By Joseph M. Ndifor
The Congolese military, fighting in tandem with the United Nations peacekeeping force, recently laid siege to the M23 rebel forces, defeating the ruthless militia that had occupied large swaths of land in the eastern part of Congo for the past year. With other rebel forces reportedly on the run, Congo is now on the verge of finding a military solution to the insurmountable problems that have plagued the country from the time it was invaded by neighboring Rwanda in the first Congo War in 1996.
However, last month’s military victory and the demise of the M23 rebel forces, hailed both within Congo and by the international community, would be a Pyrrhic victory at best if there isn’t any genuine political pathway for this country that has had little or no respite from the time it gained independence from Belgium in 1960.
What has eluded these Congolese leaders—Mobutu SeseSeko, Laurent Kabila and Joseph Kabila— is the political will to deal with the rivalry that constantly simmers among the over 200 tribes that make up Congo and which intermittently pick up arms to do battle with the central government in Kinshasa.
But lest the Congolese people delude themselves, military victory is never a panacea to the legitimate concerns of the human race. And in the case of Congo, a country rich in mineral resources but often derisively described as “the sick man of Africa”, those who join the insurgency groups against the central government do so out of frustration that their government is blatantly corrupt, woefully negligent and answers to the tribal needs of those in power. These are some of the concerns that the present government would have to address if it’s determined to extricate itself from its current morass.
With the presence of a robust U.N. force inside Congo, which has shored up the morale of the Congolese military against the rebel forces on the battlefield, the question now is whether the leadership in Kinshasa will seize the momentum to bring real political changes within the country.
In power since 2001 following his father’s assassination, I sometimes wonder if Joseph Kabila, Congo’s current president, has the political wherewithal to deal with this myriad of problems. Of the fifteen rebel groups that ran their own fiefdoms throughout Congo between 2001 and 2012, consider that nine of them were founded since Joseph Kabila ascended to the presidency in 2001, authenticating the argument that Kabila is ill-prepared to deal with the country’s political problems.
There was a time too when Jean-Pierre Bemba, Joseph Kabila’s former vice president and formidable opponent, was considered an impediment to peace and the political process supposedly taking place under Kabila. However, what accounts for the political vacuity that still exists in Congo today, even when Bemba—no longer in Congo since May 2008—was arrested for war crimes and now spends time behind bars at The Hague?
Alas, though young, militarily-trained and in power now for twelve years, Joseph Kabila, it seems, is unaware of the missed opportunities that his father, Laurent Kabila, also had even before his assassination.
In 1997, when Laurent Kabila ousted Mobutu SeseSeko, Congo’s ( then Zaire) strongman for more than thirty years, there were hopes that with the end of the cold war—a period during which Congo’s territory was used as a bastion to forestall the spread of communism in west and central African countries — he would, especially with the promise of foreign aid from the United States, restore the tainted image that Congolese had about the U.S. for having supported Mobutu during those tumultuous years.
At the time, the United States stood ready, on the premise that Kabila would address issues that would include human rights and democracy, to provide the Congolese government with assistance in form of healthcare, education and democratic elections. But those hopes were dashed when Laurent Kabila, like his predecessor, resorted to violence, torture and the arbitrary imprisonment of his opponents.
When Joseph Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness in 1899, his novella about the atrocities committed by the Belgians against Congolese natives, little could he imagine that in 2013, one hundred and fourteen years later, Congo would still be under darkness, groping for directions, only this time under the awful leadership of its own natives. Conrad would still be aghast— as I am.
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