The Courier

© EUSR

In the end, the region’s leaders had to get used to the straight-talking ways of this tried and trusted diplomat. Born in Palermo (Sicily) in 1936, Aldo Ajello became involved in politics at a very young age, becoming vice president of Italy’s national association of students while at the same time pursuing a career as a journalist with the socialist paper Avanti and at the Inter Press Service agency. A member of the Socialist Party’s central committee, and in turn a senator, Member of European Parliament and Member of the Italian Parliament, he was appointed UN Under-Secretary-General in 1992. He came to public attention most notably as the head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Mozambique.

François Misser: Did your Sicilian origins facilitate your career as a diplomat?
Aldo Ajello: There is a quite strong humanist current in Sicily. The island lies at the centre of the Mediterranean. Everybody has passed through there: the Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, and so on. They all left their mark. Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Cheetah speaks of this. I know exactly what he means. It gives you a mental openness that other regions of Italy do not have and above all a better understanding of the world south of the Mediterranean. My experience among Sicily’s peasants taught me that their reactions and ways of thinking were not so different to those you find in Africa.

FM: Especially in Mozambique…

AA: That was the great adventure of my life! I was so lucky to experience it. I took enormous risks and everything I tried succeeded, thanks to the then Secretary-General (Boutros Ghali) who gave me carte blanche. At first I had problems with the bureaucracy, receiving instructions that made no sense at all. My job was to implement the peace agreement reached between the government and the rebels and to correct the imbalance that disadvantaged the latter, as it risked causing the whole operation to fail. The risk was that people who had signed the peace agreement would think they had been tricked and start fighting again. Hence the need to give enough to the Renamo (Mozambique National Resistance) rebels for them to have something to lose by resuming the war. It wasn’t easy because we had to explain to the government that by isolating Renamo every time it acted against the peace agreement, in response to this imbalance, it risked derailing the process. I therefore sought to understand why the rebels were violating the agreement and to remove the reasons for these violations. We disarmed 90,000 people in less than four months. In the Congo, on the other hand, with the World Bank, we still have a long way to go.

FM: Why?

AA: In Mozambique the UN was in complete charge of the operation and acted with total neutrality. We set up assembly centres where those who wanted to be demobilised were separated out from those who wanted to join the army. We managed these centres directly and it quickly brought results. But in Congo the World Bank has applied the principles of development aid to the demobilisation of troops, entrusting the government with the power to make the decisions. The result is that we have created a huge bureaucratic machine. In reality the decision making was entrusted to people who had no interest in achieving progress -- a monumental mistake!

The Bank in fact had no idea how to operate. First of all it took charge of the management of the operation involving the disarming, demobilisation and reintegration. It then discovered that its own rules prohibited it from being involved in disarmament. So the Bank only took charge of these people once that stage was completed. That created a bottleneck right from the beginning because until disarmament was complete you could not get on with the rest of the work. The other problem was counting the enlisted solders. The armed forces had no interest in doing this as there were all these ‘phantom’ soldiers – a whole imaginary world of men who had been killed or never even born – being paid a wage that the officers wanted to put into their pockets.

FM: How would you assess the results of the 11 years spent as special envoy to the Great Lakes region?

AA: At first I had big problems due to the fact that as EU Special Envoy I should have been representing a common position. But there wasn’t one. The positions were varied and often completely contradictory especially on Rwanda, but also on Burundi. There were serious problems because it is not easy selling a product that does not exist. So I had to invent a common policy myself, taking into account the sensitivities of each of the parties. And this invention gradually became the effective common policy in the region.

FM: How do you see Congo’s future?

AA: That depends on a lot of things. It is a rich country. The potential is there. For the first time we have a democratically elected government, but that does not mean anything because there is more to democracy than elections alone. You need education in democracy. That must be done with the careful flexibility and sensitivity so as not to offend and also to give everyone the feeling that the country enjoys full sovereignty. It is a country that has been under supervision for too long and that now has to learn to govern itself democratically. That is not easy. But if we decide to seriously set about helping then there are good prospects for success. And success in stabilising the Congo means stability for central Africa.

To do that, the first priority is to reform the security sector, without which you cannot have development or anything else either. The army is poorly paid. It is neither equipped nor fed. It has no discipline. Above all it has officers without any military training whose main aim is to fill their pockets – having earned their stripes in the corridors of the presidential palace rather than on the battlefield. So all that must be cleaned up. We have done a lot with the EUSEC (European security mission in the DRC, editor’s note). Firstly, by sorting out the payment chain that was in fact the same as the chain of command. Payroll funds were transferred from the Central Bank to the Chief of General Staff who dipped into it before passing it on to the Navy, Air Force and Army Chiefs of Staff. By the time the money arrived at the brigades, there was nothing left to pay out. We completely disconnected the pay chain from the command chain. The Central Bank now sends money to the administration office that transfers it directly to the brigades. We have placed two European advisers with each integrated brigade to ensure that the system operates effectively. Today the soldiers receive their wages in full. Now we are making an inventory of the Congolese Army and we will then draw up a model for the new army.

FM: What was the finest moment in your career?

AA: Election day in Mozambique (in 1992, editor’s note), when we managed to convince Mr Dhlakama to take part (Renamo leader, editor’s note) after he had declared the previous day he would not be participating because he had discovered that there was some trickery afoot.

FM: And the worst?

AA: That was two days before…