AFRICANEWS

DR Congo

Unexplored issues of the Congo crisis

War

The mainstream media has not gone into the depth of the real issues sorroundingthe Congo crisis.Even as the crisis and a peaceful solution continues, several issues need to be explored objectively.

There are a number of issues that have remained largely unexplored in the media debate over the current crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

These have remained largely out of the public domain, in cabinet meeting rooms in various countries in eastern and southern Africa.The substance of these issues relates to national strategic interests, and the debate about what is, or is not, happening in the DRC is incomplete without them.

The number of external military forces acknowledged to be involved in the conflict is six, with three on either side.Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi are in the DRC supporting and arming a rebel force, while Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe have provided an allied defence force at the request of the government in Kinshasa, which is recognised by all countries in eastern and southern Africa.

It is notable, though not mentioned in most analyses, that the current governments of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi came to power by military means and have not faced the test of democratic, multi-party elections in their own countries.The three southern African nations, by contrast, are ruled by governments which have won multi-party elections accepted as broadly "free and fair" and representative of the will of the electorate.
The first unexplored issue, there, is support for democratic development. The political situation of Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, and the supporting for undemocratic regimes there, has emanated from the corridors of the international financial institutions, with the acquiescence of neighbouring countries.

When US President Bill Clinton visited Africa earlier this year, he stopped in a selected few countries, including Uganda and Rwanda. Democratically elected Presidents, such as the one from Tanzania, were summoned to Kampala to meet the US President.This gave a signal that Washington supports military regimes over democratically elected ones.
Both Rwanda and Burundi are run by military regimes which have imposed ethnic minority rule on the majority within national boundaries in which Tutsis are outnumbered by Hutus by a ratio of approx. 15:85, with no elections in sight, for obvious reasons.

Uganda has not been at peace with itself since Yoweri Museveni seized power in 1986, and the political opposition is getting increasingly restive at his refusal to hold democratic elections.He is a proponent of a "movement" form of government in a "no-party" state.Parliamentary candidates other than his own have no party structure to support them, and other presidential hopefuls must run against him without the backing which he enjoys from the "movement".

Although international criticism of his political system has been muted by the high-profile support he enjoys from the international financial institutions, Museveni faces armed opposition from supporters of other political parties and proponents of multi-party democracy who have no other means of expression, particularly in the north and east of Uganda.
A "conspiracy of silence" may be strong language, but the fact remains that the international community, and most African countries including the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), have remained largely uncritical of the lack of democracy in Uganda and Rwanda, while vocalizing their criticism of other countries.

Museveni apparently has seen no contradiction in putting his name to a communiqué with a number of his colleagues, calling for democratic elections in the DRC.Who is calling for democratic elections in Uganda and Rwanda?

Another contradiction that has not attracted comment is Museveni's criticism of DRC President Laureni Kabila for naming his son, Joseph, as army commander, while Museveni's top, trusted military commander is his brother, Salim Saleh.

When the Ugandan and Rwandan governments admitted they have troops in DRC, they said were protecting their national interests.However, this explanation stretched so far distant from their borders that they had to admit publicly that publicly that their troops were "deep" into the country.

"We will not be indifferent to developments that are adverse to our interests," said a senior Rwandan government official.Is anyone advocating a cease-fire and "peaceful" negotiations in Uganda and Rwanda? Which brings us to a second issue, the question of those other massacres in eastern DRC that got President Kabila's government into hot water with the United Nations and western governments, when he refused access to human rights officials.

The victim s of those massacres were ethnic Hutus who had fled from Rwanda, and who may have included some of the perpetrators of the genocide, but eyewitness accounts indicate that many were women and children, and other family members.

It is now clear that they were the target of Rwandan government forces, and that President Kabila may have been protecting his erstwhile backers from embarrassment and retribution.It is unlikely that he will continue to cover up for them under the present circumstances, but since that area is now back under Rwandan control, it also seems likely that any remaining evidence will be destroyed.

Will international human rights officials put the samepressure on Rwanda to show them the burial sites, as they did on Kabila? Finally, when considering the different positions taken by Zimbabwe and South Africa in response to the conflict, there is the issue of arms sales.

The new South Africa inherited an economy dependent in part upon the employment generated by the manufacture and sale of armaments, including heavy equipment.During the campaign to remove the Zairean dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, which began in September 1996, the substantial sale of South African armament and heavy equipment to Uganda and Rwanda was published and acknowledged.

The South African Minister of Water Affairs, Kadar Asmal, who chairs the national commission which monitors the arms industry, made public the 1997 export statistics of the Directorate of Conventional arms Control, which showed South African sales to Uganda and Rwanda as R24, 731,000. This was almost 60 percent more than sales to its regional partners in the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

Two-thirds of these sales were in the top category of Sensitive, Major Significant Equipment, described as "comprising conventional implements of war that could cause heavy personal casualties and/or major damage and destruction to material, structures, objects and facilities."

President Nelson Mandela, therefore, even as Chairman of SADC, could not agree to send the South African military into a conflict in which the opposing force is heavily armed with South African equipment, and in which South African soldiers could be shot by South African bullets. Ugandan President, Museveni, was bluntly open about the source ofhis armaments, when the verification mission made up of the foreign ministers from four SADC countries visited him in mid-August to determine whether the conflict in DRC was caused by an internal rebellion or an invasion from outside the country.

Museveni received his visitors at his command post in Gulu, in the north of Uganda, a highly militarized region in which he has been unable to quell a 12-year-old rebellion by his citizens.He ensured that they were given a showing of apparently new South African equipment, including armed troop carriers known as Caspirs and Panhard armoured cars.
to ensure they were left in no doubt about the source of the equipment, Museveni told the ministers that he had taken delivery from south Africa. The objective of his frankness was presumably a show of strength, to encourage the foreign ministers of Namibia, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe to advise their governments against facing a South African ally with South African firepower.

Whether the South African government knew of Uganda's invasion of the DRC is also an unanswered question.It seems unlikely since they have stated firmly and publicly that they recognize the government of president Laurenti Kabila.However the South African ministers of defense and ,foreign affairs were in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, at the same time as the SADC verification mission, apparently doing their own fact-finding, a task which also took them to the rebel headquarters at Goma.

When the other verification mission reported that DRC had been invaded, South Africa was silent.This raises another question about whether the sale of weapons of war is a national or a regional issue. (Source:SARDC)

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