The conflict in Zaire took a long time to make the news and has been poorly reported, with a few notable exceptions, writes Alison Campbell
SO far, there is little in the reporting of Zaire, or Congo, as the rebels have renamed it, to suggest that it is any more than another tin-pot African war.
The initial coverage was in stark contrast to that coming out of the Rwandan border town of Gisenyi late last year when hundreds of journalists arrived in pursuit of the story everyone had been waiting for – the expected return to Rwanda of the refugees, who at that stage were fleeing fighting and disappearing into the bush, or who were trapped behind armed frontlines.
Within days of the media onslaught, headlines proclaimed a million refugees faced starvation. The alarmism intensified after the evacuation of expatriates who had been working in the camps. Journalists and aid workers joined forces in priming public expectation for a humanitarian catastrophe equal to or greater than that seen during the cholera epidemic in Goma in 1994. The fighting which was causing the problems was routinely summed up at the end of reports as being between the Zairean army and a rag-tag force of Tutsi rebels acting as a front for the Rwandan army which wanted to clear the refugee camps.
The humanitarian catastrophe didn’t happen – not then anyway. The Zairean rebel coalition suddenly routed militant refugees who had been preventing the rest from returning to Rwanda. And return they did – en masse and in spectacular style they filled the world’s television screens and some front pages for a week. Cynical observers, however, noted just one thing missing: the mass starvation and death which had been the subject of such clamour over the preceding weeks.
On the whole the refugees were in remarkably good shape, and although they spoke of great numbers of sick and dying in the forests of Zaire, the television cameras couldn’t verify the stories.
The Rwandan government chose the moment for a canny political move, declaring after three days that almost all the refugees in eastern Zaire had returned home. The few who were left, it said, were all Interhamwe militia and soldiers in the former Rwandan army who were choosing to stay in Zaire because of their role in the 1994 genocide.
Aid agency warnings of hundreds of thousands of people still adrift amid the fighting in Zaire were dismissed as gross exaggeration. The media, forgetful of their part in the hype, turned on their erstwhile sources and joined the chorus of righteous indignation against greedy aid agencies. That done, they packed up and went home for Christmas. Coverage of the rag-tag rebel activity dropped off as though there was no continuing war and no huge population at risk from conflict, displacement, hunger and disease.
Since then, the war has seen spectacular territorial advances by the rebel army, claimed an untold number of civilian lives, and been the theatre for a multitude of largely unwitnessed atrocities. Jim Hoagland observed recently in The Washington Post: “Zaire is … only one dramatic, current case that establishes the costs of letting grand abstractions obliterate human values and realities in fashioning policies”. Referring to the consistent failure of United States policy- makers to tackle the Zairean problem until it was too late, he noted: “What you’ve feared has already happened.” This implies that it happened in a climate of information which failed to report a more challenging reality on the ground.
It also reflects the extent to which journalists themselves simply shared the policymakers’ preoccupation with the grand abstractions of the Cold War. It was a period in which African states were regularly described in the media in terms of their association with one or the other superpower.
More recently, the continent has received media attention primarily for its conflicts and humanitarian crises, creating a basket- case image out of senseless happenings and humanitarian tragedies. In the search for powerful images of human suffering, explanations for it have been sidelined and ethnicity has become the catch-all cause.
But analysts are making new sense out of Africa, discerning meaning in social, economic and political complexities, and creating new languages to describe phenomena which seemed inexplicable in the old.
Journalists, however, have some catching up to do in bringing coherence to their African stories. The Central African situation is still being attended to on a fire-fighting basis, with little apparent understanding of the background or wider significance.
At the start of the current Zairean conflict, journalists, with notable exceptions, focused on the humanitarian crisis and attributed events almost entirely to Rwanda’s desire to rid itself of its opponents in the refugee camps. They sniffed at any suggestion that the rebel alliance had any real agenda or effectiveness of its own.
Thus regular reports of large numbers of Rwandan troops inside Zaire were often based on the Tutsi appearance of the soldiers and their hallmark gumboots. This took no account of what many locals said, that these soldiers spoke Presque Kinyarwanda – a Zairean dialect rather than a Rwandan one – and that many had been refugees from the area who had joined the Rwandan army and had now defected to fight for their own country. For the journalists who remembered that the Rwandan army had done just the same thing a few years before – breaking away from Uganda’s forces to march on Kigali – this shouldn’t have seemed like too much of a tall story.
Coverage was regularly sceptical of the rebels’ stated aim of bringing down Zairean President Mobuto Sese Seko, which may have seemed physically remote at that stage (although not unlikely now). This attitude ignored the history of resistance activities on the part of the rebel leadership, particularly the 1960s when their rebellion was quashed by the intervention of a foreign force. Those awaiting an intervention force to rescue refugees in Mugunga camp in eastern Zaire could have predicted that rebel leader Laurent Kabila would not wait around for the same thing to happen to him again.
Journalists initially expressed doubt about the alliance’s potential to draw local support from areas to which the leadership did not actually belong. This reinforced the image of the rebels as an illegitimate invading force with a purely Rwandan agenda, while again ignoring the likelihood that for most Zaireans they might present a more attractive option than the dismally atrophied status quo.
This is not to suggest that the rebels have achieved their successes without assistance, but having failed to take the rebel coalition and its cause seriously at the outset, the West was surprised by the swiftness of the rebel advance and the groundswell of popular support it elicited. There has been massive death and displacement of civilians while no one was looking.
A clue to the significance of events in eastern Zaire might have been found by taking a broader look at numerous other small conflicts in the Horn of Africa which were being sporadically reported around the same time: the growing impact of the Lords’ Resistance Army on the north of Uganda, the appearance of another Ugandan rebel group, the West Bank Nile Front, the progress of the Sudanese rebels based in Uganda, and their new incursions into Sudan along the Ethiopian and Eritrean borders.
The northern-most part of eastern Zaire is a confluence point for all of these. In this area, Zaire has oppressed its own minority groups, facilitated Hutu militants against Rwanda, Ugandan rebels against Museveni, and arms flows to the southern outposts of Sudan’s Islamic government army. This degree of regional destabilisation would not have gone unremarked in, say, a European context where we have an understanding of, and a language in which to explain, its significance.
The rebel alliance is now in a position to stop all that, making life easier for their allies Uganda and Rwanda, and somewhat harder for the fundamentalist government in Khartoum, which may, after all, prove to be the true epicentre of the quake that is rumbling.
The French have never been indifferent to the fate of their cultural bastions in Africa, and while the flawed legacy of previous bravura actions is forcing France to keep a low profile on this one, there is no reason to suspect that there is no action below the parapet.
A last-minute scramble to bring the combatants to the table rests on the usual tenets, including cessation of hostilities, respect for the territorial integrity of Zaire, and the establishment of an electoral process. This is a derisory range of options for the rebels and their allies – a return, in effect, to the status quo against which they took up arms.
While giving the impression that something is being done, international forums have no new language in which to discuss the root problems, and so far the media tend to mirror their accepted but unconstructive vision of the continent. The post-world war emphasis on territorial integrity, for instance, was an attempt to move beyond hundreds of years of European history during which the acquisition of or control over territory was the accepted currency of conflict (to which Africa owes many of its arbitrarily imposed borders). Yet suggestions about the reworking of the African map have acquired an air of taboo.This has the effect of denying legitimacy to conflicts which have a territorial aim, and leaving them open to the tin-pot tag.
One political analyst of the situation in Zaire describes what is happening there as Africa’s great undeclared war. Another has spoken of a fault-line along which is crystallising a major confrontation between Anglophone and Francophone Africa. We can expect a spate of retrospective analysis in due course, but can we expect anything new out of African reporting?
Alison Campbell of Care (UK) wrote this article for Crosslines Global Report, in association with the International Centre for Humanitarian Reporting