For a while this week President Joseph Kabila thought seriously about dissolving the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) transitional government he is heading under the 2002 Pretoria Agreement, designed to end the country’s civil war.
This would have meant installing his bête noir Jean-Pierre Bemba of the rebel movement, the Congolese Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), as prime minister. Kabila was driven to near-distraction by the civil unrest that flowed into the capital, Kinshasa, from the rebel activity in the east of the country.
Responsible for the takeover of Bukavu last week was another rebel faction, the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), Goma, of Azarias Ruberwa — one of Kabila’s four vice-presidents in terms of the Pretoria Agreement.
The move by Ruberwa’s RCD Goma was unexpected. Like others in the DRC interim government, Ruberwa has taken the long view, hoping to consolidate a position close to the helm in elections that are scheduled for next year.
The poll calendar contained in the Pretoria Agreement looks impracticable in the light of the latest flare-up in the east and the capital. Happily, wiser counsels prevailed with Kabila, who decided to stay the course.
Among those urging him to hang tough was South Africa, who sent troubleshooter Sydney Mufamadi with a seven-man team to assess the situation in the DRC this week.
Mufamadi played a key role in driving the Pretoria negotiations on the DRC. He won the trust and respect of the Congolese, who said his greatest attribute as mediator was that ”he thinks like us”.
Given the duplicity involved in this week’s apparent unravelling of the peace process, this is not necessarily a compliment.
By mid-week the rebels had quit Bakavu and the crowds were welcoming back the regular army.
The rebels taunted the transitional government by reserving their right to set things straight as and when they deemed necessary.
This happened just as the country seemed to have recovered from a severe hangover. The capital is sweeping up the mess of riots and ensuing lawlessness that erupted out of mass demonstrations against the failure of the peace-keeping force, the United Nations Organisation Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Monuc), to prevent the fall of Bukavu.
Events in the east reflect not so much the impotence of Monuc — the largest and most expensive peacekeeping operation currently on the UN books — as the flaws in the agreement that put it there.
South African officials baulk at suggestions that the Pretoria Agreement is less than perfect. But last week’s events showed again that the Banyamulenge were not properly accounted for in the so-called global and inclusive agreement so painstakingly wrought.
The RCD Goma nominally spoke for these Tutsi who came over from Rwanda and settled in the DRC’s Mulenge Mountains generations ago. The rebel activity was ostensible to protect the Banyamulenge from the marauding Hutu Interahamwe.
The Hutu refugees fled the counter-attack by the Rwanda Patriotic Front on Hutu genocidaires after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
Pursuing them — and killing about twice as many people as the number that died in the genocide — is what took Rwandan President Paul Kagame’s soldiers into the Congo and near to Kinshasa in 1998. Kagame told the Mail & Guardian in April that he was ready to go back to set the Interahamwe straight again.
The thinking in the DRC is that Rwandese troops are already back over the border. Kagame has developed a rhino hide from fending off rumours for most of his political life. But this week he responded to the refusal of the UN to properly investigate the claims of a Rwandan invasion by closing its border with the DRC.
Trying sometimes too hard to tread a neutral path, South Africa is widely perceived to be pro-Kagame. This makes mediation in the DRC even tougher than it should be in a country with no tradition of trust, democracy or transparency since independence in 1960.
It raises the question of whether the attack on a South African contingent of Monuc this week — killing two and injuring 11 others — was merely a random hit on a UN vehicle.
The violence has further retarded the already stuttering progress towards elections.
Ominously for vice-president Ruberwa, the week demonstrated that no matter how nimble he is in the capital, he is a spent force in Goma and its surrounds.
Generally this was a lesson for the DRC — that political and military integration are not signatures on paper but long and sometimes bloody tests of will and commitment.
For South Africa, pressing ahead with the DRC is protecting its greatest diplomatic triumph of the democratic era.
For the Congolese it is a question of looking past the failures, consolidating the successes and holding on for the long course.