This mode of governance is typical of Kabila, what some in Kinshasa call the “informalization” of government. “The president prefers informal networks, parallel command structures,” a veteran political analyst for the United Nations told me. “It gives him greater leeway to rule.”33 Instead of passing through his Ministry of the Interior, for example, Kabila will call governors or military commanders directly. Instead of authorizing decent official salaries for civil servants, he allows many to scrape by on salaries of less than $100 a month, only to send them envelopes of several thousand dollars at his discretion to keep them happy. This parallel management weakens institutions but makes officials depend directly on the presidency.
Until Kabila won the 2006 elections, many observers cut him some slack. When he first came to power, the country had been divided by war, and he did an admirable job in uniting the country and marginalizing his opponents. During the transitional government, between 2003 and 2006, he had to share power in a clumsy arrangement with seven different parties. In this tangle of graft and power-sharing, it was difficult to get anything done. He was applauded for having brought an end to the war that had divided the country. For this, he won 58 percent of the national vote in 2006. People believed in his campaign motto: “Joseph Kabila—The Bearer of Eggs, He Doesn’t Squabble, He Doesn’t Fight.” Kabila was balancing the fragile peace in his hands; he could be trusted not to start fighting again.
But three years after the elections, Kabila struggled to articulate a vision for the country. In the economic arena, there has only been little improvement in the lives of the average Congolese. In Kinshasa, where few appreciate Joseph Kabila’s somber and lackluster character, people say, “Mobutu used to steal with a fork—at least some crumbs would fall between the cracks, enough to trickle down to the rest of us. But Kabila, he steals with a spoon. He scoops the plate clean, spotless. He doesn’t leave anything for the poor.”
Kabila’s presidency has been marred, above all, by an ongoing insurgency in the eastern Congo. In 2004, during the transitional government, General Laurent Nkunda launched an insurgency against the fledgling Congolese government. A Tutsi from North Kivu, Nkunda had been a commander in the RCD and claimed that he was only trying to protect his community from the ex-FAR and Interahamwe who still lurked in the province.
There were, however, other, less noble reasons behind his rebellion, as well. The RCD was aware of its lack of popularity among Congolese and had little hope of winning in the 2006 elections. For the RCD leadership and the Rwandan government, both of whom encouraged Nkunda to go into rebellion, the new rebellion was a means of keeping their influence in the eastern Congo in the case of electoral defeat. Their fears came true: In presidential and parliamentary polls, the RCD wasn’t able to garner more than 5 percent of the vote. They had gone from controlling almost a third of the Congo, including some of the most lucrative trade and mining areas, to almost nothing.34 The fear of anti-Tutsi persecution combined potently with business and political interests to fuel a new rebellion.
Kabila tried in vain to defeat Nkunda militarily, launching four major offensives against the rebellion and sending over 20,000 troops to the Kivus. Repeatedly, during the lulls in fighting, his government tried negotiating peace deals. Finally, in 2009, Kabila struck a deal directly with the Rwandan government, allowing them to send troops into the Congo to hunt down the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) in return for arresting Nkunda and integrating his troops into the Rwandan national army.
At the same time, Kabila faced challenges in Bas-Congo Province in the far west of the country, where the mystical Bundu dia Kongo sect was protesting abuses by the regime and demanding—sometimes violently—the right of self-determination. He also had to deal with the hundreds of bodyguards loyal to former vice president Jean-Pierre Bemba, who had refused to disarm and integrate into the national army after their leader was narrowly defeated in the presidential elections.
In both cases, Joseph Kabila reacted with disproportional force, eschewing negotiations and sending in hundreds of police and soldiers to put down both challenges to his power. Hundreds of unarmed civilians died in Bas-Congo, some brutally dismembered; over three hundred were killed during the battle for downtown Kinshasa. Hundreds of others were rounded up and tortured.35 In the words of the opposition, “the Bearer of Eggs has made one huge omelet.” Encumbered by weak security services, the government seems stuck between brutal repression and pallid negotiation.
But Joseph Kabila’s problems go further than just weak state institutions. He is surrounded by business and political leaders with their own interests and power bases. He is an outsider who was handed the presidency on a platter, without having to climb his way up through the ranks of a party or army, earning the respect and loyalty of his fellows. He knows that he can just as easily be removed from power; the example of his father is fresh in his memory.
Reforming the state will require tackling entrenched interests and mafia-like networks that permeate the administration. In doing so, he risks offending powerful people, who could then try to unseat him. In 2004, after a botched coup attempt in downtown Kinshasa, I remember speaking with outraged security agents who told me, “We know who is behind [the coup attempt], but we can’t do anything!”36
It is therefore perhaps not surprising that Kabila has chosen not to promote neutral, efficient state institutions, but rather to strengthen his own personal security and business networks. This attitude is perhaps most palpable in the domain of security sector reform. After the elections, Kabila had an army of 150,000 patched together from half a dozen different armed groups. Many of its officers were illiterate and had never had any formal military training. There were only a few military prosecutors for the whole province of North Kivu, where over 20,000 soldiers are based. There was no formal process of procurement, and army officers regularly commandeered civilian trucks and airplanes for transport. “We managed the army informally,” a general told me. “The real power was held by people in the presidency or close to the president, not by the official chain of command.”37
This state of affairs could be understood for the duration of the transition, when Kabila was wary of his former rivals on the battlefield pulling a fast one on him. After all, he didn’t want to meet his father’s fate. But he has scarcely showed more willingness for reform since the elections. Purchases of military equipment continue to be carried out by officers close to the presidency, not the logistics department, and Kabila himself has a reputation for micromanaging military operations against Nkunda, sometimes countermanding his officers and sowing confusion. He has maintained a relatively large and well-equipped presidential guard of over 10,000 troops under his direct control, but he has not been able to improve the performance of the rest of his army. As under Mobutu, this approach may prevent his own troops from overthrowing him, but it will also keep him from consolidating peace in the rest of the country.
Does Kabila want a strong state? Or does he perceive strong institutions, such as an independent judiciary and lively opposition, as a challenge to his authority? Is he condemned to negotiate with militias and other power barons around the country, or will he be able to suppress these parallel networks of power?
These are perhaps the most important questions for the country’s future. The attitude of his advisors is not encouraging:Politics is always dirty, is always a fight. This is not Switzerland! If we liberalize the political sphere and the economy, allow for unrestrained democracy, the same self-obsessed people who drove this country into the ground under Mobutu will come to power again! You see free press and political activity—we see opponents, plotting our demise. In order to reform and promote growth, we need to curtail some civil liberties and control part of the economy. It is a lesser evil for a greater good.38
This language is eerily reminiscent of the Mobutu regime’s earlier days. President Kabila is intent on centralizing power to the detriment of an efficient state bureaucracy and the
rule of law. In 2009, he suggested that he wanted to change the constitution to prevent decentralization, extend term limits, and bring the judiciary further under his control. His government has expropriated several lucrative oil and mining concessions from multinational corporations, allegedly in order to distribute them to companies close to him. As so often in politics, what appears to be politically expedient for those in power rarely overlaps with the public interest. The lesser evils of the regime become entrenched, while the greater good is never realized.
Conclusion: The Congo, On Its Own Terms
Africa is never seen as possessing things and attributes properly part of “human nature.” Or when it is, its things and attributes are generally of lesser value, little importance and poor quality. It is this elementariness and primitiveness that makes Africa the world par excellence of all that is incomplete, mutilated and unfinished, its history reduced to a series of setbacks of nature in its quest for humankind.
—ACHILLE MBEMBE
The Congo casts a spell on many visitors. It is difficult to explain why. The author Philip Gourevitch once wrote, “Oh Congo, what a wreck. It hurts to look and listen. It hurts to turn away.”1 The Congolese tragedy certainly has something of a car-wreck attraction to it. Nine governments battled through a country the size of western Europe, walking thousands of miles on foot through jungles and swamps. Over five million people have died, and hundreds of thousands of women have been raped.2 If anything should be important, it is the deaths of five million people.
Or is it? The Congo war is actually rarely seen as a problem of joint humanity. Instead, it is either portrayed in western media as an abject mess—a morass of rebel groups fighting over minerals in the ruins of a failed state—or as a war of good versus evil, with the role of villain played alternatively by the Rwandan government, international mining companies, the U.S. government, or Congolese warlords. In the twenty-four-hour news cycle, in which international news is devoted largely to the war on terror and its spin-offs, there is little interest in a deeper understanding of the conflict, little appetite for numbers as unimaginably large as five million. Instead, a few shocking individual images command the headlines. Activist and Vagina Monologues founder Eve Ensler wrote in the Huffington Post that she had heard horrific stories ranging from “women being raped by fifty men in one day to women being forced to eat dead babies,”3 while the New York Times reported how a woman was “kidnapped by bandits in the forest, strapped to a tree and repeatedly gang-raped. The bandits did unspeakable things, she said, like disemboweling a pregnant woman right in front of her.”4
All of these stories are true. The conflict has seen acts of cannibalism, girls as young as five being raped with gun barrels and sticks, and women buried alive. Journalists have a responsibility to report on these atrocities, and people are often jolted awake by such horrors. In addition, millions of dollars have gone to dedicated organizations and health centers in the region that are helping survivors cope and restart their lives.
These advocacy efforts have also, however, had unintended effects. They reinforce the impression that the Congo is filled with wanton savages, crazed by power and greed. This view, by focusing on the utter horror of the violence, distracts from the politics that gave rise to the conflict and from the reasons behind the bloodshed. If all we see is black men raping and killing in the most outlandish ways imaginable, we might find it hard to believe that there is any logic to this conflict. We are returned to Joseph Conrad’s notion that the Congo takes you to the heart of darkness, an inscrutable and unimprovable mess. If we want to change the political dynamics in the country, we have above all to understand the conflict on its own terms. That starts with understanding how political power is managed.
Perhaps the most nagging, persistent problem I have witnessed while researching and writing this book has been the lack of visionary, civic-minded leadership. The constant refrain from Congolese and foreigners alike is: Why do most Congolese political officeholders seem so morally bankrupt? If change can only come from Congolese themselves, how will this be possible?
On one of my trips back to the United States from the Congo, I spent time in a library reading Thomas Hobbes. The English philosopher, a founder of western political thought, was writing in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), which devastated much of central Europe and caused the deaths of millions of civilians. That war was the result of a complex mixture of political competition, violent localism, ideology, and greed. Hundreds of different fiefdoms battled against each other, egged on by the divide between Catholicism and Protestantism, as well as by competition for power in the Holy Roman Empire. The war was notorious for its marauding bands of mercenary soldiers, who fought for the highest bidder and who laid waste to entire regions searching for bounty. Historians often use the Latin phrase bellum se ipsum alet to describe the phenomenon—the war feeds itself. This is a concept many Congolese commanders would understand.
Writing three years after the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Hobbes had good reason to be pessimistic about the state of nature, which he believed to be one of “war of man against man.” Life in this state was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” In view of this, it was in the common interest to forfeit individual rights to the state—the Leviathan, in Hobbes’s parlance—in return for protection. This was the first notion of a social contract, which justified a government’s rule and made it responsible to its citizens.
But the Congo does not have a Leviathan, a state that can protect its citizens or even impose a monopoly of violence. In contrast with the Thirty Years’ War, which helped produce the European system of nation-states, it is unlikely that the Congo wars will forge a strong state. As these pages have made clear, the story of the Congo wars is one of state weakness and failure, which has made possible the ceaseless proliferation of insurgent groups, still numbering around twenty-nine in late 2010. These armed groups fight brutal insurgencies and counterinsurgencies that, as the United States discovered in Vietnam and Iraq, are not so much about controlling territory as about controlling civilians, who are brutalized in order to obtain resources and as retaliation for attacks by their rivals.
Congolese state and society have not always been so weak. In the fifteenth century, large kingdoms with sophisticated governance structures began forming in the savannahs in the center and west of the country. The Kongo kingdom, based in the far west along the Atlantic coast, at one point was able to field over 20,000 infantrymen and archers in battle, funded through an elaborate system of taxes, and had diplomatic representatives at the Portuguese, Spanish, and papal courts. The Lunda and Luba kingdoms, based in the center of today’s Congo, in the savannahs along the Angolan border, developed a successful model of government based on sacred kingship and local councils that spread through neighboring regions.
Since then, however, the Congo has been the victim of four hundred years of political disintegration. Starting in the sixteenth century, several million slaves were exported from the Congo by both European and Arab slave traders, sparking devastating wars between rival kingdoms over the lucrative trade as well as huge population shortages in parts of the country. Then, starting in the nineteenth century, Belgian colonial administrators dismembered what remained of most Congolese kingdoms, naming hundreds of new chiefs, severing ties between the rulers and their local councils, expropriating vast tracts of land, and allowing Belgian officials to take over many functions of the customary rulers. They created a colonial state whose purpose was to extract resources and—in its later days—provide basic services to the population, but this state was never intended to be accountable to its citizens. Unions, political parties, and other forms of mobilization were brutally suppressed by colonial authorities until the final days of their rule.
The colonial authorities then handed over government to a Congolese people almost wholly unprepared to manage their vast state. There were a handful of lawyers and university graduates in the country; under Belg
ian rule, no African could become an enlisted officer in the army, and all important positions in administration were held by white foreigners. At the same time, Belgian business interests and cold war politics led to the external backing of military strongmen and the repression of nationalist mobilization.
This historical legacy weighs heavily on the present. Since independence, the story of political power from Joseph Mobutu to Joseph Kabila has been about staying in power, not about creating a strong, accountable state. This is understandable. In the Congo, everything flows from political office: the best business deals, influence, and status. For those outside of power, there is scant opportunity to prosper. These rulers have treated strong public institutions as threats, eroding the capacity of the army so as to maintain tight control over key units and undermining an independent judiciary and parliament. The biggest fear of Mobutu’s and Kabila’s regimes has not been a foreign invasion—Mobutu was incredulous to the end that a neighboring country could oust him—but internal collapse. They feared even their own bodyguards and ministers would stab them in the back. The Congo of today is in some ways more similar to the sixteenthcentury Italy of Machiavelli—and its court intrigues comparable—than to any modern twenty-first-century state.
A central reason, therefore, for the lack of visionary leadership in the Congo is because its political system rewards ruthless behavior and marginalizes scrupulous leaders. It privileges loyalty over competence, wealth and power over moral character. Well-intentioned (albeit misguided) leaders like Wamba dia Wamba are spun to the outside of this centrifuge, while the more guileful ones stay at the center. Spend some time in the Grand Hotel in Kinshasa, where politicians mingle and deals are struck, and you will realize that the welfare of the Congolese people is absent from their conversations, while court intrigues and battles for power are a matter of obsession.
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters Page 39