Media coverage of the Congo invasion: In the footsteps of Western interests?

Laurent Désiré Kabila, the new president of the newly re-baptised Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) was voted 1997’s ‘man of the year’ by the German press. The British media were hardly less praising of the former rebel leader. On 16 April 1997, a Daily Telegraph editorial read: ‘Decades of misrule in Zaire have turned it once again into Africa’s heart of darkness. It is therefore natural that Laurent Kabila should be welcomed as a messiah in the towns which his rebels have taken from President Mobutu’s forces. Mr Kabila has shown himself no fool. He recognises the importance of regional sensibilities and has tuned his message accordingly. Too great a reliance on an ethnic minority and the governments of neighbouring countries will impede the formation of a broadly based administration.’

The Times on 19 May 1997 wrote: ‘Mr Kabila, 58, a member of the Luba tribe’s offshoot in Shaba Province, has enormous personal credibility – he had been fighting the Mobutu regime for 32 years. A former Marxist and friend of Che Guevara, Mr Kabila has clearly given up the idealism of his youth. Before he took power, he had already signed multi-million-dollar contracts with foreign mining companies to exploit Congo’s staggering mineral wealth.’

Why did Kabila reign for just 44 months? Did he become a man ‘you cannot do business with’? Congo after all is a very rich country and to have access to those riches, you need a leadership in Kinshasa that you can remote-control to serve your own interests. As Kabila’s rebellion was capturing one town after another from Mobutu’s ill-remunerated forces, Western governments and multinationals’ expectations were clearly outlined in an article published by The Times on 22 April 1997. It read: ‘Mining multinationals have signed billion-dollar deals for mineral rights with Laurent Kabila, Zaire’s rebel leader, to get ahead in what is being billed as “the second scramble for Africa”.

‘Mining giants such as De Beers and American Mineral Fields have signed contracts, which are worth at least $3 billion a year, to develop Zaire’s copper, cobalt, gold, zinc, and diamond deposits with the forces, cutting the legally recognised government out of the picture.

‘Executives with the companies said that they are happy to be doing business with the rebels who control all of Zaire’s mineral resources other than its offshore oil fields, because they do not ask for bribes.

‘De Beers has also ditched its relationship with the fast crumbling regime of President Mobutu and signed up with the rebels to get involved in the $500m a year diamond business.

‘The unusual alliance between big business and revolutionaries, many of whom were Chinese-trained Maoists and Marxists in their youth, has been accepted by Western governments, who see Mr Kabila as the man to lead Zaire out of three decades of corruption and staggering poverty.

‘This week, American Mineral Fields signed three contracts worth $885m which would give the mining house access to the vast metal reserves of Katanga Province. Other multinationals have been asked to give satellite telephones to the rebels, who have argued that without them they would be unable to negotiate mineral rights deals internationally.

‘Kenneth MacLeod, president of International Panorama Resource Corporation of Vancouver, said: “We are going to capitalise on the current strife by increasing our presence and our land holdings in the country”.

‘Another mining magnate based in Johannesburg gave the second scramble a historic twist: “Cecil Rhodes must be spinning in his grave at the opportunities he is missing”.’

Kabila’s long-term plans
But Kabila did not give in to the Western governments and multinationals’ ‘second scramble for Africa’. As soon as he settled in Kinshasa, he started to articulate the aspirations of his people and called upon them to take their destiny into their own hands, politically and economically. This was perceived by his sponsors as a covert declaration of independence. Kabila’s nationalist stance immediately clashed with their interests, as he began to review all the contracts he had signed with American and South African mineral companies when he was a rebel, demanding that they pay up-front for decades of future profits and subsequently nationalising all the mines. Earlier on he had enlisted the support of Zimbabwe to enlarge his circle of friends, should he fall out with the first ones, prompting President Thabo Mbeki to say: ‘The more time goes on, the more we will loose control of Kabila.’

The people of Congo enjoyed a short-lived respite during Kabila’s first year in power. Once again they could eat three times a day as the price of essential commodities drastically dropped. Roads and bridges were repaired, public transport restored, electricity extended to the suburbs of Kinshasa and people liberated from Mobutu’s ill-paid soldiers’ kidnapping and ransoming. (Sixty-seven members of the new army who resumed the practice were arrested and jailed). The new currency, the Congolese franc, was launched and inflation dropped from 8.83% in 1993 to 6% in 1997. Corruption was severely combated. All this was achieved in the absence of any help from the IMF and World Bank, who made their financial support to Congo conditional on normalising its relations with the institutions of Bretton Woods and pledging to pay all the debts the old regime had contracted. Such was also the position of the ‘Friends of Congo’ meeting in Brussels in December 1997.

The new government embarked on an ambitious three-year programme of national reconstruction and during the third summit of Comesa (common market community of central and southern African countries) held in Kinshasa on 29 June 1998, Kabila clearly spelt out what role Congo would play within the common market and in Africa as a whole.

He explained that ‘more than 30 years of African independence have offered to the world a sad spectacle of a continent looted and humiliated with the complicity of its own sons and daughters.’ He expressed the wish ‘to see Africa entering the 21st century totally independent of foreign interference’ and declared that the battle for Congo’s independence and sovereignty was fought in the interest of Africa as a whole.

‘Our country,’ he said, ‘has a vocation of exporting peace, development and security to the rest of Africa. A weak Congo means a vulnerable Africa from its centre, an Africa without a heart.’ The stakes were then raised! America, long suspected of having used Uganda and Rwanda as a front to get rid of an ‘intransigent’ Mobutu, branded Kabila a ‘loose canon that had to be restrained. But as Colette Braeckman, an expert in Congolese affairs, who reports for the Belgian daily, Le Soir, wrote in her book, L’enjeu Congolais - L’Afrique Centrale après Mobutu, this ‘sudden animosity against Kabila could only be explained by the fact that his nationalist stance collided with or frustrated their economic interests in Congo. Kabila opposed all forms of investments that did not represent the interests of the people of Congo.’

On the political front, the new government promised free and fair elections but did not liberalise political activities until a national assembly was set up, charged with the task of setting the rules of the game stipulated by a new constitution. On the day he was sworn in as president, Kabila gave a precise calendar of the democratic process which would have culminated in general elections in April 1999. And the people gave him the benefit of the doubt. A front-page headline in Focus on Africa magazine, from the BBC’s Bush House, read: ‘Kinshasans celebrate, but for how long?’ - as if they already knew what was going to follow.

Consequently, the Democratic Republic of Congo has been ravaged by three years of what Kabila’s allies of yesterday have called ‘a war of correction’. The Western media dubbed it ‘the first African World War’, in which Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola supported the government of the assassinated President Laurent Désiré Kabila in Kinshasa - now led by his son General Major Joseph Kabila - against Congolese rebel forces backed by Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi and elements of Angola’s Unità rebel movement.

Distorted reporting
As the Congolese people commemorated the day the war was launched, it was frustrating to notice that the media have still not shifted from their distorted perception of the war. This is despite the fact that - as time has shown and events have proved - the war is an aggression against the Democratic Republic of Congo and its people by a Rwandan-Ugandan-Burundian coalition, logistically supported and financed by superpowers and multinationals, as well as with the complicity of the so-called Congolese ‘rebels’. Together they are systematically looting Congo’s natural and mineral resources, flora ands fauna, and destroying or transferring what is left of Congo’s infrastructure to their own countries.

It is hard for anyone to believe that Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, three small and poor countries that only produce coffee, tea and bananas, can afford to pursue aggression against an immense country like the Congo, which is rich in minerals and can mobilise 60 million inhabitants to kick them out. It is also well known that these three countries ultimately depend on IMF/World bank loans and handouts to supplement their national budgets. Yet they have dared to sustain the war for more than three years because they are looting Congo’s wealth and enjoy the backing of external forces.

According to Wayne Madsen, an American investigative journalist and intelligence specialist, author of Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa 1993 – 1999, the US military has long been covertly involved in the war in Congo. On 17 May 2001 Madsen told the US House subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights, that the US was using private military contractors. Madsen said American companies, including one linked to former President George Bush Sr, are stoking up the Congo conflict for monetary gain.

The British media have relentlessly demonised Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe over the issue of land reform, which Britain should have instigated 20 years ago, and have cited Zimbabwe’s intervention in Congo as the cause of the destruction and near collapse of Zimbabwe’s economy. The Labour government even threatened not to sell Hawk jet spare parts to Zimbabwe because it reckoned Zimbabwe was involved in an unnecessary and costly adventure in Congo.

However, no such a thing is said about Uganda’s economy. In fact, the Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni boasted in New York during the UN Special Session on the Congo war, 24-26 January 2000, that the war had not negatively affected his economy. Yet the French daily, La Libération, revealed on 25 January 2000 that 55% of Uganda’s military budget is financed from money coming in as ‘development aid’ from abroad.

In addition, Zimbabwe’s intervention in Congo is not popular with some sections of society in the country. The privately owned Standard newspaper caused a national uproar when, consorting with ‘foreign intelligence’, it published a story alleging that a Zimbabwean soldier killed on duty in Congo was buried with his head missing. The story caused such alarm that the government was obliged to exhume the decomposed body and display it to the world’s cameras to prove that the allegation was false. It was a double blow to the bereaved family – they lost a breadwinner only to be compelled to exhume the body and put it on public display, something that affronts African customs.

The presence of Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundian troops in the Congo on the pretext of suppressing Hutu militia extremists (Interahamwe) responsible for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda is an alibi as time has shown. Otherwise they would also be waging war against Tanzania, Kenya and Congo Brazzaville where the Interahamwe also fled. But this is the mantra the western media always repeat.
As The Independent put it in a feature article published in January 2001, ‘Rwanda is the driving force behind the battle in [Congo]. Its Tutsi leadership wants to track down and kill the perpetrators of the genocide that wiped out a million Tutsis. Secretly funded by the CIA, Rwanda has military operations in [Congo] far above its means. It has 10,000 troops in Congo.’

Colette Braeckman said the media often follow the lead set by their home governments in deciding how to cover this war. ‘As this crisis unfolded,’ she said, ‘you had the bad guy [Laurent Kabila]. It is easy to go back and find how many stories demonise him – some with good reason, some bad, but all exaggerated.’ And because Kabila did not bite, the rest is history! It is no surprise that Kabila’s head cost $30 million financed by American agencies, according to the Belgian weekly Le Solidaire in its edition of 9 May 2001:

‘When Kabila came to Belgium, we had a briefing from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which said that [the Belgians] were not ready to give him red carpet treatment, so the [media] were influenced to demonise him, and I wonder if that happens in other countries too.

‘I wonder who sets the agenda. It was not just the press. The political leaders usually say this a good guy, this a bad guy. At the moment, Joseph Kabila is a good guy, but maybe tomorrow he will be a bad guy,’ wrote Colette Braeckman.
‘The world community,’ she continued, ‘wanted to get rid of Kabila for so many reasons, also for reasons of economic interests. Sadly the media have positioned themselves on the side of economic interests. Proof? Every time Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda announced the capture of a major Congolese locality, the media [especially the Financial Times] hurried to state precisely its economic importance. And people have closed their eyes to what is really going on,’ she added.

Congolese genocide unreported
What is going on? Both Amnesty International and the International Rescue Committee (USA) have confirmed a genocide of more than 3,500,000 Congolese by the invading troops. Often people are buried alive, shot dead or chopped with machetes, their bodies thrown into rivers or forced down latrines. That is on a larger scale and worse than what happened in Kosovo and Rwanda itself. Why does it all go unreported? Is it because the stakeholders have managed to suppress the story and to protect the perpetrators from accountability?

Can one atrocity be condemned (the 1994 genocide perpetrated by Hutu extremists known as Interahamwe, meaning ‘those who kill together’) and another condoned (perpetrated by a Rwandan-Ugandan-Burundian coalition occupying half of the Congo)?

The BBC reporter, Nick Gordon, after intense investigation into the matter and upon returning from the Great Lakes Region, revealed that under ‘Manpower Operation 2000’, 1,500 Rwandan Hutus and captured Congolese were burned alive in the Rwandan district of Bugesera, strangely close to a military camp occupied by the Americans. ‘It is impossible to say that the Americans in that base can neither hear the cries of distress of the victims, nor get to know what is happening,’ Gordon said.
Despite the burden of war, the people of Congo have kept their morale high, and are not ready to let themselves be humiliated. They know that there is only one Democratic Republic of Congo and it cannot be divided. Congo’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity are non-negotiable!

The Mai-Mai warriors, loyal to the government in the east, have taken resistance into the very heart of rebel-controlled territories where the Congolese flag is still flying in many localities. The aggressors control only the main cities, towns and road junctions, but they dare not go into the interior because they know what fate awaits them. Surprisingly, the Mai –Mai are being subjected to a negative campaign by the Western media as well as by the MONUC, the UN mission in the DRC. They are being labelled ‘negative forces’ and put in the same box as the Interahamwe.
A headline in the Daily Telegraph of 9 August 2001 read: ‘Terror reign of the “magic water militia”’, accusing the Mai-Mai of atrocities to the delight of Rwandans, Ugandans and Burundians, the true perpetrators of massacres and genocide in Congo. No! No! No! The Mai-Mai are native Congolese fighting against occupation. They held one Kenyan, one Swedish and 27 Thais hostage for over two months after they caught them red-handed while gathering timber for a Ugandan-Thai company called DARA-Forest. Another proof that multinationals are very much involved in the looting of Congo’s resources. It went unreported.

Upon Laurent Désiré Kabila’s assassination, Michela Wrong, a former correspondent for Reuters, BBC and The Financial Times, and author of In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Cong’, wrote in the Financial Times: ‘Laurent Kabila alienated Western powers and African allies in his three-and-half years in power. He was welcomed as a liberator when his rebel forces marched into Kinshasa in 1997, toppling the late Mobutu Sese Seko, but diplomats and statesmen had come to view him as a man impossible “to do business with”, a key factor in central Africa’s growing instability. The World Bank and the IMF found him so obstructive, talks on new aid were abandoned.’

Yet, as I said above, in his first year in power Kabila proved that Congo, a nation with everything, does not need to live on aid all the time. His death has deprived the Democratic Republic of Congo and its people of what they had of precious value. Alex Duval Smith summed it up when covering Kabila’s burial for The Independent on 24 January 2001: ‘A nation with very little seemed yesterday, once more, to have lost all it had. As the mausoleum door was shut on the three-and-a-half-year reign of Kabila, assassinated last week, Congo entered a new phase of fear and uncertainty. Then as the coffin, draped in the republic’s yellow-starred blue flag, was transferred to the mausoleum at the Palace of the Nation, thousands ran alongside the cortege, It was as if they were holding on to the only figure who – albeit through war – had given the nation an identity.’

Antoine Roger Lokongo studied philosophy (BA) at the Philosophy Centre, Jinja, Uganda, affiliated to the Urbaniana Pontifical University, Rome; theology at the Missionary Institute London, affiliated to the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium; and international journalism (BA) at City University, London. He has been a reporter with Charity Finance magazine, New African magazine, Fleet News, and The Catholic Herald. He has also worked in television news for Blomberg plc, for the BBC, and for several newspapers and publications.