The Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC) neighbours may have pulled their armies out of the vast mineral-rich territory, officially at least, but they will be keeping a nervous eye out for vested interests in Sunday’s presidential run-off.
The DRC’s 1998-2003 war broke out when Rwanda and Uganda launched proxy rebel groups from eastern DRC in a bid to topple their former ally Laurent Kabila. At the war’s height, six foreign armies fought over the country’s resources.
A bodyguard shot father Kabila dead in 2001 but his ruling clique, heavily influenced by allies Angola and Zimbabwe, ensured his son Joseph slid into the seat of power.
Officials from various governments refused to be drawn on whether they favoured Joseph Kabila or former Ugandan-backed rebel leader Jean-Pierre Bemba in Sunday’s run-off vote.
But analysts said Kabila had more regional support.
”I think the devil you know is sometimes less frightening than the one you don’t,” said Ross Herbert, an analyst at the South African Institute of International Affairs.
”Kabila has not been able to demonstrate himself as a manager or to be able to end the rot … But then, as for Bemba, there is no real sense of what the man is about. It’s not entirely clear what his message is,” Herbert said.
After a costly and fraught peace process which still has to pacify militias in the DRC’s lawless east, the greatest fear for many is a return to war should Sunday’s loser refuse to accept the poll result — especially after Kabila and Bemba’s soldiers fought in the capital Kinshasa in August, killing more than 30.
Chileshe Mulenga, head of the Institute for Economic and Social Research, a Lusaka think tank, warned investment may suffer: ”Investors, especially those from Europe and Asia, don’t isolate individual countries when looking at this region.”
Rivals for influence
Military analysts say Angolan troops have been training Kabila’s forces in border areas, while other countries have expanded their economic interests since the war.
”South Africa would like to stabilise and then invest in the Congo,” said Henri Boschoff of the Institute of Security Studies in Pretoria. ”But Angola considers Congo as its own backyard. It will be interesting to see how these two powers accommodate each other in the Congo.”
Even Rwanda, which fought the Kabilas for years, appears to have accommodated Joseph Kabila after a series of peace deals.
”We do not support any candidate. We want to work in peace with whoever wins,” Rosemary Museminari, Rwanda’s state minister for cooperation, told Reuters in Kigali. She said any electoral violence could send the region ”back to the days of chaos”.
Crucially for Rwanda, Museminari said both Kabila and Bemba had given assurances that if elected they would address the matter of the Rwanda Liberation Democratic Front (FDLR) which includes ethnic Hutus who slaughtered more than 800 000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the 1994 genocide and fled into the DRC.
Yet after anti-Rwandan rhetoric by both campaigns, Rwandans with business interests in east DRC may be wary whoever wins.
”To show how Congolese a person is, he has to accuse his opponent of being a Rwandan … That shows you the level of enmity. I don’t think Kigali can gain anything from backing any candidate,” said Shyaka Kanuma, editor of Rwanda’s English weekly newspaper Focus.
Uganda would secretly prefer a Bemba victory, said Paul Omach, a political scientist at Kampala’s Makerere University.
”Kabila has referred Uganda to the International Court of Justice for the invasion of Congo. They are not friends,” he said.
Yet after years of cross-border attacks — most recently by the Lord’s Resistance Army — Kampala says it just wants peace.
”We want a stable neighbourhood,” Ruth Nankabirwa, Uganda’s minister of state for defence, told Reuters in Kampala.
”A stable DRC means a stable western Uganda.” – Reuters