by Norman Lowe
Though successful, UN operations had been expensive, and within a few months all their troops were withdrawn. Tribal rivalries aggravated by unemployment caused disorders to break out again almost immediately, and calm was not restored until 1965 when General Mobutu of the Congolese army, using white mercenaries and backed by the USA and Belgium, crushed all resistance and took over the government himself.
(c) General Mobutu in power
It was probably inevitable that if the Congo, with its many problems (an under-developed economy, tribal divisions and a shortage of educated people), was to stay united, a strong authoritarian government was required. Mobutu provided exactly that! There was a gradual improvement in conditions as the Congolese gained experience of administration, and the economy began to look healthier after most of the European-owned mines were nationalized.
However, in the late 1970s there were more troubles. In 1977 Katanga (now known as Shaba) was invaded by troops from Angola, apparently encouraged by the Angolan government, which resented Mobutu’s earlier intervention in its affairs (see Section 24.6(d)), and by the USSR, which resented American support for Mobutu. This was a way for the USSR to make a gesture against the Americans, and yet another extension of the Cold War.
Having survived that problem, Zaire (as the country had been called since 1971) found itself in economic difficulties, mainly because of declining world copper prices, and drought which made expensive food imports necessary. Mobutu came under increasing criticism outside Zaire for his authoritarian style of government and his huge personal fortune. In May 1980 Amnesty International claimed that at least a thousand political prisoners were being held without trial and that several hundred had died from torture or starvation during 1978–9. An important new measure, the Nationality Law, was introduced in 1981. This restricted citizenship in Zaire to people who could demonstrate a family connection with the Congo at the time of the Berlin Conference of 1885. It aimed to deal with the problem dating back to the colonial era, when tens of thousands of migrant workers had moved into the Congo from neighbouring territories. The problem was exacerbated later by an influx of refugees from Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. There was tension between the indigenous population and the immigrants, and the Nationality Law was passed in response to pressure from the indigenous Congolese. However, it was difficult to implement, and conflict between the two continued. In 1990 Mobutu allowed a multi-party system, but with himself above politics as head of state. He remained in power, but in 1995, after 30 years of his rule, he was becoming more and more unpopular with his people.
(d) The Kabilas, and civil war again
In the mid-1990s opposition to Mobutu increased. In the east of Zaire, Laurent Kabila, who had been a supporter of Patrice Lumumba, organized forces and began to move towards Kinshasa, the capital. In May 1997 Mobutu left the country and died later in the year in exile in Morocco. Laurent Kabila became president and changed the country’s name from Zaire to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). If the Congolese people had expected dramatic changes in the system of government, they were soon disappointed. Kabila continued many of Mobutu’s techniques – opposition politicians and journalists were arrested, political parties were banned, and elections cancelled. Some of his own supporters began to turn against him; the Banyamulenge, a people of Tutsi origin, many of whom had fought in Kabila’s army, resented what they saw as his favouritism towards members of his own Luba tribe. They began a rebellion in the east (August 1998) and received support from the governments of neighbouring Uganda and Rwanda. The governments of Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia pledged support for Kabila. With forces from six countries involved, the conflict soon developed a wider significance than just a civil war. In spite of attempts at negotiation, hostilities dragged on into the next century. Then in January 2001 Kabila was assassinated by a member of his bodyguard, who was immediately himself shot dead. His motive was unclear, though the murder was blamed on the rebels.
The ruling group quickly declared Kabila’s son Joseph, the head of the Congolese military, as the next president. Joseph Kabila seemed more conciliatory than his father, promising free and fair elections and announcing that he was willing to make peace with the rebels. It was reported that since the civil war began, almost 3 million people had lost their lives, most of them from starvation and disease in the rebel area in the east. Encouraging signs soon developed:
Restrictions on political parties were lifted (May 2001).
The UN agreed that its peace mission should stay on in the DRC; it also welcomed the withdrawal of Namibian troops and called for other states with forces still in the DRC to withdraw them.
Peace agreements were signed between the DRC, Rwanda and Uganda (2002), with South Africa and the UN acting as guarantors. Both sides were to withdraw troops from the eastern area of the country; a system of power-sharing was to be introduced in which Kabila remained president, with four vice-presidents chosen from the various rebel groups. The transitional power-sharing government would work towards elections in 2005.
The new transitional government was formed in July 2003; the future looked more promising than for many years, though sporadic ethnic violence continued. Especially troubled was the north-eastern province of Ituri, where there were clashes between the Hema and Lendu tribes. A major step forward was achieved in 2005 when citizenship was awarded to everybody descended from ethnic groups present in the country at the time of independence in 1960. In July 2006 elections were held for president and for the national and provincial assemblies. Joseph Kabila took 44 per cent of the vote and did particularly well in the eastern Congo. His party won 111 out of 500 seats in the national assembly. Kabila’s nearest rival, Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo, a former rebel leader, won 20 per cent of the vote and did well in western Congo. Kabila had failed to win a large enough majority and a second round of voting was held in October. In the meantime violence broke out between armies of rival supporters, but the election itself went off reasonably peacefully and was declared to have been fairly conducted. This time Kabila won decisively, taking 58 per cent of the votes and was able to form a coalition government. However, Bemba refused to accept the result, and in March 2007 he tried to seize power in Kinshasa. After fierce fighting Bemba’s forces were defeated and he took refuge in the South African embassy. He was allowed to fly to Portugal but was later arrested and taken to the Netherlands where, in July 2008 an International Criminal Court charged him with war crimes.
Joseph Kabila was elected for a second term as president in December 2011, but the election was widely condemned and described as ‘lacking credibility’. It was reported that the votes from almost 2000 polling stations in areas where support for the opposition candidate, Etienne Tshisekede, was strong, had been ‘lost’. The election was also condemned by the 35 Roman Catholic bishops in the DRC as being full of ‘treachery, lies and terror’. They called for the electoral commission to put right ‘serious errors’. The Archbishop of Kinshasa even called for a campaign of civil disobedience until the election result was annulled (January 2012). Nevertheless, Kabila stayed in power and the violence continued through 2012 as various rebel groups, with help from Rwanda, tried to overthrow him. In September 2012 President Kagame of Rwanda insisted that Rwanda’s intervention was to protect Rwanda business interests in the DRC and to preserve Rwanda’s security.
25.6 ANGOLA: A COLD WAR TRAGEDY
(a) Civil war escalates
Section 24.6(d) described how Angola was engulfed by civil war immediately after gaining independence from Portugal in 1975. Part of the problem was that there were three different liberation movements, which started to fight each other almost as soon as independence was declared.
The MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) was a Marxist-style party which tried to appeal across tribal divisions to all Angolans. It was the MPLA which claimed to be the new government, with its leader, Agostinho Neto, as president.
UNITA (National Union for the Total Independe
nce of Angola), with its leader Jonas Savimbi, drew much of its support from the Ovimbundu tribe in the south of the country.
FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola); much weaker than the other two, it drew much of its support from the Bakongo tribe in the north-west.
Alarm bells immediately rang in the USA, which did not like the look of the Marxist MPLA. The Americans therefore decided to back the FNLA (which was also supported by President Mobutu of Zaire), providing advisers, cash and armaments, and encouraged it to attack the MPLA. UNITA also launched an offensive against the MPLA. Cuba sent troops to help the MPLA, while South African troops, supporting the other two groups, invaded Angola via neighbouring Namibia in the south. General Mobutu also sent troops in from Zaire to the north-east of Angola. No doubt there would have been fighting and bloodshed anyway, but outside interference and the extension of the Cold War to Angola certainly made the conflict much worse.
(b) Angola and Namibia
The problem of Namibia also complicated the situation. Lying between Angola and South Africa, Namibia (formerly German South West Africa) had been handed to South Africa in 1919 at the end of the First World War, to be prepared for independence. The white South African government had ignored UN orders and delayed handing Namibia over to black majority rule as long as possible. The Namibian liberation movement, SWAPO (South West Africa People’s Organization), and its leader, Sam Nujoma, began a guerrilla campaign against South Africa. After 1975 the MPLA allowed SWAPO to have bases in southern Angola, so it was not surprising that the South African government was so hostile to the MPLA.
(c) The Lisbon Peace Accords (May 1991)
The civil war dragged on right through the 1980s until changing international circumstances brought the possibility of peace. In December 1988 the UN managed to arrange a peace settlement, in which South Africa agreed to withdraw from Namibia provided that the 50 000 Cuban troops left Angola. This agreement went ahead: Namibia became independent under the leadership of Sam Nujoma (1990). The end of the Cold War and of communist rule in eastern Europe meant that all communist support for the MPLA ceased, all Cuban troops had gone home by June 1991, and South Africa was ready to end her involvement. The UN, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the USA and Russia all played a part in setting up peace talks between the MPLA government of Angola and UNITA in Lisbon (the capital of Portugal). It was agreed that there should be a ceasefire followed by elections, to be monitored by the UN.
(d) The failure of the peace
At first all seemed to go well: the ceasefire held and elections took place in September 1992. The MPLA won 58 per cent (129) of the seats in parliament, UNITA only 31 per cent (70 seats). Although the presidential election result was much closer – MPLA president Jose Eduardo Dos Santos won 49.57 per cent of the votes, with Jonas Savimbi (UNITA) taking 40.07 per cent – it was still a clear and decisive victory for the MPLA.
However, Savimbi and UNITA refused to accept the result, claiming that there had been fraud, even though the elections had been monitored by 400 UN observers; the leader of the UN team reported that the election had been ‘generally free and fair’. Tragically UNITA, instead of accepting defeat gracefully, renewed the civil war, which was fought with increasing bitterness. By the end of January 1994 the UN reported that there were 3.3 million refugees and that an average of a thousand people a day, mainly civilians, were dying. The UN had too few personnel in Angola to bring the fighting to an end. This time the outside world could not be blamed for the civil war: this was clearly the fault of UNITA. However, many observers blamed the USA for encouraging UNITA:shortly before the Lisbon agreement, President Reagan had officially met Savimbi in the USA, which made him seem like an equal with the MPLA government instead of a rebel leader. At the same time the USA had not officially recognized the MPLA as the legal government of Angola, even after the elections; it was not until May 1993, six months after UNITA had resumed the war, that the USA finally gave recognition to the MPLA government.
A ceasefire was eventually negotiated in October 1994 and a peace agreement was reached in November. UNITA, which was losing the war by that time, accepted the 1992 election result, and in return was to be allowed to play a part in what would be, in effect, a coalition government. Early in 1995, 7000 UN troops arrived to help enforce the agreement and supervise the transition to peace. But incredibly, Savimbi soon began to break the terms of the agreement; financing his forces with the proceeds from illicit sales of diamonds, he continued the struggle against the government until February 2002, when he was killed in an ambush by government troops. His death changed the situation dramatically Almost immediately the new leaders of UNITA showed a willingness to negotiate. In April 2002 a ceasefire was signed, and the two sides promised to keep the terms of the 1994 agreement. The Angolan National Assembly voted in favour of extending an amnesty to all UNITA members, including fighters and civilians. The whole agreement was to be monitored by the UN. At last, with Savimbi no longer on the scene, there seemed to be a genuine chance for peace and reconstruction in Angola.
During the 27 years of its existence, Angola had not known real peace, and its development had been severely hampered. It was a potentially prosperous country, rich in oil, diamonds and minerals; the central highlands were fertile – ideal for rearing cattle and raising crops; coffee was a major product. But at the end of the twentieth century the economy was in a mess: inflation was running at 240 per cent, the war was ruinously expensive, and the vast majority of the population was living in poverty, and thousands were on the verge of starvation. Leading politicians faced accusations of corruption on a grand scale. According to the IMF over $4 billion of oil receipts had disappeared from the treasury since 1996. Human Rights Watch reported that UNITA had employed 86 000 child soldiers, and even the government forces had used 3000. The two armies between them had laid some 15 million landmines and many of these still had to be destroyed. It was calculated that about 4 million people (a third of the population) had been forced to leave their homes and were left homeless in 2002, while 1.5 million had been killed.
Angola’s natural resources enabled the country to recover reasonably quickly economically. An encouraging sign was the signing of a peace deal with the separatist rebels of the Cabinda region. It was a relatively small area with a population of little more than 100 000, but it was important because about 65 per cent of Angola’s oil comes from there. In September 2008 the first national elections for 16 years took place. The ruling MPLA won just over 80 per cent of the votes, while the main opposition party (UNITA) could muster only 10 per cent, giving the MPLA and president José Eduardo dos Santos a two-thirds majority in parliament. By 2010 the president’s popularity was beginning to wane. One of the main criticisms was that he and his family had amassed huge personal fortunes while the country’s recovery and wealth had not percolated down to ordinary people. He survived an assassination attempt in October 2010, and there was an increasing number of massive anti-government demonstrations. By September 2011 the police were using violent methods to disperse demonstrators. However, President dos Santos, now aged 70, appeared to be the comfortable winner in the election of August 2012, and thanks to a change in the constitution, he seemed set to stay in power until 2022.
25.7 GENOCIDE IN BURUNDI AND RWANDA
The Belgians left these two small states, like the Congo, completely unprepared for independence. In both states there was an explosive mixture of two tribes – the Tutsi and the Hutu. They spoke the same language and looked very much alike, and although the Hutu were in a majority, the Tutsi were the elite ruling group, and they followed different occupations: the Tutsi raised cattle (the word ‘Tutsi’ actually means ‘rich in cattle’), whereas the Hutu were mainly farmers growing bananas and other crops (the word ‘Hutu’ means ‘servant)’. There was continuous tension and skirmishing between the two tribes right from independence day in 1962.
(a) Burundi
There was a mass rising of Hutus aga
inst the ruling Tutsi in 1972; this was savagely put down, and over 100 000 Hutu were killed, along with many Tutsi. Some 200 000 Tutsi fled into Tanzania. In 1988 Hutu soldiers in the Burundi army massacred thousands of Tutsi. In 1993 the country held its first democratic elections and for the first time a Hutu president was chosen. Tutsi soldiers soon murdered the new president, in October 1993, but other members of the Hutu government were able to escape. As Hutu carried out reprisal killings against Tutsi, massacre followed massacre; around 50 000 Tutsi were killed and the country disintegrated into chaos. Eventually the army imposed a power-sharing agreement: the prime minister was to be a Tutsi, the president a Hutu, but most of the power was concentrated in the hands of the Tutsi prime minister.