by Hugh McCullum
Despite serious efforts at a number of different levels to end five months of fighting, Zaire, one of the continent’s most strategic countries, appears to be on the verge of a new era, ending one characterised by chaos and endemic corruption.
The era will end with or without the 31-year dictatorship of President Mobutu Sese Seko whose terminal illness has virtually removed him from active politics, despite his recent return to Zaire.
The illness was an “incentive• to the alliance of four opposition forces led by Laurent-Desire Kabila. 55, backed by Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda. They have captured Zaire’s third largest city, Kisangani, and are beaded for Lubumbashi, in mineral-rich Shaba province, and also for the capital, Kinshasa.
The capture of Zaire’s third largest city, a strategic garrison city in Eastern Zaire, by Kabila’s forces signals that a change of leadership is imminent in Zaire.
Opposition parties in Zaire’s capital, Kinshasa, have attempted to remove Mobutu’s Prime Minister Leon Kengo wa Dondo for his failure to manage the government and mount a successful defence against the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation (AFDL) of Congo-Zaire.
The implications of Kabila’s capture of 1,000 sq km of Zaire and his willingness to go all the way to Kinshasa is a matter of concern to governments of eastern, central and southern African, including members of the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Three SADC member-states share borders with Zaire: Angola, Tanzania and
Zambia.
This prompted a recent summit of the four-member committee on the “Great Lakes crisis” established by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) last year.
The summit on 19 March was hosted by President Daniel Arap Moi in Kenya and attended by
President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who is the chairman of the SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and Security; Vice-President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, whose country currently chairs SADC; and Cameroon Prime Minister, Peter Mafany Musonge, whose country is currently chair of the OAU.
The summit called on the conflicting parties to implement the OAU and United Nations peace plans provided for in UN Security Council Resolution 1097 of 1997, and respect Zaire’s territorial integrity.
The government in Kinshasa, some 1,500 km along the Zaire River from Kisangani, is helplessly factionalised, a failed product of Mobutu’s skilful manipulation of the ZOO or more tribes and ethnic groups in Zaire for 31 years. And the erosion of Kengo wa Dondo’s authority on the eve of the summit weakened his position there.
The self-styled Marshall Mobutu is one of Africa’s longest reigning despots who played the Cold War game masterfully for his own ends.
Mobutu, a 66-year-old former sergeant in the Belgian colonial forces, amassed a huge illegal fortune, estimated at US$9 billion and is responsible for bringing Zaire to its present state of collapse. He also stands accused of impoverishing and underdeveloping one of Africa’s richest countries.
Doctors treating Mobutu for prostate cancer acknowledge the disease has spread and his condition is deteriorating, though he may spend his last days in Zaire or in neighbouring Congo. His immediate family has already fled from Kinshasa to Brazzaville, the capital of Congo, across the Zaire river.
Zaireans are still waiting to go to the polls which had been scheduled for July this year as promised by Mobutu since 1990.
Supported by the US and France in particular, for his anti-communist stance, Mobutu’s Zaire was a haven for forces bent on destabilising neighbouring countries – Angola, Rwanda and Uganda.
The rebel leader in Angola, Jonas Savimbi, of the National Union for the Total Independence of
Angola (UNIT A), brought thousands of tonnes of arms through Zaire and smuggled out diamonds by same route, from the diamond-rich areas in Angola controlled by his forces.
Zaire was the transfer point of millions of dollars’ worth of diamonds which paid for UNITA’s war and provided a haven for UNIT A leaders.
Whenever there was trouble in Zaire, as there was all through Mobutu’s rule, he was heavily supported and rescued several times by French intervention. And this time Kabila is watching to see if there will be any foreign intervention.
“If the French come we shall bury them,” he told his supporters in Goma, Zaire, some of whom carried a banner reading: “Down with the French Mobutistes and their allies. Long live Laurent Desire Kabila”
In 1994, when Rwanda exploded into ethnic genocide. Zaire took in some two million Hutu refugees and provided training bases and support for the lnterahamwe militias who bad almost exterminated the Tutsi minority before its rebel army seized power in Kigali.
This decision to support the perpetrators of genocide was a fatal error by the usually wily Mobutu. Eastern Zaire, ignored by Mobutu and cut off from Kinshasa 1,500 km away along the Zaire river, had been settled 300 years ago by Banyamulenge Tutsis originally from Rwanda and Burundi. Supported by Zairean officials, the Hutu militias began to harass and rob the Zairean Tutsis.
The Northern Kivu provincial governor then threatened to expel them back to Rwanda. The separatist tendencies of the Kivu provinces exploded in frustration last October.
Kabila is backed and militarily supported by Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda who joined the
AFDL in battling fa control of the North and South
Kivu provinces in the Great Lakes region.
After the leaderless, ill-paid and undisciplined Zairean army virtually collapsed, Kabila seems unstoppable in his plans to oust Mobutu’s regime.
Despite Zaire’s military impotence, the AFDL offensive was well-planned and executed.
Rwanda’s strongman, Vice-President Paul Kagame and Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, both seasoned bush-fighters have given strategic planning support to Kabila, both of whom want secure borders with Zaire.
Although the Zairean army is in shambles, known more for its ability to loot and abuse its own citizens than to mount a coherent defense, there are fears of a military coup in Kinshasa’s markets and government offices as poor Zaireans recall the 1991 looting of Kinshasa by the army.
Kabila, for the moment at least, has turned his back defiantly on the United Nations, the European Union, the OAU and southern African efforts to get a permanent ceasefire and negotiate an end the massive onslaught on three fronts. This week a francophone-sponsored summit is due to meet in Lome, Togo on the crisis. Mugabe is expected to represent SADC.
AFDL leader says he will settle for nothing less than the ouster of Zaire’s corrupt and ineffectual leadership.
A self-described “‘soldier-politician”. Kabila has spent most of his adult life as an obscure guerrilla leader in the bush of eastern Zaire. He has led the People’s Revolutionary Party (PRP) since the 1960s, when he fought with the legendary Cuban guerrilla, Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Zaire. Since that time, Kabila has made the ouster of Mobutu his life-long objective.
While Zaire agreed to a ceasefire two weeks ago, the UN and OAU are still trying to persuade Kabila to stop fighting and negotiate a five-point peace proposal which would also respect Zaire’s territorial integrity.
Ordinary people say Kabila is the answer to Zaire’s endemic poverty, disease, underdevelopment and human rights violations amidst the opulence of a handful of Mobutu cronies. Crowds shouted that they would stone” Mobutu if he ever returned.
His only supporter, France, is waging a lonely diplomatic struggle to revive plans for an international force to halt the rebel advance and prevent what France says will be another genocide. However, most observers are sceptical of France’s motives and doubt the rumours of widespread massacres in the wake of the AFDL advance.
After a visit to the area recently, Dutch Co-operation Minister Jan Pronk suggested France was denying reality. “They refuse to allow talk of the Zaire conflict as internal, insisting that it is a foreign invasion which can then justify international intervention to prop up what is seen as a pro· French government.”
Even before the Nairobi summit, there was little chance of it succeeding in any meaningful way.
Kabila has treated the summit with near contempt, noting Moi’s close relations with Mobutu and the late president of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyirimana “I have no time to go and admire the second Mobutu,” Kabila told journalists, in a clear reference to Moi, at his provisional capital in Goma.
Southern Africa, the most stable region on the continent recognizes that the collapse of Zaire will have implications for all sub-Saharan Africa. Zaire has twice tried to join the SADC and has been rejected.
But, it has long borders and close links with several SADC nations. More than 10.000 Zairean and Hutu refugees are now in Zambia and the army has strengthened its border forces. Tanzania hosted 500,000 Hutu refugees following the Rwanda genocide.
Just before the Nairobi summit, Tanzania’s President Benjamin Mkapa flew to Harare for urgent talks with President Mugabe whose presence at the meetings indicates how seriously SADC members feel about the Zaire situation.
AFDL rebels have turned their attention towards Lubumbashi, capital of the mineral-rich Shaba province in the south, along the frontier with Zambia where reports say the town of Pweta has on the Zambian border has fallen to AFDL.
Zairean troops looted Kisangani (formerly Stanleyville) and then fled across the river in small boats. The Serbian mercenaries Mobutu hired to put some backbone into his fractured army, bombed a few civilian targets and then fled in their helicopters.
Meanwhile 160.000 mainly Rwandan Hutu refugees are stranded in Ubundu, south of Kisangani where UN aid agencies bad set up operations, and need some 60 tonnes of food a day. Many of the “refugees” are interahamwe militias who have been assisting the Zairean army in fighting the Tutsi rebels while holding civilians hostage in their trek through the thick rain forests.
Southern African leaders are watching the situation closely; there is little else they can do. (SARDC)
