How M23 and Congolese army commanders benefited from $57m illegal trade in Kivu
The East African - 11 hours ago
By RICHARD MGAMBA
Posted Friday, July 4 2014 at 11:57
For the 22 years Brigadier-General Sultani Makenga fought in Congo and
Rwanda, he spent most of this time in North and South Kivu, obtaining
connections within and outside the region as well as knowledge on
financing rebellion. TEA Graphic
IN SUMMARY
With earnings from illegal mineral and charcoal trade estimated at $57
million annually, financing the M23 rebellion was easy.
The M23 had a battalion monitoring the charcoal and timber business
and collected money from the traders. Makenga also had a network of
mineral dealers using Kampala and Kigali cities to transact their
business. There was also another network: Arms smugglers within the
Congolese national army. Read Part I of the Congo crisis series: UN
mission in Congo guzzles $1.4b annually as violence spreads
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For the 22 years Brigadier-General Sultani Makenga fought in Congo and
Rwanda, he spent most of this time in North and South Kivu, obtaining
connections within and outside the region as well as knowledge on
financing rebellion.
Having joined the army at the age of 17 as a Rwanda Patriotic Army
(RPA) fighter in Uganda, Makenga who, until February 2012, was a
colonel in the Congolese army, earned experience as a guerilla fighter
in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
His rebellion, he said, was inspired by historical injustices
committed against his people, the Banyamulenge, who had suffered from
the politics of exclusion from the colonial times through the Mobutu
and Kabila regimes.
"My fight is against injustice brought about by the Kinshasa regime,"
Makenga told The EastAfrican. "I have been fighting all these years
because we want peace and stability for our people and our country."
READ: M23 General: Evolution of rebel leader at centre of Congo conflict
The Makenga generation believe that they are victims of a political
conspiracy against the Banyamulenge in Congo, which was first
initiated by the Belgian colonialists.
Presidents Mobutu Sese Seko and Laurent Desire Kabila continued to
perpetrate the historical injustices against the Banyamulenge, Makenga
said.
After fighting for eight years under Laurent Nkunda, a Seventh Day
Adventist evangelist who abandoned the Bible for the gun, in 2009, the
Banyamulenge secured a peace deal with President Joseph Kabila.
Gen Nkunda was captured by Rwandan troops in January 2009 as he tried
to escape a Congolese-Rwandan offensive against several rebel groups
in eastern Congo. Gen Nkunda had seemed "untouchable," commanding a
toughened rebel force that frequently humiliated Congolese troops.
Some Congolese soldiers believed he had magic powers. He had a white
lamb he named Betty, which was believed to "power" his rebellion.
A Rwandan journalist living in Canada told The EastAfrican in Nairobi
how Gen Nkunda postponed an interview with him because Betty was
seriously ill. "We waited for two days in the bush for the interview
because his lamb was sick," the journalist said.
Reporting about the arrest of Gen Nkunda, The New York Times' Jeffrey
Gettleman wrote: "The surprise arrest could be a major turning point
for Congo, which has been mired in rebellion and bloodshed for much of
the past decade. It instantly strengthens the hand of the Congolese
government, militarily and politically, right when the government
seemed about to implode... But it could also empower other, even more
brutal rebel figures like Jean Bosco Ntaganda, Gen Nkunda's former
chief of staff who is wanted by the International Criminal Court in
The Hague for war crimes."
As Gettleman put it, the end of Nkunda's era paved the way for the
emergence of two "dangerous faces": Ntaganda and Makenga, the men
whose rebellion came to haunt Congo as well as the international
community nearly three years after their commander's arrest.
When the Nairobi Peace Accord was signed on March 23, 2009, Makenga
and his former boss, Jean Bosco Ntaganda, agreed to be integrated in
the Congolese army on one major condition: They would remain serving
the Congolese national army in Kivu. But Makenga was suspicious and
unco-operative following the arrest of Laurent Nkunda.
Hidden motives
"We knew President Kabila very well... He was desperate to win, so he
needed a peace deal with the CNDP (National Congress for the Defence
of the People) before the General Election. After the election he had
hidden motives," Makenga told The EastAfrican.
According to the UN Group of Experts, senior commanders in the
Congolese national army FARDC believed Makenga was given control over
mineral-rich areas so as to co-operate with Kinshasa in the
integration programme.
But he attributed this to his negotiation skills.
"I wasn't bribed. I just negotiated for a better deal because I knew
President Kabila and his people very well," he told
The EastAfrican.
When we asked one of President Kabila's top security officials why the
president agreed to give ex-CNDP rebels the lucrative mining areas
just to court them into signing the Nairobi accord, he said: "The
President and the people of Congo were committed to peace, and that is
why we sacrificed our minerals to bring about lasting peace."
The official who sought anonymity added: "We were desperate to secure
peace, but remember desperate times call for desperate measures ... it
was a great gamble, but we had no choice."
Part of the deal -- apart from control of minerals -- was to make
Makenga a colonel in charge of Operation Amani Leo, which was aimed at
fighting and disarming all militias in the Kivu region, including the
Hutu rebels, FDLR.
To control the minerals business, Makenga had his man, Colonel Claude Mucho.
"FARDC officers interviewed by the Group maintained that Mucho had
explicit control and direct financial interests in the gold mine at
Matili and the cassiterite mines at Nkunwa, Nyambembe, Nduma,
Luntukulu and Lukoma," the UN Group's 2010 report says.
But allowing Makenga and Ntaganda in the area in which they had been
warlords for years was a grave mistake, because their power and
support could not be neutralised during the integration process.
"They were integrated theoretically, but practically they remained
active rebels, who used the opportunity to study the strength of the
Congolese national army," the Rwandan military officer told The
EastAfrican
in Kigali. "Neither side trusted the other but, for the sake of peace,
they had no choice."
Following the Nairobi peace deal in April 2009, ex-CNDP fighters
underwent accelerated integration into FARDC and the national police,
but the process lacked transparency.
While the CNDP leadership said it had 5,276 soldiers, the actual
figure was 11,080, according to the UN group.
The ex-CNDP fighters in FARDC were an army inside an army that
received orders from ex-rebel commanders instead of the FARDC top
brass.
But there was no regional or international neutral body supervising
the implementation of the peace accord.
"This was a failure for all of us who participated in the peace
process," said a UN diplomat.
Ntaganda and Makenga decided to go back to rebellion.
But there was mistrust between the two: Makenga viewed Ntaganda as a
liability because of his ICC case and therefore having him in the
newly proposed organisation would tarnish its image.
After Gen Nkunda was arrested and detained in Rwanda, a sharp division
emerged within CNDP. Although Ntaganda was senior, Makenga viewed him
as an outsider.
Colonels Boudoni Ngaruye, Innocent Zimurinda and Innocent Kiaina
supported Gen Ntaganda, while Col Makenga, who was the deputy Amani
Leo commander for South Kivu, retained the support of CNDP and FARDC
officers loyal to Nkunda.
To weaken the Makenga-led faction, Ntaganda, a man referred to as "The
Terminator" for his brutality, launched a series of assaults targeting
prominent local leaders and top soldiers loyal to Nkunda.
READ: The Ntaganda factor in DR Congo conflict
"On June 20, 2011, the most respected leader of the Congolese Tutsi
community, Denis Ntare Semadwinga, was murdered at his home in
Gisenyi... According to human-rights investigators, a group of men,
including a bodyguard of Ntaganda, entered Ntare's home and stabbed
him to death," said the UN Group of Experts in their report. The
killing provoked outrage among the Makenga faction of CNDP.
Then Lt-Col Antoine Balibuno was allegedly assassinated in Goma by
former CNDP officers close to Ntaganda on his way to the general's
home. He was a close member of Nkunda's inner circle during the CNDP
rebellion. At the time of his death, he was in charge of
civil-military affairs in the Amani Leo operation.
Makenga said he recruited all loyal soldiers and by February 2012, he
had about 850 fighters. He then gained the support of the Republican
Forces (FRF), a rebel faction in Kivu under Colonel Michel Makanika, a
warlord.
Makenga's next move was to find political backup for his mission.
"My business was to manage the army, but to succeed we needed more
educated and respected leaders to manage our political affairs,"
Makenga told The EastAfrican.
"We had enough dollars to pay salaries. This money came from our
supporters inside and outside Congo, but we had plans to raise more
money to finance our operations."
The plan was to introduce a toll on all trucks that entered their
territory and on business people who traded there. By October 2012,
Makenga and his troops were earning an estimated $10,000 a day.
But that was not all: Makenga had a network of mineral dealers using
Kampala and Kigali cities to transact their business. But he would not
disclose to The EastAfrican how much this network contributed to the
organisation.
But with earnings from illegal mineral and charcoal trade estimated at
$57 million annually, financing the M23 rebellion was easy.
"Congolese army units are competing among themselves for control of
the mineral-rich areas," the UN group's report said.
There was also another network: Arms smugglers within the Congolese
national army.
After Makenga mutinied and walked away with enough weapons to stage
the war, he continued getting supplies from the smuggling network.
READ: Smuggled $400m Congo gold fuels war
"I have been receiving strong support from the Congolese national
army, and also from some government officials in Kinshasa, who are not
satisfied with the way things have turned out under President Kabila,"
he told The EastAfrican in 2012.
"When the Kinshasa government buys new weapons, I also get a share
through my contacts within the army. The Congolese army is the most
corrupt, weak, divided military in the world."
The UN experts claimed in 2011 that top Congolese army officers were
behind the trade in "conflict minerals." The UN report specifically
named Gen Gabriel Hamis Nkumba, the then second in command of the
army, as the man at the centre of the illegal trade in the east of the
country.
The report quoted President Kabila as publicly stating that "the
involvement of criminal networks within his forces, the FARDC, in
illegal exploitation of minerals has caused conflict of interest in
the army's constitutional mandate."
When pressure mounted over the trade in "blood" minerals, the rebels
turned to the charcoal trade. During our brief stay at an M23
stronghold at Rumangabo, a few kilometres outside Goma town, we came
across dozens of trucks carrying charcoal and timber from the
rebel-controlled areas.
Biggest casualty
The M23 had a battalion monitoring the charcoal and timber business
and collected money from the traders.
In 2010, the UN Group of Experts estimated that charcoal trade in Goma
town was valued at $28 million annually. In Goma, a sack of charcoal
weighing some 90kg was going for $25.
The biggest casualty in this man-made environmental disaster inside
the Congo was Virunga National Park, where rebels and the national
army soldiers were competing for the $28 million trade.
ALSO READ: Africa losing $17bn to logging annually
So, with a network of arms smugglers, control of lucrative mineral
areas, illegal trade in charcoal and timber, a web of businessmen
interested in illegal deals in the Congo, introduction of levies and
knowledge of the Kivu region, Makenga launched a rebellion against the
Kinshasa government for what he termed as "failure by President Kabila
to fully honour the Nairobi peace deal."
By July 2012, when the UN group released its interim report on Congo,
Makenga's army had more than 2,500 soldiers. The M23 had effectively
become the centre of the Congo crisis, especially when the rebels
captured Goma town in November 2012.
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