On August 13th 2004, 166 people were killed and 106 were wounded at the UN’s Gatumba refugee camp in Burundi. Nearly all the victims were members of the Banyamulenge community, a Congolese Tutsi ethnic group who were deliberately targeted in the attack. The massacre was carried out by the Forces Nationales pour la Liberation (FNL), a Hutu supremacist rebel group fighting in Burundi’s civil war. Understanding the Gatumba Massacre requires understanding what forced those Banyamulenge refugees to flee their homes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and why the FNL targeted them. This background essay addresses the context historical and events that led to the Gatumba Massacre.
This essay is co-authored by Christopher P. Davey, Jean Paul Iranzi, Ezra Schrader, and Fidele Sebahizi.https://commons.clarku.edu/gatumba_background/1000/thumbnail.jp

Davey, Christopher

Iranzi, Jean Paul

Schrader, Ezra

Sebahizi, Fidele

English

Clark University

Clark University Clark Digital Commons Background Gatumba Survivors Project Fall 2022 Gatumba Massacre, Background Essay Christopher Davey Clark University, cdavey@clarku.edu Ezra Schrader Clark University, eschrader@clarku.edu Fidele Sebahizi Liberty University, fidele.sebahizi@gmail.com Jean Paul Iranzi Education for Global Peace, iranzijp@gmail.com Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.clarku.edu/gatumba_background  Part of the African History Commons, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Commons, Oral History Commons, and the Race and Ethnicity Commons Recommended Citation Davey, Christopher; Schrader, Ezra; Sebahizi, Fidele; and Iranzi, Jean Paul, "Gatumba Massacre, Background Essay" (2022). Background. 1. https://commons.clarku.edu/gatumba_background/1 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Gatumba Survivors Project at Clark Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Background by an authorized administrator of Clark Digital Commons. For more information, please contact larobinson@clarku.edu. On August 13th 2004, 166 people were killed and 106 were wounded at the UN’sGatumba refugee camp in Burundi. Nearly all the victims were members of theBanyamulenge community, a Congolese Tutsi ethnic group who were deliberatelytargeted in the attack. The massacre was carried out by the Forces Nationales pour laLiberation (FNL), a Hutu supremacist rebel group fighting in Burundi’s civil war.Understanding the Gatumba Massacre requires understanding what forced thoseBanyamulenge refugees to flee their homes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo(DRC), and why the FNL targeted them.The majority of Banyamulenge live in the province of South Kivu on the DRC’seastern border with Burundi and Rwanda. As Congolese Tutsi, the Banyamulenge havelived in the South Kivu highlands for centuries, beginning when their ancestors firstmigrated from Rwanda. During the 1980s and 1990s, political opponents of theBanyamulenge used their ancestors’ Rwandan origin to argue that the Banyamulengewere foreigners with no right to citizenship. The Banyamulenge’s increasingmarginalization was one of the many ethnic, national, and international tensionsdestabilizing South Kivu province. These tensions would explode into across-continental war as a result of the Rwandan genocide.The 1994 Rwandan genocide was fueld by ethnic conflict between Rwanda’sHutu majority and the Tutsi minority, two pre-colonial social classes that hardened intoethnicities as a result of Belgian colonization. Prior to independence in 1962, Rwandahad been ruled by a Tutsi aristocracy, but the Hutu majority seized power through awave of ethnic violence that displaced hundreds of thousands of mostly Tutsi refugeesinto neighboring countries. 28 years later in 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) -a rebel army composed of Tutsi refugees and backed by Uganda - invaded northernRwanda. By 1993 the RPF had advanced to just outside the capital and forced the Hutugovernment to sit for peace talks.These negotiations ended on April 6th 1994, when Rwanda’s Hutu PresidentHabyarimana’s plane was shot down by an unknown group. It’s possible thatHabyarimana was killed by Hutu supremacists who opposed a peace deal with thepredominantly Tutsi RPF, or by the RPF itself. Either way, the Rwandan genocide beganthe next day. Between 500,000 and one million Tutsi and politically moderate Hutuswere killed between April 6th and late July, when the RPF took control of the countryand put an end to the genocide.As the RPF advanced, hundreds of thousands of mostly Hutu refugees -perpetrators of the genocide among them - fled into camps in neighboring countries.Many settled in South Kivu, the eastern region of the DRC (formerly Zaire) where themajority of the Banyamulenge live. The exiled Hutu government used these camps asbases to launch cross-border attacks back into Rwanda. These forces were supportedby Zaire’s President Mobutu. The Rwandan Hutu supremacists in these camps incitedviolence against the Banyamulenge by tapping into the longstanding narrative that thegroup - whose Tutsi ancestors migrated from Rwanda centuries ago - were reallyforeigners, aligned with the Rwandan government against Zaire. The violence drovemany Banyamulenge to join militias trained and supported by the RPF. Ethnic clashesbetween Hutu supremacists and these militias culminated in the 1996 RPF-led rebellionagainst President Mobutu’s government.With support from Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi, many Banyamulenge andother Congolese rebels formed the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation ofCongo (AFDL), and attacked both refugee camps and Mobutu’s government. Thisconflict became known as the First Congo War. Rwanda and Uganda supported theBanyamulenge in part because they had an interest in smashing the refugee camps tostop the cross-border attacks on Rwanda. They also wanted to replace Mobutu with acompliant leader. By 1997, these aims were achieved. The camps were cleared, andpossibly up to 200,000 Hutus were systematically slaughtered by the RPF and AFDL.The violence scattered Hutu perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide throughout the DRCand surrounding countries, where some would join groups like the FNL in Burundi.President Mobutu fled the country, and the AFDL elevated Laurent-Désiré Kabila to thepresidency. Kabila rechristened Zaire the “Democratic Republic of the Congo.”The Banyamulenge benefitted in the short-term from their involvement in theAFDL as community members rose to influential positions in the military as well as localand national administration. But the increase in political power as a result of aligningwith Rwanda alienated them from other ethnic groups, some of whom felt that theBanyamulenge’s success confirmed the narrative that they were Rwandan foreigners.This narrative became more potent as the RPF continued to occupy the eastern part ofDRC and funneled profits from lucrative Congolese mines back to Rwanda.President Kabila tried to use this local conflict to strengthen his position andsecure independence from Rwanda and Uganda. He consolidated power by engagingin anti-Tutsi rhetoric and diluting the Banyamulenge’s influence in the national army. In1998, the puppet cut his strings and declared that all foreign armies - including the oneswhich had set him in the seat of power - were to leave the country. Rwanda and Ugandawere unwilling to give up their power in the DRC, and initiated the Second Congo War.During the war the predominantly Congolese Tutsi militia the Rally for CongoleseDemocracy (RCD) joined with Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi in attacking Kabila’sgovernment.Over the next four years, different political objectives pulled the anti-Kabilacoalition apart. Rwandan forces clashed with the Ugandan army across Congo. Politicalinfighting within RCD split the organization into different factions. The RPF attempted toresettle Banyamulenge within Rwanda, and when some community leaders refused,there were suspicious disappearances and deaths among anti-RPF Banyamulenge.This authoritarian treatment of political dissidents created a narrative among manyBanyamulenge that the RPF only used them as a tool to wage war and protect theirexploitation of Congolese wealth.There was a temporary reduction of violence when some of the warring partiessigned the 2002 Sun City Accords, a flawed agreement which laid out a plan for atransitional government and integration of armed groups - including the RCD - into anational Congolese army - known by its acronym FARDC. Many problems remained.Even soldiers officially integrated into the FARDC retained ulterior ethnic and politicalallegiances, and Rwanda maintained control over eastern sections of the DRC throughproxy forces. Additionally, Hutu perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide seeped intoarmed groups in and out of the DRC, with some supporting or directly joining the FNL.As a result, ethnic violence involving the Banyamulenge continued to inflame SouthKivu province.This violence was what drove Banyamulenge refugees out of the DRC and intoGatumba. In May of 2004, two Tutsi officers in the Congolese army with ties to aRwandan-aligned faction of the RCD mutinied against their superiors and seizedBukavu, the provincial capital of South Kivu, under the pretense of preventing agenocide of the Banyamulegne. Eventually the RCD-aligned officers negotiated theirwithdrawal from Bukavu and allowed the FARDC to retake the area. Tens of thousandsof Banyamulenge fled South Kivu due to legitimate fears that FARDC would inflictreprisals against civilians. 1,767 refugees ended up just across the border at the UNcamp in Burundi, where they would be targeted by the FNL.The FNL were a product of Burundi’s civil war. Like pre-independence Rwanda,Burundi’s Hutu majority had been ruled by an elite Tutsi minority until 1993, whenMelchoir Ndadaye became the country’s first democratically elected Hutu President.Ndadaye was almost immediately assassinated by members of the Tutsi militaryestablishment. Some in the Tutsi elite felt that a Hutu president threatened their shortterm economic interests and the long term political position of Burundi’s Tutsi minority.His assassination ignited a brutal civil war which saw the formation of several Hutusupremacist rebel groups - including the FNL.But by 2004 the FNL were the only major rebel group still fighting. All the otherforces had signed a peace accord which transformed them into legal political partiesand laid out a transition plan for incorporating rebels into the national army. The FNL’sdecision to keep fighting cost them dearly. By the time the Banyamulenge refugeesarrived in Gatumba, the FNL were too weak to fight open battles against the military,and they had lost much of their public support to the Forces for the Defense ofDemocracy (FDD), a former Hutu rebel group that had transitioned into parliamentarypolitics with great success. The FNL was reduced to using terror attacks in an attemptto improve their negotiating position with the government and upset the peaceagreement that had elevated the rival FDD. When the Banyamulenge refugees arrivedat Gatumba, they became targets of this strategy.On August 13th, 2004, hundreds of FNL soldiers and their families (and possiblyother groups) attacked the Gatumba camp. They beat drums and sang hymns as theyshot, burned, and stabbed unarmed civilians. The next day the FNL’s spokesmanPasteur Habimana claimed responsibility for the attack, alleging without evidence thatthe refugees were being recruited for an invasion of Burundi. 166 people - nearly allBanyamulenge - were killed, and 106 were physically wounded.No perpetrator has ever gone to trial over the attack. In the eighteen years sincethe Gatumba Massacre, the FNL has signed on to a peace accord and transitioned intoparliamentary politics. It was argued that rebels from the group attacking South Kivucities of Bukavu and Uvira had fled into this camp. Agathon Rwasa, the FNL’s leaderduring the attack, has never been arrested for his role in the massacre. The Burundiangovernment opened a criminal case against Rwasa in 2013, but indefinitely suspendedit a year later. Rwasa is now the leader of the main opposition party in Burundi’sparliament and was nominated as a presidential candidate in 2020.Meanwhile, with the support of NGOs, like Refuge Point and the UN, manyBanyamulenge survivors have since resettled in the US, UK, and other countries. In2007 survivors formed the Gatumba Refugees Survivors Foundation, a communityorganization which, among other tasks, lobbies governments and internationalorganizations to bring perpetrators of crimes like the Gatumba Massacre to justice. Weworked with the GRSF to conduct dozens of interviews with survivors of the GatumbaMassacre. Bringing survivors’ stories to public attention is a pillar of genocideprevention, and contributes to the effort to deliver justice while sustaining and honoringthe memory of those who were lost. These interviews cover the lives of survivorsbefore, during, and after the massacre, and are presented here in this digital archive.This essay is co-authored by Christopher P. Davey, Jean Paul Iranzi, Ezra Schrader,and Fidele Sebahizi.

Gatumba Massacre, Background Essay

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