Drivers of conflict in eastern DRC

Although most international attention has been focused on the ‘major cleavage’ – the fight between the government and the larger foreign-supported armed groups such as the M23 and the FDLR – conflict in the east is multi-layered and actual violence is often a result of local drivers of inter-community tensions. The wider conflict is a result of a decade of regional dynamics interposing themselves on a weak state and community tensions. As Autesserre (2010) puts it: ‘…the causation went both ways: local tensions created national cleavages, but, at the same time, national factors set the stage for local conflict to erupt into large-scale violence’.[33] These local tensions are rarely engaged with in a sustainable, context-specific manner, and as a result eastern Congo has remained fertile ground for outside-supported rebellions.

There is a complex interplay of drivers of local conflict.[34] An all-pervasive issue in Congo is neo-patrimonialism.[35] Everyone, at all levels of the country, needs to use whatever means they have available, be it through political clout, weapons, labour or money, to feed their mutually obliging support networks. This has led to a fierce, zero-sum competition for resources. The state itself is a prized resource – with positions in the army and police particularly valued as they hold the means of violence – and the state is used by these support networks for personal gain. This process has hollowed out the state and security forces, and it is in the interest of elites to keep institutions as weak and divided as possible to be better able to manipulate them. The state, in the end, may hold many of the solutions to the conflict but is also part of the problem and an actor in the generation of violence. The years of dog-eat-dog competition and war have led to a particular mindset among the population. As people live in a constant state of insecurity and cannot rely on the state, they grab chances to survive wherever they can, and rely on small, ethnic networks of trust. The more a group is threatened (or perceived to be threatened), the more it will define its identity in exclusive terms and, potentially, in opposition to others. Feelings of humiliation are common and easily manipulated by political entrepreneurs. As many people believe that violence has become the only effective means of change in the DRC, violent inter-ethnic mobilisation can come very quickly.[36] These tensions are further worsened by socio-economic pressures and poverty. Few Congolese have the opportunity to make more than a subsistence living through agriculture, and with demographic growth, the pressure on land is increasing. Many of the tensions above crystallize around land and identity: fertile land is not only a means of survival but also considered a sensitive tribal heritage, yet it is divided by elites for clientelistic purposes. Armed groups and political entrepreneurs use these tensions around land and identity to mobilise people against ‘interlopers’ from other communities. The availability of valuable natural resources can provide further impetus to this dynamic.

Critically, the way in which this interplay of neo-patrimonialism, people’s mindsets, socio-economic pressures and the availability of natural resources interacts and leads to violence differs fundamentally from one zone to the next. Conflict in eastern Congo can be different, literally, every square kilometre. People’s resilience to violent mobilisation depends on the history of the area, the role local communities play in the distribution of power, their relationship to the state and sometimes on supposedly small issues such as whether the commander of the local army contingent is from the ‘right’ tribal group or not. It also depends on how these local tensions interact with the ‘national cleavage’: whether a community has traditional ties to either the ‘Rwandophone’ CNDP or the M23, or the by now largely localised FDLR; whether these groups, or the government, has done the community wrong in the past; or, more often, whether one of these organisations is willing to support the people in question with access to land, resources, financial means and weapons. In the end, people fight for a wide variety of reasons, whether they are in the FDLR, the CNDP, the armed forces or a local self-defence group. Some do it to help their communities. Some are pressured into fighting, particularly in the FDLR. Many do it because they see few ways to gain access to resources other than through violence. In other words, mobilisation is a highly context-specific process.

This makes it all the more remarkable, as we shall see later in this chapter, that a one-size-fits all approach of ‘restoring state authority’ has been proposed by the government and its partners as a solution to these widely differing contexts.[37] The idea is that where the state provides protection and services, people are less likely to rely on armed groups for the same.Yet this ignores the individual experiences people have had with the state. People do not automatically prefer armed groups to state actors – this is highly context-specific, and many Congolese would prefer not to have to rely on non-state actors for services and protection.[38] However, the state they would like to see ‘restored’, is one that actually functions. People are not ‘pro-state’ or ‘pro-armed group’; they are rather consistently ‘pro-themselves’, and in an insecure environment, they will grab chances where they can to survive – even if this means resorting to violence themselves. Kalyvas (2006) and Verweijen (2013) have shown how local people, customary authorities and businessmen actively collaborate and make use of armed groups and the army and police, depending on who is in control of an area. Violence is a faster solution than going through legal channels, and people have engaged in illegal business and protection rackets with armed actors to safeguard their positions and generate incomes.[39] Few of these issues will be solved by a technical state- and security-focused approach. As we shall see, however, the government has its reasons to propose exactly that.

Governance: neo-patrimonialism, institutions and civil society

The Congolese political system, as mentioned, is structured along neo-patrimonial lines: personalised networks use the state for their personal gain in a zero-sum competition with other groups, and the state is purposely kept weak and divided so it can more easily be manipulated. There is a tendency to equate neo-patrimonialism with a complete lack of political willingness to make any changes or reforms, or even care very much about what happens outside elite circles in Kinshasa. In reality, this situation is not quite so black-and-white. There is no general unwillingness for any type of reform or change.[40] The status quo harms the government in some cases as well: for example, the lack of capacity inside the army has seriously damaged the popularity of President Kabila in the east.[41] Depending on particular interests, there can be ‘good enough political willingness’ to make incremental changes here and there, although the system is so opaque that it is difficult for an outsider to see where these changes could be made. The stereotype of aloof politicians in Kinshasa who care about little other than their own pockets needs to be nuanced. Many power brokers are not oblivious to the harsh circumstances in which their countrymen and women live, but their options to change the system are limited. The first and overarching interest of elites is to keep the system divided for their own benefit and expand the influence of their networks – and only then do they have the opportunity to do things for the general good. It is more important that the boat stays afloat than that it goes somewhere, as it were. This is a dog-eat-dog system, and elites are unlikely to risk their hard-won positions for abstract ethical ideas.[42]

Although neo-patrimonialism is an all-pervasive influence in Congolese governance, there are nuances: first, there is a shortage of capacity to administrate the Congo’s territory; and second, ‘ordinary Congolese’ are not merely victims of elite machinations, but also play a role in neo-patrimonial governance.

The fundamental lack of capacity to manage the eastern provinces plays out at the institutional as well as the professional level. At the institutional level, the DRC is not really a controlled, coherent geo-administrative entity but rather exists in a sort of ‘archipelago statehood’, with the central government directly controlling mainly urban population centres and high-value economic enclaves such as mining centres across its vast territory. With the costs associated with distance and few means of communications, the government has little reliable information about what is happening at local level, and vice versa. Moreover, even if the government knew exactly what was happening, they would not have the resources to address the situation. The 2014 national budget was around US$9bn, positively tiny for a country the size of the DRC.[43] Public finances seem to exist mainly on paper: disbursements are impossible to track and corruption is rampant. The Congolese bureaucracy is highly centralised, which has removed any sense of initiative from the lower levels of the state apparatus. It often seems that no one is able to take a decision without having it checked off with a higher level of authority first: the buck is constantly passed. As most forms of executive power have been concentrated in the offices of the President and Prime Minister, few ministries dare take the initiative to push through complicated activities that require long-term planning or cross-ministerial coordination.[44] As a result, there are enormous bureaucratic delays in getting anything done.

These problems of institutional capacity are compounded by professional capacity issues. State officials have few incentives to do ‘proper’ government work. They wouldn’t really know where to start: there is little strategy-making or priority-setting in government institutions. Ministers and other officials bring their own entourage with them and make all the decisions, often with little regard to what their predecessors might have agreed to. When ministers change, they take their institutional memory with them. There is not much of a financial incentive to do proper government work either. State officials are barely paid, but salaries are too low to live on in any case, and mainly serve as a ‘bonus’ that buys loyalty to the state.[45] State positions are mainly coveted because they provide a stable platform from which to make an illegal income: Congolese need to pay to have their documents stamped, to get married or simply to not get arrested on bogus charges. Staff are not judged on their performance, but on how much money they kick back to their superiors, who keep them in their position in exchange, a system the Congolese refer to as rapportage.[46] This has led to a pronounced ‘short-termism’: officials try to get as much as they can out of their position for as long as it lasts, so are more focused on day-to-day gains rather than long-term vistas, which they may never be a part of. Congolese officials also tend to have fundamentally different mindsets from their international partners, which is a constant source of cross-purpose communication and frustration. This is often a matter of background and education. Many of the government’s experts are part of the urban elite, are not always knowledgeable about conditions in the countryside, and have had little training in conflict transformation or innovative development solutions. International partners tend to come to the government with complex theoretical frameworks in a society where communication is primarily spoken rather than written, and implicit rather than explicit. Officials have few incentives to ‘rock the boat’ and risk their positions by actually naming sensitive issues on paper – better to keep things open to interpretation. Dealing with these communication problems takes time and patience, and international partners are often plagued by deadlines. They often feel that unless they take state officials by the hand and push them hard, or work around them, nothing gets done. This makes Congolese counterparts feel patronised and only worsens their disengagement.[47] In all, the very system that is supposed to be in charge of reconstructing the country and building peace, and the foremost partner of international organisations, the government, is one of the least objectively capable of doing so.

It is also important to understand that what happens in the DRC happens not only because of elite interests, but because of the participation of many ‘ordinary’ Congolese in the maintenance of neo-patrimonial governance. The somewhat romantic notion of a ‘bad government versus innocent people’ needs to be deconstructed. We have already seen how Congolese are involved in the generation of violence at local level, but they also play a role in sustaining conflict because of what they do not do, which is to act as critical citizens and as a civil society counterweight to elite ambitions. There is little that elites cannot co-opt or bribe their way out of quite easily. The media is starved of resources and writes on demand for political interests. The Congolese rumour-mill and conspiracy-thinking is given a free rein.[48] Congolese non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are often not much better in holding elites to account. Many supposedly independent NGOs are part of clientelistic structures, act as springboards into politics or are mouthpieces for ethnic groups.[49] Some of the most critical NGO representatives have gone over to the government’s side when offered official positions. The wild growth of NGOs in eastern Congo is not always a reflection of a sense of civic duty towards suffering compatriots, but an economic reaction to the sizeable ‘development industry’ that has grown over the years. Congolese NGOs elbow their way into meetings and adapt their mandates and (sometimes purely hypothetical) activities depending on the development craze of the day to find a way to get access to international funds. None of this is likely to make civil society a strong counterweight against elite ambitions. A notable exception is the Catholic Church, one of the most powerful institutions in the country, which has taken a critical position against the centralising tendencies of the government.[50]

Finally, democracy has not done much to improve elite accountability either. There are few political parties that run on a policy agenda and are not ethnically based, and votes are often bought.[51] In general, people have very few expectations from their politicians; the general consensus seems to be that fraud is inherent in the political process.[52] This is perhaps why the anger over the ‘stolen’ elections of 2011 led to resigned shoulder shrugging rather than large-scale demonstrations. Up until early 2015, there had not been much of a culture of protesting against the state. People seem to have had little confidence that they were capable of changing things by themselves and preferred to wait for outside forces to change the system.[53] Outside the (co-opted) NGO structures, there are few social networks that can mobilise people across communities, and an independent middle class, that usually forms the nexus of protest movements, hardly exists. The elites, despite their internal differences, are also united in maintaining the status quo. As such, a ‘Congolese spring’is quite unlikely.[54] A notable exception was the large-scale protest that broke out against the government’s attempts to change the constitution in early 2015. The protest movement was student-dominated and de­centralised, and a promising sign of critical citizenship. However, it’s too early to say whether it has set a precedent. One of the reasons the movement had such an impact was because there were strong divisions in the governing coalition at that time, and some of these elites openly backed the protesters in parliament.[55] The government has cracked down on any sign of civic protest since then.[56]

‘Peacebuilding’ to strengthen state control

The incentives and dynamics above have largely influenced how Congolese authorities define solutions to the crisis. As there is little capacity or willingness across all levels of government institutions to develop transformative solutions to the crisis in the east, and civil society is too divided or co-opted to provide pushback, agenda setting is undertaken from the top down and largely dominated by the elites’ patrimonial incentives, which are not always aimed at having real societal impact. Over the last few years the government has produced several overlapping frameworks and strategies for stabilization, peace consolidation, disarmament and demobilisation, and security sector reform. Taking the most relevant of those frameworks, a few telling similarities stand out.[57] First, none of the frameworks has a conflict assessment or theory of change worth mentioning. They briefly mention the presence of armed groups and then launch into a long list of required activities. Second, there is an emphasis on expanding the state into administrative and security ‘vacuums’. And third, support is requested mainly in terms of development hardware (roads, buildings, energy), equipment (transport, communications, agricultural inputs) and training, rather than for socially transformative issues such as inter-community dialogue, civil society strengthening, and oversight or improving state-society relations. As we shall see, these frameworks serve not to generate positive social change but to steer international support towards expanding the state’s territorial control and influence.

A first priority of the central government is to eliminate by force anything it perceives as a threat to regime stability. The clearest threats are what the government considers to be ‘foreign’ rebel forces, which it cannot easily control through patronage, for example the Ugandan-led ADF, and especially the ‘Rwandan’ CNDP, and later the M23. The activities of these groups have a negative effect on the government’s legitimacy across the east. There can be no discussion of the (sometimes legitimate) grievances these groups represent as these may shed a negative light on the nature of the state’s engagement with the area; they can only be stamped out militarily.[58] The former Rwandan genocidaires of the FDLR are a special case, as they are formally an illegal armed group but in practice are long-time collaborators of the Congolese army, and a tool against Rwanda and its supposed interests in the east.[59] Other security issues are less urgent and can be dealt with in other ways. Grassroots grievances that local self-defence groups claim to represent are rarely taken seriously, and these groups are sidelined as ‘bandits’. These groups can be bought off, integrated into state security structures or, in times of crisis, kept on hand to mobilise against ‘foreign’ armed groups.[60] The emphasis on military operations also provides a way to control the FARDC. The armed forces hold the means of coercion, and need to be ‘fed’ so their political sponsors do not lose control over them. An effective way to do so is to give the army a role in controlling lucrative terrain in the eastern provinces.[61] Military commanders do not answer to civilian authorities in the provinces and operate with practical impunity. Discussions about military checks and balances are muzzled by presenting the east as existing in an open-ended ‘state of emergency’ that requires the FARDC to operate at full strength, with no time for reforms. This way the armed forces are kept content within the clientelistic system, not too weak, but not too strong either. Commanders may compete among each other, but there are no threats of the army uniting or perhaps even attempting a coup. In the meantime, the government is kept safe by the Republican Guard, which consists largely of loyal Katangans from the President’s clan and is well equipped and paid.

In line with these interests, the government has requested security sector support from the international community mainly in terms of training, material and logistics. The army reform plan of 2008 (which is still active) reads like a US$686m shopping list for army, navy and air force equipment, and says little about improving command-and-control, parliamentary oversight, civil-military relations, or fighting impunity.[62] The internal reform of the army is considered to be a no-go area for foreign partners.[63] The government seems to tolerate the peacekeeping mission, MONUSCO, largely for the support it gives the FARDC with logistics, rations, transport and, when required, fire support from its artillery and helicopters. Donor coordination around security issues is actively countered and the presidency has prioritised army training with separate bilateral donors. This ‘train-and-equip’ approach to army reform has had little impact on the continuing low combat capacity of the FARDC so far.

A second priority is to expand the state into the countryside, opening up the hinterland to state services and making a singular administrative model take root across the country. This is, of course, a legitimate goal: a state should be in control of its own territory and cannot be administered through a patchwork of different local governance models. There is, however, a flipside to this ambition. By expanding into isolated parts of the country, the GoDRC may also be trying to increase its control over sources of patronage and income, making customary local authorities more dependent on the formal political-bureaucratic chain of command.[64] Customary authorities have significant authority and legitimacy at community level, raise their own taxes and divide land between tenants. Depending on where they are in the patrimonial system, they use their competencies to leverage their power vis-à-vis the state. It is only logical that the state reacts against this tendency, but it seems Kinshasa is trying to force a singular model on very different communities, who have their reasons not to trust the state as a neutral arbiter.[65] A gradual approach may have been better received, but the government is not wasting any time. ‘Peace consolidation’ means, more than anything else, ‘consolidation of the state’ to Kinshasa.

This interest in strengthening control over sources of patronage has shaped the government’s discussion with its development partners. Like security sector support, the restoration of state authority is presented in a technical manner, requiring infra­structure, equipment and training more than oversight and monitoring. A phased approach is promoted: first roads to rural centres, then buildings and equipment, then training; once these preconditions have been met, state agents can be deployed.[66] The government dictates the pace and preconditions for the roll-out of the state this way and can speed up or delay the process where it sees fit. For example, Kinshasa has often moved faster on deploying the police across the countryside, an armed branch of government influence, than it has done on judges and judicial staff.[67] The need for better infrastructure is legitimate, as state agents often operate out of little more than shacks in the countryside and have few means of transport and communication. However, the emphasis on infrastructure and equipment perhaps also serves the purpose of visibly underlining the state’s presence to local communities and showing ‘who is in charge’. The government prioritises the presence of the state over the content of that state; once buildings are constructed and training has been given, there seems to be little attention paid to how state functionaries will actually engage with local citizens. The point is rather to add layers, structures, decision-making bodies, offices and staff functions – each layer with the possibility of multiplying transactions, increasing control and deriving revenues from the process.[68]

A third priority is to present broad socio-economic development programmes as a catch-all solution for a range of complex problems. Providing jobs to as wide a swathe of the population as possible is supposed to be the solution for all types of conflict, as armed groups can arise wherever there is unemployment.[69] Kinshasa has been hesitant about donors’ emphasis on small-scale recovery programmes that target local conflict dynamics in the eastern provinces, as being ‘discriminatory’ against the rest of the country’s suffering people.70 In principle, the government’s plea for jobs and the spreading of benefits is understandable. Again, however, there are subtle differences to note. At a technical level, the government’s development priorities usually take the form of ‘hardware’ (transport, agriculture, schools, water pumps, etc) but do not clarify how such infrastructure will create jobs and subsequently strengthen cohesion and reduce conflict, especially as discussions do not take place with the communities that are meant to benefit from these works. There are few labour market analyses that project objectives are based on, let alone context-specific theories of change. Moreover, and perhaps more urgently, at a political level, development programmes have been used as a tool to buy loyalty from certain groups. There have been frequent attempts to push development projects into areas that are important for electoral or strategic reasons, or where there are strong customary authorities to co-opt. This was particularly apparent when the I4S (about which more in Chapter 4) started developing new projects in 2011, an election year. Various authorities pushed the strategy hard to develop projects for areas that were chosen more to give them a chance at an electoral seat than because there were urgent stabilization needs there.[71] The government is happy to receive funds for post-conflict recovery activity but is less keen to actually use them for that purpose.

It is difficult to see how Kinshasa plans to ensure that these activities contribute to peace: whether there will be a government budget to operationalise or maintain struc­tures, how international programmes will ‘fill gaps’ or how impunity and corruption will be curbed. However, it is not easy to have a discussion about ‘proper’ development planning with the central government. The international community has little leverage to change the way the government operates, something what will be seen in the next chapter. Tough-sounding measures like cutting back development funds are more likely to negatively impact on the local population than on the elites who call the shots but personally do not feel the sting of aid conditionality. The government doesn’t need Western donors the way some other fragile states do: Congolese elites make a good income from their patrimonial networks and international corporations are happy to invest in the mineral sector without asking difficult questions about human rights and political reforms.[72] Kinshasa is also good at ‘talking the talk’: all the laws and frameworks for post-conflict engagement are there, but implementation dies a death by a thousand cuts: the government adds framework upon framework, does not attend working groups, prepare budgets or share information, leading to endless delays. Kinshasa also uses the international partners’ aid commitments against them. Quoting the Paris Principles for national ownership of development aid, the government says it has repeatedly informed donors of its priorities (special interest-serving as they may be); therefore, if donors do not provide funds to implement those priorities, it is donor’s fault if the peace process loses momentum.[73]

The particular neo-patrimonial interests behind the government’s agenda for stabili­zation and peacebuilding are further revealed when Kinshasa’s priorities are compared with those of some communities in the eastern Congo. Population surveys by the Harvard Humanitarian Institute over 2013-14 have shown how these communities promote a more holistic approach to peacebuilding than the government does.[74] The origins of the conflict were seen by many people as exploitation of natural resources and poverty (so far in line with the government) but they also emphasised struggles for power at local level, ethnic divisions, and access to land: a notably more ‘localised’ conflict assessment than that of Kinshasa. To bring about lasting peace, people also prioritised ‘soft issues’ more than the Kinshasa-preferred military response: i.e., encouraging inter-ethnic dialogue (as a first priority), establishing the truth about the conflict, fighting corruption, and promoting accountability and justice. Having a dialogue with the armed groups is mentioned as well as using force against them. Projecting state authority across the eastern provinces may not receive an unequivocal welcome either: communities doubted the government’s commitment to improving security and bettering their lives, a trend that had actually worsened since 2008. Communities are in favour of a bottom-up prioritisation process rather than broad frameworks ‘parachuted’ in from Kinshasa which they never had a hand in developing.[75] Not surprisingly perhaps, local people’s voices have largely been left out of the discussion.

To summarise, the government sets out a technical and non-political approach for peacebuilding that mainly serves the purpose of extending its control over sources of political and economic patronage and have little to do with the root causes and drivers of conflict in the east. Very importantly, these incentives have not fundamentally changed over the last years. There is little willingness to change the status quo, even if it is harmful to many people in the eastern provinces, as it touches upon too many interests of decision-makers inside the country. This is why the cyclical engagement with the eastern provinces should not come as a surprise to longer-term Congo watchers, nor should the new cycle of disengagement and power consolidation after the defeat of the M23. The foremost international ‘victim’ of these cycles of disengagement is the long-embattled peacekeeping mission, MONUSCO. Over the last few years, the mission has been pushed back and forth by the government, and has been heavily criticised by civil society and NGOs for it supposed lack of effectiveness. Why isn’t MONUSCO more pro-active, innovative and tougher with the GoDRC? This has everything to do with the enormous constraints the mission has to deal with. We will turn to this next.