Global Policy Forum

By Colette Braeckman

The inquiry into the death of Laurent-Désiré Kabila on 16 January is likely to produce some surprises. The fatal shots were probably fired by one of his bodyguards, a young man named only as Rachidi, who had been with the rebel leader since his campaign in Kivu province and felt badly rewarded for his services. If it was Rachidi, he must have been the instrument of a long conspiracy with wider ramifications. For months Kabila had been portrayed as the main obstacle to implementing the Lusaka peace agreement. But the real reasons why Africa's "first world war" has dragged on for so long lie elsewhere.

The agreement was signed on 10 July 1999. Its mistake was to treat the conflict as a civil war and ride roughshod over Congolese sovereignty. According to the implementation timetable, the cessation of hostilities was to be followed first by the disarming of "negative forces" - i.e. the various armed groups (essentially the genocidal Rwandan militias) threatening the security of the belligerent countries - and then by an inter-Congolese "national dialogue" leading to new institutional arrangements. The withdrawal of foreign troops - the Rwandan and Ugandan "forces of aggression" and also the Zimbabwean, Angolan and Namibian forces supporting Kinshasa under defence agreements concluded by the countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) - was to take place only after these stages had been completed.

Those who conceived the Lusaka agreement, including United States special envoy Howard Wolpe, saw the Congolese regime as only one of several competing factions, obliged to negotiate on equal terms with the other parties to the conflict. These included the rebel movements: the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), backed by Rwanda, and the Congolese Rally for Democracy-Liberation Movement (RCD-ML), which has recently merged with the Congo Liberation Movement (MLC), supported by Uganda and Mobutu's heirs. Consistent with this approach, UN observers and peacekeeping forces were to be deployed along the ceasefire line in the middle of the country - with the risk of perpetuating de facto partition - rather than at the borders where they could have monitored the withdrawal of foreign forces from the Congo and any incursions by armed groups threatening Rwanda and Uganda.

With the Rwandan army at the gates of Mbuji Mayi, the capital of East Kasai province, which produces most of the diamonds that are the Congo's main economic resource, Kabila had little choice but to sign the Lusaka agreement. He then played for time and tried to get round its more awkward provisions. Rejecting the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) mediator, former Botswanan president Ketimule Masire, whom he accused of bias, Kabila put obstacles in the way of UN peacekeeping operations and sought separate meetings with exiled opposition leaders, mainly former followers of Mobutu, in Libreville, Gabon. He still refused to allow free political activity in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Attempting to impose a constituent assembly that was in his own pocket, he tried to control and mobilise the population through "people's power committees".

Kabila was heavily criticised, not least by his close associates, for his authoritarian methods and personality cult. Yet prior to his assassination the balance of forces was turning in his favour. The rebel groups were riven by internal conflict and defections. Despite the MLC's relative autonomy in the Equateur region, they had come to be seen as creatures manipulated by their Rwandan and Ugandan protectors rather than genuine popular movements. World opinion had been shaken by three bouts of fighting between Rwandan and Ugandan forces for the control of Kisangani and its diamond counters, reports of human rights violations, massacres and inter-ethnic struggles in the regions under rebel control, and the plundering of the Congo's natural resources. Overriding the calendar laid down in the Lusaka accord, the UN Security Council had passed several resolutions calling for the withdrawal of all foreign forces and the restoration of Congolese government authority over the whole country.

Opening up to the market economy

Joseph Kabila, the dead leader's adopted son, was sworn in as president on 17 January. He received good advise and immediately showed flexibility on all the contentious issues, undertaking to implement the Lusaka agreement in full, free up the political process and organise inter-Congolese dialogue. In exchange, he asked all foreign troops to leave the country and demanded respect for the DRC's territorial and political integrity. His economic decisions won him immediate invitations to Washington, Paris and Brussels. He announced plans to liberalise the market in goods, services and diamonds, and to authorise the free circulation of foreign currencies and Congolese francs, and also pledged to push ahead with a new mining and investment code. His father had reneged on contracts placed with American mining companies during the first war of liberation and had experimented with economic schemes reminiscent of the former communist countries. Joseph Kabila turned over a new leaf and opened the country to the market economy.

This new departure has been acclaimed by the western countries, which have assured the young president of their support, and also by the Congolese people themselves. Exhausted by war and the embargo imposed on the DRC in 1992, when the Mobutu regime broke with its financial backers, they hope for a resumption of international aid, the return of foreign investment that will generate employment, and an end to economic aberrations (1).

Joseph Kabila has not broken with his father's patriotism. But his conciliatory tone and economic turn-around may have given the belligerents and the international community a long-awaited opportunity to extricate themselves from the quagmire without losing face. For the war waged on DRC soil by five foreign states and a dozen armed groups (2) has proved a failure for all concerned.

Laurent-Désiré Kabila took power in 1997 when the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL), supported diplomatically by the US and backed by Angola and Zimbabwe, reached Kinshasa after seven months of war. His victory was hailed as a triumph of the "African renaissance". But it contained the seeds of a conflict between the people of the DRC and the countries that had created or supported the AFDL and now sought to cash in on the economic and political benefits.

Rwanda had posted military advisors with Kabila and several of his ministers were reporting directly to Kigali. Uganda's president, Yoweri Museveni, dreamt of a road link, or even a railway, between Kampala and Kisangani that would open Central Africa to Uganda's Asian traders. Zimbabwe was keen to conclude mining contracts with Kinshasa and supply the DRC with basic commodities, taking its revenge on South Africa for stealing the Mozambique market.

Debt of ingratitude

These hopes were dashed by Kabila's "debt of ingratitude" to his former allies. He reneged on the mining contracts, expelled his Rwandan advisors and criticised the forestry concessions which the Ugandans were carving out in the northeast of the country. The second Congolese war broke out in August 1998. It was essentially an attempt to replace the former guerrilla leader, now seen as uncontrollable, by a regime more amenable to Kigala and Kampala. Although Rwanda and Uganda invoked security arguments to justify intervention on Congolese territory, their real motive was to advance their own development by exploiting their neighbour's fabulous riches. The military operation, approved if not sponsored by the US, was intended as a blitzkrieg. But it got bogged down when Angola and Zimbabwe opposed incursions by Rwandan and Ugandan troops operating under the umbrella of the RCD.

With the war at a standstill, the belligerents have lost much more than their original stakes. The Congolese people are hostile to the rebels who have split into three rival movements (RCD, RCD-ML and MLC). The Rwandan and Ugandan presidents, Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni, have become rivals if not enemies. They have lost their prestige as "new leaders" and been summoned by the Security Council to withdraw their troops from Congolese territory.

The reasons initially invoked for the war have faded to reveal the belligerents' real motive -shameless plunder of the Congo's riches. In the eastern province of Kivu, the Société Minií¨re des Grands Lacs (Somigl) has a monopoly on the purchase of "coltan", an ore containing colombium and tantalum essential for manufacturing alloys used in aircraft, mobile phones and microprocessors. Somigl exports all the ore to Rwanda. From there it is channelled to Europe and the US by three companies, Africom, Promeco and Cogecom (respectively Belgian, Rwandan and South African). With customs duties no longer levied at the border between Kivu province and Rwanda, the Congolese population is experiencing de facto annexation. The wealth extracted from the DRC, which is used to fund the Rwandan defence budget, has fuelled the emergence of a new corrupt political and military class in Kigali where the regime is now facing a challenge from Tutsis and royalists.

In Kampala, Museveni's main rival in the presidential election of 12 March, Colonel Kizza Besigye, based his campaign on denouncing the war in the Congo. Besigye was declared the loser but the results are still disputed. The Ugandan army is openly protecting the gold and diamond counters in the areas under its control. It organises the import of Ugandan consumer goods and the export of gold, diamonds, coffee, tin, precious woods and even the oil recently discovered in the Semliki Valley. This systematic plunder is orchestrated by two of Museveni's close relatives, General Salim Saleh and Brigadier James Kazini. Uganda is also accused of fomenting strife among Congolese ethnic groups and secretly encouraging the clashes between Hemas and Lendus that have caused hundreds of deaths in the area around Bunia.

The discredited Kampala regime is now being challenged on the home front; and the war in the Congo has driven a wedge between Uganda and its financial backers, who only recently were still portraying it as an African success story. Meanwhile the security situation in Kivu province, which served as a pretext for the second Congolese war, has further deteriorated. The Banyamulenge (Congolese Tutsis), whom Rwanda was claiming to defend, are now encircled on the high plains and the Federalist Republican Forces (FRF), a movement supported by the Banyamulenge elite, openly blames Rwanda and the RCD for the conflict with their Congolese neighbours.

Attacks on parish churches and health centres are increasing throughout Kivu province. Insecurity is rife. While Rwanda denounces collaboration between "negative forces" (Interhahawe) and the Mayi Mayi (Congolese resistance forces fighting foreign occupation), numerous Congolese sources report that the Rwandan army is bringing Hutu prisoners to Kivu in order to stir up unrest and justify its permanent presence in the region, which has traditionally served Rwanda as a demographic and economic outlet. Even if the UN supervises the withdrawal of foreign troops and deploys its peacekeepers along the ceasefire line, the situation will remain explosive in Kivu province. The region also serves as a rear base for the Burundi Hutus who in February stepped up attacks on the capital of Bujumbura. This has all the signs of a "war within a war" aimed at destabilising Burundi first (3) and then perhaps Rwanda.

More harm than good

The war in the Congo has also done more harm than good to the late president's allies, despite the immediate economic and security benefits for Zimbabwe and Angola. The commitment of forces to the Congo accelerated the decline of Robert Mugabe's regime as the Zimbabwean opposition made opposition to the war into its battle cry. For Zimbabwe, involvement in the Congo was also an economic affair. The president committed $200m to funding the first war and entered the second to defend the integrity of the country, support his old friend Kabila and, not least, protect his investments. Since then the Zimbabwean army has had both a military and economic presence. The Zimbabwe Defence Force (ZDF) has concluded many contracts in the Congo via the Zidco holding company. The key men involved are Emmerson Mnangagwa, Zanu-PF party treasurer and former justice minister, and General Vitalis Zvinavashe, head of the armed forces, who owns a trucking company. Zimbabwe has been handsomely rewarded by military contracts for the supply of Chinese weapons and other equipment, a 2,000 square mile concession in Katanga to the Rural Development Authority, and the supply of hydroelectric power.

But it is in the mining industry that the Zimbabwean presence has been most visible and most controversial. In September 1998 Laurent-Désiré Kabila put Zimbabwean entrepreneur Billy Rautenbach, boss of Wheels of Africa, in charge of the state-owned Gecamines mining company and several other large concessions (4). Zimbabwe is also heavily involved in the diamond trade at Mbuji Mayi via the Osleg company (Operation Sovereign Legitimacy).

Although these commercial holdings have lined the pockets of the regime's bigwigs, they have done little for Zimbabwe itself. The international financial institutions have penalised the country specifically for its involvement in the Congo war, among other things by holding back a loan of $240m, and the regime is in deep crisis.

Only Angola, the main military power in the region, has emerged relatively intact from its involvement in the Congo, which was mainly motivated by security considerations. But its recent successes in the fight against Jonas Savimbi's forces have not proved conclusive and it has failed to deal the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita) a knock-out blow.

Africa's "first world war" has been a defeat for the OAU. Despite all the meetings and summit conferences, and the appointment of Zambian president Fredrick Chiluba as mediator, the OAU has proved incapable of imposing a settlement. The UN, too, has suffered a major setback. At the time of writing, its original contingent of 5,537 men, responsible for monitoring the ceasefire in a country four times the size of France, has been cut to 3,000.

While the lack of progress is partly due to Congolese obstruction and to shortage of funds, it also demonstrates an absence of political determination on the part of the members of the Security Council that has done nothing to improve the UN's standing in the region. The UN has yet to live down the abandonment of Rwanda in 1994, and its reputation has been further damaged by the continued presence of Rwandan Hutu refugee camps in Tanzania and Kivu province, which has perpetuated the effects of the war and sown the seeds of further conflict. On top of all this the international organisations and NGOs proved incapable of protecting the refugees fleeing through the Congolese jungle.

For the people of the Congo, the war has been an unmitigated and incomprehensible tragedy. An American NGO, the International Rescue Committee, has put the number of additional deaths in the eastern DRC caused directly or indirectly by the war at 1.7m, including 200,000 attributable to acts of violence. On 28 November last, UN emergency rescue coordinator Caroline Macaskie informed the Security Council that 16m Congolese (a third of the total population) were suffering from malnutrition and that the war had displaced two million people within the DRC and forced 300,000 Congolese to seek refugee in neighbouring countries.

In Kinshasa itself, fuel shortages and lack of public transport force people to trek for hours across a city 25 miles long. Families have got used to eating on alternate days - adults one day, children the next. The rivers, which are vital arteries in a country lacking roads and railways, have been closed to civil navigation, with disastrous effects for the inhabitants of the interior. In towns like Aketi and Bumba, in Equateur province, the coffee, manioc and rice harvests, once destined for Kinshasa, rot on the spot or are carried off to Uganda. The local population lack medicine, clothing and even salt, and shopkeepers have to fetch their goods by bicycle from Kisangani, a ride of over a 1,000 km through tropical rain forest. All the major endemic diseases - cholera, tuberculosis, haemorrhagic fevers, sleeping sickness, and Aids spread by the various armed groups (5) - are raging once again throughout the country and decimating the population.

Yet more than ever the Congolese see themselves as citizens of one country. Throughout the DRC and abroad, the churches, civil society and foreign NGOs are holding seminars and meetings that testify to the resistance of the Congolese people to occupation, the carve-up of their country and foreign tutelage. The persistence of national feeling and the existence of a highly politicised population should give us pause for thought. The Congo cannot be treated as a protectorate and its future discussed in international forums as if it were the "vacant land" claimed by Leopold II. A strong Congo is the best guarantee of stability throughout the region.

Translated by Barry Smerin

(1) Such as the grant of a monopoly on diamond exports to an Israeli company, IDI Diamonds, in exchange for fees totalling $20m. This measure led diggers and dealers to offer their gems to Brazzaville.

(2) See Mwayila Tshiyembe, "Africa's new players jostle for power", Le Monde diplomatique English edition, January 1999, and Colette Braeckman, "Carve-up in the Congo", Le Monde diplomatique English edition, October 1999.

(3) Since 1993 tens of thousands have died in inter-ethnic clashes in Burundi. In July 1996 a UN commission of inquiry described the massacres perpetrated by the Hutu rebels as "genocide".

(4) Having failed to achieve convincing results, Rautenbach was replaced by a Belgian, Georges Forrest, only to reappear on the scene a fortnight before the president's assassination. See Franí§ois Misser and Olivier Vallée, "Les nouveaux acteurs du secteur minier africain", Manií¨re de Voir, No. 51, Paris, May-June 2000.

(5) See Anatole Ayissi, "Where poverty leads to death", Le Monde diplomatique English edition, January 2001.