(december 2022)
Nations in Crisis: Congo Kinshasa
The civil war in Congo Kinshasa, officially known as the Democratic Republic of Congo, has largely been forgotten in the West but
more than 120 armed groups continue to terrorize the east, notably
the M23, an ethnic Tutsi group which is supported by Rwanda and has recently staged a rapid advance towards the city of Goma.
The M23 became famous for unspeakable atrocities. In 2012
Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, called them among the worst perpetrators of human rights violations in the DRC, or in the world for that matter.
(To be fair, in 2012 the Congolese army didn't fare any better: fleeing M23, Congolese troops raped over 1,000 women over a ten day rampage).
The world agrees with Kinshasa that Rwanda is arming and funding the M23, but Rwanda is right that Kinshasa has been sheltering the FDLR, a Rwandan Hutu group that fled Rwanda after the genocide of Tutsis in 1994.
In November 2022, the M23 slaughtered more than 130 people in the villages of Kisheshe and Bambo.
The international community has not done much to condemn Rwanda because tiny
Rwanda is actually an important actor in Africa. For example, it just
sent one thousand soldiers to fight the Islamists in Mozambique.
The border with Uganda too is periodically a troublespot: in late
2021 Ugandan troops crossed the border to fight the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF),
an ISIS affiliate that had just staged a terrorist attack in Kampala and
is generally fighting to overthrow the Ugandan government.
The Ugandan troops remained until mid 2022, with approval from Kinshasa.
This ISIS affiliate has increasingly shifted its target from Uganda to Congo (Uganda does have a sizeable Muslim population, Congo does not).
In the same general region (more precisely in eastern Iruri province) massacres of civilians have been carried out by
the Cooperative for Development of the Congo (CODECO), whose fighters are mostly
drawn from the Lendu farming community which has been fighting for decades the Hema herders. In February 2022 CODECO killed 60 Hema people in the Plaine Savo refugee camp, in September they killed 15 in Djugu
And it's not like the rest of Congo is pacified:
deadly intercommunal violence has displaced thousands since July 2022 in Kwamouth, in the west of the country.
There are now more than 5.5 million internally displaced people.
The civil war that started in 1998 has often been the theater of a broader geopolitical
conflict pitting Rwanda and Uganda against Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia,
all competing for control over Congos lucrative natural resources (gold, diamonds, cobalt, coltan, copper, tin, oil),
each having carving out their own economic fiefdom at one time or another.
Much of the mineral wealth ends up in the countries of the usual suspects: for example, China and the USA are vying for control over the global supply of cobalt, an essential element for the electric cars of the future.
Congos gold is smuggled out to Rwanda and Uganda, then exported to the United Arab Emirates where it is refined and traded in Dubai.
Note that in the region a nation is often just the personal fief of its leader: Uganda is Yoweri Museveni's personal fief, Rwanda is Paul Kagame's, Angola was Jose Eduardo dos Santos', Zimbabwe was Robert Mugabe's, and Congo was Joseph Kabila's fief before 2019 (when Felix Tshisekedi inherited power from him).
Congo's democracy is funny: the Catholic Church oversaw the 2018 elections and declared that there was a clear winner, and that winner was Martin Fayulu, the leading opposition candidate, but Tshisekedi was declared the winner after making a deal with Kabila.
The Congolese army is deeply corrupted. Generals receive more income from
bribes than from government salary.
An estimated 6 million people have been killed in Congo's multiple civil wars.
The 12,000 troops of the United Nations mission in eastern Congo (the MONUSCO), one of the world's most expensive peace operations, have largely been useless.
In fact, Congolese frequently demonstrate against their presence.
The only actors actively working for peace are Kenya and Angola, which have deployed troops in Goma and hosted talks between the government of Felix Tshisekedi and the M23 rebels.
Congo's endless civil war is an indirect consequence of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, when almost a million people were killed, mostly Tutsis killed by Hutus.
When Kagame restored order and seized power, many of the brutal Hutu gangs crossed over into Congo. At first they simply persecuted the local Tutsis. The Rwandan
government sent troops into Congo to fight these Hutu militias.
Rwanda also had reasons to hate Congo's long-time dictator Mobutu, who had supported the Hutu regime in Rwanda responsible for the genocide.
Uganda also supported Rwanda,
mainly because three Ugandan terrorist groups
(the Allied Democratic Forces, the Lord Resistance's Army and the West Nile Bank Front) were operating from there but also
because Museveni and Kagame had been friends for years,
and later Angola too joined in the invasion because Mobutu
had been a supporter of UNITA during Angola's own civil war that ended with
the victory of the MPLA, and also because thousands of former Congolese soldiers of the Katanga region (Kabila's home province)
who were living in exile in Angola (known as the "Katanga gendarmes").
In 1996 Rwanda, Uganda and Angola sponsored the creation of an anti-Mobutu
front, the
Alliances of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL), led by
opposition leader Laurent Kabila, and uniting
Kabila's Parti de la Revolution Populaire (PRP), probably the oldest opposition force (founded in 1968),
Andre' Kisase Ngandu's the Conseil National de Resistance pour la Democratie (CNRD) that included the old guard still loyal to previous dictator
Lumumba,
Masasu Nindaga's
Mouvement Revolutionnaire pour la Liberation du Zaire,
and Deogratias Bugera's Alliance Democratique des Peuples (ADP), which mostly represented the Congolese Tutsis
(mainly the Banyamulenge)
and constituted the main fighting unit.
In 1997 the rebels
with help from those three foreign powers overthrew dictator Mobutu and installed Kabila as the new president.
However, Kabila didn't restore order in the border areas and instead created
divisions within the new government.
He was originally supposed to be only the spokesman of the AFDL, not the future president of the country.
Kisase Ngandu was assassinated during the march towards Kinshasa,
Masasu was arrested in November 1997 for speaking up against Kabila
and Bugera was fired as secretary general of the AFDL.
Kabila de facto instituted a new dictatorship, a wildly unpopular one, if nothing
else because his government was stuffed with politicians who had lived in exile
(the most popular politicians was now, by far, Etienne Tshisekedi, who had never
left Congo, and had started his own party).
In August 1998 Kabila made the mistake of expelling Rwandan troops from Congo.
Uganda and Rwanda created a new generation of rebels (mostly Tutsis, at least at the beginning), this time fighting Kabila: the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Democratie (RCD), led by Bugera, widey viewed as Kagame's man in Congo.
By the end of 1998 Kabila's government had lost control of more than one-third of Congo to the RCD.
Namibia, Angola, Zimbabwe and Chad sent troops to support Kabila and this started a multi-national war that lasted until 2003 and killed an estimated five million people.
This time Angola sided with Kabila because he had just entered Congo in the Southern Africa Development Community (of which Uganda and Rwanda are not members).
If the 1996-97 campaign was mostly a liberation war that was welcomed by the population (although mostly fought by the invading troops of Uganda and Rwanda), the 1998 campaign was an intra-African war for control of Congo's resources.
In 2001 Laurent Kabila was assassinated in mysterious circumstances and his son was appointed president.
South African president Thabo Mbeki finally mediated a peace agreement in 2003 and a transitional government of national reconciliation was established that
included as vicepresidents of
Joseph Kabila the leaders of the main militias:
Azarias Ruberwa for the Rwandan-backed RCD-Goma, the largest rebel group, and Jean-Pierre Bemba for the Ugandan-backed Congolese Liberation Movement (MLC),
the second largest rebel group. The army was reorganized to distribute power
to military leaders drawn from all former armed rebel groups.
However, the proxy war between Rwanda and Kinshasa continued in east Congo.
The new Rwandan puppet was the Tutsi warlord Laurent Nkunda. The pretext for his insurrection was the activities of the Hutu militia known as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), formed by some of the perpetrators in 1994 of the Rwandan genocide.
In 2009 international pressure forced Rwanda to arrest Nkunda (who is still under house arrest in Rwanda). The remnants of his militia, now led by
Bosco Ntaganda pledged to continue fighting the FDLR as part of Congo's regular army, and he became the leader of a new party, the
National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP).
The agreement between Bosco and Kabila was signed on March 23, hence "M23".
This was yet another false peace, as in 2012 Bosco, accusing Kabila of reneging on their deal and of cheating in the recent elections (both true),
staged a rebellion and started a new Tutsi militia backed by Rwanda in eastern Congo, the M23.
In 2024 the ADF killed more than 80 people in massacres in eastern Congo,
and in one year M23 almost doubled the territory it controls, all but completely
surrounding Goma. It is eastimated that there are now more than 100 different armed groups fighting in this civil war.
It is not difficult to guess why the Western powers are ignoring Rwanda's role in funding and possibly directing M23: Russia has staged great diplomatic victories in West Africa and in the Central African Republic, and the West sees the strongmen of Rwanda and Uganda as trusted allies against Russian expansion in Africa.
Those two strongmen are also useful to the West to fight Islamists, the other standing threat to the Western Christian world: Uganda is fighting the ISIS affiliate ADF and Rwanda sent troops to fight the Islamists of Mozambique.
Those two strongmen are also competing for control of eastern Congo, not only politically but also economically (since 2016, Rwandas largest export has been gold, and Rwanda doesn't have major gold mines...).
Both strongmen are also secretly admired in the West: they might be semi-dictators but they are way less murderous than their predecessors and were indeed successful in turning their countries around.
Tshisekedi doesn't have the same kind of leverage over the West.
He is probably a man constantly afraid of being overthrown by his own army.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2022 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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