by Guy Arnold
The career of Mobutu is a case study in tyranny and corruption and his last years showed him visibly and increasingly on the defensive under intensive pressure from democratic forces demanding change. The economy was collapsing and inflation soaring. It was against this background that he opted to introduce a multiparty system and announced his resignation as chairman of the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (MPR) so that he could ‘rise above’ party politics. This situation prompted his apparent embrace of democratic processes at the beginning of the 1990s. Had he managed, as he tried, to co-opt Tshisekedi as his prime minister, he might have survived longer but he failed to do so. Outsiders often refer to tyrannies as though these are the fruits of one person’s endeavours but this is never the case. ‘One may equally wonder whether Marshal Mobutu, whose authority for so many years was uncontested, was not for a substantial period the hostage of what we have called a “board of directors”, consisting in his case of the Equatorian clique from his home province, and the military barons of the government.’4 All tyrants, in fact, surround themselves with a clique bound to the tyrant by complicity and corruption, and Mobutu was no exception to this rule. In Mobutu’s case control of the economy was exercised by smuggling out of the country officially sanctioned counterfeit banknotes and the President was ‘able to choose whether to change some of these banknotes into dollars or to use them for paying the army’.5 By the 1990s, if not well before, Zaïre under Mobutu had become a regime based upon state kleptocracy solely concerned to promote the interests of the ruling clique to the detriment of the general welfare.
Mobutu’s long reign was assisted by the fact that the United States, Belgium and France, in pursuit of their own regional interests, ignored all Mobutu’s shortcomings and went along with his outrageous system until it became convenient or necessary to ditch him. Mobutu’s economics were based upon a system of political patronage networks that made it unnecessary to put large resources into public services that would provide the elite with only limited returns. When, finally, the Mobutu regime collapsed the system of patronage became localized, allowing regional leaders to continue for themselves the process of manipulation that formerly had kept Mobutu in power. Once his immediate entourage saw that Mobutu was doomed they deserted him. ‘Mobutu’s propaganda machine and his external backers had created the image of a strongman without whom the Congo could not be held together. On 16 May 1997, Mobutu’s generals dispelled the myth when they informed the field marshal that they could no longer guarantee his own security in the country.’ He retreated to Gbadolite where the crew of his presidential jet refused to fly him out of the country on the grounds that it belonged to the state. Humiliatingly, therefore, he was flown out of Zaïre in a military transport upon which some of his soldiers fired as it took off.6
Beginning his political career as a protégé of Lumumba and a Marxist, Kabila had been implicated in the Simba massacre of civilians in Stanleyville in 1964 before he had formed his own political party, the Parti de la Révolution Populaire (PRP) which opposed Mobutu for 30 years although from 1964 to 1996 Kabila had fought a wholly ineffective campaign against Mobutu from his stronghold in the Fizi mountains on Lake Tanganyika. According to Che Guevara to whom Kabila played host in 1965, there was little of the revolutionary about him. As Guevara said, ‘He displays none of the required discipline of a dedicated revolutionary and is too addicted to drink and women.’ In the intervening years he had become a trader in ivory and gold. Despite this dubious reputation, Kabila did manage to lead a broad coalition against Mobutu and in October 1996 his PRP joined with three other parties to form the AFDL. When he emerged victorious in 1997 as Mobutu’s forces disintegrated, outside observers attributed his victory mainly to the support of the Tutsi troops from Rwanda and Uganda rather than to his own followers. Little was known of him in 1997 except that he was to the ‘left’ in politics. Presidents Museveni of Uganda and Kagame of Rwanda had proposed making Kabila the leader of an instant Congolese liberation struggle, no doubt also believing they would subsequently be able to manipulate him. Mounting a revolt from eastern Zaïre was hardly difficult in 1996 since, apart from general Congolese dissatisfaction with everything about Mobutu, the whole region covering eastern Zaïre, Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda was in turmoil as a result of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and the large numbers of Rwandans who had become refugees. By November 1996 Kabila had established his claim to lead the AFDL, which had made some substantial advances. Despite this, Kabila had no vision for a future Congo and had been forced into a leadership position by the politics of Zaïre’s neighbours.
AFDL forces entered Kinshasa on 17 May 1997 and Kabila announced the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) replacing the name Zaïre. In a broadcast to the nation Kabila said he would do everything possible to ‘guarantee peace, national unity, and the security of the people and their property’. The population of Kinshasa welcomed the AFDL troops and Tshisekedi’s Union pour la Démocatie et le Progrès Social (UDPS) (Union for Democracy and Social Progress) welcomed the new regime on 19 May. Kabila’s new government was recognized by Angola, Rwanda, Uganda and Congo (B); Western countries indicated support but withheld recognition. Kabila promised maximum co-operation with relief agencies looking after the refugees. He entered Kinshasa on 20 May and quickly made clear that there was no place for Tshisekedi in his transitional government. There were protests at Tshisekedi’s exclusion and on 26 May Kabila banned demonstrations. On 29 May he took the oath of office including full executive presidential powers. In June he announced his government priorities and said the administration would be run on socialist lines. His priorities were the construction of roads, the establishment of mechanization centres to modernize agriculture and the electrification of the whole country. On 7 September Mobutu died in Morocco. Whatever his capacities and real aims, Kabila faced general chaos and a breakdown of law and order in a country that had some 240 ethnic groups or tribes, a renewal of secessionist ambitions in Shaba and predatory Western companies moving in to profit from the economic chaos left behind by Mobutu. The corruption and greed of President Mobutu had been on such a scale that he and his supporters were deemed to be responsible for the new political term ‘state kleptocracy’ or rule by theft. As the rebellion, which got under way in 1996, gathered momentum at the beginning of 1997 it was perhaps fitting that Mobutu sought to bolster his crumbling regime with the assistance of mercenaries. In fact they did him little service and in March 1997 quit Kisangani in the face of the oncoming rebels and fled the country. Mobutu’s chief of staff, Gen. Mahele Lyoko Bokungu, had made contact with the rebels and said he saw no reason to put a city of five million at risk for one man. On 16–17 May, Mobutu’s presidential guard, including his son Capt. Mobutu Kongolo, went on the rampage in Kinshasa killing those they regarded as traitors, including Gen. Bokungu. About 177 people were killed in all. On 16 May, the minister of information, Kinbiey Mukumba, announced that Mobutu ‘had decided to leave the capital’ and had ‘ceased all intervention in the affairs of state’.
By early 1998 it was already becoming clear that Kabila, though he had been given the benefit of the doubt, was not the man to solve DRC’s problems, which included armed groups that were a law to themselves, and the eastern border area, which formed the crux of the problem. Hutu militants were launching attacks upon Rwanda from bases in Kivu, other ethnic groups in North and South Kivu simply defended themselves against all comers while former FAZ soldiers were out of control. Kabila did not enjoy a wide support base and his victory had clearly been due to the Banyamulenge backed by Rwanda and Uganda. Now, however, the Tutsis in Kinshasa overplayed their hand, behaving too much like victors, to cause deep resentment. Kabila should have sought the backing of the country’s best-known opposition figure, Tshisekedi, but he was unsure of himself and fearful of Tshisekedi’s influence so he subjected him to four months’ internal exile. Tshsekedi and his UDPS were based upon Eastern Kasai. Kabila did what his predecessor Mobutu had don
e and filled posts with his family or extended family from Shaba, his home base. He resented and then opposed the UN team that was investigating alleged human rights abuses, most notably massacres of thousands of Hutu refugees in 1997, forcing the team to withdraw in April. Aid donors who had promised half the US$1,500 million needed for an immediate reconstruction plan had only provided US$100 million by mid-year. Meanwhile, the rate of inflation increased.
In July, fearing a coup by his Tutsi supporters, Kabila began removing them (whether Rwandan or Banyamulenge) from key posts in the military. As popular sentiment against the Tutsis increased, the Banyamulenge moved back to their South Kivu homeland. In order to balance the Tutsis whom he feared, Kabila provided training camps for Hutu extremists to the dismay of the RPF government in Kigali. On 2 August military units in Goma and Bukavu mutinied and after two weeks these rebels announced the formation of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie (RCD) (Congolese Democratic Rally). The core of the RCD consisted of the Tutsi (Banyamulenge), supported by Rwanda and Uganda. The RCD drew support from other disaffected groups. A Bakongo professor, Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, became the RCD president. Meanwhile, on 4 August the rebels carried out a daring manoeuvre: using civilian planes captured at Goma airport they transported several thousand of their best troops to the Kitama military base near Matadi on the Atlantic coast. Most of the soldiers then at the base were ex-FAZ undergoing ‘re-education’ and they joined the rebels. They quickly occupied the vast Inga Dam and then pushed on to Kinshasa airport. Kabila faced forces that were superior to his own, which in any case were of doubtful quality, and so appealed to Angola and Zimbabwe to come to his aid. They responded with highly seasoned troops and air force units. The Angolans attacked the rebels in the rear from Cabinda and the Angolan and Zimbabwean air forces bombed the rebel column, forcing them to retreat into northern Angola. Other neighbouring countries – Namibia, Congo (B), Central African Republic, Sudan, Chad and Gabon – pledged support for Kabila and provided aid or small military contingents. In the east, however, the rebels seized control of a vast area centred upon Kisangani and stretching to the Sudan border in the north and Shaba in the south. With so many countries involved, even if only on the periphery, the revolt was developing into a major African war.
As yet there had been no intervention from outside the continent though the three powers with most interests in the Congo, the United States, Belgium and France, watched uneasily the unfolding of a drama over which they had no control. The readiness of Congo’s neighbours to intervene was heavily influenced by the country’s vast store of mineral wealth and it soon became clear that they had some of these resources in mind at least as much as providing assistance to one or other side in the conflict. Angola was interested in oil, Zimbabwe acquired stakes in the country’s cobalt and copper, Namibia obtained access to diamonds, Uganda to gold. ‘The main players in Congo are seen by many as greedy warlords with ready made armies at their disposal and a clear interest in enriching themselves. Continued war could be their best way of doing this.’7 By the end of 1998 the war had developed into a complex, all-Africa conflict with six of Congo’s neighbours involved to a greater or lesser degree on one or other side. Rwanda and Uganda, and to a lesser extent Burundi, supported the rebels. Angola, which wanted to ensure that Kabila did not provide future bases for Savimbi’s UNITA, supported Kabila. Zimbabwe’s Mugabe sent 12,000 troops to support Kabila, partly to help a fellow ‘Marxist’, partly to ‘protect’ his mineral interests in the country. Namibia also sent troops to support Kabila. By the end of the century the Congo conflict had been dubbed ‘Africa’s Great War’ and, whatever the original reasons for intervention by its neighbours, the huge mineral wealth of DRC made it one of the richest prizes on the continent. It began to look increasingly like a war of warlords whose principal aims were to acquire control of segments of the country’s mineral wealth rather than to assist the Congo become a united, stable nation after the long Mobutu era. Given its vast size, potential wealth and strategic position straddling the centre of the continent, a long war in the Congo involving its neighbours threatened to destabilize half Africa. Since the time of Leopold II, the Congo’s mineral wealth had been jointly monopolized by the country’s rulers and their foreign business partners rather than used for the benefit of the Congo’s people who remain amongst the poorest in the world. One result of this partnership in greed has been to persuade ordinary people that only money is worth achieving: ‘To be considered in Zaïre, you got to have money!’ How to get it then becomes the question and in a state with no law acting as a framework the search for money goes outside the law to become the norm of behaviour.8 As the war continued it became clear that Rwanda and Uganda were attempting to alter DRC boundaries to their advantage. Thus, ‘Rwanda and Uganda, later on joined by Burundi, took advantage of the disintegration of the Congolese state and armed forces to create territorial spheres of interest within which they could plunder the Congo’s riches.’9
As 1999 began, the civil war was being fought in the east of the country where a new group, the Mouvement de Libération Congolaise (MLC) (Movement for the Liberation of the Congo), was formed under Jean-Pierre Bemba. In mid-January yet another group of resistance fighters appeared. These, known as the Mai-Mai, with aid from Burundi, attacked Bukavu. In retaliation, the RCD massacred 500 civilians in a village near Uviva in southern Kivu. As the war continued – it appeared increasingly open-ended – the countries that had intervened began to count the costs in terms of both money and casualties, finding moreover that their interventions were not popular with their own populations. In consequence, five nations – Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe on the one side, Rwanda and Uganda on the other – met on 18 January in Windhoek, Namibia, and agreed the first stage of a ceasefire. In March the OAU appointed Zambia’s President Chiluba as its peace co-ordinator. In April Col. Gaddafi convened a meeting at Sirte in Libya at which President Kabila met President Museveni of Uganda and the two men signed a peace agreement under whose terms Uganda undertook to train 1,500 Congolese troops as a way to replace its own troops in eastern Congo. Kabila, who was both vain and arrogant, was not an easy man to deal with and had ordered that he should be called ‘the creator, the thinker, the initiator, the main craftsman and chief architect’, a habit of personal superlatives borrowed from China and North Korea. At the end of May Rwanda announced a unilateral ceasefire while the Kinshasa government called for the withdrawal of ‘uninvited forces’. A split now occurred in the RCD and Wamba dia Wamba was demoted though he maintained a separate power base in the Kisangani area. In July both the RCD and MLC announced substantial gains with the MLC taking Gbadolite and the RCD laying siege to Mbuji-Mayi, the diamond-producing centre in eastern Kasai crucial to Kabila’s revenue. However, under pressure from Rwanda, which, in turn, was under pressure from the US, the RCD and MLC signed the Lusaka accord and accepted a ceasefire. The Lusaka accord grew out of a June meeting that had been convened by South Africa and Tanzania. On 11 October the joint military commission (JMC) that had been formed to monitor the peace by the OAU chair, Gen. Lallali Rachid of Algeria, met in Kampala. The meeting was attended by all the warring parties, the OAU, the UN, the EU and Zambia. Its first task was to send back to Rwanda ex-soldiers of the Rwanda army and Interahamwe; Kabila saw this as a precondition for further progress. The Lusaka accord had laid down a timetable that required the withdrawal of all foreign troops by February 2000. The UN was to provide 500 peace monitors. In December the OAU appointed the former Botswana president, Quett Masire, as facilitator of the peace process. The three rebel groups, the RCD, the breakaway RCD-Mouvement de Libération under Wamba dia Wamba and the MLC came together in Uganda to form a coalition. By this time (December) the ceasefire had broken down.
Rwanda, at best a reluctant peacemaker with members of both the Interahamwe and former soldiers of the Hutu Rwanda army in DRC, decided to protect its frontiers by occupying eastern areas of DRC and continued to assist the rebels against Kabila
. On the other side, both Angola and Zimbabwe were increasing their presence and support for the Kabila government. In fact, in early 2000 the peace accord was broken almost all the time in Shaba, Kivu and Equateur provinces. Kabila offered an amnesty to any rebel who was willing to accept his authority but the offer was turned down by the MLC and RCD. Another ceasefire was agreed on 8 April, but the introduction of UN peacekeepers was delayed because the opposing forces refused to withdraw to established positions to allow the UN forces to be deployed. An SADC emergency meeting, scheduled for August in Lusaka, collapsed when Kabila refused to accept Masire as mediator. Kabila was also angered because his allies, Angola and Zimbabwe, would not call for the withdrawal of Rwanda and Uganda. Kabila then suspended the Lusaka accords and called for direct negotiations with Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi and rejected UN peacekeepers. Kabila’s intransigence could be related to the success or failure of his troops: they had been gaining ground so he did not make any concessions; in August and September they lost ground. New peace initiatives were attempted at the end of 2000. Early in 2001, however, RCD and Rwandan troops moved south to capture Pweto on Lake Mweru causing 3,000 Zimbabwean and Congolese troops to flee to Zambia, leaving the way open to Lubumbashi, the capital of Shaba and Kabila’s major stronghold.
The minerals of eastern Zaïre acted as a magnet to Uganda and Rwanda and their mining and illegal export financed military operations. At the height of the coltan boom in December 2000, revenue from the export of this mineral amounted to over US$1 million a month. In the same year, according to official statistics, the RCD exported gold and diamonds worth US$30 million. ‘After “blood diamonds”, gold and oil, “coltan”, short for columbite-tantalite, a rare ore containing tantalum, has joined the rogues’ gallery of African subsoil resources fuelling wars on the ground. Coltan is a crucial element in the manufacture of mobile phones, PlayStations or any item that needs a capacitor to maintain the electric charge of a computer microchip.’10 Its rarity – and abundance in eastern Congo – has turned it into one of the most sought-after ores. It is coltan rather than diamonds or gold that has kept the Rwandan war machine operating in the Congo war and has played a big part in attracting Congo’s neighbours to become involved in its war. For years the price of coltan was US$30 a pound but in December 1999 it soared to US$210 before settling at a more modest US$155. Since, apart from Australia, DRC has some of the richest coltan deposits in the world, the rebels declared a monopoly on coltan exports. It is the mineral riches of DRC that explain why six of its neighbours were so keen to become involved in its civil war. Thus Kabila’s allies, Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia, were granted offshore oil concessions, as well as diamond mines, cobalt and rare timber. The supporters of the rebels – Rwanda and Uganda – were taking ‘pay’ for their assistance in diamonds, timber, coffee, gold and tantalum. Uganda, which backed the rebels in the main DRC gold region of Bunia, has no important gold reserves but since the war has registered as a gold exporter. Rwanda’s intervention in support of the RCD has been largely financed by the tantalum and diamonds it was able to extract. The RCD president, Adolphe Onusumba, justified the illegal export of these DRC ores, saying: ‘I mean – we are at war. We need to maintain the soldiers. We need to pay for services.’