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

by Gerard Prunier

  UNITA had occupied most of the Kwango Valley alluvial diamond sources since 1992, and many of the problems encountered in carrying out the fusion of territorial administrations between the two rival movements had to do with the control of the diamond-producing areas. Savimbi was quite blunt about it, saying, “UNITA has controlled two thirds of the diamonds production since 1993. We are not going to give it up.”98 Both sides were rearming, but UNITA, which was under embargo, had to do it secretly. According to the findings of the Fowler Report, the best source on the diamonds-for-guns UNITA circuit, the main sources of supply were Bulgaria and very likely Belarus and Russia, who “did not provide substantive replies” to the panel’s questions.99 The countries providing fake end-user certificates were Zaire, Burkina Faso, Congo-Brazzaville, and Togo. Given the extremely close relationship of French-speaking African countries with Paris, it is not hard to see why France had a bit of a problem with President dos Santos. But the situation was ambiguous because during the 1992–1995 period of cohabitation in Paris, before Jacques Chirac was elected president, Interior Minister Charles Pasqua had become closely associated with Pierre Falcone and Arkadi Gaydamak, who had just concluded a large financial deal between Russia and Angola.100 The contracts were initially for $300 million but soon mushroomed to $450 million and later reached $642 million. The deal involved a discounted repurchase of Angola’s public debt toward the former Soviet Union (which stood at $8 billion in 1993) and payment of the debt in exchange for the supply of military hardware.101

  We can now see the whole ambiguity of the French position: on the one hand, as the Fowler Report shows, Paris was, if not an accomplice, at least a godfather of UNITA’s sanction-busting operations through its African protégés; on the other hand, through the whole SOFREMI-Brenco-Paribas-Simportex102 affair, France was also, if not the supplier, at least a facilitator of the MPLA’s rearmament campaign. UNAVEM had fallen by the wayside after the October 1992 explosion, and a small structure had been set up after the signing of the Lusaka Peace Protocol to monitor its application. It was known under its French acronym MONUA (Mission des Observateurs des Nations Unies en Angola) and was desperately trying to collect weapons, monitor encampments, support moves toward a government of national unity, and ensure respect for the Peace Protocol. It was a hard job. Out of a population of 12,486,000 there were 1,345,300 IDPs and an additional 2,161,000 persons considered by the UN as “affected by the conflict.”103 Skirmishing was happening off and on, with UNITA complaining that the MPLA was slowly encroaching on its diamond territory. But open war was more or less kept at bay for the time being. The Great Lakes explosion was going to upset that extremely precarious balance.

  Standing by, trying to keep out: three uneasy onlookers

  Northern Rhodesia was administered from 1899 to 1924 by the British South African Company and then retroceded in that year to the Colonial Office because the company did not know what to do with the territory. Four years later copper was discovered in the north, close to the border with Katanga, and the colony started on a unique course of mining and industrial development. Unlike in Southern Rhodesia, there were few settlers, and most of the whites were employed by the administration or by the mining companies.104 The economy was “developed,” but it was also lopsided and totally dependent on the decisions of foreign companies, which were not even registered in the territory.105 With such an economic kitty as a prize the whites tried to keep the territory to themselves, first against London and then against the rising tide of black nationalism when Macmillan’s famous “winds of change” started blowing. Because there were not enough of them they pooled their efforts with those of the much larger and politically active white settler population of Southern Rhodesia. The result was the creation of the ill-fated Federation of the Rhodesias and Nyasaland106 in 1953. The attempt at settler control lasted ten years and was defeated by the steady rise of African political parties. The United National Independence Party (UNIP), created in 1959, was finally led to electoral victory by Kenneth Kaunda, and Zambia became independent in October 1964.

  The whole process had been extremely civilized and Zambia had become free without as much as a single shot being fired. President Kaunda believed in a form of Gandhi-like civil disobedience, with which the British authorities were very familiar by the 1950s. The problem was that his exotic version of Britain’s welfare state rested on the extremely fragile base of a single-product economy: in 1964 the 632,000 tons of copper produced in Zambia represented 47 percent of GNP, 53 percent of tax revenues, and 92 percent of export revenues. 107 Things were fine as long as copper prices remained high. Kaunda supported all the guerrilla movements in southern Africa: the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union and the Zimbabwe African National Union, the Angolan UNITA, the Namibian SWAPO, and South Africa’s ANC. Zambia was then the epitome of the front-line state, battling at the same time apartheid, Portugal’s late fascism, and Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence regime in Salisbury; Kaunda’s “humanism” refused superbly to condescend to miserable problems of financial plumbing and much preferred to seek prestigious compensation in a worldwide diplomatic merry-go-round.108 But by the 1980s, with falling copper prices, inefficient management, and padded payrolls, Zambia’s nationalized mining economy was obviously sinking and “privatization” became the battle cry of the new Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) launched by Frederick Chiluba in the late 1980s. In October 1991 Chiluba swept into power with 75.8 percent of the vote, since most Zambians seemed to think that all their problems came from Kaunda as a person and from the UNIP barons as a group. But within months the system had reproduced itself and turned Chiluba into a free-enterprise version of Kaunda (who took kickbacks from private contractors instead of directly dipping into the public treasury) and MMD into a mirror image of UNIP. What remained, in spite of the appalling drop in living standards, was the basic mildness and decency of Zambian society.109

  As for the gathering storm clouds, they mostly came from UNITA’s long familiarity with the Zambian political landscape, dating back to 1964, when Savimbi moved to Lusaka after his break with Holden Roberto’s FNLA. The Angolan war had dragged on and Savimbi had been jailed and then deported for having attacked the Benguela railway, Zambia’s vital rail link to the Atlantic Coast. But he retained many friends in Lusaka. By the late 1980s, as the nationalized copper economy and the UNIP state were sinking together, Savimbi’s diamonds began to come in very handy for members of the elite who had to face hard times. More military equipment started to fly in, to supplement the large arsenal that UNIT A kept in Zaire. There were air connections with Mozambique, Zaire, Togo, and Burkina Fasso. The end of Kaunda’s presidency did not mark an end to the system. On the contrary. As the economy kept shrinking, the lure of UNITA’s diamonds grew. Discreet airstrips were built in various parts of the country,110 and the names of some of the new MMD elite (Vice President Christian Tembo, Minister of Commerce Enoch Kavindele, Minister of Defense Ben Mwila) appeared in the now semi-free press as “good friends of Jonas Savimbi.” Contrary to what had happened in many other African countries, the help given to UNITA came only from powerful men, not from the government as a body, and it was given mostly for financial reasons.

  But with this money and these weapons also came a new and most un-Zambian surge of violence in which the government could not but get embroiled: former finance minister Ronald Penza was shot at home in 1998 in what was described by Africa News Service as “a clumsy attempt at simulating armed robbery in which the police then shot all the suspects,” and FAPLA started to chase FALA fighters across a Zambian border whose neutrality looked more and more dubious. The local population suffered from the firefights, especially when FAPLA attacked the Angolan refugee camps. By late 1996, as the “peace process” dragged on in Angola and the Rwandese army was about to attack Zaire, Zambia was still a “neutral” country. But its neutrality depended on what would happen around it, particularly in Zaire, Angola, and Zimbabwe. Within months all
of them would be part of the global conflict.

  Extending from Zaire’s northern border, the Central African Republic is perhaps the most marginal and forlorn state on the whole continent. Called everything from “Upper Ubangi” to “Ubangi-Chari,” it was indeed, as Pierre Kalck aptly wrote, “the most neglected of France’s colonies” after having been “the last blank space on the map of Africa.”111 Ubangi-Chari was a meeting point of tribes: the Sara from the north, the Azande from Zaire, the Gbaya from the west, all nesting, not always peacefully, around the central mass of the Banda. It was also a meeting point between the savannah lands of Sahelian Africa to the north and east and the great forest of central Africa in the south and west. The opposition between the “river people” of the south and the “people of the savannah” of the north remains a fundamental contradiction of the territory to this day. But basically Ubangi-Chari was a point of passage, densely crisscrossed by navigable rivers. The nineteenth-century ravages of the slave raids from the Sudan had left it broken, despondent, and largely shapeless.

  The French treated it particularly shabbily because they did not see any use for it except to block expansion from the Congo Free State toward the Nile (Leopold tried hard in the 1880s and 1890s) or any southwesterly British move toward the Congo. For Paris Ubangi was just a plug used to stand in other white men’s way. Because it was a financial burden the Ministry of Colonies tried to make it self-supporting by selling it conditionally to what were known as “the big concessionaire companies.”112 As Pierre Kalck wrote,

  In order to save money the management of the big companies contracted with perfect social misfits113 who were ready to accept poor salaries and very hard working conditions… . These agents soon became little local tyrants who enjoyed “hitting the niggers” to satisfy their neuroses.114

  In the 1920s the system was given a facelift by renaming the hated “concessions” and calling them “commercial monopolies.” They were strictly the same thing. At the behest of some friends the famous writer André Gide went to the Congo, as it was still called, and came back horrified by what he discovered. He wrote upon his return, “I am now inhabited by an immense wailing, I now know things I cannot tolerate. What demon drove me to Africa? I was in peace. But now I know and I must speak.” The travel memoir in which he described the companies’ abuses created a scandal;115 there were discussions in Parliament, and then, as usual, the companies got the whole thing quashed. There was even worse by then: the construction of the (in)famous 600-kilometer-long Congo-Océan railway between the Pointe Noire harbor and Brazzaville. Thousands of laborers were recruited by force in the “useless” Ubangi-Chari and shipped downriver to Brazzaville to work on the “useful” railway. The construction lasted from 1921 to 1934 with an incredibly high mortality rate, “one dead man for each railroad tie laid,” in the words of the investigative journalist Albert Londres.116

  Strangely enough, immediately after World War II this tragic colonial backwater produced a man who was probably the most gifted and the most inventive of French Africa’s decolonization generation of politicians: Barthélémy Boganda. Boganda was a Catholic priest who got elected to the Paris Parliament on a “colonial” seat in November 1946.117 Coming from the small Ngbaka tribe he soon proved able to reach an audience far beyond the limits of his ethnic group, even including a number of progressive-minded white colons in his political party, the Mouvement d’Evolution Sociale de l’Afrique Noire (MESAN). It was typical of Boganda that the movement he created did not make any reference to Ubangi-Chari as such but instead tried to deal with the much bigger problem of understanding what were going to be the boundaries of the new independent states soon to be born. Coming from such a hopeless colony as Ubangi-Chari and possessing a sharp and imaginative mind, he saw that “countries” such as the one he might soon be saddled with had no economic viability. In May 1957, when he inaugurated a form of limited self-government for the colony, he boldly called for the building of “the Latin United States of Africa,” which in his view should have regrouped French Equatorial Africa as a whole, the Belgian Congo, Ruanda-Urundi, and the Portuguese territories to the south. He clearly envisioned France as a the patron needed for this federation, which he saw as a counterweight to the powerful British-influenced bloc of southern African states (South Africa, the Rhodesias, Bechuanaland, and Nyasaland). But on November 29, 1959, as he was flying from Berberati back to Bangui, his plane blew up in midair. Although the probability of foul play was very high, there was no commission of inquiry,118 and Ubangi-Chari became independent on August 13, 1960, under the name Central African Republic and under the lackluster leadership of a de facto one-party state dominated by MESAN luminaries Abel Goumba and David Dacko. Within six months Dacko had manipulated Parliament in order to marginalize Goumba and grab all the power.119 Within another five years the country was in such difficult economic straits that Army Chief of Staff Jean-Bedel Bokassa was able to easily organize a bloodless coup, seizing power on December 31, 1965.

  Although General Bokassa was a relative of Barthélémy Boganda, he was a very different kind of man. Both were born in the small village of Bobangi in the Lobaye region, Boganda in 1910 and Bokassa in 1921. Both shared the same terrible early trauma of having their fathers beaten to death by French concessionaire company agents. Bokassa was six when his father was killed “for being insubordinate,” and his mother died of despair within a few weeks. The boy was raised by his grandfather and went on to join the army in 1939. He did not fight during World War II, but he fought for three years in French Indochina (1950–1953), where he was much decorated and acquired French citizenship.

  The regime he was to create in the Central African Republic after grabbing power in 1965 was one of the strangest on the continent and can only be compared with Idi Amin Dada’s in Uganda. Bokassa’s charismatic leadership style corresponded perfectly to that described by Max Weber: “The term ‘charisma’ will be applied to a certain quality of individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities… . How these qualities would be ultimately judged from any ethical, aesthetic or other such point of view is naturally indifferent for purposes of definition.”120 Bokassa’s leadership was not ethically or aesthetically very pleasing, but it worked for nearly fourteen years. The main traits of his power were magic, theatrical violence, and larger-than-life grotesque displays of showmanship. His anger was used as a means of terrorizing the population: he kicked to death his driver because he suspected him (wrongly) of having driven his wife to an amorous appointment; he publicly smeared strong pepper on the genital organs and in the eyes of people he accused of a variety of misdeeds, including one of his sons; he emasculated and gouged out the eyes of Dacko’s last security chief and then cut off his head and ordered it to be displayed in schools throughout the country for educational purposes;121 he permanently carried a stick with a big J for Justice carved at the top and would beat people with it if he felt they deserved it. His decisions were sudden and without appeal: several times he sent judges to jail when he thought they had passed an unsatisfactory judgment and in some cases specified a new sentence that would be immediately applicable, up to and including the death penalty. His violence was often linked to magic, as when he killed his wife’s seamstress because his witch doctor asked him for the fresh liver of a young woman.122 And it seemed to work, since all plots against him failed, at times spectacularly so, as in February 1976, when one of his officers tossed a grenade at him and it did not explode. He turned any situation to his advantage: when he was poisoned during a trip to neighboring Chad he came back on a stretcher and gave an impromptu speech at the airport, declaring to a fascinated crowd, “Those colonialist bastards tried to kill me but they cannot… . I am Jesus Christ, I am the reincarnation of Barthélémy Boganda.”123 Although the violence was constant and very public, it was also limited. Bokassa killed individually, he never destroyed whole
categories of enemies, and although he systematically favored his Ngbaka tribe, he never persecuted the others.124 He delighted in being totally unpredictable, shouting in public at Kurt Waldheim that he was “an imperialist pimp,” insisting on calling General de Gaulle “Daddy”125 and offering to attack Paris with a paratroopers’ regiment and shoot up the French rebel students during the 1968 riots. He converted to Islam in October 1976, received money for his conversion, and then abjured it in January 1977. By then he had decided to crown himself emperor and felt it would be nice if the pope could come for the occasion, as he had attended the coronation of Napoleon I in 1804. The pope refused, but the coronation on December 4, 1977, was right out of a novel by Evelyn Waugh, with an enormous fake two-ton throne, a tiara studded with six thousand small but real diamonds, thousands of guests, fifty thousand dollars’ worth of champagne, and a gilded carriage pulled by eight white horses.

  Bokassa’s personal assets were vast, eclectic, and growing all the time.126 He owned restaurants, garages, pharmacies, hardware stores, a brick factory, farms, diamond mines, office buildings, a sawmill, a food canning plant; he monopolized cement imports and palm oil production; he had thirty thousand elephants killed by the army and sold the ivory; he manufactured clothes, recorded music, raised pigs and oxen, built his own slaughterhouse and coffee-processing plant, and owned a cinema, where he would sit and watch the movie of his own coronation. Nothing was too small for his profit: he advertised the flights of his presidential plane to Paris when it flew there on diamond-selling trips and sold tickets to the public. He made a great show of drinking and eating to excess; he had thirty-five legitimate children from many women as well as many other unacknowledged ones; and when his Romanian mistress was foolish enough to sleep with an officer of his guard, he had the man publicly cut up into little pieces. The image is of an ogre of legend, of a larger-than-life creature who wants to physically own his territory, manipulate it like an object, possibly even eat it.127 It was only in former Ubangi that such a regime could exist, where the dictator incarnated the country rather than ruled it, faced no organized political opposition, had no civil society to contend with, could walk all over the prostrate body of an amorphous land.