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5 The Collapse of the Democratic Experiment in the Republic of Congo A Thick Description John F . Clark The Congolese experiment with multiparty democracy that began in 1991 was ended in 1997 by willful human agents, who certainly understood that their actions would likely terminate the ongoing experiment.1 On June 5, 1997, in the midst of a presidential election campaign for a contest then scheduled for late July, Congolese President Pascal Lissouba dispatched a unit of the army forces to the Mpila neighborhood of Brazzaville to arrest “certain associates” of his main rival, former President Denis Sassou-Nguesso (“Sassou”). Sassou was well prepared for the challenge , however, and his private militia successfully prevented his arrest or that of any of his partisans. Lissouba subsequently sent larger and larger contingents of military forces to arrest Sassou and disarm his militia, but these efforts were met by ever more numerous militiamen, who rallied to Sassou’s defense from Mbochidominated parts of the city. Within days, the capital was engulfed in a full-scale civil war that soon spread to parts of the countryside over the ensuing weeks. The war proved frightfully resistant to the outside mediation of numerous parties. When Sassou returned to power through force of arms in October 1997, and with the support of foreign interveners, the Congolese experiment with democracy begun in 1992 was over. In keeping with the primary goal of this volume, this chapter offers an empirical enquiry into the collapse of the Congolese experiment. The case of Congo stands in considerable contrast to most of the others presented in this volume. Whereas most of the others have hobbled along in some form or another, Congo’s experiment (like that in the CAR) underwent a dramatic collapse in the midst of civil war. In the aftermath of the collapse, the country’s former dictator has returned to power and run the country in an authoritarian manner. The elections that Sassou staged in 2002 were fraudulent and designed primarily to legitimate his continuing presence in power, and thus do not represent a return to genuine democratic 96 experimentation. Whereas cases such as Guinea-Bissau and Niger subsequently renewed their experiments with democratic governance following military coups (that proved to be only a hiatus in democratic experimentation), Congo has not. Accordingly , it represents the most complete failure to make progress toward democratic governance of any case in this volume over the period under study. Beyond the empirical goal of presenting an analysis of the failure of the Congolese experiment, this chapter also represents a statement on how researchers can understand—though not explain—the variable outcomes that follow the advent of democratic experiments. The analytical framework for understanding the outcome of democratic experiments is based on the conclusion that such outcomes are not foreordained, particularly not at any given moment in time. Careful theorists of democratic consolidation may have been able to make well-founded, educated guesses about the prospects of survival of the Congolese experiment over a specified period of time. The more ambitious of such theorists might even have ventured a probability. The same theoretical observers, moreover, would likely have assigned a similar probability to the likelihood of democratic survival for the case of Benin. As we know, however, the experiment with formal multiparty democracy begun in 1990 is ongoing as of 2004, having now survived three presidential elections with the constitution, rule of law, and basic public order intact. The fact of the survival of Benin’s democratic experiment should give us pause in considering the failure of the experiment in Congo. After all, Benin and Congo share a great many things in common: a former colonizer, intensive (“neocolonial”) relations with the same former colonizer, and a pre-democratic past that was nominally Marxist-Leninist but actually authoritarian-military. Both states are also of small size and boast strong intellectual classes. Moreover, northern military officers ruled both Congo and Benin during the years of their “Marxist-Leninist” experiments , while there is a fundamental split between northerners and southerners in both cases. In both cases as well, northerners suffer from demographic inferiority and there is a legacy of social advantages to southerners. The survival of Beninese democracy in social conditions not so different from those of Congo thus makes the case far more intriguing than it would be otherwise. Meanwhile, two major differences between the two cases also stand out: first, Congo suffers from the “curse of resources” in terms of its petroleum endowment...

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