America’s new profile in central Africa has given rise to wild tales. One rumor on the street in Burundi last summer had a U.S. aircraft carrier patrolling landlocked Lake Tanganyika. Another claims that precious minerals lie beneath the Kivu region in eastern Zaire, where the Rwandan-backed rebels have just carved out a sphere of influence–and repatriated hundreds of thousands of refugees, pre-empting a big international relief effort. Recent visits by Rwandan President Paul Kagame to London, Washington and Israel have fed suspicions that he may have sought a green light to move on Zaire through rebel proxies.
An element of truth animates such bar talk. Washington’s efforts to isolate fundamentalist Sudan echo the cold-war era, when Africa’s vast distances and weak governments invited the big powers to invest in rebellion. Washington has shipped used arms to neighboring Uganda, among other countries, to help fight rebels supported by Sudan. Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, Rwanda’s closest ally, charged last week that Sudan had instigated a retaliatory border incursion by rebels from Zaire. ““Arabs are the ones behind this attack,’’ he said.
In reality, America’s stake is limited. Still smarting from the disastrous ““peace enforcement’’ mission in Somalia, it mainly wants to head off any crisis that might drag U.S. troops into the region. Beyond that is the moral dimension. Clinton’s national-security adviser, Anthony Lake, often wrote about Africa’s plight during his years as an academic. ““These [Tutsi] are the Israelis of Africa,’’ says an administration aide. ““They are a minority, they suffered genocide.''
But France has considered Rwanda part of its treasured postcolonial sphere of influence. That slipped away in 1994, when the Rwandan government, dominated by the majority Hutu tribe, provoked the massacre of as many as 1 million Tutsi and moderate Hutu. Tutsi exiles overthrew the Hutu, driving hundreds of thousands into exile in Zaire. Washington now takes its cues from Kagame, an English-speaking, American-trained Tutsi soldier. Last week the United States and other outside powers could not agree on how big a military force, if any, should be sent to deal with the refugee crisis. They weren’t even sure how many Hutu remained in eastern Zaire. The United Nations put the figure at 700,000; other estimates ranged from half a million to 100,000 or fewer. When Kagame’s government said no military intervention was needed, that was what Washington wanted to hear.
France, to the contrary, still sees its African realm as vital. ““France is nothing without Africa,’’ the late president FranCois Mitterrand said in the 1970s. This month French forces put down an army rebellion in the Central African Republic. Its influence extends to former Belgian colonies as well. France backs ailing Zairean strongman Mobutu Sese Seko and has sent arms to the Hutu.
The great powers hold no monopoly on intrigue. An unpublished U.N. investigative report, a copy of which was obtained by NEWSWEEK, confirms the Hutu have been the beneficiaries of ““huge, loose, overlapping webs of more or less illicit arms deals, arms flights and arms deliveries spanning the continent from South Africa as far as Europe, particularly Eastern Europe.’’ Even if Washington won’t play the ““Great Game’’ of international rivalry on the killing fields of central Africa, others are sure to keep stirring the pot.
