Formal Peace and Informal War: Security and Development in Congo [1 ed.] 0415641330, 9780415641333

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ROUTLEDGE EXPLORATIONS IN DEVELOPMENT STUDIES

Formal Peace and Informal War Security and development in Congo Zoë Marriage

‘In this elegantly written, intellectually penetrating and deeply thoughtprovoking account of Congo’s “formal peace and informal wars”, Zoë Marriage explores the true meaning of “security and development” in Congo. Not the least of her achievements is to give a voice to the Congolese caught up in the reality of on-going violence and predation. Policy makers professing concern about the “intractability” of the wars in Congo should start with this book.’ Mats Berdal, Professor of Security and Development, King’s College London, UK ‘Zoë Marriage has written an extremely perceptive and important book, in which the efforts of international agencies to fund and securitise a peace in Democratic Republic of Congo conspicuously fail to recognise local outlooks on peace, security, interests and norms. She paints a portrait of the best of expensive intentions, emanating from the West, which have rendered the DRC the worst of expensive tragedies.’ Stephen Chan, Professor of International Relations, SOAS, University of London, UK ‘This is an important book that shows how apparently benevolent agendas like “human security” and “international security” can justify wholesale invasion of a country like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with devastating human consequences.’ David Keen, Professor of Complex Emergencies, London School of Economics, UK

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Formal Peace and Informal War

Northern interventions into African countries at war are dominated by security concerns, bolstered by claims of shared returns and reinforcing processes of development and security. As global security and human security became prominent in development policy, Congo was wracked by violent rule, pillage, internal fighting and invasion. In 2002 the Global and All-Inclusive Peace Agreement was promoted by northern donors, placing a formal peace on the mass of informalised wars. Formal Peace and Informal War: Security and development in Congo examines how the security interests of the Congolese population have interacted with those of northern donors. It explores Congo’s contemporary wars and the peace agreed in 2002 from a security perspective and challenges the asserted commonality of the liberal interventions made by northern donors. It finds that the peace framed the multiple conflicts in Congo as a civil war and engineered a power-sharing agreement between elite belligerents. The book argues that the population were politically and economically excluded from the peace and have been subjected to control and containment when their security rests with power and freedom. Zoë Marriage is Senior Lecturer in the Development Studies Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK, where she teaches on security. She has researched extensively in countries affected by conflict in Africa.

Routledge Explorations in Development Studies

The Domestic Politics of Foreign Aid Erik Lundsgaarde Social Protection in Developing Countries Reforming Systems Katja Bender, Markus Kaltenborn and Christian Pfleiderer Formal Peace and Informal War Security and development in Congo Zoë Marriage Technology Development Assistance for Agriculture Putting Research into Use in Low Income Countries Norman Clark, Andy Frost, Ian Maudlin and Andrew Ward Statelessness and Citizenship Camps and the Creation of Political Space Victoria Redclift Governance for Pro-Poor Urban Development Lessons from Ghana Franklin Obeng-Odoom Nationalism, Law and Statelessness Grand Illusions in the Horn of Africa John R. Campbell

Formal Peace and Informal War Security and development in Congo

Zoë Marriage

First published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Zoë Marriage The right of Zoë Marriage to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marriage, Zoë. Formal peace and informal war : security and development in the congo / Zoë Marriage. p. cm. – (Routledge explorations in development studies ; 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Internal security–Congo (Democratic Republic) 2. Congo (Democratic Republic)–Politics and government–1997– 3. Political stability–Congo (Democratic Republic) 4. Peace-building–Congo (Democratic Republic) 5. Economic development–Congo (Democratic Republic) 6. Congo (Democratic Republic)–Economic conditions–1960– I. Title. II. Series: Routledge explorations in development studies ; 3. HV8274.A2M37 2013 967.51034–dc23 2012040931 ISBN13: 978-0-415-64133-3 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-08200-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Keystroke, Station Road, Codsall, Wolverhampton

Contents

Acknowledgements List of acronyms Glossary 1 Formal peace and informal wars

ix x xi 1

Distribution of security 3 Security policy and politics 14 Outline of the book 19 2 Leadership versus population

20

Decentralisation of violence 21 Informalised state reach 32 Global security, exclusion and differential costs 37 3 Rich in war: conflict over Congo’s political and economic resources

41

The First War: ‘the war of liberation’ 42 The Second War: ‘the war of occupation’ 51 Territorial violation and human insecurity 59 4 When was this the deal?

61

War-time tactics 61 Agency and predictability (the limits to violence) 79 5 Politics of pillage ‘Independence cha cha cha!’ 83 Pillage and lack of contract 90 Lack of strategic rationality 100

82

viii Contents 6 Fit-up agreement

102

A logic of arms 102 The Global and All-Inclusive Peace Agreement 105 Political marketplace 108 The fit-up 120 7 Hunter’s song

122

Neoliberal force 123 Shared interests 124 The confused European 130 Violence of everyday rubbish 134 A losing game: return to pillage 140 8 Security peace

142

2011: elections again 143 Containment and control 147 Return to conundrum: opening security negotiations 149 Fin 154 Notes References Index

155 160 171

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to all the Congolese people who have taken part in this research. I am indebted to the dozens of people who have answered my questions, provided insights and helped me through the complex web of Congolese reality. I would like to thank also the people who have given me accommodation, lifts and have looked out for me. Some people who have helped me in Congo must be mentioned by name: in Kisangani, Alpha, with whom I shared a guitar, and Rene Mbassi, who took me through the forests and across the rivers of Oriental Province on a motorbike; in Lubumbashi, Alain for beer and occasionally altar wine, and Vivien and her family for their hospitality. Tshiwaka Mukendi and Kitoko Wani provided invaluable assistance with gathering data in Mbujimayi and Kinshasa respectively. Augustine Kilau has been a fantastic source of discussion and challenge over the years. I am grateful to the Ndelo family for welcoming me, too. The research for this book was funded by the British Academy and I extend my thanks to them for their financial support. Back in the office, I consider myself exceptionally fortunate in my work environment and colleagues. I am grateful to many colleagues and students for their contributions to my thoughts. Amongst the staff at SOAS, particular thanks go to Tania Kaiser, Jonathan Goodhand, Christopher Cramer and Angela Impey for their friendship as well as for countless discussions, notes of guidance and insights. My deep gratitude, too, goes to Miriam Nabarro and Claudia Seymour, who have carried out exceptional work on Congo themselves, Miriam as an artist and photographer and Claudia as a practitioner and doctoral researcher. They have been a mainstay for discussions on Congo. My family and friends provide a constant source of happiness. I am grateful to them all, and extend particular thanks to Ruth, Kwabena, all the Thomases, Emma, Helen, Patrick, Sara, Miranda and Ben. My nieces, Phoebe, Rhona and Freya, make me smile whenever I think of them. My greatest thanks are reserved for my parents, to whom I dedicate this book.

Acronyms

AFDL ALiR CEI CIAT CNDP CNS DFID EUFOR FARDC FDLR FOCA Gécamines ICD IMF Miba MLC Monuc MPR NGO PALU PPRD Rcd Regideso RPF SNCC SNEL UDPS UMHK

Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo Army for the Liberation of Rwanda Independent Electoral Commission International Committee to Accompany the Transition National Congress for the Defence of the People Sovereign National Conference Department for International Development European Forces for the securitisation of the election Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda Abacunguzi Combatant Forces Quarries and Mines Company InterCongolese Dialogue International Monetary Fund Bakwanga Mining Company Movement for the Liberation of Congo United Nations Mission in Congo Popular Movement of the Revolution Non-Governmental Organisation Party of Unified Lubumbists People’s Party for Reconstruction and Development Congolese Rally for Democracy National Water Authority Rwandan Patriotic Front National Railway Company National Electricity Company Union for Democracy and Social Progress Mining Union of Upper Katanga

Glossary

$ all dollars are US dollars Bana Etats Unis ‘USA Kids’ militia in Kisangani Fc Congolese Franc kadogos young soldiers who accompanied Laurent Kabila Maimai local defence forces in eastern Congo Mzee Swahili term of respect applied to Laurent Kabila

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1

Formal peace and informal wars

On 6 December 2006 Joseph Kabila Kabange was inaugurated as President of the Democratic Republic of Congo1 in the first contested elections since 1960. The second round of the presidential elections had returned Kabila with 58 per cent of the votes, 16 per cent clear of his rival Jean-Pierre Bemba. The elections granted a mandate for a civilian government in a country that had experienced more death from violence and destitution than any other over the previous ten years. They followed an agreement between erstwhile belligerents to share power through a four-year transitional period. The peace – the Global and All-Inclusive Agreement on the Transition of the Democratic Republic of Congo – was signed in Pretoria on 12 December 2002. It covered all parts of the formal political infrastructure, including withdrawal and demobilisation of troops, inter-party consultation, liberalisation of the economy and democratisation. The formality of the peace contrasts starkly with the informal nature of the war, or more properly the wars, as multiple crises had erupted across the country in the 1990s and continued into the twenty-first century. President Mobutu, who ruled the country from 1965 to 1997, had overseen the informalisation of economic activity and political association, which established the conditions for decentralised violence. Mobutu had predicted ‘After me, the deluge’, and the late 1990s saw invasion, insurgency, counter-insurgency, hired militias, army desertion and self-defence. It was onto this fragmentary, informalised violence that the formal peace was placed. The peace signed in Pretoria is a significant moment because of the importance attached to peace and security in contemporary international politics and development practice. Through the 1990s, northern donor countries incorporated elements of security into increasingly interventionist packages implemented in developing countries including Congo. Areas of development programming expanded to include demobilisation, multilateral troop deployment, security sector reform, constitution writing, and the design and implementation of peace agreements and elections. Attention to security in development policy was sharpened after the attacks on the USA in 2001, but how did northern concerns inform interventions made in the name of security, and what were the outcomes for populations in developing countries?

2 Formal peace and informal wars This book takes as its core investigation the question of how northern donors’ security policies and politics interact with Congolese people’s pursuit of security. It examines these interactions by tracing two conflicts: one between the leadership and the population of Congo and the other the international conflict over the country’s resources. The book finds that Congolese people prioritise agency and predictability in their pursuit of security; the peace of 2002, on the other hand, prioritises containment and control of threats through the strengthening of formal institutions. The conflict between the leadership and the population persists, and the peace is not a resolution but a continuation of the contest over control of resources. The conclusion follows that the peace answers northern security concerns but does not support the priorities of the Congolese population and instead undermines them. What does it mean to place a formal peace on informal war? The label of the ‘formality’ of the peace takes its cue from the codified operations within the agreed norms of international relations. The peace agreed in Congo is described as formal on account both of the actors involved and of the type of involvement that they have. It was brokered at a high political level, was dominated by the concerns and bargains driven by the military and political elite, and assumed them to perform formal state roles. It involved various parties from lower down the hierarchy but it did so through formal mechanisms. The peace relies heavily on written agreements and documentation rather than events, this again being formal in its adherence to norms of design and implementation. The wars, on the other hand, were informal in that the belligerents, command and control structures and interests were not defined only or even predominantly by standard state procedures or internationally agreed military norms. The analytical and political boundaries between formality and informality are blurred because of the informalisation of the state: informality is not merely a popular reaction to the difficulties of entering formal employment in Congo, it has been actively promoted by the state, and state personnel operate in informal ways. Mobutu egged on his troops with the exhortation ‘débrouillez-vous’, an apocryphal ‘Article 15’ of the constitution. This has been translated in the English literature as ‘fend for yourself’ (MacGaffey 1986): fending for themselves relieved the state of its obligation to pay military salaries and licensed the army to prey on the population. Following this example, non-state armed groups also funded operations and enriched themselves through violence. The ‘informal’ is a category widely used by Congolese people alongside an acknowledgement that there is little in the political or economic infrastructure that is genuinely ‘formal’. La débrouille, fending for oneself is the marker of informality in Congo and is a commonly cited survival tactic in all parts of life, not just the military: if you ask people about their work, they will often refer to la débrouille to indicate that they do not have formal employment. I was advised not to lend my phone to someone because of

Formal peace and informal wars 3 la débrouille, so there is also an element of ‘helping yourself’. Within the word there is an element of untangling oneself from a difficult situation, coping but not thriving, and taking advantage of a situation. There is also a comment about status: that one is not being looked after by someone else or receiving a salary but is living by one’s wits and efforts. The verb is frequently used and I have translated it in reported interviews according to the circumstances.

Distribution of security I am adopting a security perspective for two reasons. First, the wars were elite-led and assistance was determined largely by official donors as, even when NGOs were implementing partners, few operated with their own funds in Congo. The centrality of these two sets of actors requires that the analysis include an investigation into the interests and power, and a security perspective grants this. Second, a security perspective moves the discussion beyond the questions of the magnitude of aid disbursements and whether the situation would be better without intervention. Attention to security interests reveals that neither aid intervention nor withdrawal is straightforwardly linked to the material condition of people in Congo, so neither fulfils their humanitarian needs. A security perspective moves away from discussions on the failures of the state or international aid and focuses on the relationships between various actors and the ways in which threats and vulnerabilities are aggravated or mitigated. The priorities, pursuit and experience of security differ across Congo. The research presented in this book was conducted chiefly through semi-structured interviews on people’s perspectives on and experiences of security over the last twenty years. I quote extensively from interviews to give space to the views of the interviewees and the manner in which they are expressed. I record the date and place of the interview and, when in conversation, the initial of the interviewee; I present myself as ‘Z’. Interviews were conducted across three groups of people to access a range of angles. The first group is composed of Congolese people selected for a breadth of opinion and includes those working in the civil service, education, health, trading and religious institutions. The second group comprises Congolese employees of international organisations; these people often have years of service and their relative wealth and status confer a greater confidence to discuss politics with an outsider. The third group of interviewees is the foreign staff of international aid organisations and companies operating in Congo. Many, though not all, Congolese interviewees noted a decline in their security over the last twenty years. Much published work on Congo focuses on one side of an imagined divide between the east of the country, particularly the Kivus (the site for studies on occupation and insurgent activity, its consequences and international intervention), and the capital, Kinshasa, in the west. The difference of experience between east and west is significant, but so too is the interaction of

44 Formal Formal peace peace and and informal informal wars wars experiences of across this imagined divide. In view view of experiences of security security across this imagined divide. In of this, this, II am bringing together areas that less research research attention: attention: am bringing together data data from from areas that receive receive less Kisangani, as well from Kinshasa. Kinshasa. II have have Kisangani, Lubumbashi Lubumbashi and and Mbujimayi, Mbujimayi, as well as as from conducted Goma and past (Marriage 2006, conducted research research in in Goma and Bukavu Bukavu in in the the past (Marriage 2006, 106–18) and reference reference to to these is also also relevant. The 106–18) and these towns towns and and others others is relevant. The location of the is shown in Figure Figure 1.1. 1.1. location of the towns towns is shown in The majority of the place in in towns. towns. The The majority of the research research took took place The significance significance of of towns due to to pronounced pronounced urban This towns increased increased during during the the wars, wars, due urban migration. migration. This migration was accompanied accompanied by by aa longer-run of industrial decline, migration was longer-run process process of industrial decline, chronic underfunding of of commercial commercial and and service drastic chronic underfunding service infrastructure, infrastructure, and and drastic pillages. are supplied supplied with produce from from pillages. Consequently, Consequently, cities cities are with agricultural agricultural produce rural areas, but extensive underemployment underemployment in from rural areas, but extensive in cities cities and and the the exodus exodus from the countryside mean the urbanisation does not not invigorate develthe countryside mean that that the urbanisation does invigorate rural rural development. of security security can explored briefly briefly opment. Some Some insights insights into into experiences experiences of can be be explored with to the the inhabitants inhabitants of each of of the four towns towns in which research research with reference reference to of each the four in which was conducted. was conducted.

Bondo Gemena Isirio

Buta

Bumba Lisala

Bunia

Basankusu Kisangani

Isangi Mbandaka

Boende

Goma.

Dem Republic of Congo

Inongo

Bukavu

Kindu-port-empain Bandundu

Tshela

Madimba

Kinshasa

Mbanza-Ngungu

Kenge

Uvira

Lusambo

Kikwlt Luebo

Mbuji-mayi

Kananga

Kabalo

Kalemi

Tshilenge

Pweto Kamina

Dilolo

Kolwezi

Likasi

Lubumbashi

Figure Map of the Democratic of Congo Congo Figure 1.1 1.1 Map of the Democratic Republic Republic of

Formal peace and informal wars 5 Kisangani The trip to Kisangani took place in 2005 at the time of registration of voters for the presidential election in 2006. With a population of around 600,000, Kisangani is the capital of Oriental Province and a town of historical and political significance to Congo. It was the political home of Patrice Lumumba, the country’s elected prime minister at independence. In November 1960, just after independence, Antoine Gizenga (who was to be appointed prime minister more than forty years later) set up a short-lived rival government there (Ngasha 2002, 85). As such, despite its relatively small size, Kisangani plays an important role in the history of Congolese security. The economic significance of Kisangani derives from its enormous diamond wealth and the fact that it is situated on the River Congo: it trades eastwards and southwards along a rail and river route to Katanga and westwards to Kinshasa. There are very few operational roads in the town and, apart from an appreciable military presence and provincial authorities, manifestations of the state are minimal. The town was devastated by fighting between occupying Rwandan and Ugandan troops in August 1999, when 3,000 people were killed and many buildings were destroyed; further clashes took place in May 2000 and June 2002, when the Ugandan army was driven out of the town. My research was conducted in the town of Kisangani and in a number of villages in Oriental Province accessible by motorcycle or boat on the route that runs from Kisangani to Ubundu, a small town 100km to the south. This is an area that suffered extreme violence when it was occupied during the Second Congo War. A book compiled from an academic seminar in Kisangani in 2002 opens with the ‘big question that faces every resident of Kisangani’, namely: why is this town targeted by every rebellion movement and what to do so that it does not happen again (Labama Lokwa 2002, 7)? Everyone in Kisangani has a direct experience of war. The loss of lives and physical infrastructure was accompanied by the isolation of the town due to the occupying forces’ control of the surrounding area. The town, prone to physical isolation by its location, became an enclave as the surrounding forest grew back during the years it was occupied. Since the withdrawal of Rwandan troops and their proxies the Congolese Rally for Democracy (Rcd), river transport has returned but no industries survived apart from two European-owned breweries that remained operational – according to a brewery employee – due to the Rwandan troops’ taste for beer. The extent of the violence experienced in Kisangani dominates understandings of security, which is perceived predominantly in terms of armed threats from the Rwandan and Ugandan armies and their militia allies. A farmer in a village in Oriental Province, for example, observed: From 2001 to today, there’s a big change. The military is coming here and the road is open. The security is better. The security is best now.

6 Formal peace and informal wars Mobutu was a dictator and the population was obliged to do a lot of things. Nationally there was good security, but for each individual it was difficult.2 The understanding of insecurity as exposure to military violence meant that with the withdrawal of troops many people noted an improvement in their security situation despite the other threats that remained and the fact that fighting continued elsewhere. A civil servant explained: On the security front there was progress. There was a cessation of hostilities between the groups. There are some problems of insecurity – in South Kivu, Ituri and North Kivu. In South Kivu, there’s the Hutu FDLR and another group. There’s insurrection of officers of the Rcd in Bukavu, and there was the attack on the residence of the Regional Commander by the Rwandophone military – the Banyamulenge.3 The association of insecurity with military attacks derives from the extreme experiences of violence in the town and the destruction it caused. A professor described the events of the Second Congo War as the Rwandan and Ugandan armies battled for Kisangani: For six days there was no water or electricity, and for six days there was constant bombardment – it amounted to a complete destruction of the town. Just imagine a nearly modern town, with electricity – people were dying in the hospitals, there were houses destroyed. Lots of people were killed, and there were those who were shot but who were not killed. You see the hole in the window there – that’s from a bullet . . . After the war everyone became a bit mad. Each time there was a shot fired everyone was shocked and over-reacted. He was working with victims of sexual abuse and assessed the legacy of the war as follows: The country is in a mess morally – there’s a violence that cannot be explained. There are abuses to the rights of men, women and children. When I say that there are forty-two women who were raped, that’s the minority. In Bunia [the district town in neighbouring Ituri] there were seventy cases, then six months later there were 500 because people started to come forward. We had $40,000 from the UN High Commission for Human Rights, but it was just exploratory. I go there and ask: when were you raped, by whom, how many people, but if I can’t help her, it’s not much use.4 His comments highlighted the layers of violence that comprised the experiences of insecurity, and tied into the question of vulnerability and the lack

Formal peace and informal wars 7 of insurance for the population. The physical and sexual assaults were not random but affected people who had no form of institutional protection or recourse. This lack of protection persisted after the withdrawal of troops, giving rise to ongoing forms of violence and legacies of the wars. A UN worker observed in 2005 that the problems facing operations were ‘chiefly due to insecurity’, continuing: We hear about the DDR and the brassage process,5 but what we see is civilians subjected to this sort of abuse. We see armed elements all over the place. They are resorting to extortion and roadblocks, human rights abuses, sexual violence, torture and killing. It’s not just in one area, but all over the place.6 Lubumbashi The data from Lubumbashi presented in this book comes from 2006, the time of the first round of the presidential elections and, as Lubumbashi is President Joseph Kabila’s homeland, there was a visible military presence in the town. Lubumbashi is the capital of Katanga, a mineral-rich province in the south of the country that has been pivotal in Congo’s history since independence. On account of the nature of the resources, which include not only copper and industrial diamonds but also cobalt and other ferro-cobalt minerals (used in ballistic missiles and other war products), control of the region and its resources is of significance to the security of various countries (Rogers 2000, 90). The mine at Shinkolobwe, from which uranium was taken for the bombs that the USA dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is also in Katanga province. The town of Lubumbashi and the surrounding province of Katanga have for a long time had loose connections with the capital, Kinshasa. The province seceded on 11 July 1960, just days after independence, relying on its mineral abundance for its viability (the secession bid was orchestrated by the outgoing Belgians who were concerned to maintain control over the mineral resources). The secession was put down by UN troops in December 1963 but the town had always had its own system of governance, administered and funded through the copper-mining company the Mining Union of Upper Katanga (UMHK). At independence, the UMHK was transformed and later changed its name to Quarries and Mines Company (abbreviated to Gécamines) but continued to operate as a ‘state within a state’. The company provided a financial and bureaucratic framework for service provision as the only major employer and the provider of hospitals, schools and housing for its workers and their families. This social provision was always meagre and became increasingly depleted in the Mobutu years. Through the 1990s, Gécamines ceased to function and with it the salaries and services stopped. Foreign companies, notably Forrest, a Belgian mineral extraction outfit, and Anvil Mining,

8 Formal peace and informal wars bought up parts of the concessions and provided some of the services – chiefly road maintenance to ensure an exit for the copper. Lubumbashi’s experience of war differs greatly from that of Kisangani. The front line did not reach the town and Lubumbashi was not occupied during the Second Congo War. The impact of the war was felt as people displaced by the fighting reached Lubumbashi, increasing the strain on services that were not publicly supported. One interviewee explained: The Second War never came here but it affected Lubumbashi in other ways. The departure of investors – when you think that the front line went through North Katanga – people can’t invest in an environment like that. Of the mining companies, some had already left, but Gécamines was still here and many of their workforce were expatriates. It’s a Congolese company but there are expatriate shareholders and they send their representatives. The minimum support that the state was giving was terminated, as this money was taken away and put towards the war effort. Gécamines was completely abandoned by the state. The explanation highlights the relationship between the population and the state, and also includes an economic element in that the diversion of funds to the war threatened people’s stability and survival. The military situation impacted on security beyond the destruction from firepower. The interviewee continued: Another consequence of the war is that SNCC [National Railway Company], which used to connect Katanga with the Kivus and Kasai, was no longer transporting to the interior because of the risk of coming across the front line. This created problems in the town, as the employees here still needed to pay medical bills, school fees and were looking after relatives. The security situation really scraped away at civilian life and took apart the social context.7 The provision of services by Gécamines proved hollow, and when the company folded there was nothing that the employees or other town residents could do to save themselves from the poverty that ensued. Attempts to make good the situation through informal mining incurred physical dangers and were also politically demeaning. An interviewee in Lubumbashi commented: On the economic front can we say these people are ok? I think it’s a distraction. People are working like this with picks and buckets in the twenty-first century. Luckily all the unemployed people are there, the women are selling things, the children likewise. But it’s like someone is hungry and you throw him a lump of bread. He’ll eat it but he’s not satisfied. The government is not able to send home all the children like

Formal peace and informal wars 9 the International Labour Organisation wants them to; the children are sent there by their families to earn money, so it’s a vicious circle.8 The town is busy with trucks pouring over the border and foreign-owned companies continue to operate, but they are not contractually linked to the provision of services or security. Like Gécamines, their core function is extractive and their contribution to Lubumbashi lies chiefly in the construction of roads. Mbujimayi Mbujimayi is the capital of Eastern Kasai province and the centre of Congolese diamond-mining activities. It is based around a mining installation built by the Belgians during the colonial era, but the town itself was constructed by the Congolese after independence and has few large buildings and little other infrastructure. In practice, all construction work has been provided by and for the exploitation of diamonds; there are a few metalled roads, single-storey hospitals, schools and small shops. Mbujimayi escaped the worst of the wars; during the Second War, Rwanda held the towns of Pama Mutombo and Dimbelege, establishing one front line 75km from Mbujimayi and a second at Kabinda, 120km away (Turner 2007, 6–7). The threat of further gains towards the diamond areas was one factor that pushed the government into accommodation with Rwanda and the Rcd in 2002. As the front line was pushed southwards and westwards, along with Katanga, the Kasais were ‘worth’ saving from the invading forces; the quasi-national diamond company Bakwanga Mining Company, known as Miba, continued to operate during the wars and the war effort derived largely from its sales. Mbujimayi, like Kisangani, is in the interior and became physically isolated. Railway transport has, to a large extent, broken down, the roads are in poor condition and the informal taxes levied on arterial routes raise the prices of goods brought to the town. For a long time after the bankruptcy of the rest of the country Mbujimayi and the surrounding province of Kasai protected themselves by rejecting the Nouveau Zaire. Continuing to use the old currency allowed sales of diamonds to release stashes of disused cash into the local economy (de Herdt 2002, 458). In this way, the town was protected by its isolation and reliance on diamond wealth, and it was able to ride the vagaries of Mobutu’s rule and the wars. Ultimately, though, it was destroyed on the same counts: the lifeline of diamond wealth was cut off and there was no opportunity or expertise to diversify. Mbujimayi’s collapse came in 2006, when the government stopped paying the Miba salaries. This had a crippling effect on the population and all other economic activity ground to a halt. Artisanal mining dried up as the commercial mines were no longer being cut. Many of the better qualified residents moved away from the town, leading to further economic decline. The threats

10 Formal peace and informal wars cited by the population came not directly from war violence but from the impact of sudden abandonment by the state and the widespread poverty and social dislocation that it caused, including the exploitation of children. People also perceived threats from bandits, thieves and murderers who reacted violently to impoverishment and the lack of publicly provided security. The perceived recurrent causes of insecurity were the destitution and attendant lack of education of the population. A Congolese NGO worker offered the following assessment: Insecurity for children is often the behaviour of adults. If there are children in the market, adults get them to carry loads for them, or the children are made to work in the mines. Also they sleep outside in public spaces where they are exposed. In the mines the children are working fifty metres underground, at the bottom of the mines. The soil is sandy there, and if there’s subsidence the children can be killed. The children work in the Polygon [Miba installation] and it’s a violent place. There are break-ins and shootings, and children are often the victims of that.9 With the generalised decrepitude of the infrastructure, the town’s main hydroelectric generator silted up. The loss of power disabled the water plant and other vital services, including medical work. It also meant that the drill and other machinery essential to the diamond industry could not be operated. A doctor commented on the situation: We are threatened by thieving as we have only the police for protection. Even if the front gate is guarded, thieves can easily jump over the wall at the back. Even the patients nick things and that makes it difficult to keep the hospital supplied. At night it’s completely dark here – there’s no electricity. The Provincial Division of Health gives us money for the petrol [for the generator] and we contribute some ourselves but it’s not enough to provide us with electricity twenty-four hours a day. That also means that we can’t have a blood bank or anything else that requires refrigeration. So women who have problems associated with pregnancy can’t have blood transfusions. For him and many others in Mbujimayi there were more similarities than differences between the successive regimes in Kinshasa. Etienne Tshisekedi, the most prominent opposition politician, came from Kasai, and, as his constituency, many in Mbujimayi felt politically sidelined. The doctor went on to comment on how the disaster at a national level impacted on the lives of people in Mbujimayi: The succession of presidents . . . affects the socio-economic life of the town and that affects everyone. The conditions of life are at the base of all health problems. People are not paid, and if people are not paid what

Formal peace and informal wars 11 are they going to bring to the hospital? It’s the families who take responsibility for the patients, it’s the families who pay for the treatment. But there are evasions too [when people leave without paying], there are maybe seventy evasions each month, and of course that has an impact on the functioning of the hospital.10 Communications were also poor, particularly during the war when transport was most severely disrupted. Not being near a border, many of the options available to other Congolese towns were not open to people living in Mbujimayi. A radio journalist in the town reflected on the war era: This province is in the centre of Congo and we depend on other provinces for providing everything. It was difficult because all the supply lines were blocked, things that were coming from Goma were not getting through and we were dependent on getting those things in from outside. There was a time when we lost contact with RTNC [National Congolese Radio and Television], we couldn’t receive the channels that were coming from Kinshasa and that meant we couldn’t get an objective opinion on what was happening elsewhere. The need for contact with others and reliable information opens another perspective on security. The inability to trade had knock-on effects that compromised a wide range of people who were rendered vulnerable. The interviewee continued: There were other impacts too, there were a lot more children on the streets and working in the mines. A lot of people lost their jobs or the patrons couldn’t pay the salaries because there was no money. This is a town where people sell diamonds, but to whom and why? There was no more transport, no aeroplanes or river transport or anything, it was all blocked. But also if you don’t get information you can’t verify anything. Things start to get difficult and the population starts to ask questions.11 The lack of protection, even when there is no specific military threat posed, had a devastating effect at an individual and societal level, and the absence of legitimate authority expanded the forms of insecurity that people faced. A Congolese aid worker assessed the town’s fortunes: Everyone protects themselves in this province. There’s no one who protects them, it’s just the population and God. There are a lot of murders. Not a week goes by when you don’t hear about a murder. And there’s too much harassment. Our driver’s stuck at the moment – he’s been blocked since 5am coming from Kananga [the neighbouring province]. All the documents were fine in Kananga, but as soon as he enters Mbujimayi it’s problematic. He’s already paid 40,000Fc getting into Mbujimayi and he’s still stuck.12

12 Formal peace and informal wars As in Lubumbashi, the economic situation was crucial for the security of the population: security was perceived as dynamic and dependent on the relations between parts of the population and between the population and the state. Aspects of life – the provision of electricity and education, the availability of opportunities and information – were interlinked and the make-shift responses that were put together by civilians did not compensate for the neglect and abuse by the state and other actors: vital services were less reliable and more expensive. Kinshasa Kinshasa is the capital of Congo, a huge city that has witnessed at closest range the machinery of Mobutu’s power, and the transferral of power to Laurent Kabila in 1997 and then to his son, Joseph Kabila, in 2001. Kinshasa is the seat of formal politics and provides the interface between Congolese and international institutions. It is a thousand miles from the mineral-rich areas and has experienced little fighting in comparison with the east of the country. Despite its relative military calm and relatively high government spending the population of Kinshasa lives in uncertain and often violent conditions. An advocate in Kinshasa assessed the meaning of security there: Security is the absence of war: that people can walk around not being troubled, that they can live without being disturbed by other people’s forces. But if they’re arrested in an arbitrary way people lose faith and say that the country won’t get any better. For a lot of people security is being able to go to the football, eat – and that’s it really. But I think there are other elements: to have medical care assured, children’s study, peace everywhere and no war, and employment. His assessment perceived diverse aspects of security ranging from the absence of war to the availability of education and productive activity. He also linked the individual’s experience of security to the societal level and the role of the state: People who are unemployed can commit crimes easily. I’m not saying all unemployed people are criminals, but if we could diminish unemployment and if people were paid – and on time – that stabilises the situation. If they say they’re paying salaries on the 30th of the month and they don’t pay until the 15th of the following month, that’s a source of insecurity too.13 In Kinshasa, the only episode of direct war-related violence occurred in August 1998, when the Rwandan army cut the hydroelectricity supply and plunged the capital into darkness in a bold attempt to take the city. In Kinshasa, ‘the war’ often refers to the few days of Rwandan attack on the

Formal peace and informal wars 13 capital, not to the ten years of violence in the east of the country. Insecurity, though, is more widespread, as a doctor reflected: Security is not just the lack of war. We see a lot of rape cases here. There are a lot of women who are raped and there’s harassment by the police. That’s not just in Kinshasa, it’s in all metropoles. If people are poor and don’t have enough to eat, that’s an insecurity in itself. There was a pillage14 here and all the disorder that came with democratisation. They destroyed the factories and there was a lot of unemployment. People become aggressive under those circumstances so there’s an insecurity associated with unemployment.15 Like others, he detected a political context for security. The population is largely jobless and while there are some vestiges of formal employment in the civil service, there is almost no productivity. There are remnants of national companies that provide less than minimal services. Some areas of Kinshasa, including the commune of Kimbanseke, home to over a million people, have practically no access to water or electricity. A local administrator there commented: Security means that the population is at ease, but here in this part of town we have total insecurity. The area is right next to the military camp and at night the soldiers come here and kill us like animals. There’s no electricity here; during the day the soldiers live amongst the population, but at night they come and take people’s possessions, their clothes, televisions, all their goods – and that’s total insecurity.16 The neglect by the state in the provision of services or the generation of employment was compounded by abuse by state agents. The capital is fed by agricultural produce brought by boat from the province of Bas Congo and further up the River Congo, and this keeps the population from famine, but people often related security to the situation of deprivation and powerlessness. An imam in Kinshasa stated: Someone is secure if he works and if what he earns is sufficient. If he stays at home all day and if he doesn’t have enough to eat, he’s not secure. Even when there are no bombs, if he’s hungry he’s not secure . . . If you go to work and there’s no transport or if you go to the hospital and there are no medicines or the doctors aren’t paid, that’s insecurity. Or if my children can’t study because the teachers are on strike, that’s insecurity.17 Differences are notable across the country in people’s understanding and experience of security but there are also similarities. Iterative mention is made of threats from the state, including the threats inherent to dictatorship, and

14 Formal peace and informal wars threats associated with the lack of services and protection, and the scarcity of education and employment. A second source of threat derives from war violence inflicted by the invading forces, including physical threats and threats to property and infrastructure. Taking the cue from the similarities in the responses made, an examination of security is made with reference to two sites of conflict: one between the leadership and the population and the other the international conflict over the control of Congo’s political and economic resources.

Security policy and politics For much of the Cold War, security theory was dominated by realism, national sovereignty and the use of military hardware to protect it. By 1990 much of the conventional canon of International Relations had proved off beam: the Cold War had ended without mutual destruction or military victory and the Soviet Union, the largest state, had disintegrated. Meanwhile there were other threats that posed much graver dangers to millions of people than the dusty weaponry of the ex-Soviet Union. Theorists moved away from the notion that the state was the sole unit of analysis, and discourse on security extended downwards from the nation to the individual, upwards from national to international, and horizontally to recognise a broader range of threats and a broader range of security actors (Buzan [1983] 1991; Rothschild 1995; Buzan et al. 1998). Critical security studies theory had already proposed that the state, as well as, or instead of, being the provider of security to a nation, could threaten the population’s security. States came under unprecedented scrutiny from human rights observers and political scientists: did they fulfil the criteria of statehood? A literature on ‘failed’ and ‘collapsed’ states focused on those that did not perform their functions of making minimal provision for their populations (Weiss 1995; Zartman 1995; Milliken and Krause 2002). Congo is on practically all lists of failed or collapsed states. Simultaneously, theory looked beyond the Western state. Critical security studies, along with postcolonial approaches, human security and feminism, incorporated development, the environment, economics and social welfare into conceptualisations of security (Buzan and Hansen 2009, 200). Policy was influenced by these analytical innovations, but also by the politics of northern donors dominated, in the post-Cold War era, by neoliberalism. In debates on security, two positions developed: one held that liberal peace had ‘won’, and the other – two-worlds thinking – perceived the capitalist core distinct from the turbulent periphery (Buzan and Hansen 2009, 167). These positions are evident in the two forms of security that particularly caught the attention of international policy-makers in the postCold War era: global security and human security.

Formal peace and informal wars 15 Global security During the Cold War, global security was conceptualised predominantly in terms of the threat from nuclear annihilation, and states that did not have nuclear weapons were not relevant to, or involved in, the debate on global security.18 These states presented no threat to the superpowers, and the safety of their populations did not enter security discussions. From the end of the Cold War, the notion of commonality and shared interest became more prominent in global security, although there had been talk of ‘interdependence’ since the 1970s and common security in the 1980s. The spark for the renewed interest in commonality was the prevailing ideology of liberal peace in the wake of the Cold War. The year 1990 saw the publication of the World Bank’s first World Development Report, the UNDP’s Human Development Report (HDR) and a reactivation of UN summits and conferences, all of which put poverty at the centre of the development agenda and claimed a collaborative agenda for its eradication (Hulme 2009, 8–9). Another aspect of the claim to commonality was that countries in Africa lost their strategic significance to superpower patrons. Bilateral aid to the continent was scaled down and much development and humanitarian work was undertaken by NGOs. At the same time, though, the possibility that security could be provided through global governance was developing, inspiring interventionism (Duffield 2001; Duffield 2007). A broad liberal possibility emerged: that universal values could protect the populations of states that are less civilised or democratic (Buzan and Hansen 2009, 219). Interventions in Kuwait, Somalia, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia were manifestations of a new role adopted by the USA and other northern countries that tied development into a global security agenda. Despite flaws in design and implementation, a pattern was established alongside an understanding of how promoting security abroad could promote domestic security for donors (Hettne 2010). Two-worlds thinking gained prominence as the liberal peace was challenged by the concern that people excluded from the benefits of capitalist development could respond violently to their marginalisation. In 2000 Michel Camdessus, Managing Director of the IMF, stated: Poverty is the ultimate systemic threat facing humanity. The widening gaps between rich and poor nations . . . [are] potentially socially explosive . . . If the poor are left hopeless, poverty will undermine societies through confrontation, violence and civil disorder. (Camdessus 2000) The Millennium Development Goals were adopted in 2000, representing a ‘world partnership for development’ that would, according to the UN, provide ‘peace and security for peoples all over the globe’ (Stern and Öjendal

16 Formal peace and informal wars 2010, 6). The issue of global security received heightened attention after the attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001. The notion of commonality was reiterated in the UN’s ‘A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility’ (UN 2004), and as northern donors adopted further roles in the provision or exercise of security, the OECD produced a handbook on security system reform. Two threads are brought together: that underdevelopment causes violence at a domestic level (by causing civil strife) and at an international level (by fomenting terrorism), and that these threats could be met by management (security sector interventions) and through poverty alleviation. The gloss was that the interests were shared; the DFID 2009 White Paper, in the context of the links between security and development, referred to ‘building our common future’. A more critical angle detects a causative relationship between the processes of development and the reproduction of insecurity within it. Duffield writes that development is an alternative to extermination or eugenics, describing it as ‘a liberal technology of security for containing and managing the effects of underdevelopment’ (Duffield 2007, 24). This perspective indicates a global scope but instead of commonality it detects a hierarchy of interests. Human security The inclusion of human security in development policy was another demonstration of post-Cold War confidence and signalled a shift in implying criticism of the state and the possibility of overriding its authority. Human security makes security into a global project: other states have a duty to intervene if people are being attacked by their states or leaders. It is consonant with the expansive vision of the liberal peace, but its vocabulary picks out the turbulent periphery identified by two-worlds thinking. Human security takes human populations as the referent object of security rather than the state and was described in 1994 by the UNDP in its seminal document on the subject as freedom of fear and freedom from want. It has four essential characteristics: it is a universal concern; its seven component parts – economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security – are interdependent; it is easier to ensure by prevention than cure, and it is people centred (UNDP 1994, 22–3). Many other elaborations of human security followed, the essence of which is captured by the Commission on Human Security (CHS), which prioritises protecting ‘people from critical (severe) and pervasive (widespread) threats and situations’ and ‘creating political, social, environmental, economic, military and cultural systems that together give people the building blocks of survival, livelihood and dignity’ (CHS 2003). Human security was adopted and adapted by mainstream development policy-makers and offered a template for aid provision. It draws conceptually on the market configuration of neoliberalism, employing a ‘growth-oriented

Formal peace and informal wars 17 discourse’ in that sub-components of human security are tackled economically (Alcoock 2009, 30). As such, it was coherent with the forms of marketled development that galvanised mainstream policy in the mid-1990s. Analytically, human security is tricky as there are no constraints on the definitions of threats: if the population is the referent object for security, everything that threatens human life constitutes a security threat. Politically, disagreement persisted on its relationship with national security. The Canadian government claims that human security and national security reinforce each other (Govt of Canada 2001), and MacFarlane and Khong observe that there is a liberal tradition of positive interaction between the individual and the state (MacFarlane and Khong 2006). This holds in many cases, but the crunch comes when the security of the state and the security of the population diverge, when protecting the state means protecting the mechanisms that are neglecting or abusing the population. This and similar problems are implicitly acknowledged by the UNDP (1994, 24), which records its rider: human security ‘is embedded in a notion of solidarity among people. It cannot be brought about through force, with armies standing against armies. It can happen only if we agree that development must involve all people.’ This describes an unlikely political environment. The vision, though, persists, and similar sentiments were expressed more than a decade after the UNDP’s HDR work in a document subtitled ‘International Cooperation at a Crossroads: Aid, Trade and Security in an Unequal World’ (UNDP 2005). Securitisation and the state of emergency Theories of global and human security, like other aspects of security, are produced and consumed by the powerful. They comprise a branch of anglophone international relations, which is characteristically about ‘how to run countries from positions of strength’ and assumes a high degree of formal capacity and strategic rationality (Croft 2010, 196). The northern bias in security theorising results in ‘historical absences’ that are not random: they are constitutive of what security means and how it is experienced (Bilgin 2010, 616). The Congolese voices recorded in this book start to fill these absences by offering a different perspective, that from a position of relative weakness. Supposing you are not general of an army or commanding an empire, how do you pursue security? The need to understand a threatening enemy has long been fundamental to security and the formulation of strategy. During the Cold War, security debate centred on the rationality of the Soviet Union: did they think the same way as the West, have the same attitude to risk and the same anxiety for their populations? Game theories built up scenarios of increasing complexity as the real threat of nuclear annihilation focused the minds of American security theorists. Following the 2001 attacks on the USA, similar questions were posed about the rationality of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein (Buzan

18 Formal peace and informal wars and Hansen 2009, 77–81 and 230). Engaging with weaker parties is crucially different from understanding a mortal enemy: weaker parties tend not to pose direct threats and the need to understand them is overlooked. Congo was ravaged by the slave trade and millions of people were killed during King Leopold’s rule, which he claimed to be humanitarian, and later during Belgian colonisation. Thousands died at the hands of Mobutu’s security forces when the country was nominally at peace. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the First Congo War (1996–7), and the Second War (1998–2002) has resulted in mortality rates that surpass all figures since the Second World War. In 2008 it was estimated that 5.4 million people had died as a result of the conflict since 1998 (IRC 2008, ii).19 Congo has experienced unrivalled suffering from multiple sources of insecurity but is rarely cited in security literature. Redressing the bias in security theory involves not applying a predetermined set of criteria but examining how Congolese people raise security concerns. This approach draws on a constructivist analysis of security, which has been theorised most thoroughly by the Copenhagen School in their work on ‘securitisation’. The theory of securitisation was introduced in response to the widening and deepening of the concept of security and is used to ‘permit a possible expansion of the concept, but . . . [to] make the actual definition of security dependent on its successful construction in discourse’ (Hansen 2000, 288). According to the Copenhagen School, something is a security issue if it is established as such in speech: if it is described and accepted as a matter of security. Inherent to this conceptualisation is the acknowledgement that interests are not prior to or waiting to be discovered by actors; instead the security question relates to how we understand the processes by which priorities are defined (Varadarajan 2004, 323). ‘Securitisation’ through speech acts provides a starting point but is not a sufficient line of enquiry. Hansen argues that under some conditions it is safer to keep quiet (security as silence) and on other occasions specific threats are subsumed into more general threats (Hansen 2000). As a result, she argues, gendered violence is seldom securitised in speech and is rarely perceived of as a political phenomenon. The priorities of Congolese people, similarly, have never influenced mainstream security discourse and are not expressed in a unified way within Congo. In the absence of a compelling spoken narrative, the Paris School inspired by Pierre Bourdieu offers a further insight into the process of securitisation: security agents reveal priorities not through their speech acts but by their activities. In Congo, this can be adapted to investigate the formulation of the population’s security through the physical responses that people make to threats. Interventions, similarly, may be made by ‘security professionals’ in the name of development but actually mask a security agenda of a donor (Bigo 2002, 64). Congo provides a further layer of analysis for security debate. The notion of securitisation implies that some events or processes are taken out of the ‘normal’ political realm and dealt with in a way that contravenes standard

Formal peace and informal wars 19 rules or time frames: ‘Rather than debate and deliberation, securitization calls for silence and speed’, writes Roe (Roe 2012, 253). In Congo, this conceptualisation of security is challenged as, for the majority of the population, extreme exposure to threats does not constitute a state of emergency or exception. On the contrary, severe threats and vulnerabilities are normal and precisely the factors that frame people’s political lives, opportunities and choices, as well as being of an intensity to merit consideration as security concerns.

Outline of the book This chapter has set up the problematic of the book, namely that a formal peace has been agreed on an informalised war, and has considered the distribution of security in Congo. The next two chapters plot the conflicts in Congo against the dominant security discourses of global security and human security. Chapter 2 presents the conflict between the leadership and the population, and chapter 3 examines the international conflict over Congo’s resources. Chapter 4 shifts the focus to the responses made by Congolese people to wartime threats. It identifies a diversity of priorities alongside coherence in the way they are pursued. It also investigates why suboptimal or non-preferred outcomes obtain, a theme taken up in chapter 5, which develops the notion of the politics of pillage, placing self-destructive decisions and dynamics in historical context. The later sections of the book examine the ways in which the formal peace fulfilled some security interests and undermined others. Chapter 6 investigates how the peace was ‘fitted up’ to satisfy an account of events that framed the need for northern intervention. Chapter 7 assesses the ‘Hunter’s song’ – the presentation of an apparently inevitable descent into violence – and challenges its ideology through an examination of the selective imposition and oversight of the liberalisation that accompanied the peace. Chapter 8 concludes the book with an assessment of how the ‘security peace’ serves particular interests.

2

Leadership versus population

Through the logic of Cold War security, Zaire’s Western patrons locked themselves into dysfunctional aid roles: they stood by Mobutu as head of state, but supporting him involved supporting the abuse he meted out to the population. The end of the Cold War and the possibility of a new form of global security that it inspired granted the Western powers an exit: with no superpower rivalry, African states were no longer of strategic significance and aid was cut. As aid was ambiguous, so too was its withdrawal and the move did not address the state’s abuse of the population. The emergent notion of global security in the early 1990s was conceptually dependent on the neoliberalism that had been championed through the Reagan–Thatcher politics of the previous decade and had its ideological foundations in the market. Neoliberalism holds that ‘there is no analytical distinction between the realms of security and the economy, and that institutions help to create a focus on absolute, rather than relative, gains’ (Croft 2010, 205). The promise of absolute gains inspired a move away from the zero-sum reasoning of conventional security to one of positive gains: through the model of the market, economic and security arrangements could be found that were better for everyone. Despite the inclusive claims of global security, there were precedents for discounting parts of the globe as, since independence, African states had been in contravention of the ostensibly internationally held tenets of security. The Leviathan, as theorised by Hobbes in 1641, was a contract whereby the population relinquishes part of its freedom in return for security from the state. The agreements of the Westphalia conference in 1648 provided for international reciprocity and sovereignty. In many African states that gained independence in the 1960s and 1970s, the Leviathan contract between the state and the population was never established and, at the international level, patrons had jettisoned reciprocity in favour of a strong political steer and frequent interventions. In Zaire, colonial political dynamics had been underpinned by a conflict between the Belgian colonisers and the population. This conflict was passed to the neocolonial structure under the leadership of President Joseph Desiré Mobutu, who established a highly personalised system of rule that over time

Leadership versus population 21 displaced the state’s interests with his own. The conflict between the leadership and the population grew in intensity through the Cold War, becoming explosive in the early 1990s. As the notion of post-Cold War global security developed in powerful northern states, pillages swept across Zaire and were followed by provincial-level conflicts as the state made increasingly expansive use of violence to its political advantage. The violence was intertwined with the processes of informalisation, including the informalisation of state functions. Within the violence a form of collaboration took place between the population and the leadership (despite the conflict that existed) that ultimately undermined both.

Decentralisation of violence President Mobutu’s power had been nurtured to fulfil extroverted political functions during the Cold War, and this had granted him enormous economic and political advantages over the population. Changes at the beginning of the 1990s came neither as a result of popular uprising against the dictatorship nor because of a realisation by patrons that mainstream development was not working (which had been known since the 1970s at least (Bates 2005, 12)), but because their security agenda had no further need for African dictators. The end of the Cold War placed Mobutu in an untenable situation: politically he could not continue as a totalitarian president but financially he could not give up. He could neither satisfy his patrons as before nor adapt his now deeply resented rule to the new northern demands of a democratic mandate. In January 1990 Mobutu opened a ‘Popular Consultation’ in Zaire. He introduced a multiparty system but immediately limited it to three parties: the MPR (his own party), the UDPS (the Union for Democracy and Social Progress led by Etienne Tshisekedi, the main voice of political opposition) and the Common Front of Nationalists (an ally of the MPR). The limit was rejected by the emerging opposition, which established a plethora of parties, although many of these had little popular base (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002, 188). There were protest riots at Lubumbashi University and around two hundred students were killed by the Special Presidential Division of the security forces on 11 May. The troika of Belgium, France and the USA, which had supported Mobutu throughout his rule, withdrew bilateral funding and offered only non-governmental assistance to the country. The EU suspended cooperation in January 1992. This pullout of donor sponsorship deprived Mobutu of a major money source and pressed him towards further domestic aggression and acquisitiveness. A coalition of the three main opposition parties, the Sacred Union, which had formed in July 1991, destabilised Mobutu’s political position, as was manifested by his appointment of four prime ministers in the space of a year. Tshisekedi took up the post of prime minister in September 1991 for one month, and again from August 1992 until March the following year, but on

22 Leadership versus population both occasions was blocked by Mobutu’s lack of cooperation. In August 1991 a Sovereign National Conference (CNS) opened in Kinshasa and soon became known as the ‘National Confusion’ (Palermo 1997, vol. 2, 1876). It proposed programmes of good governance, democracy and a fight against corruption (Ekwa 2008, 115). The CNS was suspended on 23 February 1992, reconvened in March and suspended again in December, generating a turbulence that contributed to Mobutu’s downfall (Minani Bihuzo 2008, ix). The political turmoil continued as two parallel cabinets developed in 1993 with two prime ministers and two constitutions. Two forms of violence dominated domestic politics, both stemming from the escalation of conflict between the leadership and the population: the pillages in the early 1990s and the fighting in the provinces in the years that followed. The pillages were urban violence that was mainly restricted to a few short episodes. They were of weighty significance though, as they destroyed what remained of the industrial and commercial base (which had suffered from underinvestment and heavy pilfering throughout Mobutu’s rule), resulting in the extensive loss of livelihoods and trust. Provincial-level violence was provoked by the deepening marginalisation of some groups. Géopolitique was a political order forged by Mobutu through the 1970s and 1980s that licensed regional favouritism and violence on the basis of identity, and in 1993 alone around 40,000 people were killed in violence that was linked to contested citizenship (Herbst 2000, 238). Pillages In Kinshasa 1990 was a disorderly year financially. A number of pyramid money games were introduced that quickly became popular and allowed Mobutu’s embattled regime to placate the population through promises of windfall winnings. At the end of April 1990 the pyramids collapsed; the money had gone and restitution was made only to the military and political elites (de Herdt 2002, 453–5). The financial collapse fell on an already impoverished and disenchanted population and a largely neglected army. The pillages started in Kinshasa and spread to the other major towns in Zaire, with the exception of Bukavu. Rank and file soldiers were being paid $1 per month; they requested a rise in September 1991, and on refusal the 61st Brigade looted the capital, after which much of the population joined in. Mobutu agreed to increase military pay in late September, but he delayed and the army looted again in October (Hoover 2005). Further rounds of pillaging were prompted in January 1993, when the armed forces were paid in new bank notes that were not accepted by traders (de Herdt 2002, 456; Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002, 198–9; Bates 2008, 106). The extent of the damage disorientated legal norms, and the pillages speeded the disintegration of Mobutu’s power and of the customary authority which had been a practical extension of the state in the east of the country (Turner 2007, 120).

Leadership versus population 23 On 23 August 2005 I was sitting in a small bar in Kisangani with a sociology student whose studies were on hold for lack of funds. He gave some background to the pillages and the town: By 1990 the standard of life had started to go down. It was ok, but then the crisis really started. Mobutu made a Popular Consultation – he made a tour of the whole country, including Kisangani. Life was muted and the town was an enclave. Previously you could go to Central African Republic through Banalia, or go to Bafwasende to Sudan or through Bunia to Uganda. The roads were there, but by 1990 it was difficult to get a lorry to go to Uganda. It was hard going to Kinshasa too, and the train wasn’t running to Ubundu, so life was very expensive. The pillage in Kisangani started on 23 September 1991 and led to the deaths of around twenty people (Palermo 1997, vol. 2, 1876). The student recalled the context in which it took place: The pillage had very negative effects because the traders lost everything. If the civil servants and military were paid this wouldn’t have happened. From 1991 to 1993 it was a culture in the country – it was everywhere, not just here – and it started in Kinshasa. After that there were no more shops or businesses. The population was pillaging too because they weren’t paid and they had to find things to eat. Often they didn’t eat it or use it, they just sold it on, but at a silly price, so there was no way of renewing the stock. In the pillage the rich became poor and the poor became rich. But if someone pillages a motorbike and doesn’t know how to use it, he just flogs it on at a low price and there’s no money to buy new stock.1 He put the pillages in the context of state neglect and the destitution of the population but the gains made by pillaging were weak. There was an estimated $1 billion worth of damage in the first seventy-two hours (Ransdell 1992), which caused a severe economic downturn and upset social and political organisation. The repercussions were felt down to the level of the family as people sought new means of income. The interviewee was at university at the time, and he continued: In the university we had a little bursary, which they didn’t pay, and the parents couldn’t support their children because they were in crisis too. There were some people who were still working, but they weren’t paid, so people did whatever they could to survive: they started taking photographs, or started a little garden to grow things to eat – it was all by our own means. Or people went to look for diamonds. Some went and then came back later, some have never come back, even now.

24 Leadership versus population He was describing a rapid and severe contraction of what had remained of the formal sector and the expansion of and increasing reliance on informal activities. The trigger for this transformation was the use of violence, which drove the pillage and pitted the army against the civilian population. Even within the state machinery divisions were fostered as favour and neglect contributed to the disorder. The student noted: There were different categories in the army. There was the Republican Guard, which was well paid, and there was the Civil Guard, which was also treated well. All the others were neglected. But when they revolted, the Republican and Civil Guards could not control them.2 Lubumbashi was pillaged in October 1991. As elsewhere, the looting was led by the soldiers, who used hand grenades and anti-tank rockets to break into shops. The pillage was thorough, and included the removal of switches, taps, pieces of corrugated metal and sinks. Estimates of the number of people killed run from twenty to several hundred (Hoover 2005). I interviewed a bookstall holder in Lubumbashi, who recalled the early 1990s: After the pillage there was a dead time because all the stock had been pillaged. Even the beer drinkers could not consume, so it was really a dead time. People didn’t work and all the shops were empty, they had pillaged seriously and everything was bust. They say: to cross the river you have to take a step back. It was a case of force majeure: the Commercial Bank had to support its economic operators, so they went there and took out loans and started some companies.3 Violence and informalisation reinforced each other as the leadership and the population adjusted to a more profound level of crisis. The involvement of the army not only intensified the pillage with the use of sudden and widespread violence; it also signalled a suspension of the law. An interviewee in Lubumbashi recalled that companies were pillaged clean in three days between 20 and 22 October, fuelling unemployment. He continued: First it was the soldiers. They started late at night, and we thought it was perhaps a war between the Congolese soldiers and the Belgian troops. First thing in the morning we heard this and we were scared; we thought we should get lots of water and store it up. But then at 7 or 8am we saw people carrying things on their heads – a really extraordinary sight – so everyone went to town and took everything. The soldiers started it and after that the population took what was left. There was a shop selling furniture down here which had nice suites and chairs, and the soldiers went berserk in there, and in the morning the people went to take stuff from there too.

Leadership versus population 25 The participation of the army troops in the pillaging and their use of military equipment intensified the violence to people and property. I asked if the population staged any protest, but the interviewee replied: No, because the population was inside it – they were involved in the pillage. In some of the Catholic churches they were asking for God’s forgiveness on the basis that everyone had stolen. We started to eat flour meal – flour that is meant for animals, it’s called Vimba I think, and that caused a lot of illness . . . [The soldiers] were also victims of famine. It accentuated poverty everywhere and soldiers didn’t get paid much in those days.4 The damage to shops, industries and residential compounds had acute economic impacts and Zaire’s GDP fell by around 30 per cent per year after the pillages; unemployment was at 80 per cent. Gécamines, which was in crisis already, went from producing 14.8 per cent of the country’s GDP in 1990 to 0 per cent in 1992 (Kennes 2005, 161). The pillages occasioned multiple forms of violence in terms of shootings, armed robberies, loss of assets and food shortages. A local official in Kinshasa recalled: ‘Lots of people were killed, lots of children and men and women. If they came to your house and they found you had nothing, they’d kill you.’ The repercussions were felt across various sections of society as people adapted to the increasingly straitened circumstances. A doctor in the same part of town recalled the impact of the pillage: The centre itself was not pillaged, although they pillaged a few things from the foyer – the telephone, I think. But they pillaged the Sisters’ house [convent] behind. There were European Sisters who brought in all the medicines and would just charge a small consultation fee. Their house was ransacked so after the pillages people had to pay for the medicines and the consultation fees as well, and there were a lot of patients at that stage. Previously it had just been a small fee that covered everything but after the pillage they had to raise the price and it was all itemised, so in that way the pillages changed the economy of the hospital.5 Despite the short-term gains made, the country and the population was impoverished by looting and in the aftermath people were compelled to forgo non-essential items. This sent waves back up the chain of production, and companies that had survived the pillages were hobbled by the lack of custom. An employee in a drinks factory in Mbujimayi reflected on the experience: There was a pillage of stock, of primary materials and of other bits and pieces – vehicles and documents, and they emptied the safes. And drinks, of course. Pillagers pillage whatever they find. There are some things that

26 Leadership versus population we buy locally, but the companies that supply us were pillaged too, so there was complete disequilibrium in the local economy and we had to look elsewhere for stock. That increased the problems and the prices went up too. There’s something about the system of pillage that destabilises people’s purchasing power too, so people were not buying our product. It’s practically a luxury item and they couldn’t afford it – you’re going to buy a bag of flour before you buy soft drinks.6 Sales of beer, an indicator of disposable income, were affected for similar reasons. An employee at a brewery in Kinshasa rated the aftermath as more catastrophic to the company than the direct violence: It was more the consequences of the pillages that hit Bracongo – the poverty of the people, our friends who buy beer. We make a popular product and if the population doesn’t have money, we feel the impact of that. There was a slump in commercial performance as a result of the pillages. His assessment of the outcome of the pillages weighs against the opportunities for instant enrichment and the outlet for political and economic frustration that pillaging offered. Mbembe notes: ‘The immediate consequences of institutional violence and the logic of rioting are to prevent any effective consolidation of so-called civil society while rendering the state totally impotent’ (Mbembe 2001, 51). State involvement in the pillage and the decrepitude of Mobutu’s authority meant that there was no concerted effort to recover. After the pillage, stocks were gone, investors were gone, and industries and businesses had been stripped bare. Contradictory violence The pillages were violence committed by the state through the army on the population. On one level it was an effective political weapon as, in the increasingly unfavourable economic climate, people were entirely occupied by their personal survival needs and did not organise politically against Mobutu’s regime (Trefon et al. 2002, 383). At the same time, though, the state was not in full control of the process and took heavy losses from the destruction of industrial and economic infrastructure, albeit that these losses were not as heavy as those it inflicted on the population. The costs for the leadership were accentuated as the pillages deepened the crisis of patrimonialism as assets were plundered, weakening the ability to pay or manipulate elite networks of support. Asked what Mobutu gained from the pillages, a Catholic priest in Kisangani replied: I don’t know if he gained much, but he disadvantaged the population. He wanted to become – how do you call it in Europe? – Father

Leadership versus population 27 Christmas. He thought he could win people back by giving out presents to the distressed population. But it all went wrong for him . . . He was destroying everything and he was completely desperate. It was a way to punish the population and he had a Machiavellian plan to destroy the factories here . . . to bring the population to their knees. Minani Bihuzo argues that the pillages (and the refusal to pay civil servants that contributed to them) were a direct response by Mobutu to the resistance marches that had taken place around the time of the Sovereign National Conference and were designed to punish the population (Minani Bihuzo 2008, 34). As such they served their purpose in widening the gap between the leadership and the population, even if all were going down. The priest continued: It was impossible that the army could do this without being ordered to do so. If a commander did that on his own initiative, he’d be executed. But this was done with complete impunity, and they took everything. The population joined in out of despair. What could they do? It’s difficult to analyse the thoughts of a crowd; they pillaged, but in their hearts they were against Mobutu.7 The population was faced with an unassailable force that was making direct assault on the economic infrastructure and political order, and they too were involved in contradictory agendas. Petit and Mutambwa (2005, 483) report that: ‘More than just pillaging commodities, people were destroying symbols of the regime and of the wealthy, especially those belonging to expatriates.’ Pillagers targeted big stores, shops owned by Lebanese traders, wholesalers and large private residences, particularly those belonging to Mobutu’s MPR politicians (de Herdt 2002, 455). There are patterns in the destruction that resulted, but the political message was muffled by the costs that fell heavily on the population. Aside from immediate returns, the looting was violence committed by sections of the population on others as employment and trade were torn apart, leading to severe shortages of food and medical supplies. In the longer term, looting became part of the lexicon of army and popular discontent and a means of survival in desperate situations, but it simultaneously weakened people’s ability to cope. A Congolese aid worker in Kisangani commented: Everyone joined in the pillage and someone could leave with sugar, milk or a radio. It was a bit like, whenever there was a little event, it wasn’t even what the population wanted, but they could profit from it and from that way of thinking. And that’s how we had three or four pillages. Kisangani saw a massive exodus of expatriates because they lost everything. They left town or went to neighbouring countries and when they came back they found that there was nothing. There were some who had

28 Leadership versus population really invested here – not with plantations, those had already gone, but with shops – and they lost everything. They came back for a few years and tried, but it wasn’t possible, and when their women were raped they just didn’t come back . . . This led to a lot of unemployment.8 The pillages informalised state functions as Mobutu’s power was channelled through the looting by the army. Meanwhile the formal institutions that might have curbed the looting were not functioning: ‘the magistrates were on strike and justice was put in parenthesis. Mobutu announced that he would forgive and absolve everyone “like a good father of a family – this time!”’ (Palermo 1997, vol. 2, 1876). Mobutu’s lack of reaction to the pillage confirmed his power: if he had reacted, it would have been acceptance that the population was in revolt. Significant, too, is the fact that the army did not attempt a coup (Renton et al. 2006, 157). Kasai–Katanga conflict The pillages were one manifestation of a marked increase in political antagonism and direct violence in the conflict between the leadership and the population in the early 1990s. A second form of violence occurred soon after as attacks and intimidation in the provinces crystallised rivalry over land, access to power and citizenship. This fighting drew distinctions between groups of people on the basis of area of origin according to the terms of Mobutu’s ideology of géopolitique. Géopolitique originally signified that governors and vice-governors should be recruited locally. It was touted as a means of reducing rivalry between ethnic groups but, as it gave rise to favouritism and divisive policies, its impact was the opposite: it became a watchword for ethnically charged conflict and violence. The Kasai–Katanga conflict saw violence in mining towns across the province of Katanga; around 10,000 people whose families originated in the neighbouring province of Kasai were killed in violence orchestrated by the provincial governor, Gabriel Kyungu. Up to three times as many died of hunger or exposure as they were hounded into concentration camps or cramped trains that transported them to Kasai. Hundreds of thousands more people were harassed, robbed or displaced. There were strong political and economic elements to the violence, with people vying for control over assets and abandoned positions in companies; in the late 1980s and early 1990s ‘Kasaians’ (a term principally describing people with names associated with the province) dominated the management of Gécamines and the national electricity and railway companies (Mutabusha 2002, 51–2). The disruption caused by the conflict inflicted further damage on Katanga’s struggling copper sector. In 1990 the immense copper mine at Kamoto caved in and copper production fell by 90 per cent between 1989 and 1993 (Nest et al. 2006, 19). The political turmoil precluded investment for recovery. A professor in Lubumbashi university recalled:

Leadership versus population 29 In 1991, ’92 and ’93 there was also the conflict between the Katangans and the Kasaians, so during that period production did not go up – everyone was thinking only about the insecurity. It was at the level of the province and they wanted to send back all the Kasaians and they came to town. There were outbreaks of violence in all the towns [in the province], except here [Lubumbashi]. Here they called it the ‘waiting room’ – it’s a metaphor: you have the house and the waiting room here. The other places are the bedrooms and whatever and they chased the Kasaians out of all the other rooms, all the other parts of the province and they all ended up here. Then of course there’s the question of how to get them out of the waiting room. There had been outbreaks of violence between Kasaians and Katangans in 1960, and differential treatment by Mobutu had stoked resentment between the two groups. The violence of the early 1990s confirmed the significance of ‘Katangan’ and ‘Kasaian’ not only as distinct groups (when actually the ‘Kasaians’ had been in Katanga for years and there was much intermarriage), but also as groups that had different characteristics and statuses. The professor continued: It all started in 1956, when they named the first mayors for the town. There was one white and four black. Of the black mayors, three out of the four were Kasaians and one from Kivu. There was no one from Katanga. That was the start of the fear: when people saw foreigners in charge of the political scene. On the economic front too they saw that Kasaians had more command, and if people have political and economic space, the game’s over.9 He traced the tensions from 1956 and identified social and economic aspects of the conflict, but for others the tensions and their associated violence were more sudden and more a result of political manipulation from Kinshasa than historical precedents. A Congolese aid worker in Lubumbashi reported: From 1992 to 1993 there was the conflict between the Katangans and the Kasaians. That was the food of the politicians. They didn’t have anything else to say to the population, so they made this discourse of ‘Katanga for the Katangans’ and that became very popular. That also created a humanitarian situation. The Kasaians had been here for years and had invested here, they were practically from here: they’d been born here and had children here and suddenly they had to leave. There were divorces as well – it broke up marriages; you don’t ask when you’re getting married, ‘oh I’m from here, where are you from?’10 His account is understated. Identity, much of it stemming from place of origin and lineage, is very significant in Congo, and it is unlikely that

30 Leadership versus population Katangans could marry Kasaians without knowing their background. That said, for many years previous to the violence of the early 1990s, there had not been pronounced acrimony between the two groups. Mobutu capitalised on the different identities to develop a divisive discourse in a process that bore similarities to the pillages in that it split sections of the population against each other and granted licence for the use of violence, much of which was straightforwardly self-serving. As with the pillages, the population joined in: the labels of ‘Kasaian’ and ‘Katangan’ took on a kind of ethnic mantel, but in literal terms referred simply to provinces. The quasi-ethnic rhetoric was useful as it was vague, and this lack of precision could be turned to political advantage. The professor reflected on the episode: [Mobutu] felt that the population was against him so wanted to divide the population in order to continue his rule . . . The Kasaians posed a danger in the eyes of the Katangans. In Lubumbashi, for example, in 1970 50 per cent of the employees in Gécamines were Kasaians. The bosses – most of the bosses – were Kasaians. Mobutu said he was the father of the whole nation and that people should move from one area to another and feel at home but this meant that all the bosses were from other towns. People exploited the frustration, saying ‘How is it that there are lots of others there who hold power?’ They made conflict between parts of the population and the government did nothing.11 The conflict between the two groups was linked to national political rivalry: Tshisekedi, the leader of the UDPS opposition party, was enjoying increasing favour across the country and came from Kasai, and his political standing contributed to Mobutu’s antagonism towards the Kasaians. A Congolese UN worker assessed the situation in this way: In my opinion there was no conflict, it was just political manipulation. For each group there was conflict over the leadership. The Kasaians had a lot of power and held the strategic positions in the country, and the people from the east didn’t really hold any posts. The Kasaians had been favoured before and had received a lot more education. There were a lot of them here and they held all the positions in Gécamines and SNCC, and in the public administration. All the university professors and doctors were Kasaians and they drew in their brothers to work with them. The account taps into the resentment of the favourable treatment of some groups and the exclusion of others that this licensed as these groups capitalised on the advantages they accrued. The result was an increased salience of fault lines between groups, which made for political instability as the distribution of favour was attached to the changing allegiances amongst elite politicians. The way in which the leadership was able to foment conflict

Leadership versus population 31 between parts of the population demonstrated the nature of domestic power and the sway that Mobutu held despite his lack of popularity. The interviewee continued: Gabriel Kyungu [the governor of Katanga] . . . started the discourse of chasing the Kasaians out and the Katangans taking the power. All those who were not originally from Katanga were chased out, but the Kasaians were most targeted as they had the most important positions. All this was with the blessing of Mobutu as he was the president at the time but he didn’t issue any kind of reprimand. It’s a sort of licence: when something like that happens, the authorities should do something about it, but he didn’t. Previously he had favoured the Kasaians, but then they started putting themselves in opposition to him. They were obliged to quit their posts; it was not the whole Kasaian population that was attacked – there are lots of them here – but those in significant posts were chased out, and left without any form of justice. They had to leave their houses and their possessions. Removing the Kasaians from positions of wealth and influence did little to enrich or significantly empower those who carried out the attacks, and it contributed more broadly to disaster by removing much of the skilled workforce. The interviewee reflected: There are still traces of the conflict. There’s still a feeling that the Kasaians have all the power . . . It’s the politics of the west [Kinshasa] and they were politically the closest to Mobutu. In the army as well, all the top posts are held by Kasaians. Mobutu favoured them until the early 1990s; then all the leaders around him started to remove the Kasaians from their posts and put in others, and Mobutu didn’t stop them. Despite the resentment of Mobutu that was vocalised, many people internalised his prejudice, becoming vectors for intolerance. The interviewee continued: The attitude of the Kasaians didn’t help much either: they always want to be on a higher level than everyone else. They don’t want to be the accountant, they want to be the finance director of a big company, and especially here in Katanga where there are a lot of Kasaians. So it’s a question of interests and leadership.12 The population, once it was fragmented, could be turned against each other and became instruments of divisive and violent power and party to its politics. Consequently a process of political pillage accompanied the physical damage as the possibility of political cohabitation and compromise was destroyed under Mobutu’s watch.

32 Leadership versus population A question of interests and leadership Recurrent themes in accounts of the Kasai–Katanga conflict are the perception of inequality of treatment or opportunity, the oversight of violence and manipulation by Mobutu, and the hardening of group identities through experiences of exclusion and conflict. In Kasai, those displaced from Katanga swelled the ranks of the unemployed. In Mbujimayi, the capital of Eastern Kasai, international aid was mobilised to cope with the immediate food and medical requirements, but the economic situation was precarious and the town struggled to accommodate the influx of displaced people. A doctor who had returned from Katanga reported: When I came here I found a crisis situation in that many people were coming from Katanga to settle here and those people were in tents, all along the main road here, it was full of people sleeping there on the ground. We were in a humanitarian crisis. It has taken several years to come back to a normal situation as there were so many people without a place to stay. Of course families tried to help. I came in a crisis situation, but Miba was doing well, so it was able to treat all those people, even without them paying. When they came to the hospital we used to treat them for free.13 The conflict in Katanga exposes the political mechanisms of favouritism and marginalisation that underwrote Mobutu’s political approach and allowed him to extend his rule despite his dwindling power. It was not the only site of mass political disturbance, though. Between March 1993 and May 1996 up to 10,000 people were killed when the governor of north Kivu encouraged militias to target groups on the basis of their identity (Mamdani 2001). In 1981 Mobutu had revoked the citizenship of the Banyamulenge groups in Kivu on the basis that they were not autochthonous: they were regarded as Tutsi, and not originally from Congo as their ancestry could be traced to Rwanda. The revocation was reiterated in the early 1990s and again in the exclusionary policy of 1996, when Mobutu ordered everyone of Tutsi origin to leave Zaire or face death. This final act of aggression was a bid to gain favour with the ‘indigenous’ groups in the area by licensing violence against the Banyamulenge (Huggins 2010, 94). The strategy was divisive and ultimately flawed: the reaction – the uprising of the Banyamulenge and the ties forged with Tutsi groups in Rwanda – proved to be disastrous for Mobutu when the movement militarised and presented a united front against him.

Informalised state reach Violence and informalisation in Zaire interacted to reshape the relations between the leadership and the population and between sections of the

Leadership versus population 33 population. Through the normalisation of the use of violence, the pillages and the provincial conflicts demonstrated that people and property could be attacked with impunity by the state or by civilians. These episodes of violence altered Zaire’s development and security trajectory: the steady decline that had been in train since the 1970s was transformed into a precipitous fall through the sudden and practically total destruction of political and economic infrastructure and reserves. The violence manifested the increasing hostility between the leadership and the population and took place alongside more organised forms of resistance, including some political opposition that engaged directly with the state. Tshisekedi rallied political resistance and gained popularity in Kasai, but the rhetoric of géopolitique hindered his popularity outside his home region. The Catholic Church, the universities and a number of unions organised demonstrations of discontent through engagement with the hierarchy and strikes. February 1991 saw a three-day strike in Kinshasa; workers, civil servants and public service employees downed tools and demanded the resignation of the government (Renton et al. 2006, 156). A year later, in February 1992, the Catholic Church organised a ‘March of Hope’ in Kinshasa, in which a million people protested against Mobutu’s leadership. This complemented days of ‘dead town’ when the entire population went on strike. Opposition was voiced in other cities, including Kisangani where marches were met with state oppression and the incarceration and physical punishment of protesters (Palermo 1997, vol. 2, 1876). The impact of the strikes was limited as the majority of the population was unemployed, and the state was in any case unresponsive. For many people, there were considerable costs and few benefits from contact with the state. Dialogue had been suppressed for years and security forces were increasingly violent. Instead of continuing in the wreckage of the formal state or resisting it head-on, many people evaded the state and took further refuge in informal economic, social and political affiliations. This was not new, and MacGaffey, analysing what she terms the ‘real economy’ in Zaire in the late 1980s, identifies informalisation as being as much a political as an economic phenomenon as people evaded state control by operating outside formal structures; even before the pillages, the ‘real economy’ outstripped official GDP threefold (MacGaffey 1991, 11). Barratt Brown similarly argues that engagement in the second economy presented a challenge to the state (Barratt Brown 1996, 233). It was an established mechanism: in pre-colonial Africa and through the colonial era, exit had been a dominant response to oppressive rule. Herbst (2000, 88) writes: ‘While the period of violent protest against colonial rule was brief and snuffed out quickly by superior European firepower . . . Africans continued to subvert the state for many years by simply leaving.’ This mechanism of protest continued in the face of neocolonial rule with the added irony that Mobutu had contributed greatly to, and benefited from, the informalisation.

34 Leadership versus population Informalisation affected all areas of public life as formal institutions and the economy folded. Galloping inflation resulted from Mobutu’s financial management: the exchange rate had fallen from two Zaires to the dollar in 1967 to twenty-seven million in 1993 and inflation reached 9,800 per cent (Wrong 2001, 129). Many people took part in informalised quantitative easing; one woman told me: ‘In the time of Mobutu people made money in their houses, even false dollars. It was the politicians but not just the politicians, lots of people did it. It was everywhere, and that’s why money circulated so well.’ The false notes dealt with the financial constraints but rendered the economy useless and disorientated the function of cash and with it the rationality of work. An advocate explained: Mobutu put money in boxes to be distributed and that is why the women say there was a lot of money in circulation, but they don’t ask where it came from. So Mobutu’s people would distribute money liberally but at the same time people were not being paid to go to work. In 1994 Zaire was declared insolvent by the World Bank, which closed its representation. Mobutu introduced the New Zaire currency; one New Zaire was worth three million old Zaires and about a third of a US dollar. Much of the country shifted uneasily from the Zaire to the New Zaire, but Kasai refused and established an independent monetary zone that relied on the dollar. Across the country confidence in banks had been lost, and on street corners in commercial districts men sat with piles of Congolese currency on small tables and dollars in their pockets. Education: an unequal compromise The informalisation and economic instability had diverse repercussions in everyday life as the state discarded its responsibility and costs were passed down to the population. Bank of Zaire figures show government expenditures on social services decreasing from 17.5 per cent in 1972 to 0 per cent in 1992, while expenditure on the president rose from 28 per cent to 95 per cent (Reno 1998, 154). There had been a withdrawal from ‘unproductive’ sectors through the 1980s, in line with the dictates of the Structural Adjustment Programmes that were central to mainstream development programming. Bates argues that the fiscal tightening and generalised poverty that resulted from the adjustment shifted rulers’ priorities from longer-term wealth creation and taxation to the immediate returns of predation (Bates 2008). Western donors were further implicated in Zaire’s turmoil in that they had been funding services and suddenly withdrew at the end of the Cold War. Faced with the long-term decline in government investment and the collapse of foreign funding, social services were subject to an unguided process of informalisation. This can be explored through the decline of education, a decline that was replicated across all areas of social service provision.

Leadership versus population 35 The education sector had grown rapidly in the immediate postindependence era but had been neglected from the 1970s (Ekwa 2004). A series of teachers’ strikes at the beginning of the 1990s led to a nationwide acceptance that parents should pay a ‘prime’, a charge made by the school to cover running costs, including teachers’ salaries. From the early 1990s schools operated irregularly as strikes were common and the start of the school year was often delayed. A teacher explained: For the primary schools there are school fees and those are fixed at a national level. The people in the province then arrange their own price. But there’s another thing: since the 1990s the parents have also taken charge of the teachers. There are the running costs and the parents are charged for the teachers’ salaries as the state doesn’t pay them. It’s as if the state schools have become private schools. With regard to the financial cost that the informalisation exacted on the population, he elaborated: In the downtown area there, where the people are poor, it can be $1 per month, that’s in the schools in poor areas. In the schools that are a bit more advanced it can be $5 per month, and in the big name schools it’s $10 or $15 per month. If you’ve got five children it gets complicated, but the Congolese have the capacity to adapt.14 The capacity to adapt displaced overt resistance to the state, as protest had proved ineffective and dangerous but involved no mitigation of the situation. Some schools were supported by non-state entities, particularly churches, which benefited from networks and contacts outside the country that provided resources. One sacristan explained the differences in the church-run schools: The teachers are paid by the state, but they are not paid, so the parents pay each month. It’s the same system as the official schools, but in the Catholic schools there’s a bit of infrastructure and the buildings are large and clean. The official schools are not run by priests and don’t have the links to give the schools something when it is needed. For example, here the school is run by Salesians [monks], and they can give a bit of money if something comes up, but the official schools depend directly on the state. We can get a bit of cash here and there, and in addition the parents have more confidence in the priests. Even when the running expenses could be covered, the physical infrastructure and reserves crumbled over time, so the costs rose while the quality of educational facilities fell. The sacristan continued:

36 Leadership versus population There was a meeting with the parents because there had been a strike, and it was agreed that the parents should pay each month, in addition to the school fees that they were already paying. When that started in the Catholic schools the official schools put in place the same system. Last year there was a strike at the beginning of the school year because the Coordination wanted the state to pay; since the prime was introduced the state has not paid the teachers. There was a strike, but the state didn’t respond and now we’re facing the same problem of whether the state will pay. If the parents continue to pay the prime it will be alright but if not there will be strikes like last year.15 The strikes continued, despite (or because of) the lack of reaction from the leadership, and dissatisfaction with the state was transferred to a tension between the teachers and the parents. The situation was aggravated by the fact that the generalised crisis meant that there was increasing unemployment alongside greater demands on parents to pay for their children’s education. The upshot was that the expense of schooling was crippling for many parents but did not provide a reasonable salary for the teachers and did not support a system that could educate the children. As parents and teachers became embroiled in insolvency, they were incorporated into divisive politics that found pervasive expression in what was commonly referred to as ‘mistrust’. A school inspector in Kisangani considered the options available to parents and the impact of the squeeze: People have no salary, but they have to work and when teachers are there the parents have to find money. But where can they find money? We have to steal – those who are clerks, we are stealing. So we are selfish, and each one wants to help his own family. Is it possible to go forward with this? Bribery, corruption takes place. A teacher who has no way of living and you ask him to be there from 7 until 12.30 in the morning and from 1 until 5.30 in the afternoon – we have two shifts here – do you think that that man who isn’t motivated will give you whatever you want? I don’t think so! And what kind of schooling are we doing? Are we following the state’s needs? Who is lying to whom? Jesus said, ‘Love children.’ Are you going to get to heaven like this? I don’t think so! We’re lying to the children, even the youngest children.16 The economic and social costs of underfunded, poor quality education were passed around amongst people who did not have the economic means to redeem the situation. The informalisation of basic services salvaged something for some, but could provide only for a sub-standard structure and established no mechanism for including those who could not pay. Universities perform a different social role, catering to a smaller and more privileged group, but they too were rendered untenable by informalisation.

Leadership versus population 37 Universities had experienced considerable prestige in the early independence years, but in the 1990s they faced a crisis similar to that which affected schools, as the fees charged to the students were not enough to cover the deficit left by the state. One professor recorded: The state gave some money until 1990. At independence the budget was substantial, but then we had problems with the Structural Adjustment Programmes and the World Bank demanded a reduction in the social budget. Education went down to less than 2 per cent and then 0.5 per cent of the budget, and that was supposed to pay for all the professors and infrastructure. In a bid to cover costs, universities admitted more students, irrespective of qualifications, and eroded further the possibility of training a competent professional cadre. As with school education, an accommodation was found between teaching staff and the parents that satisfied neither party and had no costs for the state. The professor continued: The professors said to the parents: if you want this university to continue, you’re going to have to contribute, and they agreed to contribute and until now the parents pay for the students. Young people don’t have money themselves so it’s the parents who pay, and that’s continued until now. But what they pay is nothing in comparison to the running costs of the university. It’s around $100 per year, but what can you do with $100 to make the university function?17 The informalisation of the education sector provides an example of how the conflict between the leadership and the population found diverse and far-reaching expression that continually reinforced the divergence of interests and differences in power. The ways in which the people accommodated the malaise led to their further economic decline and weakened their ability to confront the state or ameliorate their situation. By cooperating with school staff in arranging and perpetuating the informalisation, the population became integral to the mechanisms that weakened them further by establishing sub-standard provision and simultaneously impoverishing them by imposing higher costs. The informal activities played into the hands of the state by limiting protest: by agreeing to pay for public-sector schooling, parents dampened their political struggle and rendered the teachers’ strikes illogical.

Global security, exclusion and differential costs Within international relations theory, debate between realists and liberals at the end of the Cold War centred on whether there was continuity or change

38 Leadership versus population in the international structure of states (Baylis 2001, 271). Both schools of thought, though, were concerned with whether there was more or less chance of war between powerful states, rather than with the possibility that less powerful countries posed a threat to others or were themselves threatened. In the early 1990s concerns about the threats from underdevelopment and terrorism had yet to taint the confidence of the neoliberal position, and interventions in countries of strategic importance took place alongside the withdrawal of aid from countries that were not. Liberal institutionalism proposed that liberal values contribute to a more peaceful world, moving global security beyond the conventional self-help world perceived by the realists. This position advantaged northern countries as it entailed no examination of how the status quo had come about: in practice liberalism for powerful states was not about moving beyond self-help so much as using its discourse to help themselves. In the political realm, these values were driven by the USA’s neoliberal agenda. In his 1994 State of the Union speech, Bill Clinton pulled together political and economic elements of security in asserting: ‘The best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere. Democracies don’t attack each other, they make better trading partners and partners in diplomacy.’ Given the widespread consensus amongst security theorists tying the notion of security to ‘freedom from threats to core values’ (Baylis 2001, 254), the assumption that one set of core values had ‘won’ in global terms was consistent with the assertion that security was a common concern. Clinton went on to propose that ‘we must also do more to support democratic renewal and human rights and sustainable development all around the world’. Development policy-making was in the hands of the donors of the global north, whose power was reflected in their dominance over decision-making in the international financial institutions, as well as over multilateral and bilateral funding (Thomas 2001, 171–2). The loud discourse of global security was charismatic, fuelled by the eschatology epitomised by Fukuyama’s work on the ‘End of History’ (Fukuyama 1992). Derrida, critiquing Fukuyama’s assessment that the end of history had been achieved, observed that ‘no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth’ (Derrida 1994). In Zaire, the state and population were not incidentally insecure: the ways in which the neoliberal discourses of global security gained ascendance aggravated their vulnerability. Democracy was promoted at a time that suited the patrons, irrespective of the political conditions or preferences in Zaire, and it stoked Mobutu’s aggression. The decline in strategic significance of African countries and the abandonment of populations along with their leaders devastated Zaire’s unsteady economic and political situation. What appeared liberal and peaceful in the north was intertwined with oppression and violence in Zaire, as the international isolation of Mobutu, the destitution

Leadership versus population 39 of the population and the impossibility of organised resistance were key factors behind the pillages and provincial conflict of the early 1990s. The political economy forged through the Cold War, including the installation of the dictatorship and the Structural Adjustment Programmes, which had combined to cut back funding of social services, had shaped not only the Zairian economy but also the ability of people to cope with the predation of the leadership. When the political situation gave way, it was not to revolution or to integration of Zaire’s wealth into the globalised economy but to pillage and increased fragmentation. The frustration conveyed through violence was catastrophically disorganised and fed back into Mobutu’s manipulative forms of power, but so too did the accommodation that was found to keep the vestiges of an education system running. The political outcome was not a coherent voice of protest but informalisation and antagonism that normalised the use of violence in all parts of life. Initially used to crush secession or protect against coups, direct force became a tool to eliminate political opposition, economic competitors and social groups that were perceived as menacing or were simply unwanted. The violence of the pillage and dynamics of géopolitique brought everyone down, but some more so than others. It was functional for Mobutu as it enabled him to salvage what he could of his economic and political advantage. As one resident of Kisangani put it: ‘There was a National Sovereign Conference, and that was blocked. In the end he stayed in power until day X. He’s kept power until now – except that he’s died!’ Despite his relative power vis-à-vis the population, though, Mobutu saw his own security and that of the state decline, as he corroded the monopoly on the use of force. Mobutu’s stranglehold meant that the population was faced with an extremely limited array of choices, and people contributed to the processes that threatened them. The respondent’s comment that teachers and parents were ‘lying to the children’ is telling of the self-destructive forms of coping that were found. The leadership and the population entered a counterproductive collaboration in the pillages and regional violence. Both parties, in different ways, contributed to an accelerated informalisation of the state and implicated themselves in the destruction of physical infrastructure and trust, but neither profited from it beyond the short term. The pillages and the Kasai–Katanga conflict took place in non-war conditions and increased the insecurity experienced by the population, alienating and impoverishing people and underscoring ethnic divisions within the country. They interacted with the processes of informalisation to nurture the conditions and patterns for decentralised violence. The reach of violence spread: during the pillages, goods were violently redistributed; the Kasaian– Katangan conflict saw access to political and economic power being violently redistributed. The occupation, later in the decade, by Rwanda and Uganda was an extension of this pattern as first physical, then political, goods are secured by violence and finally political machinery. The established dynamics of local conflict would later act as drivers for national and regional violence

40 Leadership versus population (Autesserre 2010, 57). In 1998 the imposition of an informal ‘state’ run by Rwanda and Uganda and entailing an entire administrative structure commanding a third of the territory would be the ultimate expression of violence and informality.

3

Rich in war Conflict over Congo’s political and economic resources

As I was travelling from the airport to my lodgings in Lubumbashi in August 2006, my host was indicating the drabness of the city and explaining the wealth of Congo. This is the second city of probably the most mineral-rich country in the world and the capital of the politically prominent province of Katanga. She said, ‘Here we are rich in everything: in gold, in diamonds. We are rich in war.’ What does this mean? There is a lot of it, but something else too: that war is a resource, something that can be invested in the pursuit of power. ‘Rich in war’ suggests an advantage of the armed over the unarmed, those who use violence and those who do not or cannot. I am not using the term ‘rich in war’ to suggest that Congo is an inevitably violent place, or to reify the war, presenting it as a natural phenomenon rather than the result of decisions taken by human beings. I am suggesting the opposite: that processes of using violence to gain power and applying value to resources are human ones. The persistence of violence in the country, from the time of King Leopold onwards, indicates that there are conditions that support, sustain and reward violence, and few mechanisms for limiting it. Unscrupulous kings and kleptocrats exist in other countries but their actions have rarely involved the scale of violence used in Congo. Armed force is a consistent motif in Congolese politics, leading one observer to note that no crisis has ever been resolved through negotiation and all have necessitated the use of force (Ngasha 2002, 83–8). The international conflict over Zaire’s political and economic resources intensified through the 1990s as violence and informalisation opened opportunities for a host of predators. A combination of Zairian, regional and international priorities converged in the violent removal of Mobutu. Rwanda and Uganda subsequently re-invaded, laying claim to the resources of eastern Congo. The previous chapter has explored the conflict between the leadership and the population. The First War, starting in 1996, and the Second War, starting in 1998, follow a different model: both were presented by the belligerents and many observers as being popular insurrections against the leadership but both were heavily supported and directed from outside the country. Some authors have elided these two episodes and refer simply to ‘the war of aggression’ (Mantuba-Ngoma 2002).

42 Rich in war The two wars inflicted heavy tolls on the civilian population and took place at the time of innovation in northern donor discourse on development and security. The UNDP’s publication of its Human Development Report in 1994 was seminal in defining the parameters of human security, and the notion quickly gained currency with northern donors. It was consistent with the donor inclination towards state avoidance at a time when the market was central to development programming, and in Zaire there was practically no bilateral or multilateral assistance during the 1990s. The end of the Cold War had brought a major national security concern to Zaire: there was no longer any guarantee that the country would not be invaded or would receive defensive military support from its patrons if it were. Zaire had already been abandoned; then it was attacked.

The First War: ‘the war of liberation’ Revolutions and invasions are rare in Africa, and the march led by Laurent Kabila from Goma to Kinshasa, starting at the end of 1996, is widely perceived in Congo as either or both. It was revolutionary in that it overturned an apparently unshakeable leader and answered the political demands and aspirations of millions of Zairians. It was an invasion to the extent that it was coordinated by Rwanda and Uganda. Kabila headed the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL),1 a militia which was, in his own words, ‘a conglomeration of adventurers and opportunists’ (Mantuba-Ngoma 2002, 30). Within Zaire, discontent with Mobutu’s rule provided thousands of willing recruits for the force, and the Congolese contingent of the AFDL was united around his removal. The organisation of violence, though, came from outside: Kabila was Zairian but had been living in Tanzania and headed a predominantly Rwandan force. The Rwandans’ interest in joining the AFDL lay in attacking the vestiges of the former Rwandan government and the Interahamwe fighters who had led the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Now reorganised under the banner of the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda (ALiR), these groups had been encamped in eastern Zaire since 1994, when they had run before the incoming Rwandan Patriotic Forces (RPF), and were carrying out attacks on both sides of the border. These domestic and regional agendas married with a less specific but powerful set of northern interests. Mobutu had been isolated internationally but retained power in Zaire. Politically, he was a remnant of the Cold War order, and at the time of the AFDL’s formation many donors were asserting optimism about a new generation of African rulers. In 1997 President Museveni of Uganda was rated by northern donors as a reformer, and President Kagame of Rwanda had established his international standing by leading the RPF from strongholds in Uganda to capture Kigali and halt the genocide. No international players moved to back the Zairian president and many supported the AFDL against him (Fairhead 2000; Minani Bihuzo

Rich in war 43 2008, 47–8). The US Information Agency declared on 16 June 1997 that the USA had supported Kabila’s quest for power (Mantuba-Ngoma 2002, 13–15). War effort: fending for the army A key domestic element to Kabila’s success rested on the collaboration he established with the army. An interviewee in Kisangani stated: ‘When the rebellion came in 1996, many of the soldiers changed sides and went with the rebellion – and that’s why it was so quick. When Kabila came, the soldiers started getting $100 per month, which they never got under Mobutu.’ Kabila was also able to recruit from groups of civilians who had been specifically targeted by Mobutu, including many Kasaians who had been expelled from Katanga (Willame 1997, 136). Predation by Mobutu’s forces was a common experience for much of the population and removal of the dictatorship was a rallying cry in Zaire. As far as Kabila’s popular appeal was concerned, a professor in Kisangani observed: [Kabila] was welcomed as a liberator in Kinshasa – everyone had had enough of Mobutu. People weren’t paid, parents had to pay for their children to go to school, civil servants had a ridiculous salary practically amounting to one bottle of beer. The soldiers were also badly paid and abandoned, and there were different groups in the army. There were some soldiers who were exclusively in the service of Mobutu, and the others were abandoned. Kabila found a population that was very dissatisfied, completely poverty stricken, and sometimes even struggling to survive.2 The swiftness of the AFDL’s progress across the country attests both to Kabila’s support and to the decrepitude of Mobutu’s security forces: the Zairian army put up practically no fight and were routed in the path of the AFDL, which quickly seized control of strategic towns and entered Kinshasa in May 1997. Thousands of Rwandan and Ugandan as well as Zairian children and teenagers had joined the ranks of the AFDL. Initially revered as liberators in Kinshasa, these young soldiers, known as ‘kadogos’ (a corruption of the Swahili for ‘little ones’), were bold and largely untrained. A civil servant in Kisangani told me: [One] sort of violence that we saw was that perpetrated against the old supporters of Mobutu. It was the army – there were a lot of violations of human rights. For example, if they accused you of witchcraft they’d kill you with no hearing. There were the kadogos here and they’d do anything. If there’s a kadogo in the neighbourhood and he accuses you of witchcraft, that’s it: you’re battered to death. The old collaborators of the 2nd Republic were harassed and accused of being Mobutuists.

44 Rich in war They’d put a rope around your stomach and beat you with truncheons – there were many people killed like that.3 The removal of Mobutu was followed by some significant accomplishments for the parties supporting the military offensive and, under the new leadership, fear of the army diminished appreciably. A man in a village in Oriental Province reported: When Kabila was in Kinshasa, the population lived in harmony and there was a bit of security. People ate three times a day like in foreign countries. There was economic stability and a better economic situation. When Kabila was in power there was total freedom, no troubles, no arbitrary arrests, the soldiers were paid regularly, and there was no need to carry your ID card.4 The sentiment of support for Kabila was expressed in numerous interviews, particularly in and around Kisangani. Another rural teacher remembered: In 1997 when Kabila came, people didn’t know there was a rebellion. Mobutu was a dictator and didn’t take care of the people. The first army of Kabila was the population. That’s why Papa Kabila took power so quickly . . . People ate well, money circulated, there was no devaluation of the currency. Transport was very good and you were not stopped by the military – nearly everywhere.5 The general enthusiasm surrounding Kabila’s entrance was mitigated by a resentment of the sustenance his entourage demanded, and there was a contradiction between Kabila’s rhetoric of liberation and the pillage by which his rule was funded (Turner 2007, 126). In Mbujimayi, reports of Kabila are less favourable: people in Kasai had found a way of operating under Mobutu, and Kabila was politically disorganised and did not have strong links with the region. Moreover, Mbujimayi is the home region of Etienne Tshisekedi, who was sidelined by Kabila. Tshisekedi had led a peaceful opposition and Kabila headed a force that was united by violence. Kabila and Tshisekedi met for the first time in May 1998 and, giving a press conference, Tshisekedi underlined the tactical convenience of his alliance with the AFDL (de Villers and Willame 1999, 211–12). Tshisekedi’s popularity continued through 1998, with a survey showing Kabila and Tshisekedi enjoying comparable popularity overall but with stark regional differences: the UDPS had 61 per cent support as against the AFDL’s 4 per cent in Mbujimayi, and 7 per cent as against 75 per cent in Lubumbashi (de Villers and Willame 1999, 208–9). The AFDL’s march across the country was bank-rolled by tax from companies, and Mbujimayi, as the key diamond-mining area and home to the national company Miba, sustained the majority of the war effort. There

Rich in war 45 were other costs too, many of which fell on the civilians who provided vehicles and accommodation for Kabila’s soldiers. A hotelier in the town explained: [The war] affected our management because there was an embargo and people couldn’t come here any more. It was difficult to travel between provinces and people who were in the zones that were occupied by the Mzee [Laurent Kabila]6 were not able to come here. Added to that, people working for international organisations were scared to come here, so for various reasons there was a loss of earnings for us as the flow of customers went down. In addition to the loss of clientele, there were costs involved in supporting the forces themselves. The hotelier continued: When the Mzee came into the town practically all the hotels were taken by the military and were occupied for nearly a year. We were never paid for that time, we’ve written and written but we’ve never had any response. The state is our biggest client but it’s a bit vague, it’s our biggest client but it never pays. It doesn’t help to build us up, it just helps to destroy us.7 The ‘war effort’ took over from ‘fending for yourself’ as the method by which the population subsidised the state, but the dynamic was the same: civilians were serving the army. In already straitened circumstances, civilian infrastructure was further stretched to meet military demands. I visited a small factory in Mbujimayi where, since 1990, there had been a modest production line bagging sugar solution for medical purposes. The sixty-nine staff, as elsewhere, were not paid regularly. An employee at the factory recalled: The war impacted on us as we lost two vehicles, one taken by Mobutu’s forces as they fled and the other one that was taken as part of the War Effort and went up to Kabinda. We had a huge order from the AFDL when they came through, they demanded $111,800 worth of products, but that was never paid for. There were lots of patients at that time, lots of diseases. But we were never paid, and add that to the cost of the two vehicles and you can see how companies are worn down.8 Another interviewee, who worked in a drinks factory in Mbujimayi, reflected on the impact of the first war on the town: There was no war in town, but there were soldiers here and they took one of our lorries to transport the troops and it got bombed. The war came as far as Kabinda and the troops requisitioned the lorry by force

46 Rich in war and that’s how we lost that vehicle . . . The war affected the whole economy, it was everywhere, because everything went towards the War Effort, and that had inevitable consequences. People didn’t have money, the personnel was not paid, so no one had any purchasing power. There were problems with the train too, and that meant we became an enclave, even to bring things from [the neighbouring province of] Kananga we had to use the plane and that increased costs.9 The vulnerability and desperation of the population had been key to Kabila’s ability to mobilise troops, but it also limited the financial support that could be rendered as the war expenses mounted. ‘It was only hope that changed,’ one interviewee assessed, but the hope had concrete manifestations; he continued: ‘When Kabila was in power, people started to work without pay – it was just the goodwill of the people. People worked with hope – the hope that life would change. But the political actors didn’t listen.’ The hope that was vested in Kabila had palpable political outcomes internationally too. From outside the country, mining companies signed deals on concessions, referred to by Ross as ‘booty futures’, as Kabila sold companies he did not yet control (Ross 2002, 8). This demonstrated foreign confidence in Kabila’s business acumen and political inclination, and framed the fall of Mobutu as a triumph of market-led development and the ‘annihilation of the nation-state’ (Renton et al. 2006, 204). It also tied the companies (and to some extent the countries in which they were based) into the ‘hope’ of Kabila’s victory and the violence it involved. Military victory and coalition break-up A Congolese civil servant in Kisangani asserted: ‘Revolutions are a very rare phenomenon. There’s no single entity of “the population”. There was strong resistance [to Mobutu] and demonstrations, but you can’t call it a revolution.’ He went on to map the coalition: Kabila took power with the support of the Rwandans, Burundians, Ugandans and Eritreans. Also the Americans and the British. It was a period when he had Rwandan support, especially from the Tutsi regime in Kigali. We knew about the violence – the Hutus who were fleeing the events of 1994 were accused of having massacred the Tutsis. The international community wanted to confront that, but then they pursued another genocide here in the camps of Tingi-Tingi and Mbandaka. The Hutus were condemned and there were problems of massacres of Hutus in the east and up to Mbandaka. They were massacred by the Tutsis who supported the AFDL. The totalising discourse of two ethnic groups, Tutsi and Hutu, provided the vectors by which the politics of Rwanda were transferred to Zaire, and the

Rich in war 47 terms ‘genocide’ and ‘genocidaires’ (those who commit genocide) had gained currency in the region after the 1994 holocaust in Rwanda. In the context of the war in Zaire, though, the Tutsi label was attached not to the victims of genocide but to the political and military elite in Rwanda and Uganda, and these anglophone groups were perceived by many in Zaire to be linked with the USA and UK, and aggressive power. Up to 180,000 people associated with the former Rwandan regime and Interahamwe, groups that were identified as being predominantly Hutu, were killed by the AFDL during the First War (Reyntjens 1999; Stearns 2011, 131–6). The combined forces of the AFDL attacked and disbanded the camps of the exiled Rwandans and forced their inhabitants deeper into the forest, where no record was kept of the violence against them. On his arrival in Kinshasa, Kabila blocked a UN investigation into the deaths, so the plight of these people fell beyond domestic or international attention. The interviewee continued: Inside the country, people were tired of thirty years of dictatorship. When we saw Kabila backed by Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi, we closed our eyes – it wasn’t seen as an act of oppression. Kabila was seen as a man of providence, the one who toppled Mobutu. Kabila came with his friends from Rwanda and Burundi . . . In reality it was a problem of joining their interests to fight Mobutu. He needed civil support, financial support and technical support, which he got from the Americans and the British – the Anglo Saxons.10 The Anglo Saxons used the Rwandans for that, and in return Kabila promised a number of things.11 The account perceives the interplay of interests and expected returns that culminated in the AFDL’s military victory in Kinshasa. Kabila appointed himself president and renamed the country the Democratic Republic of Congo. He removed Mobutu’s representatives – known as ‘dinosaurs’ – and installed his own supporters in positions of military and political power. Despite the jingoism, the AFDL’s victory created losers as well as winners: ‘Good times for some are bad times for others, and bad times for some are good times for others,’ a woman told me, recounting how the change in regime – in her words, ‘the Rwandans’ – had dislodged her from full-time paid employment with a Kuwaiti communications company to a tiny snack stall on the pavement in competition with thousands of other street vendors. Initially, Kabila’s administration brought a decrease in harassment and people could go to market and travel freely, although these changes were experienced to varying degrees across the country. According to a survey carried out in Kinshasa in April 1998, the most marked change from 17 May 1997 was the improved security of people and their goods (43 per cent of responses), with the departure of Mobutu coming a poor second with 15 per cent of responses (de Villers and Willame 1999, 109). In the provinces, 93 per cent of respondents in Lubumbashi agreed that security had

48 Rich in war ameliorated in their part of town, as against 40 per cent in Mbujimayi and 51 per cent in Kisangani. Despite Kabila’s military capacity to take Kinshasa, he was not able to establish domestic security or a political agenda. He had little professional preparation for politics and did not have the patrimonial web of support that could make his rule credible. He attempted to profit from his national support base through the consolidation and promotion of three domestic networks: the ‘Katanga network’ that included familial and ethnic-based support, who took positions in the army, police and Central Bank administration; the ‘Kasai network’, taking key positions in the administration; and a third group formed of influential individuals from Kinshasa (Putzel et al. 2008, 26). His contacts, though, did not constitute a robust political coterie, and relying on popular support was an uncertain strategy as there was no mechanism for institutionalising it: the Democratic Republic of Congo had not elected its leader. A politician in Mbujimayi recalled the take-over of power: Mobutu was a president who was strong and intelligent and who started well. But he got drunk on success and in the 1970s he tore up the economy and became a real dictator. If you think about it now, in 1967 Congo had a gross national product that was higher than Canada’s – that’s just 40 years ago. People were coming from South Africa for medical treatment here. The glorious past is a recurrent motif in the older generation’s accounts of history and is rendered all the more dramatic by the speed of the decline. The interviewee continued: But Mobutu asphyxiated the country and when Kabila the Mzee came in, it was crazy and joyful, and he got rid of Mobutu but he was not a man to govern. People say he had the courage of a dog. The policy of the AFDL was to send people a couple of days in advance to warn of the arrival and Mobutu’s army fled. Kabila took power but he came with a kind of Marxist ideology that dated from the 1960s. He didn’t build up any relationships with other powers and had a Lone Ranger way about him. He thought he could continue without the help of others, but he couldn’t achieve anything like that.12 The AFDL’s rhetoric was of democratisation, federalism and good governance, but even before Kabila reached Kinshasa there was restiveness with his approach from regional power brokers. Kabila was not the Rwandan leadership’s first-choice candidate for president; Rwanda backed Azarias Ruberwa (who was to become the Rcd’s political leader and vice-president in the Transitional Government and candidate in the presidential elections of 2006). Whatever ephemeral calm had been achieved in Congo did not take

Rich in war 49 account of two issues. One is that Kabila had taken the country by force, meaning that his agenda prevailed for as long as he was the strongest party. His entry had seen the militarisation of swathes of the country, but he did not have the authority or infrastructure to control the violence. The second problem was related: Kabila was sponsored to lead the AFDL, and his sponsors were stronger than he was. The fact that Kabila was assisted by Rwanda is acknowledged in Congo, but the Rwandans were seen to detract from his victory rather than to have contributed positively to it. The interviewee’s comment above that ‘we closed our eyes’ was echoed by another interviewee in Kisangani: ‘People knew that Mobutu had made them suffer, and even though Kabila brought foreigners with him, he was welcomed.’ An interviewee in Lubumbashi considered the country’s fortunes: The population of course welcomed him here, as everywhere else, because they had had enough of Mobutu. In 1997 a professor in the university was getting three million New Zaires. It sounds like a lot, but it could buy only about 3⁄4kg of beef. Everyone was against Mobutu. There was no banking system – the governor would put the money in the bank and we’d go and pick it up, but then the account ran dry and the professors and the civil servants were chased out of the bank. The ubiquity of fake money in the mid-1990s had fuelled inflation and randomised the value of banknotes and the exchange rate. The interviewee continued: When Kabila came he changed the currency. We didn’t have the New Zaire any more but changed to the Congolese Franc. It’s the same song: at the start it was very strong, but we’ve seen the exchange rate diminish. But anyway the prices came down and people started to eat well. I don’t know if you know there’s a kind of fish called ‘Thomson’, it comes in a tin and it’s the fish that’s eaten most here. It was a luxury item before, but suddenly everyone could afford it – they called it ‘Uhuru’ which means freedom. The change in currency notwithstanding, there was no return to productive activity. Kabila, like Mobutu, claimed a nationalist agenda particularly with regard to resource management. It inspired collaboration amongst much of the population, and many interviewees reported that people worked although they were not being paid or that they altered the prices of goods in goodwill gestures. Nationalism was a myth in which some Congolese people, including Kabila, invested. Kabila’s avowed nationalism pulled apart the hopes of the regional and international allies whose involvement was prompted at least in part by their interest in the country’s mineral resources. The interviewee continued:

50 Rich in war In the first six months that Kabila was here the production didn’t improve, in fact it went down because Kabila was diabolised by the international community on account of the Hutus who were killed in the east by the AFDL and he was considered a genocidaire. Don’t forget that it’s the same international community who had cut off aid with this massacre by Mobutu in Lubumbashi. So there was no fresh capital, and they couldn’t replace anything if they didn’t have any money. Then the war came and the government started to take a third of people’s salary for the War Effort, and the people who saw Kabila as a liberator started to wonder about him and didn’t really know what to do . . . What we saw with Kabila was a dream of prosperity that was immediately eclipsed and there was a continuation of the crisis.13 The ‘dream of prosperity’ referred to the enduring question of who should control the country’s mineral wealth and how. The coalition that had brought Kabila to power had little internal cohesion and no common purpose once Mobutu had been deposed, and the conflict over political and economic resources divided them. Another interviewee concurred: Kabila was brought here in triumph. People were shouting, ‘Forward march!’ and he took the whole country from the hands of the dictator. He alleviated the situation, but after that things became complicated because of his alliances. He wanted to restore order, but to make omelettes you have to break eggs. There were people who were still in favour of Mobutu. There was a kind of hope, and there was a big party after he had been in power for one year, then immediately afterwards he started to have problems.14 Growing antagonism and suspicion between Kabila and his Rwandan sponsors fuelled popular resentment of Rwanda in Congo, so not only did Rwanda fail to neutralise the perceived threat posed by the former regime, but it destabilised the situation further. A civil servant in Kisangani elaborated: Then [Kabila] quarrelled with his own friends – Rwanda, Uganda, and the Anglo Saxons via Rwanda wanted to exploit the minerals here. When he got to Kinshasa, he reviewed the mineral concessions, and that’s what made them angry – enough to break up the coalition. Why the change of face? Inside the country, when he had taken power, the political parties and the people demanded that he get rid of the Rwandans – they [the Congolese] had supported the AFDL, not the foreigners. They demanded that he get rid of the people who had supported him. Kabila told the Rwandans to leave because of the pressure from inside the country, which wouldn’t accept the Rwandans. Kabila had to choose between them and he chose the homeland.15

Rich in war 51 Kabila appealed strongly to Congolese tradition and was hailed, particularly in the east of Congo, as a leader who defied the northern powers (Minani Bihuzo 2008, 58). In October 1997, the government announced the end of its cooperation with national and international aid organisations on the basis that development was the responsibility of the state and all assistance should be managed through state organs (de Villers and Willame 1999, 146). This alienated the international NGOs that were working in the country, many with emergency mandates, and raised suspicions against him, diminishing the explicit and implicit northern support that Kabila had received for his part in toppling Mobutu.

The Second War: ‘the war of occupation’ A year after Kabila took Kinshasa, the crisis pressed him to choose between the popular support he had mustered domestically and the military support that he received from neighbouring countries, which were enjoying the favour of northern donors. The groups who had brought him to power, presented in the popular discourse as ‘Tutsis’ (which included the kadogos), and who held rank in the army and elsewhere, were widely resented in Congo. Nationalist in his approach, Kabila expelled the Rwandans and Ugandans from the upper army ranks in July 1998, turning the force of the regional coalition against himself. Kabila’s former backers in Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi regrouped and backed the Congolese Rally for Democracy (Rcd) in the Second Congo War, which started on 2 August 1998. Inspired by the ease with which Mobutu had fallen, and faced with the prospect of a second long march across the country, the Rwandan army instead landed a plane of soldiers in Kitona on the Atlantic coast, cut the hydro-electric power supply from the Inga dam and made an unsuccessful attempt to take Kinshasa (Longman 2002, 139; Minani Bihuzo 2008, 49). This Rwandan military error aggravated the already tense relations between Congo and its eastern neighbours and committed both sides to a long war. Soon after the start of hostilities, altercations within the Rcd led to a split resulting in the Rwandan-supported Rcd-Goma and the Ugandan-supported Rcd-Kisangani, and to the formation of the Ugandan-backed Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC). The MLC was headed by Jean-Pierre Bemba (who would later contest the 2006 presidential elections with Joseph Kabila). The combined occupying forces established a front line extending from Mbandaka, through Kasai and to Pweto (Reyntjens 2005, 591). A third, less significant, force formed north of Kinshasa in February 1999 under the banner of the Union of Republican Nationalists for Liberation. Kabila, having drawn fire, used the war to reinforce his nationalistic agenda by designating Tutsis as the enemy (Mantuba-Ngoma 2002, 21–2). The anti-Tutsi rhetoric found appeal in Congo on account of the violence committed by the invading troops. The Rwandan involvement during the

52 Rich in war First War in the massacres of hundreds of thousands of people assumed guilty of involvement in the 1994 genocide had been widely seen in Congo as the massacre of Hutus by Tutsis. This took on weighty significance as the ‘Tutsi empire’ was perceived to be spreading down from Uganda through Rwanda to absorb Congo. The identification of small, politically contentious Tutsi groups in Congo led the majority of Congolese people to sympathise or identify with the Hutu groups, perceived as the victims of Tutsi aggression and of neglect by northern powers. The Second War involved fourteen parties in the fighting,16 including the armies of six neighbouring countries, with Rwanda and Uganda as chief protagonists; Rwanda committed 25,000 troops and Uganda twice as many (Itindi 2002, 148; Mutabusha 2002, 56). Again claiming that the former Rwandan regime and Interahamwe threatened Rwanda’s western border, Rwanda invaded Congo, and this time violently established a zone of political and economic influence in the east of Congo under the control of its proxy, the Rcd. Uganda laid claim to the area to the north of that occupied by Rwanda. An interviewee in Oriental Province commented: The population was very sad. The objectives of the AFDL had not been realised. The security situation was worse than under Mobutu: there was total insecurity. Everyone ran to the bush, they took what they could but they didn’t have much. In the town they have a fridge and whatever else, but here you take your bag and clothes and go.17 The Rcd, like the AFDL, formed in Goma and provided an umbrella for a hotchpotch of agendas. Kabila had used the discourse of liberation, and this was adopted by the Rcd too. The ‘liberation’ now was from Kabila, whom the Rcd presented in much the same terms as Mobutu had been presented by the AFDL: corrupt, nepotistic and dictatorial. As there had been scant political or economic progress under Kabila, these were charges that were accepted by some in Congo. The Rcd’s propaganda spoke particularly to the discontent amongst the Banyamulenge, the Tutsi groups in the Kivus who had been disenfranchised by Mobutu. Kabila had not dealt constructively with their citizenship claims, and his purge of the army that sparked the Second War indicated a lack of sympathy with their cause. As antagonism between Kinshasa and Rwanda intensified, so too did the salience of the fault line between Tutsis and Hutus. At the same time, though, the groups were unclear: the ‘Tutsis’ expelled by Kabila were Rwandan and Ugandan elite military cadres, but also Congolese people with Tutsi names. In Kinshasa, hundreds of people who ‘looked’ Tutsi were persecuted, deepening the significance of the discourse and the antipathy between groups. One woman, recounting her own part in the attacks in the capital, described with self-conscious amusement how anyone with a long nose and a large backside was targeted. Similarly, the label ‘Hutu’, often used interchangeably with ‘Interahamwe’

Rich in war 53 and also to refer to the ousted Rwandan regime who were cited by Rwanda as a security concern, became increasingly blurred. The groups were initially Rwandan and had been mobilised around a Hutu identity, but had splintered during the First War and re-formed as ALiR I in North Kivu and ALiR II in South Kivu. They later merged into the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), which formed in 2000 and drew support from Hutu groups in Kinshasa. Many Congolese recruits joined the force, and the military persuasion of factions within the force varied, with around half fighting alongside the Congolese army, whilst others opposed it. The Hutu tag continued to be applied to the FDLR and aligned militias, but the changing composition of the groups meant that the term did not signify a particular history or set of interests. The Rcd’s manifesto was revolutionary; it was opposing an inauspicious government and there was no chance of ever having to honour promises. Its claimed objectives were to end the dictatorship and promote the processes of democratisation and national reconstruction alongside a programme of national, subregional and continental security (Mantuba-Ngoma 2006, 46). The Rwandans occupied Kisangani throughout the war, imposing a violent regime. I asked a man in a village nearby why the Rwandans killed the Congolese if there was no pre-existing conflict between them and he replied: That’s something that is very difficult to understand. They cut off a lot of heads of Congolese people. How did this happen? They were trying to trick us and dominate Congo, and that put distance between us. There were young people who died in the massacre in Mangobo [an area of Kisangani]. The Rwandans staged a scenario, in order to kill the young people who were just expressing their rights. It was from 2pm right through until the night. Then they arrested some in the night and took them to Tshopo. That was the [vigilante] group called the Bana Etats Unis [USA kids]. That’s the cause of the real hatred in Congo: that they came looking for soldiers and they shot the civilian population. The aggression of the Rwandan army and its proxies towards the Congolese population, and their military deployment across the country, discredited their claims to be facing off a militia security threat at the border. I asked what they gained from the violence and the interviewee replied: Lots of things: diamonds, cassiterite, palm oil, and they had control of the town. They could go around the town as they liked. They took everything, even down to the luggage trolleys at the airport. They’d been there since independence. They systematically pillaged the whole town and they took all the nice cars. Even the lounge suites; they’d think, ‘that’s a nice chair’, and they took it to Rwanda. They took the stuff that Mobutu pillaged when it was Zaire.18

54 Rich in war The joint Rwandan and Ugandan occupation had its origins in the First War and the protagonists were the same. The experience for the Congolese population, though, differed markedly from that of the First War in that they experienced greatly increased levels of violence, particularly in the areas under occupation. A man in Kisangani recalled: [The Rcd] brought massacres and massacres and we were besieged here in Kisangani. There were rapes, pillages. They took all the resources from Congo to the east of the country and to Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi. Those places are rich now, thanks to us. The rebellion of the Rcd completely destroyed all salaries here, and people started working without a salary. There was no positive point about the Rcd, and life in Kisangani was dominated by misery.19 The relationship between Rwanda and Uganda was strained. They fought in Kisangani in August 1999 and, more generally, relations between Rwanda and Uganda deteriorated (Reyntjens 2005, 594). The coalition had no unified agenda, but the occupying forces had similar interests in Congo and similar means of pursuing them: they led armed incursions into Congolese territory and sustained the military effort by violently terrorising the population and pillaging mineral resources. A murder and massacres Kabila did not take the war to the invading armies, refused arbitration and maintained his position in Kinshasa. In 1999 the AFDL established a political wing, the Popular Power Committees, using discourse similar to that used by Mobutu (Mantuba-Ngoma 2002, 30). Kabila shared Mobutu’s flare for oratory, but without the political resources or acumen to challenge the invasion he acceded to the sharing of the country: he adapted to the administration that the Rwandans and Ugandans had established in the east of the country and the market that it facilitated. A new province of KibaliIturi was created in June 1999 and the Ugandan General James Kazini appointed the governor, practically abolishing the border between Congo and Uganda and triggering intense conflict between two of the ethnic groups in the area, the Hema and Lendu. In July 1999 a ceasefire between the major belligerents of the Second Congo War was signed in Lusaka but fighting continued unabated. In Kinshasa, the kadogos who surrounded Kabila were increasingly resented by civilians and were widely viewed as unruly and impetuously violent. Their zeal had been an important element in Kabila’s success, and it turned against him. Reflecting on Kabila’s fortunes, a bar owner in Kisangani stated: Kabila was an accident of history, and he was manipulated by Rwanda. When the Rwandans came to Goma all Mobutu’s soldiers fled, and he

Rich in war 55 was in a position to make war. He was running a little bar in Dar es Salaam at the time and running a taxi-bus, and he was their least worst option . . . Kabila’s speeches pleased the Congolese. This generation has grown up being robbed and they are suspicious of everyone, and he played to that. But it’s a blah-blah story, and people like him get killed.20 Speculation persists about who was behind Kabila’s murder; he was shot at close range in his palace on 16 January 2001. The young man who pulled the trigger was one of Kabila’s kadogos, who was himself shot dead at the scene, and the inquiry into Kabila’s death was long and inconclusive (Braeckman 2003, 100–25). The reaction in Kinshasa was muted; Kabila had predicted his death in public addresses (Minani Bihuzo 2008, 57; Stearns 2011, 282–4). He was a martyr in the popular imagination and was killed, according to many accounts, by agents of the USA. In the absence of any more convincing account of his death, this explanation served a political function in drawing attention away from the web of political incompetence and violent power in which he had become enmeshed. It linked Kabila with Congo’s first elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, also widely regarded to have been martyred by the CIA, and linked Congo into a longer history of resistance to the great powers. In an opaque political manoeuvre Joseph Kabila, Laurent Kabila’s son, was appointed by ministers and senior military personnel to take office within days. Rape and gendered violence The attacks on civilians during the Second War were politically disorientating for the victims and intensified the conflict by extending the animosity and destruction to the village, family and individual level. Alongside the massacres, the use of rape, coerced sex and other forms of sexual violence in the occupied areas of eastern Congo underwrote the invasion. Sexual violence had military functions in expressing power, humiliating and destroying or enslaving the victims as well as being a crime of opportunity, and it had impacts that were at once more personal and more political than other forms of violence. It terrorised its victims and their communities, causing physical and psychological harm and disrupting social norms. The assessment of rape as a weapon of war recognised it as a political phenomenon and is helpful in drawing attention to the diverse vectors of violence within the context of war. Exceptionally high incidences of sexual violence were recorded, with some accounts estimating that one in three women in eastern Congo were raped. No statistics have been compiled for the number of male victims, although qualitative evidence indicates that large numbers of men and boys were also raped in the war, and few of them received support or treatment following their ordeal (UUA International 2011). Reports detailed particularly aggressive, demeaning and debilitating sexual attacks by the occupying forces on civilians, including the use of gang

56 Rich in war rape, forced rape between victims, the insertion of objects and the mutilation or severing of parts of the body (International Alert 2005, 33–35; Dolan 2010). Categorising rape as a weapon is helpful in identifying the instrumental functions that it serves, but arguably overstates its strategic significance as well as linking it overly with the hostilities between enemy sides and associating it exclusively with war. In reality there was widespread rape committed by local militia forces, national army troops, security agents and civilian men, the majority of whom were not military adversaries, and many of whom were ostensibly playing protective roles. Sexual violence constituted and amplified the war violence but it also exacerbated existing forms of inequality and vulnerability through humiliation. International Alert notes ‘a strong link between violence committed at individual, institutional and structural level’, tracing the connections between the use of rape and the subordinate position of women in Congolese society, and the impunity that the war granted to carry out abuses (International Alert 2005, 11). Sexual violence reinforced power relations by force but also implicated its victims and society more generally in the reinforcement of power. Many victims did not report rape, particularly if their injuries did not require medical attention. Social and political factors framed the context in which mass rape took place and also the responses that were made to rape, and these responses influenced the perpetuation of sexual violence. The reluctance of victims of sexual violence to draw attention to their experiences for fear of incurring further stigmatisation or punishment is theorised by Hansen as ‘security as silence’ (Hansen 2000, 287). Hansen argues that the security can also be ‘subsumed’, particularly if the group that is targeted cuts across other interest groupings. Human Rights Watch quotes a gynaecologist who said, ‘I have the feeling that if you are born a woman in this country, you are condemned to death at birth . . . Why are we silent about this?’ (HRW 2002b, 54). His comments highlight the consequences of silence, as women’s vulnerability is generated not only by overt threats or the absence of functioning legal systems (although these were systemically connected) but also by societal reticence with regard to rape. Work by Seymour on young people’s experiences of violence in eastern Congo extends the analysis on sexual violence by investigating the ways in which transactional sex, meaning sex in return for food, shelter, money or other favours, became part of girls’ and women’s survival tactics during war. Through an examination of the mechanisms that young women employ to deal with unremitting aggression and the destitution that it occasions, Seymour identifies multiple sources of violence and also further damage that is incurred by the coping mechanisms of ‘submission and defeat’ that lead to roles of helplessness and victimcy. She finds that young people’s short term coping capacities can contribute to the conservation and reproduction of violence in the long term. These tactics serve immediate functions of appealing for assistance or protection from others, and are reinforced by a system of

Rich in war 57 relief that valorises forms of suffering that are inflicted by violence, but they can also feed into further types of violence by reinforcing the passivity and unequal relationships that generate the conditions in which violent attacks take place (Seymour 2013). The perpetration of rape by the invading forces not only violated social rules but also established new ones, providing an environment in which other armed groups and civilian individuals could fulfil agendas and settle scores through sexual attacks. The widespread abuse meted out by men who were not part of enemy forces and, in other ways, the normalisation of sexual violence are analytically similar to the participation in the pillages of the early 1990s and the provincial violence that followed. By inflicting sexual violence, thousands of people, whether as part of armed groups or not, collaborated with the direct violence of the power they were apparently opposing, or contributed to the political and social conditions in which further violence could be committed. Successful violence, political failure The invasion by Rwanda and Uganda was a success in that it achieved control over the area under occupation and allowed for the unhindered extraction of mineral resources. In 2001 the UN Panel of Experts identified five ways in which the Rcd benefited from the occupation of eastern Congo and calculated that the Rwandan army’s takings over an eighteen-month period amounted to $250 million, or 6.1 per cent of Rwanda’s GDP (UN 2001, para 130). The report found ‘mass-scale looting’ and ‘systematic and systemic exploitation’, particularly of coltan (for which there was a global boom in 2000–1), diamonds, copper, cobalt and gold, that provided resources to the Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian militaries as well as the Rcd (UN 2001). The ‘Congo Desk’, part of Rwanda’s External Affairs Department, was the Rwandan army’s military and political link in Congo, and ‘[c]ontrol over instruments of violence, rather than customary or legal title, became the deciding factor in determining land ownership and use’ (Nest et al. 2006, 106). The economic opportunities in the east resembled a free market in that they were unencumbered by government regulation and made use of open borders, but the terms on which business took place were defined by coercion as the occupying forces and their militias maintained violent control of mining areas and imposed blocks on river and road transport. One interviewee reported that: ‘During the war . . . People would sell their produce out of fear. They’d be intimidated, they’d bring it all to the depot and you could just take it.’ The violence and harassment simultaneously enriched Rwanda and Uganda and impoverished the Congolese population, who were forcibly prevented from travelling or trading. I asked a man in Oriental Province whether anyone knew that the Rcd was approaching. He replied:

58 Rich in war C: No, nobody here. It was a political problem at the national or international level. It’s like someone’s in the middle of eating then suddenly you come and take the plate from the hand. Z: What were the first signs of the rebellion? C: The population didn’t know about it. We heard that there were battles between the AFDL and the Rcd in Bukavu. It came here gradually, and there were also problems at a local level. The Rcd and Rwandans started to harass the population and so the movement started against them. In this village there were assassinations – they just killed you every day. In the war between Kabila and Mobutu they didn’t kill the population like this.21 I asked why the Rcd did this, if they wanted the support of the population, and he replied: ‘The Rcd army didn’t have salaries, so they just turned into robbers and started to torture people. They didn’t really think: if I do this, then that will happen.’ A man in another village in Oriental Province gave his opinion on the dynamics: A

Z: A: Z: A:

Then the Rcd came to trick us and did nothing for the population. During 1998, there was good animal breeding, so the villages were full of sheep and goats. The Rcd came and shot them. They just pillaged and didn’t pay. It made for a very chaotic situation. Did they want to reach Kinshasa? It’s difficult to say. They needed to get the trust of the population. If they wanted the trust of the people, why were they shooting people’s goats? They failed. They didn’t have the means to pay their own soldiers. There was no defence. They were here and they did what they wanted.22

Despite the military and economic accomplishments, the Rwandans’ and Ugandans’ political programme was weak. They did not resolve their differences with the Congolese leadership, even after the murder of Laurent Kabila, and they did not gain the support of the Congolese population. The threat from AliR and other militias hostile to Rwanda, which was used as a pretext for the occupation, was also not neutralised: the groups were iteratively reinvigorated by the conflict between Kigali and Kinshasa, which provided the militias with a cause and recruits (Marriage 2012). The Rwandan and Ugandan operations led to more violence, firstly because the lack of political success meant that violence was the only mechanism at the invaders’ disposal, and secondly because, as there were no political returns, pillage became the sole rationale for the military investment. The political failure forced a modification of Rwandan ambitions from control of Kinshasa and the country to practical annexation of the Kivus through perpetual violence, while the Ugandan army controlled the area to the north.

Rich in war 59 The front line stopped short of Lubumbashi and Mbujimayi, two towns of central political and economic significance to the government.

Territorial violation and human insecurity The First and Second Congo Wars were episodes in the long-standing international conflict over Congo’s resources, which largely defines the country’s interface with other states. The invasions relied on the lack of state control and exacerbated the extreme informalisation that had taken place during Mobutu’s rule. The AFDL drew its relative strength from the splintering of Mobutu’s army, and in the Second War all sides employed militias and informal war economies to perpetuate violence. The sexual violence exposed the structural vulnerability of women and girls and the vulnerability of men to sexual violence during war, as well as the ways in which violence inflicted by the invading forces was multiplied by Congolese militias and civilians. The fragmented environment extended the reach of violence but also hindered the consolidation of Laurent Kabila’s power and the ability of the Rwandan–Ugandan coalition to make political headway. The wars took place when human security was prominent in the development parlance of northern donors. All the component elements of human security were violated in Congo, but the paradigm did not identify threats or mechanisms for protection, and official aid was conspicuous by its absence. Human security’s asserted link to ‘sustainable development’ handed security roles to a new set of actors, meaning that interventions into two massive wars were left largely to NGOs that did not have the expertise, capacity or legitimacy to confront the situation. The vagueness of threat and responsibility inherent to the concept of human security meant that the processes by which it gained prominence intensified the vulnerability of people in Congo: its terminology diminished the political significance of invasion, massacre, rape and state abuse by imposing insipid categories and individualising experiences of violence. The concept of human security became popular amongst donors when the African state was largely discredited in northern policy. The notion of ‘state failure’ directed policy towards the market as an alternative to the state as the driver of development and security. In Congo, the regional trade in minerals was assisted by a minimal state and porous borders with neighbouring countries, but buoyant prices on the world market did not promote development and security. On the contrary, the market became part of the mechanism of violence and further impoverishment as Rwanda and Uganda capitalised on the donors’ lack of concern for Congo’s sovereignty. During the First War, the AFDL’s march was a violation of sovereignty in three respects: much of the Congolese population, including most of the army, welcomed the invasion, neighbouring countries transgressed territorial integrity by taking the state, and donors tolerated and in some cases supported anti-governmental forces. Despite the lack of donor presence in

60 Rich in war Congo, some endorsement was given to events by the fact that in June 1997 the World Bank instituted an informal group of funders known as ‘Friends of Congo’, from which emerged a ‘Stabilisation and economic boost programme’ in November of the same year (de Villers and Willame 1999, 123). In the Second War, Rwanda and Uganda established non-state administrations that visited extreme violence on the population and were politically rejected. The sustained infringement of Congo’s eastern border was not a cause for international outcry (this was six years after Iraq had invaded Kuwait, sparking the Gulf War). The inquest into Kabila’s death was dispiriting, indicating further disinterest at the level of international relations. Meanwhile international support to Rwanda and Uganda, particularly from Britain and the USA, was played out through uncritical aid and extensive trade links to the commodity chains that the two African countries managed. The IMF credited Uganda for its export-led growth as sales of Congolese gold boosted the economy (Renton et al. 2006, 193). Donor interests vested in the development trajectories of Rwanda and Uganda trumped concern for the devastation that the two countries were causing in Congo, stirring distrust of northern donors amongst the Congolese. A priest in Kinshasa reflected on the roles he perceived them to have assumed, and the consequences: The entry of Laurent Kabila was something terrible. It was directed by foreign and Western countries. Everyone here hated Mobutu, there was no one who defended him; but to chase him out they brought foreigners here to occupy the country. Mobutu had built some things, albeit some were white elephants, but in the ten years since what has anyone built? Nothing!23 Much of the rhetoric of human security was about moving away from the terminology of war. The UNDP asserted: ‘For too long, the concept of security has been shaped by the potential for conflict between states. For too long, security has been equated with threats to a country’s borders’ (UNDP 1994, 3). The concept of human security had gained its popularity in the era of the liberal peace and had no means of acknowledging competing or conflictual claims: the presentation of priorities as incontrovertible precluded a recognition of conflict. The human security paradigm shied away from identifying threats and instead prioritised ‘freedom’ from fear and want. This claim to freedom was not made against any specific party, and it did not provide a means by which people could negotiate or forge their freedom with the threatening power.

4

When was this the deal?

Debates on global security and human security are the preserve of northern theorists and policy-makers, and neoliberal ideology and claims of shared returns are reflected in their policy decisions. Stern and Öjendal argue that security and development can be seen as ‘discursive constructions that produce the reality they seem to reflect, and thus serve certain purposes and interests’ (Stern and Öjendal 2010, 7). In constructivist terms, global security and human security have been successful in drawing attention to particular sets of security concerns, but they have neither ascertained the priorities of people in Congo, nor have they improved Congo’s lot according to their own criteria. Critiquing the perspective involves moving away from the loud claims to investigate perspectives that are excluded from mainstream discourse on security. Attention to the social construction of security through speech acts risks ignoring the experiences of those who are not able to make their voices heard. The Paris School argues for including activities as securitising events, as agendas are not always openly articulated. Addressing the question of how to grasp less vocal security agendas, Hansen draws on Butler’s work to make two suggestions: ‘to include the body as an additional epistemological focus, and to examine the individualising strategies employed in keeping security problems from appearing at the collective level’ (Butler 1990; Hansen 2000, 299). The consideration of the body as an epistemological focus prompts an examination not only of what people say but also of what they do. Examining the individualisation of security gives insight not only into the strategies by which dominant actors individualise threats to weaker parties but also into the processes by which people faced by multiple war-time threats employ tactics that prevent priorities from appearing at a collective level and splinter the population against itself.

War-time tactics In precarious situations, responding to one form of insecurity can aggravate another. A teacher in Kisangani reflected on people’s choices, saying:

62 When was this the deal? You send your daughter to look for friends to get money without even thinking that AIDS exists. At what kind of risk? That’s why we refuse war. As we are so poor, we prefer that the girls go and get money. You see how women are suffering – it’s violence. This is the violence of the family – it’s not the soldiers, it’s in the family.1 By the mid-1990s, the informalisation of state functions, including the use of violence, had left the population with no systematic access to protection, and the wars increased the array of threats that they faced. In various ways, people responded militarily, politically and economically to disrupt or evade these threats. Responses were tactical as the population was threatened by superior power and could do little of a strategic nature to shape their environment. Consequently, the responses had some rationale and also some costs, at times leading to situations that were worse and incurred further losses. When was that the deal? There is something else that is also detectable: in responding to threats, people prioritised agency and predictability by creating space and opportunity for themselves to operate. And through the tiny and compromised spaces that people generated – a part in the course of the war, a modicum of financial autonomy or a religious experience – they limited the violence, not by arresting the physical damage but by limiting its political force. As a result, despite the ubiquity of the use of violence there are limits to its effectiveness: violence did not always achieve its political ends. Military responses: militias The distribution of violence during the wars of the 1990s was shaped by the informalisation that had taken place in Congo over the previous decades. People had been schooled in ‘fending for themselves’, and during the wars this manifested itself in localised military resistance, particularly in the east of Congo. The largest movement was the Maimai, the majority of whom were boys or young men. There were an estimated 10–15,000 children in armed groups during the wars (CEPAS 2003, 13), and the majority of these were fighting in non-state armed groups. The opportunity to form or join militias offered the ‘semblance of social integration’ for young men who were excluded from political processes (Vlassenroot 2001–2, 115). The Maimai were loose networks of militias that operated predominantly at a local level, providing security to their villages. Some Maimai groups traced their genealogy to the Simba militias who had fought in the Mulelist rebellion of 1964–5 and some had joined forces with Laurent Kabila’s AFDL. The Maimai fought broadly in alliance with government troops during the Second War, at times receiving funding from Kinshasa. Financial and military support for the militias was variable though, and there was an uneven battle between the Maimai and the occupying forces. A man in a village in Oriental Province asserted:

When was this the deal? 63 The Rcd were in practically every village, but unfortunately the Maimai stayed in the forest. They were there to defend, so if there was an attack they would go and fight, then return to the forest because they didn’t have enough ammunition. The Rcd had aircraft, the Rwandan and Ugandan armies, there were whites fighting for them, the Americans behind them.2 The assertion of international military support raises the profile of Maimai resistance, portraying them as local boys who fought off the world to protect their communities. In many instances, though, the relationships were more oblique. Maimai mobilisation stemmed from the need to defend villages from the invaders but took place within the occupied territories where all activity was incorporated into the war economy, which was directed by the interests of Rwanda and Uganda. As the occupation persisted, agriculture and trade were increasingly constrained as crops were destroyed and trade links were cut, heightening the significance of other economic activities. The Maimai presence was strongest in mineral areas and the opportunity to exploit minerals was essential to the groups, which had no other productive role. Mines became sites of violent contestation between groups. Furthermore, the Maimai were weak in relation to the occupying forces but strong in relation to the unarmed civilian population. Many villages were attacked and burnt by Maimai and their populations massacred, particularly if they were suspected of collaboration with the Rcd. Maimai fighters raped and abducted women as a way of punishing communities or controlling territory (HRW 2002b, 16–17). For many people living in rural areas of eastern Congo, the numerous armed groups bore similarities to each other as the civilian population was the target for raids and revenge from all sides (Kelly 2010). In reporting violence, people would often not distinguish between the groups. One interviewee, for example, reported: Lots of people have left the village and gone to Kisangani because of the insecurity. In Kisangani, there were some [violent] events, but generally the situation is calm. Here [in the village] the Maimai or the Rcd come and demand your belongings and rape the women.3 In towns, too, the informalisation of state functions gave rise to popular mobilisation in response to the occupation. In Kisangani, vigilante groups mounted armed resistance against the Rcd. The largest of these groups, numbering fewer than a thousand members, was the Bana Etats Unis – meaning ‘USA kids’ – like the Maimai, a youth and male phenomenon. Its counterpoint was the ‘Arab League’, which placed what was essentially a gang turf war within the language of international terrorism. The urban militias of Kisangani had little structure and made few inroads in military terms, although they achieved a resolute demonstration of their resentment of the Rcd. In response to the question of whether the population

64 When was this the deal? resisted the occupation, one respondent explained: ‘Amongst the young people there were those who said, “we’re going to rebel against the Rcd,” and people would follow . . . there were other forms of resistance in the interior – the Maimai, but actually they didn’t have much impact.’ Like the Maimai, the Bana Etats Unis could not match the firepower, military experience or organisation of the Rcd. On occasions, though, there were armed battles between the Bana Etats Unis and the occupying forces. The first occurred on 26 August 1998 at the beginning of the Second War, when the Rwandans had just taken Kisangani. The Bana Etats Unis had established a local reputation during the First War, having assisted the AFDL’s rout of Mobutu’s army, and remobilised against the new threat of the Rcd occupation. Hostilities flared following the attempted theft of an Rcd jeep and fighting spread through the town. A man from Mangobo, the area of Kisangani in which the militia was based, assessed their reaction to the Rcd: When the Rcd came . . . [the Bana Etats Unis] showed their support for the AFDL and their discontent with the second rebellion . . . It started in Mangobo and it spread because everyone was hostile to the arrival of the second rebellion. But they didn’t have the means to resist the Rcd, so in the end they withdrew. It was a whole day of fighting, until the night. The Rcd called for reinforcements from Bunia and elsewhere, and took the whole town, and the next day there was no resistance. But the Bana Etats Unis remained hostile to the Rcd from that day, and each time there was any movement in town or skirmishes they’d go and support others in Kisangani.4 The group did not bring security to Kisangani in terms of driving out the invaders or protecting the civilians. Like the Maimai, the security function of the Bana Etats Unis was equivocal, and they also contributed to the insecurity by heightening the level of militarisation and volatility in Kisangani. In August 2005 I went to interview some of their members but they were exchanging live fire with another group of young men; the government troops stationed in the town had deployed to stop the fighting with the threat of greater force. Something was going on, though, and, despite experiencing some extremely violent episodes and the killing of dozens of its members, the group continued to operate as local vigilantes. A resident of Kisangani observed: When Kabila’s men fled some of them sold arms to those boys and there was the four hour war when they fought with the Rwandans. The Rwandans had started to shoot at any of the young people, so they got angry and said, ‘These people said they were coming to liberate us, but now they’re killing us.’

When was this the deal? 65 The antagonism was crystallised through the confrontation and, four years after the town was taken, a ‘mutiny’ took place in Kisangani. On 14 May 2002 police and army officers took control of the town’s radio station and called on the population to reject the Rcd, claiming that ‘the enemy is the one who refuses you your liberty, who refuses to let you eat well’ (HRW 2002a, 8). The mutineers enlisted the Bana Etats Unis to lead the popular defiance towards the occupation. The Rcd, initially caught off guard, sent for reinforcements and retaliated disproportionately, arresting, assaulting and executing people; more than 150 unarmed civilians were killed, many of whom were decapitated and dumped in the river at Tshopo on the outskirts of the town (the Tshopo massacre was alluded to in the previous chapter). There were military observers and 1,000 Monuc troops stationed in Kisangani at the time of the massacre, but they did not intervene (HRW 2002a, 2). The Rwandan occupation was deeply resented across the population of Kisangani and, with no political or legal recourse, violence gave the Bana Etats Unis a channel through which to express their anger. It was not decisive or even particularly influential in military terms, but it served a function. The interviewee continued: There’s someone trying to talk to them to change the movement, to take back the weapons so that they don’t go around destabilising the town, but it’s not easy. These young people don’t accept it. They say that in Kisangani we are always the victims of rebellions. Since the 1960s, it’s always in Kisangani. They say, ‘It’s over, now we have our movement, no one talks about the Rcd.’5 In political terms this is significant; Kisangani suffered gravely from the violence of the Second War, the Bana Etats Unis resisted the Rcd with violence, and the Rcd left. These events are not linked in a causative way, though: the Bana Etats Unis did not defeat the Rcd. From one angle, the dynamic was classically realist; on 5 September 2005 one resident observed: ‘There was resistance – people were fired up and rebelled, but they had no arms. Once they rebelled, and the soldiers came here shooting and killed them – it’s the law of the strongest.’ From another angle, though, the achievement of the vigilante activity lay in its capacity to make sense of the experiences of violence and occupation. Wood, in her study of insurgent activity in El Salvador, notes a similar function of mobilisation in granting people a role in war (Wood 2003). In Kisangani, the violence gave the Bana Etats Unis a role and a means of interaction with the occupying forces, even though they constituted a weaker party and often brought further misery on themselves and the rest of the town. The reluctance to disarm was an expression of defiance that rejected the humiliation suffered by the group. By maintaining a presence, the Bana Etats Unis retained their identity within a local history of resistance. Their

66 When was this the deal? tenacity framed the brutal and public violence they experienced as sacrifice, and in doing so absolved them of the culpability for having brought the ire of the Rcd to other parts of the town. Kinshasa did not see war on the same scale as the east, but there too vigilante groups mobilised in the face of attack. The Rwandan army attempted to take the capital in August 1998 and the kadogos who had brought Kabila to power proved inexperienced and incapable in defence, leaving the city and its inhabitants vulnerable to the invaders. A civil servant described the situation: There was total insecurity. [The Rwandan army] cut the electricity at Inga and that had a devastating impact on all levels. There was no water and no electricity. People were dying in the hospitals. All the food stocks that people had were destroyed and so there was famine in Kinshasa. All economic transactions were cut off; dry goods could just about make it in, but that involved risks and was dangerous. There are always some people who will chance it because they can make money, but on the whole it was an economic freefall – there were no imports and no exports and the macroeconomic situation was destabilised, there was no economic activity. That’s what is at the root of why people in Kinshasa hate Rwanda.6 Many Rwandan soldiers who infiltrated the city were killed by groups of civilians, particularly in the densely populated areas of Masina, Njili and Kimbanseke. As in the case of the informal armed groups elsewhere, the makeshift militias in Kinshasa were an expression of informal organisation but lacked strategic leadership, direction or impact. In military terms Kinshasa was saved by the intervention of Zimbabwean and Angolan soldiers, not the actions of vigilante groups (Turner 2007, 6). Beyond their equivocal tactical role, the militias provided an opportunity for civilians to exact revenge and vent their anger on the Rwandan soldiers. A government official described the violence in Kimbanseke: They killed the rebels from Rwanda, they killed them here in August 1998. It was terrible, it took place right here in this part of town. The population killed the Rwandans because they had cut the electricity off, and cut the water and wanted to overturn the government that was in place. People were very angry. The Rwandans had made their way in from BasCongo and arrived at 6am – they were at the airport, there in Njili. People were really unhappy. After all they had suffered with Mobutu, then Kabila had started to pay people, but then there was a war and now the Rwandans had come to Kinshasa. The Congolese army did not protect the city or its inhabitants and the action taken by civilians was shaped as much by the state’s incompetence

When was this the deal? 67 as by the Rwandan invasion. People formed groups to lynch the invaders, but a wider impact was circumscribed by a lack of equipment, expertise and information. On the other hand, the groups were unconstrained with regard to the violence they could commit. The government official remembered: People took the weapons of the Rwandans who had been killed and turned against the others – they killed them here in this part of town and burned them. It was the young people, they mobilised themselves in each area and whenever there was trouble in an area the young people would get together again to fight. That’s how it worked – just at a local level, and why not?7 The question ‘and why not?’ suggests that people had little to lose from their involvement and in some cases there were gains to be made: the state was not protecting them or their potential victims. As elsewhere, these armed groups were not only a protection, but also a threat to their communities. According to a doctor in the same area: They burnt a lot of Rwandans here. Not only Rwandans but a lot of Congolese people too – if they looked a bit Rwandan. The Rwandans came here [to the clinic] seeking refuge and there were lots of wounded soldiers and a lot of malnutrition cases, particularly amongst the children. There was banditry too; the young people who had taken the weapons from the Rwandans started using them to get things from the civilians by force.8 As elsewhere, involvement in violence gave rise to heroic or semi-heroic versions of events and offered young men a chance to rework the hierarchy by claiming a reputation or goods, fighting the invaders and remonstrating against the state that left its civilians vulnerable. The lack of state protection and the unchecked violence of the invaders and their proxies threatened to make Congolese populations irrelevant, as their lives and deaths scarcely registered in the trading of access to political and economic resources. Despite the fragmentary nature of the responses, taking up arms made them players: it registered their resistance, and with it their sacrifice or that of their fellow civilians. Political responses: displacement and distribution The majority of the population did not mobilise or respond violently to the invasion, the inequality or the injustice inflicted on them by the wars. Support for the occupying forces was extremely limited, but most people did not fight. An interviewee in Kisangani assessed the situation:

68 When was this the deal? G: The population resisted. They didn’t accept the Rcd because the Rwandans were behind the movement. Sometimes they tolerated it, but that’s all. Z: Were there any demonstrations? G: Demonstrations? No. It was a state of emergency. But there were confrontations when people were killed. They were only here to disadvantage people, and there was no programme for providing services or managing things.9 A response that was much more common than military mobilisation was flight, and this redrew the demographic map of Congo. In the first few years of the Second War, 300,000 people fled to neighbouring countries (CEPAS 2003, 16) and Congo topped the table for the number of people who had been internally displaced (Ministère de la Santé 2001, 13). In the east of the country, hundreds of thousands of others who lived in the countryside responded to attacks by the occupying forces or militias by moving to the bush (often many times) or, more permanently, to larger towns. These responses were explained in interviews as attempts to pursue security or avoid insecurity. Both were unreliable, often leading to exposure to other threats. Migration afforded an unreliable form of security as people were subjected to new threats from infectious diseases, exposure and malnutrition, accounting for many times more deaths than were caused by gunfire (IRC 2000; IRC 2001; IRC 2003). It did, though, answer the immediate need to avoid the threat of attack. One interviewee in a village in Oriental Province recalled: The Rcd rebellion was not accepted by the population. It started on 2 August 1998, and they penetrated the population with their ideology. There were difficulties – political and social difficulties, and the population started to suffer. When they came the population from here hid in the forest. They stayed there as there was no security. The Rcd had people stationed in every village.10 The wars also led to massive migration to cities (de Saint Moulin 2006, 111–20); National Statistical Institute figures gauge that in the aftermath of the wars 40 per cent of the population was urban.11 People moved to towns but there was no infrastructure to accommodate them and, as many fled with few possessions or skills for urban life, they put further stress on faltering services. The impacts of the war were felt a thousand miles from the fighting. An employee of the Ministry of Planning described the challenges in Kinshasa: The impact of the war has been the massive increase in the population of Kinshasa and it’s a noticeable increase. Under Mobutu, the population

When was this the deal? 69 of Kinshasa was 4 million and something, but with the migration that has shot up. The result is that there has been huge demographic growth and that has disorientated the process of planning. The city was planned for 5 million people and now there are more than 8 million living here. Basic infrastructure is completely insufficient – roads, schools, and the hospitals can’t cope either.12 Investment in services had been moribund for a generation, and the remains of state infrastructure had no mechanism for expanding to provide for the migrant population. Informal means of organisation were also stretched by the influx. A Methodist minister considered the displacement to Lubumbashi from the rest of Katanga province: When the Rcd advanced, all the people from the occupied areas came to Lubumbashi, and the town was not able to take care of all of those people from the east. Now the war is over we want them to return but they don’t want to go back. They are doing whatever they do here now and don’t want to go. So that’s the major impact – overpopulation. We don’t have the buildings to educate all the children, we don’t have the space in the hospitals. There’s a lot of unemployment. Everyone who came here doesn’t have a job, and that causes a disturbance in the town.13 The provision of water and electricity was already patchy in towns and practically absent in the countryside. As people displaced from rural areas moved to the towns, the water system of Regideso, established at independence on the colonial era machinery, came under intense strain. The unregulated arrangements for water provision in Kinshasa and the fact that only 5 per cent of the population had access to electricity were symptomatic of the extent of informalisation and impoverishment (Musau 2005, 108–9). A bureaucrat in Kinshasa who had worked closely with government departments explained the problem: [SNEL and Regideso] both have a tariff system for charging the population and the state subsidises the costs. They have to provide water and electricity at a price that the population can afford and the state subsidises the rest. But the state doesn’t pay the subsidy so the companies have to cover the loss themselves by reducing the service. In a way I think it reassures the population, except that the service is worse, but at least they can pay for it. It was a viewpoint that accepted the state’s intransigence and worked round it by charging the population for a poor service. The interviewee saw the national electricity and water companies squeezed from both sides as neither the state nor the consumers made the necessary financial contributions to maintain provision. He continued:

70 When was this the deal? As far as the companies are concerned, their funds are negligible and they have no means of investing. They need aid or assistance, but when that finishes nothing else happens. The urbanisation carries on, people come to Kinshasa, they say, ‘we’ll live here’, they make their ‘avenue’ and install themselves, but the services don’t follow. They can’t. No one can provide services because the companies are asphyxiated.14 The rapid, unplanned and unsupported urbanisation set in train some destructive politics: people with no history of animosity found themselves in incidentally conflictual situations. As there was no expansion of services planned, there was no reason to wait for an official connection. People made use of weaknesses within the formal structure to gain informal access to services, and in the process destitute migrants compromised others who were also poor, entering a divisive struggle for survival. An employee of the water company Regideso explained the process: Theoretically everyone has a pipe and the staff go round and fix the tariffs, then you have eight days to pay it before you get cut off. But people don’t pay all the time. There are lots of pirates, and they do it with the complicity of our agents and if there’s a pipe that bursts, of course they can profit from that too. He went on to consider the impact of the migration: The war impacted at other levels. In the 1990s they were talking about two million or three million people being displaced. A lot of them have come here [to Kinshasa] and haven’t returned. We need to increase distribution as there’s nearly nowhere in Kinshasa that has water twentyfour hours a day. So we’re rationing it because we don’t have the capacity to clean it or distribute it. It’s not a problem of water – the River Congo flows all the time!15 A similar urban migration took place in Mbujimayi, beginning at the time of the Kasai–Katanga conflict and continuing through the wars at the end of the decade. Underinvestment meant that the town was not able to accommodate the influx of people, and the services available to the original inhabitants were put under increased strain. I was given a tour of the colonial era waterworks in Mbujimayi. A Regideso employee reported that the town had grown from 300,000 at independence to around 600,000 in the early 1990s. Twenty years later it was estimated at three million, and the state had neither intervened to stop the persecution of the Kasaians nor provided infrastructure or relief for those who were forced to return. The interviewee continued: From that time on there’s been a problem with the energy supply. That was our first problem, the lack of energy. Then we lost a building during

When was this the deal? 71 the pillages, a building in Dipemba [a field station] was pillaged – all the computers, all the machines, the reports, everything was pillaged. Then, in addition to the energy problem, the building and the materials were lost, it was a wash-out. So those were the three problems. He went from enumerating the problems to enumerating the costs: There are two generators, one of 21,000hp and one of 625hp. They use 220 litres of diesel per hour and 100 litres per hour, so that’s 320 litres between them. Here in Mbujimayi the petrol costs $2 per litre, so you can do the maths. There’s another problem, which is that the commercial management was not done well, and as the population has been hit by poverty, they don’t pay their bills. So Regideso has thousands of millions of Congolese Francs that have not been collected, and that’s why it can’t pay the salaries. I asked about the monthly bill for an average household. He elaborated on the processes by which a more costly and less sanitary situation was reached: A household of let’s say ten people typically uses 20m?. That’s a bill of 9,000Fc for a month, which is 300Fc a day. If you look at the cost per person, that’s 30Fc per day. But they see a bill of 9,000Fc and say it’s too expensive. In 1990 we had 19,000 households with subscriptions, and now it’s 6,000, and that’s how the water is distributed to three million people. That’s why you have people carrying water in jerry-cans on their heads, but it works out as more, because people are paying 500Fc for the jerry-can.16 The outcome was expensive, untreated water provided through informal channels. The pattern of compromise leading to further deterioration was replicated in diverse ways across the country as people attempted to remove themselves from the violence of war. Military threats were particularly destabilising as they could be sudden and devastating. Flight swapped these for more predictable kinds of threat, which could be managed to some extent, even if the costs were high, including the loss of land and food supply. Despite its hazards, though, flight allowed people some control over their disrupted lives. Displacement brought no guarantee of protection and, by moving elsewhere, people found themselves confronted by new threats, including those arising from competition with others over increasingly scarce resources and further impoverishment. Economic responses: association, tax and trade In conjunction with armed resistance and migration, economic life was a site of contestation as the wars shaped people’s opportunities and constraints.

72 When was this the deal? Across Congo there was an increased reliance on informal structures as people formed or extended the remit of mutual associations, particularly for social services and petty enterprise. An interviewee commented on the situation: The proliferation of solidarity networks . . . is in response to the crisis and is a bit more ‘African’. The African sense of poverty is not so much the lack of economic means but the lack of a human environment, so the need is not for means but to have people around you. People organise in churches and put things together, and this facilitates various things like finding a job. When you go to a church, that gives you an opening. The crisis has set in motion a host of informal activities and you have to be in a network that gives you a strategy to deal with this.17 Despite his prioritisation of human environment over economic means, inclusion in solidarity networks had, amongst other purposes, straightforwardly instrumental functions. Access to money was a major preoccupation for millions of Congolese people, and associations were formed to provide informal banking systems. The director of a centre for children with disabilities in Kinshasa described how employees had collaborated in response to the hostile economic situation: We started some self-financing activities in the sewing workshop and repairing books. That was organised before the war, but it increased a lot. And we started up a mutual fund; we decided that each month when we were paid our salary we would put a little aside to help if someone falls ill. We also have a mutual fund for credit – there are different arrangements; in that one you can get credit, especially for school fees, so it operates like a little bank . . . and when they pay back, it’s with interest. The mutual fund was started in 1985 but we used it a lot more during the war.18 In the absence of formal insurance and alongside widespread distrust of banks, associations are part of all forms of earning, from associations of market traders to organised funds within foreign-owned businesses, and they provide something of a reserve through mutuality. A member of the Taxi Drivers’ Association explained that monthly payments were made to the association so that it could help out in the case of the death of a family member. He reflected on the situation of insecurity in which decisions were being taken: There are no precautions that it is possible to take when you’re just surviving. It’s a day-to-day existence – just to look after the children. If there are problems, I have to go out anyway, just to put food on the table. Even during the troubles, people went to every effort to take the vehicle out.19

When was this the deal? 73 The majority of the women I interviewed who worked in the market were in an association of four or five people. Many explained the fundamental cause of the economic crisis as stemming from the non-payment of salaries or the lack of employment. Many were working because their husbands had no income, but the conditions were difficult as the clients were not paid. A market trader in Kinshasa reported: At the moment things are really bad and sometimes I don’t sell anything in the whole day . . . Unemployment is cruel; there’s no employment so there’s no money in circulation. This is the initiative I’ve taken: I’m working in the market selling these things. We used to have an association, but it doesn’t work any more because there’s no money.20 Some traders reported that their associations had collapsed because a member had absconded with the funds. As survival became more precarious, time and work lost value and market women sat all day, sometimes with extremely meagre produce as the competition with others increased. One trader recalled: I used to sell very well because there were not so many vendors, but now there are lots and very few clients. It’s difficult with the price of goods. If you buy at 250 you sell at 270 and that’s only 20Fc profit. When we’ve sold we pool 1,000Fc each on Saturdays. If I’ve made 2,000Fc I’d pool 1,000Fc and spend the rest in the market to give the children something to eat.21 Most associations did not generate money: they are for maintaining some regularity of income and providing assistance for members in times of personal crisis. By operating informally, they avoided contact with the state or state-like activity and claimed a means of survival in hostile circumstances. They did not, though, insulate people from predation and existed alongside an economic accommodation with aggressive power. People were accustomed to paying discretionary tax to state agents and the military, and in the occupied areas of eastern Congo they adapted to similar demands made by the Rcd and MLC. Many realised that this ‘war effort’ was funding their own destruction. The everyday extortion by the Rcd passed largely by the name of taxation. The occupying forces collected import and export levies and established road tolls to tax local markets (Reyntjens 2005, 597). In Kisangani a local human rights organisation, the Bugles for the Voiceless, kept records of abuses through the war, including the harassment by the occupying forces. They recorded 500Fc or half a sack of rice charged for river transport; river canoes: 20Fc for each passenger; cycle couriers: 20Fc each journey. Twenty road blocks were erected along a 20km stretch of road in Kisangani, allowing for collection of taxes for entering and leaving the city and contributions

74 When was this the deal? towards the soldiers’ rations and the war effort. Bugles for the Voiceless also recorded robberies from people’s houses, almost invariably by men in uniform, of money (sometimes thousands of dollars), also sugar, calculators, vehicles and bicycles. Soldiers would demand payment in return for sparing the lives of their victims (Clairons des Sans Voix 2005). A cycle courier in Kisangani reported: For the taxes, there was a real problem during the rebellion. The Rwandan leadership would make everyone pay tax, not just the cycle courier.22 For the cycle couriers they said you had to have a driving permit – it was 500Fc, and that was hard to find then. But driving permits are for vehicles! They’d take the 500Fc to the capital of the rebellion, Goma . . . All these taxes were for the rebellion, not the government, and we had to put Rwandan flags up around here. The festivals too, our Independence Day is 30 June, but here we celebrated Independence Day on 1 July – that’s Independence Day in Rwanda.23 The economic conditions generated scarcities and, with them, potential profits. In the areas under occupation, despite the political enmity and the risks involved in operating, those who traded with Rwanda and Uganda encountered more stable economic conditions than could be found by taking the boat to Kinshasa. Congolese traders became integral to the plunder of the country’s resources, establishing a local dimension to the war economy that was directed by the occupying forces and funded by international demand for minerals. A civil servant in Kisangani reported that ‘the population here was totally against the movement, there was a real hatred towards the movement’, and went on to describe the choices some people made nonetheless: The war allowed some Congolese people to benefit: those who accepted the risk. The opportunists, those who were in the movement – the people who became governor, mayor, the managers of public affairs – they are rich scandalously. There was no control or sanction and opportunists can gain from war. They could get resources, they were inside the institutions and could liaise with the government in Kinshasa and the rebellion.24 As with the formation of militias and the risks associated with urbanisation, economic responses were defined by the malfunctioning of the Congolese state as well as by the violence of the invasion. The population had no political or legal infrastructure to provide protection and their responses were diverse and uncoordinated. A bar owner in Kisangani reported: There was complete chaos here for four or five years, and it opened their eyes. They found that they could take $100 and go to Kampala [the

When was this the deal? 75 capital of Uganda], and from there go on to everywhere. If they go to Kinshasa it’s very expensive, there’s a lot of hassle, and you have to bring everything back along the river. If they go to Kampala, they can go on to Kenya with $30 and do business there with no problems. A lot of traders were born in that era. Before the war no one went to Kampala, but it’s good for business: it’s closer, it’s quicker and it’s cheaper.25 The economic accommodation that people found with the occupying forces had political ramifications as it generated opportunities to prey on the insecurity of others in a situation of little productive work and no regulation. Another resident of Kisangani recalled: From 1998 to 2001 life became really muted for some, but others fell on a time of opulence, because there was no management. Around 2001 there were some companies starting up, and then a lot of thieving. During the rebellion, people could steal things and then blame it on the rebellion when actually it was the individuals concerned. There was no financial control, and some people benefited a lot from this and made the most of the situation of others. Mainly it was the Congolese who had the support of outside forces, from Rwanda and Uganda.26 Associations allowed people to plan within the constraints that they faced, but the entire economy and its politics were ruled by war economies. It was not possible to avoid the state or occupying forces entirely, and, through taxation and trade, people made some profits or offset losses but routinely brought further detriment to others and sometimes to themselves. Prayer The Catholic Church has a history of resistance to the state in Congo and led the strikes and marches in opposition to Mobutu at the beginning of the 1990s. It has also taken a central role in providing education, and more broadly its prominence continued during the wars as it performed social, alongside religious, functions. A sacristan in Lubumbashi recalled: There were displaced people who came to Lubumbashi. The war touched people here to the extent that those displaced people didn’t have any money, so the church organised a special collection in goods and money to help them. That started in around 1999 or 2000, that’s when the displaced people started arriving here in town, and it’s still continuing. People contribute clothing or whatever and we take them to the Caritas [a Catholic NGO] office or to the welcome centres for the displaced. It’s carrying on because people have not gone back yet and need various things while they are here.27

76 When was this the deal? Protestant churches, too, have large followings and benefit from international networks that provide some access to funds and goods. The Kimbanguist church is Congolese and does not have comparable international contacts but mobilises at a national level to provide social services in the absence of state infrastructure. A Kimbanguist pastor described the social roles that the church played: We have schools and the parish is in place, and there’s a health centre. During the rebellion the schools functioned, but there were no salaries for the teachers, so it was the parents who paid the teachers’ ‘prime’ to encourage the teacher. The school is a convent: the church supports the school and the state manages it but the state hasn’t taken responsibility like it should. Luckily, in the church-based schools, the church has taken responsibility for the infrastructure. In addition to informal service provision, churches answered psychological and religious needs. Faith in God provided an alternative outlook on disaster and was expressed by many as a strength in adversity. Commenting on the dismal school attendance rates, a teacher exclaimed, ‘It’s not serious! We are believers!’ Others conveyed similar sentiments: ‘The Congolese pray a lot’, ‘We have faith’ and ‘Of course God is good, but we are old and are used to it now’. The Kimbanguist pastor recounted the violence during the war: You see the ceiling has a hole in it – that’s from a bullet. In the corridor there’s also a big hole in the ceiling where a bomb came through. You see outside there are three crosses. Those are for one of our brothers, the pastor, who died when a bullet found him where he was hiding. For him and many others, faith granted ways of responding to the horror that was imposed. He commented: It was a rebellion; you couldn’t oppose what [the Rcd] said or you’d find yourself in a difficult situation. You have to respond to their demands. We took refuge in prayer, and we had to pray that one day the situation would change. There was the Global and Inclusive Agreement and now there’s an understanding between Kinshasa and here. It’s important always to pray to God to find solutions.28 As with the explanation of the Bana Etats Unis’ battles with the Rcd, the temporal order of events merges with the causative claim: from praying to the signing of the peace. It is a line of reasoning that is supported by religion, as faith and miracles offer alternative interpretations of events. The Kimbanguist church drew on a legacy of resistance to oppression as its founder, Simon Kimbangu, who lived from 1887 to 1951, resisted colonial rule (Renton et al. 2006, 64–5). Kimbangu was imprisoned in Lubumbashi

When was this the deal? 77 for thirty years by the Belgian authorities. I visited the prison in which he was held and my guide gave a commentary on Kimbangu’s life, including his ability to escape from cells and predict the future. He described a miracle to me: [Kimbangu] came to the other side here and started walking up and down. A table appeared full of food – beans, fufu, bread, meat, everything, and he said, ‘Those who are hungry, come and eat with me.’ Some were scared, but some had courage and went to eat with him. I met a soldier who was working here when Papa Kimbangu was in prison and he said, ‘Yes, I went and ate with him. I ate meat and also took some home to eat with my wife.’ Put yourself in the place of the Africans: who else has called us like this?29 From this and other examples my guide gave me, it is clear that a crucial theme in Kimbangu’s mission was that of resisting the threat of irrelevance: through his religious contribution he had made Congo politically significant. My guide told me that ‘Jesus Christ was born chez vous, but we have the Holy Spirit’ (Kimbangu is believed to be an embodiment of the Holy Spirit), and for him this was a source of power and meaning. The second strand was hope: many of the miracles he described are similar to Jesus Christ’s miracles, particularly in their attention to the oppressed, and Kimbangu is revered as a force who was curing and providing in the face of the Belgian aggression. During the wars, the Kimbanguist church and other churches played roles in providing a space for hope that was not dependent on the disappointments of lived reality. Religious institutions, like others, were subject to informalisation that was accentuated during the wars and ‘Awakening’ churches were in the ascendance in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. These churches fell outside formal denominational lines and relied on fundamentalist readings of Christianity. Informal churches, often based in disused public buildings, people’s homes or makeshift structures, provided evangelical teaching led by charismatic pastors in highly emotive atmospheres, often to large congregations. Personal testimonies, particularly of miracles, and spirit possession feature prominently in worship. Many interviewees perceived the increase in religious enthusiasm as a sinister phenomenon as people were pushed towards the church in desperation. A teacher reported: Nowadays we have new churches in search of the grace of the Lord. If I go there, if I pray, I will get new miracles, I will get what I want – and people are being misleading. They might say, ‘Zo, the one who is looking to marry you, the Lord told me that he is to be your husband.’ They are in contact with God. They say that the Catholics and Protestants don’t know how to pray, so they have been baptised with fire. People are living in such a way of wrongness.30

78 When was this the deal? Turner theorises evangelical religion as a manifestation of an ‘economy of luck’ that dominated when the informal economy collapsed (Turner 2007, 40). Luck provides a psychological cushion when more candid reasoning points to disaster: it maintains the hope that at any stage, for no reason and at no cost things can improve. Through meeting and singing together, focusing on the afterlife and submitting to a non-violent authority, people are able to create some psychological space and escape from the concerns of everyday life. The church answered the need for certainty and belonging. An abbot who worked in a mental health centre in Kinshasa reflected: There is a proliferation in the number of churches and people form these churches for their mental health. Lots of people go to church instead of coming to us. Those who come to us are a minority of those who are suffering from stress. Economically, people fend for themselves within the ‘informal economy’ as they call it. But it’s informal in relation to what? These are independent activities, we should call them independent activities that people do in order to feed themselves.31 Despite the comforting role attributed to churches, religion was intertwined with despondency. In some Awakening churches, fear was not assuaged but aggravated by violent manipulation through accusations of witchcraft and claims to have the power to purge people, particularly children (de Boeck 2004). All the explanations of witchcraft that people gave me placed it within the context of families who could not support children, often following the death of a parent, or a parent remarrying into a larger family. Blaming the death or some other calamity on a child located a scapegoat and with it an alternative explanation of events that provided a contorted psychological release. Unscrupulous clergy profited from the anxiety felt by their congregations by stoking fears of witchcraft or damnation and fleecing their parishioners for monetary contributions. An interviewee in Lubumbashi reflected: The Congolese are Christians, they are believers and they build churches. Everyone has a church to go to, and you see there’s a multi-division of churches. As I see it, the reason for this is famine. Why? Because you find yourself like this, no one’s got a job. As a solution you say, ‘I’m going to form a church with some international contact.’ They’re bad people, they say, ‘I’m a pastor, I’m forming a church.’ Even if they start with nothing they’ll find something. He, too, linked the growth of the churches to economic harshness, but also to the destruction of formal state institutions: When the Mzee [Laurent Kabila] was here in 1997, there was a multitude of churches. If you come into the commune you can find three

When was this the deal? 79 churches. When the Mzee came to power and life became a bit easier there was no more of this. People didn’t have churches in their houses, because life had become easier. But when it becomes difficult, people go back to their old habits. What we need is a responsible government who can take care of things. Then if you needed to go to the doctor or to the magistrate you’d go straight there instead of always going to church.32 The destitution of the population was a key feature in the power that the churches were able to exert, and the church administration was in a position to exploit the congregation. A teacher in Kisangani, similarly, saw the church as a regressive institution: At independence there were just four denominations: Catholics, Protestants, Muslims and Kimbanguists. But now there’s a whole lot of Awakening churches and they’re found everywhere. What are they for? They give the pastors a living; people who are pastors can get what they like because they are in charge of the church. The collection is for him and his family and at the same time people are living in total poverty. The people who go to church go voluntarily and they give voluntarily – they’re not obliged to give – but the pastor preaches and preaches and people are blinded by that. There’s verbal pressure, the pastors perform miracles and they preach and they have direct contact with God.33 Contradictions emerged in many conversations about churches. Many interviewees were caustic about the motivations of church leaders of all denominations and the abuse of trust associated with fear and money, but they were enthusiastic church-goers themselves. In a country where little is regulated by the clock and everything is circumscribed by poverty, churches command impressive authority. People arrive on time, they bring their own Bibles, enthusiasm and even chairs if necessary. And they bring gifts and money, which, it is broadly agreed, pays the priest to continue the extortion.

Agency and predictability (the limits to violence) Including the body as an epistemological focus allows physical responses made during the war to be read as the way in which people securitise events. The responses made, including the risks taken, demonstrate a diversity of priorities and perceptions of threat as well as the weakness of the population relative to the invading forces and militias, which resulted in attempts to disrupt or evade threats rather than meeting them head-on. This approach differs from conventional conceptions of security that centre round amassing arsenal and increasing protection. Counterproductive outcomes arose from the fragmentation of association and the pervasive violence that precluded a concerted voice or unified action from emerging from the population.

80 When was this the deal? As a result of this inability to mobilise convincingly, threats and responses to them were individualised and people found themselves in conflict with others. Nonetheless, two elements recur in the responses made: agency and predictability. People generated forms of agency and used it to attain a degree of predictability by influencing their immediate experience. Valverde argues that security is ‘the name we use for a temporally extended state of affairs characterized by the calculability and predictability of the future’ (quoted in Zedner 2009, 14). Hettne places security in political context by defining it as ‘a reasonable level of predictability at different levels of the social system, from local communities to the global level’, and opposing this to the notion of ‘durable disorder’ (Hettne 2010, 33). According to this definition and in the absence of protective structures, taking some command of events in order to enhance the predictability of the immediate environment (even if only by disrupting or evading threats) is a coherent resistance to the durable disorder that confronts the population of Congo. The formation of militias was linked to the generation of a narrative – a historical trajectory, giving a meaning to the sequence of events – and to playing a part in it. Flight, either to the bush or to urban centres, at least diversified possibilities and decisions, even when these opportunities were uncertain and dangerous. The mutual associations did not generate money but created a small economic sphere that granted control over pooled funds, allowing a precarious future to be slightly more manageable. Faith in God provides certainty and significance, these amounting to some form of spiritual predictability that is not dependent on worldly politics. The most extreme manifestation of the struggle for agency and predictability is given by the most extreme conditions, when people impose a rationale that includes them on otherwise uncontrollable situations by claiming roles that are in literal terms non-existent or ineffective. Despite the violence of the wars, the physical damage they caused to life and property, and the inability of Congolese people to overcome the threats they identified, the responses curbed the political impact of violence by claiming some say or some part in events. People refused to accept the occupation even when they could not fight it and constructed stories and realities that negated the will of the occupiers. People limited the violence not by stopping it from happening but by limiting its power, that is to say limiting the impact (very slightly) and thereby limiting the ability of its perpetrators to achieve further objectives through violence. A man in a small fishing village in Oriental Province gave his perspective on the wars: There were confrontations here and there between the army and the Rcd. They fought – the soldiers and the militia, the young people from the village who got together to defend the villages. So that made for a lot of discord, misunderstandings and violence everywhere. And terrible massacres. The cat chases the mouse, but the leopard chases the cat.34

When was this the deal? 81 He explained that the cat is the Rcd, the mouse is the government (because it stays in the house) and the leopard is the Maimai movement. We discussed this and he decided, triumphantly, that the population was the lion – more powerful still than the leopard. His account, like many of the responses to the wars, was somewhat optimistic but provides a valuable insight: if the population opposes a regime, that regime is curtailed. Mobutu was finally removed and the Rcd could not establish their political agenda. In spite of the costs incurred, people found ways to survive economically, socially and psychologically, and in doing so established a bottom line.

5

Politics of pillage

Faced with the constraints imposed by war and the lack of regulation or protection, people took decisions that involved them in self-destructive dynamics. These processes, though, were not limited to times or areas of war. Self-destructive decision-making and collaboration between adversaries have already been observed during the pillages of the early 1990s and the fighting in the provinces that followed. They are characteristic of the politics that take place during pillage, as the absence of contractual responsibility minimises the costs and maximises the returns on the use of violence. Violence diminishes the chances of negotiated outcomes and decreases incentives for bargaining for the longer term. For those who do not have access to the means of violence, the pursuit of self-interest can become self-destructive. The notion that self-interest could be self-destructive captures an illogic that provides a counterweight to the salience of strategic rationality assumed in conventional understandings of security. Not only do dominant definitions of security exclude and undermine people, exposing them to more threats, but they have no way of including the kinds of decisions that people take in the face of severe constraints. People become intricately woven into the politics that destroy themselves and others. Categorically differentiating between perpetrators and victims or interpreting all responses to violence as resistance blocks discussion of the politics of pillage. This tends to victimise or heroise the underdog, obscuring the dynamics of the political environment and the nature of the decisions that people take within it. Pillage is a recurrent motif in Congolese politics and connects the conflict between the leadership and the population with the international conflict over political and economic resources; one author traces pillage to Diego Cão’s operations in 1484 (Kaplaingu 2002, 91–115). The pillage of resources has been accompanied by the pillage of human beings during the slave trade, and later of their labour within Congo during the colonial era. Commenting on the wealth that this labour generated, Nzongola-Ntalaja assesses that ‘Congo is a classic example of a colony that financed its own subjugation’ (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002, 57). Since independence, too, pillage has shaped and been shaped by Congolese politics, implicating people through the parts they have played in turning public assets to private gain. By the 1990s the

Politics of pillage 83 increasing lawlessness and scarcity gave violence and resistance a cataclysmic character, expressed by one interviewee with the words: ‘Everyone says it’s sad and joins in.’

‘Independence cha cha cha!’ Congo’s story does not start at independence and there are important continuities from the colonial period, but the moment of nationhood gives an entry point as managing security was part of the project of nationhood. Congo’s attainment of independence in 1960 was contemporary with that of fourteen other African states and, until the end of the Cold War, security was defined through roles that were internationally agreed or dictated to the state. The national security of states rested in territorial integrity ensured by military hardware. In the Belgian Congo, pressure for independence had grown towards the end of the 1950s, and riots broke out in the capital Leopoldville (later named Kinshasa) on 4 January 1959, prompting the Belgians to announce their decolonisation policy nine days later (Kanza 1972, 52–4). The country was the second most industrialised in sub-Saharan Africa, with exceptional production of cobalt, industrial diamonds and copper (de Failly 2006, 137), but only a small proportion of the Congolese workforce was employed in the modern sector and the economy depended largely on mining, industry and plantations (Putzel et al. 2008, 14). Van Bilsen, a Belgian professor involved with the decolonisation, had produced a ‘Thirty Years Plan’ in 1955, outlining his assessment of a realistic timeframe for educating a generation of Congolese professionals to administrate the country. Patrice Lumumba, leader of the National Congolese Movement, a political party formed in 1958 that represented the interests of many in the small middle class, pressed for an immediate transition of power. (People from the middle class were referred to by the Belgians as evolués, the implication being that they had evolved from the African condition. This contrasted with macaque – monkey – a derogatory term applied to people who did not have European education or table linen.) Joseph Kasavubu, head of the Association of the Bakongo, was elected president and Patrice Lumumba prime minister in May 1960. On 30 June the country gained its independence and, in an unscheduled speech, Lumumba announced to the former colonisers: ‘We are no longer your monkeys.’ Kanza reports that Lumumba had ‘two great thorns in his flesh: how he was to secure the internal and external security of his country; and how could he prevent the mineral wealth of its land from becoming the cause and source of its people’s misfortune?’ (Kanza 1972, 170). In Kinshasa, Joseph Kabasele, aka le Grand Kallé, and his band African Jazz were singing ‘Independence cha cha cha’, a song that became a hit across Africa, but national security was an immediate concern. The newly independent country got off to a rocky start with an army mutiny in the first

84 Politics of pillage week, followed by the Congo Crisis marked by the secession of Katanga and South Kasai and constituting a severe threat to territorial sovereignty (Kanza 1972, 184–95). Kivu also announced its secession but went no further. Facing widespread turbulence, Lumumba requested UN troops, which granted cover for US military involvement (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002, 99): the arrival of 1,000 Soviet ‘technical advisors’ had alerted the USA to the fact that communism could present a real alternative in what was now the Republic of the Congo (Wrong 2001, 66). Joseph-Désiré Mobutu headed a military coup on 14 September 1960. Lumumba, who was perceived by the USA to be a communist threat, was assassinated in a conspiracy between the CIA, the Belgian elite and Congolese collaborators (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002, 106–12). The Katangan secession movement, supported by the Belgian political elite as a means of maintaining ownership of the mines in Katanga, was quashed by UN troops in January 1963 (Nest et al. 2006, 17). The year 1964 brought rebellions in the Kivus and other eastern provinces, leading to the deaths of a million people (Young 1998) and the establishment of a rebel government in Stanleyville (the town that later became Kisangani). In 1965 Mobutu, Chief of Staff of the Army, seized power for a second time in a coup with the support of the USA. He abolished all structures that he perceived to carry the germs of crisis, including the constitution and political parties, and his policy objective became national unity through single party rule (Bwenge 2003, 71–2). Father of the nation Mobutu brought a degree of stability to the Republic of the Congo. An army career and astute manoeuvring had gained him the confidence of Patrice Lumumba and Joseph Kasavubu, the foremost politicians of the day. Internationally, Mobutu’s potential had been noted; he was considered intelligent and skilled, and politically appropriate, and he was feted by patrons in the USA and Europe, particularly France and Belgium. A priest who had worked for years in education assessed Mobutu’s early years as president: In 1960 there were no doctors, engineers, professors, and now we have them. I’m not saying everything is ok, I’m just noting that in a short time we achieved here in Congo what it took others a century to do. The whole country wanted change and everyone was enthusiastic. The leadership was very well managed to start with, it was really good, but in 1975 he destroyed everything. Mobutu became a dictator at the behest of the USA, and he broke everything in order to assure his authority. Schools started to teach Mobutuism, and everyone had to do what he wanted.1

Politics of pillage 85 Many testimonies of Mobutu’s rule see a mutation of governance through the early independence years and a concentration of power, while others perceive difficulties from the start. An interviewee in Kisangani explained: Mobutu took power in 1965 and we entered a very dictatorial period. He was above everyone. There was only one party – previously there had been a lot of political parties, but he combined them and said he was the father of everyone. All the power was concentrated in Equateur, which is his region. All the administrative core and the army came from there. There were two capitals: the capital of the country in Kinshasa and the capital of Mobutu in Gbadolite [where he had his palace].2 Mobutu claimed to be the father of the nation and in 1971 he changed the country’s name to Zaire. The notion of a father figure encouraged the implication that the children of Zaire should not fall foul of him and that if they did, they should fear his punishment and hope for his forgiveness. It also laid the ground for Mobutu’s gradual deification, promulgated through television clips of him floating on clouds and the co-optation of musicians to sing in his honour. An emotional basis for his support was sustained through his magnetic charisma and aggressive lionisation (Wrong 2001, 61–82). Children in school sang: ‘It’s a big lie that one day the emperor will die! Never! Never!’ Mobutu’s superhuman persona was closely linked to a national fervour, as is indicated by a comment from an interviewee in Kisangani: ‘He diabolised the place, but he instigated a love of the country. People make these theories about Congo being too big and ungovernable, but the Congolese will not allow even 1cm2 to be split off.’ Mobutu behaved as if everything was a gift, rather than a political process, and a culture of sycophancy contributed to the lack of political accountability (Leslie 1993; Young 1998, 113). The relationship between the leadership, security and the population is often expressed in contradictory ways, as is captured in the interjections made by two men in an interview in Kisangani: R: Mobutu made good speeches, he was a good orator. J: Yes, we danced and cheered for him. R: But he killed a lot of people.3 A political activist expressed a similar sentiment, and also noted the element of coercion in maintaining a partisan form of stability: When Mobutu was in power . . . there was security for the population except that the President killed a lot of people. But the security was good. When people moved around he had them arrested and killed. He didn’t pay the civil servants. He had money but he didn’t want to pay them, or the money was diverted. He was popular through fear, because if you didn’t like him you risked him killing you.4

86 Politics of pillage Much of the violence of the early years of independence had stemmed from the middle classes’ attempts to assert themselves politically, often mobilising support along ethnic lines, and Mobutu used the turmoil of this period to justify his heavy-handedness. His party, the Popular Movement of the Revolution (MPR), was formed in 1967. It was the only legal party from 1970 to 1990, membership was obligatory, and all opposition was killed, exiled or corrupted (Badye 2002, 24–6). The party’s manifesto was steeped in the principles of nationalism, revolution and authenticity. An interviewee in Kisangani recalled the era: Mobutu had his roots everywhere, and his people were very strong. There was always opposition, but they spoke quietly. The people of Tshisekedi tried to change things a bit. People moved from the main party, the MPR, to the opposition party. But everyone was obliged to say, ‘Yes, we accept.’5 From 1972 only the Catholic Church and the universities openly criticised Mobutu (Badye 2002, 27). There were single-party elections in 1970, 1977 and 1984 in which Mobutu was elected unopposed (Mutabusha 2007, 35). An interviewee stated: ‘Mobutu said, “Eat, dance, drink – do whatever you want, but don’t touch my power. If anyone dares challenge me, I’ll kill them.” But it was calm.’ The familial idiom of unity and fatherhood covered two less equitable truths. One was the favourable treatment given to Mobutu’s network of demands and support, and the Binza Group elite core was sustained by the political and economic returns of patrimonialism. The other was the increasingly unfavourable and violent treatment to which the population in general and some groups in particular were subjected. I was in Kinshasa on Independence Day, 30 June 2008, forty-eight years after the state’s foundation. The festivities involved a televised statesponsored march about a hundred yards long. Apart from that, I found no one celebrating – except one. One of the CD shops in Victoire, the musical centre of Kinshasa, was playing ‘Independence cha cha cha’ on loop, and in the courtyard outside a seventy-year-old musician who had played in the top bands during Mobutu’s rule was the only one dancing. He told me about the changes he had seen: N: President Mobutu was very sensitive to the work of musicians. If songs were released that he liked, he’d find out who’d played it and pay them for the work. One day I was playing in the Vis-à-Vis [nightclub]. The President came in with his wife and when I saw them I dropped his name into the song I was singing. He came up to me and gave me money, it was enough to buy a house. Z: Did he continue to support musicians throughout his rule? N: After a certain time the President stopped supporting musicians. It was when he felt his power was weakening and when his health

Politics of pillage 87 was weakening as well. But he helped me twice, once when he saw me playing that night and a second time when he saw me on the street. I’d hurt my leg and was sitting on the street and because the President knew me he stopped the car to give me money. It was a personal story and one that acknowledged the dynamic of patrimonial support and personal largesse of the president. Like others, though, the interviewee reported both favour and fear as strategies alongside the normalisation of violence through Mobutu’s rule. He continued: The period of President Mobutu was difficult. There was a time you could not even speak his name for fear of being taken by the security forces. And people didn’t stay on the boulevard into the night as they were afraid of being arrested. In that time they’d take you away in a box and kill you.6 Favour and discrimination were deliberately destabilising, and the population, who had appeared threatening when they voted for Lumumba, were subordinated to the role of children. They were cut out of political decisionmaking and subject to the whimsical and violent authority of their father. Nationalisation Mobutu inherited a mining sector that had been active since the beginning of the twentieth century, although the departure of the Belgian colonisers saw a near-comprehensive withdrawal of capital from the country. They also claimed ‘colonial debt’ for the investments made shortly before independence (Hesselbein 2007, 26). With what remained, Mobutu oversaw economic growth until 1974, sustained by sales of base metals for use in the Vietnam War (Kodi 2008, 7). At independence, national infrastructure was established in the abandoned Belgian buildings: the water company, Regideso, was created by ordinance of law in 1966, followed by the creation of a National Electricity Company (SNEL) in 1970. There were huge development projects in the early 1970s, including the steel works at Maluku and the Inga dam on the Atlantic coast, from which nearly two thousand kilometres of high voltage cable took hydroelectricity to Katanga. Infrastructure was already in decline, though; many of the projects failed to function at full potential and put Zaire millions of dollars in debt (Badye 2002, 26). Nationalisation was a key policy for many African countries at the time, fuelled by the discourse of African socialism (Ekwa 2008, 106). In Zaire, the scene was set by Mobutu’s nationalisation in 1966 of the copper extraction industry, the Mining Union of Upper Katanga, which later became Gécamines. This was the largest company in the country and controlled the majority of Zaire’s copper exports, on which the national economy

88 Politics of pillage depended. Its fortunes were linked to those of the second largest economic concern, the national railway company SNCC, which transported the ore, workers and equipment. The nationalisation reached its apogee between 1973 and 1975, when it was referred to as Zairianisation. The diamond mining company Miba, based in Kasai, was nationalised in 1973, along with land and plantations. A number of new industries were established in the same era, alongside the nationalisation of banks, refineries and transport services, hotels, insurance companies, schools and universities (Putzel et al. 2008, 14). The economy hit a sharp dip in 1974, when the oil crisis precipitated a two-thirds fall in copper prices, this being arguably the single largest factor in Zaire’s decline (Renton et al. 2006, 131). It led to severe devaluation of the currency, and the economy continued to deteriorate through the rest of Mobutu’s rule. Zairianisation took place in an economy that was driven not by production but by looting what was left of the industrial and mining sectors. Widely divergent political, class, gender and regional interests within the country meant that there was no simple process of making the companies Zairian, and Mobutu reallocated assets on the basis of favour rather than competence, harnessing the nationalisation to incorporate supporters into systems of patronage. The nationalisation took place in the 1970s, an era in which Western development policy reserved a commanding role for the state. It was followed by a phase of liberalisation, pursued through Structural Adjustment Programmes that were implemented in Zaire from 1976 to 1987. These programmes required cutting back government service provision and privatising companies. Mobutu again took advantage of this policy to reward people close to him by handing over control of business enterprises and to deplete the power of his rivals by exclusion. The privatisation, which continued in an unsystematic way until Mobutu was deposed, was apparently a reversal of the nationalisation project, but it bore similarities, both in conforming to the demands of Western development policy at the time and in terms of the patterns of redistribution that it licensed. The signal from the top of the political hierarchy in Zaire was that public goods could be used for private enrichment. By the same logic, company assets could be taken by the staff and Gécamines was stripped by its employees. A university professor recounted the company’s destruction in the late 1980s: Gécamines was pillaged by its own workers . . . That was in 1987 already – they took the petrol, the tyres, the change from transactions. They took cobalt – have you seen cobalt? It’s in small grainy pieces, you put some in your pocket each day and after a while you can fill a bucket. They took cables, the copper ones. They’d put it round their waist and walk out. If you take a metre a day you’ve got thirty metres after a month.

Politics of pillage 89 The pillage of Gécamines was supported by the ruling class, who found ways to make their own profits from the misdemeanours of their subordinates. The professor continued: So, first of all there was the pillage by the workers, and they sold it to make bullets. When they went to the factories they’d steal anything made from copper and bronze, even the radiators. All that went to make bullets. The governor was in favour of this activity and he sold the buying rights and it was all taken to South Africa or I don’t know where to make bullets. So they were making bullets out of this stuff with the complicity of the authorities.7 Mobutu pilfered $400 million from Gécamines, and the country’s debt was not alleviated by the liberalisation, which served instead to entrench the unequal relationship between the Western patrons and Zaire (Reno 1997, 40). World Bank officials took key posts within government ministries, and the IMF maintained a presence in the central bank, customs office and Ministry of Finance but did not arrest the economic catastrophe (Putzel et al. 2008, vii). Mobutu’s adherence to US security strategy earned him immunity for his financial impropriety from the IMF, and Zaire’s debt was rescheduled nine times between 1976 and 1989 (Wrong 2001, 194; Renton et al. 2006, 131). As the country became increasingly bankrupt, the state retreated, exposing the population to the vagaries of aid provision. National sovereignty The irony of the early years of independence is that Zaire’s nationalist project of creating a currency, flag, anthem and airline was heavily subsidised from outside, both politically and economically, to ensure that what emerged was not genuinely independent. Nowhere was this irony more acute than in the violent and divisive processes of establishing national sovereignty and an army to defend it. An interviewee in a village in Oriental Province, several hundred miles from any industrial or business operations, asserted that there was ‘no security for individuals’, continuing: ‘He built houses in Europe. He built a whole lot in Europe but nothing here . . . He abandoned the population.’ I asked if there was any resistance to Mobutu, to which he replied, ‘No. Who is going to resist a big dictator?’ Mobutu adopted Louis XIV’s position ‘I am the state’ (Trefon et al. 2002, 380) with the implication that Zaire’s security rested with the safety of his person. Security for the regime was provided by a mafia-like configuration of the army, secret services, trade networks, public administration and the MPR. There was a multiplicity of security services, and the army was used against civilians to protect the state against internal threats, but it could not repel attacks from outside and was characterised from the outset by disorganisation and unaccountability (Minani Bihuzo 2008, 3–7).

90 Politics of pillage It was a form of national security that was underwritten by Zaire’s patrons: in the 1970s Zaire was receiving 90 per cent of its military funding and equipment from the USA, Belgium, France, Israel and China (MantubaNgoma 2002, 11–12). The weakness of Mobutu’s military authority was demonstrated in 1977 and 1978, when the ‘Katanga gendarme’ incursions of Zairian insurgents attacked from Angola. Mobutu was saved by French and Belgian paratroopers and logistical backing from the USA (Minani Bihuzo 2008, 2). After the second round of attacks, Mobutu concentrated his power further by merging the military general and presidential personnel and reappointing himself as Chief of Staff. He already held positions as Minister of Defence and Supreme Commander. Katanga was not pacified, though, and further unrest in 1984 and 1985 exposed the failure of Mobutu’s national security policy. Within the army, divisions arose in the same ways that they did in the industrial sector. Mobutu gathered his political friends around him, installing incompetence in the professional cadre and stoking resentment amongst excluded groups. Elite military posts were reallocated through the 1980s, and the Special Presidential Division consisted predominantly of men from Mobutu’s ethnic group. The rest of the army was largely abandoned. Midlevel military ranks lived on the rations of the lower ranks and the lower ranks preyed on the population. This institutionalised indiscipline as military personnel lived not from their salaries but from the rents that the positions granted them (Minani Bihuzo 2008, 5–10). Mobutu’s survival through economic disaster and sub-national conflicts was ensured by the provision of aid from his Western patrons. The security of Zaire was defined by the policy of the West, and Cold War political requirements overwhelmed all other interests, sanctioning Mobutu to dismantle the country’s commercial base and authorise the army to prey on civilians. Some 40 per cent of the population was employed in the formal sector in 1955; by 1990 this had shrunk to 5 per cent (Wrong 2001, 152). MacGaffey’s work explores the question of how people survived at the end of the 1980s, given the dire economic situation (MacGaffey 1991). Trefon asked a similar question thirteen years later, after two pillages and two wars (Trefon 2004).

Pillage and lack of contract ‘Rich Africa, poor African’ a priest in a village in Oriental Province told me. Many of the above processes are not unique to Congo. Practically the whole of Africa, and much of the rest of the world, has been violently colonised. Many other countries have experienced rapid and uncharted decolonisation and the imposition of detrimental aid packages and policies. Congo borders nine countries, most of which have been involved in its wars, and many – the Republic of Congo (Congo-Brazzaville), Central African Republic, South

Politics of pillage 91 Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi – have seen large-scale violence on their own territory in recent decades. Extraction takes place in mineral-rich areas across the continent, and the story of political disorder after independence is so generalised as to appear ineluctable (Bates 2008, 15–32). Angola has a tiny wealthy elite dominating a warped economy. South Sudan has less physical infrastructure than Congo, Somalia less political infrastructure. Uganda and Kenya, although at a much higher level of development, have recurring political tensions and violence. Many African countries have shaky economies, huge inequalities and no clear path or progress. In other respects, though, Congo’s story diverges from that of other countries. Congo was relatively developed by African standards at independence: it came from in front – with a health system, primary education and substantial exports – and is now behind. In addition, its mineral resources are exceptional, and its natural resources of water and agricultural land grant plentiful and reliable harvests on both sides of the equator. One interviewee assured me: ‘You think that Western countries are developed because God loves you. But God doesn’t love you! He put you in difficult conditions and because of that you’ve had to work things out for yourselves. Here you throw the seeds in the ground and you can eat.’ Without underplaying the toll taken by wars elsewhere, Congo has also had particularly extreme experiences of violence. The divergence of the development and security trajectory and the levels of violence are linked in various ways to Congo’s exceptional natural and mineral endowments. Varadarajan argues that assumptions that security is simply the extension of US hegemony are over-structural and deny specificities and differences between countries. She presents the case that, instead, state identity and security are constituted in and through relationships with global capital: not all peripheral states perceive the same threats or respond in the same way to hegemonic power. Analysing the Indian nuclear tests of 1998, Varadarajan argues that the tests were an expression of sovereignty in the face of the popularly perceived attempts by ‘foreigners’ to exploit India through liberalisation (Varadarajan 2004, 335–6). In Congo, the response was less concerted and less spectacular than nuclear testing, but the significance of interactions with global capital was amplified by the vastness of Congo’s mineral wealth and the unequal relations that have shaped its trade. Throughout its history Congo has operated more like an extractive industry than a nation state, and most major towns are situated at its periphery. This has legacies for the political organisation that the country sustains and the threats that its citizens perceive: foreigners are often viewed with suspicion and, at the domestic level, central rule is avoided as the majority of the population lives in border areas. The availability and fertility of land support a largely self-sufficient agricultural population who are able to shun an abusive and neglectful state. The collection of tax, a key indicator and mechanism of state control, is awkward and services are hard to render (Herbst 2000, 118–120).

92 Politics of pillage For these reasons, Congo does not lend itself readily to the solidification of contracts, and the extraction of resources has relied on violence. Counterclaims over ownership are also made violently as industries, traders or company personnel are deemed illegitimate by Congolese politicians or interest groups. More than simply responding to opportunity, pillage asserts the illegitimacy of ownership in ways that are literally or symbolically destructive. The allocation of assets to cronies during Mobutu’s rule, the destruction of stock in the early 1990s and the forcible looting of eastern Congo during the wars have common strands: they all involve the noncontractual relocation of assets through violence or the threat of violence. They are political as well as economic phenomena in that they contest and reorder power and create an alternative narrative of ownership and legitimacy, and their political impact is to reproduce the conditions for violence. Pillage is embedded in notions of identity and security through the repossession of land and resources in ways that employ collective violence for individualistic ends. The rhetoric of ‘Katanga for the Katangans’ during the Katanga–Kasai conflict provided a pretext for the dispossession of those perceived to be Kasaian. It was echoed in ‘Congo for the Congolese’ while Laurent Kabila was in power, which led to the expulsion of many foreign traders, including some who had been in Congo for generations, and later by ‘Ituri for the Iturians’. Discussing the iterative populist attempts to strip the assets of those viewed as outsiders, I asked a woman in Kinshasa: ‘Who gained from that?’ She looked at me surprised and replied, ‘Gained?’ Attempts to claim, by virtue of identity, land and the resources they harbour stem from the experience of being robbed and are self-seeking in asserting ownership. They are catastrophic, superficially because they chase out stability and sometimes competence and have no structure for restoring them, but more profoundly because they implicate those claiming goods, positions, land or resources in the same non-contractual forms of transaction and contested ownership. Tying ownership to identity and security frames the contention that Congo was never in front: Congolese people were the recipients of primary healthcare and education at independence but there were no Congolese doctors. Congo was industrialised but not by Congolese financial or human capital. There was Congolese labour in factories, but no Congolese expertise or ownership; there were only seventeen Congolese university graduates and no engineers (Wrong 2001, 50). Unlike the mineral resources and the physical infrastructure that was left on Congolese soil, the legal, political and economic infrastructure did not belong to the Congolese. Zairianisation made companies Zairian, not in the simple sense of transferring companies to Zairian ownership but in the more profound sense of making them Zairian institutions, a process shaped by the violence of colonisation and the inequality installed by neocolonial rule. Urban centres were pillaged in the early 1990s, scattering foreign trading and employment practices by reallocating belongings to the Congolese.

Politics of pillage 93 Pillage is encompassing in its mechanisms. Mobutu’s use of rewards and violence in amassing political and economic power did not simply set the example of pillage; it involved the population in its caprices through patrimonialism and the threat of violent exclusion from privilege. The legacy of Mobutu’s rule is that people involve themselves in abusive power because it is the only form of power that is accessible to them and because changeable favouritism maps opportunities to salvage with impunity. In involving themselves in pillage, people reproduce political and economic collaborations in an environment of perpetual dilemma in which all decisions lead to disaster. This sets the boundaries to what the means of security can achieve: predictability is negated by perpetuity and agency by dilemma. The grey zone Primo Levi explores the ‘grey zone’ where ‘those who are condemned to survive under conditions of extreme hierarchy and cruelty jockey for survival at one another’s expense. The grey zone itself is a continuum permeating to a greater or lesser extent any social setting whose inequality and suffering is imposed by structural and symbolic forces’ (Bourgeois 2004, 428). The majority of Congo’s population lives in the grey zone imposed by destitution and oppressive power. Palermo (1997, vol. 2, 1887), recounting the strikes that affected Congolese schools in the early 1990s, comments that ‘a very sad situation developed: the parents, and others too, attacked the teachers; the teachers attacked the parents and the students attacked the parents (who could not pay the fees) and the teachers whose claims were exorbitant. But nobody attacked the big chiefs above them.’ The inability of the aggrieved population to challenge abusive power pushes them towards accommodation with its political mechanisms. The lack of political contract between the leadership and the population that characterised Mobutu’s rule has diverse subsidiaries in the dislocation of other nominally contractual relationships in contemporary Congo. State employees are not paid regularly, so many are ineffective in fulfilling their professional chores and do not have the capacity or inclination to pay taxes. The remuneration that is given to employees is not linked to productive work, and the taxes that are paid are not linked to the provision of services. For the state’s part, there is little reason to pay its agents or provide services: it is not collecting formal taxes from the population and its agents are involved in informal activities (Kodi 2008, 28–32). State agents extract their salaries from the population and, in doing so, relieve the state of its tasks whilst maintaining its physical presence and operating as an extension of its power. The population is enmeshed with this situation as they occupy positions as civil servants, teachers, doctors and other state employees or the families of these professionals, and they have no channel to challenge power directly. Some predictability can be salvaged from the dislocated set of relationships

94 Politics of pillage by efforts to regularise the abuse that is experienced. This involves defensive and pre-emptive decision-making within systems that people have little influence over and no means of escaping. A more proactive approach involves exercising agency by exploiting vestiges of formal structures for private gain, deriving concrete and symbolic profit. As is described by Levi, the struggle takes place between the impoverished groups that are divided against each other by their use or experience of violence, and those who have the means of violence at their disposal retain the upper hand in spite of their own poverty. The involvement of the population is crucial in the perpetuation of the mechanisms that reinforce the parameters imposed on their political and social environment. Any brush with power, whether through favour or threat, implicates people in its divisive processes as they attempt to minimise their own vulnerability to isolation or abuse. Making abuse predictable Amongst the works of art at the National Museum in Kinshasa is a painting of a city street scene. The style is characteristic of Congolese artists; bold shapes and bright colours capture the havoc of cars and minibuses clogging the road. At the centre of the piece is a traffic policeman in standard yellow and blue uniform with white gloves and a whistle. Seemingly an emblem of order in the chaos, he is directing the traffic. ‘But,’ explained my guide with half a smile, ‘it is he who has provoked all of this.’ Despite the limited state reach in Congo, there is an entire security personnel who command forms of violent power, including the police, who have military status. As the army and police are not paid by the state, or are paid inadequately or irregularly, they collect salaries from the population according to Mobutu’s commonly cited ‘Article 15’: fend for yourself. This is not a clean transfer of duty: they are not receiving formal payment and do not perform formal functions. The public administration is centred so heavily on the collection of taxes for personal enrichment that its mechanisms perpetuate its informalisation through what has been termed a ‘cannibalistic structure’ (Minani Bihuzo 2008, 13). As in the painting in the museum, traffic police are stationed at intersections of Congolese roads because the traffic lights do not work. A common appeal for money is expressed as a request for ‘beans for the kids’. The request does not imply that any traffic infraction has taken place and is unambitious and ostensibly well intentioned: it is about providing the bare minimum for hungry children. In theory it is a gift, but it may pre-empt a heftier fine for a traffic offence that could theoretically be pursued formally. By responding to the demand, drivers sustain the traffic police and reinforce the system. As it is a gift, it is ad hoc but, pursued on a full-time basis, it establishes a mechanism within the dislocated contracts and becomes standard funding for a job that has been adapted to be sustainable through

Politics of pillage 95 donations. Many people accept that the police have little choice but to collect money as they are not paid by the state. Demanding beans for the children is one of many forms of harassment that drives policing. Illegality tips the balance in favour of the police despite the absence of formal process and the ambiguity arising from the diminished responsibility imposed by destitution. A taxi driver told me: If you have the correct papers you can drive round easily and you don’t have problems with the police. But if you don’t wear your seat belt or you forget to indicate, there’s no point saying, ‘Oh, I forgot’ – they’ll fine you anyway.8 He did not lambaste the mindless pestering by the police, but he located the legal grey zone, the conditions in which pervasive destitution means that everything is nominally illegal but the rule of law does not obtain. I am not sure I have ever been in a Congolese taxi that had seat belts. Many have lights, indicators, windows, parts of the floor and even the ignition or petrol tank missing (the ignition can be remodelled using bits of wire, saving the need for a key; the petrol tank is replaced with a plastic bottle attached with tubing to the engine). Most vehicles are not roadworthy, and the police simply choose when and from whom to collect fines. The situation is replicated in all areas of public life. An immigration official at a market based at a port in Kinshasa identified some areas of criminality there: It’s a criminal area. There are people who live here and it’s both a port and a market. There are little thieves and there are bars here where people go and get drunk and start brawls. It’s mainly that and prostitutes who have fights amongst themselves. The atmosphere was bustling outside his office and, as he was talking, it was occurring to him that more and more of the activity around him was in contravention of the law. He continued: There’s a law here that forbids everything that happens here, but it’s still there by force of circumstance. It’s forbidden to sell drugs, alcohol, coffee and all those things [he was reading from a legal document he found on the desk]. It’s forbidden to open a market in a port, but people do it.9 The uneven imposition of the law is compounded by the fact that the informality of the state scrambles the functions of collecting fines. The collection of fines punishes civilians but is not contractually linked to the installation of seat belts or indicators, or to the dismantling of markets in port areas. Offenders pay the fine but continue with their illegal activity, thereby maintaining a steady income for state agents who have no motive or means to enforce compliance with the formal law. Policing uses public crimes for private gain through the imposition of informal penalty fares.

96 Politics of pillage The payment of tax follows a similar pattern of predation by state agents facilitated by the acquiescence of the population. As the collection of taxes is informalised, there is no recourse to authority and consequently there is a premium placed on appeasing the official and avoiding an escalation of demands. Boats are taxed when arriving in river ports in Kinshasa from elsewhere in the country, and all docks have heavy police, army and immigration official presence. An immigration officer informed me that sometimes boats are taxed in crates of beer, indicating where the revenue would be invested. In Mbujimayi, an airport tax of $60 is levied, but only from people who have not visited the province before. A kiosk holder in Lubumbashi gave his experience of taxation: After three months they come round measuring the shop and saying it’s so-and-so metres by so-and-so metres. That’s the IPMA [he did not know what IPMA stood for]. Then you have to pay the Contribution and the Environment Tax; they take $50 and it’s for them. They are always coming to the guest-house [next door] too, that’s the officials from the Immigration Office. The arbitrariness of the taxation increases its power as it cannot be questioned in any sensible way: it is not interesting to people or relevant to their decision-making to know the meaning of acronyms of the various state offices, or why immigration officials would tax a guest-house that has no foreign visitors. Not only is the tax not linked to investment in services, but it constrains people from making their own meagre living. The interviewee continued: For a kiosk or a shop, you start from zero, and you work up to a big shop. But the state interferes with that. They have a system whereby they come and take the money and if you don’t give it to them they block the shop. You don’t get a receipt, you just give him some money and he puts it in his pocket. But in two or three days he’s back.10 I asked what the taxes were for in principle, to which he answered: ‘in principle they are for their stomachs’. Accepting the lack of room for manoeuvre, people pay taxes in order to regularise and minimise contact with the state: they pay enforcement agents not to impose state authority because the state’s core function is erratic and abusive. This includes paying officials (informally) not to collect higher (formal or informal) taxes or extract fines for legal offences. An NGO worker described the relationship between the Congolese NGO and the state and the superficiality of the regulation: In principle there are links. We have a lot of letters from the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Social Affairs. On the ground we have to have

Politics of pillage 97 these letters that justify what we are doing. There’s a letter that links the NGO to the state and there are some inspections that take place; sometimes if they have financed something they would come to see what we had done with the money. They don’t give the documents freely, we have to buy them obviously; there are charges for them.11 The pre-emptive tactical submission to abusive taxation takes place in the vestiges of the formal system and fuels the established distrust of the state, which is perceived as a capricious threat. At an orphanage in Kinshasa, the director reported: For looking after the children we have to have documents from the Ministry of Social Affairs and the Ministry of Justice at the level of the commune. The state doesn’t do anything, but we have to have the documents just to cover ourselves in case there’s a problem.12 The extraction of payment from the population is both caused and strained by the generalised political and economic distress, which is experienced to various degrees by the state agents and their victims in the grey zone. I had finished interviewing a police officer at an outpost of Kinshasa; as I got up to leave, he told me: ‘And by the way, we don’t receive our rations here and have no per diem.’ I asked him how he survived and he answered: ‘Only God knows. The population doesn’t have any money. There’s a lock-up but the people are destitute. They can give you 500Fc [less than $1, in return for release] but what are you going to do with that? They don’t have any money.’13 ‘The police massacre the population,’ someone told me as I left the office. Transactions please neither party and are underwritten by the threat of violence as people are not protected by the law and the police are not restrained from attacking people or property. In Kinshasa I was in a bus when a cohort of police emerged marching and singing from the police station. As they crossed the road in front of the bus, they saw a clutch of small stalls: shoe shiners and people selling bananas and oranges. As one, the officers left off singing and destroyed the stalls as the workers scattered, and then they marched on, their display of violence in response to the informal illegal trading completed. Often, too, there is no direct violence committed, but years of abuse and the threat of more costly or insurmountable obstruction mean that state agents need simply to invite people to access power. In Mbujimayi airport, there is no genuine security procedure. You sit in a bar outside the airport until you see your plane arrive, and then you go in. That does not mean there are no administrative costs; in the absence of professional tasks or remuneration, airport staff make use of their time in the office. You say goodbye to the man who stung you for $60 on entry to Kasai and then proceed to a tiny room in which there are three uniformed personnel. One stamps the ticket

98 Politics of pillage cover and asks for money for a drink, another draws a squiggle in the stamp and asks for money for a drink. The third does nothing. Then you go to another desk where the guy asks for money for a drink. The threat of violence or definitively obstructive behaviour curtails the decision-making available to people and has its roots in mechanisms established by Mobutu to protect the power of the state. People become involved in these mechanisms because their involvement regularises the abuse and gives them access to a modicum of power: the ability to survive and operate within the constraints. Agents of perpetuation In Lubumbashi I was told about a licence-plate scheme for bicycles: the genuine and the fake plates were made by the same man and there were no distinguishing features between them. The man made money for his superiors from the formal plates and money for himself from the informal plates. Englebert writes: ‘Many people benefit from the system in some ways and contribute to its reproduction, although as a country all of them end up arguably worse off for it’ (Englebert 2002, 591). A second reason for people to take part in the politics of pillage is that it gives them a chance to reserve something for themselves. Nobody is under the impression that the distribution of resources in Congo is just, so thieving, hawking and free-riding are not deviant but legitimate. Swindling is, according to one interviewee, ‘what you do from the middle of the month’. In the absence of possibilities for productive work, the vestiges of the formal sector provide people with a seam for extremely restricted forms of agency. It is restricted because all opportunities are circumscribed by the priorities and threats of abusive power. The professional quest is not so much for economic independence, which is impractical as an aspiration and politically unviable, as for economic dependence: people attest to seeking an ‘umbrella’ – a patron, or a niche within the market of pillage. The lack of contractual employment means that Mobutu’s systems of patronage continue to outperform other forms of political or economic association. The economic worth of formal physical infrastructure has been syphoned off years ago, but the nominally formal structures, positions and conventions provide the long-term unemployed with a source of income from their fellow citizens. The coercive involvement of the population in the degrading competition of the grey zone systematically erodes confidence. A priest observed the links between the social and individual experiences of security: There’s a clear link: society is made up of individuals and when society doesn’t function well individuals suffer. And when individuals suffer, that impacts on society. Man creates society and society makes man. So if people are not paid that creates problems for them; they are going to steal and that has repercussions for society as a whole.14

Politics of pillage 99 As the vestiges of formality provide the framework for swindling, they are closely guarded: people remain in post, many sitting in the office for years after work and salaries have ceased, maintaining the social and political status that their defunct formal position confers. Without the benefit of the use of violence, civilian personnel use various means for involving people in their power, often by alluding to once-formal activities or conventions. Social mechanisms are maintained by extensive codes of sycophancy that proclaim and bolster systems of hierarchy and patronage. The use of elaborate titles and greetings reproduce cultural norms of respect but, like the bicycle licence plates, the same greetings are also a travesty of respect, a means of instrumental manipulation and demand. The allusion to status and power is accompanied by obstreperous behaviour that uses any trace of formal structure to remind people of their infraction and the need for a corrective contribution. There are diverse examples of the ways in which political or economic pressure is exerted to express agency under situations of political duress and turbulence. In the course of attempting to arrange interviews for my research, I experienced, alongside an enormous amount of goodwill, assorted tactics to involve me in expressions of power. They included demanding various proofs of identity beyond purposes of practicality, requiring that documents were not folded or photocopied, picking up on typographical irregularities of no grammatical or legal significance in documents, or delaying or avoiding meeting times. The process of profiting economically or politically in these ways, even if merely by gaining power over someone else’s time or effort, provides a live role within a moribund system. It reasserts the significance of the position or the job and, in so doing, often generates an opportunity to demand payment to offset obstructive behaviour. These kinds of interaction that lay claim to political or economic significance are referred to as gymnastics, acrobatics, ceremony, complications or simply ‘formality’ and are routine in all contact with once-formal structures. They are acts of bureaucracy that take place ostensibly for formal reasons but have no procedural function. Their purpose is to maximise the informal opportunities that the position affords, but in doing so they extend the reach of abusive power through capillary mechanisms of enforcement and discipline. A foreign NGO worker reflected on the dynamics of the informal sector and made connections with the population’s security and that of the country: You could easily earn more as a prostitute than as a doctor. They’re not getting paid, or it’s six months late. And it’s everyone, including the armed forces. The army and the police are armed and they find ways to get what they need: food, shelter, fun. They shut down a road and charge a tax to every poor farmer who is bringing his produce to market. The civil servants find ways to invent tax too, and what happens is that the poor are the ones who pay the most tax.

100 Politics of pillage The ruse works because it is those who are destitute who most need to associate themselves with power, but their choices reinforce their subordination and the dysfunction of their political environment. He tied the regressive economic gains into the broader political processes: That’s a disincentive to invest or to do anything. Just estimate the impact of that, and add the fact that if the low and mid-level civil servants aren’t getting paid, it’s because their supervisors are taking it. How do you get your army to defend you if you’re not paying them?15 Like the pillages of the early 1990s, the pillage that takes place through the everyday attempts at salvage within a patrimonial structure and the regressive and arbitrary taxation occurs with the approbation of the leadership. Recall the observation made about pillages in the early 1990s: ‘It was impossible that the army could do this without being ordered to do so. If a commander did that on his own initiative, he’d be executed . . . The population joined in –out of despair . . . but in their hearts they were against Mobutu.’ The violence meted out to the Kasaians met with similar endorsement: ‘All this was with the blessing of Mobutu as he was the president at the time but he didn’t issue any kind of reprimand.’ In pursuing everyday survival, people’s involvement in pillage constitutes a small reclamation against the leadership and the abusive conditions under which people take decisions, but it simultaneously entrenches the political hierarchy and their subjugation within it. As with Mobutu, no reaction is drawn as to react would be to accept that there was discontent.

Lack of strategic rationality Since independence, the conflict over Congo’s political and economic resources and the conflict between the leadership and the population have interacted to forestall political contract. The immediate outcomes of this are violently unaccountable power that is reinforced by the access to wealth that it accords and a disorientated population who can neither challenge nor genuinely profit from the situation despite their participation in it. Pillage enriches the powerful but, for those without power, involvement in pillage is reactive and the lack of contract is constantly disabling. As occurred during the wars, people’s agency and the predictability of their environment were systematically undercut and involved them in destructive outcomes. The individual gain that is achieved at the expense of others involves people in not only an economic pillage but also a political pillage. Political resources, in particular the space and motivation to negotiate, the possibility of interacting over the longer term and trust, are destroyed as people are woven into the fabric of aggressive power and the struggle with others that this entails. Further, by using pillage as a means of remonstration against the violent power of the state, people involve themselves in the same dynamic that they are attempting to resist.

Politics of pillage 101 Paradoxically, the politics of pillage locks people into non-contractual relationships and although this situation is individualising in pitting the destitute against each other in a struggle for survival, the mechanisms stem not from individual predilections but from the political environment. As groups that are corralled through favour and violence by profession, ethnicity, gender or other identities, the population is intricately involved politically and economically in the processes of unequal and unaccountable power. In addition, the confluence of self-seeking and self-destructive behaviour makes their activity conceptually invisible to conventional security studies, which assumes that people act rationally according to their interests. People do not command the space that would be necessary for their decisions to be strategically rational. The decisions taken by people in Congo instead continually represent attempts to minimise vulnerability and to work within space, and they also reproduce the threats posed to those who do not have the power to control the agenda.

6 Fit-up agreement

The Global and All-Inclusive Peace Agreement, the formal peace, was signed in Pretoria on 17 December 2002. It was sponsored and promoted by northern donors but, rather than bringing about a termination of hostilities, the peace in Congo took place alongside the war. The peace agreement was ‘fitted up’ by its funders to fulfil a version of events compatible with their ideological template and later to justify the interventions that they had made. I am borrowing the term ‘fit-up’ from colloquial legal commentary indicating that an account was put together to fit the requirements of the case: the war, peace agreement, Transition and elections were fitted up to suit what northern development and security policy had to offer. ‘Fitting-up’ the peace in Congo involved considerable oversight of violence and its functions in reproducing the political hierarchy. It overlooked the fact that the elites whose positions were regularised through the Transition had gained their power through war, and that violence continued to crowd out non-violence up to and during the elections that concluded the Transition. As a result of this violence and its oversight, the formal peace instituted a regressive political and economic deal between former belligerents that marginalised the population and laid the path for unopposed rule.

A logic of arms A Congolese UN aid worker based in Lubumbashi was candid about the political process that he observed: You cannot form a political opposition when the logic of arms is in place. Bemba has succeeded because he has his bodyguards and an entire army around him, but if you stand up and say, ‘Don’t vote for Mr Kabila because he’s not capable of running the country,’ they’ll kill you. He was talking at the time of the first round of presidential elections, the results of which were to be announced by 20 August 2006. (The elections had been scheduled to take place within thirty months of the peace being

Fit-up agreement 103 signed, but were more than a year adrift of the June 2005 deadline.) The time for the announcement was set for 9pm, so I arranged to watch it on television in the guest-house in Lubumbashi where I was staying. At 8.50pm the guests bought up the remaining beer in the guest-house and got ready to hear the results. Someone had a brother in Kinshasa who was reporting troops deployed all over the capital and several disturbances. In Lubumbashi, UN Mission in Congo (Monuc) troops were stationed around the town. Two days previously an army convoy had driven round the city with sirens wailing and lights flashing. Many of the troops were in riot gear or wearing gas masks. All were well dressed and had smart vehicles, boots and body armour. It was a demonstration to this slightly tattered town that there is wealth in power and that it is invested in the ability to inflict violence. There was no announcement at 9pm. The UN had a string of publicity that played on loop; it was all nicely put together, and then boring a few times later. There was a procession singing and dancing through Lubumbashi flanked by a police vehicle, but still no news about the election. Then there was a statement that, on account of the ‘generalised panic’ in Kinshasa, the electoral team had been moved to another location. The beer was running low. Another man heard from his family in Kinshasa about the troop deployment. There was anticipation and at the same time everyone knew that it was between Kabila winning and a second round. Kabila was referred to as ‘Mobila’ – an elision of Mobutu with Kabila – by one of the guests, and another mentioned that Bemba was a cannibal. Finally, at 11.45pm the channel opened on the studio. First there was a lengthy explanation of the election, then the camera cut to Apollinaire Malu Malu, President of the Independent Electoral Commission (CEI), wearing a shirt emblazoned with the CEI orange logos. He recited the relevant legislation regarding the process, then started on the results, announcing them in alphabetical order. Kabila got 44.81 per cent, which meant there would be a second round. Bemba gained fewer than half as many votes as Kabila and was his closest rival with 20.03 per cent. Antoine Gizenga (Unified Lumumbist Party, PALU) was in third position with 13.06 per cent. Everyone else had less than 5 per cent of the vote, and twenty-five received less than 1 per cent.1 So the country that had hosted contested polls for the first time in forty years embarked on another set of elections a couple of months later. Kabila again came out the front-runner, gaining 58.05 per cent of the vote against Jean-Pierre Bemba’s 41.95 per cent. The Congolese UN worker cited above discussed the changes over time: During the last years of Mobutu there were about ten months when no one was paid. When [Laurent] Kabila came in he took charge, but he was there for a very short time. There was better security because the army was paid, and there were lots of companies who were trying to work with him. People started working again, even though the salaries were not coming through. Now [in 2006] they don’t even go to work.

104 Fit-up agreement The politicians don’t care; if the schools are on strike that’s not their problem. The military is just there to guard the power of the politicians. Joseph Kabila had been politically unknown when he came to power after his father’s murder in January 2001. He demonstrated an immediate willingness to normalise international relations and reinvigorate the Lusaka Accords that had been signed by Laurent Kabila in July 1999. Early attempts to broker peace by African mediators had led to the signing of agreements between various combinations of belligerents but had not borne fruit (Itindi 2002, 145; ISS 2004, 5). Joseph Kabila won a degree of support from northern donors but the Addis Ababa conference, which was held in October 2001 and launched the InterCongolese Dialogue, was a failure. In February 2002 the InterCongolese Dialogue was reconvened, opening talks that led to the All-Inclusive Peace Agreement in December, signed in Pretoria under heavy northern pressure (Minani Bihuzo 2008, 67–77). Negotiations continued and an Additional Memorandum on the Army and Security was signed in Pretoria on 6 March 2003 and the ‘Final Act’ in Sun City on 2 April. The interviewee continued: ‘It was all decided at Sun City – you had to be in Sun City to be in the running. You can’t get on a boat that’s already left – it was their business.’ He went on to trace the struggle against violent power: [Mobutu] introduced the Sovereign National Conference, and there was hope that we would get through that and elect a leader. That never happened and the logic of arms replaced the logic of democracy, and the logic of arms took root. The Mzee took power, but then there was another rebellion brought in by Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, so people were trying to get rid of those parties and that’s why you see the Maimai movements. That same structure continues until now. You can see that the Rcd got 0 per cent in the elections.2 The MLC also got 0 per cent for itself, but people are looking for an alternative to Kabila and they’re looking for someone else, which is why they have voted for Bemba.3 The formal peace focused on front-line military activity. It set in motion an array of disarmament and demobilisation programmes, along with repatriation for foreign troops and integration into civilian life or a united army for Congolese fighters from the army and militia groups. These programmes had unrealistically short time frames given the logistical and political obstacles, and in the event they were not completed within schedule or even within the Transition (Marriage 2007). Meanwhile the political transition addressed the question of how the principal belligerents could share power. It incorporated opposition leaders into the transitional government in Kinshasa and led to presidential elections four years later, which were engineered by Louis Michel, who was the Belgian foreign minister and, from 2004, EU commissioner.

Fit-up agreement 105

The Global and All-Inclusive Peace Agreement As the peace accommodated the interests of the belligerents, it diminished the fighting but, for the same reason, its impact was circumscribed. Nobody was held responsible for the plunder of the east of Congo, meaning that nobody received reparation either (Nest et al. 2006, 55). A school inspector in Kisangani reported: Now we enter the . . . period of Kabila junior, who we have now and who is the initiator of peace. But it’s a partial peace. You don’t hear gunshots anymore but it’s carrying on elsewhere, in the east of the country. We have salaries, but of what sort? Now we’re in the second month that they haven’t been paid. So the salaries are salaries of sorts. The international community help a bit. They give things for the country, but they’re only helping the members of the transitional government, it doesn’t help us.4 The Global and All-Inclusive Peace Agreement was brokered by South Africa and signed by the Congolese government, all factions of the Rcd, the MLC, the political opposition, civil society and the Maimai. An agreement had been signed between the Congolese government and Rwanda in July 2002 and with Uganda in September, which made provision for the Ituri Pacification Commission. These agreements led to the withdrawal of foreign troops by October, although the UN Panel of Experts recorded that ‘mining battalions’ remained in Congo and verification of withdrawal was complicated by the fact that the Rwandan army and Rcd troops wore the same uniform and carried the same equipment (UNSC 2002, para 15; UNSC 2003, para 15). The parallel talks with the governments of Rwanda and Uganda allowed the Global and All-Inclusive Peace Agreement to frame the conflict as a civil war between the Congolese government and insurgent Congolese forces. By describing a civil war, the formal peace drew attention away from the international conflict over Congo’s resources. Moreover, despite its focus on the national level, a key domestic factor that was not addressed by the peace was the long-running conflict between the leadership and the population. Englebert and Tull note that ‘despite some consensus that African elites adopt policies that maximise their power and material interests, the typical reconstruction agenda assumes instead their altruism and desire to maximise the welfare of the country” (Englebert and Tull 2008, 109–10). A professor in Kinshasa University assessed the inclusion of civil society groups: Each time they were sharing power there would be the minister, the opposition and civil society. In Sun City for example they invited the politicians, the opposition and civil society, and whenever there was a useless commission that was given to civil society. Then they’d give the salaries and nothing else, just so they could say they’d given power to civil society and not left them out.5

106 Fit-up agreement The Government of National Unity was formed on 30 June 2003 and access to power was granted only to top-flight belligerents and politicians (HRW 2005). Joseph Kabila remained president during the Transition and was joined by leaders of the opposition as vice-presidents in a configuration that was known as ‘1+4’: one president and four vice presidents. They were Jean-Pierre Bemba (leader of the MLC), Azarias Ruberwa (the newly appointed leader of the Rcd), Abdoulaye Yerodia Ndombasi (a former minister and member of Kabila’s PPRD) and Arthur Z’ahidi Ngoma (formerly Rcd, then Force for the Future). The 1+4 formula reflected the donor inclination towards power-sharing in Africa at the time, a model that was limited and sometimes disastrous (Tull and Mehler 2005). The members of the transitional government did not meet for the first year, and power was gained competitively at the expense of each other (Mantuba-Ngoma 2006, 49; Putzel et al. 2008, ix). A university professor in Mbujimayi commented on the impact of this: During 1+4 there was still agitation and tension. There were incidents sometimes, if someone from one commission was from the MLC, for example, he wouldn’t have frank relations with his colleague from the Rcd. They would always be skipping the guy above them and going to whichever authority was of their political persuasion.6 Congo had an inglorious track record of collaboration between president and prime minister from different parties, and Sando enumerates what he refers to as the ‘catastrophes’ of Kasavubu–Lumumba, Kasavubu–Tshombe and Mobutu–Tshisekedi as cautionary evidence against political cohabitation (Sando 2007, 56). There were political and economic costs to sustaining the elite, and a woman who was a leading light in a civil-society group organising support for Tshisekedi commented: [Joseph Kabila] promised lots of things, but he’s done nothing. We regret that. He doesn’t pay the civil servants, the teachers or the soldiers, and it’s not necessary for the people of Congo to have five presidents. I think it’s because they’re all rebels and it’s to put an end to the war in the east, but they do nothing. We say, ‘1+4=0’ – they don’t do anything.7 Through the Transition period ‘1+4=0’ became a strap line for the opposition UDPS party, highlighting the neglect of the population by the political leadership. Others used the same formula to draw attention instead to the abuse by elite politicians (on account of this I grew accustomed to replying to the question ‘what is 1+4?’ with ‘I don’t know’). An interviewee from the tax office observed: Since 1+4 there’s been a change. 1+4 equals what? [Z: I don’t know.] It equals 5. Each one had their cabinets and each one had their way of organising things. That was set up just to pillage the country.8

Fit-up agreement 107 Many accounts attested to the multiplication of taxes after the peace was signed. A shop owner described his experience during the Transition: ‘What we felt was that we had five presidents and each person was trying to get money from companies to prepare for the election. They were taking more and more from the companies. It was like a sort of monster.’ The power vested in the transitional government was confusing as none of those in power had any mandate from the population and all were competing with each other. A taxi driver in Kinshasa noted: At the end of the war there was the 1+4. They got together to meet and then the boat started up again and the train started running, so there was a little reprieve. But the harassment was really accentuated then, and the road police were causing a lot of problems for people. They’d say ‘I’m from the Rcd’ or ‘I’m from MLC’ or ‘I’m from the PPRD’. Everyone had his corner so we didn’t know who to turn to if we wanted to protest.9 Taxation further impoverished people as the elite exploited the meagre resources of the population to consolidate the power that they had gained through their participation in the war and the peace agreement. The exclusive rental nature of the benefits that were granted by the agreement was detected by those in the lower ranks of public administration. A civil servant in an underserved area of Kinshasa reported: The era of 1+4 was just for sharing out the power. It was them who profited from that, and the population gained nothing at all. The leaders used the money for themselves and the civil servants were not really paid during that time.10 Impending elections at the end of the Transition made for shortterm horizons as the elites secured funds while the chance was available to them. The UN, UNDP, South Africa, EU and USAID acted as election partners, and contributions to basket funds came from Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Norway, the Netherlands, the UK, Sweden and Switzerland. There was a ‘corruption binge’ as $8 billion of aid was pumped into the country between 2001 and 2006 alongside a ‘lenient approach towards corruption’ (Englebert and Tull 2008, 123). The elections alone received $546.2 million of external funding, this constituting 90 per cent of the costs (Minani Bihuzo 2008, 105), and these funds were ‘literally pillaged’ by elite politicians strengthening patrimonial lines of support and control (Ngoma-Binda et al. 2010, 119). An official at the Association of National Companies commented: During the period of 1+4 they were most concerned with getting money for their electoral campaigns and that impacted on companies in a negative way. In the management committee, they had to defend the

108 Fit-up agreement interests of the people who had nominated them. So the Director General would be nominated by one of the 1+4, the Deputy by someone else, the Secretary by someone else. And they’d be named purely so they could channel money to the one who nominated them, and their competence was irrelevant.11 The Observatory of the Code of Ethics for Public Officials found that, of thirty public institutions assessed, the offices of the president and vicepresidents were the most corrupt (Kodi 2008, 25). Patrimonialism brought incompetence to power, but not all the politicians of the Transition were inexperienced. Some Mobutu stalwarts returned to government, including Kengo wa Dondo, who was prime minister three times in Mobutu’s regime and would be a candidate in the 2011 elections. A politician in Mbujimayi summed up the situation resulting from the signing of the peace: They gave responsibility to great saboteurs, they were putting people in post who had not been to university12 or who were prostitutes. It led to a lot of positions being handed out in companies and there was no money to pay for them. Every belligerent and all his people had to be recognised and that really led to a serious catastrophe. That’s what the 1+4 era did here.13 The International Crisis Group critiques a diplomat in Kinshasa for saying, ‘We must get elections done, have a more legitimate government and then address good governance and impunity’ (ICG 2006, 15). Political reform was unlikely during the Transition given the opportunities for graft and the imminent exclusion from power of four of the five members of the transitional government; it was even more unlikely after the elections had confirmed the power of the winner.

Political marketplace De Waal, in his assessment of peace agreements, identifies three markers of success: a robust and inclusive buy-in, a clear political milestone that, he argues, is achieved only in well-institutionalised states, and progress on human security (reducing deaths from violent conflict, hunger and displacement). De Waal recognises the costs of power-sharing: it establishes a licence for corruption, there is no guarantee that civilians will benefit, and it is good only for as long as the political marketplace is stable. All three of de Waal’s markers are necessary for the power-sharing to succeed but, according to his analysis, the elite bargain is the most important element (de Waal 2009). Corresponding to these success indicators, three forms of violence took place during the Transition in Congo, exposing and exacerbating the threats posed to the population. Instead of elite buy-in, there was violence between political elites: Joseph Kabila and Jean-Pierre Bemba refused to demobilise

Fit-up agreement 109 their forces, which fought in the streets of Kinshasa and violently harassed civilians. The milestone of a formal peace agreement was trumped by ongoing fighting in the east of the country, which intensified in some places after the signing of the peace. The human security situation also remained under threat, as the continued state harassment, non-provision of basic services and lack of payment of salaries maintained destitution and high rates of mortality. Ineffectual buy-in: elite aggression ‘You have to remember that this is our first time,’ said my guide as we picked our way around the piles of orange voting boxes outside the 30 June Building in Lubumbashi in August 2006. The presidential elections had inspired the formation of numerous political parties: there were at least twenty-two parties in Kisangani (including the late Mobutu’s MPR and the Rcd) and eleven in the nearby town of Bunia. In the surrounding small villages, five parties were represented in Buta, three in Bafwasenda, five in Ubundu and five in Isangi (La Reference Plus, 27 July 2005). The elections saw a high voter turnout: 70.54 per cent of registered voters, or nearly 18 million people, went to the polls (Sando 2007, 53). In Kisangani, an election official noted: There are lots of political parties but you don’t see them on the ground. They don’t do sensitisation or talking to people, they’re not rallying people and encouraging them to enrol for the elections. They’re just for welcoming their representative when he comes to town. They’re not investing in training people, and when you go out of town, in the countryside, it’s just a big silence.14 From the hundreds of political parties that were formed in anticipation of the elections and the thirty-three presidential candidates in 2006, the poll came down to a contest between Joseph Kabila and Jean-Pierre Bemba. These were two men who had gained their political standing through war and who had the largest armies when the peace was signed. The population was invited to vote in an election that was organised by external donors and Congo’s political elite. This invitation was issued despite the fact that the state consisted of a set of institutions in which the population had little confidence. To many in Congo, the wars and the subsequent peace agreement were foreign impositions. A student in Kisangani commented: There’s a problem identifying the politicians. With me, people know that I came from here, I grew up here, they know where I went to school. Now Joseph is looking for power. But who is he, where does he come from? I, papa here, this brother [indicating the others round the table], we have all suffered three wars here.15 Is it possible for us to bring back these same events? Each time they talk about democracy, but as soon

110 Fit-up agreement as they are in post, it’s all for them. And we don’t know where they come from.16 The question of where people came from is part of a legacy of regional or ethnic discourse that had gripped political discussion during Mobutu’s rule, and rumours of Kabila’s origins abounded. Supporting the president, the Alliance for Presidential Majority posted and answered the question ‘Who is Joseph?’ on its website, to respond to allegations about his background (Turner 2007, 174). Bemba, capitalising on the uncertainty, claimed that Kabila was not a ‘mwana mboka’ – a local child. He cast Kabila as the bird, the one who flies in, whilst casting himself as the chicken, the one who stays on the farm. The fact that Kabila was pushed to a second round indicates the degree of popular discontent with his leadership, fuelled in part by the perception that he was a puppet of the northern donors (Turner 2007, 165). As the interviewee above makes clear, though, the question of politicians’ origins was also about power and interests: the population had suffered in the war and the violent experiences forged certain priorities. The signatories to the peace, on the other hand, were the ones who had inflicted the violence. They were given positions in the transitional government, which granted them further access to political and economic resources to pursue their interests, irrespective of the population. The peace gave the MLC responsibility for the economy and the Rcd responsibility for the Ministry of Defence, effectively handing control of Congo’s security apparatus to Rwanda (Rogier 2003). As was noted in many interviews, the rewards offered to belligerents were part of an attempt to buy in the political and military elite who had dominated the Second War, but in reality the donors had little coercive or political leverage over them. Crowding out non-violence Throughout the Transition, violence crowded out non-violence. The character most conspicuously absent from the 2006 presidential elections was Etienne Tshisekedi. Tshisekedi’s UDPS party had been initially broadly in support of Kabila and enjoyed considerable popularity at the time the peace was signed. One study, conducted in 2002, records respondents supporting Kabila’s PPRD (23 per cent)17 in first place, followed by the UDPS in second place (19 per cent) and PALU (10 per cent) in third place. Bemba’s party, the MLC, does not feature as a contender (Schlee 2006, 247). Bemba had spent most of his life in Uganda and counted many Mobutuists amongst his supporters. By the time of the elections four years later, Bemba was in second position and Tshisekedi was not standing as a candidate. Tshisekedi’s discontent with the peace process led him to boycott the 2006 elections. The Transition had five objectives: the reunification of the country, national reconciliation, formation of a national army, organisation of elections and the establishment of a new political order. Rating that it had failed

Fit-up agreement 111 to achieve any of these objectives, on 2 April 2005, two months before the Transition was due to be completed, Tshisekedi announced its failure and declared that on 30 June the institutions should be folded and the country should return to the order of the Sovereign National Conference (C-Retro-Actuel 2006). This confirmed his distance from the members of the transitional government and the sponsors of the process. Tshisekedi had already established an equivocal reputation on account of his tendency to dissent. In 2002 he joined forces with the Rcd to form the Alliance to Save the Dialogue as part of their refusal to sign early drafts of the peace, and his persistent remonstrations did not endear him to donors, who were impatient with the delays to the Transition. The Alliance to Save the Dialogue strengthened the hand of the Rcd and, along with the threat of violence, enabled it to push further to its advantage and gain disproportionate sway in the transitional government. Tshisekedi, conversely, did not command a force and was weakened as he appeared politically obstreperous to donors as well as compromising himself domestically through his association with the Rcd. His reputation for awkward behaviour was deepened when he called on the UDPS to boycott the constitutional referendum of 18 and 19 December 2005 (Ngoma-Binda et al. 2010, 94). The new constitution strongly resembled that of France; parts were written by UN staff and there were threats to withdraw funding ‘if the parliament did not adopt a document satisfactory to Western powers’ (Autesserre 2010, 98). The ambassadors of China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States released a communiqué stating that: ‘A yes vote is indispensable in order to hold the next round of elections and to bring an end to the transition process.’ The draft constitution was supported by the 1+4 politicians, but a coalition of another forty-four Congolese parties assessed that: ‘A yes vote would sell the country out to the international community and subject it to all sorts of pressure.’ Tshisekedi’s line was that the draft constitution legitimised a process that lacked credibility; it was adopted in February 2006 (IRIN 2012). Tshisekedi demonstrated similar bureaucratic exactitude in lobbying (unsuccessfully) for a census to be taken before the election as no comprehensive demographic data had been gathered in Congo since 1984. While the incidents are disparate, a common thread is that Tshisekedi’s administrative ambitions were unrealistic in a domestic environment that was governed by violence and in the face of northern pressure to press forward with the schedule. The threat of a return to violence underpinned donor reluctance to cross the interests of the elite belligerents, and the economic and political hazards generated by the cohabitation made prolonging the period of Transition costly. Tshisekedi, on the other hand, posed no threat and was dropped from the script. The persistence of violent conflict in the east of the country also reduced Tshisekedi’s viability as a presidential candidate: he was a civilian and an old man. Kabila and Bemba were both relatively young and were defined by their

112 Fit-up agreement military performance. Their claims on the presidency made reference to national security and their military power to pursue it. Kabila was the ‘calm force’, according to his own propaganda, retaining the upper hand in coercive accommodation; Bemba promised revenge on Rwanda. Tshisekedi’s mission was explicitly one of peaceful transition and his credibility stemmed from his long-standing profile as the political opposition rather than from his association with the war or his ability to make any particular security claim. Refusal to disarm In contrast to Tshisekedi, Bemba and Kabila were both soldiers and maintained their personal armies during the Transition. Six people were killed during a rally in favour of Bemba in July 2006 in the run-up to the elections (Ngoma-Binda et al. 2010, 97), and this incident was followed by fighting between Kabila’s and Bemba’s forces, the only (and mutual) threats to power. Violence broke out at the time of the announcement of the results of the first round of presidential elections from 20 to 22 August 2006, when at least twenty-three people were killed, and again between 22 and 23 March of the following year when between 300 and 500 people were killed (Zeebroek 2008, 6; Melmot 2009, 13). These episodes demonstrated that the presidential competition was exclusively for violent players (Marriage 2010b, 308). The violence was condemned by northern donors but did not prompt any change of approach or schedule. Given that Kabila and Bemba had led opposing forces during the war, it is unsurprising that there was animosity between them, but the impact of this animosity was magnified by the architecture of the Transition. Having rewarded the use of violence with the exclusive rental arrangement of the peace, the democratisation process then destabilised the emergent political order by the absolutist nature of the outcome. De Waal (2009, 109) argues that: ‘Western governments and the UN endorsed the outcome of a winnertake-all election, delegitimising the loser’s claims on any share of the national patrimony.’ The impending threat of political annihilation raised the stakes for the contenders, making it rational to continue investing in violence to intimidate rival supporters. Following the elections, Bemba left the country on proclaimed medical grounds rather than heading the domestic opposition, and then took refuge in Portugal. He had been accused by Kabila of high treason for refusing to disarm his militias following his electoral defeat, and for orchestrating violence in Kinshasa. He was also wanted for ‘inciting rebellion’ and claimed Kabila had tried three times to kill him, in August and September 2006 and in March 2007.18 He was arrested in Belgium on 24 May 2008, under an International Criminal Court arrest warrant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Central African Republic in 2002. This removed him from the domestic political scene but, as the crimes identified had taken place

Fit-up agreement 113 in the Central African Republic, no international attention was directed towards the criminality of the violence committed by all sides in the wars in Congo. The Republican Guard, the president’s personal security detail, was never demobilised and maintained the privileged position that had been established under Mobutu. During the Transition, Kabila also controlled the state’s intelligence services and established the Special Presidential Security Group of 15,000 troops answerable directly to the president (Englebert and Tull 2008, 126). Many Congolese people took a dim view of the heavy military presence in Kinshasa, as the war was in the east and posed no direct military threat to the capital. Kimbanseke is the largest district of Kinshasa, being home to a million inhabitants. I spoke to the mayor there, who described the hand-to-mouth existence of the area’s inhabitants and the other threats that they faced: The area has become a dormitory, a place where people come to sleep, but they go to work in town or in the port and fend for themselves during the day just to get by. They do petty commerce selling fish or vegetables to get 5,000Fc [about $10] a day. With 4,000Fc they renew the stock, and that leaves 1,000Fc to eat, and they go off first thing in the morning looking for bread or whatever, just to have something to eat. At 5pm or 6pm they return and that’s when our market is open. They put petrol in the lamps so they can have a bit of light. When the parents arrive late from the market there’s no water in the house, so the second job starts then: going and fetching the water. The destitution was exhausting to the extent that it threatened people’s survival: ‘Kinshasa’s inhabitants are more dead than alive’, wrote Trefon (Trefon 2004, 4). Most of Kimbanseke is without electricity or running water and there was little contact with the state, except through the experience of violence at the hands of its security agents. The mayor continued: And if they go late at night they’re likely to meet the military and the soldiers start hassling them for money, or take their goods or rape the women . . . The area is right next to the Republican Guard, and they come here and help themselves in a very uncivilised way, so we’ve reached the stage where you don’t really have peace at night.19 The confrontations between Kabila’s and Bemba’s security forces during the elections and the routine predation inflicted at other times expose the costs to the population of the attempts to buy in the political and military elites. In overlooking the use of violent power, including the ongoing wars in the east, donors discarded all steerage over the process that they had instigated and attained an extremely limited degree of loyalty. At the end of the Transition, the special rapporteur recorded that 86 per cent of human rights abuses were committed by government officials (Despouy 2008).

114 Fit-up agreement No milestone: fighting in the east Kabila and Bemba vied for supremacy in the formal peace established in Kinshasa but their rivalry took place within the context of a country that was still at war, and the violence in the east of Congo influenced the ways in which power was pursued and expressed elsewhere in the country. A professor reflected on the violence in Kinshasa: Is there violence in the west? Yes, in the west there is. It’s mainly a mentality of violence that is growing. Before we didn’t have this mentality of the east. The population was pretty calm. There was always violence but not a culture of violence like these people who come from the east have. His distinction between the west and east of the country drew attention to the ways in which experiences of violence harden groups and feed into further violence. He continued: It’s at the level of the leadership: the war of 1998, the people who came with that war use violence and that’s something we hadn’t seen before. It was in the political zone but now it’s everywhere. If there’s a problem there’s always violence, and people react violently, and that’s something that was introduced from the east.20 The east of the country was beyond the bureaucratic reach of the state and the political aspirations of northern donors. Whilst formal political processes were moving apace in Kinshasa, the east remained at war. Official aid programming was invested heavily in the political process in Kinshasa, and donors largely ring-fenced their development interests there. The east received non-governmental aid that was deemed by donors to be ‘apolitical’ (Autesserre 2010, 67), and huge swathes of the rest of the country received practically no international assistance. The bifurcation of Kinshasa from the east was a practical response to the different operating environments, but it was politically inept in overlooking the ways in which the events taking place in Kinshasa and in the east interacted with each other. Following the signing of the peace, hostilities intensified in North and South Kivu and the International Crisis Group referred to the region as Congo’s ‘forgotten crucible’ (ICG 2003; ICG 2005a). There was increased fighting again in North Kivu from 2006, with the displacement of 400,000 people (IRC 2008, 1). In Ituri, the violence had dynamics of its own but retained political and military connections to the fighting elsewhere in the country and to the peace (CEPAS 2003, 9). In addition, a new theatre of war opened in northern Katanga in the wake of the peace agreement. The fact that conflicts were initiated or aggravated after the peace had been signed indicates that they were not merely remnants of the war; in some ways they were generated or exacerbated by the terms of the peace agreed.

Fit-up agreement 115 Kivu was the area of most consistent and most intense violence in the aftermath of the peace agreement. Laurent Nkunda, who had held the rank of major in the Rcd during the Second War, was integrated into the army when the peace was signed. In 2004 he formed the insurgent National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP), claiming to defend the Tutsi group, the Banyamulenge, from attacks by Hutu militias. Leading an intensely violent campaign, he pursued Rwandan interests in the area, principally the control of mines and trade routes. The UN never attempted to demobilise the CNDP, but in 2008, after the end of the Transition, Nkunda joined the ‘brassage’ process that mixed troops from different factions into an integrated Congolese army. He broke ranks the same year and orchestrated a surge in violence later in the year as the CNDP fought with the Congolese army, now backed by Monuc. Nkunda was arrested in early 2009, following a sudden rapprochement between the Congolese and Rwandan leaderships. Following Nkunda’s arrest, further programmes were launched to demobilise various groups operating in the Kivus, and particularly the Abacunguzi Combatant Forces, known as FOCA-FDLR (the official military wing of the FDLR that comprised the former ALiR fighters), which had provided Nkunda with a pretext for his attacks. There were logistical hazards at implementation that made demobilisation unlikely, as the FOCA-FDLR was a mobile group in a densely forested area, and demobilisation programmes did little to weaken the force (ICG 2005b; ICG 2005c). More fundamentally, though, the attempts to demobilise the FOCA-FDLR stemmed from the assumption that fighting in the east was discrete from the political processes, when in fact it was the tension between Kinshasa and Kigali that gave rise both to the existence of the groups and to the extreme vulnerability of the people they attacked (Marriage 2012). The demobilisation programmes had high costs for the population of the Kivus as they provoked revenge attacks on civilians, outweighing the accomplishment of disarming small numbers of militias (ICG 2009). In 2009, seven years after the formal peace had been signed, there were an estimated two million people displaced in the Kivus (IDMC 2009, 1). Dolan finds that nearly 100 per cent of those interviewed in the Kivus in 2010 considered that the war was not over (Dolan 2010, 15). Further north, towards the border with Uganda, fighting also continued in Ituri district, which had been held by the Ugandan army since 1998. The Union of Congolese Patriots, led by Thomas Lubanga (who was later prosecuted in the International Criminal Court), had taken over Bunia in August 2002 and was initially supported by Uganda. Ugandan troops withdrew from Ituri in late 2002 but started returning in early 2003, when the Union of Congolese Patriots turned to Rwanda for support. Uganda came under increasing external pressure to leave definitively and the sudden withdrawal of troops in May destabilised the region, leading to massacres and Monuc deployment in the area. In May 2004 an Act of Engagement

116 Fit-up agreement was signed in Kinshasa, according to which the belligerents undertook to disarm, and 13,000 fighters were disarmed in one year. In September, the Disarmament and Community Reinsertion Programme was launched specifically to address the situation in Ituri, and it fixed 1 April 2005 as the deadline for voluntary disarmament. In the closing days of the ultimatum the total number of fighters demobilised reached 7,841, of which 2,328 were children (Monuc 2005). An estimated 50,000 people had been killed and half a million displaced. The conflict was not concluded, though, and in May 2005 the SecretaryGeneral reported to the Security Council that conditions in Ituri were already precarious and deteriorating further (UN 2005). The conflict had its own dynamics as the Lendu and Hema ethnic groups clashed over contentious land laws and the dispossession that they sanctioned. However, it was linked to the Second War as the Ugandan army had supplied and trained all the major armed groups in the area and largely managed the military arrangements (Wolters 2005, 2). Politically, too, the violence was stoked by conflicts and interests at a national level: the discourse of Tutsi and Hutu was adopted by the warring Hema and Lendu groups, which magnified the scope for antagonism and the impact of the fighting. The violence was linked to the peace too, as the Ituri conflict was dealt with as a second-order concern in the InterCongolese Dialogue and belligerents from Ituri were not included in the talks (Bokanga 2002, 45). This had further repercussions; in the wake of the peace, key belligerents from Ituri were pursued by the International Criminal Court. Thomas Lubanga (leader of the Union of Congolese Patriots), Germain Katanga (commander of the Patriotic Resistance Force in Ituri) and Mathieu Ngudjolo (formerly head of the Nationalist Integrationist Front) were put on trial. These prosecutions were hailed internationally as a signal of an end to impunity in Congo, but were perceived by many in Congo to be politically manipulated. Pursuing the perpetrators of war crimes in Ituri satisfied calls for prosecutions and allowed the administration in Kinshasa to garner political credit for its cooperation. As the elites in Kinshasa were not so closely involved in the Ituri conflict as they were with other fighting in the east, their interests were not compromised (Wolters 2005, 5; Clark 2008). Meanwhile, fighting broke out in northern Katanga in 2003. The Maimai groups that had fought in the Second War turned against the government, asserting that they had not been rewarded for saving Lubumbashi from the Rcd (Autesserre 2010, 171). The resentment found violent expression, with Maimai groups attacking army positions and civilians in Katanga and causing waves of displacement. Particularly high levels of violence against civilians took place in the area that became known as the ‘death triangle’, between Mitwaba, Pweto and Manono. In November 2005 the Congolese army launched a military operation to put down the Maimai militia forces, but it was not successful. The International Crisis Group named northern Katanga ‘Congo’s forgotten crisis’ in 2006 (ICG 2006), when there were

Fit-up agreement 117 150,000 people displaced in the province, most receiving little if any international assistance. Insecurity continued until the arrest in May 2006 of Gédeon Kyungu Mutanga, the last remaining prominent Maimai leader in the area. The existence of these three battlefields meant that the peace of 2002 fell short of a political milestone. The agreement pushed back the front line, but Rwandan influence remained strong in the Kivus. In Ituri and Katanga, belligerents perceived that they were excluded from the rewards of the peace agreement and became further aggrieved, with civilians bearing the brunt of their frustration and aggression. Some victims of the attacks were given humanitarian assistance, particularly those in the Kivus, but the ways in which development programming in Kinshasa was provoking or funding rounds of fighting in the east were not addressed. Meanwhile, the violence in the east played a part in shaping the processes of democratisation in advancing the profiles of young, military men as political leaders. These men in turn had little reason to address the violence in the east: it ensured the continuation of heavy international aid funding and bolstered their military identity in the absence of any coherent political agenda or commitment. Human security undercut by destitution De Waal’s third indicator of success is an improved human security situation. The UNDP’s rendition of human security shifted the focus from territorial security to the security of the population and from security through arms to security through sustainable development (UNDP 1994). The withdrawal of troops minimally restored territorial sovereignty, but threats to the population persisted and sustainable development did not ensue. The human security condition for success was not achieved by the peace agreement: in most areas of the country the risk of violent death decreased after the withdrawal of Rwandan and Ugandan troops, but the crude mortality rate remained virtually unchanged and surpassed sub-Saharan averages by 80 per cent (IRC 2008, 8). The concept of human security has a critical element in that it rejects the exclusive focus on the state as the referent object of security and in doing so dismantles many of the related assumptions of realist security studies (Fierke 2007, 149). To the extent that it offers a challenge to the realist notion that the state and the population have interests in common, it provides an angle of enquiry into how differences in interests between the state and the population structured relationships of security after the peace was agreed. Many definitions of human security identify abstract threats or threatening situations, but in Congo, faced with the daily reality of salaries arrears and a dilapidated infrastructure, people readily frame their insecurity with specific reference to their experiences of state neglect and abuse. As there was no real military or political conclusion to the Second War, the members of the transitional government could upset the peace agreement

118 Fit-up agreement at any time. This placed a premium on their military capacity throughout the Transition, which determined the relationships between members of the transitional government and between them and the population. As the political elite continued to draw its power from the threat and use of military force, its abuse of the population continued in various ways, including the systematic non-payment of salaries, the non-provision of basic services and extortion by state agents. These elements appear to be manifestations of state weakness, but they are also demonstrations of state strength vis-à-vis the population: elite politicians derived huge revenues from aid, taxation and control of assets during the Transition and abused the population who were too debilitated to protest or promote alternative agendas. One interviewee compared the political situation to that of Machiavelli’s Prince, whose power is not critiqued or contested by the Scribe. He continued: When you have a trained elite that is not used by the country – civil servants who don’t have jobs – that creates insecurity. It’s at the psychological level, and people start to steal things. There is not really an army and the police are not paid regularly, so this creates a physical insecurity. There is bad governance and management and that creates insecurity. Why do the politicians travel around in an armed cavalcade? It’s like they are in a state of war. In a sense it is, because you see soldiers strolling around who are not paid.21 He was observing the ongoing conflict between the leadership and the population, which had various social and political manifestations. In 2005 UN Resolution 1592 revised Monuc’s mandate, placing the security of the population and respect for human rights at the centre of its preoccupations. This did not confront the insecurity inflicted by the state or the fact that the systematic impoverishment of the population underscored existing patterns of power, as people lacked the resources or opportunities to escape the crisis. The director of a vocational training institute in Kisangani explained: You have to have a strong heart to cope with the caprices of war. This war’s been going on since 1996. That’s nine years [in 2005] but before that nothing was working, even before the pillage . . . Now I get $3 per month, but I don’t get it. I see my salary on paper, but it’s not accompanied by money. I know exactly how much I’m due, but I don’t get it.22 The non-payment of salaries excluded people from access to services. School drop-out rates increased from 30 per cent per year in 1990 to 70 per cent per year in 2004 (Musau 2005, 105), and 37 per cent of the population, or around 18.5 million people, had no access to health facilities (CEPAS 2003, 9). An interviewee from the Ministry of Planning considered the consequences of the inadequate and late salaries:

Fit-up agreement 119 When you’re employed you have a salary and you can sustain your family, so that’s the top priority. For the companies that already exist, they need to improve the conditions of work for the Congolese staff, notably the salaries, as that’s what sustains the individual and the family, so it impacts at the level of the work, the family and the city as a whole. Rather than focusing on the civil war, he linked the issue of the non-payment of salaries with the destruction of infrastructure during the pillages and the state’s historic and contemporary contempt for the population, continuing: It’s because of the pillages. When they pillaged the companies all the economic fabric was destroyed, and a lot of companies closed so everyone was made redundant. Now the young people who are coming out of university can’t find jobs. The state is practically the only employer, even now. There’s a certain defiance on the part of the state, though, and it doesn’t treat its personnel well. On account of the economic hardship and political stalemate, the population was rendered incapable of responding constructively to the threats that they faced. In the absence of alternatives, many people maintained expectations of state roles in spite of the long-standing derogation of duty. The interviewee added: When you are too old to work you don’t receive your pension so in effect the state is sending its workers to their death. There are statutes that exist to protect the workers but they are not implemented. If we could implement them, we’d be fine! But it’s bad faith on the part of the state. How can you explain the fact that in the 1960s they paid the civil servants well? And it wasn’t just anyone who you’d find in the civil service, it was respectable gentlemen. That continued until 1965 despite the war and all the problems that they had at that time.23 Using the concept of human security to critique the relationships between the state and the population reveals the mechanisms by which patterns of power are reproduced. The power gained through participation in the peace, like the power bestowed on neocolonial leaders at independence, established lines of accountability to foreign funders rather than the population. As with the support offered by patrons to Mobutu during the Cold War, reinforcing the formal state with its institutionalised dysfunction enabled the leadership to continue predation and to draw strength from it. Progress on the formal peace necessitated overlooking the abuse of power and the costs it inflicted on the population. This oversight involved donors in the same problem that the concept of human security had been introduced to challenge: that supporting the state involved supporting the structures that undermined the security of the population.

120 Fit-up agreement

The fit-up According to de Waal’s indicators, the formal peace was a failure, and it omitted key aspects of the conflicts. De Waal identifies the construction of a peace entity for which many parties have incentive to speak, but none have an incentive to invest heavily, as a problem for guarantors of peace as international donors are committed intrinsically but domestic players support instrumentally (de Waal 2009, 109). Given the extreme informalisation in Congo, a bureaucratic peace signed at a high political level was unlikely to gain political traction even with the formidable amount of aid money and the determination of donors to press forward through the Transition. His observation raises two core questions: why was the construction of this peace entity so important to its guarantors, and why did they invest heavily in it when there was no intrinsic domestic support? The peace focused on a particular element of the wars: the fighting between the ailing Congolese army and the Rcd and MLC. This was an element of the war, but its prominence was politically contrived as the Rcd and MLC were proxies for Rwanda and Uganda. It was also by no means the only source of insecurity faced by the population and was in itself shaped by the pre-existing conflict between the leadership and the population and the international conflict over Congo’s political and economic resources. The formal peace identified what Z^ iz^ek would term subjective violence: the violence that ‘is experienced as such against the background of a nonviolent zero level’, as opposed to the objective violence that is ‘precisely the violence inherent to this “normal” state of things’ (Z^ iz^ek 2008, 2). He writes (2008, 9): Is there not something suspicious, indeed symptomatic, about this focus on subjective violence – that violence which is enacted by social agents, evil individuals, disciplined repressive apparatuses, fanatical crowds? Doesn’t it desperately try to distract our attention from the true locus of trouble, by obliterating from view other forms of violence and thus actively participating in them? Fitting up the peace involved presenting the mass of informal wars as a civil war and one that could be resolved by a donor-sponsored agreement between opposing leaders. This interpretation was satisfactory to northern donors as it minimised the profile of the international dimensions of the fighting: the Rwandan and Ugandan army involvement was obscured and, with it, the significance of the northern support to these countries. The economic dimension of the war was also practically ignored, as was the complicity of northern countries in the war-time trade in minerals from eastern Congo. Intervention at the formal level also generated political roles for donors and established limits: because the peace agreement excluded the informal,

Fit-up agreement 121 donors did not get embroiled in the extensive complexity of Congo’s fragmented wars. The pretence that they were helping to conclude a civil war maintained the possibility of an exit strategy. The key belligerents needed to be coaxed into the agreement as the war had established mechanisms for them to maintain a lucrative disorder, but the deal-maker was that the peace agreement challenged neither the gains made by war nor, more fundamentally, the logic of arms. The conceptualisation of a civil war legitimised belligerents as contenders to state power (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002, 234–5). They maintained their advantage, and violence in the east could continue, now appearing to be an incidental residue of this political contest. As the conflicts in Congo amounted to much more than a civil war and the elite groups had handsome incentives to renege and prevaricate on the agreement, the fit-up drew donors in deeper by requiring them to overlook the violence that brought these elites to power and the wars that intensified in the east after the peace was signed. It also required overlooking the continuing abuse of the population and their exclusion from the rewards and processes of peace. These oversights enabled the Transition to keep moving forward despite its failures. The final stage of the fit-up lay in the power to evaluate the peace and its associated processes. At the end of the Transition DFID (2006, 1) concluded: Stemming from an inclusive political settlement that recognised the election process as the cornerstone for national democratisation, these elections have helped to bring peace to the DRC . . . More importantly, the discourse has shifted to view power as being won through political victories, rather than armed conflict. In sum, the elections have legitimated the government both internally and internationally, as well as unified like-minded political forces.

7

Hunter’s song

The version of events that gains prominence influences understandings of the past and the shape of the future as policy is derived from a particular understanding of what has taken place. DFID (2008a, 7) pots Congo’s story in the opening to its ‘Country Plan’: ‘DRC’s 60 million people have suffered from decades of misrule and two devastating civil wars which were finally brought to an end with peace agreements in 1999 and 2003.’ It is anodyne in tone, and it imposes parameters and a rationale on the story. However, Mobutu’s misrule was in line with the security and development imperatives of the Western powers at the time. Mobutu irritated donors but his behaviour was a product of their security priorities, within which he served his purpose. Further, the wars in Congo were international not civil, and the First War did not end ‘finally’ with a peace agreement but with a swift military victory in 1997. The peace of 1999 was never implemented, and the peace of 2003 was actually signed in 2002 and did not bring the war to an end. DFID (2008a, 7) continues: Decline and mismanagement under Mobutu during the 1970s and 1980s led to a decade of violence and conflict that devastated DRC’s economy, social fabric, government capacity and infrastructure. This has left DRC off track against all of the MDGs [Millennium Development Goals] and one of the poorest countries in the world. Again, there is no indication in DFID’s account that there was foreign sponsorship of Mobutu’s mismanagement or of the violence that dislodged him. The case is made that it was the wars that destroyed Congo’s infrastructure, but the crisis was well under way in the 1970s and accelerated by the pillages of the early 1990s. As with the ‘fit-up’ of the peace, DFID’s account places the responsibility solely on the Congolese and the direct violence of the ‘civil’ wars. This responsibility seems even to include their failure to fulfil the Millennium Development Goals. The account is incorrect in literal terms and has a strong subtext. The implication is allowed that ‘misrule’ was a problem with domestic governance, and that the population became frustrated and rebelled until peace

Hunter’s song 123 could be arranged. On the contrary, though, Mobutu’s rule was shaped not by domestic demands but by the demands of Western patrons. These demands institutionalised the lack of accountability to the population, and the Congolese population did not respond violently. Political opposition was muted through the 1980s, with a burst of protest in the early 1990s, and there was no organised violent response to Mobutu until an army of invaders recruited a leader and foot soldiers and provided equipment. DFID’s account presents what appears to be a string of inevitabilities: from misrule to violence and failure on development targets. This is the hunter’s song. It is a hegemonic version of events that underwrites the interests and power that are pursued through the dominant agenda of global security. It justifies the focus on domestic governance, asserts the benevolence of northern donors and confers on them roles in building a formal state and organising the economy. The focus on the destruction caused by war amplifies the significance of the intervention in bringing some forms of violence to a close. The lack of attention to the misdemeanours of patrons during the Cold War or their desertion of Congo through the 1990s blanks the challenge of whether those intervening are legitimate brokers of peace and the question of why they re-engaged in 2001.

Neoliberal force Development and security had been merging in northern policy through the 1990s, and a template for interventions was crystallising around a set of neoliberal directives: this was how to deal with difficult places. MacGinty and Richmond describe the ‘liberal peace’ as ‘an increasingly formulaic synthesis of Western style democratization, “good governance”, human rights, the rule of law, and developed, open markets’ (MacGinty and Richmond 2007, 491). In countries in which the state was deemed to have collapsed or failed, interventions were pursued through top-down state-building, which naturally engages with formal parts of political and economic organisation. The neoliberal position at the turn of the century was captured in the opening words of the USA’s National Security Strategy of 2002: ‘The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom – and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy and free enterprise’ (NSS 2002, iv). The claims are encompassing and positive. ‘America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones’, asserted the National Security Strategy, and peace agreements were sponsored across Africa in the wake of the attacks on the USA in 2001. President George W. Bush rallied the common interests of the powerful, as a chapter was dedicated to ‘ignit[ing] a new era of global economic growth through free markets and free trade’. The Strategy related: ‘Today, the world’s great powers find ourselves on the same side – united by common dangers of

124 Hunter’s song terrorist violence and chaos. The United States will build on these common interests to promote global security’ (NSS 2002, v). Claims about the commonality of interests and the mutual reinforcement of development and security reiterated the neoliberal confidence of the immediate post-Cold War era but were made because of the turbulence in the periphery that challenged the liberal peace. The UN recorded: ‘The deep fault line that divides human society between rich and poor and the everincreasing gap between the developed and the developing worlds pose a major threat to global prosperity, security and stability’ (UN 2002, 2). Kofi Annan (2004, vii), in his role as Secretary-General of the UN, drew attention to ‘poor countries’ rather than the ‘great powers’ mentioned by Bush, but he alluded to the same commonality: Development and security are inextricably linked. A more secure world is only possible if poor countries are given a real chance to develop. Extreme poverty and infectious diseases threaten many people directly, but they also provide a fertile breeding ground for other threats, including civil conflicts. Even people in rich countries will be more secure if their Governments help poor countries to defeat poverty and disease by meeting the Millennium Development Goals. Compounding the question of whether the liberal peace was comprehensive or distinct from a turbulent periphery perceived by the two-worlds theorists, Annan’s comments intimate that, left to its own devices, neoliberalism itself may be exclusive. He then glosses this with the suggestion that those who are behind need ‘help’ if they are to participate in its common returns. In doing so, he exposes the hegemonic nature of his solution: poor countries are to get ‘a real chance’ to join, and norms are suspended to let them develop on the terms set by the ‘rich countries’. In Congo, the situation was more convoluted still. Congo had, in Annan’s terminology, ‘extreme poverty and infectious diseases’ but did not obviously harbour ‘other threats’ beyond the menace of war engulfing more of central Africa. Nonetheless, the neoliberal interventions were so hurried, so interventionist and so riddled with transgression and oversight that some explanation is needed for the behaviour of donors during this episode.

Shared interests Congo’s mineral resources provided a focus for the rapid liberalisation that formed the centrepiece of the donors’ neoliberal state-building. The state-building involved interventions to install liberal institutions through processes of military, political and economic transitions from war-time to peace-time configurations. In concrete terms, this involved security sector reform, including demobilisation and army unification, funding and overseeing presidential elections and an overhaul of the economy alongside the

Hunter’s song 125 liberalisation of mining, the largest industrial concern. The coincidence that the security of Congo and its population became a priority at the same time and in the same way as northern security is explained by the assertion that security would, like the market, offer shared returns. Amongst donors There was a concerted return of northern donors to Congo at the beginning of the century, and differences in project orientation and implementation were dwarfed by the commonality of interests in defining an institutional environment and claiming roles within it. The World Bank returned in 2001 for the first time since declaring the country bankrupt in 1994, and the IMF signed a Memorandum of Understanding the same year. Governmental economic measures introduced in May 2001 brought inflation down from 630 per cent to 8.8 per cent. Growth resumed in 2002 and continued at 5.6 per cent in 2003 and 6.3 per cent in 2004, as the donor re-engagement allowed this growth rate to be sustained through the input of foreign aid (Putzel et al. 2008, 15). Before the peace was signed, work was under way to liberalise the mining sector; American Mineral Fields Inc. announced the approval of a $300 million deal for copper-cobalt tailings in late April 2001 (Naidoo 2002, 7). A market-friendly Mining Code, drafted by the World Bank, was instituted in 2002 (Govt of DRC 2002). It reversed Laurent Kabila’s authorisation of artisanal mining and opened concessions for sale to foreign companies on favourable terms. The role of the state was reduced to one of ‘facilitating investment and regulating mining activity’, while private investors’ powers were increased (Mazalto 2009, 197). The Mining Code was accompanied by a raft of legislation that included the introduction of codes relating to investment, labour and forestry and the creation of industrial tribunals (Buabua wa Kayembe 2005, 24–5). The peace made provision for the establishment of the International Committee to Accompany the Transition (CIAT), an innovative approach to international governance. CIAT’s responsibilities were to act as international guarantor for the peace agreement, support the Transition, support the securitisation of the Transition institutions and arbitrate between signatory parties. It provided a political forum for donor cooperation and coherence, particularly between France, the EU and the USA. CIAT was composed of the five permanent members of the UN, along with South Africa, Angola, Belgium, Canada, Gabon, Zambia, the African Union, the European Union and Monuc, and was presided over by William Swing, an American career diplomat and the Special Representative of the UN. Monuc, operational in Congo since 1999, became ‘the military arm of CIAT’, providing a security forum for donor operations (Reyntjens 2009, 311). It was the most expensive UN single-country mission at the time, and its mandate was extended to include the provision of security for the electoral

126 Hunter’s song process, disarming the combatants, restructuring and integrating the army, and restoring state authority (Mantuba-Ngoma 2006, 42). The mandate was elastic and Monuc carried out other tasks, including ferrying NGOs and rehabilitating schools and health centres in Kinshasa, as a means of garnering trust and support from the population. Monuc had invested economically and politically in Congo and had become a test case for the UN. Commitments to Monuc’s funds continued through the Transition period, with increases in personnel after each major violent incident; by the time of the elections it had 17,600 troops, deployed alongside an 80,000 strong Congolese police force (Sando 2007, 57; Zeebroek 2008, 9). The liberalisation of mining was pursued through the promotion of industrial mining, presented by DFID as inevitable. ‘There will inevitably be a move towards industrial mining in some areas’, moved DFID, while suggesting that the miners should go ‘back into agriculture’ (DFID 2007, 8). The World Bank laid off or retired around half of Gécamines’ 25,000 personnel with one-off payments from a $45 million fund in 2003. USAID worked through PACT, nominally an NGO but funded entirely by the US government, to mitigate the negative impacts of the mining liberalisation on the population. PACT worked on the implementation of the Mining Code’s stricture that 2 per cent of the profits from industries should go towards social development: redundant miners were handed to the care of voluntary social work by mining companies. In 2004 the World Bank endorsed the approach and its impact: ‘The commitment to continued reforms, which has been reaffirmed and already demonstrated by the new Government, suggests that it will be possible to build on earlier success in the coming period’ (World Bank 2004, 18). With the Congolese? The liberalisation was set in train in the heat of the war and without political consultation, and it had no mechanism of gauging, let alone including, Congolese interests. In a post-hoc bid to suggest that this had taken place according to normal procedures, the World Bank insisted that, ‘from 2003 to 2005, the transitional government implemented rational macroeconomic policies, brought hyperinflation under control, and laid the foundations for strong growth’.1 During the liberalisation, the Congolese government sold the country’s assets, but not in the way that the northern donors had apparently anticipated. Between February 2004 and November 2005, deals were completed on 75 per cent of the country’s copper reserves (Stearns 2011, 320–1). Reviewing the thirty-five-year contracts, the World Bank noted a ‘complete lack of transparency’ and foresaw that the returns to the population would be minimal (le Carré and Stearns 2006). The fire-sale was driven by the time horizons of the Transition: it was in the interests of the elite politicians to accumulate wealth by overseeing concessions deals while

Hunter’s song 127 they had the power to claim rents (Global Witness 2006, 35). Gécamines concessions sales directed profits to elite individuals, and production fell to less than 10 per cent of the level before the Transition (Musau 2005, 109). The claims that the market would drive both development and security proved hollow: the resources had been sold but development and security had not followed. In addition, it was made evident in the process that the interests of elite politicians diverged from those of the neoliberal policymakers. The interests of the elite also diverged from those of the majority of the population, who were excluded from the economic returns on the mining deals. Industrialised mining employs small workforces, so the majority of the estimated one million small-scale diggers were surplus to requirements (Global Witness 2006, 5). As concessions continued to be sold, unemployment or the threat of it fed into resentment and outbreaks of violence in mining towns across Katanga during the Transition, leading the situation to be described locally as an ‘artisanal civil war’. The state confirmed the conflict of interests by responding to the protests with the use of firepower, compounding the derogation of duty that had been committed with the sale of concessions, and putting down the threat to stability that the disaffected miners posed (ACIDH and RAID 2005; ICG 2006). Unemployment resulted both from the liberalisation and from its contravention, when mining concessions were sold without due process in return for private kickbacks. A third scenario was unfolding in the Kivus: there, too, civilians were excluded from work in the mines and from the profits from the mineral trade. Persistent fighting made foreign investment untenable and mines remained under the control of the Congolese army, insurgent groups that had been integrated into the army (notably the CNDP), and other armed groups including the Maimai and FOCA-FDLR. The dynamics of trade, as a major source of income, largely shaped the military accomplishments in the area. The mineral trade was also at the base of the economic interaction between the Kivus and Kinshasa, as military collaborators used their control over mining to channel informal revenues to politicians in Kinshasa, including Kabila (Global Witness 2010), underscoring the differences of interest between the population and the elite. Economically and politically the liberalisation and its travesty excluded the majority of the population, as did the failure to liberalise mining in the Kivus. This did not mean, though, that the donors’ interests coincided with those of the people in Congo. Foreclosing state accountability to the population by privileging formal institutions was not incidental. It opened a space in which the liberalisation could be pursued despite the wrangling with the errant elites and while leaving their interests untouched in the Kivus. There was no economic cost to the donors and reputation damage was easily overwritten. In DFID’s ‘Research Strategy 2008–13’, growth is identified as the first of six key areas in which DFID has ‘a strong reputation or can make a special contribution’ (DFID 2008b, 20). DFID’s ‘Working with Business’

128 Hunter’s song asserts that: ‘International development relies on commerce to create the wealth and jobs that will end poverty. That’s why business is good for development and why development is good for business.’2 Restrained coercion The liberalisation of the economy and the mining sector was promoted and directed by the international financial institutions and facilitated by the injection of official assistance alongside the programme of state-building. Control over when and how to intervene lay with the northern donors and this gave them a key power advantage, including in institutional design and schedule. The question of when and how to respond to the liberalisation, though, lay with the Congolese, and in the event this did not fit closely with the donor agenda. Congo’s political significance declined at the end of the Cold War but its economic significance continued. Through the 1990s this was a dormant concern: the legacy of colonialism and development projects allowed northern donors privileged influence in Congo and, as this was not threatened, extraction fell towards the end of Mobutu’s rule. The arrival of Laurent Kabila was perceived by many foreign investors as a positive sign, but they were soon disappointed by his nationalist oratory. The real wake-up call for the north was the ascendance of China as a global economic power and its impending influence on the African continent. The change of leadership from Laurent Kabila to his son offered cover for the re-engagement. Joseph Kabila came to power in January 2001 and the abolition of the diamond monopoly was completed the next month, with other liberal accomplishments following soon after. Given the speed with which the World Bank and IMF formulated the terms of their return to Congo, and the fact that Joseph Kabila had no political track record, the change of leadership does not provide a convincing explanation for the timing of the liberalisation. In that the liberalisation was set in motion before the peace had been signed and when the embattled government controlled less than half the country’s territory, it bore the hallmarks of a security concern. Buzan defines securitisation as a process by which ‘an issue is no longer debated as a political question, but dealt with at an accelerated pace and in ways that may violate normal legal and social rules’ (Buzan and Hansen 2009, 214). Security was prominent as a donor concern, as was reflected in the provision of military forces by the EU and UN. The abrupt interest in security in Congo and the fact that the liberalisation overrode procedures of consultation were not explained by the distress of the population, who had suffered extreme violence for years and received little assistance and, through the 1990s, practically none from official sources. Instead it was a response to the fact that China had invested its first million dollars in Congo, threatening the historic influence that the north had wielded (Marriage 2010a). The security problem for the donors was not

Hunter’s song 129 how to provide security to the population but how to force through a set of liberal policies that were urgently required to protect their interests against China. Examining the interaction between powerful and weaker states, Urpelainan writes: ‘If the international cooperation problem is a direct and immediate threat to national security, the topdog should be ready to coerce the weak state if necessary.’ The problem of coercing the state was compounded, as ‘the willingness of the underdog to accept an unfavorable offer depends on the strength of his “outside options” . . . [If] the underdog cannot afford exclusion, the topdog has fewer incentives to engage in “strategic restraint”’ (Urpelainan 2011, 641). The fact that China offered an ‘outside option’ meant that donors needed to coerce the Congolese state, but with restraint in order to avoid pushing it further towards China. The neoliberal approach that promotes, in DFID’s terms, ‘working with business’ offers an economic riposte to the challenge posed by China. It is strategic in remobilising northern capital in Congo, and the liberal discourse of shared interests with the Congolese provides cover for more realist ambitions. Faced with the might of Chinese investment, there is no guarantee of northern success in reasserting its influence. It would, though, be contrary to the northern security interests not to respond. In Congo, the liberalisation was not an end or resolution to the international conflict over political and economic resources but a continuation of it, the contest now being between the north and China and taking place on Congolese soil. The threat from China explains the schedule of liberalisation and the compromises it entailed, including the overlooking of violence throughout the Transition, which was instrumental in allowing the economic reforms to be pursued despite the political setbacks (Marriage 2013). The lending from the World Bank during the Transition, totalling $2 billion, ran contrary to the Bank’s conflict unit’s recommendation to focus on community-driven development and services (BIC 2006). In the pursuit of continued influence in Congo, the liberalisation became an extroverted process of nurturing minimal compliance with the norms of the global market while the domestic institutions of export trade disintegrated. Just as the formal peace had been placed on an informal war, a formal economy was imposed on an informalised employment sector, marginalising those who were economically irrelevant. The lack of political organisation in the country meant there was little space or capacity for dissent. Hettne identifies a liberal tradition linking trade, freedom, democratisation and peace from the mid-eighteenth-century Enlightenment, noting that the focus on industrialisation and national security has prioritised order over freedom (Hettne 2010, 32). I spoke to a representative of the national association for business about the leverage of Congolese negotiators in economic affairs, and he commented: It’s because we are the victims of discrimination and stigmatisation and all the official donors think that public companies should privatise. They

130 Hunter’s song want state companies to become private companies and that’s the received wisdom at the moment, which is imposed on the state. But we can’t accept it: there are experiences with energy and water privatisation in Africa and they are not encouraging. They take a few examples of where it’s succeeded in the Philippines or Malaysia and they don’t say where it’s failed. But with our experience of Africa we have to refuse and we’ve reached an impasse with them.3 Moshanas investigates the ‘quasi- schizophrenia’ in the Congolese voices that make it to the main stage of the dominant narrative. Examining the 2008 ‘National Report on Human Development in the DRC’, he notes that in the discussion led by Congolese academics there is a strong resistance to the liberalisation. Later in the report, though, this voice gives way to praise of the liberalisation and private sector-led growth. Moshanas argues that there is coherence in that the report is able to reflect the ‘imposed character of the economic options levied by Congo, which sits uneasily with the convictions in Kinshasa’ (Govt of DRC and UNDP 2008; Moshanas 2012). The claims of shared returns notwithstanding, the processes of liberalisation were designed to remodel access to mining wealth. Security in Congo has always been linked to the control of mines, and the liberalisation placed control over vast tracts of land in the hands of foreign companies. In political terms, the costs of the success were obscured by the higher costs of the failure and the destruction in the east of the country where mines continued to provide resources for armed groups (UNSC 2009; Global Witness 2010). Liberalisation did not result in mining concessions that offered returns to the country or that disciplined state agents or reordered war economies. The state had sold the family silver and was still broke. Like the fit-up peace, this achieved something for donors, but it excluded the population from the development and security that was taking place in Congo.

The confused European The assumption of commonality means that neoliberalism has no way of assessing differences of interest or power, and this hobbles its applicability to questions of security. It does not interrogate the violent power that drives primitive accumulation or the exploitation of labour; it has no historical reference to how liberal democracies developed or what opportunities are currently available to others. Simultaneously, Congo becomes confusing: ‘Where logic ends, Congo starts’, an expatriate who had lived in Kisangani for years told me. In 2006 I was staying in a guest house in Lubumbashi. The majority of the guests were Congolese, but there was a French man, let us call him Philippe, lodging there who was in Congo short term on a mining brief. Halfway through dinner one night Philippe burst into the dining area, frustrated after a meeting he had just had with his Congolese counterparts.

Hunter’s song 131 He embarked on a monologue about how there was no solidarity or love in Africa. He said he was coming from a socialist country, where the unemployed are paid and everyone is taxed. Here, Philippe said, nobody looks out for anyone; he himself uses labour, and if he does not like it he fires it and hires someone else. No one, in his opinion, had formed any sort of trade union and because of this Africa was feeding the world and selling itself short. The guests looked on. Philippe identified a tension between his cut-throat interests in sealing the mining deal and his personal or national inclination towards a more socialist structure (his outburst was prompted not by failure but by his success in clinching a deal that benefited his company). He claimed that it was not the case that ‘all whites are bastards’, or, he modified, maybe they are, but they are equally ruthless between themselves. He wished Congo all the best and claimed to be a revolutionary, but said everyone was thinking in the short term and they needed to organise themselves. ‘If Congo stops selling copper, cobalt etc. tomorrow,’ Philippe fulminated, ‘the head of Rolls Royce is going to cry.’ There was a brief pause. One man asked how long Philippe had been in Congo. Answer: one month. ‘I’m going to sleep well on that,’ he said, and left the room. Another man said that the whites had gone to America, Africa and Asia with the mentality that land is for sale, whereas here people thought that land belonged to everyone including the animals. ‘It’s about the rules of the game,’ he said, ‘which whites have imposed on others.’ He then retreated into a rambling story about a Polish professor who had been arrested for taking photographs in Kisangani and finally released after an intervention by the rector of the university. The point of the story was that not all whites are bastards: this Polish professor sent some books, so he was all right. A third man started trying to be optimistic about the fact that elections had taken place and that things might get better. None of them took issue with his analysis. No one pointed out that the malaise that Philippe had identified was not a psychological phenomenon, which was his premise (including noting several times that ‘charity begins at home’), but a political phenomenon. Nobody pointed out that there have been organisations in the past and they have been violently dismantled, or that Laurent Kabila tried to nationalise control of resources and was killed. No one tried to mount a counter political argument, despite the fact that they all knew about the manipulation of power and allegiances by Mobutu and the lack of political reform since. In the end everyone ended up saying they agreed with him. Nobody mentioned that to profit from capitalism you need capital, and Philippe did not notice this either. The avoidance of confrontation is highly rated in Congolese etiquette, and the guests were mollifying Philippe. Philippe did not know about the mutual societies or how to survive under an abusive regime when all decisions lead to disaster. He would consider violence to be both morally wrong and economically misguided in destroying and deterring investment. At the same

132 Hunter’s song time he relied on the violence that allowed his company to work there. It is the same violence that has crushed the organisation of workers and the formation of a middle class, dislocated taxation and services and precluded any political contract between the leadership and the population. Commonality’s discontents In a more institutionalised version of the confusion, the OECD (OECD-DAC 2006, 2) assessed Congo at the end of the Transition as follows: DRC does not have an operational development strategy – that is, a coherent long-term vision and a medium-term strategy derived from it; specific targets serving a holistic, balanced and well-sequenced development strategy; and capacity and resources for its implementation. In fact, DRC finds itself in category D of a descending A–E scale. Congo does not find itself in category D; it is put there by the OECD. The dominant account and explanation of historical and contemporary events are being written by the UN and northern donors, not by the Congolese. Mbembe accounts for the loss of ‘distinctive historicity’ by observing that, since colonisation, African people and places have been ‘embedded in times and rhythms heavily conditioned by European domination’ (Mbembe 2001, 9). It is against the powerful discourse of commonality that a second discourse emerges: one of profound disruption. The elites disrupted the Transition with violence and upended the sale of mineral concessions, but disruptive behaviour was not confined to Congolese elites. Fighters refused to disarm, thousands of people remained in the artisanal mining trade and other informal activity, Philippe’s counterparts were unreliable and, in myriad ways, the entire dynamic of surviving and the politics of pillage are predicated on disruption. These two discourses of neoliberalism and disruption situate the question of how the priorities and pursuit of global security interact with Congolese people’s pursuit of security. The donors’ approach relies on the ability to define events as inevitable, or as legitimate or illegitimate. The responses are tactical, always playing in the space created by the other (de Certeau 1984), working to pick off the benefits. They do not articulate a linear or comprehensive account of events but even when the material returns are small, there is an accumulated political resistance to the hegemony, and the interruptions to timetabling and procedure issue a challenge to the legitimacy of neoliberal power. Through disruption, people also expose the north–south fault line of security: interests are not held in common. The Congolese were the only ones who knew that the liberalisation would not genuinely profit them. The interests and power involved were relevantly similar to those of the 1960s, when Mobutu was instated with Western support to end the fighting of the Congo Crisis (Marriage 2011).

Hunter’s song 133 By the 1970s the World Bank was pondering the question ‘Why would these governments adopt policies that undermined economic prosperity?’ and alighting on accountability as a key factor (Bates 2005, 14). The African state has been the subject of many academic enquiries, and Englebert and Tull identify a gap between this scholarship and the mainstream policies that retain misplaced assumptions of state-building. In their argument they cite extensively the errors made by donors in Congo: the assumptions that state institutions can be transferred to Africa, that there is a logic of cooperation and shared understanding of failure and reconstruction between donors and African elites, and that donors will be able to harness the resources necessary for state reconstruction (Englebert and Tull 2008, 110–11). The donors’ neoliberal resolve, despite the evidence and analysis available, disadvantages the population of Congo, but also inhibits the donors from being able to assess their own behaviour critically as it appears to its proponents to be uncontroversial. The ideological certainty derives not from the merit of the approach but from the political impossibility of alternatives. DFID (2011, 1) declares: ‘We believe that promoting global prosperity is both a moral duty and in the UK’s national interest.’ Donors assert that security is held in common and that the market provides a driver for development, but what if this is not the case? What if the promotion of the UK’s security involves increasing the insecurity of people in Congo and market mechanisms are politically regressive? Or what – equally problematically – if increasing the security of people in Congo increases the UK’s insecurity and reduces its market share? DFID is a government department; it cannot purposefully compromise UK interests. This is a conundrum for donors and one that is avoided by claiming that there are shared interests and no problem of power. The ideological song is necessary because the conundrum forecloses any more nuanced consideration of what security might mean for the state or population in Congo. Given the extreme vulnerability in Congo and the information and analysis that were available to donors, though, the continued insistence on commonality is cynical. The assumption that what was right for donors was right for Congo and the power advantage of donors allowed them to push through the Transition despite prior knowledge that the Congolese economy was in no shape to compete (Kobia 2002, 439). Moreover, the ideology forces an explanation of these events that delegitimises disparate forms of disruption, and in doing so renders them incomprehensible. Observing the dialectic of the relationship, on the other hand, reveals that this disruption was prompted by the amnaesia and buffoonery of donors: the neoliberal approach shapes the emergence of threats to people in Congo and generates behaviour centred on disruption and evasion, tactics that are seasoned by experiences of colonialism, and erratic investment and aid provision.

134 Hunter’s song

Violence of everyday rubbish A priest in Kinshasa observed: The World Bank has been here for thirty years and what have we seen? They have seminars and meetings, but people are a bit tired of it. Monuc has definitely helped us in getting peace, but all the money that is paid into it does not go to the Congolese. The $500 million that was spent on the elections, how much of it came here? It went out to tender and it was won by the Belgians and the South Africans. They were the ones who arrived with all the papers and machines and all the equipment for the elections. There are no Congolese companies that could win the tender at an international level like that.4 In 2006, demonstrating continued congruence amongst donors, the World Bank and UN developed a ‘common strategic framework’ for Congo. This led to the Country Assistance Framework that drew together all development programmes funded by the EU, USA, UK, China, Belgium and Germany (Mazalto 2009, 195). The inclusion of China acknowledged its burgeoning role in Congo, much of which was operationalised through ‘minerals-forinfrastructure’ deals. The World Bank committed $1.4 billion for the next two years. I was staying in Lubumbashi at the end of the Transition and recorded the following conversation with the guest-house administrator. Z: Why do they cut the electricity off? A: It seems they have a new system. Every Wednesday they cut off the electricity. Z: And that’s a system? A: Mmm. The Transition was completed: the swiftness and violence of the democratisation process meant that the leadership was effectively unopposed (Englebert and Tull 2008, 112). The army constituted ‘arguably the single largest security threat for Congolese civilians’ (ICG 2006, 14), and the mineral concessions were sold to foreign companies or left to the management of armed groups. Congo was ranked bottom in the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ report, which was subtitled ‘How to Reform’ (World Bank 2007, 6). For Congolese people the reality remained gruelling: 75 per cent of the population was living on less than one dollar a day, up from 30 per cent in 1993 (OECD-DAC 2006, 2; Mazalto 2009, 224). It was not the case that things were moving slowly in the aftermath of war, or that the population had yet to appreciate the peace dividend. On the contrary, things were moving fast and the manner and pace of the liberalisation were excluding people economically and politically. A fisherman in a river port near Kinshasa reflected on the changes that had occurred as he had grown up:

Hunter’s song 135 In Mobutu’s time, things were good. My dad was a fisherman and bought a plot of land and sent us to school with the money he made from fishing. But now I’ve finished studying and have no job so I’m still fishing and have no money. Even if you make 10,000Fc, what are you going to buy? I have money but I can’t buy anything because everything is expensive. He presented his penury as a direct result of his relationship with the state, continuing: I pay tax, but it’s the same people who are the thieves. The Minister of Agriculture who came here today steals things. The money paid in tax doesn’t go into the treasury; they go and drink it with women in bars. They are thieves because they come demanding $10 of tax, $1 goes into the state coffers and $9 goes into their pocket.5 The population was left dealing with the violence of everyday rubbish: the devastation of services, mass unemployment and non-payment of salaries, and aggressive taxation curtailed people’s opportunities and sapped strength for organisation or opposition. The abuse inflicted by the state comprised a form of biopolitical power in controlling people’s vulnerabilities and ‘foster[ing] life or disallow[ing] it to the point of death’ (Foucault 1979, 138). In Mbujimayi a teacher considered the struggle for water and the suboptimal solution that people had found that took up most of the day: I actually think that the period of 1+4 was better. Now we are in total mediocrity: no water, no electricity, in a big town like this. You buy a jerry-can of water and drink it and the next day what happens? You’re ill, but there’s no money to buy medicines. And it’s dark, the roads aren’t lit at night so there are killings, rapes, thefts and when it gets hot you’re going to see all sorts of diseases. People are shitting in the water, pissing in it, washing their clothes in it. And you buy that water for 500Fc for 20 litres. My salary is $2 per day, not even that, it’s $1 and something. Imagine if I used 5 litres a day like the World Health Organisation wants me to. Imagine if I had a wife and children and they did the same. There’s no life in these conditions, they are inhumane. Even God isn’t happy. The First and Second Congo Wars had taken place in a country that was already in crisis, and neither the threat imposed on the population by the leadership nor the conflict over resources had been addressed by the peace or the liberalisation. The international standards set were also not helpful in practice. The interviewee continued: We’re living in the consequences that these events have had on the family and the children, but there’s no solution like that. You have to go to the

136 Hunter’s song cause: when parents are in conditions of poverty, when they don’t have the money to pay for their children’s education they risk losing authority over them. If they can’t answer to their most basic needs the child starts to break loose and goes to the market to find things to do. The state needs to reconstitute the family. I’m not talking about distributing money, but everyone should work and the salaries should be paid at a level that allows people to live. He returned to the issue of water and family life, tracing the threats arising from destitution and the everyday struggle for survival: When water is so expensive people can’t afford it. 500Fc for one jerrycan? That does for one person, now what if there are six people in the family? What can you do? When families live like that it affects the security of the child. Even at school, even if we were paid by the parents it would be ok, but a lot of children are not in school. And the only education the children get is at school because the family life has been so disrupted.6 The teacher tied security to the relationship with the state, and many people in Mbujimayi reported that their predicament had worsened after the end of the Transition: in 2006, in spite of the liberalisation, the Miba diamond mining company deficits reached $140 million. Salaries to employees were cut off, unravelling the economic structure of the town, which was dependent on the wages. Another teacher also traced the connections between wages, service provision and security: In the early 1990s life was still tenable; it was not luxurious but we could get by. Now the school needs to pay the teachers because people cannot survive on what the state pays. If there are funerals or illnesses or whatever, the school has to step in. So it’s the school that has to find the money for the teachers, but where from? The cessation of salaries to Miba employees was presented as a link in a chain of catastrophes that affected the whole of society. She continued: There were a lot of children of Miba staff here and they’ve already got problems at home, we can’t punish the children because we know the problems of the parents. There are lots of illnesses because people don’t eat properly and it means they fall victim to bad health. Not a week goes by when there’s not a death of a mother or father or both and that destabilises the children. There are a lot of children who are not in school because the parents can’t afford to send them. The mothers are selling bread but they can be robbed of their takings, and now there’s no water it makes it harder for them to work. There are girls who are going to the

Hunter’s song 137 mines where there’s maximum immorality, they go there as prostitutes. It’s against all the rights of the child, and the mothers can’t say anything because they have no money either. The frequent reference to international norms vocalised people’s experience of exclusion: standards considered to be minimum requirements for human beings were for many people not being fulfilled in Congo. As far as security was concerned, the teacher noted: Security for the children is security for the parents. The children are in their parents’ house and they have to feed them and buy them things. There’s a boarding house here, but the number of parents who can afford it has gone down; at a minimum they need to buy three meals a day for them. There are a lot of our children here who were raped in the residential area, and two just recently who were raped at home by people who forced their way in. They’re not at ease, they’re disorientated by all this. In another family both the parents were killed, and for children who live like that it’s complete insecurity.7 The threats identified attested to the continued severe destitution of the population and the forms of violence that accompanied it. Meanwhile, people were aware that their experiences derived not from a lack of resources but from exclusion: the relentless threats to their survival were inflicted while others were profiting from the resource wealth. A man employed in a soft drinks factory in Mbujimayi noted no amelioration in the situation: There was a time when we were producing one million cases of drinks a year, in 1989 or 1990, but now it’s down to 200,000 and it keeps falling. I think it’s linked to the general situation; since we’ve had the war and the pillage they’ve killed off Gécamines that used to contribute massively to the state treasury and they’ve put in its place all these small companies that don’t contribute anything. It’s the same in Kivu, everyone’s got their little business going, even the UN now it seems. He was referring to the reports that Monuc personnel had been involved in gold trading (Rowe 2008), but he did not present this as particularly surprising or a departure from other experiences of international interaction. Monuc was discredited in Congo for failing to mitigate the crisis during the Transition (Minani Bihuzo 2008, 90–101). Troop numbers lagged behind what was demanded of the force, and it was vilified for wasting funds on luxury items and the involvement of its personnel in sex scandals (Zeebroek 2008, 15; Autesserre 2010, 90). Monuc vehicles were attacked on various occasions, including on 23 November 2008 when the force was rumoured to be escorting elements of the CNDP militia in the Kivus. The interviewee continued:

138 Hunter’s song In Mobutu’s time we were not pillaged like we are now and it’s all connected to arms deals with the West. They [the military elite] say, ‘Here are the minerals; give us arms in return and we’ll fight for power,’ then they put the raw minerals in the planes. You see the traders coming out of Lubumbashi – it’s like there’s no tomorrow. The economy has been completely pillaged and has all become informal.8 The bonanza of liberalisation resembled the pillage that had taken place during the wars: many of the protagonists were the same, as were their means of operations. The ‘informal’ referred to by the interviewee is ironic, given that much of the boom was driven by the notional formalisation of deals on concessions. The procedural irregularity of sales of mineral concessions and the use of violence by the army to maintain control of the trade rendered some activity strictly illegal (UNSC 2010), but the distinctions between legality and illegality were arbitrary for those who perceived the political and military elite to be fundamentally illegitimate. Meanwhile, small traders experienced – at the same time and as a result of the same political developments – a contraction of their economy. For those who relied on informality, any constriction caused by the formalisation of the economy was disastrous. Miners cleared from areas when concessions sales were completed moved elsewhere, to conditions where competition was harsher. In a similar way, liberalisation of the economy resulted in price rises but no employment or services for those who were surviving on the edge of informality. One market trader reported: When Mobutu went, that was the end of all the advantages that we knew. Mzee Kabila broke everything and everything became much more difficult and since then it’s continued. There was no change with 1+4 and since the elections everything has stayed the same. But what can we do? What are we supposed to say to whom?9 Overwhelmingly, small traders in the informal sector reported no change since the peace, or a deterioration in their situation and a lack of money in circulation. With no renewal of productive activity each year was harsher than the last. A street vendor selling shoes told me: ‘I was a pillager during the pillage and survived it as well.’ He gave his view of the political evolution: In Mobutu’s time it was very easy to sell things because there was a lot of money in circulation and I was able to eat well. When the Mzee arrived, things were not so good; in particular there was no more water or electricity. The period of 1+4 was worse still. Everything was completely ruined and since the elections it’s carried on the same – there’s no change at all. When the police come now, if I don’t move out of the way, they bundle up the shoes [I’m selling] and take them to the police station. Then you have to pay 1,000Fc or whatever to get it back.

Hunter’s song 139 In Mobutu’s time we only had to pay tax, but now it’s really bad. We hardly get enough to eat and buy clothes, there’s really nothing left.10 A market trader in Kinshasa told me: ‘In the era of Mobutu, I sold well, but now with all the wars and the changes, we’re just getting by. Things don’t work any more . . . the prices have gone up and there’s no money to pay for it.’ The most widely divergent opinions related to Laurent Kabila’s rule and whether it had conferred genuine relief, but the assessment of the current situation was constant. She continued: ‘At the beginning of the 1990s it was terrible, and when Mzee came it was really good for a while . . . The Mzee arranged the situation when he was in power, but now we are back to the situation of the early 1990s.’11 The destitution was violent in critically circumscribing people’s choices and disempowering the population, but it did not draw political protest. The early 1990s were marked by general strikes, demonstrations and an emergent political opposition, but after the Transition the Catholic Church no longer organised rallies and the students were not radicalised. A professor in the University of Kinshasa reflected on the resistance offered by the students: There are sometimes problems with the academic calendar and that goes to the Faculty authorities. But against the political leadership? Not really, and not in comparison to our time! There was a strike recently and the students protested against the professors and some protested against the government for not finding a solution to the problem with the professors. The economic status of the students and their families had deteriorated over time, but the graver cost was at the political level. The professor reflected: They’re in a difficult situation; they have to get money from their parents in order to study. It’s already difficult enough just to get into a position where they can survive life at university so they don’t protest. There’s very little protest of any ideological nature.12 In 2008 China announced its intention to invest $9 billion, and Chinese imports from Congo had grown to $1.6 billion (Holslag 2010). That year I travelled to Kinshasa and my diary entry records: There was a traffic jam practically from the airport to the university; it’s not far but it took a couple of hours. This is my fifth day; there was no water for the first three days. It came on yesterday, then last night the electricity went off, which means that the pump doesn’t work, so no water again.

140 Hunter’s song

A losing game: return to pillage ‘Look at how much Rwanda has pillaged from Congo,’ said a Congolese fellow traveller at the guest house in which I was staying in Mbujimayi. I was expecting a story about Rwandan aggression but he surprised me: ‘But look at how much more is still in Congo. And what do the Congolese do with it?’ The disingenuous transfer of mineral concessions to foreign companies for the personal enrichment of elite politicians and the military control of mines in Kivu were defiant in the face of the donor directives. Elite politicians gained by acquiescing to the peace and turning the irresponsible power that it granted to their advantage. The abuse of civilians, too, abdicates responsibility for their welfare in defiance of international standards and human rights. The response of the Congolese government, whether premeditated or not, is coherent with a tussle over blame and liability with the donors, and it throws responsibility back at them: you want to impose international standards of mineral trading and human rights? Here is an unregulated market and abused population for you to deal with! The hegemony of neoliberalism leads the state and the population back to pillage. There are no incentives for the Congolese state to adhere to its strictures: complying with the neoliberal demands involves forgoing chances of individual gain, including the possibility of playing the north off against China. The population has no chance of either complying or dissenting: it is excluded from power and pushed back into conflict with the state, and the compromises this entails. As has happened in the past, the Congolese leadership and population take part in a self-destructive dynamic, while economic and political processes are directed by others. An interviewee in Kinshasa commented: The whole of economic life has become informalised, including the copper, diamonds and gold. You see this is a city of eight million people; how many big companies are managed by Congolese people? Not one! Everything is informal and there’s no help from outside – the whole of life is informal.13 The reference to the informality of the state is a comment on the failure of the formal peace and the liberalisation. The tone of this and other comments shifts the narrative of the hunter’s song that promotes inevitability and linearity to a differentiated account that identifies conflicts in interests and inequalities in power. In doing so, it moves the discussion beyond the economic sphere assumed by neoliberalism to the political and to a consideration of the nature of contracts and compromise, the kind of market that is established and the form of development and security that it supports. These forms of development and security are reiterated in myriad ways through everyday interactions. I interviewed a lieutenant from the Military Justice Garrison in Lubumbashi. His room is pokey with a tatter of curtain

Hunter’s song 141 across the window gap. His desk was piled up with bits and pieces, and in the corner of the room there were a couple of assault rifles and some other gun parts. We went to a bar near the garrison. He drank a carton of milk through a straw and smoked a cigarette. He had been stationed there for a couple of years and earned 15,000Fc a month, about $30. With that he was the clerk in the military court. He articulated the hegemonic and counterhegemonic discourses succinctly: ‘I administer justice, but there is no justice,’ he observed. He then said: “Well, at least I’m paid, which is more than can be said for those working in the civilian court.’ He also revealed the suasion of violent power in everyday transactions. On our way out of the bar I paid for our refreshments; he asked me why and I said, ‘Because I’m not a soldier.’ He said we didn’t need to pay because the owner was a friend. It is an arrangement that is good for him, less good for the friend.

8

Security peace

An international NGO’s office in Kisangani has a large room with shelves displaying pieces of unexploded ordnance that the team has found in Congo. There are anti-personnel mines, hand grenades, hand-held surface-to-air missile launchers, rocket grenades and mortars. They originate from China, Russia, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. There are two Second World War anti-personnel mines in mint condition. In the courtyard outside there is a de-mining machine that the NGO uses. It is a low-slung tractor-type vehicle that is remote controlled, and on the front axle there are heavy chains that spin round to detonate mines. The distribution of foreign ordnance and the international involvement in removing it put the physical means of security into global perspective. The political means of security is also heavily influenced from outside Congo through the opportunities and constraints placed on war and peace. The term ‘security peace’ is deliberately confusing: security, peace? How could that combination be contentious? It is intended to denote that the formal peace agreed in Congo was defined by, and at least partially fulfilled, northern security priorities. The events presented in this book took place within the context of shifts in the meanings and experiences of security at an international level. The security framework of the Cold War sustained Mobutu in return for services; the new dispensation in the early 1990s promoted a neoliberal global security and, within development policy, human security. The concern for global security intensified with the attacks on the USA in 2001, and liberal state-building accompanied further promotion of the market in the face of the perceived threats from ‘failed states’ and the rise of China as a world power. What is striking is firstly that the twists and turns of dominant security formulations have been felt extremely quickly in Congo: Mobutu declared himself a victim of the Cold War when it ended and turned on the population to sustain his status, the disregard for Congo’s borders followed within four years of Boutros-Ghali’s assessment that ‘the time of absolute and exclusive sovereignty has passed’ (Boutros-Ghali 1992), and the peace was signed the year following the attacks of 2001 on the USA, and at a time of fledgling Chinese investment in Congo. The second observation to be made is that

Security peace 143 changes in the northern perspective on security had profoundly negative repercussions in Congo, at times massively increasing the insecurity that people there experienced. The interventionist approach of the donor programmes since the turn of the twenty-first century has involved donors in the maelstrom in Congo: more than a decade after a strong re-engagement, northern donors are not observers of the processes of peace and liberalisation in Congo, they are part of them. Driven by ideology, they have imposed a destructive set of institutions, and their attempts to buy loyalties have made them integral to the sets of interests that direct political bargaining (de Waal 2009; Vircoulon 2009). More than six years after the formal peace, the Goma Peace Agreement was signed in 23 March 2009. It integrated the CNDP into the Congolese army but did not end the fighting in the east. The following year a UN Panel of Experts report noted the army’s involvement in mineral trading and its ‘serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights abuses’ (UNSC 2010). In September 2011 Kabila issued a six-month ban on mining in three eastern provinces, apparently to control the economic activities of militias. Instead it curtailed the activities of informal gold, tin and coltan miners and enabled the army to strengthen its hold on the mineral trade (Global Witness 2010).

2011: elections again At the time of the first round of the presidential elections, the Congolese magazine La Revue ran a story entitled ‘Portrait: the true Kabila’. In it, Joseph Kabila is quoted as saying: I learnt three things from Mobutu . . . First, let democracy live, don’t harass it. Second, don’t ever believe, and don’t try to believe that the country belongs to you. You belong to the country and everything else belongs to the people. Third, always know when it is time to go and to leave power. (La Revue 2006, 47) On 28 November 2011, in accordance with the constitution, Congo held another set of presidential elections. The constitution had been changed a little: on 15 January 2011 Kabila had passed an amendment that the front runner did not need an overall majority. This was consistent with previous changes that he had made to augment or shield the power of the presidency (Crisis Group Africa 2010). With eleven presidential candidates, it meant Kabila needed a simple majority and would not be pushed to a second round of voting. Kabila was chased in the polls by the veteran politician Etienne Tshisekedi, who had maintained the opposition voice since the days of Mobutu and who returned to Congo to contest the elections following three years in Europe for medical treatment.

144 Security peace Late preparations Until very late in the process, the most notable feature of the presidential election preparations was that they were not under way. With over thirty million voters and 64,000 polling stations, the preparations did not match the enormity of the task. The instability in the east provided a foil for any semblance of order in Kinshasa, and the technical possibility that the elections would be held on time cut some political slack for the government as the alternative would be delay or cancellation (ICG 2011). Weaknesses in the preparations were complicated further by the persistent rumours, practically until polling day itself, that the elections would be postponed. Monuc had become Monusco, the UN Stabilisation Mission, on 1 July 2010 and was, along with the Darfur mission, the UN’s largest peacekeeping operation, with a force of 20,000. Some 40 per cent of the funding for the elections was met by northern donors, and the UNDP had a ‘Project to Support the Election Cycle’, but the organisation of the elections was in the hands of the Congolese government (ICG 2011, i). The Catholic Church mobilised 30,000 election observers, and in early October the EU’s Electoral Observation Mission of 147 staff started operations. Little in the way of political debate took place in Congo in the run-up to the elections and policy was hardly formulated or discussed. Kabila made few public appearances and, in the later stages of the campaign, shut down state television and mobile text messaging services and banned political demonstrations. Tshisekedi was out of the country from the start of the campaign and returned just over two weeks before polling day, by which time he had declared himself president. The run-up to the election was marked by violent events, including attacks on polling stations and their staff and equipment. Some twenty-seven people are reported to have been killed, including eighteen in Kinshasa on the last day of campaigning, many by security forces (SG-UN 2012, 2 and 11). In contrast to this lack of political discussion in Congo, northern observers established a determined commentary on the electoral process. FreeFairDRC, an NGO operating from the UK under the internet domain name www.free fairdrc.com, became a portal for news and opinion pieces about Congo. It captured the spirit of the northern donors and activists, promoting a seemingly uncontroversial aspiration for the country: free and fair elections. ‘The country’s best hope of progress is through a conclusive and transparent election,’ announced MEP Peter S^t´astny´ at FreeFairDRC’s launch held at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium. Canvassing support for their cause, the organisation envisaged a role for everyone in Congo’s political system with the exhortation, ‘Have you signed our petition yet? Please sign on today to show your support for free and fair elections in the DRC. With less than 2 months to go before the vote, we need the international community to take action now!’1

Security peace 145 Fiddling The UK’s Independent newspaper asserted that the polls were ‘seen as crucial to international efforts to prop up a resource-rich country’, while reporting irregularities in registration leaked from a Belgian firm contracted to issue biometric cards (Willis and Howden 2011). Canada’s Globe and Mail carried a story entitled ‘“All-out-War” feared as Congo goes to the polls’ and published a photograph of some, now smartly equipped, security personnel facing down a small protest in Kinshasa. One of the policemen was carrying a floral handbag, incidentally undercutting the earnestness of the newspaper’s story. ‘Botched elections . . . will create a nightmare’, a former USAID official told an audience at a panel event at the Brookings Institute.2 Electoral violence was predicted by a coalition of international NGOs working in Congo alongside some Congolese organisations (Crisis Group 2011) and by several foreign media sources, including Reuters,3 Al Jazeera,4 and the BBC.5 On 28 November 2011 nearly 60 per cent of the registered Congolese electorate cast their votes. The ‘five construction sites’ of infrastructure, health and education, water and electricity, housing, and employment at the core of Kabila’s political rhetoric had been practically abandoned, and there was still fighting in the east of the country. The elections were marked by logistical disarray and cheating; before polling day stories broke about multiple registrations of voters, registration of children and ballot papers preticked in favour of Kabila. Numerous credible reports of fraud, rigging and violent intimidation by the security forces were in circulation, but the population neither boycotted the election nor raised a united voice against the incumbent president. Many of the results returned claimed improbably high counts for Kabila, and a turnout of 101.4 per cent was reported from his home town Manono. The EU observer mission found that results from 2,020 polling stations in Kinshasa were not counted, and as many again elsewhere (EU 2011, 2). The Independent Electoral Commission, headed by Daniel Ngoy Mulunda, an ally of Joseph Kabila, rejected results from booths where there had been violence or logistical problems and was able to use this mechanism to sift out opposition results. He then refused to allow the team from the National Democratic Institute access to recount votes. The northern commentary foregrounded two aspects of the election process. One angle arose from the fascination with administrative discrepancies. This was not genuinely news, though: some of the more egregious irregularities had been exposed in August and allegations were made in September of two million fake names on the electoral roll.6 The second story was the tale of political protest and organised violence, portraying the struggles or anger of the Congolese electorate against domestic corruption. This greatly oversimplified Congolese politics and the options that people faced; the prospect of mass popular mobilisation was unrealistic given the lack of political organisation, the power disparity between the security forces and the population, and the country’s history. The identification of

146 Security peace irregularities and of popular dissent was fiddling, drawing attention to running details and distracting from the more profound political processes that were taking place. On 9 December 2011 the Electoral Commission returned the provisional results: Kabila had won with 49 per cent of the vote. The opposition registered a complaint with the Supreme Court. In Kinshasa, where the northern glare was strongest, Tshisekedi polled twice as many votes as Kabila. In Mbujimayi, official tallies recorded 97 per cent of the vote going to Tshisekedi (Smith 2011). Buoyed by these results, Tshisekedi rejected the official election outcome and swore himself in as president on 23 December, three days after President Kabila had taken the oath for a second five-year term. Kabila then effectively placed Tshisekedi under house arrest by stationing security personnel around his residence. The EU observer mission noted ‘serious deficiencies’ and the Carter Centre declared the elections ‘too flawed to be credible’. France, the USA and the UN all deplored the process in various ways but merely moved that lessons should be learnt from the experience (Agyeman-Togobo 2011; UNSC 2011, 16). Congo burns The real story was much more disastrous than the irregularities picked up on by northern observers and the discontent with domestic power. It was about the installation of regressive power, in which the donors were heavily implicated. All observers recorded serious flaws in the electoral proceedings but the rigging went much further back. Kabila did not win his contested victory by stuffing ballot boxes (although he did this too). He won by accommodating, from the moment he took office, the interests of the northern security agenda and turning the space that donors granted to his political and economic advantage. His northern donors did not need to support him on election night and the population did not need to vote for him: from political obscurity at the time he took power in 2001, he had been rendered strong enough to sustain himself. A speaker meeting took place at the university at which I work in London shortly before the 2011 elections. The FreeFairDRC representative looked puzzled as a small Congolese contingency from the diaspora vociferously rejected the election process on the basis that Kabila was illegitimate and, given the misconduct with voting papers, would be reinforced by the façade of a democratic process. The apparently good intention of supporting a free and fair election obscured the fact that this was not one of the options available. In Congo, there was frustration with the cheating and intimidation but ultimately there was just a choice between Kabila and Tshisekedi and, in their different ways, they both rejected the outcome anyway. Despite the war in the east of the country, the violence and harassment by state personnel and the generalised extreme poverty, nothing had thrown the Transition definitively off track, and the 2006 elections took place despite

Security peace 147 the breach of schedule. They were marked by violence between Kabila’s and Bemba’s forces but the population did not take up arms. Either the elections were very significant to the population, prompting a concerted effort to ride the difficulties, or they were simply irrelevant. In 2011 there was no mechanism for voting against the elections, the pre-ticked ballot papers or the perceived imposition of northern political structures and personnel. By voting, the Congolese population compounded their situation: they confirmed an abusive presidency and, in participating in an election that involved no contractual responsibilities, reiterated their involvement in the politics of their own pillage. In 2012, ten years after the Global and All-Inclusive Peace Agreement was signed, Congo tests the northern donors’ optimism. The informal wars continue in the Kivus, displacing hundreds of thousands of people. The FOCA-FDLR, still the remnants of the Interahamwe and old Rwandan regime, are accused of destabilising the region, and Rwanda is credibly reported to be recruiting fighters for the M23 faction to fuel the fighting. The army operates through parallel command chains, with many of those integrated from the CNDP now loyal to Bosco Ntaganda, Nkunda’s military heir (UNSC 2011, 3). The contribution of Ugandan troops to the UN’s mission in Somalia and Rwandan troops to that in Darfur insulate the two countries politically from northern criticism. Around $2 billion of aid money has been entering Congo each year (Global Witness 2010, 22). Kabila has sat out the wrangling over his election antics and is president again while, rising 80 years old, Tshisekedi’s age precludes him from further political ambitions. The sale of Congolese mining concessions to off-shore companies at a fraction of their market value continues, and the UK government continues to ‘urge’ companies, including those listed on the FTSE 100, to ‘disclose their activities in the way we would expect of responsible companies’.7 The latest Human Development Report, entitled ‘Sustainability and Equity: A Better Future for All’, puts Congo in last place (UNDP 2011).

Containment and control In ushering in the withdrawal of foreign troops, the formal peace fulfilled the minimum requirement of security as it was perceived by the north: containment. With the foreign armies out of Congo, the theatre of war was less likely to spread to neighbouring countries and access was allowed to Congo’s resources. The roles claimed bilaterally by donors and through CIAT and Monuc, and the state-building projects associated with the Transition, gave a degree of political control, albeit that it was unreliable. This granted sufficient leverage over the macroeconomic apparatus to record a reduction in spending, decrease in inflation and economic growth (AfDB/OECD 2008, 243). As a result of the peace, foreign troops are out and foreign companies are in.

148 Security peace Installing a security peace of this nature and function necessarily involves selecting and backing domestic players and consequently becomes part of the fabric of violent power. Faced with the question of who won the war, a respondent in Kisangani told me: You have to be a soldier or a chief, not just any sort of soldier. You have to work in a UN or US organisation such as Monuc. You must be in Unicef, Unesco or IRC – those people have a salary. Or you have to steal money from the government. If you steal you win. 8 His answer does not identify a civil war between the government and rebel troops but places the elites – the heads of the army, politicians and UN or aid workers – in a category together: they are paid to define the agenda or parts of it, and the government is funded by aid, tax and business ventures. The only challenge comes from those who steal from the powerful, those who are disruptive. The constructivist approach relates not to the discovery of an objective definition or configuration of security but to the question of how priorities are brought to the fore. The northern securitisation of the front line and emergency response to Chinese investment promoted a rental agreement between elites and an extroverted liberalisation. These had tangential benefits for Congolese elites. The perspectives of the Congolese population, on the other hand, have framed differences of power and interest as chief sources of insecurity. The population has attempted to disrupt or evade the ideology and the violence it entails by claiming agency and predictability – some ‘security space’ – in efforts to salvage protection in conflictual situations. Congolese perspectives that problematise power indicate how patterns of security and insecurity are reproduced. They contribute to critical security thinking in ‘exposing underlying power structures and interests behind politically powerful constructions’ of security (Dannreuther 2007, 5). The Congolese people’s dissent counters the discourse of inevitable catastrophes in Congo and the need for northern stewardship. Winant (1994, 116) argues that a major accomplishment of the civil rights movement was that: Whites had to begin looking at themselves from the standpoint of how they were perceived by non-whites. On the negative side, whites were threatened by minority gains . . . they suddenly noticed an identity deficit: formerly their whiteness, since it had constituted the norm, was invisible, transparent, but now, in a more racially conscious atmosphere, they felt more visible and indeed threatened. Transferring the argument from race to power, the relatively powerless Congolese population constructs perspectives that are distinct from the powerful northern agendas. These perspectives are unlikely to shake neoliberalism but they make the political agenda more visible. The rejection

Security peace 149 of the universal applicability or commonality of the northern constructions of security exposes the interventions to be politically self-serving rather than neutral. If the advocates of neoliberal security and development feel ‘more visible and indeed threatened’, it is because the disruption exposes their interventions not only to be deleterious for the Congolese, but also to stem from duplicitous ideological foundations.

Return to conundrum: opening security negotiations The costs to the Congolese population have not only been severe; they were understood in advance. Experience and analysis of conflict and the likely pursuits of elites were jettisoned by northern policy makers in favour of ideology. The first question for policy-making in Congo is why it is that northern donors continue to compromise the vulnerable people when they have information and analysis that warn that their programmes are likely to be calamitous. It is only after answering this that the question of what could be done differently can be addressed. The previous chapter identified the sticking point as being the conundrum that donors face and that fuels the insistence on commonality: that promoting security or development in Congo may transgress their security interests by conceding political or economic power. The upshot of this conundrum is that donors continue to compromise vulnerable people because it is in their interests to do so, and their claims of commonality prevent them from finding this problematic. Cracking open the conundrum is key, as acknowledging that interests are not, or may not be, or may not always be, held in common changes the focus on the security outcomes. The focus ceases to be on why the Congolese are corrupt, shambolic and failing to fulfil the requirements of global security and the standards of human security, and swivels to the disingenuous nature of the interaction and what form of negotiation could take place that would allow different parties to pursue at least some of their interests. Refocusing securitisation in this way renders illegitimate the attempts by the powerful to dominate or obliterate the interests of the weaker party. It also discards the supposition that there is a blueprint for installing security, and opens the possibility that Congo has different development and security interests from other countries that receive assistance. Refocusing on the interaction of priorities makes it clear that the question of what could be done differently starts not with tinkering with policy prescriptions but with the requirement that northern donors strengthen their conceptual apparatus to determine how more powerful actors can interact with the less powerful in ways that are not demeaning or exploitative.

150 Security peace Power and re-politicising security Taking the lead from the priorities set in Congo is difficult as they are regularly obscured by more powerful obstacles. People’s wartime tactics centred on agency and predictability, but within the politics of pillage these tactics were undercut by the lack of contractual arrangement and often, instead of reducing the threat, they intensified it or incurred further risks. Nonetheless, the responses made limited the political impact of violence even when the physical damage was unabated. Revisiting these priorities in the light of the interactions with the state and other prevailing actors, including northern donors and China, leads to the identification not simply of agency but of power, and not simply of predictability but of freedom from the ‘inevitability’ of the version of events imposed by hegemonic power. Power and freedom are boxed in by the security peace that contains and controls. The threats associated with domestic rule and international exploitation shaped the types of decisions that people took. Operating from a position of weakness, evading or disrupting agendas and frequently lacking strategic rationality, people were compelled to make choices that were outside the usual analysis of security-seeking behaviour, but it was the force that people were subjected to that rendered them incomprehensible. Weil, writing about the war in Troy as depicted in the Iliad, asserts: The true hero, the true subject, the centre of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away . . . To define force – it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to its limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. (Weil and Bespaloff 2005, 3) Successive rulers and invaders in Congo have made ‘things’ of people in Weil’s terms by killing them. Weil continues: ‘How much more varied in its processes, how much more surprising in its effects is the other force, the force that does not kill, i.e., that does not kill just yet?’ During the Second War, 90 per cent of deaths recorded in the mortality surveys of eastern Congo were not from direct violence, but resulted from increased vulnerability arising from the war (IRC 2000; IRC 2001; IRC 2003), and most deaths resulted from the destruction of health services and food supplies (Turner 2007, 3). The force that does not kill people immediately persists in the violence of everyday rubbish: the displacement, lack of services, unemployment and institutional structure that reinforces the abuse of the population. The force that makes things out of people has other manifestations in the power to record and respond to the devastation. The categorisation and quantification of disease, rape and death mark the population out as biological things to be assisted, controlled and neutralised in pursuit of global and human security. These processes underline the powerlessness of the

Security peace 151 population, individualising political processes of marginalisation and oppression to describe people’s condition as deviant from international norms of consumption, health, mortality and other indicators. In doing so, the interventions are re-legitimised, even when they do not fulfil the standards set. The imposed patterns of security also sort people in terms of economic value and strategic threat, and this too has made ‘things’ out of the Congolese population. The development of a politically extroverted state and high-tech mining does not require popular approbation and, as labour is commoditised through industrial mining, the vast majority of the Congolese population has become superfluous. The population is unemployed both in the sense of not having jobs and in the sense of being redundant in the global market. The redundancy is manifested morbidly too: the figure of five million ‘excess deaths’ from the wars is widely cited as a measure of the human tragedy, not as a cause of political disaster or as an explanation for the poor development of the country. There is no registered impact of this loss, and indeed the business model is compatible with enormous loss of Congolese life, as is demonstrated by the fact that the war has been noted as a time of economic recovery (Hesselbein 2007, 66). The market configuration values the population in terms of what they can contribute to the neoliberal market, and what threat they pose to global security. It has not only made things of them; it has made them worthless things. In the face of these dominant forces, agency requires power in order to make headway. People commonly considered employment to be fundamental to security as a means to economic power. Unemployment was promoted in Congo during the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s and again in the liberalisation of the early 2000s. Alongside annual growth figures of more than 5 per cent for all except one year since 2003, the African Economic Outlook noted: ‘The DRC does not yet have a real policy to get young people into work’ (AfDB/OECD 2011). The lack of payment of salaries, the lack of jobs and the extreme hardship that results are not seen by the population as technical issues of capacity or governance but as expressions of state power supported by northern funding that overlooks, and therefore sponsors, abuse. Responses from Congo point strongly to the conclusion that security for Congolese people is not about humanitarian assistance or buying off the elite so much as altering the relationships of abuse and victimisation: security involves a change, and specifically a change in power. Efforts have been made by Congolese people to increase their power. In war and non-war situations people find ways, despite the constraints and the statistics through which they are persistently displayed, of resisting being irrelevant and proclaiming their existence not as things. The Maimai, Bana Etats Unis and militias in Kinshasa fought against irrelevance in the Second War by entering the processes of war and constructing their own narrative of events; mutual associations pooled funds to avoid financial and social

152 Security peace annihilation; religion gave people the structure for social organisation and provided meaning to life and channels for influencing versions of events, including allowing people to claim space for themselves in forwarding the peace. There is also a semblance of contract reasserted in the ways in which people associated themselves with abusive power alongside contorted efforts to reject or evade the marginalisation imposed by that power. These forms of agency that aspire to power form a critique of the peace and liberalisation that locked donors into a set of regressive state-building processes. Once the Transition was in train, the theft of aid funds by the elite militated against prolonging it, but the same theft highlighted the absurdity of introducing a process on such dangerous terms that ridiculed donors and tied their hands. The timing of the interventions protected northern interests against Chinese competition at a crucial moment, and the terminology of shared gains denied the fact that Congo was the instrument through which security would be pursued by the north. The gains made did not contribute to but compromised security and development in Congo. The security of the population rested not in securitising the front line between government and militias by taking it out of political context but in re-politicising it. For Aradau, securitisation involves negative processes and outcomes in necessitating fast-track decision-making and producing enemy ‘others’ (Aradau 2004). Roe, too, argues that securitisation is undemocratic, operating through silence and speed, and this is doubly inappropriate when orchestrated from outside the country (Roe 2012). The wars in Congo were not sudden or extraneous events, but continuations of historically persistent crises. Re-politicising the conflicts generates potential alternative configurations of power: state-building that works from the margins in, or political organisation that does not privilege the use of force. A peace that compensated those who had been impoverished by the war or that addressed the range of informal wars would have necessitated negotiation and canvassed a broader political base than that of the military elite. Negotiation would have taken longer, but it might have moved slowly in a progressive direction rather than quickly in a regressive one. Freedom from politics of pillage The politics of pillage included the Congolese population in their own destruction. Pillage involved asserting the illegitimacy of ownership in ways that are literally or symbolically destructive. The pillage of Congo’s mineral resources during and after the Transition has reintroduced foreign companies in processes that claim legitimacy over ownership through the purported inevitability of the market. The scramble was facilitated by the manner of intervention, the speed and lawlessness of which established both the liberalisation and the conditions for its violation. The sale of assets in a situation that had neither the political nor legal infrastructure to regulate the process, or to link sales to development or security for the population,

Security peace 153 led to pillage. As in previous episodes of pillaging, ‘Everyone says it’s sad and joins in.’ Many critical security theorists arrive at freedom as essential for security (Booth 1991; Wyn Jones 1995; Zedner 2009, 143–74), but defining freedom is problematic, especially in situations in which power is continuously violently contested and exclusion from this power spells destitution. Congo offers two perspectives on this: firstly, freedom is straightforwardly defined as freedom from the politics of pillage. This is a freedom from the constraints that lead people into self-destructive decision-making and one that allows people a positive engagement with predictability: that of security into the future. From there the second form of freedom follows: the freedom to define that future. As with security, it is not something that can be determined for Congo from outside. It is what is formulated and pursued by people in Congo, and will be diverse and probably not very organised. It is something that can be arrived at through political negotiation over priorities from Congolese perspectives, rather than the imposition of predetermined ideological goals through the politics of exceptionalism. Some clues about how this could happen are given by the struggles that people have been through in disentangling themselves from abusive power. The force of ‘fending for oneself’ has been revisited throughout the book, not only as a manifestation of weakness but also as a modest form of freedom. It is a form of freedom that is expressed through colluding with state directives in the case of the army and police, but it has also been turned to establishing parallel military, economic and social associations. Even when these have achieved little in combat or by generating money or miracles, they have granted a small amount of autonomy. Despite the compromises involved, these forms of autonomy limited the political force of violence by liberating people from its exclusive logic, and people were able to gain a release from the inevitability of misery and hopelessness. These are forms of security that are invented by people in extreme situations to free themselves at some level from oppressive forms of manipulation. They do not stop people dying of hunger, disease or exposure, but they do make life bearable until then. They exert freedom from manipulation by politicians who tie identity to pillage, and they assert alternative forms of identity and relationships. By valuing the available psychological space, they allow people the feeling of security, and they attribute meaning, rather than accepting the imposition of worthlessness and marginalisation. An insight into this freedom can be gleaned from Congolese music. In the absence of international sporting heroes or other public figures, music plays a core role in popular culture. While dominant projections of Congo demarcate the country by disaster, Congolese music is characterised by effusiveness and conspicuous consumption, and for many people Congolese music is a defining aspect of national identity (Marriage 2008). There is a rich tradition of musicians being co-opted by politicians, but the vast majority of the music is not politically informed: it is formulaic and self-referential and its purpose

154 Security peace is to distract people from their worries and make them happy. In eschewing political engagement, music offers not confrontation with but freedom from dominant power and the abuse that it entails. It is psychologically liberating. Music offers escapism but also provides a focus for shared experience and expression. Its appeal stretches across Congo and exerts a powerful influence not only in Congo but also elsewhere in the central African region. Its effusiveness and conspicuous consumption are not irrespective of the reality of destitution experienced by millions of people but a rejection of it and of the force it exerts in ordering people’s lives and outlooks. In acknowledging the power of wealth, aspiration and parody are not clearly distinguished, and this ambiguity is liberating. Congolese music provides the freedom not only to enjoy space outside of the ordered actuality but also to generate it: an expressive and creative space that can be owned irrespective of other realities. This establishes a frail template for a security of survival in the face of extreme physical and political threats.

Fin One night in September 2006 I was in a bar in Lubumbashi with two Congolese friends. We drank beer, starting with Simba, which is light, and moving to Tembo, which is a stronger, brown beer. Towards the end of the night one of my friends spent time and a few broken biros explaining that when you look at a map of Africa, you see that it is God’s footprint and there is no other continent like that in the world. He drew it on the reverse of a piece of paper provided by the bar’s landlord to evangelise his customers. Most of West Africa was missing, and Zimbabwe and South Africa were geographically ambiguous. I asked (repeatedly) about the toes protruding from around Algeria, Mauritania and Tunisia and was told finally that they were just for relaxation. But, he insisted, the centre of Africa, right in the middle of the foot, is Congo. ‘You must not forget Congo,’ he told me, mostly drunk, and he also said that he drank to forget.

Notes

1 Formal peace and informal wars 1 The Democratic Republic of Congo was the Republic of the Congo from independence and Zaire from 1971 to 1997. I refer to it by the name by which it was known in the period being discussed. 2 Bananguma, Oriental Province 09/08/05. 3 Kisangani 29/08/05. 4 Kisangani 16/08/05. 5 Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) were accompanied by a mixing process known as ‘brassage’ in which fighters from different groups were deployed in the same battalion. 6 Kisangani 18/08/05. 7 Lubumbashi 19/08/06. 8 Lubumbashi 16/08/06. 9 Mbujimayi 12/08/08. 10 Mbujimayi 05/08/08. 11 Mbujimayi 02/08/08. 12 Mbujimayi 13/08/08. 13 Kinshasa 30/06/08. 14 The pillages of the early 1990s are discussed in the next chapter. 15 Kinshasa 19/06/08. 16 Kimbanseke, Kinshasa 16/06/08. 17 Kinshasa 02/07/08. 18 Congo was marginally involved in Cold War security politics as the uranium mine in Shinkolobwe in Katanga province produced the raw materials for the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. There are rumours that Mobutu sold uranium to the USA, then to the USSR, and that Laurent Kabila sold it to North Korea and Joseph Kabila to Iran. Parts of this story emerged in several interviews, and there are threads about the power that Congo commands through its access to uranium, and the Congolese leadership defying the USA and being punished. The mine was officially closed in 2004, but artisanal or informal mining still takes place, and on 8 March 2007 the BBC reported that Congo’s Commissioner for Atomic Energy was being questioned with regard to smuggling allegations. 19 This figure is widely cited but has been challenged by the Human Security Report 2009/10, which dedicated chapter 7 to a critique of the IRC’s methodology and findings. See also Benjamin Coghlan, Richard J. Brennan, Pascal Ngoy, David Dofara, Brad Otto, Mark Clements and Tony Stewart, ‘Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: A Nationwide Survey’, Lancet, 7 January 2006, pp. 44 –51.

156 Notes 2 Leadership versus population 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

This quotation is used in Marriage (2007, 285). Kisangani 23/08/05. Lubumbashi 02/09/06. Lubumbashi 16/08/06. Kimbanseke, Kinshasa 16/06/08. Mbujimayi 07/08/08. Kisangani 02/09/05. Kisangani 22/08/05. Lubumbashi 16/08/06. Lubumbashi 18/08/06. Lubumbashi 09/08/06. Lubumbashi 28/08/06. Mbujimayi 13/08/08. Lubumbashi 25/08/06. Lubumbashi 31/08/06. Kisangani 25/08/05. Kinshasa 06/06/08.

3 Rich in war: conflict over Congo’s political and economic resources 1 The AFDL comprised the Popular Revolutionary Party (PRP), the National Resistance Council for Democracy (CNDR), the Revolutionary Movement for the Liberation of Zaire (MRLZ) and the People’s Democratic Alliance (ADP), but none of these were established organisations in their own right (de Villers and Willame 1999, 20–1). 2 Kisangani 16/08/05. 3 Kisangani, 29/08/05. 4 Ndjale, Oriental Province 12/08/05. 5 Bamini, Oriental Province 09/08/05. 6 Mzee is a Swahili term of respect for older men, and Laurent Kabila is often referred to as ‘the Mzee’. 7 Mbujimayi 19/08/08. 8 Mbujimayi 11/08/08. 9 Mbujimayi 07/08/08. 10 The term ‘Anglo Saxons’ in Congo refers to the UK and USA, as opposed to the countries traditional patrons, France and Belgium. 11 Kisangani, 29/08/05. 12 Mbujimayi 30/07/08. 13 Lubumbashi 16/08/05. 14 Kisangani 02/09/05. 15 Kisangani 29/08/05. 16 The Congolese government, the Rcd, MLC, Rcd-ML, the Maimai defence forces, the combatants associated with the former Interahamwe, the Hema and Lendu ethnic groups in Ituri, and the armies of Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda (Mutabusha 2002, 56). 17 Basua, Oriental Province 10/08/05. 18 Kisangani 04/09/05. 19 Kisangani 27/08/05. 20 Kisangani 30/08/05. 21 Ndjale, Oriental Province 12/08/05. 22 Bamini, Oriental Province 09/08/05. 23 Kinshasa 04/06/08.

Notes 157 4 When was this the deal? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Kisangani 25/08/05. Basua, Oriental Province 10/08/05. Banandjale, Oriental Province 11/08/05. Kisangani 30/08/05. Kisangani 22/08/05. Kinshasa 03/07/08. Kimbanseke, Kinshasa 16/06/08. Kimbanseke, Kinshasa 16/06/08. Kisangani 02/09/05. Bananguma, Oriental Province 09/08/05. Reported by the World Bank: http://go.worldbank.org/VU4KGZ3JX0 (accessed 10/05/12). Kinshasa 17/07/08. Lubumbashi 05/09/06. Kinshasa 16/07/08. Kinshasa 10/07/08. Mbujimayi 19/08/08. Lubumbashi 09/08/06. Kinshasa 10/06/08. Kinshasa 05/06/08. Kimbanseke, Kinshasa 19/06/08. Kinshasa 27/06/08. From the mid-1990s until 2005 there were very few cars in Kisangani, and most transport needs were served by the ‘tokelist’ cycle couriers whose bicycles are fitted with passenger seats above the back wheel. Kisangani 08/09/05. Kisangani 29/08/05. Kisangani 30/08/05. Kisangani 23/08/05. Lubumbashi 31/08/06. Kisangani 06/09/05. Lubumbashi 1/09/06. Kisangani 25/08/05. Kinshasa 12/06/08. Lubumbashi 02/09/06. Kisangani 27/08/05. Banandjale, Oriental Province 11/08/05.

5 Politics of pillage 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Kinshasa 04/06/08. Kisangani 27/08/05. Kisangani 29/08/05. Kisangani 30/08/05. Kisangani 22/08/05. Kinshasa 30/06/08. Lubumbashi 16/08/06. Kinshasa 12/06/08. Kinshasa 01/07/08. Lubumbashi 07/08/08. Kinshasa 13/06/08. Kinshasa 15/06/08.

158 Notes 13 Cité de L’Espoir, Kinshasa 17/06/08. 14 Kinshasa 12/06/08. 15 Kinshasa 28/08/08. 6 Fit-up agreement 1 http://africanelections.tripod.com/cd.html (accessed 12/03/09). This result is stark as a deposit of $50,000 was levied on each presidential candidate; many were from old political dynasties (Turner 2007, 167–8). 2 The point is rhetorical; Azarias Ruberwa, the Rcd candidate, received 1.69 per cent of the vote. 3 Lubumbashi 28/08/06. 4 Kisangani 27/08/05. 5 Kinshasa 20/06/08. 6 Mbujimayi 29/07/08. 7 Kisangani 30/08/05. This quotation also appears in Marriage (2007, 298). 8 Kinshasa 07/07/08. 9 Kinshasa 12/06/08. 10 Kimbanseke, Kinshasa 16/06/08. 11 Kinshasa 16/07/08. 12 Joseph Kabila abolished the university degree as a requirement of holding office. 13 Mbujimayi 30/07/08. 14 Kisangani 29/08/05. 15 He was referring to the confrontations between Rwandan and Ugandan forces in Kisangani. 16 Kisangani 29/08/05. 17 The PPRD was Kabila’s political party, but he stood as an independent candidate in the presidential elections. 18 ‘Al Jazeera interviews Jean-Pierre Bemba – 03 Aug 07’, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=dk6xmIuwGEo (accessed 09/09/12). 19 Kimbanseke, Kinshasa 16/06/08. 20 Kinshasa 06/06/08. 21 Kinshasa 04/06/08. 22 Kisangani 17/08/05. 23 Kinshasa 23/07/08. 7 Hunter’s song 1 http://go.worldbank.org/VU4KGZ3JX0 (accessed 27/09/12). 2 DFID, http://www.dfid.gov.uk/About-DFID/Who-we-work-with1/Business/ (accessed 13/08/10). 3 Kinshasa 16/07/08. 4 Kinshasa 04/06/08. 5 Kinkole, Kinshasa 24/06/08. 6 Mbujimayi 16/08/08. 7 Mbujimayi 09/08/08. 8 Mbujimayi 07/08/08. 9 Kinshasa 13/06/08. 10 Kinshasa 12/06/08. 11 Kinshasa 23/06/08. 12 Kinshasa 06/06/08. 13 Kinshasa 04/06/08.

Notes 159 8 Security peace 1 FreeFairDRC, 30/09/11. 2 www.freefairdrc.com/en/latest-news/blog-posts/114-panelists-at-brookingsevent-on-drc-warn-of-possible-chaos-in-upcoming-elections (accessed 04/09/12). 3 ‘AU Boss jets to Congo amid rising tension, violence’, Jonny Hogg, Reuters, 07/11/11. 4 ‘Tensions rise in DR Congo in run-up to polls’, Al Jazeera, 08/11/11. 5 ‘DR Congo election: rights groups warn of instability’, BBC, 28/10/11. 6 ‘Weekly briefing on DRC elections’, Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, 26/09/11. 7 Lords Hansard text, 15/05/12, Column 252. 8 Kisangani 25/08/05.

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Index

1+4 106–108, 135, 138 ‘A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility’ (UN) 16 abuse: agents of perpetuation 98–100; predictability 93–94, 94–98 accountability 123, 133 Act of Engagement, 2004 115–116 actors 3 Addis Ababa conference 104 Additional Memorandum on the Army and Security 104 Africa 20; as God’s footprint 154 African Economic Outlook 151 agency 79–81, 150, 151–152 aid 147; bilateral 15; cut 20; withdrawal of 38 aid organisations, Kabila ends cooperation with 51 Alliance for Presidential Majority 110 Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL) 42, 49, 59, 156n1; funding 44–45; genocide 47, 50; political wing 54; support for Laurent Kabila 43–44 Alliance to Save the Dialogue 111 All-Inclusive Peace Agreement 104 American Mineral Fields Inc. 125 anglophone international relations 17 Annan, Kofi 124 Anvil Mining 7 Aradau, C. 152 Army for the Liberation of Rwanda (ALiR) 42, 53, 58 artisanal civil war 127 asset sale 126–127 Association of National Companies 107–108 Awakening churches 78

Bakwanga Mining Company 9 Bana Etats Unis, the 63–65, 151–152 banking systems, informal 72 Banyamulenge, the 52, 115 Banyamulenge uprising 32 Barratt Brown, M. 33 Bates, R. 34 beer sales 26 Belgian Congo 83 Belgium 21, 90 Bemba, Jean-Pierre 1, 51, 103, 106, 110, 111–112, 112–113 Bespaloff, R. 150 Bihuzo, Minani 27 Binza Group, the 86 biopolitical power 135 booty futures 46 border countries 90–91 Bourdieu, Pierre 18 Boutros-Ghali, B. 142 brassage process, the 7, 155n5 Brookings Institute 145 Bugles for the Voiceless 73–74 Bukavu 4, 6 Bush, George W. 123, 124 Butler, J. 61 Buzan, B. 128 Camdessus, Michel 15 Canada 17 Cão, Diego 82 Caritas 75 casualties 18; 1993 22; First Congo War 47; Ituri district conflict 116; Kasai–Katanga conflict 28; Kisangani mutiny 65; Lubumbashi University riots 21; north Kivu 32; pillages 23, 24, 25; presidential elections, 2006 112; presidential

172 Index elections, 2011 144; Second Congo War 150 Catholic Church 33, 75, 86, 139, 144 census 111 Central African Republic 112–113 child mortality 136 child soldiers 43–44, 54–55, 62–63, 66 children 136–137 China 90, 111, 128–129, 139, 142–143, 148, 152 church, the: criticism of Mobutu 86; and despondency 78; growth of 78–79; informalisation 77; legacy of resistance 76–77; power 79; role 78; social roles 75–76 CIA 55, 84 citizenship, revocation of 32 Civil Guard 24 civil rights movement 148 civil society groups 105 Clinton, Bill 38 coercion, and stability 85–86 Cold War: end of 14, 21, 34, 37–38, 42; political economy 39; security debate 17; security framework 142; security theory 14 collapsed states 14, 123 colonial debt 87–89 colonial rule 33, 132 Commission on Human Security (CHS) 16 Common Front of Nationalists 21 common strategic framework 134 commonality 15, 16, 130. see also shared interests; disruption of 132–133; and donors 132–133, 149; rejection of 149 concessions sales 126–127, 130, 138, 140, 147 confrontation, avoidance of 131–132 Congo, Democratic Republic of, map 4 Congo, Republic of the 84 Congo Crisis 84, 132 Congolese army: categories within 24; divisions 90; formation of national 110; institutionalised indiscipline 90; involvement in mineral trading 143; La débrouille 2–3; looting 28; participation in pillages 24, 24–25, 26, 28; pay 22, 43; restructuring 115, 126, 143; support for Laurent Kabila 43 Congolese Franc, the 49

Congolese Rally for Democracy (Rcd) 5, 6, 51–53, 57–58, 63, 64, 65, 81, 111, 120 Constitution, Article 15 2, 94 constitutional referendum, 2005 111 containment 2, 147–149 contractual responsibility: and the grey zone 93–94, 98; lack of 82, 90–100; and the predictability of abuse 94–98 contradictory violence 26–28 Copenhagen School 18 copper sector 125; collapse of 28–29; concessions sales 126–127; nationalisation 87–88 corruption 107–108 Country Assistance Framework 134 crime and criminality 12, 95 crimes against humanity 112–113 crisis resolution 41 critical security studies 14 currency, changed to Congolese Franc 49 Dannreuther, R. 148 de Waal, A. 108, 112, 117, 120 decision-making, self-destructive 82 decolonisation 83–84, 90 Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) 53 democratization 38, 123 deprivation 13, 117–119 Derrida, J. 38 despondency 78 destitution 113, 137, 139 development: lack of strategy 132; level 91; mutual reinforcement of 124; policy 1–2, 38, 42; projects 87; and security 61 DFID 121, 126, 129, 133; Country Plan 122–123; Research Strategy 2008–13 127; White Paper, 2009 16; Working with Business 127–128 diamonds 5, 9, 88 Dimbelege 9 Disarmament and Community Reinsertion Programme 116 disarmament and demobilisation programmes 104, 112–113, 115, 116, 126, 155n5 discrimination 87 displacement 68–70, 71, 116, 117

Index 173 disruption 132–133 distinctive historicity, loss of 132 Dolan, C. 115 Dondo, Kengo wa 108 donors 140, 147; agenda 128; approach 132; aspirations 114; and commonality 132–133, 149; condemnation of violence 112; Country Assistance Framework 134; development policy-making 38, 42; and First Congo War 59; and Global and All-Inclusive Peace Agreement 102, 104, 106, 111, 113, 120–121; and human security 59, 119; interventionist approach 143; and Mobutu 122; neoliberal resolve 133; optimism 42, 147; and presidential election, 2006 109, 110; and presidential election, 2011 144, 146; role 123; and Rwanda 60; and Second Congo War 51, 60; and security 128–129, 133; security agenda and policies 1–2, 14–16, 18; shared interests 125–126; sponsorship 3, 21, 34; state-building 124; and Uganda 60 Duffield, M. 16 durable disorder 80 Eastern Kasai province 9 east/west divide 3–4 economic conditions 71–75 economic growth 87, 125, 151 economic life, informalisation 140–141 economic resources 41 education 92; costs 35–36; informalisation 34–37; school drop-out rates 118; sector growth 35; universities 36–37 El Salvador 65 elections 104, 107–108, 110; single-party 86 electoral campaigns 107–108 electoral funding 107–108 Electoral Observation Mission 144, 145 electoral turnout: presidential elections, 2006 109; presidential elections, 2011 145 electricity 69, 87, 134 employment, formal sector 90 Englebert, P. 98, 105, 133

European Union 125; Electoral Observation Mission 144, 145; withdraws aid from Zaire 21 evangelical religion 78 everyday rubbish, violence of 134–139 exchange rates 34 exclusion 136–137, 137–138 exports 139 extortion 73–74 failed states 14, 59, 123, 142 favouritism 28–32, 87 FDLR 6 fending for oneself 2–3, 45, 62, 82, 153 fines 95 First Congo War 41, 42–51, 59–60, 135; casualties 18, 47; coalition 46, 47, 59; coalition breakup 50–51; funding of Kabila rule 44–45; genocide 46–47, 50, 51–52; impact 44–46; military victory 46–47; militias 64; pillages 44; removal of Mobutu 43–44 FOCA-FDLR 115, 127, 147 food shortages 27–28 formal sector, employment 90 formality 2, 99 Forrest 7 Foucault, M. 135 France 21, 90, 111, 125 freedom 150; definition 153; from the politics of pillage 152–154 FreeFairDRC 144, 146 Friends of Congo 60 Fukuyama, F. 38 GDP 25 Gécamines, (Quarries and Mines Company) 7–8, 25, 87, 88–89, 127 gendered violence 18, 55–57 genocidaires 46–47, 50 genocide: First Congo War 46–47, 50, 51–52; Rwanda 42, 47 Géopolitique 22, 28, 33, 39 Gizenga, Antoine 5, 103 Global and All-Inclusive Agreement on the Transition of the Democratic Republic of Congo 102–121; and aid donors 120–121; assessment of 108–119; and civil society groups 105; conflict framing 105; and continued fighting in the east 114–117; coverage 1; disarmament

174 Index failure 112–113; and elite aggression 109–110; fitting-up 102, 120–121, 122; focus 120; formality 2; and human security 117–119; implementation 105–108; and informalisation 120; legitimisation of belligerents 121; negotiations 104; and the persistence of violence 110–112, 114–117; rewards 110; signing 1, 102, 105; terms 105 global governance 15 global security 15–16, 20, 21, 37–40, 61, 142 Globe and Mail 145 God’s footprint metaphor 154 Goma 4 Goma Peace Agreement 143 Government of National Unity 106 government officials, human rights abuses by 113 grey zone, the 93–94, 98 Hansen, L. 18, 56, 61 healthcare 92, 118 Hema, the 116 Herbst, J. 33 Hettne, B. 80, 129 history, the glorious past 48 Hobbes, Thomas 20 household bills 71 Human Development Report (HDR) (UNDP) 15, 42 human rights abuses, by government officials 113 Human Rights Watch 56 human security 16–17, 59, 60, 61, 117–119 Hutu, the 46, 50, 52, 52–53, 115, 116 identity 29–30, 32; and ownership 92; and pillage 92 Iliad 150 independence 7, 83–84, 91 Independence Day, 30 June 2008 86–87 Independent Electoral Commission (CEI) 103, 145 Independent newspaper 145 India, nuclear tests 91 individual gain 100 individualisation 100, 151 inequality 28–32 inflation 34, 125, 126

informal churches 77 informalisation 2–3, 21, 24, 28, 38–40, 120; the church 77; economic life 140–141; education 34–37; populations involvement 37; and the state 62; and state power 32–37; violence 21, 24, 32–33, 62 infrastructure 91, 98 insecurity, responses to 61–79; compromise 71; economic 71–75; exposure to military violence 5–7; military 62–67; people’s choices 61–62; physical 79–81; political 67–71; prayer 75–79; tactical 62 intelligence services 113 Interahamwe 47, 52–53 InterCongolese Dialogue 104, 116 interests, commonality of 123–124 International Committee to Accompany the Transition (CIAT) 125 International Criminal Court 112, 115, 116 International Crisis Group 108, 114–117, 116 International Labour Organisation 9 International Monetary Fund 60, 89, 125, 128 international norms, exclusion from 136–137, 140 interviews 3 Israel 90 Ituri 114 Ituri district conflict 115–116, 117 Ituri Pacification Commission 105 justice 141 Kabila, Joseph: appointed president 55, 128; ban on mining 143; claim on the presidency 111–112; electoral victory, 2006 1, 103–104, 109–110; electoral victory, 2011 146; failure to disarm 112–113; inauguration 1; and Lubumbashi 7; on Mobutu 143; origins 110; personal army 112; presidency 106–108; presidential elections, 2011 144, 146; promises 106; support 110 Kabila, Laurent: administration 47–51, 54, 103, 128, 138, 139; American support for 43; appeal 51; appoints self president 47; army support for

Index 175 43; business acumen 46; causes of success 43; changes money 49; and the church 78–79; coalition 46, 47; coalition breakup 50–51; ends cooperation with aid organisations 51; forces 42; funding of rule 44–45; and genocide 47, 50; hope vested in 46; improved security 47–48; invasion 42; military victory 46–47; murder 55, 60, 104, 131; nationalism 49; popularity 43, 44; power 59; removal of Mobutu 43–44; Rwanda and 48–49; and Second Congo War 51, 52; sponsors 49; support for 49; transferral of power to 12 kadogos 43–44, 54–55, 66 Kamoto copper mine 28–29 Kampala 74–75 Kasai network 48 Kasai–Katanga conflict 28–32, 39, 92 Kasavubu, Joseph 83–84, 84 Katanga, Germain 116 Katanga gendarme incursions 90 Katanga network 48 Katanga province 114; artisanal civil war 127; crisis, 2003 116–117; Kasai–Katanga conflict 28–32, 39, 92; resources 7; secession 7, 84 Kazini, General James 54 Khong, Y. F. 17 Kibali-Ituri province 54 Kimbangu, Simon 76–77 Kimbanguist church, the 76–77 Kimbanseke 13, 66, 113 Kinshasa 3, 114; church role in 78; criminality 95; financial collapse 22; improved security 47; military presence 113; militias 66–67, 151–152; pillages 22, 25, 26; policing 97; population increase 68–69; presidential elections, 2006 103; presidential elections, 2011 144, 145, 146; rape 13; Rwandan assault 66–67; Second Congo War 52, 54, 55, 58, 60; security 12–14; self-financing activities 72; service provision 13; strike, 1991 33; taxes and taxation 97; unemployment 73; water supplies 69–70 Kinshasa, University of 139 Kisangani 4; battle for 6; economic significance 5; education 36;

improved security 48; militias 63–65; mutiny 65; pillages 23–24, 27–28; population 5; presidential elections, 2006 109; profiteering 74, 75; resistance 67–68; Rwandan and Ugandan occupation 5, 53; Second Congo War 53, 54; security 5–7; taxes 73–74; tokelist cycle couriers 157n22 Kivus, the 3, 114–115, 117, 147; concessions sales 127; rebellions 84 Kuwait 15 Kyungu, Gabriel 28, 31 La débrouille 2–3 La Revue 143 law, uneven imposition of 94–98 Lendu, the 116 Leopold, King 18, 41 Leopoldville (later Kinshasa) 83 Levi, Primo 93–94 Leviathan, The 20 liberal institutionalism 38 liberalisation 124–125, 126, 126–128, 128–130, 132–133, 136, 143, 148 Lubanga, Thomas 115, 116 Lubumbashi 4, 41, 154; bicycle licence-plate scheme 98; Catholic Church in 75; churches 78–79; experience of war 8; improved security 47–48; Kasai–Katanga conflict 29, 30; migration to 68–70; pillages 24–25; resources 7; security 7–9; taxes and taxation 96 Lubumbashi University, riots 21 Lumumba, Patrice 55, 83–84, 84 Lusaka Accords 104 M23 147 MacFarlane, S.N. 17 MacGaffey, J. 33, 90 MacGinty, R. 123 macroeconomic policies, 126, 147 Maimai, the 62–63, 64, 81, 116–117, 127, 151–152 malaise 131 Malu, Apollinaire Malu 103 marginalisation 151, 152 market traders 138–139 Mbembe, A. 26, 132 Mbujimayi 4; communications 9, 11; economic collapse 9–10; economic situation 11–12; and First Congo

176 Index War 44, 44–46; improved security 48; insecurity 10; Kasai–Katanga conflict 32; migration 70–71; murders 11; pillages 25–26; population 70–71; presidential elections, 2011 146; Second Congo War era 11; security 9–12; taxes and taxation 96; water supplies 70–71 Mbujimayi airport 96, 97–98 mental health 78 Miba 88, 136–137 Michel, Louis 104 middle classes, mobilisation 86 migration 68–69, 71; urban 4, 68–70 military funding 90 Military Justice Garrison 140–141 military pay 22, 43 militias 32, 62–67, 80, 151–152; disarming 115; motivation for involvement 67; urban 63–67 Millennium Development Goals 15–16, 122 Mining Code 125, 126 mining experts 105 mining sector: concessions sales 126–127, 130, 138, 140, 147; informal 143; liberalisation 126; mining ban 143; and security 130 Mining Union of Upper Katanga (UMHK) 7, 87 miracles 76–77 misrule 122–123 Mobutu, Joseph Desiré 1, 2, 9, 103, 142; assessment of 48; concentration of power 85; coup 84; criticism of 86; downfall 22; early years as president 84; as father of the nation 85; favouritism 32; financial management 34; isolation 42; Joseph Kabila on 143; and Kasai–Katanga conflict 29, 30, 32; legacy 93, 110; mismanagement 122; national security policy 89–90; and national sovereignty 89–90; nationalisation policy 87–89; opposition 33, 89; patrimonialism 86–87; pillage of Gécamines 89; and the pillages 22, 26–27, 28; position destabilised 21–22; power 21, 28, 31, 39; removal of 43–44; rule 84–89, 122–123, 128, 131, 135, 139; security 39; support for musicians

86–87; system of rule 20–21; use of coercion 85–86, 93; use of rewards 93; Western patrons 20, 123 Monuc (UN Mission in Congo) 103, 125–126, 134, 137, 144 Monusco (UN Stabilisation Mission) 144 mortality rates 18, 117, 151 Moshanas, S. 130 Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC) 51, 120 MPR, UDPS (the Union for Democracy and Social 21 Mulunda, Daniel Ngoy 145 murders, Mbujimayi 11 music and musicians 86–87, 153–154 Mutambwa, G. M. 27 Mutanga, Gédeon Kyungu 117 mutual associations 72–73, 75, 80, 151–152 National Confusion, the 22 National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) 115, 147 national debt 89 National Electricity Company (SNEL) 87 national reconciliation 110 ‘National Report on Human Development in the DRC’ 130 national security policy, under Mobutu 89–90 National Sovereign Conference 39 national sovereignty 89–90 nationalisation policy 87–89 nationalism 49 Ndombasi, Abdoulaye Yerodia 106 neocolonialism 20–21 neoliberal force 123–124 neoliberalism 14, 16–17, 20, 38, 129, 130, 132–133, 140 Ngoma, Arthur Z’ahidi 106 Ngudjolo, Mathieu 116 Nkunda, Laurent 115 non-governmental organisations 3; regulation 96–97 North Kivu 32, 114–115 Nouveau Zaire, the 9 Ntaganda, Bosco 147 Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. 82 Observatory of the Code of Ethics for Public Officials 108

Index 177 occupation, Second Congo War 53–54, 57–59, 60 OECD 132 oil crisis 88 Öjendal, J. 61 Oriental Province 5, 5–6, 62–63, 80–81; migration 68–70; Second Congo War 52, 57–58 ownership claims 92 PACT 126 Palermo, S. 93 Pama Mutombo 9 Paris School 18, 61 patrimonialism 26, 86–87, 93, 100, 108 patronage 98, 99 peace, the. see Global and All-Inclusive Agreement on the Transition of the Democratic Republic of Congo peace negotiations 104. see also Global and All-Inclusive Agreement on the Transition of the Democratic Republic of Congo people, as things 150–151 perpetrators 82 Petit, P. 27 petrol 71 pillages 21, 22–28, 39, 119, 138; agents of perpetuation 98–100; army participation 24, 24–25, 26, 28; casualties 23, 24, 25; civilian involvement 25, 27–28; context 23; definition 22, 152; economic repercussions 23–24; First Congo War 44; freedom from 152–154; of Gécamines 88–89; and the grey zone 93–94, 98; historical background 82–83, 83–90; and identity 92; and the illegitimacy of ownership 92; impact 25–26, 26–28; and individual gain 98–100, 100; and lack of contract 90–100; lack of strategic rationality 100–101; looting 27–28; mechanisms 93; nationalisation 87–89; politics of 82–101, 152–154; and power 100; purpose 26–27; as recurrent motif 82; return to 140–141; and swindling 98–100; targets 27 police and policing 94–97, 138–139 political order: establishment of new 110; lack of 129–130

political parties 109 political process 102–104 political significance 128 Popular Consultation 21 Popular Movement of the Revolution (MPR), 86 Popular Power Committees 54 population: fragmentation 28–32; priorities 2; relationship with state 8; urban 68–69 poverty 26, 72, 134–136, 137 power: biopolitical 135; Congolese perspectives 148–149; expressions of 99–100; manipulation of 131; and pillage 100; re-politicising 150–152; and sexual violence 56; structures 148 powerlessness 13 power-sharing 1, 108 prayer 75–79 predictability 79–81, 150; of abuse 93–94 presidential candidates: presidential elections, 2006 109; presidential elections, 2011 143 presidential elections, 2006 1, 48, 51, 102–104, 109–110, 112, 146–147 presidential elections, 2011 143; candidates 143; casualties 144; funding 144; irregularities 145–146, 146, 147; observers 144; preparations 144; results 146; turnout 145; violence 144, 145 presidents, relations with prime ministers 106 prices 73, 113 prime ministers, relations with presidents 106 profiteering 74–75 prostitution 137 Protestant churches 76 provincial-level violence 22, 39–40; Kasai–Katanga conflict 28–32, 39 Quarries and Mines Company (Gécamines) 7–8, 25, 87, 88–89, 127 rape 13, 55–57, 63 real economy, the 33 realism 14 refugees 68–69 Regideso 69–70, 70–71, 87

178 Index religion 75–79, 80, 152; and despondency 78; growth of 78–79; informalisation 77; legacy of resistance 76–77; power 79; role 78; social roles 75–76 re-politicising 150–152 Republican Guard 24, 113 restrained coercion 128–130 reunification 110 rich in war 41 Richmond, O. 123 road blocks 73–74 robberies 74 Roe, P. 19, 152 Ross, M. 46 Ruberwa, Azarias 48, 106 Russia 111 Rwanda 15, 32, 39–40, 59; Congo Desk 57; and donors 60; and the First Congo War 42; GDP 57; genocide 42, 47; Hutus 53; influence 117; peace agreement 105; pillage 140; proxies 120; support for Laurent Kabila 47, 48–49 Rwandan army 5, 6, 12; invasion of Congo 51, 52; in Ituri 115–116; occupation of Congo 57–59, 60, 65; occupation takings 57; Second Congo War 51, 52, 53 Rwandan Patriotic Forces (RPF) 42 Sacred Union, the 21 salaries, non-payment of 93, 99, 118–119, 135, 136 Sando, C.K.-L. 106 school drop-out rates 118 Second Congo War 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 41, 51–59, 116, 117, 135; agenda 52, 53; casualties 18, 150; ceasefire 54; coalition conflicts 54; Kabila’s murder 55, 60; looting 57; migration 68–69; militias 62–63, 151–152; the occupation 53–54, 54, 57–59, 60, 63, 65; parties involved 51–52; rape and gendered violence 55–57; Rwandan assault on Kinshasa 66–67; Rwandan invasion 51, 52; Ugandan troops 52 securitisation 18–19, 128, 148, 149, 152 security: as absence of war 12; definition 80, 83; and development

1–2, 61; distribution of 3–14; east/west divide 3–4; as extension of US hegemony 91; feeling of 153; and freedom 153; individualisation of 61; Kinshasa 12–14; Kisangani 5–7; Lubumbashi 7–9; Mbujimayi 9–12; and the mining sector 130; political context 13; power structures 148; as silence 56; social construction of 61; state threat to 14 security negotiations 149–154 security peace 142–143, 147–149 security perspective, the 3 security policy 14; and development policy 1–2; global security 15–16, 20, 21, 37–40; human security 16–17; northern bias 17–18; and strategy 17–18 security services 89–90 security theory: Cold War 14; northern bias 17–18 self-destructive decision-making 82 self-interest 82 services: costs 71; investment in 68–69; provision 13, 69–71 sex: coerced 55; transactional 56–57 sexual violence 6–7, 55–57, 59, 63 Seymour, C. 56–57 shared interests 15, 124–125. see also commonality; amongst donors 125–126; and the Congolese 126–128; and restrained coercion 128–130 Shinkolobwe 7 silence, security as 56 slave trade 18, 82 SNCC (National Railway/nlCompany) 8 social integration 62 solidarity networks 72–73 Somalia 15, 91 South Kivu 6, 114–115 South Sudan 91 Sovereign National Conference (CNS) 22, 27, 104, 111 Soviet Union, collapse of 14 Special Presidential Division 21, 90 Special Presidential Security Group 113 speech acts 61 Stabilisation and economic boost programme, 1997 60 stability, and coercion 85–86

Index 179 state, the: accountability 127; failure 59; informalisation of 2; relationship with population 8; role of 12; threat to security 14 state agents, predation by 94–98 state functions, informalisation 21, 28 state of emergency 68 state-building 123, 124, 128, 133, 142, 147 status 99 Stern, M. 61 strategic rationality, lack of 100–101 strikes 33 35, 36, 37, 93, 104 Structural Adjustment Programmes 34, 37, 39, 88, 151 student resistance 139 subjective violence 120 Sun City 104 sustainable development 59, 117 swindling 98–100 Swing, William 125 taxes and taxation 73–74, 91, 93, 94–97, 99, 107, 135 Taxi Drivers’ Association 72 terrorism 38 Thirty Years Plan 83 threat control 2 threats, exposure to 18–19 towns, significance of 4 traffic police 94–95 Transition, the 102, 104, 106–108, 110–112, 112, 113, 117–118, 121, 125, 126–127, 129, 134, 146, 152 Transitional Government 48 Trefon, T. 90, 113 Tshisekedi, Etienne 10, 21, 21–22, 30, 33, 106, 147; discontent 110–112; and First Congo War 44; popularity 44; presidential elections, 2011 143, 144, 146 Tshopo massacre 53, 65 Tull, D. M. 105, 133 Turner, T. 78 Tutsi, the 32, 46–47, 51–52, 115, 116 Ubundu 5 UDPS (the Union for Democracy and Social Progress) 30, 44, 106, 110, 111 Uganda 39–40, 59; and donors 60; peace agreement 105; proxies 120; support for Laurent Kabila 47

Ugandan army 5, 6; in Ituri 115, 116; occupation of Congo 57–59, 60; Second Congo War 52 underdevelopment 38; and violence 16 UNDP 16, 17, 60, 117; Human Development Report (HDR) 15, 42; Project to Support the Election Cycle 144; ‘Sustainability and Equity: A Better Future for All’ 147 unemployment 12, 24, 28, 36, 73, 127, 135, 151 unexploded ordnance 142 Union of Congolese Patriots 115 Union of Republican Nationalists for Liberation 51 United Kingdom 111 United Nations 124, 144; ‘A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility’ 16; military involvement 84; Millennium Development 15–16; Mission in Congo (Monuc) 103, 125–126, 134, 137, 144; Panel of Experts 57–59, 105, 143; Resolution 1592 118 United Nations High Commission for Human Rights 6 United States of America: and the constitutional referendum, 2005 111; hegemony 91; military funding 90; military involvement 84; National Security Strategy, 2002 123–124; neoliberal force 123–124; neoliberalism 38; security policy 1–2; support for Laurent Kabila 43; support for the Transition 125; withdraws aid from Zaire 21 universities 36–37, 86 uranium 155n18 urban militias 63–67 urbanisation 4, 68–70 US Information Agency 42 Varadarajan, L. 91 vice-presidents 196 victims 82 Vietnam War 87 violence: contradictory 26–28; decentralisation of 21–32; distribution of 62; of everyday rubbish 134–139; gendered 18; informalisation 1, 21, 24, 32–33, 62; and insecurity 5–6; limits to 79–81; motivation for involvement

180 Index 67; normalisation of 33, 87; persistence of 41, 110–112, 114; provincial-level 22, 28–32, 39–40; sexual 6–7, 55–57, 59, 63; subjective 120; threat of 97–98; and underdevelopment 16 vulnerability, attempts to minimise 101 war crimes 112 war of aggression, the 41 water supplies 69–71, 135, 136 Weil, S. 150 Westphalia, Treaty of 20 Winant, H. 148 witchcraft 78 women: mutual associations 73; sexual violence against 6–7, 55–57, 59, 63; survival tactics 56–57; vulnerability 56, 59 Wood, E.J. 65 World Bank 15, 34, 37, 60, 89, 125, 126, 128, 129, 133, 134 World Development Report (World Bank) 15

Yugoslavia, former 15 Zaire 28; abandoned 42; aid withdrawn 21; decentralisation of violence 21–32; declared insolvent 34, 89; decline of 33–34; discontent 42; financial collapse 22; GDP 25; government expenditure 34; impact of pillages on 25–26, 26–28; informalisation 32–37, 38–40; informalisation of education 34–37; military funding 90; Mobutu’s rule 20–21, 84–89; national debt 89; national sovereignty 89–90; nationalisation policy 87–89; opposition 33; pillages 22, 22–28, 39; Popular Consultation 21; provincial-level violence 22, 28–32, 39–40; the real economy 33; renamed Democratic Republic of Congo 47; Western patrons 20 Zairianisation 88, 92 Z^ iz^ek, S. 120