Baron's Briefing - Michela Wrong predicts the break-up of Congo

Wrong is an expert on the Great Lakes region, and acclaimed author of several books on Africa. Her first book, based on her time as a correspondent in Kinshasa and published 25 years ago, described the fall of President Mobutu Sese Seko in 1997.

She told the Sept. 29 Briefing that she had a strong sense of déjà vu after the Rwanda-backed M23 rebel movement took a swathe of eastern Congo early this year, including the regional capitals of Goma and Bukavu.

“There were so many echoes and parallels between then and now which meant I kept returning to my book In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, she told a well-attended online briefing entitled: “The Leopard is gone, but his legacy lives on”.

In 1997, as now, the rebels are threatening to march all the way to Kinshasa, the central government was discredited and a weak national army folded to the rebels. As always, there were terrible mass rapes, thousands of refugees, pillaging and the theft of rich natural resources.

The successes of M23, backed by Rwanda’s powerful army, have once again thrown into question the integrity of DRC, a vast country the size of Western Europe. Wrong said Balkanisation was now likely in a diverse state brutally patched together by Belgium’s King Leopold in the 19^th century to plunder its riches.

However, despite the abiding legacies of Mobutu’s rule, including a fragile army mired in corruption, there were major differences with 1997, which made the situation more dangerous and more likely to cause the fragmentation of DRC.

Instead of the Cold War bipolar world when Mobutu took power in 1965 with the support of Washington, and the division between Francophone and Anglophone interests at the time of his overthrow, we have moved into a multipolar era of transactional self-interest and cynical realpolitik, she said.

In 2012, when the M23 previously captured Goma, the West pressured Rwanda to withdraw by cutting off aid, and the rebels faded away.

But this time there were no Western sanctions as the M23 transparently built up its forces over three-and-a-half years before its attack, with the help of Rwanda.  

Britain’s previous Tory government refused to criticise Rwanda because of its abortive deal to send asylum-seekers to Kigali; France had switched from a bitter foe of President Paul Kagame to valuing him as a regional policeman who protected the Total LNG installation in Mozambique and French interests in Central African Republic; Washington saw Rwanda as an arms-length proxy to defend West Africa against Islamic Jihadists.

Wrong said a deal put together by President Donald Trump’s Africa advisor Massad Boulos to create massive U.S. private investments in both Rwanda and DRC in exchange for a peace deal held promise despite the scepticism of regional analysts. It is the “only game in town” and Trump is keen to add Congo to his list of alleged peacekeeping successes, she said.

But Trump seems to be swiftly losing interest and Boulos has moved on to Sudan’s civil war, while there are significant weaknesses in parts of the plan, including Kagame’s apparent lack of real commitment. Fighting continues on the ground, and so do mass atrocities.

Wrong is a leading critic of Kagame and her book Do not Disturb contributed to a significant Western reassessment of the Rwandan leader. But she acknowledged that his achievements in rebuilding Rwanda after the 1994 genocide made him “the single most impressive head of state in Africa.”

Rwanda may be too small for his abilities and ambitions – one of the motives for the push into eastern Congo on its border, Wrong said.

She cited evidence that the M23 was no “fly-by-night” rebel group that would fade away into the forest, as in 2012, but was establishing sophisticated administrative structures in the territory it had conquered.

“A protectorate, answering to Kigali, not Kinshasa, is being created. It looks to me very much as though the permanent dismantling of DRC as a nation state is under way and we are witnessing the redrawing of the borders of central Africa.”

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