Pre-electoral Violence in Kinshasa

There were violent scenes in Kinshasa on Monday and Tuesday. The chain of events was apparently triggered by Etienne Tshisekedi's official registration as candidate for presidential elections. On the way back from the registration office, his supporters allegedly clashed with members of the PPRD, Kabila's core party, outside of their headquarters around 5pm.

To avenge that attack (although some UDPS members are claiming it was staged to discredit them), which damaged several cars and windows at the PPRD building, several dozen Kabila supporters attacked and set fire to the RLTV television station, which is owned by Tshisekedi supporter Roger Lumbala, around 2 o'clock at night. Around the same time, youth beset the UDPS headquarters in Limete, close to Tshisekedi's residence, breaking glass and lighting fires.

Riot police in Kinshasa as Tshisekedi registered. Source: Radio Okapi

When UDPS followers awoke to find their offices damaged, they began to protest in the street. Police in the neighborhood shot tear gas canisters and, according to some, live ammunition at the protesters, killing a 30-year-old man. Other witnesses said that the person who had used live ammunition was probably a "pomba," a member of a street gang, who were standing behind the police line.

The UDPS has accused Kabila of armed a militia out of such street gangs in Kinshasa. Jacquemain Shabani, the UDPS spokesperson, also accused the government of having instigated the attack through their security services.

Tensions are beginning to mount. Just in the past two weeks, at least five journalists and human rights activists have been threatened anonymously in Kinshasa: Donat Mbaya, Tshivis Tshivuadi, Eugénie Ntumba, Jonas Tshombela, and Charles Mushizi.

It will be interesting to see whether the UDPS can keep mobilizing tens of thousands of people - as it did for Tshisekedi's return last December and his rally in April - as violence mounts. The last several rallies, in particular the protest at the CENI offices, saw only several hundred demonstrators.

Two rallies have been announced in Kinshasa for tomorrow (Thursday) - one by the UDPS and one by PPRD. While both sides have called on their followers to eschew violence, tempers are high and the vitriol is mounting in their public statements

Guest Blog: The Lord's Resistance Army and Us

Philip Lancaster was General Romeo Dallaire’s Military Assistant in Rwanda in 1994, was the head of MONUC's Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration division and the Coordinator of the UN Group of Experts on the Congo. Most recently, Philip was in charge of a international group researching ways of dealing with the LRA.

Given yet another famine emergency in the Horn of Africa, seemingly endless violence in the Middle East and the number of wobbling economies in both Europe and North America, it is understandable that concern about an obscure group of African bush fighters seems limited to a small band of Africa nerds.  But the surpassing indifference to the plight of the Azande people, who appear to have been left to the tender mercies of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), is so far below the low standard of response common to these sorts of problems that it simply can’t be allowed to pass without comment.

In addition to a long running insurgency that savaged northern Uganda for over 20 years, the murder and mayhem caused by the LRA across south eastern Central African Republic (CAR), Southern Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) over the past few years was serious enough to bring both houses of the American Congress to set aside partisan politics long enough to agree on legislation. At about the same time, in August 2010, an international working group comprised of the US, UK and EU governments with participation from the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping and the World Bank, alarmed at the reports of LRA atrocities, assembled around consensus on the need for effective coordination across all the agencies and governments involved.

The UN Security Council weighed in again in July 2011 with a second resolution calling for the LRA to disarm and praising the actions taken so far by governments, international agencies and NGOs to address the harms inflicted by the LRA.  The Security Council particularly praised the efforts of the AU to organize a coordinated military and diplomatic response.

But what, exactly, has been accomplished?

More press releases, more declarations of intent to capture or kill Joseph Kony, more empty assurances of imminent victory and yet another round of search and destroy operations led by the Ugandan Army.  None of this is new and all of it has failed in the past.  The Azande people, an historically marginalized ethnic group of hunters, herders and farmers living in the border regions of the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Southern Sudan have been targeted for special attention by the LRA, are caught in the yawning gap between rhetoric and action.  I am reminded of the feeling of abandonment felt by the few who stayed on the ill-fated UN Peacekeeping Mission in Rwanda as the outside world decided that their reports of genocide must somehow be exaggerated.  Have we all become so cynical that we will let a whole people suffer like this – again?

While the challenges of taking effective action in such a complex environment are indeed daunting, it is the shallow understanding of the military dimensions of the problem that is so disappointing.  We have ample evidence from reports of the past 20 years that the LRA are a force to be reckoned with.  Ruthless as they are, their tactics are well adapted to the terrain and the nature of the forces they face.  And yet the proposed military responses under the new AU offers no new troops, no new thinking and no sign of serious military technical analysis.  A cynic might be led to think that no one really wants to look at the problem carefully out of fear of being called to do more than they might want to.

The LRA make deliberate use of terror to tie up military forces and survive by hit and run attacks that are well-planned and flawlessly executed.  The military response from UN Peacekeeping and national forces has been totally inadequate insofar as they focus on providing limited static defense of a small number of civilian settlements.  The LRA just find the ones that aren’t protected.  Since none of the armies deployed have a policy of pursuit after attack, the LRA consistently escape with loot and abducted recruits.

Chasing the leaders, which seems to be the strategy preferred by both the Ugandan People’s Defence Force and the US military, is a hit or miss approach that will call down more attacks on unprotected civilians as the LRA instrumentalise them to send their twisted message and replace battlefield losses by abducting new fighters.  While the Ugandan/US strategy has produced some attrition, it has also generated a bloody response and a massive recruitment campaign that seems to have gone unnoticed.

During interviews conducted as part of some recent research on this subject, UPDF officers presented slides showing the numbers of LRA killed or captured but nothing about the numbers recruited.  Subsequent questions revealed that the UPDF were not really interested in recruitment.  One suspects a repetition of the ‘victory by body count’ strategy that failed so spectacularly in Viet Nam.

It is clear that there will be huge difficulties in finding the right kinds and numbers of troops that would probably be needed to be effective against the LRA.  However, it is also clear that repeating failing strategies, no matter whether through the AU or some other agency, will not work – unless exceedingly lucky and Kony and his key leaders are all killed at once.

As a matter of simple logic, and as a first step, the question of who needs to act should be informed by an analysis of what kinds of action are likely to succeed.  This could be achieved by competent technical research conducted by one of the military forces involved and it would cost very little when compared with the cost of poorly aimed military strikes.  Yet, it doesn’t seem to have been done.  Even the wealth of intelligence available from the UPDF has not been shared with the other armies now engaged and so each of them, including the UN Peacekeeping forces, are learning about the LRA the hard way. And learning very slowly.  Nor does anyone appear to have conducted a formal command estimate of the LRA problem.  Normally, no serious army would take on any mission without analysis and yet the forces engaged against the LRA seem to be operating on the premise that it’s easier to fight than to think. Surely this must have something to do with political interference with what should be a normal military staffing action.  Isn’t it time they are allowed to devote some thought to the battle plan before more civilians pay the price for the inevitable next round of blunders?

As frustrating as the problem of the LRA is, it is also a fascinating mirror reflecting political dynamics in the West.  The nub of the political problem could be understood as a manifestation of the hypocrisy of our times.  It is as simple as the old children’s story about a village of mice deciding that the solution to their cat problem is to make it wear a bell. The problem seems solved until one of them asks who is going be the brave soul to hang a bell on the cat. In the LRA case each affected state has other priorities and no third party state is willing to commit political or military resources to give either the UN or the AU a real hope of success.

But everyone involved is too polite to point out that neither organization has the capacity it needs and won’t unless someone steps up to take the responsibility to ensure that it does. 

“Who shall bell the cat?”  But, it would seem, in this case, we haven’t even started looking for a bell.


 




Controversy surrounds the sale of Congolese mines

Today, Bloomberg published yet another in a series of excellent reports on dubious mining deals in the Congo. According to the head of state-owned mining company Sodimico, the government recently sold its shares in two copper projects formerly owned by First Quantum. This is part of a series of sales in recent months and, according to insiders in the mining community in the Congo, it may also be linked to Dan Gertler, the Israeli businessman who recently purchased shares in two other mining concessions from the government.

The novelty - and the scandal - about this most recent deal is that we know how undervalued it was. According to the Bloomberg report, Sodimico sold its 30 percent stake in Frontier and Lonshi for only $30 million, less than one sixteenth of its actual price of around $480 million.

As a reminder, the shares that were sold earlier this year in Mutanda and Kansuki Mining to Dan Gertler were valued at $800 million. While there has been no official publication stating how much the government received in those cases, sources in the state mining company suggested that it may have been around as little as a seventh of the market price.

This comes in addition to other large mining deals concluded over the past year, including the sale by Dan Gertler of the Kolwezi tailing copper project to the Kazakh ENRC conglomerate for $175 million in August 2010.

Gertler was one of the businessmen who is said to have helped finance Kabila's 2006 election campaign, and he is still considered to be a close ally of the president.

If it is true that this latest sale is also linked to Gertler, his business holdings and assets will have expanded dramatically since 2005, when he founded Nikanor, a large copper mining company that was floated on the London AIM stock exchange for $1,5 billion in 2006. Gertler first became involved in the Congo in 2000, when he obtained the monopoly for diamond purchases from Laurent Kabila.

Responding to a critique of my book

African Arguments, which is hosted by the Royal African Society and the Social Science Research Council, posted my following response to a review of my book Dancing in the Glory of Monsters. This was a good opportunity to ruminate a bit on reactions to the book in general, five months after its publication. I also encourage you to read the review by Harry Verhoeven here.

*****

It is rare that I get the opportunity to argue the nuances of the Congo war in broad public fora. Knowledge about the Congolese conflict is limited outside of a small circle of academics and policy-makers; depictions in the mainstream press are often simplistic blame games, pointing fingers alternately at Rwanda, conflict minerals or - usually by default - to the grinding chaos and savagery that, so they imply, the Congo is cursed with.

Given the limited nature of the debate, I am glad to have an opportunity to respond to Verhoeven’s fair and useful criticism of my book. I hope this will also clarify my thoughts on some aspects of the conflict.

Most critically, Verhoeven faults me for not engaging more with the important theories of the Congo conflict. I take him to be pointing to a lack of a causal argument in my book. What is my overarching theory? What was the role of land, ethnicity, natural resources and western powers in fueling the conflict?

I have two responses to this criticism. First, my book’s main objective is to tackle “Congo reductionism” – the tendency to reduce the conflict to a kabuki theatre of savage warlords, greedy businessmen and innocent victims. In this sense, I spend most of the book complicating, and not streamlining, any causal argument. Typically, attempts to point to the one main cause of the conflict have ended up providing simplistic solutions to complex problems. That was the case, for example, with the fixation on the ex-FAR and Interahamwe to the detriment of other motives that Rwanda and its allies had for intervening in the Congo. More recently, advocates’ focus on sexual violence and conflict minerals has ignored the complex sources of Congo’s problems at their peril. Even the notion that local conflicts over land and authority are the main reason for violence today – an argument that has gained some traction recently – neglects the knotted politics surrounding armed group formation in the Kivus and Ituri.

Above all, we need to take the Congolese on their own terms and engage with the ragged complexity of the conflict. Most of my book spins the stories of these Congolese actors, trying to decipher their motives, trying to bring their humanity – if not necessarily their decency – home to the reader. I don’t think foreigners will ever be able to work constructively with any of the leaders in the region until we can understand their interests and attitudes. This goes for the most burning challenges: revenue transparency, security sector reform and transitional justice.

Given this emphasis on actors, their stories and the complexity of the conflict, I can understand how one might find my book lacking in leitmotifs and theory. But I would suggest that my book has different ambitions than the excellent volumes by Filip Reyntjens and Gerard Prunier mentioned by Verhoeven. I do not pretend to provide a succinct theory of the Congo war; that would go against the grain of my narrative.

Nonetheless, I do address, albeit briefly, many of the issues that the review finds lacking. Like both Reyntjens and Prunier, I locate the origins of the Congo war at the nexus of local, national and regional developments. This confluence – the decay of the Zairian state, local struggles over land and power, and the Rwandan genocide of 1994 – is, as the review states, well-known and not controversial.

 What is more contentious is foreign involvement during the war. Here I differ from Reyntjens and Prunier, if only slightly. After many dozen interviews with Congolese and Rwandan protagonists of the wars, I found little evidence for American military involvement in support of any parties during the wars. The AFDL rebellion (1996-1997) – which has often been rumored to have received US military support – had enough firepower coming from Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Eritrea, Angola and a handful of other Africa countries. Nor could I find much support in my interviews for an international corporate conspiracy in support of any of the wars, although many foreign companies did make considerable profits during the war, and US policy has been sadly short-sighted on many occasions. Overall, however, the greatest sins of western countries have been ones of omission and ignorance, not of direct exploitation. We simply have not cared enough about a crisis that is too complex to fit into a sound-bite. This has led at times to one-dimensional policy-making and the search for simple heroes and villains when the roles are much more complex than that.

As for Rwanda, I leave little room for doubt about its complicity in widespread human rights abuses in the Congo, not all of which have seen the light of justice. However, Rwanda’s motives have been complex and have shifted over time. Security predominated during the initial phases of both 1996 and 1998 invasions, as rebels launched attacks into Rwanda from the Kivu provinces. Financial considerations took on an ever more important role after 1999, as individuals and the ruling party in Kigali took advantage of business opportunities in the eastern Congo. Finally, a political calculus crept into Rwandan thinking: a weak, chaotic Congo was expedient to justify internal repression and to prevent a strong, dangerous neighbour from emerging.

This complex mix of motives in its relations with its neighbour have been refracted through a fiercely hubristic and militaristic prism, which led to their clumsy dealings with Laurent Kabila in 1996 and their attempts to quickly topple him in 1998. Which of these motives, however, has predominated at which point in time, is difficult to discern.
Finally, perhaps a word about probably the most important causal factor that sticks out in my account: the profound weakness of Congolese political institutions. All these other factors, from land conflicts to mining, have become salient precisely because no state has emerged as an arbiter of these resources and disputes. The corruption of the state – and the corrosion of most forms of political organization over centuries of slavery, rubber trade and colonialism – has allowed criminal networks to flourish and small disputes to escalate. This state of affairs has undermined the state’s ability to enforce contracts and guarantee private assets – a commitment problem that political scientists like Verhoeven have focused on.

Closely linked to this institutional fragility is a crisis in moral leadership, which I hope resounds clearly in the book. With few viable social or political institutions, collective action becomes difficult. Those who do take a stand for their ideological beliefs are chopped down or simply kicked to the sidelines.

State fragility and a moral crisis of leadership are not easily packaged into media reports, and solutions for these challenges are difficult to find, in the Congo and elsewhere. But these are probably the main obstacles the country will have to overcome over next decades.

As for Verhoeven’s criticism that I left out important parts of the war  – I can only plead mea culpa. There is only so much one can do in a book, especially one that aims at bringing the Congoelse conflict to a broader audience. Perhaps a second volume will be necessary.