BRIEFING: THE SECOND CONGO WAR: MORE THAN A REMAKE

Abstract

THE WAR which brought Laurent-Desire Kabila and his Alliance des forces democratiques pour la liberation du Congo-Zaire (AFDL) to power in May 1997 cannot be seen in isolation. The events of 1996-7 were embedded in the larger context of three conflicts, which although not intrinsically linked have tended to merge over the last couple of years: the Great Lakes conflict, which has been the most immediately visible one, and the Sudanese and Angolan civil wars. The geographical proximity of these hotbeds of instability and the play of objective alliances (where all actors reason in terms of 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend') have imbricated these conflicts, thus opening the perspective of the emergence of a war zone stretching from Luanda to Asmara. Zaire, as it then was, constituted the junction between these zones for two reasons. First, the Zairean state had virtually disappeared, thus leaving a 'black hole' with porous borders, almost no effective national army or administration, very poor communications between centre and periphery and between peripheries, and an essentially informalized economy. Secondly, the Mobutu regime was implicated in the neighbours' wars: it supported the Khartum government in its war against the Southern Sudanese rebellion, which was in turn supported by the United States, Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea; Zairean territory served as a rear base for attacks by armed movements against Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi; and the support offered by Mobutu to the Angolan rebel movement UNITA had not ceased with the 1994 Lusaka peace accord. Therefore, the change of regime in Congo-Zaire has been the result of the combination of two factors: on the one hand, the extreme weakness of the Forces Armees Zairoises (FAZ), which were just the mirror of the collapsed state; on the other, the operation of a formidable regional coalition in support of Kabila's rebellion. Five out of Zaire's nine immediate neighbours have actively contributed to the downfall of the Mobutu regime: it is no coincidence that the Presidents of Angola, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and Zambia were present at the inauguration of President Kabila on 29 May 1997.l This was of course a conjunctural and therefore fragile alliance which ran the risk of losing its cement, once