Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (64 page)

Until Kabila won the 2006 elections, many observers cut him some slack. When he first came to power, the country had been divided by war, and he did an admirable job in uniting the country and marginalizing his opponents. During the transitional government, between 2003 and 2006, he had to share power in a clumsy arrangement with seven different parties. In this tangle of graft and power-sharing, it was difficult to get anything done. He was applauded for having brought an end to the war that had divided the country. For this, he won 58 percent of the national vote in 2006. People believed in his campaign motto: “Joseph Kabila—The Bearer of Eggs, He Doesn’t Squabble, He Doesn’t Fight.” Kabila was balancing the fragile peace in his hands; he could be trusted not to start fighting again.

But three years after the elections, Kabila struggled to articulate a vision for the country. In the economic arena, there has only been little improvement in the lives of the average Congolese. In Kinshasa, where few appreciate Joseph Kabila’s somber and lackluster character, people say, “Mobutu used to steal with a fork—at least some crumbs would fall between the cracks, enough to trickle down to the rest of us. But Kabila, he steals with a spoon. He scoops the plate clean, spotless. He doesn’t leave anything for the poor.”

Kabila’s presidency has been marred, above all, by an ongoing insurgency in the eastern Congo. In 2004, during the transitional government, General Laurent Nkunda launched an insurgency against the fledgling Congolese government. A Tutsi from North Kivu, Nkunda had been a commander in the RCD and claimed that he was only trying to protect his community from the ex-FAR and Interahamwe who still lurked in the province.

There were, however, other, less noble reasons behind his rebellion, as well. The RCD was aware of its lack of popularity among Congolese and had little hope of winning in the 2006 elections. For the RCD leadership and the Rwandan government, both of whom encouraged Nkunda to go into rebellion, the new rebellion was a means of keeping their influence in the eastern Congo in the case of electoral defeat. Their fears came true: In presidential and parliamentary polls, the RCD wasn’t able to garner more than 5 percent of the vote. They had gone from controlling almost a third of the Congo, including some of the most lucrative trade and mining areas, to almost nothing.
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The fear of anti-Tutsi persecution combined potently with business and political interests to fuel a new rebellion.

Kabila tried in vain to defeat Nkunda militarily, launching four major offensives against the rebellion and sending over 20,000 troops to the Kivus. Repeatedly, during the lulls in fighting, his government tried negotiating peace deals. Finally, in 2009, Kabila struck a deal directly with the Rwandan government, allowing them to send troops into the Congo to hunt down the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) in return for arresting Nkunda and integrating his troops into the Rwandan national army.

At the same time, Kabila faced challenges in Bas-Congo Province in the far west of the country, where the mystical Bundu dia Kongo sect was protesting abuses by the regime and demanding—sometimes violently—the right of self-determination. He also had to deal with the hundreds of bodyguards loyal to former vice president Jean-Pierre Bemba, who had refused to disarm and integrate into the national army after their leader was narrowly defeated in the presidential elections.

In both cases, Joseph Kabila reacted with disproportional force, eschewing negotiations and sending in hundreds of police and soldiers to put down both challenges to his power. Hundreds of unarmed civilians died in Bas-Congo, some brutally dismembered; over three hundred were killed during the battle for downtown Kinshasa. Hundreds of others were rounded up and tortured.
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In the words of the opposition, “the Bearer of Eggs has made one huge omelet.” Encumbered by weak security services, the government seems stuck between brutal repression and pallid negotiation.

But Joseph Kabila’s problems go further than just weak state institutions. He is surrounded by business and political leaders with their own interests and power bases. He is an outsider who was handed the presidency on a platter, without having to climb his way up through the ranks of a party or army, earning the respect and loyalty of his fellows. He knows that he can just as easily be removed from power; the example of his father is fresh in his memory.

Reforming the state will require tackling entrenched interests and mafia-like networks that permeate the administration. In doing so, he risks offending powerful people, who could then try to unseat him. In 2004, after a botched coup attempt in downtown Kinshasa, I remember speaking with outraged security agents who told me, “We know who is behind [the coup attempt], but we can’t do anything!”
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It is therefore perhaps not surprising that Kabila has chosen not to promote neutral, efficient state institutions, but rather to strengthen his own personal security and business networks. This attitude is perhaps most palpable in the domain of security sector reform. After the elections, Kabila had an army of 150,000 patched together from half a dozen different armed groups. Many of its officers were illiterate and had never had any formal military training. There were only a few military prosecutors for the whole province of North Kivu, where over 20,000 soldiers are based. There was no formal process of procurement, and army officers regularly commandeered civilian trucks and airplanes for transport. “We managed the army informally,” a general told me. “The real power was held by people in the presidency or close to the president, not by the official chain of command.”
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This state of affairs could be understood for the duration of the transition, when Kabila was wary of his former rivals on the battlefield pulling a fast one on him. After all, he didn’t want to meet his father’s fate. But he has scarcely showed more willingness for reform since the elections. Purchases of military equipment continue to be carried out by officers close to the presidency, not the logistics department, and Kabila himself has a reputation for micromanaging military operations against Nkunda, sometimes countermanding his officers and sowing confusion. He has maintained a relatively large and well-equipped presidential guard of over 10,000 troops under his direct control, but he has not been able to improve the performance of the rest of his army. As under Mobutu, this approach may prevent his own troops from overthrowing him, but it will also keep him from consolidating peace in the rest of the country.

Does Kabila want a strong state? Or does he perceive strong institutions, such as an independent judiciary and lively opposition, as a challenge to his authority? Is he condemned to negotiate with militias and other power barons around the country, or will he be able to suppress these parallel networks of power?

These are perhaps the most important questions for the country’s future. The attitude of his advisors is not encouraging:

Politics is always dirty, is always a fight. This is not Switzerland! If we liberalize the political sphere and the economy, allow for unrestrained democracy, the same self-obsessed people who drove this country into the ground under Mobutu will come to power again! You see free press and political activity—we see opponents, plotting our demise. In order to reform and promote growth, we need to curtail some civil liberties and control part of the economy. It is a lesser evil for a greater good.
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This language is eerily reminiscent of the Mobutu regime’s earlier days. President Kabila is intent on centralizing power to the detriment of an efficient state bureaucracy and the rule of law. In 2009, he suggested that he wanted to change the constitution to prevent decentralization, extend term limits, and bring the judiciary further under his control. His government has expropriated several lucrative oil and mining concessions from multinational corporations, allegedly in order to distribute them to companies close to him. As so often in politics, what appears to be politically expedient for those in power rarely overlaps with the public interest. The lesser evils of the regime become entrenched, while the greater good is never realized.

Conclusion: The Congo, On Its Own Terms

Africa is never seen as possessing things and attributes properly part of “human nature.” Or when it is, its things and attributes are generally of lesser value, little importance and poor quality. It is this elementariness and primitiveness that makes Africa the world par excellence of all that is incomplete, mutilated and unfinished, its history reduced to a series of setbacks of nature in its quest for humankind.

—ACHILLE MBEMBE

The Congo casts a spell on many visitors. It is difficult to explain why. The author Philip Gourevitch once wrote, “Oh Congo, what a wreck. It hurts to look and listen. It hurts to turn away.”
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The Congolese tragedy certainly has something of a car-wreck attraction to it. Nine governments battled through a country the size of western Europe, walking thousands of miles on foot through jungles and swamps. Over five million people have died, and hundreds of thousands of women have been raped.
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If anything should be important, it is the deaths of five million people.

Or is it? The Congo war is actually rarely seen as a problem of joint humanity. Instead, it is either portrayed in western media as an abject mess—a morass of rebel groups fighting over minerals in the ruins of a failed state—or as a war of good versus evil, with the role of villain played alternatively by the Rwandan government, international mining companies, the U.S. government, or Congolese warlords. In the twenty-four-hour news cycle, in which international news is devoted largely to the war on terror and its spin-offs, there is little interest in a deeper understanding of the conflict, little appetite for numbers as unimaginably large as five million. Instead, a few shocking individual images command the headlines. Activist and
Vagina Monologues
founder Eve Ensler wrote in the
Huffington Post
that she had heard horrific stories ranging from “women being raped by fifty men in one day to women being forced to eat dead babies,”
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while the
New York Times
reported how a woman was “kidnapped by bandits in the forest, strapped to a tree and repeatedly gang-raped. The bandits did unspeakable things, she said, like disemboweling a pregnant woman right in front of her.”
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All of these stories are true. The conflict has seen acts of cannibalism, girls as young as five being raped with gun barrels and sticks, and women buried alive. Journalists have a responsibility to report on these atrocities, and people are often jolted awake by such horrors. In addition, millions of dollars have gone to dedicated organizations and health centers in the region that are helping survivors cope and restart their lives.

These advocacy efforts have also, however, had unintended effects. They reinforce the impression that the Congo is filled with wanton savages, crazed by power and greed. This view, by focusing on the utter horror of the violence, distracts from the politics that gave rise to the conflict and from the reasons behind the bloodshed. If all we see is black men raping and killing in the most outlandish ways imaginable, we might find it hard to believe that there is any logic to this conflict. We are returned to Joseph Conrad’s notion that the Congo takes you to the heart of darkness, an inscrutable and unimprovable mess. If we want to change the political dynamics in the country, we have above all to understand the conflict on its own terms. That starts with understanding how political power is managed.