Can Kabila bring peace and democracy to troubled Zaire?

By Omar Halim

JAKARTA (JP): Zaire has been held together under central and authoritarian rule since it was colonized by Belgium in 1885.

The paternalistic Belgian rulers apparently never envisaged a time when the colony would become an independent state.

But in the late 1950s, nationalism was fired by the independence movements raging throughout Africa and inflamed by the widespread Leopoldvilla (now Kinshasa) riots in January 1959.

Independence was granted on June 30, 1960.

A provisional constitution, which divided executive power between the president and the prime minister, was adopted. Elections were held in May 1960, but with the contending parties being based upon regional and ethnic loyalties, not a single one of them was able to secure a national majority.

Five days after independence, an army mutiny broke out. Expatriate officers and civil servants fled the country, and secession was proclaimed by Katanga and South Kasai, the richest copper -- and diamond -- producing areas of the country. By the beginning of 1961, there were three rival governments in Leopoldville, Stanleyville and Elisabethville.

In July 1960, the United Nations was asked to keep the peace and four bloody years later, the country was reunified. Despite the apparently well organized parliamentary elections in May 1964, the political stalemate continued and on Nov. 24, 1965, Gen. Joseph Mobutu, seized power and declared himself president.

A presidential government was established in October 1966. Mobutu banned political parties, reorganized the administration and exercised strong centralized control. This centralized system together with the military, held to the country of more than 200 tribes through his 32-year rule.

Ninety percent of the military's general staff consisted of officers from his own Equateur region and about one-half of the generals were members of his ethnic group, the Ngbandi (reminiscent of Gen. Siad Barre in Somalia and President Samuel Doe in Liberia). During the Cold War, especially in the 1980s, the West fully supported Mobutu as the bulwark against communism in central Africa.

During his rule, Mobutu is reported to have amassed a huge amount of personal wealth, estimated at US$9 billion, while civil servants earned US$1-2 per month and many of them were not paid for months. His visible assets are said to include mansions, houses, villas and a horse ranch in Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, France, Monte Carlo and Portugal. He also has a jungle palace at Gbadolits in Zaire.

Between 1967 and 1990, the Mouvement Populaire de la Revolu tion (MPR), headed by Mobutu, was the only legal political party. All other organizations, representing youth, labor, women and others were required to have a single national entity and were integrated into the MPR. The party-state arrangement ended in 1990, when a process of democratization started.

The various political parties quickly coalesced into two groups: the Mouvance Presidentielle (supporters of Mobutu) and the Union Sacree de I'Opposition Radicale et ses Allies (those advocating radical change).

In 1992, a transitional framework was adopted by the Sovereign National Council, a political reform and constitutional convention of 2,840 delegates from all sectors and strata of society. The framework, blocked by Mobutu, stripped the executive power of the president and retained him as ceremonial head of state for two-years under a parliamentary government with Etienne Tshisekedi as prime minister.

By 1994, no progress had taken place in the transition to democracy. The absence of a functioning government, and the breakdown of the infrastructure and service, led to the collapse of the economy. The talk of political and economic reforms has long gone. The collapse of the economy meant the non-payment of the military while the high rate of inflation meant whatever money the soldiers received was worthless. Mutinies and human rights abuses were rampant. The military, which used to be the glue binding together the political fabric, became the destabilizer.

The intrastate conflicts in Rwanda and Burundi resulted in the spill-over of more than one million refugees into eastern Zaire. Among the Hutu refugees were members of the Interhamwe and the Rwandan Hutu organization which led the genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994, who afterward conducted cross-border raids into Rwanda from the Kivu provinces of Zaire.

In response, Rwanda's Tutsis Vice President, Gen. Paul Kagame, reportedly trained about 2,000 Zairian Tutsis to be headed by Laurent Kabila, a close friend of President Musaveni of Uganda, since the Zairian authorities were apparently supporting the Hutu militiamen. To top it all, the Hutu militia persuaded the Zairian local authorities in the Kivu provinces to expel the Zairian Tutsis, who had been there for 200 years. The uprising was popular. The objective of the rebel forces -- the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of the Congo (ADFLC) -- was to topple Mobutu from power.

The majority of the 200 ethnic groups in Zaire are Bantu tribes: Mongo (central basin), Luba (south and east-central), Kongo (west), Lunda (south), Bashi (Lake Kivu) and Azande (northwest). These, including those in Shaba (Katanga), have been held together all these years. But the sudden thrust of the ethnic Hutu-Tutsi problem from the neighboring Rwanda and Burundi, together with the Tutsis in eastern Zaire has provided the impetus to activate forces of change latent in the other Zairian tribes for so many years.

Any intervention from outside the subregion can only be in mediation, as the UN and OAU are attempting to do. Humanitarian assistance should be channeled through the established authorities, i.e. the ADFLC. Any military intervention force, such as that contemplated late last year, would be perceived as taking the side of Mobutu.

So, what does the future hold for Zaire, and the Great Lake region?

In Zaire, it depends on whether Kabila can hold the people together, once he has liberated the whole country. So far, indications seem to be promising and he has been gaining support from an overwhelming number of people from all tribes.

If he succeeds in holding Zaire together, one could expect much closer cooperation among the governments of Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and Zaire (Congo).

Can democracy, as envisioned by the West, work in Zaire, while trying to keep the vast country together? It is doubted. There is need for a strong hand which could heed the interests of the different groups, while building the necessary institutions needed for a democracy, and this will take time.

The leaders of Zaire cannot afford to fail, since the disintegration of that central African country could have extensive ramifications for the African continent.

The writer is an Indonesian observer who served in United Nations peacekeeping missions in Liberia, Namibia and Somalia. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Jakarta.