A strong political initiative rather than an external military intervention is the solution to the Congo crisis, argues Mahmood Mamdani
When Rwanda decided to provide foot soldiers to spearhead the anti-Mobutu rebellion in October 1996, the main objection came not from Mobutu Sese Seko’s erstwhile patrons, but from Rwanda’s own staunch ally, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda.
Museveni had not forgotten the Ugandan experience of being liberated by a mainly foreign army. He had not forgotten that when Tanzanian troops intervened in 1979 to remove Idi Amin, the intervention proved to be not just the end of a crisis but the beginning of another. The intervention in fact triggered a spiralling crisis, moving from one government to another. Having come in as benefactor, Tanzania was tempted to stay in as a custodian.
No matter how hard it tried, and no matter how many times it changed local partners, Tanzania could not halt the spiral, at least not until a six- year- long guerrilla war gelled together an internal force strong enough to control the country on its own. That force was the National Resistance Army, and its fiercely independent leader was Museveni.
It is surely a supreme irony of history that Museveni should have teamed up with Rwanda in support of a second regional intervention in Congo in less than two years. One is tempted to ask: is not the same spiralling crisis afoot in the Democratic Republic of Congo that Museveni feared an intervention would trigger, like the one Uganda exprerienced from 1979 to 1986 in the aftermath of the Tanzanian intervention?
No one disputes any longer that Laurent Kabila’s government was installed in power by foreign forces. Few would deny that the parameters of Congolese politics for the first year of Kabila’s power was defined by a twin reality. One, Kabila did litle by way of political reforms to expand his domestic political base, and two, most Congolese saw the Kabila government as a stooge of Rwandese forces.
As the Congolese came to see the Rwandese as an army of occupation, it was not difficult to foresee that a government in search of instant popularity would have one trump card at its disposal. That card was the demand that Rwandan troops leave. That was the card Kabila played last month. Not unexpectedly, he reaped a mixed harvest: both civilian support and an armed rebellion.
The Kabila government may not survive this rebellion. But even if it does not, it is hard to see how the Rwanda- Uganda intervention can come out at the winning end. The lightning advance by Rwandan troops in their first intervention -when they took power in the short span of eight months, from October 1996 to May 1997 – may have lulled them into thinking that a repeat is possible. But the conditions of that advance were not just the weakness of the Mobutu military. They included, vitally, the political isolation of the Mobutu regime, both regionally and internally.
With the second armed rebellion, the military and political facts are at odds with one another. Having forged its core through a battle experience that stretches more or less without interruption from the beginning of the guerrilla war in Uganda in 1981, the Rwanda army is undoubtedly the strongest in the region.
But it can hardly boast of a similar strength politically. The region harbours strong doubts about the legitimacy of Rwandese intervention in Congo. At the same time, there is little indication of any change in Congolese hostility to Rwandese military presence on Congolese soil.
Given its historical role, Rwanda, like Uganda, can expect to influence the process of internal development in Congo. But neither can expect to commandeer it. This point is bound to be driven home, if not by the Kabila government, then by one of its successors. No doubt, it must be tempting for Rwanda and Uganda, and not just for Congo, to think that their problems come from across the border and not from within.
The next step is to conclude that the antidote to their problem is external intervention rather than internal reform.
For those in the region not directly involved in the second rebellion, it is important to recognise that the alternative to military involvement is not non-involvement, but a strong political initiative. South Africa is in a particularly strong position to take this initiative since it was not part of the regional coalition that backed the first armed rebellion and since it was, for that very reason, absent from last week’s reportedly sharply divided meeting of the coalition in Victoria Falls.
That political initiative needs to be two-pronged – one directed at the interventionist powers (Rwanda and Uganda) and the other at the government of Kabila.
The interventionist powers need to be discouraged by strong peer pressure. Both the assumption of a rapid and relatively cost-free intervention, and the wisdom of conducting neighbourly relations through military interventions, need to be questioned. The likely consequences of foreign military adventures by small and resource-poor neighbours need to be underlined. It is time to pose some hard questions: if Israel has not been able to ”pacify” southern Lebanon, what chances does Rwanda have of ”pacifying” eastern Congo?
The Kabila government in Kinshasa needs to be reminded that its real weakness is political, not military.
It needs to be told plainly that the quid pro quo of regional political support must be internal political reform. That means recognising multiple centres of political power within Congo, particularly those that came together through the process of internal civic opposition from 1990 to 1996.
It is time to recognise that political reform cannot be brought about by military intervention and, on that basis, to turn a crisis that looks like it could fragment the country we know as Congo into an opportunity for political reform.
Professor Mahmood Mamdani is the director of the University of Cape Town’s Centre for African Studies