Congo's civil war: The battle lines are redrawn again

The Economist ^ | 10the June, 2004 | The Economist

[propertius]

Congo

The battle lines are redrawn, again

Jun 10th 2004 | BUKAVU From The Economist print edition

Though the rebels have withdrawn, they haven't given up on war

THE Congolese rebels made no apology for their murder, rape and pillage. But, as they withdrew this week from Bukavu, eastern Congo's biggest town, they did concede that their week-long occupation of it had been a “mistake”. Their leader, Brigadier-General Laurent Nkunda, said he had been “mis-led” into thinking that the national army had been massacring Congolese members of his own Tutsi ethnic group in Bukavu. With that, General Nkunda's columns of Tutsi fighters plodded back into the green hills outside the town, carrying suitcases on their heads and driving herds of cattle before them.

If only the damage wrought by General Nkunda's stunt could be so easily undone. One hundred people were killed, including many civilians, as the rebels fought their way into the town. Shops and houses were looted and women raped. Ethnic tensions are now boiling. Fearing reprisal, thousands of Congolese Tutsis have fled across the nearby border into Tutsi-run Rwanda. But even these sorrows will be quickly forgotten if, as some fear, General Nkunda's raid on Bukavu turns out to have re-ignited Congo's vile civil war.

Its latest phase began in 1998, when Rwanda engineered a rebellion in eastern Congo, then invaded. Seven more African armies joined the fray, on one side or another, spawning yet more rebel groups. Some 3m people died, before the last foreign armies left last year. President Joseph Kabila then concocted a national-unity government with sundry rebel leaders. But in eastern Congo several rebel commanders disobey orders from Kinshasa, Congo's capital, and still look to their former sponsors in Kigali, Rwanda's capital. General Nkunda, for example, who spent several years in the Rwandan army, admits he is in contact with his old comrades, if “only by telephone”.

Rwanda is widely loathed in eastern Congo, which it occupied brutally. As a result, the area is always awash with wild stories of its latest meddling. Yet it is a bit hard to explain General Nkunda's attack on Bukavu unless it was ordered by his former master. The action has drawn hatred on his tribe, widened his rift with Kinshasa, and seemingly won him nothing.

Across eastern Congo, old battle-lines are now being drawn again. As the government's defeated troops marched back into Bukavu in the rebels' wake, they were attacked by another pro-Rwanda militia. Units of Mr Kabila's elite presidential guard, with smart black uniforms and gleaming rocket-launchers, have been spotted arriving at airstrips in eastern Congo. Seizing their chance amid the chaos, a fugitive Rwandan Hutu militia, which fled into Congo after perpetrating the 1994 genocide, kidnapped at least 60 villagers near the eastern Congolese town of Uvira.

Who will stop Congo disintegrating again? Belgium's foreign minister, Louis Michel, has suggested that a European Union force be deployed in Bukavu, following the success of a French-led intervention in the bloody province of Ituri, in north-eastern Congo, last year. But European diplomats say it is unlikely such a force could be raised. That leaves the UN's peacekeeping mission in Congo, which could barely defend its own staff during the recent mayhem. Blaming the blue helmets for Bukavu's fall, mobs attacked the mission's compounds in three towns. In Kinshasa, UN guards shot five protesters dead. In Goma, two South African peacekeepers were killed after their convoy came under fire.

There is confusion over what the peacekeepers are authorised to do to stop further fighting. One senior UN man argued that the UN's mandate in Congo only allows “the use of force to protect civilians, not to protect the peace process”. But if Congo slid back into war, its civilians would certainly suffer most.

Some brave peacekeepers are finding ways around such bureaucracy. During the battle for Bukavu, one South African captain came across a rebel blazing away with a machinegun at no apparent target. “I asked him what the hell he was firing at, and to stop,” the captain said. “He refused. So I said if you don't stop I'll kill you. Ja, then he stopped.” But such confrontations were rare. After one aid worker was raped and another wounded, the peacekeepers instead concentrated on evacuating wounded and threatened civilians and a Canadian punk band, SUM41, which had come to film a music video.

[propertius]

Hmm. Afraid that would play right into the hand of the aggressor -- Rwanda. The Rwandan government is basically hoping for just such a secessionist plan in the Kivus, the region of eastern Congo it illegally occupied for five years. Basically Rwanda is a small, overcrowded country with no natural resources. It has this giant neighbour next door with unimaginable mineral riches. So it invaded. Rwandan troops killed several hundred thousand there and bare the primary culpability for the deaths of millions more.

Paul Kagame's regime in Rwanda is as ugly as Robert Mugabe. He is a dictator who has persecuted and oppressed his own people, Hutus and Tutsis alike and enriched his own ruling clique (none of whom were in Rwanda during the genocide) to the detriment of his people. His economy survives on masses of donor aid given by Western governments who feel guilty about looking on during the genocide. In their naivety, those same governments will be complicit in a new genocide in Rwanda a few years down the line, and in the continued deaths of millions in Congo.

Most of this Western idiocy was led by Britain's former development secretary Clare Short (who stabbed blair in the back over Iraq and is the most irresponsible cabinet minister we have ever had in britain).

"Clare Short is responsible for the deaths of more people than any British cabinet minister since Harold Macmillan sent eastern Europeans back to the Soviet block in the 1950s" is the verdict of one American diplomat I have chatted with over here.

I would suggest two things for starters: Immediate smart sanctions on the Rwandan heirarchy, especially on people like Kagame and Army Chief of Staff James Kaberebe. Sanctions also on Ugandan govt officials and on Tanzanian Foreign Minister Jakaya Kikwete involved in supplying arms and stealing from the country.

Punishment of governments like the Canadian, Belgian, French and Russian administrations that have given tacit backing to unscrupulous Western companies who are plundering as well, and arming rebels to create the conditions conducive to their crimes.

The whole crisis in Zimbabwe stems from this too. Mugabe started to appropriate white farms to distract the population from the financial ruin of his invasion of Congo, which cost 7 million US dollars a day but enriched himself, his family and close cronies like Speaker Manangagwa and white Vichy collaborators and criminals like Billy Rautenbach and Jean-Paul Bredenkamp.

As for Congo itself, you will still always have problems. Like much of Africa it is ethnically divided and totally unprepared for independence, which should never have come until the late 1980s after a sensible transition and training period...

[propertius]

Really, how fascinating. Would love to hear of some of your experiences at the time and waht people were saying of Thsombe, Lumumba et al. Did you ever see the film The Wild Geese, starring Richard Burton, Roger Moore and Richard Harris as white mercenaries, loosely based on the Katanga War of secession?

[dufekin]

Unfortunately, your proposed solution gravely violates the world agreement that the international borders imposed on Africa by the European imperialists at the Congress of Berlin (1888) shall endure forever unto the end of time. This agreement apparently exists to prevent a major war, but I don't know that it's worked.

[Cronos]

Thanks! It's always good to get the facts from the folks who really know it. But you've not anwered what you think would be the way to solve the near-continuous fighting between all the tribes, but then that is an African thing not only limited to the Congo.

[Cronos]

Thanks guys. I don't know too much of sub-saharan africa. Foudn a good site though

[Cronos]

Or here's another one:

In 1884 at the request of Portugal, German chancellor Otto von Bismark called together the major western powers of the world to negotiate questions and end confusion over the control of Africa. Bismark appreciated the opportunity to expand Germany's sphere of influence over Africa and desired to force Germany's rivals to struggle with one another for territory.

What ultimately resulted was a hodgepodge of geometric boundaries that divided Africa into fifty irregular countries. This new map of the continent was superimposed over the one thousand indigenous cultures and regions of Africa. The new countries lacked rhyme or reason and divided coherent groups of people and merged together disparate groups who really did not get along.

[propertius]

No I didn't answer it. If we stopped African countries meddling in the affairs of their neighbours (Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe in Congo, Ethiopia in Somalia, Libya in Chad, Chad in the Central African Republic, Tanzania in Burundi, Guinea in Liberia, Liberia in Sierra Leone, Sierra Leone in Ivory Coast) then there would at least be a chance of starting to sort it out. External forces deliberately fan preexisting tribal tensions to create the atmosphere of uncertainty benefiting the aggressors. The African Union, that noble band of brigands and thieves, must stop giving the nod and the wink to the most evil men on the continent. You have to stop the gluttonous appetite of the autocrats too and you have to get Africans to get on with Africans of other tribes.

The West has got to stop being so indulgent. Africa will never look to solve its own problems if it can continue to blame them on colonialism and globalization. The West should, however, immediately lift subsidies on agricultural goods that stand in the way of Free Trade. After that we are left with two options:

1. Complete withdrawal of financial assistance to Africa. Say we have created a level playing field, it's up to you; sink or swim.

OR

2. Total re-engagement in Africa to the level of recolonization on a strictly transitional basis. In other words, we will teach you again how to run your own countries and when you have shown yourself responsible you can have them back. Pay for this with incentive schemes and sponsorship from multinational companies. Know it sounds fanciful, but you could have a major dividend after a few years. Kenya once had a per-capita GDP the size of Singapore (When it won independence from Britain in 1963). The average Kenyan now earns 100 times less than the average Singaporean. And Kenya is one of the better of countries on the continent!

If Africans cant take charge of their own destiny, we must do it for them. In the end we will benefit, and so will the ordinary African.

[Cronos]

The thing is, now, how can I put it without soundign racist, Africans have not proven themselves as being able to adminstrate themselves yet. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what I perceive.

Singapore was dirt poor but it dragged itself up as has South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia. Even the giants like China and India are improving themselves and have stopped taking aid from Western nations. The only regions that has not progressed, rather, has regressed is Africa .

[propertius]

A sullen people, half-devil and half-child... Kipling's words may nauseate many right-thinking people today, but did he have a point?

The White Man's Burden
By Rudyard Kipling

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man's burden--
In patience to abide,
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
To seek another's profit
And work another's gain.

Take up the White Man's burden--
The savage wars of peace--
Fill full the mouth of Famine,
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
(The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to nought.

Take up the White Man's burden--
No iron rule of kings,
But toil of serf and sweeper--
The tale of common things.
The ports ye shall not enter,
The roads ye shall not tread,
Go, make them with your living
And mark them with your dead.

Take up the White Man's burden,
And reap his old reward--
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard--
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:--
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
Our loved Egyptian night?"

Take up the White Man's burden--
Ye dare not stoop to less--
Nor call too loud on Freedom
To cloak your weariness.
By all ye will or whisper,
By all ye leave or do,
The silent sullen peoples
Shall weigh your God and you.

Take up the White Man's burden!
Have done with childish days--
The lightly-proffered laurel,
The easy ungrudged praise:
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers.

[Cronos]

I don't think he did. Suppose we roll back time say 2700 years ago, around 700 BC -- at that time the places of High civilisation were in what is now Iraq, Egypt, India, Persia and China. They would have looked down on Europeans (including Greeks) as barbarians.

Sorry I err, this is not quite hte racial thing as Persians and Indians owuld belong to the same indo-European family, but the more developed branch.

Just as Europeans could be taught civilisation, so can Africans.

[propertius]

Absolutely. But they have to be taught it, don't they? And so far, not many want to learn.

The other question is whether we in the West have the moral rectitude anymore to be the teachers... That is a very debateable point.

[radioman]

Those were truly strange days!
The Congo became independant in June and by July it was utter chaos. Murder and mayhem were the order of the day. The Belgians sent in paratroopers to rescue Belgian citizens, and we hauled in food for the starving victims of Lumumba and Tashombe. We evacuated the few remaining Belgian officers who were still alive.

The UN sided with Lumumba and attacked Katanga three times. Mercenaries were everywhere, and the Russians were supplying weapons to any gang that wanted them.

None of us ever new what the hell was going on, and considered all sides the enemy. The Italians even got involved, but they got barbecued...Literally.

Katanga could have been the gem of Africa, but everyone was too busy killing each other to get it together. Much of the strife was fueled by European business rivalries.

I'm glad you mentioned the movie. I'll have to see it. Those were days of high adventure and big bucks for mercenary types!

To make a long story short, the UN bungled the job!

[propertius]

European Business rivalries still fuelling the conflict there.

"Mad" Mike Hoare, who led the mercenaries, was technical director on the movie. Did you ever come across him. Guess not; Or, of course, Che Guevara who was fighting on the other side with Laurent Kabila. Guevar's African Dream is worth a read, if only to show what a venal, drunken, bumbling idiot Kabila was. It was prophetic in many ways as Kabila clearly hadn't changed when he eventually became president. I was in Katanga last year, in Kalemie on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Did you get down there at all or were you flying out of Elizabethville (Lumbumbashi)?

Thanks for the fascinating info. Would love to hear more some day -- I have a plan to write a book on Congo, once I have finished the one on Kenya I am doing now.

[y2k_free_radical]

sorry for remiss reply-not a nice place but very much in need of medical help----much evidence of war still remains and 3 days after i left 250 civilians were killed in a SPLA-GOVERMENT clash in a village 30 miles away--as you know ,KAPOETA was OSAMA BIN LADEN'S old training grounds before he went to AFGHANISTAN---i was with an independent missionary and paid cost out of my pocket

[y2k_free_radical]

i am impressed with your knowledge-can you safely tell me more about yourself?

[radioman]

Sorry about not getting back to you. Had to take a little R&R in Vegas.

The C-130's were flying out of Elizabethville. We were the last C-119's in operation. We were phased out in '62 and our base in Dreux, France closed.

At the time, we operated out of Nairobi and hauled dried fish into dirt strips all over the countryside. Elizabethville was just a gas stop for us.

I really enjoyed Kenya. I even spent some leave time there and took a camping trip to the great rift. Fantastic!

I'd love to read your book. Not all my memories of Africa are bad. During the Congo runs I was missing my girlfriend back in Paris. She was a dancer at the Red Windmill, and my business partner. I sold Marlboro cigarettes and Johnny Walker scotch on the black market. Those were the days!