EAST/CENTRAL AFRICA-OUTLOOK: A Mix Bag of Hope and Fears for 1998

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru and Jean Baptiste Kayigamba

NAIROBI/KIGALI, Dec 22 1997 (IPS) - The year 1998 offers a mix bag of hopes and fears to some 250 million people living in a swathe of territory between the south-western shores of the Red Sea to Angola’s Atlantic coast.

The area, stretching from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia and Sudan, through Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and Kenya to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), has been in the throes of turmoil, much of it likely to continue.

It could be argued that the country with most reason to be worried about the coming year is Rwanda, but Seth Kamanzi, an advisor to Rwandese President Pasteur Bizimungu, says he is optimistic about the future, despite the conflict between Hutu rebels and Rwanda’s Tutsi-led army.

“The year 1998 will be marked by, among other things, more stability in the sub-region, given the growing inter-relations between its countries,” he told IPS in mid-December.

Such optimism appears at the least surprising against the background of a massacre perpetrated earlier in December by Hutu rebels. In their Dec 10 attack, the insurgents killed 1,643 Tutsi refugees from the DRC and wounded 500 at a camp in the northwest of Rwanda, according to IBUKA, the Association for the Defence of Escapees of Genocide. Another 1,150 were missing after the raid.

IBUKA President Jean-Bosco Rutagengwa, told some 6,000 protestors in Kigali on Dec 18 that unless the government took immediate action, the rebels would strike again, and their victims would again be defenceless civilians.

The majority of those killed were women, children and old people, hacked to death by a band of men who used machetes, axes, small hoes, grenades and guns in the fashion of the 1994 genocide when up to one million people were slaughtered in pogroms led by Hutu militias.

The neighbouring DRC also seems to be in for a difficult time in 1998. Near the border with Rwanda and Burundi, ethnic militias and remnants of the former Zairean army have been battling mainly Tutsi forces who helped Laurent-Desire Kabila to power in May 1997.

While the fall of the regime of late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko came as a relief to many inside and outside the DRC, there have been worrying signs there since then, such as crackdowns against the opposition– at least one politician was detained — and harassment of the media.

The arrest in South Africa in mid-December of three top former Mobutu generals for allegedly plotting to topple Kabila also brought into sharp focus the fact that the future of the DRC is far from certain.

Blood will continue to be shed in Burundi, where a de facto regime led by Tutsis has been battling Hutu guerrillas, especially since external forces have reportedly been fuelling its civil war.

According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), an international NGO, China, France, North Korea, Russia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, the United States and the DRC have been providing military support to either the government or the rebel forces.

Angola, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and the DRC, HRW charged, have also allowed the transit through their territory of weapons bound for the two sides in defiance of a regional embargo imposed in 1996 on trade with Burundi.

The conflict in Burundi, which is likely to dog the region for some time, was sparked by the 1993 assassination of the country’s first elected Hutu President, Melchior Ndadaye, by renegade Tutsis soldiers. More than 150,000 people, mostly non-combatants, have died in the conflict.

The unrest in the three countries has affected the entire Great Lakes Region, which further includes Uganda — sometimes attacked by DRC-based Ugandan rebels — and Tanzania, home to thousands of refugees from Rwanda and Burundi.

When U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited the area in December in what was widely interpreted as a sign of increased U.S. interest in Africa, she said the world’s attention was focused on the Great Lakes Region.

But Makau wa Mutua of the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) feels that Washington’s interest in Africa is suspect and a recipe for instability. “The United States is now flirting with the new despots in Eritrea, Uganda, Ethiopia, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo,” he says. “None of them is democratic and the United States doesn’t care.”

Countries visited by Albright during her African tour included Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia and the DRC, seen as having a new generation of African leaders.

Mutua said Ugandan leader Yoweri Museveni, who has resisted demands at home for multi-party democracy, should have done better than his predecessors, dictators Idi Amin and Milton Obote. By not allowing political parties, “Museveni has created a leadership vaccuum in Uganda,” says Mutua. “If he dies now, what will happen? There will be chaos and disintegration.”

Uganda and other African nations should embrace multi-party democracy to avoid instability, according to Mutua. “Democracy is the norm today not the exception,” he argues.

The year 1998 is not likely to see the resolution of the oldest armed conflict in the region — the Sudanese civil war.

More than a million people have died since the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) started fighting in May 1983 for greater autonomy for the largely non-Muslim South of the country – home to 35 percent of the 30 million Sudanese – from the Arabised Muslim north. The latest talks between the SPLA and Khartoum, held in October in Nairobi, yielded nothing.

Albright told SPLA leader Col. John Garang, in Kampala, Uganda, that Washington was working to isolate the regime in Khartoum, which it has accused of harbouring Islamic “terrorists” and destablising its neighbours.

That strategy has been rejected by South Africa. Vice-President Thabo Mbeki told Albright when she visited that country that isolating the regime in Khartoum would only exacerbate the crisis in the region. He said both the SPLA and Khartoum had approached South Africa to mediate in the Sudanese conflict.

On a brighter note, the year 1998 may offer some hope for Angola — where the former rebel National Union for the Total Liberation of Angola (UNITA) is under pressure to cooperate with a three-year-old peace process — and for Somalia.

For the first time ever, Somali warlords Hussein Aideed and Ali Mahdi met — in Cairo, Egypt — to try to find a peaceful solution to their country’s woes, and they agreed on the form of a future government, to be called the Council of Presidency.

Paradoxically, even as prospects for a political settlement appear brighter than ever before, Somalia faces food shortages as a result of floods that have washed away thousands of hectares of cropland in the south of the country. The floods, which also affected Kenya, were caused by rains expected to continue into 1998.