Text:
http://www.mg.co.za/mg/news/98aug1/6aug-congo.html
Congo uprising looks
carefully planned
Laurent Kabila is looking vulnerable, with the rebellion against him well
-planned and widely backed. Kabila has alienated many erstwhile allies,
including the Angolan government which helped him to power. ALEX DUVAL
SMITH reports
HE FIGHTING in the Congo appears to be a well-planned attempt to overthrow
President Laurent Kabila, with the rebels producing a leader
and the country's foreign minister defecting to their side.
Speaking in the eastern town of Goma, Arthur Z'Ahidi Ngoma, leader of the Future
Party, banned since May by Mr Kabila, said his forces were fighting for "all
Congolese" and denied government claims that the rebellion was a
Rwandan-Tutsi attempt to colonise former Zaire.
As the government confirmed that the eastern town of Bukavu had fallen to a Tutsi-led dissident faction of the new Congolese army, Mr Kabila's foreign minister, Bizima Karaha, a Tutsi, announced that he had joined the rebels.
"This is a country-wide revolution to topple Kabila. It is spreading like fire," Mr Karaha said from Goma.
African leaders are meeting in Zimbabwe to discuss the crisis. Mr Kabila will
join heads of state from Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and
Namibia for the talks.
Belgium, the former colonial power in Congo, advised its citizens to leave the country, echoing advice from the United States.
The Congolese president is emerging as a failed puppet emperor, at sea in
central African power-broking and reduced to nepotism and corruption. He looks
weaker by the day as an uncohesive but powerful alliance - disenchanted
Congolese Tutsis, Rwandans, and possibly also Ugandans and Mobutists -
increases its stranglehold on former Zaire. Dissidents, many of whom he has
exiled, claim that the crisis is of his own making.
"As he has descended into corruption and nepotism, he has left himself with only the tribal card to play," said Guillaume Ngefa, the Swiss-based president of the Congolese human rights group Asadho: Association Africaine pour les Droits de l'Homme.
Brought to power in May last year by a revolt of Banyamulenge Tutsis from the east of the country supported by Rwanda, Uganda and Angola, Mr Kabila has disappointed his erstwhile allies.
He has not granted the special status demanded by the Banyamulenge, who are Tutsis of Rwandan origin, and who were repressed for years by the Mobutu regime. Rwandan troops have come to their aid.
Uganda, which has to contend with a rebellion of its own by guerrillas based in Congo's North Kivu region, is disappointed that Mr Kabila has not brought the region under control. But Kampala has not sent any troops yet. Neither has the Angolan president, Eduardo dos Santos, who is also preoccupied with fighting at home. President Dos Santos has good reason to consider Mr Kabila a traitor.
It was his army which secured Mr Kabila's entry into the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, last year. Since April, just as it did in the Mobutu years, the Angolan rebel movement Unita has been receiving supplies through Kinshasa. Not only has Mr Kabila shown himself unworthy of regional support, he has also alienated many in Congo.
According to dissidents, the war chest he raised from Zairean companies and foreign investors, including Lebanese, Colombian, Israelis and United States and Canadian mining companies, was plundered by his regime.
The Agency of Ill-Gotten Gains - set up ostensibly to investigate corruption by Mobutu's regime - collapsed amid allegations that its staff were extorting those it investigated in return for imunity from prosecution.
Mr Kabila is also accused by émigrés of using regional summit meetings to export large sums of money by air. Last year he hired a Geneva-based advertising agency, Trimedia, to handle his international public relations, bypassing the Congo's own embassy.
Mr Kabila became convinced, with
good reason, that Tutsis backed by
Rwanda were plotting a coup, and he
returned early from a state visit to Cuba
last week. He sacked a number of
Tutsis in his government and ordered all
foreign troops to leave the country.
This followed the sacking of other
Tutsis, who have been replaced by
members of Mr Kabila's Katanga clan.
His interior minister, Gaetan Kakudji,
and his justice minister, Mwenze
Kongolo, are both his cousins. His son,
Joseph, is deputy chief of army staff.
The head of the national police force, the chief of the armed forces, the governor of the central bank, his ambassador-at-large and all new members of the presidential guard are from the southern Katanga region, which was formerly known as Shaba.
Mr Ngefa said: "He claims to be rooting out 'Mobutists' but in fact, he has started targeting anyone who is not from Katanga."
Those who have been jailed or forced to flee the country include almost all human rights activists, many opposition figures and a number of journalists.
In the last few days high-ranking officials have left, too. The presidential affairs minister, Deogratias Bugera, has sought asylum in South Africa and Mr Kabila's chief aide during the battles against Mobutu, Moise Nyarugabo, has fled.
Scattered about Africa and Europe are highly influential and very rich Mobutists who are believed by dissidents to be either funding the rebellion or prepared to do so, in an attempt to consolidate their continuing interests in the former Zaire. They were briefly the targets of the discredited agency for ill-gotten gains.
But Mr Ngefa argues that despite Mr Kabila's patent mismanagement of Congo, his human rights organisation and others who oppose the guerrilla-president have no option but to call for talks.
He said: "If we are to avoid another civil war and months of massacres, we have to back a national conference of all the parties.
"President Kabila can no longer run the country but we have to allow him to remain a temporary linchpin around which talks can proceed." -- Guardian News Service, August 6, 1998.