KIVU: LAND OF CONFRONTATION

National Context

Before addressing the region that is the focus of this chapter, the situation prevailing in the mid-1990s at the national Zairean level must be summarised briefly. By the early 1990s, the Zairean state had virtually disappeared as a consequence of both internal and external factors. The external element was twofold. On the one hand, international aid policies underwent a dramatic change in the 1980s. In the context of the neo liberal philosophy, structural adjustment programmes imposed on African states both diminished the redistributive capacity of regimes, thus threatening the survival of clientelist networks, and impoverished the populations even more than before, as well as further curtailing public spending and reducing the relevance of the state. De Villers offers a telling figure of this shrinking of public finance: between 1982 and 1985, the wage bill of the Zairean public sector decreased by one-third and in 1985, the purchasing power of civil servants had dropped to between a third and a quarter of its 1975 level. On the other hand, the transformation of the international scene after the end of the cold war allowed donors to impose (or at least attempt to impose) conditionality policies aimed at democratisation, respect for human rights and good governance. Although these policies were soon weakened or even abandoned, they undermined the position of incumbent regimes and engendered a great deal of instability, in particular, in countries such as Zaire that resisted the changes wanted by the donor community. The Bretton Woods institutions and other donors ‘suspended’ their aid to Zaire in the early 1990s.