Mobutu is a fundamental political phenomenon of contemporary Africa, and the subsequent thirty-two years of his unbridled power constitute one of the most catastrophic examples of dictatorship in a continent that has displayed an impressive array of those during the past half-century.7 Protected by the Americans, who saw him as their most reliable cold war ally on the African continent, Mobutu ran the Congo, which he renamed Zaire, as a poorly managed private estate. At once greedy and munificent, violent and funny, clever and ignorant, he was a tyrant out of Suetonius whose limited horizon stopped at the preservation of his undivided power. He never seems to have given a thought to the fact that he destroyed his country in order to keep ruling it. His undoing was to come with the end of the cold war, which had been the great justification for his regime.
The turning point was the year 1990, when the whole system started to go awry. Mobutu had had opponents before but never any structural threat to his regime. The remnants of the 1960s radical guerrillas had either been crushed militarily, like Pierre Mulele’s maquis in Kwilu, or pushed into irrelevancy, like Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s PRP in South Kivu.8 Etienne Tshisekedi’s Union pour la Démocratie et le Progrès Social (UDPS) had been more of a problem because of its Kasai Baluba constituency, but it could be accommodated. And the violent challenge of the Angolan communist-backed Gendarmes Katangais invasion in 1977 had been contained through classical cold war tactics of foreign military intervention. But 1990 was something else; the world was changing and the aging dictator did not know what to make of it.
In January and February 1990 President Mobutu decided to tour the whole country. He had been shaken by the violent death of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu, who had been a personal friend, and his political acumen told him that something new was happening. Mobutu was surrounded by sycophants and largely cut off from the people,9 which made this trip a rude awakening for him in spite of all the animation and popular dancing usually organized for such circumstances. He came back with an impression of dangerous discontent at every level. His answer was to make a historic speech on April 24, 1990, proclaiming a “Third Republic” in which the press was to be free, Christian names and Western business suits were to be allowed again,10 and the MPR would lose its monopoly on political representation. Of course, he intended to maintain control over the whole process. But the pressure had been building for too long and the political agitation that developed as a result scared him, causing an overreaction: on the night of May 11–12, 1990, DSP commandos were unleashed on the campus of the University of Lubumbashi, killing dozens of students.11
This was the mistake he could not afford to make in the international context of the time. All the financial abuses that he had committed and had been allowed to get away with in the past were suddenly brought to the fore. In rapid succession Belgium, the United States, and the World Bank cut Zaire off. All had previously had excellent reasons to do so, but they had to wait until the cold war was over and the old dinosaur12 was made redundant before they decided to act. Now Mobutu had to bite the bullet, and on August 7, 1991, the Conférence Nationale Souveraine (CNS) was solemnly inaugurated.13 But the wily old man had not lost his talent for manipulation: if there were to be several political parties, there could also be too many parties, so as to make the whole thing unmanageable. The unmanageability worked beyond his wildest dreams: when the CNS started to disintegrate Kinshasa blew up as the unpaid FAZ started to loot the city.14 Large segments of the population soon joined the soldiers in an orgy of pillaging and often of sheer gratuitous destruction of anything that was a symbol of Mobutism. The CNS was suspended on January 19, 1991. Pressure mounted. On February 16 the one-million-strong Church-led Marche de l’espoir (March of Hope) ended in tragedy when police and the army opened fire on the unarmed marchers, killing seventeen, according to the authorities, or forty-nine, according to Médecins Sans Frontières. The CNS reopened on April 6 in an atmosphere of extreme urgency. The delegates by then knew that whatever their petty quarrels and divisions, they were in a historic position, with the eyes of the whole country trained on them. But the old dinosaur could still bite, and he showed it by increasingly ethnicizing the political situation in order to make it unmanageable.
In 1990 Mobutu had appointed Kyungu wa Kyumwanza as governor of Shaba Province. Kyungu was a Muluba from Katanga who was a co-founder of UDPS together with Tshisekedi. But after he was jailed he made a deal with Mobutu: to get his release he defected from the party. In Shaba he soon became a vocal proponent of a return to “Katangese autonomy.” The former prime minister Nguza had created his own political party, the Union des Fédéralistes et des Républicains Indépendants, and collaborated with Kyungu in Shaba. In September 1992 the governor ordered a massive roundup of Kasaian Luba.15 Tens of thousands were arrested, their properties confiscated or looted, they were regrouped in concentration camps and deported “back to Kasal” (where many of the youngest ones had never been). There were an untold number of victims, probably several hundred at least. This agitation and confusion contributed to undermine the CNS, especially because there were sporadic outbursts of looting in the interior (Mbandaka in October, Kisangani and Goma in December). On August 15 the CNS elected Tshisekedi prime minister against Mobutu’s wishes, and on December 6 Mobutu closed down the Assembly.
With aid cut off after years of economic decay most sources of financing for the government had dried up. Mobutu then cold-bloodedly resorted to printing huge quantities of increasingly worthless currency. The inflation rate became insane: 4,130 percent in 1991, 2,990 percent in 1992, 4,650 percent in 1993, and 9,800 percent in 1994. The new five million Zaire note which was introduced in late 1992 was the straw that finally broke the shopkeepers’ patience: they refused it as legal tender. Because the army had been paid with these new worthless notes it exploded into another looting spree, from January 28 to February 2, 1993, and completely ransacked the capital, killing French Ambassador Philippe Bernard in the process. The country was tottering on the brink of anarchy. The CNS had been reopened under the name Haut Conseil de la République (HCR) under Monsignor Monsengwo’s presidency and was trying to back Tshisekedi as prime minister, though Mobutu had named Faustin Birindwa for the position. The whole of 1993 was spent in deadlock, with two prime ministers, two Assemblies (the HCR and the old Mobutist Parliament), and increasingly chaotic provinces.16
Mobutu could still rely on a measure of French support, and in September he was invited to the Franco-African Summit in Mauritius, where he talked with President François Mitterrand. Mitterrand asked him to support the democratization of the country and Mobutu promised he would. He knew that he had very little support left from Brussels or Washington; Paris appeared to be his last hope. He managed to eventually wear down Monsignor Monsengwo’s resistance and get the prelate to embrace a mythical “third way” between the executive and Tshisekedi’s opposition. On January 14, 1994, the HCR was dissolved, and nine days later Laurent Monsengwo agreed to fuse it with the old Mobutist Parliament, creating the Haut Conseil de la République/Parlement Transitoire (HCR/PT).
To buy time Mobutu kept promising the West anything it wanted. The diplomatic skies seemed to be clearing since the 1994 Rwandese genocide and its subsequent refugee exodus had put Zaire back on the international community’s map. “Free and fair elections” for 1997 had even been promised, and the old dinosaur looked as if he had won yet another battle. In fact, he and his regime were dying, both physically and metaphorically. He was soon to be diagnosed with advanced cancer of the prostate, and the country had decayed into uncontrolled pseudo-feudal ethnic units. As for the Rwandese refugee question, far from providing the useful blackmailing card he had hoped for, it was rapidly turning into an uncontrollable disaster. Which is why, when the RPA finally crossed the border in September 1996 and found nothing standing in its way, the ease with which its military campaign succeeded against the refugee camps eventually tempted the attackers into dealing the regime its deathblow and write the l
ast chapter of a thirty-two-year rule.
The interlopers
Sudanese and Ugandans
Sudan’s independence process had mainly been an Arab affair,17 but until the 1980s, in spite of the long drawn-out conflict between northern and southern Sudan and in spite of the Ugandan civil violence of the Idi Amin and Obote II regimes, there had been little cross-border interference.18 Things changed with the advent of Yoweri Museveni’s rise to power in Kampala on January 25, 1986,19 and even more when the radical National Islamic Front (NIF) took over in a bloodless military coup in Khartoum during the night of June 30 to July 1, 1989. One of the main problems came from a (wrong) personal inference. In the 1960s both Yoweri Museveni and Col. John Garang, the SPLA leader, had briefly been students at the University of Dar-es-Salaam, then the Mecca of young African left-wingers. When Museveni came to power the Sudanese regime was immediately persuaded that Uganda would become a rear base for the Sudanese rebel movement, although there were no signs that such a plan existed.20 The whole “radical student theory” was based on a mistake in the first place, for Museveni and Garang had attended Dar-es-Salaam University at different times, and they had hardly known each other during the two or three months when both had been there. Fantasies notwithstanding, there was no “Dar-es-Salaam left-wing old boys’ network.”21 As for Ugandan support for the SPLA, it was nonexistent until 1993, and there were times when a simple appointment with the Kampala SPLA representative (who did not even have an office) could cause the poor man to be questioned and briefly detained by the Ugandan police for “unauthorised political activities.”22 Museveni was extremely careful not to antagonize Khartoum, and if he finally resorted to helping the SPLA it was only because his policy of noninterference failed in the end to produce any results.23
The NIF 1989 putsch brought to power a government even more hostile to Kampala than Sadiq al-Mahdi’s had been.24 The cause was ideological rather than factual because, contrary to the former democratic regime’s pro-Western orientation, the NIF had a strong anti-U.S. position.25 The Muslim Brothers stood for militant Islam; they were looking forward to a mediumterm future when Islamization would reach the Great Lakes, and even to a long-term future when it would sweep the whole continent.26 In that longrange strategic view, Uganda stood in the way.
Up to 1989 there had been sporadic efforts by Khartoum at helping anti-Museveni forces in Uganda. The first attempt was very early on, in 1986, when the new Ugandan regime had to face resistance from the defeated Acholi in the north.27 The former chief of the Ugandan Military Council Army, Acholi Brig. Basilio Okello, had crossed into Sudan after being defeated by Museveni’s NRA and been given help by the Sudanese army. This first attempt at interfering with the new Ugandan regime did not work out very well because the political guerrilla movement Brigadier Okello and his friends launched was soon bled of its men and equipment by a strange millenarian cult led by a young prophetess, Alice Auma, nicknamed Lakwena, “the messenger.” Alice’s mystic leadership was more attractive for the bitter and disoriented young Acholi soldiers who had just lost power than the conventional political manifestos of Brigadier Okello and his former government associates.28 She and her band of combatants smeared with dawa (magic medicine) pushed back the NRA in the north, fought their way down to the south, and were stopped only by superior firepower as they were nearing Jinja in October 1987. Alice, who was wounded, took refuge in Kenya and the movement almost collapsed. But Joseph Kony, her nephew or cousin, declared that he had also had visions and laid claim to the rebellious prophet’s mantle, creating the Lord’s Salvation Army (LSA). Between 1988 and 1993 he kept a small guerrilla war going in north Acholi, in almost impenetrable terrain close to the Sudanese border. Up to late 1991 his position remained extremely difficult because the SPLA was on the other side of the border and was very hostile to the LSA. Although the Sudanese rebels were not getting any help from Museveni at the time, they were careful to stay on good terms with him because Uganda was a major conduit for humanitarian aid channeled by trucks from Kenya to SPLA-occupied Equatoria. The 1991 fall of Colonel Menguistu’s regime was to prove a boon for Joseph Kony and his men as the SPLA, which had been close to the former communist regime, suddenly lost its main source of support. Soon after, in August 1991, the Sudanese rebel movement split into two mutually hostile wings when its Nuer and Dinka units started fighting each other. The Sudanese government, which had already taken an interest in the Kony rebellion but had not been able to access it geographically, started to make contact with it after its two successful offensives of early 1992 and late 1993. The Sudanese government had acquired control of several stretches of the Sudan-Uganda border and Kony was invited to Juba by the Sudanese Military Security; there, in exchange for a symbolic smattering of Islam (some of the fighters took Muslim names and pretended to convert), he got serious military aid. The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA),29 which had been down to about three hundred fighters in mid-1993, was suddenly up to over two thousand well-equipped troops by March 1994 and was in a position to raid the whole of northern Uganda.
It was then that the situation began to get seriously internationalized. The Khartoum government approached President Mobutu sometime during mid-1994 and got his approval to run supply convoys from Wau in Bahr-el-Ghazal down to northern Uganda through the Central African Republic and the Uele Province of Zaire. Not only did the LRA now get some of its supplies through Zaire, but Sudanese Army Security contacted Kakwa and Aringa former Idi Amin soldiers who had been living in the area since 1979 and reorganized them into a fighting front.30 The WNBLF was born in November 1994 in Faradje and, with Sudanese help, immediately started harassing Ugandan forces in West Nile from the Zairian side of the border.
This was bound to attract some kind of Ugandan reaction, but not right away, in the “triple border” zone. There was another region further to the south, around the Ruwenzori and Virunga volcanic chain, where trouble between Uganda and Zaire had long been endemic. On the Ugandan side this was an area of long-running conflict between the central government and the Bakonjo and Baamba tribes, who live astride the Uganda-Congo border. In the early 1900s the Bakonjo had been arbitrarily made subjects of the Tooro kingdom because the Tooro monarchy had allied itself to the colonial occupation and the British wished to reinforce it vis-à-vis its anti-British neighbor, Bunyoro. The Bakonjo and their Baamba neighbors took their subject position with patience but ended up asking the colonial authorities for their own district in the 1950s. Their request was denied, and they launched a low-intensity guerrilla struggle against the British, which they kept going through all the independent governments following decolonization. This movement was called Rwenzururu and became famous in a kind of local folk epic.31 After years of struggle the Rwenzururu leadership finally signed an armistice with the Obote II government in August 1982. The man who had been instrumental in this reconciliation was himself a Mukonjo, Amon Bazira, who understood that the movement was by then largely middle class and that it was possible to co-opt it with some commercial advantages. But Bazira, who was a staunch supporter of the Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC), left Uganda in 1985. He later approached President Mobutu and President Daniel arap Moi of Kenya, who each had their own reasons for disliking the new Ugandan regime. They both supported a revival of the Bakonjo rebellion under the new label of the National Army for the Liberation of Uganda, a much grander sounding name than Rwenzururu. In fact NALU was just a cut-rate version of Rwenzururu without the popular appeal. But money could do wonders in an impoverished peasant milieu in a marginal region of Uganda. NALU soon grew enough to become an irritant, and in 1992 Bazira was shot dead in a Nairobi street, most likely by Ugandan agents.
Museveni, who had always seen Mobutu as the African stooge of imperialism incarnate, was even further angered by the NALU episode and started looking for ways of getting back at the Zairian dictator. He found them on the other side of the Virunga Mountains, across from the Ugandan town of Kasese, where the waning of the Congoles
e rebellion in 1965 had left lingering guerrilla remnants around Beni. Later, in 1986, groups of young Batembo, Bahunde, and Banande who resented Mobutu’s protection of local Banyarwanda land grabbing, started a new low-intensity antigovernment operation under the leadership of Joseph Marandura’s son on the other side of the Virunga Mountains, across from the Ugandan town of Kasese.32 They called their movement the Parti de Libération Congolais (PLC), but their activity was mostly limited to raiding Ugandan border villages to steal goats and chickens. In 1988–1989 they were severely mauled by the FAZ and had to withdraw either north, all the way into Garamba National Park, or deeper into the Beni Forest.
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