bar took up the chant like a Greek chorus: “Hutu Powa, Hutu Powa, Hutu Powa.” (Taylor 1999:8)

Only a few weeks after the “Hutu Power” propaganda was spread across the country on Rwandan radio stations on April 6, 1994, the plane carrying the former Rwandan president Juve´nal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down. And just a few hours after that, rebel troops walked the streets of Kigali with machetes, guns, and grenades, brutally killing Tutsis in their homes and along the roads (Middleton 1997:17–18). The mass killing quickly spread throughout the country. During the 100 days of killing, the Hutu extremists who controlled the radio stations repeatedly broadcast messages that incited Hutus to kill the Tutsis. Within a few months the world had been informed that about 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus had been killed.1 By July 1994 the genocide was officially over, Tutsi president Paul Kagame had gained control of Rwanda, and Hutu extremists and other key organizers of the killings found themselves in refuge in the midst of a new war zone in Zaire— now the eastern Congo. In this new conflictual context, the hardline leaders

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of the genocide and ex-Interahamwe rebels began to set up military headquarters, first in refugee camps and later in the mountainous rainforest from where they still operate today. The Congo wars (1996–2003) and the long-standing violence that followed them cannot be understood in isolation from the Rwandan crisis in 1994, including the creation of the Hutu rebel group FDLR. These Rwandan rebels ascribe considerable significance to their own history and to how it determines and shapes their role in the eastern Congo. Hence any effort to understand the present-day conflict in the Congo needs to be informed by the immediate and underlying history behind the Rwandan genocide. Charting the history of the interwoven Rwandan and Congolese conflicts is a difficult task. It is difficult because for decades the region has been characterized as a zone of multiplicity and confusion, where narratives of “what really happened” over the years of war are contested, contradictory, and conflicting. And it is particularly difficult because the conflicts in and across both countries are still in the making. Andrew Strathern and Pamela Stewart (2002) argue that there are two ways of writing history. Anthropologists, they say, either write histories, that is, the local meaning of history that informants make and retell for themselves, or they write history from the perspective of the outside observer. When writing histories, they argue, “history thus becomes the ethnography of indigenous histories” that captures the local meaning attached to our informants’ perception of the world. The “realities” and the “meanings” can be fragmentary, conflicting, and contradictory, but they are still “there” and can be studied. However, a heightened problem of writing history or histories arises in contexts where people have “sharply different sets of meanings” and where people have used these meanings to interpret and define each other, to resist, or to dominate or when there are opposing and disagreeing narratives (2002:15).2 These “sharply different sets of meanings” are particularly true in the Rwandan historical context where the two groups, Hutus and Tutsis, have constructed their own definitions of themselves and of each other for decades. Throughout history, both the Hutus and Tutsis have, at different times, suffered from unequal power relations, marginalization, and exclusion from the economic and political spheres. Both groups have constructed their own histories, myths, and perceptions of the “other” and apply conflicting interpretations, meanings, and “realities” to define “their” history. The consequences of this construction have been lived out in mass reciprocal violence and genocide. It is not a new phenomenon or a new finding. Much previous work by historians,

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Figure 1. Some of the members of the FDLR participated in the Rwandan genocide in 1994. In the aftermath of the genocide, thousands of Hutus fled to the eastern Congo, where the FDLR was created. Today the rebel force comprises a diverse group of refugees, soldiers, and civilian dependents.

political scientists, and anthropologists concludes that both Hutus and Tutsis have their own, and disparate, versions of history. The story of Rwanda, of the genocide in particular, as related by the Hutu exiles now based in the eastern Congo stands in sharp contrast to the narrative put forward by the Tutsi, as well as by most outside observers and commentators in the international community. Developments post-genocide, when the rebels fled to the eastern Congo, have also been key factors in forming the Hutu collective identity as a people who perceive themselves as victims of war, exiled from their homeland, unreasonably persecuted by the regime, and neglected by international human rights organizations.3

Ethnic Identity, Politics, and Power According to the mass of scholarly literature on the Rwandan historiography, Rwanda has never been divided by race or ethnicity in a geographical

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sense. The three ethnic groups in Rwanda—the Hutus, the Tutsis, and the minority Twa (who are only 1 percent of the population)—lived peacefully side by side for centuries. They still speak the same language, Kinyarwanda, and they customarily shared land, religion, and culture. Although there are differences of opinion among scholars as to the importance of ethnicity, class, clan, and kinship in precolonial history, it is widely recognized that Rwanda was a Tutsi kingdom (see, for example, Newbury 2009 for a discussion on the precolonial history of the Great Lakes region). But while the Tutsi monarchy was coalescing in the eleventh century to become the centralized locus of power and the dominant “social group” or “class” in Rwanda, Hutu principalities existed alongside Tutsi hierarchies. Hutus were not excluded because of ethnicity or race—Hutus could also be chiefs or hold dominant social status and power in society. Moreover, many scholars have argued that ethnicity in the Great Lakes region is only one identity marker among others, such as family or political affiliation as well as social, regional, or clan-based identities (Mamdani 2001; Newbury & Newbury 1995; Reyntjens 1996, 2009; Stearns 2012a). In Rwanda, and in the neighboring countries of Uganda, the Congo, and Burundi, identity has been demarcated by various historical processes, such as migratory flows, demographic pressure, uncertainty over traditional authorities, as well as by the broad political and economic changes in the whole region (Newbury 1998, 2009; Reyntjens 2009:13; Pottier 2004). Scholars have therefore turned their attention away from explaining the genocide solely in ethnic terms and toward an understanding of the local meaning of identity, politics, and the struggles for power, arguing that the genocide must be understood in the wider political and economic context. The dominant historical narrative usually presents the kingdoms based on Tutsi lineages as continuing to dominate Rwandan society until it was colonized by Germany in 1894 and subsequently, when it was allocated to Belgian control (as Rwanda-Urundi) after the First World War. Although many of the previous Rwandan social systems began to decline during the colonial era, the Tutsi kingdoms continued to play an important role in ruling the country (Melvern 2003:18–20). During this period a number of mythologies began to emerge in relation to Tutsi identity. Noted for their chieftaincies and kingdoms, the Tutsis came to be characterized by the colonial administrators as more aristocratic and distinguished than the Hutus. Over time the Tutsi identity became associated with superiority in Rwandan

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society, and, within this construct, the Hutus became increasingly marginalized (Prunier 1995:6; Spalding 2008:10). While the origin of the Tutsis is unknown, some historians have speculated that they had their origins among the tribes of Ethiopia (Malkki 1995:23). Some myths suggest that the Tutsi are from the garden of Eden, while the colonizers themselves often made reference to the Hamitic myth that asserts that the Tutsi originated from an advanced and highly civilized race. These mythologies impacted Rwandan society not just ideologically but also institutionally, an ethnic polarization between the two population groups began to emerge (Mamdani 2001:35). Having classified the Hutus, Tutsis, and Twa as different races, the colonial system came to favor the Tutsi population, whom they regarded as more beautiful and aristocratic than the Hutus. Tutsi’s skulls were bigger, they were taller, and their skin was lighter. The Hutus were seen as simple farmers, physically less appealing, less Caucasian, more African. The colonial administrators distributed land and resources unequally in favor of the Tutsi population and to the cost of the Hutus. They elevated the social power and status of the Tutsis and appointed them to political positions within the state administration; the Hutus were simultaneously marginalized and excluded from the economic and political spheres. The Belgian administrators further consolidated the distinction between the ethnic groups with the issue and enforcement of identity cards. Ethnicity thus became a telling symbol representing access to political and economic resources for the one group while the other was entirely cut off from wealth and power. These structural and social inequalities divided Rwandan society into different economic classes, or clans: Hutu identity came to be associated with the lower classes, which were inferior to the upper-class Tutsis (see Melvern 2003:18–20 for detailed descriptions). And cleavages between rich and poor began to divide the groups. Over time the majority Hutu population became increasingly marginalized in Rwandan society, and during late colonialism, Hutu identity developed into a cult of victimhood within which the Hutu population felt oppressed by the Tutsis and resented them accordingly (Mamdani 2001). According to Mahmood Mamdani, Hutus picked up the Hamitic-myth rhetoric to argue that the Tutsis were not native Rwandans but instead foreign conquerors. The Tutsis, the Hutus argued, represented cruelty and according to Rene´ Lemarchand, these antiTutsi narratives formed the early foundations of subsequent Hutu nationalism and propaganda against the Tutsi population (Lemarchand 2009:58).

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Since the colonial era, political parties based on ethnic identity began to dominate the political sphere, and from that increasingly became a struggle between opposing ethnic identities. Mamdani notes, “The history of the encounter between Tutsi and Hutu is important, not because of where their ancestors came from, but because in their coming together they created certain political institutions which outlived that history and shaped a tragic future” (2001:60).

The Political Context During the 1950s, Belgium came under pressure from the growing anticolonialist Pan-Africanist movement in Central Africa and from the emerging movement for Hutu emancipation, and instituted reforms to encourage the growth of democratic political institutions. These changes were resisted by Tutsi traditionalists, and political tension increased internationally and inside Rwanda. Under the influence of Belgium, a military occupation was launched in 1959 to overthrow the Tutsi monarchy; several years later, the Hutu political party, Hutu Emancipation Movement (PARMEHUTU), won a referendum supported by the UN (Melvern 2003:26). The political party was based on Hutu nationalism with the aim of protecting and enriching the Hutu population. Between 1959 and 1962, a Hutu revolt, assisted by Belgium, led to the end of the Tutsi monarchy. More than 150,000 Tutsis fled the country and ended up in neighboring Congo, Uganda, Burundi, and Tanzania, where they lived as refugees (Lemarchand 2009:36). Some of the Tutsi groups in exile formed armed groups with the goal of returning to Rwanda. The first elected president after independence in Rwanda was Gre´goire Kayibanda, a loyal Hutu and founder and longtime leader of the PARMEHUTU. He governed the country for some 17 years, but internal clashes in his party combined with the widespread insecurity and violence following the revolt in 1959 caused conflict throughout the country. In 1978, Habyarimana, also a Hutu, overthrew Kayibanda and became president, governing until 1988. Habyarimana established a one-party system under the name National Revolutionary Movement for Development. Although he claimed that he wanted to open up the country to multiparty democracy, he also insisted that the Tutsis living in exile could not repatriate because Rwanda had “no room” for the large Tutsi population living abroad (Melvern

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2003:28). The Habyarimana regime took many harsh measures against political opponents, including assassination and other forms of violence (Newbury 1998:13). By the end of the 1980s, political feelings in Rwanda were on the boil and tensions were on the rise among Tutsis living in Rwanda as well as among the Tutsi living in diaspora in neighboring countries. In 1990, Tutsis living in exile, mainly in Uganda, established the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) under Paul Kagame, proclaiming that they should regain rights in Rwanda (Fuji 2009). The Hutu elite in Rwanda, themselves divided into many extremist and nationalist fractions, responded by spreading anti-Tutsi propaganda and racist iconography across the country (Adelman & Suhrke 1999): famously, Tutsis were vilified as Inyenzi—cockroaches.4 Such propaganda was widely broadcast by the popular radio station, Radio Te´le´vision Libre des Mille Collines, which was run by a group of young Hutu nationalists. On October 1 of that year, the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), the military wing of the RPF, invaded Rwanda from the north, triggering a civil war that lasted for several years. The attack, together with the prevailing state of political instability, was the prelude to the mass genocide in 1994. Although a cease-fire was signed in Arusha in early 1992, the situation in Rwanda remained tense and the power of the Hutu elite was on the increase. Two years later, on April 6, 1994, the plane carrying former president Habyarimana was shot down by unknown forces. A coup d’e´tat immediately followed, and mass killings began only a few hours later. The genocide, while organized from the top by the Hutu political elite—by members of the government, the military, political parties, and youth organizations—was, in practice, carried out by ordinary people. Hundreds of thousands of people were involved “either as an organizer, a perpetrator, a victim or a witness” (Stearns 2012a:15; see also Straus 2006 and Hatzfeld 2008 for a detailed analysis of genocide perpetrators in Rwanda). It is now widely known that policymakers in Belgium, France, the USA, and the UN were aware of the preparations for genocide; however, although the UN had about 2,600 UN peacekeepers in Rwanda (Manahl 2000:18), they did not manage to stop the mass killings. Four months from its inception, the genocide officially ended on July 4, 1994, when the Tutsi armed forces, the RPA, took control of Kigali, and Paul Kagame, the political leader of RPF, brought the violence under control, took power in the capital, and proclaimed himself the new head of state.5 The power shift in Kigali

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was further marked by reciprocal mass killings of thousands of Hutu civilians. The French operation, Operation Turquoise, which was based in Goma in the eastern Congo (then called Zaire), moved into Rwanda to protect people at risk. The operation set up a human corridor to help people flee. However, instead of helping the Tutsi population and other civilians at risk, it facilitated the escape of about 30,000 government soldiers, many of whom were senior leaders of the government and previous members of the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) and Interahamwe who had facilitated the genocide, as well as about 800,000 Hutu refugees (for a comprehensive description, see, for example, Prunier 1995:281–311; and Scherrer 2002). These factions, which had participated actively in the genocide, later reestablished themselves as the FDLR in the Congo.

From Genocide to Refugee Crisis In the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda, over 1.2 million refugees crossed the border and fled into eastern Congo (Prunier 2009), most of them were Hutus who feared being attacked by the new regime in Rwanda. The massive influx of refugees entirely changed the character of the region and continues to be a cause of significant instability. At the time of the 1994 Rwandan exodus, the eastern Congo region was already hosting refugees from previous conflicts in Rwanda; in addition, more than 100,000 Burundian refugees who had fled mass killings in Burundi were hosted throughout North and South Kivu. The new flow of dispossessed people put enormous pressure on already scarce resources (Reyntjens 2009:2). Just outside of Goma, within walking distance to Rwanda, the largest refugee camp in the world was set up under the protection of the UNHCR. Huge tracts of land were soon covered with plastic tents and populated by hundreds of thousands of families seeking shelter and protection. Many families had lost everything they had during the massacres in Rwanda and were totally dependent on international aid for survival (Halvorsen 1999:319). The refugee camps, some of which could host over 200,000 refugees, soon turned into “microcosms” (Lemarchand 2005:95) of Rwandan society. In the midst of dire insecurity, small economic and business networks were set up. Although there are very few ethnographic accounts of daily life in the refugee camps, an excellent eyewitness account is provided by a Hutu

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woman, Marie Be´atrice Umutesi, who arrived in the Congo after the genocide. In her book, Surviving the Slaughter (2004), she provides a detailed description of her life as a refugee. She writes that the refugee camps replicated many social patterns that existed in Rwanda prior to the genocide: those with money set up enterprises, producing banana beer, basketwork, and carpentry and opening modest restaurants, sewing ateliers, hair dressing salons, and other small businesses. One of the greatest threats inside the refugee camps came from the tens of thousands of former Interahamwe and ex-FAR soldiers who were living side by side with the refugees. As time passed, insecurity increased. The UNHCR reported daily incidents of killings inside the camps, with grenade attacks, mob violence, theft, and plunder exacerbating the already appalling conditions endured by the refugees. Each day the UNHCR and aid workers reported that hundreds of children, women, elders, and those in bad health had died (Halvorsen 1999:310).6 In the midst of this humanitarian crisis, a massive cholera epidemic broke out and killed several thousand refugees. Because the aid workers were fully occupied with trying to save lives and provide for the basic needs of the refugees, attention was not immediately drawn to the military units who were also living inside the camps (Halvorsen 1999: 307–320; see also the 2010 mapping report by the UN OHCHR for a detailed description of the Hutu refugee situation in the Congo). While the massive cholera outbreak was killing large numbers of people, the Hutu extremists were planning their return to Rwanda with the goal of recapturing political power in Kigali and continuing the genocide against the Tutsi (Manahl 2000:18). These forces did not accept that they had lost power in Rwanda and were intent on mobilizing and reorganizing themselves inside the camps. Instead of seeing themselves as defeated refugees, they saw themselves as a Hutu “government in exile” (Feeley & ThomasJensen 2008). Initially, the leaders of the new government in exile were Theodore Sindikubwabo, Jean Kabanda, and Augustin Bizimungu, all of whom had previous leadership roles in FAR and Interahamwe, which had led the Hutus in Rwanda during the genocide (Romkema 2007:41). Since many of the leaders of the new Hutu movement had held elite positions in the former government, they had access to money, weapons, and contacts based outside of the Congo, and they soon began to set up political and administrative networks inside the refugee camps. Under the gaze of the international community, these former political and military leaders and Hutu extremists began recruiting among the refugees (Amnesty

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International 1996; Reyntjens 2009:80–100). During the “refugee years,” between 1994 and 1996, the rebels stockpiled weapons and recruited and trained hundreds of refugees as soldiers under their command. Many of these refugees joined the armed group for protection against retaliatory attacks from Rwanda (Amnesty International 1996). Others joined the armed forces out of a more general and pervasive sense of fear. Thousands of refugees had been traumatized by the massacres taking place in Rwanda, many had seen their family members brutally killed, and feeling themselves in a marginalized and exposed position in the camp, many were afraid of what could happen if they were to resist the rebels (Reed 1998:141). The international community has come under considerable criticism for neglecting to take action to stop the activities of the armed group inside the refugee camps, but as Reed (1998) points out, this failure to intervene must be understood in the context of the massive crises in the surrounding areas. Outside the camps, the war in the Congo was escalating and many millions of people were in desperate need of food and health care. In 1995, the international community and the Rwandan government and military officials began to formally identify the Hutu rebel group in the Congo refugee camps as being responsible for the organization of the genocide (Feeley & Thomas-Jensen 2008). During this period, the rebels gave their support to a new political party set up among the refugees, the Rally for the Return of Refugees and Democracy in Rwanda (RDR), arguing for the right of themselves and the refugees to return to their homeland. But the collaboration did not last, and in the same period, the rebel movement established a headquarters of its own outside of Goma in North Kivu. The newly formed rebel organization designated itself as both political party and armed military group—and continues to do so today. While these Rwandan anti-government forces were using the Congo as a sanctuary from which to attack Rwanda, civil war was on the rise inside the country in the form of the first Congo war (1996–1998), an effort by Rwanda and Uganda to replace the dictator Mobutu in the DRC (then Zaire) with the rebel Laurent-Desire Kabila. And the Hutu rebels were soon to become an important part of that war.

From Refugee Crisis to the Congo War Zone The first Congo war had its beginnings in 1996, when Rwanda invaded the country to hit back at ex-FAR/Interahamwe. This incursion was soon

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followed by a civil war attempting to topple Mobutu. Simultaneously, in South Kivu province, the influx of refugees had created pressure on local communities. An important factor in the history of the war is the role of the Banuyamulenge population. The Banuyamulenge were originally Tutsi herders from Rwanda but have occupied the Congolese South Kivu landscape for several generations. They had hostile relations with the Congolese authorities because they had been denied Congolese citizenship in 1967; the authorities had decided to differentiate between the Tutsi population of Rwandan origin and those Tutsi who had originally come from Congo (Mamdani 2001:234–263; Prunier 2009; Vlassenroot 2007). When the authorities designated the Banuyamulenge as Rwandans and denied them Congolese citizenship, ethnic tensions in the Congo region increased. The question of the Banuyamulenge and their ethnic belonging resurfaced during the 1990s, creating new discourses over belonging, exclusion, and citizenship and leading to a later agreement by the Banuyamulenge to serve as a proxy for Rwanda (Jackson 2006; Mamdani 2001:234–263; Prunier 2009:231). Rwanda justified their 1996 invasion of the Congo as a defensive action. They feared that the Hutu rebels, who had been active during the genocide, would strike back at Rwanda out of the Congo (Paddon 2010:327). In 1996 and again in 1997, the Rwandan-backed Zairean rebel force led by LaurentDe´sire´ Kabila, the Alliance des Forces De´mocratiques pour la Libe´ration du Congo-Zaı¨re (AFDL), launched a number of attacks against the refugee camps. Their aim was to kill every refugee, without distinguishing between the former Interahamwe/ex-FAR combatants and those who were innocent civilian refugees. Although there is little literature on the killings of these Hutu refugees, a comprehensive report prepared by the UN OHCHR (2010) documents several hundred incidents of brutal mass killings of innocent Hutu refugees between 1996 and 1997. Lemarchand (2005) argues that the killing of the Hutu refugees was intentional and could even be classified as genocide. Although it is still the subject of controversy, he estimates that between 100,000 and 200,000 refugees of Hutu origin were killed by Rwanda/AFDL (see also Paddon 2010:327 for a longer discussion on the matter). The killings of the Hutu refugees, he further concludes, have imprinted strong collective memories and narratives in common among the Hutus in exile and diaspora, just as the genocide against the Tutsis has done in Rwanda (Lemarchand 2005; see also Adelman & Suhrke 1999). In the midst of the widespread violence and chaos in the refugee camps, the

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international community managed to move many refugees back to Rwanda, but several thousand of them fled deeper into the forest or spread across the country. Many died on the road as the result of hunger, exhaustion, and sickness, while others settled in the forests, where they live to this day. The second half of the 1990s in the Congo was a period of worsening instability. President Mobutu had begun to lose popularity not only among the Congolese but also among the populations of neighboring countries (Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Burundi, and South Sudan) and countries in the West (Autesserre 2010; Gnamo 1999:340). Many of the neighboring countries began to support local rebel groups, providing military logistics, supplies, and arms and forming alliances to topple Mobutu. Within a short time, North and South Kivu had become a battle zone for countless armed groups (see, for example, Francis 2005; Gondola 2002:20). It was a landscape occupied by vast numbers of refugees and an area of severe insecurity and conflict in which millions of people died. One of the largest Congolese rebel forces during this period, Kabila’s AFDL, attracted the support of many of the Mai-Mai groups—an umbrella term to define the local militias, many of them previously followers of Mobutu. Many of the Mai-Mai now turned against the president and began fighting alongside Kabila’s forces, and in 1997, the AFDL succeeded in toppling Mobutu and installing Kabila in power in Kinshasa, where he proclaimed himself head of the state and renamed the country from Zaire to the Democratic Republic of Congo. At first, peace looked promising. But when Kabila came to power, the country was encumbered with enormous debt, a humanitarian catastrophe in the eastern part of the country, and severe political instability. The transition period was also marred by the exclusion of a large number of resistance groups from the peace process and from the transitional government. These groups, who had helped to oust Mobutu, included local church leaders, local NGOs, and other political opposition groups. The population became critical of their new leadership, feeling excluded from the political sphere. Instability continued. In the late 1990s, there was an upsurge in the number of armed groups, both local and foreign. Rwandan refugees could return to Rwanda, but the years of fighting had pushed the rebels, and their civilian recruits and followers, deeper into the forest, and many of them could not go back. Rwandan refugees had allied with various Congolese groups or had formed their own rebel groups. Many communities established their own grassroots defense

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militias, some to protect themselves, others to fight against opposition groups, and others to ally with foreign troops or the government army under Kabila. Some of the groups were supported by local elites and political opposition groups; others were grassroots defense groups trying to protect their land and resources (see, for example, Adelman & Rao 2004:12 for a comprehensive reading). Intergroup relationships and alliances constantly changed. Ultimately the continuum of violence led to a second war. The second Congo war, beginning in August 1998 and officially ending in 2003, is often referred to as “Africa’s world war” (Prunier 2009). The conflict involved nine foreign armies and about 20 local armed groups, active mainly in North and South Kivu. Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi organized, armed, and collaborated with various rebel groups on the one hand, while Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, Chad, and Sudan supported President Kabila on the other (Autesserre 2010). In addition, many Congolese armed groups were fighting in countless fragmented militias. Political relations between Rwanda and the Congo, already strained, became even more hostile when Kabila tried to distance himself from his former foreign allies, ordering both the Ugandans and Tutsi-Rwandan army out of the DRC and dismissing his Rwandan chief of staff, James Kabarere, in favor of a Congolese politician. When Kabila took power in Kinshasa, there already was a lively ethnic antagonism between the Tutsis and Congolese population groups. Anyone identified as a Tutsi could be connected to problems not only in Rwanda but also to those within the Congo itself, most notably the problems associated with the Tutsis of Rwandan origin who had lived in the eastern Congo for generations, such as the Banuyamulenge in South Kivu and the Banyarwanda in North Kivu. In numerous villages, conflicts flared up on grounds of ethnicity, with Congolese groups killing thousands of people of Tutsi origin. In 1998, Rwanda once again invaded the Congo. Now allied with Uganda, Rwanda began to give military support to a new rebel force fighting against Kabila in the Congo, the Rally for the Congolese Democracy (RCD). The RCD, numbering some 30,000 soldiers, soon became one of the largest rebel groups in the region and an important player in the war, moving quickly to take control of rich mining areas and provincial towns, including the important town of Goma in North Kivu. RCD members were, for the most part, ethnic Tutsi (see Vlassenroot 2007 for a more complete discussion), but because of internal fragmentation in the group, it later split

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it into different fractions, backed by both Rwandan and Ugandan supporters (see Prunier 2009:227–230). Kabila responded to the threat from RCD (and Uganda and Rwanda) by integrating a large number of Rwandan ex-FAR/Interahamwe soldiers into the Congolese army. The Hutu rebels from ex-FAR had renamed themselves the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda (ALIR). The ALIR later split in two separate forces: one was fighting against Kabila alongside the Congolese army, while the other branch was fighting on the borders, launching attacks against Rwanda and Congolese Tutsi groups allied with Rwanda. The ALIR/PALIR was also launching attacks inside Rwanda. In 1999, ALIR killed a group of tourists inside Uganda and were listed as a terrorist organization by the US State Department (Feeley & ThomasJensen 2008:4). In early 2000, the two branches of ALIR/PALIR reunited and formed the FDLR. The FDLR was set up as a political party and formed a military wing, called the Combatant Forces Abacunguzi (FOCA), under Dr. Ignace Murwanashyaka. In an effort to promote peace in the region, a cease-fire accord was signed in Lusaka in 1999 under UN supervision. The goal of the Lusaka Peace Agreement, which was signed by Angola, DRC, Uganda, Rwanda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Namibia, was the removal of foreign military forces from the Congo. Despite the agreement, there was no lasting peace, and violence between the government and rebel groups continued unabated. At the same time, rebel groups fought each other, competing for political power and access to land and other resources. A new UN peacekeeping force (called the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, MONUC) was introduced, growing over the next years into one of the world’s largest peacekeeping missions (in 2010 MONUC was renamed United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo [MONUSCO]) In January 2001, Laurent De´sire´ Kabila was assassinated. His son, Joseph Kabila, took power and managed to obtain the withdrawal of some foreign troops. At that time, the DRC was deeply embroiled in a bloody war in which millions of people had died. As the new president, Kabila was fearful of inheriting a reputation as an ally of the ex-FAR/Interahamwe, the ge´nocidaires; he decided to outlaw every soldier associated with what was now the FDLR-FOCA (Feeley & Thomas-Jensen 2008). The remnants of the Hutu rebel forces, now identified as enemies of the Congo state, once

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again fled into the forest. Although collaboration between the FDLR and the Congo army had officially ended, the FDLR continued to ally itself with various armed groups, such as the local Congolese Mai-Mai militias, who supported the Hutu rebels with weapons (Reyntjens 2009:209). To this day, the FDLR remains a controversial and dangerous presence in the region. It is widely considered as tragic that the international community turned a blind eye to Laurent Kabila’s expedient alliance with the Hutu rebels in 1998 (Freely & Thomas-Jensen 2008). By 2006, a new rebel group, the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), composed mostly of Tutsis and backed by Rwanda, was actively pursuing the FDLR in the Congo with the support of Kinshasa. But by 2008, there was fighting between the Congolese army and the CNDP, and in 2009 Rwandan officials arrested Laurent Nkunda, leader of the CNDP. Since then, the FDLR has entered into loose, ad hoc alliances with anti-government Congolese armed groups or other paramilitary or local units. In 2005, the government of the Congo and the leadership of the FDLR met in Rome to sign a peace agreement (the Rome Agreement, March 2005). Rwanda refused to attend, arguing that the FDLR was a “genocidal military organization” (Thomas-Jensen & Feely 2008:7). The leadership of the FDLR agreed to end fighting, to stop their attacks on Rwanda, and to condemn the genocide, terrorism, and human rights violations (ibid.). The peace deal, however, has not been implemented by the FDLR; relations between Rwanda and the FDLR have remained hostile. Despite the signing of several peace agreements between more than 20 armed groups in the eastern Congo and military operations against the FDLR in 2009 and 2010 (at the time of writing there are ongoing military operations against the FDLR),7 no wider stability has been achieved. Currently, the FDLR is just one among many armed groups that continue to operate in the Congo.

Hutu Fighters in the Congo Crises Since the completion of my fieldwork in the Itombwe forest, the leadership structure and the internal organization of the FDLR have changed several times. While the group was generally spoken about at the time as a highly structured political and military organization at the time I conducted

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fieldwork, more recent reports prepared by the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2016) indicate that in May 2016, there was a formal split, stemming from internal leadership conflicts. More than 50 officers defected and created a new group called the Conseil National pour le Renoveau et la de´mocratie-Ubwiyunge (CNRD). While figures remain speculative, the latest report by the Group of Experts (2016) estimates that the number of combatants dropped substantially in 2016 after the split. Initially the FDLR headed up a force of 15,000–20,000 soldiers (Rodriguez 2011). In 2009, the International Crisis Group estimated that there were about 6,000 combatants, and according to a Small Arms Survey in 2016 there are an estimated 1,100 combatants remaining (2016:3), together with an unknown number of dependents who move with the fighters and live under their supervision. The account that follows is based on my own research in the field and by the small number of available historical accounts of the FDLR, most of them collected by human rights organizations such as the Pole Institute (2010), the International Crisis Group (2009), and Human Rights Watch (2009). At the time of writing it is impossible to tell how the organizational splits may develop further, how they will impact on the structure and functioning of the armed groups, and what the future holds for the fighters, their family members, and their civilian dependents. Historically, what has made the FDLR unique in relation to other armed groups in eastern Congo is not only their highly structured political and military organization but also their links to the global arena. Until at least 2012, and perhaps more recently, it is most likely that the rebel leaders were receiving financial and logistical support from members living in diaspora in other countries.8 And although the Hutu fighters carry out armed operations inside the Congo, its leadership was until recently controlling the group from abroad; the president of the political wing until 2009, Ignace Murwanashyaka, was based in Germany for many years. Various human rights reports have stated that Murwanashyaka was not in Rwanda during the genocide but was elected as president of the FDLR by the “committee of directors,” a committee that brings together about 30 electors from the political and military wing (Pole Institute 2010). The Pole Institute (2010) further notes that since Murwanashyaka cannot be directly linked to the Rwandan genocide, the elections were most likely a strategy to camouflage any connections between the FDLR and the ge´nocidaires. From his base in

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Germany he remained in close contact with the FDLR soldiers via telephone and the Internet, and money was transferred to the Congo through international banking systems and Western Union (Pole Institute 2010). For years he used these means to lead his soldiers in military operations in the Congo while he obtained a PhD degree from a German university. Murwanashyaka visited the rebel camps in the Congo on several occasions and, according to the Pole Institute, when in the Congo he traveled with 30 personal bodyguards and distributed money to his soldiers. These international visits were made possible by his hidden identity: he traveled on Ugandan and German passports (Pole Institute 2010:50). In November 2009, the German government arrested Murwanashyaka and his deputy Straton Musoni, and they were later found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In the eastern Congo, acting from mountaintops in very isolated and remote territories, the Hutu rebels can be characterized as being organized like “a state within a state” (Pole Institute 2010:9). The political wing of the FDLR established a government cabinet and various commissions, such as finance, defense, political, social and education, gender, foreign relations, and human rights (see also Pole Institute 2010:25). The high command, based at the headquarters of the military wing (FOCA) in Kalonge in North Kivu assigned military tasks to its soldiers spread out in various armed units and military brigades across both North and South Kivu. The armed wing, as Marina Rafti (2006) and Marı´a Rodriguez (2011) report, was designed in similar ways to a conventional army, with military offices and various departments, including intelligence, personnel, operations, logistics, and civil affairs (Rafti 2006:11). The internal hierarchical structure of the FDLR provides significant insights into how the rebels have managed, over many years, to maintain one of the most cohesive armed forces in eastern Congo. Despite living in isolation, the rebel leaders of each division, battalion, or armed unit kept in close contact with the leadership through the use of modern communications technology; for example, solar-generated electricity for the recharging of batteries and radio and satellite systems to make phone calls where there was no mobile phone reception. The FDLR-FOCA developed an internal control system to prevent soldiers from deserting. In one of the most comprehensive reports, which is based on interviews with ex-FDLR members, the FDLR-FOCA is reported as having its own military police and military companies stationed around

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the headquarters to prevent soldiers from escaping and as security measures to protect the high command (Romkema 2007:37). Each battalion also included a CRAP (Commando de Recherche et d’Action en Profondeur) unit, which was tasked with carrying out special operations, such as infiltrations into Rwanda as well as looting operations (ibid.). The FDLR attempted to attack Rwanda on two occasions, in 2001 and 2006, but both operations failed. Although there have not been any major attacks in recent years, the FDLR continues to plan attacks against the Rwandan government and carry out small “terrorist” attacks. In January 2012, for example, the FDLR was accused guilty of launching grenade attacks in Rwanda that killed two people in Kigali (see, for example BBC:2012). Because of the lack of accurate information, there is much speculation about the FDLR’s true military capacity. During the years when the FDLR was collaborating with Kabila’s army and later with local armed groups, they regularly obtained weapons and ammunition from the Congolese army (Romkema 2007). Since 2002, when the relations between the army and the FDLR changed, they have relied on ad hoc opportunities, such as looting and stealing; alternatively they obtain weapons and ammunition as booty from armed clashes. Although the FDLR has been customarily well equipped with various weapons, such as guns, machine guns, grenades, mortars, AK47s, and sometimes heavier arms (Romkema 2007:42). Hans Romkema has noted that the actual quantity of arms remains unknown; moreover, if the FDLR had to fight for a prolonged period, it was estimated that they would run out of reserves in about two months (Romkema 2007). Whether they have ever had the capacity to carry out large-scale attacks in the eastern provinces is also a matter for speculation. Ex-soldiers told Romkema that planning for future attacks was primarily used as a strategy by leaders to keep the ideological and political goals in front of group members as a means to boost the fighting spirit of the combatants (Romkema 2007:34). Despite periodic internal leadership struggles, it is important not to underestimate the impact of the FDLR in the Kivu regions. Besides seizing military control over large territories in the two provinces and over a hundred military units (bases, brigades, battalions, police, soldiers, and intelligence bases) FDLR members in many areas have established their bases close to the Congolese civilian population and have often intermarried with it. This proximity has further blurred the boundaries between combatants

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and civilians in the rebel camps where civilian members of the group carry weapons, and where many neighboring communities live under armed control. After living in Congolese society for nearly two decades, the rebels have established relatively stable economic networks, such as farming, illegal taxation, trade in minerals, mineral exploitation, control of river crossings, smuggling, and selling and buying cattle throughout the Congo region (see, for example, Feeley & Thomas-Jensen 2008; Pole Institute 2010; Romkema 2007). Access to economic networks varies between the regions. Some camps may function as a base for economic activity; others, like the camp that was the focus of my fieldwork, are dedicated to military and intelligence activities alone. In some areas, the rebels have integrated well into the Congolese social setting, at times sharing land, housing, and plots of farmland with the locals. In other areas, they have been directly linked to the mining industry, involved in entrepreneurial activities such as selling and transporting minerals to intermediaries in the two Kivu provinces (see, for example, Rodriguez 2011). Some FDLR groups engage in small farming and sell crops and other produce, such as fruit, vegetables, and groundnuts, at local markets. And in Mwenga, a small community located in South Kivu province, the rebels collaborated with the pastoral ethnic Tutsis by purchasing and reselling cows at local markets (Pole Institute 2010). However, the extent of revenue from these economic activities, as well as the level of financial and logistical support from the diaspora in other countries, remains a matter of speculation. Despite the long period of time that the FDLR has been active on Congolese soil (and also have Congolese members and supporters) and their, at times, successful integration into the local Congolese communities, it is evident that the FDLR still retain a powerful collective identity of themselves as exiles. This exile identity provides a key to understanding not only the commitment of the rebels to their military practice and goals over the years but also the political and diplomatic obstacles to disarming the group.

Post-Genocide Gray Zones Since the Hutu rebels fled into exile in the aftermath of the genocide in 1994, they have had one major goal: to return to Rwanda as a ruling political group. While this goal, rooted as it is in the history of the Hutu and the

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legacy of the genocide, is well incorporated into the ideology of the FDLRFOCA, the military, political, and diplomatic realities of the Congo war zone and the Rwanda post-genocide scenario have, with the passage of time, impacted the FDLR’s position in the current debate and in the Congo war, as well as their ideologies, political strategies, and military tactics. The controversy surrounding the Rwandan genocide is perhaps the greatest challenge for all actors: not only was the genocide universally condemned by the global structures of international law and human rights, but the memory of the genocide and its meaning remains a source of deep hostility and controversy between Rwanda and the FDLR. Ever since the international community classified the mass killings of the Tutsis as genocide, the Hutu rebels have gone to great lengths to distance themselves from any accusations of their being ge´nocidaires or perpetrators. While it is true today that the majority of the Hutu fighters and their family members cannot be linked to any participation in the genocide (because they are too young or were recruited in the aftermath), the FDLR as a whole also consistently claims that it cannot be held responsible for decisions that were made by high-ranking leaders decades ago. In a bid during the last decade to win public sympathy for their point of view, the FDLR has used official meetings, the broadcast media, pamphlets distributed across the Kivu regions, and a website to assert their innocence of participation in the genocide and to communicate that, above all, they are seeking a peaceful solution to the situation (the website is no longer in use). Through their official adoption of this rhetoric of peace, locally known as the “inter-Rwandan dialogue,” the FDLR leadership articulates their desire to return to their home country and to reintegrate peacefully into Rwandan society. In the public arena, the FDLR has emphasized that they are willing to drop their guns, to begin peace negotiations with the current government in Kigali, and to seek a diplomatic solution. But both Rwanda and the international actors have received the FDLR’s call for a peace dialogue with suspicion. In the opinion of the international community and UN peacekeeping missions, as well as the government of Rwanda, the covert purpose of this dialogue is not to effect a Hutu repatriation by peaceful measures but to use it as a means to retake political power in Kigali: to wrest the current regime from Tutsi control and bring it under Hutu domination (see, for example, Pole Institute 2010; Rafti 2006). In summary, while some of the international actors argue that the FDLR’s expression of peaceful intentions is a relatively harmless ploy to

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make the organization look good in the eyes of the international community, others insist that the leaders of the FDLR still hold extremist views, believing that the Tutsi regime is a dictatorship and that justice in Rwanda can be achieved only by overthrowing it by means of Hutu power. Still other agencies—for example, church associations and local NGOs in the Congo—argue that if peace is to be achieved, the international community must be prepared to negotiate with the rebels. While the goals and tactics of the peace framework are still hotly debated throughout the whole region, the Rwandan government, supported by international opinion, has expressed fear of an ethnic dimension to the Hutu agenda and of the likelihood of a new genocide against the Tutsis. For this reason, Rwanda refuses to negotiate with the FDLR, seeing it as a threat to post-genocide stability and security in Rwanda. Rather than opting for a peaceful settlement, Rwandan officials insist that the ge´nocidaires must first be brought to justice and continue to argue that the FDLR is a group with a “genocide ideology.” As expressed in a news article concerning the Rwandan minister of local government in 2013: “The FDLR . . . is a terrorist group based in Eastern DR Congo that comprises perpetrators of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. . . . The genocide claimed over one million innocent lives, with the Rwandan people continuously demanding for those responsible to be brought to justice. The FDLR have continued to kill people in the Eastern DRC and maintain the agenda to exterminate all Tutsi. [Regarding peace negotiations with the FDLR,] it is the unwavering government policy not to negotiate with people responsible for killing innocent Rwandans during the Genocide” (Tumwebaze 2013). In response to this atmosphere of deep suspicion, the FDLR has publicly insisted that they are not circulating anti-Tutsi propaganda and that they hold no “genocide ideology” (Spittaeles & Hilgert 2008:10). While it is hard to assess the extent to which ethnicity is actually a threat in the current situation, the contemporary meaning of ethnicity in Rwanda must be understood within the broader framework of the current debate and political discourse around how the “truth” about the genocide is being mediated (Thomson 2011). In a situation where Kagame has received substantial international aid, and where the international community has accepted the interpretation of the genocide in line with the Tutsi victim/Hutu perpetrator discourse, it can be argued that only one version of history is being transmitted. A number of scholars have commented that this one-sidedness has, in fact, led to an increase in ethnic polarization and divisiveness in

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post-genocide Rwanda (e.g., Burnet 2009:80, Hintjens 2008; King 2010). There is a growing agreement that although the Hutu forces must be held accountable for the genocide, Kagame and his party cannot be exonerated as entirely innocent victims. The massacre of 100,000 Hutu civilians (or more) in the refugee camps in the eastern Congo is one example of the willingness of the Tutsi government in Rwanda to engage in their own genocidal action (see, for example, Reyntjens 2009). The FDLR view is that it has the right to fight back against Kagame and the RPF. Following Rafti, to fight for their rights corresponds to the RPF’s discourse in 1990 when it invaded Rwanda. “The RPF claimed to be fighting for the right of Tutsi refugees to return to Rwanda and the FDLR similarly upholds the right of Hutu refugees to return. The Rwandan refugee issue remains unresolved and it lies at the heart of the protracted Rwandan conflict. Ethnic resentments and the cycle of violence consequently endure” (Rafti 2006:11). It goes without question that the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide must be brought to justice, but it is also important to point out that the prevailing monolithic, one-dimensional representation of the history of interethnic conflict in the country has led to a new wave of political instability. Although ethnicist rhetoric has been officially banned in Rwanda, scholars are increasingly arguing that the ethnic division between the Hutus and Tutsis, although covert, is more pronounced than ever (e.g., Reyntjens 2009). As noted by Lemarchand, “guilt and innocence do not run parallel to ethnic lines. But in Rwanda today, guilt and innocence are increasingly becoming ethnicised” (Lemarchand 2009:90). This is also true of the ongoing political discourse, in which the opposing sides continue to manipulate meaning, to construct history from contested narratives, and to use it for political purposes; thus distorted, ethnicity is once again transformed into a symbol of power. According to some observers, for as long as Rwanda and DRC maintain hostilities, Kagame’s government has an additional political motive for keeping the FDLR in exile (Autesserre 2006; Rodriguez 2011). Rodriguez writes: “The existence of the FDLR, however, has been used by the Government of Rwanda as an excuse to justify authoritarian measures aimed at marginalizing all opposition to the regime, and at increasingly concentrating power in the hands of the head of state. It can be said, therefore, that the FDLR represents a problem for Rwanda, but a problem that has sometimes proved to be convenient for Kagame and his regime” (Rodriguez 2011:178). While Kagame’s government and the international community persists in characterizing the FDLR group as nothing more than terrorists and war

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criminals, on their side members of the FDLR continue to depict themselves as refugees, pushed out to the margins and operating on foreign soil, who should be granted refugee status, protection, and rights. In this light there seems little prospect that the tensions between the government of Rwanda and the FDLR can be resolved.

The Politics of Refugee Status It is in the context of the long history of Hutu subjugation in Rwanda that the Hutu rebels claim to be a people in exile who fight on foreign soil to regain power in their country of origin (see also Perera 2013). A shared memory of a history of exclusion and marginalization has become an extremely important reference point to define who they are. The concept of exile for the Hutus in diaspora is based on a collective narrative of “what really happened” prior to and after the genocide. However, the narrative of the FDLR also firmly embraces a global view of human rights, international law, and refugee politics. The FDLR believe strongly that they have been neglected by the international human rights and refugee organizations. In support of their claim to refugee status, the FDLR argue that they were born in refugee camps (rather than in military units) and that the majority of their members were initially refugees fleeing impending genocide. Consequently, they should be granted the kind of refugee status that would provide rights and protection under international law, including a tent or other shelter, food, medication, and the right to return to Rwanda. But given the link between the Hutu rebels and the Rwandan genocide, and because many of Hutu exiles are in fact operating as armed combatants, the international community has, as noted by Suda Perera (2013), thus far refused to grant official refugee status to members of the FDLR. The UNHCR, following the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, offers protection only to those who are legally defined as refugees. According to the UNHCR definition, a refugee is “a person who is outside his or her country of nationality or habitual residence; has a well-founded fear of being persecuted because of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion; and is unable or unwilling to avail him- or herself of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution” (see Article 1A (2), cited in UNHCR 2011:3).

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While a person who fulfills these criteria can be granted rights, protection, and assistance by the international community, any person who has “committed a crime against peace, a war crime, a crime against humanity or a serious non-political crime outside their country of refuge [or] is guilty of acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations” (UNHCR 2011:3) is not permitted any kind of help or assistance under international law. Since the leadership and many combatants of the FDLR have been perpetrating violence in the eastern Congo, they do not meet the criteria of being refugees (see also Perera 2013 for a similar argument and longer discussion on refugees and identity politics in the Kivus). As a consequence, the Hutu rebels are trapped in a situation for which there are few alternatives other than to remain in rebel-controlled communities; they have no legal standing as Congolese, Rwandan, or international refugees. However, while the FDLR as a whole argues that its members are forced to remain in exile where they have no rights and no protection, some claim to belong to the Kivu territories and put forward demands for local citizenship (Perera 2013:576). While the group continues to be combative in the Kivu regions, the UN-backed joint military assault on the FDLR by Rwanda and Congo has further shaped a strong conviction among the rebels that they are being pressured on all sides, that there is no solution in place, and that labeling them as ge´nocidaires reduces their status to nothing more than that of perpetrators. And in contradiction to their demands for refugee status and local citizenship, the rebels’ perspective of themselves continues to be one of an opposition in exile, an enemy of the Rwandan government fighting for freedom and justice. For as long as the question of FDLR’s culpability remains unresolved, and in the absence of peace negotiations, it is likely that the rebel soldiers, together with their civilian dependents, will continue to use the forests of the eastern Congo as a site for survival and as a “moving military base” for their operations as active belligerents in the Congo war zone. In summary, the history of war, violence, and political crisis in Rwanda and the eastern Congo has been shaped by multiple factors. More than four million people have died during the course of the war, with its accompanying political and social upheaval. A culture of habitual violence has evolved over time, bringing to the surface a plethora of extremist ideological positions, racist propaganda, and false rumors, all of them leading to further fear, rage, and anxiety. Given the long history of political, economic, social

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exclusion and marginalization of groups from both sides of the ethnic divide, contested (and conflicted) narratives and political grandstanding about truth and history prevail—and are still in the making. Although more than 20 years have passed since the Rwandan genocide took place, it remains a moral and political controversy that continues to permeate and divide opinion across the entire Great Lakes region as the history of the region and its shifting conflicts is variously constructed and described by the different protagonists. In that region today, we find violently contesting versions of the genocide and not just competing but diametrically opposed explanations of its history, often provoking mutually reciprocated tension. Opinion is polarized over who is guilty, who is to blame, and who is a victim and who is a perpetrator. The Hutu rebels in the hills of the eastern Congo believe that they are victims of a long history of subjugation; the Tutsis in Rwanda argue that they are victims of genocide and continue to insist that they cannot, on any account, negotiate with the ge´nocidaires. Spilling over from the long history of political violence in Rwanda, the mass reciprocal violence in the eastern Congo is beset by confusion and instability. In the meantime, Rwanda has become the recipient of massive international aid. The country has moved forward and made significant political, social, and economic progress, and as it does so, the official story of the genocide and its aftermath is being rewritten. In this version, the mass killings of Hutus that took place to avenge the Tutsi genocide is conveniently forgotten. In the mountainous zones of the eastern Congo, the exiled Hutu combatants find themselves in political limbo. They dwell in a gray zone, caught between the governments of Rwanda and the Congo and the rebels argue that they are shunned by the international community, which refuses to provide them with any assistance because they function as an armed group. In this gray zone, the exiled Hutu rebels continue to operate as a political-military movement, perpetrating violence on local civilians and clashing with other armed groups. It is not just the rebels who are trapped in the zone however; in addition to the combatants, their community includes thousands of Rwandan civilian dependents who are equally prisoners of a historical past, imprisoned by decisions taken by Hutu leaders two decades ago and by the violence of national and international political conflict. The question of what exactly happened 20 years ago in Rwanda is difficult to answer. But how do these rebels themselves, and their civilian

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dependents, speak about the history of their current situation? How is political and military life organized in the remote hills of the eastern Congo? What exactly are they fighting for? The following chapters are an exploration of how life is organized and experienced in one FDLR rebel camp. Through this lens it may be possible to see how the genocide and war in Congo has produced a situation of liminality in a wider context of social and political instability.

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CHAPTER 2

Rainbow Brigade: Life in a Rebel Camp

A group of child soldiers and teenage rebel boys are dancing around a fire in the dark. They have just returned to the camp, deep in the jungle, after a brutal raid on a local village. The atmosphere is tense, loud, chaotic. Boys and young men drink home-brewed beer and sing loudly as they twirl around the fireplace in torn clothes and bandanas. The boys, dirty and thin, some of them barefoot, are all armed with heavy weapons. One of the rebels, Johnny, wears a white wedding dress that he stole during the raid on the village earlier that day. The dress hangs loosely around his chest. It is spattered with the blood of an innocent man he shot in cold blood a few hours earlier. Having killed the civilian, Johnny and another teenage combatant went on to rape a woman repeatedly, stopping only when she was unconscious and leaving her to bleed to death on the ground. As he dances, Johnny waves his Kalashnikov in the air, in time with the rhythm of the loud singing. A warlord takes one of the boys aside. Looking deep into the boy’s eyes, he covers his face with traditional medicine to invoke a fearless, fighting spirit in the boy and to stimulate his desire to kill. This is a scene, one of the many violent, disturbing, and frightening scenes from the Hollywood film Johnny Mad Dog, about war in contemporary Africa. Films such as Johnny Mad Dog and Blood Diamonds, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio, contribute to a stereotyped public perception of how rebel groups, and particularly child soldiers, conduct themselves in war. Everyday life on the front line is depicted as a frenzy of directionless violence in which young boys, often intoxicated by home-brewed alcohol or high on drugs, recklessly kill everyone in their path. While this cinematic imagery is crude, sensational, and distorted, it is also grounded in a certain reality. Increasing scholarly attention to the front lines of African civil wars

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over the last decade have informed us that young boys are frequently forced to commit the most brutal acts of violence; that it is often these young combatants who carry out raids, killings, torture, kidnapping, and sometimes wholesale massacre of civilian populations, voluntarily or involuntarily on behalf of the warlords. As new technologies lead to increasingly lighter, simpler weapons that can be easily carried and used by the young, research from countries such as Sierra Leone, Liberia, Uganda, Nigeria, and the DRC has shown that child soldiers and teenagers routinely fight on the front lines of war (see, for example, Honwana 2006; Honwana & de Boeck 2005; Rosen 2005). These young combatants are often recruited by force, through trickery, or by abduction. As the rebels pass through villages, children and teenagers are seized from their communities and taken to rebel camps in the bush. Easy to manipulate and train, the youngsters undergo a rite of passage and internalize a “rebel identity.” Drugs and alcohol are reported to be a widespread means of coping with the stress and uncertainty of daily existence and to have become an essential part of war and rebel life. However, not all child combatants are recruited by force; others may join rebel groups because they lack any other possibilities in life; because they are unemployed, socially excluded, or feel the need for protection; or because they harbor hopes of gaining an income, food, or security (Beneduce et al. 2006). The evidence also shows that girls as well as boys are drawn into the violence of civil war by rebel forces. While boys usually end up as soldiers, girls are used as so-called bush wives (see, for example, Coulter 2009), in the camp, or for domestic work; they also perform other functions such as spying, trading, and collecting information from local villagers. It cannot be denied that groups like the FDLR carry out widespread abductions of children and bend them to violent purpose. However, what I observed in the Hutu Rainbow Brigade rebel camp was different in many respects from what is presented by the existing literature and particularly by films such as Johnny Mad Dog. Instead of finding young, angry, and drunken rebel boys, I found a community of uprooted families living under appalling conditions. The majority of the fighters were not teenagers or children but middle-aged men between 35 and 50 years old. The soldiers lived with their wives and children in a geographically isolated zone in the mountainous rain forest. Some of them came from Rwanda, and as young Hutus during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, it is possible that they played an active role in the massacres; however, many of those I met in the camp

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did not flee Rwanda because they were genocidal perpetrators, but because they sought refuge and protection in the DRC from Tutsis bent on revenge against their Hutu persecutors. Others, like the fighters’ wives and children, had a long history of traumatic experiences, having witnessed the killing of their families and having fled the genocide in Rwanda, followed by decades of refugee life and continuous war in the eastern Congo. Yet others were Congolese Rwandan refugees or other ethnicities that had little to do with the 1994 event but, instead of remaining in refugee camps in the Congo, were recruited from the camps by the FDLR and ended up living in the forest with the rebel fighters. While conducting my research in the camp, I observed that it was not the sense of danger, the presence of soldiers and weapons, or the prevailing military atmosphere that exclusively determined the tenor of daily life. Rather, it was the normality—the hierarchy and control, routines and order, and the lack of a fighting spirit in the midst of a war zone—that dominated. The camp was a community whose everyday life was characterized by boredom and isolation; by the perpetual struggle against dirt, cold, hunger, and sickness; and by the constant challenge of finding adequate food and water. Living on the frontlines of war in this situation was not just “terror as usual,” to borrow an expression from Michael Taussig (1992), nor was it chaotic or brutal in the ways depicted by the media and on film. Life in the Rainbow Brigade camp, like military life in general, consisted largely of long periods of waiting for something to happen. In the interim, the fighters and their families lived a seemingly normal existence. They arranged religious celebrations, and they routinely attended the churches several times a day. I never saw the fighters drunk, and they always behaved politely to me and, more important, to each other. Most of the fighters were well dressed in military uniforms. They polished their boots and shaved everyday using a knife and a piece of mirror. They cleaned their bamboo shacks daily and they went to bed early. If we are to understand the texture of life in the rebel camp, of how this community habitually subsists when not mobilizing for combat, we need to reconsider a number of assumptions. We need to move beyond simplistic and stereotyped images of civil war in Africa as a celebration of meaningless violence under the command of ruthless warlords. In the following pages I aim to provide insights into some of the routines and ordinary activities of the inhabitants of a rebel camp, as well as their coping strategies for dealing with anxiety, the threat of the enemy, isolation, and exile. By focusing on the daily lives of the fighters and their families, I hope

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Figure 2. One of the soldiers’s huts in the rebel camp.

to shed light on how these individuals view their situation and how they shape and articulate the conditions governing their lives.

Rainbow Brigade: The Camp The rebel camp where I carried out the fieldwork for my research was located on a mountaintop in the midst of a thick, inaccessible, dense rain forest. It was surrounded by fog-shrouded mountains and many miles of wooded valleys. In this area, it was situated far from any modern amenities like running water, electricity, or mobile phone reception. Rainbow Brigade was a home, a hiding place, a sanctuary, and a community of about 300 inhabitants, roughly half of whom were male fighters of differing military rank; the other half was made up of women, elders, and children. Most of the women were married to the fighters; others described themselves as civilian dependents who had moved about with the rebels since the group was set up more than 20 years ago. At first sight, Rainbow Brigade seemed similar to any ordinary village. The discrepancy between an “ordinary village” and the rebel camp,

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however, soon became clear. The entire community was divided into two military encampments situated close to the top of two hills with a refugee settlement in the valley between them. On the surrounding mountains and hills, there stood a number of bamboo guard towers protecting the camp from unexpected visitors. Despite its beautiful natural surroundings, the camp itself was not a pretty sight. Built in the depths of the forest where sunlight rarely passed through the trees, it was a deeply shaded place in which the days were chilly and the nights were damp and cold. At night there were frequent, heavy rainstorms, when thunder echoed from the mountains and sudden lightning flashed over the camp. During the rainy season the temperature could plunge close to freezing. The recurrent heavy rainfall had turned the ground into an ocean of puddles, and the camp smelled moldy and rank as the damp odor of rotted tree stumps and mud mingled with the acrid scent of wood smoke billowing from the fireplaces. While the lowland areas of the Eastern Kivu province are rich in flora with spectacular green hills and colorful flowers, alive with birds and butterflies, the mountain base was devoid of beauty and color. When darkness descended over the camp, it was overrun by rats; termites ate the bamboo roofs and centipedes squirmed in the puddles. Shortly after our arrival at Rainbow Brigade camp, my coworkers and I were taken to meet with the military leaders. It struck me that everything in the camp was built of bamboo: the huts, the tables, the benches, and the fences surrounding the designated headquarters. As we waited, we could hear a crackling noise from a satellite phone; a vague moaning sound was coming from a radio lying on a table. A solar panel connected to a large battery was propped up against one of the walls, and a few meters away military uniforms were hanging on the fence to dry. Farther away, some heavily armed soldiers were standing by a tree, observing my coworkers and me with curiosity. That first meeting with the rebel leaders was tense. We were taken to one of the huts where we were told to wait for the “colonel.” A young man in a striped T-shirt, no more than 20 years old, came in to serve us tea in plastic cups. He looked nervous and insecure about how to behave around strangers in the camp; he worked quickly, avoiding eye contact as he handed us our tea, and quickly disappeared. Some minutes later the colonel arrived accompanied by four soldiers, who I later learned were highranking intelligence and military officers, as well as by his personal bodyguard, who maintained a steady grip on his Kalashnikov. Colonel Frank

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was the camp leader. He was a man in his late forties, originally from a small farming village in Rwanda, and spoke competent English with a marked local accent. He always wore an olive-green military uniform and polished boots. One by one, the officers greeted us politely, but the mood was strained as Colonel Frank asked us a number of routine questions: Who were we? Who had paid us to come to the camp? What goals did we wish to achieve? What about our professions? What was our interest in the Congo war? When I responded that we had come to the camp to research the living conditions of the camp community, the officers were visibly relaxed by my answer and told us that we were welcome to stay in the camp and that they were happy to show their lives to the rest of the world and demonstrate that they were not “killers in the bush,” or ge´nocidaires, but ordinary people. However, they quickly added that they would on no account provide us with any detailed information about their military activities. After this brief meeting, we were taken to one of the huts close to where the highranking officers lived. They called it Hotel Forest, a neatly built house containing a bed made of bamboo poles and a small table and bench. In the middle of the hut there was a small space for the fireplace. As a gesture of hospitality, the officers sent their bodyguards to watch out for my coworkers and me. During the rest of our stay in the camp, they looked after us, washed our clothes, and cleaned and polished our shoes; they brought us hot water and soap and cleaned the courtyard outside the hut. Over time I learned from the FDLR commanders that the camp was set up in 2010 as a security and intelligence liaison unit. The designated role of the camp was to collect information from the surrounding areas in the South Kivu province, analyze the political turmoil, observe the activities of other military camps in the region, and report the information back to the headquarters of the FDLR-FOCA. The unit operated as a satellite to the FDLR headquarters, which was located in the North Kivu province. The officers told me that it took about a week to walk to the high command, trekking through difficult terrain. Although the camp had existed for about two years prior to my visits there in 2011 and 2012, it was not a permanent base but instead served as a temporary home and military outpost. As a security precaution, and as the war evolves and changes, the rebels constantly migrate with their civilian dependents from place to place in the region. Jeffery, a middle-rank fighter, said, “We are always on the run. For 20 years we have been moving up and down the hills.”

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Some of the combatants were obliged to remain almost entirely within the confines of camp; for their own protection and security, the highranking officers rarely left the camp or the forest. Colonel Frank said, “Sometimes in the night, when it’s dark and no one can identify my face, I leave the camp and go to the peak where I can make a phone call. But most of the time, I stay here.” The lower-ranking soldiers were, however, much more mobile; they were always on the move, changing brigades, locations, military positions, and ranks. Thus, every day, new soldiers appeared in the camp while others left the mountain and circulated among the many other bases that the FDLR has strategically positioned in the South Kivu province. In one respect, Rainbow Brigade functioned as a temporary refuge where the inhabitants hid from the ongoing war and enemy groups; at the same time, it was a strategic center where the rebel leaders analyzed and planned their military operations. Every aspect of life in the camp was organized around maintaining security and respect for military rank. Even the spatial construction of the camp and the quality of life of the inhabitants was a reflection of the rigid hierarchical organization of the rebel group.

The Spatial Construction of the Camp: An Expression of Hierarchy Between the high trees on the peak of the mountain, with its expansive view of hills and treetops, lay the area of the camp occupied by the highranking officers. Here there was a cluster of six bamboo huts, which accommodated the two colonels and about seven other officers and other highranking leaders with titles such as “intelligence” and “head of security.” While these high-ranking officers rarely spoke about their own backgrounds, and none would ever have admitted to having participated in the Rwandan genocide, some of them had reportedly done so and were sought for genocide and war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha. Others among the high-ranking officers were Rwandan “refugees” who had joined the rebel groups in Congo; these often had a history of war crimes in the Congo but not necessarily in Rwanda. During the many years of war, these officers had achieved high military rank. They lived in small well-constructed huts with roofs covered in banana leaves and grass. Each house had its own small outdoor area furnished with a wooden bench and a table neatly decorated with a tablecloth.

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The houses were usually only a few square meters in size, with little space for anything except the bed and a fireplace, which was usually placed in the middle of the hut and was an essential source of warmth in the cold mountain nights. Inside the huts, the leaders kept a few personal belongings— some pots and pans, plates and cutlery, an extra pair of boots or a uniform, and sometimes a satellite phone. Some of them also had a toothbrush, a small mirror, or a radio, and one of the leaders had a laptop (although lacking a battery). The area where the leadership lived was well organized, the huts were well cleaned, and their personal belongings were tucked away under the bed or hanging on the walls to avoid dirt and dust. Their weapons usually leaned against the entrance of the hut. Behind the cluster of huts, there was a small washing area surrounded by a wooden fence. The washrooms were built on top of a deep hole in the ground, which functioned as a toilet; there were also latrines further away in the forest area. To avoid sickness and the spread of disease, hygiene was taken seriously in the camp, and the latrines were well separated from the huts and from the kitchen, which stood opposite the washing area. The kitchen was built as an open structure under a roof of bamboo and consisted, more or less, of a fireplace, a few pots, buckets for carrying water, and a small shelter for storing dry food, such as milk powder, a little rice, beans, and sometimes tea and sugar. Strategically close to the huts used by the leadership, there was a cluster of four even smaller huts that housed the leaders’ bodyguards. They were generally younger men who had either grown up in the camp in the forest or in one of the other military brigades controlled by the FDLR. They were sometimes referred to as bodyguards, but at other times they were just called housekeepers. Day and night, the officers were well protected by these younger, lower-ranking soldiers. Some of the bodyguards’ huts had a bed inside, whereas others were more like small shelters to protect them from the rain; many of the bodyguards slept on the ground or outside their leaders’ huts. They had few belongings; they often wore rubber sandals instead of boots, and ordinary clothes instead of a uniform. However, they carried heavy weapons. They worked in shifts, often standing outside their leaders’ huts in the heavy rain all night to protect their officers from potential danger. The bodyguards were not only responsible for the safety of the officers but also collected firewood and kept the fires burning throughout the night while the officers slept. During the day, they cleaned the camp, brushed away fallen leaves, fixed the roofs on their leaders’ huts, washed

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Figure 3. A group of fighters in the area where the soldiers live.

their leaders’ clothes, carried water from the rivers, peeled potatoes, and prepared food for their leaders. Further down the slope of the mountain lived a large group of fighters. These fighters, about 50–70 young men, were often referred to as “simple soldiers” and had ranks such as lieutenant, commander, second commander, and so on. The majority of the simple soldiers were in their midthirties or early forties, while others were mere teenagers. Typical of these simple soldiers was Alexander. Alexander was in his early forties. He had arrived in the eastern Congo in the aftermath of the genocide. The violence in the Congo escalated soon after his arrival, and he said that Rwandan soldiers occasionally attacked the refugee camps where he and his family were sheltered: “We fought back,” he said, “and things were getting tense.” The Rwandan regime was invading the Congo. To fight back against them, the exiles allied themselves with Kabila’s troops who were using Rwandan Hutu refugees as a proxy force to fight foreign armed groups. During a period of two months, Alexander crossed the Congo on foot all the way to Kinshasa to continue the fighting. From Kinshasa, he was sent to Brazzaville, the twin-capital to Kinshasa, on the opposite side of the Congo River.

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Here he allied himself with former Rwandan Hutu refugees, and from Brazzaville they walked back to the eastern territories, crossing a region as big as Eastern Europe on foot in three to four months. By this time, he said, Kabila had turned his back on the FDLR, and he and his companions had to flee for shelter in the mountains with thousands of other Rwandan refugees. For 20 years he had been on the run, moving with the FDLR from camp to camp, hill to hill, mountain to mountain. When I asked him to explain what the FDLR stands for, he turned quiet. He asked for a pen and paper so that he could write it down. I handed my pen over together with a page from my notebook. He wrote it down slowly. He then pointed at the capital letter F that he had written down, and said in French, “Forces.” He continued, pointing at the letters one by one, “De´mocratiques du Libe´ration du Rwanda.” He repeated the acronym a few times just to make sure he had got it right. When I asked him what the goal of the FDLR is, he answered promptly: “To return to Rwanda.” While his dream was to return to Rwanda, he, like the other members of the group, feared what would happen to them if they returned. “Kagame’s soldiers will kill us immediately,” he said. “Once I cross the border, I will be killed, I know that.” The only thing he could do, he said, was to pray to God that his situation would change. Like Alexander, many simple soldiers had not experienced life outside of the camps or the militarized groups for over two decades; they had lived half of their lives in exile in the mountainous regions of the DRC. It was common for fighters like him to relate stories and historical events in a rather unclear and fragmented way. They confused years and dates, they mixed up facts and details. Many of them hardly seemed to know what the goal of the FDLR was but, if pressed for an answer, would say that the purpose of the group and the fighting was to return to their country of origin. The simple soldiers lived together in one area grouped together toward the slope of the hill. Their small huts were built in a dark, shaded clearing under the trees. They lived in similar fashion to the bodyguards: in small huts, no larger than two square meters, with just enough room for a bed built, as usual, of bamboo, and a roof so low that one could barely stand up straight. The area that housed these officers was clean and well organized. Again, there was a kitchen and a latrine built well away from the huts and the cooking and eating areas. Uniforms hung in the trees to dry, the dishes were kept clean, and boots were mostly kept outside the huts. Personal belongings were kept inside; these were mostly things the soldiers

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had found or stolen—shoes, pots and pans, a uniform, ammunition, batteries, petrol cans to carry water, a guitar. Some of the soldiers had mirrors, knives for shaving, and small pieces of soap. Next to the simple soldiers’ encampment was what the leadership referred to as the headquarters—the busiest and noisiest place in the camp. The headquarters consisted of a few large bamboo barracks, with rows of benches inside, designed to accommodate a larger number of soldiers. It was the camp center, where the leaders and soldiers met to discuss political updates, where they planned military maneuvers, and where they analyzed the prevailing surrounding situation. It was also the place where the leaders communicated with officers based in other military brigades in the North and South Kivu territories. Wires and cables, hanging haphazardly between the trees, surrounded the headquarters. The wires were connected to a solar panel propped up against a tree in the middle of the area. The solar panel was connected to a motorcycle battery that provided power to the satellite and mobile phones, although intermittently, because the constant cloud cover meant that it could take as much as a week to charge the solar panels. A crackling, clicking noise from radios and satellite phones emanated from the headquarters day and night. Further down the slope the path led to two churches, one on each side of the hill. Most of the camp’s population belonged to either the Protestant church or the Catholic church; a small number of people belonged to the Pentecostal church. The church that people belonged to, they said, depended on which one they had traditionally attended prior to the genocide. Those who lived in the camp said that it was not important which church people belonged to—the important thing was that they did hold Christian beliefs of some kind. The Protestant church was built among the trees. It was neatly decorated with colorful fabrics, a tablecloth, and a podium with a crucifix beside the altar. Opposite the Protestant church was the Catholic church, likewise built of bamboo and decorated with colorful fabrics. The Catholic church was also the meeting place for the English club, where the camp population frequently gathered to practice English. A short distance away was a clearing that functioned as a meeting place for public speeches and military training. On the outskirts of the camp there was a school for the children; however, I was told that because the school lacked basic materials such as books, pens, and paper, it had been closed down a few months earlier. Near the school there were a few smaller buildings. Among these was the Pentecostal church, as well as a number of other

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small huts that were used as churches at nighttime because of their convenient proximity to the refugee camp, which was situated a little further down in the cleft between the two hills.

The Refugee Area The refugee camp consisted of about 70–100 small huts densely clustered together. Most of the people who lived in this camp, including the soldiers, called themselves refugees or civilians to emphasize that they did not belong to the military unit, that they had arrived in the Congo as refugees in the mid-1990s. The refugee population comprised men and women, elders and children. Most of these were “recruited” to the FDLR: some of these were taken by force, some “voluntarily” joined the rebels in the aftermath of the genocide, when they fled over the border to escape the mass violence in Rwanda. Since their arrival in the Congo, many of the women had voluntarily or involuntarily married rebel soldiers; they lived in the camp with their husbands and children, frequently claiming that they were more or less forced to do so.1 The children born in the camp had never experienced a life without war and had no idea of what life was like outside of their confined world. Some of the elders—defined as anyone over 50 years old—were exsoldiers now too old to fight; others were widows who lived in the camp without family members. Among their ranks were numerous “loyal supporters” of the military and the political ideology of the camp. Thus, the refugees were a mix of genders and ages and had widely differing life histories, experiences, and interpretations of life within and outside of the camp, and many among them insisted that they had not joined the rebel life voluntarily. They did not join the rebels in expectation of a better life, protection, or security but because, after the genocide, they simply had nowhere else to go; they lived in exile and had been inadvertently drawn into the politics of war. The refugee population lived in small huts that had leaking roofs and muddy floors. Unlike the soldiers’ housing, these huts were not carefully built of bamboo but poorly constructed from material from the forest. People generally complained about the rainwater leaking through the roof and the absence of blankets to protect themselves from the cold, damp nights. While some of the women lived together with their children and husbands,

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others, such as the widows, lived alone. One such woman, Madame Nathalie, lived in a small hut. She had been alone since her husband was killed in the war. She had no shoes. Her clothes were torn and her body was emaciated. Madame Nathalie complained of stomach cramps from the bad drinking water. Her house was completely empty save for a very few personal belongings; she had no clothes other than the ones she was wearing. She slept on a bamboo bench next to the fireplace located in the middle of the hut. When the rain leaked through the roof, the floor was turned to puddles, and she said that it was very hard to keep the fire burning through the night. The other refugees lived under similar conditions—a family of three to five people might live in a house only a few square meters in size with one communal bed. They had no plastic material to wrap around their houses to provide cover from the rain and cold, and most of them had no personal belongings other than perhaps a few cups and plates and cooking utensils, and these were often shared with other families. Many children lacked shoes and a spare set of clothes. Each family was responsible for its own household. However, because resources were scarce, some families shared petrol cans for carrying water, as well as pots and pans, which were shared between many households in the camp. Women gathered together daily to take turns peeling potatoes with the few knives available. While some families still had the blankets and plastic covers from their time in the refugee camps under the protection of UNHCR, I was told by two older men that since that time, they had rarely obtained new clothes, blankets, or cooking utensils: “The clothes we’re wearing now are the clothes we had on the day we left our country, Rwanda,” they said. On the other side of the slope occupied by the refugees, there was another military encampment where a smaller number of soldiers lived in approximately 20 small huts. These huts were strategically placed on the outskirts of the camp to guard the refugee area; they were located on the edge of the mountain with the entrance facing the hilltops. The soldiers living in the huts spent their days scanning the landscape and guarding the surrounding area. Behind the huts, there was a large marijuana plantation with well-grown bushes with thick green leaves. On the slopes of the mountain, there were small plantations where the community grew potatoes, corn, and beans for personal consumption. The spatial construction of Rainbow Brigade reflected its prevailing military and social hierarchies and leadership norms. The officers lived in the

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“safest” area, where they were well protected by their bodyguards; the lowranking soldiers, in turn, were strategically positioned to guard both the civilians and the high-ranking soldiers and the refugee camp. Meanwhile, the civilians had little opportunity to move about the camp and never went to the peak of the mountain, where most of the military activities took place. On a few occasions I noticed that children who came close to the headquarters were chased away; I also never observed women or elders coming to the area where the officers lived unless it was under instruction to come and help with tasks such as food preparation, washing, or carrying water. In general, the elders, children, and women were confined to the fields where food was grown, just outside the camp, to the churches, and to the refugee encampment itself. In contrast, the soldiers, and especially the officers, could move around freely. They spent their days variously in the refugee camp, in the headquarters, and in the soldiers’ area. Social distinctions were also marked by the way the different groups lived and ate. The food of the high-ranking soldiers was cooked by their bodyguards together with other high-ranking officers; the low-ranking soldiers ate together at meals usually prepared by a subordinate; the civilian population ate exclusively family by family down in the refugee camp, where each family or household was responsible for its own cooking.

Survival and Commercial Networks The population of Rainbow Brigade survived on small farming activities. Because of the cold climate and the infertile soil, very little grows at this altitude. One of the most severe difficulties in people’s day-to-day life was to find food and fetch water. During the daytime, the population went to the fields to search for food and to harvest corn and potatoes. A few hundred meters away from the camp there were small plots of land where potatoes, beans, and corn were cultivated. Because of the cold, there was a scarcity of green vegetables and fruit. If they penetrated more deeply into the forest, they could sometimes hunt bush meat, and bring the carcass back to the camp, skin it, and hang it over the fire for hours to dry the meat. Water was obtained from the rivers and carried back to camp in plastic buckets or in old petrol cans. Because of the difficult terrain, householders could manage only a few liters at a time. Because such a small quantity was

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Figure 4. A woman in the area where the civilian/refugee population lived.

insufficient for the daily requirements of cooking, cleaning, and washing, the women and children generally had to go to the rivers more than once a day. It was a long and difficult trek, involving a climb down the mountain for about 35 minutes and then a climb back up carrying the water containers on their backs or on their heads. During wet weather the paths became flooded and slick with mud, making the journey harder still. Although rainwater was also gathered in buckets and used for drinking and washing, the overall shortage of clean water caused hygiene problems, and the inhabitants of the refugee camp often complained about the spread of disease, of diarrhea, and of stomach cramps. The persistent problem of food shortages, hunger, and severe malnutrition was another compelling topic among the refugees in the camp. The inhabitants complained on a daily basis that they did not have enough food and spoke of food-related deaths among both children and the elderly. During the time I conducted fieldwork, one baby died as a direct or indirect result of malnutrition, and many women stressed how common it was for their children to die from sickness and starvation (it is hard to assert if this is true or not). Daily food intake was often limited to a few potatoes. Potatoes, people in the camp explained, were good to cultivate because it would

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keep the stomach full for many hours; they were also fast-growing—a major advantage in an insecure situation where there were regular changes of location and people could not rely on slow-growing crops and vegetables. With all these obstacles, how then did the group manage to survive in the mountains? Many FDLR rebel camps in the eastern Congo are based on some sort of commercial activity. Even if the economic benefits from, for example, mineral exploitation or other illegal economic activities are unclear, research has shown how members of the FDLR in some cases are linked to the mining industry, controlling and exploiting gold and cassiterite, as well as being linked to other commercial activities such as farming or trading (United Nations 2011). The people I interviewed in Rainbow Brigade said that they had no significant commercial networks. Once a week the women and some of the younger fighters walked to the local market in a nearby village, where they exchanged a few potatoes or firewood for cassava, roots, or vegetables. The marijuana they grew in the camp, informants said, was sold for a few US dollars per kilo. Since there was no organized economic or commercial network (at least from what I could observe), the people in the camp had to find their own means of survival. While the women and some young soldiers identified the local markets as important for the exchange of goods, many fighters explained that survival strategies were often based on plunder and theft of not only food but also weapons, uniforms, and ammunition. In fact, many soldiers walked around in uniforms carrying the logo of their enemies, such as the Congolese National Army (FARDC). Some soldiers also explained that in order to obtain weapons and ammunition, “they had to kill their enemies,” “steal their weapons,” and “empty their pockets”—and evidently steal the uniform as well. There were also stories of more systematic systems of looting and stealing. As one young soldier explained, “Sometimes we make a list of our needs. We go to the [local] village and ask for food and help. If we don’t get it, we steal it.” Another said: “We make a plan, like a list, of all things we need, like medicine, and so on. If we need medicine, we will attack the medical stores first, and then, if there is time, we can also steal more things. But sometimes we have to concentrate on one thing, what we need most.” Despite this kind of organized plunder, they also spoke of “friendly” exchanges, in which, for example, they would “meet villagers or soldiers in the field and exchange goods.” They could obtain shoes, food, or medication in exchange for ammunition or a pair of shorts.

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The goods that the soldiers brought back to the camp often ended up in the hands of the officers. Many low-ranking soldiers complained that their officers or commanders “took everything” away from them—the lower their rank, the less they could put in their own pockets. There was also rivalry between the soldiers and the civilians over the scarce resources. To give an example, several times a week, soldiers of low and middle rank came to the house where I was living. They begged me to give them the things that were brought to the camp. They asked for the flashlight, for the sleeping bag, my shoes, and the plastic bags. They all asked me to promise to give these things to them secretly when the high-ranking officers were not present, for if the leaders found out that their subordinates had been given something behind their backs, they would take it for themselves. The daily trials of poverty, hunger, and sickness were pressing topics that were brought to my attention daily by the camp community; it was common for them to compare their lives to those of animals. One soldier lamented, “We live like animals in the forest, we eat from the trees, we sleep on the ground.” Although most of the camp inhabitants expended a great deal of time finding food and water, the leaders never joined the search. While the civilians and the low-ranking soldiers were in the fields, the officers were engaged with the military and security concerns of the camp. Their responsibility was to assess the security situation, organize protection, and plan the military operations.

The Military Atmosphere While the military character of the camp permeated its atmosphere, it appeared to be primarily symbolic in form, expressed through uniforms, guns, and satellite phones rather than in organized training or marksmanship. Although the officers told me that the soldiers underwent drilling, weapon skills training, and kit inspection, I observed very little organized training. But at the same time, it was very evident that the soldiers were schooled in obedience to orders and in military protocol.2 One aspect of the military strategy of the rebels was to protect the identity of soldiers in all ranks through regular name-changing—an adoption of multiple identities by each combatant. During my first weeks in the camp, the soldiers often came to greet me using different names every day. One day a soldier could present himself as Claude, then announce the next

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Figure 5. Killing a goat that was stolen from a village.

day that his “real” name was Jean-Paul, and later on say that his name was Patrick. I never learned the real names of the soldiers. The soldiers treated their name changes lightly, but there was a more serious undertone. To shield their identity and stay secure, this kind of precaution and other extreme safety practices were integral to everyday life. From what I observed, and from what soldiers said, it seemed that many of the strategies employed by the rebel group had more to do with concealment, with confusing and bewildering the enemy, rather than with the logistics of military engagement. These strategies were not only about changing names and shifting identities but also about moving camps and their locations, about juggling military ranks and positions, and about coded communication between officers—all short-term strategies designed to conceal themselves effectively from the enemy rather than to go on the offensive. While the officers were keen to maintain the facade that they were a dedicated fighting force, the soldiers informed me that they rarely went on organized military operations but rather had to protect themselves from attack by enemy groups. Ismael, a low-ranking soldier, explained while soaking a pair of trousers in a bucket filled with water.

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Author: How would you describe your life in the camp? Ismael: Not good, I don’t have a life here. Author: What is difficult? Ismael: The problem is we live in bad conditions here. Author: Do you often leave the camp? Ismael: Twice a month Author: Why do you leave the camp? Ismael: If there is problem I will go to fight . . . and to find food. Author: So you must know this forest very well. Ismael: Yes. I’m a soldier. We find our way. Author: How do you do that? Ismael: We find our soldiers, and we sleep there. Author: And do you feel safe when you leave the camp? Ismael: We don’t often go to fight. But the enemies come to fight us here. So we have to fight them. Sometimes. Author: Do your enemies come here, to the camp? Ismael: Yes, one time. No . . . two times . . . Author: What enemies? Ismael: Congolese and Rwandan soldiers. Author: So they came to the camp? Did they attack you? [Silence. Ismael was quiet for some time, clearly avoiding my question.] Author: How do you see your future? Ismael: If there is good relation between Rwandan government and us, we will not fight. If bad relation, we will fight. As seen above, it was more common for soldiers like Ismael to argue that they had to fight until justice is restored in Rwanda and to protect themselves and their families from enemy groups rather than to put forward any clear military objective. Yet everyone was keen to uphold a kind of military spirit. The soldiers told me almost every day that they lived by the saying “You have to think ten times before you make a decision in everything you do.” This precaution embraced whom they spoke to, what they said, what they did, and how they did it. The fighters and officers indeed tried to follow this code: always careful of what they said, always looking over their shoulders to make sure that no one was listening. And high-ranking officers never answered a question directly—they always took time for reflection before they articulated their response.

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So while there appeared to be little organized training, and while the fighting spirit seemed to be low, considerable attention was paid to defensive security. Beyond the camp itself there was a security network of people who were in one way or another connected to the rebels. These people— civilians, spies, members, supporters, operators—might be based inside the DRC or outside of the country. The soldiers would say: “They are always behind us, we [the FDLR] have connections, we have our brothers everywhere.” The truth of this was demonstrated to me when I went to introduce myself to a group of soldiers who had recently arrived in the camp, They told me, “We already knew you’re here, we saw you, we followed you, we were behind you, in front of you, we saw you from every mountain when you walked here.” Later on, when I was about to leave the camp, the leaders once again assured me: “Don’t worry about security, we have people everywhere in the forest, on every hill, on every mountain, to secure the way.” Whenever the fighters left the camp, the soldiers called the excursion “military operations.” This expression usually conveyed something other than the intention to engage in organized combat. More often it meant that soldiers were leaving the camp to search for food in nearby villages, to hunt bush meat, to obtain information, or to make a phone call from one of the mountain peaks. Sometimes one of the young combatants was sent to Uvira (located several days trek from the camp) to buy milk powder or tea. But whenever the soldiers left the camp, they were always armed. Samuel, one of the soldiers, explained: “If we meet our enemy on the road, it is just a matter of who will shoot first. Me or him has to die.” He said this without attaching any particular weight to his words, as though he was describing a normal course of action. Samuel’s remark is an indication of how normalized it had become for the soldiers to live and roam through a war zone on an everyday basis, armed and ready to act in uncertain terrain. The camp leaders were in touch with other military units on a daily basis. They use satellite phones to communicate with other military officers based on faraway mountains. What they actually talked about, however, remained a secret. Not even the soldiers, they said, knew the coded language that the officers used when they spoke with chiefs in the other brigades, and the officers made it clear to me from the start that no outsider would ever be allowed to enter the closed sphere of military logistics. During much of the day, the officers were busy interpreting the intelligence that the soldiers gathered on military operations. In practice, this meant that many soldiers were on the move in the mountains, gathering information from

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nearby villagers, picking up gossip, and bringing it back to the camp where the officers would carefully analyze it. Many officers in the Rainbow Brigade were identified as intelligence officers or intelligence operators and were based in the camp because of their specific skills. These skills could have been rooted in a previous education in Rwanda, in political experience (such as membership of a political party in Rwanda), or in a period of work for the previous Rwandan government under Habyarimana. Alternatively these officers might have fought in the Congo war and acquired extensive experience with different military operations or they might have had business contacts, been proficient in languages such as French, English, or Swahili, or been trained as skilled officers in the North Kivu headquarters where, as they said, they still sent “smart and intelligent” children for training. While the military imperative always dominated the camp, it did seem to me that this militarism was more a matter of social identity rather than the consequence of participation in a trained fighting force. During the day, the soldiers might sit and polish their weapons, wash their uniforms, or play around with their guns, but there was no talk or demonstration of any kind of determination to train or to go out on military operations. Like Ismael, most of the soldiers would say that they had to protect themselves from their enemies. But in fact, from what I could observe, most soldiers simply paid attention to their officers in obedience to a top-down hierarchical structure. Beyond periodic low-key military activities that kept the fighters busy, most days were spent in simply waiting around and carrying out routine tasks.

Waiting and the Routine and Discipline of Everyday Life Everyday life in the camp was largely devoid of the excitement, drinking, bravado, or confrontations with danger that are conveyed by popular descriptions of life in a rebel camp. In contrast, daily life in Rainbow Brigade was a matter of routine, order, and discipline. The soldiers and their family members insisted that they strictly rejected drugs or alcohol, since it could “break the structure of order of soldiers.”3 One of the other soldiers explained to me that “drugs make your body weak, and your mind slow and stupid.” Colonel Solomon commented with a persuasive voice that

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“being a soldier means we have to stay focused and controlled.” All substances that can possibly make the body weak were considered a threat. When the soldiers noticed that I had brought Nescafe´, they began explaining that coffee is a drug that “makes you shaky.” Coffee, they tried to convince me, was bad for my health because it was addictive and therefore spoiled the function of the mind and made a person nervous and their body wobbly. Almost every day in the camp seemed to be the same, following the same patterns and routines. In the early mornings the refugee population and soldiers would go to work in the field, trying to find food and bringing buckets of water back to the camp. When they returned around noon, the women sat in groups peeling potatoes that they boiled or roasted on the fire. The children helped their mothers with domestic chores, such as collecting firewood, washing, and cooking. While the women were taking care of the domestic work, the men were often in the fields searching for food or they were building in the camp, fixing the houses, rebuilding the church, or sitting in groups where they chatted, studied the Bible, or practiced their English. Nearly every morning, men, women, and children attended one of the three camp churches. Then, while others went to the fields, the high-ranking officers remained in the bamboo barracks at headquarters, where they listened to the radio and discussed what was going on in the world. The men, and in particular the officers, had a passionate interest in political topics. They discussed the global crises, they named presidents and prime ministers, and of course, they discussed the political situation in the DRC and Rwanda. While the officers spent their days occupied with military and political matters, the younger soldiers and bodyguards cooked and cleaned the camp and attended to their officers’ needs. They prepared hot water for their baths, washed the dishes, and cleaned their uniforms. When darkness fell over the camp, a popular evening activity among the officers and soldiers was to gather around the fireplaces in one of the huts and play music videos on their mobile phones. Since there was no mobile phone reception in the camp, the phones were mostly used for playing previously downloaded music, with Ugandan and Rwandan Christian pop music being the most popular. The songs were generally about how to be a good Christian, about following the voice of God, and about being faithful to one’s family. Days passed in a rather monotonous fashion. The atmosphere was mostly calm

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and quiet. The men walked about in the mud in their polished boots, sat quietly in the leaky huts during the evenings, and tried to protect themselves from the heavy rainfall during the night.

Fear and Paranoia Despite its appearance of calm and quiet, the camp was located in the middle of the war zone, and it existed because there is a history of genocide and an ongoing war in the Congo. Being surrounded by the potential danger of marauding rebel groups and government forces was a constant, frightening reality. Civilians and children told me how afraid they were during the night, how they feared that someone would attack the camp, or how someone might be raped, killed, or injured while working in the fields. Fear, danger, and trauma were embedded in the solders’ imaginations and bodies. Colonel Frank, for example, would often turn toward the sky during the dark nights, and pointing toward the stars, he would explain that the Rwandan and Congolese governments had satellites over the camp to observe, register, and keep control over the camp and their activities. He would then say that “wherever we are, the Rwandan and Congolese soldiers are behind us.” Paranoia and the potential for danger were always threatening on the other side of the mountain, both as real and as imaginary experiences. During the evenings when thunder echoed from the mountains, the soldiers always reacted very strongly to sudden, loud thunderclaps. They would immediately stand up and look nervously out of the door, just to make sure that the noise was really thunder and not gunfire. After they had assured themselves that this was so, they would sit down again, laugh at their own reactions and explain: “We never know when enemies might come and we always have to be ready just in case.” The fear of enemy soldiers was a topic that was raised almost every day. While everyone agreed that enemies were all around the area, some of the soldiers and women also said that the enemies had attacked the camp. While it was unclear if soldiers had in fact actually come to attack the camp, many referred back to previous experiences in their lives when attacks against them had taken place; the narratives were very similar, although details could vary. The fear of enemy soldiers and the hostile relationship between the rebels and other armed groups was one of the main motives for staying in the camp; it was also a reason why no one really considered

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permanent integration into Congolese society. Jean-Paul, one of the lowerranking soldiers, recounted without hesitation: Jean-Paul: They come here to kill. Author: Who? Jean-Paul: FARDC [The Congolese army] and Kagame soldiers. Author: When did they come here? Jean-Paul: A few days ago, Jean-Paul said but changed his mind a few seconds later. No, wait, two months. Author: The soldiers? Did they come all the way up here? Jean-Paul: Yes, they came here. Author: What happened? Jean-Paul: They came and they took everything we had. And they raped our girls. Author: Oh, that’s horrible. Could you protect the civilians? Jean-Paul: Yes. We are sent from God. And we have guns. But the civilians have no guns so they run away. We stay here and fight them. Author: Were you afraid? Jean-Paul: Yes, ten of us died. Author: And the girls? Jean-Paul: The girls are special. When they meet our girls they rape them. Author: Why? Jean-Paul: To show their power. Even the civilians are people and they need the peace like us. We have been here for so long. Kagame must see our problems. Author: For how long do you think you will be in the camp? Jean-Paul: If there is not peace. We can be killed. The answers by Jean-Paul to my questions are an indication of the general state of fear of the outside world in the camp, but his answers were also stock answers. They clearly reflect his sense of insecurity in living in the midst of the war as well as the way in which his fear mutated into a sense of obligation to defend a community in which one must fight to protect the women from being raped. For soldiers like Jean-Paul, the experience of living under real threat produced and reproduced a chronic sense

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of danger that simultaneously legitimized their right to fight for their survival and to seek safety among their own soldiers. The rebel camp was a setting replete with anxiety and uncertainty, with fear and intimidation. In such a situation, there was little room for comparison with other contexts, hence no alternative worldviews could be contemplated, or even known about. A general state of confusion and doubt characterized many of the accounts provided by the soldiers. Often different soldiers provided different answers to the same questions: for example, one soldier might say that enemy soldiers had come to the camp several times; others might say that they had not actually come to the camp but that enemy groups were all around them in the mountains. This confusion arises in part because many of the lower-ranking fighters constantly change location—few of them are permanently based in the camp—but different answers were also produced out of the combatants’ confused memories arising from years of war. The fear is not a new or sudden phenomenon but instead comes from the long and complex life histories the combatants have as soldiers in the Rwandan war, as soldiers in the Congo wars, or as refugees, all of whom have been exposed to real personal danger for decades. In their narratives, these memories and the trauma they experienced, together with their projected hopes and fears, are pieced together to make sense and fit their general interpretation of what is going on around them. This piecing together of information must also be interpreted as a consequence of the doubts and uncertainties that originate from the insecurity of the camp life as well as from the soldiers’ and civilians’ own experiences, both ordinary and traumatic. As much research has shown, violence has a tendency to erase memory and to fill in the blanks with silence, voids, or an avoidance of speaking about an incident (Das 2007). War confuses and shatters a person’s memory while it intensifies certain experiences as trauma and underpins the blurred state in which they live. Camp life was indeed strenuous, tiring, and difficult, but it was not violent in the sense of there being fighting and raiding on a daily basis. Instead, the rebels were very isolated and lived far from other communities and towns; they were disconnected from the wider world. In this setting, as much a refuge as it was a military outpost, they had shaped a world of their own. It was not a world of excitement, macho bragging, or furious war rituals. It was a life of routine, discipline, and control, as well as of fear. To make sense of their surroundings and to pray for their homecoming to

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Rwanda, the camp community turned to the church and religion for support. Religious life was important for everyone living in the camp, and both the civilians, men and women alike, and the soldiers and officers often argued that religion and a belief in God were of critical importance to their survival in the forest.

Religious Life in the Camp Two soldiers stood behind the podium in the Protestant church. It was around noon. The soldiers were alone in the church. Ibrahim fingered the Bible open on the podium in front of him. He was praying out loud, his voice was clear, yet his tone was desperate and beseeching. Simon, standing by Ibrahim’s side was looking down; his eyes were closed. He repeated Ibrahim’s words in a whispering, quiet voice: God, our father, In the name of Jesus Christ, we are now in front of you. Now we are going to go to war. Our Lord, we thank you for protecting us during our activities. Since the army wants to eliminate our people who are in the forest and in the jungle, we ask you to do something for our protection. We pray to you in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen.4 One way of dealing with the endless waiting, the uncertainty, and the danger of refugee life was an immersion in religious and ceremonial routine. “We have to believe that God is doing the right thing, that he has a plan for us here,” Colonel Frank told me while we walked one day toward the Protestant church. Colonel Frank was not only the rebel leader of the camp but also a religious leader; he was the priest of the Protestant church. The military leaders were also the priests and pastors, and they held not only high-ranking military status, they also embodied and symbolized a sacred position, because they spoke “through the voice of God.” Each day at dawn, soldiers and civilians would gather in one of the churches for morning prayers that lasted for several hours. Then, throughout the day, people would attend further religious ceremonies.

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The services were held several times a day and could be both organized and spontaneous. The community prayed before and after every meal, they prayed when leaving the camp, and when returning to the camp after a day in the fields. Religious beliefs were an integral part of their worldview. For the soldiers and the refugees it was important to follow the norms and principles of Christianity. If one followed the “voice of God,” they said, they would be protected in the camp and in battle. And only God could help them return to Rwanda. It was common for the rebels to consign their own destinies into the hands of God. As they were leaving the camp they would always pray, asking for protection, and would end the prayers by saying, “We shall meet again if God wills” or “Only God knows if I will die or not” or “God helped me to stay alive, he will help me return to Rwanda.” The church also played an important role in social unification for those living in the camp. The church was a place where people gathered daily, where they shared news, hardships, feelings, anger, and sorrow, and where they tried to put their experiences into words and make sense of the inexplicable. Religion was indeed a binding force that strengthened the group connectivities between the different populations in the camp. And the church was an activity, a routine that structured the everyday; it created a path that enabled its members to maintain focus and balance.

Prayers and Organized Ceremonies The ceremonies in the churches varied according to the day and the occasion.5 However, although the ceremonies could differ in form and content, nearly all prayers were the same, reflecting the general worldview and underlying principles held in common by the people in the camp. People often prayed for their own safety, asking God to hear their call. Men and women prayed to secure food and water, and they prayed for those left behind in Rwanda. And one topic was endlessly rehearsed: the biblical story of exile. Many prayers returned again and again to the Old Testament story of the Jews walking through the desert to find their Holy Land; it was retold every day, both inside and outside of the church because people in the camp identified with the story. They were indeed, they said, “one people” living in exile, waiting for the day to come when they could return to their “holy land,” Rwanda.

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Figure 6. Religious ceremony in the Catholic church.

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This vision of Rwanda as a holy land was reflected in the ways that people referred to the “good days” (their previous life in Rwanda before the civil war) and the “bad days” (their current circumstances). As Nelly, one of the elder women, said, “Before the war, there was no problem in Rwanda, only good days. We had freedom there.” She paused for a few seconds, looked down, and then continued: “Now we have nothing. Only bad things in life.” When men, women, and soldiers spoke about the bad days, they referred to how they were struggling in the forest, how they were living in fear of being killed by the Rwandan soldiers “that are behind us,” and how the Rwandan regime had “put them in a bad situation” and deprived them of their citizenship as Rwandans and left them to struggle in the mountains of Congo. In the churches there was a clear segregation between men and women and between the military and the civilians. The officers were in charge of the ceremony and thus had more spiritual power than the average person; for their part, the women often sang and danced in praise of the priests. The social distinctions and gender differences were highly visible on Sundays, when the whole day was dedicated to intensive prayer. On Sunday mornings, people woke up early. The soldiers took a bath, washed, shaved, and dressed up in their nicest clothes. The officers who belonged to the Catholic church dressed in long white robes and the women and girls wore dresses. During fieldwork, I attended both the Catholic and Protestant churches and found some variations between the forms of ritual, although, substantively, the content, meanings, and motivations were parallel. The Catholic ceremonies usually began when enough people had congregated in the church and when the priests were ready. Although people began to gather from early morning, it could take hours before the ceremonies actually started. Meanwhile, the congregation got ready inside the church, and the priest waited in the shade of the trees up the hill, about twenty meters from the church. One Sunday morning when I attended the church, the priest was waiting as usual under the trees. He held a large crucifix made of bamboo sticks in his hands and wore a long white robe with a belt around the waist. Behind the priest stood two officers—they were also priests in the Catholic Church. And behind the three men stood a group of five young girls, aged between 10 and 15 years old. They wore white dresses and had crowns of paper on their heads; they held their palms together, praying quietly. When the priest was ready, he began walking down the slope along

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the muddy path that led to the church, followed by the two other priests and the girls. As they walked toward the church, they mumbled, almost whispering hymns and chants, repeating the words “Jesus,” “Lord,” “Christ,” and “Hallelujah.” Before they went inside the church, they stopped and the priest moved into the middle of the clearing in which it stood, still holding the crucifix in his hands. The girls danced around him, twirling and twisting around him as he stood quietly in the center of the circle. Inside the small, overcrowded, bamboo building the congregation of about 20 men, 25 women and 15 children was seated on benches facing the altar. A hush fell as they waited for the ceremony to begin. Some had their own Bibles and psalters, while others shared with their neighbors. A choir of about 10 young soldiers sat next to the altar at the front of the church. The simple altar was embellished by two lit candles, an open Bible, a pot, and a crucifix. Behind the altar, a stage was adorned with colorful fabrics decorated with images of Jesus with a halo around his head and a bleeding heart. Outside of the church, the girls stopped dancing. The priest bowed before the processional group entered the church through the small opening in its walls. As they did so, the people stood up to praise and welcome them and then began to sing a psalm, raising their hands as the little group walked slowly down the aisle. Loud music of drumming and singing filled the room. The girls sat down in the first row, facing the altar. The priests walked up to the podium, the first of them opened the Bible and the other two stood behind him, lowered their heads, and began to pray quietly. The priest looked out over the congregation; he thanked them for coming in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The singing began again. After a while, the girls stood up, formed a line in front of the congregation, and began to slowly but rhythmically trip around in a circle still holding their palms together and bending up and down to the rhythm from the drums and the singing by the choir. A ceremony typically lasted for several hours, from morning until midday. The content of the prayers was usually the same: the congregants would point to their hardships in the forest, the food shortages, the hunger, the cold, and the difficulties of their lives in the midst of war, and they would ask God to help them return to Rwanda and plead for safety. Toward the end of the ceremony, people could walk up to the altar to put money in the pot standing next to the crucifix. The ritual of donating money was probably more symbolic than actual as most people had no money and

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would simply lift the lid and pretend to put in a coin. Some had written messages to God on small pieces of paper that they threw into the pot in place of money. The ceremonies in the Protestant church were organized slightly differently than the Catholic one, although the content of the prayers was usually common to both. During my stay in the camp, Colonel Frank headed up the Protestant ceremonies on a daily basis; when he was not there, these were led by the other high-ranking officers. One Sunday I participated in one of the services. The spirit in the church was lively—the music was loud, and about 60 people, men, women, and children, were singing, praying, clapping, and drumming. The congregation was positioned according to rank and social status. On the benches behind the altar, high-ranking officers were seated facing the rows of benches set out in the body of the church. In the first row sat the soldiers. In the second row sat the men and elders, and in the last row sat the women and children. Beside the altar, on both sides, was the choir, which consisted of both men and women from the civilian camp. When Colonel Frank entered, the sound of drums, chants, and prayers was silenced; as he approached the altar, the women and the choir stood to sing his praises. Because it was a few days before Christmas, they sang Christmas carols. At the altar, Colonel Frank greeted the officers sitting behind him, opened the Bible, and began praying. In contrast to the Spartan appearance of the rest of the camp, the church was richly decorated with plastic flags and colorful fabrics, as well as a statue of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. On the altar there also stood a pot for collecting money. While their pastors preached, the people listened carefully, nodding. After the priest had finished his sermon, members of the congregation were free to share their feelings with others in the church. While some of them prayed in silence, others desperately screamed out to God, beseeching him to intervene in their difficulties. One woman cried out, “God, we ask you, what have we done? We pray to you to hear our call, we pray to you to help us out from the forest.” Another woman called, “God, we hear the songs, the bombs, and sounds of guns. We don’t know what is this anger? Which does not end, when shall we live like others? Why do they want to exterminate the children with spears or lances? We don’t know what we can do apart from praying.” One of the young soldiers sitting in the first row stared at the ceiling: “God, you have created us, what is it that you want? We ask you to hear our prayers, we have to get out of the forest and return to the

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Figure 7. A group of children praying.

country that we don’t even know, but that we call Rwanda. Through our prayers, may you bless us.” Apart from the organized services, there were many occasions when people gathered in the churches without priests; they would sit and pray by themselves or in a group. These gatherings took place not only in daytime but often throughout the night. The community came together to pray for numerous reasons, but it was especially when people faced particular difficulties or hardship that they would turn toward God and use the churches as a natural meeting place to pray together.

Coping Strategies Religion was the coping mechanism deployed by the camp community to deal with pervasive anxiety, extreme uncertainty, illness, and death and when everything seemed to be only a step away from disintegration. One evening, a few soldiers and I were sitting in one of their huts when we heard desperate cries from the refugee camp. The soldiers told me that a baby had died. As they said it, they shook their heads as though to convey that

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they were speechless in the face of the horrible situation. They told me that the civilians were on their way to pray for the dead baby and its mother. All night the sound of loud praying and cries of pain and sorrow echoed over the camp. The sudden death of the baby, although particularly distressing, was not the only time the sound of drums, singing, and intense prayers took place during the night. The long prayer sessions and nighttime ceremonies often took place outside of the formal churches. During the night, they used smaller shacks located on the outskirts of the camp. Late one evening I visited the Protestant church and found a group of men and women who had gathered in the church to thank God. Earlier that same day, they had heard on the radio that a man named Bagosora, who had been accused of genocide and war crimes by the tribunal in Arusha, had been released due to the lack of evidence. The news was interpreted by the people in the camp as “good news” that invoked strong hopes that one day they would be able to return to Rwanda without accusations of being ge´nocidaires. When I entered the church, a woman was kneeling on the floor in the dark; she had her baby tied to her back. As she knelt, she leant forward to place her forehead on the ground, repeatedly bowing up and down. She was praying intensely and spoke the hymns out loud but her voice was so fragile and unclear that I could not identify the words. An older woman sat next to her, leaning her body against the bamboo wall. She prayed too. The other women then stood up and began to pray. The older woman on the floor cried out in desperation: God, your name is heard. We shall thank you We are in front of you We pray to you. We pray all the time Thank you Jesus for listening to us We pray to you, please, see us, come and be with us Please reveal yourself as God We give you all our problems, Please care for us Open the gate to heaven so that you can hear our prayers We have come to ask you We pray to you in your name It’s pointless. We ask you to hear us Holy Spirit, give us wisdom and wise words

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Show us your generosity We will do as you want, please come to us and see us.6 At the front of the church stood a man from the civilian camp. He held a Bible in his hand. He stared up at the ceiling and murmured chants, discreetly, slowly, and rhythmically. His tone of voice changed repeatedly—at times he spoke more loudly and faster—and stamped with one foot to keep the rhythm. Then he began to pray slowly and quietly: God, We are praying to you. We will please you I used to sin Water and fire God We pray to you to help us keep away from hell We will praise you Please give us wisdom Please take us to your heart All our sins will disappear Please don’t let us go to hell Our sins will disappear, we will please you God, your name will be heard in heaven.7 I sat down in the corner; the other people in the church were so intent on their prayers that they did not notice me. Colonel Frank joined the man in the front, and after several minutes of prayer, he took over the ceremony. He began to intone psalms, the others joined in. They sang for about half an hour with their hands stretched toward the sky. Their voices moved from desperation to despair, and they screamed their demands of God, begging him to listen to their prayers and to help them survive in the forest and return home. It was as if they were in a trance and had lost all contact with the outside world. After a while, I left them alone, following the light from my flashlight back to the hut. As I walked through the camp, I heard more prayers, lamentations, and chants issuing from shacks in the refugee camp and from the fighters’ huts. The prayers continued throughout the night, subsiding as the sun begun to rise. The communal ideology of the Rainbow Brigade camp inhabitants was underpinned by a key perception of themselves as a people in exile with a

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shared dream of a triumphant return to their country of origin. In that sense, the story of exile bounded a certain collective sense of “who they are” and explained, “what it means to be one of us” (McGuire 2002: 20). Indeed, their shared understanding of the exile story, and the religious routines that reinforced it, shaped a strong sense of group belonging, togetherness, and social cohesion. Through laments and prayers, the people in the camp together dealt with anxiety and sorrow. However, the religious life of the camp also reflected its hierarchical and militaristic basis in which the leaders held high status, not only as military commanders but also as religious leaders. Hence religious practice was not separated from military operations: when going into combat, the soldiers turned to God, asking for His protection and help. While relinquishing their destiny to God in this way, the fighters rarely made reference to the violence of their actions or to the fact that many of them were guilty of breaking the sixth commandment, Thou shalt not kill. And although the question of sin and reconciliation was touched on in some of their prayers, neither did they speak about reconciling their Christian beliefs with the reality of their lives in war. The silence of the soldiers on these issues was, I suggest, closely related to their strong feelings of denial about the Rwandan genocide and about what actually took place in Rwanda in 1994. In summary, Rainbow Brigade, as I knew it, was a closed and isolated camp and community in the remote forests of the South Kivu province. Here about 300 soldiers and civilians lived side by side, with a common identity and ideology formed by the history of the war in Rwanda rather than by kinship and descent. The people who lived in the camp were a combination of rebel soldiers and their dependents: a large civilian group of elders, women, and children. Most of these were refugees or were born and raised in the camp, and still others were recruited or abducted by the rebels from surrounding communities. While some of the soldiers based in the camp had a history of direct involvement in the Rwandan genocide, the majority were themselves refugees who had fled Rwanda post-genocide and who had been recruited by the FDLR rebel forces about two decades before. For the high-ranking officers, the camp was a military base, a center for strategic planning in the messy ongoing war in the eastern Congo but it was also a refuge and a sanctuary. If captured, these officers risked being indicted for taking part in the Rwandan genocide as well as for participation in war crimes in the Congo. And even if the majority of the soldiers did not have a history of genocidal activities, they had been participants in the

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Congo war for over 20 years and continued to live off the spoils and resources of war. The camp was also home to the soldiers’ wives and children who formed part of the civilian group. For them, the camp was a relatively safe place where they enjoyed the protection of the soldiers, but it was also a place of confinement that offered few choices and presented almost no prospect of any kind of change or improvement. In one respect, the camp was characterized by impermanence—the FDLR protected its operations by regularly shifting its outposts from place to place—and was a place of marginality and constant insecurity, imbued by nostalgia for a past, lost life. But it was also a zone of military hierarchies, of the logistics and operations of war. Rainbow Brigade represented an intertwining of the qualities of a home, refuge, and sanctuary with those associated with military discipline and tactics. It was a zone where hierarchical authority coexisted with powerlessness. While the camp was permeated with a sense of hopelessness and despair, it was also a platform for social action. Although the life of Rainbow Brigade was less violent and chaotic than that in the rebel camps of the popular imagination, the order that was created there was carved out of conditions of violent disorder. The lived experience of being in a state of exile in the camp was expressed through the religious and ritual routines and through the collective engagement in Christianity as an overarching cosmology. The long praying sessions, the elaborate religious procedures, and the search for global answers in biblical texts were all coping mechanisms. The church was a means of reshaping intractable realities, despair, and hardship into a compelling alternative truth, a way to accommodate the needs of the inhabitants, as well as a framework for understanding the world and maintaining hope. The daily routines of churchgoing were also a way to introduce some kind of regularity into everyday life, and by reinforcing the existing hierarchies in the camp, the religious practices also upheld the orderliness and discipline imposed by the military. Although more than 20 years have passed since some of the fighters and their families left Rwanda for the mountain refuge of the Congo, the meticulous tidiness, the constant cleaning, the polishing of boots, and the imposition of discipline is a way of upholding some sort of balance and dignity in life while the exiles wait for their long-anticipated return to Rwanda.

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Politics in the Forest: Retelling History in Exile

The United Nations Security Council report on the genocide in Rwanda 1994 reads as follows: Approximately 800,000 people were killed during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The systematic slaughter of men, women, and children which took place over the course of about 100 days between April and July of 1994 will forever be remembered as one of the most abhorrent events of the twentieth century. Rwandan killed Rwandans, brutally decimating the Tutsi population of the country, but also targeting moderate Hutus. Appalling atrocities were committed, by the militia and the armed forces, but also by civilians against civilians. . . . The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide lays down the criteria for what acts are to be considered a genocide, one of the most heinous crimes which can be committed against a human population. Essentially, the convention requires both that certain acts have been committed, and that they have been done, with a particular intent: that of destroying, in whole, or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, as such. The Security Council uses the same criteria in outlining the mandate of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), contained in resolution 955 (1994). The ICTR has determined that the mass killings of Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994 constituted genocide. It was a genocide planned and incited by Hutu extremists against the Tutsi.1 The official narrative of what happened in Rwanda in 1994 is a lie. At least, according to the soldiers and the civilians in Rainbow Brigade, it is a lie.

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The inhabitants of that community consistently insisted that documents such as the UN Security Council report were nothing but propaganda. Genocide denialism is not unique to the Hutu rebels. Scholars of genocide studies have shown that denial by the perpetrators more or less always features as a characteristic in the aftermath of genocidal violence (ScheperHughes & Bourgois 2005, Hinton 2002). As Alexander Hinton & Kevin O’Neill point out, any actor involved in, and affected by, mass violence tends to “map out their narrative of the past that legitimizes their agendas for or desires for justice” (Hinton & O’Neill 2009:5). The process of denial can take many forms, such as hiding evidence, blaming the victims, or blocking investigations of crime. The Khmer Rouge, for example, quietly continued to kill ethnic Vietnamese for 20 years after the 1975 genocide, the Turkish state persists in denying the genocide against the Armenians; and the state-organized mass violence in Sri Lanka and the long-standing conflict in Darfur in the Sudan are still being contested. The mass atrocities in Rwanda in 1994 changed life completely for millions of people. Hundreds of thousands of people were massacred. Many more thousands of people lost family members, their homes, and belongings, and millions fled the havoc in panic and fear. And huge numbers of people were involved as perpetrators in the killings, heinous crimes, and atrocities. More than a thousand accused of crimes against humanity were sent to the courtroom in Arusha, and of these, several hundred have received life terms in prison. Others fled to the Congo and neighboring countries and still remain there as refugees, living with the aftermath of trauma and loss. And, for the people who settled in the Rainbow Brigade camp, the atrocities of the 1994 genocide dramatically altered their lives for the worse. Although more than 20 years have passed since the genocide took place, the massacres in Rwanda have not been forgotten. The killings are widely remembered as an abhorrent event. However, for the population in the camp, the genocide was most memorable as a landmark of political failure, as a time when the Hutus lost power to the Tutsis. Even if the majority of those living in Rainbow Brigade were not involved in the mass killings in Rwanda in 1994, they were still part of a group whose leadership can be linked to the slaughter. Yet they continued to deny any culpability in these historical events. But if, as they claimed, they did not participate in committing violence but had indeed fled the genocide as victims, why did they actively try to completely erase memory of the events and even resolutely

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avoid discussing how they had themselves suffered violence or personal loss? Remembering, and speaking about, violence, loss, or trauma can be difficult. Many scholars have pointed to the need of communities who have suffered violence to commemorate the past in order to cope with it. Communities and people affected by mass violence tend to have organized rituals, commemoration ceremonies, and other structured ways to cope with a violent past; this can be seen, for example, in the sustained fight for reparations by Guatemala’s Mayan population, the holocaust memorials in Germany, or the annual commemoration ceremonies in Rwanda, South Africa, and Sri Lanka. In Rainbow Brigade camp, I observed no such organized commemorative events. There were no evident ceremonies or memorials dedicated to the genocide, and, even though informants would make reference to the fact that they suffered “from the past,” I never heard anyone saying anything explicit about the violence of the period. Rather, I was confronted with a contradiction. While no one spoke about their past experiences of violence, they did share a standardized version of how to frame and put forward “what actually happened” during the genocide. This was, in essence, a complete unmaking and subsequent remaking of history. The population in the camp tried to rewrite the official history of the past by establishing its own historical narrative of what took place in 1994. By analyzing how the reconfiguration of memory surrounding the genocide was expressed through the day-to-day activities of the camp, and through various forms of cultural display and performance criticizing the current Rwandan leadership, I aim to show how contradictory discourses about the genocide were made coherent and established as the only truth in the rebel community. While the denial of culpability in genocide can be interpreted as the result of one of a number of different factors, or as a combination of these (for example, as a reaction to a cultural trauma or anger at being pushed into exile in the forest), the fighters and refugees of Rainbow Brigade saw themselves as the innocent victims of Rwandan political propaganda on the one hand and of a terrible misunderstanding by the international community on the other. They used denial as a means to completely obliterate memory of the past; in addition, the leadership further used a genocide denial narrative as internal and external propaganda and as a means to maintain military cohesion among FDLR members. Beneath the genocide denialism, however, there was evidence of a more profound desire

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among the camp inhabitants to connect their past history outside the forest with their current situation of exile. By exploring how the complexities of denial and the legalities of mass violence were culturally expressed, embodied, and performed, inside a rebel camp, I aim to investigate how political ideologies, morals, and worldviews around violence are constructed and shaped. Both verbal narratives and nonverbal rituals surrounding the genocide can provide a window to understanding how a reconfiguration of memory and identity, together with and discourses of “truth,” were produced in the rebel community of Hutu refugees. Despite their silence about the 1994 genocide, this community continued to narrate history and to contest other versions of the same history as told by outsiders.

Rewriting History While there is no doubt that the majority of those who were brutally slaughtered in 1994 were ethnic Tutsis, the population in the Rainbow Brigade camp argued that it was false to present the genocide as ethnic murder. In conversations with individuals in the camp, both men and women repeatedly told me that it was the current president, Paul Kagame, and his Tutsi guerillas who had orchestrated the genocide when they first invaded Rwanda in the 1990s. They said that as part of Kagame’s plan to win sympathy among the international community, he was spreading systematic propaganda to fool the rest of the world into believing that it was the Hutus who had planned and carried out the genocide; by spreading such propaganda, Kagame had evaded justice and escaped the truth. The consequence of this, they insisted repeatedly, was that all Hutus were labeled ge´nocidaires and pushed into exile in the Congo. In presenting their version of historical truth, everyone I interviewed in the camp avoided the use of the word “genocide.” They argued that such a judgmental term was inappropriate, because there had never been any intention to destroy or exterminate one particular ethnic group. According to the officers, attaching that label to the war in Rwanda was part of Kagame’s “genocide ideology,”2 whereby he sought to propagate a false version of history so that the Tutsis could remain in power while the Hutus were forced to spend a lifetime in exile. Seated around a wooden table outside one of the military barracks in the camp, I had a long conversation about politics with two colonels, Frank and Ibrahim. There were a few lower-ranking soldiers nearby; three of them

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had come closer to listen in on the conversation and were leaning against a tree a few meters away, while two other young men were busy fixing a leaking roof on the neighboring bamboo hut. Of the two officers, Frank was permanently based in the camp, while Ibrahim was a visitor who had trekked several days to meet with him. Ibrahim was a veteran within the FDLR military wing and had been with the group since its origin. He was a typical high-ranking officer: well spoken and presenting clear arguments in fluent English; he was also reflective and thoughtful. He spoke about his own actions and political goals, and those of other FDLR combatants, as if they were absolutely reasonable. We talked about Rwanda and about what had happened in the weeks and months before the genocide. Ibrahim leant one arm on the table. In his hand he held a yellow plastic cup filled with hot water. Taking a sip from the cup, he informed me that he was wanted by the criminal court in Arusha. When I asked him where he was at the time of the war in Rwanda, he looked at me with an innocent smile and said, “I was in another country, I was in Tanzania!” A group of soldiers in the background burst out laughing, and Ibrahim’s smile broadened. I understood his smile to be a way of evading the truth, so I persisted, “What do they accuse you of, if you were not in the country?” Ibrahim’s whole face lit up: “You see, it’s bizarre, it’s very bizarre, I don’t know! Maybe for planning the genocide, I don’t know, I don’t know what they want!” He laughed again to emphasize how ridiculous the situation was. I was convinced that he was lying and avoiding telling me anything about his own experiences of the genocidal period. Instead, Ibrahim and Frank tried to teach me what had actually happened. I turned to Colonel Frank, and asked him: Author: So, how would you describe what happened in Rwanda in 1994? Frank: Aahh. We know that Kagame had a plan. All the members of RPF [the Rwandan Patriotic Front] and even members of RPF who are now in exile are saying that Kagame had made the plan of shooting down the president, Habyarimana. Kagame made the plan of genocide and everyone knows that. We hope that soon there will be justice. Author: But what was Kagame’s plan? Frank: His plan was to take power in Kigali. His plan was to kill people. His plan was to shoot down the plane and the people

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who were with him [the former president of Rwanda and the other politicians who were in the aircraft, among them, the Burundian president]. Then his plan was to blame it on the Hutus, and some of the Tutsis who were in the government and in the army. Kagame has taken so many lives because so many people were killed or put in prison. Others like us, we are in the forest of Congo, and he must pay now. Now I will go and pray. When Frank had left, I turned to Colonel Ibrahim and asked him, “So, no one who is here in the camp was in Rwanda during the killings?” Ibrahim smiled politely: “I don’t know. Even us, we don’t talk about such things. What happened in Rwanda was very sad, even for us. It was sad for all Rwandan people. We try to write, to do something for our lives. The sad stories are welcome. We suffer. We suffer from the past. It was sad for everyone. But it’s difficult to know if there was a person here that was killing in Rwanda. He will be quiet. We don’t talk about the killing. Only the pain and the suffering.” Along with some obvious attempts to circumvent the official narrative by some of the high-ranking leaders, and their expressions of regret that so many people had been killed during the genocide, a prominent feature of the conversations with Ibrahim and Frank and many other individuals in the camp was their insistence that they were not falsifying history or lying about their past. Many had already prepared stock answers to questions about the genocide. For example, they might respond, “If so many Tutsis died during the genocide, why are the Tutsis now in power?” Or simply, “Kagame put people in prison like he wants, that’s why they say so many died,” or “Kagame is making up false history, why is there no memorial for the Hutus?” All these responses reveal how a particular version of historical reality about the genocide was articulated in the camp. In the prevailing atmosphere, there was no room for critique: denial was unanimous. All those in the camp with whom I spoke tried to either ignore or dismiss known facts while highlighting their own position as victims. The partisan and selective description of what really happened in Rwanda was clearly a standardized version that everyone in the camp seemed to have accepted and a “truth” through which everyone was ready to justify his or her actions, feelings, and opinion.

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Political Narratives The political ideology and the strict dicipline of the FDLR has often been explained as a military strategy used by leaders to indoctrinate soldiers, maintain internal control, and to prevent repatriation (International Crisis Group 2005). Although indoctrination is one explanation as to why the FDLR officially maintains that the genocide did not happen as depicted in the official narrative, it seems necessary to move beyond military expediency or indoctrination as the only explanation for the consistent adherence of the rebel group to that worldview. The political ideology held by the fighters and FDLR members can be better understood in the light of how the recent past weaves into their current situation. Rewriting the official narrative of the genocide is not simply an act of lying or hiding information. It has to be understood as a way of regaining identity and reclaiming history in a context where the group finds itself exiled from history and in a situation where they feel that they have no future. This rewriting occurs despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that some of soldiers have a history of committing violence, others a history of fleeing violence, and all of them share a common feeling of suffering from violence and its consequences. Ownership of a collective history brings a sense of meaning and belonging to a population. History explains the world; it determines how people attribute meaning to their lives and how they choose to act upon the world around them. History is an intersubjective and social matter. History can be dangerous when it is manipulated to meet political ends, particularly so in a context where there are many coexisting conflicting, competing, and contested narratives that people have deployed to define themselves and their enemies over centuries. History also defines and produces identity. Hence, Jonathan Friedman writes, “Making history is a way of producing identity insofar as it produces a relation between that which supposedly occurred in the past and the present state of affairs. The construction of history is the construction of a meaningful universe of events and narratives for an individual or collectively defined subject” (Friedman 1992:837). Identity is of course never fixed or static (Gupta & Ferguson 1992), but as Liisa Malkki (1995) has noted in her study of Hutu refugees from Burundi living in Tanzania, history, together with time and place, is the foundation for the creation of human identity (see also Turner 2010). Her informants, living in a closed, strictly controlled refugee camp, together reconstructed the past to build a collective identity “as a people in exile” in the particular

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setting of the refugee camp with its abundance of shared feelings and experiences of displacement, marginalization, and uprootedness. Malkki called this process “mythico-history,” to describe how her informants subscribed to a collective consensus around their common past—their “history”—as a means to define their identity and position in the contemporary political situation. Malkki (1995) writes that one of the main characteristics of her informants’ narratives was the particular way in which they spoke about their past. Her informants retold similar stories over and over. It was “rhetorical questions” together with “repetition [and] repetition with variations” that formed a very specific way of narrating history (Malkki 1995:53). Through historical lessons and repeated retelling of the same stories, Malkki writes that “[mythico-history was] like Bible stories—heavily moral stories whose purpose was to educate, explain, prescribe and proscribe” (53–54). The stories could involve biblical myths, metaphors, or stories, such as, for example, the Jews wandering in the desert, but more important, the narratives defined moral categories and perimeters, they “emphasized the boundaries between self and other, Hutus and Tutsis, and good and evil” (54). The narratives were a “subversive recasting” or a “reinterpretation” of a past, based in a given morality, and were a way to classify the world according to certain principles—thereby creating it: It was neither “history or myth”—it was “mythico-history” (54). It was “a process of world making,” she writes, that was “meaningful in confronting both the past in Burundi and the pragmatics of everyday life in the refugee camps in Tanzania” (55). Malkki’s thesis chimes with my experience of discourse with the inhabitants of Rainbow Brigade camp, who spoke about a collective history of “the Hutus” and also referred to biblical stories to depict their lives in exile. I find the concept of mythico-history useful in describing how the attempts by the population in the camp to dismiss the idea of the 1994 genocide can be understood as a process of “world making”—as a way of confronting both their past and their contemporary situation in a meaningful way while also setting up categorical boundaries between themselves as Hutus (good and innocent) and the Tutsis (bad). Following Malkki, it is not the issue that these stories are false or made up in themselves, but that a constant repetition of the same stories creates some kind of order in the world and allows for a separation of the group itself from the alien “other” (Malkki 1995:55). The stories are not, in fact, “history” but are identity-building

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mechanisms. In Rainbow camp, the reconfiguration of memory, history, and identity building took on many forms, both in verbal narratives and in everyday events and staged performances. By investigating these, we can improve our understanding of how ideology and worldview was produced in this context and how it reproduced discourses of violence, the self and the other, Hutus and Tutsi.

Retelling History and Learning Culture While certain aspects of Rwandan history were avoided by the rebels (such as the participation of Hutus in the genocide), it was nonetheless important to imprint key features of Rwandan language, culture, and heritage among all members of the Rainbow Brigade. Disseminating the language and the culture of Rwanda was one way of producing a shared set of references to the past. In the camp, four languages were spoken: Kinyarwanda, Swahili, English, and French. The most frequently spoken language was Kinyarwanda, the native language of Rwanda, and Kinyarwanda was taught to the children who grew up in the camp as a means of preserving the Rwandan culture. Language also carried a political message. When leaders and civilians undertook to communicate their messages to the international community (as seen in the following examples), they spoke in French or English, using French to reach out to the French-speaking world, in particular to those countries that were closely connected to the politics of the genocide, such as France and Belgium. Most of the elders and many of the youngsters spoke Swahili; it was used mostly in interactions with Congolese villagers. English was taught in the camp on the logical basis that, as English is currently the official language in the Rwanda, it would be needed on the day the exiles returned to the country. Besides these languages, leaders and high-ranking soldiers also spoke a coded “meta-language” when they communicated military logistics or secrets. Rwandan “culture” was also transmitted to the new generation by the elders who taught Rwandan traditional forms to the children, to the extent that all the children in the camp were able to perform the songs and dances of Rwanda. It was common for such dances to be presented to me when I interacted with the civilians in the camp. The children would line up, perform a number of dances, and proudly announce that they were Rwandans. Like other groups in exile, isolation and exclusion

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from their homeland had led to “an urgency to collect histories, identities, and memories” (McGranahan 2005:570). But further, it was also clear that everyone in the camp wanted to transmit his or her political views to the international community, and more than once the population in the camp organized campaigning activities and propaganda exercises for me to watch and record in order to reach out, through me, to the rest of the world with their agenda.

Political Campaigns In his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman (1959) makes a distinction between how people act on the “front stage,” when they are performing in front of people or an audience, and how people act “backstage,” when they are in more private or anonymous settings. There were times in the camp when the soldiers and the civilians in the camp were clearly acting out historical and political messages on the “front stage” for my benefit, with the intention of being seen and heard. Since it was uncommon that the community had had a visitor from “outside,” the leaders took advantage of my presence and position as a foreign researcher, utilizing me as a channel for the transmission of political messages that they hoped I would share with the rest of the world. One day, my coworkers and I were invited for a speech down in the clearing. As I walked down the muddy path, I could see that a crowd of about 50 people—soldiers, women, and children—had gathered. While we walked through the forested area on the way to the clearing, a high-ranking soldier who was known by the code name Obama (simply, he said, because President Obama was a black man in power) explained to me that they had arranged a public manifestation for the “Swedish delegation.” My Swedish filmmaker colleague was with me at the time. Obama turned to him and asked him to kindly film the whole demonstration.3 Then he turned to me and asked me to take close-up photos of the civilians. Although we found the whole event to be strange, we followed, without questioning, his instructions. When we reached the clearing, Obama had already prepared a good spot for us where we could “capture the best images.” A few other high-ranking leaders stood further away, next to a cluster of huts, their weapons leaning against the trunk of a tree. They observed the setting carefully. Obama explained to us that we were not permitted to take pictures

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of the leaders and emphasized that we should focus on the women and children. Obama grabbed a whistle from his pocket and went to the middle of the clearing. He counted down from five and then blew, signaling to the assembled group to begin. What followed was an arranged performance. Women in patterned dresses and flip-flop sandals came walking up the hill carrying large, handmade placards with written messages such as “Kagame is a ge´nocidaire,” “Kagame should be put in prison,” and “You, the international community should also judge Kagame and his political party, the ge´nocidaires, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (see Figure 8 and Figure 9). The women walked back and forth across the clearing. They were followed by a group of children with bands tied around their foreheads bearing such messages as “Kagame should spend a lifetime in prison” and “Kagame is a ge´nocidaire.” All of them were singing a liberation song in Kinyarwanda about the Hutu population, clapping their hands, and repeating the words “Hutu, Hutu, Hutu” to the rhythm. After about ten minutes, Obama came up to my colleague and me and asked us if we had captured everything on film. When he was assured that it was all there, he signaled again with his whistle that they should stop. The women and children lined up. Obama grabbed my hand, led me down to where they were standing in a row, and asked me to take close-up photos, making sure that the messages they carried appeared in the camera lens. Looking rather bored, the women and children assumed exaggeratedly stereotypical “sad faces” tilting their heads to one side, sealing their lips, and staring into the camera with large empty and sad eyes. The event concluded with a speech by one of the camp’s spokespersons, Alexis. Alexis welcomed the Swedish delegation to the camp and expressed his happiness that the Swedish government had decided to help the refugees out of the forest and that he, on behalf of the leadership, appreciated such a political initiative. Everyone was cheering and clapping hands, and the women and children then began to dance traditional Rwandan dances, a gesture to welcome the delegation. As part of the leaders’ strategy to spread their messages internationally, I was also given letters to take to Sweden and disseminate to the outside world. The letters, which I can only assume were written by the leaders themselves, were handed over to me by the children in the camp. One example is the following letter, signed from “all the children in the camp” and addressed to “all the children in the world.” Parts of it read:

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Here we are in the great forest of Congo, where we are living in bad conditions. We suffer. We have illness. We don’t have clothes and we don’t have a life. We don’t have good water in the forest, its only dirty water, this is the life we are living. Do you live in the same condition too? Our fathers have become animals, our mothers the same, they weep, we sing, they die and we have to see it, is it the same for you too? We know that we . . . are children and we know that we have the same rights to life as you do, we listen to radios, and we know how you are living, for us no education and no school. . . . The life we are living, it is a genocide intellectually, or it is an intellectual genocide while we have not participated in your genocide. We don’t know what genocide means, we are suffering because we hear our parents are suffering from the sins of others, are we not God resemblances like you? Other children are glad to their parents, they may play, or cook, or laugh together, they may sing. For us, our songs are the bombs [and sounds of] guns. You children of the world, we don’t know what we can ask you apart from your prayers of everyday. May you help us to go out of the forest and ask our parents who are in Rwanda to accept us and to go back to our country.4 Letters and other propaganda material containing similar messages were read out repeatedly. The example quoted above was not unique; these messages (that is, interpretations of history and articulation of political agendas) permeated the whole atmosphere in the camp. While the demonstration by the women and children was clearly an act that took place on the front stage, with the intention of spreading a political message based on the exiles version of the truth to the outside world, similar processes also took place backstage, and here the process of remaking history had a more profound meaning, which was embedded in day-to-day activity.

Political Campaigns: Making Sense of Political News One night, Colonel Frank came rushing through the darkness with a radio in his hand. He stopped in front of the table where we sat, and holding the radio between his hands, he lifted it in different directions until he managed to catch an audible signal. Although the connection was very bad, we could

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Figure 8. A political demonstration organized in the camp.

still just follow the broadcast. He seemed overjoyed and told us to listen carefully to the Rwandan news. We listened in stern silence. The broadcast was about The´oneste Bagosora, a senior figure in Rwanda’s ministry of defense at the time of the massacres in Rwanda and the man who had been accused of being the mastermind behind the genocide. In 2007, the UNbacked International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha had tried him for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide and sentenced him to life imprisonment. In the absence of sufficient evidence to uphold the penalty of life in prison, the ICTR had now (in December 2011) reduced his sentence. The broadcast was interrupted by a crackling noise, but after the broadcast Kagame made a public statement, commenting on the ICTR trial. In his speech, Kagame used the word “nonsense” to express his dissatisfaction with the decision of the international community to reconsider Bagosora’s sentence. The broadcast then continued for a few seconds before the connection faded. Colonel Frank put the radio on the table and sat down. He smiled and then laughed, “Did you hear?” he asked. “Kagame said it was nonsense!” A group of three or four soldiers had come closer to listen to the radio, and

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Figure 9. A political demonstration organized in the camp. A child carrying a sign that says that President Kagame should be in prison and that he [Kagame] is a genocidaire.

as Frank stopped speaking they began to cheer and clap their hands, excitedly shouting “Victory, victory!” Ce´dric stood up. He began to sing and the other soldiers sang in chorus. From the refugee camp down the mountain, I heard the civilian population cheering, clapping their hands, singing, and whistling. Given their reactions, it was clear that something very important had just happened, and something worth celebrating. “You see,” said Frank, “it means that in some days we are going to go back home, and the international community is now, perhaps, going to do something to liberate our people who are in exile and let us go back home to Rwanda.” Frank turned his head slowly; he was smiling broadly with a look of relief on his face. He took a deep breath, gasped, and said: “This is good news. We are now proud refugees who are going to go back home, in a few days, or months, or weeks, or years, but for sure it is a victory for the refugees.” I wanted to be sure that I had understood the incident correctly and asked again if they could explain what the “big news” was about. Frank answered my question in a clear voice.

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Frank: The big news is that the tribunal in Arusha has decided that Bagosora is not the mastermind behind the genocide in Rwanda. Author: So what this means to you is that it was not a genocide? Frank: Yeah! [Frank’s whole face lit up, as if I had just understood something very important.] If there is no plan behind the genocide and if there is no one like Bagosora that made the plan of the genocide, I think it means that there was not a genocide. Author: Do you think you will have justice now? Frank: We don’t know if there will be justice, you see, now we are in exile for 17 years and it’s now after 17 years that the tribunal happens to say that there was no planification [plan]. If it takes another 17 years, I think we will then have justice. I hope that. . . . Today is a big day. Yes, because I am not a ge´nocidier now! I was called a ge´nocidier because there was someone who made plans of the genocide. But nowadays there isn’t. So you see, I am not a ge´nocidier. I think it’s good news for the people in exile, and our people in Rwanda, and even to the rest of the people all over the world. Frank stood up. He grabbed the radio from the table and said that he had to leave for the church. I walked with him through the camp. On the way to the church, we met people on their way home from the fields, all voiced their happiness over the good news. I soon understood that this event was unprecedented. During the years that the group had been on the move, they had never had such promising and hopeful news. To them it was proof, a sign that they would be able to return home any day as refugees. The difference in our interpretations of the broadcast was clear. I interpreted the news literally: Bagosora had his sentence reduced but he was still guilty of war crimes and genocide. Colonel Frank and the people in the camp, however, interpreted the news to mean that if there was not enough evidence, there could not have been a genocide. In my interpretation, what we had heard on the radio was just a broadcast, a normal news report that most likely would not change anything. But for the families in the camp, the broadcast was a historical event that mobilized a strong feeling of hope that they might be able to return home one day soon and a belief that

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someone was on their side. They were not ge´nocidaires. The truth was emerging at last.

The Courtroom Drama The following day, this exciting news event was enacted in a makeshift theater set up by a group of soldiers. A large crowd of men, women, and children from the camp had gathered down by the clearing. In the midst of the clearing, the fighters had arranged a “stage” consisting of a wooden table and bench standing in the middle of the clearing. In front of the stage, some way from the refugee camp, about 50 men and women were waiting for the play to begin. They were drumming, singing, and dancing. A few meters away stood five of the high-ranking leaders, neatly dressed as always in their uniforms and polished boots. The soldiers appeared relaxed, their weapons leaning against a tree. They chewed groundnuts as they observed the audience, spitting out the shells and chatting with each other while they waited for the play to begin. Samuel sat down on the bench in the middle of the clearing. He rested his arms on the wooden table in front of him. He wore a T-shirt printed with an image of Saddam Hussein; black sunglasses covered his eyes. Four other soldiers entered the stage. Samuel then stood up and announced that the play could begin, and everyone in the audience immediately became silent. The children stopped playing and focused on the stage. Samuel explained that the play was going to be a fictional story. The stage was the courtroom in Arusha. He, Samuel, was going to play the role of President Kagame. Another soldier, Gerome, stepped onto the stage. He introduced himself as Bagosora, one of the men charged with genocide. Samuel explained that Bagosora was standing in front of the judges in the ICTR in Arusha. Four soldiers standing in the background played the role of the international community. One of the soldiers in a camouflage uniform stepped forward and, turning to the audience, explained that he was a representative from Belgium. The man next to him took a step forward and presented himself as a representative from the United Nations. The third man explained that he was a representative from France. The last man stepped forward and said he was a representative from the USA. The group of soldiers acting as the international community then turned to “Bagosora” as he stood in front of “Kagame,” who sat behind the

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table. The “representative from France” explained to Bagosora that the court lacked reliable evidence of genocide. He said in a loud, clear voice, “Bagosora cannot be held responsible for the genocide in Rwanda because there is no plan of the genocide.” Another man stepped forward and said, “There has been a mistake in history and he should be released from prison.” Gerome, acting as Bagosora, smiled. Samuel exaggerated how Kagame was getting more and more upset. He was shaking his head and mumbling, his body language was tense. Then the men acting as the international community stepped forward. One by one, they turned to “Bagosora.” They held their hands behind their backs while lowering their heads, bending forward and apologizing for having accused Bagosora of genocide. Samuel, acting as Kagame, was furious. He stood up and with exaggeratedly bungling gestures and clumsy body language he mimicked Kagame and his heavily accented English. He screamed out, “THIS IS NONSENSE!” He hit the table with his hand. “It’s nonsense, it’s nonsense,” he repeated several times. “The international community is wrong,” he said, and then cried out in a harsh tone, staring at Bagosora: “BAGOSORA WAS UNDENIABLY INVOLVED. HE PLANNED THE GENOCIDE. The HUTUS killed the TUTSIS.” The man acting as Kagame now looked at the men representing the international community. “The Hutus are the ones to blame for the genocide,” he said. The soldiers representing the international community shook their heads slowly. One of the soldiers, acting as a judge, explained that Bagosora had been mistakenly accused of crimes [against humanity] and that they had dropped the charges against him. He then said that they had found evidence that Kagame himself had planned the genocide and shot down the plane carrying the Hutu president [the former president of Rwanda, Habyarimana]. The “international community” nodded and mumbled in agreement with the judge’s decision. The judge, continuing, said, “Kagame should be put in jail. He is the one guilty of planning the genocide!” One of the soldiers walked up to “Kagame” and took his arm. While “Kagame” resisted being carried away, the other soldiers acting as the international community cried out in unison, “PRISON, PRISON, PRISON!” The “judge” then explained to the audience that the Hutu population in the forest had finally achieved justice and that they could return to Rwanda. The play took about ten minutes to perform. When it was over, the audience applauded wildly, and women yelled and cheered the actors.

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Figure 10. The “courtroom” drama.

Figure 11. The “courtroom” drama.

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Everyone was laughing. Children mimicked the soldiers as they were making fun of Kagame. Some old men smiled brightly. The leaders also looked on with satisfaction. This “courtroom” drama was one example of how ideologies were shared and enacted for the people in the camp and how political principles were spread not only through spoken expressions of grief and anger but also through drama and performance. In both speeches and theatrical performances, the narrative of the leadership and the military was manifested as the only truth in the camp. While many performances were staged with the intention of making the rebel ideology heard and seen (perhaps partly because I was there), there was a contradiction between the public statements about ethnicity and how it was not important and the subsequent display of ethnic hostilities by the rebel fighters. This was particularly the case in relation to their attitude to the Tutsis.

Reenacting the Past Prior to the genocide, many Hutu political parties used dehumanizing and racist propaganda to describe the Tutsi. The Tutsis were represented in numerous racist iconography and enemy images. The Hutus used harsh words to describe the Tutsis while portraying themselves as more important and beautiful, and public humiliation of the Tutsis was widely fomented in newspapers and on the radio. One of the most famous channels for hatepropaganda outreach was the radio station Radio Te´le´vision Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM), which at the time was under the control of Hutu extremists. On it, hate messages directed at Tutsis were mixed with Hutu traditional folk songs celebrating Hutu identity and glorifying Hutu culture as superior to that of the Tutsis (Taylor 1999:152). As part of the propaganda, the Hutu broadcasters frequently extolled the “ten commandments of the Hutu,” which included: “Hutus should not have mercy with the Tutsis” and “Hutus should not engage in marriages or have business with the Tutsis” (Lemarchand 2009:61). An integral part of the propaganda was the slogan Hutu Power and the abusive reference to the Tutsi as Inyenzi, which in Kinyarwanda literally means “cockroaches.” Slogans set to music, such as “Go out and kill the cockroaches,” were frequently played on the radio prior to and during the genocide. Today it is forbidden in Rwanda to use the word Inyenzi as a reference to ethnicity, and any related symbolic reference to the word is also taboo.

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“Ethnicity” was an ambivalent term among the soldiers in the camp. According to the leaders and soldiers, at least in their public speeches and conversations, ethnicity no longer played a significant role. The soldiers tried very hard to explain that ethnic boundaries and hatred against the Tutsi were no longer an issue. The majority of the soldiers routinely emphasized that “ethnicity is not important” or that “we have no problem with the Tutsi,” and some of the soldiers even voiced the idea, “We are in symbiosis with the Tutsi.” However, hidden under the attempts to emphasize that ethnic identity had ceased to be of any importance in their current situation, a systematic pattern of ethnic hatred was routinely played out. The contradiction here was that while the soldiers kept trying to disguise the underlying racial and ethnic discourses, these were in fact not hidden from anyone but regularly proclaimed in songs that everyone could hear and sing. One day in the early afternoon, down in the clearing, a group of about 25 soldiers had gathered for a military demonstration. They were chatting loudly, laughing, or singing quietly, practicing and preparing for the performance ahead. In progress was an official military display for one of the chiefs, a middle-aged, high-ranking colonel from the headquarters in North Kivu who had trekked for several days to reach Rainbow Brigade for an official meeting with the Colonel. The majority of the soldiers were dressed in green camouflage military uniforms and shiny boots, with ammunition belts strapped across their chests. Some younger men were less formally dressed. They wore colorful T-shirts tucked into green military trousers or regular shorts. On their feet they wore boots or rubber sandals. All of them were heavily armed with rifles, Kalashnikovs, and hand grenades. The high-ranking leaders stood under a cluster of trees about six meters away from the clearing, quietly observing the soldiers getting ready for the performance. Soldiers lined up. They bowed respectfully in front of the leaders then marched, synchronized and upright, their boots pounding the earth, back and forth over the clearing. One of the soldiers in command blew his whistle and the pattern changed. The soldiers raised their weapons to the air, stamped their feet, turned around, and marched faster while shouting in unison, “Hutu, Hutu, Power.” They kept repeating the words and the tension and excitement rose. Minutes later they began to run around in a circle, turning their bodies back and forth, raising their guns in the air, following the rhythm of handclaps and whistles, repeatedly singing in Kinyarwanda:

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The Inyenzi [the cockroaches, i.e., the Tutsi] that are left, they aren’t going anywhere! The Inyenzi can’t do anything. The Inyenzi, they can’t go anywhere. Those who are left, they are not going anywhere. Inyenzi, Inyenzi, Inyenzi! Hutu, Hutu, Hutu—We will go together!5 This song was repeated over and over again, and a tense, almost chaotic, atmosphere increased in intensity. Soldiers sang louder and faster, exaggerating their movements while dancing. They twirled and jumped within the circle. Some lowered their heads, closed their eyes, and fell into a trance. Others clapped their hands or raised their guns while gliding into a new song: We’ll be winners! We will have victory. We will win soon. The soldiers have always been like this! We’ll win, we’ll win soon!6 The excitement among the soldiers was intense and vivid. One by one, they danced into the middle of the clearing. The commander in charge blew his whistle. Following this signal, the soldiers begun to sing: We are the soldiers of Jesus. We really are the soldiers of Jesus. Jesus soldiers. Hallelujah, hallelujah. Amen, amen, amen. Lions, hallelujah, we are lions. Hallelujah. We can shout, hallelujah. We will take it back. We can win Soon. We are lions, Hallelujah, Amen, amen, amen!7

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Each time the word “hallelujah” was sung, the soldiers stopped briefly then continued singing and repeating the words for several minutes. The dancing had become less rhythmical, with more jumping, twisting, and twirling than synchronized dancing. Handclaps and cries from the officers and the sound of the whistle drowned out their voices. Some minutes later, the soldiers turned toward the middle of the clearing, slowing down, breathing for a short moment, and then finishing up, repeatedly shouting: We’ll light the fire [shoot], I will fire. I’ll move forward, I’ll fire, I’ll move forward and fire, I will fire, I will fire!8 After having repeated the song for about 15 minutes, the soldiers lined up in a row again, and holding themselves upright, they ran around together in the circle a few times and then followed the muddy path leading away from the clearing and continued down the hill. Only when they were some hundred meters away from their leaders did they stop singing. The leaders, who had quietly observed the performance, picked up their weapons from the ground and left the clearing.

Military Performance and the Politics of Performances In the songs and performances I have described, the fighters made explicit the ethnic hostilities that the leaders publicly downplay. But it is not only ethnic discrimination that stands out but also the celebration of military comradeship and war in which the aspiration to take back their country and a continuum of violence were encouraged through military chants. Both the theatrical event and the military performance can be interpreted in various ways. Here I will focus on the political cosmology, in particular, how the genocide is dealt with in ritualized public performance. There are various approaches to understanding rituals, social events, theaters, and performances. Following Richard Schechner (1985), theater is just one type of ritual performance: “Theatre is only one node in a continuum that reaches from the ritualizations of animals (including humans) through performance in

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Figure 12. Military performance in the camp. The soldiers are singing political and military songs about Rwanda.

everyday life—greetings, displays of emotion, family scenes, professional roles and so on—through to play, sports, theater, dance, ceremonies, rites, and performances of great magnitude” (Schechner 1985, quoted in Hornborg 2010:15). “Any performance,” Ann-Christine Hornborg writes, following Schechner (1985), “is a cultural exposition or a cultural production in which he highlights the importance of the matter and what is achieved in a performance” (Hornborg 2010:15; see also Wittrock 2011:77). While performances can be interpreted as a way to produce “truths” and to manifest ideologies, they can also be seen as a way to manage the underlying tension related to genocide and its consequences. Victor Turner is known for his concept of “social drama” (1987). A social drama takes place when there is some kind of change in a community or in a group, for example, a state or initiation, social position, age, etc. Inspired by the work of Arnold van Gennep (1960), Turner (1974, 1987) analyzes a social drama in four phases: 1. Breach or separation takes place when the social structure breaks from the normal cultural condition, for example, everyday life, news, a social relationship, etc.

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2. Crisis or liminality refers to an exit from normal social life, a postliminal phase or a transitional phase when individuals are “inbetween” or “betwixt,” in a kind of state of limbo where individuals are separated from their previous status or position in society and they are reincorporated in that society. The liminal phase is an ambiguous state characterized by humiliation, tests, assaults, etc. 3. Redressive action occurs when some kind of crises are dealt with or when a crisis legitimates some other kind of resolution. 4. Reintegration is a kind of reincorporation into society when some kind of solution is reached (Turner 1987:4). A social drama, Turner argues, can end in harmony and integration or it can end in disintegration. For example, in contexts of war, harmony would occur when two fighting sides make peace. When two groups cannot make peace, there will be disintegration, or what Turner calls “schisms,” and the social conflict will end in disharmony. There are various ways to interpret the courtroom drama about the ICTR in Arusha as it was enacted in the forest: as a spontaneous act, a celebration of the “good news” event, a collective gathering, a propaganda manifestation, or a historical lesson. Following Turner’s model, the courtroom drama could also be interpreted as a way of handling the crises and tensions surrounding the genocide and culpability for it. In the breach or separation phase, the soldier-actors break from their normal social roles and emerge onto the stage as politicians and as powerful representatives from the international community together with their biggest enemy, Paul Kagame. In this public event, they raise the taboos surrounding the politics of the genocide; they dare and grapple with the representatives of order; Kagame, the judges, and the international community. In the liminal phase, they humiliate Kagame by making fun of him and accuse him of genocide and wrongdoings. In the third phase, that of regressive action, they deal with the underlying political challenges: the international community admits that he is guilty of war crimes and the Hutus in the forest can return to Rwanda as heroes. Here they construct a new way of making sense of, and subsequently resolving, the crisis and the conflict. The audience cheers and celebrates the resolution. For the population in the camp, the crisis ends in harmony when they can return home and when the Rwandan president Kagame is judged guilty of genocide. In daily life, however, the conflict between Kagame and the Tutsis in Rwanda and the exiled Hutus in the forest remained a schism—a crisis that

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endured. But while acting out this event, they collectively agreed on the play as a way of resolving the past in celebrations and cheering for the actors and for the message they presented. In this way, everyone agreed on a new shared truth by which they could commemorate and cope with the past, following the logic that they were not guilty of genocide. The children who observed the play simultaneously learned the true story of the genocide, and the message transmitted and produced a new, shared memory that gave meaning to their current situation. They learned “what really happened.” They learned why they were in exile. While many of the inhabitants of Rainbow Camp, both fighters and civilians, men and women, said that they never spoke about the genocide, not even among themselves, the courtroom drama can also be interpreted as a way of recollecting the past and thereby coping with it, although following a different logic. To accommodate to their life in exile in the forest, it was perhaps easier to reconfigure the past following their own subjective truth rather than dealing with the fact that some of them might have been perpetrators, that they had failed in their political goals, that they had failed to take power in Kigali, and that they had been pushed into exile with little prospect of immediate return. The drama can be interpreted as an expression of how the poulation in the camp thought and felt about the genocide and how they “created” or “remade” history. These events were not just played out for the leaders but they also mobilized the whole audience, including women and children. As such, the event shows that there is more than merely indoctrination going on. It has a more profound meaning: that of criticizing the history of genocide and shifting attention to that person who the population in the camp feel is to blame for their situation. When the message is accepted by the collective, it establishes some kind of order in the group by legitimizing the standard official narrative as the only truth. Hence, while strengthening group boundaries and their identity as Hutus, they also separate themselves from the Tutsis and, in particular, from the political elite in Rwanda.

Categorizing Enemies The long-standing grievances against the Tutsis and Rwandan president Kagame, as well as the long bitterness against the international community, were expressed not only in broad political rhetoric but also in personal

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animosity. In the process of dealing with the past, and perhaps with their own failure, the Hutu exiled leaders had adopted an image of their enemy as the archetypical Other. Rwandan president Kagame had become a symbol that represented everything they hated: political exclusion, being powerless to take a place in the political life of their country, being powerless to return to their communities, feeling marginalized, and being forced to live in the wretched conditions in the forest. From the perspective of the people in the camp, Kagame was a symbol of dictatorship, a reminder of a failed past, and a symbol of the long duration of the war. On an everyday basis, there were endless derogatory phrases in use to smear Kagame—he was a “dictator spreading genocidal ideologies,” he was running the country “badly and bizarrely,” he had “a cold heart.” On many occasions, the soldiers also made public fun of Kagame by mimicking and exaggerating his broken English, his soft voice, and his clumsy body language. The camp inhabitants’ personal animosity toward Kagame was so marked that even children, as well as the second generation, adopted a certain language to describe and differentiate between “us” and “them,” and to blame the regime in Kigali for all their everyday problems. At one point, a group of five or six children, boys and girls between the ages of 5 and 12, barefoot and in torn clothes, came walking up the path after they had attended a ceremony in church. As there were no adults around, my coworker and I took the opportunity to speak with them in private. I asked, Author: What do you want to do when you grow up? Child 1: We want to cook for them. Author: For whom? Child 2: The soldiers. Author: Why? Child 2: It’s a bad situation here for them. Author: How do you live in the forest? Child 3: Very bad. Author: Why? Child 3: Because of Kagame, he is the problem. [The other children nodded to show me that they agreed.] Author: What did Kagame do to you? Child 2: He does war on us. [She stared at me.] When we look for food. Kagame’s soldiers kill us. We are afraid of him. And afraid of enemies and the soldiers of Kagame.

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Author: Who are your enemies? Child 3: Rwandan soldiers. They want to kill us. [The other children nodded.] Author: Do you want to go back to Rwanda? Child 4: Yes. We cannot stay here. We will go to Rwanda soon. By airplane. Or car. We will be helped to go back to Rwanda. [He was pulling my shirt to get my attention.] Author: Did the enemies come here to the camp? Child 4: No, not yet. But [we] wait them here. Child 5: Can you talk to Kagame? Ask him why he comes to kill us. Say, he is a killer. [She was sitting in the grass a bit farther away. She stared at me with large eyes.] Author: Why does he want to kill you? Child 5: We got information from Rwanda about what Kagame is planning to do. Because of his power, he will kill us. Author: Do your parents speak everyday about Kagame? Child 5: Yes. He is a bad guy. My grandmother is here in the forest. She speaks bad about Kagame. Author: How do you think Rwanda is different from the forest? Child 5: It’s very different. But in Rwanda there is a war. There is no peace in Rwanda. In Congo we have to cross many rivers. It’s very muddy and far away. To walk is a big problem for us. It’s a hard situation here but we must help mama to get water. We want to go to school. We pray to God to help us down the mountains. Narratives like these provided by the children were frequently articulated and logically imbedded in verbal expression. They were too prevalent to forget, reject, or ignore. They were essentially incorporated into the order and reordering of the political and moral world of the camp. Following Malkki, the [mythico-history] narratives of the camp refugees [refering to her fieldwork on Hutu refugees in Tanzania] were centrally concerned with the ordering and reordering of sociopolitical and moral categories, with the construction of a collective self in opposition and enmity against an “other”; and ultimately with good and evil. Thus, the mythico-historical narratives ingested events, processes

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and relationships from the past and from the lived conditions of the present and transformed them within a fundamentally moral scheme of good and evil. These were moral ordering stories on a cosmological level. (Malkki 1995:244) In establishing a “good” collective self, even very young children had constructed a “bad enemy” who they said was going to kill them and who blocked a potential return to their home country. But despite recognizing the threatening presence of a hostile enemy in Rwanda, the camp inhabitants looked upon it as the utopia, and the forest was seen as a liminal space. Just like the children spoke about returning home, there were many similar occasions when I understood that Rwanda was looked upon as a dreamland. On one occasion, early in my fieldwork, I had trekked with the rebels over the mountains and had brought along a bottle of juice. When I passed the bottle around to share the juice with the soldiers, one of the young fighters looked carefully at the bottle, on which were the words, “Made in Rwanda.” On the label was a painting of a landscape with the sun rising over the mountains and a paved road running between the hills. Simon, as he was called, was overwhelmed. He had never been to Rwanda, and this was the first time he had seen a picture of “his country.” He studied the drawing for a long time and repeatedly said how beautiful it was. The whole group gathered around the picture on the bottle and discussed how modern it was, pointing at the paved road, and said over and over again that they hoped to return, if “it wasn’t for Kagame and their enemies.” Again, it was mentioned that the Tutsis and the political situation make it impossible for them to return. The propaganda and the way the world was ordered in good and bad, in black and white, and how ideologies of past violence were produced and reproduced in the camp had real consequences, not least in the current situation of war. Rwanda was a daily topic of conversation among the fighters too; they spoke much less about their engagement in the Congo war zone. The inhabitants of the rebel camp saw the Congo and the camp itself as a transitional zone, a liminal space in which they were fighting a war in order to return to their home country. As they saw it, the war was between the Rwandan state and the FDLR rebels; it was simply being fought on Congolese soil. One day I visited Jules, one of the lower-ranking soldiers, in his

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bamboo hut. A pot was hanging on a bamboo stick over the fire and wood smoke billowed from beneath. I asked him, Author: What are you cooking? Jules: Corn and beans. Author: Whom are you cooking for? Jules: For the soldiers, he said and looked down. Author: Do you live here? Jules: Yes. Author: Is that your job? Jules: Yes. I cook and I am a soldier. Author: What is your rank? Jules: I am a simple soldier, he said in a quiet voice. Author: What does it mean? Jules: My mission is to cook. Not to go on missions outside the camp. Author: How long have you lived here? Jules: Fifteen years, he said after thinking for a few seconds. Author: How old are you? Jules: Thirty-five years old. Author: So you spent almost your whole life in the forest? Jules: Yes. Author: Why are you here? Jules: Because of Rwandan politics. No freedom there. Author: What will happen if you return? Jules: There is no freedom of human beings. If I go back, I will be killed. Author: Why are you not living with the Congolese civilians? Jules: I am not Congolese. There is a problem. The Congolese used to chase us out. The government used to kill us. We cannot live with the Congolese. Author: I see. Is it difficult to be a soldier? Jules: Yes. It’s a difficult condition. I live this kind of life because there is nothing else to do. I need to go back to Rwanda. Like Jules, the majority of the lower-ranking soldiers had no illusions about the hardships of their lives in the forest. There was nothing romantic or adventurous about being hungry, sleeping on the cold, wet ground, and

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fearing an attack by Congolese forces. But they had a common expression or stock answer to argue that they must fight until justice was restored. They also frequently commented that they could not live anywhere else than with their own comrades because they were not Congolese and thus had no rights to settle down in Congolese communities. For many lowerranking Hutu soldiers, women, and children, the only hope that remained for them was a return to Rwanda. The unmaking of history and the rewriting of it in a new official version with themselves depicted as victims and as fighters “until justice is restored,” the creation of a history that was repeated in performance and which everyone shared—this provided something worth fighting for, something that legitimized their suffering and lifestyle. The rebel community in the camp cultivated a history of diaspora: they had lost “their” country and they shared a belief that they had been displaced. Their daily complaints and grievances and their anger at the Rwandan political regime not only established a categorical enemy but also was an existential cry to get out of the forest, to rejoin and connect with a history somehow. The forest, they said, was a place without roots.

The Forest Without Roots Another theme that stood out in many conversations was the distinction made between “place” and “home.” The rebels dwelt in the mountains. Even if they had a place to go to—their bamboo military barracks and camps in the forest—they had no place that they called their home. The camp, which functioned as would any “ordinary” community with churches, schools, English clubs, and military headquarters, was not spoken about as home. The fighters used the words “better than a prison” to describe the camp. Children said, “This is not a life,” to describe their situation and emphasized repeatedly that “we need to go home to Rwanda.” Instead of a home, the camp was seen as a refugee camp, a hiding place, and a sanctuary where “enemies are all around” and “we are pushed deeper and deeper into the woods.” Hence, the camp was also an insecure place where “enemies can attack at any time.” It was a camp, but hardly a home. Another recurring theme in their narrative of their past and current history was the metaphor of the forest. At one point, I had a conversation with Samuel, one of the soldiers who had grown up in a small village in

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Rwanda. He said. “Because of the war we are pushed into the forest. We are pushed into the forest, pushed to do many bad things that can kill us, because we are in the forest and we cannot survive here in the forest.” Many referred to their current situation as “living in the forest,” and “being pushed into the forest,” as “exiles in the forest,” and said that “in the forest we are killed” or that “enemies are in the forest” or that “we cannot survive here in the forest.” While the forest was a hiding place and a refuge, it was also spoken about as a hostile place in which no one wants to live. The forest was a dark and rainy place, the forest was not “a life,” as Jules described it, and the forest was a place where they lived “like animals.” Overall, the metaphor of the forest indicates that they were out of their history, in a liminal space where there was no future. The forest was a place of displacement and dislocation, a place where they were refugees out of their country. The experience of living in the forest was clearly expressed in a letter given to me by one woman in the camp. A part of the letter reads, “Our children are born in the forest, they cannot survive in the forest, they miss contact with families, no education, loss of culture, all this makes our life as refugees. . . . We are suffering and put in the condition of nonhumans.” Although the forest was mentioned as a place (or perhaps a non-place), there were clear links to an existential cry to get out of this forest, where they had no future and perhaps no history either, and to rejoin a history beyond the forest. The forest, as described in the letter and in conversations, correlates with feelings and experiences of being “uprooted,” forced into exile, banished from their culture, land, and homeland. After the genocide, they did not acknowledge the official Rwandan government (Tutsi) history; they acknowledged only their exile. History somehow stopped. Now they were “nonhumans.” The forest was a place where they were truly “out of place.” But to rejoin with history, however, would imply an abrogation with genocide. Instead of attempting to rejoin with history, it was clear in many conversations with soldiers and civilians that they wished to “save” Rwanda. This was evident not only in their own self-vision, referring to themselves as “saviors,” but also in the way in which they often used well-known icons and heroic figures to lend definition to their place in history. In the camp, Nelson Mandela, for example, was a popular symbol of a freedom fighter. Mandela, they said, was well known as a peacemaker. In Mandela, they found a heroic identity. Ibrahim described it in the following way: “Rwanda

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is circulating a genocide ideology. You see, Mandela was also called a terrorist but now is a hero. I think one day I will also be called a hero, when they find the error in history.” Another similarity between themselves and Mandela, I was told, was that Mandela, like them, had been forced to spend a lifetime in prison. These days, “Mandela is known by everyone. He is the hero of the world.” Just as Mandela had achieved heroic status in the international community, the rebels would also gain recognition once the “error in history” had been discovered and the “truth” was finally allowed to emerge. Both the metaphor of the forest and the iconic and heroic image of Nelson Mandela show how the rebels both created history and attempted to expunge it from memory. The genocide led to their loss of a home country, their expulsion, and their displacement; they were now forced to live a life in exile and of isolation in the forest. In the production of a new historical narrative that contained the “real truth,” they would “fight against injustice” and be able to return to their home country when the international community found the truth in history. In the insecurity of the camp, we might speak of a local “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) in which the “truths” surrounding the genocide were constructed and performed. It was a community of common historical memory, even if many of those had not been there or had not even been born, when the events to be remembered actually took place. For the fighters and their families, to make history in the forest reflected a desire to regain honor and pride and to reconnect with their past. It was a profoundly deep desire.

Summary In summary, to retell history is a way to make sense of the past. There are many ways to interpret the genocide denial. Is it the denial of an event that everyone wants to forget, of an unacceptable marker of political failure, or of a cultural trauma and loss of country, or is the denial simply a way to mediate propaganda? It can also be interpreted as a means to establish a shared collective identity and meaning making in a situation of exile in the forest. Although it is impossible to be certain that everyone in the rebel community really believed in this retelling, it does helps to understand how ideologies and shared narratives grew out of a marginalized and isolated rebel community in the forest. It also helps to understand how the enemies

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that they blame for their situation continue to be constructed through performances and how violence is reproduced and endures over time. Although the rewriting of history in itself can explain how the rebels dealt with the genocidal past on an everyday basis, it does not immediately explain why the members of the group actually stayed in the rebel camp instead of settling down among the Congolese population. Nor does it really explain why they did not try to enter amnesty camps or return to their home country. But history in Rainbow Brigade was more than an accommodation with the past—it was connected with the everyday social order in the forest camps, a social order run on a military basis. Thus, while the denial of genocide and the reconfiguration of memory express a profound desire on the part of the population of the camp to escape from their situation, these mechanisms are also used by the leaders as a control strategy to maintain cohesion and the dominant hierarchy. I will return to this theme in Chapter 4.

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CHAPTER 4

Captivity and Commitment

How is it possible that the FDLR fighters, operating from isolated mountaintops and rain-soaked bamboo huts with mostly low-tech arms and artillery, have managed to become one of the largest, most cohesive, and strongest military groups in the eastern Congo? If members of the group were tired of living in the forest and fighting an endless war, as they said they were, why then did the fighters and their families remain in the camp when fighters from other armed groups decided to disarm, repatriate, and seek more peaceful lives? The atmosphere in the Rainbow Brigade was indeed one of social order and collectivity, even commitment. It was an atmosphere in which the religious and political life of the people was marked by collective expressions of a sense of exile and of shared dreams and desires to return to their homeland. The community of soldiers and their families had a strong collective identity and commitment to each other. Below the surface, however, I could also observe a pervasive climate of insecurity in the camp. This insecurity was the result not only of the possibility of attack by hostile forces but also of the hierarchical structure of the camp itself. While members of the rebel community shared a proHutu, anti-Kagame, “we are victims” way of looking at the world, I observed a parallel system of military control and power. There was a general fear of the officers and leaders among the lower-ranking soldiers and their women that no one spoke about. The gap between what people said and what I could observe was in many ways a gap between public performance and private utterances. For example, while a collective identity, ideology, and worldview was performed in public, in reenactments and dramas, in military life, and in religious ceremonies, with everyone praising and celebrating the leaders and their ideology, when I spoke with individuals

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on their own, however, they often looked over their shoulder to confirm that no one was listening. They rarely spoke about their personal lives and told very few personal stories. Soldiers were keen to perform in front of the camera and to talk about their political ideologies in front of their leaders, but as soon as I asked them about their personal views or experiences, they remained silent. Jules, one of the “simple soldiers” who was about 35 years old, stared into the camera lens. He wore a green T-shirt tucked into a pair of camouflage trousers and a military-style beret with a shiny gold star in the front. In his left hand he held a satellite phone, and in his right a Kalashnikov that he had decorated with a scarf in rainbow colors. Jules had asked me to take his picture. I waited for him to get ready. He stepped back a few meters. He looked over his shoulder behind him to check the scenery behind him—the mountains and treetops. He put one foot in front of the other and raised his Kalashnikov. He pointed his gun toward me so it faced straight into the camera. Jules sealed his lips, wrinkled his eyebrows, straightened up, and stared expressionlessly into the camera. He focused on keeping his pose right. He nodded to indicate that he was ready. I took a picture. Jules ran up to me and studied the picture on the camera display for a few seconds. No, he was not satisfied. He told me to erase the picture and he went back again. We went through the same procedure, with the same stance, same expression. This photo was not right either. He repeated the procedure a few more times before he was satisfied. Finally, peering at the display screen on my camera, he smiled brightly, and said, “This is a good one.” A few days later, I was sitting in Jules’s bamboo hut. His attitude was very different. The self-confident toughness that he had projected days earlier was gone. I had asked him a personal question about his previous life in Rwanda and it was a question that had invoked a nervous reaction. Jules was quiet and avoided looking at me. His anxious body language demonstrated that he was not comfortable answering my questions, nor did he show any sign of wanting to discuss his personal life or private feelings. This kind of reaction was not unusual. While soldiers loved to perform in front of the camera, showing off and swaggering with their weapons, in private settings they provided only fragmented stories at best. Many of them behaved in a disorientated way, doubtful, and even frightened to share personal information. While every soldier repeatedly emphasized that they were determined to achieve the FDLR’s political and ideological goals and return to Rwanda, it was extremely difficult to move

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the discussion beyond such stock accounts. The longer I stayed in the camp, the more reluctant the lower-ranking soldiers and women were to speak. The identity that Jules had adopted is related to what I call the “paradox of commitment.” A paradox of the camp was that the fighters had adopted a self-confident identity—they were fighters confronting enemies with courage and skill—but they were simultaneously subordinated to a system of dominance, control, intimidation, and even forced captivity. I will therefore attempt here to show that personal and collective convictions and what appear to be voluntary commitments may in fact be the result of a series of constraints. It is in the gray zone between their personal motivations and organizational requirements that the soldiers and their families live and act. It is a collective, voluntary spirit, but also one under conditions of strict surveillance.

Internal Regulation and Surveillance It is axiomatic in ethnography that more time and proximity to informants will enhance the outcome of one’s data. As I mentioned in the introduction, anthropologists usually claim that the more time we spend in one place and the more we get to know our informants’ personal life spheres, the more reliable data we will obtain. During my fieldwork in the Rainbow Brigade camp, however, I did not find this to be the case. I believe that it was because of the specific nature of the military organization among this group (and perhaps of military organization generally). The strict control hierarchy was not something I noticed immediately. It was hidden inside the social and military structure. While soldiers and their families generally spoke openly to me during the first weeks, even the first month, the more time I spent in the camp, and the more acceptance I gained among the rebel commanders, the more distant my relationships with the civilian population became. The more time I spent among the leadership, the less those who were lower in rank, including women and children, were prepared to say to me. In my understanding, this was not necessarily related to a distrust of me or a refusal to include me in their social circle. On the contrary, I believe that people enjoyed having a visitor in the camp. During the first weeks, women invited me to their homes; we shared tea, spoke about their children, and discussed the general hardships of camp life. They showed me

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around and briefed me about the structure of the camp and they shared their hardships in daily life. We could laugh together, and I was often invited to sit down with the women when they peeled potatoes or prepared food. However, the more I got to know them, the less they spoke about their private lives. When I moved away from general questions and began to ask them more details about their private lives and personal opinions, the more reticent they became to answer my questions. They would pretend they did not hear, or they would look the other way, or they would simply begin to talk again about their everyday difficulties, the lack of water and food, etc. After a couple of weeks, I noticed that women were repeating the same narratives over and over again. Thus, while I had anticipated that time and trust-building would bring me closer to individual men and women, the barriers just seemed to grow. This general reticence, I soon noticed, was related to fear and to the hierarchical control in the camp. As the leaders increased their surveillance of my activities (as a way to control information, to make sure the civilians did not provide sensitive information to an outsider, and to make sure I heard one single coherent story), the soldiers and civilians spoke less and less to me about their personal lives. The control and suspiciousness followed a rather awkward process. While Colonel Frank and the other high-ranking leaders seemed to accept my presence in the camp, they simultaneously began to control many of my interactions with the civilian population. While commanders and soldiers in mid-rank positions came every day to chat with me and conveyed a kind of friendship, at the same time they simultaneously sent soldiers to observe what I was doing. This, I began to realize, is how the system of control in the camp worked. While military sociologists typically say that close-knit military units are characterized by military loyalty, trust, and friendship, the relationships in Rainbow Brigade seemed to be built on suspicion and fear. The distrust in the community encompassed both the military units and the civilians. The more relaxed the women and children became in my presence, the more the high-ranking leaders had to step in and control the interaction. In my interpretation, the officers seemed to be suspicious of what the civilians might say when they were alone with me, as I will discuss below. Many times I was not allowed to interact with the civilians without being supervised by the leaders. This process of increasing control was never marked by any dramatic event. It occurred, rather, in increments.

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For example, the leadership would set up interviews for me instead of allowing me to interview whomever I wanted, explaining that they wanted to “help out.” As it turned out, wherever I was I frequently often (although admittedly not always) found one of the leaders close by, taking notes and recording the questions I asked, who said what, and what kind of information they provided. The fact that my quarters were close to those of the high-ranking officers was also a way for them to guarantee control and supervision. In one way, the soldiers described themselves as committed fighters with political ideologies and wider goals. There is a need, however, to move beyond political slogans about retaking Kigali as the only explanation and commitment as to why soldiers and their families remained in the camp. We are certainly not talking only about a dedicated force of rebels fighting for their cause in a spirit of militant comradeship. Such a description would apply, at most, to the higher-ranking officers, but even they, as I shall suggest, were living under strict hierarchical control. Why did the soldiers speak about commitment and brotherhood to other soldiers and self-stage an image of themselves as strong fighters, while at the same time being subjected to intimidation and fear? How can intimidation and fear coexist with voluntary commitment to a cause? I will attempt to answer this question by describing how the process of internal regulation and military control and fear and intimidation can coexist with voluntary commitment and grassroots support—at least in this marginalized setting where there were few other options.

Making “Fighter Identities” To understand the motives of and participation in armed groups, many previous studies have based their findings on the narratives of ex-soldiers and (former) child soldiers. For example, Lotte Vermeij (2014), focusing on socialization among child soldiers, has noted that armed groups have various strategies for producing “fighter identities” among newly recruited children. She notes that strategies of fear, force, and punishment are often ¨ zerdem & used to forge a strong fighting force (Vermeij 2014; see also O Podder 2011; Peters & Richards 1998). Such research has often focused on the forced captivity of very young boys and the process by which they were transformed into soldiers through initiation rituals, training, in-group

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socialization, and indoctrination. Ex-soldiers often recount initiation rituals and hazing as painful experiences in which they were forced to undergo a process of dehumanization, such as beatings, and subjection to humiliation and military drills, and being exposed to pain, and to shame. Such rituals attempt to “re-birth” the new recruits into new fighter identities (Honwana 2006; Vermeij 2014; Wood 2008). New recruits become socialized into the military culture of the group while being simultaneously alienated from ¨ zerdem and Podder (2011) their previous life. In the new rebel context, as O point out, commanders and peers provide stability and regulation in insecure settings. Socialization after induction reorients previous norms and rules, often in combination, by means of violence and submission. To understand the military system of FDLR, a comparative perspective is needed. The strict military control within the FDLR has been noted in a number of studies. Hans Romkema (2007),1 for example, in his research among excombatants and previous members of the FDLR, described a military system with a strict, rigid internal system of control and surveillance that prevented repatriation and desertion. The ex-combatant in the study said that only selected combatants were allowed to leave the camps. Only one member of each family was allowed to leave at a time, and until that person returned, other family members were kept under strict observation. The soldiers were told that if they left the camp, they risked being imprisoned, condemned to forced labor, and even executed by FDLR’s own “justice” system, or the families they had left behind risked being punished and tortured. These interviewees also said that civilian dependents were not allowed to speak to strangers and that soldiers were discouraged from socializing with the Congolese communities. The study also explains that to prevent defection by members there was a complex system of espionage that included hundreds of Congolese civilians, as well as a large number of “intelligence” operatives who collected information about their own comrades so as to ensure the loyalty of the troops. The system of internal surveillance is described as being structured into several departments: research, espionage, and counterespionage. According to the ex-soldiers, the system of espionage was common knowledge and created an environment in which there was a “perception that everybody spies on everybody” (51). The soldiers further stated that sensitive subjects were not spoken about in public and not even among family members, since everyone was afraid of being entrapped and accused of being disloyal (51–53).

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Prior to my fieldwork in Rainbow Brigade, I conducted interviews with about 10 ex-soldiers and 2 women who had been affiliated with the FDLR. These interviews provided information that could not be obtained in the camp. While soldiers and women in the Rainbow Brigade were still living inside the system of hierarchical control, the men and women whom I interviewed in a demobilization camp were now living far from the bush, in relative safety. It meant that the ex-combatants could describe the system without fear of being punished by their leaders. Their accounts were not marked by the gaze over one’s shoulder that I observed in the active rebel camp. The other difference was that the ex-soldiers had been recruited by force by the FDLR, while most men and women in the camp had been in the forest for years; some had never been outside of the camp. The camp was their only home. The ex-combatants whom I interviewed had had an ordinary village life before being abducted to the rebel camp; their life in the bush was experienced as an abrupt shock of displacement from their previous lives, but it was also understood that it would last for a relatively short period of time. This was not the kind of permanent condition that the rebels in the camp saw for their lives. While many ex-soldiers have proved able to provide detailed information and long narratives, the soldiers and their family members in Rainbow Brigade camp would not provide me with any detailed or sustained descriptions. Their stories were often fragmented, unclear, and confusing. The information gathered among ex-soldiers confirmed other reports of the FDLR having systematically recruited Congolese youngsters by trickery, subterfuge, or simple abduction and then having taken them to training camps and socialized them through political education and intimidation. The young recruits were given a gun and then forced to participate in military operations. They were held in the rebel camps against their will. Many ex-soldiers provided descriptions of the regime command of absolute obedience and strict control. Soldiers recounted how they were forced to carry out atrocities under the eyes of their commanders, including acts of brutal violence against the Congolese civilian population, on the threat of being killed. Several young men described their life conditions within the rebel group: There, my life was very difficult in the bush, finding food is not easy, they sent us to different houses to steal, for cassava. For example,

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one day they sent me to go and rape a girl and loot and steal some money, and I refused and they kicked me and sent me to jail. They sent me to jail. Killing. Only killing, this was not good for me. (Boy, age 19)2 There were no good things in the army. We were looting and killing. We killed Tutsi people and other people we met on the paths and roads. If I met a lady and I didn’t know her, I could take her and by force, I could rape her. (Boy, age 16) Before the army? I was a student in my village from [name of village]. One day soldiers ran into our village and said, “All children must be soldiers.” I was in school, but the rebels took me and carried me to the camp. They taught me how to fight. I spent six months learning to fight; they taught me how to use the gun. I was now an FDLR, and I was told to fight the Tutsi. I was a small child; I was a [have been a] soldier since 1999. We were all over the bush; we went by foot, sometimes for three weeks, sometimes for three months. Mostly we walked in the night. (Boy, age 16) One day we got uniforms and food. But there were many days where we didn’t eat anything. The food didn’t have any salt. We had to survive so we picked some leaves that we put in water so we could get the appetite to eat. We prayed every day for a helicopter to come and pick us up and to give us food and clothes. (Boy, age 16) While men described how they were forced to carry out violence against their will, girls faced other dilemmas. One girl explained how she ended up in the army: Before I joined the FDLR I was living very well. I didn’t go to school but I had no problem with the army. I was helping my mother; she had four girls and one boy. How [did I end] up with the FDLR? I was raped by [one of them], the one who raped me; he met me in the bush and said, “You will be my wife.” I said no, but he said, “Immediately you will be my wife, we are going to travel together to the bush.” I was then in the bush. Then he made me pregnant, but when the baby was six months, he left me, and I was alone. I

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named my baby Prince. My husband was now running around looking for another wife. I don’t know where he is now. I lived with the FDLR in small huts in the forest, it was war and we were moving all the time. I later found out that all my sisters were also kidnapped by the FDLR. Life was not easy because of the food. It took two days to walk to get food. And out in the bush, there was a wild [savage] war. We girls, we had to cook. And the men, they had to fight. But then I was moved to another brigade. And there, they treated me well, they said they wanted peace and return to Rwanda. They were all Rwandese. But I said, “I cannot marry a Rwandese.” They said that I would be a second wife. But a second wife is not good because the husband will not care about you. I was able to escape one day, and a community took care of me because I am not Rwandan. I want to be a trader now, to trade clothes and take care of my baby and forget life in the bush. (Girl, age 16) These accounts show us a system of FDLR organization much like many other armed groups, a system of forced obedience and violent control. While the majority of those interviewed prior to my visit in the camp were Congolese teenagers, two participants stood out. One boy and one girl whom I interviewed were not Congolese but Rwandese teenagers. They were not kidnapped by the army but had grown up in communities controlled by the FDLR. Their narratives were very different. One of the girls I spoke with was in fact disappointed about having been “freed” from the camp by an NGO working in the region. She said: As I told you, my father was in FDLR, and then I was born into that tradition. I am 15 [or 16] years old now, and that is how many years I have spent inside the army. I was born in the army. My father is dead now. And my mother is dead too. But I would like to go back to the camp. We were cultivating [food] in the bush. Selling some things, goats, groundnuts, beans, we were living in a good way, no problem. They were not treating me badly. The goal is only peace. [The] FDLR don’t fight, for instance, if the government army comes then we can fight, but we don’t need to fight, we need only peace. I know, really the FDLR doesn’t fight, some of them can have food and they go to the market and they sell their food, no problem. But if the government army comes to

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trouble us, then we can fight and that is how we can react to kill people, to loot, to fight. (Girl, age 16) And one Rwandan boy who had also grown up inside an FDLR camp, said: I was not badly treated because I was a commander. I was a commander because I know how to write and how to read Swahili. I was used to the big guns. (Boy, age 17) All of the quotes are needed to show the difference between the two sets of children. While the Congolese boys were abducted from their villages and were subjected to intimidation and forced to kill and rape to escape punishment by their leaders, the Rwandan teenagers who had grown up inside rebel communities had a more benign experience of life inside the rebel group. These examples tell us that there is a difference in how one might perceive the world growing up in a rebel community with no alternative with which to compare it. (The social and military hierarchy is also seen here—Rwandan children were treated better and they can be commanders, but the Congolese children cannot achieve high military rank.) The teenagers who had grown up in the camp speak in a manner similar to the soldiers in the camp; they had internalized the norms and ideologies of the group and did not make clear distinctions between family relations and military linkages. Unlike the ex-combatants in refugee camps, they had not undergone any kind of military socialization or indoctrination, although they had accepted and shared the worldviews, norms, and rules of the camp. The active soldiers’ nervous reactions when I asked them about their private lives could therefore be interpreted as a reaction of doubt and confusion because they were unfamiliar with thinking or talking about themselves as individuals when I was asking questions about their personal life. They identified themselves primarily as FDLR soldiers in a larger community where one’s identity was fixed in the hierarchy of the group. Inherent in this military hierarchy was fear—fear of revealing too much information and fear of being punished by their leaders.

Ruling with an Iron Fist At one point, I asked one of the colonels for permission to move around alone in the refugee area.3 He told me to wait. Several minutes later he

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came back, this time accompanied by a middle-aged soldier, Alexis. Alexis politely introduced himself as the “head of humanitarian affairs” and the “spokesperson” for the civilians.4 He said that he was responsible for the well-being of the civilian population and that his special task was to protect “the refugees in the camp.” In his hand he carried a pen and notebook. While he browsed through his papers, he explained that he had gathered all the details about the civilians in his book. His notes were diagrams and statistics of who was living in the camp, how many men and women there were, the numbers of children born in the camp, the number of soldiers, their ranks, profiles, and so on. Alexis said that it was better if he could accompany me when speaking with the refugees so that he could explain if there was something I did not understand. I tried to explain that his company was not necessary and that I, if possible, preferred to work alone. However, my request was not negotiable. Alexis, my coworker, and I walked down the slope of the hill. When Alexis walked in front of me, I could see that he had written down a list of names in his notebook. When we reached the slope of the mountain, Alexis told me he had already prepared a list of people “good to talk to.” I did not protest. I thought it was better to see what Alexis had in mind before I interrupted him. I was taken to one of the bamboo huts down in the refugee area. A young woman, perhaps in her thirties, was sitting on the ground close to a fireplace behind the bamboo fence surrounding her hut. Alexis introduced me to the woman. Her name was Grace. A group of children stood further away, eyeing us suspiciously from a distance. Grace looked at me briefly and smiled politely when I sat down next to her. Since women preferred to speak in Kinyarwanda, my translator, Christopher, was also with me at the time. Grace rarely made eye contact but kept glancing at the potatoes that she was roasting close to the fire. Occasionally she leaned forward to move the potatoes from the flames. While I began to introduce my coworker and myself to Grace, Alexis stepped back. From where I sat, I could glimpse over my shoulder when he took up his pen and paper, getting ready to record our conversation. Before I had even had the time to properly introduce myself to the woman, Alexis said that I could begin the interview. Alexis’s pushiness was disturbing to me and clearly to Grace as well. Grace expressed no willingness to participate in the “interview,” and the situation was both awkward and uncomfortable. While we were both following Alexis’s instructions, I asked Grace the first question that came to my mind: where she came from and how

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she experienced her life in the camp. Still looking down, she said in a weak, trembling voice, “We really suffer here in the forest. We have no clothes, no books for our children, we have nothing.” Then she turned quiet. Alexis continued to push the conversation and said that I should ask Grace about the situation of women suffering in the forest. Grace explained that being a woman in the forest is very difficult. She said that the worst fear that women encounter is pregnancy. If there are any complications, either the woman or the child must die, she said. Both of them will not survive because there are no medical doctors around. She pointed at the muddy ground and said, “We give birth to our children here on the ground, in the cold rain.” She was looking down again. Alexis, who now took notes of what Grace said, took a step forward. He then asked Grace, again in a rather arrogant voice, to explain to me how women were raped in the forest. Both Grace and I were disturbed by Alexis’s harsh voice and how he insisted on having Grace recount an obviously difficult experience. She gave Alexis an uneasy look. She was quiet for a second; her mouth was half-open as she tried to find the right words. She looked anxious. She closed her mouth and sealed her lips for a brief moment. Then she began to talk. She spoke quietly, in a trembling voice. She said, “When I go to the fields . . . soldiers come behind me. We are raped in the fields. . . . I was raped. . . . Rwandan soldiers want to exterminate us.” She turned quiet again and moved the potatoes from one side to the other, continuing to look away from me. Alexis looked at Grace, clearly expecting her to continue speaking. He waited for her to speak again but when she remained silent, Alexis filled in the blanks himself: “Rwandan soldiers try to kill our women. They are sent by Kagame to kill us and to push us deeper into the forest.” He pointed toward the forest as if he wanted to demonstrate that soldiers were really there, hiding in the bush. The interview with Grace is a typical example of how the high-ranking soldiers controlled what the women said and how they directed the civilians to speak about certain subjects while silencing other topics. The topic of rape was a recurring subject highlighted by the women. I do not doubt that women experience fear about being raped by enemy soldiers, nor do I have any reason to believe that they were lying to me when they told me of having been raped. However, in the rebel camp, these kinds of narratives were not always spontaneous. On all too many occasions it was obvious to me that the officers were prodding the women to speak. They filled in the blanks with their own words and interpretations; they stood behind the

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women, following us around, recording and observing what was taking place and leaving very little room for the women to tell their own stories. These controlled interactions and scripted interviews are one way in which the leaders kept control over what was said to me. They had clear motives for ensuring that I heard only a single, coherent narrative. I soon became more attuned to the silences concerning their view of life in the camp than to the content of what they actually said. Of course, women, lower-ranking soldiers, and children may have been quiet for many reasons. Some may not have been comfortable speaking about difficult experiences with a foreign researcher; some may have been shy and unaccustomed to share sensitive stories with a stranger, and given the general climate of suspicion and lack of trust that generally infiltrates contexts of war; others may have been quiet to protect their own identity; still others may have been fearful about what I would do with their opinions and personal stories. But from everything I observed, the silence most likely indicated that the subaltern groups in the camp—the women, the lowerranking soldiers, the elders, and children—had been forced to speak in a certain way by their leaders and that these groups were subjected to intimidation. Nevertheless, even in a context of intimidation and perhaps even fear, many individuals saw the Rainbow Brigade camp as their only base for security and protection from surrounding enemies.

Collective Fear and Suspicion After fleeing into the Congo from the devastation and possible repercussions of the genocide, many Rwandan men and women I spoke with said that they were exposed to further trauma and violence in the aftermath of the genocide. One event was particularly important. During the refugee crisis in the Congo at that time, many refugee camps were continuously attacked by Rwandan soldiers. During this period, Rene´ Lemarchand (2005) writes that it is possible that over 200,000 Hutu refugees were killed by the Rwandan intervention in the DRC (see, also Gnamo 1999:331–332). In addition, thousands of refugees died in the forest trying to escape the revenge killings, dying on the bush paths from exhaustion, hunger, sickness, and malnutrition (Lemarchand 2005:1–10). While the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda has received enormous attention, there is comparably less information about the revenge killings committed in the DRC against Hutu

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refugees in 1996. While the killing of thousands of refugees seem to have fallen out of the public memory (and is still a topic of controversy), these events were vividly recalled by individuals in Rainbow Brigade. Everyone in the camp, even children, was very suspicious of outsiders. The alleged massacres of the Hutus in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda was spoken about in terms of the “extermination,” the “purification cleansing,” and the “genocide” of the Hutu refugees. One of the most descriptive accounts of this period was recounted by Hope, a woman in her mid-forties, and a mother of two children born in the camp. She said, “We have done 21 years of war and 17 years of refugee outside of our country. When we were in the refugee camps, we faced many difficulties. Many of us died from hunger, cholera, and malnutrition. We have undergone purification cleansing and a genocide done against us by [Rwandan Tutsi] soldiers coming to chase or pursue us, and the soldiers have raped so many women refugees.” While Hope did not speak about her own personal memories of this time, she, like many others, instead referred to a generalized, collective memory of fear and trauma shared by Hutus in the DRC. Another woman told me: “All this passed [the killings of refugees] with intimidation, it surpassed the capacity of our women; while Kagame and his people he was working with, they wanted to exterminate the refugees, there was genocide, in Uvira, in Goma, and other provinces of DRC. The genocide was done by our enemies, the RPF and other strangers [other armed groups] since 1996.” The collective experience of the mass killings was articulated as a betrayal by the international community, which had done nothing to help the refugees. According to Hope, “We have no rights as refugees, our right does not exist, where can we sleep in the evening? Wherever we go in the Congo, they are behind us, planning death for us. We came to cross Congo entirely on foot, we are undergoing trauma, suffering.” While Hope spoke about the general history of the Rwandan Hutu refugees, she particularly mentioned the hardships faced by the women: “Women have been taken by force [raped], undergone violence, they killed our husbands. Women are not a concern of the history. Women are dislocated, shamed along the way, forced to divorce husbands, and so many women have been dislocated along the way.” Hope’s story bears many similarities to the way others in the camp remembered and articulated their past. The experience of living for years in the forest with hunger and fatigue and seeing their loved ones die around

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Figure 13. A group of women talking about their hardships.

them, together with a general fear of going back to Rwanda, had formed a strong collective suspicion against anyone from the outside, while at the same time it seemed to shape strong social ties to those with similar experiences.

Commitment and Loyalty There were numerous examples of the strong commitment the soldiers shared with the group. Even if the leadership structure was clear and the lower-ranking soldiers, women, and children generally had lower status and positions, as seen in everything from restricted movement, duties, responsibilities, etc., they were still included in the wider community. Soldiers frequently spoke about each other as brothers and used familial terms to describe individual members of the collective group. For example, they talked of “our brothers in other camps,” or those who were loyal to the group, such as “our brothers in other countries” or “our brothers in Europe,” but they also used “brother” to refer to all other Rwandan Hutu: “our brothers in Rwanda.” Family terms were used not only for soldiers

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but could also include women. For example, women who were of Hutu Rwandan origin were often called sisters, and women used the term to refer to other women with whom they had a connection, the same way the soldiers did. When I returned to the camp the second time, the leaders, soldiers in all ranks, and women also referred to me as their sister, as a way of showing inclusion. However, referring to each other in terms of family relationships was simultaneously a tactic by leaders to establish a sense of collective homogeneity and loyalty and to provide meaning to stay in the group and protect their “brothers” and “sisters.” Referring to each other in familial terms is not unique to the Hutu fighters. It resembles the way names are used in many armed groups to create a sense of group belonging, collective identity, and cohesion, thus fulfilling a wider purpose. There were other attributes that characterized the internal logic of reducing one’s personal identity. As I have mentioned already, the soldiers often took on different names to present themselves. While they explained that their sudden changes of name was primarily a strategy to bewilder and confuse enemies and protect their own identity, this can also be seen as a way to reduce one’s true identity and distance oneself from one’s own actions, thus making it easier to carry out (violent) activities by adopting different “fighter identities.” Names, language, and identity play a crucial role in establishing internal order, cohesion, and control. In her study of female combatants and women kidnapped by armed groups in Sierra Leone, Chris Coulter (2009) identified a similar pattern. The women in Coulter’s study noted that while they were in the rebel groups in the bush, women were not allowed to speak their local language but were forced to speak only the language of the officers and soldiers. If they refused to speak the language demanded of them by the soldiers, they said they risked being killed (2009:118). Language control, Coulter argues, served to distance the women from their previous life and cut any connection to their identities of origin. Coulter further notes a similar pattern among soldiers. She describes how during the war, soldiers adopted “noms de guerre,” names used only in the war, not only as a means of protection but also as a strategy to reinforce confidence and reputation among the soldiers (2009:118). Soldiers were given names such as Cut Hand or High Firing, names that served to reduce one’s own identity and evoke a sense power (2009:118). While the soldiers in the camp, used mixed identities by changing names and referred to each other as brothers and sisters, it was also important for them to introduce themselves in terms of military rank and position. Since

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the FDLR considered itself a conventional army (at the time), it makes sense that rank and position played a crucial role. The achievements of rank provided the soldiers with a sense of control and power while controlling and confirming one’s position within the system. Rank was a mark of status as well as a label confirming one’s place. The aspiration of being a soldier was further marked in symbolic actions, such as the status of wearing a uniform and the bravado attitude that came with carrying a gun, as seen in the example where Jules was posing in front of the camera with his gun. If asked about their previous life or their feelings beyond being a soldier, without guns and a military uniform, the individualistic and personal upbringing that is implied in such questions was unfamiliar to the fighters. They perhaps even considered it unimportant since it was outside of the hierarchical system in the military system. In the camp, and more generally within the military organization of FDLR, there is no room for personal or individual freedom. Yet they were determined to achieve their goal of returning to Rwanda. In spite of the enemies, the fear of attack, and the collective commitment, there were cases in which soldiers wanted to leave the security of the camp.

Prevention of Desertion and Defection No one is allowed to leave the camp for more than a few days unless they have permission from their leaders, but none of the individuals I spoke with mentioned that they were held in the camp against their will. One day I visited Jean-Pierre, who was about 35 years old and one of the fighters, in his bamboo hut. He was washing his clothes in a yellow petrol can. He was kneeling, bent over the container full of water, occasionally looking up. I observed a guitar without strings on the roof of his hut and asked him where he had gotten it. Jean-Paul smiled and said he found it in the village where his girlfriend lived. Jean-Pierre then told me he was going away for a few days to see a girl he was in love with. He looked happy. His girlfriend, he said, was a Congolese woman, living a few days’ trek away from the camp. We spoke for a while and then I asked him if he went to see her often, to which he answered, “No, not really.” When I asked him why, Jean-Pierre told me that because he was a soldier, he could not stay away from the camp for more than a few days at a time. As we were talking, Alexis soon appeared in the background, as he had so many times before.

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He was there to listen and record our conversation. I turned to Alexis and asked him if soldiers ever leave the camp for long periods. Alexis explained that a soldier can leave for a few days, but if they do not come back, “we will send our soldiers to bring him back.” Jean-Pierre did not seem to react strangely to this. Rather, it was common for soldiers to simply say “We have to stay here” or “We must fight” when I asked them about their relations with the surrounding communities or if they wished to settle down elsewhere. Although few would question this statement, this is not to say that they did not think about what a life outside the camp could offer. Many spoke longingly of a “normal” life in Rwanda and a life in peace and freedom. However, no one mentioned that they wanted to escape from the camp or leave the group behind. This willingness to remain—even among those who were recruited by force or subterfuge—can be related either to their classificatory family bonds and acquired commitment to FDLR ideology or their willingness to remain in the camp for other reasons. However, the fact that no one mentioned leaving the camp was also related to the strict internal control exerted by the leadership and the fear of what would happen to them if they left the camp. Many soldiers knew that the UN peacekeeping mission in the Congo (MONUSCO) ran several programs to disarm the rebels. The Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration Program (DDR) has tried to peacefully disarm the soldiers for several years with little success. For example, the UN has airdropped pamphlets from helicopters in rebel-controlled territories that say the rebels can peacefully return. Since many rebel units have access to radios, the UN has also broadcast successful stories of combatants who have dropped their guns and entered demobilization camps. The UN has also spread information about Rwanda to encourage soldiers to give up fighting and hand in their weapons to the DDR. Among individuals in the camp, it was frequently argued that until the government of Rwanda was willing to negotiate, the soldiers would not face the risk of being killed by Rwandan forces. As one of the combatants said, “We don’t know what will happen if we cross the border. Some of us will be mutilated, burned, or executed.” I was told by Patience, a lower-ranking soldier, that he had heard on the radio that the UN could help soldiers from the FDLR to repatriate to Rwanda. However, Patience said that his field commander, who was with him at the time, had told him that the news reportage was false. His field commander had said that Rwandan soldiers would kill every

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soldier connected to the FDLR as soon as they crossed the Rwandan border. Patience simply believed his commander and kept saying that the information about UN assisting combatants to return was false. Patience, like the majority of the fighters and refugees, believed that they would be killed if they returned to Rwanda with help from the UN. While leaders have access to radios and information from other parts of the region, lower-ranking soldiers have to rely on the information given to them by their leaders. Providing biased information to the people in the camp, I believe, was one strategy to prevent soldiers from escaping the camp. This instilled fear of what might happen if soldiers and their families tried to desert the camp was rarely mentioned; nevertheless, there were moments when fighters in the camp touched upon the subject of the strict control from the inside. There were cases when I could understand that they are not allowed to move about freely. At one point, prior to my fieldwork in the camp, I was sitting in an outdoor coffee place in Uvira with Ce´dric, the “security agent,” and my coworker. While Ce´dric could not reveal in detail exactly what he was doing for the FDLR, he said, while laughing, something like, “If we go to the camp, they will never lose sight of you.” At the time he said it, I did not pay any attention to his wording. It was only later, when I was in the camp that Ce´dric said, in confidence, that even if I thought the leaders were friendly, everyone in the camp was being watched. He then explained that he risked being killed if he decided to exit the organization. Even if he wanted to leave, he could never do it, he said. While he joked incessantly and was laughing even when he revealed such information, perhaps as a projection of fear, I initially thought that he was exaggerating. It was not until I met Ishimwe, who actually did escape the camp between my two stays when I was doing fieldwork, that I really understood the strict control to which the population in the camp was subjected.

Escaping from the Rebel Camp Ishimwe was in his early forties. He was married to a Rwandan woman and was the father of two young girls. He was currently one of the “intelligence and security” officers in the camp. When he left Rwanda in 1994, Ishimwe said he was a young student and he often recalled the memory of his time in school. Ishimwe’s dream was to return to school one day. He often said

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that he wanted to become a nurse or a doctor. I had met him during my first round of fieldwork in the camp. When I returned to Congo a couple of months later for the second round of fieldwork, I received a text message from Ishimwe. In the message, he wrote that he had escaped from the rebel camp a couple of months earlier and was now in a Congolese town several days’ trek away from the camp. We agreed to meet. (Ishimwe wanted to meet with me because he needed money.) When we met, I noticed that he now looked different from the way I remembered him. Instead of the usual green uniform, boots, and a Kalashnikov hanging over his shoulder, he had on a white nursing outfit and shiny black shoes. Ishimwe had decided to run away from the camp a few months earlier to seek a better life outside the forest. Although Ishimwe had plans to move his family away from the camp at a later stage, he decided first to go on his own. He departed from the camp with a group of soldiers under his command. On the day of Ishimwe’s escape, the soldiers trekked the whole night and the following day. When they reached one of the peaks of the hills, Ishimwe commanded his soldiers to return to the camp while he stayed. His fellow soldiers left him alone, without questioning his order (since he was the commander in charge) on the mountain peak. Ishimwe explained how he prayed the whole day while waiting for the darkness to fall over the mountains. At dusk, he left the mountain and began the long way down to town, leaving his rifle in the bushes. When he reached the town, he explained that he spent the first days searching for a place to stay and tried to orient himself in the new environment. It was not easy, he said. He was not used to the traffic and lights, and the new surroundings felt unsafe. At the same time, Ishimwe was struggling with shame and guilt for leaving the camp, including his wife and children. He had to try hard to convince himself that what he was doing was right. He explained how he prayed intensively and struggled to overcome his fears. Ishimwe said that life in the new setting was very difficult but better. Life in the forest “was not a life,” he emphasized several times. Ishimwe eventually found a Rwandan refugee family living outside the town. For a couple of dollars a month, he could stay in a small room in a barrack in the back of the yard. He explained that he had no personal belongings and no mattress and that the small amount of money he was receiving from unknown sources (to help protect his identity, I omit this part) he had spent on school fees, a school uniform, and books for himself. Every day

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was a struggle. Changing life completely was difficult, and Ishimwe said that he prayed every day to be given a second chance. He admitted that he missed his friends and family in the forest but would not return. A potential return could also be dangerous, he said, since he knew that he had betrayed the group. Moving away from the rebel zones and starting a new life was not a life of freedom. Ishimwe still feared that the rebels would find and kill him. To limit security risks, he moved only between his house and school and always watched to see if he was being followed. The skills from being a soldier and intelligence officer, he highlighted, had helped him in town: he knew how to hide, how to escape, how his enemies think, and how to avoid confrontations. Ishimwe explained how he had to radically change his identity in order to settle down and integrate into the new setting. Proudly he showed me his new (fake) identity card that he said he had bought for $100. He had changed his name and age. His plans for now were to send a message to his family and to try to get them out of the camp. Back in the camp, having met Ishimwe some weeks before, Ray came to me one day and said he had spoken with some of the soldiers. Ray explained to me that he had asked the soldiers where Ishimwe was; the soldiers had responded in angry voices. Ray imitated one of them saying “Ishimwe . . . If we find him, we will kill him immediately! He betrayed us. He left us here! Can you believe it? We trusted him and he let us down. Yes, kill him, we will kill him.” Samuel, who stood in the background, leaning against the wall, had said, “He let us down. We cannot trust him. He must die but only God knows where he hides.” It is not hard to understand why Ishimwe was ambivalent about leaving the camp. Like others in such military and refugee situations, be they from rebel camps in the DRC or from authoritarian regimes far away, there is the guilt, shame, longing for his family and friends, and the loss of belongingness and solidarity from the former life. For Ishimwe, life in the town, although far from the camp, was difficult to adapt to even if described as “better.” He spoke more about his own personal loss of family and friends than of his military activities. Behind the fac¸ade of soldier solidarity and commitment that Ishimwe said he missed lay the harsh reality of forced conscription into a military unit by which he could be killed, and his family punished, if he deserted. So much for the committed rebels dedicated to patriotic duty out in the forest.

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Prisoners in the Camp Against the threat that the soldiers and their families leave the camp only at the greatest peril, life in the camp certainly produced a general condition of fear, if not simple captivity. The strict security protection around the camp, and the large territories that the rebels had to cross if they wanted to escape, made it even more difficult to imagine how they might leave. That captivity was further notable in the restrictions placed on soldiers and women regarding contact with family members outside the camp. While most of the soldiers had their family members within the confines of the camp, some still had family members in Rwanda. Many had severed their relations with their outside family members completely. Claude, for example, said, “I don’t know if my family is alive. After I left Rwanda, I lost all contact. I cannot get in touch with them because it can put them in danger to have a relative in the forest of the DRC.” Like Claude, many of them said that it was not safe for them to be in contact because they were afraid of what would happen to their family members if the leaders found out. Hence, while I was in the camp, to give an example, one of my coworkers was secretly given notes by several soldiers. The notes contained their names and a phone number to a relative, a friend, or a contact. While it was quite common that soldiers frequently used this communication system among themselves as a substitute for telephone calls when there was no network, contacting their family members involved some personal risk. In this case, they used a third party. The fear of what might happen if one leaves is not confined to soldiers and civilians—it also affects the leaders. The officers also spent time thinking about a life outside the camp. One day, as my fieldwork was about to end, my coworker Ray came to me. Ray explained to me that he and one of the colonels had spoken about his condition in the forest, and the colonel desperately wanted to leave the FDLR. The officer had begged Ray for money and to find him a passport that could take him to Europe, where he said he could hide. Ray had explained that he had no money, but that the officers should speak with me. The reason Ray explained this to me was so I could be prepared for the situation when it occurred. Later that same night, while sitting by the fireplace in my hut, writing field notes, I could see the officer walking toward my hut. He was quieter than usual. I had prepared for his request and waited for him to begin the conversation. But he did not. I remember that we were talking about his

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family, a topic that he had avoided before. I asked him if he was married. He looked down and said that he did not have a family and that he had never been married or had the opportunity to have children. I asked if he felt alone in the camp or if he had any family members nearby. He explained that he had a sister in Rwanda; however, she could not know that he was alive. Since I remembered the conversation with Ray, I asked if he ever thought about leaving the forest life. He was quiet for a long time, and then he said, “Sometimes I can think about Europe.” I asked if he would like to go there and leave his current life. He said, “Someday” and then was quiet for a moment before continuing: “But no, not really, I have to stay here. I have to advocate for my people and country.” I do not know if he had any clue that Ray and I had spoken. Then he stood up, politely said good night, and then disappeared into the darkness. Only on one other occasion would he touch upon the subject of leaving the forest. One night he came to my hut. He asked me if I knew a way to obtain a passport and how much a ticket out of Congo would cost. When I answered with a ticket price, he said that he was just curious to know, and then he left. He never again spoke about leaving the camp. It might have been my presence as a foreign outsider that made leaders and fighters think about a possible way out. It is difficult to know exactly what individual soldiers actually thought and what they really believed about their life conditions. However, my presence provided some way in which they could, at times, reflect on their own way of life. Many were curious about the world outside—every day, leaders and individual soldiers asked questions about the “outside world.” They asked about politics in Sweden, about prime ministers and presidents in Europe; they asked how people live, about family relations, marriage, and all kinds of details attached to a “normal life” outside of the context of war. At the same time, many questions they asked were about politics, presidents, and governments and whether there were rebel groups in Europe—questions that were important in their own situation. There was ambivalence between renouncing the armed struggle and the strong feelings of commitment that existed among the soldiers, and the feelings of betrayal that came with escaping or leaving the group, as was the case with Ishimwe. Certainly high-ranking leaders and other soldiers knew that there were soldiers who left the camp and survived in towns and demobilization camps and even in Rwanda. There was, however, a concomitant uncertainty about what might happen if they left the camp. Uncertainty

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was also produced from the inside. Although soldiers experienced fear from outside threats, enemy groups, and the lack of social networks outside the camp, they were subject to the strategy of the officers, who constantly emphasized that if the soldiers deserted, they would be killed by enemy soldiers. In this environment, the officers were holding subordinates “prisoners” by implementing strict control and order. At the same time, lower-ranking soldiers and the refugee population seemed to have genuine hopes, dreams, and ideologies. In this marginal context, captivity and commitment seemed to go together.

Ambiguous Relationships and Social Order The explanation as to why individuals did not lay down their weapons and return to a more peaceful life must be understood as a combination of factors. In the camp, as seen throughout the book, the camp leadership played a crucial role. The camp officers, aside from their military rank, were also acting as pastors, priests, and political commissars. The political chanting and the rituals that I described in Chapter 3 were constructed out of shared historical memories and accepted by all. However, the leadership also used these political rituals to enforce political hierarchies so that civilians would not desert the camp. Under surveillance by officers, the camp inhabitants felt watched and controlled. But the camp also provided a base for security. While there may have been a desire to escape from Rainbow Brigade, the soldiers and civilians thought that their chances of survival on the outside were low and the risks great. Are we talking simply about a captive group in the Congo forest? Not quite. Since everyone in the camp shared the general ideology and goals of the group, it is simplistic to describe the rebels’ participation in their military life only in terms of fear and intimidation. Everyone participated in the public gatherings and partook in organized political ceremonies, and it was clear that everyone had accepted the political worldview and found a basis upon which to justify their fighting to achieve the political aims. Although no one was actually hiding the fact that they fought and continued to fight to achieve their goals, their ways of acting must be understood from various angles, not only as a product of a political and military movement. Thus, even if the lower-ranking soldiers and civilians were captured

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in a destructive system, they were also part of mobilizing it. They had a strong sense of commitment to the group and found moral bases to justify their acts. Individual agency, however, emerged from a marginalized position where they found no other alternatives in life. They acted from a position where they saw everyone around them as enemies and where the outside world was threatening. They saw justice and peace as being achieved only by continuing to struggle for an eventual return. In the context described above, fighting and protecting their own existential grounds, each family sought power and balance in life and struggled to maintain stability and safety in time of uncertainty. Through a constant process of military and political socialization and resocialization, and the reproduction of a fighter identity in this liminal space, individuals acquired the culture of the group and maintained identities that led to common interests, norms, goals, etc. and maintained the “spirit of violence.” Acquiring a meaningful identity led to sustained compliance. In this setting, strong loyalties were shaped while simultaneously reducing an individual’s sense of self. In a context where there were few options to leave the group and maintain an ordinary life, and any kind of alternative socialization was nonexistent, the rebel community provided a space where they could live and acquire a meaningful identity. Simultaneously, social relations were strengthened by external threats, marginalization, and disconnection from the wider social structure. On the one hand, the strong collective and shared fear of the outside, the collective history, religion, political ambitions, and various symbolic social ties—such as family names, ranks, carrying a weapon, seeing oneself as a brave fighter in the group—formed a strong identity and commitment. On the other hand, social relations were also ambiguous and gray. Individuals, especially those lower in rank and social status, expressed fear of speaking about certain topics and avoided my questions. Besides commitment and loyalty, I observed internal fear through silent acquiescence. In this context, however, individuals also sought personal opportunities or benefits and even took the risk of leaving the camp and their family behind.

Summary There were two sources of insecurity in the camp. One came from outside enemies and the fear of being attacked (again) by Rwandan soldiers. The

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other was from the military structure within the camp. While the fear and uncertainty of outside enemies heightened emotional commitment, at the same time the domination and power imposed by the leadership affected every form of social life inside the camp. The interaction of power relations was played out on various levels and formed a closed military and political system, and not all actors living in the camp were equally powerful. The inequality between those in the higher ranks and those in the lower ones was visible in what the soldiers could talk about and what they refused to talk about. The internal system of the camp had developed into a closed community with subtly imposed discipline. It was equally clear that the camp’s military leaders exerted influence and control over the behaviors of the people living in the camp and that they were worried about soldiers leaving for the outside. Through political and military control, the lives of the soldiers and their family members were circumscribed. Despite commitments to fight for a return to Rwanda, those living in the camp also considered escaping, while others tended to suppress their dissatisfaction through silent acquiescence. In this setting, rebel life was a combination of individual commitment laced with fear and intimidation. Rainbow Brigade was not only a band of highly committed, idealistic fighters. It was also an anxious group of distrustful, insecure (young) men who continually weighed the legitimacy of their commitment and at times considered leaving or actually deserting their “movement,” even if it meant risking being hunted down by their erstwhile “brothers.” In Chapter 5, I will discuss how the rebels moved about in the wider surrounding territories and how they interacted with civilians.

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CHAPTER 5

The Forest of Volcanoes: Rebel-Civilian Interactions

In 2009 a series of brutal attacks were carried out across the South and North Kivu region. A few months previously, Hutu rebel troops had moved through the area and left threatening messages in villages; the messages said that the local population would be punished. Some of the letters, collected and translated from Swahili to English by Human Rights Watch (2009), read as follows: Today we burn, tomorrow we slaughter. We are only at the beginning. (Human Rights Watch 2009:54) You, the population of Mihanda, be on guard. We are going to kill the pregnant women and open their stomachs and we are even going to kill the young girls. The men will be decapitated like the salted fish. Since they are trying to force us out of Congo, we will punish the population of Ziralo. (Human Rights Watch 2009:54) The day when your soldiers come to force us out, that will also be the day when you die. We’ll only return to Rwanda after exterminating the Congolese population here and burning your villages. (Human Rights Watch 2009:57) A few weeks later, the threats were carried out. Hutu rebels, their allies, and soldiers from a handful of other armed groups overran local communities, burned down villages, raped women, and killed people with guns,

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Figure 14. The landscape in South Kivu surrounding the camp.

machetes, and knives. According to a report published by Human Rights Watch (2009), the attacks killed over 1,000 civilians and left many women brutally raped and sexually assaulted. In one single village 96 people were massacred, and the violence that followed further displaced thousands of people. On top of this, soldiers burned and destroyed homes, schools, and churches. They took away with them young men as new soldiers and kidnapped girls as bush wives. The FDLR violence was a reaction to attacks perpetrated by the Congolese government against them. The Congolese operations, formally named Umoja Wetu (“our unity” in Swahili) and Kimia II (“quiet” in Swahili) were backed by Rwanda and the UN peacekeeping mission in the Congo (MONUSCO).1 The campaign against the Hutu rebels was supposed to disarm the FDLR and bring peace and stability to the region. Instead, the response of the FDLR and the other armed groups was to embark on a countercampaign of ruthless violence against civilians. A woman who managed to escape the mass killing told Human Rights Watch: I came back the next morning and saw bodies decapitated, burned, and raped. I was scared so didn’t stay for long. . . . The women were

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all naked so we knew they had been raped. Some of them were in their homes, others next to the houses. Some were killed by bullet and others by knife or machete. I saw two women who were pregnant, and the FDLR had cut open their stomachs and removed the fetuses from their bodies. The nine children’s bodies I saw had all been burned. One of them was killed first with a knife. . . . I left that day for Goma. (Human Rights Watch 2009:64) Another Congolese woman recounted: I was hiding in the house with my three children when the FDLR attacked. They came into our house and said, “You the Congolese people, you are here with these soldiers who don’t know how to fight. We will kill you, and we will exterminate you.” Then they grabbed my 18-year-old son, pulled him out of the house and killed him. After that, they hacked to death by machete a 42-year-old woman and a 3-month-old baby girl who were also hiding in my house. (Human Rights Watch 2009:63) These atrocities were a strategic move on the part of the FDLR, intended to instill fear in the governments of Congo and Rwanda and the headquarters of the UN, as well as in those civilians who refused to collaborate with the rebels. By killing civilians, the FDLR sent a very clear message to the Rwandan and Congolese governments: “If you try to hunt us down, we will kill innocent men, women, and children.” It was an act that showed civilians what would happen to them if they refused to assist the rebels or to shift their loyalties. Caught as they were between opposing armed groups, the civilian population was perpetually forced to choose sides—the “wrong” choice could lead to ruthless retribution. This particular series of attacks stands out as extraordinary in that they began as an organized operation to disarm the FDLR rebels but gave rise to the mass killing, maiming, and displacement of civilians and the destruction of their homes. In war there may be any number of underlying motives and perceived justifications for targeting civilians. In the case of the FDLR, how can we explain these atrocities? How can we make sense of such brutality? In order to understand the motivation of the rebels, the utility of their tactics must be explored from their own viewpoint. While it is sometimes

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argued that violence against civilians fulfills no other purpose than to visit harm and wholesale destruction on a defenseless population, it is in fact necessary to analyze the motivations of those perpetrating the violence: why it is that a civilian population is targeted by warring groups? In order to achieve a deeper understanding of the FDLR’s violence against civilians, this chapter explores the interaction and entanglements of the group of rebels that I interviewed and civilians. How did the rebels move about in war? What strategies did they use to maintain power and control? And how did they motivate their combatants to commit acts of violence? As in many other war zones around the world, the civilian population in the DRC has been the main target of atrocities and conflict related violence. Around the world, we read of surprise attacks on government buildings or foreign missions, suicide bombings in public or tourist areas, and apparently random attacks on civilians. In the eastern Congo, this kind of violence takes place in remote and inaccessible territories. These areas, often in highland regions where there are no roads, mobile networks, or access to help and security are perfect hiding places for rebel activity. Keeping track of armed groups in the eastern Congo is hard. New groups are emerging, and it is difficult to track their strategies and agendas. In 2017 it was estimated that there were about 150 active non-state armed groups in the Kivu territories (Stearns & Vogel 2017). In the territory surrounding the camp where I carried out fieldwork, there were at the time around 50 active armed groups (that I knew of) that both threatened civilian communities and, at the same time, depended on them for information and supplies. Since many communities have their own grassroots militias, it is extremely difficult at times to distinguish between armed groups and villagers or between perpetrators and victims —an uncertainty that contributes even more to the extreme insecurity of the region. The villages located between hills and mountains are mostly populated by local Congolese together with various other ethnic groups. However, there are also villages and armed communities primarily composed of Rwandans or Burundians; some of them are internal or external refugees whereas others have lived in the Congo for many decades. Also in the area are a number of camps of Congolese National Army brigades (FARDC), placed there to protect communities from the surrounding rebel and militia groups. The civilian communities in the region suffer from rampant poverty and a lack of infrastructure, such as schools and health services. Continuous conflict in the area has also shaped a landscape of

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constant fear in which the FDLR and other armed groups maintain control over potentially disloyal civilian communities through various forms of terrorization. But terror is just one of many elements in the long-standing relationship between the armed groups and the villagers; there is also, in equal parts mundane and practical interaction. We could speak of “cycles of normality”: periods of peace punctured by an onslaught of terror and intimidation followed by another peaceful period when everyday relations are resumed. In this context, violence is normalized as a recurring phase in the cycle. The population learns to live with fear; there is raiding and there is trading. Relations between villagers and rebels are also not solely antagonistic. In some instances, the villagers obtain benefit from their interactions with the rebels: protection of the population and their livestock from other armed groups, exchanges of food and other necessities, and political support. Nevertheless, intimidation and terror remain the key means for the rebel groups to maintain their dominance over the civilians.

Terror Warfare and “Soft Terror” Terror warfare is a military strategy with the goal of “defeating political opposition by controlling populations through fear and brutality” (Nordstrom 1998:103). Terror warfare takes a number of forms; it is not limited to any one particular set of tactics or maneuvers. As Nordstrom writes, the power of terror warfare “lies in the threat it poses to life, limb, and the basic normalcy of the world” (107). Terror warfare is visible in attacks or raids, where killing or destruction is the goal. But it also exists in less murderous forms: those involving the destruction of property or resources or, alternatively, the control of territories where resources like food, water, animals, or minerals are located, all with the ultimate effect of preventing any kind of long-term development. Terror warfare is perpetrated on an everyday basis. Rebels and armed groups constantly use threats of violence, assault, and torture to control the daily lives of the civilian population to their own advantage. Or, as Nordstrom puts it, the goal of terror warfare is “to reproduce the hegemony of violence in the minutiae of everyday life” (1998:197–198). The conditions of prevailing uncertainty and pervasive fear that afflict communities in the conflict areas in the eastern Congo are not “an acute reaction, but a chronic condition” (Green 1994:227). Terror warfare has

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long been one of chief strategies of the Hutu rebels as a means of upholding power and maintaining their activities. Over and above the deliberate assaults on the civilian population, it is also widely known that drunk and undisciplined young soldiers (including those from the Congolese army who are supposed to protect civilian communities) engage in looting, rape, and intimidation of civilians. Thus terror, both officially and unofficially, becomes part of an all-embracing effort to humiliate, destroy, and break communities apart. At times the FDLR have used systematic terror as a means of punishing civilians for having betrayed them. At others they have used threats of torture and killing to gain support from civilians. The burning down of villages, systematic lootings, ambush, and even massacres of entire communities has been a threat for over a decade. On occasion, however, the fighters engaged with civilians less violently for their own personal benefit through what can be described as “soft terror.” As part of my fieldwork I trekked with a group of FDLR rebels for 25 days across vast territory and was able to observe firsthand how they used various forms of soft terror to obtain food, shelter, and information. I saw how they negotiated relations with civilians in terms of “friendly alliances” for the achievement of “common interests.” The 25-day trek with the rebels was an important source of information to me because the soldiers who accompanied me could speak without being controlled or supervised by their commanders. Being outside of the camp offered opportunities for more accessible dialogue and a different kind of information than I could otherwise obtain. In the following sections, I will describe the relationship between terror warfare and power and the line between making war and surviving war. In order to understand the social relations of fear, violence, and terror warfare in the Kivu region, we need to grasp the insecurity of the setting, the perceptions of the soldiers themselves of their living conditions and actions in this setting, and how they navigate and interact with civilians, as well as how the civilians themselves respond.

Forest of Volcanoes A few days before they left the camp, I watched the soldiers giving one of their frequent military performances. About 30 soldiers were dancing

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around in circles. They waved their weapons, singing loudly. One of the songs was about how they “live in the forest of volcanoes” and must not leave their fellow soldiers behind in combat. As Samuel, one of the field commanders, once said, “War in the Kivu is like a volcano eruption, it can happen at any time.” This reflection on local conditions is a helpful way to describe the surrounding landscape of conflict: not as a war governed by any logical course but rather as a fragmented and unpredictable series of violent eruptions. Hostilities had been simmering underneath the surface for decades. The conflicts, both spontaneous and organized, and the outbreaks of battle or violence could quite simply take place at any moment. Although there are periods—sometimes months—of relative calm in the eastern Congo, war has become the normal condition, where the “uncertainty has become the certainty” (Hoffman & Lubkemann 2005). The rebels often used the French expression c’est la situation qui commande, which can be translated as “it all depends on the situation” or “the situation will decide.” This expression was used to encapsulate how the war and violence in the region could not be reduced to one single explanation and was not governed by a logical pattern; the choices to be made by the combatants depended on the particular situation at any given time. The soldiers frequently used the expression to answer simple questions, such as which road to take, which road to avoid, or how to traverse a section of enemy territory. Although the fighters had a fair idea of the potential threats in a situation at any given time, they often had to improvise along the way. The expression c’est la situation qui commande was also used to refer to political or military developments. According to the soldiers, many things could “depend on the situation”: their next move, the strategy of an enemy group, or indeed the future itself. In summary, the environment was unpredictable. The choice to be made would “depend on the situation,” and the phrase expresses the constant sense of insecurity that was inherent in any kind of activity outside the camp; although the soldiers might know where they were going, they could never be sure how they would get there or when they might arrive. The inherent mobility of the Kivu region—where rebel groups, government troops, and militias change brigades, positions, and camps on a regular basis—made it difficult for the combatants to predict beforehand what route to take or what paths to avoid; these decisions had to be made along the way. To make them, the soldiers sent spies ahead to collect intelligence; they made use of markers, such as trees and stones, along the pathways to

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communicate with each other; they spent many hours hiding and waiting along the way; they obtained news from villagers; and they had “transit zones,” where they met regularly and exchanged information. In an unpredictable situation like that of the war in the eastern Congo, it is fair to say that most of the violence must be understood from the particular political, social, economic, security, or territorial context in which it occurs at any one time. An episode of violence in the Congo is likely to depend on a momentary articulation between time, space, and territory. What appears to be the motive behind one attack might not explain another. Rather, the motives and underlying causes are multidimensional and must also, importantly, be understood in the light of the everyday experience of the combatants. In what follows, it is not my intention to explain the underlying causes of violence but instead to provide an account of how my informants legitimized their participation in the war in the Congo, of how violence for them had become a way of life. From the perspective of the rebels, the question of war was often articulated as a means of achieving power, protection, and balance in insecure settings.

“Motives” for Fighting in the Congo Any analysis of how the rebel troops moved about in the war in the Congo, and of how they conducted a campaign of terror against civilians, must begin with an understanding of how the rebels themselves legitimized their involvement in the war. As discussed in previous chapters, the majority of those I interviewed said that they were fighting in order to return from exile to Rwanda. They described their participation in the conflict in the Congo as being in defense of their home territories—that is, the areas where the Hutu refugee population lived. The FDLR held control over large territories in both North and South Kivu. Although some of these territories were demarcated zones occupied by their own intelligence or military units, the FDLR also controlled large areas where thousands of Rwandan refugees were settled in scattered villages. According to the fighters I interacted with, protection of their kin was their main priority. As one of the field commanders said, “We are pushed deeper into the forest; we have to protect our families.” Most of the time, the soldiers argued that the Congolese army and the Rwandan

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soldiers from across the border were their main security threat. But it was also true that the rebels additionally confronted a large number of militias and grassroots defense groups living and operating in nearby areas. While the FDLR clearly had a political agenda and supporting ideology related to their eventual return to Rwanda, the soldiers often emphasized that the war in the Congo had less to do with politics than with simple survival. The war, they said, was only partly explained by their bad political relations with Rwandan power holders. Although the Hutu rebels had collaborated with the Congolese army during the second Congo war in 1998, the soldiers now spoke about the Congolese army as having become their enemies after Kabila took power in 2001. Their motivation for joining with the Congo army in the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda was, according to one of the soldiers, “never to achieve power in Congo but to launch attacks on Rwanda.” Thus, in the narratives of the rebels, participation in the war in the Congo was a way to survive while waiting to return from exile. And although the protection of their own families and fellow soldiers was given as the main reason for continuing the fighting, there were many other factors influencing that decision—the most significant of which were economic in nature.

Beyond Greed In much of the research about violence in civil war, economic aspiration is often identified as one of the major motives for militias and rebel groups to engage in systematic looting and pillage (see, for example, Collier 2000; Keen 1998). Violence committed by the FDLR had an economic component as well, but the rebels often insisted that the motive for looting and pillaging was not driven by a desire to acquire wealth but rather as a means to meet their basic material needs—for sheer economic survival. They usually responded to my questions by saying no more than “We have to survive.” They also often denied that they had used violence to obtain food and supplies from local communities, even when it was evident that they had. “We don’t loot,” they would say. “We get food from villages because we have good relations with them.” However, while it was true that the rebels were indeed provided with regular food supplies from the civilians on an apparently voluntary basis, it was clear that the exchange took place against a backdrop of force and intimidation.

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During the years that the FDLR rebel forces lived in South and North Kivu, many of them had established fairly sustainable economic networks that generated income (see Chapter 1). Reports from the UN Group of Experts have managed to trace networks of trade in minerals and cattle as well as the extortion of protection money from villagers (United Nations 2011, 2012). It is also widely known that the rebel leadership obtained financial support for logistics and weapons from outside sources (Human Rights Watch 2009). However, inevitably, most of the income obtained ended up not in the hands of the low-ranking soldiers and their dependents but in the pockets of the leadership; the majority of the low-ranking soldiers did not receive any kind of assistance. In some areas, the combatants undertook farming activities, the transportation or smuggling of minerals, or small-scale trading (see also Pole Institute 2010). But, as one of them explained, the proceeds were small: “Some say we make a lot of money from mining activity. This is not true. If it was true we would not live like this.” And one of the younger soldiers told me, “Some of us [the soldiers in a particular group] make money on this business, but not us, we have nothing.” Yet another combatant said: “I have heard about soldiers who are involved in this business. They trek carrying the minerals and they make a lot of money on this.” However, they all emphasized that the soldiers from Rainbow Brigade did not have any access to mining or were involved in any economic activity related to mineral extortion. Whether this is true or not is hard to ascertain, but many of the fighters’ accounts described violence and looting as acts of desperation, as “need rather than greed” (Thams-Olsen 2007:4).

Navigating (In)security While basic economic material need can explain some aspects of the violence against civilians, it cannot explain the raw brutality of the violence. Material need was evidently far from being the only motive. The violence must also be understood as an outcome of the combatants’ own search for personal safety in everyday life. By terrorizing civilians, the soldiers could obtain moments of dominance, using fear and force to meet their need for security as well as for material goods. The FDLR had hundreds of soldiers and, when necessary, was highly capable of carrying out organized attacks under military command. Most

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of the time, however, the soldiers operated in small units, trekking between communities in search of food, shelter, and supplies rather than with the intent to engage in battle. Throughout the time I spent trekking with the rebels, they expressed no intention of conducting military operations. On the contrary; the soldiers were more interested in speaking about ordinary life in the field. Most combatants spend a lot of their time trekking through the mountains, forests, and hills, guarding their territories and seeking out resources. Ordinary life in the hills was described as being one of constant rotation and movement between military shelters and villages. The areas in between camps and villages were intermediate zones; they were liminal places of danger. Survival tactics rather than military objectives were paramount. Unless they stopped in villages, the major goal of the combatants was to avoid enemies rather than to confront them. The soldiers often highlighted the importance of “finding the way” and ensuring their own safety and that of their families. They spoke about the territories between brigades or communities as zones of uncertainty—precautionary measures were essential. Above all, they stressed the need for geographical knowledge, simplistic as that may sound. As a small group of combatants alone in the field, they were not equipped with high-tech devices and advanced technological support; most of the time they relied on low-tech devices and crossed vast territories to reach their destination. As Samuel, one of the intelligence officers, explained: “What saves me one day can kill me the next.” As well as knowing which roads to take and which paths to avoid in order to escape enemy attention, it was also vital to know how to navigate the bush, often under cover of darkness, using rivers and other natural formations to identify the route. To avoid direct confrontations with soldiers or ordinary villagers, the rebels often trekked at night without flashlights. They walked, sometimes for hours, silently in the dark, guided only by the moonlight.

Bodyguards and Command Structures Security was integral to life in Rainbow Brigade; safety measures were constantly discussed and implemented at all times. Each commander had his own bodyguard who always walked about 25–30 meters ahead of the leadership to reconnoiter and secure a route and who would be sent out to survey an area while the leadership sat and waited in the rear. The place of the bodyguards in the hierarchy was apparent in how they communicated

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Figure 15. Bodyguards carrying bags and other items.

Figure 16. A group of soldiers and bodyguards trying to get mobile reception.

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with each other and how they behaved. For example, when the unit stopped to eat or drink water from the rivers, the bodyguards would stand a few meters away to keep a watchful eye on the surroundings. And during the time we trekked, I never saw the rebels give food to their bodyguards. On one occasion I noticed that when Samuel sat down in the grass, his bodyguard sat down some distance away. Samuel had a few roasted potatoes left in a plastic bag and began to share these potatoes with the other soldiers but gave nothing to his bodyguard. When I asked why, Samuel said that the bodyguards would eat later; he added that their job was not to eat but to secure the safety of the commander in charge. At night, when the soldiers slept, whether in a local village or in the forest, the bodyguards stayed up all night, taking turns to protect the leaders, finding food, and maintaining the fire. In line with the military hierarchy, the bodyguards were subject to strict discipline. One of them, Alfa, explained that he was under orders at all times when outside of the camp. He complained of the hardship of never being able to control his own life. At one point, he asked me for a piece of soap. He asked in secret so that the leaders could not hear and then confided that I had to give it to him when the leaders were not watching so that he could hide it in his pocket, otherwise he would not have been allowed to keep it for himself.

“Good” and “Bad” Villages It was not only the bodyguards who were treated badly. I also observed how relationships with the inhabitants of surrounding communities were based on instilling fear to control the civilian population and, to ensure that the daily needs of Rainbow Brigade were met, on a kind of soft terror. However, interactions with civilians were not always based on intimidation alone. Given the length of time the rebels had shared land with the civilians, some relationships had become more complex. Generally speaking, the Hutu rebels and the surrounding armed groups in the region posed a real threat to the lives and welfare of the local population. The FDLR had many military units positioned around South and North Kivu. On their treks over large areas populated by civilians, confrontations were unavoidable. But while some of these were purely hostile, it is important to stress that not all interactions were based

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on fear and intimidation. Rebel-civilian interactions are diverse and varies across the Kivu provinces. In some areas, rebels are embedded in local society and have more or less stable alliances through intermarriage and commercial activity, living from the same land and resources and thus blurring the boundaries between civilians and rebels. At the time of fieldwork, many communities in the region were living under trying conditions and were highly vulnerable to the presence of rebels and militia groups who depended on them for survival. In the highland areas, the weather is cold and windy, and farming is not very productive. When resources were already scarce, and when there was not always enough food to feed a family, the soldiers could be a real burden on the local economies. Against this background, many villagers entered into alliances, but from an asymmetrical and marginalized position. Most alliances were only partially voluntary, since villagers were intimidated or found it difficult to separate themselves from the politics of war. And, as in any war, alliances were of vital importance for the rebels to achieve and maintain advantage. R. Brian Ferguson notes: “Alliances are crucial for success in war. Allies can provide combat assistance, intelligence, material support, places of refuge, and secure flanks. In plotting campaigns against an enemy, no move may be contemplated without estimating its impact on existing alliances. Alliances also affect the balance of power between opposed groups—itself a factor of great importance in shaping military actions. . . . The structure of alliances not only affects who wins, but also the initiation, spread, and cessation of hostilities” (Ferguson 1990:43). Although the rebels were dependent on local populations for resources and logistical support to sustain their military presence in the Congo, their alliances with the village communities should not be regarded simply as an aspect of military strategy that was relevant only in wartime. The war in the Kivu region has become more of a permanent social condition, it is perhaps more appropriate to speak of “interactions.” The rebels I spoke with often described communities in comparative terms, such as “a good village” or “a bad village,” to identify their history and current status. A good village, according to the combatants, was a community or a group of people that allowed the soldiers to shelter with them overnight and provided food and information. Many good villages were seen as refuges, as relatively stable and secure, but even with good villages, relations were usually based on domination and intimidation.

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Controlling Civilians Through Fear While trekking with the rebels I witnessed a number of such “interactions” in which, despite the soldiers’ insistence that they had “good relations” with a community, control and intimidation and even extortion were highly evident. On one such occasion, arriving at a small village, Samuel drew his Kalashnikov over his shoulder. The other soldiers put down their rifles and instead of carrying their Kalashnikovs on their backs as they normally did, they held them in front of them, as if prepared to shoot. With this display of weapons, the soldiers entered the village. A group of women quickly hurried out of their huts. They ran across the yard to where their children were playing and quickly carried them inside, occasionally looking over their shoulders to establish what was going on behind their backs. Their facial expressions and body language clearly indicated that the rebels’ entry had caused considerable fear among the population. Everyone, men, women and children alike, retreated into their houses, and in a few minutes, the courtyard was empty. Samuel looked around and then said in a loud voice that they were hungry and that they were begging for food. A man looked out of a door and explained to the rebels that they had neither food nor water. Samuel turned around holding his Kalashnikov in front of him in a further display of his power. Instead of responding to the man’s statement, he said that they would be waiting in a hut down the hill. The rebels entered a hut on the outskirts of the village. They unpacked their bags and took off their boots to warm their wet feet near the fireplace. About two hours later, a man entered the hut with a container full of potatoes and some plastic cups. Samuel grabbed the container and served potatoes to each of us. When the food was finished, a few children dared to come to the hut to pick up the empty container and cups, at which point Samuel said we had to leave because “this is a bad village,” and, gesturing toward the children, told us that they had tuberculosis. Although I cannot be sure whether the children were actually sick or not, I interpreted his remark as being intended to intimidate them rather than anything else. On another occasion, we stopped to rest in a “transit camp” located on a mountain peak and known by most of the soldiers as a “safe place.” The small village was a regular meeting site for the soldiers, a community who they knew “supported them” by providing safety and information. Although the soldiers claimed that they trusted the villagers, that they could

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stay in the village knowing that the villagers protected them, it was notable that they treated the locals with a minimum of respect. Later that evening, a group of soldiers were sitting on the ground around a fireplace in the center of the courtyard. The rebels had ordered a young woman to bring them food. I observed how she prepared the food in a mud hut a few meters away from where we sat. The woman worked quickly, preparing rice over the fireplace and washing a few plastic cups in a bucket of water. When the food was ready, she came down the path carrying a large container filled with rice. She served the rice to the rebels in plastic cups, carrying out her duties in a hurried way. The rebels joked with each other: “She is a good mama,” they repeated several times and laughed. The woman pretended she did not hear what they said and continued to serve each person, one by one. When she left, one of the soldiers, Balaam, said, “She is a good mama, like a wife to the rebels.” When I asked what they meant, they continued to laugh and avoided answering my question. The woman, who had gone back to her hut, was on her knees washing a pot. The soldiers continued to eat the rice and joke among themselves. They then asked the woman to come outside and sit with them. The woman pretended not to hear their request and went on with her pot washing. Some minutes later she came back to the fireplace to pick up the dirty cups. The soldiers joked with her again, repeating that she was a good woman for cooking and taking care of the soldiers. The woman appeared insecure; although she smiled politely, it was clear that she did not find the jokes very amusing. About an hour later, the soldiers retired for the night, even though it was only early evening; the rebels usually went to bed at sunset so as to be sufficiently rested to set off unnoticed at dawn. As the soldiers started to pack their things and prepare to retire into the huts, one of them said he would stay with the “good mama.” The other soldiers laughed, some clapping their hands, as the soldier crawled into the hut where the woman was living. While I cannot know the true relationship between the soldier and the woman, nor what actually took place that night, the woman’s behavior strongly suggested that she felt awkward in his company. It was also clear that, while the soldiers laughed and bragged and enjoyed teasing and making fun of the woman, she herself seemed to dislike their behavior. While I have no evidence that the soldier forced her against her will in any respect, the way they interacted with her exemplified the attitude of dominance that was typical of the rebels’ interaction with civilians.

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Trickery, Dishonesty, Lies Rebel interactions with civilians were also characterized by trickery and dishonesty. For example, the soldiers would sometimes dupe the locals into giving them what they needed by pretending to be their allies. When the locals were not listening, they would tell a very different tale. Such was the case with a local pygmy population living in the mountains of the Itombwe forest. Like many small villages, they had their own militia with a selfproclaimed leader. A few hours before the rebels had even entered the pygmy territory, they began to speak about the pygmies in a manner that openly expressed their feelings of hostility and contempt. The soldiers said that the pygmies were a “short and stupid” people whose ethnic origin made them despicable. The pygmies, they said, lived in unhygienic conditions, sharing houses with animals because they lacked the skill to build “proper houses.” They also said they lacked the ability to create a strong fighting force and were not a trustworthy people. The pygmy community was located on a mountain peak overlooking miles of hills and valleys of the Hauts Plateaux (previously called Hauts Plateaux d’Itombwe). Due to the relatively cold climate in the mountains, hardly anything grows at this altitude (in this area elevation varies between 1,500 to 3,4000 meters). The village was small, numbering only a few huts, which were built of mud and wood from the forest. In the courtyard in the middle of the village stood a few cows and pigs that, the rebels said, had been stolen from a nearby village. The group of rebels that I was accompanying openly demonstrated their dislike for the way the pygmies lived: in addition to their comments about badly constructed houses, with animals and people sharing sleeping quarters, they complained that there was no separate area for washing and a latrine. However, when one of the village leaders came to greet them, the soldiers politely greeted the man and explained in a friendly tone that they needed a place to sleep for the night. As soon as the man disappeared, they continued to complain about the man and the village and apologized to me that we were obliged to stay in the village overnight. Later that same night, when everyone was sleeping, one of the bodyguards came inside the hut to wake us up. He told us that the leader of the rebel pygmy militia wanted to say something. Samuel let the man into the hut. Obviously drunk, he sat down on a small bed of cane sticks in the

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corner of the hut and begun to complain about the war and their hopeless situation in the mountains. Samuel stood up, looked at the man, shook his head to demonstrate his irritation, and went outside. When the man left a couple of minutes later, Samuel came back inside and said that he had gone out because he “could not tolerate that the man was drunk” when speaking to him. Again he railed against the pygmies, repeating that they were “short and stupid people” and saying that the rebels take advantage of them because “they are too stupid to understand.” At the time, I didn’t understand why, if he disliked the pygmies so intensely, he would pretend to have friendly relations with them. However, the following morning I understood the reason for his dishonesty. At dawn I heard the soldiers negotiating with a group of men and women out in the courtyard. The villagers were told that if they helped carry the unit’s bags toward the mountains, the soldiers, by way of exchange, would guard their cows so that they would not be stolen by other armed groups. Samuel managed to talk the group of villagers into carrying the bags for almost a whole day. Later, Samuel again told me that he thought the pygmies were easy to manipulate because they were stupid, and of course, he said, the rebels would never help them out but would only take advantage of the pygmies’ stupidity, shortness, and drunkenness. In such ways the Rainbow Brigade regularly manipulated local civilians and, while disparaging them, took advantage of them to obtain their support and protection, use them as servants, and even, at times, recruit them as members. In one village we entered, a boy of about eight years old was sent by the village leader to give fresh milk to the rebels. At the time I did not pay much attention, but, about an hour later as we were leaving the community, I saw that the boy was following the soldiers. He carried a bag and walked close to the field commander. I asked Ce´dric, the security agent and my coworker about the boy, who he was, and what he was doing with the soldiers. Ce´dric said that the boy had been promised five dollars to carry the soldier’s bags to the camp. In another village, a local man of about 30 years old was also promised money to carry bags to the camp. Both the man and the boy followed the soldiers all the way to the camp. In numerous interviews I had with ex-combatants prior to my fieldwork in the camp, this is exactly how they described their “recruitment” into the militias— many of them said that they had been promised money to carry a soldier’s luggage and ended up under the control of the group.

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While I never saw the boy again, I later saw the young man in the company of the lower-ranking soldiers. Although it would be problematic to label the sequence of events as forced recruitment or kidnapping, it was clear that both the man and the boy had been promised money that they most likely did not receive. While I do not know what happened to the boy, the young man remained in the camp at least during the time I was there.2 The examples above demonstrate, in one way or another, how the rebels engaged with civilians and how local communities were affected by the presence of the soldiers. The cases also illustrate how the dominance of the soldiers was underpinned by the threatened use of arms; they also point to some of the underlying distrust, hostility, and pure bad faith of the rebels in their dealings with the civilians. The rebels used naked power to get what they wanted, and they also used lies: promises for which they were not held accountable and an outward show of friendship and cooperation despite keeping a private tally of which villages were “good” and which were “bad.” From these interactions, it was obvious to me that the rebels saw the villagers as a resource to be exploited—as “stupid,” “bad,” “less intelligent,” or even afflicted by “sickness,” as in the case of the children deemed to have tuberculosis. The soldiers’ use of language to classify the civilian population as “stupid,” “useless,” and “easy to fool” sustained a distinction between the Hutu rebels and the “others,” who were, of course, not just different but also inferior. A parallel can be drawn between this rhetoric about the local Congolese population and the way the Hutu described the Tutsis as cockroaches. By classifying different groups of people as “other,” they “may serve as objects of projection onto whom negative feelings and ideas may be transferred, thereby inflating one’s own sense of self-worth and moral superiority” (Hinton 2002:9). When the other is stigmatized as nonhuman (Tutsis) or subhuman (pygmies), it is easier to commit violence against them. The examples I have presented demonstrate the hostile relationships that characterized the everyday interactions of the rebels with civilians as they made their way about the warscape. Yet such relationships do not always only involve hostility, fear, and intimidation. Civilian and rebel interactions sometimes also exhibited voluntary collaboration toward the achievement of common goals.

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Collaborations: “Our Village Was on Fire” As a foreign female researcher accompanying a group of armed rebels, my interactions with the civilian population were obviously limited. My presence probably caused as much anxiety and doubt among civilians as did the rebels’ incursions into the local communities. In one village, however, I was approached by the village leader, who wanted to tell me how his community and his family had suffered from the presence of the soldiers. While the soldiers were sitting on the grass, resting and waiting for a group of women to prepare food for them, an old man came up to my side. He presented himself as the village headman and said he wanted to show me something. While I walked away with him, I could see that the soldiers had become nervous. When one of the bodyguards made an appearance in the background, I understood that he had been sent after us to see what the man had to say. The old man took me to the outskirts of the settlement. He stopped and pointed toward the ruins of what used to be a medical clinic. He described how the rebels had come during the night, a couple of months ago. The group (that he did not want to identify by name) had run through the village. “People really panicked,” the man said, speaking in broken English. “Everyone was asleep and suddenly there were gunshots.” The man described how the soldiers had stolen everything that the community possessed and had burned down their medical storehouse, the school, and the church. The man cried in a bitter and angry voice about how much he hated the war, about how much the soldiers’ destruction had pained him and his village. His wife, he said, had become mentally ill from years of terror inflicted by the war; she had become possessed by evil spirits. The man said that his family members spent several hours a day trying to heal his wife in ritual ceremonies to take the “bad spirits” out of her body. The man expressed a terrible weariness of war and said that he had decided to ally with the Hutu rebels to obtain protection from future attacks. The destruction caused by decades of war in the Congo has not only been material and physical, it has also destroyed the minds of people— hence the exhausted village leader’s decision to ally with the rebels to gain their protection from further destruction of his community. In this case the Hutu rebels promised to bring men, weapons, and ammunition to the community in exchange for guarantees of food and a

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place to sleep when they passed through the area. In other situations, the collaboration could be more political in nature.

“We Watch Their Cows” The Hutu rebels often used the English expression “the enemy of your enemy is your friend” to describe how their grassroots alliances worked. The expression was used several times by the soldiers to underline the fact that two groups could enter into an alliance because they had a mutual enemy and shared a common militarily strategic goal. Such was the case I encountered with the Banuyamulenge population. The Banuyamulenge occupy large territories in the High Plateau. They are ethnic Tutsis; originally from Rwanda, they have lived in the Congo for several generations (Mamdani 2001; Prunier 2009). The Banuyamulenge played a major role during the second Congo war and through the decades of the war were enemies of the FDLR. The Banuyamulenge are traditionally herders. They continue to occupy large areas of land in the Uvira region, and they have many communities spread throughout the area. At the time of war they incorporated a large group of Tutsi soldiers who used to operate under the name RCD (Rally for Congolese Democracy) in alliance with the Rwandan government forces. However, since 2002, the Banuyamulenge militias have argued that it was counterproductive for them to be allied with Rwandan forces since they wanted to be accepted by Congolese communities and also because Rwandan troops had not done enough to protect the Banuyamulenge from the surrounding Congolese armed groups, such as the Mai-Mai groups (Carayannis 2003:247). Thus, despite the Hutu rebels and the Banuyamulenge militias having had a long history of conflict, I found out, that the two groups were collaborating. The collaboration, Samuel explained, was possible because they had a mutual enemy: the political regime in Rwanda. While the Banuyamulenge population used to fight alongside soldiers from Rwanda, one of the Banuyamulenge officers whom I met explained that they “felt ignored by the Rwandan politicians.” He also said that there was a “small problem” with the Congo army that was living nearby and that soldiers did not always get along with the civilians. I asked how the Hutu rebels and the Banuyamulenge collaborated. Samuel explained: “We watch their cows in exchange

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for information and we can pass through each other’s territories.” During the time I trekked with the rebels, we spent three nights staying in territories controlled by the Banuyamulenge. From what I could observe, their relationships were not hostile or intimidating, as I had witnessed elsewhere. Instead of threats, fear, and force, the Hutu rebels were provided with a place to stay, the soldiers from the two groups greeted each other in a friendly manner, and food was shared between them. But while the soldiers ostensibly had good relationships with the Banuyamulenge populations, there was still evidence of distrust and suspicion. At one point, the rebels who I trekked with were supposed to meet up with another group of soldiers. Several days earlier we had agreed to meet them in a local hospital in a Banuyamulenge controlled village. About a day before our planned arrival in the village, a heavy rainstorm prevented us from walking. We had to spend the night in another village and finally arrived at our destination one day later than expected. Since there was no mobile network, we were unable to contact the other group of rebels to say that we could not get there at the arranged time. When we arrived in the village, Simon did not want to reveal too much about the meeting. In climates of war, he later told me, suspicion is always present and caution is always important; however, since it was important to know if the other groups had arrived, Simon questioned Innocent, one of the doctors and the owner of the hospital: Simon: Did anyone come here yesterday? [Meaning, “Did any person come to search for us yesterday?”] Innocent: No . . . not really. [looking away] Simon: Really? Are you sure? [to emphasize that we know what he knows] Innocent: Hmm, well, yes, a guy . . . I don’t know him . . . He came late yesterday night. I went out and he said, “Hey, is everything all right?” And I said, “Yes” to him . . . and asked . . . “Do you need a hospital?” He said, “No. . . . I am just checking so everything was OK.” And I said, “Yes it’s OK” . . . and then he said . . . “I am going again.” . . . So maybe yes, I remember now, because no one usually comes here at night if they are not very sick. Someone is looking for you? Simon: Yes, it might be the right guy. . . . So, this guy, did he say something else?

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Innocent: No, he just asked me if everything was OK. I’m sure about that. . . . OK . . . I didn’t know you were coming here tonight. . . . If I knew I would understand. Simon: It’s OK. . . . We were supposed to come yesterday but we were late because of the rain last night. Innocent: OK, I understand. If he comes tonight again, I will tell him you are here. Simon: Thank you! This conversation is evidence of the mutual suspicion between the two men. One of the rebels who had arrived the previous night had not revealed his identity. Innocent, who did not know that the rebels had arranged a meeting in his hospital, did not immediately understand that the man who had come the day before was one of them and therefore he did not immediately tell the group that the man had come to search for them. A few hours later that same night, I awoke to chattering voices in the room next to mine. Ray, who was already awake, came into my room and said, “The rebels are here, they have come now.” In the light from the candle I discerned eight soldiers sitting around a small table and on the floor. They lit the flashlight and passed it around to show their faces. Later that same night, I asked Johnny: Author: So, how did you know we were here? [I knew that they knew we were there because, if not, they would not have shown up in a group. If they had been unsure, they would have sent only one soldier to check if we had arrived.] Johnny: Some lady told us you had come. Author: A lady? And how did she know that you were looking for us? Johnny: We came yesterday to look for you but you were not here, so we stayed there, on that mountain [pointing] in a village . . . we slept there. And we told the ladies to go and search for water and look at the road if you had come. They asked some people and they said white people are here somewhere, yes. Author: OK, so then you knew that we had come? Johnny: Yes, we cannot make any mistakes. This example demonstrates how the civilian population collaborated with the soldiers and how they carried messages to the rebels. They kept an

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eye on who had passed through the area and then reported back to the soldiers, who were often hiding in nearby villages. The rebel meeting in the Banuyamulenge village was made possible to some extent by the fact that the civilians could mediate and carry messages between the two sides. But it also shows how, although the two sides collaborated, the interactions still had to take place in secret, and how they had to deal with the mutual suspicion that arose when they met before they could identify one another. The next morning a new soldier had arrived. It was Alfa, the bodyguard to one of the commanders, the man who had asked me for soap when I first met him at the Rainbow Brigade camp. When he received the message from one of the patrolling FDLR soldiers that we were at the hospital, he had left his station and trekked the whole night to come and meet us and, especially, to fetch the gifts that I had promised to bring to him the next time I came back. When I saw him, he looked happy. Alfa: Hi, do you remember me? Author: Yes, of course, how is it? Alfa: It’s OK. Did you bring me the soap you promised me last time? Author: Oh, shit, no . . . so sorry, I forgot the soap. But I have your cigarettes, cigarettes from Rwanda. . . . Sorry. . . . But I might have extra soap. I will look for it in my bag when we get to the camp, OK? Alfa: It’s OK. . . . Thank you. . . . But I will not be with you in the camp this time. Author: Why? Alfa: I have changed location; I’m in a different camp now . . . a smaller camp. Author: Ah, OK. Maybe we can come to see you there? Perhaps on the way back? Alfa: No, you can’t. Author: Uh-huh, why? Alfa: Because the FARDC is close and if they come, you might be killed. Not safe . . . it’s too much of a risk for you. Author: Mm, OK. But maybe you can come to visit us in the camp or, we can meet on the road somewhere? Alfa: Maybe, they [some other soldiers] have sent a message to our boss there [the chief at the headquarters] . . . to ask him . . .

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but maybe . . . I don’t know what the answer will be. I don’t know yet. Author: So, you came here now only to say hello to us? Alfa: Yes, the message was passed that you wanted to greet me and talk with me, so I came here alone to see you. . . . But I have to go back now. . . . I will not stay with you. Author: Is your camp far away from here? Alfa: No, not really, maybe eight hours. . . . I will be there by tomorrow. Please, next time you come here, can you please bring me a jacket because it’s very cold here. . . . I have to go . . . bye. God bless you. Author: Yes, I will try. Goodbye. Alfa lit a cigarette and walked away. From Alfa’s point of view, an eight-hour trek away was close and he had come to the hospital only to greet us when “the message had been passed.” The fact that Alfa clearly said that it was not safe to come and visit him in the camp where he was based shows the unpredictability of what might happen and how danger is always present in a conflict setting.

Danger and Fear in the War Zone Although the soldiers planned for security, took safety measures, and established relationships with civilians to avoid risks and danger, I encountered many stories of dangerous situations that were impossible for the soldiers to predict and in which they had to react spontaneously. They might, for example, meet enemy soldiers on the road or be the planned targets of hostile forces. Such incidents, which might involve shootings and death, are often not registered in the formal statistics and received no media coverage. News of fighting from the eastern Congo war zone usually reaches the international media only when there have been major violent events, such as massacres or a mass rape of villagers. Although there might be weeks between attacks, even sometimes months of relative calm, there are a continuum of small clashes, such as a sudden unexpected encounter between two rebel groups. During my trek with the rebels, I heard of several events of this kind. At one point we climbed a steep mountain. It took several hours to climb the rocky path.

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When we reached the peak, the temperature had dropped by several degrees. Balaam, one of the majors, spotted something in the grass that caught his attention. He bent down and picked up a bullet. “Look,” he said, opening and closing his hand several times as if trying to prompt a memory. Handing the bullet to me, he said, “A few months ago, there was a fight [a gun battle] on this mountain. We killed three soldiers that day, if I remember it right. We spent so many days up here.” He pointed toward the thick bamboo bush a bit farther away and said, “We had heard that the soldiers [the FARDC] were on their way to our territory. We were sent to look for them. For days, nothing happened . . . we were just waiting, I was sleeping there [pointing towards a few trees]. Then one day, they came climbing up the mountain. They were not many. We fired at them. They were very quick and they shot back at us. One of us died. But then we killed them, all three of them. You can keep the bullet. It’s a souvenir from the forest!” he said while laughing and handed it over to me. This was not the only time the combatants spoke to me about an exchange of fire with enemy forces. On another occasion we were close to a village when Samuel suddenly stopped. “Over there,” he said, pointing toward a local village, a long row of empty bamboo stalls near a river. He explained that when the soldiers from the Congolese army were not there, the rebels could come to the market to buy food or exchange goods. One day, Samuel said, they had met two enemy soldiers on the road. While pointing toward a spot near the road, Samuel said: Samuel: We had to be very quick. We shot them. Author: Oh, OK. Then what did you do? Samuel: We had to run away. Very quickly we left that day. After describing how he had killed the two soldiers, he walked on, apparently without further reflection on the incident. Both Balaam’s and Samuel’s stories show how unpredictable killings could occur. They are also evidence of how the culture of impunity had become rooted in a society where there was absolutely no trust and where a human life had little value. The way the rebels spoke about such incidents (whether they are true or not) also proved how violence had become so normalized that they could even laugh or joke about what had taken place. One evening, after a long day’s trekking, the rebels quite suddenly stopped by a river. Although it was still early, it was already quite dark.

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There was thick bush on the far side of the river, and the grass along the sandbank was twinkling with the lights of fireflies. The rebels removed their weapons and sat down in the grass, close to a swamp above the river with a view of the surrounding hills. One of the bodyguards climbed down to the water to wash the mud off his boots. The territory on the other side of the river was under the control of the government army, and it was to be several hours before the light of the moon emerged sufficiently to allow the rebels to cross the area without flashlights. A military barracks was located on one of the hills, and a searchlight from the camp was moving in circles to survey the territory. Dogs barked at a distance, and the silhouettes of the enemy soldiers could be seen as they paced back and forth across the hills. Following orders from Samuel, Claude was sent to spy. He stood up, threw his weapon over his shoulder, adjusted his jacket, and headed toward the other side of the hill we occupied. The others followed him for a few meters before his shadow disappeared among the trees in the bush. Returning shortly thereafter, Claude pointed at the weapons lying in the grass to indicate that we must immediately pack up and leave the area. It was not safe, he said. FARDC soldiers were coming closer; we had to move. The other combatants followed his advice. They quickly collected their belongings and were ready to go in a few seconds. Samuel gave strict orders: we had to be quiet, stay close to one another, and refrain from using any flashlights when passing through the territory. The terrain was difficult. We slid downhill, crisscrossing between the slippery stones. My coworker, Ray, prayed under his breath, while, staying close together, we struggled to find the path in the dark. Suddenly, the rebel group came to an abrupt halt. I could see the light of flashlights approaching. My heart seemed to stop—the enemy soldiers were coming closer. Samuel fell to his knees, gesturing that we should do the same and follow him. We crawled through the grass as quickly and as quietly as we could. One of the rebels took my hand and dragged me for a few meters, pointing with his finger over his mouth to demonstrate that I had to be quiet. Ray was next to me. I could hear his heart beating. My stomach cramped; I felt sick, and my own heart was racing. The soldiers came closer still and we hid in the grass, just a few meters from the path where the enemy troops were passing. They must have heard something that caught their attention because the sound of their footsteps suddenly ceased. Their flashlights lit up the ground close to where we were hiding, but thankfully they did not see us and moved on. For several minutes we stayed quiet, hiding in the

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grass. Ray continued to shake for a long time; both of us were riveted with fear. When we reached the far side of the territory several hours later, we were allowed to talk to each other again. The rebels then burst into collective laughter. For several minutes, they bragged about what had happened, making fun of how nervous we had been. In a boasting tone, Samuel said, “You see, this is normal for us. This is war. If you had not been there, we would have killed them straight away. Now, because you were scared and we had to protect you, we didn’t shoot them.” Alfa, the bodyguard, who was standing next to me, elaborated: “You didn’t have to be afraid. I had control over the situation. If they had tried to shoot, I would have killed them first.” After this incident, the rebels referred back to it many times over. They re-created the scene repeatedly and retold what had happened. The event became a shared experience. The rebels used it as evidence that my coworkers and I now knew how dangerously they lived, as if they were glad that we had experienced a threatening situation together so that I could come to know “their life.” “Now you know our war,” they repeatedly told me. But they also often bragged about how they would have killed the soldiers if they had been alone; how afraid the enemy soldiers must have been; how much stronger, more focused, and more disciplined they were than the FARDC; and how it was thus never a real danger to cross into their territory. They liked to talk about how, if they had killed the soldiers, they would have stolen their machine guns and uniforms, emptied their pockets of small change, left the corpses on the ground, and then moved on. While I cannot know how the rebels would have reacted to the situation if I had not been with them, it seems significant that they kept bragging about the incident, insisting that they were not afraid and had full control of the situation. I confess I had some difficulty believing them. A day’s trek away from the FARDC-controlled town of Uvira, the rebels were obliged to stop. For their own safety, the rebels could not approach the town for risk of being seen and caught. Claude, a youngster of about 17 years old, was sent to accompany me to Uvira to buy milk powder and sugar and to bring it back to the camp. Before we set out, Claude changed his boots for flip-flop sandals and left his Kalashnikov in a nearby village. By changing clothes and leaving his rifle behind, the other rebels said he would look like any village boy and would be able to enter the town without a problem. He and I then began to cross a large territory patrolled by

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FARDC troops. After a few hours, two soldiers spotted us coming down the mountain. They shouted, pointed with their weapons, and screamed that we had to stop. They asked us a number of routine questions: who we were, where we had been, where we were going, and so on. I showed my research permit and the documents that allowed us to cross the territory. During the conversation, I could see Claude’s reactions. He was looking nervously down at the ground and pacing back and forth, his hands shaking. Later, when the encounter with the soldiers was finally over and he felt safer, he said that he had never been so close to his enemies and that he had felt very scared having to confront them without having his weapon to hand. He asserted that if he had his gun, he would have shot them “without even thinking.” The constant bragging and stories of shooting and killing effectively camouflaged how the rebel soldiers really thought about the conditions under which they were forced to live or what they actually would have done in the case of an emergency. But it does reveal something about their general perception of the situation, about the security they felt with a gun in their hands, and about the ease with which they claimed to be able to kill an enemy. The boasting was a telling expression of the prevailing danger and violence in the region that had shaped a general condition of mutual suspicion and fear in which daily terror and the use of a gun had become normal.

Making War, Surviving War When the fighters were asked why they needed to use such brutal violence, they invariably answered, “We have to survive,” or even more simply, “If I don’t shoot, I will be shot.” From the perspective of the Hutu rebels I interacted with, the war was being fought in terms of “survival” and of gaining the “freedom” to return home. Although the combatants justified acts of violence ideologically in terms of achieving power in Rwanda and gaining “democracy” and “human rights,” the basic issue was really one of simple survival. In this context there were no limits, no rules of engagement: violence was a survival strategy. The eastern Congo, they said, had become a platform for war where the rebel soldiers tried to remain alive, to balance their lives, and to maintain control over the territory that they had occupied. Violence, intimidation, and trickery were the primary means of

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survival. At the same time, because the eastern Congo war zone is lucrative, generating opportunities to engage in (illicit) commercial activities, the soldiers balanced their use of “terror warfare” with predominantly cynical “friendly alliances” with local communities, offering protection to civilian supporters in exchange for temporary shelter, food, and trading opportunities. But such friendly alliances were played out against a backdrop of fear, intimidation, and threats. The interaction of the rebels with the civilian populations was responsible for breaking communities apart, shattering families, imposing rule by fear, and forestalling any kind of development. Years of war and terror allowed the rebels to retain power over territories and communities. Despite their use of the term “friendly alliances,” relationships between the rebels and surrounding communities were not built on long-term trust. Armed groups or local communities might collaborate with the rebels to achieve short-term goals, such as access to resources, exchange of goods, or security from other groups. In such cases, the relationships seemed to be based on mutual dependency. This dependency, however, was not stable in the long run. It might have been justified as necessary, but it does not serve to build a peaceful society. War, then, in the eastern Congo had become a lifestyle—a life that, in the case of the combatants, was fought in the space between the government of Congo and the Rwandan state. This twilight zone became a territory of struggle for power and political voice, but equally it was a struggle to gain access to food, to a small income, to security, and to sustainability. The nature of their lives was rarely spoken about in positive terms, and more or less all lower-ranking combatants complained about the difficulties they faced for themselves and their family members. They complained about the cold and the lack of food and spoke repeatedly of their dreams of returning home. This does not excuse their acts of violence, but it does explain the conditions under which that violence was exercised. Their war was fought out of hardship and suffering much more than with political passion or will. It was a vicious cycle, a routinized way of life. Fighting was a means of surviving in the forests of the Kivu region. There is an undeniable banality about much of the small-scale conflict in the Congo: armed groups making war, while simultaneously surviving war in order to make war.

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CHAPTER 6

From Bare Life to Bare Violence

A few days before Christmas Eve, I was sitting outside one of the huts with a group of soldiers. We were about to eat. This was not just an ordinary meal of potatoes and beans; for the special occasion of Christmas and because fieldwork was about to end, we were going to eat goat meat. As meat was a rare luxury, it had been carefully prepared. A group of lower ranking soldiers had spent the whole afternoon preparing the meat by cutting the goat’s throat, emptying its blood, and skinning it. The body of the goat had hung upside down over the fire to dry. We waited for hours while the meat cooked. When the meat was ready to be served, one of the combatants asked me to stand by with the camera. While laughing, he asked me to take a photo of the goat’s head that was served on a plate “The people in your country will think we are savages,” he said in an ironic tone of voice. But under the banter, his concerns were serious, the soldiers frequently revisited the issue of how they were depicted by outsiders as ge´nocidaires, as killers. Later that night, Colonel Frank returned to the same topic. We were taking cover from a heavy rainstorm in a hut. Thunder echoed across the mountains. Frank warmed his hands over the fire then leaned his back against the bamboo wall and gazed at the floor. His eyes followed a centipede crawling over the puddles. Frank was quiet for a long time. When the centipede came close to his boot, he kicked it so hard that it flew into the flames; it crackled and twisted before fading away. “So,” he asked, “do all people in Europe really think we are ge´nocidaires? That we are killers?” I gave him an honest answer and replied that in general most people would agree that the FDLR should be held accountable for mass violence in the Kivu regions. Frank gave an insincere smile. “I thought so,” he said.

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As usual, Frank showed little emotion. There was no anger, no regret, no particular feeling showing on his face. “So what will you say when you return back home,” he asked. “That we are good or bad people?” His words told me that he was worried about what image of the rebels I would take back to Europe, what story I would tell, and how I would portray them in the European context. I do not remember what my answer was, but the concerns articulated by Frank reflect one of the central themes of this study: the collision between the rebels’ own understanding of the enforced condition of their exile and the outside world’s view of them as perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide. This book has presented an analysis of the micro-politics and practices of everyday life in a Hutu rebel community in the eastern Congo. By avoiding stereotypical labeling of the individuals involved as perpetrators of genocide and violence, I have tried to depict a more fragmented and complicated sociopolitical reality. I have tried to provide a more nuanced perspective to the question of why individuals like Frank, Lucien, Simon, JeanPaul, Grace, and Hope, along with many other men, women, and children who belonged to the FDLR, remained for so long in the forests of the Congo; why some of them used brutal forms of violence; and how, in my observation, soldiers and their civilian dependents perceived the conditions of their own lives in a situation of long drawn-out war. The Hutu rebels do not compose a single, uniform category of perpetrators. They are a diverse group; some indeed participated in genocide, others had no connection to genocide but might be found guilty of war crimes in the Congo. Until today, together with their civilian dependents, they are constantly on the move, trying to survive in one of the world’s most long-standing war zones. The highest-ranking FDLR officers operate on a global scale with funds and resources coming in from diaspora networks around the world. They use mobile phones and satellite phones to communicate with their leaders based outside of the region. Although the rebels and their family members live in bamboo huts in the forest, they follow the global news, and they are armed with weapons coming from all over the world. In some areas, they are involved in the international trade of minerals and other commodities. The leaders train their soldiers following codes of conduct and military standards like a conventional army; they also know the sanctions for their crimes. The rebels have their own government, and their leaders sign peace treaties. They seek to benefit from, or manipulate, the global standards that define their actions and act within an international political context whose

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definitions and labels determine their current situation and their future. However, this “global reality” is confined to a small number of highranking leaders. The majority of the rebels and their families are in isolated forest camps, far away from the centers of power. The rebel camp, where part of the fieldwork was carried out, was not only a remote rebel military outpost on some distant mountaintop. It was also a community, a hiding place, a refuge, a sanctuary, and a base for military activity. For some of the high-ranking officers, the military camps were refuges where they could hide and avoid justice for crimes they had committed. The majority of soldiers, however, were caught up in a system of control from which there were few exits. By exploring the social and military organization in the rebel community, I have sought to explain how the rebels extracted meaning from their situation: how collective identity, reconfiguration of history, and military hierarchy were constructed in a marginal space and lived out through religious ceremonies, political ideology, social events, and military chanting and performances. My goal has been to enhance our understanding of life in a mobile military community and to understand the manufacture, experience, pathways, and trajectories of violence together with its justifications in the minds of its perpetrators. Overall, this study has explored how combatants are active war-making agents, as well as being imprisoned in a structural conflict. As such, they operate in a gray zone where boundaries between guilt and innocence, exile and belonging, legality and illegality, right and wrong, and life and death are not just blurred but also confused and ever changing. In this final section, I will discuss some of the conceptual and theoretical contributions offered in this book.

Political Structures and Bare Life To establish a structural and theoretical framework, this book took its inspiration from Agamben’s theories of the state of exception and bare life (Agamben 2005). Homo sacer, as I described in the introduction, was a metaphorical figure of someone who had committed a crime. Homo sacer was a sacred man who had lost all legal rights: he was excluded from the society and could be killed by anyone. Homo sacer was inside the law but excluded from the law; homo sacer was in a state of exception. From this figure, Agamben developed the theory of a state of exception as a way to

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describe how a modern sovereign power can transcend the rule of law in times of crisis. A state of exception, he argues, is a form of government power that can diminish or exclude human rights, citizenship, and individual rights in pursuit of “the public good” (Agamben 2005:3). After the 9/11 terror attacks, for example, Agamben discusses how state powers used a state of exception as an extension of power to carry out military intervention in Afghanistan. Afghans and others, assumed to be terrorist combatants, could be imprisoned, taken to Guantanamo Bay, and deprived of any legal rights. They were both inside the law and excluded from the law. Prisoners were reduced to a bare life, held captive in a gray zone where boundaries between good and bad, black and white, legal and illegal were blurred. Agamben brings up issues that are useful to consider in the context of war in the eastern Congo, although the situation there varies from his model in that, in the absence of a functional state in the Congo, the state of exception is not an extension of state power. The Congo state has lost its power to control the eastern Congo. Despite this, the state-of-exception theory helps to explain the conditions under which the Hutu rebels are caught up in a political limbo between the two states, Rwanda and the Congo, and are, moreover, beyond the assistance of international law. They have committed crimes, have lost their legal rights, and are banned and excluded from society. Outlawed by both states, they cannot obtain refugee status and thereby fall under the protection of international law. Despite the fact that many of them played no role in the genocide, they are reduced to a bare life in the forest. They are in a no-man’s-land with few ways out. Agamben’s concepts are useful thinking tools to explain why the majority of the soldiers do not simply leave their state of exile in the forest; clearly a highly significant reason for the rebels to remain and fight is their very entrapment in this state of political limbo. In this zone, violence is a real social practice, a social condition that is self-perpetuating. In the ongoing conflict in the Congo, with its international and local dimensions, including the presence of thousands of refugees, the Hutu rebels are uniquely positioned as a foreign, armed group with no political intentions, territorial ambitions, or military motive for remaining where they are. Despite some organized economic networks and intermarriages with Congolese, their major objective is to escape the Congo forest and return to their country of origin. Although there have been serious military attempts to disarm the FDLR in recent history (in 2009, 2010, and 2015), the wider international

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community has avoided direct confrontation with the Hutu rebels for fear of provoking further violence and suffering. Hence, there have been few political or diplomatic initiatives to solve the basic problem: the legacy of the genocide more than two decades earlier. The long conflict, with reciprocal mass violence committed on both sides of the Hutu-Tutsi divide, makes reconciliation and peace difficult. The government of Rwanda itself has taken few steps toward reconciliation or resolution of the impasse with the Hutu rebels in the Congo. According to the Rwandan government, the ge´nocidaires still pose a threat to post-genocide stability and security. And, as argued by Marı´a Rodriguez (2011), the Rwandan regime sometimes finds it convenient to keep the rebels in the Congo as a way of marginalizing all opposition to their rule (178). During the continuing crisis in the Congo, there have also been few attempts by international players to deal adequately with the Hutu rebel groups. One possible solution frequently put forward by both the men and women of Rainbow Brigade camp was to provide refugee status to the Hutu rebel group. However, under international law and in line with the position of global structures of human rights, organizations cannot offer any help or assistance to an armed group. The Hutus in the eastern Congo would first have to surrender their arms and disband their military units. Thousands of Rwandan soldiers and their families, many of them young and without any direct link to the genocide, are currently ensnared in the remote hills and forests of the Congo, where they have few prospects or alternative options. Several months after I returned from my fieldwork, I received a text message from a Zambian phone number. The message was from Lucien, one of my informants and a soldier I had met in the camp. Lucien wrote that he had left his life in the forest. He provided no details of how he had managed to escape or where he was. I wrote back to him asking if he was in a Zambian refugee camp. Several minutes later, I received a text message: “I’m not in the camp because I’m not recognized as a refugee. Actually there is no ground to seek asylum as Rwandan. I want to go to South Africa to seek asylum as Congolese, before risking arrest, deportation or execution. Here is not safe for me. But the other ones [the rebels in Rainbow Brigade] are still in the forest.” The message from Lucien exemplifies the dilemmas faced by individuals who want to escape the conflict. Lucien had no right to seek asylum either as a Rwandan, as a Congolese citizen, or as a refugee and would have had to travel on foot to South Africa in search of an identity. While Lucien had

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Figure 17. A soldier talking about his life as a rebel in the Congo forest.

managed to escape the rebel camp, he had nowhere to go. Lucien went from one liminality to another; his life epitomized Agamben’s concept of a bare life. Even if the rebels continued to engage actively in a structural conflict, it is evident that life inside a gray zone is much more complex than one of a single-minded commitment to war and violence.

Social Structure and Micro-politics Research and media descriptions of rebel groups or child soldiers tend to focus on lives in chaos, where fighting and killing is a normalized daily event. My research provided a very different picture. One of the differences lies in the fact that much research on rebel groups has been conducted in postwar settings among ex-soldiers and former child soldiers, and understandably, researchers have focused their data collection on reports of violence and on personal motives for fighting. My data was collected in a setting where violence is still prevalent but where individuals also have an “ordinary” life; for those living in a rebel camp, the brutality of war is only

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one dimension embedded in everyday existence. Along with periodic bouts of violence, the Hutu rebels of Rainbow Brigade had a vibrant political, religious, and cultural life. It is clear to me that more research is needed on the social organization and “ordinary” life of rebel communities. We need to move beyond “bare violence” as the main focus in order to understand how soldiers construct, reconstruct, and build meaning into their situations. Throughout the fieldwork, I found very few “fighting spirits.” Instead, I found an uprooted and shattered community of frightened and insecure soldiers and their families suffering severe anxiety from traumatic memories and years of unremitting violence. In this context, days were organized and systematized. Everyday life, aside from religious and political activities, was full of boredom, waiting, and routine. Individuals spoke very little about actual fighting; their bravado was expressed mostly through their visions of returning home to Rwanda and by swaggering with weapons in front of the camera. Despite this, the military underpinning of the camp was ever present, and violent feeling could be readily brought to the surface through political and military rhetoric, through ideology, and through military chanting, performance, and celebration. Thus Rainbow Brigade was both a military unit and a viable community. It was also a liminal space on the margins of society. Inside the rebel camp, everyday life was constantly strained and difficult; soldiers, men, women and children all lived under the most strenuous conditions. But the camp was also a place in which ideology and propaganda were produced, where ethnic hatred was reproduced, and where an exile “Hutu fighter identity” was defined, constructed, and maintained. In short, life in Rainbow Brigade consisted of bare life, with its suffering, in combination with the power and dominance of social hierarchies in which officers lived in relative luxury and ordinary soldiers slept outside in the rain, cold and hungry. The ranking officers were the focal point of the rebel camp, and their views of life in general expressed the difference between their experiences and those of the lower-ranking soldiers and civilians. While the officers said that the camp was “better than a prison,” the civilians maintained that they lived in “nonhuman conditions.” It is likely that these differences arose because of the disparity between histories: the leaders had participated in more battles, and the war crimes they had committed robbed them of any hope of a return from exile. They knew they could probably never reconcile and take up a normal peacetime existence in Rwanda without being

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punished. In this light, it is questionable whether we can view the entire Rainbow Brigade community in unvarying terms of a bare life. While the camp leaders often expressed weariness of life in the forest, sheltering in rain-soaked bamboo huts, in comparison with the ordinary soldiers and civilians they lived fairly well—they could profit from conflict and had acquired resources. The camp for them was not really a confinement but rather a sanctuary where they could escape justice. For the others, especially the women and children caught up in a military system and subjected to intimidation in an extremely hierarchal military organization, life in the camp was indeed little more than a prison from which they could escape only with great difficulty. In the eastern Congo, as elsewhere, there are dimensions to a bare life. Some lives are “barer” than others. Some violence is symbolic or structural, while other violence is just brutally physical. The unequal power relations in the camp could be observed on an everyday basis. The leaders embodied not only the highest military powers but the religious ones as well: they were the priests and pastors, they lived in larger and better-appointed bamboo barracks, and they had housekeepers and bodyguards. The lower-ranking soldiers and the women were in the background, collecting food, cleaning, cooking, and raising the children. They were reluctant to speak, constantly looking anxiously over their shoulders, and they dared not question their leaders’ authority. While it was obvious to me that the civilian dependents were the most vulnerable in the camp system, I also found it significant that social status was defined as much by rank and military position as by gender, with low-ranking soldiers and women being treated equally. In addition to their domestic servitude, they had minimal access to information, little room to move around freely, and no power over decision-making. But despite their low social status, they were not without agency. Women and lower-ranking soldiers took part in community mobilization, spread political propaganda, cheered the soldiers, and participated in public demonstrations. Use of the term “community” to describe a camp like Rainbow Brigade, as we have seen, can be somewhat problematic. While all of the soldiers, regardless of rank, spoke about their military comrades in terms of commitment and loyalty, many were simultaneously subjected to intimidation and fragmentation. Lower-ranking soldiers were controlled by their officers and completely under their power, yet they still insisted that they would not “abandon” their fellow soldiers. I would argue that such a paradox must be understood as a replacement of individual identities with collective/soldier

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identities. Being identified as a Hutu, as a rebel, or as a member of the Hutu community and arguing for shared goals was more significant to these soldiers than their own individual objectives. Since those I interviewed had been living in a closed-off and exiled community, many of them for their entire lives with no other kind of life to compare it with, there was scant room for developing any kind of individual identity or alternative aspirational framework. Given the restricted access to any other kind of life, the communion in the rebel camp became forged into a strong social institution, where shared meanings—hatred toward Rwandan president Kagame, the daily sufferings of life in the forest, the difficulties of a soldier’s life—were manifested as a culture in common, with the surrounding conflicts and threats sustaining its attitudes, ideologies, and belief systems. Following Roberto Beneduce et al. (2006:36–37), rebel camps become “new” spaces and platforms for socialization, which in turn produce new subcultures. The rebel community provides a sense of identity and belonging where new meanings of life and status become important, even in a context where intimidation is widespread (ibid.). Despite the power differences between soldiers and civilians, the existential cry for escape from the forest could be heard across the collective culture. Both soldiers and civilians found that living in the midst of a war zone meant alienation, isolation, and exclusion. The rebel camp was a space of privation and hunger, where newborn babies died, where finding food and water was a daily struggle, where they were surrounded by enemies, and where fear and paranoia were always at hand. Desperation to leave the forest, the liminal space, was regularly recounted through religious practice; day and night, prayers could last for hours. Religious ritual, enacted through both organized ceremony and spontaneous prayer, was a means of coping with insecurity, of regaining control, of dealing with death and mourning, and of holding onto hope. In their everyday prayers, men and women asked for forgiveness; they begged to be heard by their God, and they implored Him for protection and a triumphal return to Rwanda. While religious cosmologies were embedded in everyday life, the church was also a social setting in which order and the hierarchies of power were fabricated and in which the military leadership and higher-ranking soldiers reinforced their symbolic military and spiritual power and legitimized their absolute political control. As an integral part of daily life, religious routine was a way to balance life and to stay focused and disciplined. Prayer was also a means of seeking strength in battle and maintaining military order—military songs and performances contained

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religious messages, and symbols of religious and military power were intertwined. Rather than a prompting a rebellious spirit, ordinary life in the camp was full of boredom. In contrast to the popular image of war as being crazy and messy, daily life in Rainbow Brigade was governed by routine: waking up early, attending church, rebuilding the church, cleaning the houses, fixing leaking roofs, and tidying the camp. Soldiers shaved every day, and they washed their clothes, polished their boots, and cleaned their weapons. Such an effort to uphold dignity and respect in difficult conditions is probably a universal coping strategy. Primo Levi (1988), for example, in his personal account of imprisonment in a German concentration camp during the Second World War, describes the order and routines among prisoners—how soap was one of the most valuable belongings and how the prisoners obsessively cleaned their shoes as a way of sustaining personal integrity, selfworth, and an “ordinary” life in an extraordinary situation. In order to comprehend the continuums and trajectories of violence among the rebels, an issue for further consideration is that of the need to contextualize history, displacement, memory, and identity. Malkki (1995), in her research on how Burundian Hutu refugees living in a closed refugee camp, shows how they constructed a cosmology of being a “people in exile” stemming from experiences of marginalization, oppression, and injustice. My informants in Rainbow Brigade adopted this same perception of themselves—that of an oppressed people in exile. Malkki uses the concept of mythico-history to explain how her informants constructed a particular Hutu identity based on a local understanding of history. Given the historical complexities of the sequencing of reciprocal mass violence between Hutus and Tutsis, both ethnic groups continue to see themselves as victims. Conflicts over identity, power, and their local meanings continue in the peripheries, and for at least some of my informants, the war for political power in Rwanda is not yet over. A strong Hutu victim identity has been constructed as a reaction to historically unequal power relations and unsatisfactory access to political and economic spheres. In the camp, this collective identity was reactivated and reproduced in a marginalized setting in which everyone shared the assumption that they were being pushed away, expelled, and barred from their country of origin, even though only some of my informants were part of building the history that led to the genocide in Rwanda and others knew the history only by rumor.

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Through various performative acts, daily activities, political instruction, lessons in what really happened, and cultural practices such as learning Kinyarwanda and Rwandan songs and dances, everyone in the Rainbow Brigade community learned about their home country and shared and reproduced the dream of taking it back from the Tutsis. The exiled Hutus of Rainbow Brigade learned to love their country and to prepare for their triumphal return. To fight until justice was restored and then return to Rwanda was a goal that was internalized and accepted as the only truth in the camp. It was so deeply rooted that even very young children spoke about returning. Although the rebels claim that ethnicity is no longer synonymous with ethnic hatred, the data shows that ethnic distinction (ethnic hatred) is still central to the ideology of the FDLR and that ethnic stereotyping plays an important role in justifying violence. Informants identified themselves not as perpetrators doing harm but as victims of a long history of subordination and of the war they were fighting. From this idea flowed another: that they would be “heroes of the world,” “saviors” fighting for freedom and justice for the Hutu population. While the previous goal of taking political power and installing a Hutu government in Rwanda had failed, and the political project of exterminating the Tutsis population had collapsed, the rebels had now to justify their refugee-like situation. Instead of power, wealth, and welfare in Rwanda, the rebels had become martyrs for Hutu freedom, living a harsh life in rain-soaked bamboo huts deep in the forests of the Congo war zone. In this setting of frustration and political limbo, they reinterpreted and recreated history. Building on previous studies of exile, collective identity, and memory (Ballinger 2002; Malkki 1995), one theme discussed in this study was the dislocation and displacement of the rebels, not only from a normal life but also from their own history. As we have seen, years of exile, war, and isolation led to the formation of a new collective historical narrative for the soldiers and civilians of Rainbow Brigade. Everyone who lived in the camp wanted to rejoin history to some extent, and reconfiguring a collective memory over what actually happened during the genocide was a collective project. The practice of identity—identification—is about placing the self in some kind of history: where we come from, who we are, why we are here. For the Hutu rebels and civilians of Rainbow Brigade, this process was dominated by the Rwandan genocide. It was the mark of identification that they wanted to erase, rewrite, or simply forget. Instead of accepting their current situation or reconciling with history, the topic of exile

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penetrated all levels of community and military life. Exile formed the basis of their political ideology through which they could justify their military goals of returning to Rwanda and fighting the Tutsis who had “pushed them into the forest.” Many people in Rainbow Brigade divided their history between the “good days,” prior to the genocide when the Hutus dominated political life in Rwanda, and the “bad days,” which denoted their current situation of misery and suffering. By dividing their history in this way, they were caught between the internationally dominant political narrative of Rwandan history (of Hutu culpability) and their own model, in which the Rwandan president Kagame and the Tutsis were held responsible for the genocide. From the outside, it is often noted that the imposition of political ideology is a key element in military indoctrination, a strategy used by leaders to maintain cohesiveness. But the empirical data highlight that it is important to advance a form of research that moves the focus beyond an exploration of indoctrination and socialization processes as the only way of explaining how soldiers assimilate political and warfare ideologies. Soldiers, and indeed civilians, are not just passive recipients of political and military socialization. They are not simply victims of propaganda. They also construct and mobilize meanings in more dynamic forms. While the imposition of a collective ideological hegemony might be a strategic way to socialize “members” of the group, in the rebel communities such ideologies are also deeply rooted in a past that lives on into their current situation. More research and comparative case studies of these phenomena are needed to fully understand how meanings are mobilized and produced inside rebel communities. In particular, we should focus more on how memories of history and violence, ideologies, and practices are transmitted across generations and maintained through time. By using Victor Turner’s (1987) model of “social drama,” I have analyzed how the genocide was dealt with in a theatrical setting. The use of theater was a collective way of making sense of the past—of dramatizing it while simultaneously reshaping a new collective and shared history of events. History, political worldviews, and shared memory have a profound meaning and are not just propaganda to be swallowed. In times of crisis and in permanent liminality, social bonds, common goals, and collective identity are strengthened. In public gatherings and performances at Rainbow Brigade, there were no passive or voiceless actors. These performances

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were a forum for expressing complaints about living in nonhuman conditions. They were part of a drive by the commanders to make the rebel predicament seen and heard by the international community. But they were simultaneously a crucible for uncompromising hostility against the government of Rwanda and the Tutsi elite. The atmosphere was redolent of explicit hatred directed against the Tutsi enemies (at least hatred of Kagame), such that even children who had never been outside of the camp learnt to express that hatred. The collective goal of returning to Rwanda was repeatedly expressed. And most frequently, my informants justified their past actions by making a common appeal to a long history of inequality, ethnic oppression, social injustice, a feeling of exclusion, and a shared worldview of victimhood and by a strong determination to leave their life in exile and return home to their country (cf. Jackson 2013:120). While everyone at Rainbow Brigade camp spoke about “our own people” in collective terms, very few would speak about their own individual life goals. While this “silencing” of individual identity can be seen as a strategy by the leadership to maintain cohesiveness and instill a fighting spirit among soldiers, the camp was also a culture in which a person’s social status was fixed in the hierarchy, where everyone strived for the same goals, where collectivity was important for survival in the mountains, and where daily life was characterized by a shared set of worldviews, ideologies, norms, and beliefs. In such a system, there was no room for individual ideas or dreams. Against the background of marginalization and exclusion from a “normal life” and in the shared goal and ideology of returning to Rwanda, belonging and cohesiveness were likely to be intensified. But although such collective cohesiveness was strong, social relations remained ambiguous and there were those who were ready to compromise. For example, the case of Ishimwe, who escaped the camp, demonstrates that individual dreams and desires did exist alongside a collective sense of belonging. And while Ishimwe expressed insecurity at his separation from his “brothers” and his family in the camp, he also clearly indicated that, despite the unfamiliarity of the new setting in town, his life there was definitely better than living in the camp. The complementary research I did with ex-combatants in the demobilization camp in the town of Bukavu (as discussed in Chapter 4) provided another level of analysis. These interviews supplied information that was very different from what I had observed in the camp. The ex-combatants,

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who were young men often under the age of 20, gave detailed descriptions of military life. They said that the killing and raping of civilians under their command was an integral part of how the FDLR made war. Some of the former soldiers said that they had killed under the pressure of the circumstances they were in and that they did what they were told to do out of fear of being punished by their leaders. While my observation was that the military hierarchy in the camp adopted a relatively low profile and that the maintenance of discipline, while tight, was tacit rather than overt, the excombatants presented a very different picture of military order and control. This perceived difference might be explained by the origins of the excombatants I interviewed. They were not Rwandan but Congolese and had not grown up inside the rebel camp. They had no history with Rwanda. They were Congolese boys who said that they were recruited by force— taken from their villages, uprooted from their home environment. As abductees, they had not grown up under military constraints and had a different ethnic identity, background, and experiences; hence, they perceived life in the military organization very differently from those who had been raised under it. Another interpretation is that “outsiders” (i.e., local Congolese recruits) were treated very differently because they had no cultural or ethnic connection to the Hutus. Yet their accounts provided information about the military system that was often downplayed to me by the high-ranking leaders in the camp, possibly for fear of revealing damning information to me or in order to protect the future of their families based inside the camp until such time as they had achieved the justice they sought. The discrepancy between the narratives of the soldiers of Rainbow Brigade and those of the ex-combatants may also be accounted for by the latter experiencing nothing more than the imposition of a military hierarchy and command structure, whereas for the rebel soldiers there were also elements of personal motivation and agency tied to the eventual return from exile, to religion, to revenge, to fear and protection, and to commitment and the individual opportunities that being a combatant might offer. While excombatants had a home to go back to in Congolese society, for the majority of the men and women in Rainbow Brigade the camp was their only base of security. Hence, even if the rebel combatants were expected to unquestioningly obey orders, they might also have found the motivation to legitimate violence on a personal level. Recalling Alicinda Honwana’s definition of “tactical agency” (2005:49), the soldiers often used force to obtain food or to “negotiate” with civilians for a place to spend the night.

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It is, furthermore, important to point out that the narrative also differed extensively between the rank-and-file soldiers and those higher in the hierarchy, and while some of the combatants acted only from a position of weakness, higher-ranking leaders had more choices and bore a different responsibility. And despite their complaints of being forced or compelled to stay in the forest and fight until they could return to Rwanda, many soldiers in Rainbow Brigade also expressed personal and social motivations for fighting, such as simply to get hold of a new military uniform, a firearm, medication, or the like. It is simplistic to describe violence solely as a result of compelled obedience to superiors or as tactical agency. We must also incorporate elements of personal intention, emotion, and commitment to the group. The implication here is that personal convictions must be understood alongside those behaviors that are embraced under constraint, and we need to further investigate for soldiers the interaction between personal motivation and military organizational requirements. The relationship between hierarchy and commitment is complex. With the overall goal of this study as the exploration of underlying mechanisms and structures that lead to violence, we have seen that beyond conventional accounts of direct perpetration of physical violence by rebel groups in the Congo, there lies a much more complicated and fragmented sociopolitical reality incorporating exclusion from the wider structures of society and a sense of pervasive loss and disorientation. In such a context, we need to move beyond personal or individual motives or justifications for violence. The ethnographic data show that while the rebels say they have to fight until justice is restored in Rwanda, this is in fact not what they are doing. Most days are nonviolent. The Hutu rebels have not launched any attacks against Rwanda in several years. Rather, violence and threats of violence take place as adjuncts to simple survival strategies, such as finding food, shelter, and protection. We might say that the combatants are victims in some contexts, civilians or outsiders in others, and “following orders” in still others, and that on certain occasions, genuine individual agency and personal motivation will also play a crucial role in carrying out violence. An understanding of the diversity within a collective and cohesive group must be applied to better explain how combatants relate to the contradictions between personal motivation (although the majority of soldiers expressed little motivation to fight) and the organizational requirements of the camp—sometimes even to explain how they act in response to the highly insecure surroundings of war and uncertainty.

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The war in which the rebels participated has no one single logic, but many; thus, their acts of violence must be understood from multiple perspectives. While individual combatants shared a worldview and promoted similar political goals, this does not explain, for example, why some soldiers would shoot someone on the road without provocation or carry out massacres against civilians, whereas others might decide to defect from their military unit or escape camp life. Individual agency—how a person actually reacts to their participation in a way of life that includes violence—is never coherent. Every act of violence is also context specific. For combatants like Ce´dric, Jean-Paul, and Jules, who trekked the mountains armed with Kalashnikovs, their engagement in shooting or fighting, they said, would depend on the wider dynamics and structures of the war. While some individuals may have acted out of a general state of confusion, panic, and fear, others, the leaders in particular, might have used violence as a strategic means of achieving certain goals. Acts of violence could also be reciprocal or for revenge or used as a tactic to punish the civilian population, as in the case of the massacres in 2009. At times, the rebels carried out violent attacks on enemy groups in an effort to acquire power, yet at other times, killing took place in response to danger, fear, or simply hunger or frustration. But despite the individual diversity and associated various motives for violence, it was also a collective social practice. Individual violence was the outcome of a political viewpoint that was socially reproduced and conditions that had become standardized, accepted, and internalized within a wider climate of fear and social exclusion.

The World in Jeopardy Since I completed my fieldwork, a number of events have caused further conflict and instability in eastern Congo. A new rebel group, called the M23, invaded and took control of Goma in 2012. The M23 rebels are a collection of former soldiers from the Congo army, rebels from various militias, and newly recruited combatants from around North and South Kivu. The M23 have not only contributed to tension and renewed violence and insecurity but have also forced thousands of people to leave their homes. The number of internally displaced people has again increased and the problem has spilled over neighboring borders. A peace treaty was signed in Addis Ababa in February 2013 (known as the Peace, Security, and Cooperation Framework, or

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PSCF). The framework, funded by multiple donors, was supposed to support the Congolese government along with the international community to carry out new military operations in the region.1 While leaders from African governments, the World Bank, civil society, and the UN have held several meetings in Kinshasa and Goma to promote and facilitate a ceasefire, the situation in eastern Congo remains fragile and the populations are again vulnerable to the difficulties. At the time of finishing this book, the political landscape is likely to change again, following the elections at the end of 2018. Despite the efforts of international stakeholders, my friend and coworker, Ray, informs me that there has been no major improvement in the security situation in the Kivu region and the continuum of violence and political crisis is rampant. And conditions at Rainbow Brigade camp have changed dramatically for the leaders, the combatants, and their family members. A few months after I returned from my fieldwork in 2012, I received an email from Ray. He wrote that the camp had been attacked. One of the colonels was killed and several women and children shot on the road while trying to flee. The news that the colonel and the women and the children had been killed left me with a feeling of uncertainty. What had happened in the camp that day? Was the story really true? Was it just a rumor? Many questions remain unanswered. I have not been able to identify any sources that adequately confirm what happened that day. I have tried several times to ask those who are still in the mountains, but no one seems to know the whole story. People’s stories and memory are fragmentary, and their imaginations are built on such fragments. There is no whole story. In situations like this, there never will be. Colonel Frank and I have not been in contact since 2014. When I last heard from him, he was back in the camp, where he said he had been appointed the new chief of all military units in the South Kivu. I also heard that one of the other high-ranking leaders was shot by his own bodyguard, and several weeks later, Samuel, the intelligence officer, called me from a refugee camp in Zambia, where he said he was hiding with his family. Ishimwe, who escaped the camp in 2012, called from Rwanda a couple of times but at the time of writing we are no longer in touch. I also stayed in touch with Ce´dric, who moved back to Bukavu where, he said, he continued working as an intelligence operator for the rebels. We spoke several times before I heard that he was in the hospital suffering malaria, where he died a few weeks later. These recent events are just examples of the extreme fragility of the anatomy of war and violence in the eastern Congo. The

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rebel groups collapse or disappear, only to reemerge with new leaders and members in a continuing cycle. For these rebels, for their families, and for the civilian dependents operating in such a long-standing war zone, war is a real daily social practice and violence has become an organizing principle in everyday life.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. See for example, Stearns (2012a) and Mamdani (2001) for similar analysis to exploring violence in the DRC by using Hanna Arendt’s “banality of evil” theory. These sources, and in particular Jason Stearns book Dancing in the Glory Monsters (2012a) inspired me to use Hanna Arendt’s “banality of evil” theory in the Introduction. The questions and arguments as to why “ordinary people” commit violence in Rwanda and DRC is therefore similar to Stearns (2012a) work. 2. A number of authors provide a more comprehensive reading of the historical context; among them are Young (1965), Prunier (1995, 2001, 2009), Willame (1972). A more recent historical overview of the Congo wars and conflicts in the eastern Congo and the Great Lakes can be found in, to give only a few examples, the work of Autesserre (2006, 2009, 2010, 2013), Hoffman (2007), Jackson (2006), (Jourdan 2004, 2011), Lemarchand (1997, 2005, 2009), Mushi (2013), Raeymaekers (2005, 2010), Romkema (2007, 2009), Stearns (2012a, 2012b, 2012c, 2013), Thakur (2007), Tull (2003), Turner (2007), Verweijen (2013), Vlassenroot (2006, 2007), Vlassenroot & Van Acker (2001), Vlassenroot & Vlassenroot & Perrot (2012), Vlassenroot & Romkema (2002). 3. In this book, I use the term “war” or “conflicts” to emphasize that there is a lack of peace although there might be weeks and even months when the situation is calmer. My informants further used the term “war” to emphasize that the war against Rwanda is not yet over. The characteristics of this war are described throughout the book. 4. Honwana is building on Certeau’s analysis of tactical and strategic agency; see Honwana (2005:49) for a comprehensive discussion. 5. Bøas & Dunn (2013) have made a similar argument in their research on local citizenship and identity in North Kivu, arguing that the FDLR is caught up in the “unwelcoming borderlands” (2013:96), and Perera (2013) has also published an article on the FDLR as “refugee warriors,” where she also highlights the problems with FDLR, identity, refugee politics, and local citizenship in the North Kivu province. 6. See also Verweijen (2012), Wood (2006), Rodgers (2001), Kovats-Bernat (2002) for good discussions on methodological and ethical dilemmas when researching perpetrators and conflict dynamics. 7. Yet, a few very good studies do exist. For example, the discussion paper on the origin, ideology, and military structure of the FDLR published by Rafti (2006), an article on the FDLR as an obstacle to peace in the eastern Congo (Rodriguez 2011), and more recently, Perera (2013) published an article on Rwandan refugee warriors and the question of belonging.

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210 Notes to Pages 35–91 8. The Enough Project (sometimes) and the Usalama Project publish their reports in the authors’ names. When I refer to these reports, I refer to the author directly. 9. Ellipses in original.

Chapter 1 1. These numbers are cited in the dominant official narrative but have been questioned by scholars such as Scott Straus (2006:51) and a report by Human Rights Watch (1999) estimates that about 500,000 Tutsi civilians and 10,000 Hutus were killed. 2. See Strathern & Stewart 2002 for a longer discussion on internal and external perspectives on writing history. 3. The genocide in Rwanda has been covered extensively in articles and books, and I will not write a comprehensive history of Rwanda. Nevertheless, it is important to briefly summarize the major political events that led to genocide to further understand the developments in the Congo. 4. Originally, the word Ineynzi was a label of a Tutsi political party to underscore that the Tutsi could not be exterminated. Later, the label was picked up by Hutu extremists, following the rhetoric that they could exterminate the Tutsis. 5. Kagame and the RPF jailed between 30,000 and 80,000 Hutus accused of participating in the genocide. At this time, the new regime also launched attacks against Hutu civilians. People were afraid of a new genocide and many fled to refugee camps in Burundi, Tanzania, and the Congo and to other countries. For a comprehensive analysis, see Middleton (1997:19). 6. The numbers are based on estimates from the UNHCR and other organizations that were there at the time. 7. The first military operation, Umjo Weto, took place in North Kivu in January 2009. It was conducted by the Congo army (FARDC) and backed by Rwanda. The second military operation, Kimia 11, started in March 2009 and was carried out in both North and South Kivu by the Congo army and backed by the UN. The third operation, Amani Leo, was carried out in North and South Kivu in 2010 and also backed by the UN (Human Rights Watch 2009; Mueller & Bafilemba 2013). Many high-ranking leaders have been captured or killed during these operations, which has weakened the internal structure of the FDLR. Although the operations managed to capture leaders, the violence that followed the attacks has had devastating consequences on the civilian population as discussed in Chapter 5. 8. This is also suggested in the reports by the UN group of experts (United Nations 2011, 2012), where they have collected lists and proof (of telephone numbers and money transactions) of whom the rebels have contacted outside of the Congo, whereby they assume the rebels gain support from a number of diaspora members from various countries.

Chapter 2 1. Gender inequality was an integral part of the structure of the camp. I discuss how they were treated and what women and children say about their life situations in Chapter 4. 2. Here the focus is on the organization of military life, not the ideology or expressions of political life, which are dealt with in Chapter 3. 3. During fieldwork in the camp, I observed no use of alcohol or drugs and there was a shared assumption among the soldiers that drinking is bad. I don’t know if this was always the case, if it was a lie, or simply an image the leaders wished to publicly show. 4. Translated from French.

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Notes to Pages 92–179 211 5. Focus here is on the Protestant and Catholic churches. During my stay in the camp, I never observed any organized activity, such as masses or ceremonies, in the Pentecostal church. 6. Except where noted, all of these statements are translated from Kinyarwanda by Christopher, my coworker. The translations from Kinyarwanda to English were further doublechecked by Fortune C-M, a Kinyarwanda/Swahili/English/Swedish–speaking student living in Malmo¨, Sweden). 7. Translated from Kinyarwanda.

Chapter 3 1. Quoted in UN S/1999/1257:3. 2. As I mentioned in Chapter 1, the term “genocide ideology” is also used by Tutsi officials to refer to the Hutus in the Congo, who the government claim maintain the genocide ideology of exterminating the Tutsis. See Chapter 1. for a longer discussion. 3. In front of the camera, high-ranking leaders often said “the Swedish delegation” and used a very formal rhetoric to communicate their political messages. 4. Translated from French by Christoffer, my coworker. 5. All of the four songs are translated from Kinyarwanda. 6. Translated from Kinyarwanda. 7. Translated from Kinyarwanda. 8. Translated from Kinyarwanda.

Chapter 4 1. This report was written in 2007. It is likely that the system of FDLR was probably stricter and more controlled at that time. In 2007, the FDLR had a larger number of combatants, and since then, many high-ranking leaders have been captured or killed. However, as will be shown, the fear was still well-founded and incorporated into the structure of the group. 2. Except where noted, all of these statements were translated from Swahili and Kinyarwanda by P. Ombeni and/or Yves, who were translators at Centre De Transit et D’orientation Pour Enfants Sortis de Forces et Groupes Armes Au Sud-Kivu, in Bukavu, where I carried out interviews with ex-combatants and child soldiers. 3. During the first round of fieldwork, I was rarely allowed to move around freely in the camp. I was always followed by one of the high-ranking leaders. However, during the second round of fieldwork, I was “permitted” more flexibility in that regard, but there was always someone keeping an eye on the person I was speaking to. See the methodological section in the introduction for a detailed description. 4. It was not the first time I heard the expression “spokesperson” Several times, the soldiers stressed that they were “spokespersons,” that they represented the “gender department,” or “civilian affairs,” etc. Since the FDLR is structured like a conventional army, they have such divisions and positions within the military organization.

Chapter 5 1. The UN-sponsored the operations using more than US$1 million. 2. It is difficult to know if the man and the boy were simply forced to stay in the camp or if, for example, they had a previous relationship with the rebels.

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212 Notes to Page 207

Chapter 6 1. See the BlogSpot, The UN Conundrum in the Eastern Congo, Is It a Carrot or a Stick? for a detailed analysis: http://congosiasa.blogspot.se/2013/08/the-un-conundrum-in-congo -is-it-carrot.html (accessed January 2014).

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INDEX

Page numbers in italic type indicate illustrations. AFDL. See Alliance des Forces De´mocratiques pour la Libe´ration du Congo-Zaı¨re Afghanistan, 194 Africa’s World War, 9, 52 Agamben, Giorgio, 25–27, 193–94, 196 alcohol, 66, 67, 86, 166, 222n3 Alliance des Forces De´mocratiques pour la Libe´ration du Congo-Zaı¨re (AFDL), 50, 51 Angola, 53 animals, Hutus’ lives like those of, 82, 113, 132, 197 Arendt, Hannah, 1–2 armed groups, 164 Armenian genocide, 103 Army for the Liberation of Rwanda, 53 Autonomous Region of Bougainville, 13 Baaz, Maria Eriksson, 14 Bagosora, The´oneste, 114, 116–18 Ballinger, Pamela, 24 Banuyamulenge population, 50, 52, 181 Banyarwanda population, 52 bare life, 25–27, 193–94, 196–98 batteries, 33, 34, 56, 70, 76 Belgian Congo, 9 Belgium, 43–45, 46, 110 Beneduce, Roberto, 199 Bible, 4, 87, 91, 95, 99 Bizimungu, Augustin, 48 Blood Diamonds (film), 66 bodyguards, 29, 73–74, 87, 171, 172, 173 boredom, 68, 200 Bosnia, 11 Bourgois, Philippe, 19, 20 Burundi, 47, 108–9

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INDX

Bush, George W., 25–26 Busher, Karen, x bush wives, 67, 162 Cambodia, 11 Catholics, 76, 93, 94–96 children: activities of, 79, 87; deaths of, 81, 97–98; enmity expressed by, 127–28, 203; experiences of, 77; transmission of culture to, 110–11, 126 child soldiers. See young rebels churches, 76–77, 87, 91–97 civilians: fear experienced by, 163–66, 173–76, 190; interactions with rebels, 39, 173–85; rebel alliances with, 166, 174, 177, 181–84, 190; relations with FDLR, 57–58; as target of war, 12, 161–64; terror warfare against, 165–66 clothes, 68, 78, 94 coded language, 37, 83, 85, 110 coffee, 87 colonialism, 8–9, 43–45 Combatant Forces Abacunguzi (FOCA), 53, 56 Commando de Recherche et d’Action en Profondeur unit (CRAP), 57 commemoration, 104 concentration camps, 26–27, 200 Congo Free State, 8 Congolese army. See Forces Arme´es de la Re´publique De´mocratique du Congo Congo Reform Association, 9 Congo wars (1996–2003), 40–41, 49–54. See also war in eastern Congo Connerton, Paul, 24

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226 Index Conseil National pour le Renoveau et la de´mocratie-Ubwiyunge, 55 Coulter, Chris, 22, 150 culture, transmission of, 110–11, 126, 201

DRC. See Democratic Republic of the Congo drugs, 66, 67, 86, 222n3

dances, 110–12, 122–23, 201 Darfur, Sudan, 103 defection. See desertion dehumanization, 2, 120, 140, 179 Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR): alliances of, 54; associated with genocide, 24–25, 59–62, 67, 72, 100, 103, 106–8, 192, 194–95; attitude of, toward researchers, 30–31, 71, 111, 137–38, 157; civilian relations with, 57–58; control in, 140; DRC’s outlawing of, 53; in eastern Congo, 4–5, 17–18, 53–58; economic activities of, 58, 81, 170; global connections of, 55–56, 192; goal of, 3, 18, 58–59, 75, 136; justifications of soldiers in, 168–69; members of, 42, 55; military capacity of, 57; military wing of, 53; organization of, 54–57, 192; origins of, 41, 42, 47, 53; planning of military actions by, 57; political message of, 59–60; propaganda of, 16, 31, 34, 104, 111–13, 119, 202; recruitment for, 67, 141–43, 162, 178–79, 204; research on, 35–36, 55; Rwanda’s relations with, 54, 60, 195; self-perception of, 18, 23–24, 25, 30–31, 63, 129–33; socialization in, 140–42, 144, 159, 202; “state of exception” concept applied to, 26–27, 194; violence against civilians, 161–66; weapons of, 57. See also Combatant Forces Abacunguzi; rebel camp and rebels Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC): and Banuyamulenge population, 50; map of, xiii; naming of, 51; natural resources of, 8, 9, 10; political situation in, 51; population of, 7; sources of violence in, 19–20. See also Congo wars; eastern Congo desertion, 56–57, 140, 151–53 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 66 dirty wars, 12 Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration Program (DDR), 152 disease, 73, 80 dishonesty, 177–79

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eastern Congo: FDLR in, 4–5, 17–18, 53–58; life in, 28; map of, xiv; recent instability in, 206–7; refugees in, 47–50; “state of exception” concept applied to, 194. See also war in eastern Congo Eichmann, Adolf, 1–2 elders: activities of, 79; deaths of, 81; description of, 77; transmission of culture by, 110–11 enemies, construction of, 126–31, 177–79 English, 32, 76, 110 English club, 32, 76 Enough Project, 35 ethics, 36–37 ethnicity: Hutu, 43–44, 120–22, 201; identity based on, 42–45, 120–22; in rebel camp, 121–22, 201; in Rwanda, 42–45, 60–61; Tutsi, 43–44, 120–22, 201 ethnography, 16–19 evil, 1–2 ex-combatants, research conducted with, 37, 140–41, 178, 196, 203–4 exile/marginalization: Hutus’ self-perception of, 18–19, 23–24, 44, 62, 99–100, 105, 131, 191–92, 200–202; as theme in religious thought of rebels, 92, 94, 96–97, 99–100 FAR. See Rwandan Armed Forces FARDC. See Forces Arme´es de la Re´publique De´mocratique du Congo farming, 78, 79–81 FDLR. See Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda Ferguson, R. Brian, 174 FOCA. See Combatant Forces Abacunguzi food, 79, 80–81, 175, 191 Forces Arme´es de la Re´publique De´mocratique du Congo (FARDC), 4, 36, 81, 89, 164, 169, 187–89 France, 46–47, 110 French, 110 Friedman, Jonathan, 108 Gennep, Arnold van, 124 ge´nocidaires, 3, 23, 31, 71, 105, 112, 116, 191, 195 genocide: denial concerning, 103; of Hutus, 50, 147–48; UN Convention on, 102;

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Index 227 worldwide, 11–12. See also Rwandan genocide Germany, 55–56, 104 girls. See women and girls Goffman, Erving, 111 Goma, ix–xi, 52, 206–7 gray zones, 7, 26–27, 58–62, 194 Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 55, 170 Guantanamo Bay, 26, 194 Guatemala, 104 Habyarimana, Juve´nal, 28, 40, 45–46, 86, 106 Hinton, Alexander, 103 history: constructing/writing of, 41–42; Hutu construction of, 41–42, 104–7, 133–34, 202; identities constructed through, 108–10, 133–34; mythical construction of, 109–10, 128–29, 200; political use of, 108, 112–13; of Rwandan genocide, 60–61 Hoffman, Danny, 16 homo sacer, 25–26, 193 Honwana, Alcinda, 16, 20, 204 Hornborg, Ann-Christine, 124 Human Rights Watch, 35, 55, 161–63 hunger, 80, 82 huts, 69, 72–73, 75, 77–78 Hutu Emancipation Movement (PARMEHUTU), 45 Hutus: ethnic identity of, 43–44, 120–22, 201; genocide perpetrated by, 2–3, 40; genocide suffered by, 50, 147–48; histories constructed by, 41–42, 104–7, 133–34, 202; marginalization/exile of, 18–19, 23–24, 44, 62, 99–100, 105, 131, 191–92, 200–202; and politics, 45–46, 48–49; as refugees, 3, 47–49, 62–63; Rwandan genocide as conceived by, 24–25, 42, 59, 100, 103–10, 116–20, 125–26, 133–34, 202; self-perception of, 104; violence perpetrated by, 5. See also Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR); rebel camp and rebels hygiene, 73, 80 identity: collective, 150, 159, 198–200, 203; ethnic, 42–45, 120–22; as fighters, 39, 86, 137, 139–44, 150; history as means of constructing, 108–10, 133–34; Hutu construction of exilic/victimized/marginal,

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23–24, 42, 58, 100, 108–9, 131, 135, 191–92, 200–202 Interahamwe, 3, 47, 48, 49, 53 international community: FDLR in eyes of, 23, 34, 49, 59–62, 104; Hutu desire for communication with, 31, 71, 111–13, 117–18, 191–92; and Hutu refugees, 51; inaction of, in humanitarian crises, 12, 48–49, 54, 148, 194–95; Rwandan genocide as perceived by, 12, 42, 49, 59, 60, 114–15 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), 72, 102, 114 International Crisis Group, 35, 55 intimidation, 12, 90, 137, 139, 141, 144, 147, 148, 158, 160, 165–66, 169, 173–75, 179, 182, 189–90, 198–99 Inyenzi (cockroaches), 46, 120, 122 Johnny Mad Dog (film), 66, 67 justice, Hutus’ desire for, 24, 60, 63, 84, 106, 116, 118, 131, 133, 201 Kabanda, Jean, 48 Kabarere, James, 52 Kabila, Joseph, 9, 53 Kabila, Laurent-De´sire´, 50–54, 57, 74–75, 169 Kagame, Paul, 3, 34, 40, 46, 60–61, 75, 89, 105–7, 112, 114, 117–18, 120, 125–28, 135, 146, 148, 199, 202, 203 Kayibanda, Gre´goire, 45 Khmer Rouge, 103 Kimia II (government operation), 162 Kinyarwanda, 32, 43, 110, 112, 120, 121, 145, 201 language, 32, 76, 110, 150 latrines, 73 Lemarchand, Rene´, 44, 50, 61, 147 Leopold II, King of Belgium, 8–9 Levi, Primo, 200 looting. See plunder and theft Lubkemann, C. Stephen, 12, 22 Lumumba, Patrice, 9 Lusaka Peace Agreement (1999), 53 Macˇek, Ivana, 23 Mahmood, Cynthia Keppley, 16

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228 Index Mai-Mai militias, 51, 54, 181 Malkki, Liisa, 24, 108–9, 128–29, 200 Mamdani, Mahmood, 44–45 Mandela, Nelson, 132–33 marginalization. See exile/marginalization marijuana, 78, 81 markets, 81 Mayan population, 104 mining industry, 28, 52, 58, 81, 170 mobile phones, 10, 56, 69, 76, 87, 192 Mobutu Sese Seko, 9, 50, 51 MONUSCO. See United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo M23, 206 Murwanashyaka, Ignace, 53, 55–56 Musoni, Straton, 56 mythico-history, 109–10, 128–29, 200

Perera, Suda, 62 phones. See mobile phones; satellite phones plunder and theft, 5, 48, 57, 81, 83, 141–42, 169 Podder, Sukanya, 140 Pole Institute, 35, 55–56 potatoes, 80–81 prayers, 92, 95, 96, 97, 98–99, 199 propaganda: associated with Rwandan crises, 38, 63; FDLR, 16, 31, 34, 104, 111–13, 129, 202; Hutu anti-Tutsi, 3, 40, 44, 46, 60, 120; Hutu claims of victimization by, 103–7 Protestants, 76, 91, 96, 98–99 Prunier, Ge´rard, 8 pygmies, 177–78

names of rebels, 82–83, 150 National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP), 54 National Intelligence Agency, 36 National Revolutionary Movement for Development (AFDL), 45 9/11 terror attacks, 25–26, 194 Nkunda, Laurent, 54 Nordstrom, Carolyn, 16, 165 Obama, Barack, 111 officers: authority of, 29; characteristics of, 106; communication practices of, 83–86; control exerted by, 135, 138–39, 145–47, 150–53, 158, 198; duties of, 82, 87, 192; languages of, 32, 86; living conditions of, 72–73, 79, 82, 197–98; and religion, 91, 94, 96; thoughts of life outside camp, 156. See also bodyguards; rebel camp and rebels: hierarchy in O’Neill, Kevin, 103 Operation Turquoise, 47 othering, 46, 120, 122, 126–29, 177–79, 203 ¨ zerdem, Alpaslan, 140 O Pan-Africanist movement, 45 Papua New Guinea, 13 Peace, Security, and Cooperation Framework (2013), 206–7 Peace Appeal Foundation, 35 Pentecostals, 76

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radios, 56, 70, 73, 76, 113–16, 152, 153 Radio Te´le´vision Libre des Mille Collines, 46, 120 Rafti, Marina, 56, 61 Rally for the Congolese Democracy (RCD), 52–53, 181 Rally for the Return of Refugees and Democracy in Rwanda, 49 rape, ix, xi, 5, 12–14, 22, 33, 66, 88–89, 142, 146, 148, 161–63, 166, 204 rebel camp and rebels: appearance of inhabitants of, 68; challenges of living in, 68; circulation of soldiers in, 72; civilian alliances with, 166, 174, 177, 181–84, 190; civilian interactions with, 39, 173–85; commitment in, 135, 139–44, 149–52, 155, 158–60; conducting research in, 29–33; construction of enemies by, 126–31, 177–79; coping strategies in, 91, 97–101, 200; courtroom drama enacted in, 117–18, 119, 120, 125–26; description of, 4, 69–72; desertion/defection from, 56–57, 140, 151–53; entertainment in, 87; escape from, 153–55, 195–96; ethnicity in, 121–22, 201; fear in, 88–91, 135–36, 138, 147–49, 151–53, 155–60; fighting involving, 83–84, 185–89, 197; hardships of, 68, 70, 77–82, 95–101, 130, 146, 173, 190, 197, 199; headquarters of, 76; hierarchy in, 29–31, 30, 72–79, 82, 86, 96, 100, 135, 137, 151, 158, 173, 197–99, 204; history of, 24–25, 71; identities in, 39, 82–83; intelligence activities in, 71, 85–86; isolation of, 68; kitchen of, 73; landscape

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Index 229 surrounding, 162; language in, 32, 76, 110, 150; living arrangements in, 69, 72–73, 75, 77–78; members of, 24, 67–68, 69; military atmosphere of, 82–86, 197; military performances in, 121–23, 124, 166–67; mobility characteristic of, 171; mythicohistory in, 109–11; ordinary life in, 5–6, 17, 38, 66–101, 171, 196–97, 200; overview of, 100–101; perceptions of the forest in, 131–33; personal belongings, 4, 73, 75–76, 78; personal motivations of, for continuing rebel life, 16, 137, 139–44, 149–51, 158–59, 169, 202–5; political broadcast heard in, 113–17; political demonstration in, 111–13, 114, 115; as “prison,” 17, 27, 39, 156–58; recent developments in, 207; refugees in, 77–79, 80, 145–47; religious life in, 91–101, 199–200; reluctance to discuss personal lives, 30, 136–38, 140, 144, 147, 151; routine in, 86–88, 200; security concerns and surveillance in, 30, 70–71, 82–85, 137–40, 144–47, 151–60, 171, 173, 185–89; society constituted by, 24, 27, 196–99, 203; spatial construction of, 72–79; stereotypes of, 66–68; survival strategies in, 79–82, 170–71, 189–90 refugees: in eastern Congo, 47–50; global numbers of, 7; Hutus as, 3, 47–49, 62–63; political status of, 26, 62–63; in rebel camp, 77–79, 80, 145–47; resulting from genocides, 12 religion, 91–101, 199–200. See also churches research considerations: conflict zone as setting of research, 14–16, 27–34; ethical issues, 36–37; ethnographic perspective, 16–19; personal considerations, 15–16, 29, 31; reliability of sources, 35–36 Richards, Paul, 17 Riches, David, 21 Robben, Antonius, 31 Rodriguez, Marı´a, 56, 61, 195 Rome Agreement (2005), 54 Romkema, Hans, 57, 140 RPF. See Rwandan Patriotic Front Rwanda: aspiration of Hutu exiles for return to, 3, 4, 5, 18, 39, 45, 48, 58–59, 75, 92, 96–101, 110, 116, 118, 127–29, 131, 136, 197, 201–3; colonialism in, 43–45; Congo wars in relation to, 40–41, 49–54; ethnicity

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in, 42–45, 60–61; FDLR’s relations with, 54, 60, 195; gray zones in, 59–62; political broadcast from, 113–17; political context in, 45–49; refugee crisis of, 47–49. See also Rwandan genocide Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR), 47, 48, 49, 53 Rwandan genocide: aftermath of, 103, 147–48; commemoration of, 104; conflicting accounts of, 42, 59–61; denial concerning, 100, 103–5, 107, 133; description of, 2–3, 40; fears of renewed, 60; Hutu narratives of, 24–25, 42, 59, 100, 103–10, 116–20, 125–26, 133–34, 202; Hutu political motivations for their representation of, 108–10; memorial to, 2–3; participants in, 46; rebels associated with, 24–25, 59–62, 67, 72, 100, 103, 106–8, 192, 194–95; UN Security Council report on, 102–3 Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), 46 Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), 46, 61, 106, 112 satellite phones, 4, 56, 70, 73, 76, 85, 192 Schechner, Richard, 123–24 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, 19, 20 school, 76 Scott, James, 19 Scramble for Africa, 8 simple soldiers, 74–75, 74, 196 Sindikubwabo, Theodore, 48 Sluka, Jeffery, 16 Small Arms Survey, 55 soap, 71, 76, 173, 184, 200 social drama, 124–25, 202 socialization, in armed groups, 139–42, 159, 202 soft terror, 166, 173 solar energy, 56, 70, 76 solar panels, 34 Solomon Islands, 13 songs, 110–12, 121–23, 201 Sontag, Susan, 33 South Africa, 104 South Kivu, 162 special operations, 57 Sri Lanka, 103, 104 states of exception, 25–27, 193–94 stealing. See plunder and theft Stern, Maria, 14

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230 Index Stewart, Pamela, 21, 23, 41 Strathern, Andrew, 21, 23, 41 suspicion, 29, 138, 145, 147–49, 182–84 Swahili, 32, 110, 161 Sweden, 112 Syria, 11–12 tactical agency, 20, 204–5 Tanzania, 108–9 terror warfare, 165–66 theater, psycho-political functions of, 123–26, 202–3 theft. See plunder and theft trauma, 13, 33, 49, 68, 90, 104, 147–48 trekking, 32, 33, 166, 171, 173–76, 185–89 triangle of violence, 21 Turkey, 103 Turner, Victor, 124–25, 202 Tutsis: in DRC, 52; ethnic identity of, 43–44, 120–22, 201; genocide suffered by, 3, 40; histories constructed by, 41–42; Hutu propaganda about, 3, 40, 44, 46, 60, 120, 122; and politics, 45–46 Uganda, 52, 53 Umoja Wetu (government operation), 162 Umutesi, Marie Be´atrice, Surviving the Slaughter, 48 UNHCR. See United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees United Nations: Congo peace supervised by, 53; and Rwandan genocide, 12, 46 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 62 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 7, 8, 47–48, 50, 62–63 United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC), 53 United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO), 53, 152–53, 162 United Nations Security Council, report on Rwandan genocide, 102–3 United States, 46 Usalama Project, 35 US State Department, 53 Utas, Mats, 16

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Vermeij, Lotte, 139 Vietnamese, genocide of, 103 Vigh, Henrik, 16 violence: construction of discourse about, 105; in contemporary world, 6–7, 11–12, 22; coping strategies for, 104; defining, 19; ethnographic perspective on, 16–19; as everyday norm, 12, 20, 186, 208; explanation of, 5–6, 13–16, 168, 170–71, 205–6; intimate physical nature of, 5, 12; intimidation as goal of, 12; legitimation of, 20–22, 168–69; local understanding of, 23; motivations of perpetrators of, 6, 14–15, 17, 189–90, 204; sources of Congolese, 19–20; structural approach to, 19–20, 27; terminology of, 22–24 Vlassenroot, Koen, x, 28 war in eastern Congo: consequences of, xi, 8, 11; description of, xi, 12–13; geography of, 8; global aspects of, 7; history of, 8–11; sources of, 19–20; spillover violence in, 10; strategy and decision making in, 167–68; terminology of, 221n3 warscapes, 12 water, 79–80 Whitehead, Neil, 23 women and girls: activities of, 79, 87; author’s interactions with, 137–38, 145–46; commitment of, to rebel camp, 149–50; hardships suffered by, 145–46, 148; pregnancy and childbirth, 146; in rebel camp, 67, 69; recruitment of, 67, 142–43, 162; soldiers’ treatment of civilian, 176; as wives, 67, 69, 77, 142. See also rape Wood, Elizabeth, 28 World Bank, 35, 207 young rebels: identity construction for, 139–40; paths of recruitment of, 67, 141–42, 162, 178–79, 204; violence perpetrated by, 66–67, 141–42 Zaire, 51 Zambia, 53 Zimbabwe, 53 Zuliaka, Joseba, 16

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has grown out of a long journey. I am indebted to so many people who have helped me along the way. I am forever indebted and thankful to all individuals, whose names will remain anonymous, in the eastern Congo who accompanied me along the way, invited me to their homes, who shared stories and made a “stranger” feel welcome in an unfamiliar setting of rebel life. To all of you whom I met along the way, in rebel camps, in demobilization camps, in towns and villages, thanks for teaching me about your world. My coworkers and friends, whose names I have changed to fully protect their identity, Ce´dric, Christopher, and Ray have provided important insights, knowledge, friendship, and humor throughout the fieldwork. Please know that I am grateful to all of you and that this book could not have been written without your help and support. This book has roots in an earlier project I began at Lund University, Sweden, in 2014, which was first printed by Media-Tryck, Lund. Since that time the manuscript has changed significantly. It has been an honor to work with Peter Agree and Toby Kelly and the editorial team at the University of Pennsylvania Press and I am truly grateful to the two anonymous reviewers who carefully read and commented on my manuscript and who provided insightful and critical comments that have helped me to revise, structure and improve the final version of the book, thank you! All the mistakes that remain are my own. Like the conflict in the eastern Congo has changed over the years, so has my manuscript. Even if the manuscript has been revised, I would like thank all of those who read and commented on earlier draft versions of this book. In academic life, I have received tireless support from Professor Steven Sampson. Steven’s extensive knowledge and interest in anthropology have been an invaluable source of inspiration over the years. His untiring and unwavering support, sharp and critical reading, extensive comments

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232 Acknowledgments

and corrections, and encouraging feedback have been invaluable for this book and my thinking as an anthropologist. I am further indebted to Professor Kajsa Ekholm-Friedman and Professor Jonathan Friedman for reading earlier drafts of this manuscript, for discussions and critique, comments and corrections. Professor Don Kulick and Professor Michael Whyte also read and commented on earlier drafts of this book and I am truly grateful for the time and efforts spent on reading, for kindness, inspiration and encouragements; your help has been vital for this project. During the writing process I have benefited greatly from the support and input from my friends and colleagues at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Lund University, Sweden; the department “Integration and Conflict” at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, where I was a guest researcher for a couple of months, as well as all my colleagues at the South African Research Center for Social Change, University of Johannesburg, and more recently, many thanks to all my colleagues at the Urban Violence department at the Danish Institute Against Torture (DIGNITY) in Copenhagen, Denmark, and especially the “Violent Exchange” research team. All of you have contributed in your own important ways, many thanks to each and every one of you! A special thank you to Patricia de Villiers in Cape Town for reading the manuscript and improving the text and to Fortune, a student at Lund University, who helped me to double-check Swahili and Kinyarwanda translations, thank you! Portions of the ethnography and some of the arguments outlined in this book have appeared previously in various forms, some ethnographic examples and analysis in Chapters 3 and 4 were originally published in the journal Conflict & Society: Advances in Research with the title “There Was No Genocide in Rwanda”: History, Politics, and Exile Identity Among Rwandan Rebels in the Eastern Congo Conflict, volume 1, number 1, pages 23–40; and in the journal Africa: Journal of the International African Institute with the title “We’re Just Simple Soldiers”: Blurring the Distinction Between Compulsion and Commitment Among Rwandan Rebels in the Eastern Congo, volume 87, number 4, pages 1–19. I was given permission to publish the country maps I use in this book courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin. A part of the early fieldwork was carried out in collaboration with a filmmaker, Mark Hammarberg. Both he and I are the photographers of the pictures that I use in this book.

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Acknowledgments 233

Furthermore, I want to acknowledge the financial support from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation in New York and the Crafoord Foundation in Lund for initially believing in and supporting this research. At a later stage, I would also like to acknowledge funding from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond in Sweden who awarded me the Nils Eric Svenssons Resestipendium, which provided me with the time to work on the book. Toward the end of the project I was able to work on the manuscript due to a postdoc funded by University of Johannesburg and the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) and later I received financial support from a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship. I also want to thank the Marie Curie Alumni Association for awarding me the Micro Media Grant and Lars Hiertas Minnesfond and A˚ke Wibergs Stiftelse for smaller research and fieldwork grants. Finally, thank you to all my anthropology and non-anthropology friends (you know who you are) that have provided friendship, support, and courage over the years; I am blessed to have you in my life. A special thank you to my family who have always supported my decisions and ideas. They worried about me when I was away for fieldwork and when I stayed in the office over Easter. My family helped me to take care of my apartment when I was doing fieldwork or lived abroad, handing over keys to tenants, collecting mail and watering my plants; they dropped me off at train stations to say goodbye and picked me up at airports to welcome me home—to all of you, my love and thanks. Lastly, I am grateful to Jacob Zocherman, not only for editing the photos I use in this book but also for being the light in my life, I love you.

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