Africa

by Guy Arnold

  Peace talks between representatives of the governments of Côte d’Ivoire and France and the three rebel groups began on 15 January in Marcoussis, south-east of Paris, and concluded on 24 January with a tentative agreement for the establishment of an interim ‘government of national reconciliation’ representing all parties and rebel groups, as well as an amnesty and new measures to overcome the ethnic friction that was at the root of the conflict. The 2,500 French troops, then in Côte d’Ivoire, would, together with troops from several West African states, oversee disarmament. The agreement was approved at Marcoussis at a meeting attended by 10 African leaders and international donors and was jointly chaired by President Chirac of France and Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General. The plan was thrown into doubt at once when mobs besieged the French embassy in Abidjan, accusing France of humiliating Côte d’Ivoire by brokering a peace agreement that was too kind to the rebels. Gbagbo did not, as he had promised, deliver a television address supporting the power-sharing agreement. The French government had pushed Gbagbo too far and de Villepin almost accused him of playing a double game by accepting peace terms in Paris while ordering his supporters onto the streets in Abidjan. ‘Ivory Coast humiliated in Paris’ was the front-page headline (27 January) in Notre Voie, a newspaper run by Gbagbo’s ruling party. As France discovered, ‘With 16,000 French residents barricaded in their homes and 2,500 French soldiers under attack from supporters of a government they were deployed to defend, Paris faces the prospect of being drawn into all-out civil war.’11

  The conflict was broadly about north-south ethnic differences. One in four of the country’s 14 million population have foreign roots and while many have been in the country for decades, others were more recent incomers, attracted by the country’s stability and economic boom. Much of the blame should rest at Gbagbo’s door because of his use of the concept of Ivoiricité – giving priority to Ivorians – that had led to attacks upon minorities. At issue after Marcoussis was the promise that the MPCI should get the defence and interior ministries in the new government. The protesters made plain that they did not want the rebels in the government at all. By mid-February with renewed fighting, the Marcoussis agreement appeared to be dead. It seemed clear by this time that the rebels were financed by Burkina Faso. French policy was uneasily poised between wanting to achieve a return to stability as quickly as possible in Côte d’Ivoire, since that would best suit French interests, and reluctance to support Gbagbo who was keen ‘to extract Ivory Coast from the long-established stranglehold of French business interests’.12 As with many other African countries, Ivorian ‘independence’ has only benefited a few Ivorians and their external (French) patrons. Too often, when a crisis arises, African governments turn to their former colonial powers for a way out. ‘The continuous dependence and reliance on former colonial powers confirms what (Frantz) Fanon said, that “there is no new entity born of colonialism”. Herein lies the problem.’13

  LIBERIA

  Following the 1980s, a decade of increasingly corrupt rule under Samuel Doe, an uprising was launched against him at the end of 1989. The rebels called themselves the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL); they were led by Charles Taylor, a former Doe minister who had fled Liberia in 1984, accused of corruption (his nickname was ‘superglue’), taking US$900,000 with him to the United States. Taylor manifestly did not possess the credentials of a crusader against a corrupt regime. He wanted his share of the loot and was after power. Taylor had escaped from prison in the United States in odd circumstances – he was about to be extradited to Liberia – and returned to Africa where he obtained the backing of Libya and Burkina Faso for his onslaught upon the Doe regime. He established a base in Côte d’Ivoire with the support of Houphouët-Boigny where he created the NPFL. Taylor’s rebels launched their attack from Côte d’Ivoire at the end of 1989 and by mid-1990 the civil war had engulfed Liberia. Doe himself was seized and killed by Prince Yormie Johnson and his rebel group and thereafter the rival factions reduced Liberia to chaos and years of fighting. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) prepared a military intervention force under the command of the Ghanaian soldier Lt-Gen. Arnold Qainoo, and its Monitoring Group (ECOMOG) established itself in the capital of Liberia, Monrovia. This was the first attempt at regional peacekeeping in West Africa and ECOMOG was to remain involved in Liberia until the civil war came to an end and elections were held in 1997.14 The 1997 elections resulted in victory for the principal contender for power, Charles Taylor, who won the presidential election while his party, the National Patriotic Party (NPP), took 49 of 64 seats in the House of Representatives and 21 out of 26 seats in the Senate. Normalization of political life in 1998, the year after the elections, was uncertain at best. Taylor did not keep to the peace agreement that had been worked out with the other warring factions but packed the administration and reformed the security forces with his own followers from the NPFL. He worked to crush opposition by force and intimidation while his relations with the ECOMOG forces that were still in the country to oversee the peace were strained.

  Meanwhile, he had begun to provide support for the RUF rebels in neighbouring Sierra Leone. In the course of 1999 Taylor became more deeply involved in Sierra Leone and was condemned by the international community for his destabilizing activities in the region. In part his interference in Sierra Leone and also Guinea was retaliatory since both countries had committed military forces to ECOMOG whose presence in Liberia Taylor deeply resented. More important, he wanted access to the diamond-mining region of Sierra Leone across the border, which was then controlled by the RUF.

  Taylor’s hold on power was now challenged by dissidents based in Guinea. During August and September they launched armed attacks in Lofa county. They called themselves the Joint Forces for the Liberation of Liberia and they were made up of elements of former rebel factions. On 17 September Taylor signed a peace accord with Guinea’s President Lansana Conté at Abuja in the hope of curtailing the dissident activities and in October the last ECOMOG forces were withdrawn, enabling Taylor to enter 2000 with some sense of security. He maintained his grip on power through a circle of corrupt associates protected by loyal armed guards. He controlled the diamond export trade and this was boosted by events in Sierra Leone where Taylor supported Foday Sankoh and the RUF. This policy backfired when Britain persuaded the EU to block the first tranche of US$55 million EU aid to Liberia. In February 2001 rebels launched an attack, which was backed by Guinea. Taylor’s government, under international pressure, announced that it was closing the RUF offices in Monrovia. In March the UN Security Council gave Liberia two months to convince it that it had stopped supporting the RUF; otherwise, sanctions would be imposed. The ambassadors of Guinea and Sierra Leone were declared persona non grata and given seven days to leave Liberia. On 19 March Liberia closed its borders with Sierra Leone. Despite these measures, UN sanctions were imposed in May because the Security Council did not believe that Liberia had really cut its ties with the RUF. The sanctions were to last for 12 months and they included a ban on the all-important diamond exports. In October an Amnesty International report accused the government of brutal treatment of its opponents.

  During 2002 Taylor’s many crimes against his people caught up with him as an increasing number of people revolted against his corrupt and brutal government. In January tens of thousands of Liberians fled the north of the country as fighting escalated between government forces and rebels of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD). At this stage the rebels were thought to be led by Doe’s former chief of staff Charles Julu. Fighting broke out in other parts of the country where LURD was gaining support. In February Taylor declared a state of emergency. In March LURD said it was ready to conduct peace talks with government or opposition, but not with Taylor himself. Taylor ignored these offers and sought to destroy his enemies by force although this was to prove increasingly difficult because the international arms embargo prevented his government obtaining fresh arms. I
n May the UN Security Council renewed sanctions against Liberia for another 12 months because Taylor’s government had ‘not yet complied fully’ with its demands to end its support for the RUF rebels. Towards the end of September the Liberian government claimed major successes against LURD and lifted the state of emergency. Taylor said that all areas occupied by LURD forces had been retaken except for parts of the northern city of Voinjama. This apparent government success proved illusory.

  In early June 2003, while attending a Liberian peace summit in Ghana, Taylor said that he might step aside if it would bring peace to Liberia. He had just been indicted for war crimes in Sierra Leone. He told the conference: ‘I will strongly consider a process of transition that will not include me. If President Taylor removes himself for the Liberians, will that bring peace? If so, I will remove myself.’ It is doubtful that many in his audience believed him. By that time some 200,000 Liberians had died in the civil war of the previous decade while the two rebel movements, LURD and the Movement for Democracy in Liberia, controlled two-thirds of the country and had several times fought their way into the outskirts of Monrovia. By mid-June about a million people had crowded into Monrovia, facing the city with potentially disastrous health and food shortage problems. A Liberian man, Anthony Washington, explained his country’s plight: ‘We got no order. We don’t know who’s a rebel and who’s a government man. We don’t know who to run from, or where to run to next.’ This is the Liberia Taylor’s greed for power has created. The rebels were supported by his three neighbours – Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea and Sierra Leone – because he had armed and supported rebels in their countries.15 Despite these pressures Taylor had publicly withdrawn his promise to step down. By this time aid workers and Liberians were calling upon the United States to intervene to end the anarchy although Washington showed no inclination to do so. There were 100 marines in Monrovia to guard the American embassy. Following shelling, angry crowds accused the United States of failing to protect Liberians from fighting in the capital. At this point in the Liberia story, an interesting debate surfaced among the major Western powers as Britain, France and the United Nations urged Washington to intervene. Why, if Britain and France have sent forces to help their former colonies in Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire, should the US not help Liberia? The conflicts in the three countries had been linked as rebels moved back and forth across borders.16 By mid-July 2003 all the signs pointed to a final bloody confrontation in Monrovia before the final collapse of the Taylor regime.

  The wars in these four countries – Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia and Sierra Leone – had much in common. They occurred in small countries where ethnic divisions were acute or could easily be elevated into lethal antagonisms. The conflicts had more to do with power-hungry warlords seeking control than any more ideological question of a ruling philosophy on behalf of the people as a whole. In each case the structures of government proved fragile and unable to withstand the pressures they faced. And in each case increasingly desperate populations appealed for outside intervention and turned ‘naturally’ to their former metropolitan powers, a fact that tells volumes about the brainwashing capacities of the colonial powers: if they achieved nothing else they created a sense of dependence that has not yet begun to disappear.

  CHAPTER THIRTY - SEVEN

  The Congo: Africa’s Great War

  Deeply troubled since its creation as a personal fief by Belgium’s rapacious king, Leopold II, the independent Congo was born in bloodshed only to be treated again as a personal fief by the equally rapacious Mobutu before rising demands for democracy at the beginning of the 1990s signalled the coming end to his rule. Democracy, however, had to wait as the Congo came near to disintegration under the pressures of its predatory neighbours. The struggle for multiparty democracy in the Congo that threatened the Mobutu regime at the beginning of the 1990s may have been part of a continent-wide rejection of military rule and the one-party state yet, as its leader Etienne Tshisekedi and his supporters were to discover, they had a long way to go. Major examples of Mobutu’s rearguard reactions to demands for change over his last years include the massacre of Lubumbashi University students in 1990, the instigation of looting and violence by the military in 1991 and 1993, the massacre of Christian demonstrators demanding the reopening of the National Conference in Kinshasa in 1992, the instigation of ethnic cleansing in the Shaba and Kivu provinces in 1992–94, the refusal to deal with the danger posed to the country by the Rwandan refugee camps under the control of Hutu extremists over 1994–96 and finally the use of white mercenaries in a last-ditch effort to save his regime in 1996–97.1

  In 1992, apparently bowing to popular pressure, Mobutu saw the formation of a democratically elected government under Tshisekedi who was to learn much about frustration if he achieved little else. ‘During the three months in which his government was formally unchallenged as the executive power of the state, from 30 August to 30 November 1992, he was unable to start fulfilling his promise to the people. His adversaries, the forces of the status quo, responded to his olive branch with utter contempt, and exploited his patience to obstruct his administration.’2 In fact, Tshisekedi and his cabinet functioned like a caretaker government rather than a regime that was going to change anything, and a caretaker government waiting for the Mobutuists to resume control. On 6 December 1992 the National Conference dissolved itself to be succeeded by a 453-member High Council of the Republic (HCR) with Archbishop Monsengwo as its president. It was empowered to amend and adapt the constitution and organize presidential and legislative elections. In January 1993 the HCR, which had declared Tshisekedi head of government, also declared Mobutu guilty of treason and threatened impeachment unless he recognized the legitimacy of the transitional parliament. Strikes and disorder followed this pronouncement while Mobutu attempted to reassert his authority and worked to divide the various forces ranged against him. He reconvened the dormant national assembly as a rival to the HCR and then created a conclave that appointed Faustin Birindwa prime minister. By September 1993 Mobutu was insisting that Tshisekedi’s mandate had been superseded while his supporters insisted that he was still prime minister. In January 1994 Mobutu announced the dissolution of the HCR, the national legislative council, the dismissal of the Birindwa government and a contest between Tshisekedi and Molumba Lukoji for the premiership. In 1995, expert as ever in the game of playing for time, Mobutu used the presence in the country of 2.5 million refugees from the Rwanda genocide war as an excuse for postponing elections.

  In April 1996 it was announced that a referendum on a new constitution would be held in December and would be followed by presidential, legislative, regional and municipal elections in 1997. In fact, none of these events took place for by the end of the year the security situation was collapsing. In August Mobutu flew to Switzerland for treatment for cancer and was to be away for four months. His absence, added to the chaos in eastern Zaïre as a result of the Rwanda refugee crisis, marked the turning point of Mobutu’s long rule. Having established a national elections commission (the Commission Nationale des Elections) (CNE), Mobutu had proceeded to marginalize it as he did with anything designed to encourage the emergence of democracy. ‘One by one, each of the major components of the institutional framework of the transition – the legislature, the executive and the electoral commission – failed to help effect the democratic transition in the Congo. The original framework adopted at the Conférence Nationale Souveraine (CNS) (sovereign national conference) was called into question by the Mobutu camp, which used its control of the security forces and other organs of state power to block the democratization process.’3 Meanwhile, Rwandan Hutu militiamen who had fled Rwanda in 1994, fearing Tutsi retribution, had mingled with the refugee camps to turn these into bases for recruitment and rearmament. From 1996 the Hutu militias began carving out strategic territory for themselves in eastern Zaïre with support from locally based Hutus and members of the Zaïrean armed forces (Forces Armées du Zaïre) (FAZ), killing and expelling
local Tutsis and other ethnic groups in the process. They were assisted in this course because there already existed widespread resentment of local Tutsis resident in South Kivu province who were known as the Banyamulenge. An aspect of the ethnic complexity of this region was the long-running dispute as to whether the Banyamulenge were entitled to citizenship of Zaïre. In October 1996 the governor of South Kivu ordered the Banyamulenge to leave the province in a week and though the order was subsequently suspended it caused great alarm with the result that Tutsi militias were formed and were at once supported by the Tutsi-controlled Rwanda government and Uganda. They proceeded to attack the Hutu forces and their FAZ allies. The Tutsi rebels were joined by various other groups of ethnic dissidents and these formed the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo-Zaïre (AFDL), which made the somewhat unlikely figure of Laurent Desiré Kabila its leader. Kabila had been an aide to Lumumba and an opponent of Mobutu since the 1960s. By November 1996 the AFDL forces controlled significant areas bordering on Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda including Goma and Bukavu. Mobutu’s continued absence meant that his regime was not co-ordinated properly to meet the AFDL threat. By the end of the month the AFDL controlled most of Kivu Province.