AFRICANEWS

Congo

The Truth Is Coming Out

Conflict

Devastating details about the causes and effects of the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo are emerging with the publication of a U.N. report describing the looting of the tumultuous country and the opening up of the east to aid workers and journalists.

Beginning March 15, the armies that have been waging war in the Democratic Republic of Congo since August 1998 began a step-by-step withdrawal from their front-line positions, while a few hundred troops of the United Nations peacekeeping force, MONUC, moved into the pre-arranged buffer zones. The implementation of the disengagement plan, carried out as part of the 1999 negotiated Lusaka Accords among the warring parties, has opened up the eastern Congo for the first time since 1997, when the Ugandan and Rwandan armies seized huge swaths of territory in the mineral-drenched Congo.

A reporter for the Associated Press, for example, described in a March 9 article what he found in talking to newly arrived Congolese in the eastern town of Kabinda. "Ntambue Ntambue fed his seven children rats and cassava leaves for the 15 months they hid from rebels in warring Congo. When there were no more rats, they ate only leaves. Sent running by shelling that set their southern village aflame on March 15, 1999, the 36-year-old farmer and his neighbors watched from the scrub as Rwanda-backed rebels laid claim to the village's cattle and stripped its fields." The AP wire noted that although the rebel groups discount the stories of starvation in eastern Congo, "AP reporters, visiting isolated communities and hospitals in Congo's northeast and southeast, saw emaciated children and adults and heard direct accounts of years of running and hiding and of starvation that persists to this day.�

The suffering witnessed by the AP reporters is further confirmation of the report released May 8 by the New York-based International Rescue Committee that 2.5 million excess deaths have occurred in the occupied territories of eastern Congo since the war began in August 1998. Last year, based on a mortality survey of the region, the IRC reported that as of April 2000, 1.7 million Congolese died - mostly due to starvation and disease - because of the protracted war. The latest study shows that within the last year, another 800,000 people have died.

That reporters are able to travel to Kabinda and relate their findings to the world is due to a determination to implement the Lusaka accords. These were signed in 1999 by the Congolese government and its allies Angola, Namibia, and Zimbabwe, and the invading forces of Uganda and Rwanda along with the various rebel groups they have sponsored inside the country. When the newly designated D.R.C. President Joseph Kabila came to the United States in February, a proposal was placed before him for a step-by-step implementation of the Lusaka accords and settlement of the war. This included a disengagement plan in which the warring parties would withdraw from their frontline positions and the United Nations' peacekeeping force would fill the buffer zones the withdrawals would leave. The younger Kabila agreed to the deployment.

Secondly, Washington proposed opening up the Congo River to permit supplies to be sent to MONUC and relief agencies in the eastern areas of the country. This reverses Washington's previous logistical stance toward eastern Congo, as in 1994 and 1996, when relief supplies and supplies to the Rwandan and Ugandan forces were channeled through Entebbe and Kigali only.

The practical implementation of the Lusaka accords as proposed calls for an eventual ceasefire to be agreed upon once the disengagement process is completed. The disengagement and the ceasefire are seen as preconditions for calling an inter-Congolese dialogue, by which the Congolese government, the political opposition parties, and all armed Congolese parties to the conflict would sit at the table to work out a transition to a new government incorporating all Congolese factions. Once this is worked out, the plan envisions, the political and institutional conditions would exist for the withdrawal of all foreign forces from the Congo.

No sooner had the ink dried on the Lusaka accords, than in August 1999, Rwanda and Uganda forces engaged in bitter military fighting over the control of the northern city of Kisangani. At this point, it became clear to all who wanted to see that the real reasons for the Ugandan-Rwandan invasion of Congo had nothing to do with "national security" but with the control and extraction of the vast mineral wealth in eastern Congo, which lies at the heart of Africa's mineral-drenched Great Rift Valley.

This fact was decisively proven on April 12 of this year with the release of the Report to the United Nations Security Council of the Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The 70-page report puts forward evidence to show that under the cover of the war, the Rwandan and Ugandan militaries have been siphoning off timber, casserite, coltan, gold, diamonds, and agricultural products from the Congo zones under their control. This looting has proceeded under a reign of terror and violence against the Congolese people, including abductions, killings, massacres, and use of Congolese as slave laborers for mines.

The report also documents that, although the wealth seized illegally from the Congo flows to Kigali and Entebbe, it does not stay there, but is shipped quickly to Europe, Asia, and the United States. In short, the Rwandan and Ugandan forces operate as mercenaries for the illegal international exploitation of the Congo. Although the intermediaries for this looting operation may be various mafias of ill repute, or ultra-corrupted military figures in Uganda and Rwanda close to their respective presidents, the fact remains that the ultimate destination for most of the wealth extracted from the Congo is western firms that enjoy full respectability. Implicated in the eastern Congo illegal smuggling operation are such firms as Banro Resources of Canada, the Bayer Company of Germany, the Bollore Group of France, Afrimex (Kotecha Group) of Great Britain, Citibank of the United States, and Air Sabena of Belgium.

Is peace possible? This question is yet to be answered. There is evidence that corporate forces in the United States, who helped finance the war that put Laurent Kabila in power in May 1997 in Kinshasa, are anxious to gain some kind of peace in the Congo in order to do business on a less ad hoc basis and exploit the nation's resources in greater depth. The Corporate Council for Africa, chaired by diamond dealer Maurice Tempelsman, a longstanding friend of the late President Mobutu, hosted Joseph Kabila in Washington in a show of U.S. business interest in doing more normalized business with Kinshasa directly.

Efforts are being made to also gather public support for a peace in the Congo and put an end to the reign of terror and death in eastern Congo. For instance, the IRC's mortality study of last year went largely unnoticed by the international press. This year, the IRC report has been given greater prominence and the UN Expert Panel has been reported and amplified in the press by reporters such as Karl Vicks of the Washington Post, who chronicled the Rwandan military's exploitation of coltan in the Congo.

The opening of the Congo River and beginning implementation of the disengagement plan are the first steps of a very fragile process. But it can only be hoped that the United States is seeking an actual peace in the Congo, rather than providing the diplomatic cover and military assistance, as it did during the Clinton years, for the Rwandan and Ugandan mercenary invasion and destruction of the country.

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