Introduction
By navigating the history of the the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) this essay will discuss the negative implications of violent regime change. Both violent regime changes, manufactured by foreign governments to secure their interests and those arising from internal political frustrations mostly on ethnical / tribal adherance’ grounds, on the long-term democratic prospects for a country. After, gaining independence from Belgium in 1960 the Democratic Republic of the Congo, DRC, underwent a period of internal conflict which ultimately resulted in a military coup and takeover by army Chief of Staff Joseph Mobuto in 1965. Mobutu ruled the country for thirty-two years until tribal conflict in neighbouring Rwanda spilled over to the DRC leading to the First Congo War during 1996-97 and to his deposition and flight in exile to Morocco. This was later followed by the Second Congo, the great war of Africa which lasted for five years between 1998 and 2003. Although still suffering from internal conflict, the DRC has recently voted for a second time in 2018, and is currently experiencing its ever first spell of democratic rule. Well-endowed with natural resources, including oil, and strategically well positioned at the centre of the African continent, the DRC has a landmass equivalent to that of eastern Europe and is Africa’s second largest country. It is bordered by nine neighbours, and still has open access to the Atlantic Ocean.
Following the Schumpeterian tradition, the essay will firstly explore the distinctive approaches to democracy and to what extent the DRC met these during each period of its historical development. Theorists have drawn distinctions between rationalistic, utopian, and idealistic definitions of democracy on the one hand, and between empirical, descriptive, institutional and procedural explanations on the other and have concluded that only the latter have provided analytical precision and empirical evidence that make the concept a useful one. (Huntington, 1991). Secondly, the essay will assess the responsibility and role played by the international community, the world governmental bodies, as well as the current and former Congolese elites in addressing the issues of democratisation and stability of the DRC throughout its history consistently impeded by the negative effects of violent regime changes – a history awash with resistance against systemic exploitation of the country’s huge mineral resources by foreign powers, coupled with repression of local populations by subsequent regimes. (Kasonga, 2018). Finally, the essay will conclude by offering thoughts and possible solutions to enable democratisation from an African/ local perspectives.
Background to Colonialism and Regime Change in the DRC
Congolese state and society have not always been so weak. The Kongo kingdom flourished in the fifteenth century along the Atlantic coast and, at one point, was able to field over 20,000 infantrymen and archers in battles funded through an elaborate system of taxes. It also had diplomatic representatives at the Portuguese, Spanish and Papal courts. The Luba and Lunda kingdoms, based in the centre of today’s DRC, developed a successful model of government based on sacred kingship and local councils that spread throughout neighbouring regions. Since then, the country has experienced violent change commencing with the slave trade during the sixteenth century when millions of slaves were exported from the country by both European and Arab traders. This led to conflict and bloodshed between rival kingdoms over the lucrative trade, and also to a huge population shortage. In the nineteenth century, the country was synonymous with tragedy and a history of executions, assassinations, mass killings, rape, and other human rights abuses as a result of domestic dictatorships, foreign invasions and meddling by external powers. Most notably, King Leopold II of Belgium acquired rights to the Congo territory at the Berlin Conference in 1885 and made the land his private property, a situation which continued until 1908 when the country was formally annexed by Belgium. At this stage, a colonial state was created but it was never intended to be accountable to its own citizens and no African was ever enlisted as an officer in the army, and all important positions in the administration were held by white foreigners.
The colonial administrators continued to dismember what remained of the Congolese kingdoms, appointing hundreds of new chiefs and expropriating lands and allowing Belgians to take over many functions of the customary rulers. Local inhabitants were forced to produce rubber to supply the emerging industries of the Industrial Revolution, particularly the automobile industry, in Europe and the USA resulting in the death of millions through disease and exploitation (Hochschild, 1999). According to Roger Casement, the then British Consul, it was estimated that ten million native Congolese died as a result of these exactions (Casement, 1903). The triumph of the Allies in World War II initiated a wave of democratisation that reached its zenith in 1962 with thirty-six countries governed democratically, but this was followed by a second, reverse wave between 1960 and 1975 that brought the number of democracies back down to thirty (Huntington, 1991).
In the Congo, following the bloodshed of January 1959 commemorating the victims of the independence movement, and which precipitated the negotiation of independence in June 1960, the colonial authorities handed over government to a handful of lawyers and university graduates who proved unprepared to manage a vast country and its resources. Meanwhile, foreign business interests and cold war politics led to Belgian and American backed mercenaries repressing nationalist sentiment and to the assassination of the fragile government’s first prime minister, Patrice Emery Lumumba, in January 1961. Following the contested elections of 1965, with the government in near-paralysis, Mobutu seized power in a bloodless coup on 25th November under the auspices of a regime d’exception, the equivalent of a state of emergency. Although ostensibly declaring a non-aligned position in international affairs, he emphasised his alliance with the United States and the western world and continued to rule the Congo, renamed Zaire in 1971, as president for thirty-two years until 1997.
Following the deterioration of social and living conditions in the country, Mobutu grew unpopular and was losing control of his generals, a cornerstone of his totalitarian regime. Facing serious internal and external pressures, and through the National Sovereign Conference under the leadership of the Catholic Church, he offered to collaborate politically with his arch enemy, Etienne Tshisekedi Wa Mulumba. Most serious of the external pressures was the coalition of Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi, formed and led by the Rwandan army, to combat and destroy the Hutu[1] rebellion in the East of the DRC following the assassination of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana himself from the Hutu ethnicity. This triggered the onset of the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and led to the opening of the DRC borders for humanitarian reasons. However, the DRC has paid a huge price to this day for this action due to the intrusion of coalition forces, unauthorised by the United Nations, and to a serious violation of its sovereignty under international law (Barhatulirwa, 2017).
In order to avoid international condemnation, and in an effort to legitimise the incursion, Laurent Desiré Kabila, a long-time opponent of Mobutu then in exile, was recruited by the coalition to ostensibly portray the invasion as an internal rebellion. The invasion was launched in September 1996 in the eastern region of the country and was supported by the Clinton administration in the USA. Mobutu, now weakened by ill health, was isolated politically and had lost the support of his fragile and unpaid army. He had also been abandoned by the West, most notably by Washington and London, as he was now perceived as an embarrassment. In an act of hypocrisy by the West, President Clinton sent his secretary of state Bill Richardson to Kinshasa to advise Mobutu to leave power peacefully. In the meantime, the USA provided the invading coalition with substantive logistical resources to speed up the regime change process. In May 1997, Kinshasa was seized after seven months of fighting and the country fell completely to the liberation forces in August of that year therefore ending thirty-two years of Mobutu’s rule. He died in exile in Morocco in that year just prior to the country’s capitulation (N’Gbanda, 1998).
Under the new leadership of Laurent Desiré Kabila, who instilled a deep sense of patriotism across the country, there was reason for new hope and a commitment to positive change with a particular dedication to fight corruption. However, he gradually alienated his western backers by suspending several mining contracts with multinational corporations and by becoming unpredictable and politically unreliable, most notably by aligning himself with communism. His first official visits as president were to Cuba, North Korea, China, Libya and Zimbabwe, and a dispute with the then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright effectively signed his death warrant (Barhatulirwa, 2017). Ultimately, in a similar scenario to the First Congo War, a rebellion erupted in the Eastern region of the DRC in August 1998. The same coalition declared war on Kabila who sought support from the Zimbabweans, Namibians and the Angolans forces to defend his power. Thus commenced the Second Congolese War, also known as the African war, with seven armies confronting each other on DRC soil with the local population once again paying the heaviest price.
Facilitated by the international community, negotiations led to the Lusaka ceasefire agreement bringing an end to the hostilities in July 1999. This addressed several issues including the cessation of hostilities, establishment of a joint military commission (JMC) comprising representatives of the belligerents, withdrawal of foreign groups, general disarmament, demobilisation and reintegrating of combatants, release of prisoners and hostages, re-establishment of government administration, and the selection of a mediator to facilitate an all-inclusive inter-Congolese dialogue. The agreement also called for the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force to monitor the ceasefire and investigate violations of the treaty (Lusaka Agreement). In January, 2001 president Kabila was killed by one of his body guards, like Lumumba, amidst clashes of foreign powers’ interests within his country. He was soon replaced by his son, Joseph Kabila, who inherited a country that was still engulfed in war and that, for the most part, was without a functioning government or basic services, and whose economy had largely been ruined from years of conflict.
Little was known about Kabila, and the first assessment was that his father’s advisers had chosen him as a figurehead. However, during the following months Kabila surprised many people by taking government policy in a different direction. Less than a week after being sworn in he made his first trip abroad to confer with government leaders in France and Belgium and also travelled to the USA to meet with Secretary of State Colin Powell, officials of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations. Whilst in the United States he also met with Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, who had been one of his father’s principal opponents.(Britanica, 2020). In a meeting in Zambia in February 2001, Kabila agreed to begin the implementation of the cease-fire agreement that had been signed in July 1999 but which had not been honoured. He also held talks with rebel groups and the governments of the five countries that had troops in the Congo: Rwanda, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Angola, and Namibia, who agreed to begin their withdrawal. The cease-fire and pullback of troops was monitored by United Nations peacekeepers who arrived at the end of March 2001.
In the following month, Kabila dismissed the cabinet which he had inherited from his father’s administration and named his own group of ministers and, in December 2002, signed an agreement with rebels to end the war and form a power-sharing transitional government. This agreement was ratified in April 2003 and later that year an interim government was formed that kept Kabila as president with named rebel leaders appointed to vice presidential and cabinet posts. This was the position until the elections of 2006 were held and inaugurated him as the first democratically elected president since the country became independent in 1960. For over a century from 1908 to 2018, little has changed in the DRC. Since independence in 1960, the lives and human rights of Congolese citizens have been jeopardised by corrupt and dictatorial leaders from Joseph Mobutu to Joseph Kabila who have utilised violent means to acquire or remain in power, and who have misappropriated the country’s wealth rather than use it to create a democratic and accountable state.
The death of dictatorship does not ensure the birth of democracy. It however unleashes a huge array of popular, social, and political forces that have been effectively supressed during the period of dictatorship (Huntington, 1991). This is evidenced in the history of the DRC subsequent to the democratic election of Joseph Kabila in 2006 who was then controversially re-elected in 2011, and who attempted to force a third term in office in contravention of the country’s constitution. This sparked a wave of killings and human rights abuses across the country, a period in which even United Nation investigator and peacekeepers were assassinated. However, during this period, and despite the background of violence, the country experienced a proliferation of civil society movements with a non-violent and pro-democratic focus. One such organisation was the youth-led LUCHA (LUtte pour le CHAangement),[2] which is a non-violent and non-partisan youth movement founded in June 2012 in Goma, the capital city of North Kivu province. The movement advocates for social justice and accountability in the DRC through campaigns, and encourages Congolese citizens to fight for the promotion and respect of human rights (Frontline Defenders, 2020). When president Joseph Kabila announced the postponement of the DRC presidential elections in an attempt to extend his two-term mandate, LUCHA and several other youth-led organisations were instrumental in organising civil society in a call to respect the rule of law and human rights, and for non-violent and democratic regime change in the DRC.
Following intense pressure, Kabila finally organised for further elections in December 2018. Although these were held throughout most parts of the country, and in generally peaceful conditions, there were some reports of violations of the voting process and of the tabulation of votes. When the results were announced, Félix Tshisekedi was declared the winner, followed closely by another opposition candidate, Martin Fayulu, with Kabila’s appointed candidate, Shadary, coming third. The results, however, disagreed with pre-election polls which showed Fayulu as being firmly in the lead, and were also disputed by an independent election monitoring group. Fayulu and others accused Tshisekedi and Kabila of having made a deal to secure the former’s election victory in exchange for protecting the interests of the latter and his associates, but both men denied the accusations. Fayulu challenged the results at the Constitutional Court but the court upheld Tshisekedi’s victory. Kabila stepped down on January 24, 2019, handing power to Tshisekedi, the first peaceful transition of power in Congo since the country became independent in 1960.
The International Community and The Congolese Elite Responsibility in the DRC’s instability
The DRC’s wars are often portrayed in the western media as the result of repetitive violent regime changes and a morass of rebel groups fighting over minerals within a failed state, rather than as the problem of the international community. While some of the wars and political instability within the country may lead international opinion to view the events as the result of foreign conspiracies against the country to plunder its resources, the Congolese conflict does not fit well into this analytical straightjacket (Stearn, 2012). Contrary to general belief, western leaders generally have little interest in inter-ethnic wars between militias in foreign countries as may be evidenced by NATO’s nature of response and interventions in Kosovo in 1999, as opposed to its reaction to the Congolese protracted issues where peacekeeping forces are capped to 20,000 personnel, mostly ill-equipped South Asians. Much fewer resources have been allocated to high-risk military operations and much humanitarian aid is dispersed to non-accountable leaders – a sort of short-term solution to a larger problem: this displayed a view that all long-term development is to be deeply rooted in political considerations. Therefore; past, current and future Congolese elites hold a considerable share of responsibility regarding events in our country. It is perhaps correct that we should accept collective failure and reconsider our own role in shaping the political landscape and in providing the political, legal and democratic structures to build a country better than that inherited from our predecessors.
Conclusion
Africa is rarely seen as possessing things and attributes that are properly part of ‘human nature’ or, when it is, these are generally viewed as of lesser value, of little importance, and of poor quality. It is this simplicity of view that portrays Africa as everything that is incomplete, mutilated and unfinished with its history reduced to a series of setbacks of nature in its quest for humankind (Mbembé, 2003). And this has been somehow transformed into a customary belief both on the continent as well as the remaining part of the world.
In the wake of independence, the DRC and most African Countries are still struggling with issues of self-identity and identity as nation-states, and in many respects retain the limited perception of themselves that was portrayed by their previous colonial occupiers. This is a perspective shared by many in decision-making positions across the continent. In particular, the Congo suffers from a morally bankrupt leadership personified by a lack of vision and failure to build civic society. Whether orchestrated by foreign actors, or as a result of internal insurgencies, the repetitive violent regime changes in the DRC have inhibited economic development in the country since its independence. However, there are no simple solutions to the problems in Congo. As evidenced in the foregoing discussion, although governments arising from non-violent regime change might offer greater hope of democratisation and the construction of civil society, this is no guarantee.
The experience of the DRC illustrates that violent regime change rarely offers much hope for the long-term democratic prospects in a country. Often, it destroys what governmental and civil societal structures in existence from the previous regime and fails to replace them with anything better. To take power by violence is, in itself, dismissive of and a contradiction of democracy and offers little hope that new democratic structures will be enacted after regime change through violence. Only when that power itself is substantially challenged mostly internally and/or backed with external support form mainly the international community, as was the case in DRC, is there some hope for more peaceful change. Important to peaceful regime change is the building and maintenance of sound institutional and civil society structures, and the lack of these has been instrumental in the historical instability within the DRC. Belgian failure to build these, along with a competent civil service to administer them prior to Congolese independence in 1960, led to a weakened and fragile government taking power in 1960. The seeds if its failure were already sown, as were those of other African states where colonial powers departed hastily and failed to prepare and provide adequate governmental structures before granting independence, which as well in most cases involved a great share of violence. That artificial national borders were also created by colonial powers, often dissecting and dividing traditional tribal boundaries, also laid the basis for future wars and conflict, and for the proliferation of war between neighbouring states. Again, this has been evident in the DRC and has contributed to instability and the potential for ongoing violent regime change.
It may be argued that not all instances of violent regime fail to offer long-term democratic prospects for a country. In this respect, one may point to the revolutionary upheavals in the eighteenth century in America and France, one against a colonial power, and the other against an autocratic monarchy. Reference may also be made to England in the seventeenth century when regime change was ultimately enforced through civil war. The eventual achievement of democracy in these countries took differing paths and timescales, but perhaps an important factor was that some semblance of civil society and structure beneath the violence and provided a foundation for future stability and peaceful democratic change. In this regard, the work of LUCHA within the DRC is highly important. The ultimate fate of the DRC rests with the Congolese people themselves. However, western governments also have a role to play, in part because of their historical debt to the country, and in part because it is the right thing to do. This does not mean imposing a foreign vision on the country or simply sending food, money and other aid which is often exploited and misappropriated. It entails understanding the politics and nature of society and by providing the resources and structure to build an environment conducive to economic growth and stability (Stearn, 2012).
Henry-Pacifique Mayala
Social Scientist Analyst & Researcher (Statecraft)
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Global Politics Msc. – Birkbeck University of London
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Pro-Democratic & Non-Violent Activist (LUCHA-RDC)
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Notes
Achille Mbembe (2010) Sortir de la grande nuit: Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée, Paris: La decouverte.
Adam Hochschild (September 3rd 1999 ) King Leopold’s Ghost, 1st edn., USA: Mariner Books.
Frontline Defenders (2020) LUCHA, Available at: https://www.frontlinedefenders.org/en/organization/lucha (Accessed: 12th February).
Honoré N’Gbanda Nzambo Ko Atumba (Author) (1998 ) Ainsi Sonne Le Glas : Les Derniers Jours Mu Maréchal Mobutu (French) , Paris: Gideppe Edition.
Jason K. Stearn (2012) Dancing in the Glory of the Monsters, The Collapse Of The Congo And The Great War of Africa, 1st edn., New York: Public Affairs.
J.-A. Mbembé, Libby Meintjes (Winter 2003 ) ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture Duke University Press, 15, Number 1, (1), pp. 11-40.
Karume Barhatulirwa Cadet (2017) Democratic Republic of Congo: A failure Nation. Marshall Plan With A Dream Team Government Is The Main Solution , London: Mary Bro Foundation Publishing .
Mbombo Jean-Marie Kasonga (October 2018) ‘Congo: Nonviolent Struggle in the DRC. Making Sense of the Consent Theory of Power’, Conϐlict Studies Quarterly , (25), pp. 49-67.
Roger Casement (2020) Roger Casement’s report, Available at: http://www.rogercasementsgac.com/about-us/roger-casement (Accessed: 10th February 2020).
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica (2020) Joseph Kabila, Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Kabila (Accessed: 9th February).
Samuel P. Huntington (1993) The Third Wave : Democratisation in the Late Twentieth Century, USA: University of Oklahoma Press.
United Nations (2020) Ceasefire Agreement (Lusaka Agreement), Available at: https://peacemaker.un.org/drc-lusaka-agreement99 (A
[1] Hutu: is one of the ethnic groups within Rwanda. It is estimated to represent more than 80 percent of the Rwandan population.
[2] English: Struggle for Change.
