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

by Gerard Prunier

  Meanwhile things were getting more and more out of control on the Zairian side. Tshisekedi had come back from his meeting with Mobutu in Cap Martin saying that the ailing president had made him prime minister, and he was welcomed back in Kinshasa by huge crowds.87 But Mobutu denied the appointment, and Tshisekedi had to be restrained by force from entering “his” office at the prime minister’s official headquarters. On the ground the AFDL was cautiously moving ahead, taking Butembo (November 26) and Beni (November 30). In Beni the AFDL received support from the Ugandan army, which had crossed the border mostly to crush the ADF base at Kasindi. The Ugandans denied the crossing.88 But the situation was uncertain. On paper at least the FAZ remained quite a large army and its reactions were still untested. But the Zairian armed forces were not united; they were a clientele-based series of independent bodies, all organized around the person of Mobutu, “radiating around him like the spokes of a wheel.”89 The most powerful body was the Division Spéciale Présidentielle (DSP), twelve thousand strong on paper,90 under the command of General Nzimbi, Mobutu’s nephew. Its soldiers were mostly Ngbaka and its officers were Ngbandi, from the president’s tribe. It had its own artillery and armor and totally escaped control by the FAZ chief of staff.91 Then there was the Garde Civile, a kind of military police entirely made up of Ngbandi under the command of General Kpana Baramoto. Its theoretical strength was ten thousand, but because Baramoto was the most powerful man in Zaire after the president, nobody would have dared to count the actual number of troops. Then there was the Service d’Action et de Renseignement Militaire, a special elite corps of three thousand men (mostly Ngbandi, of course) under the command of Mobutu’s brother-in-law General Bolozi. There was also the Service National d’Intelligence et de Protection (SNIP) under General Likulia Bolongo.92 And finally there were the regular FAZ, the ordinary foot soldiers, who were pretty much abandoned to their fate and seldom saw a payday.

  In theory all this added up to around eighty thousand men;93 in practice there were at the most around fifty thousand, with probably less than half at anything like fighting capacity.94 The officer corps was not only ridiculously large (fifty generals and over six hundred colonels), but it was also split by rivalries between officers trained in Belgium, in the United States, or in France, who formed their own factions in addition to the tribal divisions.95 Most of the top ranks were natives of Equateur Province; almost all the professionally inclined officers belonging to other areas had been purged or even killed over the years.96 The winners of that negative selection process were absolute gangsters; their corruption was such that when the managing directors of a number of public companies were changed by decree in 1991, the top officers besieged the offices with armed men and tanks to try to impose their own candidates for the jobs. But by then Mobutu was so weakened that he threatened to resign instead of shooting them.97 Such was the army that the AFDL was going to have to “fight.” In fact, the AFDL mostly saw it running away; the only fighting during the campaign was done by foreigners. The FDD Burundians fought in South Kivu, and the Rwandese ex-FAR and Interahamwe fought at the Osso River and at Shabunda. Angolan UNIT A regiments defended in Bunia and, during the only large-scale battle of the war, fought at Kenge before everything fell apart.

  On December 17, 1996, Mobutu came back from his Cap Martin villa to a triumphant welcome by over a million people in Kinshasa. This spontaneous popular movement for such a discredited man was a sort of warning for the future: Mobutu was disliked, but he was the old devil everyone knew, while there was great fear and uncertainty concerning the foreign forces silhouetted behind Kabila.98 FAZ Chief of Staff Eluki Monga Aundu had been fired in November99 and briefly replaced by Baramoto. When he came back President Mobutu replaced him with the only general who still commanded a minimum of respect among military and civilians alike: Gen. Mahele Lieko Bokungu. Mahele, who was a graduate from the prestigious French Army Officer Academy of Saint-Cyr, had fought courageously in Shaba in 1977 and 1978 and had stood, pistol in hand, in the way of his pillaging troops in 1991. He was supposed to be the candidate Paris had groomed to replace Mobutu. But the type of support he then got from France to help him fight off the invasion was nothing short of catastrophic when he received a bunch of mercenaries who looked like a cross between Frederick Forsyth’s “dogs of war” and the Keystone Kops. In many ways they were a typical product of the declining capacities of Françafrique.100 When the ailing Mobutu asked Dominique de Villepin and Fernand Wibaux to help him recruit some mercenaries in October,101 he had in mind the likes of “Mad Mike” Hoare, Jean Schramme, and Bob Denard. But they were all either dead or retired. All that the French could come up with were a bunch of Bosnian Serb veterans recruited through a shady telecommunications company.102 The first mercenary contingent arrived in Kinshasa in December. By early January 1997, Col. Christian Tavernier had set up his command post in Kisangani, with a so-called White Legion of 276 men under his orders. Their only serious trump card was their small air wing, consisting of four Aermacchi MB-326 light fighter bombers and four powerful Mi-24 Russian combat helicopters.103 They were so hopeless that they did not even manage to use them correctly.104 They spent their days getting drunk and aimlessly harassing civilians.105 They did not have proper maps, they spoke neither French nor Swahili, and soon most of them were sick with dysentery and malaria. General Mahele privately complained, “The French want me to regain control of the situation and they do not even manage to supply me with the simplest things.”106 Confused efforts were made: on January 12 two giant An-124 cargo planes chartered by a British company arrived from Belarus with 200 tons of weapons which they delivered to Kisangani;107 several MiG fighters came from China, but there were no trained mechanics capable of taking them out of their crates and putting them back together. On January 24 the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs finally issued a denial about any recruitment of mercenaries; nobody believed it, and it did not matter anyway.

  On December 25 the rebels took Bunia. For the first time there was a bit of serious fighting because UNIT A sent some men to the eastern front. Many vanished in the jungle as they were trying to make their way on foot or with broken-down trucks all the way from Kamina to Upper Zaire.108 But others were flown directly to Bunia and tried to stand their ground. UNITA Gen. Abilio Kamalata (“Nuna”) was killed during the assault, along with several of his men. It was after the fall of Bunia that Kabila and his minders started to seriously take stock of the situation:109 they now controlled a 600-to 700-kilometer strip stretching from Uvira to Bunia, with Walikale as its westernmost point, and they had to make a decision on their final strategic objectives. In the eyes of many observers they appeared to have achieved their final aims: smashing the refugee threat and getting control of a few little gold and diamond mines.110

  So far the FAZ had proved to be no match for the combined AFDL, RPA, and UPDF forces, and AFDL was now recruiting easily, even if it was obvious that the new soldiers would not be operational for several months.111 The first local problem started when a group of Mayi Mayi fighters attacked AFDL Banyamulenge near Butembo on January 3, killing eleven. The North Kivu Mayi Mayi had supported the invaders in October, when they attacked the Rwandese Hutu refugee camps, a logical move given the fact that the armed wing of the refugees had been steadily encroaching on their lands for the past two years in an effort at creating a “Hutuland” rear base for their war with Kigali. But now that the ex-FAR and Interahamwe were fleeing west, they feared, not Hutu, but Tutsi domination and they turned against the Tutsi-supported Alliance.

  The strategic choice was made in late 1996, and it was made for all-out war. On January 4, 1997, the AFDL decided that its four components were now fused into one. Four days later the AFDL military leader Kisase was killed by the RPA.112 He had always been a thorn in the side of the Rwandese because of his openly nationalistic attitude, which often brought him into conflict with his RPA minders. There was a famous occasion when he stopped the RPA from taking a large electric generator
from Goma Airport to Rwanda, saying that it belonged to the Congolese state and that he was accountable to that state and not to Kigali. And there were numerous occurrences of public speeches when he had voiced his defiance of the overbearing Rwandese. The RPA had never managed to keep him under control, while Kabila accepted the nonstop day-and-night presence of six to ten Tutsi “guardian angels” around him. After the AFDL “consolidation” everything went very quickly: since he was “a nationalist” the Rwandese asked him with some irony to go and take care of this newly developing Mayi Mayi problem. At the last moment, as he was heading to Butembo, his bodyguards were removed and replaced by some of Kabila’s.113 Kisase was careless enough to go anyway, and they killed him. Kabila then lied about the murder on January 17, saying that Kisase “had been wounded by the Mayi Mayi, was hospitalised and would soon be back.” This was a portent of things to come in terms of his future style of government.

  On January 2 Zairian Prime Minister Leon Kengo wa Dondo announced “a total and crushing offensive [offensive totale et foudroyante], which will spare no enemy, Zairian or foreign.”114 Then he did nothing. In the meantime two key Luanda officials, National Security Adviser Gen. Helder Viera Dias (“Kopelipa”) and MPLA Secretary-General Lopo do Nascimiento, arrived in Bukavu.115 Their job was to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the Alliance and the degree of involvement of UNIT A on the Zairian government’s side. Since the 1994 Lusaka Peace Agreement UNIT A and the MPLA were in a situation of “no peace, no war,” which did not stop them from skirmishing on the fringes of their respective areas of control. The two MPLA envoys were a bit wary because they knew that the RPF had long-standing relations with UNIT A.116 But they realized that circumstances had changed, and they decided that Kagame now needed them and would collaborate in their strategy of strangling UNITA. Between February 12 and 25, 1997, two battalions of “Tigers” were flown to Kigali from Luanda on big Ilyushin Il-76 cargo jets.117 They were later to play a decisive role in the war.

  Meanwhile the AFDL-RPA forces had carefully started to move to cut off the various access points to Kisangani, their next target. Mahagi, just across the Uganda West Nile border, was taken on January 29 by thirty Ugandan soldiers. The move was denied two days later by President Museveni himself in a radio interview: “We are not in Zaire… . Dissident groups have been present there for thirty years, lumumbists, the Tshombe group, Mulele groups and others. They are the ones who have taken up arms.”118 On the day Museveni was making this disingenuous claim his troops reached Watsa in the north, forcing Tavernier’s mercenaries to flee back to Kisangani. Watsa was taken to be the stepping stone for Uganda’s coming attack on southern Sudan. By then Alliance forces were moving in three directions at once: southward, where they occupied Kalemie on February 3;119 northward, where they occupied Aru on February 2; and westward, where they had been fighting for the Osso River crossing on the Walikale-Lobutu road since mid-January. This last front was the only one where some serious fighting took place. Beyond the river was the large Tingi-Tingi Rwandese refugee camp, and the ex-FAR were doing their best to stop the RPA advance.120 But the Alliance forces had started moving southwest as well, taking Shabunda on February 6, a move that opened the road to mineral-rich Kasai and Katanga.

  The Ugandans were fulfilling an agenda of their own, which had more to do with the Sudan than with Zaire. President Museveni had declared, “We have run out of solutions with the Sudan. We are now seeking a solution on the battlefield.”121 By then the war had generalized and the Ugandan army had taken prisoner some former FAZ soldiers among the ADF guerrillas operating in the Kasese area,122 while the Sudanese were air-dropping supplies to the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda in the hope that it could hit the UPDF hard enough to stop it from joining the battle in Zaire. But the LRA was more of a terrorist outfit than a regular guerrilla force: between January 7 and 9 it had killed 312 civilians in Lamvo County, near Kitgum,123 a move that only strengthened Museveni’s resolve to deal directly with the Sudanese. In early February the Uganda National Rescue Front II guerrilla group, led by Ali Bamuze, attacked the village of Midigo (Aringa County) in West Nile.124 This move had been encouraged by the Sudanese Secret Service, which was anxious because the main body of West Nile guerrillas (the WNBLF) was crossing over from its bases in Zaire and surrendering in large numbers to the Ugandan army.125 By then the Sudanese were desperately trying to coordinate with Colonel Tavernier and the FAZ remnants in Upper Zaire, but they were crumbling so fast that the Sudan border now lay open. On the other side Museveni was now working with the SPLA to try to squeeze the Ugandan rebels in northeastern Zaire in a three-pronged assault coordinated with the AFDL-RPA forces then moving northward. The next step would be to push them back into southern Sudan.

  Faced with these dynamics, reactions both from Kinshasa and from the international community were extremely weak. On February 17 three Zairian Air Force Aermacchi MB-326 light strike aircraft dropped a few bombs on the Bukavu market, killing nineteen civilians and wounding thirty-seven.126 This action was totally useless from a military point of view. The next day in New York the United Nations passed Resolution 1097 demanding an end to hostilities, the withdrawal of all external forces, including mercenaries, the protection and security of all refugees, and an international peace conference for the Great Lakes crisis. None of these demands had the slightest effect on the situation.

  By early March Alliance forces and their foreign allies were moving at great speed in all directions: Kindu fell without fighting on March 3, followed the next day by Manono. The road to Katanga was now open. In the north the combined forces of Congolese rebels, the RPA, the Ugandan army, and SPLA Sudanese rebels had pushed the last FAZ remnants to the Sudanese border. Inside Sudan SPLA forces besieging Yei had captured the supplies air-dropped by the Sudanese Air Force for the beleaguered garrison, and on March 13 the town fell. But the Ugandan rebels then moving northward to escape the trap in Zaire did not know it; they were trekking up on foot from Morobo toward Yei, together with bedraggled remnants of the FAZ and some Sudanese regulars, a column of over four thousand men, women, and children. They fell into a major SPLA ambush halfway to Yei on March 12: two thousand people were killed, over one thousand captured,127 and the rest, including wounded WNBLF Commander Juma Oris, fled in disarray toward the safety of the Sudanese army garrison in Juba.128

  President Museveni briefly stopped in Paris on a return flight from the United States on March 11. His interview with President Chirac was icy because he denied the presence of UPDF troops in Zaire, something the French had fully documented through their Commandement des Opérations Spéciales commandos. But French efforts were increasingly irrelevant: on March 13 at a meeting in Brussels France was still trying to convince the European Union of the need for a military intervention;129 two days later Kisangani fell into rebel hands. Tavernier’s mercenaries did not even try to resist but instead fought the FAZ to get into the fleeing helicopters. It now looked increasingly likely that the Mobutu regime was on its last legs. On March 17 Kabila refused a cease-fire, saying, “Only direct talks with Mobutu might bring some kind of a pause.”130 Two days later Jacques Foccart, the Grand Old Wizard of French African policy, died at his home in Paris, a symbol that the end was near.131

  On March 20 the French army pre-positioned one hundred troops in Brazzaville, with five Transall transport planes in case foreign civilians would need to be evacuated from Kinshasa.132 Mobutu was back from the Riviera the next day, so sick he could hardly walk out of the plane.133 Four days later there was an OAU general meeting in Lome which all the main players felt it mandatory to attend: Honoré N’Gbanda, André Boboliko, and Gérard Kamanda wa Kamanda from Kinshasa; Bizima Karaha and Gaëtan Kakudji for the AFDL;134 Howard Wolpe for President Clinton; African Affairs Adviser Michel Dupuch for President Chirac;135 and, of course, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. All they had to go by was Resolution 1097, and it was not much: Kabila declared the next day, “We will never enter into any ki
nd of power-sharing arrangement with the Kinshasa government.”136 Mbuji-Mayi, the diamond capital, fell without fighting on April 5. A week earlier Jonas Mukamba Nzemba, managing director of the Société Minière de Bakwanga (MIBA), had declared that he was ready to work with the AFDL.137 This meant that the rebel movement was now out of the woods, both physically and figuratively: coming into Kasai meant that the rebels were out of the dense central forest and could look forward to easier operations in the savannah area; the road to Kinshasa was now open. Also, getting the cooperation of the largest diamond company in Zaire meant that they were likely to begin accessing some kind of self-financing. As we will see in the next section, the signal was not lost on the international mining community, which was soon beating a path to Kabila’s door.

  There was now panic in Kinshasa. President Mobutu fired Prime Minister Kengo wa Dondo, who had reached maximum unpopularity,138 and tried to replace him with Etienne Tshisekedi. AFDL agents secretly came to see the old opposition leader and warned him that accepting would mean his political death.139 He accepted nevertheless, generously offering the AFDL six portfolios in his future cabinet. Because all the remainder was going to his UDPS party, he managed to antagonize both sides at the same time, and the last Mobutists refused him. After some comical scuffling he was again prevented from taking his position, and Mobutu, who by then was nearly dying, named SNIP boss Gen. Likulia Bolongo as prime minister on April 11. Three days later Lubumbashi fell to the combined AFDL-RPA Katangese Tiger forces.140 There was not much fighting even if the local UFERI militia of Katanga’s governor Kyungu wa Kumwanza theoretically sided with the last few DSP troops left. Their contribution was mostly to loot the city before it fell. The attackers surprised them by entering Zambia and then attacking from the southeast when everybody expected them to come from inside Zaire, through Kasanga or Likasi.141 A few days later and without any form of consultation Kabila proclaimed himself president of the now renamed Democratic Republic of Congo.