[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 155 (Friday, December 15, 2000)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2206-E2207]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                     CONGO: THE HEART OF DARKNESS?

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. FRANK R. WOLF

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                       Friday, December 15, 2000

  Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, I want to share with you this informative 
article from The Economist magazine that describes the critical 
problems facing the Congo and the Great Lakes region of Africa. The 
humanitarian crisis in the Congo is startling as between 1.7-2 million 
people have died in the past several months. Thirty percent of those 
who died were under the age of 5. Clearly, the situation in the Congo 
deserves the attention of the West and I hope every Member will have an 
opportunity to read this article.

                   [From the Economist, Dec. 9, 2000]

                        In The Heart of Darkness

       The hefty cargo plane grinds on across Africa, the 
     deafening monotony of its engines never changing. The hold is 
     stuffed with drums of fuel and crates of ammunition, spare 
     parts for weapons and medical supplies. Perched among them 
     are a dozen soldiers, one of whom is carrying a suitcase full 
     of dollars. Three young women, one of them with a child, 
     crouch among the drums with wrapped-up bundles, a couple of 
     live chickens and several bunches of bananas.
       The old Russian-made plane is flown by Ukrainians. They and 
     the plane have been rented in Kiev by a Greek entrepreneur 
     who also deals in coffee, timber and arms. This time he has 
     hired it out to the Ugandan army, but it could have been made 
     available to any one of the seven national armies at war in 
     Congo. His business prospects look good. Peace is impossible 
     just now.
       Below, the forest stretches to the horizon in all 
     directions, a vast head of dark trees broken only by state-
     coloured rivers. Look down two hours later, and nothing has 
     changed. It is as if the plane hasn't moved. Congo is big. 
     Lay a map of Europe across Congo, with London at its western 
     end, and the eastern border falls 200 miles beyond Moscow.
       War in Congo does not involve huge armies and terrible 
     battles, but a few guns can send hundreds of thousands 
     fleeing their homes. It threatens Congo's nine neighbours 
     with destabilisation, and with thousands of refugees pouring 
     into their border areas. In the first week of December alone, 
     by UN estimates, more than 60,000 refugees fled into Zambia 
     from fighting that has just delivered the town of Pweto to 
     Congo's anti-government rebels. War in Congo means a 
     generation growing up without inoculation or education and 
     the rapid spread of AIDS, the camp-follower of war in Africa. 
     A recent United Nations report described Congo's war as one 
     of the world's worst humanitarian crises, affecting some 16m 
     people.


                          The legacy of greed

       Congo was only briefly a nation state. For most of history 
     it was a blank on the map, luring in the greedy and unwary. 
     It was first pillaged by the slave kingdoms and foreign 
     slavers; then by predators looking for ivory, rubber, timber, 
     copper, gold and diamonds.
       Leopold, king of the Belgians, grabbed it in 1885 to make 
     himself a private kingdom. That sparked the imperial takeover 
     of Africa by Europeans at the end of the 19th century.
       Leopold's agents cut off hands and heads to force the 
     inhabitants to deliver its riches to him. Then came Belgian 
     state rulers. They built some roads and brought in health and 
     education programmes, but blocked any political development. 
     When Congo was pitched into independence in 1960, there was 
     chaos.
       Congo nearly broke up; then out of the chaos came Mobutu 
     Sese Seko, one of the more grotesque rulers of independent 
     Africa. America and Europe supported him because he was anti-
     communist; but he was Leopold's true successor, regarding the 
     country as his personal possession. He renamed it Zaire, used 
     the treasury as his bank account and ruled by allowing 
     supporters and rivals to feed off the state. If they became 
     too greedy or powerful, he would have them thrown into prison 
     for a while before being given another post to plunder. On 
     two occasions he encouraged his unpaid, disgruntled soldiers 
     to satisfy themselves by looting the cities. He built himself 
     palaces and allowed the roads the Belgians had built to 
     disintegrate. This helped break up Congo into fiefs. When 
     Mobutu's rule ended in 1997, the nation state was dead. The 
     only national organisation was the Catholic church.
       One of his fiefs was Hutu-ruled Rwanda. Mobutu called its 
     president, Juvenal Habyarimana, his baby brother. In 1994 
     Habyarimana was killed in a plane crash, and the rump of his 
     regime carried out genocide against Rwanda's Tutsi minority. 
     But, with Ugandan help, the Tutsis triumphed. The old Rwandan 
     army and the gangs of killers fled into Congo, where Mobutu 
     gave them shelter and weapons. In 1996 the new Tutsi-
     dominated Rwandan army crossed the border and attacked the 
     Hutu camps, intending to set up a buffer zone to protect its 
     western border. The attack worked better than anticipated and 
     the Rwandans, Ugandans and their Congolese allies kept 
     walking westwards until they took the capital, Kinshasa. 
     Mortally ill, Mobutu fled and the Rwandans installed Laurent 
     Kabila as president.
       A year later, Mr. Kabila tried to wriggle out of the 
     control of the Rwandans and Ugandans. He allied himself with 
     their enemies, the Hutu militias in eastern Congo. In 
     response they launched another rebellion to try to dislodge 
     him. But this time Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Sudan and Chad 
     sent troops to defend him. They said they were acting on 
     principle, to protect a neighbouring state from invasion. The 
     war reached a stalemate with the country divided. In the 
     western half,
       Mr. Kabila was backed by Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia 
     (Sudan and Chad withdrew). The east was controlled by three 
     rebel movements and their creators and controllers, Uganda 
     and Rwanda. Burundi also has troops in Congo allied to the 
     Rwandans, but these stay close to the Burundi border.
       In June and July last year, a peace agreement was signed in 
     Lusaka by the government of Congo, the three rebel groups and 
     five intervening nations. It provided a timetable for a 
     ceasefire, the deployment of African military observers 
     supported by UN monitors, the disarming of ``negative 
     forces'' (the militia gangs that roam eastern Congo), and the 
     eventual withdrawal of all foreign forces. It also prescribed 
     a national dialogue between Mr. Kabila and the armed and 
     unarmed opposition.


                         Neighbours on the take

       Unsurprisingly, it has not worked. The ceasefire has been 
     persistently broken by all sides, most recently with the 
     fighting around Pweto. Although the defense chiefs of six of 
     the intervening countries, led by Zimbabwe, and several rebel 
     groups signed a deal in Harare on December 6th to pull back 
     their forces from front-line positions, it is still unlikely 
     to happen. The exploitation of the country by the intervening 
     armies reinforces the imperialist nature of the invasion, as 
     do their disparaging comments about the Congo * * * ``A 
     hopeless people,'' remarked one Rwandan. ``All they want to 
     do is drink and dance.''
       Each of the interveners in Congo has complex and different 
     reasons for being there. At one level, they have been sucked 
     into the vacuum; social and population pressure east of Congo 
     has drawn the neighbours towards a country with few people 
     for its size and no state structures. But each also had 
     internal political reasons for going to Congo.
       The Rwandans want to track down the perpetrators of 
     genocide and either drive them back to Rwanda or kill them. 
     The success of the 1996 invasion and American support has 
     made them over-confident. President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda 
     also has ambitions bigger than his own country. He wants the 
     economy of eastern Congo to link up with East Africa, and 
     wants to replicate his own political system in Congo. The 
     rebel Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC) was created 
     by Uganda, and mimics Mr. Museveni's political analysis and 
     ideology.
       On the other side, Mr. Kabila's allies also have domestic 
     reasons for being in Congo. Sudan, engaged in a proxy war 
     with Uganda, wanted another way to attack it. Angola wanted 
     to get into Congo to stop its own rebel movement, UNITA, from 
     using Congolese territory as a supply route and rear base. 
     Namibia got involved because it is indebted to Angola. 
     President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, jealous of South 
     Africa's new power in southern Africa, wanted to make himself 
     the region's military leader. Others loiter in the 
     background: North Korea has sent some 400 soldiers to help 
     train Mr. Kabila's fledgling army and tons of weapons, 
     reportedly in exchange for future sales of copper, cobalt and 
     uranium.
       Many western diplomats and analysts, as well as most 
     Congolese, suspect that America is secretly funding Rwanda 
     and Uganda. State Department officials deny this, but it is 
     hard to see how these poor countries can fight without 
     outside resources. Their meagre defence budgets (Uganda's is 
     allegedly

[[Page E2207]]

     $100m this year) cannot possibly sustain their operations in 
     Congo.
       Once in Congo, the interveners found commercial reasons to 
     stay. The war has created huge business opportunities which 
     have obscured its primary, political, cause. Hundreds of 
     dodgy businessmen, mercenaries, arms dealers and security 
     companies have come to the region. Diamonds are a big prize 
     and the main source of foreign exchange for Mr. Kabila. It is 
     hardly surprising that the war ground to a halt around Mbuji-
     Mayi, the main diamond-producing area. Congo pays for 
     Zimbabwe's presence with a diamond-mine concession. It has 
     also formed a joint oil company with Angola.
       Senior military officers from all the armies, as well as 
     their political cronies back home, make money trading 
     diamonds, gold, coffee and timber, and from contracts to feed 
     and supply their troops. They have little interest in peace. 
     Local and foreign businessmen often pay them to provide 
     troops to guard a valuable mine or a farm. The Kilo Moto gold 
     mine in Kivu has been taken over by freelance diggers, but 
     the entrance is guarded by Ugandan soldiers who tax them. 
     Kigali and Kampala are crawling with diamond dealers and 
     others looking for Congo's rare minerals, such as tantalite 
     and niobium. The loot is not confined to minerals. One 
     Ugandan unit, returning from Congo, caused fury in both 
     countries by having their newly acquired Congolese wives and 
     girlfriends flown home with them at government expense. War 
     booty, said chauvinistic Ugandan politicians. Rape and theft, 
     said Congolese men.


                          The Kabila disaster

       When Laurent Kabila was catapulted to power by Uganda and 
     Rwanda, everyone thought Congo would change. He could hardly 
     do worse than Mobutu, they argued. Perhaps he would turn into 
     one of the much-vaunted ``new leaders'' of Africa. He had few 
     enemies. Everyone wanted to help him rebuild Congo. Sadly, he 
     turned out to be little more than an outsize village chief, 
     adept at staying in power, but with no vision and a deep 
     distrust of competence. He has surrounded himself with 
     relatives, friends and oddballs he scooped up on his march to 
     Kinshasa. Mentally he is stuck in the cold war of the early 
     1960s, imagining global plots against Congo.
       The formal economy is dead. Nor far from the central bank 
     in central Kinshasa, carefully tended cabbages have sprung 
     from a small patch of waste ground by the roadside. Nearby, 
     families having moved into the ruins of a half-built office 
     block, hanging their washing over the abandoned concrete 
     pillars and cooking on open fires on the floors of rooms 
     designed for board meetings. Only about 20% of the city's 4m-
     5m people have jobs. Most of these pay, if at all, about $8 
     or $9 a month. The city has little fuel, so people get up 
     before dawn to walk to work. Most eat nothing all day, then 
     return on foot to the one daily meal of cassave porridge or 
     bread. Less than 30% of the capital's children are in school 
     and few can afford medicine if they are ill.
       Mr. Kabila blames all this on the war. It has more to do 
     with his old-fashioned statist policies and his arbitrary way 
     of handing out contracts and concessions and then canceling 
     them. That has frightened off foreign companies. So has his 
     policy of locking up foreigners and demanding ransom. 
     Heineken, a Dutch brewing company, recently paid $1m in cash 
     to the finance minister to secure the release of its two 
     senior executives in Kinshasa. Maurice Templesman, an 
     American diamond dealer, also lost millions of dollars when 
     his staff were seized and thrown out of the country. One 
     foreign security company in Kinshasa says its best new 
     business is negotiating the release of foreign nationals 
     arrested by the government.
       Mobuto played the country and its political elite like a 
     chess master. Mr. Kabila tries the same techniques; putting 
     people in power or in prison and playing the ethnic card. But 
     he is no expert. Long in exile, he barely understands Congo. 
     There have been splits and mutinies in his fledgling army and 
     his ministers are at each other's throats. Only in the south-
     east, his home territory, does he still have some support. 
     The impoverished people of Kinshasa despise him, but will not 
     demonstrate against him for fear of being accused of 
     supporting the rebel movements--which they do not.
       Mr. Kabilia is currently trying to get the Lusaka accord 
     rewritten. He has blocked the development of UN military 
     observers and humiliated and rejected Ketumile Masire, the 
     former Botswanan president, who was appointed to organize a 
     national dialogue. He even failed to turn up at meetings with 
     his backers, Angola and Zimbabwe. President Eduardo dos 
     Santos of Angola warned him in August that he had ``had 
     enough of his arrogance'', and that the allies would withdraw 
     from Congo if he continued to obstruct the peacemakers. But 
     Mr. dos Santos knows there is, as yet, no alternative to Mr. 
     Kabila and that there would be chaos if the allies withdrew 
     now.
       That is the crux of the problem. Mr. Kabila has failed, but 
     there is no one else who enjoys national support or looks 
     remotely capable of pulling the country together. Mobutu 
     ensured that every politician in Congo was smeared with his 
     corruption. Nor do the rebel movements present an 
     alternative. The Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) split 
     apart, with one faction supported by Uganda and the other by 
     Rwanda. Uganda then launched the MLC and, in June, the former 
     allies fought a full-scale battle in Kisangani for six days, 
     destroying much of the town's centre and killing 619 
     civilians. This engagement also destroyed the credibility of 
     the two leaders, Mr. Museveni and Rwanda's president, Paul 
     Kagame, in Congo. America and western countries were furious 
     with them and blocked Uganda's promised debt relief as 
     punishment.
       Both factions of the RCD are now deeply unpopular in their 
     own areas. The clumsy intervention of Rwanda and Uganda in 
     South and North Kivu has stirred up bitter ethnic rivalry. 
     Much of this region suffers from the same Hutu-Tutsi 
     divisions that exist in Rwanda and Burundi. The intervention 
     has upset the fragile balance, and the region flares with 
     massacre and counter-massacre.
       Local communities have tried to defend themselves against 
     all outsiders by forming self-defense militias, but many of 
     these have degenerated into wandering gangs of mercenaries 
     and bandits, the ``negative forces'' of the Lusaka accord. 
     Some are linked to Rwandan Hutus, some fight against them. 
     Mr. Kabila is fanning the flames by sending them weapons 
     across Lake Tanganyika. The Kivus are now a horrendous mess 
     of wars and sub-wars that will burn on long after the 
     national war is over.
       In northern Congo, the picture is slightly better. Jean-
     Pierre Bemba, the young MLC leader and a businessman, is 
     popular there because his Ugandan-run army is fairly 
     disciplined and, in Mobutu's home area, he is seen as his 
     successor. It is a label he vigorously rejects, since he 
     knows it will kill support for him in other places.


                           What happens next

       The present situation is deadlocked and unstable. The UN 
     will not deploy its forces until it is convinced that all 
     parties are serious about peace, but the ``negative forces'', 
     Hutu militias, gangs and others have signed no ceasefire and 
     have little interest in peace. That means the foreign forces 
     cannot fulfill the Lusaka accord and leave. But their 
     governments, even the oil-rich Angolans, are worried about 
     the cost. They are all engaging in bilateral talks with each 
     other; but that increases mistrust and suspicion.
       The Rwandans, realising how unpopular they are in Congo, 
     have given up hope of overthrowing Mr. Kabila and instead 
     have offered to withdraw their troops to the Kivus. Zimbabwe, 
     hard-pressed by domestic problems, wants it 12,000 troops out 
     as soon as there is a face-saving formula. Their departure 
     could destablise Mr. Kabila. Maybe the Angolans, left holding 
     the fort, will remove him. At present they seem to be trying 
     to bring in Mr. Bemba and a representative of the unarmed 
     opposition to create a trumvirate with Mr. Kabila. To achieve 
     this, the Angolans have to trust Mr. Bemba's backer, Uganda. 
     They don't, because Uganda has been a conduit for arms to 
     UNITA rebels in Angola. Besides, the Ugandan army and the MLC 
     are still pushing westwards towards the strategic city of 
     Mbandaka, garrisoned by Angolans.
       And what of the Congolese people in all this? Impoverished, 
     disregarded and oppressed, they still give one clear message 
     almost unanimously in every conversation: they do not want 
     Congo to break up. But the long decomposition of this vast 
     country seems inevitable, whoever rules in Kinshasa.
       This war could rumble on for years, if not decades. The 
     Lusaka accord, concedes a senior UN representative, is not 
     going to work; but no one has a better plan. The best he can 
     suggest is that outsiders remain engaged, help the victims, 
     try to understand what is happening--and make it worse. 
     Congo's experience of outsiders is, to put it mildly, 
     discouraging.

     

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