Back
Cairo Times, Egypt, 01-02-2001
The sudden power vacuum on the battlefield due to the death of Congo's president Laurent Désiré Kabila has surprised both his worst enemies and his staunchest allies. For the moment, however, none of them will be able to take advantage of the situation.
"A wimp hooked on booze and women," is how Ché Guevara described Laurent Désiré Kabila, after fighting together with him in the Congolese jungle in the mid-1960s. Kabila was an old horse in Congolese politics, active since before the country got its independence from Belgium on 30 June 1960. After studying philosophy in France, he joined the party of Congo’s first president, Patrice Lumumba. When Lumumba was killed on 17 January 1961–ironically forty years to the day before Kabila himself would be assassinated–he took to the bush and joined the Simba revolt in eastern Congo.
Here Guevara joined Kabila’s "revolution" for a short while, but was disappointed by Kabila’s incompetence and lack of organization. "Nothing convinced me he was the right man for the situation," Ché would later write in his diary. Kabila however went on with his rebellion, mainly busying himself with diamond smuggling. Only after a 25-year kleptocracy, when president Mobutu Sese Seko was dying of cancer, did Kabila get another chance. Congo’s neighboring countries and the United States went looking for a suitable successor for Mobutu and remembered Kabila. He was immediately catapulted as one of the leaders of the rebel alliance and marched to the capital of Kinshasa without much difficulty.
Kabila was not a popular president. In his ways, he quickly changed from promising revolutionary to primitive Mobutu clone. Even his stature shifted accordingly. While he was relatively lean at the start of his long march on Kinshasa, by the time he arrived in the capital in May 1997, he had grown into a fat autocratic dictator. Within half a year of the start of his presidency, all hopes for a bright democratic future had vanished. Different secret services had to spy on each other, half his family joined his government and Congo became a police state. If Mobutu had done his stealing and repression stealthily and with subtlety, Kabila moved around like an elephant in a china shop.
Rwanda and Uganda had originally helped to propel Kabila to power, but quickly fell out with him. Also the rebel alliance that had marched with him fell apart and turned against him. With Congo’s own army weak and divided, Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia send 20,000 troops to keep Kabila in power. Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi joined his former rebel allies and started to fight against him. Congo became an incredible mess.
Only the moment and the method of Kabila’s assassination came as a surprise. One of his bodyguards just strolled up to the president and shot him in the neck. The obvious amateur lone gunman scenario precludes any big conspiracy theories. In addition, the fact that the murder was not followed by a coup d’état suggests it had not been an overly planned action. Nevertheless, Congolese think the West or one of the countries participating in Congo’s ongoing civil war orchestrated the murder.
All the external interference has mainly to do with Congo’s great wealth of natural resources. Diamonds, gold, timber and all kinds of other precious metals are in abundance in the country. Kabila paid his foreign supporters with concessions on diamond mines, though the soldiers and people of Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia see none of the profits on this. Zimbabwe’s economy has been devastated by spending an estimated US$2 million a day on their war effort in Congo. It is one of the main reasons Zimbabwe’s President Mugabe lost most of his popularity, but he refuses to pull back his troops.
For the moment, it does not seem that the death of Kabila will solve anything. Almost two million people have already died, and an end to the civil war seems a long way off. Opposition forces rule almost two-thirds of the country, but will have difficulty reaching the capital, Kinshasa. In fact, the whole civil war has been in a deadlock for some time. The 1999 Lusaka cease fire agreement–which was meant to stimulate a dialogue between the fighting parties–was not implemented. The United Nations withdrew their plan to send peacekeepers. None of the armies are gaining ground, just losing soldiers. Both withdrawal and attack are not options. With the current power vacuum, the country will dissolve into full-scale war if any of the parties withdraws.
Kabila’s successor, his son Joseph, was not looking very happy with his inheritance during his inauguration. The 33-year-old ruler is a kind of shy family man, appointed as head of the armed forces only a few days before his father was murdered. According to informed sources he did not actually get that appointment based on merits. As far as his military strategic thinking goes, he is as weak as his father was. Having grown up in Uganda he speaks mainly English and Swahili, while his citizens speak Lingala and French.
Most observers see Kabila Junior as a kind of puppet of the power elite, inside and outside Congo. According to them he will be gone before we notice it, drowned in the power games between his father’s foreign allies. However, in his inauguration address–in French–he promised both peace and democratic elections, though peace would have to come first.
Telling Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi to get the hell out of his country, he said he would pursue peace "by all means necessary." Clearly, he is planning to stay for a while.
Former colonizer Belgium–which was the first to announce Kabila’s death–was also one of the first to come out of its reverie and is already trying to revive peace talks. They seemed to receive an interested ear from at least some of the parties.
Particularly Angola seems eager to back out but does not want to do so unilaterally. They fear things might get ugly if they leave now. Even if some peace process could succeed, it is questionable if it would last. Mobutu thoroughly corrupted political life, and Kabila did it again. Nor are the different rebel factions very peaceful or democratic. Power-sharing is probably not part of their political vocabulary.
For the moment all parties to the conflict are nervously awaiting what the others will do as no one sees a way forward. Peace for Congo sounds like a novel idea, but the war is still far from over.