Zaire: The Roots of Rebellion

Through the United Nations, the West fed and watered the hordes in the camps [many of whom have now returned to Rwanda]. But the aid helped to ensure the survival of the Interahamwe militias, the Hutu extremists who led the killing of Tutsi in Rwanda. And the UN turned a blind eye to the past crimes of these mass killers and their efforts to perpetuate the slaughter from their bases in the refugee camps. That act set the present crisis in motion when Zairian Tutsi, known as the Banyamulenge, fought back and won.

The roots of the Banyamulenge rebellion lie in the fate of Tutsi during the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and in the mass slaughter of other Tutsi in eastern Zaire over the past two years. Hutu militia attacks from the refugee camps drove 150,000 Zairian Tutsi in northern Kivu from their homes; 15,000 people were killed. The Banyamulenge -- literally, the people from the Mulertge hills -- are portrayed by the Kinshasa government as outsiders. But the first of their number settled in southern Kivu several hundred years ago. In 1971, the Banyamulenge were finally awarded Zairian citizenship. Ten years later, the country took it away. The Banyamulenge's real problems begall after the arrival of Hutu refugees in 1994.The young militiamen among them exploited simmering resentments in Zaire over past grievances and the Banyamulenge's relative prosperity.

The crunch came this fall when southern Kivu's deputy governor, Lwasi Ngabo Lwabanji, gave the Banyamulenge one week to get out of Zaire or agree to be placed in camps. "Those who defy the order and stay in the hills will be treated as rebels, and like rebels in other countries will be exterminated and expelled," Lwtabanji said.

The Banyamulenge were only too aware of what had happened to Tutsi in northern Kivu. The language had all the hallmarks of gearing up for genocide. So, after months of skirmishes and hit-and-run attacks, the Banyamulenge struck back with force and sent the Zairian army [and the Hutu militias] reeling. For many of the Tutsi fighters in Zaire, the battle is about something basic -- their own land. One of them, Muller Ruhimbika, acknowledges that the Banyamulenge began preparing to fight when the Tutsi in northern Kivu started to succumb to slaughter. "We bought weapons from soldiers," he says. "There were some Banyamulenge who had joined the Rwandan army and some who joined the Zairian army, [but] we asked them to quit and help us. Some of them did and started training us."

The Banyamulenge rebels claim that their success is inspiring those in other provinces to take up arms. Secessionist movements have long bubbled in Kasai and in Shaba, where the UN helped put down a rebellion in th'e 1960s. The Banyamulenge may prove the catalyst that causes the final disintegration of the nation its president has done so much to destroy.

The Observer (liberal weekly), London

Oct. 27, 1996

The Depth of Economic Crisis

To visit Zaire is to enter a world where formal economic activity is scarce and where much public sanitation, transportation, and communications infrastructure has virtually ceased to exist. The national postal system is all but nonexistent. Most cities lack working telephones. All of Zaire's economic data should be treated with cautions -- statistics are so unreliiable that the World Bank stopped listing the country in its annual "World Development Report" after 1993. Yet the magnitude of the crisis is evident, not least in the plunging exchange rate of the~urrency called the zaire and in skyrocketing inflation.

Zaire's economy has shrunk more than 40 percent since 1988 (16 percent during 1993 alone), and its 1995 growth rate was estimated at 0.6 percent. In 1993, per-capita gross domestic product (GDP), a modest $117, was 65 percent lower than in 1958, just before independence. Zaire is the fourth poorest country in the world, although it boasts some of the world's largest deposits of diamonds, cobalt, and copper; the world's second largest rain forest; and some of Africa's most fertile farmland.

From independence, Zaire's economy has been beset by problems ranging from a shortage of skilled managers to widespread misappropriation of state funds. Remark- able amounts of public-sector funds have "gone missing" in the last three decades. One International Monetary Fund official documented $150 million in diversions from a state minerals marketing agency over two years. Such losses prevented major government-owned companies, notably the giant copper- cobalt Gecamines (now producing at only 10 percent of mid-1980s levels) and the diamond firm MIBA, from modernizing or expanding production. Corruption charges fueled public tensions, especially toward a group of wealthy Zairians, most of them allies of the president.

"The situation in which people now live is worse than that of a war," says Bruno Lokuta Lyengo, vice president of the Zairian human-rights group Voix des Sans Voix (Voice of the Voiceless). "People are dying of fanmine and of malaria, and diseases which we once eradicated have now reemerged." Wages are often so low, Lokuta adds, that many families cannot even afford to bury their dead.

Members of elite military units usually, fare better than most; some earn close to $300 a month and actually receive it. But the local "gendarmerie" usually do not and are often blamed for stealing from local communities. Poverty among the military moved local nongovernmental organizations in Lubumbashi, capital of Shaba province, to launch an inno vative program: helping local army brigade members grow food, both to eat and to sell, in the hope that they would become less inclined to rob civilians.

Since 1990, political conflict and civil strife--particularly the pillage of several cities by unpaid soldiers in 1991 and again in 1993 have accelerated Zaire's decline. The World Bank estimated that the destruction of assets by rioting and looting is equal to one quarter of the country's total GDP. Today, the government can rarely afford to pay its own workers. Many of Zaire's 600,000 civil servants must work additional jobs to replace their erratically paid or stolen wages - or extort money in return for their services. Health and education have been hard hit. In 1986, the government covered only 5 percent of recurrent health costs, compared with 50 percent or more in most sub-Saharan countries. World Bank figures indicate primary school enrollment fell to 76 percent in 1990 (from 98 percent in 1980) and sec- ondary school enrollment to 23 percent (from 35 percent in 1980). In 1990, the bank urged the government to spend more on social programs and less on security and political activities.

Much of Zaire's eco nomic activity has shifted to the informal sector. The dynamism of Zaire's informal economy, where both pri- vate entrepreneurship and some small-scale rural and urban production have proliferated in recent years, has to some extent softened the impact of the crisis. Close to 80 percent of all Zairians now rely on the black econ- omy or smuggling, the two growing sectors of Zaire's economy.

Signs of the economic crisis, and the desperate and creative ways Zairians find to survive, are as ubiquitous as the street kids who weave through Kinshasa's busy traffic, hawking everything from lingerie and radios to hairbrushes and the odd spare part. Many neighborhoods are littered with piles of rotting garbage and backed-up sewers. In Kasai Oriental, most of bustling Mbuji- Mayi--urban home to more than half a million people-- lacks electricity, and many roads become virtual riverbeds when it rains. Enterprising young men frequently stop dri- vers to demand a "toll" for filling in gullies and potholes on a stretch of road.

In the spring of 1990, public protests over corruption, human-rights abuses, and lack of democracy in what had until then been a one-party political system pressured Mobutu to agree to multiparty democracy and elections. In 1990-91, major donors cut off aid and restricted visas for Mobutu and his colleagues to protest his refusal to relinquish control over the central bank and security forces--and to push concrete planning for elections. Six years later, Zairi- ans have yet to vote.

Newslink Africa (feature service), London,

Oct. 7, 1996.