From The Economist print edition
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| On his way out |
BY fin de régime standards, it was an elegant exit—if exit it was. Splendidly limousined as ever, President Mobutu Sese Seko swept off to the airport and a meeting of regional leaders in nearby Gabon that was to look for a negotiated end to Zaire’s civil war. He wanted to be and would be back, his flunkeys said. Many Zaireans hoped not. They wanted Laurent Kabila, the rebel leader, in Kinshasa, the capital, as soon as possible—and without resistance.
Though at midweek there were reports from well to the east of serious resistance—or was it just serious massacre, most of the 300 reported dead being civilians?—few doubted that Mr Kabila’s men were on their way. For Kinshasa’s citizens the question was whether army officers would be able to save the city from sack by its own defenders, and hand it over peacefully.
When General Likulia Bolongo passed the hat around among Kinshasa businessmen this week, it was not to ensure a fighting fund for their city’s defence, though the general is a respected professional soldier and in theory Mr Mobutu’s prime minister too. No, his message was just the opposite: “Give generously and I might be able to pay my troops not to rob you.”
They had in fact already begun, robbing people in the streets after dark, or raiding houses on the pretext of looking for rebels, and then looting. But much worse could follow, despite foreign governments’ pressure on both sides to avoid it. Whether it would was still partly up to Mr Mobutu.
At last weekend’s face-to-face talks between the rival leaders on board a South African navy ship, Mr Mobutu had tried to stick stubbornly to office. He seemed to believe that even now he could wangle something—or maybe, with the stubbornness of a man dying of cancer, felt he had nothing to lose by hanging on. He would leave, he said, but only when he could hand over to an elected president. The idea was farcical. It would have left him in power for a year or more while elections were held—an improbable event at the best of times in Zaire, and one of implausible results if it did ever happen. Mr Kabila, meeting his foe for the first time, turned the idea down flat. Mr Mobutu must go at once, he insisted.
The talks adjourned, supposedly for not more than ten days. But no one, except conceivably the South Africans, whose President Nelson Mandela had organised the talks and chaired them in person, believes the rivals will meet again. Back in Lubumbashi, in south-eastern Zaire, Mr Kabila, who had told Mr Mandela that he would stop his troops advancing for the moment, ordered them forward. The unusual resistance they seem to have met at Kenge, 190 km (120 miles) east of Kinshasa, appears to have made them pause, but no more.
Foreign governments’ eagerness for a peaceful handover is not prompted solely by concern for the citizens of Kinshasa or even for their own nationals there. France, Britain and the United States have troops in Congo, just across the river of that name from Kinshasa, ready for rescue missions, if need be. But the Americans know that if Mr Kabila takes the city by storm, or even simply marches in without negotiation, he emerges as total victor and they will have less leverage over him. And American enthusiasm for him has been cooled by his inability or unwillingness to curb atrocities against Rwandan refugees, his snub to Mr Mandela by arriving at the peace talks two days late and his inflexibility when he got there. The Americans want him to include all Zairean political leaders in a transition process leading to an election in a year or two’s time.
That looks unlikely, but for the fact that it is the Americans who want it. There is no doubt now who is the coming outside power in Zaire. While an American diplomat, Bill Richardson, has been striding around the region talking to Mr Kabila’s backers, the once-influential French have looked on as observers. They would have liked their ambassador in Congo to attend last weekend’s shipboard talks. Some francophone African leaders too hoped to be invited. But, South Africans apart, only one nation had its man there: the United States, with its Mr Richardson.
Meanwhile, far to the east, another and much nastier conflict is being fought out: one for the lives of Rwandan Hutu refugees. Mr Kabila’s men—to be generous to them—have little interest in saving the refugees. They and local villagers first attacked the refugees, then blocked efforts by the United Nations and others to rescue them, then demanded that all be removed to Rwanda within 60 days—and are still doing little to help the evacuation.
The UN, despite a disaster when refugees stampeded to get on a train and nearly 100 were killed, is doing what it can, taking those fit enough to move by truck, train and aircraft. By midweek 10,000 had been evacuated. But that left tens of thousands more, many of them near to death from wounds, disease, or plain lack of food. It would take a horror in Kinshasa to be worse than this.
How new a man is Kabila?
From The Economist print edition
IT ENDED quickly: Kinshasa fell within 12 hours on May 17th. President Mobutu Sese Seko, his family and friends fled to Togo; his army commander, who was trying to arrange a peace, was murdered. So were more than 200 other people, mainly soldiers who did not get out quickly enough. But there was no hostage-taking or killing or mass pillaging by the defeated army. Defying predictions of revenge and mayhem, a jubilant Kinshasa welcomed its liberators as its sons.
After more than 30 years of misrule, people’s joy, at least to begin with, was unconfined. Even the nouveau zaire, the inflated currency that had become a symbol of Mr Mobutu’s appalling rule, seemed to celebrate by mysteriously doubling in value. But, as the first enthusiasm subsided, his new subjects began to wonder who exactly their new leader was.
Their old one, Mr Mobutu, was Africa’s arch “toad king”: a description given by the Nigerian playwright, Wole Soyinka, to those monarchical rulers who lived in grotesque splendour while their people starved. He was also one of the last to go. In the toad kings’ place are a growing band of serious-minded men who are trying to make Africa work. Is Laurent Kabila, his old-fashioned appearance aside, one of them?
When he emerged in eastern Zaire last October, it was hoped that he might turn out to be. Africa’s new leaders are typically pragmatic and well-educated; they can speak the language of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; they know that not all their countries’ problems are caused by wicked foreigners.
In the north-east of Africa the club now consists of Issaias Afwerki of Eritrea, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Paul Kagame of Rwanda. Although the problems they face are very different, they have much in common. They all came to power leading guerrilla movements that eventually overthrew the old regimes. More or less Marxist in their youth, they now have adopted a coherent vision of development, seeing themselves as members of a global free market.
As a candidate for the club, Mr Kabila has friends to vote him in. He is close to Mr Museveni and Mr Kagame, and his military tactics and his good treatment of Congolese civilians (though not Rwandans) in liberated areas suggest their influence. Nor does his past as a hardline Marxist disqualify him: like the others, he claims to have moved with the times.
Most of Congo’s contracts with mining companies have been reviewed but renewed. The agreement to sell the diamonds from the MIBA mine in East Kasai province exclusively to De Beers has been torn up but this, it is explained, has been done on free-market grounds. “We don’t like monopolies,” said a spokesman. But there is one black mark: his nationalisation of Sizarail, the railway in the southern province that was Shaba and is now, once again, called Katanga, and the expulsion of its South African and Belgian managers. This has alarmed investors.
There is one particular difference between Mr Kabila and the other new leaders: time. The Eritreans took 30 years, the Ugandans 6 and the Rwandans 4 to win their revolutions. The years in the bush gave them time to forge a collective leadership of men who trusted one another. They came to power preaching the same message: the top men answer to committees, in which they do not win all the arguments.
Mr Kabila’s revolution has been too quick. Although he can claim to have been a rebel for more than 30 years, always loyal to his dream of destroying Mr Mobutu, he has not spent that time creating a vision or strategy for a new Congo. And the reports now coming out about him suggest that he has, so far, been uninspiring as a political leader. He ruled a small part of eastern Congo as a warlord, oppressing the local Babembe and Bavira people and, in all too familiar fashion, creaming off the fruits of local gold-mining for his own use. He showed callous disregard for Hutu refugees sheltering in Congo. A monarchical tendency was displayed in his dismissive snub of Nelson Mandela’s peace initiative.
When the so-called alliance of four parties was announced in Kivu last October, Mr Kabila was described as its spokesman. Collective responsibility turned out to be a myth. The only man who challenged Mr Kabila’s claim to leadership, André Kisase, died—in mysterious circumstances. Mr Kisase represented the old Katangese movement, perhaps no longer separatist but certainly seeking autonomy for the province.
Nothing since has been heard of the other members of the alliance. Mr Kabila and his young followers, most of whom have been in exile for years, have made all the running. They do not speak with one voice. Bizima Karaha, the foreign affairs spokesman, is reassuring about the plans for democratic elections. But Deogratias Bugera, the alliance secretary, speaks of “political education” and peasant power.
At mid-week, the world still awaited the most important indicator of Mr Kabila’s intentions: the appointment of a government. Would he accommodate some opposition leaders, such as Etienne Tshisekedi? The fear was that he would try to go it alone, his government reflecting not the differences within Congo, or the troubles ahead, but the reality of military power.
Congo’s fractured war
From The Economist print edition
The government, the rebels and their respective allies are all busy squabbling
AFTER dark, four tanks rolled out of the Ugandan base a few miles from Kisangani—which is held by the Ugandans and their Congolese rebel allies—and drove into town. Each of the four fired twice across the Congo river. There were no particular targets, no riposte and no casualties. The blasts lit up the night sky and shook buildings. The tanks then drove back to base.
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| Happy Kabila (left) under Mugabe’s brotherly protection |
The incident illustrates the confused, fractured state of the Congo war, which began almost a year ago and has sucked in troops from seven neighbours. It has become chaotic, often a localised scramble for loot, mainly gold and diamonds. This weekend, a peace treaty is supposed to be signed in Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, by all parties to the conflict. But they are far apart, and the effort seems doomed to fail. Even if they sign something, their ability to impose their will on this vast country will be negligible.
When most of the countries involved in the war met last weekend for Thabo Mbeki’s inauguration as South Africa’s president, Emile Ilunga, the new political leader of the main rebel movement, the Rally for Democracy (RCD), made his demands. He called on Congo’s President Laurent Kabila to stop bombing civilian targets and killing ethnic Tutsis, to release political prisoners, and to agree to talk directly to the rebels. Rwanda, which, with Uganda, backs the rebels, also insisted that Mr Kabila should disarm the Rwandan Hutu militias and their allies who fight for him. For their part, Mr Kabila’s officials continue to exhort the Congolese to take up sticks and stones to fight the “Rwandan invaders”. Peace does indeed seem remote.
The RCD, in public, and Rwandan officials, in private, say that were it just up to Mr Kabila, he would probably agree to talks. The stumbling-blocks, they say, are his Zimbabwean and Namibian allies. Zimbabwe and Rwanda, the most committed backers of the government and the rebels respectively, have been holding bilateral talks; diplomats describe these as a waste of time. This week Zimbabwe sent in extra troops.
Confusion on the ground has intensified. The various factions of the rebel movement and their foreign backers all bicker among themselves. Officially, Rwanda and Uganda say that they differ on the ways of arriving at their common goal. In fact, it has become pretty obvious that they no longer share even a goal.
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For a start, Rwanda shows no sign of wanting to end the war. Uganda, which is finding it ever harder to cover the costs of intervention, has committed itself to withdrawal and has already pulled out some of its men. The Ugandan commander says he does not have the money to complete this pull-out. Rwanda, although it is spending at least as much on the war as Uganda is, seems better at disguising this from foreign donors. Moreover, it is under a far greater threat than Uganda from incursions of Hutu rebels across the Congolese frontier. “We must defend our frontiers, or we perish,” says a Rwandan military commander.
The two countries no longer support the same rebel factions. Rwanda backs the RCD with Mr Ilunga as its political head and Jean-Pierre Ondekane as its military leader. Uganda backs a rebel splinter-group led by Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, who was ousted as leader of the RCD earlier this year. For the past few months, Uganda has also supported Jean-Pierre Bemba, who is heading a separate rebel group in Equateur province. So long as Rwanda and Uganda still have troops in Congo, there is no chance that the rift within the Congolese rebel ranks will heal. Distrust between the Rwandan-backed RCD faction and the Ugandan-backed Wamba faction is deep-seated.
The big military challenge for the rebels is to take Mbuji-Mayi, Congo’s diamond-mining centre. If they did, they could then move on the capital, Kinshasa. But Mbuji-Mayi is defended by Zimbabwean troops whose political and military masters are doing well from mining—and from contracts for supplying the troops. So the Zimbabweans are unlikely to withdraw. The Angolans, who defended Kinshasa from rebel attack last summer, have now pulled back many of their troops. The rest are in the far west, away from what fighting there is.
Rwandan sources now concede that taking Kinshasa may no longer be their aim. There are even rumours that the Rwandans have offered the Zimbabweans a free hand to dig diamonds around Mbuji-Mayi if they hand over Hutus fighting alongside pro-government forces. But Mr Ondekane, the RCD’s military boss, insists that, even without Rwandan help, he is determined to continue his advance on Kinshasa. Western observers are unanimous in saying that he does not have the means to do this.
The war is dead. Long live the war
From The Economist print edition
WELL, they signed in the end, most of them; but whether their signatures are enough to bring peace to Congo remains to be seen. Six heads of African governments embroiled in Congo’s rebellion, including Congo’s own president, Laurent Kabila, flew to Lusaka, the Zambian capital, last weekend and put their names to an agreement which committed them to a ceasefire and a withdrawal of foreign troops from the country. “The war is over,” exulted Yerodia Abdoulaye Ndombasi, Congo’s foreign minister. He may regret his certainty.
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| His signature would be even more welcome if Kabila’s rebels had signed too |
The signing had already been delayed for two weeks while the search for a text acceptable to everybody dragged on. Then, on July 10th, the document appeared to be ready and the presidents started flying into Lusaka. But by midday only one person had taken his seat in the conference hall: Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, who claims to lead the main group of rebels, the Rally for Democracy. But is he still its leader? No, said a rival bunch, which claims he has been deposed. Another rebel group, the Movement for the Liberation of Congo, said it would not sign unless both the others did.
For more than 12 hours, the presidents tried to get all of them to sign. They failed and, unwilling to go home empty-handed, trooped into the conference centre to inscribe their own names. President Frederick Chiluba of Zambia, the peace talks’ host, said he would go to eastern Congo, where the rebels are based, and get their signatures there. Please do, said everybody, including President Bill Clinton and the United Nations secretary-general, Kofi Annan.
What happens if the rebels still do not sign? President Kabila thinks that will not matter. “The rebels’ bosses have signed,” he said on July 14th, referring to the governments of Rwanda and Uganda, which he called the real “invaders of Congo”. But whether those governments will wish, or be able, to make the rebels accept the deal is far from clear.
The agreement says that shooting should have stopped 24 hours after it was signed. Two weeks later the various official armies involved are supposed to pull apart. Their commanders, having formed a joint military council, should then organise the disarmament of the militias involved in the fighting, including the Interahamwe, the Rwandan Hutu extremists who carried out the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 and then moved into Congo. After four months, the five foreign armies now in Congo will begin to withdraw, and be replaced by a UN peacekeeping force. Two months later, Mr Kabila and the rebels are supposed to have integrated their forces into a new Congolese army and be sitting down together to discuss a new democratic system for Congo.
It sounds like fantasy, and may well turn out to be just that. Yet underneath the pious hopes lies an element of serious reconsideration. The leaders of the outside countries involved in the war have become increasingly reluctant to go on fighting each other in the jungles of Congo, even though some of them, or their cronies, have done well out of business deals there. They are also under pressure from the western countries that give them aid, and can help them to get assistance from the World Bank or the IMF.
And the weeks of talks have helped the various governments to understand each other’s concerns. Rwanda and Uganda got involved in the Congo mess because they wanted to hunt down those genocidal Rwandan Hutus. Mr Kabila and his allies—Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia—saw this as an invasion; but now they acknowledge that Rwanda does have genuine worries about the intentions of the armed Hutus in eastern Congo. That is why, despite some reservations from Zimbabwe, they have agreed to the disarming of the Interahamwe.
But will the Interahamwe hang around and wait to be arrested and disarmed? It seems likelier that, by the time that joint military council has got itself organised, they will have melted into the jungle. The idea that the peacekeeping can then be handed over to the UN is even odder. The area involved, bigger than France and Germany combined, has almost no roads; it is covered with thick bush criss-crossed by thousands of paths known only to the locals. It could take, on one glum estimate, half a million men to police it, most of them probably with no idea of how to tell a Congolese from a Rwandan. And the UN’s peacekeeping department is at the moment talking of a mere 500 armed monitors. A band of 2,000 tough guerrillas who knew the country well could run rings round such a force.
The UN’s Mr Annan does not want to duck the challenge. He was, after all, in charge of the organisation’s peacekeeping in 1994, when the world did nothing to stop the genocide in Rwanda. His successor this week sent a party of negotiators to the area, but delayed sending a technical team because of the rebels’ failure to sign the accord. The UN’s overstretched peacekeeping department is expected to remind Mr Annan, who already knows the facts all too well, just how tough peacekeeping in Congo would be. Neither an army of peace-makers, nor peace itself, is likely to reach Congo any time soon
Split Congo, with peace treaties but no peace
From The Economist print edition
The United Nations is supposed to monitor Congo’s ceasefire but, so far, the firing has not quite ceased
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| Kabila’s half-kingdom |
WHEN a petrol tanker arrived at the port of Mbandaka on the Congo river the other day, the provincial governor was disappointed to find that the fuel was destined for the army, not for the electricity company or the town. The demands of war have meant that Mbandaka, a city of several hundred thousand people, has had no electricity for over a year. The vice-governor shrugs and says that the people do not mind because these are times of sacrifice.
That is what President Laurent Kabila’s government would like to think. But war has drained the country’s meagre resources, leaving little room for voluntary sacrifice. Increasing numbers of people edge closer to absolute poverty. In certain districts of the capital, Kinshasa, many are finding that they cannot even eat every day. The UN says that over 1m people have been displaced.
Government revenue is trickling away, largely because vast tracts of the country are under rebel control. Making matters worse, the government has banned the use of dollars, which used to circulate freely. In normal times it would make sense to try to stabilise the exchange rate, clean up the banking system and regulate the sprawling informal economy. But, with the war still simmering despite the peace treaty that was signed this summer, the times are far from normal.
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The government has decided that the country’s private sector is to blame for the collapse of the new currency it launched in July last year. In January, with only a week’s warning, it banned all informal exchange dealing, closing down Kinshasa’s famous “Wall Street”, where local currency dealers sat on the pavement dealing in anything from dollars to drachmas. Now, all foreign currencies must be changed at commercial banks at the official rate, barely a third of the black-market rate. But the black-market rate determines the prices of everything from beer to school fees. The result is a shortage of foreign exchange—and the driving underground of Congo’s lucrative diamond trade.
Everyone, from vegetable sellers to large importers, agrees that the foreign-exchange shortage will worsen and the economy, already gasping, could soon suffocate. Congolese businessmen, big and small, have weathered nationalisation, civil war and bouts of looting. But now many are in the mood to shut up shop. They question whether Mr Kabila imposed the currency measures for sound economic reasons or to allow members of his government to stuff dollars into their own pockets. Reports that the army has set up joint-ventures with its military ally, Zimbabwe, to sell gold and diamonds, have exacerbated a growing sense of frustration and betrayal.
Neither the government nor the rebels have a coherent plan for Congo’s future and both are deeply unpopular. The outsiders are all still there, at least to some extent. Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia prop up the government; Uganda and Rwanda run the rebel movements. Burundi also has troops in Congo. Although all involved in the Congo war signed the peace treaty (negotiated in Lusaka) in July or August, there is no sign of forces being withdrawn. Many suspect that the Lusaka deal was designed to freeze the interveners’ positions on the ground.
Outsiders have economic as well as political reasons for staying. Heavy fighting has stopped, but skirmishes continue between armies dug in round honeypot centres, such as the diamond mines. Uganda and Rwanda, supposedly allies, but in fact backing different rebel factions, compete for control of Kisangani . In August, the two fought a pitched battle for this port on the Congo river.
What, meanwhile, has happened to the Hutu militiamen whose presence in eastern Congo was the reason Rwanda and Uganda gave for intervening in the first place? According to the terms of the ceasefire, they are supposed to be disarmed. Are they hiding in the bush, absorbed into President Kabila’s army or attached to Zimbabwean forces in Congo, as the Rwandans claim?
It is unlikely that the militiamen still exist as a coherent fighting unit, but also unlikely that they can be peacefully neutralised. The official Rwandan news agency proudly announced this month that Rwandan troops and Congolese rebels had killed about 200 Rwandan Hutus, suspected of involvement in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
This is the ceasefire that the United Nations is supposed to be sending military observers to monitor. So far, UN military liaison officers have gone to the capitals of all the countries involved in the war. On October 12th, the UN received security guarantees from all three rebel movements, and military teams are exploring ten areas in eastern Congo to see if observers can be deployed there. Monitoring the status quo may be possible but, if serious fighting restarts, peacekeeping will be out of the question.
Congo’s hidden war
From The Economist print edition
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Uganda and Rwanda used to be friends. For nearly two years now, they have been fighting each other in Congo—with devastating consequences
THEY could not agree who had started the war in Kisangani, nor who ended it. For six days last week, Rwandan and Ugandan soldiers, on foreign soil and more than 500 kilometres (310 miles) from home, rained shells and mortar fire on each other, killing up to 250 civilians in this sprawling riverside town in central Congo, and wounding over 1,000. Much of central Kisangani, including the imposing cathedral at the river’s edge, was destroyed. It was the third, and by far the most brutal, time the two armies have battled for control of the town since they began fighting each other there nearly a year ago.
It is dispiriting enough that Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, and Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, old friends once considered part of a “new generation” of African leaders, should be at war. It is doubly so that the wider consequences should be so grave: their struggle, waged deep inside Congo, is a serious setback for efforts by the United Nations and others to help Africa solve its wars.
The UN had agreed to send 5,500 troops to Congo to monitor a peace deal signed a year ago by the country’s government and the five countries with soldiers on its territory: Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, Rwanda and Uganda. But repeated breaches of the ceasefire have delayed the UN deployment. Now the whole operation is in doubt. On June 13th, a furious Kofi Annan, the UN’s secretary-general, called on the Security Council to use sanctions and other punitive measures to force Uganda and Rwanda to pull their troops out.
The latest battle for Kisangani ended on June 11th, when Rwanda announced a unilateral withdrawal of its troops, citing concern about “unnecessary fighting and the loss of innocent lives” in the city, but boasting of a tactical victory. For their part, the Ugandans denied defeat, saying their forces too had unilaterally withdrawn to avoid further casualties. Both sides said they would withdraw to 100km from the city, though that would still leave their armies deep inside Congo. Whether they do even that, and then stay put, depends on the powers of persuasion of the UN on the ground. So far, the UN has only 21 unarmed observers in Kisangani, and no peacekeepers at all.
What has this fighting been about? The two countries first invaded the country in 1996 to drive Mobutu Sese Seko from power and install Laurent Kabila as president. When, once in office, President Kabila did not do as they ordered, the two invading presidents tried to oust him, but they failed and then fell out over their aims in Congo. Each accused the other of using the war against Mr Kabila for his own ends. In August 1998, Rwanda sent thousands of soldiers to help its proxy, the rebel Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD). Though the Ugandans then joined in, Rwanda accused them of failing to fight the same war, of pursuing short-term commercial interests and of losing sight of the real enemy. When the RCD split in two, Rwanda and Uganda backed different factions and Uganda sponsored a third.
Uganda does not micro-manage the rebels it supports in Congo as Rwanda does. It has argued throughout that its aim has been to “empower” them. President Museveni accuses Rwanda of trying to destroy Congo, and says that Rwanda manipulates and gags its rebels, and does not understand how to build support among the people. Rwandans repeatedly single out Mr Museveni’s chief of staff, Brigadier James Kazini, as the man who plunged Kisangani into war: he dispatched his men to the town when it was already occupied by Rwandans and their rebel friends.
But other motives are mixed in. One is the control of mineral wealth: the diamond trade thrives in and around Kisangani, and some Ugandans close to Mr Museveni have grown rich exporting gold and other commodities from the country’s north-east. The Rwandans also argue that they are acting to protect their national security; many of their countrymen are still under threat, they say, from Congo-based exiles who took part in the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
The battle for Kisangani has become part of a wider rivalry for regional supremacy. To that end, Rwanda has gained territory for its proxy army from the past week’s fighting. It has consolidated its control of the town’s two airports, while the Ugandans have withdrawn across the nearby river Tshopo. Between the two of them, Rwanda and Uganda now hold sway over more than half of the entire country.
The former friendship between the two presidents now looks irreparably damaged. When Mr Kagame, once a top officer in Mr Museveni’s guerrilla army, was sworn in as president of Rwanda in April, Mr Museveni was notably absent. Mr Kagame now talks angrily of Rwandans “growing tired of being told what to do”. They have become disillusioned with the Ugandan president over the past 18 months. “The man is now our main problem,” says a senior Rwandan official. “He lies at summit meetings, he passes the buck to his commanders, he uses the media to attack us.”
For their part, Ugandans feel betrayed by Mr Kagame, whom they say they helped to seize power. They were outraged by the news that he had recently met his sworn enemy, President Kabila. Now they accuse Mr Kagame of cutting a secret deal with him.
As relief agencies began this week to fly food into Kisangani, there were the first signs for months that normal life might resume. Tens of thousands of refugees ventured back from surrounding hiding places. The UN monitors also moved back in. But they are ill-equipped to do much to stop further warfare. The two foreign armies have been fighting each other, on and off, in Kisangani since May, despite ceasefire promises to the UN.
Even if the latest ceasefire holds, huge damage has already been done. A recent study for the International Rescue Committee, a refugee agency based in New York, suggests that a staggering 1.7m of the deaths in eastern Congo since August 1998 can be attributed, directly or indirectly, to the fighting
From The Economist print edition
ON A rainy Sunday, Marie-José sits in her dark home in Masina, one of Kinshasa’s poorest neighbourhoods, which has not had electricity for several days. Her husband, Pierre, is a soldier in the national army. Under the late Mobutu Sese Seko he was an officer, earning enough to keep his family alive. But these days, the only soldiers who earn regular salaries are those who swept President Laurent Kabila to power in May 1997. Pierre has not been paid for three months. Marie-José augments their income by selling cold drinks from her home, but it is not enough to send her seven children to school.
The military front is hundreds of kilometres away. Except for a few weeks in August 1998, when rebels attacking the capital were routed by the Angolan soldiers who had come to Mr Kabila’s aid, Kinshasa has been spared the violence of war. The city of 6m people gives a calm and functioning outward appearance. But scenes of bustling streets and well-dressed Congolese going about their business belie the growing hardship faced by all but the richest local residents, or Kinois.
The main topic of conversation is the economy, or rather its collapse. The Congolese franc was recently devalued from nine to the dollar to 23.5. But the black-market rate is over 60 francs to the dollar. Year-on-year inflation hit 84% in May, as prices rose in line with the black market. The government prints money non-stop to finance the war. At at the same time, it blames the currency depreciation on “economic saboteurs”, by which it means big businesses run by foreigners.
But no one is fooled. Although rebel occupation of the country’s most productive areas has contributed to the economic crisis, most Kinois blame Mr Kabila and his advisers for their troubles. Salaries, many of which are set in dollars but paid out in francs at the official rate, are daily eroded by price increases. With so many people hit in their pockets, the informal social-welfare net consisting of extended family and friends is no longer sufficient. A growing number of households are eating less than once a day, and few people nowadays can afford the costs of even rudimentary medical care.
Strangely, this has not led to a higher crime rate in the capital; it has one of the lowest rates in Africa. The economic hardship has, however, cost Mr Kabila much of his support. “He does not keep his promises, there is no reason to trust him,” says Marie-José. Gaby, a middle-class mother of eight, says she is ashamed to speak Swahili, the language used by Mr Kabila and his circle. Their sentiments are shared by many. At a busy intersection, a painted billboard of Mr Kabila standing amid bulldozers and building equipment—a plug for his national reconstruction plans—has been splintered by the stones thrown at it
From The Economist print edition
The war in Congo is the world’s biggest, affecting at least ten countries and millions of people. Can anything be done?
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THE hefty cargo plane grinds on across Africa, the deafening monotony of its engines never changing. The hold is stuffed with drums of fuel and crates of ammunition, spare parts for weapons and medical supplies. Perched among them are a dozen soldiers, one of whom is carrying a suitcase full of dollars. Three young women, one of them with a child, crouch among the drums with wrapped-up bundles, a couple of live chickens and several bunches of bananas.
The old Russian-made plane is flown by Ukrainians. They and the plane have been rented in Kiev by a Greek entrepreneur who also deals in coffee, timber and arms. This time he has hired it out to the Ugandan army, but it could have been made available to any one of the seven national armies at war in Congo. His business prospects look good. Peace is impossible just now.
Below, the forest stretches to the horizon in all directions, a vast head of dark trees broken only by slate-coloured rivers. Look down two hours later, and nothing has changed. It is as if the plane hasn’t moved. Congo is big. Lay a map of Europe across Congo, with London at its western end, and the eastern border falls 200 miles beyond Moscow.
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War in Congo does not involve huge armies and terrible battles, but a few guns can send hundreds of thousands fleeing their homes. It threatens Congo’s nine neighbours with destabilisation, and with thousands of refugees pouring into their border areas. In the first week of December alone, by UN estimates, more than 60,000 refugees fled into Zambia from fighting that has just delivered the town of Pweto to Congo’s anti-government rebels. War in Congo means a generation growing up without inoculation or education and the rapid spread of AIDS, the camp-follower of war in Africa. A recent United Nations report described Congo’s war as one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, affecting some 16m people.
Congo was only briefly a nation state. For most of history it was a blank on the map, luring in the greedy and unwary. It was first pillaged by the slave kingdoms and foreign slavers; then by predators looking for ivory, rubber, timber, copper, gold and diamonds. Leopold, king of the Belgians, grabbed it in 1885 to make himself a private kingdom. That sparked the imperial takeover of Africa by Europeans at the end of the 19th century.
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| Leopold plundered |
Leopold’s agents cut off hands and heads to force the inhabitants to deliver its riches to him. Then came Belgian state rulers. They built some roads and brought in health and education programmes, but blocked any political development. When Congo was pitched into independence in 1960, there was chaos.
Congo nearly broke up; then out of the chaos came Mobutu Sese Seko, one of the more grotesque rulers of independent Africa. America and Europe supported him because he was anti-communist; but he was Leopold’s true successor, regarding the country as his personal possession. He renamed it Zaire, used the treasury as his bank account and ruled by allowing supporters and rivals to feed off the state. If they became too greedy or powerful, he would have them thrown into prison for a while before being given another post to plunder. On two occasions he encouraged his unpaid, disgruntled soldiers to satisfy themselves by looting the cities. He built himself palaces and allowed the roads the Belgians had built to disintegrate. This helped break up Congo into fiefs. When Mobutu’s rule ended in 1997, the nation state was dead. The only national organisation was the Catholic church.
One of his fiefs was Hutu-ruled Rwanda. Mobutu called its president, Juvenal Habyarimana, his baby brother. In 1994 Habyarimana was killed in a plane crash, and the rump of his regime carried out genocide against Rwanda’s Tutsi minority. But, with Ugandan help, the Tutsis triumphed. The old Rwandan army and the gangs of killers fled into Congo, where Mobutu gave them shelter and weapons. In 1996 the new Tutsi-dominated Rwandan army crossed the border and attacked the Hutu camps, intending to set up a buffer zone to protect its western border. The attack worked better than anticipated and the Rwandans, Ugandans and their Congolese allies kept walking westwards until they took the capital, Kinshasa. Mortally ill, Mobutu fled and the Rwandans installed Laurent Kabila as president.
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| Mobutu stole |
A year later, Mr Kabila tried to wriggle out of the control of the Rwandans and Ugandans. He allied himself with their enemies, the Hutu militias in eastern Congo. In response they launched another rebellion to try to dislodge him. But this time Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Sudan and Chad sent troops to defend him. They said they were acting on principle, to protect a neighbouring state from invasion. The war reached a stalemate with the country divided. In the western half, Mr Kabila was backed by Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia (Sudan and Chad withdrew). The east was controlled by three rebel movements and their creators and controllers, Uganda and Rwanda. Burundi also has troops in Congo allied to the Rwandans, but these stay close to the Burundi border.
In June and July last year, a peace agreement was signed in Lusaka by the government of Congo, the three rebel groups and five intervening nations. It provided a timetable for a ceasefire, the deployment of African military observers supported by UN monitors, the disarming of “negative forces” (the militia gangs that roam eastern Congo), and the eventual withdrawal of all foreign forces. It also prescribed a national dialogue between Mr Kabila and the armed and unarmed opposition.
Unsurprisingly, it has not worked. The ceasefire has been persistently broken by all sides, most recently with the fighting around Pweto. Although the defence chiefs of six of the intervening countries, led by Zimbabwe, and several rebel groups signed a deal in Harare on December 6th to pull back their forces from front-line positions, it is still unlikely to happen. The exploitation of the country by the intervening armies reinforces the imperialist nature of the invasion, as do their disparaging comments about the Congolese. “A hopeless people,” remarked one senior Rwandan. “All they want to do is drink and dance.”
Each of the interveners in Congo has complex and different reasons for being there. At one level, they have been sucked into the vacuum; social and population pressure east of Congo has drawn the neighbours towards a country with few people for its size and no state structures. But each also had internal political reasons for going to Congo.
The Rwandans want to track down the perpetrators of genocide and either drive them back to Rwanda or kill them. The success of the 1996 invasion and American support has made them over-confident. President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda also has ambitions bigger than his own country. He wants the economy of eastern Congo to link up with East Africa, and wants to replicate his own political system in Congo. The rebel Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC) was created by Uganda, and mimics Mr Museveni’s political analysis and ideology.
On the other side, Mr Kabila’s allies also have domestic reasons for being in Congo. Sudan, engaged in a proxy war with Uganda, wanted another way to attack it. Angola wanted to get into Congo to stop its own rebel movement, UNITA, from using Congolese territory as a supply route and rear base. Namibia got involved because it is indebted to Angola. President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, jealous of South Africa’s new power in southern Africa, wanted to make himself the region’s military leader. Others loiter in the background: North Korea has sent some 400 soldiers to help train Mr Kabila’s fledgling army and tons of weapons, reportedly in exchange for future sales of copper, cobalt and uranium.
Many western diplomats and analysts, as well as most Congolese, suspect that America is secretly funding Rwanda and Uganda. State Department officials deny this, but it is hard to see how these poor countries can fight without outside resources. Their meagre defence budgets (Uganda’s is allegedly $100m this year) cannot possibly sustain their operations in Congo.
Once in Congo, the interveners found commercial reasons to stay. The war has created huge business opportunities which have obscured its primary, political, cause. Hundreds of dodgy businessmen, mercenaries, arms dealers and security companies have come to the region. Diamonds are a big prize and the main source of foreign exchange for Mr Kabila. It is hardly surprising that the war ground to a halt around Mbuji-Mayi, the main diamond-producing area. Congo pays for Zimbabwe’s presence with a diamond-mine concession. It has also formed a joint oil company with Angola.
Senior military officers from all the armies, as well as their political cronies back home, make money trading diamonds, gold, coffee and timber, and from contracts to feed and supply their troops. They have little interest in peace. Local and foreign businessmen often pay them to provide troops to guard a valuable mine or a farm. The Kilo Moto gold mine in Kivu has been taken over by freelance diggers, but the entrance is guarded by Ugandan soldiers who tax them. Kigali and Kampala are crawling with diamond dealers and others looking for Congo’s rare minerals, such as tantalite and niobium. The loot is not confined to minerals. One Ugandan unit, returning from Congo, caused fury in both countries by having their newly acquired Congolese wives and girlfriends flown home with them at government expense. War booty, said chauvinistic Ugandan politicians. Rape and theft, said Congolese men.
When Laurent Kabila was catapulted to power by Uganda and Rwanda, everyone thought Congo would change. He could hardly do worse than Mobutu, they argued. Perhaps he would turn into one of the much-vaunted “new leaders” of Africa. He had few enemies. Everyone wanted to help him rebuild Congo. Sadly, he turned out to be little more than an outsize village chief, adept at staying in power, but with no vision and a deep distrust of competence. He has surrounded himself with relatives, friends and oddballs he scooped up on his march to Kinshasa. Mentally he is stuck in the cold war of the early 1960s, imagining global plots against Congo.
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| Abandoned in Kisangani |
The formal economy is dead. Not far from the central bank in central Kinshasa, carefully tended cabbages have sprung from a small patch of waste ground by the roadside. Nearby, families have moved into the ruins of a half-built office block, hanging their washing over the abandoned concrete pillars and cooking on open fires on the floors of rooms designed for board meetings. Only about 20% of the city’s 4m-5m people have jobs. Most of these pay, if at all, about $8 or $9 a month. The city has little fuel, so people get up before dawn to walk to work. Most eat nothing all day, then return on foot to the one daily meal of cassava porridge or bread. Less than 30% of the capital’s children are in school, and few can afford medicine if they are ill.
Mr Kabila blames all this on the war. It has more to do with his old-fashioned statist policies and his arbitrary way of handing out contracts and concessions and then cancelling them. That has frightened off foreign companies. So has his policy of locking up foreigners and demanding ransom. Heineken, a Dutch brewing company, recently paid $1m in cash to the finance minister to secure the release of its two senior executives in Kinshasa. Maurice Templesman, an American diamond dealer, also lost millions of dollars when his staff were seized and thrown out of the country. One foreign security company in Kinshasa says its best new business is negotiating the release of foreign nationals arrested by the government.
Mobutu played the country and its political elite like a chess master. Mr Kabila tries the same techniques; putting people in power or in prison and playing the ethnic card. But he is no expert. Long in exile, he barely understands Congo. There have been splits and mutinies in his fledgling army and his ministers are at each other’s throats. Only in the south-east, his home territory, does he still have some support. The impoverished people of Kinshasa despise him, but will not demonstrate against him for fear of being accused of supporting the rebel movements—which they do not.
Mr Kabila is currently trying to get the Lusaka accord rewritten. He has blocked the deployment of UN military observers and humiliated and rejected Ketumile Masire, the former Botswanan president, who was appointed to organise a national dialogue. He even failed to turn up at meetings with his backers, Angola and Zimbabwe. President Eduardo dos Santos of Angola warned him in August that he had “had enough of his arrogance”, and that the allies would withdraw from Congo if he continued to obstruct the peacemakers. But Mr dos Santos knows there is, as yet, no alternative to Mr Kabila and that there would be chaos if the allies withdrew now.
That is the crux of the problem. Mr Kabila has failed, but there is no one else who enjoys national support or looks remotely capable of pulling the country together. Mobutu ensured that every politician in Congo was smeared with his corruption. Nor do the rebel movements present an alternative. The Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) split apart, with one faction supported by Uganda and the other by Rwanda. Uganda then launched the MLC and, in June, the former allies fought a full-scale battle in Kisangani for six days, destroying much of the town’s centre and killing 619 civilians. This engagement also destroyed the credibility of the two leaders, Mr Museveni and Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, in Congo. America and western countries were furious with them and blocked Uganda’s promised debt relief as punishment.
Both factions of the RCD are now deeply unpopular in their own areas. The clumsy intervention of Rwanda and Uganda in South and North Kivu has stirred up bitter ethnic rivalry. Much of this region suffers from the same Hutu-Tutsi divisions that exist in Rwanda and Burundi. The intervention has upset the fragile balance, and the region flares with massacre and counter-massacre.
Local communities have tried to defend themselves against all outsiders by forming self-defence militias, but many of these have degenerated into wandering gangs of mercenaries and bandits, the “negative forces” of the Lusaka accord. Some are linked to Rwandan Hutus, some fight against them. Mr Kabila is fanning the flames by sending them weapons across Lake Tanganyika. The Kivus are now a horrendous mess of wars and sub-wars that will burn on long after the national war is over.
In northern Congo, the picture is slightly better. Jean-Pierre Bemba, the young MLC leader and a businessman, is popular there because his Ugandan-run army is fairly disciplined and, in Mobutu’s home area, he is seen as his successor. It is a label he vigorously rejects, since he knows it will kill support for him in other places.
The present situation is deadlocked and unstable. The UN will not deploy its forces until it is convinced that all parties are serious about peace, but the “negative forces”, Hutu militias, gangs and others have signed no ceasefire and have little interest in peace. That means the foreign forces cannot fulfill the Lusaka accord and leave. But their governments, even the oil-rich Angolans, are worried about the cost. They are all engaging in bilateral talks with each other; but that increases mistrust and suspicion.
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| What will Kabila do? |
The Rwandans, realising how unpopular they are in Congo, have given up hope of overthrowing Mr Kabila and instead have offered to withdraw their troops to the Kivus. Zimbabwe, hard-pressed by domestic problems, wants its 12,000 troops out as soon as there is a face-saving formula. Their departure could destabilise Mr Kabila. Maybe the Angolans, left holding the fort, will remove him. At present they seem to be trying to bring in Mr Bemba and a representative of the unarmed opposition to create a triumvirate with Mr Kabila. To achieve this, the Angolans have to trust Mr Bemba’s backer, Uganda. They don’t, because Uganda has been a conduit for arms to UNITA rebels in Angola. Besides, the Ugandan army and the MLC are still pushing westwards towards the strategic city of Mbandaka, garrisoned by Angolans.
And what of the Congolese people in all this? Impoverished, disregarded and oppressed, they still give one clear message almost unanimously in every conversation: they do not want Congo to break up. But the long decompositon of this vast country seems inevitable, whoever rules in Kinshasa.
This war could rumble on for years, if not decades. The Lusaka accord, concedes a senior UN representative, is not going to work; but no one has a better plan. The best he can suggest is that outsiders remain engaged, help the victims, try to understand what is happening—and not make it worse. Congo’s experience of outsiders is, to put it mildly, discouraging.
A snub from Kabila
From The Economist print edition
But Congo’s ruler is now irritating his allies as well as his opponents
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| He walked out |
LAURENT KABILA, Congo’s president, plays by his own rules. He often turns up late for meetings, and sometimes not at all. So it was no surprise for other African leaders when he abandoned an emergency summit in Lusaka in the early hours of August 15th to attend to “important business” at home. He left the others to draft a communiqué on how best to save his country.
But Congo may be beyond salvation, for now. For the past six months the United Nations has been thinking about sending 5,500 peacekeeping troops to protect and enforce the modest mission of some 250 observers already there. But the Security Council may conclude that there is no peace to be kept.
Mr Kabila and his allies—Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia—signed up to a ceasefire at Lusaka, in neutral Zambia, a year ago. So did the three Congolese rebel movements and their Rwandan and Ugandan sponsors. An ambitious peace accord was drawn up, providing for an end to hostilities, a phased deployment of UN peacekeepers, and a process of national reconciliation. But, regardless of the ceasefire, fighting continues on several fronts, notably in the north-western province of Equateur and in the eastern border regions of North and South Kivu.
Mr Kabila determinedly puts the fighting in the context of a foreign invasion, refusing to see the rebels as anything more than Rwandan and Ugandan puppets. And that view is indeed supported by many of the Congolese living in rebel-held areas. They accuse rebel movements, such as the Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), of having no agenda beyond their own enrichment. In rebel-held Kisangani, the Ugandan and Rwandan armies fought each other for six days in June, killing more than 600 Congolese civilians.
The Rwandan government and the RCD both recently offered to pull back thousands of their troops from frontline positions, creating a giant “disengagement zone” in Congo. But the proposal came with the precondition that the UN send in enough troops to fill the vacuum and prevent Mr Kabila from taking advantage of the gesture.
The Congolese government has been a difficult host to the UN observers, constantly vetoing missions to sensitive areas and holding out against the arrival of peacekeeping troops. Many Congolese feel that the UN is sanctioning their country’s partition rather than defending its sovereignty.
But Mr Kabila’s real contempt has been reserved for Ketumile Masire, a respected former president of Botswana. Brought in, against his own better judgment, to serve as Congo’s “facilitator”, Mr Masire was given a mandate to create a dialogue between government and rebels to pave the way for a national conference on Congo’s political future. His exact offence is not clear, but Mr Kabila has repeatedly called for his removal, demanding that the UN or the Organisation of African Unity come up with an alternative.
In rudely rejecting both Sir Ketumile and the Lusaka summit, Mr Kabila has not just upset would-be peacemakers. He is also snubbing the allies who rode to his rescue two years ago and whose troops still prop him up. An exasperated Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s president, who has lent him 12,000 soldiers in return for unspecified commercial opportunities, hinted that Mr Kabila should pay heed, and listen to his peers.
Kabila is dead, long live Kabila
From The Economist print edition
Joseph Kabila has inherited Congo’s presidency from his father Laurent, but not much power to go with it
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CONGO buried its assassinated president, Laurent Kabila, this week with full military pomp at a marble mausoleum in the capital, Kinshasa. The following day his son, Joseph, was to be inaugurated as president but the ceremony was at first delayed, apparently to allow parliament, handpicked by his father, to ratify the succession.
In death, Mr Kabila inspired an upsurge of nationalism, something he had never managed to achieve in life. His funeral ceremony, held in the vast Chinese-built People’s Palace, was marked by outbursts of anger against Rwanda and Uganda. Those two countries invaded Congo in 1998 in support of rebel movements, and still control much of its territory. Gaetan Kakudji, Mr Kabila’s cousin and Congo’s interior minister, reminded the crowd of that, bringing the ceremony to a close with a blast of nationalist fury. The crowds pressing around the palace compound bayed their approval, vowing to avenge the president’s murder and punish the colonialists who plotted it.
If that mood continues, so will the war. The new President Kabila may just be a stop-gap, quickly appointed to ensure continuity and avoid a power struggle that might benefit the rebels. None of the regime’s faces have changed save the president’s and the old guard insists there will be no policy changes either. But in private some of the inner circle admit that their new leader is willing to open talks with the rebels and the countries that support them. That would be a huge departure from his father’s stubborn attitude, which even his allies had seen as the main obstacle to peace.
Louis Michel, the foreign minister of Belgium, Congo’s former colonial power, has embarked on a mission to harness these hopes. After attending the funeral, he set out for exploratory talks with every neighbouring power involved in the war. “What we have heard from the Rwandans, the rebels and the administration here suggests some faint signs for optimism,” his spokesman said. Businessmen in Kinshasa also showed signs of optimism: the Congolese franc regained a third of its value against the dollar the day after Mr Kabila’s death. The two Ugandan-backed rebel groups, the Movement for the Liberation of Congo and the Rally for Congolese Democracy, have just agreed to merge, slightly simplifying the process of negotiation.
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But the young Mr Kabila makes an improbable peace-broker for such an intractable conflict. He is an unknown, callow youth between 28 and 31 years old, promoted to the rank of major-general by his father after some military training in China. He speaks the official national language, French, poorly and the unofficial one, Lingala, not at all. He said nothing at his father’s funeral and has yet to address the nation. He has given only one recent interview, in English, to Zimbabwean television.
Mr Kabila may not even have the power to make peace. His father’s funeral clearly showed who is now calling the shots in Congo. The soldiers closely guarding the president were not Congolese but Zimbabweans and Angolans. The Congolese troops remained outside the building, without bullets in their guns, according to some reports. On the dais, Mr Kabila received the presidents who will, at least in the short term, be his masters: Sam Nujoma of Namibia, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe and, especially, Eduardo dos Santos of Angola.
In the past, the Angolan president had expressed exasperation at the late Mr Kabila’s failure to implement the 1999 Lusaka peace accord that would have ended the civil war. Since the assassination, Angola has hugely increased the number of its troops in Congo to more than 4,000. Some of them now control critical places such as the airport, while Congolese soldiers sit idle in their barracks. Angola’s influence is rivalled only by that of Zimbabwe, which has more troops in the country, including the bodyguard that surrounds the new president at his home, the Marble Palace.
So did the Angolans or Zimbabweans instigate their ally’s murder? There are some signs that the killing was planned, not simply the act of a single crazed gunman as the official version has it. There was no panic in the government after the assassination, diplomatic sources say. Although Mr Kabila almost certainly died within minutes or hours of his shooting, his body was flown to Harare, ostensibly for treatment but probably merely to give the government time to reorganise and agree on a successor. Orders were issued in his name and the death was kept secret for 50 hours. As a result, Kinshasa remained calm and factions in the army that might have risen up were disarmed. But if Mr Kabila’s killing was planned—and it may well have arisen just from discontent among the palace guard—it is still not clear what it was meant to achieve.
Peace here means war elsewhere
From The Economist print edition
What happens to the foreign armies as Congo moves towards peace?
AN EASING of the war in Congo may lead to a fiercer war in some of Congo’s nine neighbours. The most likely victims—Rwanda, Burundi and Angola—are already bracing themselves for an upsurge in fighting. Tanzania, Uganda, the Central African Republic and Congo-Brazzaville could also be affected, at least by a new influx of refugees, and possibly by a spillover from the fighting.
There are over 100,000 armed foreigners in Congo, of whom about 58,000 are members of rebel groups from neighbouring countries. Some support the government, others the Congolese rebels, others again are there for their own reasons. Under the 1999 Lusaka agreement, now being cautiously implemented, the foreign armies must withdraw. The accord laid down that a UN force should disarm the foreign rebels, but the force that is there has no Security Council mandate for this—and nobody who does not wish to give up his gun is doing so.
Congo is full of semi-literate young men (and some women) who live by killing and looting, and do not care much whom or where they fight. For them peace in Congo will simply mean that they go in search of trouble elsewhere. But other fighters are committed members of foreign rebel groups, who moved to Congo to use its unpoliced spaces to launch hit-and-run raids into their own countries.
In the 1990s Congo became a proxy battleground for civil wars in Angola, Rwanda and Burundi. The governments of these countries sent their armies into Congo partly to pursue their own rebels. Once inside the country, both armies and rebels found mines, hardwood forests, coffee plantations and much else that they could exploit. None of the foreign armies or rebel groups will be poorer when they leave Congo than when they came in.
If the 2,000 or so well-armed UNITA rebels from Angola were made to leave Congo, they would cross back into northern Angola and intensify the fighting there. Rwandan rebels have already started to launch attacks into their own country (see article).
In Burundi, a UN-sponsored peace process has failed to bring together the Tutsi-led military government and the militant Hutu groups. A boatload of Burundian rebels was ambushed on June 13th on Lake Tanganyika as they tried to make their way home from Congo. Burundi’s ambassador to the UN, Marc Nteturuye, explained what was happening. “The welcome peace prospects in Congo are paradoxically, but deliberately, at the root of the worsening security situation in Burundi,” he said. “Peace will have either to be regional or not be there at all.”
The war in Congo has created strange bedfellows. The bond between Rwanda’s and Burundi’s Hutu rebels is long-established, as is the co-operation of the Rwandan and Burundian armies in tracking them down. But a new informal alliance has developed between the Ugandan and Rwandan armies and Angola’s UNITA rebels, though the only thing they have in common is that they are all against the Angolan army. That alliance will probably end if peace can be found in Congo. But if a peaceful Congo proves unsafe for Rwandan and Burundian rebels, they, in turn, could decide that richer pickings are to be had fighting beside the rebels in Angola.
A report from Congo
Africa's great war
From The Economist print edition
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Congo's civil war may have claimed as many as 3m lives. The country is so inaccessible that its horrors are rarely reported
IN THE chocolate waters of the Congo river, a mutilated corpse rolls by. The rebels' “minister for children” shivers. How is he going to explain this to the horrified UN peace envoys from the capital, Kinshasa, who are at that moment stepping on to the quay to meet him? Not by telling the truth, obviously, which was that his rebel group had slaughtered 150 people in the town of Kisangani on May 14th-15th, then pitched their disembowelled bodies into the river with stones crammed into their bellies. Instead, he smiles, accepts the envoys' offerings of food aid, and talks chummily of other things.
Over the past four years, Congo's war has claimed more lives than any other. The International Rescue Committee, an American aid agency, says that by the middle of last year, 2.5m people had died because of the war in eastern Congo alone. Some were shot or hacked to death; many more succumbed to starvation or disease as nine national armies and a shifting throng of rebel groups pillaged their country. By now, the death toll is probably over 3m, although this is the roughest of estimates. As one UN worker puts it: “Congo is so green, you don't even see the graves.”
Western powers seem barely to have noticed the catastrophe. This is partly because, unlike the Middle East, Congo has no strategic importance. But it is also because it is two-thirds the size of Western Europe, thickly-forested, incredibly dangerous and has hardly any paved roads or working telephones. Simply finding out what is happening in Congo is a challenge, as your correspondent discovered while accompanying militiamen on patrol by the shore of Lake Kivu last week, when he was forced to hide in a bush to avoid 200 hostile Rwandan soldiers passing by.
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And yet there is hope. In April, the Congolese government signed a peace deal with most rebel groups. By offering rebel leaders a share of power, the government won nominal control of 70% of the country (see map below). This part of Congo is now relatively peaceful, and slowly recovering economically. But one important rebel group refused to sign. The Rwandan-controlled Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD), whose minister for children brazened out the watery corpse, still holds most of eastern Congo.
Here, the war blazes on. Or rather, dozens of overlapping micro-wars flicker, in which almost all the victims are civilians. A typical village can expect to be looted by several different bands of armed men. Under what amounts to Rwandan occupation, eastern Congo is arguably the most miserable place on earth.
The story of Congo's war began in 1994, with the genocide in Rwanda, Congo's tiny neighbour. A government dominated by Rwanda's Hutu tribe tried to exterminate the Tutsis, a prosperous minority. In 100 days, 800,000 Tutsis, and Hutus who refused to co-operate, were murdered. The slaughter stopped when an army of exiled Tutsis invaded from Uganda, and drove the killers into Congo (which was then called Zaire). The new, Tutsi-dominated government in Rwanda was afraid that the genocidaires would regroup and return to finish the job. So when Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire's dictator, gave them succour, Rwanda engineered a rebellion that toppled him.
In his place, the Rwandans installed a guerrilla leader and drunk, Laurent Kabila. They hoped he would do their bidding. Instead, he rearmed the genocidaires. So Rwanda tried to topple him, too. With help from Uganda and Burundi, it nearly succeeded. Kabila was saved by five friendly nations, of which the most effective were Angola and Zimbabwe. Most of the countries that intervened had legitimate interests in Congo. Rebels from most neighbouring states were using Congo's lawless forests as a base from which to launch cross-border raids. The failure of the Kabila government to curb these rebels prompted Rwanda, Uganda and Angola to enter the war. Zimbabwe, which shares no border with Congo, sent troops for different reasons: to satisfy the power-broking pretensions of its president, Robert Mugabe, and his army's appetite for loot.
Before long, the war reached a stalemate and the miscellany of armies settled down to the serious business of plunder. Zimbabwe bagged diamond seams in the south. Angola joined the Congolese government in an oil venture. Rwanda and Uganda began digging for diamonds and coltan (a mineral used in mobile telephones), harvested timber and ivory, and even emptied schools of desks and chairs. Though supposedly allies, Rwandan and Ugandan troops have occasionally clashed over the spoils. But in general, the more all the armies plundered, the less willing they became to fight each other (as opposed to unarmed peasants).
Then, in January last year, one of Kabila's bodyguards shot him once in the gullet and twice in the guts. No one knows who gave the order, because the assassin was himself killed almost immediately. One rumour is that his allies were so sick of his double-crossing that they had him killed.
Kabila's legacy is not a happy one. At his mausoleum in Kinshasa, a bronze statue shows the dead president clutching a book, which is an odd memorial for a man who halted book-keeping at the Congolese finance ministry. In the parts of Congo he controlled, Kabila ruled as despotically as his predecessor, but less competently. He scared off investors by jailing foreign businessmen and demanding million-dollar ransoms. He banished aid by insulting foreign diplomats. By printing money while enforcing price controls, he caused Soviet-style shortages. By the end, petrol was so scarce that the state oil firm resorted to flushing its main pipeline with river water to force out the dregs.
Kabila was succeeded by his son, Joseph. Now 31, Mr Kabila junior is doing a better job. He endorsed a peace plan that his father rejected. A ceasefire followed, policed, where possible, by the UN. Angola withdrew to its border, and Uganda pulled out some troops, leaving others to mind its businesses in northern Congo.
Zimbabwe stayed, at the government's request. The young Mr Kabila wants to be protected from the Rwandans, who refuse to leave. The Rwandan government says it will not withdraw its army, which occupies a slice of Congo 27 times bigger than its own country, until the last Hutu fighter has been captured or killed.
Rwanda reckons that 55,000 Hutus, still intent on genocide, continue to lurk in Congo's jungles or have joined the Congolese army under false names. The estimate of the International Crisis Group, a think-tank, is half that number. All the same, to prevent the Hutus from regrouping and invading Rwanda, the UN has proposed setting up a Congo-based border force. Mr Kabila's government accepts this. To show goodwill, it has already released 2,000 Rwandan Hutus from its army and invited the international genocide tribunal to investigate. But Rwanda says no.
No one is suggesting that Rwanda's fears are unfounded. Yet many observers say that Rwanda and its pet rebels are no longer pursuing the genocidaires with much passion. Refugees from Mwenga, a bush-town in South Kivu, a mineral-rich province, complain that their homes were attacked by Hutu militiamen a dozen times in the past two months, but that the town's Rwandan garrison did nothing. The townspeople say they asked the Rwandan commander why. He is said to have replied: “These are our brothers, do you think we can kill them?”
Another example: the Hutus' camps on South Kivu's Ruzizi plain are well known to the Rwandan troops nearby, say UN officials, but they are seldom, if ever, attacked. A local Hutu commander claims that the Rwandans regularly supply him with arms. Elsewhere, according to a senior Rwandan officer who recently sought asylum in Belgium, the army hires Hutu militiamen to work its coltan mines. He told the Belgian senate that they could otherwise be eradicated “in less than a month”.
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Besides securing its own borders, Rwanda claims to be protecting Congo's ethnic Tutsis, the foot-soldiers of its two rebellions, from being murdered by Hutu militias or other Congolese. But even this group is now rising against Rwanda's occupation. Early this year, a brigade of Congolese Tutsis mutinied and returned to their tribal homeland, in the hills above Lake Tanganyika. Around 1,000 rebel fighters have deserted to join them. Rwanda swiftly sent 8,000 troops to crush the revolt, and is now reportedly herding Tutsi villagers into a barren camp, to stop them feeding the deserters. Tutsi against Tutsi, this is now the fiercest battle of the war.
With mid-ranking rebels meanwhile crossing to the government side, and senior rebels expected to follow, the RCD could be on the verge of disintegration. Rwanda has tried to deter desertions by force, of which the massacre in Kisangani was an example. But if the RCD crumbles, Rwanda will doubtless find an alternative cover for its occupation of eastern Congo. Indeed, it has already started looking: in June, Rwanda deposed the RCD“government” of South Kivu, and replaced it with the leaders of a more pliable militia.
The players change; but the game remains the same. This is bad news for the hapless people of eastern Congo. Everywhere they look, they see men with guns. Besides the Hutu militias, the Rwandans and their rebel allies, there are the Mai-Mai, a warrior cult, and myriad gangs of bandits. All prey on the poor.
Across Kivu, a land of postcard-perfect green hills, villages are half-deserted, fields neglected and livestock a fond memory. In the forests around Mantu, near Bukavu, villagers have dug waist-deep trenches and covered them with branches. When Hutu marauders come, as they do most weeks, they hide in these holes.
The peasants of Ramba Chitanga, a village too tiny to appear on any map, tell a grisly tale. When the RCD left, Hutus moved in, and accused the villagers of feeding their enemies. Then the Mai-Mai attacked. During the ensuing battle, the Hutus hacked off 29-year-old Janet Vumilia's hands. Now, with her skittle-like stumps, she ticks off the relatives they killed: her parents-in-law, her brother-in-law, her pregnant sister, her niece.
Villagers say they can distinguish different factions by their actions. The Hutus, they say, are more vicious than the Mai-Mai, while the rebels are more likely than the Rwandans to abduct children. But sometimes the distinctions become blurred. Francine, a 14-year-old new mother, says she thinks her baby's father was an RCD rebel. But he could have been a Mai-Mai; men from both groups raped her. When her father objected, the Mai-Mai slit his throat.
In Kivu, cattle are now scarce, yet livestock prices have plummeted. Locals calculate that if they buy a cow, armed men will take it, so they don't buy cows. The rebels levy a “security tax” of $1 per hut, but payment does not seem to reduce the likelihood that, sooner or later, killers will come in the night.
In Walungu hospital, near Bukavu, 1,200 patients compete for 300 beds, and the attention of three doctors. About half the inmates are relatively healthy, but too terrified to go home. Murals in the hospital depict black doctors in white coats peering into microscopes, recalling the lost hopes of the 1960s. Now, the wards are full of black children with blonde hair, a sign of malnutrition. The hospital's 32-year-old head of nursing says she has received only three months' salary in her whole career. Why does she carry on? “It's our country,” she shrugs. “It's painful, but there it is.”
If Rwanda had been a benevolent occupier, it might have turned a profit without stealing. As Congo's infrastructure crumbled over the past 40 years, people in the east of the country strengthened their commercial links with Rwanda. This trend accelerated when war closed the Congo river, the country's main highway, severing eastern Congo from Kinshasa. Had the Rwandans built a decent road or two linking eastern Congo with Kigali, their own capital, they could have exploited this.
Instead, they chose to murder and plunder. “We couldn't believe the things these people did during the genocide, until they came and started doing them to us,” said a market-woman in Bukavu, jumbling together Hutu killers and Tutsi invaders.
In Kinshasa, meanwhile, stinking bank notes suggest that things are looking up. The new government printed no money in the second half of last year, and lifted price controls. Inflation is currently below 5%, down from 511% in 2000. On June 13th, the World Bank approved a $450m loan, part of a multilateral aid package that could total $1.7 billion. The Bank's new man in Kinshasa, the first posted there in a decade, says that Congo could be about to see surprisingly rapid development.
This is heroic optimism. Congo's institutions are as dirty as its bank notes. Corrupt parastatals disgorge no revenue to the central bank. Their past thieving has saddled Congo with $13 billion in debt. Civil servants make ends meet by demanding bribes or doing other jobs on the side. In the offices of the immigration ministry, for example, not only visas but also sexual favours are for sale. Respect for human rights has improved under the new regime, but only a bit. Political troublemakers, and journalists, are regularly arrested. Policemen and soldiers, often drunk, in mirrored sunglasses, freelance as muggers. During a random “visa inspection”, The Economist's correspondent was bundled into a black Mercedes and relieved of $450 by four men claiming to be security officers. It could have been worse: an American aid worker was recently beaten senseless after overtaking a general on the boulevard.
Whether Joseph Kabila could control these abuses is unclear. He is popular throughout Congo, because people regard him as the best hope for peace. But he has some ugly people around him, including some of the worst crooks and thugs of his father's administration, and of Mobutu's too. The people of Congo tell anyone who asks that they want their country to be united, invader-free and democratic. The prospects for this are woeful, in the short term at least.
Mr Kabila has promised to hold free and fair elections as soon as the country is reunited. But no Congolese leader has ever kept such a promise before, and some of Mr Kabila's allies have cause to try to prevent the young president from keeping his. For example, Mwenze Kongolo, who is Mr Kabila's uncle and Mr Mugabe's good friend, is associated with the worst abuses of the old Kabila regime, and so cannot expect anyone to vote for him. He is however popular with certain army brigades.
If Congo's different factions agree about anything, it is that white foreigners are responsible for their troubles. Given a history of western meddling—King Leopold of the Belgians plundered Congo in the 19th century, and America first propped up Mobutu and then helped overthrow him—such a view is understandable. But it is hopelessly out of date. Since the cold war ended, western governments have seen no reason to care much about Congo.
Mostly, they ignore it, considering its problems too tangled to solve. The UN's ceasefire-monitoring mission consists of only 442 military observers. Efforts to disarm the militias in eastern Congo have been crippled by the RCD's refusal to grant the UN free passage.
Since 1994, western donors have put a bigger effort into Rwanda than Congo. In part, this stems from guilt at having failed to stop the genocide. It is also because bite-sized Rwanda's problems seem more manageable, and its efficient government is refreshing to deal with. Throughout Congo's war, aid has poured into Kigali.
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| The pity of war |
All the same, Rwanda's behaviour in Congo may soon cost it some friends. In August, a UN Security Council panel will deliver its third report on the looting of Congo's resources, focusing on the humanitarian impact of Rwanda's plunder in the east of the country. Sanctions, or at least a reduction of aid, are possible. Britain, Rwanda's biggest bilateral donor and keenest apologist, is expected to oppose such moves. But France will probably be in favour. And the Americans may be willing to go along with some sort of censure of Rwanda, even if it is only a reprimand.
It will take more than a reprimand to eject Rwanda from Congo. Its leaders—the Tutsi fighters who stopped the genocide—have turned their country into one of the most militarised in Africa. By plundering Congo, some have found a way of enriching themselves without upsetting their own people. Meanwhile, war gives Rwanda's president, Paul Kagame, an excuse to squelch dissent and muffle the press. It also keeps at least 20,000 unruly, mostly-Hutu soldiers from coming home and stirring fresh trouble in Rwanda, where it all began
Peace, they say, but the killing goes on
From The Economist print edition
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Against a vile background of slaughter, Congo is supposed to be getting a new unified government
BESIDE the cooling ashes of his home, Ruhigwa Likoka spades earth on to the lacerated bodies of his four small children. The pale green hillside where Mr Likoka lives is deserted. His neighbours have fled the tempest of tribal killing that has raged through Ituri, a province in north-eastern Congo, in recent months. As he buries his family to the whistle of birdsong, Mr Likoka has no idea that Congo's civil war was supposed to have ended this month.
Congo's war is horrible and complex. To simplify: this enormous and never stable country fragmented in 1998, when Rwanda and Uganda invaded to topple the Congolese government. Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia sent troops who saved the regime, but left the invaders in control of much of the country. All parties then proceeded to loot Congo's minerals, as innumerable local militias slaughtered and pillaged. Rwanda and Uganda, once allies, fell out and fought on Congolese soil. Their conflict did not last long, but the two countries remain bitterly at odds. In all, perhaps 3.5m people have died as a result of the war, mostly of disease or starvation.
Lengthy peace talks culminated in pacts between Congo, Rwanda and Uganda, and a power-sharing deal with their leading rebel proxies. A new “transitional” government was to have been formed this month, giving Congo its first unified administration in almost five years, and eventually leading to elections. But it has been postponed until next month, and the violence in Ituri may derail the whole process.
Uganda had promised to withdraw its last 1,000 troops from Congo by March 20th. But on March 6th it reoccupied Bunia, Ituri's capital, and a dozen airstrips and villages nearby. To justify its actions, the Ugandan government cited an attack by a vicious bunch of rebels, the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), one of several anti-Ugandan factions in Ituri it accuses Rwanda of arming.
Rwanda, which officially withdrew from Congo in October, is now threatening to reinvade. According to the International Crisis Group, a think-tank, around 5,000 Rwandan soldiers never left, having been seconded to its main rebel proxy, the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD). These rebels, apparently reinforced by more Rwandan regulars, are now moving north towards Ituri. Rumours abound that Rwanda and Uganda will soon come to blows again—or that Rwanda will launch a new offensive against its Congolese enemies, thus reactivating the war. No one is sure. Britain, which gives slabs of aid to both Rwanda and Uganda, is trying to calm matters.
Meanwhile, in Ituri, the war has made old tribal squabbles much bloodier. The province's two main tribes, the cattle-herding Hema and the seed-sowing Lendus, used to bicker intermittently. Now they howl for each other's extinction. A decade ago, Uganda selected the Hemas for its business partners in mineral-rich Ituri. Since the war began, it has armed several Hema militia groups. Last year, it created the UPC, which is Hema-based, only to see it switch its allegiance to Rwanda.
Uganda then befriended a resentful rabble of Lendu militias. These leopard-skin-swathed warriors were allowed to join its troops on a triumphal rampage through Bunia on March 6th. Plucking Lendu arrows from his office walls, a UN official grumbles that they stole his only copy of a UN report on the looting of Congo by foreign forces.
Whichever of Ituri's two tribes is briefly in the ascendant has taken revenge on the other. In 1999, at least 10,000 people were murdered. During the UPC's repellent rule over Bunia and its outlying hills, probably as many died again. Even as Ugandan mortars rained on Bunia, the UPC's child-fighters indulged in one final killing spree. A 29-year-old Lendu man tells how his father was butchered and his sister stolen. Then he lifts his shirt to reveal shotgun wounds: with the local clinic charging $17 per pellet removed, his recovery will take time.
The Lendu fighters are just as wild. Mr Likoka's children were made to round up his cattle for the militiamen, and then hacked apart. One drunken Lendu warrior, while firing his submachinegun over your correspondent's head from a couple of yards away to emphasise a point, stumbled. Happily, no one was hurt.
The UN's peacekeeping mission in Congo is powerless to stem the deluge of blood, despite a budget of $600m a year. While expressing concern over Uganda's failure to withdraw, it has engineered a new agreement granting Uganda another month's stay in Ituri, on the ground that there is no one else to keep order. As it turns out, Uganda does appear to be quelling the killing, at least in Bunia. Townspeople from both tribes now refer to the Ugandan troops as their “liberators”.
But while Uganda remains in Congo, Rwanda seems sure to bar its rebel proxies from joining the new government. Uganda has probably had enough of Congo. It never had as pressing a reason as Rwanda to be there: the Rwandans want to disarm or kill the remnants of the army that carried out the Rwandan genocide of 1994, who remain hidden in eastern Congo's rainforest. Also, whereas Rwanda has looted systematically to pay for its war, Uganda has done so haphazardly. And as Congo crumbles, it grows harder to plunder: operations at Ituri's vast Kilomoto gold mine, for example, have virtually ceased since local peasants started digging up its airstrip and panning the dirt for ore.
The UN is scratching its head for a solution. One option under consideration is to invite a regional power—probably Angola—to send troops that would not be under UN control. This would get around the unwillingness of rich countries to send their troops to die in Congo. The UN force is too puny: its peacekeepers usually retreat at the first sound of gunfire. Uganda would probably approve such a plan, and Rwanda might assent, so long as Angolan troops did not come too close to its borders. But Congo's government, suspicious of Angola's ambitions, could object. That would be a disaster for the people of Ituri. But Congo's pudgy rulers have never worried about ants like Mr Likoka.
Commerce in Congo
A mend in the river
From The Economist print edition
With a semblance of peace, trade is flowing again
LADEN with salt, sugar, cement, steel bars, bicycles and powdered milk, a convoy of cargo boats arrived in Kisangani on August 3rd. In a calmer country than Congo, this would not be news. But civil war had blocked the Congo river for five years. Now, with peace, came the first commercial delivery from the capital since the fighting began in 1998. The joyful citizens of Kisangani held races in dugout tree-trunk canoes to celebrate.
Congo has practically no paved roads, so the river is the main artery that keeps its trade alive. Kisangani, perched atop the river in the centre of the country, suffered terribly when that artery was cut. Suddenly, the only way to get goods in or out was on aeroplanes operated by associates of the rebels and their Rwandan and Ugandan backers.
Nomi Ikoti, a tailor in Kisangani, remembers the shock. Before the war, he used to buy reasonably priced, high-quality European fabrics that came up the Congo river from Kinshasa. When the river closed, he had to buy inferior materials for twice the price, flown in from Dubai, via Rwanda or Uganda.
Every other trader has a similar tale. High transport costs meant that Kisangani got less for its own products, notably palm oil, and had to pay more for everything it bought. Now, even though the town's docks are in disrepair, that should change. Indeed, the mere prospect of renewed river trade has been enough to drive down some prices. A measure of salt cost 200 Congolese francs ($0.60) in Kisangani in mid-July. A week later, it cost 120 francs.
Congo's commercial reunification is proceeding apace. Goma, on the Rwandan border, now has a direct air link, on rickety Russian planes, to Kinshasa, a journey that used to be a nightmare. The city also buzzes with the activities of Kinshasa-based mobile telephone firms that have set up relays on a nearby mountain. You can call the capital, 1,500 km away, for the cost of a local call.
Politicians can still be relied on to hobble trade, usually citing security. The governor of Kisangani is said to have exploded when he heard that 2,000 people were accompanying the cargo boats from Kinshasa. The convoy was detained for a while and, before your correspondent's eyes, two dozen soldiers burst into the home of the chairman of Kisangani's chamber of commerce and interrogated him.
For Kisangani to reclaim its former glory as a transport hub, parts of the river would have to be dredged. Fortunately, donors are keen to help. Some roads would be nice, too.
Things fall apart?
From The Economist print edition
Congo's power-sharing government starts to crumble
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| Back to the past? |
TWO weeks after the massacre, something much worse may be brewing. On August 13th, 160 Congolese Tutsis were hacked to death in a refugee camp just across the border with Burundi. Tutsi politicians called it “genocide”, and cited it as proof that Congo's sputtering peace process had broken down. On August 23rd, Azarias Ruberwa, one of Congo's four vice-presidents and the country's most prominent Tutsi, announced that he and his party, the RCD-Goma, were walking out of the transitional government.
However you look at it, this is bad news. Congo's government is a fragile creature, an uneasy attempt at power-sharing involving the two main rebel movements of the civil war of 1998-2003 and the regime they rebelled against, plus a few token civilians. RCD-Goma was a Tutsi-dominated rebel army before it joined the government, armed and backed by the Tutsi-led government of neighbouring Rwanda.
Mr Ruberwa's followers have tried to allay fears that they are planning to take up arms again. From their base in Goma, on the Rwandan border, they say they are calling for international mediators: ie, South Africa, which brokered the peace deal that led to the creation of the transitional government. But many Congolese are sceptical. “I've seen this in the past. We are headed for war,” says a young man selling mobile-telephone vouchers in Goma.
The transitional government has been in trouble from the start. None of the former foes trusts each other, and none has shown much interest in actually governing, as opposed to merely using the levers of office to amass power and wealth. Ministers screech around the capital, Kinshasa, in gleaming motorcades, while the roads remain cavernous and civil servants wait longingly for their salaries.
Mr Ruberwa was the vice-president in charge of defence and security, but the president, Joseph Kabila, saw to it that he wielded little of the power of his portfolio. A parallel structure called the Maison Militaire reports directly to the president. Mr Ruberwa reportedly did not even receive daily intelligence briefings. The former rebel armies were supposed to be integrated with the national army, but many units still answer to their former bosses, and Mr Ruberwa's men complain that their ranks have not been recognised.
Nationwide elections, Congo's first proper ones, are due to be held next year. Observers fear that some of the most powerful men in government are so appalled at the prospect that they may be prepared to re-ignite the civil war to avoid it. Mr Kabila's supporters, including at least one newspaper, are speculating that war may be the only way to solve the problem of Tutsi politicians who owe more loyalty to Rwanda than to Congo.
There is still time to pull back from the brink. Some RCD members (mainly non-Tutsis) have refused to join Mr Ruberwa in quitting the government. Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, is appealing for more peacekeepers to be sent to eastern Congo. South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, is expected in Kinshasa at the end of the month to try to talk sense into all sides. Ordinary Congolese will be praying that he succeeds.
From The Economist print edition
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Congo's war, the bloodiest anywhere since 1945, is more or less over. The fear in the vast and shattered country is that it could restart
WHEN your correspondent tried to fly out of Kinshasa seven years ago, rebels attacked the airport and the flight was cancelled. Congo's great war was just starting and there were charred, petrol-soaked bodies on the capital's garbage-strewn streets. Now, millions of deaths later, the war appears to be over. The government has made peace with most of the main rebel groups. The half-dozen foreign armies that ravaged the country have withdrawn, and been replaced by 16,000 UN peacekeepers. Tribal militias still battle and pillage in the north-east, but the UN, after a long and shameful spell of inertia, is finally starting to protect the innocent by shooting or capturing the bad guys.
Arriving in Kinshasa today is less fretful than it was. By hiring a retired boxer as an escort, your correspondent passed through the airport without losing any possessions. (The gentleman in question is something of a local celebrity: on seeing him, customs agents smile, mime a left hook and forget to rifle through one's bags.) Like Congo itself, the airport is shabby, dysfunctional and packed with ill-paid, predatory officials. But at least the guns are quiet.
The question is, for how long? The war formally ended in 2003, when most of the warring parties came together to form a power-sharing transitional government. This was hardly an ideal solution. None of the new regime's members was elected, few are honest and some are mass murderers. But Congo's weary people were happy to accept gunmen in government as a temporary measure to end the fighting. Under the terms of the peace deal, nationwide elections for a legitimate regime were to be held by June 30th.
They won't be. This is partly for logistical reasons. Congo has held no census since 1984, so no one knows how many voters there might be. (The electoral commission guesses 28m, out of a population roughly twice that number.) In a country with no experience of democracy, no functioning civil service and virtually no roads, organising a ballot takes time, even with the best political will in the world.
Such will is notably absent. After two years in power, the government only last month got round to approving a draft constitution laying the ground rules for the poll and defining the powers of whatever regime is elected. And that constitution still needs to be approved by a referendum. The electoral commission, meanwhile, has registered no voters and hired hardly any of the 40,000-60,000 electoral workers it thinks it will need, let alone taught them how to use the 9,000 voter-registration machines it finally ordered last month.
Realistically, no election can be held this year. The peace accord allows, under exceptional circumstances, for up to two six-month delays. So everything is on track, really, says the government. Many Congolese think this is self-serving baloney. They believe their unelected rulers are postponing the poll for as long as possible because they want another year to carry on stealing.
The leader of the main opposition party, Etienne Tshisekedi, says the government will cease to be legitimate on June 30th, and is calling for its members to stand down then. Probably most people in Kinshasa agree with him. Incendiary leaflets are circulating, and there are rumours of the mass distribution of machetes. In May, a general strike paralysed the town of Kananga and riots gripped the diamond city of Mbuji-Mayi. On June 5th, when one of the country's four vice-presidents attended a football match in Kinshasa, the 90,000-strong crowd chanted “Kill him”.
It could blow over. But peace in Congo cannot be taken for granted. Half of Africa's modern wars have reignited within a decade of ending, typically because post-war regimes have not addressed the problems that caused them to flare up in the first place. Congo's transitional government has conspicuously failed to treat the malady that makes the country so war-prone: corruption.
The country first fell apart because its rulers stole the cement. The state was looted until the government could no longer control its own territory. Foreign invaders and domestic rebels filled the vacuum. Mending the devastation they wrought will require more statesmanship than the nation has ever known.
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Congo is a big place—bigger, for instance, than all the states that voted for John Kerry in America's election last November put together. It shares a border with nine other countries, and touches every sub-Saharan region: central, south, east and west. A stable Congo could be Africa's healthy heart. Arterial roads could be built through it; it has a huge trove of untapped minerals and enough hydroelectric potential to light up half the continent. Conversely, a return to chaos could be a continental heart attack.
Optimists point out that the country's current president, 33-year-old Joseph Kabila, is probably its best since independence in 1960. Pessimists retort that that is not saying much. His best-known predecessor, Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled from 1965 until 1997 and renamed the country Zaire, was a ruthless crook who fitted his palace with a nuclear shelter, hired Concorde for shopping trips and so gutted the treasury that inflation between October 1990 and December 1995 totalled 6.3 billion per cent. He lost control because he and his flunkies filched too much. Unpaid soldiers refused to defend the regime against a rebellion led by Laurent Kabila, Joseph's father, who seized power and restored the country's old name.
The senior Kabila turned out to be even worse than Mobutu. He was equally brutal and corrupt, but less intelligent. He had people executed while he was drunk and then forgot that he had done so. He ordered diamond dealers to sell their gems to a state-backed monopoly for near-worthless Congolese francs, and then wondered why the country's largest source of export revenues dried up. He provoked Rwanda, Congo's aggressive neighbour, by arming and supplying the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide, who were hiding in eastern Congo's forests. Mobutu had done the same, which was why the Rwandan army helped Kabila topple him. Now Rwanda backed a revolt to topple Kabila, too.
That was how the war started in August 1998. Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia rushed to Kabila's defence. Uganda sided with the Rwandans, but later fought them. Then it got really confusing. In all, six national armies and dozens of rebel groups and militias joined the fray. All sides plundered Congo's minerals. When Joseph Conrad spoke of “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience”, he was describing Congo under Belgium's King Leopold II, but his phrase has not dated.
No one knows how many people died. A survey published in December by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a pressure group, put the death toll at 3.8m between August 1998 and April 2004. The IRC calculated this by comparing death rates before, during and after the war and then extrapolating. Almost all the deaths—more than 98% in 2003-04—were from war-induced starvation or disease, rather than from bullets or spears. Clearly, the IRC's guess is open to challenge. But no one has come up with a better one.
Amid the mayhem, Laurent Kabila was shot dead by one of his bodyguards. His son Joseph took over, and quickly proved wiser than his father. Under western pressure, he signed a peace accord in South Africa in 2002. Unlike his father, who tore up treaties like old betting slips, he has honoured it, more or less.
He welcomed his former enemies into the transitional government that took office in June 2003. Two of his four vice-presidents are ex-rebels, and most armed factions have been given a ministry to mismanage. In theory, all the big rebel forces are to be merged into a single, slimmed-down national army. In practice, most remain under the control of their old commanders, and the process of demobilisation has been worryingly slow.
Most of Congo is now calm, although the east is much less so. A hot war continues in the north-eastern region of Ituri, where rival militias (backed by Rwanda and Uganda respectively) have killed at least 60,000 people in a quarrel over border trade and gold fields.
The other immediate threat comes from the Rwandan génocidaires who continue to lurk in the eastern Congolese rainforest. So long as they remain, Rwanda could invade again, as it has twice before, to try to eliminate them. Rwanda's president threatened to do so last year.
With help from the UN, both of these dangers are being tackled, says William Swing, the head of the UN mission. In Ituri, the blue helmets have started storming militia camps. Mr Swing says the UN's firepower has put the militiamen on the defensive and more than 12,000 have been persuaded to join a disarmament programme, leaving only a hard core of 1,500-2,000 at large. As for the genocide veterans, their main faction agreed on March 31st to lay down its weapons, go home and form a peaceful political party.
Not everyone is as optimistic as Mr Swing. By mid-May, the transit camps for surrendering Rwandan guerrillas were still empty. Last week a peacekeeper in Ituri was killed and two employees of the medical charity, Médecins sans Frontières, were abducted. And on June 2nd, Human Rights Watch, a pressure group, issued a fat report on continuing “widespread ethnic slaughter, executions, torture, rape and arbitrary arrest” in the region.
Even by the standards of war, some of the atrocities in eastern Congo are shocking. Zainabo Alfani, for example, was stopped by men in uniform on a road in Ituri last year. She and 13 other women were ordered to strip, to see if they had long vaginal lips, which the gunmen believed would have magical properties. The 13 others did not, and were killed on the spot. Zainabo did. The gunmen cut them off and then gang-raped her. Then they cooked and ate her two daughters in front of her. They also ate chunks of Zainabo's flesh. She escaped, but had contracted HIV. She told her story to the UN in February, and died in March.
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| They've got a good job, by Congolese standards |
The new “unified” Congolese army seems incapable of policing the east. When ordered to work together, its soldiers sometimes fight each other instead. So the heavy work is left to the UN.
Nonetheless, the junior Mr Kabila's government is the only show in Congo, so donors have flocked to support it. In 2003, including debt relief, Congo was the largest recipient of French aid and the fourth-largest recipient of America's.
The donors' cash buys some influence. At the urging of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Mr Kabila has restored economic sanity—inflation fell from 135% in 2001 to 4.4% in 2003, though it has since crept back up. As the violence eases, growth has rebounded, and is expected to hit 7% this year. But the average Congolese income, by the IMF's estimate, is still only $100 a year. That is an unbelievably low sum for a country where food is fairly easy to grow. The true figure must surely be a bit less wretched. But nobody really knows.
The country's recovery would be assisted if foreign investors, who mostly fled decades ago, were to return. Some are coming. Adastra, a London-listed mining firm, has signed a joint-venture deal with the government to turn two huge heaps of dirty-white dust into metal. The heaps are by-products of a moribund mine near the once-prosperous town of Kolwezi. Between them, they contain 1.7m tonnes of copper and 360,000 tonnes of cobalt. Tim Read, Adastra's boss, reckons the project has a net present value of $459m.
Mr Read's firm is betting that Congo will not go back to war, and that its government—which has introduced a generally admired new mining law—will respect property rights, or at least those of big investors. The Congolese government is betting that Adastra will pay taxes and create jobs that are preferable to the local alternative, examples of which can be seen all around the big pile of dirt. Hordes of freelance miners scrabble for ore by hand, wash it in a river and sell it to local smugglers. Many are injured or killed when their tunnels collapse. Your correspondent saw a boy no bigger than his three-year-old son struggling under a half-sack of ore (he was probably older; malnutrition makes Congolese children quite short).
Adastra hopes to make a difference. But after the construction phase is over, the firm will employ only 700 people in a town of 250,000 where unemployment is practically universal. A shop assistant in Kolwezi makes $35 a month—less than those desperate freelance miners. The lowest-paid civil servant gets $2 a month. Congo needs many more Adastras, but they will come only when the country looks less daunting.
Congo's people have learnt to cope. In the absence of piped water, families in Kinshasa earn a living carrying buckets of it to building sites. A story from the southern town of Lubumbashi offers a snapshot of what works and what doesn't.
Veronique, an office worker, was separated from her daughter by the war. When peace broke out, she booked an aeroplane ticket for her (penniless) girl to rejoin her. But before the daughter could board the plane, she was detained. Her yellow fever vaccination card had been stamped by rebel health authorities, and so was invalid, the officials tut-tutted. Alas, she had no money for a bribe.
But Veronique was able to send her the equivalent of cash by mobile telephone. She bought $20 worth of telephone cards. These give you a code number which you key into your phone and thereby “recharge” it with pre-paid airtime. Veronique called the obstructive officials and gave them her code numbers to recharge their own mobile phones. It took only minutes to send her bribe across the country—faster than a bank transfer, which would in any case have been impossible, since there is no proper banking system.
That's Congo. Private cellphone networks and private airlines work because the landlines do not and the bush has eaten the roads. Public servants serve mostly to make life difficult for the public, in the hope of squeezing some cash out of them. Congo is a police state, but without the benefits. The police have unchecked powers, but provide little security. Your correspondent needed three separate permits to visit the railway station in Kinshasa, where he was stopped and questioned six times in 45 minutes. Yet he found that all the seats, windows and light fixtures had been stolen from the trains.
The government offers the usual excuses. Before a British audience in March, Jean-Pierre Bemba, one of the four vice-presidents, stressed that much of the blame for corruption rests with those (ie, western firms) who pay the bribes. But bribery, though rife, is less of a problem than simple theft.
For example, the central government is shelling out $8m a month to pay soldiers' salaries, partly in the hope that they will stop robbing civilians. But many soldiers are still not paid. In the east, where the problem is especially acute, observers assume that local commanders are snaffling their men's pay packets. Not so, says one of Mr Kabila's disgruntled advisers. In fact, he says, the money sent out east is intercepted and wired straight back to Kinshasa, where it is stolen by bigwigs. “It's called Opération Retour,” he explains.
Supposing Congo weathers the likely storm of protest around June 30th and eventually holds elections, what then? It will depend on two things. First, who will win the presidency? Second, will the next president allow his powerful rivals enough of a stake in government to dissuade them from going back to war?
The most likely presidential contender is the incumbent, Joseph Kabila. In the absence of opinion polls, it is impossible to say how popular he is. But he is not personally blamed for any major atrocities, and he has all the apparatus of the state to bolster his cause.
Another possibility is Mr Bemba. As the vice-president in charge of the economy, he has colossal powers of patronage. But his patriotism is open to question: he used to lead a rebel army backed by Uganda. And his men are alleged to have eaten people. Mr Bemba dismisses the allegation, but it is widely believed and will not endear him to voters.
A third contender is Mr Tshisekedi, the opposition leader. His long and honourable opposition to Mobutu has won him much support in his home region and around Kinshasa. But he has no money to mount a nationwide campaign. It would boost his chances if he could organise big protests against the missed election deadline. Which gives the government another reason to crush any protests.
Whoever the next president is, he will have to placate several groups with contradictory desires. The men with guns must be given the right mixture of threats and inducements not to wreck the peace. People must feel they have enough stake in the new regime not to try to overthrow it. And donors must be shown enough progress that they do not walk off in disgust. Somehow, Congo must find a leader who will refute V.S. Naipaul's jibe. “It isn't that there's no right and wrong here,” the novelist once wrote. “There's no right.”
Democracy postponed
From The Economist print edition
Worries are growing as Congo's election timetable slips
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| Only 28m more needed |
THE date came and went—and there were no elections, just more violence. June 30th was the original deadline for Congo's provisional government to hold the first nationwide elections since the end of a civil war in 2003 that killed almost 4m people in the world's deadliest conflict since 1945.
The main opposition party, the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS), accuses the present government of wanting, without a vote, to become rather more permanent than provisional, and says it will keep up the pressure to hold elections. So, unless it soon becomes clear that an election is in the offing, the mood in Congo's crumbling capital, Kinshasa, home to 9m people, may start getting ugly.
Father Apollinaire Malu Malu, the electoral commission's head, says things are on track for all voters to be registered by October. The peace accord allows the government—given Congo's exceptional circumstances—up to two six-month delays if the June 30th deadline is missed.
In its defence the government, brought together from former belligerents, representatives of civil society and elements of the political opposition, rightly says that organising elections in Congo is a logistical nightmare. The country is about the size of western Europe, but with scarcely a decent road outside any of the main towns.
Voter registration started only in late June; by July 10th, over 1m people will have registered. But that leaves another 28m-odd waiting to register, out of a population probably twice that size, most of it in places without the relative efficiency of Kinshasa for running a high-tech electoral system. Despite that, over 9,000 kits—each with a laptop, a digital camera, a fingerprint scanner and a card printer—will be dispatched across the country, reaching their destinations by air, down bumpy bush tracks or on the dugout canoes that ply Congo's rivers. But it is taking time for the first of the 45,000 officials to get to grips with the equipment.
Critics such as the UDPS accuse the government of dragging its feet to hang on to the perks of power. And the government's reaction last week to protests in Kinshasa against the delay was not reassuring. Some 5,000 men from the police and presidential guard beat up demonstrators, while riot police tear-gassed any gathering of people (including this correspondent) almost indiscriminately. The police killed ten people or so and arrested up to 700.
Under the current timetable, Congo should have a referendum on its future constitution in November; a general and presidential election are due by next May. On the eve of the latest protests, President Joseph Kabila promised to speed up preparations for the elections. Doubts about his sincerity may grow.
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