Howard W French
Rebel forces in the Democractic Republic of Congo consolidated their hold on Wednesday on much of the eastern regions of the country, and the names of civilian leaders who might replace the embattled President Laurent-Dsir Kabila if the uprising succeeds began to circulate for the first time.
In the clearest indication so far that the armed insurrection against Kabila, which began on Sunday, may spread across Congo, a rebel-controlled radio station in Goma identified a Kinshasa politician and native southerner, Arthur Zaidy Ngoma, as the leader of the rebels.
The radio reported that Ngoma, who had been jailed by Kabila, had already joined the rebels in Goma, which Kabila’s government concedes is firmly in rebel hands.
Ngoma, a long-time official of the United Nation Childrens’ Fund, had been living in Paris, where he had gone for medical care and asylum after he was released from prison in response to strong international pressure. Ngoma was jailed late last year after his small Kinshasa-based party, the Forces of the Future, attempted to convene a political forum in the capital.
Until Ngoma’s name emerged, the rebellion had been almost exclusively identified with dissident troops from the country’s small Tutsi minority from the eastern border with Rwanda.
Kabila rode to power at the head of a rebellion by these very same Tutsi forces. But as a guerrilla fighter long isolated in the mountainous east with little national name recognition and no political base, Kabila was never able to establish much authority for himself.
If the rebels’ choice of Ngoma is confirmed, it may indicate that the patrons of the rebellion – by almost all accounts, Rwanda – have decided that they cannot afford to have a new national leader who comes across as the puppet of the Congolese Tutsi, the Banyamulenge.
For their part, Rwandan officials repeated their denials of involvement in the Congo revolt, but in doing so seemed to reaffirm their strategic interest in the country.
“At the moment there is no reason for Rwanda to be there,” President Pasteur Bizimungu said during a visit to Zambia. “But if we have a serious reason to get involved, we will.”
In Washington, a senior official said intelligence sources show considerable Rwandan involvement in the insurgency. “The Rwandans are on the march from three corners of the country and they’re getting a lot of sympathy and moving very fast,” the official said.
At the outset of the uprising against Kabila, statements by some rebel leaders led many experts to say the insurrection was concerned with defining a large buffer zone in eastern Congo that would be at least loosely controlled by Congo’s eastern neighbours, Rwanda and Uganda. Those two nations have long complained about attacks by guerrillas based in Congo.
But when he formally defected to the rebel side, Kabila’s former foreign minister, Bizima Karaha, made clear that the goal was to press all the way to Kinshasa, just as Kabila did.