The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is the largest country in Africa. It shares borders with nine countries. As products of the Berlin Conference, Congo and its neighbours share communities with common ancestry and culture, which can potentially create tensions and, in extreme cases, conflict. But only one of these cross-border communities, the Tutsi Congolese, a sub-group of the Banyarwanda communities, is facing genocidal violence. Why is this?
The short answer is that Congo’s leaders, from Mobutu to Tshisekedi, have failed to tackle decisively two major issues. One is the Berlin legacy and the other is the ideology underlying the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. The first issue is common to almost all African states, although in Congo’s case it is exacerbated by state weakness. The second is self-inflicted because it stems from the decision of Congo’s leaders to embrace the ideology exported to Zaire by those who committed genocide in 1994. Above all, the existence of this ideology has meant that the challenge of the Berlinian state is uniquely manifested on one of Congo’s nine borders.
The Berlin legacy
One of the enduring criticisms of colonialism is that the Berlin Conference arbitrarily drew intra-Africa borders to suit the interests of Europeans, with no regard for the native Africans. A key debilitating consequence is that some of the states they created that later became independent are too large to be governed effectively by their weak governments. Others are too small to be economically viable. These borders cannot be undone. The process of state formation in Africa is final as bequeathed and therefore inorganic. This problem has its own cascading effects, such as conflict and violence arising from what scholars call “irredentist” and “secessionist” tendencies. They both challenge the notion that state formation is final and irreversible.
The irredentists are groups that feel persecuted and want to break away from one state to join another, across the border, where there are communities with shared identities, where they believe they have a better chance of protection. Secessionists seek to create independent states as a means of ending mistreatment and curing longstanding grievances. Both tendencies, therefore, stem from grievances against the state. The inorganic nature of African states means that almost all of them face this challenge and, as a result, the quality of leadership in Africa is measured first and foremost by the ability to manage these grievances. This is the ability to nurture feelings of a common and indivisible citizenship that guarantees protection for all. In other words, a good leader is one who makes the state attractive for those within its boundaries by enticing them into disregarding its imposition, as a preventive measure against resistance. Otherwise, those left outside this protection will continue to dream that independence was primarily about the freedom to choose where to belong, by seeking to create their own states or deciding to join another next door. The role of the United Nations, through its security council, as the guarantor of the modern state will count for little in this showdown.
If acting as arbiters of these grievances and the tensions they beget is the most important measure of the quality of the African leader, then it is in the failure to do so that we should look for explanations for the abysmal performance overall by post-colonial African leaders. There have been three types of leaders. Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere is an excellent example of the enormously successful in nation-building. Others, like Kenya’s Kenyatta, his successor Moi, and many others did just enough to preserve difficult marriages. If genocide is the lowest threshold on this measure, then Rwanda’s pre-genocide leadership exemplifies the worst example of failure. Where other leaders worked hard to convince their people that they belonged together in the countries they had been bequeathed by colonialism, Rwanda’s leaders sought to get rid of a section of their people. Only in Rwanda did governments seek to create a category of unwanted citizens and lead the efforts to marginalise and, eventually, exterminate them. This approach to state management was then exported to the then Zaire.
Genocide ideology: How Mobutu slipped
For all the misery he inflicted on his people, Mobutu never tried to wipe out any group of Congolese before 1994. He granted and withdrew citizenship to Congolese Banyarwanda according to the prevailing political temperature in the country, but never with the aim of evicting or exterminating them. In 1994 the ideological heirs of Rwanda’s pre-1994 leaders, Gregoire Kayibanda and Juvenal Habyarimana, the remnants of which are now commonly known as the FDLR, crossed into Zaire after committing genocide in Rwanda, where they killed at least a million Tutsi. Mobutu chose to give them refuge because of his close ties to Habyarimana who had long regarded him as his patron and mentor. Mobutu was also acting under the influence of the French, who had provided a safe corridor for the killers to flee to Zaire.
Crucially, these influences gave Mobutu and his successors, in their role as arbiters between Congolese communities, a new tool in their arsenal: extermination. Finally, Mobutu who had never sought to exterminate any community during his three decades in power, made it possible by offering shelter and support to Rwanda’s mass murderers. With the help of the FDLR, Tshisekedi is currently exercising the extermination option against Tutsi Congolese. In so doing, his actions carry grave implications for inter-state relations and regional peace.
Clearly, in its conflict with the DRC, Rwanda is driven by a refusal to tolerate the uniqueness of the manner in which the Berlinian challenge manifests itself along its border, and the decision by Congo’s leaders to weaponisee it. This is the main reason why, as some would have it, Rwanda remains the DRC’s most problematic neighbour. In addition to its determination to neutralise Tshisekedi’s accomplices, the FDLR, it is unlikely to look the other way Kinshasa attempts to implement the “final solution” to a political problem that originated at the Berlin conference. If the RPF-led government were to simply sit back and do nothing, it would embolden those who wish to unleash hell on Rwanda itself.
