Africa to move in better directions

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Africa is nearing a turning point. As usual, all the signs point in different directions, but it looks like a turning point for the better.

"The tragedy in Zaire is an illustration of a new form of conflict which, following the Cold War, threatens our whole continent," Togo's Foreign Minister Pierre Koffi Panou said recently as African leaders gathered in Togo's capital, Lome, for an emergency summit. It sounded wise and grave, but it was utter nonsense.

The tragedy in Zaire is not new. It is 32 years old, and it was caused by President Mobutu Sese Seko, who seized power in 1965 and has comprehensively looted and ruined one of Africa's biggest countries. The rebels who aim to overthrow Mobutu, and the war by which they have gained control of a quarter of Zaire in the past five months, are not the problem; they are the solution.

It will not take the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (ADFL) fifteen months, or even fifteen weeks, to win control of the remaining three-quarters of Zaire. Kisangani, the country's third-largest city, fell two weeks ago. Lubumbashi, the second-biggest city and copper-mining center, and Mbuji-Mayi, the diamond-mining capital, may both fall this week.

And in Kinshasa, the chaotic capital where three million people eke out a living despite the total lack of government services, shanty-town dwellers and middle-class professionals are equally impatient for the triumphant entry of rebel leader Laurent Kabila. They will probably not have to wait much longer.

The old Zaire is dead, and a good thing too. But what will the new one be like? What impact will it have on the region? (Zaire is so immense that it has borders with nine other countries). Above all, who is Laurent Kabila?

The leader of the Alliance is a stout, 56-year-old man who has been in the revolution business so long that he used to swap slogans with Che Guevara. He started out as a Marxist, founding the 'Popular Revolutionary Party' on the shores of Lake Tanganyika in 1964. But Mobutu seized power in Zaire in 1965, and Kabila divided the next three decades between studying abroad (Tanzania, Europe, the U.S., and China), and fighting in the bush.

All that is over. "Now I'm on the same page as O.J. Simpson," Kabila lamented recently, gazing in horror at an international newsmagazine, but he is clearly delighted to be coming out of the bush at last. And there is little doubt that he will keep going until Mobutu is history and the ADFL is in Kinshasa.

There is no reason to fear a massacre, or even a major fight, when the Alliance's forces march into Kinshasa. The French, Belgian and American troops standing by across the river in Brazzaville are mainly there to rescue foreigners if the Zairean army, which ran amok in the capital and killed hundreds in 1991 and 1993, goes on one last spree before the ADFL arrives. But even France has decided not to mount a last-ditch defense of its long-time protege Mobutu.

The rebels may well invite Etienne Tshisekedi, who became prime minister in 1990-1992 at the height of the pro-democracy agitation in Kinshasa, to resume his office. (Indeed, Tshisekedi has never accepted his dismissal by Mobutu: "He's been holding cabinet meetings every Thursday since 1992," said an aide). But it is unlikely that the ADFL will hold the scheduled national elections in July, or any time soon.

Which brings us to the question of what kind of regime Kabila will create in Zaire. It will certainly not be Marxist. Young Africans inhaled Marxism in the 1960s like 1960s Americans (except for Bill Clinton) inhaled marijuana, but Kabila outgrew all that long ago. In the eastern, gold-mining areas of Zaire that fell to the Alliance in January, foreign companies are already being offered mining concessions.

But will the new Zaire be more democratic than the old? If you mean the rule of law, free speech, respect for human rights, then of course it will. But if you mean multi-party democracy as practiced in Canada, Turkey, or India, then don't hold your breath. Part of the analysis of the 'second-generation' leaders of east-central Africa is that the multi-party system is uniquely ill-fitted to that part of Africa's unusual circumstances.

Zaire, where about 250 ethnic groups have their own languages, is a prime example. What Zaire can expect, for the foreseeable future, is Ugandan-style 'non-party' democratic elections. That would be a vast improvement on what it has had for the past 32 years -- or, indeed, the past century.

It would be no mean feat merely to rescue 35 million Zaireans from the poverty, abuse and humiliation they have suffered for the past generation, but there is something bigger afoot. It's becoming possible to talk of a benign conspiracy among 'second- generation' African regimes to rescue their neighbors from the depredations of 'first-generation' post-independence regimes like Mobutu's.

They are doing it partly to protect their own borders, of course. When Uganda and Rwanda give the Alliance forces in Zaire military aid -- of course they do; how else do you think the ADFL manages to equip its fast-growing army with radios right down to squad level? -- part of their motive is simply to destroy the guerrilla armies that Mobutu allowed to operate against them. But they also have a higher mission: to rid Africa of monsters.

Not just Mobutu: the next victim of an ADFL victory will be Jonas Savimbi in neighboring Angola. Savimbi is a sad case, a genuine rebel leader against the Portuguese colonialists whose UNITA movement was frozen out after independence in 1975 because the rival MPLA movement got Soviet and Cuban support. In desperation, he turned to the U.S., Mobutu, and even apartheid South Africa for support -- and turned into a monster.

Fifteen years of war between the MPLA government and UNITA rebels reduced Angola to ruins before Savimbi accepted a UN- mediated ceasefire in 1990. When UNITA lost fair, internationally monitored elections in 1992, Savimbi rejected the result and returned to war. There was a second ceasefire in 1994, but last month the UN Security Council had to threaten sanctions against Savimbi unless UNITA joins the 'unity government' as agreed.

Savimbi has depended on Mobutu for decades to channel foreign aid into Angola and sell UNITA's illicit diamond exports, so he did not hesitate to help in Mobutu's time of peril: he airlifted UNITA troops into eastern Zaire to help resist the Alliance's advance.

But the war is virtually over now, and Mobutu is a goner. So is Savimbi, a little later, for he is now losing his connection to the outside world. Which means that Angola may finally find peace.

But it's only when you pull back from specific countries that the true scale of these changes hits you. All of southern Africa -- over 100 million people from Cape Town to Lusaka -- is already at peace and mostly free from tyranny. Now, after wars lasting decades and genocides that killed millions, almost all of east- central Africa -- another 200 million people from Sudan to Tanzania, from Zaire to Kenya -- is nearing the same goals.

This is not an accident. It is the fruit of a deliberate conspiracy between the admirable 'second-generation' regimes in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Rwanda, latterly with some discreet outside support from South Africa and the United States. True, parts of West Africa, including giant Nigeria, are still powder-kegs waiting to explode. But it is a huge change for the better -- and it is being accomplished by Africans themselves.

For the ADFL in Zaire, there is only one dark cloud on the horizon. Its official seal, stamped on all government documents, features a lion's head -- and the lion in question is all too obviously the Lion King from Disney's film of the same name. It's one thing to take on Mobutu's mercenaries, but have these people never heard of Disney's lawyers?