Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe

by Gerard Prunier

  The French tolerated his eccentricities because of the strategic role played by the Bouar military base in the Chadian conflict. Throughout the 1970s Gaddafi’s pressure was growing on Chad and France had decided to resist it, with discreet U.S. approval. The Bouar base was vital. As for Bokassa, he was not anti-French but rather possessed by what one could call “aggressive Francophilia” on the model of the expression used by Ali Mazrui about Idi Amin.128 France could live with that. But when he quelled school riots in April 1979 by packing dozens of school kids in airless cells where nineteen eventually suffocated to death, there was an international scandal and the OAU imposed a commission of inquiry. Emperor Bokassa I got nervous and flew to Tripoli, promising Gaddafi he would reconvert to Islam and give him the Bouar base to attack the French from the south. This was too much for Paris, and on September 20, 1979, French Air Force transport planes flew into Bangui from Ndjamena and simply removed the problem.129

  But removing Bokassa and bringing back Dacko130 was not enough to make the Central African Republic viable. In spite of a bevy of French advisers at every government level, in spite of the presence of a large French army contingent, in spite of French economic aid Dacko lasted only two years. He was overthrown in September 1981 by Gen. André Kolingba, a quiet and professional army man whose eventless twelve-year rule gave the impression that he had finally “normalized” the Central African Republic and brought it up to the ordinary standards of the French neocolonial system131 to the point of accepting democratic elections and losing them in October 1993. The elections were won by Ange Félix Patassé, a northern Gbaya-Sara who finally put an end to rule by the “river people.”132 Jean-Paul Ngoupande, who became his prime minister, described him as “intellectually, an eclectic mixture of Third World radicalism tinged with Marxism and populist nationalism . . . but laced with cynicism and a crude perception of the country as divided between two blocks, the ‘nice savannah people’ who have suffered and the’ evil river people’ who made them suffer… . And more than everything his everyday political style is marked by the influence of Jean-Bedel Bokassa.”133 Which of course does not make for a very coherent or orthodox way of dealing with public affairs. He was arrested at the Paris airport in September 1979 with a gun in his pocket, as he was trying to get on a Tripoli-bound plane.134 During his eleven years of exile in Togo during the Kolingba presidency he seems to have been involved in highly dubious business dealings which he never denied when they were made public.135 His lackluster performance after 1993, the corruption of a new “get-richquick” group of businessmen around him, and his erratic administrative style made his hold on power in what former prime minister Ngoupande calls “a non-existent state” tenuous at best. His army mutinied in April 1996 because it was not paid, and it was only the intervention of French troops that managed to restore order. In a sort of nihilistic challenge to their desperate condition the soldiers not only looted but destroyed everything that symbolized wealth or prestige, including a cigarette factory that was razed to the ground, most Bangui downtown stores, and the MOCAF brewery, which was thoroughly trashed.136 In November 1996 the Central African army mutinied again. Part of the problem, apart from the nonpayment of salaries, was that the army had retained a Yakoma and “river” majority since the Kolingba presidency, whereas the Presidential Guard was solidly Sara and “savannah.” Both were at each other’s throats, while the civilian population, which was neither, was caught in the middle.137

  By late 1996 the Central African Republic was a rudderless ship, with a discouraged civil service, a divided and rebellious army, and a mostly “informal” economy, its porous borders crisscrossed by zaraguinas,138 the Sudanese army, SPLA guerrillas, Chadian poachers, and even Ugandan rebels in the extreme southeast. Tottering on the brink of nothingness, it was going to be suddenly affected by the distant Rwandese genocide when fleeing former génocidaires chased by the RPA ended up crossing the Ubangi into its territory.

  In medium-size Congo-Brazzaville the population of 2.7 million is extremely unevenly distributed, with over 60 percent living in the towns, mostly in Pointe Noire and Brazzaville, which are both in the south. The neglected, sparsely populated, and rural north contains only 20 percent of the people. This lopsided distribution has had major effects in heightening tribal tensions and exacerbating the impact of urban problems on politics.139 Brazzaville-Congo’s ethnic distribution is relatively simple if compared with huge countries like Zaire or Angola: a cluster of Kikongo-speaking tribes in the south, the Teke group in the center, and a variety of small related northern tribes collectively known as Mbochi. But the problem is that, unlike in Zaire, the tendency of the various ethnic groups has not been toward regional regroupings but, on the contrary, toward militant fragmentation. Thus the coastal Vili around Pointe Noire have developed a political identity separate from their other Bakongo brethren, and so have the Lari around Brazzaville. The various Teke groups have both mixed with and fought against their Bakongo neighbors. The northerners have obstinately clung to a variety of subidentities (Bangala, Koyo, Mboko, Kabonga), even though they are in fact very closely related; in the north some of those identities (Ngbaka, Banza) overlap with those in the Central African Republic.

  The “middle Congo,” as the country was called during colonial times, was placed at the center of what became French Equatorial Africa (AEF). The other AEF territories (Chad, Ubangi-Chari, and Gabon) were poorer and/or landlocked, which gave the Congo the role of a regional capital at the heart of a small empire. This explains the oversized development of Pointe Noire and Brazzaville, which were harbor and administrative capital, respectively, for a much larger territory than the Congo itself. It also explains the higher degree of education found at an early stage among the native population, a tradition that has survived right down to our time.140 Congo’s first president at independence was a Mukongo priest, Father Fulbert Youlou, who ordered his cassocks from Christian Dior, was waited on by a special body of nuns, and spent money wildly. He was overthrown in August 1963 by an exasperated populace.141 In “intellectual” Brazzaville Alphonse Massemba-Debat started the left-wing drift that was going to be so typical of Congolese politics over the next twenty-eight years. He called himself a “Bantu socialist,” which caused a disagreement with his prime minister, Pascal Lissouba, who saw himself more classically as a “scientific socialist.” Both were southerners like Youlou,142 but the majority of the army came from the northern tribes and they soon decided to turn that asset into political power. On July 31, 1968, Capt. Marien Ngouabi, a Kouyou officer, overthrew Massemba-Debat, a year later creating the Parti Congolais du Travail (PCT), a sort of elitist communist party that was to culminate at 1,475 members in 1974. Zigzagging between right-wing coup attempts and left-wing guerrilla insurrections by way of purges and selective political murders, the PCT-led Congo started on a long career of tropical Marxism that has been aptly described as “an ideological swindle.”143 It is not impossible that some of the younger officers took their Marxism seriously and saw themselves as defenders of an oppressed peasantry, but for the majority of the army the PCT was just an instrument of privilege and of northern political domination over the more populated south, which would have had its way in any kind of election. The dictatorship of the proletariat was in fact the dictatorship of Mbochi officers,144 and the oil boom, which started in 1973, soon fueled corruption and heightened the competition for power. But given the PCT’s hegemonic position the competition came from inside the party rather than from outside, causing frequent upheavals and purges.145

  This did not prevent Brazzaville from turning into one of the most vibrant African capitals, partly due to its own tradition of intellectual life and partly due to the influence of the robust Zairian popular culture just across the river in Kinshasa.146 In March 1977 President Marien Ngouabi was murdered in obscure circumstances.147 and his successor, Gen. Joachim Yhombi-Opango, never quite managed to get things under control. His power was soon threatened by Gen. Denis Sassou-Ng
uesso, another PCT northern officer, with a slightly different ethnic inscription (Mbochi instead of Makwa). In February 1979 Sassou-Nguesso took power and threw his predecessor in jail, where he left him to languish for the next thirteen years. Sassou soon enacted another constitution148 and brought the PCT brand of tropical Marxism to a point of near perfection. In May 1981 the Treaty of Mutual Help and Friendship with the Soviet Union gave the regime a solid political and military backing, while the growth of economic and oil cooperation with France ensured the possibility of vast overspending, particularly through bloating the civil service:

  The number of civil servants doubled between 1970 and 1979 although their salaries did not increase in keeping with inflation… . Even poorly paid the civil servants were slightly better off than many other people… . But even more than the expenses in salaries what grew completely out of control were the expenses in equipment for the ministries. They were multiplied by three between 1980 and 1982. Nevertheless it was hard to find a single photocopy machine in working order in most ministries and there was a constant dearth of chairs and tables in the schools. But it is true that it is easier to steal money on the funds earmarked for equipment than on the salaries themselves.149

  This padding of payroll to prevent social unrest was possible only because of the “understanding” attitude of the French oil company Elf, which controlled most of the oil production. By international standards Sassou accepted a very low return on oil exploitation, on the condition that Elf be prepared to pay oil dividends ahead of schedule. So by the time the PCT regime collapsed in 1991 under the weight of its own incompetence, coupled with the fall of its Soviet protector, Brazzaville’s oil revenues were mortgaged ten years in advance, until 2002.

  Unsurprisingly, the final blow that brought the system down came from France. At the momentous Franco-African Conference at La Baule in June 1990, President François Mitterrand announced that French economic aid would in the future be linked to increased democratization.150 Obediently, most of the francophone African dictatorships started to display at least some signs of political transformation. Benin, nicknamed “the Latin quarter of Africa,” showed the way, and the Congo-Brazzaville was next in line. On February 25, 1991, it opened a national conference that was to last three and a half months and dismantle the “workers state” of the prior twenty-two years. But now the main problem was that the command economy it had created was also in many ways a “command society,” which encouraged educational development but did not provide it with any outlet apart from a bloated civil service, which the IMF now wanted deflated. In a massively urbanized society where over 60 percent of the citizens were younger than eighteen this was an explosive mix. And the mix did explode.

  The apparent catalyst was once more tribal politics. After a short transition period the August 1992 elections brought to power Pascal Lissouba, Massemba-Debat’s former prime minister of the mid-1960s. Lissouba was a southerner from a very minor tribe. He was thus faced with two difficulties in ethnopolitical terms: an obvious one, keeping the now frustrated northerners in line, and a more delicate one, building an alliance of minor tribes that would give him a power base in the south. Faced with a crisis in Parliament and believing that the electorate would support him, Lissouba chose to dissolve the Assembly and call for another election in October 1992. This is when the situation started to get out of hand.

  The army was still mostly northern and therefore pro-PCT. The new president made a deal with the Israeli private security firm Levdan, which started to train a special militia for him, the “Aubevillois,” from the name of the Aubeville Social Centre for Youth, which they used as a meeting place.151 This was not seen with pleasure in France, whose army had always considered that security in former French colonies was its special preserve. But this was just the beginning of the process: Lissouba found that he did not have enough money to pay for the hefty Levdan contract (around $50 million), so he offered in exchange a cut in the Marine III offshore oil permit to Naphta Inc., an Israeli petroleum company with close ties to Levdan.152 With an empty treasury, pressing needs opened by the hopes following democratic change,153 and a national oil production already mortgaged for the next ten years, President Lissouba had only two solutions: either get new and better terms from Elf154 or else introduce new players in the oil game. He chose to try Elf first, asking for $200 million on good collateral, the new N’Kossa oil field then getting under production. Elf refused. But in a way the small Naphta contract had opened a psychological breach in the Elf monopoly and Lissouba did the unthinkable: he contacted the U.S. company Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) and asked for money up front. He was offered a facility costing $150 million secured by the same Congolese government’s share of the N’Kossa permits that Elf had refused as collateral for the loan. This sent alarm bells ringing both in Paris (at Elf and in government circles, which at the time were almost one and the same thing) and in Brazzaville itself, where the PCT reacted as if it were still in power, sending one of its top members, Rodolphe Adada, to the United States to get Oxy to cancel the deal. The tension rose by several degrees when the PCT-MCDDI155 opposition refused to recognize the results of the June 1993 legislative elections, which seemed to show a reinforcement of the presidential camp. By July 1993 Brazzaville exploded into wild urban riots which, with periods of lull between bouts of fighting, were going to last until February 1994. These eight months of violence caused only a limited number of casualties,156 but they led to a massive and artificial reethnicization of society that severely dented the country’s self-confidence.157

  Why “artificial” reethnicization? Because the “new tribes” that appeared during this conflict, and that were later to take part in the even more violent battles of 1997–1998, were very far indeed from being the primeval ethnic entities ethnologists might have studied some years before in the same area. First, there was the phenomenon of urbanization: all the southerners lived in the same parts of town and had intermarried; therefore, since it was southerners who were fighting each other,158 they had to create new artificial distinctions among themselves, using the “real” ethnic markers as a base but turning them into new synthetic “tribes.” The militias were the tools of this transformation.159 Second, there was the question of the ethnicization of the regions when their ethnic makeup did not allow them a large and coherent enough stake in the civil war; thus the so-called Niboleks were born, their name being an aggregate from the southern district names of Niari, Bouenza, and Lekoumou. The “Niboleks” were “really” Bouissi, Nzabi, Voumbou, or Bembe; or, if one prefers, they were “really” Teke and Kongo, the global identities that regroup the smaller tribes along language lines.160 But the “real reality” were the militias, the politically induced groupings of young urban unemployed and semi-educated youths who fought for lack of a future, to get some money right now, and to do as in the Kung Fu and U.S. action movies they had watched when idling away their unemployed lives.

  By early 1994 the fighting had slowly died down without any clear settlement being reached. Even if Lissouba was still in power, the net victor was Sassou-Nguesso, who had sat it out while the southerners were destroying each other. Lissouba had had to backtrack on the Oxy oil deal and was back begging from Elf; everybody knew that Elf had discreetly supported the Cobra militias of Sassou-Nguesso during the war, all the more discreetly since the Cobra did not fight much themselves but instead passed on this support to Bernard Kolelas and his Ninja, who were the ones actively confronting the government. The militias had survived the war and shared the meager resources of the quartiers (neighborhoods) among themselves, setting up their own racketeering systems. But there were 10,000 men in the militias and the army was 20,000 strong, with 12,000 officers and NCOs (northerners in their majority) and only 8,000 privates of all tribes. The demilitarization agreement that had followed the end of the fighting provided for the militias’ integration into the army. Because it would have radically altered that structure the northerners resisted it.


  On the oil front President Lissouba compounded his mistake of 1993 by antagonizing Angola. Right from the beginning, when FLEC leader Da Costa became prominent among the cadres of the Aubeville Centre, it was obvious that Lissouba had overestimated the possibilities of change brought about by the collapse of the Soviet Union; he wanted, if not to annex the Cabinda Enclave, at least to bring it within his sphere of influence. But given the fact that over 50 percent of Angola’s oil came from Cabinda alone, it was unlikely that Luanda would accept such a change without a fight. Sassou’s Soviet alliance had brought him to the MPLA side of the Angolan conflict, and Lissouba seemed to think that the demise of the Soviet Union opened the possibility of an alliance reversal for the Congo. On August 15, 1995, Jonas Savimbi stood by his side on the Brazzaville podium, where the thirty-fifth anniversary of Congo-Brazzaville’s independence was celebrated. This did not go unnoticed in Luanda, and at that moment Pascal Lissouba became a marked man in many eyes: Paris did not look with much sympathy upon a francophone African head of state who had broken the ranks;161 Elf suspected him of favoring “foreign” (i.e., non-French) oil companies;162 former President Sassou-Nguesso, who had gone to live in Paris, was planning his comeback; and the Angolan leadership considered him a dangerous UNITA ally. The situation was extremely fragile. Given Brazzaville’s very close relations with Zaire, the destabilization of the Mobutu regime concurred in pushing the internal Congolese situation over the brink, especially when, as in the Central African Republic, a number of former génocidaires arrived in the country, with the Tutsi RPA in hot pursuit.