Readers of this blog and of
my blog in French
are already familiar with the name of Jason Stearns, whose blog,
Congo Siasa [Swahili = Congo politics], also happens to be on my blogroll. But I never met the man. It was therefore with a sense of anticipation and thrill that on Friday, April 16, I attended his conference titled
“The Logic of Conflict in the DRC: Militias, Resources, and Politics in the Kivu,” which was part of the Johns Hopkins - SAIS African Studies Program Spring 2010 Lecture Series.
Some heavyweights of the African and Congolese scenes were in attendance, including former Undersecretary for African Affairs Herman “Hank” Cohen, one of the few former American diplomats to voice concerns and serious doubts over AFRICOM; Tony Gambino, former head of USAID in Kinshasa, who’s been busy theorizing over the reform of the security sector in the Congo.
INTRODUCTION
Stearns started out, as in any good narrative, in media res, with the October 2008 CNDP offensive of Laurent Nkunda, a
“key moment,” as it were, in understanding the conflict in the eastern Congo. That offensive was the
“culmination” of Nkunda’s insurgency against the Congolese government that started roughly in 2004. In the face of the massive humanitarian disaster that ensued, with hundreds of thousands of IDPs, Kinshasa
“freaked out” and
“ratcheted up” the then stalled negotiations with Kigali, as the Congolese government realized that 1) the people behind the CNDP insurgency were actually located in Rwanda and 2) the military approach to end the conflict wasn’t working. Congo and Rwanda finally came to an agreement, an “enigmatic peace deal” around December 2008-January 2009.
This peace deal led to several different developments: Nkunda was arrested in Rwanda; the CNDP was integrated into the Congolese army; the Rwandan military was allowed to go into the Congo to
“track down” and to
“hunt down” the FDLR (Operation Umoja Wetu [Swahili = Our Unity]); and, after the withdrawal of Rwandan troops five to six weeks later, the Congolese army continued the military campaign against the FDLR (Operations Amani Leo [Swahili = Peace Today]).
Stearns was quick to point out that though this peace deal between Kigali and Kinshasa would look like
“window dressing,” it was actually an unprecedented breakthrough, and a major
“dramatic geopolitical shift” in the African Great Lakes region in a very long time. The rift between Rwanda and the Congo that dominated the conflicts in the region, overshadowing everything that went down in the Kivu provinces,
“shifted” overnight. Whereas previously the DRC was allied with the FDLR to fight against Rwanda and the CNDP, Rwanda and the Congo had now joined forces to fight against the FDLR.
What was the impact of this geopolitical shift in the region?
There were some successes in these military operations, hailed by some humanitarian organizations, including the International Crisis Group (ICG), for which worked Jason Stearns as an analyst, such as: the integration into the Congolese army of over 20 000 CNDP fighters and various Maï-Maï combatants; the demobilization of more than 2 500 FDLR fighters; and the killing of an unknown number of FDLR elements. Though the exact figures are unavailable, it’s quite possible that roughly 40% of FDLR could have been killed since the Operation Umoja Wetu,
“a huge dent in the FDLR organization.” These losses, in turn, caused major rifts within the FDLR leadership, thus somehow weakening the outfit.
The most important success is arguably the
“makeover,” the
“détente” in Rwandan-Congolese relations.
There are, however, some pitfalls that accompanied these developments: the FDLR isn’t dismantled, with its chain of command still intact; there are strong resentments within Kivu communities over this détente between Kigali and Kinshasa—these communities interpreting this deal between Rwanda and Congo as made to their detriment; and though the CNDP is now nominally integrated into the Congolese army, it maintains its parallel command and control. To some extent, this deal has even strengthened the CNDP.
It’s a strange situation that has happened to CNDP: it has been at once strengthened and weakened. It has splintered into two groups:
1) the Nkunda loyalists, led by Colonel Makenga, most of whom are Tutsis from Jomba (the Bajomba Tutsis), which is where Laurent Nkunda is from (area of Rutshuru close to the border with Rwanda and Uganda): this group maintains the loyalty of most of the CNDP officers;
2) the group of Bosco Ntaganda, who, in theory, is the head of the CNDP and a replacement of Nkunda; it controls fewer people, but it is the group that has the strongest support of Rwanda; it is also the group that has been able to set up an administration structure
“to cement its control over” that part of the Kivu, around the
“highlands of Masisi.” Therefore, though not militar
ily strong, it is a politically and administratively stronger group than the Makenga group.
The goal of the CNDP for now is
“to stay alive till 2011” when general elections will be held, though they weren’t pleased that they weren’t given ministerial positions in the recent reshuffle of government in Kinshasa.
This is the current situation on the ground.
THEORY
Jason Stearns then zoomed out in order to analyze and offer his theory of the conflict. His theory stemmed from the following set of questions he strived to address: why was conflict continuing after a peace deal was already signed in 2003, general elections held in 2006, and violence ceasing in most of the Congo while escalating in eastern Congo? How could one make sense of this?
There are many
“students” of Congo who offer various and contradictory theories:
1) One group claims that the conflict was
“all about minerals”:
“a bunch of power-hungry interest groups—be they multinational corporations or be they warlords—who are vying to get their hands on the minerals.” The focus here is on the
“resource-aspect of things.”
2) There’s another group—mostly made of academics—that claims that it’s all about
“local grievances”: land and ethnic grievances.
3) The claim of the third group is close to the view of the UN diplomats:
“Let’s deal with the recognized actors”; no questions asked about
“who they are and what they are doing.” This
“school of thought isn’t analytically profound; it’s just pragmatic.” That’s how the peace process has been brokered from the beginning. This the “black box” school of thought: it doesn’t look inside the box; it just takes the box as it presents itself.
JASON STEARNS’S THEORY OF CONFLICT IN EASTERN CONGO
Jason Stearns’s theory encompasses
“three layers” that give a clearer understanding of the simmering conflict in the Kivu provinces.
Initially, the conflict wasn’t about minerals. When Rwanda invaded the eastern Congo in 1996, this had nothing to do with minerals.
There were three dimensions that could help explain events: 1) there were local issues: tensions and problems of access to resources at the local level that were going on since the 1930s; 2) there were national issues, relative to the collapse of the Congolese state due to more than 30 years of Mobutu’s misrule; 3) and there were regional issues: genocide in Rwanda; refugee camps on the border with Rwanda.
While analysts would focus exclusively on the armed bands on the eastern borders of the DRC, they often forget that at the time there were other armed groups, like Angola’s UNITA, operating in other parts of the country as well—a situation that prompted an economist to quip that
“Zaire was actually a Zaire-shaped hole in the middle of Africa.” Angolan, Ugandan, and Burundian armed groups were feeding into this gigantic hole.
These were the three dimensions that led to the conflict in eastern Congo, from which Stearns then theorizes.
Stearns’s theory rests on three hypotheses: 1) the
"commitment problem"; 2) the
“logic of disorder” in Kinshasa; 3) and the
“Rwanda’s conundrum.”
1) The commitment problem. Issues-groups (business and political elites) in and around Goma—which is the
“crucible of the conflict”—have a very serious commitment problem vis-à-vis the government in Kinshasa. It is not in their interests to demobilize the various armed groups in favor of a centralized seat of power in Kinshasa.
In light of this problematic commitment, the theory of
“land issues” falls apart. These land issues could certainly be a
“driving motor of conflicts.” In the 1930s, the Belgian colonial regime decided to
“facilitate the immigration” into the Congo of thousands of Tutsis and Hutus from Rwanda to work into the mines and plantations of the Belgian Congo—a way of alleviating famine and population density in Rwanda. An
“immigration on a massive scale.” By the time of Congo’s independence, Belgians had brought into the country close to 150 000 Rwandans—by and large, these waves comprised only Rwandan peasants, most of them Hutus.
Another wave of Rwandan migrants—this time, mostly educated Tutsis—came in around 1962, following the pogroms of Tutsis at the time of Rwanda’s independence.
About half a million of descendants of these people live in the highlands of Masisi, one of the most fertile areas of the Congo. They almost entirely displaced local populations that were there. In Masisi,
“Rwandophones” are the majority population.
Mobutu’s reaction to this development was a
“very astute one.” He
“cultivated” these Rwandans according to the principle
“Après moi le déluge” [After me, the flood]: a constituency he could rely on in the region, because these Rwandophones
“had their backs against the wall.” They turned out to be his most loyal backers in the region.
These well-educated and wealthy Tutsi elites, just like any other immigrant groups in the world, lived in tight-knit communities. During the transition process in 1973 known as the
“Zaïrianisation,” when Mobutu nationalized most of foreign businesses and lands, Mobutu sold them to these Tutsi elites. In the Masisi area, for instance, where about 42% of the place is made of large plantations (coffee and cattle ranches), Mobutu sold 90% of these lands to the wealthy Tutsi elites. Thus, in the Masisi region, not only were the local Hunde populations displaced, but economic power and
“power of the land” were given to a minority population of the Tutsis,
“which just stoke resentments against them all the more.”
And
“in a cynical and brilliant move,” during the 1990s, when Mobutu came under attack and under pressure for democratization, he turned against these Rwandophone communities. He then devised what he called
“la géopolitique”: stoking resentments in the periphery of Congo in order to distract opposition against him in Kinshasa. This resulted in an anti-Tutsi and anti-Hutu mobilization in the Kivu that led to violence in the Masisi area in 1993.
By the time Rwanda invaded Congo in 1996, almost every single Tutsi living in the rural areas of the Kivu had fled into Rwanda, which by then was controlled by the Tutsi-led RPF.
This was the context of the dynamics of ethnicity in the region.
But how would one understand the CNDP and other armed groups in the area today? Are they really motivated by land or ethnic grievances?
If anything, the obverse would be true: local communities are those who’d be rising up in arms against the Tutsis to vent their grievances. Besides, armed resistance has always been prevalent in the area for decades. Under Belgian colonial rule, there were armed groups such as the Kitawala (a variant of the Watch Tower or Jehovah Witnesses), etc. Though these groups were categorized as
“ethnic uprisings” by the Belgians, they were actually made of disenfranchised unemployed youths
“outside any ethnic structures.” Thus, even at that time the uprisings weren’t motivated by land or ethnic grievance per se.
Mobutu repressed ethnic allegiances but in the 1980s he abandoned that policy and started empowering ethnic-based
“mutuelles” or local associations, which were
“basically ethnic groups not necessarily focused around traditional chiefs, but ethnic associations that were strong in urban areas.” This was part of Mobutu’s policy of
“Après moi le déluge”: again,
“let’s create discord in the periphery of the country in order to distract from opposition against me.”
In the Kivu, there were two prominent of these ethnic
“mutuelles”: 1) the MAGRIVI [Mutuelle des Agriculteurs des Virunga] of the Hutus; and 2) the ACOGENEKI of the Tutsis.
By 1993, the Tutsi “mutuelle” had become militarized. These “mutuelles,” which are the harbingers of the CNDP, weren’t controlled by traditional chiefs but by the
“up and coming middle-class elites.”
Thus, it’s not all about lands and access to land; it’s all about a new way of politics in the region being expressed through these “mutuelles”; and the CNDP could readily fit into this category.
Now, how was the CNDP created and who supports it?
Since the late 1990s, the Kivu provinces were ruled by people closely associated with Rwanda and by the Rwandophone elites (RCD being one of these groups of people). During that period, anybody to emerge as a business or political elite was
“linked in some shape or form to Rwanda.”
This in itself isn’t unique. Elsewhere in the Congo people who emerge are bound to do so through some form of political
“patronage.” In this area of the country, it just happened that patronage was linked to Kigali: the Makabusa brothers, for instance, emerged through strong financial backing from Kigali. Some of these people benefited from a strong patronage under the Mobutu regime, then went on to shift their alliance to Rwanda.
These elites looked with great alarm at the 2003 peace agreement, when the country was supposed to be whole and centralized again. For seven and eight years, they had developed their own business networks in Goma and in North Kivu—not only in the mining sector, but in trade ventures in tea, coffee, cement, etc, as well—and didn’t see their interests in Joseph Kabila uniting the country, the army and the administration. They saw the peace deal as a clear and present danger to their business networks. It was in this context that CNDP was created.
The CNDP was by no means a
“grassroots rebellion” of Congolese Tutsis against Kabila whom they saw as a
“dictator.” What really happened was that these business elites in Goma and Kigali felt that all their business and security interests would be
“eviscerated” if they were
“to allow this [peace deal] to happen”:
“We don’t trust Kabila, because we’re a minority, (…), we need power in the region and leverage in the scene.”
The CNDP was created by telephone calls from Rwandan security services to Nkunda and other Tutsi officers who were in the RCD rebel outfit, calls that instructed them
“not to integrate the Congolese army; stay back; create your own army; we need a plan B; (…), we need a leverage on the Congolese government, (…), political leverage won’t be enough, we need military leverage.” The CNDP was therefore a
“top-down creation.” Nkunda, being a
“charismatic man,” then mobilized the community around the idea,
“tapping into (…) local resentments.”
Stearns insisted his analysis isn’t done to
“castigate the Tutsi community.” There were all sorts of security dangers to the Tutsi communities as the simmering resentments of other Congolese communities might come to the fore in the wake of the peace deal. What were other alternatives out there for the Tutsi communities to protect their interests? Could they just rely on the rule of law? Could they just rely on Kabila? In the absence of strong institutions in the Congo, who would they trust? This goes to the core of the
“commitment problem.”
In the South Kivu province, the situation is different. Some communities could easily switch their alliances from Kigali to Kinshasa. In contrast, there seemed to be no alternative to the Tutsi community of North Kivu.
This is the major “commitment problem” that requires the attention of the international community when it looks at ways of resolving crises in that part of the Congo: how to create strong enough institutions that everyone would trust them? How could one tell the Tutsi community:
“allow the CNDP to be completely demobilized and we’ll protect your interests”? Or
“Believe our promises.” Well, no one would believe such promises.
2) The Logic of Disorder in Kinshasa. Stearns here shifts his focus to Kinshasa and its interests in this situation. He boldly hypothesizes that since coming to power, Joseph Kabila has shown little interest in creating strong institutions.
Despite Kabila’s rhetoric, his preferred modus operandi is to operate outside the strictures of the Constitution. For instance: it’s not the Minister of Defense who primarily deals with the Armed Forces, it’s someone else in Kabila’s own personal military cabinet who deals with them; it’s not the Minister of Interior who deals with issues regarding the police and internal law and order, it’s someone in the inner circle of Kabila. He thus maintains a
“strong parallel chain of command.” This is quite obvious with the Prime Minister Adolphe Muzito himself who
“has nothing to say on many of the sensitive issues,” especially on security issues and on important economic deals.
Muzito for example had nothing to do with the Chinese deal. This was the purview of Pierre Lumbi and Katumba Mwanke. In fact, Katumba Mwanke is illustrative of Kabila’s style of governance. Katumba Mwanke used to be the head of Kabila’s political coalition. He now doesn’t really have an official governmental position but yet he is the
“incontournable” [gatekeeper] in Kinshasa, that is,
“you can’t go around Katumba Mwanke, (…), especially in the mining industry.” Mwanke is also
“incontournable” in security issues: he was instrumental in the peace deal with Kigali.
Kabila also shows a total disregard for the judiciary. He wants to change the Constitution, and he is asking for a
“constitutional review,” which, among other things, would allow him to head the
“Conseil supérieur de la magistrature,” the body that manages and disciplines judges—the French model, his supporters claim, though some argue that the French model wouldn’t necessarily be good for the Congo.
Not everything is bleak under Kabila, however. He managed to reform the administration and to double the country’s internal revenues. Overall, the economy is better than what it was 5 or 6 years ago.
But on many levels, the situation has worsened. For instance, Kabila pretty much fired the president of the National Assembly, Vital Kamerhe, thus infringing upon the independence of the legislature. Kabila then named someone close to him [Evariste Boshap] as president of the National Assembly. What’s more,
“on a regular basis, MPs are bought off or co-opted.” The opposition is weakened and some opposition MPs just jostle each other in order to position themselves so that they could be
“bought off.”
Why this
“logic of disorder”?
Stearns seems to still be fleshing out this hypothesis. In the meanwhile, he speculates that this has to do with Kabila’s drive for
“control”; his fear of creating
“competing centers of power” that would ultimately weaken him (he thus seems to be taking his lessons from Mobutu’s book of governance). By allowing strong institutions to emerge, these strong institutions would come back to
“bite you, to tie your hand behind your back in terms of what you can do and what you can’t do.” These institutions would also create
“independent competing centers of power.”
A second reason is that because business and politics are so interwoven in the Congo, this situation has obtained
“a zero-sum game” scenario. For instance, according to the World Bank, if a business in the Congo were to pay all the taxes it is supposed to pay, it’d be paying 250% of its profits in taxes! In other words, if you want to run a profitable business in the Congo, you need
“political cover,” someone to help you skirt red tape and taxes.
Therefore, institutions that want to engage the Congolese government in capacity-building of Congolese institutions—the World Bank or other organizations or, for that matter, the U.S. government—need to understand Kabila’s unwillingness to build strong institutions. There’s strong evidence that Kabila wants to keep these institutions weak.
3) Stearns then tackled what he called the
“third part of [his] puzzle” (hypothesis):
“Rwanda’s conundrum.” He prefaced this part of his theory by asserting that he doesn’t see much of a
“sane debate” on Rwanda around: on the one hand, some people blame Rwandans for everything bad in the region; on the other, there are those who praise them for anything positive. Stearns disagrees with both of these stances:
“They are not angels, and they aren’t demons” either. The Rwandan government is like any other government, and people need to understand it. Unable to understand anything that goes on in Kigali, some just choose either one of these positions and do not go further in their analysis.
The RPF is a government that came to power by force in 1994 in a Tutsi-led rebellion. They have little interest in democracy, construing it as a code word for
“majoritarianism.” They equate
“free speech” with genocidal tendency. They aren’t going to relinquish power one day in the name of democracy. In that neighborhood,
“once you are out, you are out.” You’re not going to come back after, say, 5 years on the sideline as the opposition party.
The RPF power structure is different from that of Kinshasa where power radiates in concentric circles from the center constituted by Kabila. For instance, Kabila’s mother, Maman Sifa, has
“patronage scheme networks” in the customs service and in the DGM (Direction Générale de Migration). There are thus several of these patronage schemes around Kabila.
By contrast, in Rwanda, it’s a
“pyramid-scheme of power.” The RPF is good at keeping everyone in check and control. There are few networks and very efficiently centralized resources. Stearns acknowledges that everything he alleges on Rwanda is difficult to verify, thus he wouldn’t like being quoted on this score. Through privatization schemes in the DRC, Rwanda controls vast resources in the Congo and in Rwanda.
The prototype of this type of schemes is for instance the
Tri-Star Investments, a company created in the 1990s. Another example is the
RIG (Rwanda Investment Group). These companies are made by private individuals who are with the RPF and who pool money and resources and take control of assets. For instance, the exploitation of the methane gas in Lake Kivu was given to RIG who then partnered with an American company. But
“where you see RIG, you see RPF.”
This scheme is duplicated in all the schemes of privatizations in Rwanda: cement-making industry, breweries, etc. The RPF keeps shares in these companies. The rationale was that as nobody wanted to invest in Rwanda, it was incumbent upon the RPF to come up with a huge chunk of the initial capital investments. That’s why the RPF
“took an aggressive and intrusive approach into the private economy” and its control of the economy is simply
“impressive.”
But there have been rifts in the RPF as well, from the 1990s down to today. The more recent defections, however, are different and far more serious. The head of the external branch of intelligence, Patrick Karegeya, had to flee the country; the former chief of the army, Kayumba Nyamwasa, fled into exile; there are unconfirmed reports that the deputy chief of military intelligence, Kacyira, has been arrested. These people aren’t non-entities within the Rwandan establishment. These people were on the list of the top dozen people in Rwanda.
What this means for the RPF is unclear, though it still has everything under control.
How does this fit within the context of the Congo?
The FDLR, though weakened, still represents a threat to Rwanda. Just consider the devastating impact of the infiltration by FDLR elements into the National Park where they’d for instance slaughter all the gorillas. They could also attack the cement or the methane gas factories or the breweries. In any case, this is the
“spiel” given by Rwandan security and intelligence officials when told that the FDLR threat is overblown.
What’s more, the
“symbolic and political importance of genocide” can’t be stressed enough.
“Genocide is everything in Rwanda,” asserts Stearns. Every aspect of discourse is pervaded by genocide.
Powerful people in Rwanda have economic interests in the Congo: for instance, Rwanda’s cassiterite comes from the Kivu.
******
******
At the close of his remarks, Stearns briefly addressed the questions of the minerals bills on Capitol Hill and of the anti-conflict minerals advocacy of groups such as the
Enough Project.
Is the conflict all about minerals? Not really, Stearns answers his own rhetorical question. Minerals weren’t the initial contention of the war to begin with. Do minerals and cell phones
“fund rapes” in eastern DRC? Maybe… but most of the minerals used in electronics in the U.S. don’t come from the Congo. The biggest culprits of rapes in the Congo are Congolese soldiers who are deployed in other areas of the Congo. There are groups like the LRA that have no connections to minerals who nonetheless commit wanton atrocities and mass rapes.
The
“supply-chain due diligence” approach is a very important step for sure, but it should rather be envisioned within the framework of strengthening Congolese institutions to prevent this kind of abuse happening in the future. In other words, getting rid of these minerals wouldn’t end the conflict in eastern DRC.
The proposed bills in Congress and the advocacy by some groups in the U.S. boil down to two sets of actions: 1) due diligence and 2) certification at source—which are two sides of the same coin.
Due diligence means that the companies operating in the U.S. that use this kind of minerals have to develop a traceability procedure of these minerals through their chain of supply. This is based on the presumption that one would know what qualifies as conflict mineral and non-conflict mineral.
This in itself constitutes a huge challenge as minerals in the Congo come from bits and pieces of mines spread over a territory of the size of California. And access to those mines is controlled by various armed groups. Once these minerals leave the mines and get at the big buyers’
“comptoirs” in urban centers, they are soon mixed with minerals coming out of the mines that aren’t controlled by armed groups. Thus very soon you lose control of what is conflict mineral and what is not.
That’s why you have groups like The Enough Project that want to have the certification at source (it has since nuanced its position), meaning that there would be someone at source (the mine pit, that is) to put a seal on bags, asserting that the given batches aren’t conflict minerals for instance. Given that the area is the size of California with hundreds of pits, this certification at source isn’t realistic at the moment.
The approach that is more realistic in the short term, according to Stearns, is to tackle the problem from two angles:
1)
“Let’s not certify every single bag coming from eastern Congo, rather let’s conduct spot checks.” Stearns here advises that the best approach would be
what the police approach in the United States to prevent drunk driving. The police don’t stop and subject every single person who gets into an automobile to a breathalyzer test. They carry out spot checks, stopping randomly a few drivers. In the Congo, there could be created an independent panel of trained staff to carry out investigations that would seek out people violating the rules. This would allow the certification of what could be certified, thus creating
“islands of transparency.”
2) What would be the responsibility of Congo's international partners in this process, of the U.S. government for example? In the Congo, Stearns hypothesizes, there’s a conjuncture akin to a
“Karzai situation.” In other words, how do you push for institutional reform when the incumbent himself doesn’t see his interests in those reforms? Problems of “commitment” thus need to be tackled head on, as well as a host of other regional issues.
