The chief is dead, long live the chief

Laurent Kabila's death has caused fresh problems for trouble-torn Congo. M. S. PRABHAKARA on the situation as his son takes charge.

THE FULL truth of a political assassination is seldom known, or made known. The successors to power have an immediate stake in ensuring continuity and order. Assassins caught in the act, if they survive, will no doubt face trial and be ``brought to justice''. But such observance of the ``due process of law'' does not always constitute the full truth.

Despite the mystery surrounding the actual event, the assassination of President Laurent Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) last week, with the killer immediately slain, conforms to the classic type of political assassinations. A senior DRC leader on a visit to Togo has spoken of ``some ramifications that we have discovered after the first questionings which show that a foreign hand, an enemy hand, cunningly prepared the assassination''. Whether this conspiracy, if it indeed existed, will be fully uncovered will depend as much on the investigation as on broader political considerations. After all, the dead tell no tales, have no grievances nor scores to settle.

The DRC National Assembly unanimously approved by acclamation on January 24 the ``appointment'' of Major General Joseph Kabila, Laurent Kabila's eldest son, as the country's new President. In fact, it was only endorsing the decision made by the Government (officially, the Public Salvation Government) on January 17 to entrust the ``leadership of the Government and the military high command'' to General Kabila.

Top among the new President's priorities, as was indeed the case with his father, will be the securing of an end to the conflict in the DRC. The normative solution envisaged is an end to the ``occupation'' of DRC territory by ``invading forces''. The new President said in an interview to Zimbabwe Television on January 24: ``Our forces are ready to fight until all the invading forces are out, until our country is free.''

The fighting words, strictly speaking, do not negate the Lusaka Accord, officially an ``Agreement for a Ceasefire'', the framework for ending the conflict. Indeed, everyone involved in the conflict in the DRC continues to swear by this Agreement. Everyone agrees that any negotiated settlement can follow only after the Ceasefire Agreement is implemented. However, this implementation has been so beset with problems from beginning that one has to ask if it can at all ne enforced. This, though all the parties swear by that document.

Indeed, the signing of the Agreement took place in two stages, on three different days. The six belligerent countries (the DRC and its allies Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe, and Rwanda and Uganda which support rival rebel factions which since the signing of the Agreement have undergone further splits) signed on July 10, 1999. The Movement for the Liberation of the Congo (MLC), one of the rebel groups, signed on August 1; and two other rebel groups, both called Congolese Rally for Democracy (CRD) and differentiating themselves by the name of the cities (Goma and Kisangani) where they claim to be based, signed on August 31.

The Agreement set out in Appendix B an elaborately worked timetable, a Calendar for the Implementation of the Ceasefire Agreement, beginning with D-Day, August 31, 1999, with each stage precisely spelled out as D-Day plus so many hours or so many days, and coming to an end exactly 365 days later. Today, January 28, 2001, is the 515th day since the Agreement was signed. One has to ask not what has happened in the last 18 months but what has not happened. There has been never been any ``cessation of hostilities'' (D-Day plus 24 hours), no ``beginning of a national dialogue'' (45 days) with its ``closure'' too spelt out (90 days), no ``deployment of a U.N. peace keeping mission'' (120 days), no ``orderly withdrawal of all foreign forces'' (180 days), let alone other equally laudable and slightly longer term objectives such as verification and monitoring of these events, disarming of various malitia and of non- military personnel, and re-establishing state administration throughout the country, all to be completed well before the final deadline, D-Day plus 365 days.

This is hardly surprising. For, a notable aspect of the conflict in the DRC is that the rebel groups and their backers, all opposed to the Kinshasa Government, have also been fighting against each other. The territory of the DRC, nearly twice the size of South Africa and sharing its borders with nine other countries at the very centre of the continent, is large enough to accommodate several battlefronts. Not merely has there been fighting among rebel factions, but also between the regular forces of Rwanda and Uganda.

It is not just cussedness that makes those opposed to the Kinshasa Government also fight each other. After all, they were also Laurent Kabila's allies when he launched his drive to oust Mobutu Sese Seko. The fact is, the opponents of the Kinshasa Government have very different objectives. The ``security concerns'' of Rwanda and Uganda, for instance - which is the rationale offered for their intervention directly and in support of different rebel factions - are very different. These in Rwanda's case arise out of its experience of the 1994 genocide by the Hutu Interahamwe, which convinced the leadership in Kigali to seek a settlement which would in effect create a buffer state, well disposed to it, in eastern Congo. Uganda does not seem to have such territorial ambitions.

An even more problematic factor is that the allies of the Kinshasa Government too have developed stakes going beyond ensuring the ``defeat of aggression'' in the DRC.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Opinion
Previous : People power prevails