90 - The Other Invasions, III
Unconnected to Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine, equally unprovoked and destructive invasions convulse large swaths of Africa. Islamist militants loyal to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State attack Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger incessantly; al-Qaeda allies keep Somalia, northern Mozambique, and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in daily turmoil; Rwandan-backed fighters pillage the eastern Congo; Ethiopia attacks its own citizens in the north; in Cameroon, Ambazonian separatists battle the state; and in populous Nigeria, Islamic State rebels, home-grown bandits, local secessionists, and a host of other armed dissidents disturb the peace.
This is the third of three connected posts, today’s dealing with Ethiopia, Mozambique and the Congo. Monday’s focused on Somalia. On Friday, we wrote about West Africa and the Sahel.
Mozambique
Cabo Delgado, Mozambique’s northernmost province, just south of Tanzania, is a poor and neglected region with many Muslims and disparate ethnic groups that have long competed for land and water. National governments have long discriminated against residents of the province, withholding access to infrastructure and social services. In 2017, a shadowy Islamist youth group, allegedly inspired by al-Shabaab’s success in Somalia, began killing villagers and threatening the multinational energy conglomerates that only just before had announced the discovery of vast offshore gas and petroleum deposits. The Mozambican government anticipated a great revenue bonanza; unprepared, it soon found itself instead faced with a major insurgency.
Since 2017, the al-Shabab clone that says that it is affiliated with the Islamic State (not al-Qaeda) has killed villagers, outwitting the divided and under-motivated Mozambican army and police, and pinning 4,000 or so expatriate oil and gas workers to a narrow peninsula jutting out toward offshore drilling sites in the Indian Ocean.
This Islamist group calls itself Ahlu Sunna wa Jama (ASWJ), and it, too, (like al-Shaabaab) survives owing to lucrative profits that derive from transferring heroin and other drugs from Somalia southward to South Africa. It also pillages throughout Cabo Delgado.
ASWJ has imposed strict Sharia law on villages and has harassed Pemba, the main city in the region. It controlled Mocimboa da Praia for a period in 2018-2019 and threatened nearby islands. Since 2017, nearly 800,000 people have been forced from their homes throughout the province and been compelled to shelter elsewhere.
At first the insurgents largely evaded reprisals by Mozambique’s corrupt and militarily weak regime. But the Southern African Development Community (SADC) has since late 2021 deployed 2,000 South African, Botswanan, Lesotho, and Tanzanian soldiers in Cabo Delgado, greatly curtailing ASWJ’s attacks. Even more effective against the ASWF have been 1,000 Rwandan troops. Together, the two contingents have managed to reduce the sway of the Islamists throughout much (but not all) of Cabo Delgado province.
Even so, as recently as June, the jihadists beheaded villagers, forced 10,000 from their homes, and attacked an Australian-run graphite mine. Last year, ASWJ ransacked 395 villages, towns, and government installations across northern Mozambique and southern Tanzania. About 4000 civilians have lost their lives since ASWJ began its attacks in 2017.
As in Somalia and the Sahel (see previous posts), indigenous jihadism, however inspired and financed, is difficult for national defenders to extirpate. Even lacking overwhelming firepower and numbers, small local bands of nimble fighters can often outwit their pursuers.
Ethiopia
Ethiopian government forces invaded Tigray, one of its smallest provinces, in 2020, hoping like Putin in Ukraine quickly to bring an upstart set of autonomy-minded dissidents to heel.
Leadership vanity, and Putin-like egotism, motivated what turned out to be an unwinnable incursion. It also plunged Tigray into misery and hunger. A Ghent University research team estimates that up to 100,000 have been killed so far in combat, 200,000 more due to famine, and a further 100,000 as a result of a lack of medical attention. More than 2.5 million people have been displaced, with 60,000 or so fleeing into the neighboring Sudan. Today 3 million Tigrayans still endure hunger; Ukrainian grain may not reach them in time.
The origins of the war in northern Ethiopia are not that complicated. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in late 2020, a year after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, became infuriated that the regional Tigrayan government was defying his refusal to allow a local election, which took place anyway. So Abiy invaded Tigray with overwhelming numbers of federal troops, quickly conquering the province. But several months later the Tigrayans, who had dominated all of Ethiopia politically from 1991 to 2018, and who had officered the national army, regrouped, pushed Abiy’s forces out of Tigray and marched south toward Addis Ababa, the national capital.
Abiy blocked UN food relief convoys from reaching Tigray, putting at least 400,000 Tigrayans at risk of starvation. Hence the righteous drive toward Addis Ababa by the Tigrayans in 2021, Their goal was to oust Abiy, re-start food imports, and end what they considered an unjust assault on their existence, and their legitimacy.
More broadly, Abiy’s attempt ethnically to cleanse Tigray, and to round-up civilian Tigrayans in Addis Ababa and to purge them from commerce and employment across Africa’s second most populous country, left deep scars that will not easily be removed. Indeed, because the Tigrayan war effort was joined in late 2021 by the Oromo Liberation Front and seven more ethnically-based opposition movements from within the country, Ethiopia could easily fracture. That is, Abiy’s ego-driven obstinacy could cause a weak state kept together only by strong leadership under Emperor Haile Selassie from 1923 to 1973, by Marxist dictator Mengistu Hailemariam from 1974 to 1991, and by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and his Tigrayan allies until 2018, to collapse into a heap of snarling ethnicities, with the large Oromo pluralism taking the lead and Somalis following.
As in Ukraine, even invasions by larger and theoretically more powerful conquering legions, often go awry. Today, Ethiopia is unstable, the Tigray, Afar, and parts of the Amhara provinces are still in conflict, and widespread hunger prevails because of Abiy’s interference with World Food Program food convoys.
Democratic Republic of Congo
Literally, 120 or so separate armed groups disrupt the peace in the eastern Congo, especially in the North and South Kivu provinces abutting Uganda and Rwanda. In this century, about 4.5 million Congolese have been displaced by the raids of these 120 militant rebels.
Driving the various uprisings in the eastern Congo are lucrative minerals and the corruption and incompetency of the very distant Congolese government. Goma, the capital of North Kivu province, is 1,644 miles from Kinshasa, Congo’s capital – the same distance as between Washington, DC, and Denver, CO.
Unlicensed artisanal miners pan and prospect for gold in North Kivu and others unearth deposits of coltan from haphazard diggings in both Kivus. Coltan is a combination of columbite (niobium)and tantalite (tantalum), essential for capacitors in all kinds of electronic devices, especially cell telephones. Congo supplies 80 percent of the world’s coltan. Gold is gold.
The resources are fought over, endlessly. And just as Mexican traffickers contest territory and rights to distribute drugs, so the Congolese rebel armies battle to control local resources. Although none of the minerals is found in Rwanda, in recent years it has become a major gold and coltan exporter.
Among the fighting insurgents are two who want something in addition to resource dominance. M-23 is Tutsi-led corps that may be controlled by Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame. He seems to be using M-23 as special legion to attack Hutu militants who fled to the Congo after the Rwandan genocide in 1993, and constituted an anti-Rwandan force. As recently as June, M-23 shot up villages in North Kivu, killing 29. About 200,000 civilians have been forced from their homes.
The other is the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an Islamist group that says that it is part of the Islamic State (this time in Eastern Africa) and allied to Somalia’s al-Shabaab. It trafficks in illegally cut timber, gold, and coltan. The ADF has attacked Uganda and been pursued into the Congo by Ugandan troops. It has killed 6,000 Congolese since 2013.
Trying unsuccessfully so far to preserve the peace in the Kivus and protect vulnerable populations throughout the eastern Congo and especially in the cities of Bukavu and Goma are a hesitant contingent of UN 12,000 peacekeepers and “stabilizers,” and detachments of the largely incompetent Congolese regular army.
Only greatly improved governance in the eastern Congo, more active UN intervention, and the end of Rwandan meddling will bring durable peace to civilians in their millions. Exactly how that will happen is a continuing Congolese, all-African, and international problem with no easy paths to success.