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THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO


The so-called “Democratic” Republic of the Congo—“La République Démocratique du Congo,” or the DRC for short—is my homeland. In 2002 I was forced to leave my country as a consequence of my fight to change the dictatorial system there. My comrades and I engaged in this fight with conviction and determination. When I left my country, I left comrades in prison, where they continued to endure physical and mental torture. Others, whom I had seen for the last time, were dead. But our fight was noble and just. Back then, we continued to hope that no matter how hard it would be, no matter what suffering was required of us or how long it might take, we would ultimately be assured of victory, and our hope for that victory was expressed in the slogan of our party: “Keep holding on—the UDPS will be victorious.”

At last, in December 2018, elections were held, and Félix Tshisekedi, one of the leaders of our party, was elected the new leader of the DRC. For me and all my comrades, this victory was a major achievement, after all our long years of struggle. As I revise the English version of this book, there are signs of hope. But the overall situation remains highly ambivalent. Some of my imprisoned friends who managed to survive the oppression and torture of the Kabila regime have now regained their freedom. I visited my country in the summer of 2019 to see with my own eyes the changes that were taking place, and was pleasantly surprised to see people demonstrating in the streets without being bothered by the police—unlike what we experienced in the past.

At the same time, it is obvious that Joseph Kabila and his clique still exert considerable influence. It is clear to everyone that the army, the police, and the security services are not controlled by the new president. Kabilists are also still present in the various sectors of the country’s economy. In addition, the former dignitaries have acquired a majority in the parliament and the senate, and the police still arrest and detain peaceful demonstrators. Although I believe that the 2018 election was a huge step forward in the history of my country, it is imperative that we are not blind to the shortcomings of the new government.

In order to understand where we are now, it makes sense to begin with a short introduction to my country, to provide some background to what I will go on to report. I am well aware that this historical section, in particular, may demand a certain amount of effort from readers unfamiliar with the region—first, because since 1994 the DRC has been convulsed by four wars, resulting in many millions of deaths. Second, because those wars can only be properly understood in the context of the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi in the DRC’s eastern neighbor, Rwanda. Nonetheless, I don’t think anyone in the West should be allowed to take the position that the history of Africa is always complex, violent, and somehow incomprehensible: that is a racist stereotype. The prerequisite for a true decolonialization of the mind is to take an active and differentiated approach to the history of individual African countries and regions. We need to understand that this history is very closely interlinked with the history of Western colonialism, starting with the Atlantic slave trade from the early sixteenth century onward.

| A VAST AND WEALTHY COUNTRY

Geography teaches us that the DRC, formerly known as Zaire, is an immense country located at the heart of Africa. In the late nineteenth century, the DRC was colonized by Belgium. It became independent on June 30, 1960. The country covers 2,345,409 square kilometers, making it the second-largest country in Africa, after Algeria. The DRC is almost four times the size of France, and shares its 9,165-kilometer border with nine other countries. Although there are no reliable statistics due to the lack of a census, according to current estimates there are around eighty million people living in the DRC, giving it a population density of forty inhabitants per square kilometer. Sixty percent of the country’s population are young people under the age of twenty-five, which constitutes a promising human resource for the development of the country.

In addition to the four main languages—Lingala, Tshiluba, Kikongo, and Swahili—more than four hundred dialects are used in the DRC. This linguistic diversity is the pride of the entire population, and could have brought development and self-confidence to the people of the DRC had the colonial language—which, more or less coincidentally, is French—not been introduced. The colonial administration spoke French, so it became the official language, although to this day only a small percentage of the population speak it well; the prerequisite for doing so is school attendance.

As far as the practice of religion is concerned, it must first be made clear that the DRC is a secular state; there is no state religion. Christians constitute the largest faith group, organized into the Catholic, Protestant, and Evangelical churches. Islam, which used to predominate in Kinshasa and the country’s eastern regions, is currently regaining popularity. As well as these religions, which came to the country from abroad, particular mention must be made of Kimbanguism, adherents of which worship its founder, Simon Kimbangu, and believe he was sent from God many years ago to liberate the people from the colonizers. Kimbangu, who lived from 1887 to 1951, urged the Congolese to emancipate themselves from colonial rule. In 1921, Kimbangu was arrested because of his subversive teachings, and was held in Katanga, two thousand kilometers from his base and stronghold, until his death in 1951. His followers were persecuted, abducted, and murdered by the colonial rulers. Those who wanted to escape repression by the colonial administration joined other churches, where the ideas of the prophet Kimbangu continued to be preached in secret.

While Kimbanguism played a substantial role in the decolonization of the DRC, it must be mentioned that the Catholic Church was also an important factor in the resistance to General Mobutu’s decades-long dictatorship. Cardinal Malula began this fight in the 1980s when he publicly criticized the Mobutu regime’s poor leadership, and the resistance intensified in the 1990s, when Mobutu was first compelled to open up the political arena.

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The DRC possesses an immense wealth of natural resources and mineral deposits. When you consider the vast size of the country, its position is quite extraordinary: its earth contains gold, diamonds, copper, cobalt, zinc, silver, cadmium, germanium, carbon, manganese, tin, tin oxide, beryl, tantalum, coltan, tungsten, monazite, uranium, nickel, oil shale, bauxite, lead, emeralds, hematite, malachite, phosphates, coal, methane gas, natural gas, and oil.

In addition to its mineral and fossil riches, the DRC is covered in vast swaths of forest. Its total forested area measures an estimated 135 million hectares—6 percent of all the forest in the world, and 47 percent of all the forest on the African continent. Furthermore, parts of the DRC also have huge potential for agricultural cultivation and the farming of livestock. Already the network of rivers that crisscross the DRC generates 98 percent of the country’s electricity.

Yet despite this huge potential, the majority of Congolese live in extreme poverty. The DRC is one of the ten poorest countries in the world. There is a striking degree of inequality. Around 80 percent of the population live below the poverty line of $2 a day. Life expectancy is barely fifty-four years.

| HISTORY OF THE DRC

I cannot give a complete account here of the recent history of the DRC, but I must at least make brief mention of the two most important periods.

This large, rich African country was officially ceded to King Leopold II of Belgium at the Berlin Conference of 1885. The Congo Free State became his private property. The king pretended to the outside world that his motives in the country were humanistic, emancipatory, and civilizatory. In reality, he presided over the creation of a cynical and inhumane system unlike any the world had ever seen. Leopold’s rule was characterized by the subjugation and abduction of the indigenous population. There was also a system of forced labor: women and children were held hostage in order to compel the men to harvest rubber. Entire villages were wiped out. Anyone who resisted was tortured, or mutilated by having their hands chopped off. Several million people died violent deaths under this system.

This was the price the Congolese people were forced to pay for King Leopold’s supposedly humanitarian and civilizing activities.

It wasn’t until 1908 that criticism of the crimes for which the king was responsible actually had an effect. The Belgian parliament annexed the Congo Free State, renaming it the colony of Belgian Congo. However, despite this change, the system for exploiting the local population remained in place.

The country didn’t gain its national sovereignty until June 30, 1960. This was the result of a long struggle by the Congolese people, led by Patrice Émery Lumumba. The day the Congo became independent, Lumumba spoke the following words: “All of you, my friends, who have fought tirelessly at our side, I ask you to mark this June 30, 1960, as an illustrious date that you will keep indelibly engraved in your hearts, a date whose meaning you will proudly teach your children, so that they in turn might relate to their children and grandchildren the glorious history of our struggle for freedom.” The first free elections in the history of the new Republic of the Congo resulted in Joseph Kasavubu becoming the president and Patrice Émery Lumumba the prime minister. However, just a few months after independence, Moïse Tshombe declared the independence of Katanga. This province was particularly important to the Congo, because the exploitation of its mineral resources accounted for 70 percent of the foreign currency entering the country. The presence of the mines, and therefore also of large Western capitalist firms, largely explains Katanga’s political orientation. A few days later it was South Kasaï’s turn to secede, under the leadership of Mulopwe Kalonji Ditunga. The two new self-proclaimed heads of state were clearly supported by the former colonial power. After appealing to the United Nations, which sent peacekeepers but held back from intervening against the secessionists, Lumumba turned to the U.S.S.R., and from then on his fate was sealed. Dwight Eisenhower, the U.S. president, was not willing to allow a bastion of communism to be established in the heart of Africa. On January 18, 1961, Lumumba was assassinated, with the complicity of the Belgians and the American secret services.

Following this murder, the crisis in the country continued; finally, amid the ongoing political confusion, General Mobutu seized power in a military coup on November 24, 1965. Mobutu was able to rely on strong support from the United States, which had a considerable interest in maintaining the supply of materials for its industry, and in preventing the Soviet Union from increasing its sphere of influence on the African continent.

For his part, Mobutu’s justification for the coup was that it was necessary in order to put an end to the chaos in the country and deliver the riches of the Congo—renamed Zaire in 1971—to its people. In fact, what he did was establish a bloody dictatorship that the Congolese people will never forget, to which corruption, misappropriation of public funds, and human rights violations were endemic. Anyone who resisted Mobutu risked being persecuted, imprisoned, banished, or even murdered. All political parties were banned, and one-party rule was institutionalized in 1973, when the so-called Popular Movement of the Revolution (MPR) was declared the party of state.

Nonetheless, in 1980, a group of thirteen parliamentarians decided to speak out in opposition to their country’s undemocratic leadership. They wrote a fifty-two-page letter, addressed to Mobutu, harshly criticizing his administration of the previous fifteen years; then, on February 15, 1982, ignoring attempts to intimidate them, they founded an opposition party called the Union for Democracy and Social Progress (UDPS). Their mission would not prove an easy one: their leaders would be threatened, imprisoned, subjected to physical and psychological torture, or exiled to their native regions.

Political pressure on Mobutu increased, both at home and abroad, and on April 24, 1990, he was forced to introduce a multiparty system. This process resulted in the holding of a national conference1 in 1991, bringing together around 2,800 delegates from all sectors of society—representatives of civil society and of the various religions and parties, as well as other holders of public office.

The aim of the conference was to reexamine the history of the Congo and to reconcile the Congolese people with themselves. The past was to be subjected to critical analysis, and transparent, democratic structures were to be created, all in the hope that the community of this nascent third republic could be shaped according to these principles.

The decisions made at the conference included the determination that a prime minister would be elected to lead the country during a two-year transition phase to democracy. In August 1992, the National Assembly elected the UDPS’s Étienne Tshisekedi to this position with more than 70 percent of the vote. The National Assembly chose Tshisekedi because of his moral integrity, as well as his opposition to Mobutu’s regime. He had held several positions of high office between 1961 and 1979, but had distanced himself from Mobutu when the latter introduced the one-party system and began to employ increasingly nontransparent methods of government. Tshisekedi then moved to the opposition, and, as the leading figure among the aforementioned thirteen parliamentarians, he seized the initiative to found the UDPS.

Tshisekedi’s election as prime minister was greeted with enthusiasm by much of the population. Among Mobutists, however, it provoked fury. Mobutu was used to ruling the country like his own private company. He did not allow the newly elected prime minister a free hand. However, Tshisekedi had already become a tenacious opposition leader who wanted radical changes to the way the country was run.

Mobutu responded by organizing the “ethnic cleansing” of the Kasaï ethnic group—to which his rival belonged—in the province of Katanga, where he was abetted by the provincial governor, Gabriel Kyungu wa Kumwanza. Men, women, and children were killed and expelled as part of this “ethnic cleansing.” Those who escaped took refuge in Kasaï Province. Many of their houses and possessions were appropriated by residents of Katanga; tens of thousands of people died.

* * *

The power struggle between Mobutu and Tshisekedi showed no sign of ending, with Mobutu trying to gain control of the army and public finances. Just three months after he was elected prime minister, Tshisekedi was removed from office. The crisis the country had thought it had survived was only just beginning.

With a view to reinstating the political order introduced by the National Assembly, several rounds of negotiations were scheduled—but in vain. The crisis continued until 1996, when a rebellion started brewing in the east of the country. It was led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, a former follower of Lumumba who had been involved in repeated uprisings against Mobutu in the east since 1964 and who led a movement called the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL). Initially, it was said to be just a resistance movement—self-defense on the part of the Banyamulenge. These were ethnic Tutsis who had migrated from Rwanda many years earlier. More recently, they had fled to the mountainous province of Kivu, in eastern Congo, to escape the genocide committed by Hutu militias in Rwanda between April and June 1994, in which more than eight hundred thousand Tutsis were killed. Rwandan Tutsi rebels eventually succeeded in toppling the Hutu government and installing their own leader, Paul Kagame, as the new president of Rwanda. Consequently, from 1994 onward, many Hutus fled Rwanda for the Congo (at the time still known as Zaire), and the Banyamulenge now felt threatened. The arrival of these huge numbers of Hutu refugees was completely uncontrolled. Heavily armed and well-financed Hutu militias, some of which had been involved in the Rwandan genocide, were able to penetrate the Congo. Both the United Nations and certain European countries, including France, supported the trend, and did not even attempt to disarm the militias. The international community also exerted considerable pressure on the Congolese leadership, forcing it to agree to the strategy.

This grave mistake must be seen as a significant cause of the deaths of millions of Congolese men and women. The policy was responsible for exporting the Rwandan conflict between Hutus and Tutsis onto Congolese soil. Hutu militias utilized the Hutu refugee camps in the DRC as rear bases from which, first of all, to pursue the war against the new government in Rwanda, and, second, to attack the Banyamulenge, or Congolese Tutsi.

Paul Kagame, the Tutsi president of the new government of Rwanda, felt extremely threatened by the activities of the Hutu militias, and took the side of the Congolese Tutsi—particularly when they were being targeted and massacred. Defenseless men, women, and children were murdered; many were forced to flee eastward, toward Rwanda. While all this was happening, the Congolese central government didn’t say a word. Mobutu had had a good relationship with Juvénal Habyarimana, the Hutu president of Rwanda whose murder had ignited the genocide. In remaining silent, Mobutu made himself an accessory.

While researching this book, I spoke to a friend of mine who is Banyamulenge. He told me: “Our children and grandchildren lived here in Congo. I grew up in Congo, even though I speak Kinyarwanda and still feel connected to Rwandan culture. So I see myself as Congolese. But when the Hutu drove us out and massacred us, I was outraged by the indifference of the Congolese government in Kinshasa.”

The flight of the Banyamulenge to Rwanda came in 1996, at just the right moment for Kagame. He set about banding the refugees together, arming them, and sending them back to the Congo to initiate a campaign of conquest. In the words of my friend: “When we arrived in Rwanda we were warmly received by Paul Kagame. He said to us: ‘You are Congolese—but does a Congolese man kill his own countrymen? The Hutus have killed your brothers and sisters, your parents and your friends, because they see you as foreigners. Your task now is to avenge the deaths of your people.’ Kagame provided us with military training and weapons in no time, and afterward he said: ‘Now the moment has come. Attack the Congo. I promise you this mission will be victorious, because the United States and Great Britain are behind me.’”

However, the task Paul Kagame was entrusting to the Banyamulenge was by no means just that of taking revenge. Rather, Kagame was using this motivation to conceal his strategic and economic plan, which was to hound Mobutu out of office and install a leader he trusted in Kinshasa—someone who would help him both to rid himself of the Hutu threat, and to annex the wider region of Kivu, giving him access to its mineral resources.

Meanwhile, the Banyamulenge, now armed and supported by the Rwandan army, grew ever stronger and harder to control and increasingly problematic for the Congolese government. Finally, in 1996, the deputy governor of Bukavu, on the Rwandan border, fanned the flames by deciding that all Banyamulenge should be forcibly returned to Rwanda. This triggered the First Congo War. Congolese government troops fought the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which claimed to be championing the cause of the Banyamulenge. In short: it became clear that the Congolese Banyamulenge had joined forces with other players to form a broad alliance.

Then, on October 23, 1996, Laurent-Désiré Kabila established the aforementioned AFDL. Essentially consisting of five rebel movements and political parties, it was purely an alliance of convenience. Its official aim was to hound Mobutu out of office and restore democracy to the Congo. The Congolese people were enthusiastic about this goal. After thirty-two years of Mobutu’s rule, they had had enough. His army was already debilitated; there was resentment toward the dictatorship among the ranks, and Mobutu himself had been weakened by the opposition. All these factors contributed to the ease with which the AFDL was able to advance from Lemera in Kivu to Kinshasa. Its troops crossed the whole vast country in just seven months, despite the terrible condition of the road and communication networks.

However, the declared aim of toppling Mobutu concealed other goals. The AFDL’s intention was to split off part of the Congo from the body politic in order to protect and extend the territories of the AFDL’s confederate states, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. This is even recorded in article 4 of the AFDL’s founding declaration, known as the Lemera Declaration: “Since the Alliance is committed to pan-Africanism, it advocates that an area of 300 kilometers from the Congolese border into the interior be transferred to the neighboring countries Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi, to protect them from the rebellions that threaten them.” This, of course, has little to do with the original idea of pan-Africanism.

AFDL troops took one city after another, finally forcing Mobutu into exile in Morocco on May 16, 1997. The following day, the army of Laurent-Désiré Kabila reached Kinshasa. Kabila himself was in the provincial capital, Lubumbashi, where he declared himself president of the republic and Mobutu’s successor. The war that brought about this outcome, supposedly a “war of liberation,” cost the lives of several hundred thousand Congolese civilians, as well as those of Rwandan Hutus who had fled to the Congo.

On May 22, Kabila formed his first government. All the opposition forces in the Congo, including the UDPS, were excluded, prompting demonstrations in almost every major city in the country. The movement to oppose Kabila’s power had begun.


Copyright © 2014, 2021 by Emmanuel Mbolela

Copyright © 2021 by Charlotte Collins

Copyright © 2021 by Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein