Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

by Jason K. Stearns

After some squabbling, everyone in the room realized there was little choice. They needed someone who could command the respect of the army and their allies alike. If they chose anyone else besides Joseph, the government was at risk of collapsing into internecine fighting. Joseph was young, shy, and practically unknown on the political scene, but this could be a good thing. “The logic was: The weaker the person we chose, the less he was likely to be contested, as they thought they could influence him,” one of the people who attended the meeting told me.

internecine

The ayatollahs of the Congolese government were in for a surprise. The weak, introverted successor turned out to be much smarter and more independent than anybody had suspected. Within a year of his nomination, Joseph would rid himself of almost everybody who had put him in power. He also launched a peace process, setting the gears in motion to bring an end to the war and paving the way for elections.

It would have been difficult to find someone more different from his father than Joseph Kabila. Where his father was authoritarian and confrontational, Joseph was shy and reclusive.

For the Congolese public, the contrast was jolting. “He doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, doesn’t like going out to dinner, doesn’t have a large wardrobe, doesn’t have a lot of good friends, and doesn’t speak the languages of the people he’s going to govern,” an American reporter observed.5 In an early television interview in the United States—he avoided the press in his home country until he had a better command of French—his expression was wooden, his hands folded in front of him, barely moving when he answered questions.

After the AFDL’s victory, Joseph kept a low profile in Kinshasa. He lived in the same house as several

Rwandan commanders and began to explore the capital. He visited the famous bars and nightclubs of Bandal and Matonge, where ambianceurs (lovers of the nightlife) and sapeurs (dandies) strutted the latest fashion and ate grilled goat washed down with bottles of Primus or Skol beer.

It was an abrupt change for him; he had had little experience in military operations. 13 Now he commanded tens of thousands of Congolese troops against the very Rwandans who had trained him. As soon as he got off the plane from China, he rushed to defend the capital from his former mentor and friend, James Kabarebe.

As much as Joseph admired his father, he also realized that his views were outdated. In his first address to the nation, just days after he had laid his father to rest, Joseph announced a sea change in foreign policy. George W. Bush had just been elected in the United States, and Kabila’s message was directed at him: “Without beating around the bush, I recognize there has been mutual misunderstanding with the former administration.

The new Kabila was no pacifist. He did not stop fighting with his enemies; he just changed tactics.

Government officials often did not know where they stood with the president, a style of management that kept everyone guessing. When they went to present projects, he would nod at their comments but not say anything. Thinking that he wanted more explanations, they would expound further, only to be met by more silence or a few words. Encouraged by his polite smiles and silence, they would leave thinking they had succeeded in convincing him, only to find out weeks later that he had canceled the project. This kind of prevarication often shone through in his contacts with international partners as well. “It used to infuriate Kagame and Museveni,” a UN official who attended meetings of the heads of state told me. “Kabila would be silent throughout the meeting; then someone would come and whisper something in his ear, and he would answer.”19

Kabila’s reticence also marked his personal life. He kept out of the limelight, avoiding cocktail parties and other social events. He would wake up at around 6 o’clock in the morning, check the news and his e-mail, and work out in his exercise room, lifting weights and sweating on his stationary bike. Before he assumed the presidency, he lived in a modest townhouse with his common-law wife, Olive Lemba, a light-skinned woman he had met in the eastern Congo during the AFDL. He doted on his young daughter, Sifa, named after his mother.

He did not have many close friends. His twin sister, Janet, and his younger brother, Zoé, visited frequently, and a Tanzanian friend showed up from time to time. In the evenings, he would relax in front of the television and play video games with his brother, a habit that earned him the nickname “Nintendo” from a skeptical French ambassador.

Joseph Kabila’s greatest accomplishment was the peace deal with his rivals.

After two months of talks, on the eve of the deadline fixed by the facilitators, the government and the MLC shocked the conference. Following late-night meetings in a nearby hotel, the two delegations announced that they had reached a bilateral agreement, making Joseph Kabila president and Jean-Pierre Bemba prime minister in the joint government.

furor,

The deal was bound to fail.

egregious

In November, the delegates trudged back to South Africa. This time President Mbeki, wary of prolonging the Sun City circus, took matters into his own hands. Instead of allowing commissions to develop their own power-sharing proposals, Mbeki presented his plan and gave delegates firm deadlines to come back with counterproposals. “Mbeki had a bash-heads-together philosophy,” one of the organizers commented. “He told the delegates that if they didn’t agree on a solution, he would shut down shop and tell them to go home.”

“Did it compromise the future? Yes. But it was the only way out of a difficult situation.”

After an all-night session, at 7:30 in the morning, Mbeki asked the delegates to rise and sing the Congolese national anthem. After five years of war and millions of deaths, the country was unified once again.

Figuring out how power works in Kinshasa is a complicated affair.

A key word in the Congolese lexicon of corruption is enveloppe.

The enveloppe preserves the dignity of the recipient: You avoid the crude embarrassment of receiving naked cash from your benefactor. After all, who can turn down an anonymous envelope whose contents are unknown?

The names included judges, generals, ministers, opposition parliamentarians, and journalists. Perform your job well, and Katumba could

augment your salary by several thousand dollars; perform poorly, and you could find yourself broke and on the street.

This mode of governance is typical of Kabila, what some in Kinshasa call the “informalization” of government. “The president prefers informal networks, parallel command structures,” a veteran political analyst for the United Nations told me. “It gives him greater leeway to rule.”

Instead of passing through his Ministry of the Interior, for example, Kabila will call governors or military commanders directly. Instead of authorizing decent official salaries for civil servants, he allows many to scrape by on salaries of less than $100 a month, only to send them envelopes of several thousand dollars at his discretion to keep them happy. This parallel management weakens institutions but makes officials depend directly on the presidency.

Kaguta surely made a good teacher

But three years after the elections, Kabila struggled to articulate a vision for the country. In the economic arena, there has only been little improvement in the lives of the average Congolese. In Kinshasa, where few appreciate Joseph Kabila’s somber and lackluster character, people say, “Mobutu used to steal with a fork—at least some crumbs would fall between the cracks, enough to trickle down to the rest of us. But Kabila, he steals with a spoon. He scoops the plate clean, spotless. He doesn’t leave anything for the poor.”

Their fears came true: In presidential and parliamentary polls, the RCD wasn’t able to garner more than 5 percent of the vote. They had gone from controlling almost a third of the Congo, including some of the most lucrative trade and mining areas, to almost nothing.

It was a trap! Besides most ethnic rwandase cldnt vote.

Finally, in 2009, Kabila struck a deal directly with the Rwandan government, allowing them to send troops into the Congo to hunt down the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) in return for arresting Nkunda and integrating his troops into the Rwandan national army.

In the words of the opposition, “the Bearer of Eggs has made one huge omelet.” Encumbered by weak security services, the government seems stuck between brutal repression and pallid negotiation.

But Joseph Kabila’s problems go further than just weak state institutions. He is surrounded by business and political leaders with their own interests and power bases. He is an outsider who was handed the presidency on a platter, without having to climb his way up through the ranks of a party or army, earning the respect and loyalty of his fellows. He knows that he can just as easily be removed from power; the example of his father is fresh in his memory.

Reforming the state will require tackling entrenched interests and mafia-like networks that permeate the administration.

doing so, he risks offending powerful people, who could then try to unseat him. In 2004, after a botched coup attempt in downtown Kinshasa, I remember speaking with outraged security agents who told me, “We know wh...

It is therefore perhaps not surprising that Kabila has chosen not to promote neutral, efficient state institutions, but rather to strengthen his own personal security and business networks. This attitude is perhaps most palpable in the domain of security sector reform. After the elections, Kabila had an army of 150,000 patched together from half a dozen different armed groups. Many of its officers were illiterate and had never had any formal military training. There

Politics is always dirty, is always a fight. This is not Switzerland! If we liberalize the political sphere and the economy, allow for unrestrained democracy, the same self-obsessed people

who drove this country into the ground under Mobutu will come to power again! You see free press and political activity—we see opponents, plotting our demise. In order to reform and promote growth, we need to curtail some civil liberties and control part of the economy. It is a lesser evil for a greater good.

him. As so often in politics, what appears to be politically expedient for those in power rarely overlaps with the public

As so often in politics, what appears to be politically expedient for those in power rarely overlaps with the public interest. The lesser evils of the regime become entrenched, while the greater good is never realized.

interest. The lesser evils of the regime become entrenched, while the greater...

The Congo casts a spell on many visitors. It is difficult to explain why. The author Philip Gourevitch once wrote, “Oh Congo, what a wreck. It hurts to look and listen. It hurts to turn away.”1 The Congolese tragedy certainly has something of a car-wreck attraction to it. Nine governments battled through a country the size of western Europe, walking thousands of miles on foot through jungles and swamps. Over five million people have died, and hundreds of thousands of women have been raped.2 If anything should be important, it is the deaths of five million people.

This view, by focusing on the utter horror of the violence, distracts from the politics that gave rise to the conflict and from the reasons behind the bloodshed. If all we see is black men raping and killing in the most outlandish ways imaginable, we might find it hard to believe that there is any logic to this conflict. We are returned to Joseph Conrad’s notion that the Congo takes you to the heart of darkness, an inscrutable and unimprovable mess. If we want to change the political dynamics in the country, we have above all to understand the conflict on its own terms. That starts with understanding how political power is managed.

Perhaps the most nagging, persistent problem I have witnessed while researching and writing this book has been the lack of visionary, civic-minded leadership.

The constant refrain from Congolese and foreigners alike is: Why do most Congolese political officeholders seem so morally bankrupt? If change can only come from Congolese themselves, how will this be possible?

Serious moral dilemma

Historians

often use the Latin phrase bellum se ipsum alet to describe the phenomenon—the war feeds itself. This is a concept many Congolese commanders would understand.

Life in this state was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

In view of this, it was in the common interest to forfeit individual rights to the state—the Leviathan, in Hobbes’s parlance—in return for protection. This was the first notion of a social contract, which justified a government’s rule and made it responsible to its citizens.

But the Congo does not have a Leviathan, a state that can protect its citizens or even impose a monopoly of violence. In contrast with the Thirty Years’ War, which helped produce the European system of nation-states, it...