There is no doubt which was the year's most horribly compelling story from the South: the unfolding conflict on the border between Zaire and Rwanda during October and November. Some background may help make sense of this year's events.
The tiny, neighbouring Central African countries of Rwanda and Burundi were once Belgian colonies. The majority population of both is Hutu but the Tutsi minority were favoured by the Belgians with more education and more powerful jobs. When independence came the Tutsis took on the mantle of the ruling class, as the Belgians had intended, but Hutu resentment periodically exploded into violence.
In 1994 a Hutu government had come to power in Rwanda but its President died when his plane crashed. The Interahamwe, an unofficial Hutu militia whose name translates as 'We kill together', used the event to translate bad feeling and suspicion of the Tutsis into a murder spree. At least half-a-million Tutsis were massacred in their homes and on the streets in the worst genocide in African history. A Tutsi-dominated rebel army, the Rwanda Patriotic Front, then marched on the capital, Kigali. Around a million Hutus, fearing bloody revenge, fled their advance and most eventually found refuge in vast refugee camps over the border in eastern Zaire.
The goal of aid agencies and the international community has been to persuade the refugees to return home to Rwanda. They have been endlessly frustrated over the last two years by the Interahamwe, who have ruled over the camps by terror.
The Banyamulenge are Tutsis who have lived in eastern Zaire for hundreds of
years but whose right to Zairean citizenship was withdrawn in 1981. The explosion
this year occurred when Zaire's provincial governor announced his intention
to expel a third of a million of them. Probably armed by the Rwandan Government,
the Banyamulenge started to take on the inept Zairean army, with immediate success.
In the end there was the best possible outcome: the Banyamulenge's military
success unlocked a previously unresolvable problem as refugees streamed home
into Rwanda in their hundreds of thousands and the Interahamwe and their families
fled into the hills. And the ineptitude of Zaire's military and political performance
only drove home the utter bankruptcy of President Mobutu Sese Seko's monumentally
corrupt dictatorship: people took to the streets in the Zairean capital Kinshasa
demanding and receiving the resignation of the Prime Minister, Kengo Wa Dondo.
Mobutu himself was recuperating from an operation in his villa on the French
Riviera. Zaire may be about to fall apart as a single political entity - but
given the nature of Mobutu's Zaire over the last three decades, that may not
be such a bad thing.