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Written 15th April

The 19th April marks the ten year anniversary of the signing of the Sun City Agreement, a peace deal aimed to bring about the end of the Second Congo War. The young President, Joseph Kabila, took little over a year in office to negotiate an framework for the end of the conflict, which had raged since 1998, and saw his stock rise as he received credit for catalysing a deal, making Rwandan reticence seem obstructionist at best and belligerent at worst. On one level this praise may well have been deserved, but there is also no doubt that pressure to end the war from the DRC’s Angolan and Zimbabwean allies played a part in Kabila’s decision. After all, his father’s failure to do so may well have cost him his life.

There is a consensus that the Angolan government, even if it did not order Kabila Snr’s assassination, in likelihood knew about it, and were not all that enthusiastic to stop it (Jason Stearns has a good overview of potential scenarios surrounding Laurent Kabila’s murder). What is less in doubt is that Kabila Jnr. rose to the presidency with the assent of the Angolans, Zimbabweans and other Congolese politicians. Mwenze Kongolo summed up the mood of these patrons when he said “We all came to the conclusion that this young man was the one we needed to keep things under control for the time being, until we have a President again”. Kevin Dunn also put it well when he wrote in 2002 that “it appears that [Kabila] has learned from his [father’s] mistake and is far more willing to follow the advice of his Zimbabwean and Angolan backers… This is in no doubt tied to the fact that Joseph Kabila’s survival is clearly in the hands of these external patrons”.

In this context, one where Kabila was clearly dependent on the support of others for his rise to the presidency, it would appear that his position should be far weaker than it was a decade ago, as his “external patrons” have one by one disappeared. Angola’s historic interest in the DRC was a consequence of a civil war mentality, and the UNITA bases in the Congo that resulted from Mobutist support for the rebel group. Since the end of the war in 2002, Angolan interest in the DRC has dissipated. Robert Mugabe was the only foreign head of state to attend Kabila’s inaugration following the 2011 elections, yet rumours about his health abound, and, long before then, Zimbabwean involvement in the DRC was increasingly unpopular as costs rose, lives were lost and the relationship to the Zimbabwean national interest of military involvement in the Congo were unclear. And domestically, the death of Augustin Katumba Mwanke, described by US diplomats as the “power behind the throne” was a huge blow, as he was seen as a key commercial link to the outside world.

Yet Kabila has consistently confounded those who have underestimated him. He carved his own path ever since his first days in office, acting in a statesman-like manner, both towards his allies but also on the broader global stage. As Gérard Prunier has noted, “devoid of a national constituency, he had decided to treat the international community as his powerbase.” And this powerbase is not one that he has been beholden to, nor one which has been static. In van de Walle’s phrasing, in playing the “politics of permanent crisis” he has exercised remarkable autonomy even as his state has demonstrated limited capacity to maintain security, and as such, changes to the mandate or nature of the deployment of MONUC/MONUSCO in the DRC has been largely on his terms, or at least to his favour. Regionally, his rapprochement with Rwanda and Uganda has shown his willingness to shift with the changing geopolitics of the region, and while this flexibility may have been forced on him to an extent, descriptions of him as a “proxy for Rwandan interests” are insensitive to his agency and capacity to evolve with the times, as what constitutes best serves his interests in self-preservation changes. After all, as Prunier has observed, those who assumed that he was a “front” for Angolan interests a decade ago “were in for a big surprise”.

The Sun City Agreement was in many ways imperfect, but also represented Kabila approaching the peak of his international legitimacy, a period which lasted until at least the elections of 2006. At this time he was given the benefit of the doubt, and the problems of the country were assumed by the UN to be solvable once peace and democracy were in place. The five years leading up to elections in 2011 saw a different tone being taken: one of frustration and one of fatigue, as rebel groups previously external to the FARDC were absorbed into it, and still abuses happened at their hands. However, despite a far less hospitable international environment, Kabila seems to be weathering the storm, and has kept one step ahead of his critics by maintaining a coalition regional support for his government, even if its members change. His problems may multiply, however, if, like his father before him, the Rwandans and Ugandans decide that Kabila Jnr is failing to meet their security concerns. Without being able to depend on Angolan or Zimbabwean support, he might find himself very isolated indeed.