Kabila pays the price on second try in Congo

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The candidate did well at the job interview, impressing the board of trustees with his desire to turn the business, ruined by the former management, into a going concern. But at the end of Laurent Kabila's probationary year as chief executive, Congo (ex- Zaire) is still a political and economic disaster, and the board has changed its mind. They have decided that Kabila must go.

The rebellion against Kabila has spread with amazing speed since it began on Aug. 2 -- rebels already control the east of the vast country and the vital corridor to the Atlantic coast -- but the rest of Africa finds it embarrassing to drop Kabila only fourteen months after celebrating his swift overthrow of the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Which probably explains South African Foreign Minister Alfred Nzo's careful choice of words.

Nzo flew into Lubumbashi in southern Congo recently to see Kabila. When asked if Pretoria still backed the Congolese leader, he replied: "Yes, of course we do. We support the Democratic Republic of Congo, which at the moment is headed by Kabila."

This is the diplomatic equivalent of saying: "I will always be faithful to my wife, who at the moment is a woman called Charlene." Whatever Kabila has managed to steal in the past year will have to be enough; it's time to start packing his bags.

It's humiliating for a big country like Congo to be treated like a wayward child, but that's what you get after 32 years of tyranny by a brutal, greedy, and ignorant dictator have reduced your country to a virtual state of nature. A group of much smaller neighbors, faced with incessant guerrilla attacks and uncontrolled smuggling across their borders with Congo, have effectively set themselves up as trustees of the wrecked giant's future.

It was the governments of Rwanda and Uganda, with lesser or later support from Angola, Burundi, Ethiopia and Eritrea, that in late 1966 chose Laurent Kabila, then an obscure rebel in eastern Congo, as a promising Congolese leader to replace the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. In a lightning seven-month campaign, using Congolese troops trained by Rwandan instructors and some Rwandan regulars, they brought Kabila to power in May of last year. (Mobutu died four months later in exile).

But since Kabila was greeted by ecstatic crowds in Kinshasa fifteen months ago, he has done none of the things that his backers wanted -- control his borders, curtail the corruption, restore the economy -- so now they are trying again. And they have assembled exactly the same forces they used to get rid of Mobutu last year.

The soldiers who brought Kabila to power were mostly drawn from the Banyamulenge minority of eastern Congo, who belong to the same ethnic group as the Tutsis of neighboring Rwanda. They were trained and led by Rwandan officers who had gained battlefield experience against the Hutu regime that committed the anti-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda. Mobutu's chaotic 'army' (specialties: looting, raping, and fleeing in panic) just melted away before them.

There was hardly any serious fighting last time -- and there may not be much this time either. It is a measure of the contempt in which the rebels hold Kabila's non-Rwandan-led forces that they commandeered three large passenger jets in eastern Congo, filled them with troops, and landed without challenge at a key military base near the Atlantic coast 1,500 kilometers (1,000 miles) to the west.

Not only did the rebels -- led personally by their commander, Sylvain Bikelenge -- take the base without incident, but they have now moved out from there to seize the Congo's only seaports. Last time it took seven months to overthrow the regime in Kinshasa, but this time the resistance is so feeble and disorganized that it could take less than seven weeks.

In the midst of all this Kabila dashes hither and yon seeking aid from other African regimes (as though they could do anything for him, even if they wanted to), and issues defiant, empty warnings that he may declare war on Rwanda and maybe even Uganda.

His anger at Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni, Rwanda's President Pascal Bizimungu, and Rwandan military chief Paul Kagame is unconstrained.

"Bizimungu, who is Kagame's errand-boy, and the famous Museveni who supports him, are only big liars and manipulators," he told Congo state radio last week. This is technically true -- since international etiquette compels the men he names to deny that they are backing the rebels, and since they did, after all, manipulate him into power only last year -- but it is not the whole truth, and it certainly won't save him.

Kabila brought this upon himself by failing to pay his most basic debt to these men: he has not shut down the supply lines that run across Congo's long borders to supply the Lord's Liberation Army and other groups that terrorize northern Uganda, and the Interahamwe militia of Rwanda's former Hutu rulers that raids constantly into Rwanda. And he has made little effort to cut the supply lines of the UNITA rebels in northern Angola either.

His neighbors might have forgiven his failure to make any visible headway in restoring Congo's economy, infrastructure, and public services (though they had hopes in that direction). But the borders were their bottom line, and Kabila ignored it.

Now he will pay the price, and they will start again with a new candidate: Arthur Z'Ahidi Ngoma, a former UNESCO official who may understand more clearly what his backers expect of him. If at first you don't succeed....

Should we be horrified by this blatant foreign meddling in a sovereign state's affairs? Not really. Even the diplomats whose job it is to be horrified by infringements of sovereignty don't really sound very indignant about Congo. Rwanda, Uganda, and their silent partners are concerned about borders, but they also genuinely want to turn Africa around -- and there is little prospect of turning Congo around without foreign help.