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

by Gerard Prunier

  199. Monitor, December 24, 1998. In Kisangani Ugandan staff officers Chefe Ali and Peter Kerim organized the training of about fifteen hundred young Congolese to strengthen the MLC. Other batches were being trained in Beni, Bunia, Isiro, and Bafwasende.

  200. Author’s interview with Wamba dia Wamba, Kampala, September 2000.

  201. The following account is drawn from a variety of interviews with RCD cadres, various Ugandan actors, and UN and NGO personnel in Kampala, Nairobi, Paris, and Brussels between June 1998 and early 2000. Unfortunately, there is very little input from the Rwandese side, as the author’s relationship with Kigali had by that time degenerated into name-calling and threats of physical violence.

  202. Reuters dispatch, Nairobi, May 25, 1999.

  203. New Times (Kigali), August 2, 1999.

  204. I am much indebted for treatment of this section to my friend Peter Tygesen, who gave me the benefit of his extensive knowledge of the Kisangani diamond situation (Kampala, March 1998, and Paris, October 2000).

  205. Since the diamond mines were small and spread over a vast territory, uncut gems were brought back to the Kisangani counters by boys riding trail bikes through the bush. These couriers were highly vulnerable.

  206. For a detailed analysis of the agreement itself, see International Crisis Group, The Agreement on a Ceasefire in the DRC, August 20, 1999. For a global overview of the peace process, both before and after Lusaka, see J. C. Willame, L’accord de Lusaka: Chronique d’une négociation internationale (Tervuren, Belgium: CEDAF, 2002).

  207. Le Monde, October 8, 1998. For the Elysée, Laurent-Désiré Kabila had become again an acceptable partner now that the hated “Anglo-Saxons” had dropped him and appeared to support the invasion. But this vision was not shared by the Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin (the Socialists had won the legislative elections in May 1997 and France was again going through a period of split executive known as “cohabitation”), who was not very keen on inviting the Congolese president to the forthcoming Franco-African summit in Paris. President Chirac overrode his objection.

  208. Le Monde, October 17, 1998.

  209. Interview with U.S. State Department personnel, Washington, DC, October 1999. The U.S. mercenaries seem to have been recruited on the same basis as those used earlier, during the first Zairian war (see chapter 4, notes 43 and 44). There were about 150 of them based on the small Lake Kivu island of Wahu just east of Idjwi, in Rwandese territorial waters, where they occupied a former Peace Corps rest camp. Later they rented several floors of the Hotel Umumbano in Bukavu for fifty of their number, who rotated with the reserves on Wahu Island. They fought regularly side by side with the RPA in South Kivu and suffered some losses, including two prisoners whose hands were cut off by a Mayi Mayi chief (September 1998) as a warning to others. Various interviews with Bukavu residents, March 1999.

  210. IRIN Bulletin, no. 538 (November 4, 1998).

  211. IRIN Bulletin, no. 591 (January 20, 1999). Unfortunately that quote could be applicable to a lot of other internationally sponsored “peace agreements” in Africa, notably in the Sudan.

  212. A part of the Chadian expeditionary force was redeployed in Bangui to ensure the security of President Patasse, something Gaddafi definitely cared more about than the Congo.

  213. Given his greater transparency (and lack of marketable genocide resources) Museveni was under the greater pressure. In May the IMF had refused to disburse a previously agreed upon $18 million loan because of the skyrocketing Defense budget, which had gone up 130 percent between 1997 and 1998. IRIN Bulletin, no. 665 (May 6, 1999).

  214. This new fighting was in addition to the intense combats pitting the Rwandese against the Zimbabweans around Mbuji-Mayi, which never stopped during the negotiations.

  215. Reuters dispatch, Kinshasa, August 8, 1999.

  216. Following massive pressure from the international community, particularly from the U.S. delegation.

  217. The denial persisted for years. In late 2001 I was still arguing with Howard Wolpe, one of the U.S. godfathers of the Agreement, trying unsuccessfully to convince him that Lusaka had been dead from the start.

  218. Which, interestingly, goes a long way toward showing the flimsiness of their claim to represent all or part of the mythical “Congolese people” they kept grandly invocating.

  219. For a complete text, see Willame, L’accord de Lusaka, 35–37.

  220. In spite of the fact that Burundi was not a signatory.

  221. “The war is dead. Long live the war,” Economist, July 17, 1999.

  Chapter 7

  1. Title of an article in the Economist, July 17, 1999.

  2. The United Nations estimated that there were about 826,000 IDPs in the Congo in November 1999. By early February 2000 the numbers had risen to 1,120,000. IRIN Bulletin, no. 863 (February 17, 2000).

  3. IRIN Bulletin, no. 924 (May 16, 2000).

  4. See La Lettre de l’Océan Indien, September 4, 1999; Africa Intelligence, September 7, 2000. “Van Brink” was finally deported from Uganda to the United states in May 2004 to face the charges against at him.

  5. In January 2000 he was sent by Wamba to regain control of Bafwasende, where the RCD-ML thought it had a force of one thousand men. Upon arrival he found about seventy sick and hungry fighters who had not been paid for months. Using his outside connections in Kampala he proceeded to put into exploitation the local small diamond mines, buying the stones from the creuseurs at a fair price and paying his soldiers. Soon he had forty-five hundred men flocking to his standard and could have had more had he been able to buy more guns. In spite of being a Luba from Kasaï, he had no problem commanding local loyalty. “I was a good warlord,” he told me. “I paid my men. Too many people want the boys to fight for them for free.” Interview with Roger Lumbala, Paris, March 2001.

  6. The Ituri District of Province Orientale is a multiethnic area (thirteen tribes are present) where tensions had long existed between the Hema and the Lendu, neither of which are autochthons (the Lendu originally came from southern Sudan and the Hema are close cousins of Uganda’s Banyoro). In April 1999 the Ugandan army entered the fray in support of a Hema landlord who had confiscated Lendu coffee farms, triggering a succession of massacres and countermassacres that were to last for the next four years with varying degrees of intensity. See ASADHO, Rapport sur le conflit inter-ethnique Hema-Lendu en territoire de Djugu, Bunia, December 1999; G. Prunier, “The ‘Ethnic’ Conflict in Ituri District,” in J. P. Chrétien and R. Banegas, eds., The Recurring Great Lakes Crisis (London: Hurst, 2008), 180–204.

  7. Lotsove immediately switched to the MLC and agitated for Bemba’s occupation of the Ituri.

  8. Apart from the coffee, they exploited illegally the Kilo Moto gold mines around Mongbwalu.

  9. IRIN DRC chronology, February 28, 2000.

  10. New Vision, April 17, 2000.

  11. New Vision, December 6, 2000.

  12. In November 1999 the Batembo tribal chiefs gave Mayi Mayi leader Padiri Kanero thirty days to stop his aggressions against civilians, saying that he and his Interahamwe Rwandese allies had caused over two thousand deaths in the community during the past year. Because he was a Mutembo, Chief Katola Ndalemwa threatened to have him “outlawed.” IRIN Bulletin, no. 1,062 (November 29, 1999).

  13. Trying to equate Mayi Mayi, whether or not supported by Kinshasa, with the “negative forces” defined in the terms of the Lusaka Agreement was a constant theme of rebel propaganda.

  14. See chapter 5.

  15. For his assessment of the Banyamulenge predicament, see his book: Les Banyamulenge du Congo-Zaïre entre deux guerres (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2001). By then he was living in exile in Germany after unknown parties had tried to murder him in Bujumbura.

  16. In early July 2000 Banyamulenge militiamen killed eight Babembe boys “suspected” of having Mayi Mayi contacts; a few days later several boys joined yet another “false Interahamwe attack” on Kabare village, outside Bukavu. Interview with Congolese NGO w
orkers, Bukavu, November 2000.

  17. IRIN Bulletin, no. 975 (July 26, 2000).

  18. While most of the roads were extremely poor and next to impassable, the huge network of navigable rivers flowing into the Congo constituted a major transport facility of key military importance.

  19. Reuters dispatch, Lisala, January 18, 2000. By then the international community was beginning to realize that the Lusaka process was in poor health. Bernard Miyet, the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations under-secretary, admitted, “There has been a serious deterioration during the last three months.”

  20. IRIN Bulletin, no. 836 (January 11, 2000). Former Central African Republic president André Kolingba was helping in the recruitment, making it doubly embarrassing for Patasse.

  21. Associated Press dispatch, Kigali, April 22, 2000.

  22. Agence France Presse, Kinshasa, April 27, 2000.

  23 IRIN Bulletin, no. 915 (May 3, 2000).

  24. IRIN Bulletin, no. 972 (July 21, 2000).

  25. IRIN Bulletin, no. 987 (August 11, 2000). For spectacular pictures of the river battle, see the military buff magazine Raids, no. 171 (August 2000).

  26. New Vision, September 26, 2000.

  27. La Lettre de l’Océan Indien, September 30, 2000. The part about De Miranda’s reaction comes from an interview with a French Foreign Affairs civil servant who was present at the meeting (Paris, October 2000).

  28. IRIN Bulletin, no. 1,024 (October 3, 2000).

  29. “We are fighting every day; there is no ceasefire,” declared Kin Kiey Mulumba, the RCD-G spokesman, on April 2.

  30. Some of them were more lucid. Alexis Thambwe, who had just resigned from the RCD-G, declared to Agence France Press in Paris on April 13, “Both the rebels and Kabila believe in a military victory. But a military victory cannot be expected. So we are getting mired in a status quo which is slowly leading to the partition of the Congo.”

  31. International Crisis Group, Scramble for the Congo: Anatomy of an Ugly War, Brussels, December 2000.

  32. IRIN Bulletin, no. 1,041 (October 27, 2000).

  33. On December 11 the pro-government Herald wrote that the Zimbabwean troops “had not run away but had complied with the recent decision of the Harare conference on security to effectuate a 15 km pull-back.”

  35. IRIN Bulletin, no. 1,065 (December 4, 2000).

  34. IRIN Bulletin, no. 1,075 (December 14, 2000). There were also over two thousand ALIR Rwandese rebels.

  36. Meeting with the author, New York City, January 2001. This meeting took place at the end of the first week of January, that is, while Laurent-Désiré Kabila was still alive.

  37. Interview with a MONUC employee, Paris, May 2001.

  38. Les Coulisses, no. 77 (January 15–February 15, 2000).

  39. SWB/RFI, 17 January 2000.

  40. Amnesty International communiqué, October 5, 2000.

  41. IRIN Bulletin, no. 877 (March 8, 2000).

  42. Sir Ketumile Masire, former head of state of Botswana, had been chosen by the United Nations as mediator in charge of helping to carry out the Lusaka provisions. Gentle and urbane, he was somewhat ineffective, first, because he spoke only English and, second, because he was too much of a gentleman to deal realistically with the likes of Kabila, Bemba, and Ilunga.

  43. SWB/RFI, April 24, 2000.

  44. F. Kabuya Kalala and Tschiunza Mbiye, “L’économie congolaise en 2000–2001: Contraction, fractionnement et enlisement,” in S. Marysse and F. Reyntjens, eds., L’annuaire des Grands Lacs (2000–2001) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 175–194. World Bank figures for exports are slightly different ($1.214 million for 1998, $974 million for 1999, $892 million for 2000), but they reflect the same pattern.

  45. The average value of the exported carat had fallen from $14.68 in 1998 to $7.49 in 1999 due to the fact that all good jewelry quality stones were by then smuggled out, leaving only the inferior quality industrial gems on the official market. La Lettre Afrique Energies, November 24, 1999.

  46. Interview with an expatriate eyewitness, Kampala, November 2000.

  47. La Lettre Afrique Energies, September 29, 1999.

  48. Nord-Sud Export, September 24, 1999.

  49. La Lettre Afrique Energies, November 10, 1999.

  50. The financial support to Kinshasa was largely interested since Bredenkamp was, by his own admission, congo’s main private supplier of weapons.

  51. See Chris MacGreal, “The Napoleon of Africa and the Motiveless Murder,” Guardian (London), December 16, 1999.

  52. IDI was created in 1996 by a fairly inexperienced young man, Dan Gertler, who was soon to prove insolvent in the purchases over which he had acquired a monopoly. See Jeune Afrique, August 15–28, 2000; Africa Mining Intelligence, November 1, 2000. His role in the sale of the 267.82 carats “wonder diamond” sold by FECODI president Alphonse Ngoy Kasanji for $17.9 million in October 2000 was questionable.

  53. For the plight of the ordinary people in the government-controlled areas, see Th. Trefon, “Population et pauvreté à Kinshasa,” Afrique Contemporaine, no. 194 (June 2000): 82–89; Colette Braeckman’s article in Le Soir, December 21, 2000; monthly reports on food security from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; the zonal reports from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Humanitarian Impact of the Socio-Economic Environment, Kinshasa, April 2000. On a regular basis the monthly reports of the Brussels-based Réseau Européen Congo are an invaluable source.

  54. Luanda being short of manpower, some former Interahamwe militiamen and even CNDD Burundians went along.

  55. Thus in December 2000, Kinshasa’s allies had to plug up the Pweto gap opened by the Rwandese Zimbabwe did not have the long-range planes to bring its troops to Lubumbashi, and so the job was carried out by large Angolan Ilyushin Il-76s. The Zimbabweans then took care of the last leg of the trip with their smaller CASA planes.

  56. Energy Compass, March 12, 1999, quoted in ICG, Scramble for the Congo: Anatomy of a Dirty War, Brussels, December 2000.

  57. Reuters dispatch, Kinshasa, October 28, 2000.

  58. In early 2000, after President Thabo Mbeki had hosted Etienne Tshisekedi during his visit to Pretoria, Kabila launched searing attacks on South Africa, accusing it of selling weapons to Kigali and Kampala. New Vision, January 20, 2000.

  59. Africa Confidential 40, no. 21 (November 5, 1999).

  60. African Business, September 1999.

  61. Reuters dispatch, Harare, September 29, 1999.

  62. Osleg, which was financed by Zimbabwe Defense Industries, had 40 percent of Cosleg. Oryx, which held 40 percent, was headed by the son of a former oil minister from Oman with business interests in Zimbabwe. Comiex, which had 20 percent of Cosleg, was a Congolese company linked directly with the Kabila family. Africa Confidential 41, no. 12 (June 9, 2000).

  63. Apart from the British hostility to Mugabe, which had caused the London stoppage, other stock exchanges were wary of Cosleg for two reasons: the “blood diamonds” campaign then under way and also, in a more mundane fashion, the fear that the “one billion dollars” concessions in Mbuji-Mayi were both overvalued and resting on dubious legal grounds.

  64. On this last point, see Erik Kennes, “Le secteur minier au Congo: Déconnexion et descente aux enfers,” in F. Reyntjens and S. Marysse, eds., L’Afrique des Grands Lacs (1999–2000) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 299–342.

  65. Mungbalemwe Koyame and John F. Clark, “The Economic Impact of the Congo War,” in John F. Clark, ed., The African Stakes of the Congo War (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002), 216.

  66. Daily News, November 10, 2000.

  67. Financial Times, October 8, 1999.

  68. All Tutsi from “Ugandan” families, they had grown up speaking English and could not take their exams in French, as the university required them to. Although willing to learn French they had never been given the means to do so. They were nevertheless faced with dismissal after “failing” their exams in a language they did not
know. Interviews with students, Kampala, January 2001.

  69. During a secret meeting about the crisis RPF Secretary-General (and former Butare University vice chancellor) Charles Morigande called them “well-fed brats” and suggested they should be arrested to make an example. Security men attending the meeting suggested killing one or two to deter any further demonstrations. This scared the parents (some of whom were present at the debate), who helped their children run away “back home,” that is, to Kampala. “if we, their children, could be treated so roughly, it made me wonder about the fate of the Hutu,” a young Tutsi student confided to me.

  70. See “Rwanda Bishop’s Trial Puts Church on the Dock,” New Vision, August 29, 1999; “State v. Church,” Economist, September 18, 1999.