IDP Numbers
January 1998
Ocrober 1998
February 1999
March 1999
August 1999
423,000
654,000
881,000
1,200,000
2,000,000
Source: UNHCR.
Fighting was intense, with a massive deployment of tanks and artillery that made the Congolese operations look amateurish by comparison. Large towns such as M’Banza Congo, Maquela do Zombo, and Chinguar would change hands several times in a few months. Paulo Lukamba (“Gato”) declared that UNITA would fight until dos Santos agreed to “direct talks,”179 an offer the MPLA lost no time in turning down, saying instead that it would “wage a final war.”180 The civilian population was caught in the middle in a way that was perfectly summarized by the civil society NGO Angola Forum:
We [the civil society] are the target of deadly persecution by the regime for having exposed corruption cases in the government… . Senior FAA members have been selling fuel to UNITA… . UNITA is a purely military movement that promotes political instability while President Dos Santos shows a total lack of political solutions on how to shelter the thousands upon thousands of Angolans displaced by the civil war… . To wage [war] more easily the government called for the withdrawal of international community observers but it now wants UN personnel back to take part in humanitarian assistance.181
The intensity of the fighting was such and the stakes were so high that the Angolan regime saw any other foreign entanglement as secondary in relationship to the main battlefield. When the survivors of Kabarebe’s Blitzkrieg attacked Maquela do Zombo together with UNITA, it prompted an immediate redeployment of FAA forces from the DRC and a counterattack from the Congolese side of the border. Maquela do Zombo was retaken with Zimbabwean help. Luanda’s foreign minister, João de Miranda, went to Pretoria in May to try to stop South African support for UNITA. But South African Foreign Minister Alfred Nzo countered by saying that it was all happening outside of his government’s control because over one hundred small airfields were used by the smugglers.182 After the UN Fowler Report came out, saying that UNITA was still getting at least $200 million a year from its diamond smuggling, De Beers suggested a “standardized” Certificate of Origin system, with verification offices in Ouagadougou, Abidjan, Kolwezi, Lubumbashi, Kampala, Ndola, Luanda, and Kiev.183 That list is as interesting for the diamond smuggling geography it outlines as for the one it hides. Ouagadougou, Abidjan, and Kampala are understandably there. Ndola recognizes the role of Zambia in the system, and Lubumbashi realistically stands for the Congolese collusion with their allies’ enemy. Luanda is even more interesting in that it recognizes that many UNITA diamonds were going through the Angolan capital with the help of corrupt MPLA officials. Kiev is there to annoy De Beers’s Russian rivals. But Johannesburg and Antwerp, where De Beers itself operated, are absent. And so is Kigali because in the postgenocide wave of Western contrition it would not be politically correct to suggest that the Tutsi “victims” could also be UNITA diamond smugglers. By then UNITA had turned into everybody’s favorite villain: it spoiled the diamond market and could potentially threaten future oil interests by calling into account the huge pre-exploitation bonuses American and French companies had agreed to pay to the MPLA, with no questions asked about how the money was used.184
This puts into perspective Angola’s interest in the Congolese side of the war: it was both essential—Savimbi should not be allowed to reclaim the rear bases he had there during Mobutu’s time—and secondary because the war was not going to be won or lost on the Congolese battlefields. Therefore Luanda was content with letting the Zimbabweans, the FAC, and the Rwandese ex-FAR and Interahamwe do all the hard fighting in the Congo while it devoted itself to the purely Angolan military situation. This also explains why Savimbi (who had at the most seventy thousand men under arms) did not agree to send an expeditionary force to the Congo, where his MPLA enemies had kept only a limited contingent of about fifteen hundred men once the threat to Kinshasa receded.
Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean position was much more simple: it was in the war to protect its past investments in the Kabila regime, to secure new ones, and to block what it saw as a South African-supported attempt at taking over the Congo. This was clearly stated at the highest level, and Minister of Justice Emerson Munangagwa, one of the ZANU-PF heavyweights, had declared, “There is a deliberate effort on our part, as a government, to push Zimbabwean business into the Congo.”185 As later reports were to show, the ZANU-PF government was not too choosy about the nature of that “Zimbabwean business.” This had been obvious from the start, when Laurent-Désiré Kabila had signed a rather vague agreement between Gécamines, Ridgepoint Overseas Development Ltd., and the Central Mining Group Corporation on September 29, 1998. The last two companies were in fact branches of Billy Rautenbach’s company, Wheels of Africa,186 which specialized in importing Japanese cars to Zimbabwe, a successful business that was greatly helped by his father’s political connections with the ZANUPF establishment. Mugabe picked Billy as the man best able to make some quick money for the cash-strapped Congolese government, and by late 1998 he was extracting 150 tons of cobalt a month, worth $6 million, from the Likassi slag heaps. On November 6 Kabila, who was delighted with his wonder businessman, made him general manager of the giant Gécamines corporation. But as we saw earlier, the going soon got rough and increasing quantities of cobalt were being seized by foreign creditors of the government in lieu of unpaid bills. The legitimate mining companies were shutting up shop everywhere,187 and in the following months Rautenbach and his Zimbabwean backers found that the going got much rougher than hitherto.
As for the Zimbabwean army, it was simply the field agent of Zimbabwe’s economic interests, something that was painfully clear to the vast majority of that country’s people. As time went on, withdrawal from the Congo became one of the strongest demands of the MDC political opposition.
Rwanda and Uganda: a violent friendship
Rwanda’s main problem in the early days of the new war were the rebel infiltrations in the northwest of the country. By mid-October there were 478,637 IDPs in the two northern prefectures of Gisenyi and Ruhengeri.188 By mid-December their numbers had passed the 500,000 mark. But the repression that had started before the war went on unabated and sheer force ended up by prevailing over the guerrillas. After a massacre during which at least 140 civilians were killed on December 19, the insurgency seemed to collapse, and African Rights, an advocacy NGO based in Britain, coyly declared, “The population is no longer prepared to support the insurgents.”189 To better control the situation the Rwandese government moved part of the vast mass of IDPs (they were 508,626 by late March) into the new Imidugudu housing.190 The donors meekly gave 58 percent of the $37.9 million needed, calling the forced resettlement “an answer to the housing crisis.”191 Rwanda was keenly aware of its dependency on foreign aid and it never lost an opportunity to remind the West of its criminal negligence at the time of the genocide. Thus the war in the Congo was described purely in terms of security concerns. As early as October Rwanda’s foreign minister Anastase Gasana had asked the UN “to condemn the genocide of the Tutsi now underway in the DRC.”192 With such “explanations” playing fully on Western guilt it was easy for Kagame to bluntly state, “RPA troops will stay in the Congo as long as Rwanda’s national security will be under threat… . Militarily we have eliminated the insurgency from Rwanda but there is still a threat coming from the DRC… . We shall be in the Congo till a solution is found.”193 As the extreme violence of the Rwandese troops against Congolese civilians became common knowledge, Kigali reacted by trying to blur the issue into a kind of genocidal melting pot, wherein Congolese citizens became assimilated into the Interahamwe. Gerald Gahima declared, “We have to protest against the implications that our armed forces have a policy of indiscriminate killings of non-combatants during counter-insurgency operations”;194 he then added in a per
fect non sequitur, “We ask the international community to take a stand against the spread of the genocide ideology in the Great Lakes region.” In reality the former génocidaires could never have dreamed up better public relations agents than Kagame’s soldiers, as their brutality toward innocent civilians helped to progressively develop an unhealthy retrospective toleration of the genocide among the Congolese population. But the donors remained blind and deaf to the problem, particularly Britain’s minister for overseas development Clare Short, who was persuaded of the Rwandese regime’s absolute innocence. Since the French were sulking in a corner in the aftermath of their Rwandese debacle, the British, through Short, became Kigali’s main advocate in Brussels. It was through her insistence that the European Union finally released in May a $50 million grant it had withheld for the past six months due to criticism of the Rwandese invasion of Congo by other EU members. The accompanying communiqué was sadly amusing, stating, “The amount will be used to support economic reforms.”195 In exchange for their belated kindness the good donors were trying to get some few scraps of niceties for their diplomatic mill. It was at the behest of Susan Rice, U.S. under-secretary of state for African affairs, and Clare Short that Kagame finally admitted—four months after the beginning of the war—that his troops were indeed in the Congo, adding cryptically that there were “good reasons not to acknowledge it before.”
Donors also kept harping on the question of “transition.” Ever since the collapse of the government of national unity in August 1995 the international community had been hoping for some kind of decently balanced new political dispensation which would be a symbol of national reconciliation. On April 29, 1998, shortly before the war, Kagame had said, “The recent elections could mark the end of the transition period,”196 and no more was heard on the subject for quite a while. But in June 1999, irritated by constant reminders of the donors, Kigali decided to “extend the transition period,” and RPF heavyweight Charles Morigande declared, “Rwanda is a special case and there are challenges to be met.” The following month, when the five-year transition period agreed upon in July 1994 came to an end, the Rwandese government simply decided to prolong the transition for another four years. The donors swallowed their objections rather than be reminded for the umpteenth time of their callousness during the genocide.
But the international community was soon to be challenged by another problem. As the war in the DRC broadened and deepened, the invaders increasingly tried to finance their operations directly through the exploitation of Congolese natural resources. This was the period that saw the creation of what would become the notorious “Congo Desk” in the Rwandese Ministry of Defense and in which a Brussels bank created a (modest) “revolving fund” of $10 million financed by “coltan from Butembo, gold from the Sominki mined in Kamituga and Kisangani diamonds.”197 A staggering prize (the more than two hundred artisanal mines around Kisangani had produced $5.3 million between July and October 1997 alone), this particular source of cash was soon to exacerbate the growing difficulties that had begun to develop between the two allies, Rwanda and Uganda.198
At this point a word of warning is needed: so much has been made of foreign rivalries over “the looting of Congolese riches” that I must insist on the fact that the growing antagonism between Kigali and Kampala was more than a fight between gangsters sharing the product of a heist. It was both a thuggish fight and a political and strategic conflict, and it was the political conflict that came first. Rwanda and Uganda had attacked the Congo together but with different views on almost everything: the relative importance of their own security, the economics of the war, the attitude toward the international community, and, last but not least, what to do in Kinshasa in case of victory. Museveni still retained a basic faith in the tenets of his revolutionary past: the Congolese must be allowed to decide for themselves (with a little help from their friends) and should create an inclusive government of national unity, preferably some sort of “no-party democracy,” as practiced in Kampala. For Kagame and the RPF this was pure poppycock; the Congolese were simply to be manipulated into some kind of neocolonial subservience to their natural masters. Of course, these views were never articulated in so many words, but they shone through the actions of the parties. Museveni tried to wheedle and coddle his Congolese; Kagame simply bullied his.
These differences were soon to lead to practical repercussions on the ground. In November 1998 the Ugandans announced the creation of a Joint Military Command (JMC) between them and the Rwandese, an idea that seemed to make sense in purely military terms. The announcement was contradicted five days later by Kigali, which declared that there was no such a thing as a JMC between them and the Ugandans. As early as December 1998 a Ugandan opposition paper echoed stories of limited military clashes between the RPA and the UPDF because of the latter’s support for Jean-Pierre Bemba’s fledgling MLC.199 But the divergences were not limited to the MLC/RCD dichotomy; they were also inside the RCD. On December 31, as RCD president Wamba dia Wamba was giving his New Year’s speech on Radio Goma, the broadcast suddenly went off the air as his rival, Lunda Bululu, cut the power supply. Bululu allegedly did not appreciate the attacks on “former Mobutists who disfigure our movement.”200 In such a climate the first few months of 1999 saw a growing rift between the pro-Kampala and the pro-Kigali wings of the RCD. Wamba had moved his group to Kisangani, while Kigali’s friends stayed behind in their original headquarters in Goma. As a result, the two factions became informally known as RCD-K and RCD-G and started to fight a war of propaganda though their respective media, les Coulisses and Radio Goma for RCD-G and Radio Liberté and Kisangani TV for RCD-K. Finally, in early May, Lunda Bululu called an RCD General Assembly in Goma for May 23, but Wamba beat him to the draw by calling another one in Kisangani for May 15. The fight was on.201
On May 17 the RCD “dissolved itself” at a meeting hastily convened in Goma and then “recomposed” itself as a “new” organization which comprised only the Kigali faithful (Emile Ilunga, Jean-Pierre Ondekane, Moïse Nyarugabo), that is, fifty-one members of the original 151 in the executive. On May 20 Wamba refused the dissolution and reorganization and was reelected in Kisangani by seventy-five members of the movement’s executive. Two days later he organized a demonstration in his own support in Kisangani, but the city’s control was split between Rwandese and Ugandan troops, each backing opposite factions of the splintered RCD. There were four people killed and a score wounded and Wamba suspended the RCD-nominated governor. The next day Bizima Karaha and J. P. Ondekane flew into Kisangani, organized an anti-Wamba meeting, and confirmed the governor in his position. Bemba was coolly looking at the situation, declaring, “I am ardently courted by both factions but I am not ready to get married.” At this point Wamba declared that he was prepared to meet with Kabila and to organize elections in the territory he controlled. This sent a shock wave into the highly unpopular RCD-G, which organized its own “elections” for governor in Goma on May 24, with RPA units encircling the building where the delegates made their choice, just to be sure the choice was the right one. On May 25 Wamba landed in Goma, protected by five hundred UPDF troops and four tanks. His “negotiation” with RCD-G unsurprisingly yielded no result, and the next day he was escorted out by road to Rutshuru and Kisoro, over to Uganda. With the kind of clumsy frankness that was eventually to cost him dear, President Pasteur Bizimungu declared that Rwanda would continue to fight because “even if the rebellion disintegrated we have our own interests.”202 The war of words was rapidly edging toward a shooting war and the two factions began trading pot shots in Kisangani. On August 2 Rwanda pulled out its usual ideological ultimate weapon, saying that Wamba was recruiting former Interahamwe and accusing Uganda of complicity.203
Although the crisis was fundamentally politically driven, there was a seedy economic underside to it, and in order to understand that we have to take a look at the exploitation of the local diamond mines since the RCD’s occupation of Kisangani.204
In August 1
998, when the rebels and their foreign friends occupied the city, they immediately closed 150 of its 200 or so diamond export counters. They also found a stash of uncut stones worth $100 million, which they confiscated to finance the war. Prices immediately fell by 30 percent; this was when the Ugandans brought in their famous “Papa Felipe” (Philippe Surowicke) of Angolan repute. He had been unemployed for a while and arrived in Kisangani in December 1998 after much negotiating in Kampala. At the time the surviving counters were paying a 3 percent tax on all diamond transactions to the RCD. “Papa Felipe” offered 10 percent in exchange for a monopoly. But he was working with the Victoria Group of Salim Saleh, Museveni’s half-brother, and he dealt exclusively with the pro-Kampala wing of the RCD. In the meantime Kigali had brought in a whole bevy of Lebanese diamond traders who had their own “monopoly.” By early 1999 the two sides were staring at each other over the barrels of their Kalashnikovs.
In the meantime Generals Nzimbi and Baramoto, the two Mobutist stalwarts, arrived in Kampala to make contact with Bemba. In January 1999 they all met at the Palm Beach Hotel in Kisangani, where Bemba, flashing his Ugandan support and diamond money, made an overt play for RCD loyalties. This nearly led to an armed clash when the Rwandese tried to arrest the two Zairian generals at the airport. And then on May 10, as the RCD split was getting under way, the UPDF arrested six Lebanese diamond traders and one Belgian working for the Rwandese under the pretext of unpaid taxes. In a rougher way some of Bemba’s men killed two or three “motor bike boys” working for pro-Kigali dealers.205 This brought the situation to the point of explosion.
So we can see that the final break, which was to end in major combat between the UPDF and the RPA in the streets of Kisangani, was both about politics (who will control the RCD) and about mineral resources. Actually, the two issues fed into each other at a crucial moment, exactly at the time when the various actors of the war were trying to appease the international community by brokering some kind of a peace agreement.
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