OTR Politics - April, 2004

Like an earth-shattering proclamation on the tenuousness of Congo’s transitional government, heavy artillery rocked the pre-dawn calm of the Kinshasa suburb where I slept. Later that morning (March 28, 2004), word circulated that armed assailants had been repulsed by pro-government troops at three strategic points around the city: the Ndolo airbase near the international airport, Camp Tshatshi where President Kabila’s offices are, and a Naval base along the river Congo. Armed remnants of Mobutu Sese Seko’s ousted regime, in disgruntled exile across the river in Brazzaville, were believed to have staged the coup attempt.

Foreign embassies announced a security lockdown for their nationals, and Kinshasa streets were empty of local traffic throughout the day. By noon that day, gunfire had subsided and local newscasters were reporting the death of one assailant, with no injuries among troops loyal to Kabila. Far more devastating was the loss—unstated but apparent to all—of confidence in the peace process and, more generally, in the stability of the transitional national government.

The next afternoon, seventeen assailants hailing from Mobutu’s defunct national army were captured in an army sweep dubbed “Opération Pentecôte” by the Kinshasa press. Other opinion leaders predicted renewed tensions between the Kabila regime and that of Sassou Nguesso, beleaguered president of neighboring Congo-Brazzaville, whose support for the attack was likely but unproven.

Congo’s transitional government recently marked its one year anniversary without fanfare. Much, if not all, remains to be done. The power-sharing arrangement at its core is built on an age-old, famously dubious bargain: rebel leaders were offered the prospect of political office in exchange for adhering to an internationally-monitored peace process. Exiled “Mobutistes,” however, are not among those partaking in the transitional process. And as recent events in Iraq attest, as long as armed malcontents linger in the shadows of a tenuous transition to sovereignty, neither indigenous political institutions nor an international occupying force (UN peacekeepers in this case) are immune from the threat of armed destabilization from without.

Of course, Congo is not Iraq, and Iraq is not Afghanistan or Vietnam. The insight that binds these contexts, however, is that peacekeeping and nation-building, in almost every case, appear to share an Achilles Heel that reflects upon the global body politic: the perils associated with the creation of a new national army from the detritus of rebel factions, paramilitary groups, and soldiers of the fallen regime. By failing to disarm rival factions and “disbanded” military contingents – in Congo, as in Iraq and Afghanistan – peacekeepers and would-be nation-builders allow toxic elements to persist and pollute the political soil. This object lesson was starkly conveyed in a recent New York Times Magazine article, “Peacekeeping: Can It Ever Be Made to Work?,” in which differences were tallied between the relative success of Kosovo and East Timor and the tragedies of Iraq and Haiti. Congo currently teeters towards the latter.

Nation-building in Iraq, Congo and, for a second time, Haiti, will fail without a concerted effort to engage and disarm marginalized opposition groups who, by their lights, have everything to gain and nothing to lose by upending their fledgling nation states. In Iraq, Paul Bremer and his boys now face the ugly impossibility of reconstruction without prior disarmament. In Congo, neither the UN nor international diplomacy appear to have a clear strategy to deal with this menace.

The peace dividends of Kinshasa’s transitional government have not reached the eastern redoubts of the Mayi Mayi, Mudindu 40, and other fractious, unaligned militias, who remain heavily armed, unpaid, and wholly unaccountable. With no prospect of an alternate livelihood on offer, they continue to terrorize and prey upon local populations, whose political relevance to the conflict has never been more than fodder.

Sexual violence, to cite one mode of civilian subjection, continues unabated, particularly in the eastern Kivu regions. On April 1 2004, Médecins Sans Frontières reported that at least 620 rapes, all perpetrated by men in uniform, had been documented in Baraka, South Kivu, since MSF began operations there in July 2003. 75% of these rapes were committed by groups of two to five men, MSF reported. Neither the UN nor the transitional government have any strategy to tame the wild impunity of eastern Congo, second only to Sierra Leone in its flagrancy and duration.

A number of international aid agencies are currently assisting a post-conflict process known as “DDR”—the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of ex-combatants—with which I was involved. The national DDR process being stalled in the gates of inept administration, the government thus fails to foster national security and popular confidence in the peace process. Admittedly, its tasks are Herculean: drafting a new constitution, preparing for national elections in 2005, and re-instating civilian ministries and the rule of law. Yet without DDR, Congo’s tenuous peace would be easily squandered with a single, well-conceived assault—such was my fear as the mortars fell that Kinshasa morning.

Aid agencies are mobilizing to offer rural combatants an opportunity to regain civilian life while the official DDR process incubates. Paid reconstruction projects such as road and bridge building, agriculture, and literacy and numeracy courses conducted at the community level will soon be initiated across the east. These will be open to villagers seeking employment and rudimentary education after years of isolation and neglect. Initial communications with rural militias indicate their desire to lay down their arms, reintegrate and begin rebuild the nation. But until this alternative is realized and proven viable, civilian predation and atrocities are likely to continue. Impunity and the question of reparations will continue to haunt Congo, as in so many other post-conflict scenarios in Africa.

These questions were on my mind as I drove to the airport last week, days after the coup attempt. Military patrols had been stepped up in the city, and our vehicle became entangled in traffic caused by a patrol of slow-moving armed personnel carriers (APCs). As we idled in the languid Kinshasa heat, I noticed a decrepit VW van of 60s vintage, gutted and transformed into urban people mover, wedged into the throng of pedestrians on the roadside. Immobilized, its rusty white roof peeked out above the crowd, between the passing column of APCs.

Along the roof scampered a pair of brown monkeys, hissing and screeching in agitation as they paced the narrow perimeter afforded by the short cord tying them to the top of the abandoned vehicle. It was a classically Congolese juxtaposition, seemingly random but inevitably suggestive of the country’s dire state of affairs. My Congolese cohort said it first: “Kinshasa la poubelle”—a local pun that captured the city’s lost and former glory.

Edward B. Rackley received his doctorate in philosophy from New School University, and works as a consultant to international agencies operating in conflict and post-conflict contexts, primarily in Africa. His writing has appeared in the Christian Science Monitor and Multitudes, a Parisian journal.The author may be reached at rackleyed@yahoo.com.