THE march of Laurent Kabila and his spirited rebel army through the jungles of Zaire is less a war story than a tale of disintegration. If he had transport, Kabila would be in Kinshasa already, if there were roads. The difficult part only begins when he gets to the capital, when the euphoric crowds that have welcomed the “liberators” to their villages have gone back to the fields.
Zaire is a country in name only. It has a central bank without any money, an exchange rate that is set by diamond merchants and a border that only exists as a line on the map. Mobutu Sese Seko long ago abandoned any pretence of ruling the vast hinterland, but through his malign presence and his now shattered army a national identity was maintained.
That, too, is about to disappear and Kabila could find he has marched into a vacuum, that conquest is easier than control or consolidation.
The map of central Africa is about to be redrawn. Shaba, one of the most glaring cartographic anomalies, has long favoured going it alone. Diamond-rich Kusai has been ruling itself for years, with a minimal connection to Kinshasa.
In Eastern Zaire, the cordon sanitaire that has been drawn to drive the Hutu militia away from Rwanda, and to keep the Lord’s Resistance Army at arm’s length from Uganda, could pull the east into a larger political and economic union with Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni at its centre.
The Organisation of African Unity, terrified of opening the Pandora’s box of secessionism and ethnic war, has a principled opposition to the redrawing of colonial boundaries, its only exception in 30 years being Eritrea. But the reality on the ground, and the weakness of Kinshasa, might dictate otherwise.
An internationally brokered conference, in which all options are put on the table, could provide for an orderly agreement which would at least give the United Nations something to police.
There is, of course, the possibility that the peasants of Zaire, for so long used to living without a government, would simply continue their lives as before and not be too bothered about who occupies the palace. But fortune hunters, war lords, demagogues and great powers seldom leave the people to themselves, particularly when there are riches in the ground. When Laurent Kabila gets to Kinshasa, the contest for Zaire will be far from over. It might be just beginning.