56. Which included the powerful intelligence operative Patrick Karegeya.
57. See chapter 8.
58. IRIN dispatch, Kinshasa, February 18, 2004.
59. IRIN dispatch, Kigali, April 22, 2004.
60. IRIN dispatch, Kigali, April 23, 2004.
61. IRIN dispatch, Kinshasa, April 24, 2004.
62. IRIN dispatches, Kinshasa, April 27 and 30, 2004. FDLR prisoners declared that their officers were trying to prevent them from going back to Rwanda, even shooting those who tried.
63. There were no media reports of these attacks.
64. IRIN dispatch, Kigali, May 12, 2004.
65. Mbuza Mabe, a tough career general with a good track record, had replaced Nabyolwa as head of the 10th Region. He was particularly disliked by the Banyamulenge troops because, as a Mobutu general, he had been one of the few FAZ officers to fight them successfully (in March 1997 in Mbandaka).
66. Interviews in Bukavu, November 2006.
67. The reason for preferring to flee into Burundi came from a political calculation: the Banyamulenge civilians, who hoped to come back to the Congo after a while, did not want to be accused of being “Rwandese” and of having run to “their country,” Burundi was seen as much less ideologically connoted.
68. See chapter 8.
69. There were 22,000 by mid-June and 34,000 by the end of the month.
70. AP and AFP dispatches, Kinshasa, June 2, 2004.
71. New Vision, June 21, 2004; IRIN dispatch, June 22,2004.
72. New Vision, June 24, 2004.
73. Multiethnic but with a lot of Congolese Hutu among its fighters.
74. Sevetal of them (FNI, FRPI, FAPC) were in fact directly or indirectly controlled by Rwanda and/or Uganda, and the resumption of hostilities in the north was most likely linked with the South Kivu events.
75. AFP dispatch, Bukavu, July 31,2004.
76. The Tutsi and their Banyamulenge cousins were systematically targeted by the killers, who would inquire about ethnic identities and spare the Bashi refugees. Telephone interviews with NGO workers in Bujumbura, August 2004.
77. Note the amalgam of all “Hutu forces” into one murderous gaggle and the assimilation of “the DRC” to these same “negative forces.”
78. IRIN dispatches, Bukavu and Bujumbura, August 18, 2004.
79. There was one small element of hope in that fanatical mess: the fact that Muyamulenge commander Patrick Masunzu, who had lost any illusions about the RPF a long time before, allied himself with Mbuza Mabe and pushed fellow Muyamulenge officer Jules Mutebutsi down to Fizi, later forcing him to take refuge in Rwanda.
80. It might seem strange to see two commanding officers of the same army agreeing not to fight each other. But Rwibasira was Murebutsi’s brother-in-law, and his attitude during the crisis was ambiguous (he closed the Goma Airport, blocking Ruberwa on the ground at a time when restricting the vice president’s movements could have proved disastrous).
81. Confidential interview with MONUC officers, Kinshasa, October and November 2006.
82. Ibid.
83. New Vision, December 3, 2004.
84. East African, December 5, 2004; IRIN dispatch, Kampala, December 8, 2004.
85. IRIN dispatch, Kigali, December 15, 2004.
86. Confidential interview with a person close to the Rwandese president, Nairobi, April 2005.
87. CIAT was the body set up by the international community to support the transition process (see next subsection).
88. Reuters dispatch, Goma, December 22, 2004.
89. East African, December 26, 2004.
90. Author’s emphasis. Interview with ICG in Kigali, late December 2004; ICG, Congo: Solving the FDLR Problem Once and For All, Brussels, May 2005.
91. The expression was used by the Economist in an article aptly called “Good News from the Congo,” August 9, 2003.
92. The French Africanist journalist Christopher Ayad called it “une usine à gaz,” a slang expression that roughly translates in American English as “a Rube Goldberg contraption.” Libération, July 24, 2003.
93. Agence France Presse dispatch, Sun City, April 1, 2003.
94. Reuters dispatch, Capetown, April 9, 2003.
95. Yerodia Ndombasi for the former government, Jean-Pierre Bemba for the MLC, Azarias Ruberwa for the RCD-G, and Arthur Z’Ahidi Ngoma for the unarmed opposition.
96. La Libre Belgique, April 29, 2003. The president used the occasion to pardon about seven hundred political detainees. But none of the accused in the murder trial of his father were included in the pardon.
97. IRIN dispatch, Kinshasa, April 28, 2003.
98. Still, it did not work in the case of a very serious crisis, as it became painfully clear during the Bukavu fighting of 2004.
99. They were the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, the media watchdog Haute Autorité des Médias, the National Human Rights Observatory, and the National Electoral Commission.
100. IRIN dispatch, Kinshasa, May 18, 2004.
101. On March 28, 2004, some former DSP soldiers coming from Brazzaville, and then on June 10 an attempt by disgruntled Balubakat, who felt that Joseph was not enough on their side.
102. Interview with Adonya Ayebare, Dar-es-Salaam, December 2003. This is one reason Rwarakabije did not manage to bring back many of his men into Rwanda with him: his rallying the government was seen by them as the continuation of a strategy of personal enrichment.
103. Senators and members of Parliament were earning $2,000 a month and each vice president had a total budget (salary plus expenses) of $5.5 million a year in a country where the average salary, for the man lucky enough to be employed, averaged $6 a month. Le Potentiel, September 18,2003.
104. Veteran UDPS chief Etienne Tschisekedi seemed irresolute and contradictory in his strategy. He had refused to participate in the Electoral Commission and was calling for a boycott of the whole process, while at the same time criticizing its imperfect implementation.
105. IRIN dispatch, Kinshasa, January 11, 2005.
106. IRIN dispatch, Mbuji-Mayi, May 17, 2005.
107. See Reuters dispatch, June 28, 2005; IRIN dispatch, June 30, 2005; AFP dispatch, July 2, 2005. Voter registration, a tremendously difficult exercise in a country of 2,345,000 square kilometers with poor communications, started on June 20 and people wanted to feel they were not making the huge effort to register in vain.
108. The text of the constitution, too complicated and technical to elicit gut reactions, was almost irrelevant. Voters voted “yes” or “no” as a show of support or rejection for the transition politicians, particularly President Joseph Kabila.
109. Reuters dispatch, Kinshasa, January 4, 2006. The old fighter seemed oddly unresponsive to the new political environment, and the often-heard remark about him was that “he was frozen in 1992,” the year of his greatest glory, when he had become prime minister of the Conférence Nationale Souveraine during Mobutu’s aborted “democratic transition.”
110. IRIN dispatch, Kinshasa, February 22,2006.
111. Given the importance of the tribe and especially its high profile in the public administration, durably alienating it is a dangerous development.
112. J. C. Willame, Les faiseurs de paix au Congo: Gestion d’une crise internationale dans un état sous tutelle (Brussels: GRIP/Editions Complexe, 2007).
113. Even adding the civilian northern supporters of the MLC and the Banyarwanda supporters of the RCD, one does not reach a critical mass of the population representing a civil war constituency on the model of the Sudan or even of Biafra.
114. For a good overview of the postconflict security problems, see the ICG report Security Sector Reform in the Congo, Brussels, February 2006.
115. Which might have been intentional since precise security arrangements might have been impossible to negotiate at the time without dragging an already overlong process into further delays.
116. In international newspeak, “DDRRR”
means Disarmament, Demobilization, Repatriation, Reinstallation, and Reinsertion; “SSR” means Security Sector Reform. They logically should follow each other, but they often overlap.
117. Even in the world of the notoriously ill-disciplined Congolese soldiery, Mayi Mayi fighters were the worst. Initially formed by volunteers who wanted to protect the civilians from foreign invading armies and their proxies, they ended up preying on the population they were supposed to protect and proved at times as bad a scourge as the invaders. They tend to be heavily segmented according to their tribal recruitment.
118. After Sun City the belligerents even tried to pretend that their combined forces numbered 340,000.
119. The biggest component is Belgian, with a strong participation from France, Angola, and South Africa. An EU mission (EUSEC) acts as a kind of supervisory body. In addition to its peacekeeping role MONUC has tried to have a hand in FARDC integration, but its quick officer turnover has considerably limited its effectiveness.
120. Soldiers often live in substandard housing and diseases are rife among the troops due to a very poor medical system.
121. See next section on the elections.
122. In a play on the phonetics of the French acronym, PIR, the always cheeky Kinshasa public calls it “Pire que tout” (Worse than all).
123. I was an eyewitness to the debacle. But the “Angolan” units, often made up of Portuguese-speaking former Zairian refugees in Angola, are definitely of a tougher (perhaps too tough) material.
124. For a quick overview, see G. Prunier, “The ‘Ethnic’ Conflict in the Ituri,” 199–202.
125. Floribert Njabu and two of his aides were arrested in early March and Thomas Lubanga two weeks later. IRIN dispatch, March 22, 2005. The arrest of the long-feared UPC warlord acted as a positive psychological shock in the Ituri. Chief Kahwa Pandro Manga was then arrested in April for trying to stop disarmament. IRIN dispatch, April 12, 2005.
126. IRIN dispatch, Bunia. April 8, 2005.
127. See ICG, Katanga: The Congo’s Forgotten Crisis, Brussels, January 2006.
128. New Vision, December 29–30, 2005.
129. There were representatives from UPC, FNI, FRPI, and FAPC. The key player was Bosco Taganda, a North Kivu Tutsi friend of General Nkunda who had also sent members of his Mouvement de Libération de l’Est du Congo, even if those usually tended to be closer to Rwanda. Interview with Jason Stearns, Nairobi, November 2006.
130. New Vision, March 24, 2006. The LRA maintained a shadowy presence in the Garamba National Park in the extreme north of the DRC. Its capacity to attack Uganda in any serious way from there was almost nil and it mostly preyed on the few local inhabitants. But at the same time Mouvement Révolutlonnaire Congolais guerrillas were wreaking havoc from the Ituri down to Rutshuru in North Kivu.
131. By then the Rwandese had withdrawn into a much more neutral stance and they direcred a lot of their complaints at the Kampala representatives, voicing considerable doubts about the Peoples Redemption Army they were accused of sponsoring against Uganda and whose existence was strongly in doubt.
132. New Vision, May 30, 2006.
133. For an excellent study of the FDLR, see Multi Country Demobilization and Recovery Program, Opportunities and Constraints for the Disarmament and Repatriation of Foreign Armed Groups in the DRC (FDLR, FNL and ADF/NALU), written by Hans Romkema, De Vennhoop, April 2007.
134. RPF officers only had to consult their own memories to remember how an organized military force outside of Rwanda could use favorable circumstances to attack and overthrow an embattled regime in Kigali.
135. In addition, MONUC troops were a mixed bag, with very different combat capabilities. For their at times lackluster military performance, see the hard piece published in the Telegraph (London), May 1, 2005.
136. There were 50,045 polling stations spread over the huge national territory, and with its sixty helicopters, 104 aircraft, and thousands of vehicles MONUC was a key element in helping out. As Bill Swing liked to boast, MONUC was by then the second largest airline in Africa after South African Airways.
137. The FAA troops were in Soyo facing Muanda, in Ango Ango facing Matadi, and in the Cabinda Enclave facing Tshela. Security reports also detected the presence of Angolan Secret Service men in plainclothes gathering information. JMAC, Report on Bas Congo, October 2006.
138. But he ran a very tight campaign and was to emerge reinforced and strengthened from the elections.
139. Mbusa Nyamwisi, who had initially been a “serious” candidate, desisted shortly before the last lap of the campaign and chose to back Joseph Kabila. This was an important switch since Mbusa Nyamwisi could bring him the support of the so-called independent republic of Butembo, that is, of the well-organized Nande networks.
140. These were the words used by Roman Catholic priests in Bas Congo who had been preaching in church against voting for the president.
141. Africa Confidential 47, no. 16 (August 4,2006).
142. Confidential interview with a MONUC officer, Kinshasa, November 2006. Such a move would have been a disaster since this was exactly what Bemba was hoping for to have a legitimate recourse to extralegal means.
143. These disgraceful events seem to have been typical of the degree of confusion and low professionalism of the “security” forces. Contrary to what was later asserted, if the presidential camp had wanted to kill Bemba, there would have been better and more discreet ways of doing it than shooting up his house when it was full of foreign diplomats.
144. Both leading candidates had in fact a somewhat larger reach through the coalitions they had created. But these coalitions, particularly Bemba’s, were fragile, making the creation of a working parliamentary majority (or of a coherent opposition) a real headache.
145. This complicated system, called proportionnelle au plus fort reste (proportional vote, with the seat going to the candidate with the highest rest), had been designed by a Lebanese UN voting expert. Because of both his personal cultural inclination and UN pressures (originating in the United States) hoping to favor the Kinyarwanda RCD electorate, this system had contributed to fragmentation without independent representation and to the multiplication of bogus “small parties.”
146. Jean-Pierre Bemba has a rough and at times violent personality. His overbearing manner tended to alienate potential allies, and many of this top men (Jose Endundo, Olivier Kamitatu, Alexis Thambwe) were driven away from the MLC by their leader’s authoritarian streak.
147. IRIN dispatch, Kinshasa, November 16, 2006.
148. IRIN dispatch, Kinshasa, November 17, 2006.
149. IRIN dispatch, Kinshasa, November 21, 2006.
150. He pretended having only 800 men when he probably had around 1,200; he then promised to evacuate 600 and in the end moved only about 100. Interview with Bill Swing, Kinshasa, April 2007,
151. ICG, Congo: Consolidating the Peace, Brussels, July 2007, 7.
152. Governors and vice governors, like the senators, were elected indirectly by the regional assemblies. They all bought their “victories” (even those who could have won without corruption), because the regional MPs told them that even if they were popular, this was not a reason to avoid paying.
153. Luanda did not want the BDK anywhere near power in Bas Congo because the sect stands for a restoration of the old Kongo kingdom, an event that, if it came near realization, would trigger secessionist movements in both the Brazzaville-Congo and Angola itself, where Bakongo tribesmen live in large numbers. The areas that would be affected are regions of considerable oil production.
154. Figure obtained by the author in April 2007 from three Kinshasa NGOs after visiting the city morgues. The government never released any official figure.
155. The former CIAT (it no longer existed officially but still functioned informally) later kept insisting on Bemba’s return as a sign of democratic normalization. That would have been symbolically true, even though in reality it would probably prove more of a headache than anything else, g
iven the man’s vision of his role as opposition leader.
156. The rescheduling did not apply to the whole debt but only to the approximately $9 billion owed to the multilateral institutions.
157. This corresponded to the amount of the arrears accumulated since Zaire was suspended from the IMF in 1992 for nonpayment.
Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe Page 70
