Looks at the new regime in Congo
Aronson, David
IN OCTOBER 1996 a rebellion broke out in eastern Zaire and spread with astonishing rapidity from one end of the country to the other, toppling in the course of seven months the thirty-year...
...Each week they seemed to shave off another slice of territory, and in their giddiness adopted a nickname, the Simbas (or Lions, in Swahili), and stamped a figure of Walt Disney's Lion King on their flag and business cards...
...Professors disappear in the night...
...refugee camps established by the humanitarian community become supply sources and staging grounds for the most vicious of insurgents, as in Thailand and Zaire...
...On the basis of very preliminary information, Roberto Garreton, the original chief of the UN team sent to investigate the massacres, identified 134 alleged incidents of mass killings by ADFL troops, and indicated that they might be widespread and indiscriminate enough to constitute "acts of genocide...
...government and the international human-rights community been as acrimonious as it is today over U.S...
...Reports on their number and condition were conflicting and confused...
...During this time, the rebels continued their astonishing advance...
...Since the death in 1993 of eighteen servicemen in Mogadishu, Somalia, the United States has been deeply reluctant to send troops to Africa...
...There are perhaps a couple of hundred miles of paved roads in the entire country...
...Now they beat me anyway" • DAVID ARONSON is an editor in the International Migration Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace...
...Sending in the marines might freeze the situation on the ground, giving Mobutu time to rally his forces and defeat the rebels...
...government, which by contrast is obliged to give lip service to certain norms of international behavior, has been going back and forth on whether to predicate its assistance to Kabila on his allowing the UN team unimpeded access to the country...
...3. During the height of the controversy, for example, the U.S...
...The World Bank scheduled a "Friends of Congo" meeting for early December 1997, and proposed creating a $4 billion "trust fund" to help reincorporate Congo into the international economy...
...The plight of these refugees attracted widespread media attention, and the international community, which perhaps felt a twinge of guilt at its prevarications during the genocide, mounted a massive relief effort) But among the refugees who fled to Zaire were many who had actively participated in the killings, and within months they had reestablished their political and military supremacy inside the camps...
...Human rights groups were equally harsh in their assessments...
...Our cooperation is not guaranteed if the investigation team strays from the set rules," he added...
...What all this means for ordinary Zaireans is captured by the recent plaint of one peasant woman...
...There are, in addition, reliable accounts that Kabila is padding his bank accounts...
...It was into this vastness that the refugees had fled, and from about December 1996 to March 1997 no one knew what had become of them...
...The Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which as many as eight hundred thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutu were slaughtered in one of the most concentrated killing sprees in history, ended when Tutsi rebels seized the Rwandan capital, Kigali, in July of that year, sending over a million Hutu refugees across the border into neighboring Zaire...
...Salih Booker, the director of African Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, declared the rebels "the armed wing of the democratic opposition" to Mobutu...
...As the rebels gained territory, many independent observers—again, I include myself— became preoccupied with using them as leverage to force Mobutu out of power...
...Another high-ranking U.S...
...Per capita Gross National Product sank to $120 a year, and the country regularly topped the United Nations Development Program misery index, a mix of several qualityof-life indicators...
...without any readily identifiable access to food or water, they were presumed to be at risk of perishing...
...This is misleading...
...We have to respect the African point of view," said one official, as though revulsion at massacres were a uniquely Western fetish...
...The debate about who the rebels were and what they wanted was not confined to the fringes, however, nor was it simply academic...
...Indeed, that experience was probably the single most important factor guiding the American response to the Rwandan genocide...
...Indeed, not since the 1980s, when the two were colliding over Central America, has the relationship between the U.S...
...Mobutu's parasitic brand of corruption had long since impoverished the country: in the mid-1980s, according to the New York Times, one child out of two was dying by the age of five...
...It is said that Mobutu's own troops, enraged at being abandoned, fired on the old dictator's cargo plane as he flew into exile...
...Indeed, Kabila's statements suggest he has only a tenuous grasp of basic political and economic realities...
...That was the case with George Washington...
...when one of them spoke up for the Mai-Mai, a group of rebels who had been kicked out of the ADFL early on, several people in the audience snickered...
...The U.S...
...2. Soon after his tenure at State, Cohen, along with two European associates, would, according to the French newspaper Liberation, receive a $600,000 contract from Mobutu for "political communications...
...And since the United States was the only other power capable of mounting a rescue operation, the debate, by extension, was about whether an MNF was really needed...
...By April 4, they had taken Mbuji Mayi, a diamond town to the southwest, and on April 9 they took Lubumbashi, Zaire's second most important city and the capital of the mineral-rich province of Katanga...
...Kabila's first act was to change the country's name to the Democratic Republic of the Congo...
...The crisis in Zaire seemed tailormade for those arguing that the international community needed to start thinking more clearheadedly about the political implications 22 n DISSENT / Spring 1998 of humanitarian intervention...
...Some observers claimed that hundreds of thousands of refugees had fled the advancing Tutsi-dominated army...
...IN OCTOBER 1996 a rebellion broke out in eastern Zaire and spread with astonishing rapidity from one end of the country to the other, toppling in the course of seven months the thirty-year dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko...
...In 1991, Mobutu had bowed to international pressure and announced that he would form a national assembly to draft a constitution and electoral laws...
...I. As hundreds of thousands of people were being slaughtered in the late spring of 1994, the Clinton administration had ordered officials not to call what was happening in Rwanda a genocide lest that obligate us to do something about it...
...The rebellion had two sources...
...He went on to praise the rebels' leadership and discipline, and suggested they were being warmly received by the local population...
...Believers in the protective powers of sacred water, the Mai-Mai go into battle nude, draped with faucets and other bathroom fixtures...
...In October 1997, after months of wrangling, Kabila finally promised UN Ambassador Bill Richardson that the probe would be allowed to proceed...
...By contrast, the ADFL's opponents seemed either compromised or ludicrous...
...The international human-rights community was deeply divided on the issue...
...Since then, some 225,000 have been voluntarily repatriated, and some 200,000 are feared still to be missing...
...The Canadian general in charge of that force has stated that he could have stopped the genocide if he'd been given five thousand troops...
...At this point an odd assortment of voices started to harmonize...
...On May 17, 1997, ADFL troops, somewhat anticlimactically, entered Kinshasa to the guarded enthusiasm of the local population...
...Other observers felt that there were larger issues involved...
...Mobutu fled, first to Gbadoalite, and then, as the ADFL advanced on him there, to Morocco...
...We hoped, and let hope guide our thinking, that Kabila would form a coalition with Zaire's vibrant civil society and with the nonviolent democratic opposition in Kinshasa, and urged U.S...
...That number has since climbed to over two hundred, and as of this writing the UN team has yet to make it into the field...
...Finally, in the Englishlanguage press, there began to appear exposés of the ADFL's crimes during their long march westward...
...Early promises that elections would be forthcoming seem to have slipped off the agenda...
...At issue was whether the United States should participate in the Canadian initiative to send a multinational force (MNF) to rescue the remaining Hutu refugees who had fled west, into the Congo rainforest, after the rebels had cleared the camps...
...But in the 1990s, with inflation occasionally spurting to 20,000 percent, the state and its few remaining institutions essenPOLITICS ABROAD tially flat-lined...
...S0 WHEN a group of Zairean Tutsi took up arms in self-defense last October and vowed to march on the capital, many observers applauded their initiative as long overdue, even while doubting their capacity to bring off a successful revolt...
...The rest has reverted to bush, and the landscape is a cathedral gloom of rainforest laced with the waterways of the river basin and pocked here and there with conglomerations of mud or wood shacks...
...He visited Congo in June 1997...
...The news from Congo continues to be grim...
...So that," another girl added, "if they revived they wouldn't be able to escape...
...Since the secession of Biafra from Nigeria in 1967, it has become increasingly clear that humanitarian intervention can prolong or exacerbate the political conditions that give rise to the humanitarian emergency in the first place...
...Sometimes, rebels are better than governments...
...Many who felt this way, including myself, dismissed the early reports of ADFL massacres as French or Mobutuist propaganda...
...24 n DISSENT / Spring 1998...
...By March 14, they had seized Kisangani, the most important town in the northeast...
...The allegations are deemed preposterous by administration officials, yet Le Monde, Jeune Afrique, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, and the Boston Globe have all published reports indicating that the United States may not have been wholly forthcoming about what it knew and did during the war...
...And as of this writing, in mid-January, the probe has yet to begin its work...
...But just as this debate was reaching a crescendo, the refugees themselves disappeared...
...For those with an interest in Zaire—as for Zaireans themselves—the unfolding history of that rebellion has entailed a gradual, painful process of disillusionment...
...official exclaimed before an assembly of nongovernmental organizations and human-rights representatives that it would be best if everyone "just shut up" about the alleged massacres...
...Zaire is usually described as the size of western Europe or of the United States east of the Mississippi...
...Fielding a military force to help repatriate or resettle these refugees was the only way, these advocates argued, to prevent a "massive" humanitarian catastrophe...
...The country's production of copper, cobalt, diamonds, and other minerals all but ceased...
...I can go to market with money in my hand and no one disturbs me now," one Bukavu resident was widely quoted as saying, marveling at the change from the old regime, when soldiers would routinely harass the population for money and goods...
...Committee for Refugees, spent four days with Kabila in eastern Zaire and on his return argued that "very often, governments are not good...
...It used to be I gave them my money and the soldiers left me alone," she said...
...Some aid agencies pulled out of the camps, unwilling to facilitate such acts...
...Why the United States is so committed to Kabila is far from clear, but allegations are beginning to surface that the United States played a larger role in the war than it has admitted...
...aid, even as he, in their joint press conference, fulminated against a jailed opposition figure...
...Property is seized...
...Prominent American Zaire watchers weighed in on behalf of the rebels...
...policy makers to foster.a dialogue between them...
...From these safe havens, they launched insurgencies into Rwanda and, in collaboration with local politicians, conducted pogroms against Zairean Tutsi...
...DISSENT / Spring 1998 n 23 POLITICS ABROAD But Kabila immediately backtracked, saying that any attempt to link the investigation with Congo's reconstruction would be a "vast conspiracy" to impede the country's progress...
...Faced with another African disaster of unknown proportions, the United States opted, as it had in 1994, to minimize the situation...
...And so while French authorities spoke darkly of a "conspiracy of silence" regarding the refugees, and a UNHCR spokesperson declared that the rebels were practicing "genocide by starvation," the debate in the United States was about whether the political destiny of Zaire should be held hostage to the fate of an unknown number of refugees—many of whom were suspected genocidaires...
...The spokesperson and soon (putative) leader of the rebels, the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of the Congo (ADFL), was a gregarious, beaming fellow named Laurent Desire Kabila, a peripatetic ex-revolutionary from the 1960s...
...4. Though the decision to nix the Canadian plan was probably the Pentagon's, these voices carried the day publicly and gave legitimacy and rationale to the decision...
...At times, as belated revelations of rebel atrocities appeared in the press, the experience has been like awakening inside a Hitchcock movie, where the seemingly reliable turn out to be suspect, and only the shrill, crazy, or conspiracy-minded see things as they are...
...In fact, Kabila probably has little to worry about...
...IT WAS at about this time that many of the "missing" refugees began reappearing, scattered over the south, north, and west of the country...
...Instead, the United States continued to marginalize these groups in favor of Mobutu...
...First they separated the girls from the boys," said one girl, interviewed by a UNICEF team...
...Officials consistently downplayed—and on occasion may simply have lied about—the number and plight of refugees remaining in Zaire...
...Local human rights monitors report that the situation is no better than it was under Mobutu...
...As one commentator noted, "It is an observable fact that in wars people get killed...
...3 The administration was not alone, howDISSENT / Spring 1998 n 21 POLITICS ABROAD ever, in its reluctance to send in soldiers...
...Equally implausible were representatives from the Schiller Institute, an outgrowth of Lyndon Larouche's party, who attended several meetings around Washington, claiming, with a weird, unblinking intensity, that the British Privy Council was sponsoring genocide in Central Africa...
...AT HEART, this was a debate not just about Zaire but about the nature and purpose of humanitarian intervention...
...And they shot the boys, and then they cut them in half...
...Roger Winter, the head of the U.S...
...One of Winter's January 1997 briefings in Washington was attended by a group of Zaireans who denounced him for supporting the rebellion...
...ambassador to Rwanda, Robert Gribben, estimated that there were "tens or twenties of thousands of refugees" who wanted to return...
...Yet in a matter of weeks they had cleared the camps, pushed six hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand refugees back into Rwanda, and established possession of a strip of territory running from Bukavu to Goma along Lake Kivu...
...His heavy-handed efforts to stage-manage the assembly provoked a cycle of popular demonstrations and crackdowns, and led, ultimately, to the selection of Etienne Tshisekedi, Zaire's most prominent dissident, as prime minister...
...others, like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees 20• DISSENT / Spring 1998 (UNHCR), called repeatedly for armed intervention to weed the killers from the genuine refugees, but felt they had no choice but to continue providing relief...
...policy in Congo...
...France was eager to send a force, but lacked the credibility to intervene unilaterally: it was widely believed that France was more interested in propping up Mobutu than rescuing refugees...
...Instead, the United States led the drive to gut the UN's small peacekeeping presence...
...And on her recent foray to the country in December 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright promised Kabila forty million dollars in U.S...
...to the extent that killings were actually occurring, we believed that they were probably attributable to the genocidaires and/ or reflected the terrible but inevitable consequences of war...
...But Tshisekedi was unable to wrest real power from Mobutu, and a subsequent mediation effort led by Herman Cohen, the American assistant secretary of state for African affairs, resulted in Tshisekedi's ouster and replacement by a Mobutu ally.' The political stasis that ensued discouraged all but the hardiest of Zaire watchers, and as the country continued its collapse a mood of profound pessimism pervaded talk of its future...
...Albright's toadying to Kabila prompted the New York Times to remark that this administration's African policies "eerily mimic those of the past," when cold-war imperatives drove the United States to support even the most heinous of dictatorships...
...The Clinton administration seems determined to cooperate with the new regime come what may, and in a preemptive mode has been declaring its sympathy with Kabila's complaint that the UN and human-rights organizations are seeking to impose Western values on Africa...
...the condition of women and children is used to manipulate world opinion, buttressing the regimes responsible for their plight, as in Biafra and Ethiopia...
...A thousand miles to the west, in Zaire's crumbling capital of Kinshasa, Mobutu's kleptocracy was in its death throes...
...In South Africa, negotiations with Mobutu's nephew Honore Ngabanda, a bully and petty POLITICS ABROAD tyrant nicknamed the "Terminator," fell apart when Nelson Mandela prematurely announced that talks were agreed upon: Kabila promptly denied it, and Ngabanda nonchalantly announced that he was there shopping for shoes...
...When, after arduous diplomatic wrangling, the United States and South Africa finally did arrange for Mobutu and Kabila to meet, on the SAS Outeniqua, a South African icebreaker, the "peace talks" did little more than give Kabila a chance to snub Mandela and rub his own imminent victory in Mobutu's face...
...The rebels had cleared the camps housing the Hutu genocidaires—which the international community had notably failed to do—and were now challenging a brutal thirty-year dictatorship...
...The old man, abandoned by his cold-war allies, his body wracked by prostate cancer, spent most of his time convalescing in Monaco or Aix-enProvence...
...They were, for the most part, in dire condition, and their stories confirmed everyone's worst fears...
...Supplies meant for the civilian population are traded for war materiel, as in Somalia...
...Yet even as the extent of the killings became apparent, the vast machinery of the world's financial and diplomatic institutions was locking Kabila into place...
...From the beginning, there were indications that something was awry—an archbishop assassinated under mysterious circumstances, allegations of a massacre at a local hospital— but in its first few months the news about the rebels was generally positive...
...newspaper editors are jailed and beaten...
...For over two years, from July 1994 to October 1996, the situation festered, as central Africa sank from the news...
...Asked about the implications of assisting a government that may have come to power with "acts of genocide" on its hands, a bank official stated that the bank does not take a position on the ways governments come to power and that allegations of massacres are beyond the bank's mandate...
...on his few visits to Zaire, he preferred his remote jungle enclave of Gbadoalite, a fantasy of marble fountains and glass palaces erected on the site of the mud-hut village where he'd been born...
...He's suggested there ought to be a television in every hut, urged the formation of a six hundred thousand—man army, and recently declared Lingala, spoken in the western half of the country, a "dirty language...
Vol. 45 • April 1998 • No. 2
