Behind and around the war: domestic politics, diplomacy, and economics
The Congo
Seen from Kinshasa the whole war situation hinged on Laurent-Désiré Kabila, his obsessions, whims, and bizarre cabinet. Kabila’s entourage resembled a medieval court in that the paper positions of the cabinet members were only a vague indication of what their actual roles could be and in that the favor of the prince counted for everything. The key man was perhaps Mwenze Kongolo, a thirty-eight-year-old Muluba married to an African American; he was one of the “ANACOZA recruits” of the AFDL days who was also a key member of the president’s Baluba inner circle. He had managed to put his trusted man Jean Mbuyu in the important position of Kabila’s secretary, which enabled him to oversee everything in the president’s office. Another confidant was Didier Kazadi Nyembwe, an eastern Kasai Muluba on his father’s side with a Burundian Tutsi mother. Kazadi Nyembwe was a longtime associate of the president and of his son Joseph, whose studies he had supervised in Dar-es-Salaam when the father was away for long periods. His intimate knowledge of the president’s affairs put him at the heart of the security system and of his private business deals. In the shadow of his former minder Joseph Kabila acquired steadily growing importance in military affairs after returning from military training in China. When Pierre-Célestin Kifwa, who had been made army chief on July 13, turned out to be completely incompetent, Joseph, who was his deputy, had to replace him impromptu as he floundered helplessly in the midst of Kaberebe’s Blitzkrieg.150 In fact, it was the triumvirate of Mwenze Kongolo, Kazadi Nyembwe, and Joseph Kabila who, together with Didier Mumengi and Yerodia Ndombasi, had held the fort during those decisive days in August when Laurent-Désiré Kabila had safely removed himself to Lubumbashi. Their loyalty was beyond question. Not so with Fernand Tala Ngaï, the finance minister who was sacked in October because he had been too close to the Tutsi component of the AFDL. He was replaced by Mawampaga Mwana Nanga, a Mukongo who had briefly held the position in the early days of the AFDL before his wife was caught trying to smuggle $200,000 out of the country in a shoebox. Pierre-Victor Mpoyo was another Muluba whose long history as an oil middleman doubled as that of an informal representative of Angolan interests.151
This “government” was organized like a loose band of freebooters or a hunting pack. Roles could be switched easily,152 there were no rules or procedures, state business and private business were hopelessly intermingled, and there was a tremendous feeling of precariousness. Failure to win would mean exile or death. The war was run in a most haphazard fashion because there was no army to speak of, and while the FAC were slowly and painfully brought up to standards, the government had to rely on two sources of military support: foreign armies and the Mayi Mayi guerrillas.
Among these foreign troops the most controversial were the Rwandese ex-FAR and Interahamwe. Although embarrassing, they had the advantage of being fiercely loyal, both because they hated the new Kigali regime and because they could see no hope in their present situation unless Kabila won. On September 28 Colonels Serubuga, Rwagafilita, and Kibirigi arrived in Kinshasa from their Nairobi exile and met Gen. Augustin Bizimungu, who had just been fighting on the other side of the river for the militia of President Denis Sassou-Nguesso. There they were welcomed by Michael van Krut, the boss of Executive Outcomes in Luanda,153 who had already seconded about 40 South African and 120 French and Belgian mercenaries to the FAC at the request of the Angolan government.154 Soon large numbers of Hutu former soldiers flocked to the Congolese capital from Brazzaville, the Central African Republic, Gabon, and as far as Sudan. As the war went on the refugee camps emptied, and within six months “the Rwandese [were] at the forefront of the fighting and there [were] no adult males left in the camps.”155 This was militarily necessary but politically quite damaging for the Kabila regime, which laid itself open to Kigali’s propaganda attacks of “preaching genocide.”156
Another important source of military support for the embattled Kinshasa government was the Mayi Mayi guerrilla forces, which had sprung up spontaneously all over the occupied east. They were reckless, confused, mostly very young, poorly armed and organized, and often so violent that they were feared by the very populations they purported to defend. Almost immediately they became a key element in the eastern theater of operations when they attacked Goma, the RCD “capital,” twice during September.157 The Mayi Mayi were a godsend for Kinshasa for a number of reasons: they fought voluntarily; they gave the regime a certain popular legitimacy to which the president himself, with his Maoist past, was particularly sensitive; they were cheap; and they were a constant thorn in the side of the Rwandese army as it tried to push into Kasai and Katanga. For the Congolese government this largely outweighed the international discredit their real or supposed génocidaire associations brought along.158 In Kinshasa Faustin Munene, the vice minister of the interior, and General Sikatenda, an old friend and companion of Laurent-Désiré Kabila from his guerrilla days, were in charge of liaising with the Mayi Mayi in the field, but the help they could give them, especially at the beginning of the war, was extremely limited. Nevertheless, supposed “FAC victories” in the east (and even those of the foreign armies fighting alongside them) were often in fact achieved by Mayi Mayi forces.159
But the Mayi Mayi phenomenon had tragic consequences for the population in the two Kivus. The Rwandese and their RCD cohorts were widely hated and the Mayi Mayi were the armed expression of that hatred. But because they were militarily weak they could not protect the population from a horribly violent repression. This led to repeated massacres, all of which are not yet fully documented. It started in August with the Kasika massacre (600 killed), followed by the Lemera massacre of December 4 (30 killed), the Ngweshe killings (around 30 killed in early February 1999), the Kamituga slaughter (around 100 victims on March 5), the Burhinyi and Walungu killings of mid-March 1999 (280 killed), 41 villagers burned alive by the RCD in Malemba-Nkuku (Upper Lomani) at around the same time, the big Makobola slaughter of March 15 (814 casualties), the May 1999 “Mayi Mayi surrender massacre” in Kinyogota,160 and the Uvira slaughter of early August 1999 (119 victims).161 These outrages are simply the largest and the best known ones, but the whole atmosphere of life in the Kivus became impossible, with a constant stream of murders, carjackings, armed attacks, rapes, theft, arson, highway robberies, and casual looting.162 Life became so difficult that whole segments of the population took refuge in the forests, where the absence of medical care and the presence of malaria and tropical rains killed many more than did enemy bullets. Agriculture was neglected because women feared being raped when they went to cultivate their fields. Prices rose in the occupied areas as commerce dwindled. The Catholic Church became the last service provider still able to function.163 This violence in the occupied territories was matched by the casual way the government used the air force (or rather, that of Kabila’s allies) to bomb “enemy targets,” which were simply civilians living in enemy-occupied areas.
Bombing
Date
Casualties
Nationality of Aircraft
Kalemie
Sept. 8, 1998
25 killed
Angolan
Kalemie
Nov. 25,1998
20 killed
Zimbabwean 90 wounded
Kisangani
Jan. 12, 1999
40 killed
Sudanese
Goma
May 11, 1999
43 killed
Zimbabwean
Uvira
May 11, 1999
20 killed
Zimbabwean
Uvira
June 3,1999
3 killed
unknown
Equateur
Aug. 4, 1999
524 killed
Sudanese
Sources: IRIN Bulletins, press agencies, eyewitnesses.
The attack, on August 4, 1999, during which two Antonov An-12 flying from Juba had bombed a series of villages (
hitting, among other “targets,” a crowded market), was the only one in which soldiers were actually killed (134 MLC and 10 UPDF). But on the ground the FAC did not commit the type of atrocities that were commonly associated with the Rwando-rebel forces simply because they did not have to face a hostile civilian population. There was one exception to that: Equateur Province, where the local people actually supported Bemba and his MLC and where the FAC committed their only known atrocities of the war when they killed about 320 civilians during their short-lived counteroffensive in January.164
Political life in such a climate was restricted to a minimum. President Kabila had created the Comités du Pouvoir Populaire on January 21 and he saw this “popular mass organization” as playing the central role of “transmitter belt” between the government and “the masses.” On April 20 he convened their first congress, during which he dissolved the AFDL, calling it “a conglomerate of opportunists and adventurers.” He railed against the “one hundred parties” of the late Mobutu era, which he said had turned democracy into a joke, and extolled the new organization as “one organization for the people to create their own happiness.”165 A Kinshasa newspaper sadly remarked, “One thought the one-party state had died in 1990 but it is now coming back in another guise.”166 The same blend of aggressive populism and Marxist-Leninist leftovers inspired his diplomacy. He courted Beijing and Pyongyang,167 letting loose a curiously antiquated rhetoric not particularly calculated to endear him to what he probably saw as “the capitalist West”: “If the American slave traders are planning to occupy the Congo to plunder its wealth as their Rwandan and Ugandan agents are already doing in the occupied territories, the Congolese people will show them . . . that they will never passively suffer genocide like the American Indians… . Imperialist aggression . . . is a plot which ultimately aims at reducing all Congolese into slavery. We must unmask the enemy even if he is hiding under a cassock, wearing the mask of a humanitarian organization or that of a diplomat.”168
His economic policies were perfectly coherent with his general political line. On September 11 he created the Service d’Achat des Substances Minérales Précieuses (SASMIP), which was supposed to centralize all gold and diamond purchasing for the state. The results were eloquent: within one month exports were down by 13 percent. Central Bank Director Jean-Claude Masangu was politely aghast and managed to get the SASMIP disbanded. He also put his foot down on the printing of fresh currency since the Congolese franc had lost 64 percent of its value since August 2 and inflation had risen to 81 percent, though he had previously managed to bring it down to 7.3 percent just before the war.169 But Kabila was not going to be foiled by his Central Bank director, no matter how clever he was. On January 8 Presidential Decrees 177 and 179 re-created the SASMIP under another name (Bourse Congolaise des Matiéres Précieuses, or BCMP) and banned dollar trading altogether.170 De Beers was horrified and tried to talk some sense into the president because it feared that, unless he ordered the treasury to wildly print more currency, Kabila would not be able to mobilize enough Congolese francs every month to finance the fifty million dollars’ worth of Congolese diamond exports. Masangu was arrested on January 14 for criticizing the two presidential decrees and for refusing to disburse $17 million (in hard currency) due to Zimbabwe. The Congolese franc immediately fell from 3 to 6.6 to the U.S. dollar on the black market; it eventually had to be devalued by 35.5 percent on April 8, down to $1 = FC 4.5. By then Masangu had been freed from detention to try to save the situation, but the black market rate was up to 8.2. Since the dollar was only at FC 3.6 in the rebel areas, which were in better financial shape due to the free market smuggling of commodities, a juicy traffic was immediately started by the FAC (and even by the allied ZNA and Namibian Defense Force), taking big bundles of Congolese francs over the “front lines” and converting them into dollars at the better rate.171 When commercialized, the first six months of MIBA diamond production brought only $1.4 million and oil revenue dropped from $36.4 million (1997) to $9.9 million (1998) due to the price distortions.172 The value of diamond exports fell precipitously as the BCMP was systematically short-circuited and gems were sold on the black market.
Value of Diamond Exports (in U.S. $ millions)
April 1998 50
December 1998
January 1999
February 1999
50
35
17
16
Source: La Lettre Afrique Energies, 31 March 1999.
Congolese exports were increasingly impounded by court order to cover unpaid import bills: 6,500 cubic meters of precious lumber was seized in Lisbon, 800 tons of cobalt in Johannesburg, 40 tons of cobalt in Antwerp. On April 11 fuel prices were doubled, and the next day Kabila’s motorcade was stoned as it rode through Kinshasa. The bodyguards opened fire, killing one bystander and wounding three. The popular singer Papa Wenge composed a new song, “Titanic,” and many night clubs picked up the name. The latest dance was called “Firing Position.” In spite of the growing threat of AIDS casual love affairs flourished. There was a kind of defiant despair in the air, as if tomorrow would never happen. If people were going to go down, at least they would go down singing.173
Angola
The situation had become intractable: it was evident that the MPLA had decided to destroy UNITA as a possible form of alternative power. An emasculated UNITA that would take its (small) share in the looting of the country’s wealth would have been acceptable, but one that might demand an equal share or even all was unthinkable. This was in fact a view shared by the international business community, and particularly the Americans. The J. P. Morgan Bank had arranged a $750 million loan backed by oil futures, which implied the continued control of resources by the MPLA,174 and a major trading company went one step further in July when it arranged a $900 million credit to Luanda against one whole year of oil production. As a qualified observer remarked at the time, “Savimbi has complied with the bulk of the peace protocol six months ago.”175 But it did not matter. On September 4 President dos Santos “suspended the dialogue with UNITA” and sacked UNITA’s four ministers and seven vice ministers in the government. Frantically trying to dissociate themselves from Savimbi, whom they felt had a personal fight with the MPLA leadership, several top UNIT A commanders “suspended” Savimbi from his position at the head of the movement.176 Then the charismatic leader Abel Chivukuvuku launched another dissident faction that rallied fifty-five UNIT A MPs behind it. They had not really understood the nature of the situation, but they soon did, when “somebody” fired several shots at Chivukuvuku’s car, missing his wife by inches. The UNIT A dissidents never got anywhere. The reality was in the new offshore deep-water oil permits: block 14 to Chevron, block 15 to Exxon, blocks 17 and 32 to Elf, block 19 to Petrofina, and block 20 to Mobil. These brought almost $1.5 billion in advance bonuses, and the MPLA elite had no intention whatsoever of sharing that loot.177
At the end of October, on the principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, Savimbi flew to Kisangani to meet James Kazini and Kayumba Nyamwasa. They discussed the exfiltration of UPDF Brig. Ivan Koreta and his boys, left stranded in the western Congo, and they talked diamonds. Soon Savimbi was to make a big present to the “rebels” by sending them “Papa Felipe,” the legendary Belgian diamond dealer Philippe Surowicke, who had long been UNITA’s main diamond trader and who used his old Antwerp connections to start trading diamonds in Kisangani in November, drawing on supplies from over two hundred small artisanal mines around the city. But the gift was to prove poisonous because “Papa Felipe” soon came to do business mostly with the Kazini—Salim Saleh group of companies, that is, with the Ugandans, which fed, with dire consequences, into the growing Rwando-Ugandan rivalry in Kisangani.
Meanwhile the war had restarted in earnest on December 4, when the FAA attacked Bailundo. The fighting was extremely hard and no mercy was shown to humanitarians: the UN lost four airplanes shot down between December 11 and January 2; the government and UNIT A bl
amed each other for downing the aircraft. On January 17 Kofi Annan finally admitted, “Peace has collapsed.” The MPLA accused Burkina Faso, Togo, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia of helping UNITA,178 which was largely true provided the word “help” is qualified. President Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso and President Gnassingbé Eyadema of Togo were mostly out to make money and to some extent further their complicated schemes in west Africa. Rwanda and Uganda mostly wanted to get UNITA to support their war in the Congo and in the meantime did not mind serving as a conduit for some of UNIT A’s diamond exports. As for Zambia, as we already saw, the government was not even involved, but some powerful individuals made money by selling UNITA what it needed. The war flared all over Angola, although the worst-affected provinces were Malange and Huambo. The number of IDPs shot up tragically.
Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe Page 33