The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa. Rene Lemarchand

10 turns the spotlight on the state of play on the eve of the transition to democracy, Chapter 11 looks at Burundi's “endangered transition” in the wake of the 2005 elections.

      Part III (on the Democratic Republic of the Congo) is a somewhat impressionistic and largely retrospective portrayal of the forces that have made the former Belgian colony one of the most violent areas on the continent. It looks at the multiple crises that have engulfed the Congo in a time-space perspective. Chapter 12 is excerpted from my 1993 USAID report, at a time when Mobutu stood as the arch-villain in blocking the country's transition to democracy. I include it because it captures some of the problems which continue to beset the country after its first multiparty elections in thirty years. Looking back to my diagnosis there of Zairian ailments—a weak civil society, the omnipresent threat of insecurity, the appalling lack of cohesion and professionalism of the army, an economy in shambles—the continuing threats they pose to the resurrection of the Congolese body politic are hard to escape. Chapter 13—first presented at a 1999 conference on the theme of social capital at the University of Antwerp—uses Robert Putnam's civil society lens to delve into the complex interconnections between ethnic violence, public policies and social capital in the Kivu region, one of the most potentially unstable arenas anywhere in the DRC, along with Ituri. Chapter 14 is a broad-gauged analysis of the Congo as a failed state and of the persistent hurdles that stand in the way of a reconstructed state system. The title of Chapter 15 captures the gist of the argument: the “tunnel at the end of the light” metaphor is enough to disabuse the reader of the notion that elections can serve as a panacea to resolve the country's enduring ills, ranging from residual pockets of insurgency to rampant corruption, widespread poverty, and persistent indiscipline and chronic defections within the armed forces, not to mention the ever-present threat of armed intervention from Rwanda.

      The concluding chapter (“From Kabila to Kabila: What Else Is New?”) is a reflection on the lessons to be drawn from the Congo's first multiparty poll in forty years (held at a cost of over half a billion dollars to the international community). While reiterating the well-worn cliché about elections not being a guarantee of future stability, or a substitute for a functioning state, it tries to assess the historic legacy of the Mobutist state and that of his successor, the despotic buffoon whose son is now in charge of charting a new course toward peace and democracy. Although there can be no question about the significance of the changes that have occurred since the death of Kabila père, today the Congo remains dangerously vulnerable to the ills inherited from Mobutu's thirty-year dictatorship.

      Attempts to sketch future trends are not without risks: the newly emergent institutions are conspicuously weak, the concatenation of forces on the ground in a state of flux, and leadership patterns at the provincial levels all but impossible to pin down. Nonetheless, some plausible scenarios come to mind. The most obvious relates to the continuing impact of outside forces on the salience and direction of domestic conflict. In the past the sheltering of opposition movements from Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda have raised major security concerns among their respective governments and have served as a pretext for armed incursions. In recent times the stakes have become more complicated, with access to mineral wealth looming increasingly large on the agenda of Rwanda and Uganda, and the many connecting links between eastern Congo and its neighbors portend continuing conflict.

      The likelihood of what Samuel Huntington calls “within-state fault line conflicts”⁵ acting as a catalyst for interstate confrontations is not to be discounted. The mutual distrust between the self-styled indigènes or “native sons” in North and South Kivu, and the Kinyarwanda-speaking allogènes, will not go away any time soon,⁶ any more than the bitter enmities between remnants of the Hutu genocidaires and the Tutsi communities indigenous to eastern DRC. The conflict lies at the heart of the tensions that brought Rwanda and the DRC to the brink of war in late 2004. It could resurface at any time in the future.

      How such conflicts might play themselves out on the ground is an open question. The gravest danger would arise from the simultaneity of violent insurrections in both east and west, as happened in the wake of the transition to multiparty democracy, thus confronting the fledgling Congolese armed forces with an unmanageable challenge. But by far the worse-case scenario is one where the army might dissolve in the midst of factional rivalries, leaving the government in a state of utter impotence in the face of widespread outbreaks of violence. Granted that the main guarantee of future stability lies in the presence of the Mission de l'Organisation des Nations Unies du Congo (MONUC) peacekeepers, when one considers the costs of its operation and the less than cooperative attitude of the Congolese government, one wonders how much longer the MONUC can be relied on to help maintain a modicum of peace and stability. Even in the best of circumstances, its past performance raises serious doubts as to whether it will be equal to the task.

      Just as debatable is whether the long-awaited transition to democracy can do more than provide a constitutional fig leaf to conceal the nakedness of a party-dominated, clientelist polity. Even at this early stage, there are ample signs that Kabila fils is unlikely to distance himself from the authoritarian style of his predecessor. The legitimate political opposition has been either forced into submission, bought off, or reduced to a marginal position. The army, meanwhile, will remain the Achilles' heel of the regime. Its restructuring is still at an incipient stage. Its nuisance capacity is not the least of the problems inherited from the Mobutist past. In this, as in many other ways, the DRC bears testimony to the many wounds inflicted upon its people by its rulers with the help of its neighbors.

      The Congo's supreme anomaly—a country of immense wealth home to one of the continent's poorest populations—will continue to shock, intrigue, or infuriate observers and political actors alike for many years to come. Yoked together by an accident of history, the three states of the former Belgian Africa are each engaged in a process of self-reinvention, each trying to shape its future in defiance of its past. Whether the legacy of their recent agonies can be set aside for the sake of a more promising destiny is impossible to tell. That they will continue to influence each other, for better or for worse, in their seemingly endless quest for a political rebirth is beyond doubt. My hope is that this book will provide the reader with a better sense of the complex historical ties that will continue to impinge on their tortured trajectories and of the continuities and ruptures beneath.

      Part I

      The Regional Context

       Chapter 1

      The Geopolitics of the Great Lakes Region

      In common usage the Great Lakes region refers to Central Africa's Great Rift valley, stretching on a north-south axis along the Congo-Nile crest, from Lake Tanganyika in the south to Lake Edward and the legendary Mountains of the Moon in the north. But where exactly does it begin, and where does it end? Should it include western Tanzania and southwestern Sudan? Should the Maniema and north Katanga be factored in as well? The answers are anything but straightforward. There is general agreement, however, that a minimal definition should include Rwanda, Burundi, eastern Congo, and southwestern Uganda as the core area of what once was called the “interlacustrine” zone of the continent, covering an estimated 300,000 square miles. This is the sense in which we shall use the phrase.

      The interlacustrine metaphor, though still fashionable among geographers, suggests too much in the way of uniformity and too little about the diversity of peoples, cultures, and subregions subsumed under this label.¹ There is a fundamental truth in the observation that “the extent to which people are attached to their native turf (terroir d'origine) is still highly developed among the people of the Great Lakes.”² To this day, group loyalties continue to cluster around precolonial terroirs. Whereas many readily identify with places like Nduga, Kiga, Bwisha, Bwito, Masisi, Rutshuru, Beni-Butembo,