The FDLR, built on an ideology that cast the Tutsi as enemies, remains a source of regional security concerns, according to four former senior officers who defected from the group and returned to Rwanda. They spoke to Al Jazeera at the Mutobo demobilisation centre, where they underwent rehabilitation.
"In our history and ideology, Tutsis are referred to as 'snakes'," said Anastase Munyaneza, a former FDLR major general. "The analogy is that if a snake bites you, it injects poison and you die. Therefore, it is better to kill the snake before it bites you." Lieutenant Colonel Idrissa Bizimana said they were taught at school that the Tutsis had come from Ethiopia and had "ruled through hatred for 400 years". Such ideas were reinforced through Rwanda's political and military institutions before the 1994 genocide and persisted among those who fled into what is now the DRC after the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) took control in July 1994.
The roots of the anti-Tutsi ideology stretch back decades, to a period when ethnic identities became increasingly politicised. Under Belgian colonial rule, identity cards classifying Rwandans as Hutu, Tutsi or Twa were introduced in the early 1930s, reinforcing distinctions that became more rigid. By independence in 1962, about 120,000 people, mostly Tutsi, had fled. Attacks by exiles in Tanzania and Zaire between 1962 and 1967 were followed by retaliatory killings of Tutsi civilians in Rwanda, prompting further waves of refugees.
When the RPF attacked in 1990, Bizimana said, they were told that the same "Inyenzi" (cockroaches) had attacked. "We grew up being taught to hate them," he said. These narratives were carried into the military, where soldiers were taught to view Tutsis as enemies. Munyaneza said permission to marry was denied if a fiancée was Tutsi, on the grounds that her family might pass sensitive information to the enemy.
The ideology was put into practice during the 1994 genocide. Munyaneza said soldiers trained members of the Interahamwe militia, who participated in massacres alongside the Presidential Guard and the army. Bizimana said his battalion was actively involved in the killings in the area where it was deployed. The killings began after a plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down on April 6, 1994, triggering approximately 100 days of mass killings.
When the RPF took control, former government officials, soldiers and militiamen fled into Zaire. In eastern Zaire, former members of the Rwandan Armed Forces took control of refugee camps. "That was where we resumed our military activities," Munyaneza said. A decisive alliance emerged in 1998 when Congolese President Laurent-Desire Kabila fell out with Rwanda. The former soldiers reorganised under the FDLR name in 2000. "Kabila asked us to defeat the Tutsis who had attacked him, promising in return to help us defeat the Tutsi-led government in Rwanda," Munyaneza said.
The FDLR's leadership has denied the organisation as a whole participated in the genocide. In a 2005 interview, the then-president Ignace Murwanashyaka said the FDLR was a new movement that appeared six years after the genocide, though he did not rule out individual involvement. Murwanashyaka and his deputy Straton Musoni were later convicted by a German court for leading a foreign terrorist organisation and aiding war crimes in eastern DRC. In 2012, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for FDLR military commander Sylvestre Mudacumura on nine counts of alleged war crimes.
The former officers say the FDLR has relied on external support and networks to survive in eastern DRC, where its presence remains a major point of contention between Kigali and Kinshasa.