Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe
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Meanwhile, regardless of the successful completion of the elections, the east did not heal. Military violence in the east has often been treated as a kind of whole, although it is in fact a series of different problems coming from groups whose impact is global but whose origins, structures, and motivations are quite separate.
The less dangerous (although not the least violent) are probably the various Mayi Mayi groups (Willy Dunia in Fizi, Capt. Bendera Kilelwa on the Ubwari peninsula, several groups loosely linked to Padiri Kanero in North Kivu, Gédéon’s former fighters in northern Katanga) who refuse to recognize anybody’s authority and keep a system of shifting alliances.170 In many ways they are “social bandits” whose problem is chiefly economic. As a local UN worker in charge of DDRRR said, “There has been a lot of talk about disarming and reintegrating Mayi Mayi fighters back into society but so far no one is really doing anything.”171 This is a problem that should not be addressed at the level of the leaders only, but also—even more—at the level of the rank and file, which is socially desperate and keeps shifting between groups in order to eat.
The various warlords (Cobra Matata, Peter Kerim) who have survived amid the debris of that civil-war-within-the-civil-war in the Ituri are not very different from the Mayi Mayi, but they are more regionally and tribally grounded. They also have for a long time had the support of Uganda, which kept clumsily trying to fish in increasingly bloody waters. They are now being “integrated” into FARDC at fairly high levels.172 But as the recent International Crisis Group report remarked, “They [the warlords] have refused to leave Ituri and prevented most of their troops from going to designated assembly areas since they fear arrest and want to keep a reserve force in case the deals do not work out.”173 Here too dealing with the leaders has been an inefficient shortcut since the men who really matter are the disenfranchised and criminalized ordinary fighters.174
The third group of uncontrolled armed men in the east, the “foreigners,” is more serious because of its real or imagined potential for regional destabilization. It comprises various foreign guerrilla groups, such as the Ugandan LRA and ADF, the Burundian FNL, and the biggest, best organized, and potentially most dangerous, the Rwandese FDLR. The LRA and ADF are vastly overrated. The LRA is a “cultural” guerrilla force, the product of Acholi alienation from the mainstream of Ugandan social evolution since 1986. Poisonous as its military behavior can be, it has no capacity for spreading beyond its initial social group; particularly in the DRC, it is a kind of rootless “Thugs without Borders” outfit, moving aimlessly between the province of western Equatoria in Sudan, the southeast of the Central African Republic, and the Garamba National Park in the Congo. Even though it will die kicking, its days are numbered. The ADF, which still survives in the foothills of the Ruwenzori, has evolved from a guerrilla group into a rogue mining company. The recent fighting on the Ugandan border175 was almost purely motivated by an attempt at controlling the border trade.176 As for the FNL, its last few fighters survive on the Burundian border, largely by fishing in the lake. President Museveni periodically threatens to cross the border and hit the LRA inside the Congo. This is most likely motivated by his irritation at still having to deal with an armed opposition that has been around for twenty-one years and one that Museveni’s rational nature completely fails to understand. These angry presidential outbursts are more a sign of frustration than a political response to a real threat. The ADF and the FNL are—rightly—perceived in Kampala and Bujumbura as carryovers from the past rather than dangers for the future. This nevertheless leaves the Congo forced to deal with what are actually, for all practical purposes, bandits.
The FDLR, which still has a fighting strength of perhaps six thousand men, is in another category if only because, through its genocide image, it still retains the capacity to trigger strong reactions in Kigali.177 But the FDLR problem, contrary to what it was in the past, is neither an invasion threat for Rwanda (in the present) nor a pretext for Kigali’s armed actions in the DRC. As Richard Sezibera said very clearly in December 2004, at the end of the last “Rwandese” crisis in the east, the problem with the FDLR lies in its capacity to hinder Rwanda’s economic effort. The FDLR is perceived by the Kigali regime as a weight rather than a danger, but the RPF leaders, who came to power through a somewhat similar phenomenon (they were the armed remnants of an earlier crisis in Rwanda, in the 1960s), cannot completely discard the idea that one day, after some unforeseeable events, they might have to face a revamped and aggressive FDLR which could be an instrument of Hutu revenge. In the meantime, given the large Kinyarwanda population in the eastern Congo, which has its own Congolese and even “Kivutian” problems, the FDLR presence acts as a kind of permanent irritant in the relations between (a) the Tutsi and Hutu on the Congolese side, (b) the Banyamulenge community and the other Kinyarwanda speakers, (c) all of the above and the so-called originaires (native) tribes.
Which brings us to the last and perhaps most dangerous segment of the armed groups in the East, that of Gen. Laurent Nkunda. After 1998 he became one of the main officers of the RCD-G; his troops played a key role in the Kisangani massacre of 2002.178 He was later indicted with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, accusations he rejects, which caused him not to come to Kinshasa when he was appointed in the new army because he feared a trap.179 He lay low after the May—June 2004 attempt to capture Bukavu, but then in November 2006 he rebelled again and attacked Goma, probably intending to hold it as a bargaining chip in any future negotiations. After losing about three hundred of his fighters to the firepower of MONUC’s Pakistani battalion, he went to the negotiating table and agreed to see his men enter mixage.180 He then used his unités mixées to carry out a thorough cleaning-up of the “Petit Nord” region, that is, the Walikale-Rutshuru area, where his soldiers went on the offensive against the FDLR, causing large civilian loss of life and displacements. These “victories” gave Nkunda the idea of widening his “crusade” beyond the local level, and on December 30, 2006, he created the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP), which was in fact a political armed militia but which he tried to present as a political tool to “clean up Congolese politics.” His discourse kept oscillating between minimalist demands (jobs) and flights of demagogic rhetoric in which he demanded the resignation of the government and his own assumption of power in Kinshasa. In the meantime he complained about his various pet hates: the shabby way he had been treated by FARDC; his innocence in the Kisangani massacres; the betrayal of his erstwhile friend and political boss, former RCD-G president Azarias Ruberwa, who became vice president in Kinshasa during the 2002–2006 transition but nevertheless had done nothing for him;181 and the tragic fate of his Banyamulenge friends at the end of the war. But what soon made him more dangerous was that, under the fold of his demagogic populist CNDP banner, he started to recruit all sorts of malcontents, mostly Tutsi of course, but also Hutu Banyarwanda from Masisi and even flotsam and jetsam from various tribes who began to drift toward him as the pressure from MONUC and its demobilization programs from other regions liberated a lot of former fighters into military unemployment. He went further and started actively using allied Mayi Mayi groups such as Mundundu 40 to network and recruit for him. He even went across the borders and started to recruit young unemployed Tutsi men in both Rwanda and Burundi, offering them spurious hopes of nonexistent civilian jobs. Some of them deserted and surrendered to MONUC when they found out about the scam after crossing the border into the Congo, but some, who had nothing much to go back to, stayed and joined his “army.”
By his own account Nkunda now has around twelve thousand men.182 But the worst aspect of his maneuvering is that he has kick-started the FDLR back into life and reopened all the sores of the east; his repeated attacks in the Walikale-Rutshuru area were the cause of brutal génocidaire retaliation when they massacred a whole village in cold blood at Kanyola in South Kivu on May 29, 2007. In his own “Petit Nord” area the various former anti-RCD-G tribes, such
as the Banande, the Bahunde, and the Banyanga, started to mobilize their young men to fight him. As a result the whole region, from the southern Ituri down to the edge of northern Katanga, experienced a sudden return to a state of tension previously forgotten.
Does all this mean that we are back in July 1998 and about to see the Congo explode into another civil war?183 Most likely not. Why? Because there are several fundamental differences:
• Rwanda, even if it is involved, is involved only at a marginal level. In 1998 it had mobilized its whole army for an invasion.
• In 1998 pro-Kigali elements such as Jean-Pierre Ondekane controlled large segments of the FAC, which was then the Congolese national army. The initial onslaught was carried out through an internal rebellion of the armed forces. Not so today. Nkunda controls an army only of unofficial militiamen.
• In 1998 the regime of Laurent-Désiré Kabila was very weak, hardly legitimate, and did not have any serious international support. Today his son is strongly supported by the international community after achieving a clearly democratic election.
• In 1998 the Congolese economy was in complete disarray; today it is slowly picking up.
• Before 1998 Kagame could count on almost unlimited sympathy from the international community, which felt guilty for its neglect during the genocide. Today his moral credit has been seriously damaged by the horrors committed in the Congo during 1998–2003.
The danger comes from the belligerence of some former members of Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s entourage in Kinshasa, combined with the timidity of the international community and Nkunda’s own near desperate gambit. The recent FARDC reshuffle in the region is good,184 but the transfer by Kinshasa of large amounts of heavy weapons to the east around mid-May is worrying. Interior Minister Denis Kalume and Minister of Defense Chikez Diemu both favor a military offensive to crush Nkunda once and for all.
Will the east finally heal? That remains an open question at the time of this writing.185 But the Goma Roundtable Conference of January 2008 has significantly brought things forward. For once, a UN initiative was taken seriously by the local participants. President Kabila picked Father Apollinaire Malu Malu as chairman, a controversial but good choice. Malu Malu was the chairman of the Electoral Commission for the Congolese national elections of 2006 and did a commendable job in difficult circumstances. But more than that, he is himself an easterner and a very special one. He is a Nande from Butembo and as such the “prince” of the “Autonomous Republic of Butembo.”186 This gives him considerable clout in regional affairs because the Kinshasa minister of foreign affairs, Mbusa Nyamwisi, is a Nande as well and largely dependent on the good father for his local political support. And Mbusa is not in fact the real foreign minister (this job goes directly to the president himself); he is truly and really the minister of the Great Lakes. When he was a rebel during the war he dealt constantly with Kagame and Museveni, and he knows them through and through. His job in the cabinet is to deal with them and with the broader eastern situation. Father Malu Malu’s appointment did not please Nkunda too much because the good father knows the eastern situation like the back of his hand, is a tough customer, is a devoted Kinshasa supporter even if not a “centralist,” and belongs to a tribe that the Kivu Tutsi cannot accuse of genocide (the Nande were on their side during the civil war) but whom they fear for their numbers, organization, and economic clout.
At the same time, this appointment was a guarantee that the conference was not going to be another session of empty babbling. The Goma conference was top news in the Kinshasa press because everybody realized that this was a very important step in the final postwar normalization. To drum up support all ministers in Kinshasa were asked to contribute 10 percent of their salaries for the financing of the conference; Prime Minister Antoine Gizenga voluntarily gave up 50 percent of his.187 Nkunda was under a lot of pressure from the region (both nationally and internationally) to shape up and work toward a solution. His bogus screams of “Genocide! Genocide!” simply were not enough any more to replace a political program. On the other side, Father Malu Malu is one of the few people who might be able to talk some sense into the autochthonous tribes and tell them that Rwanda or no Rwanda, they cannot take out their anger and frustration on the Congolese rwandophone populations and that they have to accept some kind of a deal on a new citizenship law.188
The problems of the east are (in this order) demographic, agrarian, ethnic, and economic. The first problem is a given which cannot change in the short to medium term; the second is the heart of the matter. But agrarian problems touch the heart of the people’s livelihood, so they are directly tied to the ethnic problem because land belongs to tribes and most of the struggles have been to displace or kill the other tribe in order to get their land. This whole demographic-agrarian-ethnic nexus is exactly what was at the root of the war back in the 1990s.189 Which is where the fourth problem kicks in: the only way not to have agrarian reform work as a zero-sum game is to inject money into a static rural economy through the cash nexus, which in the Kivus means transport and mining. And transport and mining mean security, which in turn presupposes some kind of a working settlement between Nkunda’s Tutsi, the various Mayi Mayi bands still plundering the area, the Banyamulenge, the autochthon tribes, and, yes, the FDLR génocidaires, who, although “foreign,” are part and parcel of the problem and therefore need to be included in any kind of solution.190
Therefore, a way out of what I have called elsewhere “the recurring Great Lakes crisis”191 lies in brokering a temporary security deal that can bring enough security to restart the mining operations and get the economy moving out of its present doldrums, in which a gun is a more useful tool to earn a living than either a hoe or a shovel. The conference in Goma is tackling the essential questions, whose answers have been postponed for years.192 This is understood in Kinshasa, where the press wrote, “Finally we are now dealing with the basics.” Mere window dressing simply won’t do. We are dealing here with a problem as basic as that of the enclosure system in seventeenth-century England.
Whether the sense of urgency will be enough for the actors to rise to the occasion (and that includes the international community) remains to be seen. Meanwhile, the question of the relationship between Rwanda and the Congo has stood very much at the forefront of the conference.193 Today President Kagame does not try to control “the Congo” anymore but simply to control enough mining interests in the Congo to help finance his great dreams of turning Rwanda into the Singapore of Africa. The money comes from a variety of nonferrous metals (niobium, cassiterite, not much coltan these days since the Australians got back into the market) extracted from mines controlled by local Congolese militias194 who export their product to Rwanda in light planes. President Kagame has to deal with a resolute opposition within his militarized party that still regrets the good old days of Congo plundering. These people, like his chief of staff, James Kabarebe, are the ones who underhandedly helped Nkunda in December 2007 and who were less than enthusiastic about the Goma conference.195
Goma might not be the final and complete attainment of peace, but it is a positive step along that road.
10
GROPING FOR MEANING: THE “CONGOLESE” CONFLICT AND THE CRISIS OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICA
After most of the sound and fury of war had died down (leaving large pockets of territory where it still reverberated) outside observers were left with an impression of both inevitability and painful absurdity. Thirty-two years of Mobutism could not but have ended in catastrophe. But then what? Were the nearly four million victims of the war a typically Congolese problem? Or were they the result of a more general crisis of the African continent after half a century of decolonization? Were foreigners well-meaning Samaritans eager to help? Or evil manipulators of the crisis? Were they baffled bystanders in spite of all their control rhetoric? Or were they simply indifferent, as the limited reporting of these monstrous events might tend to suggest? What were the deep underlying causes of such a lar
ge-scale conflict: the anarchic violence of unstable states? an African version of old-style territorial imperialism? a confused grabbing of natural resources by predatory self-appointed elites? Was “conflict” a pertinent category, and was “conflict resolution” a realistic goal or just snake oil sold by smooth operators? Did our familiar tools of diplomacy, media exposure, and humanitarian action actually function as advertised, or did they get waylaid into perverse unintended consequences? We will not of course succeed in answering all these questions since doing so would entail a capacity to solve most of the core problems both of Africa studies and even, to some extent, of the social sciences. But in this last chapter I will try to look analytically at those years of turmoil, at their historical structure, at their relation to the rest of the world, and at their pertinence to the general paradigm of an “African crisis.”