Text:
http://www.africanews.org/central/congo-kinshasa/stories/19990409_feat4.html
Source App: [In The Heart of War - Netscape]
In The Heart of War
April 9, 1999
Windhoek - The Namibian's Werner Menges was recently in the DRC on a visit
facilitated by the NDF. In this article he takes a look at the regional conflict
and its causes.
BEING held at gunpoint in a dark street in a strange city in a foreign land at war can be quite unnerving, especially when those wielding the guns are little more than teenaged boys, bursting with bravado and apparently incapable of understanding either English or any attempt to reason with them. "Carajo!", one of the teenage soldiers swore when he and about twenty comrades had bundled together our group of five Namibian reporters who were looking for an innocent Saturday night drink in what was obviously the wrong badly-lit street in Kinshasa.
Minutes before, a few of them still had bummed cigarettes off us as we passed them where they were stationed outside a high-walled house; now they were frisking us for weapons and insisting that we explain our presence to their 'Commandante'. An hour and a half and a lot of explaining later (through a fellow foreign journalist who lives in Kinshasa and who speaks French), the commander returned apologetically from the hotel where he had gone to verify our credentials with Namibian Army officers serving in the SADC Allied Force.
The young soldiers skulked back to their post after we had complied with the 'Commandante's' suggestion that we hand them a couple of Congolese franc to buy themselves a few beers. Then the commander insisted on providing us with an escort, who accompanied us to a sidewalk cafe where we had some drinks and who ended up driving us back to our lodging in time for the city's 24:00 curfew.
The foreign reporter remarks: "These people will steal from you, and then expect
to remain your good friend." This kind of occurrence is probably not unexpected,
especially in the light of us being told that the house where the soldiers were
stationed was formerly occupied by the Rwandese commander of the Congolese armed
forces whose removal by Kabila sparked Africa's most serious conflict in
decades. Prince or Toad?
The Democratic Republic of Congo is at war, both with its rebellious self and with its Central African neighbours and not-so-long-ago allies Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi; more than half a dozen African states have joined the fray.
Congolese television news broadcasts are dominated by scenes of masses of parading young soldiers singing battle songs and of Kabila addressing his troops. Less than two years after being hailed as the conquering hero whose gumbooted army, amply helped by Uganda and the Tutsi-dominated regime in Rwanda, threw the kleptocratic Mobutu Sese Seko out of power in May 1997, Kabila the prince seems to have turned into a warty but quite familiar-looking toad.
He might have replaced Mobutu, but Mobutuism lives on, many of his citizens are saying. In a world where perception is often more powerful than reality, Kabila is perceived by many Congolese as going down the well-trodden path left by the incomparably corrupt Mobutu, favouring relatives and friends with jobs and contracts, responding to internal dissent and opposition by jailings, and using foreign support to hold onto power at whatever cost.
In Kinshasa an evidently well-educated young air force officer who says he had received six years of training as a pilot, complains that he has not received his salary for the past seven months. The Kabila government is also not paying salaries in Gbadolite, the home town of Mobutu in the far north; in Lubumbashi, Kabila's home region in the southeast, salaries get paid promptly, he says.
It is the familiar perception of the politics of patronage all over again, it seeMs. In Kinshasa, a Congolese journalist bitterly complains that it is easier for him to work across the Congo River in Brazzaville, where civil war continues to rage, than in Kinshasa in his own home country. Other foreign journalists who have been based in Kinshasa for months express surprise when they are told that Namibian reporters were taken to the eastern DRC military supply base of Kamina - only to be turned back, it must be added, apparently on the orders of the area's Zimbabwean commander - and visited the Western Corridor which connects Kinshasa to the sea.
Despite repeated efforts they have never managed to be granted the necessary official permission to travel to these parts of the DRC; the Kabila government is keeping information on the war under tight wraps, it is indicated. Symptom of Disease
In many respects the war in the DRC is the symptom of the disease that results when two of Africa's most poisonous conflicts converge.
Take the bloody ethnic rivalry that has torn apart Rwanda and Burundi this decade, and also over the past forty years since their independence, combine it with the stubborn civil war that Unita and the MPLA have been fighting in Angola for the past 25 years, and the DRC war is the resuLt. The fear of instability caused by the spillover effects of the Hutu-Tutsi ethnic strife in Central Africa and Unita's vengeful resumption of the Angolan war, planted the seeds of another war that pits supposedly friendly countries - Uganda and Namibia, for instance - against each other. The Angolan war is not being fought only in Angola anymore.
This is evidenced not only by the presence of Angolan troops in the DRC and the arguments, also from Namibian leaders, that the SADC Allies' involvement in the DRC war is justified to prevent the destabilising effect of the Angolan war that is sure to follow if a Unita-friendly rebel regime takes over in the DRC, but also by the continued presence of Angolan troops in Congo-Brazzaville. There the Angolans are propping up the regime of Denis Sassou Nguesso, which they helped put in power in October 1997 after a five month civil war against the rule of elected President Pascal Lissouba, who was considered to be the strongest supporter of Unita since the demise of Mobutu.
Meanwhile, the once attractive city of Brazzaville is being destroyed by urban warfare, militia gangs roam the streets, and reports of a massive humanitarian disaster, with an estimated more than 100 000 residents of the city displaced by fighting, are reaching Kinshasa, within sight and earshot across the river. As tangled as the causes of the Angolan civil war, so too are the grounds for the presence of Ugandan, Rwandan and Burundian troops on the rebel side in the DRC.
The Tutsi are, understandably, still feeling unsafe in a Rwanda and Burundi where they, being only about 14 per cent of the population, are wielding power over the remaining 85 per cent of the population who are Hutu, and where Hutu fighters were operating against their rule from safe havens in what was then eastern Zaire. In this part of the world, the massacre of hundreds of thousands in Rwanda in 1994, as shocking as it was, is not all-too-unfamiliar.
In 1963/64 in Rwanda, in reaction to a Tutsi invasion against the Hutu government of independent Rwanda, the formerly subjected Hutu revolted against their Tutsi oppressors, killing some 10 000 to 14 000 and turning many thousands more into refugees. In 1972 in Burundi, the machetes were in other hands, as that country's minority Tutsi government reacted to a Hutu uprising by having Hutu with government jobs, with wealth, and with education, killed.
An estimated 100 000 were slaughtered. In Rwanda, the Hutu reacted by killing
Tutsi - up to 3 000, it was estimated - and forcing Tutsi from their jobs and
from educational institutions.
The spasms of Africans committing genocide against each other continued, until Rwanda's 1994 apocalypse. Then the Tutsi Rwanda Patriotic Front took over and, a few years later, helped Kabila's forces storm across Zaire and depose Mobutu.
At last the Tutsi had secured their regional safety, it seemed - but then Kabila
ordered his foreign backers to leave and the DRC war started. And the
destruction of ethnic warfare in Central Africa is spreading across the heart of
Africa, reminding one of the theories of the increasing ungovernability of a
colonially created country such as the DRC.
This is the kind of battle ground Namibia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Chad, Sudan, and on the other side Uganda, have now entered. Better The Devil ..
Kabila's people might be disillusioned, but they still seem to be clear about
one thing - better the devil you know than one who comes from another country.
While they were complaining about the direction the Kabila regime had taken, the
Congolese air force pilot and his reporter compatriot both were unequivocal on
one point: "We would rather have Kabila as a dictator than be ruled by
foreigners." And foreigners, it seems, are what many Congolese regard the rebels
in control of a vast swathe of the DRC in the east and north, including the city
of Kisangani, to be.
It can be a chilling experience, hearing a Congolese soldier explain how a rebel is recognised in a country where even the official Congolese army wears an array of uniforms and various types and mixes of camouflage and civilian clothes, with t-shirts of the Gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur appearing to be a particular favourite. To the south-west of Kinshasa a senior officer in the Congolese armed forces explains to Namibian journalists how a rebel soldier is recognised.
They don't look like other Congolese, he says, and they don't speak the same language either. It is easy to spot a Tutsi, he explains.
Even officers in the SADC Allies force sketch the war in such terms - they are
fighting the foreign, invading Tutsi, they explain. That is the perception; the
reality, non-Tutsi rebel leaders insist, is a quite different story of true
Congolese having risen, for the cause of democracy, against their champion who
is turning into a dictator.
I wondered, as I departed from the DRC, driving through Kinshasa's littered streets and polluting traffic, the sweaty city swarming with ordinary people struggling to get by in a treacherous country, and later as I saw the green, seemingly deserted countryside shifting by under our plane as we flew over: "Is it not simply a case of fighting the Tutsi symptoms, rather than the real disease?"