OK.
Let's begin with a cursory examination of the claim that only humanitarian intervention was tried in the Congo.
That's a...uniquely poor effort at supporting your claim.
First of all, your quoted segment describes the
First Congo War, in which Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, their other allies, and Kabila's extemporized "rebel" forces brought down the decrepit Mobutu regime. (The second war was an entirely different fiasco.) This war was relatively quick; Mobutu's armies were pretty much overwhelmed and lacked interest in fighting. Despite a last-ditch French effort to shore up the Mobutu regime with a mercenary force, Angolan and Rwandan forces seized Kinshasa and forced Mobutu to flee the country, ending the war.
During the war, Rwandan forces were supported in small ways by the American government. USAF cargo planes gave logistical support to the advancing Rwandan mechanized spearheads, which otherwise would probably have stalled out fairly early. But all indications are that the Americans did not actually get anything concrete out of this assistance. There were no mineral concessions of any size to a company that could be called 'American', except to a holding company briefly formed in Arkansas by an African refugee as a tax haven, and who promptly liquidated his holdings by selling the stakes he acquired from the Kabila and RPA governments to larger interests like De Beers.
By and large, the Clinton administration appears to have been motivated by less sexy motivations. One was guilt: the failure to intervene against the Hutu Power regime in 1994 charged American policymakers with an almost unconditional approval of RPA policy, in an attempt to wash away the West's sins. (These were sins of omission, not commission, but so too had been failing to prevent the Holocaust.) Another was the former relationship between Mobutu and the American government, which in the 1970s and 1980s had gotten lambasted in domestic press for openly backing a tyrant purely as a pawn move in the Cold War. The Clinton administration wanted to expunge the Mobutu embarrassment by giving token support to a 'broad-based coalition' of African nations that conveniently already existed. (Much like the Russians accidentally created an anti-Ottoman league in the Balkans to kick off the First Balkan War in 1912, Julius Nyerere accidentally brought the anti-Mobutu coalition together as part of one of his efforts to play African Elder Statesman. As the Russians had thought to use the league offensively against Austria-Hungary as an aggregation to Russian military power, Nyerere saw his initiative as part of strengthening Great Lakes regional ties and insuring that Uganda, Burundi, and Rwanda were all forced to rely on Dar es Salaam for support. As he did so many other times in his career, Nyerere miscalculated, and badly.)
Moving on. The Rwandan-led anti-Mobutu campaign had initially been strongly motivated by Mobutu's efforts to keep control of his eastern provinces, the Kivus. Following the Zairian political reforms of the early 1990s, Mobutu lacked the power to keep order in the Kivus himself, and merely contented himself with keeping all of the regional power interests weak enough to come to him for support and legitimation. When Paul Kagame's RPA crushed the Hutu Power regime in Rwanda in 1994, the already unstable mixture in the Kivus gained a new element, as former
génocidaires fled to the region as refugees - along with hundreds of thousands (as many as two million) Hutu and Tutsi that had survived under the Habyarimana regime.
The RPA was already engaged in "quiet" killings in Rwanda itself. Soldiers enraged by their long exile in Uganda and by the horrors visited upon fellow Tutsi slaughtered Hutu and non-returnee Tutsi alike. The Hutu, obviously, were targets regardless of whether they had backed Hutu Power; many Tutsi who had lived under the regime were branded as collaborators and killed all the same. The magnitude of these killings was a very far cry from the disaster of 1994, but they were still there, if anyone cared to look. (The UN suppressed a report on the widespread RPA killings in 1995-96, and most Western media outlets, insofar as they reported on the atrocities at all, repeated the RPA official line that they were the work of
génocidaires, not the heroic RPA. This picture was complicated by the fact that some
génocidaires really were crossing the border to commit atrocities in Rwanda, then returning to Mobutu-guaranteed safety in Zaire.)
Mobutu supported the former
Interahamwe goons in the Kivus because their very presence made the other elements of the Kivu political mixture less powerful and less able to take over the region for themselves. Furthermore, he assumed that he had French backing (correctly) and American backing (incorrectly), and thought that those two states would protect him from anything the Rwandans could possibly do. Then came the Rwandan invasion, and all that calculus was proved incorrect.
Rwanda saw the new Kabila government as, effectively, a puppet of Kigali. Kabila had lacked any support whatsoever before the RPF invaded the Kivus; he had not even been in the country, and was called in after the invasion started to provide a threadbare justification for the invasion as a "local grassroots alternative political solution" to the grand old man in Léopoldville. He relied, in the immediate aftermath of Mobutu's fall in 1997, on the RPF to keep control, especially in the eastern provinces. And the RPF continued to carry out its anti-Hutu campaign, frequently attacking refugee camps under the observation of NGOs and slaughtering their inhabitants. MSF was the first to give up on the Kivus in disgust, angry about the lack of protection for the camps, with many workers feeling as though all their work was pointless when Kagame's and Kabarebe's thugs might show up one afternoon and massacre all the people they were trying to help.
The reason for the Kigali-Kinshasa split that led to the Second Congo War is somewhat obscure still. Some people blame Kabila entirely, arguing he wanted to strike out on his own regardless of the cost; others claim that the RPA and President Museveni of Uganda had heard rumblings of discontent and wanted to strike first to replace Kabila with the theoretically more pliant Kabarebe. There were other concerns, too, such as Uganda's efforts to make war feed war (and, later, to make war feed the national economy) and friction over Angola's efforts to wipe out UNITA (which was forced to fall back on bases inside the Congo as Angolan forces methodically wiped out UNITA bases within Angola itself).
Those concerns are secondary, however. The main point is that, when the Second Congo War started, the RPA continued to carry out its anti-
génocidaire campaign - a campaign that even if partially justifiable still unforgivably claimed the lives of thousands upon thousands of refugees and condemned millions more to starvation. Of course, other forces in the Congo were responsible for atrocities, too. Kabila and his son could barely keep control of their armed forces (although they did a better job of it than Mobutu had). Equateur became a new and bloody locus of struggle in the second war with the rise of new local warlords, and civilians were caught in the crossfire. And Ugandan depredations, although they were not nearly so coherent as Rwandan ones, were just as bad from a humanitarian point of view.
Nobody in Africa was able to rein in these marauding armies. The African Union is and was a paper tiger (more like a paper chimpanzee, because it barely even
pretends to be anything other than useless). South African-exerted economic pressure did a decent job of forcing the combatants into the Sun City accords in 2002-03 (although Kabila's death and the Bush administration's expressed disapproval off the ongoing fighting played a role as well). But the Sun City agreement, even though it was a remarkable success in that it basically ended the
regular fighting, did nothing to halt the
irregular fighting in the eastern Congo. Nothing since 2002 really has, although many observers chose to mark the end of the conflict with Joseph Kabila's political reforms in 2007. The creation of MONUC and its effective administration by Bill Swing, combined with those reforms, did more to alleviate the humanitarian crisis than anything before it, but even those solutions were basically Band-Aids - nothing lasting.
So your mention of the RPF, Ugandan army, etc. was kind of funny. Those forces were not intervening on
behalf of those concerned about the humanitarian disaster in the Congo. They were, in significant part,
causing it. The West sent billions of dollars in aid to the dozens of NGOs working in the Eastern Congo, but because those NGOs were maintaining camps that were virtually impossible to police and control without the assistance of peacekeepers or regular military forces, gobs of that money went to financing and sustaining the exiled
Interahamwe die-hards and the
génocidaires. And because the West failed to protect those camps in any way, even more of that money disappeared as though it had been thrown down a rathole when the refugees that had been the recipients of that aid were massacred by the forces involved in the war.
That's the point I'm trying to make. Humanitarian aid is one of the most laudable things that people can contribute to. But all the aid in the world doesn't make a lick of difference in the face of armies. You don't just have to deal with poverty, displacement, and the collapse of social networks in these civil wars. You have to deal with the war, too. By and large, the educated West thought that humanitarian aid by itself was enough to deal with the Congo wars and with Darfur. And because of that attitude, people kept dying in droves. Humanitarian aid
must be combined with meaningful political and/or military initiatives in order to have any effect at all.
If you think the US and its regional "partners" in Africa had nothing but "humanitarian" participation in the conflicts in thr Congo (diamonds, et al) or Darfur (oil), then I weep for your naivete.
The last African conflict to be resolved favorably through combat was Angola -- because the foreign combatants were badass Cuban volunteers!
Sent via mobile.
Who's more naïve - the person who insists on a trite, doctrinaire "the capitalist-imperialist We$t is the source of all global problems" narrative, or the one who can actually be assed to read the work of relatively ideologically untainted academics?
The United States got essentially zero mineral benefit from the Congo wars. Again, the only connection during the Clinton administration was so tenuous as to be nonexistent. The only American firm to make any money off of mining concessions in the Congo employed no actual Americans, made its money by
immediately selling those concessions to companies like De Beers that could actually use them, and was merely incorporated in Arkansas for convenience and tax purposes. But at least there's a concrete, solid bit of evidence that the US government supported Rwanda, at least quietly, during the First Congo War.
The Bush administration's policy was almost the exact opposite. Starting in 2001-02, the State Department started sending signals that it was tired of Rwanda's and Kabila's prolongation of the fighting, and sick of the excuses both sides were making. America would stop legitimizing the ongoing bloodshed and start making noises about a peaceful resolution. (These were only noises; sub-Saharan Africa very much took a back seat to Bush's War on Terror. But moral and ideological support remained important, even when unconnected to aid dollars.) Kabila's death removed one obstacle, but Rwanda didn't really stop until more American pressure was brought to bear. The remarkable thing about that pressure is that it came at the moment when the RPF had begun a major new offensive designed to change the calculus of the war. Before, it had focused largely on the Congo River valley itself, and on attempting to retake Kinshasa to put replace Kabarebe with Kabila.
But in 2001, Kagame and the other RPF leaders decided that Rwanda had to prepare for the long haul, and initiated an offensive to the south, to seize the mineral wealth of Katanga and improve Rwanda's financial situation. (The increasing tension between Uganda and Rwanda, which had bizarrely broken out into open violence, also played a role. Rwanda's usual cash cows in the Kivus were under threat from Ugandan forces and could no longer be relied upon.) Kabila's troops had completely failed to prepare for this eventuality, and the RPF swept them aside. But Rwanda halted the offensive anyway, under South African and American pressure. Had the Americans been after mineral resources, would they not simply have continued the Clinton-era policy of backing Rwanda, thereby gaining Katanga's wealth with hardly any effort at all?
And if the Americans are so concerned about oil concessions in Darfur,
why aren't they doing anything about it? Violence is dangerous, destabilizing, and bad for the continued profitable operation of any facility. Surely American oil concessions in Darfur - supposing that they actually existed, and they don't - would be accompanied by an American military intervention, or at least an economic one. But the US State Department couldn't care less about Darfur. When the violence flared up again over the last year or so, where were the Americans?
Never mind, of course, that the Angolan Civil War was won not by the Cubans, but by the MPLA itself. (The vaunted Cuban intervention failed to do much more than wasting Cuban blood and treasure; UNITA remained a powerful force largely on a par with the MPLA-PT into the late 1990s, which is why the Lusaka Protocols happened.) And it did so largely because Savimbi and UNITA were abandoned by their usual backers (especially, of course, the USA and South Africa) as "embarrassing Cold War relics". Backing away from Savimbi was, as far as the Clinton administration was concerned, all part of the same policy as backing away from Mobutu. The MPLA saw its way free to ensuring total victory, tore up the Lusaka accords, and launched an all-out sneak attack on UNITA. Thousands of Ovimbundu were massacred, and Savimbi - who was certainly a disgusting figure responsible for atrocities and the deaths of thousands, but his opponents were just as bad, and at least he did a slightly better job of staying within the peace accords - was driven into exile and then killed.
There was nothing 'favorable' about the end of the Angolan civil war in 2002 other than the fact that it was finally over. If it had ended with the 1994 cease-fire, one might have reasonably called it something of a success - although obviously it would've been better for the war to not have happened at all - but the bloody and scurrilous way that it actually ended did nobody any favors.
Of course, the only reason you think that the end of the Angolan war was a success and all others failures is because the MPLA eventually won, and since the MPLA is a vaguely communist-ish organization it gets an automatic stamp of approval from you. That's not really naïveté; it's more like willful delusion.
Cool Democracy, Bro
