The lift jolted from floor to floor of the Grand Hotel, Kinshasa, collecting gunmen. On the sixth floor, a rebel in a green beret entered. On the fourth, two more rebels, but their berets were blue. The first floor yielded a bare-headed soldier: government or rebel, it was hard to know.
Almost exactly 30 years since Muhammad Ali rumbled through its corridors, the Grand, scene of many crises in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s violent history, is filled with fighters. They represent at least six armed groups, loyalist and rebel, local players in a five-year regional war that at one time involved most of Congo’s neighbours. By one estimate, the inferno has cost more than four million lives, more than any other conflict since the second world war.
Now the invading armies are gone. In Kinshasa, two months ago, a power-sharing government was formed. Congo’s war could be over, its leaders say.
”Are we out of the woods completely?” President Joseph Kabila said in an interview with the Guardian. ”No. We have got shadows still lurking behind us. But the process itself is irreversible. We have got the country back together.”
The 32-year-old soldier who came to power after the assassination of his father, President Laurent Kabila, two years ago, added: ”The Congolese people [are] moving from the east to the west, the west to the east, the north to the south. You’ve got families coming back together after five years of war. You’ve got the pacification process moving on. And you’ve got the economy more or less trying to take off.”
The change is startling. One year ago, up to 40 000 Rwandan and Ugandan troops were marauding through eastern Congo, with little apparent sign of concern from the western donors on whom their governments depend.
Mr Kabila controlled barely a third of the country. The world’s most expensive UN peacekeeping mission, undermanned and mandated only to defend its own installations, witnessed massacre after massacre without firing a round.
Since then, largely US diplomatic pressure has forced the invaders out, though Rwanda is suspected of having left some troops behind.
Shorn of foreign support, Congo’s main rebel leaders agreed to accept Mr Kabila’s offer of government jobs.
Even the UN mission has been transformed. Shamed by a recent French intervention in Bunia, north-eastern Congo, to bail out its peacekeepers, the UN has doubled the size of its force in Congo and beefed up its mandate. Last week, a UN attack-helicopter fired on a band of the same rebels who had humiliated the UN peacekeepers in Bunia only weeks before.
In all these developments, nothing is more startling than the sight of Azarias Ruberwa, the former leader of a brutal Rwandan-backed rebel group and now one of four new vice-presidents, sitting beneath a portrait of Mr Kabila. Until recently, Mr Ruberwa was perhaps the most loathed man in Congo.
”When I first came here to Kinshasa, it was an act of suicide,” he admitted. ”But now my future depends on my work. I must work hard on good governance, human rights. I must work for transformation. My chance is in the value of my performance.”
Another new vice-president is Jean-Pierre Bemba, a former Ugandan-backed rebel who was recently referred to the international criminal court in connection with his troops’ atrocities, including their alleged habit of cannibalism.
”The political situation, after the unification of the country, is going well, we are putting together institutions,” said Mr Bemba, shuffling paper in his riverbank office. Dismissing the allegations against him, he added: ”Accusations don’t mean you are guilty. You need evidence [of cannibalism] – the name of the person, and his address and the remains of the body. That is the minimum.”
But if Congo’s future looks suddenly more promising, by the standards of almost any other country it would still look dire. Some 350 000 gunmen have still to be demobilised. And with virtually the entire population of 55 million living in absolute poverty, the gun retains a persuasive allure.
Congo’s infrastructure is so broken that to traverse the country – a distance greater than London to Moscow – would require a tank. According to UN reports, local and foreign criminal networks are implicated in the exploitation of minerals in every sector.
”Decades of dictatorship under Mobutu Sese Seko [the first dictator of what was then called Zaire], a decade of turmoil and years of civil war have broken everything here except the human spirit,” said Bill Swing, the UN secretary general’s special representative in Congo.
With conflict bubbling across the country’s east, Congo’s war is not yet over. Half a dozen militias that were excluded from the peace process control much of Ituri and north and south Kivu provinces. They include several groups allegedly still backed by Uganda and Rwanda, despite a UN security council arms embargo.
Since Mr Ruberwa arrived in Kinshasa, his Rally for Congolese Democracy group has launched several assaults on its local enemies.
”There is great distrust of the government everywhere,” said Wamba dia Wamba, a former Rwandan-backed rebel leader who has been appointed to Congo’s new upper house. ”Bemba and the others could easily lose control of the men in the bush.”
The new government was not designed to impose order on this mayhem, but simply to include as many rebels and warlords as possible. Its more than 60 ministries are barely functioning, yet already they are squabbling over the spoils, western diplomats in Kinshasa claim.
If Congo is to be salvaged, analysts say, Mr Kabila will remain the key. Through western backing and shrewd negotiation, he has unified Congo – at least nominally – without greatly reducing his powers. He remains chief of staff of the armed forces and still rules largely by decree. But if the aid money pledged for the reconstruction of Congo, including nearly £3bn from the EU and the World Bank, is to flow, this will not be enough.
Within three years, Mr Kabila must also hold Congo’s first democratic elections, and this he promises to do.
”Mobutu used the same argument for 15 years: that we don’t have roads, so elections couldn’t be held in this country,” Mr Kabila said. ”I won’t use the same argument. That would really be irresponsible.” — Guardian Unlimited Â