In this respect, as in several others, the Great Lakes or “Congolese” conflict resembles the European Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), in which looting was one of the fundamental activities of the contending armies. Even when they are relatively efficiently used by the state, the combatants devise strategies of economic relevance that turn “war” into something Western observers cannot recognize as the kind of “real military conflict” we have been used to identify due to its extensive use in the past three hundred years. Here economic predation, trafficking of all kinds, and looting both at the individual and at the collective level become essential features of the conflict because they are essential means of financing it.26 This has massive consequences on the way the war is fought. Because civilians are the ones from whom the military can take its means of survival, armed violence is more often directed at civilians (including, at times, those of one’s own camp) than at the enemy army. Direct armed confrontation is often avoided, and straightforward military victory is only one of the various options in the field. It is actually this nonstate, decentralized form of violence that makes the conflicts so murderous and so hard to stop. Looting and its attendant calamities (arson, rape, torture) become routine operations for the “combatants,” who are soon more akin to vampires than to soldiers. Even the regular armies—and here the parallel with the Thirty Years’ War is inescapable—all use militias to supplement or reinforce their own capacity. After a while there is a kind of “blending” between the so-called regular forces (who in Africa are usually poorly paid and poorly disciplined) and the militias they have recruited as auxiliaries. This blending leads more to the de-professionalization of the regular forces than to the professionalization of the militias. This was a key factor in the grotesque fighting between the Rwandese and Ugandan armies in Kisangani, where the invaders seemed to have lost even the most elementary vision of what they were doing in the Congo and turned to fighting each other like dogs over leftover bones.
These problems move straight to the fore when the war ends. In an environment in which economic alternatives are extremely limited or even nonexistent, the well-meaning DDRRR plans of the foreigners are often almost completely impracticable, since war has become a way of life for those involved in it. In the Congo this is the main difference between the intractable east and the rest of the country: in the east (and from that point of view the east includes northern Katanga) civilian militias have taken war to the village level, whereas in other areas of the country it was the various armies (Congolese, Rwandese, Angolan, Zimbabwean) who fought semiprofessionally and therefore could be physically stopped and evacuated elsewhere. But in the eastern war zone, because there had never been a unified command capable of carrying out a coherent centralized strategy, bringing under control the myriad feuding units was akin to trying to harness a bunch of wild horses to a cart.
This is what explains the tragic casualty structure of the war,27 in which, although there were no massive weapons resources (aviation, heavy artillery), the deaths were largely civilian. Civilians died partly because the soldiers killed them but, more often, because their living conditions (absence of health care, impossibility of steady cultivation, impossibility of trade, lack of shelter during the rainy season, constant displacement) caused their death. War is never very much fun. But the Congolese continental conflict was particularly horrible, not only because it caused the deaths of nearly four million human beings but because of the massive suffering it visited on the surviving civilian populations.
The war as seen by the outside world
What did all the diplomatic agitation actually achieve?
Much has been written on the supposedly important U.S. involvement in the Great Lakes conflict, an involvement that has often been described as driven by allegedly large U.S. strategic and economic ambitions in the Congo basin. I hope that this post-Leninist bogey was somewhat laid to rest in the last pages of chapter 3.28 The veteran American Africanist William Zartman was much more realistic when writing in 2000, “The U.S. is engaged in the Congo willy-nilly . . . and since we are held accountable anyhow, it might as well be on the basis of a coherent policy.”29 Apparently this policy never materialized because a year later the same author declared, “The hallmark of the Clinton administration policy towards Africa has been one of overwhelming rhetoric with no follow-through.”30 Nevertheless, as we saw earlier, the first period of the conflict was a moment of definite U.S. engagement in support first of the AFDL and later of the anti-Kabila forces. Why so? This support seems to have been rooted in cultural traits that, though “imperialistic,” had little to do with conventional “imperialism.” Since the collapse of the “Evil Empire,” the United States, which already considered itself “God’s country,” blossomed into an overweening sanctimoniousness that attributed its victory in the cold war to an innate cultural superiority. Since September 11, 2001, this has morphed into complex feelings of persecution, election, and revenge akin to those of the Hebrews.31 But since God’s people are by definition good, the United States was deeply embarrassed at having passively connived in a genocide and tried to make up for that by turning the RPF into a black Israel. In addition, Zaire remained an embarrassing albatross in U.S. cold war memories. President George Bush Sr. was still declaring as late as 1989, “Zaire is among America’s oldest friends and President Mobutu one of our most valued friends on the whole continent of Africa.”32
In practice U.S. involvement in Mobutu’s regime had gone through three phases: active support and promotion in the wake of the first Congo civil war of 1960–1965, disinterest for the next ten years, and then sudden reengagement after 1975, when Angola jumped to the forefront of Washington’s cold war worries and Henry Kissinger decided Mobutu was the man to help the United States confront that threat. But the cold war had ended and democracy blossomed everywhere, which turned Mobutism into a skeleton in the American cupboard. Then, completely unexpectedly, the Rwandese “problem from hell”33 exploded, and with his customary repulsive aplomb Mobutu embraced the surviving demons. The groan of disgusted embarrassment from Bill Clinton was almost audible as the former U.S.-supported dictator welcomed the génocidaires the White House had so carelessly failed to curb. For a great power sure of its greatness and its goodness, the whole spectacle was unsavory. In typical Clintonian fashion, the president’s reaction was emotional and personalized34 but only superficially worked out in practical terms. During the summer of 1995, as tension was growing between Kigali and Kinshasa, Joseph Nye and Vincent Kern, the Department of Defense numbers two and three, went to Rwanda. Ambassador Rawson told them the State Department had just sent a cable saying it wanted Kagame warned not to cross the border in reprisal attacks. But the pragmatic State Department approach was behind the times. The Department of Defense was taking over the U.S. Great Lakes policy and would not let it go for the next few years; Kern told the ambassador not to deliver the message because it did not agree with the Department’s policy.35 This muscular moralism resulted in incredibly simplified versions of reality being bandied about. When Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice came back from her first trip to the Great Lakes region, a member of her staff said, “Museveni and Kagame agree that the basic problem in the Great Lakes is the danger of a resurgence of genocide and they know how to deal with that. The only thing we have to do is look the other way.”36
American support for Rwanda, Uganda, and the “rebels” they backed did not come from a Machiavellian plan to dismember the Congo and take over its mineral riches. It came simply from a deep sense of unease on the part of President Clinton, mirroring that of a large segment of U.S. public opinion, which could not conceive of an America that wasn’t on the side of the “good guys.” As Africa ranked very low on the scale of Pentagon security concerns,37 the White House did not feel constrained by official obligations and could afford a very subjective level of engagement. Thus trusted aides like Susan Rice, John Prendergast, and Ambassador Richard Bogossian, who shar
ed the president’s regrets and his somewhat simplified view of the resulting situation, would be allowed to act on their personal feelings and deeply influence policies.
During 1997–1998 this trend briefly tied in with the short-lived craze over the alleged phenomenon of the “New African Leaders.”38 There was a naïve gushing enthusiasm in the media (“Museveni sounds like Ronald Reagan. He’s bought the whole gospel”),39 and doubters were seen as party-poopers.40 The former Marxist born-again market economy Democrats were seen as leading Africa forward, and Mobutu’s fall embodied the (brief) triumph of young virtue over stale habit. Even when the “friends” jumped at each other’s throats41 there remained a lingering sympathy for the dead concept, and in the Congo the simplified idea of “struggling against the génocidaires” became embedded as an article of faith in U.S. policy.
Its limited means and simplified ideas did not prevent Washington from having a strong influence on the situation, simply through its sheer symbolic weight. Thus John Prendergast could write without exaggeration, “The leverage of the United States cannot be judged solely on the amount of aid it provides. There is a cachet U.S. involvement brings to any initiative which should not be minimized.”42 Physical intervention could be dispensed with since virtual political blessings sufficed at this highest stage of altruistic imperialism. This was particularly visible in February 2001, when Paul Kagame and Joseph Kabila came to Washington at the same time, leading to a change in the U.S. relationship with Rwanda “from a warm embrace to a cordial handshake.”43 For Kigali this was a fifteen-second catastrophe and a fundamental turning point in the war. This new type of American influence could be effective only when the blessing or cold-shouldering was “for real,” meaning that it had a strong U.S. domestic grounding, for U.S. diplomacy is secondary to domestic concerns, and Africans know this very well. Thus Richard Holbrooke’s December 1999 “Congo crisis tour” had little impact because elections were due eleven months later and it was so obvious that Holbrook was campaigning for his own hoped-for position as President Gore’s future secretary of state44 that all actors preferred to camp on standby.
During the presidential campaign Republican candidate George W. Bush candidly declared, “Africa is not part of U.S. strategic interests.”45 And in American eyes September 11 was to deal the final blow to the continent. As Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Charles Snyder told me shortly after the events, “Before that Africa did not figure very high on our list of priorities. Now with this thing it’s completely gone off our radar screens.”46 But by then South Africa had picked up the diplomatic ball in the Congo and was running almost alone. The African vision of U.S. diplomacy sank back to the simplicities of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act47 and the “war on terrorism.”48
France’s intervention in the Great Lakes crisis stands in almost complete contrast to that of the United States. This is not because of their alleged (and greatly exaggerated) rivalry but because of the radical heterogeneity of their cultural views of the continent. Louis de Guiringaud, once a foreign minister under President Giscard d’Estaing, said back in the 1970s, “Africa is the only continent which is a possible field of action for France, the only one where, with 500 soldiers, she can still change the course of history.”49 The immediate question from the puzzled non-French reader is why would she want to? Which takes us back to the differences with U.S. policy. U.S. policy toward Africa has been one of benign neglect interspaced with limited periods of sharp activism targeting one particular problem: Soviet threats, real or perceived (the Congo 1960–1965, Angola 1975–1988, Ethiopia 1985–1991), humanitarian public relations (Somalia 1992–1993, Darfur since 2004), and guilt politics (the Great Lakes 1996–2001). Since September 2001 two new items have crept onto the agenda: secure west African oil supplies and fight Islamic terrorism.50 France has never known these spurts of enthusiasm followed by long periods of disinterest because the basic drive behind French foreign policy is ontological: a systematic geopolitical perspective and a desperate quest for vanished grandeur, resulting in a diplomatic version of Remembrance of Things Past.51 Because that concern is constant and because, as Guiringaud noted, Africa is one of the few areas where this obsession has some chance of playing itself out, Africa has remained at the forefront of French diplomatic concerns since the ambiguous “independence” of its colonies in 1960. In the French view of international relations, a diabolical conspiracy by the “hyperpower” (read: United States) is permanently unfolding with the help of its British sidekick, with the aim of “lowering” France and humiliating its qualitatively superior culture.52 In this view, the courageous Gallic Don Quixote fights the “Anglo-Saxon” conspiracy with the help of his little African Sancho Panzas. Of late, the size of the windmills has become quite awesome.
This led to a reiteration ad nauseam that the whole of the Great Lakes crisis could be explained by the rivalry of Paris with Washington and London. Many journalists bought this interpretation because it was so pat, so convenient, and seemed to give such a welcome gleam of sophisticated veneer to what many readers would otherwise have perceived as just another obscure scuffle between savages in the heart of the Dark Continent. France did have a pré carré (reserved area) in Africa. Its unstated but evident purpose was to prop up France’s world rank and shine in the international arena.53 Taking advantage of this motive, a whole bevy of rather unsavory characters squatted the concept to further often dubious business interests.54 But this was limited to its former French-speaking colonies. The “tragedy” of Rwanda55 was that, because of a misconceived linguistic pride, François Mitterrand felt obliged to defend the integrity of something that had never been within the confines of that nostalgic preserve. The French governmental Commission of Inquiry on Rwanda, whose report came out in December 1998, was a curious mixture of guilty admissions, convoluted denials, and poker-faced sophistry. It was more eloquent in its avoidance of embarrassing subjects than in its reticent admissions. More than anything else it was an exercise in futility: its chairman, Paul Quils, and all its members belonged to the Socialist Party and could not dissociate themselves from the policies of Mitterrand.56 Most French politicians of a certain generation, regardless of their political side, saw Africa as a necessary prop of French grandeur. “Mistakes” had been made, but not to the point of crime. Which, from their point of view, was true: France had for forty years tolerated recurrent violence on the part of its protégés. Killings (preferably in limited numbers) were regrettable but necessary tools in the exercise of power in Africa. Concerning Rwanda, nobody at the Elysée Palace had ever dreamt that little murders between friends would escalate to such an apocalyptic level.
Then the 1996–1997 “Mobutu war” came at the tail end of the Rwandese horror and Paris gamely persisted in its mistakes till the predictable bitter end. The whole pas de deux of the multinational force was an exercise in almost unbelievable bad faith, on both sides. The French pretended to want to save the Rwandese refugees when they actually wanted to save Mobutu, and the Americans pretended that all the refugees had gone home because they wanted their recently anointed New Leaders to rid them of the old cold war Frankenstein still hunched over the banquet table.
The New Leaders did kill the old monster, even if this was not the end of the story but the beginning of a new one. And in that new episode, the French were clueless. They had lost their familiar bearings in the scuffle, and besides, at home a certain amount of weariness was beginning to develop around African issues. For a new generation of politicians the continent was increasingly seen as a faraway, exotic, and dangerous place, largely irrelevant to the modern world except as a recipient of charity. Without realizing it, civil society critics of French corruption in Africa had the unintended effect of turning disgusted public opinion from further involvement. The whole Foccart–de Gaulle generation was now either dead or in retirement, and their epigones were tiring of what increasingly looked like a rearguard action. During 1998, as the Great Lakes crisis grew in
to a continental war, Paris closed down its Ministry of Co-operation and integrated it into the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. For a non-Frenchman this might seem like a small matter, but in terms of Franco-African relations it was an earthquake: the Ministry of Co-operation had been a latter-day Ministry of (Neo)Colonies, where French-sponsored regimes got preferential treatment.57 With the blending of the two ministries there was a feeling that Africa was “abandoned” and left to the European bureaucrats in Brussels:
It is now in Brussels that African delegations have to face cold-blooded European examiners to answer interrogations about human rights, good governance and democratic agendas… . Today there is nothing left of what De Gaulle had wanted and which Foccart tried to preserve… . [Without Africa] France will soon sink to the level of Spain and Italy, second-rate powers.58
An era was indeed coming to a close. Rwanda and the fall of Mobutu was the watershed that marked the end of a certain conception of France’s action in Africa, even if many other forces were at work to bring it to an end. But it was psychologically easier to blame “Anglo-Saxon plots” for this demise of grandeur than to have to admit that the world had changed and that the Gaullist dream of a Françafrique was dead.59
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