ABSTRACT
Introduction In recent years scholars have used the term “refugee-warriors” to refer to people who fled their home countries to organize military structures in order to force their return by overthrowing an existing regime or founding a separate state. With post-1948 Palestinians as a typical example, debates on this militarization of refugees focus on globalization, the international refugee regime, particularly refugee camps, host countries and lack of solutions to refugee crises. The existence of refugee-warriors has been employed to show that refugees are not always helpless victims though some argue that rebels should not be considered refugees but manipulators of refugees. Among the many millions of refugees in postcolonial Africa, there are numerous examples of exiled armed movements that fall into the category of refugee-warriors with some experiencing this situation for several generations.1 An important complicating factor in these situations is the frequent practice of neighbouring African states, in “tit-for-tat” fashion, backing exiled rebels from each other’s countries. Given their dependence on host states and geopolitical circumstances that may deny them an opportunity to fight their main enemy at home, many refugee-warriors in post-independence Africa ended up fighting wars in which they had little direct interest. There are many examples. In return for Ethiopian staging areas and military support in its struggle against Khartoum, the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) of the 1980s fought separatist movements such as the Gambella People’s Liberation Front and the Oromo Liberation Front inside Ethiopia. Of course, these movements could be portrayed as indirect enemies as they were supported by the Sudan government as revenge for Ethiopia’s sponsorship of the SPLA. After the failed Katanga secession of the early 1960s and their mutiny against the Congolese state in 1966, many Katangese “gendarmes” moved to Angola where they helped the Portuguese colonial regime to fight African nationalist insurgents based in Congo and, after Angola’s sudden independence in 1974, they formed an insurgent movement backed by the Angolan government and Cuba that staged two unsuccessful invasions of Congo’s Shaba province (Katanga) during the late 1970s. The frustrated “gendarmes” and their sons were then incorporated into
the Angolan army as the “Tigres” and in 1997 several thousand were flown to Rwanda, from where they participated in the invasion of Zaire that overthrew the Mobutu regime, which was backing Angolan rebels. This chapter compares two groups of African refugee-warriors, Rwandese who fled Kigali’s Hutu Power regime, and South African anti-apartheid activists who were sometimes compelled by circumstance to set aside their primary struggles and fight other people’s wars. Despite many differences, these groups shared a similar prolonged exile over the same mostly Cold War period, roughly 1960-94, and aimed at reforming oppressive and exclusionary states rather than achieving regional secession.
