A Soldier’s Journey: Banyamulenge Narratives of Genocide

Abstract

This article adds to debates in genocide studies on identity by analyzing Congolese Tutsi, or Banyamulenge, soldier narratives. It discusses this group’s identities and agency through the lens of the militarized generation of the 1990s. A conception of narrative identity is proposed that captures physical and relational networks as well as experiences of genocide. It examines fieldwork interviews conducted among former Banyamulenge soldiers and participants in the Alliance des Forces Démocratique pour la Libération du Congo-Zaïre (AFDL) and Rwandan Patriotic Army/Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPA/RPF). This narrative analysis uses open thematic coding to trace emplotment around three core themes: insecurity, marginalization, and destructive crises. In these narratives, genocide is conceptually utilized as a relational and discursive concept, and, therefore, permits an assessment of how participants understood and utilized the term. Doing so demonstrates the layering of victim and perpetrator identities, making a case for fluid identities in exposure to and with experiences of genocide. In the particular case of the Banyamulenge soldiers, they were active agents in the conflicts and events addressed in this article. Actors in genocide are agentic and engaged in the formation of fluid identity.

Keywords

agency Banyamulenge genocide identity narrative networks postcolonialism relational sociology

Introduction

In 1996, the Alliance des Forces Démocratique pour la Libération du Congo-Zaïre (AFDL) declared a rebellion against Mobutu in the name of a relatively obscure Banyarwanda or Congolese Tutsi group, the Banyamulenge (Jackson, 2007; Mamdani, 2002; Willame, 1997).¹ This article aims to offer an insight into identity and agency, through the journey of Banyamulenge soldiers. This journey resulted in the AFDL cause in their name in 1996, including the alleged attacks on refugees camps throughout Zaïre, resulting in thousands of deaths (Kisangani, 2012; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2010). Much is now known about this politically significant South Kivu group and their militarization since the early 1990s and later incorporation into the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC; Stearns, 2013; Vlassenroot, 2002; Willame, 1997). Yet, this group remains labeled as Rwandaphone or obfuscated as Rwandan proxies in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Consequently, these labels misplace or diminish Banyamulenge actor identity formation and agency. Notable scholars of the region have characterized Banyamulenge involvement as ambiguous or manipulated by Kigali, some questioning their existence as a political or ethnic group (Nzongola-Ntalaja, 1999; Prunier, 2008). Little attention is paid to the identities within Banyamulenge actors. Anthony Court (2013) articulates a development of this group that is often misunderstood or itself erroneously recast as a reference to all Congolese Tutsi. However, the Banyamulenge, notwithstanding the mid-20th-century emergence of the label itself, are a distinct cultural and linguistic group (Court, 2013). Since this self-actualized ethnogenesis, the political presence of this group has ebbed and flowed in significance.²

As a contribution to genocide studies and analysis of actor identity and agency development, this article takes a relational sociology approach to genocide in the Great Lakes region. This means that this phenomenon is viewed beyond the legally constrained and historically conditioned perspectives of genocide, and through a broad model of social destruction as well as the perceptions and experiences of the actors. Genocide is, therefore, analyzed as a discursive tool deployed by Banyamulenge participants. Furthermore, this article looks beyond the archetypal use of perpetrator and victim actor framings, by considering the formation and layering of identities in genocide. Genocide studies largely inform how this scale of violence is viewed in other disciplines. Where the former’s key debates center on definitions and intent, not on actor agency and identity, such influence can be lacking in analytical and case-specific rigor in other disciplines. In African cases of postcolonial genocide, such as Rwanda and Burundi, reliance on Holocaust-derived categorizations of victims and perpetrators belies the complexities and formations of identity (Shaw, 2013).

This article uses narrative analysis based on open thematic coding of interviews with early Banyamulenge recruits who joined the Rwandan Patriotic Front/Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPF/RPA) from 1991 to 1996, and then the AFDL in 1996. Doing so identifies the perceptions, interactions, and violent relations around experiences with genocide. This analysis relies on Paul Ricoeur’s conception of narrative identity and emplotment. The latter offers both temporal and reflective character cohesion. Participants’ construction of narratives on this period, and their involvement and identity, is brought together by plot points. These plot points formed around three key elements: insecurity, marginalization, and destructive crises. Each element was used by participants to frame their physical and relational journeys leading to 1996 invasion of Zaïre.

This article relies on the analysis of narrative identities using Banyamulenge actor interviews. What is meant by a relational approach genocide and actor agency is briefly discussed. The “Concepts: Genocide, Identity and Agency” section addresses insecurity through becoming RPF soldiers around the 1994 genocide. The “Method: Narrative Identity and Field Method” section discusses the narrative analysis approach used and comments on the fieldwork. The “Analysis” section covers destructive crises as the recurrence genocide in 1996 and the formation of the AFDL. Conclusions are made about the fluidity of identity inherent in the soldier’s journey undertaken by Banyamulenge young men. It finds that Banyamulenge identity is shaped and formed by experiences of genocide and its uses as a discursive concept, resulting in layered victim and perpetrator identities. Banyamulenge soldier agency also demonstrates active participation in historical and social processes, not widely acknowledged in the literature about this group.

Concepts: Genocide, Identity, and Agency

Genocide is deployed in this article as a relational concept that frames perception and experience. This phenomenon is defined herein as social group destruction and deployed more subjectively in participants’ narratives as a frame of reference for violent experiences. As such, this article seeks to add to the growing literature assessing genocide through meso- and microanalysis of processes and broad theoretical engagement (Owens et al., 2013; Verdeja, 2012). A relational model of genocide can be described as social group destruction in line with Raphael Lemkin’s work exploring the displacement and erasure of identity (Shaw, 2007; Short, 2016). Lemkin’s concept entails “the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group” where the “pattern” or figurations of the group are violently imposed upon by another (Card, 2003; Irvin-Erickson, 2016; Lemkin, 1944, p. 79; Powell, 2011). This level of group destruction removes the socially cohesive connections of identity, culture, property, physical life, and well-being. Through a relational lens, such violence engages the performative and intersubjective identification of groups (Barta, 1987). This approach opens up the analysis of actor perceptions of genocide, and use of the terms in the perception of existential threat beyond discussions of expressed intent.

Questions about the interaction of agency and identity can then be addressed in this context of perception and relational performance. The agency of Banyamulenge, as a contested feature in the history of the RPF and AFDL, can be defined using Anthony Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory. The latter identifies agency as an actor’s dual constitution in “knowledgeability” and “capability” (Long, 1990, p. 8). In terms of genocide, this acknowledges actors as cognitive participants in violence, whether categorized as either victims or participants (Kalyvas, 2006; Shaw, 2007). Identities in this schema are fluid and adaptive to circumstances. They are ascribed onto actors and subscribed to by actors. Although alternative approaches move beyond the identity dialectic, they still pursue categories of actors as a way of imposing sense onto complex cases (Moser & Clark, 2005; Williams & Buckley-Zistel, 2018).

Agentic, fluid social actors in genocide are obfuscated by the paradigm of victims and perpetrators, and in doing so remove crucial intersubjectivity and self-sensing of actors. Zygmunt Bauman exemplifies this obfuscation. He describes genocidal destruction as another “face” of modernity, the “ingredients” of which are integral to modern society (Bauman, 2013, p. 8). However, Bauman’s of modernity critique breaks down, because, according to Christopher Powell’s (2012) relational view, Bauman resorts to a moral “essentialism” (pp. 40–41). Individuals are inherently preprogrammed moral agents who are able to choose, sociologically speaking, between an objective, universal right and wrong. This position then mystifies how the agents of modernity can act in such destructive concert if the good or evil of their actions is so apparent. Either modernity is so blinding in its ability to turn ordinary men into willing executioners, expunging human agency, or both humanity and modernity are so flawed to frequently resort to genocide without any reasoning whatsoever (Goldhagen et al., 1996). The morality of engaging in genocide is far more subjective, and requires a measured articulation of actors themselves. Bauman’s macro perspective presents an easy parsing of actors as either victims or perpetrators, without accounting for the discrete reasoning that renders moral decision making integral to identity formation.

Several questions opened up by a more fluid view of social actors in genocide. Is there a layering of identity that can occur when persons are subject to forms of mass trauma and violence, and then participate in such actions themselves? What is the role of actor agency in the variations of this scenario? These questions require a deeper response, beyond this article’s single case study. Powell’s (2011) relational framing of genocide describes “an identity-difference relation of violent obliteration” (p. 84). The identity–difference relation recognizes the collaborative and fluid construction of identities; central to the indictment here of “barbaric civilization” genocide is both destructive and productive, “it works to produce relations of identity-difference through a process of annihilation” (Powell, 2011, p. 82). The production of difference is a result of a full complement of social, economic, and political dynamics. In the case of Banyamulenge RPF and AFDL soldiers, these dynamics specifically translate into the identification of actors against the background of destructive crises (Dhamoon, 2010). The narratives of these soldiers reveal the insecurity and marginalization integral to their own identity formation and use of agency.

Methodology: Narrative Identity and Field Method

Analysis of identities through participant narration provides a window into the relationship between genocide, agency, and identities. Actors subjectively order self-perception and retrospection around emplotted narratives. According to Caroline Riessman, this interpretative device involves “sequence, theme, structure, temporal order, [and] evaluation” (Riessman, 1993, p. 51). Paul Ricoeur (1992a) similarly states, “The narrated story as a temporal totality and the poetic acts as the creation of a mediation between time as passage and time as duration” (p. 22). This makes emplotment the active construction of a narrative around distinct plot points. When a narrative is produced, it symbiotically “constructs the identity of the character, what can be called his or her narrative identity, in constructing that of the story told” (Ricoeur, 1992b, pp. 147–148).

Vital in Ricoeur’s rendering of narrative identity is the use of emplotment in temporal underpinnings to the story. Emplotment, for Ricoeur (1992b), serves two purposes: a temporal “permanence” of disparate elements and a reflective practice of narrative construction (pp. 140–141). Actor–performer narratives produce a reflection of the self and construct identity. This reflection incorporates and builds into narrative identity the perception of the Other. Riessman’s (1993) approach identifies a specific methodology of the narrative analysis. This process entails five stages of attending interviews, telling of story, transcribing, analysis, and reading (Riessman, 1993). Foundational here is the acknowledgment that any kind of narrative analysis is a subjective and cumulative process (Riessman, 1993). Both researcher and narrator are engaged in recreation and coconstruction of narratives, which ultimately remain with the researcher as the final narrator in the construction. Performance by both participant and researcher is recognized in this work as inherent.

The case of Banyamulenge soldier participation in the AFDL was selected as a result of its absence from literature on the Rwandan genocide, as well as in literature about successive Congolese conflicts (Prunier, 2008; Reyntjens, 2009; Turner, 2007). Analysis at this level of detail is limited to single interviews, or the occasional nongovernmental organization (NGO) report on South Kivu (Stearns, 2011, 2013; Van Reybrouck, 2014). How the Banyamulenge were brought into the RPF and the impact of this formative experience and exposure to genocide remain largely undocumented and unassessed (Dorsey, 2000; Rever, 2018; Verweijen, 2015).³

The method of fieldwork for this research was shaped by Riessman’s five stages. Attended interviews of 28 participants are part of a series of field visits from 2016 to 2018 in Kigali (Rwanda) and in Bukavu, Goma, and Kinshasa (DRC).⁴ The target participants were former or current combatants involved in both the RPF and the AFDL, during the 1990s.⁵ Secondary to this grouping were political actors involved in either early RPF networks in eastern Zaïre or the AFDL as cadres in the mid to late 1990s. All participants described themselves as Banyamulenge, and were male. The interviews revealed no indication that any women were recruited into the RPF from South Kivu during the 1990s. The age range of participants stretched from the 40s to some in their 60s, making most either teens or university students in the early 1990s. Semistructured questions were used to providing a space for participant performance or in-depth telling of their narrative. As this narrow grouping of actors was hard to identify, the snowballing of participants was often subject to individual gatekeepers within this community. In each of the above locations, at least two gatekeepers were identified, avoiding overlap of contacts or social networks. In a community that is small and often insular, this was challenging to do. As such, all participant interviews have been included in the data set to ensure that divergent views, where they exist, have been considered. Transcribed interviews were openly coded, utilizing the interview questions and immersion into the material. The plot points of insecurity, marginalization, and destructive crises emerged from this coding.⁶ These themes were self-reflective of their personal experience and perception of the wider Banyamulenge group. These plot points are captured in terms of group insecurity and marginalization within the Congolese state from the 1960s to the present. The destructive crises plot points are divided into perception of both the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the threat of this pattern of Tutsi killing remerging in South Kivu in from 1996 onward.

Analysis

The following analysis is in keeping with intersubjective understanding of narrative identity and genocide, and seeks to produce a reading of narratives as such: genocide as history and discursive concept. Although participant narratives covered a longer period of Banyamulenge experience, from the prior generations’ involvement in the Cold War era Mulele rebellion to participant’s own fighting in groups in the late 1990s and 2000s, this article focuses on the formative period of the early 1990s. This period is the most neglected by current literature.

Becoming RPF Soldiers

This section opens the narrative where participants had been actively involved in military activities, and in their terms protecting their communities, as well as Tutsis more regionally. One participant, as an 18-year-old RPF recruit, was driven by a zero-sum logic to fight. Where he belonged was expressed in the fluidity of his and many other soldiers’ identities. This was a product of the soldier’s journey that he and his generation of Banyamulenge young men took as they joined the RPF in the early 1990s. According to an AFDL political actor, most left for opportunity and remained in Rwanda before returning to Zaïre for the liberation. Growing enlistment antagonized local groups, the Bembe and Fuliro. Relations worsened with the arrival of the Rwandan exodus of genocidaires and refugees in 1994, as more Banyamulenge youth left for Rwanda.

Overcoming marginalization and insecurity: RPF recruitment 1990 to 1994

This 18-year-old’s journey began in early 1993 when abakadas, the RPF cadres form Rwanda, gathered donations and “sensitized” recruits for their civil war.⁷ Another participant, who joined later in 1994, said of the abakada, “They came down during the war and showed us how the Tutsi in Rwanda are persecuted. That motivated a lot of us to go into the RPF.” This active network produced a convincing version of the Rwandan conflict, and presented as opportunity and empowerment to these would-be soldiers. The deployment of RPF narratives on their just cause applying to all Tutsis was reinforced by their appeal to anticolonialism and the marginalization faced by the Banyamulenge (Scott, 2008; Willame, 1997).⁸ This would be a central theme of the political training later received by these recruits.

Supplementing the network orchestrated by the abakada, RPF radio Muhabura promoted the work of “sensitizing” Banyamulenge youth to join the RPF, according to one participant. According to another participant,

They were broadcasting that people should go back to Rwanda. And there was no other way, [but] to go and fight. Because the government of Habyarimana had already been saying that all Tutsis should be killed. Therefore, although you are a Tutsi, but a Congolese, that motivated you to feel like you needed to intervene where your Tutsi brothers are.⁹

For this participant, the radio broadcast indicated the regional nature of the threat against all Tutsi (across Uganda, Burundi, Congo, and Rwanda), or Tutsi brothers as described by another participant “your families . . ., your tribes,” making little distinction between them. This same participant noted,

So, yeah our brothers, or one of the neighbors had gone to support our brother, our Tutsi brothers. It made us willing to go and support Rwandese although we never knew what a Tutsi was or that there is a country [where they lived].

Affinity to Rwandan refugees, forcing their own returning from Uganda in the early 1990s presented to Banyamulenge recruits a model for overcoming their own marginalization. RPF narratives induced an associative ordering of previous Tutsi ascriptions that many Banyamulenge had been exposed to prior to leaving.

One participant presented a more nuanced picture of the logic inherent in participants’ narratives. He considered the insecurities faced by the Banyamulenge as connected to the fact that they were seen as Tutsis, “[we] were friends to the Rwandans, and they also [were] mass persecuted [sic], and labelled as the same group. That’s how we embraced the path of RPF.” It can be reasonably inferred that RPF abakada portrayals of the conflict fed into a sense of their marginalization, connecting them via ascribed identities to persecuted Tutsi in Rwanda. Yet, when considering these recruits, it was increasingly difficult to see where their narratives ended and where RPF ones began. Another saw this as a result of a Tutsi identity that was fixed, recognizing the Banyamulenge as part of this wide regional group,

I just found myself with this identity . . . I am this way. And if you are born and just know that there is a problem ahead, you have to use all means you’ll have to defend it, if it is even to die, you can die but you are defend, you are fighting for it.

This fatalistic approach to identity connects the crucial strands at the beginning of the soldier’s journey around elements of insecurity and marginalization. Identity, perceived as having some permanence, was shaped by the relation to and experiences of postcolonial violence.

These soldiers expressed a generational conflict over what some family members regarded a foreign war. Such divisions and the choice to leave underscores the agency and pursuit of a distinct identity, intermingled with some familial expectations. Participants’ parents felt Rwanda had nothing to do with the Banyamulenge, with only a few already in favor of or as subscribers to RPF narratives through existing abakada networks. One participant recalled that his parents “did not feel good about it. But they didn’t know what was really happening. We never asked for consent from them. We kind of escaped.” When pressed on this divide and how older generations responded to the abakada, he continued to describe how events in Rwanda were not seen as Banyamulenge business. Younger people had the “energy” and “zeal” lacking in their parents, “We could not have prepared our parents for how we were going to go fight with the regime of Habyarimana. They were less-informed of what was happening. They didn’t know Rwanda. They didn’t know what was happening.” The divergence in views was down to an absence of awareness. If they had heard the messages, they apparently lacked the willingness to appreciate the connections to their own precariousness. Crucially, it was the empowering knowledge given to these young men via RPF narratives that created such a shift in self- and political awareness. Some followed in the footsteps of peers and elder brothers and an exceptional few were encouraged by RPF-supporting parents. One participant’s father would speak of a gendered rite of passage and the historic connection between self-defense and survival for their community. He added that his father directly pressured he and his brothers and peers to leave to protect the older generation from “being shot [by the Forces Armées Zaïroises (FAZ)], or “being beaten and being kidnapped and taken.” This perspective recognized a regional conflict felt at home in South Kivu. If the fight was now in Rwanda, then this is where they would learn to survive.

The RPF-facilitated journey would be made clandestinely through Burundi, Tanzania, and Uganda arriving in northeastern Rwanda. One participant, 22 years old at this point, left in one of the first groups, only to be caught by Zaïrian authorities in Uvira, South Kivu, and returned home. His second attempt managed to get him over the border in 1992. Another participant, then 18 years old, described how leaving to join the RPF was his only remaining option. Following the theft of his father’s whole cattle herd by a Bembe neighboring group, he reflected the following,

Life kind of stopped. You feel like there is no other objective. You’re not anticipating any kind of life. You think let’s go there. You don’t have a hope for life . . . That’s how I went to the army; nobody told me to go.

Prior to his departure in 1994, his three older brothers left, creating a sense of duty to follow these older siblings and fulfillment of an obligation to family. Opportunity increased following the capture of Rwanda, where Banyamulenge could obtain military training and possibly even an education. In doing so, recruits asserted both agency and identity contextualized by family circumstances and the desirability of opportunity in Rwanda. These were taken up as an escape from insecurity and marginalization.

Training “those who put an end to the Rwandan genocide.”¹⁰

Most Banyamulenge recruits found themselves in the Gashora training camp just south of Kigali sometime after it was captured by the RPF in 1994 (The Prosecutor v. Bosco Ntaganda, 2015). As young recruits, some participants noted the severe beating that formed the induction and ongoing discipline. After months of manual labor, one of these recruits recalled a violent process intended to instill fear and obedience, “We were told to come and meet at a playing field. What I can remember is that I saw trainers cutting sticks. We were all beaten from morning until evening.” He attested to this violence that would form the day-to-day business at Gashora, “They punish you seriously . . . Your arm will have lots of stripes, they caned you seriously [sic]. They made you roll in the mud or made you sleep with a load on your back.” This violent method was extended into RPF-run training camps in eastern Zaïre, following the arrival of the Rwandan and Banyamulenge recruiters in mid to late 1996. Another participant recalled, “It was . . . brutal, it was hard, and whoever would try to escape, they were shot dead.” This training involved live ammunition and the sexual humiliation and subjugation of young recruits, who were forced to ejaculate into holes in the dirt of the training ground (Stearns, 2011).

Within the RPF Training Wing, young Banyamulenge men were stripped of any outside affiliations and aspirations. Their identities were reconstructed as instruments in the hands of the RPF, while still reinforcing the subscribed notion of a group under regional threat. One participant described the type of discipline instilled in them as new recruits,

A soldier [that] has been trained very well, cannot have any sort of tribalism or tribalism in his mind. Although you may know that these are the people that killed your relatives or your family, you are obliged to protect him, and you forgive him.

The RPF was keen to establish its narrative of national unity featuring postethnic claims to legitimacy.¹¹ “Tribalism” as a reified postcolonial concept was seen as regressive, and limiting to the cause of national liberation. Rising above identity-based killing was indicative of this mission; yet, ordered killing would be crucial to establishing security.

After training, many entered or returned to formal education and employment under the new Rwandan state until their mobilization into the AFDL. Others went on to fill advanced military roles, demonstrating how this period would shape their lives and responses to the pending threat of genocide in eastern Congo. Some participants were among those Banyamulenge selected out of the rank and file for Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) commando training. After one participant’s time at Gashora, he was selected and sent to Gako Training Wing, east of Kigali. Here, he would receive Israeli-derived military instruction by RPF trainers. Another participant was selected to be a police officer for the judiciary. This meant serving arrest warrants and documenting the capture of “genocidaires.” During the interim period of the mid-1990s, he witnessed the uneven hand of postgenocide justice,

When we were arresting the genocidaires, we had something which was important to the RPF. They would teach us not to be angry and kill people instead of bringing them to justice. Because some soldiers, which maybe I cannot name them, when they were arriving [in 1994] where many people had been killed . . . they tell you “that one is a genocidaire instead of bringing him to court and will we kill him.”

Beyond the training camp, in these new roles supporting the establishment of the state, recruits were embedded into the RPF practices defining and dealing with adversaries.

One participant in particular worked as a political commissar in the Training Wing, up to the time of the 1996 invasion. He saw his role as crucial in fostering the right kind of movement to protect his people,

We came to Congo where the people were not happy. When we took over the country, [I] was working in the department [responsible for] patriotism, teaching people to love the country, work for the country, and fight for the country . . . so that there is nothing compared to your country. You may not have wealth but long as you have identity, the country, you are rich.

This soldier’s narrative highlights the evolution of his own self-identification, leaving Minembwe to support Tutsi brothers and remaining in Rwanda, until circumstances entailed a return to liberate the Congolese. Identity was key, but where and which identification these young men were attached to was fluid. It was contingent with agentic performance to circumstance. His comment “if you don’t give your blood to your country, the dogs will drink it for free,” if applied back into his own narrative, demonstrates the connection of performance to belonging and identities. Political education given by the RPF to these young recruits with a background of insecurity and marginalization was formative in a soldier’s relational identity formation.

Rooted in the RPF’s historical narrative was their interpretation of the ills of colonialism and the distortion of the past still present in colonized histories (Roessler & Verhoeven, 2015). One participant commented on his training that,

We were given political education and we were taught how the kingdoms were established in Rwanda and that whatever people were teaching them were lies. They told us how [Europeans] came to Rwanda and how they were treated, and that colonial ideology was just creating conflict among them. All these ideologies were brought by the westerners. It is the [Habyarimana] regime that embraced these ideologies and then used it to separate people

This perspective was strongly held by the RPF and formed a central pillar in the party’s worldview. Yet, the RPF was not without its own reification of Hutu and Tutsi identities as the movement engaged in the identification of the genocidaire, offering clear notions of victim and perpetrator (Burnet, 2009).

Destructive Crises

This section discusses what participants considered to be existential threats. Following their induction into the RPF, these young men not only were exposed to the massive scale of destruction in 1994 Rwanda but also were confronted with the threat of this same violence exploding in South Kivu. RPF framing of the genocidaire and this threat were the chief influencers of identity production in this period leading up to the First Congo War and the AFDL. Emplotment of the narratives indicates this RPF framing through the drive and purpose of their training in what some labeled the promise to return and fight against the genocidaire.

Destructive crises I: Exposure to genocide

Identification of the genocidaire took place in a variety of ways for these recruits, but mostly revolved around the genocide of 1994. Those who fought during the first half of 1994 witnessed firsthand the resultant devastation. One participant, who arrived in Rwanda in 1991, fought through the civil war and was present at the capture of Kigali in July 1994. His narrative was, in part, inscribed on his body with the circle of scar tissue from a gunshot in July near Kigali in Ribero, and another injury that left him “lame.”¹² Upon entering ex-Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR) and Interahamwe held areas, he witnessed death, “I saw a lot of people piled, dead, a lot of corpses piled in houses.” Reflecting on this level of atrocity, another participant concurred there was a deep and lasting impact on all soldiers who had witnessed such violence,

Some killed themselves, and others went and killed others [for] revenge . . . It was unavoidable that something happened of course, there were errors and mistakes, but we cannot [stop this], even here in Congo, there was some serious problems.

This acceptance of a level of catharsis in RPF violence was present in most participants’ narratives.

The relational impact of this exposure was profound in shaping identities and, in doing so, the soldiers’ context of a viscerally framed existential threat. One participant reflected on the destruction around the Gashora camp as bodies littered the surrounding area,

How could a person kill others to this extent? You start thinking what it is that you can do. I am fighting with you and that person, the other person who is there who does not know what the cause of the war, he now becomes a victim, children, women. The fact is there’s no way that you cannot be affected with that.

Others would be placed on duty to remove and dispose of corpses, embedding a formative and bodily demarcation of victims. Another participant translated what he saw into a sense of urgency, offering a fertile ground for interpretive power of RPF ideology and training, “That made me feel like I need to protect everyone wherever I will be, and I have the capability to do so.” Most participants similarly captured in their narrative how these sights and experiences were seen through the lens of their own community’s persecution and pending threat of genocide: They “felt the need to stop this so it cannot happen again.”

Training centers such as Gashora were equipped with video players and televisions to show recruits what genocide looked like. One participant recounted such an instance,

That is when they would bring a television and they would show us people that were killed, they would even show us that actual killings on televisions. You know people that were dug out from holes, I witnessed that myself. But when we are training they only bring a television and we see people being killed and people are running are shouting . . . That ideology that was put in us it was that these things that took place during the Habyarimana regime should not take place anywhere else.

By ensuring recruits were exposed by video, combat, or corpse removal, the effects of genocide were purposefully embedded into their training. This substance of the RPF narrative allowed for the emergence of a definition of genocide that tied together jus ad bellum and prevention. The morality of the cause was defined by relational connections to the dead and the guilty genocidaire.¹³

The promise of return

Returning to Zaïre was vital in the narratives produced by participants; however, when this expectation germinated is difficult to identify. In some cases, this was said to be discouraged by RPF trainers and commanders when raised by Banyamulenge recruits (Nzongola-Ntalaja, 1999).¹⁴ There was debate about whether or not this was an original intent when leaving South Kivu in the first place, with some adamantly claiming this was the case from their departure in the early 1990s. The interpretations of this promise are key in expressing Banyamulenge agency, particularly in the context of this group being pawns in elite regional politics. One participant often pleaded with his trainers that the purpose of their instruction should solely be to return home as “we were feeling that our parents may even die before we come to save them.” Those who shared this retrospective saw an urgent need to return and protect their families. Many adopted the broader RPF narrative of liberation as part of this promise. Another participant spoke of a “mutual agreement” based on the logic of the Rwandans doing for the Banyamulenge what the Ugandan National Resistance Army (NRA) had done for them. A further participant believed that

Museveni, the Ugandans, had to help them to go and overthrow the government. You see Kagame, those people are Tutsis, the people of our tribe. So they came to sensitize us so then we have to go and help them.¹⁵

Although there is some coherence across these narratives and each participant’s own situation between 1994 and 1996, some still viewed this commitment with skepticism.

One participant argued that no Banyamulenge recruit left Zaïre on the basis of this promise, and that this was not used by the Rwandan recruiters as a lure. Another pessimistically noted, while reflecting on his war injuries and current unemployment, “I knew that, I felt that, having gone into the military in Rwanda, I would literally come back to my home and my security. That never happened.” Yet, he did also clarify, despite his resignation, that the hope was to join the RPF and replicate their success,

I was not a Congolese. We were denied that, so we lacked security, and there were our brother refugees, Tutsis that were in Uganda who also did not have rights to go to Rwanda. I felt that I should go, join them, in order to bring about peace in Rwanda, which would eventually come back and also provide security to our parents.

He combined the issues of marginalization and a common cause with Rwandan Tutsis. This fluidity and ascription of ethnicity are reflected as an ordering principle of identity.

One participant realized, as he agitated his Rwandan superiors in 1995 to deliver on this promise, that things were not as he had hoped. Speaking with his Banyamulenge colleagues during that year, he asked them,

What do you think will happen if today we go back to Zaïre and we are led by RPA officers? . . . Do you think that we will get something from that war? . . . A war in which we do not know their [RPF] interests to go to Zaïre?

This view draws out a theme far more common in reflections about current security and the deteriorated relationship with Rwanda and the RPF. Although there was indeed a shared regional identity, interests soon divided after the AFDL mission got underway. Notwithstanding, for the above participant, a bond of solidarity had been realized and common narratives established, articulating the reasons for their shared persecution and the remedy. The picture of agency here is complex and shaped by individual soldier experience with their Rwandan brothers and their current situation. Finally, somewhere in the middle of 1996, Rwandan officers, led by the DMI started to amass around 6,000 Banyamulenge and Banyarwanda soldiers, and others at the Rwanda–DRC border (Roessler & Verhoeven, 2015). It was also clear at this stage that a key strategic purpose for the invasion, and consequently the promise of return, was to dismantle the refugee camps and force a return of Rwandan refugees and genocidaires (French, 2005; Roessler & Verhoeven, 2015).

The specificity of the promise of return for older RPF Banyamulenge recruits fades into a swath of motivations and narratives. Its seems that the desire for the protection of families in South Kivu merged into the overarching RPF narrative of liberation and political identity for these Tutsi brothers in Congo: removal of an existential threat posed by the myriad of forces threatening another genocide, whether the Interahamwe and ex-FAR insurgents into northwestern Rwanda, or the same Rwandan groups allying with FAZ and various local militias (African Rights, 1998).¹⁶

Reoccurrence of existential threat: “We were expecting another genocide.”

One participant, who identified as an AFDL political operative, used the above words to articulate the ratcheting up of tensions leading to South Kivu Deputy Governor Lwasi Ngabo Lwabanji’s foreboding announcement. This announcement, made on October 8, 1996, stated, “I demand the population in the highlands to descend to the shores of the lake. We will consider everybody who stays in the Haut Plateau as rebels” (Integrated Regional Information Networks [IRIN], 1996). A journalist asked Lwabanji and for a deadline on this ultimatum, to which he hastily uttered 1 week, and then rushed off to meet with provincial military leaders (Stearns, 2011). This announcement had massive repercussions for the narratives of insecurity and shaped the longue durée of conflict in Eastern Congo. By October, the AFDL/RPA invasion of key places in eastern Zaïre was underway. For this participant, and many others, this moment constituted the visible point that rose out of the undercurrent of genocidal processes. It saw realization of decades of narrative building and interpretation of Banyamulenge marginalization: the erasure of their people.

Destructive crises II: The escalation of violence.

The destructive crisis of the Rwandan exodus into Zaïre in 1994 ushered in the realignment of power relations in localized conflicts against the Banyarwanda Tutsi in North Kivu and Banyamulenge in South Kivu. Another political operative from this period, summarized this impact,

The Interahamwe and ex-FAR had started to kill the Banyamulenge already and they started to shoot their houses in our town and killed some people already so if nothing would have been done, they could have killed all of us.

The perception of this emerging collation of militarized actors embodied an existential threat. One participant recalled the destructive nature of arrival of Rwandans in mid-1994,

It was when they fled from Rwanda, when they were living here. They wanted to carry out the genocide to our people [sic]. Because they look at us in the image of the soldiers that were in RPF . . . They joined together with the Mobutu soldiers, the ex-FAR, Interahamwe, were telling the soldiers that the Tutsis will chase them. Then therefore, they will tarnish our image in that way. There is nothing that will stop them from killing us, they will go ahead and kill people here.

The potency of the genocidaire was in the articulation of genocide as a future outcome and reality. This ascription was based on the RPF training, prior exposure to genocide, and viewing present circumstances through a narrative of insecurity.

A conspiracy of foes aligned in this cause was a recurrent theme at this stage of the narratives. The perceived connections between the FAZ and the ex-FAR/Interahamwe seemed ubiquitous to Banyamulenge in the mid-1990s. The FAZ, various ethnic militias, including Hunde and Nanda in North Kivu, and Bembe and Fuliro in South Kivu, were perceived to be increasingly collaborating with the Interahamwe and ex-FAR.¹⁷ Another AFDL political actor, labeled this growing organization of forces as a “campaign of intoxication.” This campaign was purposefully executed when these Rwandan forces amplified existing “discrimination” of Tutsis, and took advantage of this emergent power relations. Other participants added that the Rwandan military groups were roaming across the Kivus “sensitizing” local militias, especially Banyarwanda Hutu, to join the effort against the Tutsis.¹⁸

As part of an advance party, one participant deserted his post upon hearing of a reported massacre near his home area,

I found that they had already killed 87 people. And that is where I found my father. He was also killed among those people. I found that they have killed 16 from my own family. Some who survived, I helped them. I found my mother, she was still alive. I found the wife of my elder brother. And some of the children also survived.

This soldier’s dispassionate recitation of this incident indicated a level of acceptance and numbness to the conflict that had now engulfed his home.¹⁹

Throughout South Kivu, such violence proliferated in 1996.²⁰ Attacks by a conglomeration of FAZ units, Bembe militias, ex-FAR/Interahamwe and Burundian Hutu armed groups spiked in September 1996, and ranged from Bukavu down along the border and shore of Lake Kivu into Fizi (Human Rights Watch, 1997; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2010). Around this time was a forced expulsion of 900 Banyamulenge into Cyangugu and Cibitoke in Rwanda (Médecins Sans Frontières, 2013; Turner, 2007). Many civilians were targeted on the basis of suspected collaboration with the RPF (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2010). Although individual cases are hard to verify, it is clear from the above narratives that this collaboration was indeed taking. One political actor, recounted relatives’ beheading in Uvira as part of a growing campaign of violence against Banyamulenge. He described how Banyamulenge would be randomly targeted in the streets, or when traveling outside of their home communities. Many were dragged from vehicles when allegedly spotted by those wishing them harm,

There are those that were beheaded and then they would hang his head alongside the road . . . I’ve seen the corpse[s] . . . [One of them] he was married to another lady of our community, [in] Uvira . . . He was beheaded and his head was hung on trunk of a tree and it was, they were all singing that “look we have killed a Banyarwanda.”

Singling out individuals as a result of ascribed identities, such violence was viewed as an escalation of decades of tension, living in the marginalization of Zaïrian society, and now imminent existential threat. He situated these attacks in a larger emerging, coordinated effort to target Banyamulenge.

Many participants in narrating their engagement with military forces and objectives into October and November 1996 noted the discovery of plans to kill Banyamulenge on a massive scale. Another political actor referred to this as a “fixed date” when all Banyamulenge would be killed. The presence of the Interahamwe was enough to promote an apparent spreading of this message that Banyamulenge were to be targeted as Tutsi were in 1994 Rwanda. This threat was validated by one participant, in the discovery of plans in Kamombo, South Kivu, for “how [ex-FAR/Interahamwe] would execute all the Tutsi and Banyamulenge here . . . Yeah, I saw those papers myself. I witnessed that . . . they will go to Minembwe and terminate our families.” Several participants, soldiers and political actors, saw the parties involved in this proposed destruction in Minembwe are somewhat nebulous, and again referred back to an emergent conspiracy of Rwandan and Congolese armed elements. Feeding this conception of insecurity on a personal, local, and larger regional level, these young soldiers were poised and prepared to act in defense of home and family.

The impact of the 1994 exodus and intensification of violence in South Kivu in September, provided a crucial backdrop to Vice Governor Lwabanji’s declaration. This salient moment featured in many of the narratives as a tipping point, and further bolstering the conspiracy and threat of genocide. Many of the reconstructions of this event follow the descriptions outlined by one participant,

The governor of South Kivu, he announced on air that all Banyamulenge should be killed or driven back to Rwanda. During that time after he had declared that on air, the Congolese were furious enough to kill the Banyamulenge and drive out some to Rwanda.²¹

This was a clear threat to life that this soldier and others recalled. Some narratives mix varied elements, including the above initial recounting of Lwabanji’s words by news reports at the time. A political actor further elaborated on the precise consequences, introducing a threat of firebombing Minembwe as part of the ultimatum unless these ascribed Tutsis went home to Rwanda. To emphasize the coalescence of this point, others described through earlier narratives of insecurity making linkages to citizenship and the claim that Banyamulenge were merely Rwandan immigrants who had now outstayed their welcome. Another political actor described a connection with reference to the perceived Tutsi physical appearance that was the basis of the targeting of Banyamulenge.

One soldier prompted a lengthy discussion about how the phrase genocide was being used and what exactly was being referred to. At first, he sought to make a clear distinction between what had happened in 1994 Rwanda and the ongoing conflict in Congo, suggesting any confluence was sensational. Then, intrigued by these distinctions being made, he further clarified whether we were talking about genocide in Congo, was it about the Banyamulenge or the Rwandans, meaning those who had arrived in the exodus of 1994? I clarified that we were talking about the threat perceived by the Banyamulenge; what he saw as the insecurity of his community. This clarity drew an instant association of violence against Banyamulenge with the 1994 genocide, “For Banyamulenge it is absolutely similar to what took place in Rwanda, the Banyamulenge was hunted from caves and everywhere and the orders come from above, from the high officials . . . the high officials were Congolese.” This comment offers a glimpse of RPF narratives received in training and a framing of prevailing notions of genocide as a highly structured and top-down organized killing event.

Formation of the AFDL: “Soldiers without frontiers.”²²

The AFDL emerged in this increasingly tense context (United Nations Economic and Social Council, 1998). Each constituent military and political group was carrying its own agenda, including that of their sponsor states in the region (Cooper, 2013; Human Rights Watch, 1997; Reyntjens, 2009; Roessler & Verhoeven, 2015; Stearns, 2011). For those Banyamulenge and Banyarwanda, the AFDL represented a twofold response. First was in the short term, to destructive crises in the arrival of the exodus of Rwandans in 1994, and the burgeoning threat of genocide in 1996. Second was in the long term, to postcolonial marginalization. As discussed above, these responses were articulated in the RPF narrative interpreting conflict dynamics and actors for Banyamulenge soldiers. These narratives were then undergirded by the visceral identification of genocide and the imperative to halt it at any cost. In a sense, the AFDL was simultaneously about Congolese and Tutsi liberation. Under Rwandan leadership, the AFDL methodically dismantled Rwandan and Burundian refugee camps across Zaïre, in many cases starving, bombarding, and executing both civilians and armed actors as genocidaire (Prunier, 2008; Reyntjens, 2009; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2010).

Perceptions of the wider issue of persecution and existential threat against Tutsis regionally were common. One participant, for example, described his family’s presence in Congo going back some generations, but then also connected with a broader regional ethnic identity as experiencing difficulty, “our people or tribes have been going through hard times because of those countries. Then the country, I mean Congo, people were not considering us as people from here.” Seen throughout the long journey many had taken since the early 1990s, there is a fluidity of belonging and identities, where another participant, as well as others, when asked, considered himself Congolese, but had a familial affiliation with Tutsi brothers. This shared, regional sense of identity was framed by the existential threats faced, whether in Minembwe or Kigali. This regional identity combined many soldiers’ fluid self-perception with a popularly ascribed Tutsi identity. Therefore, it was the AFDL, engineered by elites in Kigali and Kampala, that was the vehicle for the expressions and performance of these identity-based threats. Yet, as much as chants of liberty and freedom accompanied the AFDL rallies across the country, and as Laurent–Désiré Kabila swelled the ranks of this conglomerate of rebels, the motivations and objectives were (Associated Press, 1997a, 1997b).

Participants’ perceptions for the formation of the AFDL ranged accordingly: “defend their family against the ex-FAR, the Hutu militias, and others,” “it gave us nationality, it gave us power,” or “bring about the liberation of the country.” One participant, by virtue of his nascent political training and teaching, expressed succinctly,

One of the objectives was to overthrow the government; one was to bring peace in the country, to bring poor people to love the country. And the other thing was also to chase away the Interahamwe that were received by Mobutu and were living close to the borders of Rwanda.

The AFDL’s purposes, and even its success, were looked upon by participants with mixed reviews, again pointing the narratives toward the theme of continued insecurity and fluid identities. Many were convinced, though, of its potency in halting the pending genocide of the Banyamulenge, but perhaps not permanently. The promise of return was fulfilled; however, along the soldier’s journey from the cattle-grazing hills of South Kivu to training camps such as Gashora, and back again, genocide was a recurrent theme. It was an appeal to authenticity of threat, an association of belonging in a regional brotherhood, an authoritative claim on suffering.

Summary and Limitations: “The Congolese Looked at Us as Strangers”

These narratives present a set of emplotments and self-identifications as participants moved through experiences of genocide. They demonstrate the use of situational agency of Banyamulenge soldiers as they journeyed through these events. They performatively identified as Rwandan, RPF, Congolese, AFDL, with a level of intersubjectivity determined by ascribed identities and their own self-framings. Narratives of insecurity allowed participants to interpret their marginalization. The latter and the question of nationality provided ample grounds for the RPF to build conceptions not only of where Banyamulenge belonged as part of a regional Tutsi defense but also of the identity of the genocidaire. These relations gave added context to narratives of insecurity brought from Zaïre, and the reinterpretation of such by the RPF. Soldiers began to acutely sense who they were in reference to their own narrative baggage. This relational identity difference observed by participants articulated their own identity and that of the genocidaire. Such a view was reinforced by the experience of genocide in Rwanda, and later contextualized into the marginalization and insecurity both past in Zaïre and in their mid-1990s present. The resurgence of anti–Banyarwanda and Banyamulenge violence solidified relational connection within the RPF-framed perceptions of the genocidaire.

The physical and relational networks that structured the soldier’s journey, in turn, shaped identities and provided constraints and choices for young Banyamulenge. RPF networks developed throughout North and South Kivu provided a connection, and ultimately an antecedent cause to perform the identities already formed by the narratives of insecurity and interpretations of marginalization. The networks that propelled these recruits into Rwanda fed, clothed, beat, armed, and educated them within the RPF narrative of anticolonialism. The genocidaire was formed in both concrete terms if they fought in Rwanda from 1991 to 1994, or viscerally through the exposure to corpses in mass clean-up operations. These were not passive acts of national reconstruction, but performative relations to the genocidaire: efforts at clearly defining a victim and perpetrator. This finding applies to the state of genocide studies, where more solid categories are relied on to identify actors and characterize violence. A relational approach demonstrates the layering of victim and perpetrator identities, making a case for fluid identities in exposure to and with multiple experiences of genocide. Considering people in genocide as social and relational actors for analytical purposes can help avoid the unnecessary weight of categories such as victims or perpetrators. Such actors are agentic and engaged in constructing fluid and performative identities. Broader studies of identity and violence will be significantly advanced by appreciating this complex performance of narrative identities.

Due to the limited nature of research into the Banyamulenge and these narratives around the larger events of the Rwandan genocide and the First Congo War, there were some themes raised that require further research. Notions of masculinity in the course of the soldier’s journey were indicated where patriarchal pressures encouraged RPF enlistment, including following the footsteps of older brothers. Connections to a more thorough accounting for RPF/RPA and AFDL violence from 1994 onward are also raised here but are yet to receive systematic analysis. The 1990s role of Banyamulenge and Banyarwanda also deserves more attention. Finally, the themes of ongoing conflict and the perception of threat in South Kivu continue to drive the narratives assessed in this article. Future research into this South Kivu population and their regional involvement should consider these additional themes.

What did it mean to be a Tutsi or Congolese for the Banyamulenge recruits? The answer should reveal the subjective limitations and liberations of such ethnic ascriptions and subscriptions. These young men, who grew up being ascribed as Rwandans, embraced this identity out of desperation, opportunity for improved life chances, and in seeking a sense of performative belonging. They engaged in violence and perceived violence around them in a way that incorporated victimized narratives, and justifications of violence. However, this identification was parallel to other identities, especially in the retrospective narratives of these soldiers. Had Rwanda not pursued its own citizens into Zaïre, it is quite likely these recruits would have remained there in employment or education long term, in a similar fashion to the many Ugandan-born RPF recruits who descended into Rwanda in the early 1990s. The crucial role of the RPF in this period was that it constructed an identity relation with deep contextual connections to lived experience of marginalization in Zaïre. For the Banyamulenge, the inception and development of the genocidaire character ordered their moral and existential universes.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

For valuable input into this article, I wish to thank my PhD supervisors, Fiona Macaulay and David Harris, the anonymous reviewers of this text, and colleagues from the Congo Research Network. The participants in this research, as well as other field contacts, have made a profound contribution to this research, without whom it would not have been possible.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Christopher P. Davey

Notes

Author Biography

Christopher P. Davey, PhD, has a doctorate in peace studies and international development from the University of Bradford. His research focuses on identity, narrative, and emerging perspectives on genocide. He is interested in the evaluation and development of narrative analysis as a qualitative study of participation in genocide, as well as in the intersections of mass violence, identity, and climate change.

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