Marina Ottaway
Senior Associate and Co-director, Democracy and Rule
of Law Project
Testimony Prepared for the Hearings on “Conflicts
in Central Africa,” June 8, 1999
Subcommittee on Africa, United States Senate
Conflict in Central Africa
The central part of the African continent, a broad swath extending from the Horn Africa in the Northeast to Angola in the Southwest is the theatre for a growing number of conflicts. There is little reason to believe that stability will return to the area in the near future. The most worrisome situation is a cluster of conflicts which involves the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, and Congo Brazzaville as first tier actors, plus Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia and the Central African Republic in the second tier. The crisis can be traced back to 1994, when a series of relatively unconnected political threads started becoming entangled into one major snarl. It is necessary to describe this cluster in some detail.
The first thread was ethnic conflict in Rwanda. With ethnicity highly politicized since colonial times, the demographic composition of Rwanda--14 percent Tutsi and 86 percent Hutu--was a dangerous mix. Hutus dominated the politics of the independent country, after a showdown in 1959 sent several hundred thousand Tutsis fleeing across the border into Uganda. Tutsi exiles supported Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in his fight for power in the early 1980s, gaining both political and military support. This support facilitated the formation of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which launched the first attacks into Rwanda in 1990. With the help of other countries in the region, the conflict was halted, and a promising agreement to form a government of national reconciliation and an integrated national army was reached in Arusha in 1993. However, the implementation of the agreement was opposed by Hutu extremists in the military and in the Interahamwe militia. When the Rwandan president, a Hutu, was killed in a still unexplained plane crash in 1994, Hutu extremists launched a mass slaughter of Tutsis and moderate Hutus. In turn, the Rwandan Patriotic Front launched an all out attack on Rwanda. When the country settled after several months of horror, probably 800,000 people were dead, the RPF was in power in Kigali and two million people, including both refugees from the massacre and its perpetrators were living in camps in Eastern Zaire.
There, the thread of ethnic conflict in Rwanda became entangled with that of the domestic politics of Zaire in the waning days of the regime of President Mobutu Sese Seko. In the 1990s, Zaire was in practice a country without a government. In Kinshasa, an ailing Mobutu still manipulated allies and foes effectively enough to prevent the formation of another government, but he had little or no control over the rest of the country and little hope of re-establishing it.
For Rwanda and also for Uganda, the weakness of the Zairian state was a problem. Opponents of the Ugandan government operated from eastern Zaire with the support of Sudan. In the refugee camps, members of the Rwandan army defeated by the RPF and of the Interahamwe militia were reorganizing and rearming, under the eyes of humanitarian organizations that saw what was happening but did not have the means to separate refugees and armed men and could not stop housing and feeding the latter without starving the former. The international community was unwilling to intervene with the force necessary to do the job.
Seeking to protect itself against the threat posed by Hutu extremists rearming in the camps, the new Rwandan government, with the help of Uganda, chose a radical solution: it destroyed the camps from which the attacks were being mounted, and also sought to replace the Mobutu regime with one it hoped would be friendlier and more capable of controlling Zairian territory. So advanced was the disintegration of the Zairian state, compounded by the weakening of the political skills of a dying Mobutu, that a weak guerrilla force, supported by Rwanda and Uganda and headed by a virtually unknown local warlord, Laurent Kabila, marched across the country and seized power in a few months.
But President Kabila proved to be an incompetent leader. He quickly alienated most domestic groups, from aspiring politicians in Kinshasa to provincial elites and organizations of civil society. He never gained the confidence of the international donor community, whose help the country badly needed. He also soon lost the support of the Ugandan and Rwandan governments, disillusioned by his lack of political acumen and even more by his incapacity to control the eastern region of the renamed Democratic Republic of the Congo.
With their enemies once again reorganizing and rearming in the area, Rwanda and Uganda abandoned Kabila in 1998, and threw their support behind a new movement dominated by Congolese Tutsis, the Rassemblement Congolais pour la Democratie (RCD). The new round of fighting, which continues at the present time, gathered more threads into the growing tangle.
One was the struggle between the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertacao de Angola government and UNITA (Uniao Nacional para a Independencia Total de Angola) in Angola. The enmity between UNITA and the MPLA dated back to the 1960s, when both were fighting against the Portuguese government for the independence of Angola. The first round was won by the MPLA, which assumed power when Angola became independent in 1975. But UNITA did not desist and with the support of South Africa and the United States went to war again the MPLA, which in turn received the backing of the Soviet Union and Cuba. The war in Angola thus turned into a proxy war between the superpowers. That phase came to an end in late 1988, when an agreement provided for the withdrawal of the Cubans and South Africans from Angola, as well as for the independence of Namibia. With this settlement, the United States and the Soviet Union turned from parties to the conflict to mediators of the continuing rivalry between the MPLA and UNITA. A peace agreement was signed by the two rivals in 1991, but it did not hold. After losing elections in 1992, UNITA returned to war. A new agreement negotiated in 1994 was never implemented completely. As a result, Angola headed again for war at the same time as the new conflict in the DRC flared up.
To wage war anew, UNITA needed channels through which to import weapons and fuel into the country—the financing was provided by the smuggling of diamond. Under Mobutu, Zaire had been a source of support for UNITA, and as a result UNITA had supported Mobutu against Kabila, while the MPLA had backed the insurgency—both, however, had been minor players in that fight. In 1998, Angola continued to back Kabila, hoping that he would stay in control and repay Angola for its support by blocking the supplies going to UNITA. Inevitably, UNITA supported the RCD.
The Congolese conflict picked up many other, though lesser, threads as well. One such thread was domestic. Mobutu’s generals in charge of his elite corps had not put up much resistance against Kabila, choosing exile in South Africa instead. When the RCD started its war against Kabila in 1998, some of the generals saw their chance and opened their own front in the northwest of the country, the region from which Mobutu and his closest supporters originated. The ramifications of this intervention are still difficult to fathom, but are likely to be significant, because the generals not only have some support in the region and are also involved in the international arms trade.
Other foreign components were added to the growing imbroglio. Zimbabwe, whose President Robert Mugabe has mining interests in the Congo, sent planes and troops to Kabila’s defense, probably with the financial support of Libya. Congo-Brazzaville, whose government is supported by Angola and had ties to Kabila, nevertheless allowed-or at least was incapable of preventing—Mobutu’s former generals from using its territory to launch attacks. Zambia, which initially tried to stay out of the conflict and play the role of the peacemaker, lost much of its neutrality when Angola, angered by the Zambian refusal to let it enter its territory better to fight UNITA, allegedly carried out a series of bombings in Lusaka as a warning to the government. To avoid strife with Angola, Zambia in turn discontinued the supply of fuel to the southern DRC, hoping that this would convince Kabila to become more active in curbing UNITA activities from the Congo.
Implications of the Conflicts
These conflicts have major implications for Africa as a whole. First, many of the participants are openly flaunting the principles of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) on which African interstate relations have been based since independence, namely that of the inviolability of colonial borders and non-intervention in each other’s affairs. Second, the conflicts are giving rise to new alliances that undermine efforts to strengthen regional organizations; the Southern Africa development Community (SADC) in particular has seen growing divisions among its members. And third, these conflicts show the increasing role of non-state actors, including military groups with the capacity to mount major operations but also organizations of civil society seeking to protect civilians and bring about reconciliation.
Borders are being violated freely by participants in these conflicts, with African states intervening in each other territory without being asked by the incumbent government. The intervention of Uganda and Rwanda in the DRC, or Angola in Congo Brazzaville did not come at the request of the governments of those countries. The violation of international borders can be expected to become more widespread in the future, because of the incapacity of most states in this region to control their own territory. For example, the DRC government has not had real control over its eastern region for many years, and the Angolan government has never controlled some parts of the country. In Congo-Brazzaville and Uganda as well there are areas essentially outside the reach of the government and similar situations exist in many parts of Africa. The areas outside the government’s effective sphere of influence inevitably become breeding ground for domestic insurgencies and attract intervention by neighboring countries that feel threatened by the vacuum of power on their borders. Lines between purely domestic conflict and conflict with an international dimension are thus increasingly blurred.
The increasingly frequent violations of the OAU principles by African countries is not simply the result of aggressive policies by rogue regimes flaunting international law and the charter of the Organization of African Unity. It is also a symptom of the profound crisis affecting many African countries, which increasingly created a vacuum of power in many areas, thus inviting proliferation of armed movements and intervention by neighboring countries.
The conflicts in Central Africa are also creating new alliances that not only divide countries, but make conflict more dangerous by expanding its scope. African countries are increasingly divided between those that still claim to abide by OAU rules and consider all incumbent governments as legitimate no matter how they got to power, and those countries that refuse to recognize the legitimacy of governments or the sovereignty of countries that threaten what they see as their national interest and security. In Central Africa, the governments of the DRC and Zimbabwe take the former position, those of Rwanda, Uganda and Angola seek to defend their interests by intervening wherever they consider it necessary. Angola, for example, supported the insurgents against the government of Zaire 1994, but is not supporting the government of the DRC against the insurgents.
These differences are threatening to regional organizations. SADC, of which the DRC is a member, has become very divided over the issue, with President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe siding with the incumbent government because it is the incumbent government and President Nelson Mandela of South Africa reluctant to support Kabila, who has demonstrated both incompetence and brutality, just because he is the president.. Zimbabwe and South Africa are the two most important countries within SADC, and this dissension makes it more difficult for the organization to play a positive role in restoring peace.
Finally, the conflicts in Central Africa show the growing importance of non-state actors, the threat they pose, but also the promise they hold. There are two major categories of non-state actors. On the negative side, there are the insurgent armed movements. Some of these have more or less clearly defined political goals, but other are little more than organized bands of brigands. All these armed movements commit gross human rights abuses, recruit child soldiers, and in general brutalize civilians. Many governments do the same, but armed, non-state actors are even less open to outside political pressure to moderate their stance than governments. On the positive side, non-state actors include NGOs that seek to protect the rights of the populations and seek to represents their interests. These NGOs are often the voice of morality and sanity, but their influence is limited because they are unarmed actors in the midst of conflict. Furthermore, these organizations usually claim to speak for the people, but they are not representative organizations, and their support among the population is untested. Not all civil society organizations are as well-meaning and altruistic as they claim; there is a lot of opportunism in their ranks as well.
Why is conflict exploding now?
Each of the conflicts in Central Africa has specific causes which have been briefly discussed earlier. There are common factors, however, that explain why all these conflicts, many of them underway or latent for many years, have flared up suddenly and become entangled with each other.
I have already touched on the first reason, namely the poor performance of most African states since independence, which has reduced many to the condition of failed states. The 1970s saw the narrowing of the base of support of most African governments, as single party or military regimes with little legitimacy replaced the leaders of the independence struggle. The situation was made worse by the rapid economic decline of the 1980s, followed by the imposition of structural adjustment programs that, while essential for recovery, also further reduce state capacity by imposing strict budgetary controls. Many countries today are caught in a vicious circle, where they cannot recover economically unless they adopt austerity budgets, but cannot restore even minimum capacity and services because of budget constraints.
A second, connected reason, is the ready availability of young men ready to enroll in any army, governmental or otherwise, in countries with a large young population that has no educational opportunities and no economic future. Fighting is a way of making a living. This is particularly true in Central Africa, where natural resources such as diamonds can easily be exploited by insurgent movements.
A third reason for the outbreak of conflict is the decreasing role that outside powers play in Africa. During the Cold War period, the US-Soviet rivalry exacerbated some conflicts, above all in Angola where a domestic enmity turned into a proxy war among superpowers. However, the rivalry also helped maintain stability, because each side made sure that its clients would remain in control, thus perpetuating the status quo. Now, Russia has no interest in Africa and the US has little incentive to intervene in conflicts that no longer affect its security. Furthermore France, whose often criticized interventions also served to stabilize Africa, has adopted a much more cautious stance toward the continent in recent years and French paratroopers are not automatically dispatched to restore order. African countries, as a result, have been left to their own devices in trying to establish a regional balance of power, and have so far failed. This is not surprising, given the fact that order in Africa has been imposed from the outside for over a century. The outcome, however, is increasing chaos.
What can be done to reduce the level of conflict?
For the United States and other outside powers, the conflicts in Central Africa are worrisome for two reasons: instability is becoming endemic not only to specific countries but to entire regions, and it is spreading; and humanitarian crises are multiplying, causing moral dilemmas and taxing the capacity of relief organizations.
The United States and other outside powers are paying more attention to African conflicts because they are spreading across borders, turning from domestic to international ones. However, it is unlikely that much progress can be made toward reducing the level of conflict in the Central Africa and other regions unless each country makes some progress toward addressing its own domestic problems. For example, there is little possibility to stop the interstate conflicts in Central Africa unless in the DRC and Angola tackle their internal crises.
As long as the present vacuum of power continues in the DRC, other countries will continue to intervene directly or to support armed insurgencies in order to safeguard their own interests. After the 1994 genocide, Rwanda cannot ignore the existence of Hutu militias on its borders. The threat is real, and it can only be addressed if the DRC government can stop its territory from being used as a staging ground for cross- border raids. Uganda and Angola also have a direct interest in what happens in the DRC, because their enemies use its territory. The key to managing the regional conflict thus is the restoration of a state in the Congo. This will not happen unless Kabila not only negotiates with the insurgents, but also undertakes a process of political consultation with all political parties, regional governors, organizations of civil society, and other significant interest groups to reach an agreement on how the Congo can be put back again—or, if necessary, divided. Without a process leading to the rebuilding of the Congo, there is no possibility of ending conflict. At best, some of the states whose interest in the Congo is less direct, such as Zimbabwe, might withdraw from the fray. This would be a positive step in itself, but would not restore stability to Central Africa.
The domestic political situation in Angola also fuels regional instability, because both the government and UNITA take advantage of what happens outside their borders to further their interests. But it is increasingly clear that negotiations will not end that conflict; only a military victory by one side will do that. The conflict has lasted for a quarter of a century, negotiations for about fifteen years. They were successful in bringing about the withdrawal of South African and Cuban troops, but not in reconciling the government and UNITA. The first agreement between the two, laboriously reached in 1991, broke down after the 1992 elections. A new agreement was reached in 1994 after another round of war, and it was never implemented. After five more years of negotiations on how to implement the agreement, war has started again. It is clear at this point that an agreement between the two parties cannot be reached under the present leadership. It is also clear in retrospect that the constant negotiations just prolonged the conflict without sparing the civilian population the horrors of war, preventing a military solution while failing to provide a political one, and allowing both sides to rearm and reorganize periodically under the cover of cease-fires and peace agreements that eventually failed. The best the international community can do at this point is to try and slow down the flow of arms to both sides and seek to control the sale of the diamonds that finance UNITA. The recent formation of a United Nations panel to study how to curb the sanction-busting by UNITA is a modest step in the right direction.
Is There a Role for the United States in Central Africa?
The United States or other non-African actors face a major choice in dealing with the conflicts in Central Africa, namely whether to intervene massively or not to intervene at all. The situation has deteriorated to the point where it is not simply a question of helping existing states to strengthen their institutions or revive their economies, or to convince government to respect the rules of the Organization of African Unity. Many of the states that emerged from the colonial period have ceased to exist in practice, and the rules of the OAU cannot apply to states that are no longer there. The problem is to create functioning states, either by re-dividing territory or by creating new institutional arrangements such as decentralized federations or even confederations. We should have no illusion that any of these solutions can be devised, and even less implemented, quickly, easily, and without major controversy. Least of all, any solution outsiders imposed would require a massive foreign presence to implement. No matter how benevolent the intentions, intervening to partition African territory and set up new political entities and institutions would put the United States and other outsiders in a colonial role. It is not a decision to be taken lightly.
The alternative, which I believe more appropriate at this time, is to allow African countries to find solutions on their own. Inevitably, this will entail a continuation of domestic and interstate fighting, and probably the break up of some countries, before stability is reached. It is not a happy prospect, but there are no realistic alternatives.
Our policy thus should concentrate on helping states that are still viable remain such by encouraging economic and political reform. Seeking to curb arms flows and the illegal sales of diamonds are also important steps in decreasing the level of conflict, although they cannot be expected to halt it. Finally, we need to make sure that our own well-intentioned actions do not fuel conflict, as humanitarian assistance did in Somalia, for example, and endless negotiations probably did in Angola.
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