Don't in
Zaire Repeat the West's
Mistakes in Angola
By JONATHAN POWER
LONDON-- The rapid and dangerous way things are going
suggest that Zaire could very easily, like its sideshow
Angola, become the scene of an unending civil war between
the two rival protagonists.
In Zaire in the contest to succeed the dying president,
Mobutu Sese Seko, we have in the capital Kinshasa, the
ex-prime minister Etienne Tshisekedi, pulling out every stop
to take over from his erstwhile boss. His charisma and
organizational skills are formidable. Early this week he led
a stunning strike which, for the breadth of a day, reduced
the bustling, noisy, helter-skelter of life in the capital
to an earie silence.
In the west is his rival for power, Laurent Kabila, who
by force of arms has captured the most populous half of the
country, taken over the diamond and copper mines, the main
source of the country's wealth and is now advancing on
Kinshasa.
This is reminiscent of how civil war began in neighboring
Angola 20 years ago. That time the Russians took one side
and the American CIA, under the orders of Secretary of
State, Henry Kissinger, the other. The ratcheting up of
civil war by the Cold War antagonists ended up with one
side, the MPLA, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of
Angola, today the government, bringing in the Cubans and the
other side, UNITA, the National Union for the Total
Independence of Angola, bringing in the South Africans. The
civil war so exhausted and drained the country that the
World Bank concluded that ``there was no economic activity
to measure."
In the end the Cubans fought the South Africans to a
standstill. The Bush administration in Washington with the
Gorbachev administration's help in Moscow arbitrated a peace
agreement that got the South Africans and Cubans
removed, gave its blessing to the MPLA as the party of
government and gave Jonas Savimbi's guerrillas of UNITA a
role in the capital as the formal opposition. Last week the
war was supposedly finally concluded after the inauguration
of a government of national unity.
Yet Savimbi still holds back--thanks to his old friend,
President Mobutu. Savimbi declined to attend last week's
ceremony, though his representatives did. Instead, with
Mobutu continuing as before to keep him well stocked in
arms, he is deploying UNITA guerrillas against Kabila. To
match this the official Angolan government has dispatched
contingents of its army to Kabila's side.
Hence the ongoing ``murderous violence in the pregnant
land of Africa,'' to quote the Portuguese novelist, Antonio
Lota Antune who wrote so acutely about Angola's
incommunicable image of war in his ``South of Nowhere.''
Zaire, thanks to the spirits who watch over Africa, no
longer has to contend with superpower backers, but there
remains a danger that it could end up with the U.S. on the
side of Kabila and the French and the Belgians with their
historically larger stakes in the old order in Zaire backing
Tshisekedi. But even if the western powers decide to be
sensible and cooperate the elements for another great
African feud are all too clearly in place. These days, given
the easy availability of arms, one doesn't need an official
``backer'' to get one's hands on murderous amounts.
If the lesson of Angola is don't start a civil war the
lesson of the twentieth century is that ``most civil wars
have only ended with the outright military victory of one
side over the other.'' So writes Charles King in a study
published this week by the International Institute for
Strategic Studies. He goes on to observe that ``military
victory in civil wars is often associated with widespread
human rights abuses, atrocities, genocide, environmental
degradation and a host of other ills which make
reconstruction and political reconciliation especially
difficult.''
His argument should be cold water for those outsiders who
think anything could be gained by trying to tip the scales
one way or another in the Zairean power struggle. The chance
of success would be slim and the price of failure great.
Once civil war starts it is extraordinarily difficult to
stop and then, as Professor King observes, a negociated
settlement, even if it can be reached, may be inherently
unstable, as appears to be the case in Angola.
Thus now is the time for outsiders to stand back from
partisanship and instead deploy their joint resources to
broker a compromise before the rivals spill blood. They must
throw their weight without reserve behind the rather clever
UN arbitrator, Mohammed Sahnoun. An election where the
contenders face off must be the common goal. Meanwhile, for
a year or so a government of national unity is necessary to
keep the country ticking over and to give time to organise
an honest ballot.
Outsiders, principally America to begin with, pulled
apart Angola's power sharing commitment to hold elections in
1975. It would be a tragedy to repeat that appalling mistake
in Zaire today. Hopefully by now everyone should know
better. But do they?
April 16, 1997,
LONDON
Copyright © 1997 By JONATHAN POWER
Note: I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172
and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
|