Africa's first world war. Financial Times Saturday, November 14
At the heart of the continent is a web of intrigue every bit as complex as early 20th century Europe.
Mark Turn reports
Rebel leader Jean-Pierre Ondekane is dressed for the revolution. Brand new Converse trainers, a hooded black tracksuit, Nike USA emblazoned on the front, matching baseball cap, chunky gold watch. Completing the outfit is an essential accessory - a briefcase-sized satellite phone, deferentially proffered by a grim-faced deputy, whose drab camouflage kit provides a sharp contrast to guerrilla chic.
Commander Ondekane would not look out of place compering the MTV music awards. Instead, he is the military commander of a rebel movement waging a war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, which is sucking in its neighbours and threatening to destabilise all of central and southern Africa.
The rebellion is barely three months old, but close to half of Africa's third-largest country is in the hands of Ondekane, at the heart of what might become, in the words of Susan Rice, the US under-secretary of state for Africa, the continent's "first world war".
To many eyes, it already is.
Central Africa is bound by a web of political, economic and personal intrigue every bit as complex as early 20th century Europe. In the centre of the web lies Congo, offering countless riches, a springboard for the insurgencies plaguing the governments of Sudan, Angola, Rwanda and Uganda, and an ethnic mix with spine-chilling potential for conflict.
This is a region haunted by the horrors of 1994, when Rwanda's militant Hutus massacred close to 1m Tutsis, while the world stood by and let it happen. The road from Rwanda to the Congo is littered with refugee camps, tattered United Nations tarpaulins and an endless stream of soldiers who stand guard against the remaining Hutu insurgents. Forests and banana plantations along the route have been razed to deny rebels a hiding place.
"It's terrible," says Vianney, a Tutsi taxi driver who fled to Goma during the 1994 Rwanda massacre, as he points to the temporary shacks in which refugees still eke out a living. "I used to have so much family in Kigali [Rwanda's capital]. Now they are all gone."
Ever since those events, Goma, a small Congolese border town on the shores of Lake Kivu, has found itself in the midst of a social and political maelstrom unrivalled anywhere in the world.
First, it served as a home to thousands of Tutsis fleeing the violence in Rwanda. Then it became a base for hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees, in their ranks the Interahamwe militia which carried out the 1994 genocide. They still mount operations from the town's forested northern perimeter.
Goma has remained in the front line. In 1996 and 1997, it was swept up in Laurent Kabila's rebellion, the man chosen by Rwanda and Uganda to topple Zaire's ageing dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Kabila is now fighting for his political life as his former backers seek to replace him.
Today, the people of Goma are as poor as ever, and find themselves in the grip of another Rwandese-backed rebel force denouncing another dictator in the capital, Kinshasa - this time Kabila. Rwanda and Uganda may have tried to deny it, but the high-booted soldiers, dark green trucks and military aircraft at Goma's airport left few doubts about the foreign flavour of this rebellion.
Never far behind the Congolese rhetoric offered by the rebel leaders lie the unmistakable hallmarks of Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni, the Rwandan and Ugandan leaders, who dream of a secure buffer zone on their western borders.
Kabila, the obscure ex-Marxist whom they raised to Congolese president in 1997, has proved a dismal failure, failing to crack down on the Hutu militia still seeking to overthrow Kagame, and espousing an increasingly xenophobic philosophy.
Their new champion, Ondekane, still in his running suit, strides down the street in Goma, fraternising with relaxed but decidedly respectful troops. But the town is tired of war, and of foreign interference.
"This is not a rebellion," shouts Jean, a student from the Free University of the Great Lakes, 15 minutes' trudge away from Ondekane's lakeside villa. "It is an aggression." A group quickly gathers and a dozen voices cry: "We will never accept the rebels", and "Rwanda is going to wipe Goma off the map".
Rwanda and Uganda might have succeeded in seeing off Mobutu, but this time, their hopes of a quick, clean takeover have been shattered in the face of region-wide outrage. Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, Chad and Sudan, have sent thousands of troops to shore up the Kabila government's remaining strongholds in the south and west of the country, railing against what they claim is a blatant foreign invasion.
Left standing on the sidelines are Zambia's president Frederick Chiluba and South African president Nelson Mandela, both of whom have tried to salvage the Southern African Development Community's efforts to rebuild the region's economy, but have emerged looking directionless and weak.
Caught in this chaos, the war-weary Congolese face further economic ruin. Their daily reality is one of gruelling hardship, exacerbated by insecure roads and collapsing infrastructure. The franc congolaise, the country's new currency, has halved in value since the beginning of the war, and Kinshasa suffers daily food and fuel shortages.
In the east, the story is no different. Throughout Goma, fading French signs with promises of elegant patis-series and western fashions adorn semi-derelict shops, which contain only the most rudimentary and increasingly expensive goods. Dollars that used to flow from foreigners visiting the guerrillas have dried to a trickle.
"Ever since the rebellion, foreign tourism has been completely destroyed," says Kapepa Sanibili, a tragi-comic figure who heads Goma's tourist bureau, shaking his head in despair. "The local population wants the war to finish - it is not useful for anything."
Elegant colonial columns supporting a portico outside Kivu General Store hide shelves stocked with a few tubes of Aquafresh toothpaste, tins of Milo malted drink and nondescript cleaning products in pink plastic bottles. The bulk of the store is empty.
A bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label whisky is perched triumphantly out of reach, but at $15 few can afford it. In a town where meat and fish have become a rare luxury, most people have to make do with the beans that grow over every inch of Goma's roadsides, and the occasional loaf of cassava bread.
This is Congo's tragedy. In a country so rich, blessed with absurdly fertile soils, vast stretches of tropical wood, a potential 100,000MW of hydroelectric power, and vast mineral wealth, the Congolese have been made one of Africa's poorest people by 100 years of colonial brutality, African corruption and war.
So much promise has been thrown away. In the late 1870s, Lieutenant Verney Cameron, the British explorer, entranced Belgium's King Leopold with his tales of a veritable El Dorado in the heart of the continent. "The interior is a magnificent country of unspeakable riches," he told the Royal Geographical Society. "I am confident that with a wise and liberal expenditure of capital, one of the greatest systems of inland navigation in the world might be utilised, and from 30 to 36 months begin to repay any enterprising capitalist."
The frantic activity by the Anglo-American and Iscor companies in the south shows that little has changed as they chase a potential prize of 500,000 tonnes of copper and 10,000 tonnes of cobalt a year. Farther north, the Kasai area is groaning with industrial diamonds.
Those seeking to understand Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe's involvement in the war need look no further. A string of deals with Zimbabwean businessmen close to Mugabe's government has bought Kabila the support of a country that can otherwise ill afford a large-scale military exercise, and whose own population is growing increasingly discontent with the war.
Angola, fighting at home against its own rebels, Unita, is determined to ensure that neighbouring Congo will deny them the support Mobutu used to provide. And the Ugandan businessmen now thronging Kisangani, the rebel-held city on the bend in the River Zaire, suggest that Museveni's intervention, driven in part by his own need for a secure border with Congo, has commercial rewards.
At the bottom of the pile, the Congolese can do little but rail against the Machiavellian powers they believe keep them in poverty. Tales abound in Goma of midnight kidnappings and murders by mysterious forces, belying Goma's calm exterior by day.
The rebels have organised the administration of the town into Rwandese-style units of 10 houses, each overseen by a local chief, who exerts a tight and ominous grip. In some quarters, people are afraid to leave their houses after 8pm.
The stories are no less harrowing in the government-controlled territories; Kabila's calls for the Congolese to take arms against murderous foreigners has raised yet again the harrowing spectre of inter-ethnic bloodshed in central Africa.
There are reports of an unholy alliance between Kabila and the Hutu Interahamwe in the north, of mass graves in the recently rebel-taken river port of Kindu, and of arrests of Tutsi and Congolese supporters of the rebellion in the southern capital Lumumbashi.
The posters which cover the rebel-held buildings in Goma attest to these tales with the stark slogan: "Stand up Congolese! Down with Kabila and his genocidal allies!"
A full-scale humanitarian disaster appears so far to have been averted. The UN's refugee arm, the UNHCR, says that perhaps 200,000 people have been displaced by the present war, but that for the most part they are not in a critical condition. "Many of them were able to take cattle with them, and are able to feed themselves," said an official.
But mass displacement, and the de facto divide imposed by the two warring sides, have ripped apart people who rely on access to extended family networks. "My father, my mother and all my brothers and sisters are in Kinshasa," says 28-year-old Patrick Motindo, waiting outside a letter-writing service run by the International Committee of the Red Cross in Goma. "For three months I have not been able to speak to my family. I am not happy - they should negotiate and find some solution for us; we cannot stay like this."
Faced with such unden-iable discontent, the rebels admit they have a problem. "It is true that the people have welcomed the war with reserve," says Lunda Bululu, a former prime minister under Mobutu who now heads the rebellion's political wing, the Congolese Democratic Movement.
Bululu nevertheless insists that with time, when people begin to understand what his movement is about, his approval rating will rise: "We want to re-establish the rule of law, we want to re-establish good governance, and we want to give the Congolese people a reason to hope for a better world," he says.
"In two years, Kabila has done as much harm as Mobutu did throughout his time. That we must explain." But the price of a rebel victory will be high.
With increasing numbers of Zimbabwean troops pouring into the south and pushing towards the east, and Angola insisting it is there to stay, the next few months promise to be bloodthirsty and destructive. Yet the rebels refuse to contemplate a ceasefire unless Kabila meets them face to face, which he will not do.
Ondekane, meanwhile, insists that his cause - the overthrow of a tyrant - justifies the potential cost. "We must avoid the situation of the strong-man," he says, filling a plastic chair, and dominating the view of Lake Kivu behind him. "We want a collegiate government."
Dismissing fears that he would be another Kabila, Ondekane adds that he is firmly under the control of the politicians. "It is they who have the authority," he says.
As in neighbouring Rwanda, the military would have to be represented in any future administration. "Politicians can forget the cause of the war, so the military must act as a guard-rail," explains Ondekane.
"Isn't that right?" he asks suddenly, turning to his deputies seated nearby. The enthusiastic nodding of heads left few doubts as to who was in charge.
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