Rwanda Rebels Add Chapter to African History

Some of them are only boys, 14 or 15 years old, wearing sheepish grins and raggedy uniforms that make them appear no more threatening than toy soldiers. They smile easily, but the smile does not reach their eyes.

Already these boys are wartime veterans, warriors who have no rank, collect no pay and travel on foot, lugging an odd assortment of French, Belgian and Soviet weapons. They sleep on the ground, stuff bullets in their pockets and have not yet learned to salute or field-strip a rifle. “It’s not a bad life,” said one of the boys manning a checkpoint here on the road to Kigali, the capital. “One day I go back to my father’s farm. Today I fight.”

The boys are part of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a guerrilla group whose roots go back to 1959 but which remained virtually unknown to the world at large until its members launched a major offensive April 6 after President Juvenal Habyarimana and the leader of neighboring Burundi, Cyprian Ntayamira--both Hutus--were killed in a suspicious plane crash. The rebels have now chased government soldiers out of half of this beleaguered, impoverished nation.

In the process, the front has become part of Africa’s post-independence legacy. Page by page, over 40 years, guerrilla groups from Angola to Kenya have rewritten the history of the continent. The results have not always been beneficial for the people in whose name the rebellions were launched.

The first guerrilla wars, like Jomo Kenyatta’s Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the early 1960s, were undertaken to drive out the European colonialists.

Each succeeded, and from bloodied Angola and Guinea-Bissau in the west to Mozambique in the east and Northern and Southern Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe) in the south, power was transferred to the Africans.

With the recent election of Nelson Mandela to South Africa’s presidency, all 47 sub-Saharan African countries are now governed by the black majority.

Today, the purpose of guerrilla groups such as the Rwandan Patriotic Front--and others that have fought in Mozambique, Angola, Somalia, Ethiopia and Djibouti--is to dislodge a ruling African elite in the name of reform.

Under whatever banner they may fight, the rebels’ ultimate purpose is always the same--power: economic, political and sometimes tribal.

“I know this African history, and I swear to you we are different,” said an RPF officer who requested anonymity. “We are fighting to install a government of national unity. We want democracy and reform. The first thing we will do is get rid of the cards identifying your ethnic group that the government makes everyone carry.”

Although such lofty ideals are heard often in Africa, the RPF, composed mostly of members of the minority Tutsi tribe, has proved itself a more disciplined, organized military force than the Rwandan army and its fearful Hutu-dominated militias that have run pell-mell through the countryside, massacring untold thousands of civilians.

Villagers cheered the arrival of RPF troops along the road to the Tanzanian border last month, but many Rwandans, especially Hutus, remain deeply skeptical about the rebels’ ultimate goals and feel that they may begin a new round of bloodletting to avenge the massacres they have endured.

“I will never return to Rwanda if the RPF is in power,” said Eliachim Mulindandabi, a 20-year-old Hutu refugee in Tanzania’s Benaco camp. “It would not be safe. For me or any Hutu. They are killers, and they would hunt us down.”

The RPF fighters are mostly Rwandan Tutsi refugees whose families escaped to Uganda after a 1959 revolution that ended 400 years of Tutsi domination over the Hutus, who represent 90% of Rwanda’s more than 7 million people. Historically, the Tutsis formed the intellectual and professional core of Rwandan society. Until the revolution, they held the Hutu farmers in a form of feudal serfdom surpassed only in Ethiopia.

In Uganda, many of the Rwandan refugees were recruited as mercenaries in the Uganda National Liberation Army that, with the help of Tanzanian soldiers and Ugandan dissidents, overthrew Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in 1979. The rebel leader, Yoweri Museveni, became president of Uganda in 1986 and has not forgotten his debt: Uganda provides the RPF with its lifeline of weapons, ammunition and supplies.

Many RPF rebels speak English learned in Uganda, while the Zairian-supported Rwandan army speaks French or Kinyarwanda, the language shared by both Hutus and Tutsis. Some of the rebels wear Ugandan uniforms, and more than a handful have returned to join the battle from jobs abroad as accountants, teachers and a variety of middle-class positions.

“I deal with the RPF every day, and I found them very responsible,” said a French doctor who works in rebel-controlled territory. “But they’re having a lot of trouble doing all the things you have to do when you administer civilian authority. That I don’t think they’re prepared to handle.”

The RPF says it is unwilling to negotiate with the interim government that has set up office in Gitarama, 25 miles southwest of the capital. It also has said it has no objections to the dispatch of 5,500 U.N. troops to Rwanda as long as their mission is solely humanitarian.

Ever since the Hutus began demanding political reform in 1957, there have been outbreaks of fierce violence between the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and neighboring Burundi. Thousands of Tutsis in Rwanda were massacred in Hutu-organized slaughters in 1959 and 1963. The most recent unrest began Oct. 5, 1990, when fighting broke out in Kigali between the rebels and the army that has since become a civil war.