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Contributions from
the Column
Focus
Interview with Tilman Evers: “Small beginnings, great potential” of civilian engagement
Rolf Paasch: Illusions of intervention in Afghanistan
Dominic Johnson: Congo’s recent electoral split
Peter Croll and Volker Franke: UN Peacebuilding Commission needs positive notion of peace
Francis Rolt: Media’s role is often misunderstood
12/2006
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Split in elections
While tensions are mounting in the Democratic Republic of Congo after the votes have been counted, the European Union is preparing its withdrawal. The real challenges are only becoming apparent. The elections have produced a winner, but not the national unity that was hoped for. On the contrary, the threat of civil war remains. EU and UN need a new concept.
[ By Dominic Johnson ]
When the decisive round in Congo’s presidential elections took place on 29. October, German troops in the capital Kinshasa were busy tackling problems of their own. Torrential rain had transformed the city of eight million including the military base of the EUFOR intervention force at Ndolo Airport into a lakeland. “The rain is leaking into the tents,” a Bundeswehr spokesman said, “so we have to shuffle a bit closer together.” Meanwhile, the civilian election observers from the EU gathered in the city’s expensive hotels and gave TV interviews describing the elections as peaceful and orderly.
Appearances may deceve – but it definetly did not look as if the EU presence was particularly relevant. Moreover, it was later revealed that a fibre-optic cable for transmitting data from an unmanned Belgian EUFOR surveillance aircrat had been sabotaged on the eve of the election, in the second such incident in just a few weeks.
Even before the first election round on 30 July, one of the four drones flying over Kinshasa had been shot down by a ground-to-air missile. According to a Belgian source speaking off the record, that was done in collaboration with controllers at Ndjili International Airport, which is under President Joseph Kabila’s command. In August, a second drone crashed into the heart of the city, killing two people. That the transmission capacity of the remaining carriers was later tampered with, indicates just how eagerly some quarters in Kinshasa wanted to disrupt the foreign surveillance operation. No one says so openly, but many people understand that Kabila was unhappy with hightend international monitoring of military activities in the officially de-militarised capital – and that his army and his presidential guard felt the same way.
The arrival of 40 tanks from the Ukraine at Congo’s Atlantic port, Matadi, a few days before the first round of the elections was the talk of the town among Kinshasa’s diplomats, but no one did anything about it. The build-up of arms for Kabila’s troops and, to a lesser extent, for those of Jean-Pierre Bemba, his vice president and opponent in the elections, continued right through to the run-off election. The international community did nothing to stop it. As far as the tanks were concerned, the UN mission accepted an explanation offered after the event, according to which the tanks were meant for Congo’s new national army, the FARDC, which is exempted from the UN arms embargo. The claim was preposterous, however. After all, arms deliveries for the FARDC require previous notification by the Congolese government. Moreover, the FARDC has no one who can operate the tanks, and it never received them.
Such carelessness has gradually discredited the international community in Kinshasa, while the country’s warlord politicians kept gaining strength. When the vote count showed Kabila to lead unbeatably Bemba’s supporters responded with angry street protests. Suddenly, half-naked men, armed with spears – a phenomenon unseen so far in the capital – were among the challgenger’s supporters. They looked like traditional tribal warriors from the war zones of eastern Congo, the so-called Mai Mai militias, but not like the trained elite soldiers of a presidential candidate. Obviously, Bemba, the defeated candidate, was able to mobilise armed groups different from his personal guard, which the international community had recently sought to keep under control.
The threat of civil war remains real, as the elections have split the country. But neither UN nor EU military presence is equipped for that kind of scenario.
Weak mandate, weaker mission
When the EU military operation in Congo was conceived in early 2006, rather different scenarios were considered. The greatest fear was that defeated warlords would stage a coup, so troublemakers needed to be deterred. With what seemed at times like racist undertones, it was argued, in effect, that the fearsome presence of professional white soldiers would put black warlords in their place. Nonetheless, the UN Security Council approved a much narrower mandate in April and confined the EU force to supporting the UN blue helmets, securing Kinshasa’s airports and evacuating people at risk – and only for a period of four months.
However, not even that limited mandate was adequately fulfilled. When the mission began with the first round of voting on 30 July, diverging rules of engagement, various regulations on dress and hygiene, a disputed understanding of EUFOR’s role and incompatible equipment of troops from different countries presented serious obstacles. EUFOR’s military base at Ndolo Airport was not even completed within the four months of the mission. More importantly, it was hidden away on a site sealed off by Congolese troops behind the headquarters of the Congolese air force. In fact, the EU mission depended on the very forces it was supposed to deter. Even before the EU mission got underway, the shooting-down of the first European drone showed who really commanded a deterrent force.
The EU mission in Kinshasa was never what one might call robust – not even in the three-day war in August, when an attack by Kabila’s presidential guard on the residence of challenger Bemba triggered days of heavy fighting, with tanks and artillery shelling in the heart of the city. The assault was a vengeful act by the president. He had unexpectedly failed to win the first election round with an absolute majority, a disappointing result for him. Kabila’s tanks opened fire on Bemba as the latter was hosting a meeting with foreign ambassadors who wanted to commit the presidential candidate to moderation. UN troops had to evacuate the diplomats.
Contrary to what European sources claimed afterwards, a special unit of Spanish EUFOR troops on standby took no direct action. By providing cover for the blue helmets who rescued the diplomats from Bemba’s residence, however, the EU force did rid itself of ist image of only being a reserve force for Kabila. Nonetheless, it failed to act as an effective deterrent even after that incident. From October on, the EU troops stepped up their street patrols in Kinshasa. But when the next challenge came, in the form of fighting on 11. November in response to Kabila’s looming victory in the run-off poll, the EU force did not even show up. “If something like that happens, we call an immediate halt to patrols and withdraw to our base,” was what EUFOR’s spokesman responded when asked.
Situation still unstable
In the wake of the 2006 elections, Congo has become a different country, one with no place for the EU mission. Up to the elections, the military objective was to keep the warring factions of the 1998-2003 conflict appart. These were the Kabila government in Kinshasa on the one hand and the rebel movements in eastern Congo, notably the Rwandan-backed RCD (Congolese Rally for Democracy) as well as Jean-Pierre Bemba’s Ugandan-backed MLC (Congolese Freedom Movement), on the other hand. There were also the anti-Rwandan Mai Mai militias, which the Kabila government had armed on RCD territory, as well as smaller groups and the civilian political opposition in Kinshasa. The 2002/2003 peace negotiations brought all these factions into a provisional government, set up to pave the way for elections. The UN mission was supposed safeguard that process and keep the country on track for peace.
The elections made most of those groups irrelevant, especially the RCD and the civilian parties in the government. Now, only Kabila’s and Bemba’s forces are left. The latter may have lost the election, but not by much. He managed to secure the support of the western half of the country, including the capital Kinshasa, even though political heavyweights across the region had endorsed Kabila. Bemba won a majority in six of Congo’s eleven provinces, Kabila in just five – all of them in the east and south of the country. So Congo’s old and new president will have to rule without the support of Kinshasa, Africa’s third-biggest city. The majority of provinces – and accordingly the Senate, the upper house of the Congolese parliament – are stacked against him. This new split in Congo has little to do with the war-time divisions, and calls for a re-think on international intervention.
Congo’s unity will be severly tested as a result of the elections that were supposed to pull the country together. In Kinshasa and other parts of western Congo, the conviction is widespread that Kabila won the vote by cheating. His overwhelming majorities in the east – all of more than 90% – are not considered honest outcomes. In eastern Congo, on the other hand, people are impatient with the noisy, self-obsessed and unproductive capital Kinshasa, an economic burden many would like to get rid of, once the fiction of a united Congo is abandoned.
All these recent developments are beyond the horizon of the international intervention and the diplomat-designed plans for Congo, which were entirely based on the assumption that free elections would produce a universally accepted government, and that work could then start on building a more or less oprational state. William Swing, head of the UN mission, said on his appointment in 2003 that the elections were the UN’s exit strategy from Congo. The world organisation knows better now. Realising that a swift post-election withdrawal would destabilise the country, the UN is now planning a long-term presence. In future, its mission will not be designed just to provide military security for the young Congolese democracy, but also to supervise the newly elected institutions. In February 2007, when the question of extending the UN mandate will come up for review, the UN Security Council will consider its options in the light of the new political situation.
But the basic assumption is unchanged. With the elections, the peace process in Congo is considered successfully concluded, with the creation of effective inistitusions being all that remains to be done, now that the question of legitimacy has been dealt. That view was shared by EU foreign and defence ministers at their conference in Brussels on 13, November, when they definetly ruled out extending the EUFOR mission. What the ministers chose to ignore, however, was
– that the elections have not yet produced a government,
– that the result of the poll will do more to hinder than help find a government respected across the country, and
– that the risk of a military challenge to the outcome of the election is far from averted.
In Congo in future, the international community will no longer be able to duck the question of how the institutions with which it cooperates politically, financially and militarily get their legitimacy. That calls for much closer observation of the societal processes in Congo that give rise to power. Efforts can no longer be geared to merely achieving a balance between greedy vultures in a tiny elite. The interests of the people must come first, even against the interests of the elite. Only staging elections will simply not do.
Dominic Johnson
is the Africa editor of the tageszeitung in Berlin.
johnson@taz.de
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