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

by Gerard Prunier

  Apart from the Ituri there was fighting almost everywhere else in both North and South Kivu, right up to the Pretoria Agreement. In the Itombwe, the Banyamulenge, who were by then desperately trying to distance themselves from their alliance with Rwanda,144 rose in revolt against the Rwandese army under the leadership of RCD-G deserter Cdr. Patrick Masunzu in February 2002. The RPA turned against them with great violence, deploying Mil Mi-17 combat helicopters.145 In addition to battling the MLC in the northeast Mbusa’s men also fought Mayi Mayi groups, which did not recognize his new alliance with Kinshasa.146 The situation around Rutshuru and Lubero degenerated into almost complete anarchy, with ALIR I, four Mayi Mayi groups, the RCD-G, and the RCD-ML all fighting each other in total confusion.147 Worst of all, this horror remained marginal and did not intrude on the main “peace process.” When a respected advocacy NGO wrote in a report that “unless a peace process is crafted especially for the Kivus and made central to the government’s transition programme and to international efforts, the Pretoria Agreement will fail,”148 it was—fortunately or unfortunately—not the case. The Kivu slaughterhouse had provided the initial casus belli of the war, but once the central actors had decided that the game was no longer worth it, they let it fester without bothering to include that complicated situation in their “peace” calculations. The paradoxes were massive, particularly if one remembers that it was to “save” the Banyamulenge threatened with “genocide” that the Rwandese army had first entered the Congo in 1996. Now that same Rwandese army was attacking the same Banyamulenge with combat helicopters.

  The grim truth was voiced by Monsignor Melchisedech Sikulu Paluku, bishop of Butembo, when he said in his Christmas 2001 homily,

  In the Congo everybody is now talking about peace. Conferences, dialogues, meetings are happening here and there. But beyond these meetings and dialogues it is clear that it is the very people who pretend to want peace who are fuelling war with all its terrible attending circumstances. And all that in the name of “liberation,” “self-defence” or “resistance.”

  The good prelate was mostly right. But what he perhaps could not comprehend was that the peace the actors had in mind was simply a continuation of the war by other means.

  9

  FROM WAR TO PEACE: CONGOLESE TRANSITION AND CONFLICT DECONSTRUCTION (JANUARY 2003–JULY 2007)

  The conflict’s lingering aftermath (January 2003–December 2004)

  The peripheral actors drop off

  As we saw in chapter 8, several of the war’s protagonists, the peripheral ones, had started to walk away even before the Sun City peace process reached fruition. The term peripheral should not be understood here as meaning “unimportant,” but rather as “not vitally involved.” In many ways, if we examine the bare bones of the conflict, what I called a “continental war” (which it really was, courtesy of its political elites) was fundamentally a war between Rwanda and the Congo. The Tutsi-Hutu conflict in Rwanda had been left unresolved by the genocide, the RPF victory, and the flight of the vanquished into Zaire. The RPF then decided to solve it once and for all and, in a gigantic leap of political faith, tried to vassalize its huge neighbor at the same time. All the rest was anecdotal. This is why the expression “Africa’s First World War,” used by the Africans themselves, is only partially correct. Yes, Rwanda and the Congo experienced in several ways the anger, the fear, the hatred that were evident in Belgrade, Paris, and Berlin in 1914. But in the case of Angola, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Burundi, and Namibia the pattern of the conflict was much older and prenationalistic: it was more like the Thirty Years’ War that had ravaged Europe between 1618 and 1648. For most of the African countries involved, as had been the case for seventeenth-century Sweden, Poland, France, and Lithuania, the war took place purely because of the princes’ ambitions, prejudices, and security fears. And the Congo, like Germany in the seventeenth century, was their battlefield. The violence and the meaninglessness were the same. In Burundi and Angola, already ravaged by civil wars of their own, projecting troops into the DRC had just been an extension of internal conflicts, and in Zimbabwe and Uganda, where the Congolese intervention was highly unpopular, it was perceived as an elite strategy that had nothing to do with the ordinary lives of ordinary people. For the really peripheral actors, such as the Sudan, Chad, Libya, and the Central African Republic, the populations were barely aware of their country’s involvement in the Congo; if and when they were aware, they saw it as their leaders’ political calculations about domestic problems, having almost nothing to do with the Congo itself. None of the nationalistic fervor that was such an essential feature of the First World War was in evidence in any of these countries. This set Rwanda and the Congo, where the mass of the population deeply cared about the war, in a category apart. Logically, the patterns of exit from the war reflected the reasons for getting involved in it.

  Angola was probably the one participant in the Congo war that left it completely behind in the quickest and most radical way. This is because it never had a stake in the Congo itself, but only in what the Congo could represent in terms of strategic depth for its own civil war, and also because its enormous mineral wealth enabled it to look to its future without much concern for a secondary war theater that it had been able to finance without any serious economic strain.1 As soon as Jonas Savimbi was shot dead in February 2002, the war stopped.2 Around 80,000 rebel soldiers and 300,000 of their relatives came out of the bush and quickly faced a grim situation: half-starving in camps, they did not benefit from the social reinsertion programs that they had been promised.3 The former UNITA guerrillas turned into a political party, and Isaias Samakuva, long the movement’s representative in Paris, became its secretary-general in June 2003. Elections were planned for late 2004 or early 2005, but they did not take place; most recently, they were scheduled for 2007 “at the latest.”4

  During 2002, as the situation got superficially normalized in the Congo, Angola’s fears receded and it seemed to lose interest. But although it evacuated the DRC, it kept troops in the Republic of Congo, in Dolisie and Pointe Noire, ready to intervene. And as the pattern of Angolan troop deployment during the October 2006 Congolese election later showed, the loss of interest was more apparent than real, and Luanda’s watchful eye remained on Kinshasa.

  Zimbabwe was in a very different situation. It had already fallen into a radical phase of internal political decline when it entered the Congo war,5 and its involvement in the DRC had nothing to do with security and everything to do with money. In a way, the Zimbabwean involvement in the war was, at least partly, a kind of foreign extension of the corruption of its leaders, who hoped to derive real economic benefits from their intervention in the DRC. Unlike in Angola, where the Congo was (correctly) perceived as a secondary theater of operation of the domestic civil war, the Zimbabwean population could not see any arguable reason for being in the DRC and the war was highly unpopular.6 When the second UN report on the looting of Congo resources was published, the Zimbabwean government declared that it would not think of starting an inquiry about the people whose names were mentioned in the document for the following reason: “We did a good job in the DRC and we will not respond to malicious allegations by the British masquerading as the United Nations.”7 During August 2002 the Zimbabwean government signed no fewer than six different trade agreements with the Congo in a futile attempt at protecting the interests that had been acquired by the Harare “elite network.”8 “We have opened the doors; it is now up to the businessmen and businesswomen of Zimbabwe and DRC to pass through those doors,” declared Commander Murerwa during the signing ceremony of one of the agreements.9 But like most other Mugabe policies this was a complete pipe dream, and many observers realized it: “I think we will see a repeat of what happened in Mozambique,” said the political scientist Masipula Sithole. “We did all the donkey work only for South Africa to gain the peace dividends and now Mozambique has overtaken Zimbabwe as South Africa’s biggest trading partner.”10 Five years later, not only had Zimbab
we failed to reap any benefit from its Congolese adventure, but it can even be said that this mad foray into a war it did not have to fight became one of the contributing factors to its further collapse.

  The smallest of the three government allies was also the one whose involvement in the Congo was the least important. The conflict that Namibia was really involved in was the Angolan civil war, and, at least as much as a desire to remain aligned with its SADC partners, it was the Angolan war that caused Windhoek to get involved in the DRC in the first place. Apart from the need to please Luanda, nobody could see any reason for being in the Congo, and as soon as the Botswana pre-dialogue reunion had taken place, Namibia was the first country to start withdrawing. By September 2001 it had brought back 80 percent of its contingent and announced a complete pullout as soon as possible. By January 2002 there was not a single Namibian Defense Force soldier left in the Congo. When old Sam Nujoma launched his (unconstitutional) drive for a fourth presidential mandate later in the year, the Congo issue had disappeared from the political landscape.

  On August 28, 2000, Burundi entered a peace agreement that was supposed to end the civil war existing in the country since the assassination of President Melchior Ndadaye in October 1993, the cause of its involvement in the Congo in the first place.11 The agreement provided for eighteen months of continued UPRONA government under President Buyoya, followed by another eighteen months under FRODEBU Vice President Domitien Ndayizeye.12 But because the actual shooting war was fought between the Forces Armées Burundaises (the regular army) and the CNDD-FDD and FNL guerrillas, this “solution” remained an empty paper construct. And because the FAB were in the Congo for purely Burundian reasons, the assassination of Laurent-Désiré Kabila did not mark any sort of turning point.

  Things slowly started to change when the actual fighters13 finally agreed to meet with the government in March 2002. At first the FAB tried to scuttle the peace process by forcing the government to sign a useless draft document with the now dormant Ndayikengurukiye and Mugabarabona14 factions of CNDD-FDD and FNL. In spite of the peace developments in the Congo, the fighting factions could keep their rear bases in South Kivu because a number of people in the Kinshasa government discreetly kept giving them support.

  Then in December 2002 Pierre Nkurunziza finally agreed to sign a cease-fire; a month later, in what was to become its first peacekeeping mission ever, the African Union decided to create the African Mission in Burundi. The turning point was the power transfer between Buyoya and Ndayizeye in May 2003, not because “a Hutu” was now in control of the government (he was not) but because the whole political construct shifted. A political space suddenly opened for CNDD-FDD to challenge FRODEBU as the main representative of the Hutu population. At the same time, a number of war-weary Tutsi (particularly the Muramvya group, which had felt excluded from politics since 1972) saw in the CNDD-FDD a possible alternative to the infernal UPRONA/FRODEBU dichotomy which had polarized and sterilized Burundian politics over the past ten years. In a way it was timidly reminiscent of the early days of independence, when the Tutsi-Hutu question had not yet usurped the center stage of national politics.15 The October 2003 final peace agreement signed in Pretoria left Agathon Rwasa’s group as the only embodiment of the diehard ethnic war position. From then on Burundi’s involvement in the Congo decreased proportionately to the success of its own internal peace process. Following the successful elections of August 2005, this left the FNL guerrilla remnants in South Kivu as the last trace of a Burundian presence in the DRC.

  This group of actors was quite different from the others, in that its links with the Congolese conflict were always peripheral, whereas their involvement with each other was very strong. In many ways we have here a geopolitical “cluster,” which at a certain point got drawn into the Great Lakes–Congolese vortex although it never “belonged” to it.16

  In this northern cluster Libya was the prime mover. Since 1991 the Lockerbie affair had kept Libyan diplomatic initiatives under a pall. But after years of negotiating, the international sanctions were finally lifted in April 1999. In late 1998 Colonel Gaddafi, who knew he would soon be able to act freely, had restarted the picturesque diplomacy he had been famous for in the 1970s and 1980s. But he had largely changed tack. He publicly declared, “I am tired of my Arabism,” and, as a respected weekly wrote, “Qaddafi says farewell Arabia and sets his sights on Africa.”17 The “Guide” was angry at his Arab peers for not giving him support during the period of the sanctions, whereas several African heads of state18 had visited him to express their solidarity, defy the West, or pick up their checks. Gaddafi’s Congolese intervention should be seen in that light, as a lackadaisical “African adventure” rather than a carefully thought-out policy. On the other hand, Khartoum, supported by Gaddafi, wanted to help Kabila for anti-Ugandan reasons19 but could not do it directly. And Chad’s President Idriss Deby was trying to strike an independent course on his oil development program with a pipeline heading west toward Cameroon and not north toward Libya. For Deby, providing the manpower Khartoum wanted and Tripoli was ready to pay for squared the circle, even if the depth of his geopolitical engagement was questionable.

  So after the Chadians got drubbed, Gaddafi magnanimously pulled them out of the mess he had put them into. But the complexities and interferences did not stop there. To keep pressure on Chad, even after it withdrew from the Congo, Libya supported President Ange-Félix Patassé of the Central African Republic. Patassé had been “reelected” in December 1998, not only through ballot box stuffing but through a process of “electors without borders,” whereby thousands of neighboring foreigners also came to vote: Congolese Ngbaka, Ngbandi, and Yakoma had crossed the border to vote for Patassé’s opponent, former president André Kolingba, while thousands of Chadian Sara crossed into the north to vote for Patassé.20 The result was a fairly unstable regime, and in May 2001 Kolingba, the loser of that bizarre election, tried to overthrow Patassé through a military coup. He failed. But Patassé’s savior represented another big problem: it was the Congolese guerrilla leader Jean-Pierre Bemba whose men had crossed the river to thwart the coup.21 They had fought the insurgents side by side with Libyan troops also protecting Patassé. Thus Tripoli found itself in the strange position of fighting alongside rebels who were trying to overthrow the Kinshasa government Gaddafi supported. This put Patassé in a delicate position. Two years before, already caught between Kinshasa and Bemba’s rebels, he had tried to finesse his way out of the situation by saying “Kabila is my brother but Bemba is my son.” Now with Kabila Senior dead and Bemba protecting his doorstep, he modified the family relationships: it was Bemba who had become “his brother” and Kabila the Younger was now “his son.”22

  It took a successful coup by Gen. François Bozizé on March 15, 2003, to start clearing the atmosphere. Libyan troops went home, the new regime normalized its relations with Kinshasa within a week, and Bemba’s men prudently remained on their side of the river. In an ultimate paradox, six months later the same Jean-Pierre Bemba had become a minister in the new “national unity” government in Kinshasa. As for Khartoum, which had supported Patassé up to the last moment, it superficially reconciled with Bozizé.

  Thus by mid-2003, the countries of the northern cluster were completely disengaged from the Congolese conflict, even if their mutual relationships remained fraught with suspicion and shifting attempts at mutual destabilization.

  Uganda and Rwanda refuse to give up

  During the eighteen months preceding the signing of the final “all-inclusive” peace agreement, the UPDF had progressively withdrawn almost 10,000 of the 13,000 men it had once deployed in the DRC.23 The idea was that after extensive training, MLC troops would be capable of taking Kinshasa on their own, without embarrassing Kampala. But when that hope eventually faded away and when the question became essentially one of making the most gracious exit possible while safeguarding the greatest possible number of economic interests, the situation became much more complicated, fo
r a number of reasons.

  • President Museveni had won a presidential election in circumstances that were not very glorious for his regime. Despite prospects of certain victory, he had harassed his main opponent, Kiiza Besigye, and let his men indulge in limited and unnecessary ballot box stuffing. The result (69 percent of the vote) turned the once “darling of the international community” into just another heavy-handed African politician.24

  • Practically at the same moment the first UN report on the illegal exploitation of Congolese riches put the Ugandan regime into a very poor light. President Museveni’s reaction of pique did not improve his image.25

  • Then the enmity between Rwanda and Uganda reached such a level that the major military problem for Kampala became, not Kinshasa any more, but Kigali. Once again, as with the Sudan before, the Congo threatened to become a battlefield wherein third-party proxy warfare could develop. Time and time again, London had to intervene to avoid all-out warfare between the two countries.26

  • The danger of a war with Rwanda and the Congo conflict combined to increase military expenses, creating an added irritant for the donors.27 To make matters worse, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which had remained relatively quiet for the past two years, suddenly burst forth in renewed violent activity.28

  • The combination of growing military expenditures and deteriorating relations with the donors caused Kampala to risk losing its extremely lucrative HIPC status, without which the country could not run.29