The Bleeding Heart of Africa

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Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni had similar designs on Congo. Ugandan troops have been supporting a second group of Congolese rebels eager to remove Kabila. Museveni insists his intentions are peaceable. As he appeared on television last week describing his army's hunt for the Bwindi killers, he was polished, global and sophisticated. Museveni takes pride in his soldiers and insists their presence in Congo is a stabilizing force. They train the Congolese rebels. They turn over any mines captured to the rebels so that they can buy the hearts and minds of their fellow Congolese.

But Museveni's generosity hasn't stopped him from exporting more Congolese gold last year than any other nation in the region--trade he swears was legitimate. Congo's civil war has destroyed what was once a promising personal alliance between Kabila and Museveni, men who seemed to embody a new kind of progressive African leadership. "Museveni is a nigger like Mobutu," Kabila says of his onetime ally. "He's an exploiter." Says Museveni: "Kabila was always weak, but I didn't know he would also be so treacherous."

Museveni says he still dreams of building a road from Uganda to Kisangani, fathering a Uganda-Congo economic and military alliance that would be among the strongest forces in Africa--an idea that is a nightmare for other African states.

It is that jockeying for political and economic advantage that has splintered the central-African alliance. Oil-rich Angola, under the leadership of Jose Eduardo dos Santos, has supported Kabila since they began fighting together to unseat Mobutu at the end of 1996. Namibia, in support of Angola, has sent a small force to support Kabila. Zimbabwe's leader, Robert Mugabe, has sent 10,000 soldiers to Kabila's assistance. In return, Kabila has promised Zimbabwe a slice of Congo's economic pie: lucrative contracts with Congo's mining conglomerate and the protection of investments by Mugabe cronies.

As peace in Congo slips out of reach, leaders like Mugabe and Museveni find the stability of their regimes wrapped up in Congo's war. The real fear is that the fight inside Congo will become a fight for Congo, a struggle to carve up the nation and assign new borders. Explains Johan Peleman, director of the Belgian-based International Peace Information Service: "The longer the war lasts, the more politically and economically involved the players become in the territory they are occupying." A year ago, that involvement was a hopeful guarantee of peace. Now it seems to be taking Africa down an unfamiliar and dangerous path.