Introduction

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Introduction

This book examines a decade-long period of instability, violence, war and extreme human suffering in Central Africa. Whilst a great deal has been written on specific aspects and episodes of the successive Congo wars, studies attempting a global overview are almost nonexistent.1 Interpretations have considerably diverged, with emphasis put on state failure, the resource base of the conflicts, their internal or external nature, ideological issues both regional and global, the macro or micro levels and the rationality or lack of it displayed by the actors. Three perspectives have dominated the question of why the recent wars in the region have occurred: the collapse of the Zairean/Congolese2 state, ‘warlordism’ coupled with plunder and local political dynamics, and external interven- tions, both by neighbouring countries and by more distant international players.3 A combination of these and other perspectives, rather than a sin- gle perspective, will emerge in this book. Indeed, in order to understand the multifaceted and complex nature of the conflicts, an eclectic approach to factors is required; some factors occurred simultaneously, whilst others were successive. Take Rwanda’s motives as an example. They were a combination, changing over time, of genuine security concerns, economic

1 An exception is T. Turner, The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality, London/ New York, Zed Books, 2007. However, there is little overlap between this book and that of Turner, which focuses on the cultural and ideological aspects of the wars. 2 The name of the country at the relevant time will be used, that is, Zaire until May 1997, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) or Congo after that date. 3 These perspectives are summarised in J. F. Clark, ‘Introduction. Causes and Consequences of the Congo War’, in: J.F. Clark (Ed.), The African Stakes of the Congo War, New York/ Houndmills, Palgrave MacMillan, 2002, pp. 2–4.

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interests, ethnic solidarity and even (selective) humanitarian concerns, the need to ‘buy’ internal elite solidarity, (military) institution building and a feeling of entitlement coupled with a sense of invincibility against the background of the comfort offered by the collapse of its rich neighbour. Considered in the past as peripheral, land-locked, and politically and economically uninteresting, in the 1990s, the African Great Lakes region found itself at the heart of a profound geopolitical recomposition with continental repercussions. Countries as varied as Namibia in the south, Libya in the north, Angola in the west and Uganda in the east became entangled in wars that ignored international borders. However, the seeds of instability were sown in the beginning of the 1960s: the massive exile of the Rwandan Tutsi, who fled to neighbouring countries during and after the revolution of 1959–1961, and the virtual exclusion of Tutsi from public life in Rwanda, the radicalisation of Burundian Tutsi who monopolised power and wealth and the insecure status of Kinyarwanda- speakers in the Kivu provinces – all these factors were to merge with others to create the conditions for war. The acute destabilisation of the region started on 1 October 1990 when the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF ) attacked Rwanda from Uganda with Ugandan support. After the collapse of the 1993 Arusha peace accord and following the genocide and massive war crimes and crimes against humanity, the RPF won a military victory and took power in July 1994. More than 1 million people died and more than 2 million fled abroad, mainly to Zaire and Tanzania. Eight months earlier, the democratic transition had ended in disaster in Burundi: tens of thousands of people were killed, and the country embarked on a decade- long civil war. At the end of 1993, some 200,000 Burundian refugees inundated the Zairean Kivu provinces, followed in mid-1994 by 1.5 million Rwandans. This was the beginning of the dramatic extension of the neighbouring conflicts, most prominently of the Rwandan civil war. The progressive implosion of the Zairean state, undermined by gen- eralised ‘predation’, was a major contributory factor to this extension. However, Zaire was also surrounded by nine neighbouring countries, seven of which were endemically or acutely unstable.4 In a perverse cycle, the instability of its neighbours threatened Zaire, just as Zaire’s instability was a menace to its neighbours. We shall see the determining impact of circumstantial alliances in a situation where borders are porous and where actors reason using the logic of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. State collapse opens space for very diverse local and regional,

4 I consider Tanzania and Zambia as stable.

Introduction 3

public and private actors, each with contradictory interests. Such a context favours the privatisation of public violence and the challenging of states’ territorial spaces. I therefore agree with Nzongola , when he writes that “[t]he major determinant of the present conflict and instability in the Great Lakes Region is the decay of the state and its instruments of rule in the Congo. For it is this decay that made it possible for Lilliputian states the size of Congo’s smallest province, such as Uganda, or even that of a district, such as Rwanda, to take it upon themselves to impose rulers in Kinshasa and to invade, occupy and loot the territory of their giant neighbour.”5 Others are less pessimistic. Bayart argues that, as has been the case in Europe,6 wars in Africa might be the expression, albeit a pain- ful one, of a process of state formation. He sees conflicts as contributing to the emergence of ‘trickster states’, which skilfully exploit the interstices of the global economy and the interface between formal and informal, even illegal activities.7 Be that as it may, state collapse was not the only factor. Conversely, a unique combination of circumstances explains the unravelling of the successive wars. The main circumstance can be found in the recent history of Rwanda. Although it is the smallest country in the region, it is there that the epicentre of all the crises lay. Without it, the conflicts would not have developed to such an extent. On the one hand, the 1994 genocide is a fundamental reference: as a consequence of both the old regime’s resistance to change and the deliberate strategy of tension conducted by the RPF , not only were hundreds of thousands of Tutsi killed, but the Rwandan civil war also resulted in the violent restructuring of the whole region. On the other hand, the RPF – incapable of managing its victory – chose exclusion, ethnic domination and the military management of a political space, a mode of management which it extended beyond Rwanda’s

5 G. Nzongola-Ntalaja, The Congo from Leopold to Kabila. A People’s History, London/ New York, Zed Books, 2002, p. 214. 6 He adds the important proviso that war has not been a sufficient cause of state formation in Europe. 7 J. F. Bayart, ‘La guerre en Afrique: dépérissement ou formation de l’Etat?’, Esprit, 1998, pp. 55–73. For a similar argument, based on local-level politics, see D.M. Tull, ‘A Recon- figuration of Political Order? The State of the State in North Kivu (DR Congo)’, African Affairs, 2003, pp. 429–446, who argues that, contrary to the discourse on collapsed states, the evidence suggests that there is a resilient (if ambivalent) attachment to the idea and prac- tice of the state in North Kivu. I disagree, because the practices Tull outlines (the mimicry of the Mobutist ‘state’) are precisely those that led to the demise of the Zairean state. While the continuity between Mobutu and the RCD-Goma suggested by Tull is undeniably present, it does not lead to state formation, but rather to its collapse.

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borders. Encouraged by its moral high ground and by the ineptitude of the so-called international community,8 the new regime explored the limits of tolerance, crossing one Rubicon after another, and realised that there were none. (Military) success is intoxicating: the Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA ) went from war to war, and from victory to victory (from 1981 to 1986 on the sides of Museveni in Uganda, from 1990 to 1994 in Rwanda, from 1996 to 1997 in Zaire, though not in the Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC] after 1998). The status of regional superpower acquired by this very small and very poor country is truly astonishing, and it was obtained through the force of arms, which was allowed to prevail because of the tolerance inspired by international feelings of guilt after the genocide. Paraphrasing what was said in the late 19th century about Prussia, Rwanda became an army with a state, rather than a state with an army, and it emerged as a major factor of regional instability. This book attempts to present a synthetic overview and analysis of the complex and violent evolution of Zaire/Congo in the regional set- ting, between the beginning of the first war in 1996 and the elections of 2006 that marked the formal end of the transition. Given the length of this period and the vast amount of empirical data, this book cannot go into great detail. It does, however, provide a broad map for understand- ing, with references for further study. The focus is on the ‘small’ Great Lakes region, with Rwanda, Burundi and Kivu at the centre. However, successive wars have entailed a considerable geopolitical extension of this area, so much so that the notion of the ‘greater Great Lakes region’ has emerged. As many as eleven ‘core countries’9 participated in the con- ference on peace, security and development in the Great Lakes region, which was held in Nairobi at the end of 2006. Although focusing on the smaller region, this book will also take into account wider developments where necessary. A macro perspective has been adopted. This does not mean that the importance of local-level dynamics should be underestimated. On the

8 I use the expression ‘so-called’, because the ‘international community’ does not really exist. Is it its institutional translation, namely the United Nations? Or does it refer to specific countries with a particular interest in a given situation or the press or vocal non- governmental organisations (NGOs) attempting to influence international public opinion? As can be seen in the situation analysed here and elsewhere in the world, the international community is all of these, and the notion lacks clarity and allows the actors to escape their responsibilities. However, after this caveat, the expression will be used frequently throughout this book. 9 Angola, Burundi, the Central African Republic, the DRC, the Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.

Introduction 5

contrary, these dynamics are important in order to understand the situation fully, and they are both under-researched and highly relevant from the perspective of human agency and suffering. Moreover, there is no strict dividing line between the international, regional and national levels on the one hand, and the local level on the other: macro actors interact with local forces, while local actors interpret larger dynamics and enlist the support of macro players. Autesserre shows the joint production of violence due to the interaction of local, national and regional motivations: “[L]ocal violence was motivated not only by top-down causes (regional or national), but also by bottom-up agendas, whose main instigators were villagers, traditional chiefs, community chiefs, or ethnic leaders.”10 Although players external to the local arena feature prominently in this book, this does not suggest that the Congolese were passive objects at the receiving end of events. All the actors, including many Congolese, have exercised var- ious degrees of agency and have engaged in violence and plunder, and, in Taylor’ s words, they were “not simply automatons carrying out the wishes of outside forces.”11 As an issue of Politique Africaine on ‘the war from below’12 clearly documents, local players were actively engaged in the violence, sometimes in a ritual fashion; marginalised groups actively seized the opportunities to renegotiate their status and/or to gain access to resources; ‘civil society’ and new political actors found their way into the system; and entrepreneurs of insecurity at both the micro and macro levels fully exploited the possibilities offered by instability, war, statelessness, and social, economic, and political reorganisation. In order to address the micro level, brief reference will be made to the rare studies that are avail- able, such as those by Vlassenroot and Raeymaekers . Chapter 1 examines the premises of the extreme violence that has cost the lives of millions of people. While Rwanda, Burundi and Kivu have been hotbeds of instability for decades, the events in Burundi and, more so, in Rwanda in 1993–1994 have been fundamental accelerators. The enormous flows of refugees, among whom there were many ‘refugee- warriors’, in a context of ‘transborderness’, the conclusion of alliances and the absence of a functioning state in Zaire, transformed domestic civil wars into a regional war in 1996, and into a continental one in 1998.

10 S. Autesserre, Local Violence, International Indifference? Post-Conflict ‘Settlement’ in the Eastern D.R. Congo (2003–2005), Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, September 2006, p. 298. 11 I. Taylor, ‘Conflict in Central Africa: Clandestine Networks and Regional/Global Con- figurations’,Review of African Political Economy, 2003, No. 95, p. 46. 12 RDC, la guerre vue d’en bas, Politique Africaine, No. 84, December 2001.

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Chapter 2 analyses the first war. Without entering into the military details, the role played by national, regional and international players will be analysed. Chapter 3 studies the ‘collateral damage’ inflicted on hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees, who were massively slaughtered by the Rwandan army, whilst a divided international community turned a blind eye to their fate. Chapter 4 analyses the fall of the Mobutist state, amid the hypocrisy and ineptitude of both the international community and the Zairean political class. Chapters 5 and 6 study the inter-bellum, a period which contained all the seeds of the new war that started in August 1998. Chapter 7 addresses the dialectics of continental war. Because of shifting alliances and the rallying of regional powers behind the Kinshasa regime, contrary to the first war, the outcome was not overthrow but military stalemate, thus leading to a fragile political settlement. How this settlement came about is the subject of the final chapter Chapter( 8). This book does not have one particular thread other than to attempt to offer an orderly presentation of a very complex episode in the region’s troubled history. A number of key dimensions are analysed. They have not operated in isolation: rather, there is a logical sequence between them, and they acted against the background of a failed state in Zaire/Congo. The overarching one is the unfinished Rwandan civil war, exported in 1996, and again in 1998, to the DRC. It was at the core of the successive wars and it is going on up to the present day through the presence of the Hutu rebels of the Forces démocratiques pour la libération du Rwanda (FDLR ) and Rwandan support for Congolese Tutsi renegade General Laurent Nkunda . A second recurring factor lies in the politics of identity in Rwanda, Burundi and eastern DRC. The Congolese Tutsi Banyarwanda (or Kinyarwanda-speakers) are torn between their local and national allegiance on the one hand, and their ethnic and trans- boundary loyalty on the other, with the latter offering (the illusion of) protection and being a threat at the same time. The interlocking conflicts allowed ethnic entrepreneurs to mobilise identities across boundar- ies, thus giving rise to instant ‘ethnogenesis’ under the form of a divide between ‘Bantu’ and ‘Hamites’. Thirdly, at the regional level, the shifting alliances produce an unpredictable and constantly evolving geopolitical landscape, where players engage in cost–benefit analyses and, as previ- ously stated, adhere to the logic of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’. Both these traits instill a strong element of ‘realism’ and of ‘rationality’ of sorts in the calculations, at least in the short term. International players, the United States and France in particular, functioned very much in the same vein during the first war, though much less during the second

Introduction 7

war, by which time the magnitude of Pandora’s box had become clear. A fourth dimension relates to the humanitarian fallout. Wars are always costly in terms of (mainly civilian) lives lost, but the first war was marked particularly by the massive atrocities committed by the RPA against civilian Hutu refugees, while the second war caused the death of millions of Congolese, particularly in Ituri and the Kivu provinces. Although the International Criminal Court (ICC) has indicted a few Ituri warlords and former Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba (for crimes committed in the Central African Republic), these crimes have been left largely unpun- ished. A fifth dimension concerns a consequence of the combination of weak Zairean/Congolese statehood and the strategies developed by local and regional entrepreneurs of insecurity. This combination has allowed profoundly privatised and criminalised public spaces and economies to emerge. These are linked to the global economy but largely discon- nected from the state on whose territory they function. These networks of violence and accumulation can also be found in vulnerable peripheries elsewhere in the world. A final dimension shows the ineptitude of classical international diplomacy, despite the recent rhetoric on conflict resolution, peace-building and the duty to intervene and protect. Local and regional players, be they state or non-state, seized the initiative and largely pre- vailed because they had the advantage of being on site and not hindered by considerations of international (humanitarian) law. During the second war, regional powers, South Africa in particular, imposed a settlement and, together with international players, put the DRC under a de facto trusteeship and imposed elections on a reluctant domestic political class. The externally induced nature of the transition is also its weakness. As a complement to the existing literature, this book seeks to provide an in-depth analysis of concurrent developments in six realms: Zaire/DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and the African and international contexts. By adopting, as far as possible, a non-chronological approach, the dynamics of the inter-relationships between these realms become apparent. This allows the discussion of developments in different places and at different levels and times not as being peripheral to the war(s), but as a consistent and concurrent whole. A chronology is provided at the end of the book, but, given the complexity and abundance of events, a brief timeline is proposed here to assist the reader. After the genocide and the overthrow of the Rwandan Hutu-dominated regime in July 1994, 1.5 million Hutu refugees settled just across the border in Zaire. Among them were the former government army, the Forces armées rwandaises (FAR ), and militia. They launched

8 Great African War

cross-border raids and increasingly became a serious security threat to the new regime, dominated by the mainly Tutsi RPF. Under the guise of first the ‘Banyamulenge rebellion’ and later the ‘AFDL rebellion’, the RPA attacked and cleared the refugee camps during the autumn of 1996. Having security concerns similar to those of Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi joined from the beginning, to be followed by a formidable regional coali- tion intent on toppling Mobutu . In May 1997, Laurent Kabila seized power in Kinshasa. During the latter half of 1997, relations between the new Congolese regime and its erstwhile Rwandan and Ugandan allies soured rapidly. In August 1998, Rwanda and Uganda again attacked, and they did so once more under the guise of a ‘rebel movement’, the RCD (Rassemblement Congolais pour la Démocratie), which was created in Kigali. The invading countries expected this to be a remake of the first war, only much faster this time. The reason for this failing to occur was the result of a spectacular shift of alliances, when Angola and Zimbabwe sided with Kabila against their former allies Rwanda and Uganda. This intervention made up for the weakness of the Congolese army, thus ensur- ing a military stalemate along a more or less stable frontline that cut the country in two. Considerable pressure from the region led to the signing of the Lusaka Accord in July 1999. However, Laurent Kabila blocked its implementation, and only after his assassination and succession by his son Joseph in January 2001 was the peace process resumed. Again under great pressure, by South Africa in particular, and after cumbersome nego- tiations, the Congolese parties signed a ‘Global and All-Inclusive Accord’ in December 2002. It took another three-and-a-half years to implement the accord, along a bumpy road replete with incidents, obstructions, nego- tiations and renegotiations, and constantly threatened by the resumption of the war. An informal international trusteeship, supported by a large U.N. peacekeeping force and also by the international and Congolese civil society, imposed elections on very reluctant political players. These took place in July–October 2006, in an overall free and fair fashion, and were won by Joseph Kabila and his party PPRD. Kabila was sworn in in December 2006, both houses of parliament were installed in January 2007, and a new government was formed in early February, thus formally ending the transition. A final introductory word must be said about sources. As this is a book on contemporary history, much of the material used is ‘grey’, in some cases oral, and contemporary to the events it addresses. This sort of material is often partisan, serving a political, ideological or personal cause, and untested by previous research. The advantages of such documents

Introduction 9

are obvious, as they offer immediate and sometimes very detailed information that cannot be found elsewhere. However, the drawbacks are equally clear: these sources need to be handled with suspicion, corrobo- rated and counterchecked. In addition, their possible bias must be clearly acknowledged and, where warranted, the conditional tense must be used or conflicting versions must be put forward. Since 1996, a number of episodes and themes addressed in this book have fortunately been the subject of scholarly research, which enables the author to put the more immediate sources in context.

A Region in Turmoil

1.1 Kivu: Land of Confrontation

National Context Before addressing the region that is the focus of this chapter, the situation prevailing in the mid-1990s at the national Zairean level must be summarised briefly.1 By the early 1990s, the Zairean state had virtually disappeared as a consequence of both internal and external factors. The external element was twofold. On the one hand, international aid policies underwent a dramatic change in the 1980s. In the context of the neo- liberal philosophy, structural adjustment programmes imposed on African states both diminished the redistributive capacity of regimes, thus threat- ening the survival of clientelist networks, and impoverished the popula- tions even more than before, as well as further curtailing public spending and reducing the relevance of the state. De Villers offers a telling figure of this shrinking of public finance: between 1982 and 1985, the wage bill of the Zairean public sector decreased by one-third and in 1985, the purchasing power of civil servants had dropped to between a third and a quarter of its 1975 level.2 On the other hand, the transformation of the

1 For more details, see G. De Villers, J. Omasombo, Zaïre. La transition manquée 1990– 1997, Brussels/Paris, Institut Africain–L’Harmattan, Cahiers Africains, No. 27–28–29, October 1997. An inside story of the last ten years of the Mobutu regime can be found in F. Vunduawe Te Pemako, A l’ombre du Léopard. Vérités sur le regime de Mobutu Sese Seko, Brussels, Editions Zaïre libre, 2000. 2 G. De Villers, ‘La guerre dans les évolutions du Congo-Kinshasa’, Afrique Contemporaine, 2005, 215, 51.