ZAIRE-US: Washington Frets Over Kabila

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, May 19 1997 (IPS) - Nine months ago, he was an obscure gold smuggler, paying off local army officers and leading a tiny, rebel enclave of a few hundred followers near Lake Tanganyika. Today, his troops are in control of Kinshasa – having ousted former President Mobutu Sese Seko from the capital of Zaire after a 32 year reign.

Now, U.S. officials and African analysts are looking intently at Laurent-Desire Kabila – the 56-year-old, president of the triumphant, eight-month-old Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (ADFL).

And they’re not certain that they like what they see!

“He’s a big question mark,” says Pauline Baker, former staff director of the U.S. Senate’s Africa subcommittee who currently heads the Washington-based Fund for Peace.

Like many others here, she worries that Kabila is listening more closely to his more authoritarian backers in Uganda and Angola than to South African President Nelson Mandela whose latest efforts to broker a transition between Mobutu and the rebels were rejected by Kabila.

“We hope that he will be a responsible leader who believes in what the Zairean people deserve, and that is economic reform and reconstruction and political freedom,” according to State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns who called Friday for Kabila to “prepare for elections so that at some point in the future, the Zairean people can decide things for themselves.”

Burns, who said Washington will provide funding for such elections to help move Kabila in that direction, noted that the rebel leader “has held a variety of political and ideological positions throughout his long career.”

Indeed. Kabila first came to public notice during the 1964-65 insurrection in Stanleyville – now Kisangani – where he worked as a key political organiser on behalf of leftist forces led by Antoine Gizenga and eventually alongside Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara who complained in his diaries that Kabila’s tastes for women and alcohol did little to advance the revolutionary cause in central Africa.

After the rebellion was crushed by then-Defence Minister Joseph Mobutu and French and Belgian mercenaries, Kabila retreated to the Uvira region of eastern Zaire where he set up the Popular Revolutionary Party (PRP). In 1977 and 1978, the PRP refused to join an initially successful insurgency by Angola-based Katangans who tried to take over mineral-rich Shaba province.

It was only last October when Kabila resurfaced, first as spokesman, and then as “coordinator” of the ADFL, a loose coalition of armed groups hurriedly set up in the wake of the strikingly successful attacks by the Rwandan-backed Banyamulenge on Hutu refugee camps and Zairean army posts in eastern Zaire.

At that point, according to French expert Gerard Prunier the Banyamulenge’s key foreign sponsors – Rwandan Defence Minister Paul Kagame and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni – needed a Zairean face to make the rebellion more credible. “Using Kabila as a form of local cover” solved the problem, Prunier wrote in a recent article. But Kabila no longer is viewed as a puppet of Kagame and Museveni, whom he had known when all three men were exiles in Dar es Salaam.

“Kabila is, above all, an opportunist, and quite an adroit one,” says one U.S. intelligence source. “He’ll do what he has to do to get what he wants. The problem is that we’re not sure what he wants, beyond getting rid of Mobutu and taking power in his place.”

Kabila’s association with Kagame and Museveni has also fed the notion that he sees the other two leaders as models.

“That model would argue for placing order and control above elections,” says Pauline Baker. Kabila has said he favours putting off elections in Zaire for as much as two years and has spoken contemptuously of opposition political parties and their leaders.

Such remarks have alarmed others, such as Gerald Bender, an expert on Angola at the University of Southern California and past president of the Africa Studies Association. The Angolans, who have also backed Kabila “have problems with him, because they’re worried that his hard line is not going to produce stability in Zaire,” says Bender.

“Despite their support, they don’t really know him or what he wants,” according to Bender, who, like most other analysts here, believe that Kabila and his ADFL will have to reach out to the opposition and civil society in order to govern.

In fact, says William Minter, political analyst at the Washington on Africa, Kabila will have to make compromises just to keep the AFDL together. “Everything I’ve seen says that the people around him are a very diverse group,” according to Minter, who adds that there have already been a series of conflicts he has had to manage between the Banyamulenge and the Angola-based Katangans, who joined the ADFL forces around the turn of the year.

Minter says that in the central Kasai province, which is a stronghold of opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi, there are signs that Kabila and local leaders “are working out a modus vivendi.”

Minter and Steve Weissman, a Zaire specialist who directed work in the 1980s in the Africa Subcommittee of the House of Representatives, stress the importance of not focusing too much on Kabila himself as the unquestioned ADFL leader.

“There really are lots of different military forces in the alliance,” says Weissman, “and it’s very unclear as to who is in charge …or even if Kabila will remain as head.”

While Kabila has insisted that relief officials should have access to Rwandan Hutu refugees in northeastern Zaire, ADFL forces there have been anything but cooperative. “It’s not clear if this reflects a policy decision by Kabila or by forces on the ground over which he has little control,” notes Baker.

“The real question is how forces both in and outside Zaire can encourage the ADFL in a more democratic direction, something that will not happen naturally,” says Weissman. The apparent willingness of the opposition, including Tshisekedi, to welcome Kabila to Kinshasa could be a hopeful first step in building a collaborative relationship.

Washington, which, according to virtually all independent analysts, lost valuable leverage with Kabila by pressing Mobutu to step down only at the 11th hour, should now offer the rebel leader a package of incentives, including aid and debt relief, to encourage him to share power with the unarmed opposition.

Aid, primarily in the form of loans from the World Bank and other international agencies, will be badly needed, according to Weissman, who says he is “very sceptical that private investors are going to be ready to put a lot of money down right away,” says Weissman.