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

by Gerard Prunier

  158. See, for example, the article by J. P. Mbelu, “Les options fondamentales du budget: Une menace pour le Congo,” Le Potentiel, June 26, 2007. In fact Muziro, Finance Minister Athanase Matenda Kyelu, and Central Bank Governor Jean-Claude Masangu were engaged in a desperate struggle to get for Congo the still elusive Heavily Indebted Poor Countries status it has been running after since 2002.

  159. According to the new constitution voted in December 2005, the number of provinces has to be brought from eleven to twenty-six and their budgets will be financed directly by the taxes they raise, which, instead of being centralized in Kinshasa, should see 40 percent of their amount kept directly at the source. The problem is, of course, 40 percent of what? Some provinces will be very poor, and some taxes, particularly those paid to the Direction des Grandes Entreprises, will be excluded from the locally retained 40 percent.

  160. Mobutu deeply distrusted honest civil servants (there still were some) because he suspected them of using their honesty to further oppositionist political agendas. He did not tolerate corruption, he actively encouraged it.

  161. See chapter 4.

  162. Interview with the mining lawyer Marcel Yabili, Lubumbashi, April 2007.

  163. There is a large and growing literature on the subject. See Global Witness, Rush and Ruin: The Devastating Mineral Trade in Southern Katanga, DRC, London, September 2004; Global Witness, Reforming the DRC Diamond Sector, London, June 2006; Global Witness, Digging in Corruption, London, July 2006; Human Rights Watch, The Curse of Gold, New York, 2005; Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rapport de la commission spéciale chargée d’examiner la validité des conventions à caractère économique et financier conclus pendant les guerres de 1996–1997 et de 1998, Kinshasa, June 2005. Known as the Luntundula Report, this report is available on the Web but has never been officially published.

  164. The Kabwelulu Commission’s findings were made public in March 2008, after five months of behind-the-scenes bargaining with the companies had ended in deadlock. The result is probably going to be a series of protracted court cases between the Congolese state and the big mining groups.

  165. Later bought by the even bigger Freeport MacMoran for $26.6 billion.

  166. See Global Witness, Same Old Story: A Background Study on Natural Resources in the DRC, London, June 2004.

  167. This is a recurrent shortcoming in the approach of the international community when it deals with Africa. Elections and “peace agreements” are too often taken as an end in themselves, without factoring in the context within which they start and later develop. The 1993 Burundi elections were one of the factors leading to the civil war; the Sudanese so-called Comprehensive Peace Agreement (January 2005) is unraveling as I write; and the Darfur Peace Agreement (May 2006) did not for one moment stop the violence in that part of the Sudan. Legal constructs are too often mistaken for realities. Although the DRC elections were quite real, they were not sufficient to directly address the whole of the Congolese reality.

  168. See chapter 2, “The Refugees and the Kivu Cockpit.”

  169. S. Wolters and H. Boshoff, Situation Report, ISS (Pretoria), July 2006.

  170. For example, the Mundundu 40 group in North Kivu, which, although it has many Hutu fighters, has made an informal but efficient alliance with Laurent Nkunda’s Tutsi forces.

  171. IRIN dispatch, Bunia, January 3, 2006.

  172. Thus the thuggish “Cobra Matata” (a nom de guerre) who became a FARDC colonel in November 2006, barely more than two months after attacking the FARDC at Cingo, sixty kilometers to the south of Bunia. See Le Potentiel, October 5, 2006, for the attack; IRIN dispatch, Kinshasa, November 30, 2006, for the promotion.

  173. ICG, Congo: Consolidating the Peace, 14.

  174. DRC human rights organizations protested against the appointment as FARDC colonels of two notorious war criminals. IRIN dispatch, Kinshasa, October 11, 2006.

  175. On March 26, 2007, the ADF crossed into Uganda and attacked Bundibungyo, losing thirty-four of its men. This was the third clash of this kind in a week. New Vision, March 27, 2007.

  176. Interview with Bill Swing, Kinshasa, April 2007.

  177. As already mentioned (note 134), the best study on all these “foreign” armed groups is the Multi Country Demobilization and Recovery Program’s Opportunities and Constraints for the Disarmament and Repatriation of Foreign Armed Groups in the DRC (FDLR, FNL and ADF/NALU).

  178. Se chapter 8, “The South African Breakthrough.”

  179. Nkunda is very resentful about his treatment because several of his accomplices in the 2002 Kisangani massacres (Gabriel Amisi, Sylvain Mbuki, Obed Rwibasira) not only were not charged but received high positions in the FARDC.

  180. But not brassage. In mixage the former rebels are put together with other types of troops but their units are not dissolved, they are juxtaposed. In brassage they would have been melted down and even geographically reshuffled.

  181. He reportedly said in October 2006 at the time of the elections, “Ruberwa f****d me over.” Interview in Bukavu, November 2006.

  182. About 1,500 in the “Grand Nord,” his main battle corps of 8,000 in the “Petit Nord,” and another 3,000 in South Kivu.

  183. On June 12 UN Human Rights Chief Louise Arbour solemnly warned that “Central Africa was on the brink of yet another major conflict.”

  184. Mostly the firing of the 8th Military Region, Gen. Louis Ngizo, who was replaced on May 15 by Gen. Vainqueur Mayala, the man who had managed to slowly squeeze FNI into resilience in the Ituri.

  185. March 2008.

  186. For the past eight years, the Butembo area and the surrounding countryside has, for all practical purposes, been an independent political and economic unit. Although there has never been talk of secession, the “Republic” has its own tax system, produces its own electricity, maintains its own roads, and pays its own militia. The “government” is run jointly by the Catholic and Protestant bishops, with representatives of civil society. But it takes part in the national political life and has elected members at the Parliament in Kinshasa.

  187. All participants are supposed to get a $135/day per diem, which adds up to quite a bit since a lot of the international financing for the conference fell through at the last minute. The per diems were essential because for once there is genuine participation of the civil society, which means ordinary people who are usually flat broke.

  188. Citizenship laws in the Congo have been a headache since independence and have been changed several times. Each time, the change, although theoretically “national” and “objective,” was in fact completely political and driven by the need to deal with the Rwandophone population of the east.

  189. See chapter 2, “The Refugees and the Kivu Cockpit.”

  190. In addition, the Rwandese Hutu have largely “gone native”: they marry local women, live in local villages, raise their children locally, and till the local fields. The problem is that they are also the friendly neighborhood local killers and rapists.

  191. This is the title of a book edited by Richard Banegas and J. P. Chrétien, published by Hurst in 2008.

  192. Conference subcommittees were still at work in March 2008.

  193. Kigali has not sent a full official team to Goma, but only observers.

  194. And by the FDLR.

  195. Kabarebe and the internal opposition are the worse for Kagame. But on top of that he has to contend with his diaspora enemies (J. P. Mugabe, the king, Sebarenzi), with marginalized RPF (Kayumba Nyamwasa, who is ambassador to India; Karenzi Karake, who has been sent to Darfur), and with rogue elements of his security apparatus (cf. the December 2007 “legal limbo jailbreak” of Security Chief Patrick Karegeya, who had been detained without trial for the past two years). Compared to these Tutsi threats, his Hutu FDLR enemies in the Congo are negligible.

  Chapter 10

  1. This Kinyarwanda word means a strong but variable wind with unpredictable consequences. It is by that name that the Rwande
se refer to the violent events that marked the end of Belgian rule.

  2. There is a distinct parallel with the case of the Palestinian refugees after 1948 or later with that of the Pashtun Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Their “problem” refused to go away.

  3. For many this was not an obvious move. The men who later were to run Rwanda, including President Kagame himself, had never even seen “their” country till they were in their thirties.

  4. For the connection between the Rwandese refugee situation and the Ugandan political world, see G. Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (London: Hurst, 1995).

  5. They had done so before, in Cameroon in the early 1960s and in Chad in the 1970s and 1980s, without suffering any adverse consequences.

  6. This poses the problem of Francis Fukuyama’s famous book The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). Fukuyama’s mistake was not so much to have announced the “end of history,” a point that could be defended, but to have surmised that since the developed world had come to this fateful moment, the rest of the planet, which functioned along radically different lines, would simply follow suit. In other words, he overestimated the depth of the cultural reach of globalization. What happened on September 11, 2001, was probably the strongest way that point could be made. In a less momentous way, Africa’s continental war fits within the same cognitive dissonance: unassimilated historical elements that have survived the homogenization of economic globalization suddenly challenge the dominant worldview.

  7. There is an interesting comparison to be made with the combination of Western hubris and ignorance of local circumstances that led President George W. Bush and his administration to invade Iraq in 2003 in the hope of provoking a kind of democratic shock therapy for the whole Middle East.

  8. The core group of the New Leaders was made up of Meles Zenawi, Issayas Afeworqi, Yoweri Museveni, and Paul Kagame. Their positively viewed associates were Eduardo dos Santos, Thabo Mbeki, and even for a while Laurent-Désiré Kabila, all of them supposedly “reformed communist” sinners. They were first promoted by Dan Connell and Frank Smyth in “Africa’s New Bloc,” Foreign Affairs, March–April 1998, and later taken down a peg or two by Marina Ottaway in “Africa’s New Leaders: African Solution or African Problem?” Current History, May 1998.

  9. The rwandese génocidaires were ceaselessly described as “tropical Nazis” and their evil was assigned the same founding role in the supposed new African episteme as the German Nazis had for the Western world. Just as post-Nazi Europe had been the victorious battlefield of democracy, post-Rwanda genocide (and postapartheid Africa) was going to usher in a new era for the continent.

  10. It is amusing that the most enthusiastic supporters of the New Leaders paradigm were both former Leftists like Claire Short, with a soft spot for what they saw as a modern reincarnation of their old beliefs, and those most aggressive promoters of the new triumphant globalized capitalist orthodoxy, the IMF and the Word Bank.

  11. For an introduction to their nature and their problems, see Mauro DeLorenzo, “Notes for a Historical Ethnography of the Banyamulenge,” paper presented at the Conference on Grassroots Perspectives on the DRC Conflict, University of Ghent, Belgium, May 26–28, 2004.

  12. Upon assuming power in January 1986 President Museveni said, “This is not a simple changing of the guard, this is a new dispensation.” But twelve years later the fact that 56 percent of Uganda’s budget was financed by aid, that it remained plagued by a host of minor insurgencies, and that its “no-party democracy” system was more of an enlightened despotism than a real democracy was systematically shoved aside by an international community that desperately wanted at least one African success story. This deliberate blindness was probably not so much willed for the sake of Africa itself as an attempt to show that the new quasi-magic economic recipes that triumphant free-market economists thought they had discovered were absolutely right and universally applicable.

  13. The Somali invasion of the Ethiopian Ogaden in 1977 and the Tanzanian occupation of Uganda in 1979 were the only cases. But both were short, sharp, and motivated by clearly limited war aims.

  14. Sudanese support for the Eritrean guerrilla movements, Ethiopian support for southern Sudanese rebels, Somali support for southern Ethiopian insurgents, Zairian support for the anticommunist Angolan guerrillas, Libyan support for warring Chadian factions, and Liberian insurgents, to name but a few.

  15. As the Bakongo can be between Angola and the Congo or the Sara between Chad and the Central African Republic. These cases are different in that the divided tribe has no central connection with a single ethnic state next door.

  16. The same phenomenon was used in other parts of the world by ideologically very diverse states such as post–World War I Greece (when it attacked Turkey to defend the Greek Aegean diaspora), Hitler’s Germany (with its aggressive defense of the Volkdeutsch in central Europe), and Turkey (when it invaded Cyprus in 1974, claiming to protect the Turkish minority after the failed attempt at an Athens-sponsored Enosis). Serb military action in Bosnia in the 1990s was based on a similar rationale.

  17. The large literature on Mobutu’s Zaire tends to focus mostly on political abuse and economic predation. But Mobutu’s only achievement, the creation of a strong feeling of nationalism, perhaps compensatory for the feeling of domestic frustration, has received less attention; for this point, see G. de Villers, De Mobutu à Mobutu: Trente ans de relations Belgique-Zaïre (Brussels: DeBoeck, 1995); Michela Wrong, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo (London: Fourth Estate, 2000).

  18. See Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem, La société zaïroise dans le miroir de son discours religieux (Brussels: CEDAF, 1993).

  19. For a detailed description of this period, see G. de Villers, Zaïre: La transition manqué (1990–1997) (Brussels: CEDAF, 1997).

  20. The Banyamulenge, having long ago “Tutsified” themselves, were automatically seen as an RPF fifth column.

  21. This was made explicit by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2006 when he said that Africa’s situation was “a blemish on the conscience of the world.”

  22. This was of course a godsend for the RPF regime. So when the Rwandese were finally forced to evacuate the Congo and were pushed back to their overcrowded microstate, they tried to parlay this one asset into an attempt at turning Rwanda into some kind of Singapore. They managed to enlist foreign acolytes into that project, at times reaching amusing levels of sycophancy; see, for example, Colin Waugh, Paul Kagame and Rwanda (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland Publishing, 2004); Stephen Kinzer, “Big Gamble in Rwanda,” New York Review of Books, March 29, 2007.

  23. In a seminal paper on war and peace in Africa Ken Menkhaus remarked, “One of the recurring problems hampering external interventions in Africa has been misdiagnoses of the crises.” “A Sudden Outbreak of Tranquillity: Assessing the New Peace in Africa,” Fletcher Forum on World Affairs 28, no. 2 (May 2004). The Western refusal to take African history seriously usually goes hand in hand with the “ancient ethnic hatreds” approach: in spite of today’s politically correct discourse, Africa is still often unconsciously seen by foreigners as “prehistorical.” President Sarkozy’s surrealistic speech in Dakar shortly after his election is another proof of this almost unconscious mental attitude.

  24. Recognition of the essential emotional elements overdetermining the Rwanda-Congo historical situation implies in no way adhering to its prejudices on the part of the author.

  25. On the African continent the Angolan civil war and the Eritrean war of independence were the only conflicts to which the “total war” concept was applied.

  26. For studies of such conflicts, see F. Jean and J. C. Rufin, eds., Economie des guerres civiles (Paris: Hachette, 1996) (not available in English, but there is a German version published by Hamburger Verlag in 1999). The only (partial) exception to this privatization was the case of the Angolan army because Angola was the only country involved in the war that had enough
money to pay its own way.

  27. For this, refer to B. Coghlan et al., “Mortality in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: A Nationwide Survey,” Lancet, no. 367 (2006): 44–51

  28. See the subsection on the mining interests.

  29. William Zartman, “To Restore the Congo,” unpublished paper, Washington, DC, February 2000.

  30. William Zartman, interview with IRIN press agency, Washington, DC, February 2001.

  31. This is one of the reasons why U.S. foreign policy has more than ever before taken Israel under its wing, as from one God-chosen people to another. It is for the same reason that the French who feel that “quality of life” is their exclusive preserve cannot stand what they perceive as American arrogance, so similar to theirs in its manifestations, so different in its causes.

  32. Official speech by President Bush Sr. at a White House reception in honor of President Mobutu on June 29, 1989, quoted in Peter J. Schraeder, United States Foreign Policy towards Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).