(Jason Stearns, Usalama Project manager, being mobbed by the press at Sultani Hotel in Kinshasa, Monday, November 4, 2013)
***
The Rift Valley Institute (RVI) held Monday, November 4, an invitation-only 4-hour marathon event billed as the "final conference" of its flagship Umoja Project in the Suzanne Muk conference room of the Sultani Hotel on the Avenue de la Justice in downtown Kinshasa.
The project, as presented by RVI Director John Ryle, is well-targeted: To provide not only the nuts and bolts of armed groups besetting eastern Congo but actionable understandings of those groups as well.
Actionable understandings, because Usalama Project studies are thick descriptions stuffed with ready-to-tread "solution paths" for "cutting the Gordian knot of insecurity" propelled by Congolese armed groups, to paraphrase the title of one of the reports released by the Usalama Project.
These are prescriptions for action to be explored by policymakers, stakeholders, activists, donors, philanthropists, and concerned people--the global constituency--interested in lasting peace in the North-Kivu Province. In the last 12 months, said Ryle, Usalama Project has produced 11 reports and several briefings on armed groups--not to mention workshops and seminars organized in the Congo. (RVI provided each participant with a flash drive containing these reports and at least two hardcopies of these reports in French. Those reports are also available online.)
The conference theme was titled "Usalama Project: Understanding Congolese armed groups: Research Conclusions and Political Considerations."
The timing of the conference couldn't have been better. These days, here in Kinshasa, people are for the moment basking in the euphoria of FARDC military victory over M23 and feel somehow invulnerable.
And it's a good thing that Usalama Project had come to town to tell revelers they could use some reality check--a damper no doubt on the ecstatic mood prevailing around, but a clarion call nonetheless for reminding people that we aren't out of the woods yet, given that the very same dynamics that caused the outbreak of M23 could still be simmering and for a long time.
As a matter-of-fact, there are more than four dozens of armed groups still operational out there, with varying degrees of nuisance.
The Usalama Project is unfortunately winding down--unless it is continued in some form or another by its donors, Jason Stearns, its outgoing manager, told me. In that event, Stearns added, the ideal would be to bring the project where it is the most needed: here, in the DRC. But even if the project is continued, however, Stearns would no longer be at the helm: academic obligations would tie him down closer to home in New Haven, at Yale University.
The conference was divided into two parts: the first half (from 2 to 3:30 PM) being the snapshot of the current dynamics of armed groups and the FARDC, and the second half (from 4 to 7 PM) a string of political recommendations based on those fieldwork studies, followed by a Q & A section.
The conference panel featured three experts of Usalama Project:
1) Stearns: Research objectives and conclusions of the Usalama Project as well as a Case Study on the CNDP/M23;
2) Koen Vlassenroot: Case Study: the armed "franchise" Raïa Mutomboki; and
3) Judith Verweijen: Case Study of the FARDC.
All three panelists made their presentations in French.
JASON STEARNS
The last time I attended a presentation on the conflict in eastern Congo given by Jason Stearns was on Friday, April 16, 2010 in Washington, DC.
That presentation was part of the Johns Hopkins SAIS African Studies Program Spring 2010 Lecture Series and was entitled "The Logic of Conflict in the DRC: Militias, Resources, and Politics in the Kivu."
At the time, Stearns was assessing the short- and medium- term post-conflict dynamics on the ground in the wake of the "enigmatic peace deal" between Rwanda and the DRC that happened around December 2008-January 2009.
The deal itself resulted from the pressure the international community brought to bear on both countries following the military offensive unleashed by Laurent Nkunda's CNDP troops--the ancestors of M23--in October 2008 with devastating humanitarian consequences in North-Kivu Province.
Some optimistically thought that the signing of the March 23, 2009 agreement with the CNDP and other armed groups would come to seamlessly slide into that previous accord with Rwanda--and eastern Congo would henceforth live forever in peace and security.
Rwanda and its creation--the CNDP--reaped enormous benefits from the 2008-2009 and March 23. 2009 agreements whereas it more and more became apparent that the DRC was short-changed in the process.
Rwandan troops were given unfettered access to DRC territory "to track down" and "to hunt down" FDLR terrorists. The CNDP, on its part, paid lip service to its reintegration into the national army, kept a parallel chain of command, expanded its territorial control and furthered the illegal commercial and mining interests of its commanders and officer corps.
In those days, the logic in Kinshasa was a contortionist's logic, of bending over backwards to accommodate Rwanda's slightest interests and whims. The peace and diplomatic windfalls the DRC government was expecting from these deals never materialized and in fact were far outweighed by their domestic liabilities (humanitarian disaster in North Kivu, government unpopularity, and turbulence within President Joseph Kabila's coalition that culminated in the toppling of Vital Kamerhe from the speakership).
But Stearns saw this diplomatic understanding between Rwanda and the DRC as a marker, a "dramatic geopolitical shift" in the Great Lakes region--though this optimism wasn't justified by the humanitarian catastrophe that Rwandan intervention in the DRC triggered.
Like many other observers at the time, Stearns gave an appraisal of bucolic "post-conflict" conditions and the revamped ambition of ex-CNDP politicians.
As I noted, Stearns was then speculating that,
"The goal of the CNDP for now is just 'to stay alive till 2011' when general elections will be held, though they weren't pleased that they weren't given ministerial positions in the recent reshuffle of government in Kinshasa [following the agreement signed between armed groups and the DRC government]."
(http://alexengwete.blogspot.com/2010/04/jason-stearns-unpacks-his-theory-of.html?m=1)
And the rest is history...
To be sure, for M23 as for other pillage entrepreneurs there were stronger incentives for taking up arms one more time than for a reconversion into political activities.
A. UNDERSTANDING ARMED GROUPS
In Kinshasa, Stearns stressed in his opening remarks that armed groups are a complex phenomenon and that deterministic, linear theories that purport to singlehandedly explain the rise and intricacies of armed groups more often than not fall short of accounting for everything.
There are currently 3 such linear theories wrestling to explain armed groups in eastern DRC:
1) State weakness. If the weakness of the DRC state could explain for instance that Rwanda created, organized and supported CNDP, they fail at the same time to explain why Rwanda wasn't supporting other armed groups.
2) Local conflict. Land tenure conflicts, traditional power grab dynamics, etc, though they are important variables in the onsets of some armed conflicts and groups they are by no means the primary cause of those conflicts.
3) Natural resources. They are certainly an important variable to factor in, but the theory of natural resources as a causation of armed groups is just as partial and linear as the two other ones.
Incidentally, this observation led in the Q & A section to a brief testy exchange between Stearns and a community activist who misconstrued the remark as an attempt at giving a free pass to multinationals. Stearns was at first defensive in rejecting that characterization of his observation and his explanation seemed to have put the matter to rest. Then, after two unrelated questions, Stearns grabbed the microphone again and told the community activist something along these lines:
"Sorry, I've misspoken. Multinationals do indeed directly intervene in the Congo to rip off the country. And it's not in North-Kivu, but in the industrial mining sector in the Katanga."
After making short shrift of these three partial theories of the emergence of armed groups in eastern Congo, Stearns then presented the 5 main conclusions inferred from Usalama Project field studies:
1) Peace deals in the Congo are brokered on the back of wars--a situation pregnant with ever more conflicts. A case in point being the RCD, which in time would beget CNDP. It once held sway over a third of the Congolese territory. But after the 2002 Sun City Agreement and the 2006 general elections, this control would plummet to less than 4% of politicians elected on RCD tickets nationwide. And this created deep resentment. The assumption that the Sun City Agreement had somewhat magically ushered the country into "post-conflict" conditions was therefore a fallacy. And efforts towards peace, demobilization, reintegration, etc, were foolishly abandoned.
2) Some armed groups are more important than others. And those important groups have "multiplier effects" as their actions by synergy have momentous reverberations on the ground. Thus, CNDP-qua-M23, FDLR, FNL, etc, are examples of such important groups.
3) Armed groups have broken away from their natural communities and have plugged into broader national or regional "elite networks." The armed groups Raïa Mutomboki are illustrative of this argument. Initially created as a community vigilante group in response to the security vacuum in the Shabunda district of South-Kivu Province that allowed the FDLR to move in and to perpetrate massacres in 2005, the Raïa Mutomboki are now a loosely-connected armed franchise operating across several communities.
4) Militarization of Politics and Politicization of the Military. This is by and large caused by the logic of power grabs, of electoral positioning, of strongmen--the proverbial "firefighters-arsonists" characters.
5) Repeated negotiations with and integrations of armed groups into the FARDC that have resulted in the weakening of the national army.
B. CASE STUDY: CNDP/M23
In this section, Stearns reiterated his observation on the stunning decline of CNDP from its peak in its previous incarnation as RCD--when it controlled a third of Congo territory--to its shadow as a political movement that counted less than 4% of elected politicians.
No wonder then that "fear" among the RCD/CNDP flared up as its members felt that they were being sidelined for good.
On top of the security interests of the CNDP, there were security concerns of Rwanda, which has always felt that without a strong proxy in the DRC, its regional interests would be trampled.
But by launching the CNDP on the path of escalating violence in eastern DRC, Rwanda also coincidentally triggered in reaction the creation of other armed groups fiercely hostile to its interests.
It is worth repeating here that the December 2008-January 2009 agreement between Kigali and Kinshasa and the March 23, 2009 accord between CNDP and Kinshasa were skewed to benefit Rwanda and its Congolese proxy.
While Kigali sought to appease donors and the DRC thought it was getting rid of CNDP, those agreements actually cemented Rwanda's position as a stakeholder in Congolese domestic politics. What's more, after its nominal integration into the FARDC, CNDP kept a parallel chain of command and expanded its area of control over Congolese territory, which they administered as a lawless micro-state.
Several factors would ultimately combine to set off the M23 insurgency in April 2012: upcoming provincial elections where CNDP was anticipated to obtain paltry results; the coalescing political will in Kinshasa to dissolve the CNDP, the guilty verdicts of warlord Thomas Lubanga at the ICC, and so on.
But overall, a closer look at M23 evinces an armed group beset by two major failures in its internal dynamics that its initial blitzkrieg concealed:
1) Failure in terms of significant mobilization at the grassroots level of the community from which the armed group sprang up.
2) Failure in terms of its overdependence on Rwanda.
KOEN VLASSENROOT
CASE STUDY: RAÏA MUTOMBOKI
The franchise of armed groups called Raïa Mutomboki leaps up as a case apart.
Initially created as a community vigilante group, it has evolved into a string of armed groups bound by the same "ideology" of anti-FDLR sentiments and the belief that the "dawa" (juju) could bestow the magical gift of invulnerability to combatants.
Several factors explain the emergence of the Raïa Mutomboki.
By 1998, the FDLR were deeply entrenched in the area of Kanyoka, in the district of Shabunda in South-Kivu Province. FDLR raids and all manners of small and big exactions were more or less tolerated till they hit the tipping point of the massacres of local merchants perpetrated by the FDLR in March 2005 mentioned hitherto.
The youth of the area then ganged up into a vigilante posses to go after the FDLR.
Two factors account for the success of the Raïa Mutomboki in driving out the FDLR from their communities:
1) They benefited from the support of customary power structure (chiefs, notables, etc) and
2) They were also able to cause massive mobilization of the local population.
Among the other intervening factors in the birthing of the Raïa Mutomboki there was--ironically enough--the restructuring of the FARDC that resulted in the security vacuum which allowed the FDLR to raid unprotected communities.
Once successful armed groups with widespread popular support in their communities, Raïa Mutomboki are today accused of resorting to the brutality and the exactions they rose up against.
JUDITH VERWEIJEN
CASE STUDY: FARDC
Judith Verweijen set out by positing that the recent victory of the FARDC--with the backing MONUSCO's Force Intervention Brigade (FIB)--reflects "important advances made in logistics, (....), intelligence coordination, discipline, and morale."
These advances are not solely military, but they are political as well: better human resources management, better management of soldiers' workload, better coordination of battle groups, etc.
These advances are still a drop on the ocean in what still remains to be done in the national army.
Following the 2002 Sun City Agreement, the FARDC embarked in 2003 in a massive campaign called "brassage" that was supposed to integrate all the previously warring factions under one national chain of command.
But the brassage couldn't completely dispel the deep distrust of ex-rebel groups for one another and for FARDC troops. This distrust often ended up leading to open armed confrontations.
Besides, the brassage process had mixed results at best. And the national army was still beset by crippling woes such as ethnic or regional factionalism and double-cross.
Despite these mixed results, there were 18 fully operational integrated brigades. These gains are however threatened by factions who have taken the army hostage.
Other negative effects of unsuccessful brassage process include the inflation of high ranks and senior positions in the army, and misconstruing the creation of armed groups as leverage to gain access to state entitlements.
All these factors led to big frustrations among professional troops.
These deleterious consequences of the integration of armed groups into the FARDC don't fully explain the dysfunction of the national army. What's more, some of these problems date back to the Mobutu regime era where in order to ensure political loyalty, the army was purposefully divided and racketeering encouraged within the officer corps.
This dysfunction from the time of Mobutu was exacerbated by the more recent integrations of rebel groups into the army.
Three distinct characteristics could be pinned to these repeated integrations of rebel groups into the national army:
1) Deterioration of meritocracy. This deterioration of meritocracy has at times made some army groups look like "inverted pyramids" with members of the officer corps more numerous than the rank and file;
2) Factionalism, parallel chains of command, network membership (for example membership to the same former armed group, or to the same ethnic group) also cripple the army; and
3) The provincialization of the army in the Kivus evinces the fact that there is no balanced policy of military personnel transfer.
Coupled with rampant wheeling and dealing or outright racketeering and influence peddling, these factors create the eerie situation where weapons and intelligence are for sale, and some members of the national army are devoid of any loyalty to the state.
***
FUTURE CONSIDERATIONS: A FEW SOLUTION PATHS
JASON STEARNS
In this second part of the conference panel after a half-hour break, the three panelists offered solution paths and future considerations on the topics tackled in the first half.
In attempting to come up with future considerations, Jason Stearns acknowledged right away that that exercise wasn't simple.
He further said he was glad to find a number of solution paths already contained in the speech of President Joseph Kabila of October 23 to both chambers of Parliament at the end of national consultations.
Here are a three solution paths traced by Stearns:
1) It is imperative that "elite networks" providing support to armed groups be dismantled. But the dismantling of these networks is seemingly a politically intractable problem as some of the politicians working with armed groups do so openly and brazenly. And this begs the following question: how come these troublemakers are never ever nabbed?
2) When dealing with armed groups, give priority to major spoilsports of the ilk of M23 and FLDR (whose forces are now estimated at half of their 2008 strength): Going after them would significantly decrease violence in eastern DRC.
3) Donors have to discard their technocratic point of view and have their ears closer to the ground. For example, the support given to a DRC-government-designed project like the 2009 STAREC (Kivu Stabilization) without encouraging "ownership" by the government was shortsighted; as was defining the period after the 2006 elections as "post-conflict."
KOEN VLASSENROOT
Koen Vlassenroot made the following 4 observations followed by "political responses and considerations":
1) The number of armed groups has been increasing since the 2002 Sun City Agreement. This means that old conflicts are unresolved.
2) There's a big diversity among armed groups in terms of interaction with communities, strategy, and popular support.
3) Armed groups are a form of privatized governance. The outreach of some of those groups go even beyond their local community.
4) Peace efforts have spawned new demands and claims whereas fundamental conflictual problems are left untouched.
Consequently, instead of post-conflict transition, we could be waddling deep in a "failed state" [régime déliquescent] situation.
POLITICAL RESPONSES AND CONSIDERATIONS
1) Political responses must address these observations.
The proliferation of armed groups is the result of the interaction of several variables. Therefore, each armed group needs a "target-adapted strategy" within a global policy.
At the local level, land tenure tensions, often a decisive factor in the outbreak of armed conflict, must be appeased.
While focusing mediation efforts on the short-term, more violent conflicts have to be tackled collectively and land tenure dealt with at the national level.
2) Investing in inter-community reconciliations should be a priority, in "barzas" for example. But barzas have their own problems: some of them are involved in local conflicts. The reconciliation effort must include the "real leaders" of the community, not impostors. They have to also benefit from donors' support.
3) The success of any policy targeting armed groups has to rely on local and state capacity building.
JUDITH VERWEIJEN
Judith Verweijen prefaced her "future considerations" by insisting on the obvious: the army is a complex institution.
And this complexity must be reflected throughout.
1) Good management of integrations of armed groups.
Integration is not a uniformly bad thing. There have been good results yielded by army integrations in Burundi and South Africa for example. Unfortunately, integrations have obtained mixed results in the DRC.
If integrations are to be pursued, however, special attention has to be meritocracy and
training.
Negotiation prior to integrations are often conducted in total opacity, without any parliamentarian oversight. Transparency has to be inserted into this process.
Impunity. Care should be taken to avoid sending the wrong message of repeated amnesties and promotions of offenders.
The conundrum is that there wouldn't be any certainty of convincing rebels to get out of the jungle without some form of impunity.
Strike the right balance in transferring integrated soldiers in order to get at a geographical equilibrium. This could be done gradually as armed confrontations often break out when an armed group is moved from its turf.
Mitigate identity or ethnic tensions within the army.
In sum, integration isn't impossible though in the long term it should be discarded.
2) HUMAN RESOURCES POLICY OF THE ARMY
The Congolese soldier is poorly paid, has no paid leave, and lacks social benefits.
Military spouses often follow their husbands to the frontline where they live in squalid conditions. They do so because they can't get parts of the salaries of their husbands deployed on the frontline if they stay home. This issue of pay is crucial as famished soldiers can't be trained.
Elderly soldiers are still active because the government can't pay their retirement pensions.
TRAINING. Training only reaches an insignificant percentage of soldiers. For example, training programs seldom target leaders of "basic units" that are the hard core of the army.
JASON STEARNS adds that there are two kinds of donors' initiatives for the army: "top-down and bottom-up initiatives" which have obtained mixed results. Mobile tribunals for example are a good initiative. The major problem with those initiatives is that they aren't sustainable and collapse once funds are terminated. Besides, there's no coordination of efforts among donors. Donors' initiatives toward the Congolese police force have proved to be more successful.
***
Photo by Alex Engwete
(Jason Stearns, Usalama Project manager, being mobbed by the press at Sultani Hotel in Kinshasa, Monday, November 4, 2013)
***
The Rift Valley Institute (RVI) held Monday, November 4, an invitation-only 4-hour marathon event billed as the "final conference" of its flagship Umoja Project in the Suzanne Muk conference room of the Sultani Hotel on the Avenue de la Justice in downtown Kinshasa.
The project, as presented by RVI Director John Ryle, is well-targeted: To provide not only the nuts and bolts of armed groups besetting eastern Congo but actionable understandings of those groups as well.
Actionable understandings, because Usalama Project studies are thick descriptions stuffed with ready-to-tread "solution paths" for "cutting the Gordian knot of insecurity" propelled by Congolese armed groups, to paraphrase the title of one of the reports released by the Usalama Project.
These are prescriptions for action to be explored by policymakers, stakeholders, activists, donors, philanthropists, and concerned people--the global constituency--interested in lasting peace in the North-Kivu Province. In the last 12 months, said Ryle, Usalama Project has produced 11 reports and several briefings on armed groups--not to mention workshops and seminars organized in the Congo. (RVI provided each participant with a flash drive containing these reports and at least two hardcopies of these reports in French. Those reports are also available online.)
The conference theme was titled "Usalama Project: Understanding Congolese armed groups: Research Conclusions and Political Considerations."
The timing of the conference couldn't have been better. These days, here in Kinshasa, people are for the moment basking in the euphoria of FARDC military victory over M23 and feel somehow invulnerable.
And it's a good thing that Usalama Project had come to town to tell revelers they could use some reality check--a damper no doubt on the ecstatic mood prevailing around, but a clarion call nonetheless for reminding people that we aren't out of the woods yet, given that the very same dynamics that caused the outbreak of M23 could still be simmering and for a long time.
As a matter-of-fact, there are more than four dozens of armed groups still operational out there, with varying degrees of nuisance.
The Usalama Project is unfortunately winding down--unless it is continued in some form or another by its donors, Jason Stearns, its outgoing manager, told me. In that event, Stearns added, the ideal would be to bring the project where it is the most needed: here, in the DRC. But even if the project is continued, however, Stearns would no longer be at the helm: academic obligations would tie him down closer to home in New Haven, at Yale University.
The conference was divided into two parts: the first half (from 2 to 3:30 PM) being the snapshot of the current dynamics of armed groups and the FARDC, and the second half (from 4 to 7 PM) a string of political recommendations based on those fieldwork studies, followed by a Q & A section.
The conference panel featured three experts of Usalama Project:
1) Stearns: Research objectives and conclusions of the Usalama Project as well as a Case Study on the CNDP/M23;
2) Koen Vlassenroot: Case Study: the armed "franchise" Raïa Mutomboki; and
3) Judith Verweijen: Case Study of the FARDC.
All three panelists made their presentations in French.
JASON STEARNS
The last time I attended a presentation on the conflict in eastern Congo given by Jason Stearns was on Friday, April 16, 2010 in Washington, DC.
That presentation was part of the Johns Hopkins SAIS African Studies Program Spring 2010 Lecture Series and was entitled "The Logic of Conflict in the DRC: Militias, Resources, and Politics in the Kivu."
At the time, Stearns was assessing the short- and medium- term post-conflict dynamics on the ground in the wake of the "enigmatic peace deal" between Rwanda and the DRC that happened around December 2008-January 2009.
The deal itself resulted from the pressure the international community brought to bear on both countries following the military offensive unleashed by Laurent Nkunda's CNDP troops--the ancestors of M23--in October 2008 with devastating humanitarian consequences in North-Kivu Province.
Some optimistically thought that the signing of the March 23, 2009 agreement with the CNDP and other armed groups would come to seamlessly slide into that previous accord with Rwanda--and eastern Congo would henceforth live forever in peace and security.
Rwanda and its creation--the CNDP--reaped enormous benefits from the 2008-2009 and March 23. 2009 agreements whereas it more and more became apparent that the DRC was short-changed in the process.
Rwandan troops were given unfettered access to DRC territory "to track down" and "to hunt down" FDLR terrorists. The CNDP, on its part, paid lip service to its reintegration into the national army, kept a parallel chain of command, expanded its territorial control and furthered the illegal commercial and mining interests of its commanders and officer corps.
In those days, the logic in Kinshasa was a contortionist's logic, of bending over backwards to accommodate Rwanda's slightest interests and whims. The peace and diplomatic windfalls the DRC government was expecting from these deals never materialized and in fact were far outweighed by their domestic liabilities (humanitarian disaster in North Kivu, government unpopularity, and turbulence within President Joseph Kabila's coalition that culminated in the toppling of Vital Kamerhe from the speakership).
But Stearns saw this diplomatic understanding between Rwanda and the DRC as a marker, a "dramatic geopolitical shift" in the Great Lakes region--though this optimism wasn't justified by the humanitarian catastrophe that Rwandan intervention in the DRC triggered.
Like many other observers at the time, Stearns gave an appraisal of bucolic "post-conflict" conditions and the revamped ambition of ex-CNDP politicians.
As I noted, Stearns was then speculating that,
"The goal of the CNDP for now is just 'to stay alive till 2011' when general elections will be held, though they weren't pleased that they weren't given ministerial positions in the recent reshuffle of government in Kinshasa [following the agreement signed between armed groups and the DRC government]."
(http://alexengwete.blogspot.com/2010/04/jason-stearns-unpacks-his-theory-of.html?m=1)
And the rest is history...
To be sure, for M23 as for other pillage entrepreneurs there were stronger incentives for taking up arms one more time than for a reconversion into political activities.
A. UNDERSTANDING ARMED GROUPS
In Kinshasa, Stearns stressed in his opening remarks that armed groups are a complex phenomenon and that deterministic, linear theories that purport to singlehandedly explain the rise and intricacies of armed groups more often than not fall short of accounting for everything.
There are currently 3 such linear theories wrestling to explain armed groups in eastern DRC:
1) State weakness. If the weakness of the DRC state could explain for instance that Rwanda created, organized and supported CNDP, they fail at the same time to explain why Rwanda wasn't supporting other armed groups.
2) Local conflict. Land tenure conflicts, traditional power grab dynamics, etc, though they are important variables in the onsets of some armed conflicts and groups they are by no means the primary cause of those conflicts.
3) Natural resources. They are certainly an important variable to factor in, but the theory of natural resources as a causation of armed groups is just as partial and linear as the two other ones.
Incidentally, this observation led in the Q & A section to a brief testy exchange between Stearns and a community activist who misconstrued the remark as an attempt at giving a free pass to multinationals. Stearns was at first defensive in rejecting that characterization of his observation and his explanation seemed to have put the matter to rest. Then, after two unrelated questions, Stearns grabbed the microphone again and told the community activist something along these lines:
"Sorry, I've misspoken. Multinationals do indeed directly intervene in the Congo to rip off the country. And it's not in North-Kivu, but in the industrial mining sector in the Katanga."
After making short shrift of these three partial theories of the emergence of armed groups in eastern Congo, Stearns then presented the 5 main conclusions inferred from Usalama Project field studies:
1) Peace deals in the Congo are brokered on the back of wars--a situation pregnant with ever more conflicts. A case in point being the RCD, which in time would beget CNDP. It once held sway over a third of the Congolese territory. But after the 2002 Sun City Agreement and the 2006 general elections, this control would plummet to less than 4% of politicians elected on RCD tickets nationwide. And this created deep resentment. The assumption that the Sun City Agreement had somewhat magically ushered the country into "post-conflict" conditions was therefore a fallacy. And efforts towards peace, demobilization, reintegration, etc, were foolishly abandoned.
2) Some armed groups are more important than others. And those important groups have "multiplier effects" as their actions by synergy have momentous reverberations on the ground. Thus, CNDP-qua-M23, FDLR, FNL, etc, are examples of such important groups.
3) Armed groups have broken away from their natural communities and have plugged into broader national or regional "elite networks." The armed groups Raïa Mutomboki are illustrative of this argument. Initially created as a community vigilante group in response to the security vacuum in the Shabunda district of South-Kivu Province that allowed the FDLR to move in and to perpetrate massacres in 2005, the Raïa Mutomboki are now a loosely-connected armed franchise operating across several communities.
4) Militarization of Politics and Politicization of the Military. This is by and large caused by the logic of power grabs, of electoral positioning, of strongmen--the proverbial "firefighters-arsonists" characters.
5) Repeated negotiations with and integrations of armed groups into the FARDC that have resulted in the weakening of the national army.
B. CASE STUDY: CNDP/M23
In this section, Stearns reiterated his observation on the stunning decline of CNDP from its peak in its previous incarnation as RCD--when it controlled a third of Congo territory--to its shadow as a political movement that counted less than 4% of elected politicians.
No wonder then that "fear" among the RCD/CNDP flared up as its members felt that they were being sidelined for good.
On top of the security interests of the CNDP, there were security concerns of Rwanda, which has always felt that without a strong proxy in the DRC, its regional interests would be trampled.
But by launching the CNDP on the path of escalating violence in eastern DRC, Rwanda also coincidentally triggered in reaction the creation of other armed groups fiercely hostile to its interests.
It is worth repeating here that the December 2008-January 2009 agreement between Kigali and Kinshasa and the March 23, 2009 accord between CNDP and Kinshasa were skewed to benefit Rwanda and its Congolese proxy.
While Kigali sought to appease donors and the DRC thought it was getting rid of CNDP, those agreements actually cemented Rwanda's position as a stakeholder in Congolese domestic politics. What's more, after its nominal integration into the FARDC, CNDP kept a parallel chain of command and expanded its area of control over Congolese territory, which they administered as a lawless micro-state.
Several factors would ultimately combine to set off the M23 insurgency in April 2012: upcoming provincial elections where CNDP was anticipated to obtain paltry results; the coalescing political will in Kinshasa to dissolve the CNDP, the guilty verdicts of warlord Thomas Lubanga at the ICC, and so on.
But overall, a closer look at M23 evinces an armed group beset by two major failures in its internal dynamics that its initial blitzkrieg concealed:
1) Failure in terms of significant mobilization at the grassroots level of the community from which the armed group sprang up.
2) Failure in terms of its overdependence on Rwanda.
KOEN VLASSENROOT
CASE STUDY: RAÏA MUTOMBOKI
The franchise of armed groups called Raïa Mutomboki leaps up as a case apart.
Initially created as a community vigilante group, it has evolved into a string of armed groups bound by the same "ideology" of anti-FDLR sentiments and the belief that the "dawa" (juju) could bestow the magical gift of invulnerability to combatants.
Several factors explain the emergence of the Raïa Mutomboki.
By 1998, the FDLR were deeply entrenched in the area of Kanyoka, in the district of Shabunda in South-Kivu Province. FDLR raids and all manners of small and big exactions were more or less tolerated till they hit the tipping point of the massacres of local merchants perpetrated by the FDLR in March 2005 mentioned hitherto.
The youth of the area then ganged up into a vigilante posses to go after the FDLR.
Two factors account for the success of the Raïa Mutomboki in driving out the FDLR from their communities:
1) They benefited from the support of customary power structure (chiefs, notables, etc) and
2) They were also able to cause massive mobilization of the local population.
Among the other intervening factors in the birthing of the Raïa Mutomboki there was--ironically enough--the restructuring of the FARDC that resulted in the security vacuum which allowed the FDLR to raid unprotected communities.
Once successful armed groups with widespread popular support in their communities, Raïa Mutomboki are today accused of resorting to the brutality and the exactions they rose up against.
JUDITH VERWEIJEN
CASE STUDY: FARDC
Judith Verweijen set out by positing that the recent victory of the FARDC--with the backing MONUSCO's Force Intervention Brigade (FIB)--reflects "important advances made in logistics, (....), intelligence coordination, discipline, and morale."
These advances are not solely military, but they are political as well: better human resources management, better management of soldiers' workload, better coordination of battle groups, etc.
These advances are still a drop on the ocean in what still remains to be done in the national army.
Following the 2002 Sun City Agreement, the FARDC embarked in 2003 in a massive campaign called "brassage" that was supposed to integrate all the previously warring factions under one national chain of command.
But the brassage couldn't completely dispel the deep distrust of ex-rebel groups for one another and for FARDC troops. This distrust often ended up leading to open armed confrontations.
Besides, the brassage process had mixed results at best. And the national army was still beset by crippling woes such as ethnic or regional factionalism and double-cross.
Despite these mixed results, there were 18 fully operational integrated brigades. These gains are however threatened by factions who have taken the army hostage.
Other negative effects of unsuccessful brassage process include the inflation of high ranks and senior positions in the army, and misconstruing the creation of armed groups as leverage to gain access to state entitlements.
All these factors led to big frustrations among professional troops.
These deleterious consequences of the integration of armed groups into the FARDC don't fully explain the dysfunction of the national army. What's more, some of these problems date back to the Mobutu regime era where in order to ensure political loyalty, the army was purposefully divided and racketeering encouraged within the officer corps.
This dysfunction from the time of Mobutu was exacerbated by the more recent integrations of rebel groups into the army.
Three distinct characteristics could be pinned to these repeated integrations of rebel groups into the national army:
1) Deterioration of meritocracy. This deterioration of meritocracy has at times made some army groups look like "inverted pyramids" with members of the officer corps more numerous than the rank and file;
2) Factionalism, parallel chains of command, network membership (for example membership to the same former armed group, or to the same ethnic group) also cripple the army; and
3) The provincialization of the army in the Kivus evinces the fact that there is no balanced policy of military personnel transfer.
Coupled with rampant wheeling and dealing or outright racketeering and influence peddling, these factors create the eerie situation where weapons and intelligence are for sale, and some members of the national army are devoid of any loyalty to the state.
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FUTURE CONSIDERATIONS: A FEW SOLUTION PATHS
JASON STEARNS
In this second part of the conference panel after a half-hour break, the three panelists offered solution paths and future considerations on the topics tackled in the first half.
In attempting to come up with future considerations, Jason Stearns acknowledged right away that that exercise wasn't simple.
He further said he was glad to find a number of solution paths already contained in the speech of President Joseph Kabila of October 23 to both chambers of Parliament at the end of national consultations.
Here are a three solution paths traced by Stearns:
1) It is imperative that "elite networks" providing support to armed groups be dismantled. But the dismantling of these networks is seemingly a politically intractable problem as some of the politicians working with armed groups do so openly and brazenly. And this begs the following question: how come these troublemakers are never ever nabbed?
2) When dealing with armed groups, give priority to major spoilsports of the ilk of M23 and FLDR (whose forces are now estimated at half of their 2008 strength): Going after them would significantly decrease violence in eastern DRC.
3) Donors have to discard their technocratic point of view and have their ears closer to the ground. For example, the support given to a DRC-government-designed project like the 2009 STAREC (Kivu Stabilization) without encouraging "ownership" by the government was shortsighted; as was defining the period after the 2006 elections as "post-conflict."
KOEN VLASSENROOT
Koen Vlassenroot made the following 4 observations followed by "political responses and considerations":
1) The number of armed groups has been increasing since the 2002 Sun City Agreement. This means that old conflicts are unresolved.
2) There's a big diversity among armed groups in terms of interaction with communities, strategy, and popular support.
3) Armed groups are a form of privatized governance. The outreach of some of those groups go even beyond their local community.
4) Peace efforts have spawned new demands and claims whereas fundamental conflictual problems are left untouched.
Consequently, instead of post-conflict transition, we could be waddling deep in a "failed state" [régime déliquescent] situation.
POLITICAL RESPONSES AND CONSIDERATIONS
1) Political responses must address these observations.
The proliferation of armed groups is the result of the interaction of several variables. Therefore, each armed group needs a "target-adapted strategy" within a global policy.
At the local level, land tenure tensions, often a decisive factor in the outbreak of armed conflict, must be appeased.
While focusing mediation efforts on the short-term, more violent conflicts have to be tackled collectively and land tenure dealt with at the national level.
2) Investing in inter-community reconciliations should be a priority, in "barzas" for example. But barzas have their own problems: some of them are involved in local conflicts. The reconciliation effort must include the "real leaders" of the community, not impostors. They have to also benefit from donors' support.
3) The success of any policy targeting armed groups has to rely on local and state capacity building.
JUDITH VERWEIJEN
Judith Verweijen prefaced her "future considerations" by insisting on the obvious: the army is a complex institution.
And this complexity must be reflected throughout.
1) Good management of integrations of armed groups.
Integration is not a uniformly bad thing. There have been good results yielded by army integrations in Burundi and South Africa for example. Unfortunately, integrations have obtained mixed results in the DRC.
If integrations are to be pursued, however, special attention has to be meritocracy and
training.
Negotiation prior to integrations are often conducted in total opacity, without any parliamentarian oversight. Transparency has to be inserted into this process.
Impunity. Care should be taken to avoid sending the wrong message of repeated amnesties and promotions of offenders.
The conundrum is that there wouldn't be any certainty of convincing rebels to get out of the jungle without some form of impunity.
Strike the right balance in transferring integrated soldiers in order to get at a geographical equilibrium. This could be done gradually as armed confrontations often break out when an armed group is moved from its turf.
Mitigate identity or ethnic tensions within the army.
In sum, integration isn't impossible though in the long term it should be discarded.
2) HUMAN RESOURCES POLICY OF THE ARMY
The Congolese soldier is poorly paid, has no paid leave, and lacks social benefits.
Military spouses often follow their husbands to the frontline where they live in squalid conditions. They do so because they can't get parts of the salaries of their husbands deployed on the frontline if they stay home. This issue of pay is crucial as famished soldiers can't be trained.
Elderly soldiers are still active because the government can't pay their retirement pensions.
TRAINING. Training only reaches an insignificant percentage of soldiers. For example, training programs seldom target leaders of "basic units" that are the hard core of the army.
JASON STEARNS adds that there are two kinds of donors' initiatives for the army: "top-down and bottom-up initiatives" which have obtained mixed results. Mobile tribunals for example are a good initiative. The major problem with those initiatives is that they aren't sustainable and collapse once funds are terminated. Besides, there's no coordination of efforts among donors. Donors' initiatives toward the Congolese police force have proved to be more successful.
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Photo by Alex Engwete
