THERE is a long-forgotten picture of Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, then still a guerilla leader, shaking hands with then president Bazilio Okella on December 17 1985. The leaders had just signed a treaty to end the civil war and create a transitional government in Kampala. A few weeks later, Museveni tore the treaty up, took the capital by force and declared himself the unchallenged ruler of Uganda.
There are two lessons in this for students of war and peace in Zaire. The first is that a victorious peasant army will not stop marching until they have broken down the statues of the dictator, ransacked his bathroom and run up the rebel flag from the spire of the legislative buildings. The other is that one of Laurent Kabila’s closest advisors before his army began its unstoppable march across Zaire was Yoweri Museveni.
It would be naive to expect the peace talks which South Africa is brokering this weekend to end the conflict in Zaire. Hopefully, their most immediate impact could be a humanitarian one – saving as many lives of refugees and innocent victims caught up in the fighting as possible. But they could be extremely important in a deeper process of soul-searching.
The conflict goes way beyond the removal of Mobutu from office. It is part of the very process of Africa remaking itself. The springboard for Kabila’s extraordinary leap towards Kinshasa was the tangled ethnic and cross-border conflicts of eastern Zaire.
The spark that ignited Kabila’s decades- long insurgency, transforming it into a viable challenge to Mobutu, was when the Hutu militia and Mobutu’s troops rounded on the Zairean Tutsis last year and found themselves faced with a powerful and organised grouping of forces who adopted Kabila as the figurehead.
Museveni wanted to drive his own rebels, who were receiving succour from both the Sudanese and Mobutu, away from his borders. The Rwandan government was concerned that Hutu militia were using the safety of United Nations camps in Zaire as a base to plot further genocidal incursions against the Rwandan Tutsis. They both supported a rebel advance that would drive the militia back deep into Zaire.
In the course of his march across Zaire, the rebel leader forged a coalition of allies with long-standing grudges against Mobutu. These included the Angolans, who have had to bear 20 years of Zairean support for Unita and the destruction of their country.
Yet Kabila’s insurgency grew above and beyond those that helped send him on his way, or are even serving in his army, and in a manner that noone could have predicted. As Zaire collapsed before him, a path opened to the capital.
Even Museveni now has severe doubts about Kabila. The Hutu camps under his control that were opened to the international scrutiny last week raise serious doubts about his ability to control his troops.
He is without a national political organisation, ranged across a land riven by deep ethnic tensions, and surrounded by nations with their own agendas and age-old enmities. What hope has he to govern such a large, amorphous land as Zaire, which has not had a proper government for decades and where the only instruments of national cohesion will disappear with Mobutu?
Simplistic solutions such as multi-party elections could only exacerbate, not resolve, the tensions. You cannot have elections until you have drawn up a Constitution to create a federal state, to rein in secessionist tendencies, and to grant protection and security to minorities.
Next-door neighbour Angola was propelled back to civil war by an election that went awry. Multi-party elections can bring dictators or demagogues back to power. Democracy in Zaire can help transform the whole continent, but only after the ground has been firmly laid.
Increasingly, African leaders are looking at other priorities, such as the modernisation of the economy.
If we are to follow Deputy President Thabo Mbeki and take the African renaissance seriously, then Uganda is a key player. Museveni inherited a wasteland from Idi Amin and Milton Obote, and has made enormous strides in turning his country around. Yet he has achieved this without multi-party democracy.
In his recent autobiography, Museveni acknowledged that you can’t build a sustainable democracy with 92% of your population as peasants. You can’t build a modern state without a middle class of personal income taxpayers. And democracy means nothing when International Monetary Fund and World Bank strictures leave no revenue to pay for basic social amenities.
Along with Eritria, Ethiopia and Rwanda, Uganda has been through not just colonial domination, but a post-colonial nightmare – and has emerged stronger, searching for an African solution to its problems, but with few illusions about what a hard continent this is. Post-Mobutu Zaire could also fall into that category.
The South African aim of searching for an inclusive settlement is the correct one. Pressure has to be brought to bear on Kabila that he cannot hope to go it alone in Zaire. But regional powers such as Uganda, Rwanda and Angola have to be brought in to the discussion.
Once South Africa’s leaders have taken the step of getting involved, they must know that this means more than getting Mobutu and Kabila to meet face to face. What is happening on a navy ship off the coast of our continent this week should be the start of an dialogue aimed at exploring a range of options that will remake Africa.
This is not a fanciful idea. The cost of failure will be what the pessimists are warning of – an enormous and devastating conflagration in central Africa.