Who are . . . the Congolese Rebels?
Ann Eveleth
When Congolese rebel commander Jean- Pierre Ondekane vowed this week to “intensify” the rebellion against embattled Democratic Republic of Congo President Laurent Kabila, he spoke with a confidence his opponent has never enjoyed.
Unlike Kabila, whose 1997 Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo rebellion against erstwhile Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko depended heavily on the backing it received from Rwandan and Ugandan forces, Ondekane knows he controls enough Congolese forces to continue fighting even after his backers – the same countries – have signed a truce.
Ondekane (36) is a career soldier with roots in his home province of Equateur in north-eastern Congo. The province is a stronghold of ex-Mobutuists where the rebel army has reportedly begun organising extra military backing. Ondekane cut his teeth in Mobutu’s Zairean Armed Forces before joining Kabila and rising quickly through the ranks of the Congolese Armed Forces (FAC).
In the early days of the current rebellion, he joined forces with Kabila’s former interim chief of staff, James Kabarehe. The rebellion started on August 2 with the announcement by FAC commander Sylvain Mbuchi that the Goma- based 10th battalion he led had mutinied. Ondekane commanded the 10th battalion last year, before taking command of the Kivu-based 12th infantry brigade, which he led into the mutiny. Other FAC battalions, including commander Ilunga Kabambi’s Bukavu-based 222nd battalion, joined the rebellion within the week.
But the decisive moment for the accumulation of internal military support followed the rebel airlift to Kitona – reportedly organised by Kabarehe – where 30 000 disillusioned FAC troops were garrisoned. The London- based newsletter Africa Confidential reported last month that Mobutu’s former military elite, generals Kpama Baramoto and Ngbale Nzimbi, urged these troops – many of whom had served under them in Mobutu’s army – to join the rebellion.
Baramoto, Nzimbi and Mobutu’s former defence minister, Admiral Mudima Mavua, began plotting with South African mercenaries to overthrow Kabila after seeking refuge in South Africa in May 1997. Their involvement has helped ensure the rebels could hold their own without Uganda and Rwanda.
They also form a curious link with the civilian-political wing of the rebellion, the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD).
The RCD was first reported as a group of ex-Mobutuists organising in Europe in mid-1997. Now led by Ernest Wamba dia Wamba – a former Mobutu opponent who emerged last month from relative obscurity as a history professor at Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam University – the RCD claims it supports an inclusive national conference aimed at finding a democratic political solution to the crisis.
But the rebel movement has so far demonstrated little public support in the towns it has conquered. And Wamba dia Wamba’s call to veteran politician Etienne Tshisekedi to lead his Union for Democracy and Social Progress into the rebel alliance has so far been rejected.
A pan-Africanist who supported Kabila’s rebellion but refused to join it, Wamba dia Wamba’s political programme is unclear. He is understood to have formed close ties with former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere during his 33- year exile in that country.
Significantly, Wamba dia Wamba did not join the rebel delegation which flew to last week’s Victoria Falls summit. The delegation was led by rebel co- ordinator Arthur Z’Ahidi Ngoma and Kabila’s former foreign minister, Bizima Karaha. Ngoma is a well-known opponent of Mobutu, and president of the Forces of the Future party.
Like many of Kabila’s political opponents, Ngoma was arrested for political activity in 1997. A former employee of the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, he was evacuated for health reasons to France – a country with which he is alleged to have close ties – but reappeared in Goma when the rebellion began.
Karaha is a Munyamulenge (Congolese Tutsi) who reportedly has close ties with Rwandan Vice-President Paul Kagame. One of the most prominent Tutsis in Kabila’s government, Karaha maintained his position as foreign minister through three Cabinet reshuffles. He joined the rebellion while on a state visit to South Africa, where he had studied medicine, saying Kabila had become a worse “dictator” than Mobutu. The Tutsi- led rebellion followed five days after Kabila demanded the withdrawal of all Rwandan troops from the Congo. Karaha is one of several former members of Kabila’s entourage to have joined the rebellion.
RCD deputy chair Moise Nyarugabo, also a Munyamulenge, served as Kabila’s adviser and headed the Office for Ill-Gotten Goods, charged with recovering state money stolen by Mobutu’s regime. He left that post amid allegations of misappropriation of goods.
Former Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo leader Deogratias Bugera, another Munyamulenge, was nominated state minister during Kabila’s last Cabinet reshuffle, but left Kinshasa after Kabila turned out his erstwhile Rwandan backers.
Rwanda and Uganda signed a ceasefire agreement at the Victoria Falls summit, but Karaha and Ngoma said they had been excluded from the agreement and were not bound by it. Said Karaha: “They will only know we exist when we start shooting.” He vowed to continue fighting to force Kabila to recognise the rebellion’s Congolese nature.
But observers said the rebels’ decision could scupper multinational efforts to force Kabila out of power through a political process that would tie him to democracy.
Vital Statistics:
Born: Officially in Goma on August 2, but conceived much earlier through a marriage of convenience between former enemies
Defining characteristics: A motley crew of ex-Kabilaphiles, anti- Mobutuists, Mobutuists and Tutsi nationalists
Favourite people: Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and Rwandan President Pasteur Bizimungu
Least favourite people: Congolese President Laurent Kabila and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe
Likely to say: “The enemy of our enemy is our friend”
Least likely to say: “By rejecting the ceasefire, we have played right into Kabila’s hands”
@Wanted: One jolly good bastard
Howard Barrell
Over a Barrel
One of the more surprising appeals from the African National Congress in recent months has been that we should not “play politics” over the difficulties we are experiencing with crime.
The implications of its call are astonishing. One inference is that politics is just a game and that crime is too serious an issue to be kicked around in the course of it. If this is so, we are justified in asking: what, apart from buffoonery, can our political class cope with?
Another implication of this ANC appeal could be that crime has nothing to do with politics. It is difficult to credit how any ANC politician could say or imply such a thing. For the ANC comes from a tradition in which crime is thought to result mainly from deprivation.
In the South African case, this is deprivation of the majority caused directly by the politics and skewed economics of apartheid. And, as the ruling party, the ANC has directed much of its legislation and even more of its rhetoric towards correcting this legacy.
I am not interested in arguing here over whether bad circumstances, bad morals, bad genes or bad people make good criminals. No doubt it’s a bit of each. What I am concerned to do, however, is to show just how politically dangerous the crime crisis may be for this ANC government.
There is a respectable body of political theory which says that our most basic social need as people is to prevent anarchic violence. Why?
Well, it’s not only because we don’t want to be robbed, raped or murdered. It is also because anarchic violence can destroy economies.
Why sweat and toil in your fields, or scrimp and save to buy new cloth- making equipment, if some heavily armed, light-fingered lumpen is going to come down from the hills and plunder your homestead or factory as soon as you are up and running?
The point is this: victims of violence and theft do not lose only what is taken from them; they may also lose the incentive to produce any goods to exchange with others. This means people go hungry or naked. It means famine.
If this sounds a little theoretical, it is not. It is happening today in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. It happened a few years ago in Chad, Ethiopia and Mozambique. People in these territories have direct experience of famine induced by anarchy and the roving bandits who alone thrive on it, to some degree.
Some theorists argue that governments and our idea of “the state” came from just this kind of experience. One of the more interesting among them is Mancur Olson, an American economist, who died recently.
In an article in the American Political Science Review, Olson argued that the worst curse for any society is “roving bandits”. Where these are prevalent there is no security of person or property – not even for the bandits themselves.
One of our biggest advances as human beings came, according to Olson, when one roving bandit leader seized a particular territory, became a “stationary bandit” and drove off all roving bandit rivals.
But the stationary bandit remained a bandit. He acquired, so to say, a monopoly of theft in his domain. People living in his territory had to hand over property to him. That is, they had to pay taxes. In return, these people received his protection from other roving bandits – something they were happy to pay for.
The more intelligent stationary bandit leader, according to Olson, did not use taxation to rob his subjects blind. Instead, he taxed them in a way that ensured they still had the means to generate further income which he would be able to tax later.
Thus, says Olson, “the rational self- interested leader of a band of roving bandits is led to settle down, wear a crown and replace anarchy with government”. He adds: “History until relatively recent times has been mostly a story of the gradual progress of civilisation under stationary bandits interrupted by occasional episodes of roving banditry.”
The democratic forms of government we have developed in recent years have complicated the picture Olson paints. But these democratic state systems still depend on the same basic deal between the governed and the government: if you want to tax me, then you must protect me and my property from roving bandits. This is something our current government is singularly failing to do.
I hesitate to suggest that the experiences of South Africans in parts of the Cape Flats, KwaZulu- Natal, isolated agricultural areas and the old townships are as difficult as those of people in Sudan and the Congo.
Our situation is nothing like as acute – yet. But South Africans in large numbers find themselves at the mercy of bandits and gangs operating with impunity in their areas. The South African state and its forces of law and order quite clearly exercise no writ across large parts of the country.
More than 500 farmers have been murdered over the past four-and-a-half years, prompting farmers in some parts of the country to consider not paying their taxes until the government demonstrates some seriousness about protecting people. Agricultural organisations report that many peasant farmers in KwaZulu-Natal and other parts of the country have stopped trying to upgrade equipment to work their lands because any pump they install or fence they erect is stolen.
Terror still reigns in Richmond and other parts of KwaZulu-Natal, despite what we are told are the best efforts the government can muster. People in Guguletu, an old black township outside Cape Town, have concluded that taxi drivers and the rough justice they mete out are much better able to protect them from gangs than the local official police force, whom they treat with open contempt.
Other townships duplicate this experience. Scores of bombs have gone off in gang warfare and quasi- political violence on the Cape Flats over the past year, yet no one has been brought to book for them. Huge cash heists following well-established patterns of execution are reported weekly in Gauteng and elsewhere. At night our city centre streets are deserted by most except muggers and criminals.
Wealthier South Africans cower behind high walls and electronic gates. Many of our most gifted citizens are emigrating. And the high rates of growth of thousands of security companies around the country testify to the incredible ineptitude or disregard of our political leaders.
Crime is not, as some disingenously suggest, a white problem. It is a crisis for all South Africans, and the poorer they are, the more grievously they feel its cosh. It is a profoundly political crisis. It is a crisis of state, no less.
Wanted: a good stationary bandit. Any effective bastard will do.