The Bleeding Heart of Africa

By Marguerite Michaels/Kinshasa

Bwindi National Park sits on Uganda's southwestern border with Rwanda and Congo, riven by lush green valleys and sprinkled with running streams. It had always been an oasis. But since 1994, as political extremism and military violence began tearing at the region, it has been a transit center for Hutu guerrilla fighters moving in and out of Rwanda. Yet it remained a popular destination for adventure travelers in love with the idea of an Africa blessed with limitless natural beauty.

Early last Monday, death emerged from the wilderness. Deep in the park's misty hills, a band of more than 100 Rwandan Hutu guerrillas, driven into a fury by months of fighting in the ruleless Congo, turned on a group of Western tourists, killing eight (see following story). For the outside world, it was a vivid reminder of the terror that still grips the heart of Africa.

The latest turmoil has its roots in the meltdown of a once hopeful alliance that united four African nations--Uganda, Angola, Rwanda and Burundi--with the promise of establishing a stable, democratic Congo. But the alliance, formed in 1996 to speed the ouster of longtime Congolese leader Mobutu Sese Seko, was split almost instantly by self-interest, greed and ambition. Laurent Kabila, the onetime Congolese rebel installed at the head of the new Congo government, is fighting against three of his ex-allies--Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi--in a desperate war to preserve his rule. The fighting has bled across Congo's border with Angola, and with last week's killings, there is fear it will spread further. Already Africans are starting to place blame. The Hutus who struck in Bwindi aimed their anger at the Americans and British, who they say are plotting to encourage the dominance of their rivals, the Tutsis, in central Africa. It was a shocking message for Westerners, who a year ago hoped that Africa would soon invite them into a new era of stability and peace.

"Here's my business card. Sorry my name is misspelled. A friend made the cards. I have no money." Meet the interim Finance Minister of Congo, Mawampanga Mwana Nanga. He is also the Agriculture Minister. "Every day is a nightmare. The roads go no farther than 60 miles outside the capital. Less than 10% of the country has electricity. People have forgotten how to work together, and too many are corrupt. This country is not a state. It's a mess. Why are we Africans shooting at each other? There is so much work to be done."

The Congo that Kabila inherited was in need of help. The vast river basins and dense rain forests of the Congo, a piece of land the size of the U.S. east of the Mississippi, have never been conquered by asphalt or rail ties. Steamers still ply the Congo River, the only efficient means of transport that survived Mobutu's unbenign neglect.

What the Congo could be has been obvious since British explorer Lieut. Verney Cameron captivated Belgium's King Leopold in 1876 with tales of riches. The soil is fertile. There are giant stretches of tropical wood, and an estimated $58 billion of mineral wealth is in the ground.

Kabila meant to turn that promise into a future. Between his arrival in office in May 1997 and the outbreak of civil war last August, he changed the name of the country back to Congo (from Zaire). He brought inflation down from 900% to 5%. He attempted to build a professional army. But what Kabila didn't do was broaden his political base beyond his own tribe. And he began using arrests of politicians and journalists as a management tool.

"[He] never had a chance," says Daniel Simpson, U.S. ambassador to Zaire when Kabila arrived. "He was a minor opponent of Mobutu who had been operating for more than 30 years in the bush. He never had an army; he never had an ideology. He couldn't delegate as President. He became obsessed with his personal security and became dependent on people from his tribe in the south of the country."

Almost immediately his allies turned against him. The first was Major General Paul Kagame, Rwanda's Vice President and Minister of Defense. It was Kagame, with Uganda's and Burundi's support, who had chosen Kabila to replace Mobutu. In exchange, Kagame made one demand: he wanted Rwandan officers to retrain the Congolese army, as a way to help stop cross-border attacks by Congo-based Hutu warriors on Rwanda's Tutsi population.

But as Kabila's rule rotted, Kagame lost patience. Kabila, who belongs to the Luba tribe, had begun to look like another Mobutu: paranoid and willing to use ethnic violence to maintain his rule. The idea terrified the Rwandans, who encouraged a faction of the Congolese army to oust Kabila. In response, Kabila recruited thousands of Rwandan Hutu fighters. By last September, the country was in an all-out civil war. Says a U.S. official: "The threat of more genocide is what is behind this war."

It wasn't only the Rwandans who worried about that. Tutsi-led Burundi, whose soldiers have been fighting Kabila, has been pressing to use the Congo as a buffer zone. It is 100 miles from the capital of Rwanda to the Congo border but just 10 miles from that border to Burundi's capital--too close in the eyes of Burundians, who worry about a contagion of Rwanda's ethnic chaos.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni had similar designs on Congo. Ugandan troops have been supporting a second group of Congolese rebels eager to remove Kabila. Museveni insists his intentions are peaceable. As he appeared on television last week describing his army's hunt for the Bwindi killers, he was polished, global and sophisticated. Museveni takes pride in his soldiers and insists their presence in Congo is a stabilizing force. They train the Congolese rebels. They turn over any mines captured to the rebels so that they can buy the hearts and minds of their fellow Congolese.

But Museveni's generosity hasn't stopped him from exporting more Congolese gold last year than any other nation in the region--trade he swears was legitimate. Congo's civil war has destroyed what was once a promising personal alliance between Kabila and Museveni, men who seemed to embody a new kind of progressive African leadership. "Museveni is a nigger like Mobutu," Kabila says of his onetime ally. "He's an exploiter." Says Museveni: "Kabila was always weak, but I didn't know he would also be so treacherous."

Museveni says he still dreams of building a road from Uganda to Kisangani, fathering a Uganda-Congo economic and military alliance that would be among the strongest forces in Africa--an idea that is a nightmare for other African states.

It is that jockeying for political and economic advantage that has splintered the central-African alliance. Oil-rich Angola, under the leadership of Jose Eduardo dos Santos, has supported Kabila since they began fighting together to unseat Mobutu at the end of 1996. Namibia, in support of Angola, has sent a small force to support Kabila. Zimbabwe's leader, Robert Mugabe, has sent 10,000 soldiers to Kabila's assistance. In return, Kabila has promised Zimbabwe a slice of Congo's economic pie: lucrative contracts with Congo's mining conglomerate and the protection of investments by Mugabe cronies.

As peace in Congo slips out of reach, leaders like Mugabe and Museveni find the stability of their regimes wrapped up in Congo's war. The real fear is that the fight inside Congo will become a fight for Congo, a struggle to carve up the nation and assign new borders. Explains Johan Peleman, director of the Belgian-based International Peace Information Service: "The longer the war lasts, the more politically and economically involved the players become in the territory they are occupying." A year ago, that involvement was a hopeful guarantee of peace. Now it seems to be taking Africa down an unfamiliar and dangerous path.

--With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town and Clive Mutiso/Kigali

With reporting by Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town and Clive Mutiso/Kigali