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Rwanda is the Reason

The Monitor (Kampala)
ANALYSIS
October 10, 2004
Posted to the web October 11, 2004
Kampala
This is segment two of the fourth and final instalment in our serialisation of
The African Stakes of the Congo War, a book about the Congo war. This
instalment, by John F. Clark, is titled "Museveni's Adventure in the Congo War:
Uganda's Vietnam?"-
One arrives at the most plausible explanation for Uganda's participation in the
Congo war by putting the Rwanda-Uganda alliance at the center of the argument.
Specifically, a number of developments inside Congo and between Congo and
Rwanda had put the regime of Paul Kagame at risk by late 1998. In turn,
Museveni could not afford to see the Kagame regime fall from power at that time
without suffering major security problems of its own.
To understand Museveni's dilemma in August 1998, then, one must start with the
evolution of relations between his ally, Kagame, and Laurent Kabila in the
previous year. Paul Kagame and the largely Tutsi leadership of the RPF regime
in Kigali had good reasons for coming to fear Kabila during this time.
Naturally, Museveni would have been fully aware of the concerns of the Rwandan
leadership about Kabila's leadership. According to Prunier, "Although it is
very difficult to know what actually passed at that moment between Kigali and
Kampala, it is probable that in the spring of 1998 Major General Kagame managed
to convince his Ugandan ally of the impossibility of treating with Kabila and
of the necessity of overthrowing him.
It [only] remains to know how and when." In keeping with his preferred
strategy, Kagame mounted his now-famous effort to seize Kinshasa in August 1998
by airlifting troops to Kitona airbase in Bas-Congo. These forces very nearly
took Kinshasa and overthrew Kabila at the very start of the war, and would have
done so if not for the intervention of Angola and Zimbabwe on Kabila's behalf.
Rwanda's army was prominent in this invasion from the beginning, and it only
later became evident that the UPDF was, as well.
According to a prominent Ugandan journalist, the Ugandan leadership was not
initially aware of Rwanda's plan, but once belatedly made aware of it, Museveni
decided to provide some troops. Kagame's plan might well have succeeded were it
not for the unexpected intervention of Zimbabwe, and then Angola, on Kabila's
behalf. By the end of August, however, Kagame's gamble had failed.
After Kagame failed to remove Kabila in his initial gambit, the Rwandan
leader's regime was left in a highly vulnerable position. First, one should
recall that the post-genocide Tutsi population inside of Rwanda, even with the
impressive in-flow of Tutsi from neighboring countries since 1994, numbers only
a few hundred thousand.
In turn, the contemporary RPF relies overwhelmingly on Tutsi officers and
troops, and thus the demographic basis for the RPF is quite small. Second, as
of late August 1998, the RPF faced an impressive array of enemies: internal
opponents, the Angolan and Zimbabwean expeditionary forces in Congo, the FAC
itself, and the rump of Habyarimana's Forces Armees Rwandaises (Rwandan Armed
Forces - FAR) and the Interahamwe, who had escaped into Congo in 1994.
Third, a large part of the Rwandan Patriotic Army's (RPA) strength in 1998 owed
to the continual training and equipping of the army by sympathetic outside
forces, notably the United States military. This support was soon to be
officially withdrawn when it was realized in Washington that Rwanda had engaged
in a risky effort to overthrow a regime that Rwanda itself was largely
responsible for installing in power. In short, in August 1998 it appeared very
much as though Kagame had probably bitten off more than he could chew.
Museveni, however, could not afford to see his ally fall from power with
equanimity. The Museveni regime itself faced certain vulnerabilities associated
with rebels operating from across international frontiers. If it also faced a
hostile regime in the south, which any successor regime to Kagame would likely
be, then it would be rendered even more vulnerable. Moreover, Museveni would
naturally be loath to suffer the political blow to his prestige that would
accompany Kagame's fall from power. Finally, if Kagame were to fall from power,
Museveni would likely face yet another influx of Tutsi refugees from Rwanda. As
a result of such considerations, it is logical that Museveni would have
continued to support Kagame, a man with whom he also had a personal bond of
friendship and a history of cooperation.
Thus, though Rwanda almost certainly initiated the war against Kabila for its
own ends, Museveni felt obligated to support the effort for political and
personal reasons.
Another set of putative motives for Uganda's second intervention in the DRC has
to do with the exploitation of the country's material resources. The fact that
the volume of highly valuable commodities now flowing out of Congo via Uganda
has increased dramatically since late 1996 is quite beyond dispute, but the
meaning of this fact hardly speaks for itself. Rather, Uganda's involvement in
the market for Congo's natural resources only raises specific questions about
the relationship between the original motivation for Uganda's intervention and
the UPDF's continuing presence in Congo, about Uganda's ultimate purposes in
Congo, and about the extent to which President Museveni is truly in control of
the Ugandan national army.
There are three distinguishable arguments about Uganda's economic motives in
Congo, but only two are relevant to the initial intervention. The first is that
officials of the Ugandan government purposively planned and executed Uganda's
invasion in order to further the economic interests of the state.
As argued by William Reno, the invasion and occupation of eastern Congo could
plausibly be part of a longterm, rational process of state-building. Other
theorists, seeking primarily to explain wars in the peripheral areas of the
world, have also attributed such wars to the state-building process. This
theoretical approach would suggest that Museveni went into Congo with the idea
of building up the national treasury.
Indeed, some empirical evidence also seems to support this idea. The
extraction, and export of Congolese natural resources, including timber,
coffee, gold, diamonds, and other commodities, via Uganda has in some regards
had a salutary effect on Uganda's national economy. Specifically, the revenues
from such trade may have helped to ease the burden of Uganda's growing current
accounts deficits.
In 1997, for instance, gold and gold compounds were Uganda's second largest
source of export earnings, after coffee, amounting to some U.S.$81 million, or
12 percent of all export revenues. This is remarkable since Uganda produces
extremely little gold domestically. Ugandan businessmen have also been able to
increase the quantity of manufactures that they sell in Congo since the
beginning of 1997. Ugandan trucks loaded with such products as soap, metal roof
sheeting, plastic goods, and canned foods now ply the roads to Congo bearing
the fruits of Ugandan light industry to be traded for local goods.
A closely related argument emphasizes Museveni's desire to integrate Uganda
economically with the other states of east and central Africa. Museveni's
enthusiasm for East African Cooperation, including the integration treaty
signed in late 1999, is apparent. Despite the challenge that Uganda's nascent
industries will experience in the face of Kenyan competition, Museveni
genuinely believes that integration serves Uganda's economic interests. Thus,
the prominent Ugandan journalist Charles Onyango-Obbo averred that the
unforgivable sin that Kabila committed against Museveni was making the decision
to take Congo into the Southern African Development Community (SADC) regional
trade bloc in early 1998. According to Onyango-Obbo, this decision put Congo in
the position of serving South African, rather than Ugandan and Kenyan, economic
needs.
There are two major problems with this argument. First, it is far from clear
from the evidence that Uganda is experiencing a net economic gain from its
involvement in the DRC. There are considerable costs, as well as benefits,
associated with Uganda's intervention in Congo. These are considered in more
detail in the final section of this chapter.
Second, it is highly problematic that Uganda's profits from Congo will increase
because of the war. Despite the reality of much theft by rogue elements of the
UPDF, the main economic gains of Uganda in Congo are achieved through
quasilegitimate business. In other words, most of the Ugandan officers engaged
in commerce in Congo are trading products for the commodities that they are
receiving.
Thus, the question is whether Uganda as a state would profit more from
peacetime commerce with Congo or through war-induced economic disarray. The
fact that Ugandan gold exports plummeted to only U.S. $l9 million in 1998 from
four times that level the previous year suggests that war may not, after all,
be good for business or for Uganda's trade figures.
As for satisfying the IFIs with a positive economic performance generated by
Congolese loot, they are now highly perturbed with the Ugandan government for
damaging its national budget through increased military spending.
A second economic argument about Uganda's intervention in DRC is that Museveni
ordered his army into Congo so that they could plunder for their own, personal
benefit. Perhaps the most common (and accurate) observation about the practice
of African politics is that rulers patronize their key supporters to gain
support for their regimes. This argument shares with the previous one the
assumption that the UPDF is acting with the blessing of President Museveni, but
it suggests that the UPDF is actually engaged in criminal activity that does
not benefit the Ugandan state or people at large. One illuminating analysis of
the UPDF has described the army's officers as being "entrepreneurs of
insecurity" who acquire gains from conflict both within Uganda and outside, in
Congo. The means of achieving such gains are variable. At the petty level,
soldiers in Uganda's troubled regions often conspire with local rebels to steal
money and property from local residents.
On a grander scale, senior officers, most notoriously the president's own
brother, Salim Saleh, profit by selling (often defective) arms to the
government at inflated prices. Other senior officers are well known for
stealing the pay of ordinary soldiers, who are often victims themselves of
their own venal commanders. This argument suggests that the loyalty of
Museveni's key military supporters is rewarded and reinforced by the free hand
that Museveni gives them to plunder.
This argument, however, is contradicted by some evidence that the UPDF was not
initially enthusiastic about the war. According to the International Crisis
Group, one senior Ugandan military official told them that Museveni actually
had to convince a reluctant high command to go along with the invasion.
They quote the officer as saying, "We felt that the Rwandese started the war
and it was their duty to go ahead and finish the job, but our President took
time and convinced us that we had a stake in what is going on in Congo." This
statement suggests that while certain Ugandan officers may be engaged in
profitable business in Congo now, such opportunities were not necessarily on
their minds in August 1998. Instead, they may have been considering their own
lives, those of their men, and the damage to the UPDF's prestige that it would
suffer in losing a war.
A third economic argument is that the officers of the UPDF only became
interested in the economic potential of occupying Congo after their re-entry
into the country in late 1998. This argument acknowledges that the UPDF is
engaged in plunder as well as legitimate business in Congo but perceives the
Ugandan army to be now only loosely under the control of its own commander.
If this is the case, then President Museveni himself may not encourage or
condone the commercial and criminal activities of the UPDF. This plausible
scenario need not suppose, however, that President Museveni intended his troops
to engage in such activities when he originally ordered them into Congo.
Rather, officers of the UPDF likely began engaging in them spontaneously once
they had begun their duties of occupation.
That Museveni could be unaware of the well-documented illegal business
activities of his own brother, Salim Saleh, is beyond imagination. The only
question is whether President Museveni encourages such activities or only
tolerates them. It may even be the case that President Museveni "negotiates
with," rather than commands his army in some instances, as some evidence
suggests. If this is the case, Museveni may not be able to extract his own
forces from Congo now even if he wishes to do so.
Certainly, commanders who are deeply engaged in profitable businesses would be
loath to leave Congo, despite the evident military failure of the army to
displace Kabila. Were President Museveni to order a withdrawal from Congo
against the will of his commanders, he might well be inviting coup against
himself. (Well, the Ugandan troops have long since left DR Congo - ed).
This view would also explain the clashes between the UPDF and the RPA in
Kisangani in August 1999 and again in March and [June] 2000.
In neither case did Museveni or Kagame seem to have ordered their commanders to
attack the forces of their ally. Indeed, there is no reasonable security issue
that could have led to the clashes between the RPA and UPDF in Kisangani.
Rather, most of the media have concluded that the first clashes were generated
by the rivalry over access to resources of commanders in the two armies, and
the second by the desire for revenge by UPDF commanders, whose forces suffered
far more in the first round of fighting. Such a conclusion is more logical than
the notion that the UPDF and RPA went to battle with one another "due to
persistent and serious differences over the objectives and strategies of the
war in Congo."
To return briefly to the Vietnam analogy, Uganda's motives, like the United
States in Vietnam, are not altogether clear. Uganda does not seem to have re-
entered for ideological reasons, as the United States did, but nor do its
motivations seem to have much to do with national interest.
If any states had an interest in seeing the Vietnamese revolution and
reunification fail in the 1960s, it was other states in southeast Asia, not the
United States. Likewise, in the second Congo war, it is Rwanda that has a
direct interest in the outcome of the Congo war, and not Uganda. Another
similarity in the two situations is that Uganda now finds it difficult to
withdraw from the "quagmire" in which it finds itself.
Uganda's Strategies in the Congo War
In accord with the lack of coherence in Uganda's Congo policies, it is far
better to speak of the country's "strategies" than its "strategy." Moreover,
one's analysis of Uganda's strategies depends directly on what one perceives to
be the country's main goals in Congo. And, as we saw just above, its goals in
the Congo war are far from clear and obvious.
Accordingly in this section, I analyze Uganda's goals in Congo with due regard
to the range of its foreign policy goals in general, the fact that it had both
minimal and maximal goals there, the fact that its goals changed over time, and
the fact that different actors within Uganda may [have] had specific goals
different from those of the state in general.
Uganda's evolving strategies in the Congo war must, first and foremost, be seen
in the context of its broader foreign policy exigencies.
The root purpose of Uganda's foreign policy, like that of other African states,
is to keep its ruler in power over the medium term. In this regard, Uganda's
foreign policy can only be seen as an adjunct of Museveni's domestic goals,
which serve the Museveni regime's fundamental goal most directly.
While a variety of domestic strategies might have been pursued to stay in
power, Museveni has chosen a relatively positive one that relies on economic
growth and building state capacity, as well as suppression of the opposition
under the cover of his "no-party" ideology. The foreign policy component of
this domestic strategy requires, above all, for Uganda to remain in the good
graces of the IFIs and the Western donors.
As a result, the Museveni regime, having staked its legitimacy on the delivery
of economic growth to the population, is more dependent on the IFIs - and
specifically the good will of the United States - than other African countries
facing far more severe economic circumstances.
Hence, a "negative goal" of Uganda in the Congo war has also been not to
alienate itself from its main Western backers. Fortuitously for Museveni, the
regime of Laurent Kabila had fallen out of favor with the West in general and
the United States in particular by the time of the August 1998 Rwanda-Uganda
invasion of Congo.
Kabila had of course come to power with the backing of Rwanda and Uganda as
well as, indirectly, the United States and most other states in Africa and
Europe. At the moment of Kabila's installation in power in Kinshasa in May
1997, only France seemed to be troubled by the turn of events. Yet Kabila had
fallen out of favor with most of the international community by the end of his
first year in power.
Kabila's most important failings included his refusal to cooperate with the UN
mission sent to investigate the massacre of Rwandan Hutu civilians during the
liberation war and his utter failure to begin the arduous process of rebuilding
the Congolese state and economy. His rule was nearly as kleptocratic as that of
Mobutu, and with even less flair. Nor was he able to justify his dictatorship
in terms of post-genocide guilt (as could Rwanda) or in terms of an illusory
ideology of politico-economic development (as could Uganda). Accordingly,
Museveni's need to keep the favor of the key Western donors did not prevent him
for ordering the UPDF into Congo in 1998.
When the second Congo war began in August 1998, Uganda initially backed Rwanda
in that country's risky gamble to overthrow Kabila by airlifting troops to Bas-
Congo.
Although Ugandan troops were not part of this effort, Museveni apparently knew
of the move and did nothing to dissuade his ally from taking the risk. There
was certainly no public denunciation of the move from Uganda, which was already
secretly sending troops into eastern Congo.
Once Rwanda was defeated, thanks largely to the intervention of Zimbabwe and
Angola, a high-profile disagreement between Rwanda and Uganda on the
appropriate means for displacing Kabila from power soon emerged.
It seems that each of the two allied rulers sought to replicate his own
experience in coming to power in the Congo war to remove Kabila: Kagame wanted
to send a professional, foreign-based army (with little popular support) to
seize control of the capital, while Museveni wanted to assist disgruntled local
segments of the population to engage in a slowly building rebellion against
their own ruler.
Some analysts even argued that this disagreement was a major reason why Uganda
and Rwanda originally clashed in Kisangani in August 1999.
The military aspect of Uganda's policy in Congo has been to recruit, train, and
arm soldiers to fight in the two rebel groups that it supports [the
Rassemblement Congolaise pour la Democratic-Bunia (RCD-Bunia) and the Mouvement
pour la Liberation du Congo (MLC) of Jean-Pierre Bemba].
Given Museveni's contention that the success of the Congo war ultimately
depends on the initiative of local leaders and the political support that they
can garner among ordinary Congolese citizens (as Museveni himself did between
1980 and 1986), this strategy accords well with his ideology and own
experience. Uganda has generally deployed fewer of its own national troops into
Congo than has Rwanda, and has tried harder to build up and train local forces.
According to an April 2001 Security Council report, Uganda only had about
10,000 soldiers in Congo, compared to some 25,000 for Rwanda. One can discern
an evolution in Uganda's strategies of support for the two rebel groups in
Congo due to changing events.
As long as the RCD was united and the Uganda-Rwanda alliance intact, Uganda
focused its efforts on building up the RCD, headed by Wamba dia Wamba. The
split of the RCD into a Goma faction headed by Emile Illunga and a Kisangani
(now Bunia) faction headed by Wamba signaled the divergence of the two former
allies, leading up to their first clash in Kisangani in August of 1999.
Although Museveni initially favored Wamba as a like-minded ideological thinker,
he finally came to recognize that Wamba lacked a strong domestic following in
Congo, particularly in Orientale and North Kivu, and that his military
organizational skills were limited. According to one source, the RCD-Bunia had
only 2,500 troops after the split, while the RCD-Goma had 17,000 to 20,000."
Understanding Wamba's limitations as a guerilla leader, the Ugandan leadership,
upon its entry into the Equateur region in late 1998, selected Jean-Pierre
Bemba to lead a new rebel movement in that region. Bemba had a number of
advantages over Wamba, including his local popularity, the wealth and
connections of an established local businessman, and the organizational skills
needed to train and equip a capable rebel force. Bemba's fighting force had
grown from a mere 158 in December 1998 to between 6,500 and 9,000 in late 2000.
Due to his growing reputation for getting results, Uganda selected him to head
the umbrella organization (the Front de Liberation du Congo - FLC) that linked
two factions of the RCD-Bunia and the MLC in early 2001.
To some extent the military successes of the MLC in 2000 may have even revived
Museveni's hopes for a rebel military victory in Congo.
* The African Stakes of the Congo War is edited by John F. Clark and published
by Fountain, 2003. It is available in all leading bookstores in the country
* Next week, we start serialising Aboke Girls: Children Abducted in Northern
Uganda by Els de Temermman.

   

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