Zaïre, South Africa: Moving Forward?
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Review of African Political Economy No.72:165-170 © ROAPE Publications Ltd., 1997 ISSN 0305-6244; RIX#7201 Zaïre, South Africa: Moving Forward? Chris Allen Mobutu's undignified exit from Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) brings to a close one of the few remaining terminal spoils regimes in Africa. It creates - unlike Somalia - an opportunity for a different, more democratic and decentralised political system, though it is precisely the long process of decline, corruption and internal violence that makes terminal spoils systems so vulnerable that also makes the building of viable popular regimes in their place so difficult. So also do external constraints, pressures and forces: we may have seen the last of Mobutu, the man installed in part by the CIA, but we have not seen the last of American influence upon events. Early in his twin career as head of state and familiar of US Africa policy, Mobutu attempted to conceal the latter role, and enhance the former, by nationalising the Belgian-owned Union Miniere firm, the main copper-mining company in Zaire. Gibbs' article in this issue describes the part played in this by the American diamond company Leon Tempelsman and the US government, stressing the US perception of decolonisation as creating openings for US capital in what the colonial powers had formerly kept as closed areas for metropolitan capital. Thus the US government backed Mobutu's attempt to detach copper-mining from Union Miniere's control (with, in the end, some success), while at the same time combining with other western governments, including Belgium, in opposing nationalisation without compensation. Thirty years later, as Gibbs and Collins (in Briefings) point out, imperialist rivalries persist, as does collaboration in the face a common threat. They have taken two forms: conflict over the nature and extent of intervention (though not wholly its goals), and competition for access to Congo-Zaire's mineral wealth. This time, too, there is a new competitor, South African capital, represented directly by Anglo and de Beers, and indirectly, and more uncertainly, by the ANC-led government. During the cold war, and especially in its final decades, intervention in Africa had three principal goals: exercising control over the nature and development of African economies (increasingly through the IFIs rather than the action of individual economies and firms); the pursuit of cold war geostrategic aims, often reflected in support for individual heads of state like Mobutu; and the national interest of certain states, notably France, for whom Africa - and only Africa - could provide a chasse gardee, or private estate, in which it could act as a global power, displaying its diplomatic, economic and military strength. Since 1990 only the second of these goals has disappeared, replaced for the US at least by a bundle of conflicting goals - structural adjustment, 'democratisation', protection from a variety of new global menaces (Islam, drugs, crime etc), and a division between those who see Africa as too marginal to merit attention, and those who stress the need for further investment, trade and preventative diplomacy. 166 Review of African Political Economy The discourse of intervention has changed too, concealing older goals behind assertions of the need to promote democracy and human rights, and to secure humanitarian goals. State sovereignty, once a convenient cornerstone for ignoring human rights abuses on the part of cold war allies, is now - no less conveniently - ignored. This is a profoundly ambiguous, even inconsistent, discourse. The IFIs impose political conditions for loans, including democracy and human rights. Yet a government cannot be accountable for its economic policy both to the IFIs and to its electorate. Human rights conditions are imposed to different degrees by different leaders, and there is an increasing tendency to ignore abuses once cosmetic changes are made, as with Kenya. Similarly, and especially since the US decision to withdraw from Somalia, humanitarian need has been treated selectively. The civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, despite the scale of suffering involved and the threat to regional peace and order that they constituted, have been left to ECOWAS and the NGOs, Sudan to a combination of mediation and NGO action; Burundi to the neighbouring states. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 resulted in an extraordinary combination of partial UN withdrawal, belated recognition of the scale of the killings, and then unilateral action by France, a state heavily implicated in the Habiyarimana regime and in the training and arming of its (in)security forces. The French action, so obviously designed to protect the retreat of the former Rwandan government (FGR), its army and militia, points up a second feature of 'humanitarian intervention': its use in re-defining the nature of emergency need and of the underlying political process. In Rwanda the nature of the emergency was entirely clear: a planned series of killings, at first directed towards those seen as political opponents of the extremist wing of the FGR and/or sympathisers with the RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front), and then more generally towards all those identified as 'Tutsi'. It was their bodies, floating in rivers or piled in churches, that created a demand for international action. But that action became focused almost entirely not on preventing further killing, nor on reconstruc- tion, but on support for the refugees. The flight of the refugees to Zaire and Tanzania had mixed motives. The vast bulk were not Tutsi but Hutu, some genuinely fearful of the RPF (made so by a combination of propaganda and guilt over the massacres). Some were organised into flight by the FGR, and mixed in with the refugees were the killers, protected by a human shield which they would later use in the camps to gain access to food, water and medical treatment. The agencies and NGOs responsible for the camps quickly lost any political control to the killers, and were in no position to deny them: only a rival armed force could have disarmed and detained them, and at considerable risk. In the process the FGR was allowed to re-establish itself within the camps, to continue its propaganda, to rearm (courtesy of the Mobutu regime) and to carry out raids across the border in Rwanda. The raids increased in intensity in 1996, as did the killings of those coming forward as witnesses in the enquiries into the 1994 massacres. More than this: the nature of the 'problem' became re-defined. From one of genocide stemming from a decades long process of political decay and calling for a combination of reconstruction of justice/reconciliation, it became one of the Hutu refugees, calling for the channelling of humanitarian and other aid into Zaire and the camps. The effect has been to leave the genocide unresolved; to direct resources from reconstruction in Rwanda to short term emergency needs to Zaire; and to create a new threat to the RPF government - that a large percentage of Rwanda's population might Editorial: Zaire, South Africa: Moving Forward? 167 never return and that its enemies would be able to resume their programme of genocide. The RPF did not escape the process of redefinition: from being the only force capable of cutting short the genocide it became itself suspected of arbitrary killings and extensive human rights abuses. Recent events in Zaire show analogous patterns. In October 1996 an armed revolt began in Kivu, at its core Banyamulenge farmers, with more or less remote links to Rwanda, and recently exposed to attacks by the Zairean army and the provincial governor. This revolt was led by Laurent Kabila, who became leader of the AFDL (Alliance des Forces Democratiques pour la Liberation du Congo-Zaire), an alliance of four local groupings, and supported by the governments (and soldiers) of Rwanda and Uganda. Early targets were a number of refugee camps seen as bases for the former Rwandan government (FGR) army and militia, fled into the bush. This prompted demands for humanitarian military intervention, from the UN Secretary General, from a number of African heads of state, and from France and Canada. The purpose would be to protect the refugees, either returning them to their camps (the French view) or creating a safe corridor for their return to Rwanda (the US view, once Clinton had in mid-November decided 'in principle' to support intervention). Before an interventionary force could be assembled and despatched, the refugees had themselves begun to return, encouraged by the AFDL and units of the Rwandan army. About 900,000 returned; but the rest, including the militia and FGR troops, moved deeper into Zaire, some even traversing the entire country to emerge in the Congo or Angola. The presence of these refugees, up to 350,000 in all, and many in poor condition, has created a lever to exert pressure on the AFDL. A variety of NGOs, the new UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and other officials, and the French have demanded that the AFDL treat the plight of the refugees as primary and the overthrow of Mobutu - and the elimination of the threat of Hutu extremism - as secondary. Thus in April Kofi Annan called on 'all parties to stop fighting and allow the unimpeded delivery of humanitarian assistance to the civilian population caught in the conflict' (AFP, 21 April 1997). France and the US have, since December, pursued distinct policies in Zaire, readily seen as reflecting rival economic and political interests. France, wishing to retain its influence in Zaire, tried to sustain Mobutu, looking for 'solutions' that would place foreign troops in Zaire, and bring about a transition process that would allow Mobutu or his nominee, to oversee a transfer of power, preferably not to the AFDL, which it saw as a tool of American interests, like the governments of Rwanda and Uganda.