Congo

Thomas Turner

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745648446, 9780745648439
• eBook ISBN: 9780745656724
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Democratic Republic of Congo has become one of the world's bloodiest hot spots. 2003 saw the end of a five-year war in which millions lost their lives - one of the deadliest conflicts since World War II. Despite recent peace agreements and democratic elections, the country is still plagued by army and militia violence. Congo remains deeply troubled, since the deep-rooted causes of conflict have not been adequately addressed.

The conflict in the DRC has divided opinion; some call it a civil war, or a war of aggression by the country's neighbours; others a continuation of Rwanda's Hutu-Tutsi conflict on Congolose soil, and a war of partition and pillage. The prevalence of rape and sexual violence has led some analysts to mark it out as a hidden 'war against women'. Tom Turner's insightful book reveals how each of these descriptions accurately captures the separate elements of this complex and multidimensional political conflict. In exploring each of these contributory factors, he shows how current attempts to rebuild the shattered state and society of DRC are doomed to fail. So long as the full complexity of the Congo crisis is not taken into account and a clear consensus as to its precise dimensions reached, the future looks bleak. The DRC, he argues, will likely remain a global hot spot for some time to come.

1

Congo as a Playing Field

In October 1996, so-called “Banyamulenge” (Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese Tutsi) captured the eastern Zaïre cities of Uvira, Bukavu, and Goma. They attacked the UN refugee camps near these cities, sending more than one million Hutu refugees back to Rwanda. Other refugees fled westward, into the Congo forests. Two weeks later, long-time Mobutu opponent Laurent Kabila was presented as the head of a coalition called the AFDL.

Told in this fashion, the story begins in October 1996, and pits various opposition groups against the regime of Marshal Mobutu. In reality, it begins earlier, and was more international than it was made to appear. Many authors trace the war back to the genocide in Rwanda and the seizure of power in Kigali by the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), in 1994. Former US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Herman Cohen begins the story with the RPF invasion of Rwanda in 1990, an invasion the United States should have stopped, in his opinion.¹ Each of these alternative narratives converts the 1996 war from a civil war into an international war. Strangely, however, the World Bank persisted in classifying the hostilities (including the second war that began in 1998) as a civil war, something that worked greatly to the advantage of Rwanda and Uganda, the principal aggressors in both conflicts.

Those who see mineral wealth as the main motor of conflict in DRC interpret the war of 1996–7 as a resource war much like the war of “partition and pillage” that began in 1998. As the AFDL gained strength, international firms signed deals, effectively treating rebel leader Laurent Kabila as Zaïre’s ruler even though he controlled only a small portion of the country.²

By 1997, the AFDL forces had rolled across the country and reached Kinshasa. They met little opposition except at Kenge (Bandundu province), where troops from the former Rwandan army and from Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola/National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) resisted for a time. Successfully overcoming their opponents, Kabila’s men entered the capital in May and President Mobutu, who was ailing from prostate cancer, was forced to flee.

Kabila proclaimed himself president of the country and announced a government in which Rwandan citizens and Kinyarwanda-speaking Congolese held a number of key posts. James Kabarebe, a Rwandan army officer, was named chief of staff of the Congolese Armed Forces (Forces Armées Congolaises, FAC).

The pretense that the Congolese had overthrown Mobutu lasted a few more weeks until, in July 1997, Rwandan vice-president Paul Kagame admitted (Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja says he “boasted”³) that Rwanda had planned and executed the war, and had assembled the coalition of Kabila’s Parti Révolutionnaire du Peuple (People’s Revolutionary Party, PRP) and the other groups to give a Congolese face to the invasion.

Kabila performed his job of providing a Congolese face for the Rwanda-led invasion, notably by frustrating the efforts of the United Nations to investigate the massacres of Rwandan Hutu refugees in the Congolese forests. Increasingly, however, the regime was polarized between the Rwandans and their Congolese Tutsi protégés, on the one hand, and Kabila’s Luba-Katanga community and Katangans in general, on the other. In July 1998, Kabila pre-empted a rumored coup d’état, transferring Kabarebe from his post as army commander to a powerless position as advisor to the president. A few days later, Kabila announced that he was sending Kabarebe and the other foreign officers home.

“Africa’s world war” began as a Rwandan attempt to overthrow Kabila. It started with a mutiny at Goma (on the Rwandan border) and an invasion by Rwandan troops. As in 1996, a Congolese cover was provided for a military operation conducted by Rwanda in collaboration with its neighbors Uganda and Burundi. Ten days after the Rwandan troops re-entered DRC, the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (Congolese Rally for Democracy, RCD) announced its formation. Rather than moving from town to town as in 1996, the Rwandans hijacked airplanes and flew their troops and Congolese auxiliaries to Kitona military base in Bas Congo province, west of Kinshasa. They freed and recruited a number of men from Mobutu’s army being “re-educated” at Kitona. The Rwandans also seized the hydroelectric complex at Inga – cutting off power to millions of civilians, and to the hospitals of the capital – and Congo’s major port at Matadi. They were thwarted in their efforts to seize Kinshasa by military intervention by Angola and Zimbabwe. Namibia soon joined its neighbors and fellow Southern African Development Community (SADC) members Angola and Zimbabwe in support of Kabila.

Opposing the pro-Kabila coalition was the same coalition that had invaded in 1996, minus Angola. Rwanda again was the leader, followed by Uganda. Burundi was mostly “minding its back door,” as Gérard Prunier puts it,⁴ and had no ambitions to impose a friendly regime in Kinshasa. It did, however, seize the chance to strike against Burundian Hutu rebels who had long been based in South Kivu’s Uvira and Fizi territories.

The Congolese “rebels” of 1998 were stronger militarily than the Congolese central government, mainly because of their foreign backing. However, that same foreign backing meant that the civilian institutions in the rebel zone were illegitimate in the eyes of the population. Rwanda was unwilling to accept that it was the core of the problem. Instead, the Rwandans ran through a series of RCD presidents, from Arthur Z’ahidi Ngoma, to Prof. Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, to Dr. Émile Ilunga, to Dr. Adolphe Onusumba, to Azarias Ruberwa. The fact that the first four included university lecturers and medical doctors reflects the prestige that comes with academic degrees and titles in Central Africa, rather than the idea that their background might be relevant to the job.

Once the possibility of a blitzkrieg victory had passed, a war of “partition and pillage” set in. In the Rwandan occupation zone, administered through the RCD, the combat against the Hutu “génocidaires” took a back seat to plunder. The Rwanda/RCD zone comprised a sizable chunk of eastern DRC, from Orientale province in the north to Katanga in the south. The Mouvement de Libération du Congo (Congo Liberation Movement, MLC), a rival movement sponsored by Uganda, controlled a vast swath of northern DRC, principally in Equateur and Orientale provinces. The Kabila government controlled a strip of territory running from southern Katanga through the mineral-rich Kasai provinces, on to Kinshasa, Bas Congo, and the Atlantic Ocean with its offshore oil. Not coincidentally, the entire Congo–Angola border was included in the Kabila zone. The RCD, MLC, and central government zones each housed a complex network by which Congo’s minerals and other resources were extracted and sold in international markets.⁵

Efforts to end “Africa’s world war” began almost as soon as the war itself. Angola, DRC, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe signed a cease-fire agreement in Lusaka (Zambia) in 1999, and a UN observer force was approved, but fighting continued. President Laurent Kabila was in no hurry to accept a situation that placed him at a disadvantage. However, with his assassination in 2001 and his replacement by Joseph Kabila, the movement toward peace was facilitated. The following year, a peace agreement was signed in South Africa, leading to the withdrawal of most foreign troops. Nevertheless, several militias continued to fight in eastern Congo, and Congolese civilians continued to suffer.

The formula for moving forward was to create transitional institutions in which each major faction was represented. Joseph Kabila remained president but was surrounded by four vice-presidents, one each from the presidential camp, the RCD, the MLC, and the unarmed opposition. This government proved very unproductive, prompting a joke among educated Congolese, “1 + 4 = 0.”

The various armies were to be integrated but a number of RCD officers refused to accept new posts offered them under the command of Kinshasa. The formula for the transition also involved attributing the provinces and military districts to the various “components” (former government, the RCD, the MLC, etc.) such that no one would control both the civilian and military structures in the same province. South Kivu had been under the military and civilian control of the RCD. The attempt of General Prosper Nabiolwa, a veteran of Mobutu’s FAZ, to assume his post in Bukavu set off a mutiny among RCD officers, led by Colonel Jules Mutebutsi, a Munyamulenge Tutsi. Forces led by Tutsi General Laurent Nkunda invaded Bukavu in June 2004 and occupied it for ten days, killing and raping, before Nkunda was persuaded to leave by MONUC (the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

In 2006, Joseph Kabila won the first relatively free and competitive elections since 1965. Jean-Pierre Bemba of the MLC finished second to Kabila in the presidential runoff, necessitated by the failure of any candidate to secure the majority (50 percent plus one) in the first round. The results revealed an east–west split; Kabila carried all the predominantly Swahili-speaking provinces in the east. (These results are analyzed in Chapter 3, on the politics of identity.)

Violence was common, both in the campaign leading up to the vote and afterwards. Locally dominant parties consolidated their position through attacks on their opponents: the Parti du Peuple pour la Reconstruction et la Démocratie (People’s Party for Reconstruction and Democracy, PPRD) against the RCD in the Kivus, the MLC against the Union of Mobutist Democrats (UDEMO) in Equateur, and so on. Following the elections, the security forces of the central government clashed with Bemba’s bodyguard or personal militia in Kinshasa, leading to numerous casualties.

Although the elections supposedly turned the page, warfare continued. Apart from the clashes in Kinshasa, several other provinces experienced extreme violence. Kinshasa’s relations with its former ally Angola deteriorated. Angolan forces apparently occupied several villages in Bandundu, adjacent to the diamond-producing province of Lunda Norte. Angola expelled thousands of Congolese from Lunda Norte and Lunda Sul, and DRC retaliated by expelling Angolans. The expellees in both directions suffered rape and other violence.

Early in 2009, Uganda and Congo launched a joint operation, Lightning Thunder, intended to root out the Ugandan insurrection movement the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which had been implanted in Ituri (northeast DRC) for years. The operation was monumentally unsuccessful, scattering the LRA forces but not destroying them, and provoking vicious counter-attacks against Congolese civilians.

In North and South Kivu, a similar agreement had been reached between Rwanda and DRC. “Umoja Wetu” (Our Unity) was designed to destroy the threat posed by the rebel Hutu Forces Démocratiques du Libération du Rwanda (Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, FDLR). Perhaps not as spectacularly unsuccessful as Lightning Thunder, it still failed to deal a mortal blow to the FDLR. In fact the operation led some of the Mayi-Mayi to ally with the Rwandan Hutu to fight the FARDC. Following the withdrawal of the Rwandan army, the FARDC launched Operation Kimia II to combat the FDLR with the support of MONUC. Despite these operations, the FDLR survived.

Elections for the presidency and the national assembly were held in 2011. The rules had been changed, requiring a plurality or simple majority rather than an absolute majority, as in 2006. Incumbent Joseph Kabila was declared the winner of the presidential race, with approximately 49 percent of the votes; long-time opposition leader Étienne Tshisekedi of the Union pour la Démocratie et le Progrès Social (Union for Democracy and Social Progress, UDPS) supposedly finished second with 32 percent.

The elections were labeled “seriously flawed” by the US Department of State, which added that it was unclear whether the irregularities had been enough to change the outcome. France and Belgium took similar positions. Kabila apparently would govern the country for (at least) five more years, but the legitimacy of his rule had been diminished.

As summarized here, the Congo conflict involves nation states, international organizations, militias, political parties, and other sorts of actors. The question we need to answer is whether, behind this struggle, with its pillage and backstabbing, the machinations of international, non-African actors are determinant.

Extra-continental Actors

When Rwanda and Uganda invaded DRC in 1996 and again in 1998, many observers assumed that the invasions had been organized by the United States. This made sense, in that Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda had been called a new generation of African leaders (along with the rulers of Eritrea and Ethiopia) and they were receiving material support from the United States and the United Kingdom. If the US sponsored the invasions, along with the UK, then France supposedly was involved too, in opposition to the “Anglo-Saxons.”

The idea of extra-continental powers using Africa as a playing field is very old. By encouraging French competition with Britain in Central Africa in the 1880s, the German Chancellor Bismarck may have hoped to induce the French to forget Alsace-Lorraine. The British apparently supported first Portugal and then Leopold II as a means of blocking French expansion in the Congo Basin. Perhaps in recent years DRC again has been a playing field or a chessboard on which extra-African powers have waged their struggles, using African proxies.

Of the extra-African actors of the 1990s, France most clearly viewed Central Africa as a playing field. The French interpreted the Great Lakes crisis, set off by the invasion of French-speaking Rwanda by English-speaking Rwandan exiles in 1990, in terms of the Fashoda Syndrome: that is, their feeling of having been cheated out of what was rightly theirs by the British, over a century earlier.⁶ Moreover, they seem to have believed that Rwanda, where French was the language of administration and instruction, belonged to them in their role as protector of La Francophonie, the zone of French language and culture.

The British responded in kind, likewise interpreting the struggle for Rwanda in cultural terms. Britain’s New Labour adopted the English-speaking Tutsi leader, Paul Kagame, and indeed Tony Blair, after leaving the British government, served as an unpaid advisor to the Kagame government. Moreover, Rwanda joined the Commonwealth, although it had not been a British colony. The US relationship with Kagame and the RPF was predominantly military in the first instance, but the American embassy in Kigali developed a strong case of clientitis. At any rate, both the United States and the United Kingdom have strong affective bonds to Kagame and the RPF, and the French were right to fear a drastic decline in their influence in this part of Africa.

Is the behavior of the major actors to be explained in terms of the state institutions, the elites that control those institutions, or individual leaders? The reactions of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, in the aftermath of their failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda, might seem to confirm the individual-level hypothesis. However, leadership change (to George Bush in 2001 and Barack Obama in 2009, and in Britain to Gordon Brown in 2007 and then to David Cameron in 2010) did little to dampen the enthusiasm of the respective governments for Kagame.

Another line of argument also privileges international actors. Leninism and its contemporary variants see the industrial powers competing to acquire overseas territories in order to exploit their natural resources. Many writings on DRC assume such causation, but this needs to be demonstrated.

Proxy or surrogate war – a war that results when two powers use third parties as substitutes for fighting each other directly – has been seen as a prominent feature of African international politics. The Angolan civil war, beginning in 1975, in which the Soviet Union and the United States backed rival Angolan liberation movements, could be seen as an example. Neither of the superpowers put its own troops on the ground in Angola; nor did China, whose anti-Soviet stance had emerged clearly by the mid-1970s. Cuba, South Africa, and Zaïre (DRC) did send troops. The conflict unfolded in an environment of Cold War bipolarity but Cuba was not really a proxy for the Soviet Union. Cuba took the initiative in aiding the Angolan Marxist movement the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, MPLA) and the Soviet Union followed the Cuban lead. Eventually, in 1989, the Americans induced the Cubans to withdraw by facilitating the decolonization of Namibia.

A major participant in US foreign policy making, former Assistant Secretary of State Cohen argued that while most wars in Africa have been internal, the ongoing border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea and the successful war of Rwanda and Angola to overthrow President Mobutu of DRC in 1996 have been exceptions. Internal conflicts in Africa could be classified into two categories, civil wars and surrogate wars. Civil wars “respond to a deep set of grievances held by a significant percentage of the population that supports violent action against the regime in place.”⁷ True civil wars since 1960 occurred in South Africa/Namibia (1966), Ethiopia (1974), Angola (1977), and Sudan (1983), according to Cohen.

Civil wars are to be distinguished from surrogate wars, which are “generated entirely from the outside by neighboring governments that have a v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Maps
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Author’s Note
• Introduction: Congo, a Perennial Hot Spot
• 1 Congo as a Playing Field
• 2 African Players on the Congo Field
• 3 Identity as a Driver of Conflict
• 4 Congo’s War Against Women
• 5 Congo’s “Resource Curse”
• 6 The Responsibility to Protect
• Bibliography
• Index