2012-11-23 09:06
New York – How could a rebel band that started with just a few hundred men take over a huge chunk of Africa’s biggest country, set presidents against each other and leave the United Nations reeling?
Easy when it is the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to analysts and diplomats, who say a corrupt and disappearing army, alleged meddling from neighbouring Rwanda and a UN force with its wrists tied create a chaotic mix.
The M23 rebels have in just one week moved out of a small corner of DRC’s North Kivu to take over most of the province – an area twice the size of Belgium and rich in diamonds, precious metals and minerals.
The rebels, armed by Rwanda, according to UN experts, broke from the main government DRC army in April with barely 500 men.
The said they were protesting that a 2009 peace accord, intended to end conflict in the Kivu region over the past decade, had not been applied.
But now they simply say they want to unseat President Joseph Kabila, while the United Nations warns that they are killing opponents and raping women as they spread their control.
More than 100 000 people have fled their homes, according to the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef). Children’s centers in Goma, the North Kivu capital, are overflowing with thousands of displaced and cholera has been reported.
The DRC army collapsed in the face of the rebel force, which had grown to an estimated 3 000 by the time it moved on Goma. The army “simply melted away,” according to UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous.
UN’s biggest peacekeeping force
The UN mission in DRC, Monusco, is the UN’s biggest peacekeeping force with more than 17 000 troops, costing $1.5bn a year.
But its UN Security Council mandate is to protect civilians, not to fight rebels on its own, Ladsous insisted.
The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is to report soon on how to reinforce the UN troops, who come from 50 countries but mainly India, Pakistan, South Africa and Morocco.
Meanwhile, the role of Rwanda has sparked controversy.
This week’s report by UN experts said the M23’s “de facto chain of command” includes Bosco Ntaganda, a Rwandan wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, and “culminates” with Rwandan Defense Minister James Kabarebe.
The report said arms and troops had come across the border.
The Rwandan government has expressed outrage and denied the allegations and Uganda has threatened to pull its troops out of peacekeeping missions over the report’s claims about its own backing for M23.
“The evidence against Rwanda is compelling, against Uganda less so,” said one UN diplomat.
The UN officials say there is no “direct evidence” that Rwanda bolstered the rebels for this advance.
Complete shambles
But their suspicions were raised by the number of English-speaking officers they have encountered at checkpoints on roads leading to strongholds of the French-speaking bandits.
There has also been a change in M23 tactics and weaponry.
“On Thursday when they launched their first attack, they were not able to repulse the Congolese army,” said one UN official. “On Friday there was a bit of a lull and on Saturday morning it was just like a Blitzkrieg.”
Peter Chalk, a senior political scientist at the RAND security research organisation, said the DRC army is a “complete shambles” while the Rwandan military “is one of the most efficient in Central Africa”.
“If the M23 are indeed receiving weapons and training and even support from Rwandan frontline troops that would account for the ease for which they went through that area,” he said.
“Basically they had a free run to do what they wanted, a combination of the ineptness of the DRC military, the attitude of the UN and the added benefit of support from Rwanda,” he said.
Apart from the UN experts, an independent group, no UN official has publicly accused Rwanda. And Ban and other UN leaders are now encouraging Kabila and Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame to start political talks.
DRC future
Diplomats say it will be a tough task because of the lack of trust between the two leaders.
“There is a need to prioritise political solutions,” said Ladsous, who added that more energy had to be put into strengthening border monitoring.
Chalk at Rand said the future of DRC may now be at risk.
“The DRC is the biggest country in Africa and it may just be that it is too big and complex a state to exist as a single unified country,” he said.
“The history of the country, the various interests of neighbouring states makes it basically a very untenable place to govern.”
Understanding Museveni’s Foreign Policy Chess Game
By Zach Warner
With events in the eastern DRC rapidly unfolding, what will Museveni do next and why?
22 November 2012 – 5:17pm | By Charles Okwir [Source]
In the latest high-level diplomatic move surrounding the conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Presidents Joseph Kabila of the DRC, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda yesterday jointly demanded that the M23 rebels pull out of the recently-captured town of Goma and end their offensive.
This may seem strange given that many believe M23 is a proxy army of Rwanda and that in a leaked UN Panel of Experts report, Uganda was also accused of providing more “subtle” support to the rebels and allowing “the rebel group’s political branch to operate from within Kampala and boost its external relations”.
Both Uganda and Rwanda strenuously denied the claims and Uganda’s Army and Defence Spokesman Felix Kulaigye dismissed the report as “hogwash…a mere rumour that is being taken as a report”.
Shortly after, as if to demonstrate its deep displeasure, Ugandan officials threatened to pull out of international peace-keeping missions in Somalia, the Central African Republic (CAR), and the DRC. However, Wendy Sherman, US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, amongst others seemed to believe Uganda was calling the international communities bluff, saying she “fully expects” Uganda to continue playing “the leadership role it has” in diplomatic and military terms.
With events unfolding quickly in the region, it may be difficult to predict Museveni’s next move and pick apart the short-term motivations behind his most recent actions, but looking at how he has operated in the region previously and the issues that take the centre ground in his foreign policy calculations may offer some insight.
Political survival
One factor that might explain Sherman’s confidence in dismissing Uganda’s threat to withdraw international peacekeepers is Washington’s history of cooperation with Museveni on security matters. Following the death of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia earlier this year, the Ugandan president is the most powerful and significant pro-Western leader in the region remaining.
Museveni has been a long-time US ally in regional security in conflicts from Sudan to the Lord’s Resistance Army in central and east Africa to al-Shabaab in Somalia. Museveni and his military chiefs have done well from these partnerships and there are whispers suggesting the US is building a military base in Uganda’s north-eastern region of Karamoja.
Another reason for doubting the seriousness of Uganda’s threats is that there is almost always more to Museveni’s political moves than meets the eye. He often proclaims the ‘noble aspects’ of his foreign ventures whilst keeping his real motives close to his chest, and has proven himself to be shrewd operator when it comes to geopolitical and regional issues.
In Somalia, for example, in which Uganda contributes to the AU peacekeeping force AMISOM, Uganda’s Foreign Affairs Minister Sam Kutesa promised that Uganda’s “primary intention…was not to do business. It was our pan-African role in ensuring that Somalia ceases to be a failed state.”
However if you scratch below the surface, a different picture with possible ulterior motives emerges. At the time of Uganda’s military incursion into Somalia, the international community was intensifying its calls for a smooth political transition in Uganda – “transition” possibly being a euphemism for ‘a Uganda without Museveni at the helm’. Concerned by these calls, and perhaps inspired by Muammar Gaddafi’s advice to him once that “revolutionaries don’t retire”, Museveni offered large numbers of Ugandan troops to the mission in Somalia. Uganda now contributes more than a third of the 17,600 AU peacekeepers stationed there to combat the militant Islamist and al-Qaeda-linked group al-Shabaab, and this move effectively established Museveni as one of the West’s indispensible allies in the war on terror.
Regional power game
Apart from the need to deflect attention from his “life presidency” project, another of Museveni’s key objectives for going into Somalia was possibly to secure an alternative sea port to Kenya’s Mombasa as an alternative for exporting newly-discovered Ugandan oil.
Additionally, by establishing a Ugandan presence in Somalia, Museveni likely hoped to ensure any future Kenyan president would have to accept his hegemony in the interests of Kenya’s security, especially in the critical northern corridor around Lamu port, where multi-billion dollar oil, rail, and road infrastructure projects are underway.
Considering the odds-on favourite to become Kenya’s next president is the current PM Raila Odinga, a man who has had a love-hate relation with Museveni, we can see what journalist Charles Onyango Obbo meant when he suggested that success in Somalia would be Museveni’s greatest victory. Success in Somalia would firmly enable Museveni to gain strategic leverage over a country that has shown signs of discomfort with Museveni’s ambition to become, and perhaps even retire as, the first president of the proposed East African Community (EAC) federation.
But Kenya is not, and never has been, a passive observer in Museveni’s regional power games. It saw what was coming and decided to follow Museveni into Somalia under the AMISOM umbrella. That move pulled a strategic rag from under Museveni’s feet, although Ugandan troops remain crucial in Somalia.
What next for Museveni?
The security threat from eastern DRC was always likely to be Museveni’s next foreign policy theatre. Indeed, in his reaction to the UN report, Uganda’s International Affairs Minister Henry Okello Oryem expressed Uganda’s displeasure at the handling of the region, telling the BBC that “the UN was seeking to blame others for the failure of its own peacekeeping force in the eastern Congo”.
This may explain why the Great Lakes leaders, led by Museveni and Rwanda’s President Kagame, decided to push ahead with the creation of a neutral force to pacify the region despite the fact the UN had given the idea a rather lukewarm reception.
Both Kampala and Kigali seem to believe one of the most important solutions to the crisis in eastern DRC is for the President Kabila to end to what Museveni and Kagame see as his persecution of immigrant Tutsis who have ancestral ties in Rwanda and Burundi. This would be one of the reasons behind creating a regional force.
And according to a Ugandan analyst speaking to Think Africa Press on the condition of anonymity, although the US has been quick to show it is critical of Rwanda’s alleged support for the M23 rebels, it has also shown signs of sympathy for the positions being pursued by Museveni and Kagame. It would not be against US interests, for example, for a neutral force to impose a federal state system in the DRC, nor – taken to the next extreme – for the expansive DRC to be broken up into smaller states.
The threat looms that emerging powers might be able to detract from the US’ influence in the region, to which Uganda is crucial, and in a recent interview, Uganda’s Foreign Minister declared that Uganda will now be “looking at countries like China, Brazil and India” and reposition itself “because there is a shift in the economies of the world and we must position ourselves to take advantage of all this”. How Museveni exploits these tensions will be one of the hallmarks of his legacy.
All in all, it is not difficult to agree with those who think Museveni actually sees himself as an African “political architect”. As one analyst put it, the foreign policy chess game “motivates him like hell”.
If we’re to believe recent official statements and high-level media appearances, there is barely a single country interested in anything other than peace in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
President Paul Kagame of Rwanda dubiously claimed that no-one has worked harder to end conflict in the DRC than Rwanda, while the Ugandan government has charged headlong into the role of peace negotiator. Suspicious of neighbours’ meddling, the DRC’s donors have mustered as much hand wringing as has been seen in a decade.
Yet, as always, the politics is complex and multi-layered, and the reality is a far cry from a rosy world of responsible states working as one to eliminate pernicious insurgencies.
Earlier this year, a new rebellion calling itself M23 joined the growing group of rebel factions operating in or near North and South Kivu, two eastern Congolese provinces. With M23’s strong ties to Rwandan-backed elements in FARDC, the DRC’s military forces, battles lines were immediately drawn between Kinshasa and Kigali. Since then a blizzard of accusations and denials has dominated central African diplomacy.
Fortunately, however, this does not mean full-blown, interstate conflict akin to the Second Congolese War – or ‘Africa’s World War’ – from 1998 to 2003 is about to break out. This is because, simply put, it is unclear there is much incentive for further external actors to involve themselves in the conflict. Rather, it appears likely that international indifference will lead to the conflict’s stagnation. There is no doubt much human suffering to come, but not from another continental conflagration.
Rising in the East
Rwanda, the DRC’s neighbour and regional military hegemon, is committed to stirring up trouble to serve its strategic interests. Despite President Kagame’s recent appearance on the BBC to deny supporting the M23 insurgency, there is overwhelming evidence that the Rwandan state is aiding and supplying the rebels. The United Nations Group of Experts has found Rwandan-supplied weapons, intercepted official communications, spoken with witnesses, interviewed some 80 deserters from the rebellion (31 of them Rwandan), and talked to active M23 and other military leaders.
Worryingly, this evidence indicates that Rwanda has helped position the M23 into overlapping alliances with other ‘negative forces’ such as the Raia Mutomboki alongside an array of political and military hangers-on such the Forces for the Defence of the Congo (FDC) and Nduma Defence of Congo (NDC). Perhaps most surprisingly, the Group of Experts found evidence that the Rwandan government remobilised ex-members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) – alleged genocidaires and sworn enemies of the Rwandan state – to join the rebellion.
Against such claims, the Rwandan government has called the report “biased and devoid of integrity”. The content of their denials, however, are thin. ‘Counter-evidence’ consists mainly of statements and official minutes of meetings, all stage-managed by political and military brass. Meanwhile, the government dismisses accusations the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defence provided M23 with logistical and financial support by claiming he is simply too busy to trouble himself with helping the rebels. By way of contrast, the UN document verifies each finding with five independent sources and although there is every likelihood it contains inaccuracies, the weight of the evidence undoubtedly favours the Group of Experts; Rwanda’s backing is central to M23’s slow march to Goma.
Self-containment
However, although thousands of civilians are already suffering from these developments, there are good reasons to believe that the fighting will not escalate into another continental conflict. For one, the structural factors that did much to bring the war in the 1990s – state decay in DRC (then Zaire), the end of Cold War zones of influence, and the rising tide of democratisation – no longer obtain.
Moreover, when Kagame’s new government first interloped in the region in late 1995 (much as it does today), there were millions of Rwandan refugees waiting as genocidaires re-armed in the camps. Now such a security threat is non-existent.
Unlike in 1995, this year’s significant scaling-up of Rwanda’s involvement in the DRC is most likely motivated by a heterogeneous mix of interests. The government does have genuine security concerns about various rebel groups, but it also wants to expand control of North and South Kivu’s resource wealth and pursue regional ambitions with the prospect of a broader zone of influence, among other factors.
Satisfying these interests only requires enlarging the Rwandan protectorate in the eastern provinces, with the most ambitious of goals ending at Kivutian secession from the DRC. But even this would not require a change of government in Kinshasa; if the rebels take Goma (as they are currently threatening to do), it is entirely possible Kagame will quit while ahead. Having won the space to let its security forces roam free, collect revenues from the mineral trade, and project its influence beyond its borders, Rwanda may choose to avoid the diplomatic problems associated with forcing regime transition in a sovereign state.
After all, it was precisely this over-reach that scuppered Rwandan ambition between 1999 and 2003. Already responsible for President Mobutu’s demise, Rwanda reinvaded the DRC to install a favoured candidate in Kinshasa only to see Angola and Zimbabwe rush to the country’s defence. The offensive stalled, the war dragged on, immeasurable global goodwill faded, and left to fester were many of the same problems that continue to trouble the Kagame administration today. Shrewd strategists in Kigali are unlikely to make the same mistake again.
Neither help nor hindrance
This logic crumbles if the DRC’s neighbours line up behind Rwanda to help topple Joseph Kabila’s government and partake in the benefits. However, this is unlikely. Whereas several governments used the war in the 1990s as an excuse to battle their regional nemeses, most of these proxy wars have ended. Sudan is too busy with its own internal conflicts, for example, while Angola’s security interests in the Congo died in 2002 with Jonas Savimbi, the former leader of the infamous National Union for the Total Independence of Angola. In short, few countries today have security threats that can be ameliorated by taking part in renewed conflict in the DRC.
Some of these dynamics are evident in the DRC’s failure to round up support at meetings of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, a regional body representing 11 countries. Earlier the group deployed former Tanzanian president Benjamin Mkapa and former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo as Special Envoys to investigate the gathering storm of Congolese insurgencies. But efforts to convince member states to contribute troops to a monitoring force or provide rhetorical support against Rwanda have fallen on deaf ears. No-one wants to touch the conflict.
Uganda may be one exception: the Allied Democratic Forces – a rebel group opposed to the Ugandan government – continues to pester President Yoweri Museveni. And, having recently patched things up with Kagame, the two presidents could collaborate on the M23 to mutual benefit – as they have with the multiple rebellions they co-sponsored in the 1990s. However, the ADF more closely resembles an annoyance than a threat to Museveni, and his troop commitment already extends to conflicts in Somalia, South Sudan, and elsewhere. Adding to this overstretch are Uganda’s new oil sites to which Museveni has assigned extensive military protection. And even should he wish to deploy troops to the DRC, Uganda is facing a generalised budgetary crisis, exacerbated by recent human disasters.
A common narrative sees Museveni involving Uganda to get a hand in the Congolese honeypot, paying for such a foray with the DRC’s plentiful natural resources. Yet when Uganda and others (notably Zimbabwe) lusted for riches in 1999, the minerals were ripe for the plucking and more easily re-exportable onto world markets; now they are a hot-button issue for donor agencies and already for the most part inaccessible, captured in Rwanda’s tight grip over Kivutian trade. Threatening donor funds and incurring Kagame’s wrath trump the remote possibility of resource wealth.
Sideshows in New York
Ironically, much recent attention has the conflict has focused on states which happen to have the least influence on the ground: Western donors. Humanitarian and diplomatic communities are attempting to up the stakes of Rwandan meddling, but these efforts fall far short of impinging on Kigali’s plans.
There seems little that the West can do to pour cold water on the affair. Donors focus on peace-building, striking temporary pacts among competing warlords. These efforts in the Kivus often actually give rise to a weaker Congolese army and more insurgencies for it to fight. Additionally, as Séverine Autesserre argues, elite negotiations even at their best do little to resolve the thousands of localised conflicts that fuel the broader war.
Another option presents itself in financial sanctions. Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US have all recently interrupted aid flows on which Kagame’s government is utterly dependent. However, while such decisions are a major symbol of changing attitudes, donors are still firmly behind the Kagame administration, clinging to its image as a successful, if heavy-handed, reformer. The American cuts represent less than one-tenth of 1% of the roughly $250 million given to Rwanda annually. Such a loss is unlikely to slow the march of the M23.
Even if American reticence evaporated, however, and the West decided to move decisively against Rwanda, Chinese and Russian influence would likely block any attempt to punish Kigali through the UN Security Council (beyond issuing vague warnings). Meanwhile, despite the use of UN gunships against the M23 rebels, the DRC is getting nowhere in its attempt to expand the mandate of MONUSCO, the UN’s regional peace-keeping mission. Its cost is already an exponential $1.4 billion per annum, and even if Kinshasa could convince the UN to go through the long and complicated process of a mandate change, few countries would readily maintain their troop presence on the more dangerous frontlines.
Finally, unilateral action from a Western power is nearly unthinkable. All that remain are stern words and the most innocuous of sanctions.
The silver lining?
Despite its best efforts – and the 17,000-strong MONUSCO notwithstanding – the international community will remain mostly out of the Kivutian equation. It is possible that one of Kabila’s neighbours sees an opportunity in the conflict, but such a course is ultimately unlikely. And while Rwanda has the potential to change all this by pressing forward to capture Kinshasa, there seems little reason to do so, given Kigali’s strategic interests.
It seems likely that the fighting will continue for some time yet while the rest of the regional actors remain on the outside looking in. Leftovers from Africa’s World War continue to motivate power politics in the Great Lakes, but it is unlikely that they are about to bring a sequel. Kigali’s fortunes may rise, but Kinshasa is not about to fall.
Dogma and Geopolitics 