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

by Gerard Prunier

  If the government itself was thus living from hand to mouth, for the ordinary citizens the hand carried less and less to the mouth, particularly in the sprawling capital of six million people.53 In the midst of agricultural plenty, the war-torn Congo was slowly starving.

  Angola: the pressure begins to ease off

  After the battle for Maquela do Zombo, in which some forces that had survived the failure of Kabarebe’s Blitzkrieg took part alongside UNIT A, both Harare and Kinshasa sent troop reinforcements to Uige and Moxico Provinces.54 Slowly the tide began to turn. In September 1999 the FAA went on a general offensive, using lots of air power. Within three months most of UNIT A’s conventional military capability had been destroyed and the government occupied the rebellion’s “capital” in Jamba (December 1999). FAA forces progressed on all fronts. The last provincial capital in UNIT A hands, Cazombo, on the Zambian border, fell to the government in September 2000. By then Angola had few troops remaining in the DRC, even if they still played an essential role in case of need.55

  Luanda had derived a number of economic advantages from its intervention, such as bringing fuel distribution in the DRC under Sonangol’s control via its Cohydro subsidiary, and acquiring a controlling interest in the Congolese Coco offshore wells.56 But more important than anything else, Luanda acted as the ultimate guarantor of Kinshasa’s security. With airborne forces conveniently stationed in Dolisie, Pointe Noire, and Brazzaville since October 1997, the FAA was in a position to militarily stop any foe trying to take the capital. Hence Bemba’s (unsuccessful) efforts at convincing Luanda of his innocuousness in relationship to UNIT A. Although by late 2000 Angola had become rather disenchanted with Kabila’s diplomatic blindness, it had no better choice, for the time being. In October it had reluctantly called a meeting of the Communauté Economique des Etats de I’Afrique Centrale (CEEAC; i.e., the Republic of Congo, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and the Central African Republic) in Kinshasa, where it aligned itself with Kabila’s demand for a revision of the Lusaka Agreement.57 The CEEAC was largely a French diplomatic construct, and the move seemed to fit within the usual Franco-U.S. rivalry in west and central Africa. But Luanda’s heart was not in it; instead, the government was beginning to explore the possibility of “neutralizing” Kabila. There were enough Luanda men in the regime (Victor Mpoyo, Col. Eddy Kapend, Generals Yav Nawesh and Faustin Munene) to make such an operation possible. By late 2000, with the advantage of a much-diminished UNIT A threat, Angola was keeping its options open.

  Zimbabwe: trying to make the war pay for itself

  Zimbabwe’s basic motivations for being in the Congo had not changed: to block the northward creep of South African influence,58 particularly at the mining level, and to recoup its initial investment in Kabila’s rise to power. On September 4, 1998, Kabila and Mugabe had signed a contract providing for the “self-financing” of Zimbabwe’s intervention through a 37.5 percent interest in Gécamines; 30 percent of the company’s profits were to be earmarked for financing Harare’s war effort.59 But the former giant mining concern was as sick as the rest of the Congolese economy; it had $1 billion in long-term debts and over $50 million in short-term trade liabilities.60 Harare did not have the money that should have been invested in Gécamines to make it profitable, and Kinshasa’s monthly installments soon stopped coming. Moreover, the whole deal rested on Rautenbach’s position as head of the company, and his poor management and eventual removal caused the whole deal to fall by the wayside.

  Harare then tried several different courses. The Zimbabwean Electricity Supply Authority signed a contact to double its power import from the giant Inga dam at a very low cost. But the power lines had to be built and there was no money to do it. Later, 500,000 hectares of prime farmland in Katanga were given to a large Zimbabwean state farm, which did nothing with the land because it lacked the necessary capital.61 In late 1999 the so-called Osleg (Operation Sovereign Legitimacy) Company was set up. Kinshasa Minister of Mines Kibassa Maliba immediately gave Osleg the Tshibwa and Senga Senga diamond permits, near Mbuji-Mayi, which had been attributed to MIBA; this caused a furor at De Beers, which, as a minority shareholder in MIBA, considered itself fleeced. Then, using this donation as an asset, Osleg joined with Oryx and Comiex to create the Cosleg Consortium and tried to get it quoted in London to raise more capital for its development. But in June 2000 London’s Alternative Investment Market threw out the Cosleg quotation at the behest of the Foreign Office.62 Cosleg tried to get quoted in Amsterdam and in Dublin but failed in both and in the end achieved almost nothing.63 Harare’s problem was that it had completely failed to realize the degree of decay of the Congolese economy in general and of its mining industry in particular.64 But by then Zimbabwe, whose own economy was in a tailspin, was getting frantic about making the war pay for its own costs.

  Harare admitted to spending $36 million a year in the Congo, but by mid-2000 this fiction was no longer tenable, and even Finance Minister Simba Makoni was forced to admit to having spent at least $200 million during the past two years. The World Bank had already estimated that the real cost was at least $27 million per month and had cut off a much needed $340 million loan to Zimbabwe in retaliation.65 War costs escalated wildly during 2000, with the purchase of weaponry from China costing $72.3 million, three MiG-23s from Libya for $1.5 million, and spare parts for British-made BAe Hawks fighter bombers costing $5 million to $10 million.66 By late 2000 the Zimbabwean economy, already reeling from other causes, could no longer sustain the costs of the war in the Congo. A Harare newspaper expressed popular sentiment when it wrote, “The best Christmas present Zimbabweans could get would be the announcement of a troop withdrawal from the DRC.”67

  Rwanda and Uganda: the friendship grows violent

  Between August 1999 and April 2000 Rwanda faced a growing internal political crisis which had indirect repercussions on its international political engagement:

  • A group of students of the University of Butare fled to Uganda in August after threats of expulsion when they questioned the university’s language policy.68 Although children from the very elite of the RPF, they were brutalized in a way that called into question the internal logic of RPF functioning.69

  • On August 20 the bishop of Gikongoro, Monsignor Augustin Misago, was charged with complicity in the genocide. The political nature of the trial was obvious from the start.70 The anti-Catholic mood of the regime was such that the preceding April Jean-Népomucène Nayinzira, leader of the Parti Démocrate Chrétien (which was part of the government “coalition”) had changed the “Chrétien” to “Centriste” to keep the PDC acronym on the safe side. After a long drawn-out procedure intended to vilify the Church and although he had been sentenced to death, Misago was finally acquitted on June 15, 2000. Court Public Prosecutor Bernard Kayihura came under threat and promptly fled the country.

  • During October 1999 the Transitional National Assembly (TNA), composed entirely of hand-picked MPs, “removed” Anastase Gasana71 and Minister for Social Affairs Charles Ntakiruntika from their posts. Prime Minister Pierre-Célestin Rwigiema was accused of misappropriation of funds dating back to the period when he had been minister of education in the first postgenocide cabinet. The pressure against him progressively built up to the point where, accused of being an accomplice in the genocide, he resigned in February 2000 and fled the country.72

  • In early January 2000 Parliament Speaker Joseph Sebarenzi came under fire. Because he was a Tutsi survivor of the genocide he could not be accused of being an accomplice; he was instead denounced for “seeking a cheap popularity.”73 Put into a minority position by the obedient TNA, he resigned and also fled the country. The popular paper Imboni printed a special number on the affair which they used to criticize the authoritarianism of the regime.74

  • On March 5, 2000, RPF cadre Aciel Kabera was shot dead by three military men who were never arrested. Like Sebarenzi he was a Tutsi from Kibuye. With the RPF hard core mostly belonging to the so-called Gahini mafia, regio
nalist rivalries were beginning to look like the days of Habyarimana’s old akazu.75

  • On March 20 President Pasteur Bizimungu went on the air to denounce the role of the TNA in the political crisis; three days later he was forced to resign. His main sin had been to organize a faction within the RPF (together with one of the key Tutsi cadres, Patrick Mazimpaka) and to have tried to influence the composition of the new cabinet that Rwigiema’s and Sebarenzi’s resignations had made necessary. The akazu did not like to share the spoils, and on April 17, dispensing with both the “nonethnic” and the “democratic” fig leaves it had used up to then, the RPF “elected” Kagame as Rwanda’s new president.

  But by then events in the Congo had forced the internal political crisis to take a back seat to more pregnant developments. Resentment had simmered between Rwanda and Uganda since the Kisangani clashes of August 1999. There were a lot of personal feelings involved, and analyzing them would be an almost Freudian endeavor. The expression most often heard on the Rwandese side was “We cannot accept their ‘big brother’ attitude,” while the Ugandans usually complained of the “ungratefulness” of the Rwandese, “whom we have put where they are.” Added to this were the personal rivalries between the top actors. Museveni was bitter and resentful at Kagame’s “arrogance,”76 while his half-brother Salim Saleh was persuaded that at least one of the two murder attempts he had survived during 1999 had been planned in Kigali.77 As the UN report on the illegal exploitation of wealth in the Congo was soon to make abundantly clear, Salim was up to his neck in Congo looting. And that put him in direct competition with RPA officers, who had sometimes rather abrupt ways of resolving their business quarrels.

  After the August 1999 fighting “Papa Felipe” had been kicked out of Kisangani by the victorious Rwandese, who replaced him and his apparatus with a Lebanese network headed by a certain Ali Hussein.78 But the Lebanese network found itself frustrated by the dispersion of the Kisangani-area small diamond mines. In spite of having won the battle for the city, the RPA soon found that its men were unable to access many sites, particularly those north of the Tshopo River and around Banalia, where close to ten thousand creuseurs were at work. This, in addition to Lumbala being in control of the Bafwasende area, made the RPA victory hollow from the mining point of view.79 The economic resentment deepened the other causes for bitterness, and on the morning of May 5, 2000, the two “allied” armies went at each other’s throats in Kisangani.80 After the first five days of fighting Ugandan proconsul and Salim business associate James Kazini declared, “Rwanda is now an enemy . . . which will be crushed.”81 These martial words contradicted Museveni’s; he blamed the whole disaster on “lack of communication.”82 A “demilitarization” of the city was agreed upon, but RCD-G forces refused to move, arguing disingenuously that they feared a Kinshasa airborne attack on the city if they left. In fact, Commander Ondekane feared that the Ugandans would use the nearby MLC forces to occupy Kisangani.83 “The agreement is null and void if the Goma group does not pull out,” fumed a UPDF commander.84 In any case, the communication must have gone bad again because at 10 a.m. on June 5 the fighting resumed. The battle lasted for a full week and killed about 120 soldiers on both sides, with an estimated 640 Congolese civilian deaths and 1,668 wounded.85 Later, when General Kagame was asked about the causes of the fighting, he answered with his usual capacity for deflecting embarrassing questions, “The situation in Kisangani is a complex matter which I find hard to explain.”86 In fact, even if the details were indeed complex, the overriding cause was grossly simple: the predators had problems, both internal and with each other, and they were fighting over the carcass of their quarry to settle them.87

  Before we leave the question of the actors in the conflict I must say a word about the overall human consequences of the war: they were absolutely appalling. In June 2000 the U.S. International Rescue Committee made public the results of a mortality survey carried out in eastern DRC by the competent and dedicated demographer Les Robert. His findings were clear: there were about 1.7 million excess deaths due to the war between August 1998 and April 2000, when he carried out his survey.88 Only about 12 percent (i.e., around 200,000) were directly attributable to fighting; the vast majority of these deaths resulted from frequent forced population displacements, from the near total collapse of the health system, from the impossibility of carrying out normal agricultural work, from overexposure to the weather and to diseases, and probably from plain despair.

  The international dimension: giving aid, monitoring the looting, and waiting for MONUC

  During the war international aid went on as usual. The phenomenon was perhaps clearest (and most ambiguous) in the case of the aid for Rwanda. Rwanda had an army of 50,000 to 60,000 men (plus 6,000 gendarmes, or paramilitary police, and 7,000 Local Defense Unit militiamen). Out of this force a minimum of 25,000 to 30,000 were in the Congo.89 In his careful discussion of the relationship between aid, illegal resource exploitation, and military expenses, Bjorn Willum90 compares official and unofficial estimates of the Rwandese military budget: for 2001 the IMF accepted the Kigali government’s figure of $55.6 million, whereas the International Institute of Strategic Studies estimated the spending reality at $135 million and the International Crisis Group (ICG) at $161.8 million. These two different attitudes toward Kigali’s military spending had considerable consequences: by accepting a lower figure the international community could justify its high level of aid in proportion to the budget by arguing that it did not contribute to the war either directly (through misuse of aid) or indirectly (by allowing military spending to be financed extralegally while civilian spending would be taken care of by aid).

  Budget Spending Financed through Foreign Aid (in percentages)

  1996

  1997

  1998

  1999

  Uganda

  36

  36

  35

  39

  Rwanda

  59

  47

  44

  50

  Sources: Uganda: HIPC Point, January 2000. Rwanda: Country Report, January 2001. Both from IMF.

  One of the key questions to be asked was whether the international community was aware of the amount of illegal resource exploitation in the Congo. The first estimates had come in indirectly, through a study commissioned to determine how UNIT A could have been suddenly resurrected phoenix-like in late 1998, complete with an expensive new arsenal of heavy military hardware.91 The report detailed many of UNIT A’s arms-buying circuits in Eastern Europe, its fuel-purchasing networks in Africa (particularly in the Republic of Congo, Zambia, and Botswana), and, most interestingly, its diamond export networks across the world. It showed that the by then notorious “blood diamonds” from Angola were handled through Burkina Faso, Zambia, South Africa, Zaire (prior to 1997), and Rwanda (since 1998), all channels eventually leading to Antwerp. The Fowler Report noted that “the lax security environment that prevailed in Antwerp seemed to be largely influenced by the often-expressed fear that stricter regulation would simply cause traders to take their business elsewhere” (Section 89). It soon became apparent that this “business realism” excuse extended to many other raw materials and that illegally mined Congolese riches were being bought all over the world by unscrupulous operators. In August 2000 UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed a panel of experts on resource looting in the DRC, led by an Ivorian former minister of justice, Safiatou Ba N’Daw.92 The panel report was made public in April 2001, finally giving substance to many elements that previously had been known only through rumors.93 Using this report as well as IMF documents, a final reasonable estimate could be produced.

  Estimated Value of Congo-Originating Raw Materials Re-exported by Rwanda and Uganda (in U.S.$ millions)

  Rwanda

  Uganda

  1999

  2000

  1999

  2000

  Diamonds

  Official exports

  0.4

 
; 1.8

  1.8

  1.3

  DRC re-exports

  40.0

  40.0

  36.0

  36.0

  Re-export net added value

  8.0

  8.0

  7.2

  7.2

  Gold

  Official exports

  0.1

  0.1

  95.0

  89.9

  DRC re-exports

  29.0

  29.0

  95.0

  89.9

  Re-export net added value

  5.6

  5.4

  19.0

  18.0

  Coltan

  Official exports

  24.0

  16.6

  13.9

  —

  DRC re-exports

  200.0

  200.0

  13.9

  —

  Re-export net added value

  150.0

  150.0

  13.2

  —

  Total value official exports

  61.2

  68.4