The Lusaka “peace” charade
What came to be known as the Lusaka Peace Agreement had a long history behind it by the time it was signed on August 31, 1999, and a good part of that long process was marked by the Franco-American differences of views over what was actually going on in the Congo.206 As early as October 1998 Paris had sent Special Adviser for Africa Michel Dupuch to Kinshasa;207 Laurent-Désiré Kabila arrived in Paris soon after to take part in the Franco-African Summit, where he was invited as “acting president.” On November 27 President Chirac announced a French-brokered cease-fire in the Congo that did not seem to have much support: Thabo Mbeki and Museveni expressed doubts, and two of the main protagonists, Kabila himself and Pasteur Bizimungu, denied that anything had been decided. Kofi Annan and Chirac congratulated each other, and everything went on as before. Officially the Americans shared the politically correct vision, and Kinshasa’s U.S. ambassador Bill Swing condemned “the outside intervention of Rwanda and Uganda.”208 What somewhat weakened his declaration was the presence of rebel leader Jean-Pierre Ondekane in Washington at the same time.
In late October U.S. Under-Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice and Special Envoy Howard Wolpe arrived in Luanda to try to mollify President dos Santos. The meeting proved hard for the American envoys as they were kept waiting for two days by the Angolan president, who had just learned of the presence of U.S. mercenaries in South Kivu.209 Rice, who very likely had been kept in the dark, put on a brave face and stuck to her guns, declaring in Luanda, “The spectre of genocide is once again present in the DRC.” She had more trouble three days later, when she met with Kabila in Kinshasa; he challenged her version of events, saying that what was happening was “not a rebellion but an invasion.”210 Things were easier with Wamba and Bizima Karaha in Kigali the next day, and she took the opportunity to ask them to admit that RPA troops were indeed in the Congo. Caught between the undeclared French bend in Kinshasa’s favor and the equally hypocritical favor shown by the United States toward Rwanda and Uganda, the peace process was not getting anywhere, especially as long as the invaders/rebels had a hope of winning militarily.
On November 20 there was an inconclusive “peace meeting” in Botswana, just before the bizarre Paris episode related above. On January 19 Patrick Mazimpaka, a close adviser to Kagame, summarized the process with disenchanted honesty: “The insistence on the signing of an agreement and not on its contents is definitely symptomatic of an impatient world that wants to run away from the problem rather than solve it.”211 He had the hopeless Paris proceedings in mind, but the same could be said of all that was to follow.
On March 23 President Chiluba of Zambia finally got what he had wanted for so long: he was made the official mediator of the peace process. But when a minor breakthrough occurred, it owed nothing to him: on April 17 Kabila signed some kind of a “peace agreement” with Museveni in Sirte, Libya, in the presence of Idriss Deby of Chad and Issayas Afeworki of Eritrea. In fact, the whole thing had been brokered by Colonel Gaddafi, who wanted to disengage himself and his Chadian proxies from what he increasingly saw as an endless and useless conflict. The “agreement” was limited to the northern front (its main purpose was to give the MLC a free hand in the hope that it could march all the way to Kinshasa), and it only served to allow the Chadians a quick and painless withdrawal.212 Mazimpaka declared on April 25 that Rwanda was not concerned by the Sirte Agreement. Many people expected that the limited peace agreement would extend to the wider conflict, but unfortunately this did not occur; there was no virtuous contagion. There were vague rumors of a possible meeting in Rome, but nothing happened until the Rwandese and Ugandan forces began to run out of steam and feel the pressure of the donors.213
Finally, on June 24, “the great meeting” everybody had been waiting for opened in Lusaka, with fifteen countries represented (but not Burundi) and all the “good” fighting movements. There were no representatives of either the loose Mayi Mayi groups (who announced on July 3 that they would not recognize the results of the talks since they were not taking part in them) or, of course, of the “bad” Rwandese and Burundian guerrillas who stank of genocide. It took a couple of weeks to arrive at a draft cease-fire, which was signed on July 11 by all the heads of state present but not by the “rebels,” who had fallen out among themselves: both Wamba (RCD-K) and Ilunga (RCD-G) insisted that they were the legitimate representative of the movement and refused to sign if the other did. As for Bemba, he said that the MLC would sign only if the two branches of RCD both signed. RCD-G “expelled” Wamba, accusing him of “high treason,” and on July 27 Ilunga walked away from the table because the negotiators had agreed that Wamba could sign. Bemba signed on August 1 but said he would withdraw his signature if the two RCDs did not sign within a week. The two RCDs then agreed to sign, but then did not.
While this confused process was sloshing around it was brutally overshadowed by the military explosion that suddenly threw the “allied” forces of Rwanda and Uganda against each other.214 For one long week (August 7-16) the RPA and the UPDF battled it out in the streets of Kisangani, using heavy artillery against each other with a complete lack of restraint or care for the Congolese civilian population. Kinshasa accused the two opponents of “a semblance of rivalry . . . aimed at derailing the Lusaka accord.215 This was false, but the degree of paradoxical confusion that had been reached by then was such that the actors could be forgiven for trying to make sense out of the absurdity. For what was happening in Kisangani was only a portent of things to come: the disintegration of a “rational” war into myriad “privatized,” socially and economically motivated subconflicts. But at that stage the international community did not understand the nature of the problem and still believed that it faced a conventional conflict that could be treated by traditional diplomatic methods. So when the various contenders finally agreed to sign on August 31,216 the document they agreed on was outwardly “normal” but in fact completely unfit for dealing with the reality on the ground.
All along, from the moment the first draft agreement had been put on the table, international diplomats had refused to deal with what could be termed the “reality gap.”217 In spite of the contorted disputes that had nothing to do with the actual contents of the agreement but only came from conflicts of etiquette and legitimacy among the signatories,218 what was finally signed on August 31 was basically that initial draft document. What did it contain?219 Basically, an international community wish list: fighting was supposed to stop within twenty-four hours of the signing; then the various armies would form a JMC, which would organize the disarming of the various “negative” militias, such as ALIR and the Burundian CNDD-FDD;220 forty-five days later all Congolese political forces would open a national dialogue, with the help of a neutral facilitator; then, after four months, all the foreign armies would move out of the Congo and be replaced by a UN force; two months after that, the Kinshasa government and the “rebels” would have integrated their respective armed forces and would sit down to discuss a democratic government of transition.
As a reporter for the Economist wrote at the time, “It sounds like a fantasy and it may well turn out to be. Yet underneath the pious hopes lies an element of serious reconsideration. The leaders of the outside countries involved in the war have become increasingly reluctant to go on fighting each other in the jungles of Congo, even though some of them, or their cronies, have done well out of business deals there. They are also under pressure from the western countries that give them aid and can get them assistance from the World Bank or the IMF.”221 This quote perfectly illustrates the contradictions between what could be termed “globalized logic” and the grassroots logic of the contenders. The degree of compliance with the Lusaka wish list—even if after years of delay—was going to be directly proportional to the degree of an actor’s implication in the international market diplomacy system. Angola would be the first to quit because of its susceptibility to U.S. pressure. Zimbabwe would follow suit, when its
internal situation degenerated so much that it had to concentrate on it to respond to British and Commonwealth pressure. Namibia, as usual, simply followed the Angolans. IMF-sensitive Uganda would tentatively half-withdraw many times before finally quitting in 2003. And Rwanda would improvise ever more complex games because its grassroots interests largely outweighed its international ones. As for the nongovernment actors, ranging from the Congolese NGOs to the Rwandese guerrillas and from the Mayi Mayi to the Burundian fighters, they simply could not rely on a piece of paper nobody was ready to enforce on the ground. The “reality gap” had opened up in the Congo, and it was going to remain open for several years to come.
7 SINKING INTO THE QUAGMIRE (AUGUST 1999–JANUARY 2001)
“The war is dead, long live the war.”1
The East: confused rebels in confused fighting
The Lusaka agreements had a temporary restraining effect on the battles taking place on the “real” fronts, such as western Equateur and northern Katanga, where large units using modern equipment were engaged. But in the two Kivus, in Maniema, and in the Province Orientale the confused violence that was typical of the situation in mid-1999 went on unabated. News reports and press dispatches logged an endless litany of skirmishes, massacres, ambushes, and random looting: at Kahungwe, forty kilometers north of Uvira, unidentified “armed men” slaughter thirty civilians on November 2, 1999; on November 22 Mayi Mayi forces attack Butembo airstrip, killing thirty; clashes in Ituri between Hema and Lendu irregulars cause thirty thousand civilians to flee around mid-December; on December 23 Interahamwe militiamen coming from the Congo attack the Tamira resettlement village near Gisenyi, inside Rwanda, killing twenty Congolese Tutsi refugees; on December 29 the Congolese ambassador to the UN André Mwamba Kapanga accuses the Rwandese army of having massacred fifteen civilian women in Mwenga District of South Kivu; in January 2000 RCD-K leader Mbusa Nyamwisi starts training his “children’s army” at Nyaleke Camp near Beni (median age of the future combatants: thirteen); on January 6, 2000, Lendu militiamen kill 425 Hema civilians at Blukwa village, near Bunia; twelve civilian women accused of supplying Mayi Mayi with food are beheaded by RCD-G rebels in Kasika (South Kivu) on January 28; on February 3 an RCD-RPA offensive retakes Shabunda and its surroundings, which had been in Mayi Mayi and ex-FAR hands for the past month: number of casualties unknown; ex-FAR and FNL guerrillas, who have come into Burundi from the DRC, fight each other north of Bujumbura for two weeks in early February: around three hundred are killed. Early February was also marked by massive IDP displacements in South Kivu, with nearly 150,000 persons on the move.2 In March the Mayi Mayi forces that had been trained at great cost in Zimbabwe to bolster the FAC fighting capacity in the east went home and started attacking Banyamulenge civilians instead of fighting. Then seven hundred refugees crossed into Burundi. In late March and early April Lemera was taken, lost, retaken, and lost again by Mayi Mayi forces linked with Commander “Willy” Dunia; each change of control of the town was an occasion for a spate of summary executions. On the night of May 14–15 Rwandese and Burundian army units encircled the village of Katogota, where a FAB officer had been murdered the day before, and killed thirty to forty civilians. This list is only very partial and could go on ad nauseam, making Lusaka look like a sick joke when seen from an eastern Congo point of view. But the violence that kept unfolding in the area could barely be qualified as “war.” It was an unending series of confused clashes in which low military intensity did not mean low casualty figures among civilians. And the political actors often seemed to be in a state of amoral uncertainty about what their military men were doing: when the UN Security Council, spurred on by Ambassador Mawamba Kapanga, challenged RCD-G on the massacre of the fifteen women at Mwenga, Emile Ilunga’s cry from the heart would have been funny had it not been horrifying: “But we killed only three women,” he said, “and then the other side does it too.”3
Since its split into pro-Rwandese and pro-Ugandan branches, the RCD was even more organizationally weak than it had been before. Finances were a perennial problem since their Kigali and Kampala sponsors took the first cut, leaving very little for their Congolese agents. The RCD-G resorted to levying taxes on the movement of goods between the area it controlled and that controlled by Wamba in North Kivu, as if the two zones were separate countries. In October furious local traders went on strike and forced the rebels to lift their roadblocks. Then in November 1999, Wamba dia Wamba, ever the absent-minded professor, took up with a certain A. Van Brink of the “First International Bank of Granada.” Van Brink, whose real name was Allen Ziegler, was a bankrupt real estate operator from Oregon with a Granadian passport and a genuine international crook on the run from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a $400,000 swindle. He “secured” a $16 million “loan” for the RCD and promptly used the documents signed by the Congolese as collateral to get more money out of other gullible investors.4 The RCD never saw a penny of the promised monies.
Wamba had formalized the split by calling his movement RCD-ML (ML standing for Mouvement de Libération), but his control over it was loose and it was riven by suborganizational rivalries. In November 1999 Désiré Lumbu Lumbu, one of the movement’s cadres, was arrested in Beni; transferred to Butembo, starved, half-blind from maltreatment, he was finally beaten to death in mid-December by RCD-ML fighters after one month of continual torture. He had been accused of colluding with the Mayi Mayi, but what may have cost him his life were accusations that he was plotting with rivals from RCD-G. Meanwhile in Goma Roger Lumbala, a prominent RCD-G leader, had been arrested for “rebellion,” in fact because he was suspected of having transferred his allegiance to RCD-ML. Later freed, he resigned from RCD-G and, after a brief spell with Wamba, created his own “movement” in Bafwasende, the RCD-N (N standing for National).5 By then the rebels’ sponsors were getting nervous at the fissiparousness of their Congolese protégés, and in late December they organized a meeting in Kabale, Uganda, where the MLC, the RCD-G, and the RCD-ML promised to establish a common front. In spite of the promise, this was to remain an elusive goal in the years to come.
Of the three, Wamba’s group was the sickest. At Kampala’s prompting the RCD-G had created in June 1999 a new “province” called Kibali-Ituri and named a Hema woman, Adéle Lotsove, as its governor. This was an unfortunate choice because since April 1999 the Ituri region of Province Orientale had been in a growing state of upheaval.6 Wamba soon realized the mistake he had made and replaced Lotsove with a new, ethnically neutral governor, Uring pa Dolo, an Alur.7 But the UPDF officers, who by then were up to their necks in using the Hema as proxies for their local economic interests,8 did not approve of Wamba’s move. In the short term they could do nothing about it, but they undermined Wamba’s position by supporting two of his rivals in the RCD-ML, Jean-Bosco Tibasima Atenyi and Mbusa Nyamwisi. Tibasima was a Hema and Mbusa a Nande from outside the province and both wanted to eliminate Wamba. Soon Tibasima was sending his young men to Uganda to create an independent militia and Mbusa was training his own near Beni.
The interethnic clashes stepped up and Wamba started to lose control of his territory. In November 1999 a UN mission found a “catastrophic humanitarian situation” in Ituri, with an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 deaths due to fighting since April and over 100,000 IDPs.9 Raphaël Katoto Katebe, a millionaire businessman close to the RCD, declared, “Kabila, Wamba or Ilunga, they have all failed to govern the small areas they control: how do you expect them to rule the whole country?”10
By early August 2000 Wamba’s men and his rivals’ were fighting each other, in the midst of the Hema-Lendu interethnic strife. Ituri waded into a bloodbath. On November 3 Tibasima and Mbusa overthrew Wamba in Bunia, only to be kicked out the next day by UPDF troops. On orders from Museveni himself his proconsul James Kazini had reluctantly sided with the “official” leader of the RCD-ML, but his own officers were wavering because of their business interests. By November 21 there were already forty-one casualties in and around Bunia d
ue to the intra-RCD-ML clashes; the fight eventually spilled into Uganda when the two rival factions tried to take control of the Kasindi border post in December.11
While Ituri was sliding into anarchy, the situation was not much better in North and South Kivu. There were around eight different military groups fighting each other in fluctuating patterns of alliance and confrontation: at least three Mayi Mayi groups, only one of whom was—distantly—controlled by Kinshasa; the Rwandese army; the Burundian army; the RCD-G; and the former Interahamwe of ALIR. The fighting patterns of the various groups did not always respect what could have been expected, that is, a proor anti-rebel dichotomy. Thus the CNDD and ALIR guerrillas, although theoretically allied, at times fought each other; the Mayi Mayi, who were supposed to protect their fellow countrymen from the foreign invading forces, often looted and killed them instead.12 The RPA, which used the pursuit of the Interahamwe militiamen as its rationale for being in the Congo, often protected them instead, as long as it was not targeted by their attacks.
As for the Kinshasa government, it tried to use the mess to weaken the Rwandese and Ugandan forces, without giving too much thought to the sufferings of the local population. Gen. Sylvestre Lwetcha had been named FAC chief of staff in September 1999, immediately following the signing of the Lusaka Agreement. This nomination was greeted with fury by the RCD, which called it “an effort at avoiding his indictment for complicity with the Interahamwe.”13 Lwetcha, a Mubembe from South Kivu, was seventy-two years old and his appointment was due to two things: he had been involved with Kabila’s anti-Mobutu underground network since 1969 and he had always sided with Kabila in his various quarrels with the guerrillas’ old guard. Kabila knew that he could trust him to try to keep the resurgent Mayi Mayi forces more or less in line with Kinshasa, not an easy job. In spite of his age Lwetcha plunged into it and rallied the east overland from Lubumbashi, partly on foot. Late in the year the RCD-G announced gleefully that he was dead, but he resurfaced in early February 2000 in Kigoma, from where he was transported to Dar-es-Salaam and flown home. He was actually in pretty bad physical shape, but he had managed to coordinate some of the unruly eastern guerrilla forces, and from March 2000 on they started getting better air supplies from the capital.
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