09.01.1997

Central Africa - a workers’ solution

This article first appeared in Class Struggle, journal of the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International

The current civil war in Zaire is not a product of native barbarism, but a consequence of imperialist domination. This barbarism is a result of both backward capitalism penetration and its inability to develop the economy. In the 19th century the western powers divided Africa into colonies to exploit their raw materials and people. They carved up territories and divided ethnic groups, creating in the process a legacy of rivalry, division and suspicion.

To facilitate their rule, the colonial powers promoted ruling classes out of various tribal elites, and elevated traditional chiefs into local warlords. In order to boost their power, these rulers appealed to tribal loyalties rewarded by patronage and corruption which favoured one tribe against another. So it is not only ancient tribal hostility which is the cause of today’s conflicts. Modern tribalism is a creation of imperialism as part of its indirect method of ruling its former colonies.

The lakes area in central Africa is one of the most fertile and populated zones in the continent. It was also one of the last parts to be colonised. Imperialist dominance came only around one century ago. In that region the pre-capitalist social relations were based on a division between those who had more than 10 cows - the Tutsi, and those that cultivated the land - the Hutus. Germany colonised Rwanda and Burundi until World War I and Belgium colonised Zaire last century and Rwanda and Burundi after World War I. They both promoted a deeper division between these two social layers. A modern racist ideology was developed in support of Tutsi supremacy by administrators and anthropologists. It accentuated the “whitish” character of the Tutsi because they had originated from shepherd tribes in the Horn of Africa and are more Mediterranean-looking compared with the Hutus were based mainly in the old ‘African’ Bantu population.

When the imperialists pulled out during the de-colonisation of Africa after World War II, these new ruling classes were left in charge, administering the semi-colonies on behalf of the former colonial rulers. The legacy of colonial rule was not only the arbitrary geographical groupings of tribes, but economies that had been turned into sources of cheap exports for the world economy. These new states were firmly locked into an international division of labour in which they would produce raw material and agricultural exports, and import machines or finished consumer goods from the west. In Rwanda, for example, coffee was the main crop, accounting for 70% of the farms, and 80% of the foreign exchange earnings. In Zaire, it was the hugely rich supplies of minerals which were eagerly sought by the world economy. Rubber, the main crop in the 19th century, was replaced by cobalt (two thirds of the world’s production) industrial diamonds (Zaire was the world leader), zinc, tin, manganese, gold, silver, iron ore and uranium, etc.

But imperialism is an unstable system and prone to world crises caused by a tendency for profits to fall. Crises mean that capitalism is constantly on the lookout for cheaper raw materials and labour power. During the last period of world crisis from the early 1970s, world prices for products from the semi-colonies in central Africa fell dramatically. The price of coffee fell by half in 1987, causing the fragile Rwanda and Burundi economies to almost collapse.

Unemployment and starvation set in. This in turn brought old and new rivalries to the surface as the masses looked for ways to solve the problems of imperialism.

The latest events in central Africa are therefore the product of this long imperialist history. Imperialism today washes its hands of its rotten past, and pretends that the tribal warfare it created is the product of ‘African tribalism’. It blames the racially selected `political’ classes which it created, and continues to arm to rule on its behalf, for the `genocide’ of Tutsis and Hutus. It claims that these tribal forces are so destructive that imperialism cannot intervene except to pick up the pieces with humanitarian aid. As soon as the aid organisations come under threat, the democratic imperialists wash their hands of the problem.

Therefore it was colonisation and decolonisation process in central Africa that created the conditions which led to civil wars.

In Burundi the Tutsi monarchy remained in power, while in Rwanda it was overthrown in the early 1960s by a peasant Hutu uprising which established a new republic. These two countries are geographically very small but have the highest population density in Africa. Their population speaks the same language (French and Rwandese dialects) and were divided between around 85% Hutu and 14% Tutsi.

In Burundi the Hutus are still second class citizens and the army is still monopolised by the Tutsi. In Rwanda many Tutsi and former rulers left to live in neighbouring countries, where they became discriminated against. The 35 years of formal independence saw constant genocides against the Hutu in Burundi and against the Tutsi in Rwanda. On October 21 1993 the first Hutu-elected president of Burundi was killed after less than 100 days in office. This led to more ethnic violence. Meanwhile, in Rwanda the civil war between the Tutsi Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) and the Habyramina’s Hutu- dominant regime provoked the massacre of more than half a million people (mostly Tutsi and Hutu oppositionists).

In neighbouring Uganda the massacres were even more massive. A very heterogeneous country, Uganda is divided into around 40 nationalities which have very

different languages and religions. Idi Amin, Milton Obote and Museveni between them killed more than one million people during their dictatorships. The RPF was created by the Museveni dictatorship, which has been in power since 1986. Museveni has Tutsi origins and his new army and government was reinforced by the Tutsi émigrés.

When in July 1994 the RPF took power, more than two million Rwandese (one quarter of the population) left the country. Many Tutsis and Ugandans repopulated former Hutu properties. The RPF had little popular support in Rwanda, but its superiority was based on better equipment and logistic support in Uganda. Behind this conflict there is some inter-imperialist rivalry. The RPF was very well promoted in the US and UK media. France backed its former ally Habyarimana, the Rwandese dictator, because it wanted to defend its francophone African region. It was opposed to the RPF, led by English speaking Tutsis and Ugandans.

In Zaire Mobutu has been in power for the last 31 years, overseeing the super-exploitation of Zaire by imperialist multinationals. His personal wealth is equivalent of around one quarter of the foreign debt. In the last six years Zaire has faced a very deep crisis. Mobutu tried to buy off the leader of the radical opposition, Tshikeidi, by making him prime minister. After a period of cooperation, Mobutu sacked him.

Zaire as a united country is almost ceasing to exist. The biggest country in Africa is divided between four regions which have a lot of communication difficulties and which are much more integrated with their neighbouring economies than internally.

The impoverishment and regional division of Zaire is creating ethnic conflicts. The Rwandese émigrés were attacked. The Tutsi communities which lived in eastern Zaire before the European arrival suffered discrimination and expulsions.

Imperialism is afraid that the crisis in Zaire could deepen and lead to an unstable situation. Their response is to form a UN force to oversee stability in Zaire. On the one hand they favour a ‘democratic’ regime over Mobutu’s dictatorship. On the other hand they fear a popular movement for democracy turning into a radical movement. The rebel army which occupied eastern Zaire is led by Tutsi fighters. The Rwandese regime openly supports this movement. The enemies of the rebels accused them of trying to create a single Tutsi-led state which would unite Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and eastern Zaire.

There are some reports which say that the rebels are not exclusively or even mainly Tutsi. They are made up of several currents including that of Laurent Kabila (not a Tutsi) who fought with Lumumba in the 1960s and formed the Parti de la Revolution Populaire (PRP) in 1967. Other groups include the Mouvement Révolutionnaire pour la Libération du Zaire based in theBakuvu region; L’Alliance démocratique des Peuples, founded in 1995 by Andre Kissasse (another non-Tutsi) in the province of Kasai.

The more than one million Rwandese Hutu which survived in eastern Zaire are now returning to Rwanda. Over the last two years they have been forced to leave their homes and live in the most inhuman conditions in disease-plagued refugees camps. Today they are returning to their lands, now occupied by Tutsi or other people, and accept they will live under the Tutsi regime. Is this the solution to the problem? Living under one or other military dictatorship? Some of the left see the Zaire civil war as merely an extension of the Rwandan/Burundi conflict, where the Tutsi are now dominant and backed by the US to introduce a more ‘democratic’ regime in Zaire. They are believers in the liberal ideology that the West can help to ‘democratise’ Africa. For example, our current was created in a fight against the LRCI leaders, who called for the military victory of the US/UK backed Tutsi RPF, which produced the biggest refugee exodus in Africa. The west’s liberal goals are the IMF/World Bank policies of structural adjustment along with “good governance”, a codeword for ‘multi-party’ democracy which also means inter-ethnic harmony. But imperialism, even in its most pious, humane guise, - the church-based, UN-sanctioned aid agency - is the cause, not the solution to the problem

The workers and poor peasants of central Africa have the solution in their hands. They should critically participate in mass demonstrations and uprisings against the Mobutu regime in Zaire and the Rwandan and Ugandan regimes. But they need to organise themselves against the leaders of the rebel movements who are trying to became the new bourgeois dictators.

These new rulers would maintain the right of imperialism to continue to super-exploit the region, and continue the historic pattern of poverty, starvation and new massacres against the toilers or other ethnic communities.

The tragedy in central Africa is that dictators based on one ethnic group can be replaced by another elite. The main social problems caused by imperialism’s dominance and super-exploitation arise from the forms of backward semi-colonial economies, intermingled with old pre-capitalist social relations.

What is needed to overcome these backward pressures is the independent activity of the working class. The multi-ethnic wage workers from the mines, rural states and urban industries should unite in powerful rank and file-controlled unions and councils, which should have their own self-defence committees. Only such united and independent workers’ organisations can lead the masses of small, impoverished farmers in the struggle for democracy and on the road towards socialism. The workers need to win the battle for democracy: for the release of all political prisoners; for workers and popular tribunals to judge paramilitary actions and massacres; for freedom for all parties; for democratic elections controlled by workers’ and people’s committees; for self-determination to all the nations; for the replacement of corrupt armies through workers’ and peasants’ militias and for a constituent assembly. The central African proletariat should fight for a workers’ and peasants’ government that can give the land to the peasants, expropriate the big capitalists and imperialist corporations and cancel the foreign debt to the banks and IMF.