The end is near for the delegates negotiating a peace deal at Sun City, writes John Matshikiza
After a month and a half of dragging their heels and getting bogged down with grandstanding, showmanship and irritable nitpicking, the 361 delegates to the Inter-Congolese Dialogue hosted by the South African government at Sun City finally came to a tentative agreement at 3am on Thursday April 11 the deadline set by President Thabo Mbeki.
Mbeki himself was forced to intervene at the 11th hour, when it became clear that consensus was still only a remote possibility.
The delegates had been given 45 days, starting on February 26, to find a solution to the intractable military and political turmoil of the Democratic Republic of the Congo formerly known as Zaire. After 40 days, the delegates, representing the three main military forces, scattered Mai Mai guerrilla groupings, various political parties and members of civil society, had done little more than enjoy the lavish hospitality of the gambling and leisure resort (paid for by the South African taxpayer) and reiterate their diverse political positions.
Mbeki, acutely aware of the cost of failure, put everything else aside and flew to Sun City to personally take charge of proceedings. After a series of private meetings with each of the main delegations, conducted in a private suite in the gaudy Palace of the Lost City, he prepared a compromise document that was finally discussed and tentatively accepted, to muted jubilation, by most of the parties in the small hours of Thursday morning.
But it was far from the end of the road. All parties agreed that important breakthroughs had been achieved. But the key issue of who would assume the titular leadership of the vast central African country during the transitional period leading to democratic elections was the final obstacle to the achievement of a successful outcome. The fat lady was not yet singing.
No one had truly expected that agreement would be reached even within the generous time frame allowed. In fact, the delegates have been given a seven-day extension to bring them closer to an acceptable solution. But it was an important psychological victory that some sort of agreement should have been announced by the original April 11 deadline.
There is something bizarre in the fact that the unreal environment of Sun City, with its exotic, imported tropical trees and Raiders of the Lost Ark architecture, was chosen as the venue for these talks. Previous attempts to get these talks going having failed in Abuja, Nairobi, Geneva and Addis Ababa, it was perhaps felt that Sun City offered the ultimate in bland neutrality, a contained and relatively controllable environment.
Sun City itself is like an independent principality within the borders of a modern republic like Monaco or Liechtenstein, playgrounds for the rich of Europe, with their own infrastructures of casinos and nightclubs.
As Monaco is to France, so, in a sense, Sun City is to the Republic of South Africa.
The South African government has paid for board and lodging for the delegates and dependents, and provided technical facilities including the closely guarded encampment of pristine-white, air-conditioned marquees that were set up on the perimeter of Sun City for the deliberations.
Each day the participants would shuttle between this mini-conference centre and the plush hotels of the entertainment complex where they were accommodated. Huddling in separate, mutually suspicious corners and on bar terraces framed by dramatic, albeit artificial, waterfalls, the various groups would pore over proposal documents, assessing rival strengths and weaknesses, and manoeuvring for preferential positions.
And at the top of the hill, a tangible but invisible presence, the president of the neighbouring republic of South Africa took up residence beneath the domed towers of the palace, taking careful note as one delegation after another came to argue their positions, and finally offering a series of compromise formulae.
The most forceful supplicants were the main belligerents in the civil war that is now dragging into its eighth year Joseph Kabila’s fragile government in Kinshasa, the various factions of the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) based in Goma, and Jean Pierre Bemba’s Congolese Liberation Movement (MLC) occupying the north-west of the country.
But other voices were also clamouring for the president’s attention. And hovering in the background of each deliberation was the accusing shadow of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first and last elected leader, and still the only enduring symbol of Congolese unity.
Francois Lumumba is the eldest son of the murdered Congolese prime minister. He was 10 years old when his father was assassinated in 1960. By that time he and his siblings had been spirited out of the country. Their father, responding to premonitions of disaster, had arranged for them to be given sanctuary in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt.
Lumumba completed his primary and secondary education there, went on to study economics and political science in Budapest, and then settled into a long exile in Geneva and Paris. Ten years ago, in the thawing climate that marked the faltering last years of the Mobutu Sese Seko regime, he felt it was finally safe to return to Kinshasa and enter the political arena.
As an exiled politician he had revived his father’s Congolese National Movement (MNC-Lumumba) in 1981. The Lumumba name still unleashes strong emotions among the Congolese people, and he claims to have established a country-wide support base since his return although conditions were not easy for him after a 32-year exile.
Although he is greeted with res-pect among many of the delegates at Sun City, it is impossible to gauge the extent of his support. But then it is impossible to gauge the extent of anyone’s support here, given that the country is divided into at least three huge zones controlled by rival armies, with the support of at least six other African states whose presidents have taken sides with one or other of the antagonists.
Lumumba is just one of many politicians operating in the turbu-lent cockpit of Kinshasa. To delegates who come from Bukavu in the east or Lubumbashi in the south, these are unknown quantities. And yet everyone is vying for attention, and claiming the right to veto their rivals’ aspirations.
Lumumba is a mild-mannered man, exhibiting none of his father’s fiery charisma and oratorical flair. But you get the sense that he, like many of his compatriots, is deeply concerned that there should be a positive outcome to the talks at Sun City. He makes no flamboyant claims to the throne, but says instead that he is ready to take on whatever responsibilities his country might call upon him to take on.
At the other end of the scale is MLC president Jean Pierre Bemba. He has popped in and out of the talks, arriving most recently in his private jet, and refusing to land at Johannesburg’s Lanseria airport, as directed, but insisting on landing at Sun City airport instead.
Having broken one set of protocols, he proceeded to flout others by descending from his aircraft with a phalanx of heavily armed bodyguards. South African security forces, who have been keeping a discrete eye on this long-running saga, had to delicately intervene.
Bemba is widely regarded as using his crude, warlord-style tactics to win himself a place near the top of the pecking order in the new dispensation that might, against all odds, emerge from these tortuous deliberations.
Other flamboyant characters have floated in and out of Sun City to make their points. Raphael Katebe Katoto, a multimillionaire businessman based in Belgium, arrived with two helicopters, containing himself and his entourage, and a glossy pamphlet and even a CD recording outlining his vision for the Congo.
“We must not be like the man who looks for the sun after it has set,” he said, highlighting the desperation for a political solution to 40 years of chaos that affects every Congolese.
Another glossy pamphlet billed itself as “the crusade of Madame Nzuzi-wa-Mbombo for peace, unity, democracy, national accord and development”. This plump, bespectacled lady dressed in gold and black was promoting her own cause as prospective president of the transitional national assembly, arguing that the feminine touch could produce uplifting results, where males had only succeeded in delivering escalating destruction.
These are fringe players, dressed to kill but having little impact on the course of events.
The toughest negotiators come from the camps of antagonists who were once firm friends and allies in the war to remove Mobutu, but have now become implacable foes.
Joseph Kabila, who inherited the mantle of president after the assassination of his father, the unelected and unlamented Laurent Kabila, has mostly maintained an enigmatic absence. His position has been articulated instead by a senior minister and by his elegantly fluent Minister of Information, Kikaya bin Karubi.
The biggest sticking point at this stage of the talks is Mbeki’s proposal that Kabila should be accepted as interim president, overseeing a legislature and government made up of representatives of all interested parties. For the RCD and the MLC this is anathema the removal of Kabila fils, with whose army they have been locked in combat for all these years, is a non-negotiable bottom line for them.
Karubi is able to skilfully manipulate Mbeki’s words in the service of his own cause.
“All sides must accept that there is a president and a government in the Congo,” he says. “President Mbeki himself pointed out to us that even the African National Congress had had to negotiate with an illegal, illegitimate, white minority government in order to achieve transformation.”
South African state institutions, including the army, were not simply scrapped they were integrated. The same process, he argues, should be followed in the Congo.
There is much to manoeuvre for not only control of the incredible riches of the Congo, but also the restoration of peace and dignity to the Congolese people a state of grace that they have never known.
“Fifty million Congolese people depend on this African-inspired initiative to succeed,” says Jacques Depelchin, one of the key intellectuals in the leadership of the Kisangani faction of the RCD, led by Professor Ernest Wamba dia Wamba.
“Not only 50-million Congolese,” he elaborates, “but 800-million Africans have to see agreement reached, on behalf of the African continent. We have to achieve agreement on at least a framework for the next stage in order to persuade the international community that we are capable of achieving the rest.”
“We have no choice but to succeed,” says Mme Cumba Rose, president of one of the smaller political parties and a leading member of the women’s caucus that arose spontaneously at Sun City.
“Who does not pray for peace? We all pray for the same thing, but the big, armed groups, the government, the MLC and the RCD are all using their might to block the process. In the meantime the ordinary people of the Congo are living in unspeakable misery. The people continue to suffer while the leaders of these big groups continue to dig in their heels.”
It is hard to imagine this suffering among the gaudily dressed representatives of the Congolese people gathered at Sun City.
The stakes are high. This is why even Mbeki chose to risk all on attempting to reach the basis of an agreement this week, a process that is now set to continue for an additional, desperate week of negotiation. Thus far, according to Francois Lumumba, Mbeki’s intervention has brought the process to the point of “a firm and coherent basis for the commencement of discussions, and is a step that could yet save the Inter-Congolese Dialogue”.
Resolving the 42-year-old crisis of the Congo is probably the first major challenge facing the South African president’s New Partnership for Africa’s Development. If this gambit fails, Nepad’s chances of respect and recognition from the powerful world community will be very slim.