After the successful removal of Lumumba, the West could not afford to leave a country of such a strategic importance in the hands of an unreliable person. They gave preference to a military man, a 35 years old Colonel Joseph Mobutu, who was the Army’s Commander-in-Chief.
Colonel Mobutu took advantage of the political instability that followed the assassination of the democratically elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba34 on 17 January 1961 and with the help of the CIA agent who was involved in what has been described as ‘the most important assassination of the 20th century’ (De Witte 2003), he seized power in a coup d’état on 24 November 1965 (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2002; Peck 2000;
34 For more detail see De Witte, L. (2003) The Assassination of Lumumba, second edition, London: Verso
Young and Turner 1985) and install a dictatorial regime that had no regards to human rights.
Throughout his reign Mobutu was a key ally of the West; despite his bad human rights record he was supported chiefly by Belgium, France and the United States (McNulty 1999:58). The United States provided him with more than 400 million dollars in weapons and military training over 30 years (Savage 2006:9) and France provided military support for more than two decades, especially during the 1970s when competition between the superpowers over the decolonisation of Angola, Mozambique, and white-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa was intense (McNulty 1999).
Because of the military cooperation with the West, Congo had a well-equipped and very professional army and its intelligence services were very efficient although not well governed as they acted in total impunity. The democratic governance of the security forces of the Congo was not a priority for the West. The West was rather more concerned about the fulfilment of the mission assigned to the DRC security organisations in relation to the danger posed by the Soviet Union.
President Mobutu, a political creation of the US and a military strategist, began his reign by establishing a centralised administration so as to reduce the power gained by traditional authorities during the colonial period (Putzel et al. 2008) and to ensure that he has total control of the country. His horizontal elite networks administration reduced the power of long-established local networks because members of this administration were selected mostly from vulnerable ethnic groups.
Mobutu took advantage of these groups because of their political vulnerability and their social status as minorities (Jackson 2007). He also used this strategy for appointments and promotions in the army and intelligence services.
In relation to eastern provinces of the DRC, President Mobutu chose representatives from the minority Tutsi Congolese to be part of the elite networks instead of those from Hutu Banyarwanda35 and indigenous Congolese. One of the most influential members of the elite networks was Barthélémy Bisengimana, a Rwandese Tutsi who was the Head of the Office of the President and who favoured his fellow tribesmen and helped them acquire land illegally (Prunier 2008).
In 1972, under the influence of Bisengimana, Mobutu singed a citizenship decree to grant citizenship to all the Banyarwanda populations with the aim of securing the status of Tutsi minority.
Among the Banyarwandaare those who migrated to the DRC long before the colonial period (Lemarchand 1997), those who belong to the DRC because of colonial division (Mamdani 1998; 2001), those who were brought as labour supply to the agricultural plantations and mining centres through colonial promotion (Huggins et al. 2005; Mamdani 2001; 1998; Lemarchand 1997), and those who arrived as refugees from the political violence in Rwanda in the early 1960s (Lemarchand 1997).
The signing of this decree led to conflicts and division between the Hutus and the Tutsis just as it was correctly perceived by the Hutus and the Congolese autochthones that form the majority of the population in eastern DRC as representing a rise in power of Tutsis. Tutsis have ever since been occupying key positions within the military and political circles of successive regimes in the DRC (Putzel et al. 2008; Nest 2006b, Lemarchand 2003).
Several reforms were implemented by Mobutu during his early times. He transferred the ownership of all mineral rights and land to the state by passing the Bakajika Law in 1966 in order to solve intrinsic conflicts between the customary system of land tenure and the land law
35Banyarwanda are people from Rwanda (Hutus and Tutsis) or people of Rwandan origin. The prefix ‘Banya’ means ‘People From.
system based on individual land ownership that was established during the colonial period (Meditz and Merrill 1993).
He also introduced an authenticity campaign in 1971 leading to the change of the country’s name to Zaire and his own name from Joseph Mobutu to Mobutu Sese Seko Koko Ngbendu Wa Za Banga which literally means ‘the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake’ (History.com n.d.). No Zairian was allowed to have a Western name or to wear a tie.
The authenticity campaign was followed in 1973 by Zairianisation campaign which led to the seizure and nationalisation of all foreign- owned businesses and the passing of a new Land Law, the General Property Law, which enabled purchases of individual land rights from the state, which officially owned all lands (Van Acker 2005; Meditz and Merrill 1993).
These campaigns were political strategies that helped Mobutu and his political elite patrons to gain control of the nationalised businesses for their benefit (Young and Turner 1985) and to personalise both private and public funds, resulting in a notorious kleptocracy (ISS c2008).
At all these periods, the price of copper was very high and this allowed Mobutu to provide good public services to his people. But in 1974 the price of copper, which was the country’s main source of income (Young and Turner 1985), collapsed causing a deep economic crisis. This affected state revenues directly, through nationalised mining companies, and impacted economic and social development thereafter (Nest 2006b). Zaire’s economy began to decline and the country defaulted on debt payments to international financial institutions.
Mobutu was asked to implement reforms in order to overcome the budget deficits through structural adjustment programmes prescribed by the IMF (Zeilig 2009). He partially implemented the reforms by cutting
expenditure in ‘non-productive’ sectors such as education and health but continued to default on debt payments. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund then demanded the privatisation of the Zaire’s two main state-controlled mineral conglomerates - La Société Minière et Industrielle du Kivu (SOMINKI) and La Générale des Carrières et des Mines (GECAMINES) in order to qualify for aid.
Mobutu refused to privatise the mineral economy when all countries of the world under the Washington Consensus of the Breton Woods Institutions and the US Treasury were required to open up markets for free trade. It was then decided to refuse any loan or credit to Mobutu’s government which, by the late 1980s, has increased its external state debt to 8billion US$ (Nabudere 2002:3).36 Mobutu refused to privatise the economy at the time when a new conglomeration of Anglo- American corporations was interested in the mines of Zaire. This gave good reason to the financiers and those mining interests to require change in that country.
The effect of the economic collapse was, hence, significant (Zeilig 2009). The civil servants and soldiers were poorly and irregularly paid and the value of the meagre earnings of the population was dramatically reduced by inflation forcing the population to live at subsistence level.
To avoid any internal pressure, Mobutu changed his strategy and abandoned the horizontal elite networks. He formed vertical networks based on ethnic and regional affiliation in order to maintain his power (Putzel et al. 2008:vi). Unfortunately, this shift in strategy gave rise to regional strongmen or ‘warlords’ who gained control over mineral production and trade through their connection with him and control of coercive forces (Nest 2006b; Reno 1998) and whose groups later expressed resistance to the Congolese states and appropriated themselves sovereign functions (Beswick 2009:338).
36This amount comprised debt inherited from Belgians totalling 5 billion plus 3 billion Mobutu had added since he took power in 1965.
Local forces that had been marginalized by the Zairian state were also manipulated by neighbouring countries to claim the redrawing of the boundaries for greater autonomy since their security and existence could no longer be guaranteed from Kinshasa.