ZAIRE-POLITICS: Mobutu Comes in From the Cold

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Jun 3 1996 (IPS) - Zairean President Mobutu Sese Seko’s transformation from international pariah into a major player in the sub-region has filled his neighbours with apprehension.

Mobutu’s new role is now grudgingly accepted by Western powers which had dropped him after the Cold War because of his blatant corruption and despotism. When Washington cut ties in 1993, they referred to Mobutu’s “obstruction of democracy” — a fact overlooked when the United States had propped him up as a bulwark against communism.

Mobutu’s new role is born of the crisis in Rwanda and Burundi. In 1994 he offered France a base for its limited U.N-backed intervention in Rwanda which created a safe haven for fleeing Hutu soldiers and militiamen in south-western Rwanda. His stock then increased exponentially with the more than one million refugees that teamed across Zaire’s border and into the refugee camps in the east of the country.

Mobutu and his government have made political capital out of their presence, as well as a good deal of money through the aid operations supplying the refugees.

He allowed Hutu hardliners to rearm in the camps from where they have steadily increased the intensity of raids into Rwanda. Then last year, he threatened to deport those that refused to be voluntarily repatriated to Rwanda which caused international waves and several rounds of negotiations with senior U.N. figures.

Now, looking to local government elections next year, he appears to be supporting Hutu Banyarwanda who have been in the Kivu region for generations and are in alliance with Hutu refugees against anti-government “indigenous” communities.

“It seems as if Mobutu will stop at nothing in his attempt to use the Hutu refugees as a bargaining chip to gain influence in the region,” says a political scientist at the University of Nairobi, on condition of anonymity.

Mobutu however casts himself as the peace-maker and elder statesman.

In May, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, George Moose, flew in to meet with Mobutu and Zairean Prime Minister Leon Kengo wa Dondo.

Announcing the visit, U.S. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said the U.S. was determined to make every effort to find a peaceful solution to the crisis in that region: “We believe that Zaire is part of that.”

Since August, Mobutu has been exchanging letters with ex-U.S. president Jimmy Carter who has involved him in two major conferences on the Great Lakes Region over the past two years.

Mobutu’s resurgence is also attributed to France, whose geo- political view is to an extent clouded by linguistics considerations. France backed the francophone Rwandan regime against rebels of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) invading from Uganda in 1990. The rebels, children of Rwandan Tutsis that fled pogroms in the 1960s, had grown up in anglophone Uganda with a healthy distaste for French policy in Africa.

Along with French training for the Hutu Interahamwe militia, which spearheaded the genocide of up to one million people in 1994, Zaire sent troops to support the Kigali regime.

“With the French backstopping the Rwandese army in Kigali and advising on the handling of heavy artillery, and with Zairean paratroopers fighting alongside Rwandese troops, the RPF invasion was soon halted,” notes the ‘Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda’, a report funded by the Danish government.

It was only a temporary reprieve for the government of ex- president Juvenal Habyarimana who was eventually forced to the negotiating table and the acceptance — on paper at least — of a power-sharing arrangement in 1993 which included the domestic opposition and the RPF.

Mobutu is said to view the RPF’s victory after civil war reignited with the start of the genocide in April 1994 as a coup for the movement’s ally, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni.

Mobutu’s diplomatic rehabilitation however has been welcomed by his staunch allies, Rwandan and Burundian Hutus, who believe that only he can check Museveni’s perceived influence in the two former Belgian colonies controlled respectively by the Tutsi-based RPF and a Tutsi-dominated army in Bujumbura.

According to Innocent Nimpagariste, the representative of Burundi’s hardline Hutu rebel National Council for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD): “We believe Mobutu can play a major role in mediation in Burundi.”

The CNDD is demanding that Mobutu join former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, the internationally-backed mediator on Burundi, in bringing peace to the ethnically divided country. But Nyerere has yet to reconcile Tutsi and Hutu hardliners before organising a conference.

“Without Mobutu, I don’t see how peace can come to Burundi and Rwanda,” says Hassan Ngeze, editor of the Nairobi-based ‘Kangura’, an extremist Hutu magazine. Ngeze is a genocide suspect wanted by Kigali.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are those that regard Mobutu as the arch-villain in the region’s continued crisis. Through the refugee camps in Zaire transit the men and their military supplies to launch raids into both Rwanda and Burundi.

The Zairean army has also turned a blind eye to ethnic cleansing in the northern Kivu Masisi region where, since the beginning of the year, Tutsi Banyarwanda have been killed and driven across the border along with other smaller ethnic groups by the Hutu MAGRIVI militia.

“The situation is very serious in that region. The Zairean (ethnic groups) are fighting back. They are fighting both the Hutu and the Tutsi,” says Ben Parker of the Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN) of the Nairobi-based U.N. Department of Humanitarian Affairs.

“In fact Mobutu is regarded, in Rwanda and Burundi, as the key supporter of Hutu rebels seeking to overthrow the governments in Kigali and Bujumbura,” says Desire Joe Bizimana, a Nairobi-based analyst on the Great Lakes region. “And every move he makes in connection with the political crisis in the region is viewed with a lot of suspicion in the two capitals.”

If the conflict continues, Bizimana warns, it will engulf the entire Great Lakes Region, which comprises Burundi, Rwanda, eastern Zaire, southern Uganda and north-western Tanzania: “And no one will be able to put out the fire.”