Musanze, Rwanda – The Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) was built on an ideology that cast the Tutsi as enemies, according to four of its former senior officers, who say they were taught to hate them long before the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi ethnic group. Therefore, it is better to kill the snake before it bites you.” The former officers say such ideas were reinforced through Rwanda’s political and military institutions before the 1994 genocide and persisted among those who fled into neighbouring Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), after the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) took control of Rwanda in July 1994. More than three decades later, the FDLR remains a source of regional security concerns, with its presence in eastern DRC a major point of contention between Kigali and Kinshasa.
Al Jazeera met the four former officers, who defected from the FDLR, returned to Rwanda and underwent rehabilitation at the Mutobo demobilisation centre. Their accounts offer an insight into the origins of the group’s ideology, its development in exile, and the networks that have helped it survive. The roots of the anti-Tutsi ideology described by the former officers stretch back decades, to a period when ethnic identities became increasingly politicised and institutionalised in Rwanda.
In November 1959, a Hutu uprising helped bring about the overthrow of Rwanda’s monarchy. The period was also marked by violent attacks on Tutsis, the killing of hundreds and the forced exile of thousands to neighbouring countries. Before colonial rule, Hutu and Tutsi identities were shaped by social, political and economic relationships.
Under Belgian rule, these distinctions were increasingly formalised. In the early 1930s, the colonial administration introduced compulsory identity cards classifying Rwandans as Hutu, Tutsi or Twa, reinforcing distinctions that became increasingly rigid. By independence in 1962, about 120,000 people, mostly Tutsi, had fled the country.
Exiles in Tanzania and Zaire who sought to return staged attacks between 1962 and 1967. According to the United Nations, each incident was followed by retaliatory killings of large numbers of Tutsi civilians in Rwanda, prompting further waves of refugees. By the end of the 1980s, about 480,000 Rwandans were refugees.
President Juvenal Habyarimana argued that population pressures and limited economic opportunities made it difficult to accommodate large numbers of returning Tutsi refugees. In 1988, exiles in Uganda founded the RPF to secure their repatriation, according to the UN. Lieutenant Colonel Idrissa Bizimana said the exiles who launched attacks against Rwanda were branded “Inyenzi”, meaning cockroaches.
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