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

by Gerard Prunier

  Kabila in power: a secretive and incoherent leadership

  Laurent-Désiré Kabila arrived in Kinshasa almost stealthily on May 20, 1997, and he was not seen publicly till his swearing in ceremony nine days later. This bizarre behavior corresponded to something all parties involved in the problems of the new Congo were soon going to realize: the new president was a political Rip van Winkle whose conspiratorial political style had been frozen at some point back in the 1960s and who still lived in a world seen strategically as a deadly struggle against imperialism and tactically as a mixture of conspiracies and informal economics. This was going to be painfully obvious in the way he picked his cabinet, “bypassing both the country’s impressive civil society and the squad of opposition politicians led by Etienne Tschisekedi.”2

  There were two main problems with the cabinet President Kabila announced on July 1, 1997: its heterogeneity and its diaspora origins. The minister of the interior, Mwenze Kongolo, was an “ANACOZA recruit” who had moved from a minor legal job in the United States;3 Raphael Ghenda, now minister of information and cultural affairs, was an ultraleftist admirer of Kim Il Sung who had spent the past thirty years in exile in France and Belgium; Justine Kasa Vubu, daughter of Congo’s first president and minister for the civil service, was a UDPS activist who had been living in exile in Algeria, Switzerland, and finally Belgium for the past thirteen years; Bizima Karaha, the minister of foreign affairs, had lived and worked as a medical doctor in South Africa; the chief of staff and future successor, Abdoulaye Yerodia Ndombasi, was said to be a “Lacanian psychoanalyst” who had been living in Paris;4 Etienne Mbaya, minister of national reconstruction, had spent years living in precarious exile in Germany; Mawampanga Mwana Nanga, the new minister of finance, was another ANACOZA recruit from the United States, where he taught agricultural economics. Over half of the cabinet members came from the diaspora and represented a bewildering array of personal and professional experiences which precluded any possible idea of teamwork. And it was the same thing for the various advisers, who, without being officially in power, often had more power than the ministers themselves. These were Moïse Nyarugabo, Kabila’s Munyamulenge personal secretary; Aubert Mukendi, a Muluba from Kasai who was his chief of staff and quasi–prime minister; the AFDL’s official boss, Déogratias Bugera; and primus inter pares Paul Kabongo, head of the new Agence Nationale de Renseignements (ANR), a sort of reincarnation of the Mobutist SNIP. Kabongo, whose last known occupation was as a bar owner in a Madrid suburb, had no special qualifications apart from being a personal friend of the new president. But for a while he was the only one who had permanent access to Kabila, day or night, and he did not refrain from making everybody understand that he was on top of it all. Then, on August 21, without any warning, he was jailed and lost all his mysterious influence. There was going to be more and more of the same style of leadership, especially at the level of the military. For the first few months there was no minister of defense, no known chief of staff, and no ranks; all officers were Cuban-style “commanders” called “Ignace,” “Bosco,” “Jonathan,” or “James,” who occupied connecting suites at the Intercontinental Hotel and had presidential list cell-phone numbers. None spoke French or Lingala, but all spoke Kinyarwanda, Swahili, and, quite often, English. Twenty-seven-year-old Anselme Masasu Nindaga, who called himself a “general,” told anybody who cared to listen that he was the army boss; nobody contradicted him until he also was jailed in November, after which President Kabila said that he had never been chief of anything and that he was “only a former Rwandese Army corporal” anyway. When the Belgian journalist Colette Braeckman asked Kabila what was the actual army command structure apart from himself he answered, “We are not going to expose ourselves and risk being destroyed by showing ourselves openly… . We are careful so that the true masters of the army are not known. It is strategic. Please, let us drop the matter.”5 This only contributed to further fueling the rumors of Rwandese control over the Congolese armed forces. Government business was transacted in an atmosphere of permanent improvisation “verging on anarchy,”6 whether at home or abroad. On a state visit to Tanzania President Kabila simply decided in the midst of his trip that he had more important things to do in Kinshasa, picked up the phone, talked to President Mkapa, and drove to the airport, leaving his hosts in total confusion. Shortly after, he told former president Nyerere that he needed to see him and that he would come and visit him at his home village in Butiama. Then he called and said he had flown instead to Bujumbura, then under an embargo, and that he had just thought he could mediate between President Buyoya and the rest of the region. It was a comment that Nyerere, who had just initiated the Arusha peace process and had arranged for a special mediator, did not really appreciate. Kabila also stood up President Mubarak, who was waiting for him at Cairo Airport in late February 1998 with a red carpet and a guard of honor, simply phoning him two days later to say that “he had been feeling tired.” Everything seemed arbitrary. A young French doctor who spent several weeks in detention7 later said that anybody could be jailed under the most bizarre pretexts and be brutally treated, like the foreign minister’s chief of staff, who was brought into detention during the doctor’s stay and was severely whipped: “People were denouncing each other from Ministry to Ministry, between one service and another, from office to office. Anything could land you in jail, from an accusation of conspiracy to some bit of black marketing.”8

  Contrary to what often happens in Africa, the problem at first was not the new government’s ethnopolitical balance, which was reasonable enough, even if the Equateur Province was understandably largely absent.9 The problem was that Kabila kept promising the same thing to different people and giving contradictory answers to the same question asked at different times. He also had multiple “special advisers” who all thought they had direct access to the chief. He seemed to think that pitting these various men (and the groups they represented) against each other would enable him to remain in full control of what one hesitates to call “the state apparatus.” But most of the time these convoluted ploys, which were a direct inheritance from his old conspiracy days,10 only resulted in confusion, sterile infighting, and paralysis. As a result, “ethnic problems” soon developed because the Kasaians were played against the Katangese, the Balubakat against the Lunda, and the Tutsi against all the others.11

  Thus in September 1997 Emile Ilunga, who with Deogratias Symba had been one of the key actors in swinging support from the Gendarmes Katangais behind the AFDL in late 1996, blasted the new regime:

  Four hundred of our men have been arrested in Lubumbashi with General Delphin Muland, and detained upon orders of the Rwandese… . Confusion prevails… . Masasu says he is Commander-in-Chief: where is the decree? Mawampanga is arrested and then rehabilitated: where are the official documents12 Everything is done orally. What is Kakudji doing at Gécamines?13 Kabila has no coherent political project and the recent fighting in Kivu is a result.14 If we have to use revolutionary means to change that situation, we are ready for it.15

  In fact, the Tigers swallowed their pride and did not do anything and General Muland was eventually freed from jail on November.16 The key to that erratic situation was the almost complete lack of institutionalization, which turned every conflict of competence into a personality conflict and then into an ethnic one.

  Apart from a blurry populist and “anti-imperialist” stance that never quite seemed to find ways of expressing itself beyond mere denunciations, Kabila seems to have had only the vaguest notions of what he actually intended to do after overthrowing Mobutu.

  Interviewer:

  What model of democracy do you see as suitable?

  Kabila:

  I cannot say now, you are asking too much. Being a head of state is not like being in a restaurant. I have to have time to think about it.17

  One of the key struggles in the installation period of the new regime concerned the place of the AFDL as an organization. Deogratias Bugera and his Rwandese ba
ckers were pushing for a one-party state because they knew that in the Congo, unlike in Rwanda, they could never manage to contain the existing opposition parties. Aubert Mukendi and a number of other people around “Mzee”18 were pushing for a fully multiparty system, albeit with some controlling devices to avoid the Mobutu-induced “party anarchy” of the CNS period. Kabila fluttered between the two, seeming at first to encourage the one-party approach,19 but then slowly downgrading the importance of the AFDL, until he finally sacked Bugera in June 1998, replacing him with the much tamer Vincent Mutomb Tshibal.20

  The single-party question was linked to the all-important point of deciding on how to deal with the long-standing nonviolent anti-Mobutu opposition. From that point of view the Ugandans had given Kabila totally different advice from that of the Rwandese. As early as May 1997 they had told the old conspirator that he would be well advised to follow the example they had set in January 1986, after they took power, and to create a “broad-based government” in which all moderate opponents would be invited to take part. Then he could always secure the system by keeping a politically and tribally safe hub at the center of that liberal wheel. “Unfortunately that fool did just about the opposite,” complained one of his former interlocutors.21 President Museveni was appalled at the crude way Kabila treated the old anti-Mobutu opposition, declaring publicly, “He should include opponents in his cabinet. Not doing it is a mistake. I don’t know what he is afraid of.”22 The Ugandan leader knew from experience that political inclusion was the best way of sterilizing opponents and pleasing the Western donors at the same time. In comparison to Mobutu, Kabila was a soft dictator, but his clumsy defiance managed to both irk the donors and spur his opponents into more virulent action at a time when he could hardly afford to choose such a path of confrontation.

  The first arrests in mid-June 1997 could pass as a post-Mobutu cleanup operation since they mostly concerned former ministers, bankers, and managing directors of state enterprises. But the old anti-Mobutu human rights organization AZADHO immediately understood and denounced a “downward drift into totalitarianism coupled with an indifference to the summary justice meted out by AFDL forces.”23 Foreigners were hoping things would turn out all right. Acting U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs William Twaddell spoke about his country’s “critical engagement,” and European Union representative Jacques Poos put on a brave face, declaring, “Kabila has a firm will to base the future of the Congo on the same values as ours: democracy, respect for human rights and building a legal state.24 The old rebel Antoine Gizenga and his Parti Lumumbiste d’Action Unifié were the first ones to test the political waters by organizing a small-scale demonstration on July 25; the police opened fire, three demonstrators were killed, and fifty-four were arrested.25

  Security services were among the first institutions the new regime paid attention to, and it quickly became obvious that the ANR was the new SNIP and that Direction Militaire des Activités Anti-Patrie (DEMIAP) had replaced the old Service d’Action et de Renseignement Militaire.26 The repressive spirit remained. Political arrests began to multiply for the most varied reasons, running from the ordinary (Arthur Z’Ahidi Ngoma and Joseph Olenghankoy simply for being politically active) to the conspiratorial (“Commander” Masasu Nindaga after a shootout we will come back to). The final test was Tshisekedi himself, who had declared that he would defy the ban on open political activity. He was arrested in January 1998, on the anniversary of Lumumba’s death,27 and later relegated to his village in Kasai. By early 1998 an Amnesty International report could already display an impressive roster of political prisoners and denial of basic liberties.28 To look tough and impress a new respect for law and order on the population, the regime also organized batches of collective public executions by firing squad.29

  All in all the results were mixed. Most people were still grateful for the overthrow of Mobutu, even if they would have liked a more democratic approach to the transition. Confusion was perhaps expected, but the brutal authoritarianism created fear. This ambivalence was obvious in a series of opinion polls that were taken in early 1998 in the major Congolese cities. They showed that in case of a presidential election Kabila would definitely win over Tshisekedi, even if by a limited margin (33 percent of the vote in a first round against 20 percent). But they also showed that at the legislative level the UDPS would beat the AFDL with about 35 percent of the vote to 14 percent for Kabila’s party.30 In July Kabila “unbanned” Tshisekedi and allowed him to come back to Kinshasa.31 Two days later the old “Lion of Limete” agreed to collaborate with the new regime. But in typical Kabila fashion, several of his aides were immediately put under arrest when they became a bit too active.

  As for the international community, it sort of grumbled at the internal civil liberties and human rights violations, but it might have tolerated a certain amount of them had it not been for a more burning issue.32 What really set it in a face-to-face duel with the new regime was the unresolved question of the fate of the Rwandese refugees.

  Diplomacy and the refugee issue

  To understand the incredible year-long trial of strength between the United Nations and the Kabila government over the Rwandese refugee issue, one has first to keep in mind what the toppling of Mobutu meant for Africa and how it came about. The fall of Mobutu was the wiping out of a fundamental blot of shame on the whole continent, the revenge on a feeling of permanent humiliation that had lasted for over thirty years. The man once described by a French diplomat as “a walking bank account with a leopard cap” had long embodied all that Africa felt was wrong in its relationship with the rest of the world: humiliation, toadying to the “imperialists,” corruption, vulgarity, and violence coupled with powerlessness. The Alliance had been the hollow point of an Africa-wide bullet rather than a purely Congolese phenomenon.

  In late 1996 it was Kabila who had cold feet about venturing west and it was the Alliance’s foreign backers who had nudged him on.33 The impetus, as we have seen, came mostly from Rwanda, which wanted a “final solution” to the problem of the Rwandese refugees, and from Uganda, which had decided that its undeclared war with Sudan would be solved laterally by doing battle in Zaire. But it also came, in a less obvious fashion, from the states of Africa’s southern cone—Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia, and Angola—who still smarted at the memory of Mobutu’s alliance with the CIA to support the FNLA against the MPLA, SWAPO, and the ANC. The former “front-line states” (Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania) still saw in Mobutu the man ushered into and kept in power by Washington, right-wing white mercenaries, France, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, and the king of Morocco in order to bolster the South African apartheid regime.34 Even if they now had the blessing of America’s New World Order, all the African heads of states supporting the Alliance were old leftist sympathizers. From Nelson Mandela to Yoweri Museveni and from Robert Mugabe to Issayas Afeworki, all of them had sympathized with Moscow, Havana, or Beijing at some point in their career. Overthrowing the imperialist puppet was their triumph. On May 18, 1997, Thabo Mbeki made sure that he was the first African leader to fly into Kinshasa to congratulate Kabila on the downfall of “that man who stank.”35 In distant Kampala an opposition paper quoted approvingly one government member, Amanya Mushega, when he said in a speech, “The Great Lakes have been chosen by God to launch the struggle against the modern oppressive regimes of Africa… . The current liberation crusade started in the bushes and caves of Luwero in Uganda.”36 The government paper printed a cartoon showing one member of Parliament telling another, “Kabila is using our [presidential] jet? I am going to query this!” while the other answered, “You don’t have to: this is kulembeka in progress.”37 Kulembeka, meaning “our task, our duty.” Removing Mobutu was Africa’s kulembeka.

  Of course, all noble historical tasks have a less noble underside. In 1995 Uganda exported $23 million in gold, mostly from its small mine in Kaabong. But in 1996 the figure climbed to $60 million and then to $105 million in 1997, an increase directly related t
o gold from the Congo, some given by Kabila and some bought cheaply from the local diggers. Meanwhile, in early 1997 the Rwandese Embassy in Brussels was trying to sell thirty-two tons of papain, a chemical produced exclusively in the Congo.38 Then there were those monies transferred by the MIBA to the treasuries of Rwanda, Uganda, and others after the war.39

  These were secondary aspects, the economics of the dream, so to speak; they did not really matter. But the question of the refugees was something else: it involved ethics and politics, seen from diametrically opposing points of view. Once Mobutu was gone, why did the international community keep trying to find out what had actually happened to the Hutu refugees during their headlong flight from the camps? It was perceived as disingenuous imperialist political nit-picking. This position was perfectly summed up by General Kagame when he told a sympathetic American journalist:

  These are politically-motivated allegations, even at the highest levels of the international community. They are terribly wrong . . . in fact I think we should start accusing those people who supported those camps, spent one million dollars per day, supporting these groups who rebuilt themselves into a force of militarised refugees… . This is the guilt they are trying to fight off [by accusing us], this is something they are trying to deflect. [The victory of the pan-African alliance in the Congo has constituted a defeat for the international community, writes the author.] “They have not determined the outcome so this is something they cannot stomach… . Kabila emerges, the Alliance emerges, something changes, Mobutu goes, things happen, the region is happy about what is happening . . . and everything takes them by surprise. They are extremely annoyed by that and they can’t take it.40