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

by Gerard Prunier

438.8

  380.5

  Total value DRC re-exports

  269.0

  269.0

  144.9

  126.0

  Total re-export added value

  163.6

  163.4

  39.4

  25.2

  As GNP %

  8.4

  7.1

  0.7

  0.5

  As military spending %

  200.0

  190.0

  34.0

  24.0

  As public aid %

  65.0

  110.0

  13.0

  6.0

  Source: S. Marysse and C. André, “Guerre et pillage économique en République Démocratique du Congo,” in S. Marysse and F. Reyntjens, eds., L’Afrique des Grands Lacs (2000–2001) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 326.

  These interesting results call for a number of comments:

  1. “Re-export added value” means the money actually derived from the re-export of DRC resources once their production and transport costs had been deducted.

  2. Diamonds, which are foremost in people’s minds when looting is mentioned, in fact constitute a small proportion of the resources illegally exploited. But the fierce competition for their control comes from the fact that, at very high value for a negligible weight, they are easy to steal and transport. There was constant competition between looting for war support and looting for the private enrichment of the officers involved. Generally speaking, RPA officers tended to be more “public-minded” (the feared Congo Desk at the Ministry of Defense was there to remind them of their duty), whereas more loosely controlled UPDF officers tended to look to their personal benefit first.

  3. Uganda had a more “transparent” policy (some would say brazen) and declared a lot of its DRC-acquired products to be official exports. The question never asked by the international community was how these had been acquired.

  4. Coltan was the product that made the big difference, but its price fluctuated wildly. I would personally tend to minorate the 1999 figures, when prices were hovering around $80/kilo, and increase the 2000 figures when they had risen to $600/kilo. In his estimate Bjorn Willum figures at least a $191 million re-export added value for Rwandese coltan in 2000, which seems high but not unreasonable.

  5. The exploitation of Congolese resources was much more essential for Rwanda than for Uganda, both because its military spending in GNP percentage is much higher (4 percent officially, instead of 2.5 percent) and because its export capacity is much lower.

  6. The international community had been, to say the least, rather negligent in its evaluation of the situation.

  This last point deserves some development because international aid has—rightly—come under heavy criticism both for prolonging the war and for favoring the anti-Kinshasa camp.94 When the EU commissioner for development Poul Nielsen released 110 million in aid for Rwanda, he declared that the monies would “support government efforts to reduce poverty and consolidate its reform programme both on macro-economic matters and good governance.”95 When the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided on added aid to Rwanda in 2000, it justified its decision by “progress made in the area of the economy and good governance.”96 As for the British Department for International Development, it decided to grant £30 million to Rwanda because of “its progress in fiscal, monetary and trade reform.”97 When the World Bank approved a new $75 million loan to Rwanda in February 1999 and questions were asked about whether this might not be used to support the war, Bank economist Chukwuma Obidegwu answered, “The government assured us that it is not interested in continuing the war. Which is satisfactory for us… . We have no guarantees but we have their word.”98 Should such attitudes be attributed to naivété or to a political choice? Probably to neither: there was the already mentioned desire of the international institutions to “push money out of the door” (otherwise, why do such institutions exist?) and then the enormous amount of guilt that came from not having done anything about the genocide when it was in the power of the international community to stop it. As a result, even when actors of the Congo looting showed themselves ready to speak, no attention was paid to what they had to say and no further action was undertaken. From that point of view, the testimony of RPA staff officer Deus Kagiraneza to the Belgian Senate Commission of Inquiry on the Great Lakes is an amazing case in point:

  In 2000 I was contacted unofficially by a World Bank expert who asked me why was it that there were in Antwerp records of $30m of precious metals imports from Rwanda while there was no trace of that in our national accounting.99 I told him that I did not know but . . . that we had a second set of unregistered books for our national accounting.100

  This in the year when Poul Nielsen and the Dutch minister for foreign affairs were both finding signs of “good governance” to be rewarded financially. At least in the case of Uganda the donors kept asking for a reduction of the military budget, and $278 million of Heavily Indebted Poor Countries debt relief got delayed because of the war.101 But in the end, the tolerance was similar.

  Lusaka had given the warring parties a precise (perhaps too precise) timetable for everything from disarmament to UN deployment. But from the beginning it was obvious that the UN was not going to get much cooperation from the Congolese authorities. Foreign minister Yerodia Ndombasi, not known for his diplomatic niceties, had already declared that he did not see the point of deploying UN personnel “where there are no rebels and no aggressors.”102 In other words, keep your noses out of our business. This attitude, which was quite widespread not only among government members but even among the general population, came from the very ambiguous role played by the UN in the early 1960s, with the accusations of having connived in Lumumba’s murder and of having protected Tshornbe’s secession.103 When the first MONUC observers were deployed in November 1999,104 they were theoretically allowed in Goma, Bukavu, Kisangani, Gbadolite, Lisala, Pepa, Isiro, Kabalo, Bunia, Pweto, Bumba, Kalemie, Moba, Kongolo, and Kindu. But they were explicitly barred from Mbandaka, Mbuji-Mayi, Lubumbashi, Kananga, Matadi, and Kamina. This meant that Kinshasa accepted the MONUC deployment on rebel territory but refused it on its own, particularly in the places where it had fighting forces or where it handled military cargo. In fact, MONUC observers (seventy officers to cover 2.3 million square kilometers) were looked upon by the government as spies. The noncooperative attitude of the United States did not help. It was so obvious that U.S. UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke even tried to justify it in a contorted way, saying, “We are dragging our feet not because we are opposed to peacekeeping in the Congo but because we don’t want to write the DPKO [UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations] a blank cheque, we want to get it right.”105 What “getting it right” meant exactly was not spelled out. In January 2000 Kofi Annan proposed the deployment of 5,537 UN troops for the MONUC force, a proposal that received lukewarm U.S. support.106 Kabila declared that the Lusaka Agreement “was going to be put into practice within the next two weeks,” the first of a long series of broken promises. In mid-February, as soon as he started working on his non-Lusaka National Assembly plan, Kabila recanted in practice and put many complicated conditions in the way of troop deployment. This sabotage came at the very moment when both the government and the rebels had finally abandoned all pretence and returned to open warfare. The UN declared itself” disappointed” by the offensives, which might stop the deployment. This caused Museveni’s diplomatic adviser Amama Mbabazi to quip, “It should be the opposite; they should deploy and set straight what they don’t like.”107

  In spite of its Chapter Seven mandate, MONUC, which was experiencing serious staffing problems, was not about to deploy in the midst of the fighting. And by then, on top of Kabila’s hostility, the UN had to face that of the rebels. Emile Ilunga, the RCD-G chief, declared irrationally, “The Lusaka process has been held to ransom by the international community and Laurent-Désiré Kabila… . There is complicity between Kabila and the UN…
. The cease-fire no longer holds.”108 The reality was simply that, like Kabila himself, by early 2000 the Rwandese-backed rebels had renewed hopes of a direct military victory and did not want inquisitive eyes looking on.109 When Facilitator Masire arrived in the DRC at the end of March, he sat for a week in Kinshasa waiting for flight clearances to various points of the country and finally had to fly home without being able to go anywhere. In early May, as things were still stuck, Holbrooke flew to Kinshasa to plead for MONUC deployment. With the Rwando-Ugandan fratricidal fighting going on in Kisangani, his mission was aborted. The song and dance went on in confused and desultory fashion: Masire met with Wamba, Ilunga, and Bemba, who all assured him of their cooperation and did nothing; MONUC said that the MLC advance southward was a violation of the Lusaka Agreement; Bemba answered that there had been over one hundred violations so far; Kabila refused to meet Masire; Robin Cook appointed Douglas Scrafton as British Great Lakes special representative (he remained underemployed); Museveni declared that unilateral withdrawal of military forces was very dangerous since “it could upset the carefully negotiated sequence of events and lead to the collapse of the cease-fire agreement as a whole,”110 a somewhat surrealistic statement given the situation; Kabila relented and allowed for MONUC deployment, then, at the last minute, changed his mind and said that UN forces could not be allowed to deploy in government-controlled territory.111 The RCD-G said it was out of the question that it would evacuate Kisangani. By then Kabila’s allies were frantic, especially when their champion “forgot” to show up at the conference that the SADC had organized in Windhoek on August 6 to try to rescue the Lusaka process. Chiluba chased Kabila to Lubumbashi on August 10 and wrangled from him a reluctant consent to attend yet another “summit.” Kamel Morjane, the embattled head of MONUC, immediately jumped in and managed to get Kabila to confirm his promise to Chiluba on August 11. He then attended the so-called “last chance summit” in Lusaka on August 14 but left after one day without making any commitment. As the Economist wrote, “Congo’s ruler is now irritating his allies as well as his opponents,”1l2 something which was to have very grave consequences for him. A week later, when he flew to Luanda to ask for more troops for his northern front offensive, he was cold-shouldered and got only a few aircraft.113 Peeved, he had his minister for human rights, Léonard She Okitundu, announce that Kinshasa had decided to unilaterally suspend the application of the Lusaka Peace Agreement.114 This time it was too much for dos Santos, who made an angry phone call to Kabila in the middle of the night and told him to stop his obstruction. So Kabila backtracked the next day and declared personally that he was now ready to accept the deployment.115

  In the midst of this tiring tragicomedy it was sobering that a member of the U.S. mission to the United Nations had the decency to remind whoever cared to listen that “in terms of the number of countries involved this war is probably the greatest threat to peace and security in the world today and, considering the numbers of at-risk civilians, it is one of the greatest humanitarian crises ever.”116

  On August 23, Kabila again unilaterally suspended the application of the Lusaka peace process, a move characterized by Emile Ilunga of the RCD-G as “contradictory and insane.”117 The situation appeared to be so blocked that that perennial diplomatic gadfly Colonel Gaddafi jumped in and organized a meeting in Tripoli calling for the deployment of a “neutral African force” in the Congo that, he said, would have “immediate impact.” Enchanted with this new smokescreen, Museveni declared that the African force “should replace all foreign armies,” and Rwanda promised “an unconditional and complete withdrawal.”118

  MONUC had been slowly inching upward (although nowhere near its 5,537 personnel deployment target), and it now had 566 people in the DRC. Of these, 117 were local recruits used for administrative and logistic jobs, 205 were expatriate UN civil servants, and only 26 were soldiers. The remaining (218) were “military observers” (i.e., soldiers without weapons) who were stuck in Kinshasa and rarely flew out to the field.119

  Dos Santos and Chiluba then wearily organized a “last last-chance” meeting in Maputo for November 27. It resulted in catastrophe when Museveni and Kagame stormed out of the conference during the very first session. Kabila had answered their demand for the disarmament of the Interahamwe militiamen with the quip that the only two Interahamwe in the Congo were Museveni and Kagame themsclvcs.120 All venues for negotiation seemed definitely blocked. Forty-nine days later the Congolese president was dead.

  Mzee’s assassination

  On Tuesday, January 16, 2001, around noontime, Laurent-Désiré Kabila was sitting in one of the offices of the Presidential Palace in Kinshasa, looking at papers and chatting with Social Affairs Counselor Emile Mota when one of his bodyguards, Rashidi Kasereka, walked up to him as if to whisper something in his ear. Instead, he pulled out an automatic pistol and fired two or three bullets (the various accounts do not agree) at point-blank range into the president. One of the bullets entered the back of the skull and killed him almost immediately. Then things got more uncertain. There was a lot of shooting which seemed to have come from the courtyard, where elements of the president’s bodyguard were exchanging fire with a small group of armed men. The murderer ran out of the room. Almost immediately Presidential Aide Col. Eddy Kapend shot a bodyguard whom he later said was Kasereka.121 After about half an hour of shooting things quieted down at the Palace. The radio then announced that the president had been wounded in an assassination attempt. The same evening, although Kabila had now been dead for several hours, an ambulance took his body to Ndjili Airport and put it aboard a Congolese DC-8 transport, which flew it to Harare, under the pretence of looking for medical help. On Tuesday evening at 6 p.m. Colonel Kapend went on the air, told everybody to stay at home, asked the armed forces to remain calm and disciplined, and announced that all borders were closed. But he did not admit the president’s death. At 8 p.m. Interior Minister Gaëtan Kakudji announced a curfew, effective immediately, but still did not acknowledge that the president was dead. That same evening the Belgian Foreign Ministry, which had its own sources of information in Kinshasa, announced that President Kabila had been killed.122 That message was contradicted the next day by the Congolese ambassador to Zimbabwe Kikaya bin Karubi. Deputy Defense Minister Godefroid Chamulesso, who was visiting Libya, was the first Congolese official to admit that Kabila was dead.123

  The rebels stressed their support for the Lusaka Agreement,124 and Zimbabwe pledged continued support for the Corigo.125 Meanwhile, Kabila’s staff called the whole diplomatic corps accredited in the capital to the Cité de l’Organisation de l’Unité Africaine, where the diplomats were told solemnly that Joseph Kabila, the president’s son, was to be “head of the interim government for the time being.”126

  The official announcement of Laurent-Désiré Kabila’s death finally came on Thursday, January 18, at 8 p.m., when Government Spokesman Dominique Sakombi Inongo declared that President Kabila had died from his wounds that same morning at 10 a.m. and announced thirty days of official mourning.127 The body of the dead president was then flown back from Harare on Sunday, January 21, and a grand national funeral where hundreds of thousands of mourners turned up took place on Tuesday, January 23.

  Why all these complications and dissimulations? And why the lie about Kabila’s actual hour of death? The reasons are complex and have to do with what lay behind the murder itself.

  The best account of the murder, even if incomplete, was published about a month later in the Paris newspaper Le Monde.128 Although generally well-received, this article was criticized on two levels.129 First, some people considered that it was too “French-centered,” that it “protected” Luanda of any responsibility and that it had been “inspired” by the French Secret Service, both to protect Luanda for oil contract reasons and to try to pin the guilt on Kampala.130 A second line of criticism was that the story was naïve and that the murder could not have been (as the authors, Smith and Glaser, present it) the act of isolated
individuals but that behind this smokescreen lay a vast international conspiracy which was at times attributed to Mobutist circles and Angola131 and at times to vast, dark, and somewhat imprecise forces of an evil nature.132 In fact, several of these explanations and criticisms, if taken together and somewhat shifted for better focus, constitute a kaleidoscopic version of the truth. Let us look at some of the elements that went into the killing of Mzee, the man who tricked his puppet masters, surprised his enemies, puzzled the international community,133 and won the grudging respect of the fellow countrymen he both defended and oppressed.

  There are two main strands in the assassination story. The first one could be called the “Kivutian strand” and the other the “Angolan strand.” To understand the first one we have to go back, as Smith and Glaser do, to the early days of Kabila’s last adventure, during the fall of 1996 in Kivu.134 Kabila, picked by the trans-African anti-Mobutu crusade leadership, had no military means of his own. From the beginning he knew he would need his own armed group, in the short term to compete with Kisase Ngandu and, perhaps later, to emancipate himself from Rwandese tutelage. He then systematically set about recruiting young local boys to join the newly formed AFDL. To his surprise, they came in droves:135 massive rural poverty, lack of schooling opportunities, boredom, disgust with Mobutu’s decaying rule, all combined to give him in a few months an army of 10,000 to 15,000 kadogo (“little ones”).136 They ranged in age from ten to twenty, with a median age of around fifteen. Many were orphans, their parents having died either from diseases137 or in the Kivu ethnic wars that had been endemic for the past three years.138 They looked up to the resurrected revolutionary leader as a charismatic father-like figure. It is they who, very early, started to call him Mzee (“old man,” an expression of quasi-filial respect in Swahili). He, in turn, played with them like an old tomcat with young kittens. They had no social worth; thanks to him they became, first, young adventurers, then apprentice soldiers, and eventually heroes. For Mzee they would kill and they would die. He knew it and he used it; then he overused it. The turning point did not come at once; it started with the August 1998 war. There were kadogo in the 10th Brigade and there were kadogo in the ranks of the FAC units that remained loyal to Kinshasa. Within a month they were fighting each other, an emotionally painful situation that was to last for the next two and a half years; both the kadogo who had stayed on the government side and those who had “rebelled” had simply followed their commanding officers. In all these armies of child soldiers, the officers and the boys had developed quasi-familial relationships.139 and above them stood Mzee, father to them all. It was for that reason that the young boys made up his bodyguard, because he trusted them in a way he would not trust the adults: “They can’t harm me,” he used to say. “They have been with me since the beginning. They are my children.”140