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by Mphuthumi Ntabeni

G21 Columnist

an oasis for the thoughtful

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DAY ONE - CONGO: MPHUTHUMI NTABENI provides analysis on the situation behind the contended election in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Mphuthumi Ntabeni

East London, SOUTH AFRICA - As the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) teeters at the brink of another civil war, I think it is opportune to look bac k at the stubborn cause of clashes there so as to venture towards finding lasting solutions. But whatever we say or do, the final solution remains with the Congolese.

Around 18 million Congolese went to the polls on 30 July 2006 to choose their president and national assembly. These were the first free and almost fair elections the Democratic Republic of Congo has had in over 40 years. The vote was largely peaceful, with few a sporadic scenes of violence here and there.

It was reasonably organized, though many irregularities were reported at polling stations. The incumbent, Joseph Kabila, won 45 per cent of the vote, just short of an absolute majority of 51%, it has been reported. Jaun Bemba, his Deputy President, received 20 per cent. Kabila's Alliance for Presidential Majority took some 300 of the 500 seats in the National Assembly, while Bemba's Union of Nationalists won 116.

Since there was no outright presidential winner, the Congolese had to go to the polls again towards the end of October 2006. There was a general sense of fatigue and impatience. The international community feared the Congolese might blow 'their last chance' by resorting to violence. Congo has to get it right; it's now or never; were general statements you heard. Most Congolese didn't care much who took power, in my view, all they want is stability and security to live their lives in peace.

Western political culture regards democracy as an essential definition of freedom. But the words of James Madison, perhaps the most far-seeing of the founders of what we nostalgically refer to as the American Republic, cautions us from such generalization. In a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1788, as the American Constitution was nearing completion, he wrote:

"There may be a certain degree of danger that a succession of artful and ambitious rulers may, by gradual and well-timed advances, finally erect an independent Government on the subversion of liberty."

Democracy does not necessarily develop from free elections, even if they are bona fides of a democratic system. In most Occidental countries, for instance, democracy did not become viable until after a polity inclined toward law-and-liberty had emerged. Habeas corpus and the rule of law were not products of democracy, but of a long effort, from medieval times, to curb the power of the English executive elites. The fact that now the executives are re-emerging in the guise of the corporate system - that obviously influences to an extent of controlling the Western democratic system - is a topic for another time.

Our Esteemed Editor, in his article "Athens Speaks of Sparta," at Huffington Post blog puts it thus:

Even then, before the long and tawdry elucidations of the new vision of democracy presented by the dominant spokespeople of the United States, we still believed that the concept of democracy was tied to the popular will. Not anymore. As our government has explained and demonstrated to us and the world, democracy is when the people of a given nation choose leaders that are acceptable to and supportive of the interests of the United States and those corporations it supports. Otherwise, the popular will is invalid, period.

Democracy can only be seen in any positive or laudable sense if it emerges from, and is, an aspect of the law-and-liberty tradition. The rule of law is what is fundamentally lacking in DR Congo. The main thing democratic people share is not so much the institutions as habits of mind, which are far more crucial. The Congolese, in general, are of this mind and want the rule of law to presuppose a level political field and bring decency to their difficult lives. Unfortunately, those in economic power have vested interests in the lack of rule of law in DR Congo and do everything in their power to prolong it.

The DR Congo is endowed - most say cursed - with considerable mineral resources, making it potentially Africa's wealthiest nation. Southern Katanga province alone has large cobalt reserves, 80% of world's coltan, and numerous deposits of copper, manganese and zinc. It has oil reserves of about 180 million barrels. Mining the gold deposits in the north of DR Congo can easily employ 80% of the the country's working population. DR Congo has 5 national parks with wildlife that includes mountain gorillas and white rhino, which should the green gold of its tourist attractions.

In spite of this wealth, or because of it, DR Congo has had a turbulent political history. Its woes go back to the time of Atlantic slavery, even earlier. But the period the Congolese suffered the worst bloodshed was between 1890 and 1910, under the rule of a cunning, greedy and decadent king Leopold II of Belgium. Ndaywel Ë Nziem, a Congolese scholar and author of Histoire générale du Congo puts the death figure at 13 million Congolese during this brief period. Congo's curse then was, 'The Wood That Weeps', rubber.

When Leopold II delved into Congo, with the help of his murdering emissary Henry Morton Stanley, he had scant idea of the returns he would make beyond the ivory trade. The rubber boom came at an opportune time for him - he was dangerously in debt with his Congo investments. According to the diaries of officers of Force Publique, Leopold's armed soldiers in Congo, the Congolese were forced into producing rubber by kidnapping their women, children and elders, so as to force the rest to work in the forests to buy back their people from the soldiers by exorbitant kilograms of rubber.

The kilograms required to purchase a family's freedom rose with the demand for rubber until the natives were not able to cope with the demand. Most escaped to the depths of the forests, preferring to abandon their cultivated fields to live on roots and nuts like animals. Those not fortunate enough to escape were treated like slaves, worked, starved and flogged to death with chicotte that permanently maimed them.

It took the commendable work of mostly black American Baptist missionaries to Congo like William Sheppard to expose these cruelties. The Catholic priests in Congo were usually the staunch allies of the state. The likes of E.D. Morel reported extensively about Congo atrocities in England, bringing to his collaboration the respected voice of Sir Roger Casement from the British consular service, whom the British later hanged for his freedom-radical views and homosexuality under the guise of treason.

Joseph Conrad, in his book The Heart of Darkness, skirts the tip of the iceberg. Mark Twain took up the challenge against Leopold, too. Bob Dylan in his autobiography, Chronicles, speaks of the 'sixties in America in this manner:

Though there was an undercurrent of upheaval reverberating, and in a few years the American cities would tremble, Ray took little interest, said the real action was "in the Congo."

Unfortunately today's Americans don't show that much interest in DR Congo even though the facts are still as gory as ever. Instead of the pro bono of Leopold II, now its mostly the companies, like those who make cellulars, who benefit from the DR Congo mines.

When the heat was on Leopold II, he appointed a Commission of Inquiry to investigate the claims of atrocities committed by his emissaries in the Congo. This is what one Congolese witness, M'Putila of Bokote, testified to, (needless to say the report was suppressed and never published):

As you see my right hand is cut off... When I was very little, the soldiers came to make war in my village because of the rubber... As I was fleeing, a bullet grazed my neck and gave me a wound whose scars you can still see. I fell, and pretended to be dead. A soldier used a knife to cut off my right hand and took it away. I saw he was carrying other cut-off hands... The same day, my mother and father were killed, and I know they had their hands cut off."

Soldiers of Force Publique had to bring their victim's severed right hands to account for the bullets they used, the reason give was to avert wastage. Some cut off the hands of living Congolese to hide the fact that they used the ammunition for hunting.

When Congo eventually gained independence from Belgium, in 1960, Patrice Lomumba was made a coalition-government prime minister. Lumumba wanted more than political independence for Africa, he pushed for economic independence and repatriation of wealth looted by the Western countries from Africa. He wanted Belgium and France to pay for the rubber crimes, Portugal for coco that made Cadbury, England for their gold and the U.S. for the uranium mined from a heavily guarded Congo mine of Shinkolobwe most of which was used on the atomic bombs that were dumped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Naturally, his speeches immediately set off alarms in Western capitals. Belgian, British and American corporations had by then vast investments in Congo.

When Lomumba found no sympathetic ear in the West, he turned to the then communist Soviet Union. I'll let Adam Hochschild, the American author of the frank and honest book King Leopold's Ghost describe what happened next:

Less than two months after being [Lomumba] named the Congo's first democratically chosen prime minister, a U.S. National Security Council subcommittee on covert operations, which included CIA director Allen Dulles, authorized his assassination... In a key meeting, another official who was there recalled, [Dwight D.] Eisenhower clearly told CIA chief Dulles "that Lumumba should be eliminated." The key figure in the Congolese forces that arranged Lumumba's murder was a young man named Joseph Désiré Mobutu, then Chief of Staff of the army and a former NCO in the old colonial Force Publique.

Lomumba was subsequently arrested by a collaboration of Congo anti-Lomumba army forces and CIA and Belgium covert forces, clearly urged by their respective governments, and shot to death at Elizabethville in January 1961. Mobutu, who had been receiving cash payments from the CIA before Lumumba's death, visited the White House in 1963, hosted by J.F. Kennedy who presented him with an airplane for personal use and a U.S. Air Force crew to fly it for him. Then Mobutu, with the encouragement of the U.S. government, staged a coup in 1965 that made him the country's dictator and kleptocrat for more than thirty years in DR Congo.

DR Congo covers 2.3 million square kilometers, making it the third largest country in Africa. It borders Angola, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. The population of DR Congo has been estimated at approximately 58.3 million, with 200 ethnic groups. The four largest groups - Mongo, Luba, Kongo (all Bantu) and the Mangbetu-Azande (Hamitic) - constitute nearly half of the population.

The DR Congo's most recent war originated in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which over 500,000 minority Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were slaughtered by an extremist Hutu government. The Rwandan new government claimed, with reasonable evidence, that Hutu génocidaires - the former Rwandan army troops known as ex-FAR and their Interahamwe militia allies - had taken refuge within eastern Congo, and were still broadcasting mischief through the region from there. Hence Rwanda and Uganda backed a May 1997 rebellion in Congo that eventually removed Mobutu Sese Seko, replacing him with their chosen and trained man, Laurent Kabila.

However, when Kabila moved to purge Tutsis from his government, Rwanda intervened in DR Congo for a second time, this time with the intention of removing Kabila. Rwandan troops, backing Congolese Tutsi rebels, invaded in August 1998, leading Kabila to seek assistance from Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia. For five years DR Congo experienced a civil war that eventually involved several of these African countries. Both the present Kabila, the son of Laurent, and Bemba took part, on different sides, as combatants in this war that killed four million people, mostly through hunger and disease, and displaced a further five million.

This was the war that presented the country with a huge humanitarian challenge. Eventually, the countries involved, with the help of numerous negotiations facilitated by the UN, neutral countries like South Africa and the non-governmental actors, signed a ceasefire agreement at Lusaka (Zambia) in July 1999. Subsequently the UN Security Council sent a peacekeeping mission (MONUC) to the Congo in 2000.

Nonetheless, violence fueled by mineral wealth, especially in the east, continued. In one of those skirmishes Laurent Kabila was assassinated in January 2001 and replaced by his son, Joseph Kabila. Peace negotiations went on through 2002. Ugandan and Rwandan troops withdrew - secretly leaving their proxies behind. This withdrawal started the process of demobilization and disarmament of Rwandan Hutu rebels in the eastern Congo with the hope of finding lasting peace in DR Congo.

A power-sharing, unity government was set up under Joseph Kabila in July 2003 with four vice-presidents, three of them from former rebel groups. But the long-simmering conflict over land and mineral wealth in the north-eastern Ituri region in the meantime broke into widespread inter-ethnic violence and massacres between 2002-2003. An EU army, predominantly French, was deployed on a 3-month emergency mission in July 2003, which managed to contain the situation. With the situation seemingly back under control, a more robust UN mission (MONUC II) was deployed in the DR Congo.

Since 2002, nearly 17,000 primarily Rwandan fighters and their dependents have been repatriated voluntarily, under a scheme supervised by the UN Mission to the DR Congo. Despite this, nearly 15,000 foreign armed combatants are still present in the east and northeast of the country. A small number are Ugandan and Burundian rebels. But most combatants are the génocidaires who were responsible for instigating the 1994 Rwandan genocide. They have been operating in the east of the country where they murder, steal and rape. They're afraid to go back to Rwanda where they're wanted to account for their crimes during the genocide, so the instability of the region is in their best interest and that of the French troops who have protected them since the days of the genocide, it is alleged.

The president of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, also hailed the resolution of the DR Congo presidential contest as a means for his country's military assault on the rebel LRA, whose leaders are reportedly holed up in DR Congo, Garamba National Park, to proceed. The commanders of LRA, especially the leader Joseph Kony, are said to have moved to the Garamba safe haven late last year after the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for him and four of his top commanders. Consequently, Kampala is hoping whoever wins elections in DR Congo would give him blessings to hunt and finish the LRA in DR Congo.

Meantime, in the DR Congo, the brigades - comprising former rival factions - have been deployed to the troublesome Ituri District in the northeast where an armed group, created in June 2005, called the Mouvement des Volontaires Congolais was formed from an alliance of various militiamen who refused to disband and be integrated into the national army and maintain hostilities.

At least 16,500 combatants of six armed groups and militia - transformed into political parties or disarmed - are awaiting integration into the regular army. These Ituri militia have been fighting since 1999, leading to the deaths of at least 50,000 and the displacement of hundreds of thousands more.

In the southeastern province of Katanga, militia previously supported by the government have resisted government disarmament efforts. These militias have continued to attack civilians, causing hundreds of thousands to flee. The weak integrated DR Congo army this year launched an operation to disarm and disband them to no avail.

The integrated army is weak in morael, unity and, most of all, equipment. Most of the troops prefer making a quick buck as guards of mining-pirating companies that pay lucratively. Kabila and Bemba have both said that, apart from integrating the military, they would rebuild dilapidated barracks and other military infrastructure dating to the colonial period 46 years ago. In 1960, for instance, the police numbered 50,000 men but today this has tripled without a corresponding increase in facilities.

Various armed groups, including those that protect Kabila and Bemba, continue to threaten the stability of the country. Hence DR Congo's neighbors continue to perceive the situation as a threat to their interests and continually take actions that further destabilize the fragile process of transition.

The ongoing tensions in Kinshasa and Kasai are stark warnings that the conflict in the DR Congo could quickly spiral into another large-scale war. Bemba and his followers are now reported as saying the recent presidential elections were rigged, and have applied to the Supreme Court not to endorse them. Bemba's supporters have taken to protest in the street, looting and vandalizing state and private property. Anyone who knew anything about Bemba expected this if he lost the elections.

What is required of Kabila is to keep his calm, not to give Bemba reasons to go back to guerrilla war, treat him the same way Mandela handled Mangosuthu Buthelezi when he threatened to unleashed black-on-black violence during the first tenor of South Africa's democratically elected government. Cajole him and let him hang himself inside the governance of national unity.

The priority in solving the DR Congo situation is security. This can only be achieved by disbanding the remaining Congolese militias, expelling all foreign fighters from the country and with the Kinshasa government taking control of its natural wealth. But this will be a long process of convincing neighboring governments and curbing the corruption of foreign companies who make enormous profits from the chaos in untaxed gains.

Somehow, the UN will also need to regenerate from its ossified state to find legitimacy among the majority of ordinary Congolese and Africans in general. The devil, as usual, is in the details. Anything else, like the fast-takeaway peace deals, are just a waste of time and resources that prolong the dire situation in DR Congo.

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