The crippled Bula Matari: the roots of the Congolese war economy
| | RISQ Reviews | 11 June 2003 |
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Author: Carlo Cornelis
 For the French-led UN peace-enforcing mission in Congo to succeed, it is important to understand the nature of the conflict in the country and its historical background. Central in our analysis should be Congo’s long history of state predation. As far back as the Congo Free State the plunder of natural resources has been the driving force behind the existence of this Central African state.
Introduction
In September 2002 I submitted a dissertation at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London as part of my study in African Politics. My topic was the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a country torn apart by war since 1998, where rebel movements and ethnic militias fight each other for the country’s rich natural resources like gold, diamonds, coltan and tropical hardwood. While I handed in my rather pessimistic analysis of the war in Congo, two separate peace deals were being negotiated between the Congolese government and its two adversaries Rwanda and Uganda, which both supported different rebel groups in the DRC. As a result of these peace efforts, the first troops were being withdrawn in the second half of September 2002.
Now some 8 months later, and witnessing yet another wave of massacres and militia warfare between the Hema and the Lendu in the northeast of the DRC, my analysis of the conflict in the Great Lakes region seems quite relevant again. Especially now the European Union have decided to send a French-led peace-enforcing mission to the region, it is important to understand the nature of the conflict(s) in the DRC and its historical background.
Central in our analysis should be Congo’s long history of state predation. As far back as the Congo Free State the plunder of natural resources has been the driving force behind the existence of this Central African state. On the eve of the establishment of the Congo Free State the Belgian King Leopold II already told his associates: ‘Nous devons être à la fois prudents, habiles et prompts à agir … (afin de) nous procurer une part de ce magnifique gâteau africain’. And ever since, war has been fought in the Congo for a piece of the cake.
30 years of state decay
The war economy operating in the DRC today has its roots in the regime of late president Mobutu Sese Seko. Under his leadership Zaire became the stereotype of an corrupt African dictatorship. Behind the public façade of legal procedures and formal institutions, the Zairian state was in fact run as a private household through informal politics and personal, clientelistic relations. Under Mobutu’s leadership corruption became the very fabric of society that held the immense country together. As Mobutu himself put it in a speech in November 1977: ‘Everything is for sale, everything is bought in our country. And in this traffic, holding any slice of public power constitutes a veritable exchange instrument, convertible into illicit acquisition of money or other goods, or the evasion of all sorts of obligations.’
In the colonial period and in the immediate years after independence the Zairian state was referred to as Bula Matari - a superimposed, omnipotent force that crushes all resistance. But although Zaire was a nation-state of enormous potential blessed with a vast size and mineral endowment and despite the image of power, majesty and glamour provided by its leader Mobutu Sese Seko, the Zairian state was always a very fragile structure. Mobutu ruled the country like a traditional African Big Man, handing out money and buying people’s allegiance. According to Mobutu, ‘if you go to see the head of the village you never come back empty-handed’. Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, two well-known Africanists, claim that the African state is merely a décor and political power rests ultimately on the distribution of resources. ‘… To succeed as a “Big Man” demands resources; and the more extensive the network, the greater the need for the means of distribution. The legitimacy of the African political elites … derives from their ability to nourish the clientele on which their power rests.’ The survival of Mobutu’s regime depended ultimately on the extraction of wealth from the mining industry, Western allies and international financial institutions. The latter two were always willing to provide Mobutu with extra credit because the Zairian president was a loyal Western ally making Zaire an important bastion against communism in Africa. In the shadow of the Cold War the West turned a blind eye to the corruption, mismanagement and repression in Zaire.
Over thirty years Mobutu and his closest followers managed to plunder the Congolese mineral wealth and hung on to power by a mixture of cooptation, repression and external backing. The state was hijacked by a small political-economic elite known as Les Grosses Légumes consisting of Mobutu’s extended family, members of his tribe the Ngbandi, local strongmen, army commanders, business cronies and political clients. This small elite was in charge of all state institutions and state corporations like the copper giant Gécamines. All positions in the army, security services, offices or state enterprises depended on one’s personal relationship to Mobutu. Mobutu was able to antagonize powerful members of the elite from each other and reshuffled them constantly over the important offices. The state officials’ insecurity led to corruption on a massive scale and short-term enrichment. One banker in Kinshasa saw it as a necessary evil: ‘They run with the loot while they can. That is the price of peace and unity in Zaire’.
The neo-patrimonial nature of the Zairian state had crippling effects on its functioning. Decades of mismanagement and corruption had undermined a proper institutionalization of the state. In 1990 the state had not only physically disappeared in that its institutions and services were no longer functioning. The state had lost legitimacy and authority among its citizens. The Zairian state had always been a fiction. Behind the façade of an institutionalized, bureaucratic state administering an integrated national territory the real politics took place in a myriad of personal networks linking the different levels of power and regions to the top. With the Zairian infrastructure collapsed, the economy basically informalized and whole regions virtually independent, state institutions had become simply irrelevant and Mobutu had to rely increasingly on army commanders, local strongmen and power-brokers as intermediaries between the state and the population. Ethno-regional forces became stronger and the integration process of the immense country was reversed. Mobutu’s politics of survival in the long run had the opposite effect and increased the power and independence of collaborators and strongmen.
Where extraction and redistribution of wealth first served to strengthen the Zairian state, later this was benefiting intermediaries and collaborators more than it did the Mobutuist state. As a political scientist wrote at the time: ‘Mobutu has recently appeared to be concerned with extracting wealth for its own sake, regardless of the consequences for the reproduction of his rule. At the same time, extraction by the state has become more diffuse, benefiting local “warlords” and officials as much as Mobutu himself.’ In the 1990’s Mobutu’s system of political patronage was rapidly crumbling down as fewer resources were available. An extreme example of this, which makes one wonder in how far Mobutu was still in control of the system he created, was when Mobutu found out that some of his generals had sold the complete Zairian fleet of Mirage jet fighters, which was supposedly in France for maintenance.
From the late 1980’s on the territory that was officially Zaire became increasingly an empty spot on the map. In 1990 Zaire reached the critical juncture and, unable to reform itself, the Zairian state was set on a course towards its final collapse. As the country was slowly disintegrating into a Hobbesian state of nature, Mobutu and his closest circle - worried about their personal security - had retreated to Gbadolite in Mobutu’s home province Equateur. At this stage the Zairian state had ceased to exist.
Informal economy and cross-border trade
The Congolese population tried to avoid and escape the corrupt and abusive Zairian state whenever possible. The massive self-enrichment by the small elite stood in sharp contrast to the general misery of the majority of the population. Ordinary Zairians turned very cynical about politics and felt alienated from the nation-state they were part of. With the official economy in shambles, inflation skyrocketing and the Zairian average annual income falling below $ 120, people relied increasingly on the informal or second economy which took on unprecedented shapes in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Only 5 per cent of the population was estimated to work in the formal sector during the 1990’s.
The state Mobutu had created was an environment very prolific to an informal way of doing politics and business and to the growth of the second economy. In the 1970’s Mobutu had made clear that his citizens should stop complaining and asking for help all the time. They should rely on themselves. Mobutu’s message to Zaire was: ‘Vous êtes chez vous, débrouiller-vous’. (“This is your home, so fend for yourself.”) And that is what people did: they fended for themselves in the second economy.
Little research has been done how ordinary people actually survived in this chaotic environment. Janet MacGaffey conducted extensive research on the second economy in Zaire because according to her ‘…little is said, or known, about the impact on individuals, families and communities of the disorganization, violence and disruption of social life and morality that results when the state ceases effectively to exist in terms of the performance of its normal functions.’ She concludes that ‘in confronting such chaos, we find people relying on the trust of personal relationships to compensate for the absence of a functioning legal and judicial apparatus to sanction contracts; creating their own systems of values and status, their own order amidst disorder; and evading a venal bureaucracy and an oppressive state by operating in the second economy to find opportunities to better their lives.’
Very creative methods were developed to struggle with everyday survival. A good example is the story of Zaire’s Air Force (FAZA). First, pilots and other air crew turned the air force into a clandestine airline undercutting the rates of Air Zaire. As the ground-personnel was left out of this profitable enterprise they took less care of the aircraft. This convinced the air personnel to include them in their business allowing them to find passengers of their own. But this joint venture of ground and air personnel aroused the jealousy of the fighter pilots who began selling spare parts of the planes and stealing the fuel as compensation.
In the 1990’s more and more Zairians decided to follow the example of Mobutu and his cronies and took whatever they could lay their hands on. It was Mobutu himself who had once told them in a speech broadcasted live on national television: ‘Go ahead and steal, as long as you don’t take too much.’ Minerals like copper and cobalt disappeared and were smuggled across the border; equipment, spare parts and even high voltage electricity cables were stolen and sold. In 1994 around a third of Gécamines’ production was being smuggled south of the border. As one journalist reported on the escalating wave of looting and theft: ‘… The army decided it was time to take, and then the people felt it was their turn. It was more like an extension of government policy, as if the people had finally understood and adopted the philosophy of their own ruler towards the country - grab as much of it as you can. Now.’
Over the years the population had developed various creative survival strategies and in the process society had become disconnected from the state. People relied on themselves, their local community and the second economy for their survival. As a UN report concludes: ‘As the country’s precious resources were plundered and mismanaged, an informal economy based on barter, smuggling and fraudulent trade in commodities thrived, becoming the sole means of survival for much of the population.’ In the meantime for many people the state had become irrelevant as a provider of jobs, welfare or security; they had found their own ways of meeting their needs.
A phenomena closely related to the flourishing of the second economy is the survival of precolonial trans-border trade networks. The African nation-states that were carved out by the colonial powers at the end of the 19th century cut through ancient trade routes between natural regions offering different resources. These trade networks are often based on ethnic groups now separated by the national borders. The development of the state and national economies has not been able to stop or replace these old trading networks and alternative social organisation competing with the state. Quite the opposite; the severe bureaucracy and numerous regulations made official economic transactions difficult and stimulated smuggling and bypassing the official distribution systems. Bribes were a standard procedure government and officials were directly involved in many business adventures.
In Zaire the national economy never managed to overcome the existing cross-border trade networks and especially the Great Lakes region is an example of the endurance of a pre-colonial trade region. MacGaffey and her co-authors conclude that ‘… studies of unrecorded trade across Zaire’s southern, northeastern and western borders show how the circulation of smuggled commodities links these three regions more closely to other countries than to the rest of Zaire. Northeastern Zaire is part of a regional area extending eastwards to the parts of the Indian Ocean and north to the Sudan, but only as far west as Kisangani.’ In the late 1980’s the principal commodities traded in the border zone of Eastern Zaire were coffee, palm oil, gold and ivory. In Southwestern Zaire diamonds were the main commodity.
The looting of the DRC’s natural resources into Rwanda and Uganda is a continuation of older informal smuggling patterns. These cross-border trade networks are partly a result of the Zairian state’s failure to integrate and build a national economy.
Militarization of society
The end of the Cold War and of foreign patronage left many leaders of weak African states with much less resources to distribute in their neo-patrimonial networks. Weak regimes had to rely on other strategies than patronage to maintain the loyalty of their armed forces. One of these strategies is the decentralisation of the armed forces to prevent any coordinated attempt of the military to oust the incumbent regime. Using a Machiavellian divide-and-rule principle, threatened rulers fragmented the army and relied for their personal security on various special-forces units. Another strategy of weak state’s leaders to maintain the army’s loyalty is to let the armed forces engage in commerce and informal trade.
When Mobutu could no longer count on his external backers he relied increasingly on such survival strategies. He fragmented the army in different sections and reshuffled the commanders regularly. No less than 6 different special-forces units existed in Zaire; the DSP (La Division speciale presidentielle), GACI (La Garde civile), SARM (Le Service d’action et des renseignements militaires - military intelligence), BSRC (La Brigade speciale de recherché et de surveillance, SNIP (Le Service national d’intelligence et de protection) and FAS (Les Forces d’action speciale). Besides these special army units Mobutu could rely on the use of foreign mercenaries which he employed on more than one occasion.
The regular army was not paid in a proper way; either the state did not pay them or the salaries never reached the troops as their commanders kept the lion share of it. ‘For the bulk of the soldiers in the regular army … daily life is marked by extreme scarcity and uncertainty. The pay of regular troops and junior officers is pathetically low, less than $ 5 per month, and in most cases salaries have not been paid in some time.’ With Mobutu’s consent the armed forces engaged in commerce, smuggle and looting to compensate for the lack of payment. The predatory character of the Zairian armed forces and the militarization of society are well illustrated by the following story of extortion of diamond miners in Kasai by the Zairian army: ‘… They ordered us to give ourselves up one by one and hand in to the commandants the stones we had dug. We were forced to react by the very same soldiers who dug for diamonds for the colonel, the commandant of the regional gendarmerie who made us pay for mining permits, who claimed they were there to protect us and took diamonds from us in return … That’s when the shooting increased. Men fell like flies. Policemen stripped the bodies to steal the precious stones … The situation was all the more serious because we genuinely believed that we were digging legitimately for diamonds. In fact, the Zaïrois army was receiving a duty of 5 Z from the clandestine diggers and 20 Z from the smugglers.’
This trend of the military becoming increasingly involved in commerce and extortion has been noted on the African continent in general. ‘An important process of military accumulation is taking place in several countries … through the control by armed forces (the formal military or others) of economic enterprises related to the war, of resources such as diamonds, ivory, timber or drugs, of donor-sponsored food aid programmes to war victims, and of commerce in war zones … The decay of state structures provides both opportunity and encouragement for the use of violence to commercial ends.’
As with normal salary the bulk of the income from commerce and crime went to the commanders; regular troops had to make ends meet by extortion, theft and looting. In Kinshasa harassment and extortion by the police was a daily routine. ‘The Garde civile. They never give your license back if you let them have it … They want money.’ Clark concludes that ‘the issuance of a firearm to a soldier or civil guardsman in Zaire becomes a de facto licence to extort.’ No wonder the Zairian troops were feared more than the rebels when the AFDL marched to Kinshasa in 1996 and the unpaid Zairian army retreated in a massive scorched-earth campaign of looting and rape.
Army commanders were given a remarkable degree of freedom in their province and ruled them as personal fiefdoms. As the control and authority of the central government was slowly collapsing, the army commanders became ever more powerful and deeper involved in commerce.
In fact there was little that distinguished them from the warlords operating in the DRC today. Army units and security organizations turned into mafia-style commercial syndicates. A good example is General Kpama Baramoto, head of the Zairian Garde Civile and high up in Mobutu’s closest circle, who became actively engaged in clandestine commerce after 1992, especially in gold and diamond mining in Kivu province. Baramoto was later involved in clandestine diamond trade from UNITA-held territory in Angola. Senior officers and army commanders often operated in joint ventures with Lebanese traders in Zaire. ‘This was a mutually advantageous partnership in which the Lebanese used their money and business know-how to engage in high-risk activities such as the smuggling of gold, diamonds and other goods, by relying on the protection of the military.’ Today’s warlord economy in the DRC with its convergence of violence, commerce and crime was already operating in the late 1980’s. It seems Mobutu’s clique and the Zairian armed forces have simply been replaced by the rebel movements and their Ugandan and Rwandan partners.
Conclusion
For the French-led UN peace-enforcing mission in North-eastern Congo to succeed, it is important to understand the nature of the conflict in the DRC and its historical background. The DRC is a country which has lost many of the criteria we normally attribute to a state. Different factors have played a role in the long process of state disintegration, which are not limited to Congo, but which are widespread in many Third World countries: the decay of state institutions, loss of state control beyond the capital city and several economic enclaves, a flourishing informal economy, cross-border smuggling, the militarization of society and the armed forces’ involvement in commerce and crime.
As I have explained, the war economy operating in the DRC today has its origins in the late Mobutu period. Over the years, these structures of violence and commerce have grown and are firmly embedded in the country’s political order (or perhaps disorder). With the current UN peace-enforcing mission to pacify a local tribal dispute in North-eastern Congo, it seems the world community is placing its foot in the middle of a pool of quicksand. Where “ethnic violence” is often a cloak for economic plunder, the UN will have a difficult task pacifying the local conflict between the Hema and the Lendu, without dealing firmly with the war economy and systematic plunder of natural resources in the DRC as a whole.
Published on 11 June 2003 by RISQ
© Carlo Cornelis | www.risq.org
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