Second-generation African regimes dawning

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Laurent Kabila is running late. When he launched his revolt in eastern Zaire last October, he promised that he would be in Kinshasa, the capital, by Christmas. Almost three months later, the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (ADFL) is only now on the verge of capturing Kisangani, the biggest city in eastern Zaire. Even then Kabila's forces will still be 1200 kilometers by road from Kinshasa.

But that's not bad going in a country one-third the size of the United States. In only five months the ADFL has already gained control of around 10 million of Zaire's 35 million people. Kabila will almost certainly be in Kinshasa before next Christmas -- and his impending victory has laid bare the divisions between first-generation and second-generation African regimes as never before.

Zaire's dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, has already lost the war. His army is riddled with corruption and useless for military purposes, and the white mercenaries he imported aren't much good either. He is about to lose his last airport in eastern Zaire, at Kisangani. Soon after, he will also lose the mines in southern Zaire that provide most of the regime's cash-flow.

Mobutu's 31-year career of tyranny and theft is coming to an end unless he can get foreigners to save him by sending United Nations troops to monitor a 'ceasefire' agreement in eastern Zaire. And other 'first-generation' governments in Africa are mobilizing to help him, in a show of solidarity that clearly demonstrates the generational divide among African governments.

On March 4, Mobutu's regime abruptly reversed its policy and accepted a United Nations resolution calling for a negotiated peace in Zaire. It demanded that international 'monitors' be sent quickly to eastern Zaire to enforce a ceasefire. And all of Mobutu's foreign friends promptly chimed in to back his new strategy.

French Foreign Minister Herve de Charette launched a campaign to convince Western public opinion that what Mobutu faces is not a rebellion but an invasion. "We demand the respect of Zaire's territorial integrity," he said. "What must stop are the interventions of its neighbors, particularly Uganda, whose activity on Zairean soil is an established fact."

On March 5, the Kenyan government announced that it had invited Mobutu and five other African heads of state to a summit in Nairobi on March 19 to end the Zairean conflict. "The purpose of the summit is to advance the search for peace and a lasting solution in eastern Zaire," said Kenyan foreign ministry spokesman David Kikaya. But neither the rebels in Zaire, nor the 'second-generation' African governments of Uganda and Rwanda that support them, were invited to Nairobi.

As a political maneuver, it is transparent. There is no 'established fact' of a Ugandan military presence in Zaire, though the Kampala government makes no secret of its support for the rebels. And there is no point in holding a political summit to which neither the ADFL nor its African friends have been invited.

There is no "search for peace": Mobutu's regime still refuses to negotiate with the ADFL (whose first demand is that he resign). "Kabila is a mere puppet," said Zairean Deputy Foreign Minister Lokondo Yoka. "How can President Mobutu negotiate with him when it's known that he is only a front man for the aggressors?"

The Nairobi summit is simply a last-ditch attempt to provide diplomatic cover for a UN intervention to save Mobutu, and the rebels are openly contemptuous of it. "International monitors could become an interposition force (to stop the ADFL advance)," said ADFL Justice Minister Mwenze Kongolo in the recently captured town of Kindu. "It would just result once again in the protection of Mobutu Sese Seko by his foreign friends."

It won't work this time, and even the authors of the strategy know it. But it has certainly exposed where the African fault line lies.

On one side are regimes that may privately deplore Mobutu's spectacular corruption and the disintegration of the Zairean state under his mismanagement, but still feel obliged to defend him publicly. They are not all dictatorships (though few hold elections that are fully free and fair). In almost none of them, except perhaps Kenya in recent years, has the level of official corruption achieved Zairean heights.

But they are all 'first-generation' regimes, descended from the original post-independence leaders by a succession process that preserved the privileges of deeply entrenched ruling parties. They back Mobutu because he is, in the end, a member of the same club. Whereas the ADFL rebels definitely aren't.

The ADFL's friends and backers are all 'second-generation' governments that have grown out of successful rebellions that overthrew corrupt and tyrannical 'first-generation' regimes in places like Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia. They are not perfectly democratic either, but they all understand the need for the rule of law, for an end to official corruption, for African governments to deliver services to the people they rule.

When they back a revolt like Kabila's, they are working for Zaire's salvation, not its destruction. The differences between them and the 'first-generation' regimes are not exactly an ideological conflict, but they are as profound, as instantly recognizable to all concerned -- and as important.

And the 'second-generation' countries are going to win. They already have an ally in South Africa, whose post-apartheid leaders watched the plight of the rest of Africa for decades from their prison cells or guerrilla camps and came to similar conclusions.

Once Mobutu falls, their ranks will include three of the four biggest African countries (Ethiopia, South Africa, and Zaire, though not yet Nigeria). And in years to come it is they, not the dinosaurs, who will be setting the agenda in Africa.