Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Despite its vast economic potential, the Democratic Republic of Congo has been bedevilled by civil war and corruption. Rear Vision unravels the complex story leading to the recent violence in Goma, the city long at the centre of conflict and humanitarian crises.
Keri Phillips: This is Rear Vision with Keri Phillips.
Journalist (archival): For days, Goma’s one-million-strong population had cowered indoors as rockets and gunfire sounded around the city. Then as the UN, with its mandate to protect civilians, watched from the sidelines, the rebels advanced. A brief firefight with government troops, and the city was theirs.
Keri Phillips: Despite its vast economic potential, the Democratic Republic of Congo has been bedevilled by civil war and corruption. Over the last two decades the conflict between government forces and various rebel groups has been inflamed by Congo’s neighbours, active participants in fighting that ripped the country apart from the late 1990s. Despite a peace deal and the formation of a transitional government in 2003, the violence never really stopped in the eastern part of the country and it’s here in Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, that we’ve watched the latest episode in the battle over this resource rich area.
Today, Rear Vision looks at this recent conflict, which, according to Dr Phil Clark from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, has deep roots in Congo’s experience as a Belgian colony.
Phil Clark: When Congo became independent in 1960 it inherited a highly divided and extremely volatile nation, which was largely the result of Belgian colonialism. The Belgians had embarked on a vicious, brutal and divisive regime for the best part of the first part of the twentieth century. And it was a Belgian colony, which played different ethnic groups off against each other. It was a way to try and destabilise the population and to ensure that there was no serious opposition to Belgian rule.
And the Belgians had used a lengthy program of forced labour in which they had essentially enslaved the Congolese population. That had also involved the forced displacement of particularly Banyarwanda—Hutu and Tutsi—from Rwanda, who were pushed across the border onto the rubber plantations, forced to work for the Belgian colonial powers, forced to help to build railways—and again this was almost a period of enslavement. When Congo, as it was known… in 1960 when it became independent it acquired all of these problems and all of these divisions from the Belgian period. And the Belgians had essentially left Congo overnight with almost no warning and no smooth transition to a new government.
What that then meant was that the first five years of independence in Congo were extremely tumultuous. This was also a time when Congo became very embroiled in the Cold War. There was a serious battle between the US and the Soviet Union over control of Congo and control of Congolese leaders, because Congo was seen as strategically very important to the superpowers. And so one of the challenges for the new Congolese leadership was how to play this new game, how to play the game of international diplomacy and to try and gain power and influence because of powerful friends on the outside.
Journalist (archival): We’ve had a very exciting 48 hours. What did you do, Mr Buckley.
Colin Buckley: Thursday the paratroopers came and rescued us, the Belgian paratroopers.
Journalist (archival): I understand it was you who led the paratroopers to relieve the mission post of Nala.
Colin Buckley: Yes, Nala is another mission station, about 12 miles away, and I volunteered to lead the relief party. We rescued four Belgians and the two English missionaries and we fought all the way there and all the way back. We killed at least three rebels that I saw and many, many, many more were wounded.
Journalist (archival): Were they well armed?
Colin Buckley: No, they were armed with nothing but pieces of stick.
Keri Phillips: A missionary from Stanleyville waiting at Leopoldville Airport to be evacuated in the early 1960s, during the violent jockeying for power following independence. Patrice Lumumba, independence leader and Congo’s first legally elected prime minister, was deposed and executed in 1961 by Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, who, after a second coup in 1965, assumed the office of prime minister.
Phil Clark: So, Mobutu comes to power in 1966 and immediately puts in place a form of brutal and divisive rule, which in many ways is very similar to what Congo had experienced under the Belgians. And in some parts of Congo today people talk about the Mobutu era as being even more barbaric and even more destructive than colonialism had been, which is quite a statement given how destructive colonialism was. And for the next 30 years Mobutu embarks on what many commentators have called a ‘kleptocracy’, a form of rule geared around the theft of natural resources and again the playing off of different ethnic groups to weaken opposition and ensure that Mobutu could stay in power.
Mobutu paid very little attention to economic development and to the general empowerment of the population. He particularly saw the east of Congo, or Zaire as it became known under his rule, as a nuisance. He saw the east as a part of the country where opposition could potentially rise, and so he ensured that development was very low in that part of Zaire. He ensured that there was no possibility of organising political dissent. He used armed violence against opposition groups and political parties and in essence ensured that he could remain in control of the country for 30 years.
The only way to remove Mobutu was through outside force. Mobutu had, I guess, frustrated other countries in the region. He had exacerbated relationships, particularly with Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi—the countries neighbouring Zaire to the east. The context here is the Rwandan genocide of 1994. In the aftermath of the genocide, hundreds of thousands of Hutu militiamen and Hutu civilians spread across the Rwandan border into the eastern part of Zaire. Mobutu began to use many of those Hutu militias as part of his own armed forces, particularly to target the Tutsi population that he had seen as key opponents of his rule for a very long time. And he continued to arm and he continued to mobilise those Hutu militias.
And this concerned Rwanda in particular. The fear in Rwanda was that Mobutu was basically stirring up those Hutu militias and that there was a danger that another genocide might take place. So in 1996, Rwanda along with Uganda and Burundi created a rebel movement called the AFDL, which then invaded the eastern part of Zaire, mobilised a great deal particularly of the Tutsi population in the eastern part of the country, was able to fight Mobutu’s forces all the way westward for 2000 km to eventually capture Kinshasa. This was a remarkable military push. It sent Mobutu into exile. It completely destroyed his armed forces, completely destroyed his government’s structure. And this rebellion that had been backed by outside powers was then able to install Laurent-Désiré Kabila as the new president of Congo—unelected, in many ways considered weak and illegitimate by much of the population, but I think it’s fair to say there was a sense of jubilation that finally the dictator Mobutu was gone.
Journalist (archival): ‘Goodbye, Mobutu. Goodbye, Mobutu,’ the crowds chant. The collective weight of 32 years of oppression has been lifted from the shoulders of the Zairian people and they are filled with joy. Since Laurent Kabila’s troops marched into the Zairian capital, Kinshasa, on Saturday, thousands have jammed the streets to greet them and hail their victory. This motley army that has now secured Kinshasa and toppled the despised Mobutu Sese Seko are finally liberators.
Keri Phillips: Séverine Autesserre is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Barnard College, Columbia University. When I spoke to her on Skype, she said that the supportive relationship between Kabila and his allies in neighbouring countries didn’t last long.
Séverine Autesserre: No, it didn’t last more than a year. He eventually—Laurent-Désiré Kabila—eventually turned against his former allies and that’s what led to another rebellion, another rebel movement that were thinking, ‘OK, we’ve done it once and we’ve liberated the entire country in less than a year, so we’re going to try to do it another time.’ And so they set up a rebellion and they tried to take over the country and to go up to Kinshasa and to topple Laurent- Désiré Kabila, but this time it didn’t work out as they expected, because several countries and several major players stayed on the side of Laurent-Désiré Kabila.
So what happened during this rebellion—and that’s the war that started in 1998—it ended up… instead of ending up with Laurent-Désiré Kabila being replaced by someone else, it ended up with a country divided in several areas of influence, with the Congolese government keeping control of the south and the west of the country and then several large rebel groups controlling other different parts of the Congolese territory. And each of these rebel groups was supported by one of the neighbouring countries.
Phil Clark: The situation between Laurent Kabila and Rwanda and Uganda, his regional allies, became particularly tense at the end of 1997. There had been a reasonably harmonious relationship between Kabila and his regional backers through 1996 and ‘97, but it’s at the end of ‘97 that that relationship begins to fray and it’s at that time that Kabila begins to suspect that Rwanda and Uganda want to remain on Congolese territory and to use this as a way to plunder natural resources. And in many ways that’s the precursor to the violence that we then see in 1998 and 1999, when Kabila turns against his former allies and we then see this explosion of violence between the Congolese armed forces and the national armies and rebel movements supported by Rwanda and Uganda.
What’s important to understand here is that from Rwanda and Uganda’s point of view, this was very much a battle about natural resources. They saw the eastern part of Congo as an extraordinary opportunity. They could plunder this largely uncontrolled part of the country, they could get direct access to mines for minerals such as diamonds and gold and coltan and other natural resources. This was an opportunity for them really to fill their coffers. So that really is at the heart of the violence that we see in the second Congo war, between 1998 and 1999.
Keri Phillips: And is it the case that other neighbouring African states took Kabila’s side and also joined in the fight at this point?
Phil Clark: That’s another key dimension of this conflict: that Kabila looks around the region and desires allies; he needs allies. And he draws in a range of other countries, including Zimbabwe and Angola, who essentially come to his rescue. And this is why this conflict is often called a continental war, because at one point at the end of 1999 it involved as many as six or seven African countries and a whole range of rebel groups who were being supported by those outside countries. So this becomes an ever more complicated conflict. It begins with this fight between Kabila and his former allies, but very quickly it sucks in the neighbouring countries, who all have different vested interests—often material interests, often an interest in natural resources, but also a desire for greater stability.
Keri Phillips: This is Rear Vision on RN with Keri Phillips.
Although a ceasefire agreement was signed by Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe in 1999, it wasn’t until 2002 that a series of agreements signed in South Africa promised to bring an end to the violence and a path towards democracy in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Linda Mottram, AM (archival): The devastating conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, has claimed more than two million lives and embroiled eight countries, but now, the President of the DRC, Joseph Kabila, and his Rwandan counterpart, Paul Kigame, have signed the historic deal in South Africa’s capital, Pretoria.
Sally Sara, AM (archival): If the agreement holds together it will bring an end to one of the bloodiest and most miserable wars in Africa.
Séverine Autesserre: From 1998 to 2003 it was really the full civil war, the civil war that affected the entire Congolese territory. And then late in April 2002 you finally had a peace agreement that was signed in Sun City in South Africa, and that was the agreement that officially put an end to the Congolese war, to the 1998 Congolese war.
So the transition to peace was from 2003 to 2006. And what it meant is that for three years you had the major Congolese armed groups that sent their highest representative to Kinshasa to participate in a transitional government, a government of national unity. And the government of national unity had one president—that was president Joseph Kabila, so now the son of Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who had been assassinated in January 2001. So one president and then four vice-presidents, who were basically the leaders of the three major rebel groups, Congolese rebel groups, and the leaders of the political opposition. And then the ministries were divided up among the main rebel groups.
So from 2003 to 2006 you had the transition to peace and democracy that ended officially again with the general elections that were held in December 2006.
Keri Phillips: By 2007, Congo was officially at peace and had held its first ever democratic elections, but Phil Clark says that rebel groups had remained active in the eastern part of the country.
Phil Clark: One of the key outcomes of the conflicts in the 1990s is the rise of very powerful rebel forces, particularly supported by outside countries. We see a succession of rebel groups supported by Rwanda and Uganda who are used as proxies by those outside countries. They continue to win important military battles over the next seven or eight years and in some cases begin to entrench themselves in political structures in eastern Congo. So rebel movements begin to become provincial governments and they tend to take even more control of the eastern provinces. And the violence continues through this period.
So for many people living in eastern Congo the war has in essence continued almost unabated since the later 1990s.
Séverine Autesserre: From 2008 until 2011 it was this period where officially the Congo was at peace. And everybody was saying, ‘It’s fine. It’s just low-level violence,’ but when you were in Goma at that time you realised very quickly that there was no peace and that the official discourse that the Congo was at peace and was a democracy was completely wrong.
I spent a year in 2010 and 2011 living in Congo for my research and whenever I had to travel to Masisi and Rutchuru, the districts where the violence is ongoing right now, there were already a lot of security problems. There was constant fighting—low-level fighting, but constant fighting—and people were afraid. And there was already these people who are now in the M23, they already controlled some of the villages, some of the major towns; they were already fomenting trouble. And the militias, the local militias that had been very active since 1993, they were still fighting with the CNDP and they were still fighting among one another.
Keri Phillips: In this part of Congo, it’s not just the rebel group and the government fighting each other, but there are other smaller players, other militias—is that the case?
Séverine Autesserre: Yes, exactly. And that’s something extremely important if we want to understand what’s going on in the eastern Congo and especially in the Kivus, the area where the fighting is ongoing. So you’ve always had the government and at least one major rebel group—so now it’s called the M23. But since 1993, or since the early ‘90s, you’ve had what we call Mai-Mai militias, which are basically self-defence militias that villagers set up just to defend themselves, to defend themselves against either… against abuses from either one of the rebel groups or from the national army, the army of Mobutu and then of President Kabila, or against various foreign armed groups who were present in Congolese territory, like Rwandan armed groups and Ugandan armed groups that were present in the area.
So these militias, these Mai-Mai militias, were set up first as self-defence militia but very quickly they started turning against their villages and committing abuses and human rights violations on their own villages. And they started fighting among themselves and also with various armed groups, so with the major rebel groups or with the national army or with one of the foreign armed groups that were present. So they were fighting with some of the other armed groups and at the same time they were allying with the enemy of their enemy. And they have continued to be active on Congolese territory up to now and they still hold a lot of influence and a lot of power.
Journalist (archival): A mass exodus is underway in one of the largest cities of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Rebels have taken control of Goma despite the presence of a large UN peacekeeping force.
Journalist (archival): The rebels opened fire as they entered Goma from the north, chasing away the last remaining Congolese army positions. With loyalist forces gone, rebel soldiers walked in virtually unopposed. UN peacekeepers, with their mandate to protect the civilian population, could only stand by and watch as the rebels marched past their white armoured vehicles.
Phil Clark: Goma as a city plays a crucial role in all of the conflicts that Congo’s experienced since the early 1990s. Goma is a transit point. It’s a very important border town. It’s also the entry point for particularly Rwandan people and Rwandan armed forces coming across the border seeking to engage in further violence in eastern Congo. So Goma has always been a hotspot, it’s always been a place that has been on the frontline of the conflict.
But to make matters more complicated, Goma is also a very important political and cultural space. Goma is a place where many different ethnic groups interact—sometimes in tense ways but often much more harmoniously than they do in other parts of North Kivu Province. So Goma is a frontline town and it’s deeply affected by the conflict, but for many communities it’s been a safe haven. Especially in the last five or six years as violence has continued through many parts of eastern Congo, Goma was a place that many people flocked to. They flocked to it for a sense of safety and they flocked to it for a sense of economic opportunity. And because of the mining boom in eastern Congo in the last decade, Goma has become a boomtown—enormous amounts of development, increasing degrees of infrastructure, small degrees of prosperity and in some ways a kind of growing sense of confidence in the town.
And Goma’s a place that I visited consistently over the last eight or nine years and I’ve seen it develop in that time. I’ve seen this growing sense of stability, this growing sense of confidence, paradoxically to what was taking place in the rest of eastern Congo. The people were very aware that the conflict was raging in other places, that it was moving very quickly and that it could even encroach on the city, but nevertheless, there was a sense that the city itself was largely protected.
One of the key elements in the eastern Congolese conflict in the last few weeks is the effect that it’s had on the civilian population that Goma has been captured by the M23 rebels. This is a hugely important moment in the way that violence has played out in eastern Congo in the last ten years or so. It’s a sense now that this town that was considered a safe haven is no longer so, that Goma itself is extremely fragile, it has become a site of violence.
And the message that that sends to most Congolese people is if that can happen to Goma it can happen almost anywhere. And it shows how powerful these rebel groups still are and it shows how powerful their outside backers are. So the capture of Goma in many ways symbolises an escalation in the conflict, it symbolises a new phase of violence, and it shows just how extremely vulnerable the Congolese population is in the midst of this conflict.
Keri Phillips: Just looking at that border area, to what extent is it a border in the way we would think of a border, somewhere that’s controlled by somebody and where people going back and forth need to show documents and things like that? Is it in any sense like that?
Phil Clark: This is a very fluid border. It’s a border where people come and go very easily. The reason for that is that, particularly in terms of the Rwandan and the Congolese population, there are mutual economic interests on both sides of the fence. And so people are able to move backwards and forwards quite comfortably, because they engage in economic activities on both sides. And of course, as has been the case in many other parts of Africa, these borders were artificially drawn, especially after the Berlin Conference at the end of the nineteenth century, where European powers essentially carved up the entire continent of Africa.
One of the places that was most affected was Central Africa. It’s a hugely ethnically diverse part of the continent; it’s a place where ethnic groups historically have found ways to coexist, often under customary leadership. Much of that was changed because of the way that the borders were drawn. New nations were created, new divisions were created, and much of what we’re still dealing with in Congo today, I think, is a product of the very artificial ways in which different ethnic groups were pitted against each other at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
Now, what’s important to understand in the current context is that the border, especially between Rwanda and Congo, even though it’s very fluid, has also become heavily militarised. So what tends to happen is that the Rwandan and the Congolese armed forces keep a very close eye on that border. They let everyday citizens move backward and forwards, because they’re not seen as a threat. They’re often engaged in day-to-day economic activities. But it’s a border in which there’s a huge amount of suspicion and a huge amount of paranoia because of how much armed movement there has been in this territory over the last 10 to 15 years.
So it’s a very complex situation: citizens able to move backwards and forwards quite easily, but we see an enormous amount of armed power on both sides; we see the very obvious presence of the armed forces on both sides of this border. What’s important in the current conflict is to recognise that much of the power struggle between the M23 rebellion and the Congolese army is also about control of these borders. It’s also about who gets the final say about who ultimately can go back and forth, and that’s especially important in terms of the natural resource trade, because the M23 rebellion to a large extent represents Rwandan economic interests in eastern Congo—and that means Rwanda’s interest in the easy transportation of natural resources from eastern Congo to the Rwandan capital Kigali and then for sale on the international market.
So the border is an extraordinarily important asset for whoever is able to control it at any particular time.
Keri Phillips: What can you tell us about that group, M23?
Phil Clark: Following the second Congo war, the Rwandan government created a rebel force called the RCD, which was largely Tutsi-dominated. The RCD was responsible for serious human rights violations, but it was able to become part of the political infrastructure in eastern Congo so that the RCD captured key governorships and other positions of significant political power. That group then morphed into a second rebel movement, called the CNDP. Three years ago there was an attempt to integrate the CNDP into the Congolese armed forces. This has been one of the key mechanisms to try and quell violence in eastern Congo; it’s to integrate rebel movements into a national army, to try and incentivise them to put their weapons down, to be seen as part of the national military infrastructure.
The CNDP within the national army, however, didn’t feel that they were being treated with the respect that they deserved and at the beginning of 2012, President Kabila threatened to disperse the CNDP forces out of the national army in places like Goma and Bukavu and to send them to other parts of Congo. In essence Kabila saw the CNDP as becoming too powerful. They were in essence a parallel organisation within the Congolese armed forces. The fear of the CNDP and Rwanda was that if they were sent to other parts of Congo they were going to lose any kind of military or political influence that they had in the eastern part of the country. The response to Kabila’s threat to disperse the CNDP was to create this new rebel movement called M23. M23 then began fighting against the Congolese army.
Keri Phillips: The rebels took Goma on the 20th November and held it for 11 days. Then they withdrew under a deal that promised further negotiations with the government.
Séverine Autesserre: On the long term it really depends on the negotiations between the M23 and the Congolese government and also with the various other foreign countries that are involved. So we have several scenarios. The most optimistic one is that they manage to find a solution and to find an agreement that satisfies everybody and we’re back to a period of low-level violence, because I don’t think that in the short term we can really hope that all of the grievances, all of the armed groups—including the Mai-Mai militias that I mentioned before—that everything is going to be settled at once. I don’t think it’s realistic.
And then the worst-case scenario is that they don’t find an agreement and that the M23 starts again on the offensive and starts again taking major cities. Because they have shown that they have the military power to do so, so they can certainly try to do so again in the future if they want to.
Keri Phillips: Séverine Autesserre from Barnard College, Columbia University in New York. We also heard from Phil Clark from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
That’s it for Rear Vision but if you’re after a transcript of this program go to our website—abc.net.au/radionational/rearvision—we’ve also posted there as our special feature a program on the background to the law on the plain packaging of cigarettes which has just taken effect in Australia. You’ll also get to the website if you just Google Rear Vision.
Timothy Nicastri is the sound engineer today. Goodbye from Keri Phillips.
- Dr Phil Clark
- School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London
- Séverine Autesserre
- Assistant Professor of Political Science
- Keri Phillips
- Keri Phillips