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Le vrai profile de Joseph Kabila – Selon le Washington Post
By Lynne Duke, Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, 5.11.2003
The Troubled Inheritance Of Joseph Kabila
Leader Faces Congo's Past, and His Family's
Congo gained independence in 1960 but, Joseph Kabila says, "Four decades have not really changed that much."
(Jahi Chikwendiu -- The Washington Post)
There are no crocodile shoes, no fat cigars, no flowing whiskey. Nor does President Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo wear paranoia on his sleeve. He doesn't spout ideological dictums, either, or make an art of being inscrutable.
He is not his father, and that has been his most instructive credential. He is not the former Congolese president Laurent Desire Kabila, who vexed the international community with his intransigence, his Marxist rhetoric and his stillborn reform agenda after ousting Mobutu Sese Seko. The elder Kabila was assassinated in January 2001, and his 29-year-old son took his place, elevated by his father's government, becoming the youngest president in the world.
It was a job Joseph Kabila, in Washington this week for a meeting with President Bush, says he never expected. He thought maybe he'd wend his way through the military command, perhaps become a legislator one day when his country's parliament resumed operation. But never in his wildest dreams, he says, did he expect to be called Mister President.
Losing his father was traumatic enough, he says. And then he lost the relatively anonymous contours of his own life. "But that's the meaning of being responsible. You have to make sacrifices whether you want to or not."
Now 32, Kabila is presiding over a tricky political transition that could either place his country on the path of reform and development, or lead to continued fighting in a five year conflict that has been called Africa's first "world war." He sits atop one of the world's most naturally rich but deeply troubled nations -- formerly called Zaire, it is as vast as the United States east of the Mississippi River.
Today Kabila is to meet President Bush for the second time in two years to discuss U.S. assistance for his country's redevelopment effort -- seeking a level of engagement with Washington that his father once eschewed. He also is meeting this week with the U.S. Agency for International Development, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. He is a compact and elegant man. Even while seated in a suite in the Willard InterContinental, his bearing is erect, no doubt from his days as a general in the Congolese Armed Forces. He neither smokes nor drinks. And though unmarried, he is the father of a 3-year-old girl and expects to wed one day. Unlike the bristling and bellicose repartee for which his father was famous during interviews, Kabila speaks matter-of factly and with understatement.
He is not his father, and yet Joseph Kabila is very much a product of the same raucous and quixotic world that produced his father. His rule in Congo, he says, is a continuation of the "revolution" started by Patrice Lumumba back in 1960 and continued by rebel leaders like his father after Lumumba's assassination launched the 32-year Mobutu regime.
Times have changed, Kabila says. "But the objectives of the Congolese people are definitely the same . . . to better the lives of the Congolese people, to make sure that the Congolese people get the destiny of the country into their own hands. . . . Four decades have not really changed that much."
And that is Congo's tragedy, Congo's challenge. The past is always close at hand, almost inescapable. Mobutu was very much a product of the past -- a relic of the Cold War, when Washington paid him handsomely as an ally against communism in Africa. And his successor, Kabila the elder, often seemed stuck in the past, unable to chart a new course after a lifetime spent hating and plotting against Mobutu. Once in power, the elder Kabila promised reform and democratization. Instead, he choked off political activity, jailed opponents and presided over a score-settling regime that targeted Mobutu supporters.
But Joseph Kabila does not publicly criticize his father. He speaks only in general terms of both "the positive things that we did" and "from where we did go wrong, to try to correct the mistakes that we did make in order to move forward." He is trying to do as his father taught him: "Doing the correct thing and pursuing it to the end. He used to tell me that. And I believe more or less it's what I've been trying to do."
With five years of war winding down, Congo has a new coalition government in place, with both friends and foes as lawmakers. These are the young Kabila's successes.
Still, the country's eastern regions, along Africa's Great Lakes, are roiled with sporadic fighting, massacres, mass rape, even reports of cannibalism among some militia groups. It is a war characterized by mass death -- more than 3 million dead, mostly from starvation, since 1998. Kabila does not try to whitewash his nation's
problems.
"It has been documented," he says, referring to United Nations investigations of the atrocities. It is, he says, "not only embarrassing, it's shocking. You're not embarrassed, you are shocked."
The reports only fuel his determination to extend the rule of law to lawless areas, "to move forward." His lead role in his father's revolution came in 1996, when he commanded rebel units alongside troops from neighboring Rwanda, which also wished to unseat Mobutu and root out the Rwandan rebels who'd been hiding in Congo. These combined forces, along with troops from Angola and Uganda, seized Kinshasa, the capital, in May 1997. And Kabila became ground commander of the Congolese Armed Forces in his father's post-Mobutu government. The following year, he went to China for several months of military training. It was in August 1998, while he was away, that the Kabilas' Rwandan comrades launched a second war, in cahoots with Uganda again. In a spectacular national and personal betrayal, the allies who helped Laurent Kabila to power now wanted to unseat him. Three years later, they got their wish when a bodyguard shot and killed Kabila in the presidential palace. When Joseph Kabila took over, he made peace his primary objective. He reached out for dialogue with the rebels and the Rwandan and Ugandan leaders who started this latest war, and he cooperated with African mediators trying to guide the peace process. It has been risky. Though the coalition government was inaugurated in July, it is not certain that it will hang together.
"When I started, quite a lot of people were telling me that I was making a very big mistake," he says. "And I said, I believe this is the way forward and I'm going
to pursue it until the end."
His rule, like his country, is a work in progress. Will he end up another Mobutu – venally corrupt? Will he be another Kabila -- vengeful and inept? Or will he chart a new course? An American diplomat who has studied him describes him as a "cunning" blend of all
these tendencies. You cannot understand men like the Kabilas without
understanding what Congo has been: a country plundered and brutalized under Belgian colonialism through much of the 20th century. Independence came in 1960, under Lumumba, the first prime minister. But freedom was cut short by Cold War machinations and internal ethnic divisions. Lumumba was slain in 1961, and his supporters became rebels. While Mobutu, who seized power through two coups, killed off the rebel leaders, minor insurgents fled to the hills. Among them was Laurent Kabila.
Joseph Kabila was literally born into his father's revolution, up in the rebel maquis, or stronghold, called Hewa Bora, in the eastern Congolese region known as Fizi-Baraka, along Lake Tanganyika. Hewa Bora started as a revolutionary redoubt that even attracted the support in the 1960s of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara. But Che wrote in his published diaries that he left in disgust after only six months because of Kabila's disorganization, his many absences from the front, and his troops' reliance on magic as much as military prowess. The maquis apparently was organized enough to provide education. Joseph Kabila says he was educated through primary level at a school in Hewa Bora. But over time, Congolese historians say, the stronghold degenerated. The senior Kabila became a local trader or smuggler, by some accounts, and turned brutal. Local villagers told The Washington Post in 1997 that Laurent Kabila had his opponents burned
alive. By the late 1980s and '90s, he'd become a revolutionary has-been who circulated within the Pan-Africanist milieu of east Africa.
"We had, as a family, quite a number of phases," Kabila says, avoiding discussion of his father's doings in those days. They lived in Nairobi; in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania; in Kampala, Uganda, where for a term Joseph Kabila attended Makerere University along with his twin sister, Jane, one of his seven siblings.
"I was planning to study law," he says with a tinge of regret. "I wanted to be a really good lawyer." Instead, he's been charged with the task of putting his country back together. He didn't seek the presidency, but he sees it as his duty to serve in this phase of "the revolution."
He says that he is his own political model – informed by the African leadership offered by elder icons such as Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Lumumba, Nelson Mandela, and, yes, his father. For now he is not prepared to say he will be a presidential candidate, should planned elections actually take place in two years. He only offers that he does see himself "going beyond this transitional period" in some capacity.
"What can I say," he shrugs. "I'm doing my job."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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