How an assassination split Uganda, Rwanda

Or was this a gold deal gone wrong over the misty skies in the Rwenzori Mountain ranges? Was his body found with a gunshot wound? Were the claims that there was $2 million aboard the ill-fated plane plausible?

In Kinshasa, Kabila Sr, who was almost overrun by rebelling Banyamulenge Kadogos in early August 1998, had made a triumphant return to the city after Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, Chad and Sudan had come to his rescue. Rebellious forces, including the Banyamulenge, Congolese factions led by Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, Pierre Bemba, and their allies, Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi, were quiet. For that time.

Cracks, however, began to emerge among allies—Rwanda and Uganda. This publication, quoting the East African Alternatives Magazine, reported that a moderate Hutu politician and former Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) Interior minister, Seth Sendashonga, met the Ugandan president’s brother, Gen Salim Saleh, two weeks before the former’s assassination on May 16, 1998. 

Sendashonga was a moderate Hutu who was on August 28, 1995, sacked at the peak of rivalry with senior Tutsi RPF leaders. This was after he disbanded the Local Defence Forces accused of arbitrary arrests, disappearances and killings. 

The others sacked included moderate Hutu leader and then prime minister Faustin Twagiramungu; Transport and Communications minister Immaculée Kayumba; Justice minister Alphonse-Marie Nkubito; and Information minister Jean-Baptiste Nkuriyingoma. 

House arrest
Sendashonga and Twagiramungu were placed under house arrest and their documents examined for any incriminating evidence. They were eventually allowed to leave the country unharmed by the end of the year as the former Interior minister moved to the Kenya capital of Nairobi. 

It was revealed that Saleh met Sendashonga upon the request of President Museveni, and this was not the first time to discuss what sources termed as the ‘situation in Rwanda.’

Sendanshonga reportedly told Saleh that he was anxious about his safety and was sceptical about the sincerity of the political elite in Kigali as regards reconciling with the Opposition hiding in exile. He also revealed to Saleh that there was an “elaborate plot” to lure him to Rwanda “and then finish him off.”

On May 16, 1998, at about 5pm, Sendashonga was being driven home in his wife’s United Nations Environmental Programme car when  two gunmen firing AK-47s took his and driver Jean-Bosco Nkurubukeye’s lives. 

Twagiramungu, now living in Brussels, Belgium, declared: “I’m pointing to the RPF and its government.” A number of other exiled political groups offered support.

Kigali denied the allegations
“We had no quarrel with Sendashonga. He had been removed as minister of Interior by Parliament, but had been free to stay in Rwanda.

He never said he had gone into exile,” revealed the RPF spokesperson, Maj Wilson Rutayisire, adding: “We do not think Sendashonga posed a threat to the government. Although we disagreed with him, I do not think deserved death because there are many people we have disagreed with but we have not killed. This is politically-motivated propaganda.”

Finger pointing
Three men, David Kiwanuka, Charles Muhaji and Christopher Lubanga were arrested by the Kenyan police. They had been identified, in what author Gerrard Prunier derides as a story “obviously fed by rather untalented Kigali security operatives”, Kenyan taxi driver Ali Abdul Nasser, who claimed that the three men had tried to hire him as a paid killer, made the discovery. 

Sendashonga, the story went, had stolen $54 million (Shs200.5b) in a criminal partnership with Kiwanuka’s father. Kiwanuka’s father, who the Nairobi police claimed to have been the director of Immigration Services in Kigali, had subsequently been supposedly killed by Sendasonga so he would not have to share the loot. 

This story ran into hurdles when the actual Director of Immigration Services, Charles Butera, surfaced to state that he was alive; that he had no son named Kiwanuka; that he knew Sendashonga only as a brief acquaintance; and that nobody had ever stolen $54 million. 

Despite the problems with the Kenyan criminal case, the three men remained in jail until May 31, 2001, when they were released by a Kenyan court which found that the murder was political and blamed the Rwandan government. 

In a December 2000 hearing, Sendashonga’s widow, Cyriaque Nikuze, claimed that the Rwandan government was behind the assassination and revealed that he had been scheduled to testify before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the French Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry.

Suspicion was then rife between the erstwhile allies as Rwanda accused Uganda of trying to prop up elements across the Diaspora who had fallen out with the RPF government.

Kagame heads to Kampala 
On August 14, 1998, a high-ranking Rwandese military delegation visited Kampala to discuss how the allied armies could deal with the growing suspicion and streamline their methods of work. 

Paul Kagame, then the Vice-President and Defence minister, alongside the minister for the presidency, Patrick Mazimakha, led the Kigali delegation at the meeting attended by President Museveni and the UPDF top brass at State House, Nakasero. 

This included Gen Salim Saleh; Army Commander Maj Gen Jeje Odongo; Ag Chief of staff, Brig James Kazini, the second and fourth Division commanders Col Nakibus Lakara and Brig Katumba Wamala, among others.

Specifically, the New Times, a government-leaning newspaper, accused Gen Salim Saleh and others of undermining the RPA.

Rutayisire claimed that if there were any differences, they were at an individual level and could not affect the ties between the two armies.

Kabila Sr ‘vanishes’
Two weeks into the DRC conflict, Kabila named his son Joseph Kabila as the army chief of staff, replacing Maj Celestin Kifwa. He also announced the creation and arming of a popular militia to defeat the Rwandan-backed rebels. 

After the capture of Matadi, the rebels continued to move towards Kinshasa while Kabila’s forces prepared for a showdown in the strategic corridor linking Kinshasa and the south Atlantic.

Francis Ngolet, in his book titled, Crisis in the Congo: The Rise and Fall of Laurent Kabila, wrote that “loyalist forces suddenly found themselves in a state of confusion. No one knew of Kabila’s whereabouts since he no longer appeared to be in Kinshasa and did not attend the Defence minister’s conference in Harare. His troops were in a total disarray; even the renowned Zulu Battalion defected to the rebels in the west.”

The situation became so alarming that 150 British Royal Marines joined 250 French soldiers in Congo-Brazzaville in evacuating their respective citizens from Kinshasa. The United States also sent a marine taskforce to evacuate Americans, and the Belgian government expedited the withdrawal of 990 of its citizens. 

Alliance forces raid DRC
As Kinshasa prepared for an attack, the conflict began to take a radical turn as Zimbabwe and Angola forces arrived to rescue Kabila’s embattled regime. 

Military technicians and advisers from Zimbabwe arrived in Kinshasa, along with soldiers disembarking at the Kinshasa Ndjili Airport. One-hundred Angolan commandos supported by tanks moved from the Cabinda enclave into the western DRC. 

Some Angolans troops also disembarked with Zimbabwean soldiers at Ndjili and immediately entered into action against rebel forces. They soon took control of a central supply base in the west. Zimbabwean troops also quickly moved to the frontlines and contributed to the effort to push back rebels in the corridor leading to Kinshasa. 

Angolan forces quickly seized the military base of Kitona, as well as the towns of Banana, Muanda, and Boma, from RCD rebels. When Angolan forces captured the town of Mbanza-Ngungu, the event prompted Information Minister Didier Mumengi to predict that “the western front would be mopped up within days.

Angolan and Zimbabwean forces continued to take rebel positions, killing hundreds of rebel troops in the process.

A report circulated that rebels holding the Inga hydroelectric power plant were negotiating a surrender, threatening to destroy the facility if they were not granted a safe passage out of the area. 

Namibian troops also intervened on Kabila’s behalf, but their contributions were minimal. In the light of these victories, Kabila returned to Kinshasa from Lubumbashi around August 25. He called the inhabitants to resist. 

The DRC leadership then vowed to attack the rebels in their eastern stronghold. Rumours circulated that Zimbabwean and Angolan troops were landing at the airport of the far northeastern city of Isiro, preparing to attack rebel-held cities of Bunia and Kisangani. 

With momentum on their side, allied forces shifted their attention to the east. In the first week of September 1998, loyalist forces encircled the rebel town of Kalemie in Katanga and shelled it for two days.

Uganda, which had initially said it had no troops on DRC ground, sent more troops in September 1998 as its forces occupied Isiro and the airfield at Buta, Bas-Uele District, Orientale Province.

UPDF High Command meets
Uganda’s decision to bolster its forces in eastern Congo and deny Sudan control of the region’s airfields and river ports was made on September 11, 1998, following the arrival and deployment in Congo of hostile Sudanese troops.

The Government of Uganda’s decision was recorded in a confidential document titled: Position of the highest UPDF organ, the High Command, on the presence of the Ugandan army in the DRC.

The justification for the government’s decision to maintain forces in the DRC were based on the plan to deny Sudan the opportunity to use the territory of the DRC to destabilise Uganda—to enable UPDF neutralise Uganda dissident groups which had been receiving assistance from the government of the DRC and the Sudan—to ensure that the political and administrative vacuum, and instability caused by the fighting between the rebels and the Congolese Army and its allies did not adversely affect the security of Uganda, among others. 

This came at the time efforts to initiate a peaceful settlement continued to flounder. 

Mugabe salvo
Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe  (RIP) accused Rwanda and Uganda of being liars and vowed that he would not allow the invaders to ‘take control of the DRC.’

“Do they really think this country can be subjected to the wiles and guiles of Rwanda or for that matter to the control of Uganda or both?” Mugabe retorted.  He continued, “We of this region cannot brook that, as he described Uganda and Rwanda’s involvement in the DRC as ‘absolute stupidity.’”

Adding: “We had hoped the situation in the east would be resolved by peaceful means, but it would appear the more we negotiate peace, the more they wage war. We now regard them as liars.”

On August 11, Mugabe, alongside his Defence minister Moven Mahachi and the Defence forces commander Vitalis Zvinavashe flew into the southern town of Lubumbashi where they held talks with Kabila.

This came barely after Kabila’s troops lost the strategic Kindu, which had a strategic airport and rail link to Katanga province in eastern DRC.

Beating war drums
Barely after talks in South Africa aimed at finding a solution collapsed, as a wedge grew between Mugabe and South Africa’s statesman, Nelson Mandela, the DRC and its allies sounded war drums, announcing that they were now planning to take the war towards the invading countries.

“We are going East. What this means is that we are going to defend the Congo from the rebels,” said a hawkish Mugabe, who was flanked by Angola’s president Eduardo Dos Santos and Namibia’s Sam Nujoma.

“This decision is to avoid greater violence, disintegration of the Congo and the undermining of the sovereignty of the Congo,” Mugabe argued as thousands of troops from Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe rolled out tanks and ramped up their firepower in the skies against Rwanda and Uganda’s militaries as the rebels positioned themselves to capture Mbuji Mayi, DRC’s diamond hub.

The war had also sucked in Chad and Sudan, which were backing Kabila.

Zimbabwe immediately dispatched thousands of troops, equipment and 20 combat aircraft in Lubumbashi, the major town in Kabila’s native mineral-rich Katanga province in southeast, 1,600 km from the capital.

According to AFP, Angola deployed MI-24 and MI-25 combat helicopters to Kinshasa in the past few days, sources revealed. “If the logistics of armament are followed through, the Angolan MIs will constitute devastating firepower much more fearsome than the artillery of the FAC (Congolese Armed Forces),” a military analyst in Kinshasa told AFP. 

At the time, some Zimbabwe troops had been captured by rebel fighters as the southern African country planned to send more troops to the frontline.

It came at the time there was growing flak from citizens and civil society in Harare against the foreign deployment who accused Mugabe of sending troops in a ‘Rambo-style’ military adventure. 

In the next instalment of Africa’s Forever War, we will profile events in October and November of 1998.

The rebels who appeared to be on a retreat began to make gains and captured the towns of Moba and Kongolo in Katanga Province, the birthplace of President Kabila.

This came at the time fissures began to emerge with the Zimbabwe and Namibia soldiers after President Mugabe sacked his Chief of Staff, Michael Nyambuya.