The Shackled Continent

by Robert Guest

  That was the situation when I was cowering in Kinshasa. The city would certainly have fallen but for the arrival, at the last minute, of some powerful allies. The armies of Zimbabwe, Angola, and Namibia arrived with fighter-bombers and relatively well-trained troops. They quickly repelled the rebels and Rwandans and secured the city. The insurgents dispersed, hiding in bushes and backyards. The ill-disciplined Congolese army was given the task of mopping them up. The resultant killings were more or less random.

  Anyone with thin features or a long nose, traits associated with Tutsis, was at risk. After decades of intermarriage between Tutsis and other tribes, a long nose was not a reliable indicator of anything, but it was enough to condemn many to death. Young men with dust in their hair were assumed to have acquired it marching through the bush. In a city that had had little or no running water for a month, such reasoning was hardly foolproof, but it was good enough for Kabila’s troops. Those unfortunate enough to be caught looking disheveled were beaten or shot. I saw corpses lying on the crumbling pavement, blackened and charred after being doused with gasoline and set ablaze. One suspected rebel was hurled from a bridge in front of a television camera and machine-gunned as he bobbed in the river below.

  After the relief of Kinshasa, the war grew more complex. At one time or another, nine national armies were involved, in alliance with several local rebel groups and militias.

  The four armies that mattered were those of Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, and Zimbabwe. The Rwandans and Ugandans fought against Kabila because, they said, he was helping Rwandan and Ugandan rebels. The Angolans supported Kabila because they thought that was the best way of crushing their own rebels. The Zimbabweans had no obvious reason to be involved but said they wanted to defend the legitimate government of Congo against external aggression.

  There were other, smaller players: Namibia, Chad, and Burundi all sent troops at one time or another, and Sudan briefly sent some transport planes. Hutu militias fought against the Rwandans. The Mai-Mai, a Congolese warrior cult whose members sometimes charge into battle naked, started off supporting the rebels but then switched sides and started slaughtering Tutsis. Both Rwanda and Uganda backed their own puppet rebel movements. Uganda backed at least two.

  Finally, there were mercenaries, the rough and reckless types who show up in every African war. The government hired a small number of eastern Europeans to fly planes and operate complex military hardware. On their days off, they could be seen relaxing by the pool at the Grand Hotel in Kinshasa “wearing nothing but the Y-fronts of their native Ukraine.”6

  Confused? So was everyone else. All but the bravest aid workers fled Congo in terror. Outsiders despaired of restoring peace. In 2000, when South Africa first considered sending peacekeepers to Congo, a cartoonist summed up why this might be tricky. A peacekeeper at a road block in Congo sees the tip of a rocket-propelled grenade launcher poking out of a bush. “Halt,” he cries: “Who goes there?” “Congolese Rally for Democracy,” comes the reply. “Hang on a minute,” says the peacekeeper, and he turns to consult a chart of parties to the war, of which seven are listed as “friend,” eight are listed as “foe,” and ten are listed as “not sure.”7

  Pillage delays peace

  The war reached a stalemate in 1999. Talks in Lusaka, the Zambian capital, produced a peace pact that no one honored. The main stumbling block was that most of the commanders in the field were making fortunes by looting Congo’s mineral wealth.

  In the east, the Rwandan and Ugandan armies dug diamonds and cobalt, chopped down trees, slaughtered apes for bushmeat, harvested ivory, and grabbed everything else they could carry away. A bustling diamond market sprang up in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, although Rwanda produced no stones of its own.

  In June 2000, Ugandan and Rwandan troops, supposedly allies, came to blows over the spoils. For six days, they blasted each other in the city of Kisangani, destroying much of the town center. In April 2001, a UN report accused Rwanda and Uganda of “the systematic and systemic” exploitation of Congo’s natural wealth, in particular diamonds, copper, cobalt, gold, and coltan, a rare and costly mineral used in the manufacture of mobile telephones and computer-game consoles.

  The report alleged that presidents Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Paul Kagame of Rwanda were “on the verge of becoming the godfathers of the illegal exploitation of natural resources and the continuation of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” It did not claim that the presidents were looting Congo themselves but accused them of failing to prevent their associates – including Museveni’s younger brother – from doing so. It called for sanctions on both countries.8 Both presidents denied the allegations.

  Kabila’s allies did well out of the war, too. Zimbabwean and Angolan commanders demanded, and were granted, the rights to mine precious minerals in areas they defended. Angola formed a joint oil venture with the Congolese government. South of the town of Mbuji Mayi, Zimbabwean troops guarded a diamond concession worth an estimated $1 billion, which was awarded in 2000 to a firm partly owned by the Zimbabwean ruling party. The costs of Zimbabwe’s military adventure in Congo were borne by Zimbabwean taxpayers. The profits went largely to President Mugabe’s cronies. A UN report in 2002 accused top Zimbabwean officers of the “organised theft” of

  Congolese assets.9

  Senior officers in all armies ran small patches of Congo as their own private estates. Ordinary soldiers and guerrillas eked out their rations, if they received any, by robbing Congolese villages. Life grew so frightening for Congolese peasants that millions of them abandoned their cassava crops and hid in the bush, subsisting on wild fruit and insects. In the first four years the Congo war caused an estimated 2 million premature deaths, mostly through starvation and disease.10

  In January 2001, Laurent Kabila was assassinated. A bodyguard named Rashidi Kasereka, one of whose jobs was to announce new visitors and to whisper messages in the president’s ear, entered Kabila’s office and asked to speak to him. As Kabila lent forward to listen, Kasereka shot him once through the neck and twice through the stomach. Why he did it, or who put him up to it, is not known: Kasereka was himself killed within minutes.11

  Kabila was replaced by his twenty-nine-year-old son Joseph, who showed signs of being less truculent than his father. In July 2002, he signed a peace deal with most of his adversaries, which led to the majority of foreign troops being pulled out of Congo. Even the Rwandans left, although no one would be surprised if they came back. Joseph Kabila created a transitional government and promised eventually to hold elections. Peace, of a sort, returned to about two thirds of the country, but not to eastern Congo, where a confusion of militia groups continued to rape, rob, and occasionally eat hapless villagers.

  I visited Bukavu, a stunning lakeside town in eastern Congo, in September 2003. The town itself was quiet, as there was a force of UN peacekeepers encamped by the water’s edge, and the rebel group that ran Bukavu was nominally at peace with the central government in Kinshasa. But in the surrounding hills armed bands plundered unchecked.

  I spoke to peasants in nearby villages and heard a hundred variations on the same story. Charlotte, a petite lady with chunky earrings, told me how men with guns had broken into her home and forced her to carry all her belongings – her clothes, her children’s clothes, her cooking pots, her mattress – to their forest hideout. When she protested, one of them broke her wrist. Then two of them raped her. She struggled home, but, she said, “For a long time after that, I felt pain everywhere, in my back, all over. And after two months, another group of armed men came, and stole everything that the first group had missed.”

  To avoid a similar fate, most of the villagers I met said they abandoned their huts at night and slept in the forest or in crevices below river banks. But, according to Barhingenga Mujijima, a small farmer, “now that the bandits no longer find anyone to rob in the villages, they’ve started looking in the fields and round about.” Mujijima said he now walked six kilometers from his home t
o the nearest garrison town every night, where he slept in the street, and then six kilometers back to his fields every morning. This daily trudge left less time and energy for growing food, he said, so he never had enough to eat.

  Riches without effort – for the few

  Throughout the world, mineral wealth tends to corrupt. Part of the problem is that mines cannot move. If the Chinese government tried to plunder Hong Kong’s financial district, the bankers would simply move to Singapore. Gold and diamonds, by contrast, must be extracted where they are found – meaning that politicians can grab a big slice of miners’ profits without fear that the miners will emigrate.

  Governments that depend on natural resources for most of their income are usually venal and despotic. Most oil-rich Gulf states are, and African oligarchies, such as Nigeria, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea, have a wretched record, too. But perhaps the country where oil has proven most destructive is Angola.

  Angola is the world’s ninth-largest oil producer, but most Angolans are poorer than they were when the stuff was first discovered off the country’s Atlantic coast. Oil fueled a civil war that left Angola scorched and starving, while allowing a tiny elite to grow fantastically rich.

  I caught a glimpse of how Angola’s Big Men live in 1999, on a veranda outside the Hotel Panorama in Luanda, the capital. It was the scene of the Miss Luanda beauty contest. On a smooth white stage, a procession of gorgeous women twirled and posed, first in ball gowns, then in swimsuits. Most had big hair, all wore explosively loud make-up. Against a backdrop of softly lit palm trees, they sashayed past the judges in a whirl of pink and blue silk. On a dais to the left stood the prize: a shiny new car.

  The audience sported emerald necklaces, Prada handbags, and fat fistfuls of gold rings. One man wore a red crushed-velvet suit over his paunch. There was some excellent fresh lobster on the buffet and as much Cutty Sark whisky as the crowd could drink.

  It was night-time, so when I looked past the stage and across the bay below, I could see only a few lights winking in the distance. The air was pleasantly warm, and since I could not see the city, with its sagging shacks and mounds of uncollected trash, it felt as if I were in some gilded resort: Saint Tropez, say, or Mauritius. Daylight spoiled the illusion.

  I visited some of Angola’s less fortunate citizens in a nearby refugee camp. I smelt the place before I saw it. Children squatted by the dusty track that led there, tattered shorts around their ankles, faces wincing from diarrhea. When the car I was riding in rounded a dune, I saw ahead a village of drab, khaki tents nestling in the sand.

  Twenty-five hundred souls were squeezed into Campo Malanje, a haven for Angolans who had fled from fighting in the hinterland. Most refugees were peasants. UNITA, Angola’s rebel movement, had deliberately driven them off their land and into the cities in the hope that they would become a burden on the government. They arrived with heavy iron hoes and centuries of agricultural know-how. But the camp was crowded, so each family typically had only enough land to grow a few dozen stalks of corn or cassava. Everyone in the camp was hungry, and the sick lay limply on filthy mats outside their tents.

  Angola’s civil war started in 1961 as a struggle against Portuguese colonialism. In 1975, the Portuguese left in a hurry, and Angola became a Cold War battlefield. A Marxist group, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), seized power but was challenged by the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). Apartheid South Africa, terrified of having a Soviet satellite on its doorstep, sent an army to help UNITA. The United States, equally keen to block Soviet expansion, sent weapons and cash. The MPLA, meanwhile, was supported by thousands of Cuban troops and supplied with arms by the Soviet Union.

  When the Cold War ended, Angola should have found peace but did not. A ceasefire was reached in 1991, followed by elections. But when UNITA lost, its leader, Jonas Savimbi, cried foul. The fighting continued, almost without pause, until February 2002, when Savimbi was shot dead. More than a million Angolans died out of a population estimated at 13 million in the late 1990s. An estimated 1.7 million were forced to flee their homes. Many found themselves living for years in places like Campo Malanje.

  Why did Angola’s war last so long? A clue can be found by looking at Portugal’s other large African colony, Mozambique. Like Angola, Mozambique endured a bloody anti-colonial war and then, when the Portuguese left, an even bloodier civil war. The country was blasted back into the bronze age as its Soviet-backed government fought anti-communist rebels, armed first by white supremacists from Rhodesia, then by similar folks from South Africa. But unlike Angola’s civil war, Mozambique’s ended shortly after the Cold War did.

  Why the difference? It doubtless helped that as apartheid crumbled South Africa, the regional giant, put pressure on both Mozambican parties to make peace. (South African diplomats tried the same in Angola but failed.) It also helped that the Mozambican leaders were more reasonable people than their Angolan counterparts. Savimbi, particularly, was determined not to share power with anyone else. This was a man who had his own lieutenants burned alive, along with their families, if he suspected them of disloyalty.

  When he failed to win the presidency of Angola, Savimbi went back to war. A story from his youth, which may be apocryphal but has the ring of truth, casts light on why. Fred Bridgland, a biographer who once admired him, tells how when Savimbi was a boy, he owned a football. The missionaries at his school arranged a match between their students and some white boys from a neighboring town. Savimbi provided the ball, and the white boys brought a Portuguese referee. The white team surged ahead. Savimbi accused the referee of bias, picked up the ball, and stomped off with it, spoiling the match.12

  Savimbi’s personality was not, however, the only force that prevented peace from breaking out. The crucial difference between Mozambique and Angola was that Mozambique had nothing much worth stealing.

  Angola’s precious curse

  A few miles off Angola’s Atlantic coast, oil rigs rise above the waves. Unlike most other structures in Angola, they are in good repair. Smooth steel spars fit neatly into concrete bases. Engineers in hard hats walk briskly about their business. Everything works.

  Angola’s oil industry has so little connection to the mainland that it might as well be in another country. Most of the oil is under the sea, so most of the action takes place offshore. The industry accounts for over 90 percent of Angola’s exports but employs only 10,000 people. Western oil firms provide most of the capital and expertise. Expatriate technicians arrive in Luanda and fly straight out to the rigs in helicopters, rarely stopping for long on Angolan soil.

  Angola’s offshore wells disgorged 800,000 barrels a day in 2000, and production was expected to double by 2004. Oil accounts for half of GDP and provides the Angolan government with almost all of its taxes. But many ordinary Angolans do not even know that their country has oil. They never see the rigs, and they never see any benefits from the petrodollars, either.

  On the contrary, oil kept Angola’s civil war blazing long after the original reasons for fighting were forgotten. Both sides wanted the oil. Ultimately, the government won the war because it already controlled the oil wells and therefore had more money to pay its troops and buy guns. But it did not exactly hurry towards victory, not least because so many politicians grew so wealthy from prolonging the fighting. The war gave them an excuse (“national security”) for secrecy, which made it easy to pocket huge kickbacks on arms deals or simply to funnel oil receipts into offshore accounts. By one estimate, in the late 1990s between a third and a half of public spending in Angola was not properly accounted for.13

  UNITA, meanwhile, bought its supplies with diamonds, mined by virtual slaves in areas the rebels controlled. For a while, UNITA grew rich from diamond smuggling, earning an estimated $300 million to $500 million annually. But after the turn of the millennium, a global ban on buying UNITA’s gems began to bite. At the same time, the Angolan army forcibly evacuated peasants from areas where UNITA o
perated, so that the rebels would have no one to steal food from. By the time the government found and killed Savimbi, his followers were starving. Even the UNITA leaders who negotiated a ceasefire in 2002 were so malnourished that their belts were threaded twice around their waists.

  Chasing the spoils of peace

  If peace holds, Angola has a chance to recover. But it will not be easy. The country needs honest and benevolent government, but war has allowed a rather different type of leader to rise to the top. Corruption blights almost everything that the state does. New businesses cannot start without paying bribes, nor can goods move through Angolan ports without pay-offs. Even the supply of subsidized textbooks to schoolchildren has been tarnished. Officials have reportedly pocketed the subsidy and sold the books to parents at ten times what they were supposed to charge.14 An anti-corruption commission, established in 1996, has done nothing.

  Because the government has no need to raise money from sources other than oil, it has done little or nothing to nurture other parts of the economy. Angola’s coffee plantations withered long ago. So did Angolan industry, apart from oil, diamonds, and the firms that supply oilmen and diamond miners with equipment, hotel beds, and so on.

  Since nothing much is made in Angola, everything of value has to be imported. When I first boarded a flight from South Africa to Angola, I had trouble reaching my seat. The big wives of Angola’s Big Men were blocking the aisles with microwave ovens and cramming television sets into the overhead luggage compartments.

  Doing business in Angola is tough. Miners and oil firms have to import everything from mechanical diggers to fresh vegetables to keep their expatriate managers happy. If machinery breaks down, it often has to be sent 2,000 kilometers to South Africa to be fixed. Firms have popped up that specialize in moving supplies through Angola’s ports without losing too much to thieves or crooked officials. I visited one such firm, called Global Mining Support Services, run by a hard bunch of former officers of the South African army. The manager, Cobus Viljoen, told me that his diamond-digger clients even wanted their guard dogs flown in from Johannesburg. The local pooches were too scrawny and timid, he said, to be of use.