The military men had a characteristically prosaic formula for success in what was billed as the final Pretoria leg of transitional negotiations for the Democratic Republic of Congo: move the politicians out of the way and let the generals get down to talking soldier talk, they said.
In the end it took nine days to do this — thanks to the considerable skill and firmness of the mediator, South Africa’s Minister of Provincial and Local Government Sydney Mufamadi.
And the upshot will be more talks in Pretoria — this time involving the military experts. Even as the politicians were busy, news of an altogether more sinister military intervention was trickling around the corridors of the presidential guesthouse.
President Joseph Kabila — deservedly skittish given the cruel fate suffered by his father — had put down a coup attempt, delegates were saying.
There was understandably no official word on this plot, which reportedly involved attacking the young president on his way home from the Franco-African summit in Paris last month.
Congolese sources said chief of the Air Force General John Numbi was being held as a conspirator. Numbi is not a career soldier in the traditional Congolese mould, having been brought in from the militia by Laurent Kabila.
The military representatives left in Pretoria after the talks will discuss the composition of the integrated Congolese army. The tough issue here is the question of the various intelligence services somehow omitted from the Pretoria Agreement signed on December 17. All the other military and paramilitary elements of the army and the forces of the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD) and the Congolese Liberation Movement (MLC) are catered for in that landmark agreement.
The men in uniform will also have to finalise arrangements for protecting the politicians and institutions in Kinshasa during the two-year transitional period leading the first democratic elections in the DRC since independence in 1960.
The government has accepted the rebels’ insistence that a neutral force will have to hold the ring until the integrated Congolese police force is formed and deployed in the city of eight million people. At least 3 000 men will have to be drafted in for this job, which will last no less than six months.
As the politicians sought to wring maximum benefit from these emotive issues, Mufamadi patiently worked on the constitutional issues. Not only were these the least divisive but also, with a constitutional accord in the bag and the Pretoria Agreement signed and sealed, he reckoned that no individual delegation could block the process. ”All it took was firm mediation,” said Mufamadi, who was unfazed by his co-mediator, Moustapha Niasse, leaving the talks to attend his party congress in Senegal.
Niasse, who was appointed by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, is a presidential hopeful in the next Senegalese election. The Congolese politicians have their work cut out back home.
The flicker of hope from yet another accord in Pretoria can barely be seen in a country that has lost 2,5-million people in a five-year war that at its height drew in seven African countries.
The women who ululated during the signing ceremony in Pretoria in mid-December were hearing of genocide and cannibalism by Christmas.
Fighting has not stopped in the Ituri province near Bunia where 467 civilians were reported killed last weekend. The government has denied claims that its soldiers and supporting militia are involved. These clashes involving shifting alliances and mercurial groups have displaced more than 150 000 people.
The launching of the transitional period envisaged in the Pretoria agreement is the only way of stopping this. The military men left behind to fill in the the agreement’s commas and full stops are working against this deadly deadline.