wfn.org | Congolese and U.S. Church Leaders Address Post-War Anxieties of

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Parishioners 17-June-1997 
 
4256  Congolese and U.S. Church Leaders Address Post-War Anxieties of 
Parishioners    
 
      by Alexa Smith 
 
LOUISVILLE, Ky.-- Acknowledging that elation is turning into anxiety for 
many Congolese in the new republic, Presbyterian church leaders there -- 
and their overseas partners here -- are taking a wait-and-see stance on 
what to expect as the fledgling government of new President Laurent Kabila 
establishes itself. 
 
     Anxiety -- virtually every one says -- is the expected emotional 
fallout of the wild euphoria that accompanied Congo's stunningly short 
civil war that exiled its much-despised dictator Mobutu Sese Seko and 
installed Kabila as president three short weeks ago. 
 
     But the uneasiness -- and outright fear -- among Congolese now is not 
so easy to dismiss. 
 
      Too many remember experiencing "liberation" once before, only to find 
themselves governed for the last 32 years by a tyrannical military and 
political despot who bilked billions out of Congo's rich mineral deposits, 
while letting the nation's infrastructure collapse into ruin and its people 
into poverty.  So the decision of Kabilia's Alliance of Democratic Forces 
for the Liberation of Congo (ADFL) to ban other political parties and to 
not grant Mobutu's most powerful democratic opponent, Etienne Tshisekedi, a 
position in the new government brought back old worries. 
  
     But crackdowns on demonstrators protesting that decision -- combined 
with rumors of militarily authorized revenge-killings of Hutu refugees in 
Congo jungles by powerful Tutsis in Kabila's movement -- brought up new, 
and unexpected, worries.  And church leaders are finding themselves -- here 
and there -- living in the delicate tension of being a voice of conscience 
to a government that, they hope, will implement democracy as it has 
promised by 1998 and will rein in the military, as they, simultaneously, 
try to remind people desperate for change that authentic political change 
takes time. 
 
      Fear hit Presbyterians hard when the dead body of a young male 
protester was taken to one of Mbuji-Mayi's Presbyterian churches in late 
May after soldiers allegedly fired into the crowd, killing at least eight 
people. Mbuji-Mayi sits in the heart of the Kasai region, which is 
Tshisekedi's homeland, and, is a major center for Presbyterian ministry. 
Members there were already rattled by the arrest and rumored incarceration 
of a local diamond-mining executive with no judicial process. "This is why 
people say,  We are afraid Kabila may be a new dictator.'  And this is a 
big stress," said the Rev. Mbaya Tshiakanyi of Mbuji-Mayi, a leader in the 
Presbyterian Community of Zaire (PCZ) in the Kasai. 
 
     The irony is that some weeks ago -- when Kinshasa fell to the ADFL 
with little resistance on Pentecost eve -- there was unbridled joy, even 
500 miles away in the Kasai.  "I don't have a way to express what people 
were feeling that day ... [with] the Feast of the Holy Spirit and new 
times, really new times," Tshiakanyi said, stressing that it is hard for 
desperate people who've waited for too much for too long to be patient with 
slow change. "Almost everybody was praying for really new times ... that 
Kabila and his regime should be a kingdom of justice. 
 
     "Everybody was praying [that] Kabila  not be a new dictator, and for 
him to address the great questions for the life of this nation, like the 
economy, like education." 
 
     But what really has people scared, according to Amnesty International 
in New York City, is that 123 people were then shot by soldiers in Uvira 
protesting the killings in Mbuji-Mayi. There are also word-of-mouth 
descriptions of lootings and beatings by armed groups that are not so 
clearly identified, some of which are described as ADFL soldiers, others as 
remnants of Mobutu's army and still others as criminals. 
 
     "There's a big cloud over this government over the refugee issue," 
said the Rev. Willis Logan, the National Council of Churches (NCC) liaison 
to Congo, alluding to anxieties surrounding Tutsi political and military 
leaders in Kabila's government and the failure of the military to allow 
international delegations near the reported mass graves.  And there's the 
other issue:  "Whether [Congolese] will be allowed to form a truly 
representative government is still a question ... 
 
     "And that has everything to do with the future.  If [Kabila's 
government] takes the wrong position, it will inevitably become a 
repressive regime -- and they'll have to use force to keep people in line. 
The real challenge is to try to incorporate the democratic movement into 
this new situation." 
 
     Hesitation about instituting democracy worries Presbyterian John 
Metzel of the Congo Education Council in Washington, D.C., because he 
remembers Mobutu's repeated pledges to institute a democracy that was never 
put into place.  Kabila's action to ban political parties other than his 
own, according to Metzel, sets back "the movement for multi-party 
democracy" to the time before 1990 when Mobutu legalized opposition 
parties. 
 
     "There's no reason," he said, referring to the longtime work of 
Tshisekedi and his party, "to suppress a group nationwide that, there is no 
question, led the struggle in bringing down the Mobutu dictatorship." 
 
     But Dr. Francoise Muyumba of Terre Haute, Ind., a Congolese 
Presbyterian who is now visiting Kinshasa, argues that critics are 
expecting too much too fast..  "This is only the second week of the [new ] 
government," he said, in an interview last week. "And it's a government 
that is still in formation ... 
 
     "When a government is coming into power, it is not going to negotiate 
itself out of power," he said.  Muyumba said it is somewhat politically 
naive to expect the ADFL to put someone like Tshisekedi into it's 
hierarchy, but that, other lesser party figures may well be included. 
 
     Others are more skeptical, with one Congolese man saying -- and 
requesting anonymity for security reasons -- that "people of arms, of 
rifles, not people of words," now control the government. "And we are 
looking," he said, "for people of reason to come along side ... 
 
     "So that they complete one another." 
 
     It is, to say the least, a complicated process.  As Logan puts it: 
"Kabila's government has taken over one of the most complex countries in 
Africa.  There are ethnic questions, religious questions, economic 
questions, social questions ... 
 
     "It's going to take careful management and judgment to make this work 
for the people of Zaire.  It's going to take the highest degree of 
statesmanship to manage this effectively without being an outright 
dictator.  And that's the challenge." 
 
     But in the meantime, pastors are tending to longstanding problems 
facing Congolese families that are intensified by the civil war, such as 
hunger and lack of money.  And they are wrestling, according to the Rev. 
Tshimungu Mayela, president of the 60,000-member Presbyterian Community of 
Kinshasa, with how to be a voice of conscience in a time of intense 
turmoil.  He said one pastor has been caring for a family whose daughter 
was raped by an AFDL soldier, and simultaneously, trying to dissuade them 
from seeking revenge-style justice by having the military kill the accused 
soldier. 
 
     "And from the pulpit," he told the Presbyterian News Service, "[we're 
preaching that] change can't be everything you want the first day.  There 
will be a solution in this and we need to work and to wait for that 
solution.  We can't be discouraged.  We must continue to pray and work. 
The same God who can [cause] a war to be won can make a difference in our 
organizational structures as well." 
 
     Interviewed at Pentecost, the Rev. Wa Kasonga of First Presbyterian 
Church in Kinshasa was urging parishioners to think along similar Reformed 
lines.  Cautious from the first that desperate Congolese may expect too 
much too fast, Kasonga has been preaching that getting a stable economy and 
currency, a disciplined army, more jobs and an organized educational system 
-- what people say they want -- will take time and work. "Liberation gives 
us more responsibility.  We've not been liberated so that everything will 
fall down like manna ... God gives us responsibility," he said at 
Pentecost, describing such responsibility to mean bolstering the economy, 
demonstrating "good behavior" in society and working to end discrimination 
between tribes and political parties. 
 
     But just weeks later, that work seems even more formidable.  "Having 
lived through one bloody autocratic dictatorship of 32 years, Congolese are 
painfully aware of what uncontrolled force can do," said the Rev. Hunter 
Farrell, the PC(USA)'s liaison to Congo.  "That's bloodchilling to me." 
 
     "But," he said, reflecting, "the Pentecost moment [here] is that we're 
going to see what to the Gospel means in an extremely painful, difficult, 
vulnerable, tearful context.  We're going to see what it means to be a 
Reformed church on African soil.  
 
     "And there may be a huge cost." 
 
     Neither the PCK or the PCZ has yet issued a formal statement about the 
war or the ensuing change in government.  General Assemblies for both 
bodies have been delayed because of the war. 

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