Small wonder the South African government was incensed at the coup attempt against President Joseph Kabila last Sunday.
The peace that President Thabo Mbeki so patiently and expensively brokered in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) 15 months ago is the foreign policy highlight of his first term as president.
The putsch bid by elements of the presidential guard of former dictator and kleptocrat Mobutu Sese Seko appears to have been resisted with relative ease. Fifteen of the men were captured within hours of crossing the Congo river from Brazzaville. Another 18 are on the run.
But the insurrection and the panic it created is indicative of the tenuousness of the transitional deal.
Stitching it together involved getting a consensus among disparate groups, with no experience of democracy and compromise, that were involved in the worst conflict since World War II.
More than three-million people died in the five years of civil war. Only about 10% of these were actually killed in fighting. The rest succumbed to disease and starvation caused by the war.
The collective sigh of relief when the warring parties reached the Pretoria Agreement of December 2002 matched that heard when South Africans achieved their negotiated settlement eight years earlier.
Transitional president Kabila and his vice-presidents, who only months before had been planning his demise, signed the inclusive agreement at Sun City early in 2003, knowing they had their work cut out to meet the June 2005 deadline for the DRC’s first democratic elections.
A year later, the stakeholders in the process — those powers that are paying more than half of the DRC’s budget— were publicly making known their concern about the snail’s-pace progress of the transition.
And the DRC would not be the DRC without regular rumours of duplicity and dirty work.
In February Vice-President Azarias Ruberwa of the RCD Goma faction was accusing Kabila’s men of colluding with an attempted assassination attempt.
Last Sunday’s adventure was a horse of an entirely different colour.
For starters, it involved a group that never made its presence felt in the negotiations leading up to the Pretoria Agreement.
Congo (Brazzaville) has provided shelter to more than 3 000 of Mo- butu’s Armed Forces of Zaire (Faz). These men, with the crack former presidential guard at their helm, have deeply resented their isolation.
Military sources insist that their attacks on four military installations around Kinshasa were not just an attempt to destabilise the transitional government. They were nothing short of a full-on coup attempt.
The plan was to seize Kabila from his presidential palace — still dominated by giant murals of his father, who had in turn seized power from Mobutu — and then commandeer the international airport. Step two was to get the young president aboard an aircraft out of the country.
Congo Foreign Minister Alain Akoula says his government was not involved in the plot.
”Our country has nothing to do with what just happened in Kinshasa,” he said earlier this week, adding that his army had reinforced the river border to prevent any further attempted crossings.
It has not been ascertained whether the shooting of a South African peacekeeper, Colonel Siyalala Apheus Mothapo, by a sniper in the eastern Bukavu region this week was connected with the coup bid. Mothapo was about to finish a six-month stint in the DRC.
For more than a year South Africans have comprised more than 700 of the 10 000 members of the UN peacekeeping force in the DRC, known as Monuc. This is the most expensive UN peacekeeping operation on Earth, costing more than R6,3-million a day.
Despite the assurances from DRC Foreign Minister Antoine Ghonda that everything is now under control, the instability will not have assisted his government’s energetic drive for investment from South Africa.
During his state visit to Kinshasa in January Mbeki said this could amount to R63-billion.
The serious concerns expressed by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan would also have been a deterrent to those drawn to the natural riches of the DRC.
Annan said the increasing factionalism in the transitional government was disquieting.
More, the continuing reports of militias’ atrocities against civilians were a matter of concern, UN News reported.
”Peace is not irreversible,” Annan insisted. However, he remained ”deeply concerned about continuing reports of massacres and other atrocities committed against civilians, including reports of horrendous, widespread sexual violence used as weapons of intimidation and war.”
The secretary general added his voice to those urging the transitional government to step up the pace and to normalise relations with its neighbours. The DRC should start exchanging ambassadors with its neighbours, Annan said.
”The most crucial issue concerns the ability of the transitional leaders to act as a truly unified government and overcome the persistent atmosphere of distrust.”