News from the misnamed Democratic Republic
of Congo in recent months has been so grim as to make one want to turn the page
or flip the TV channel in despair: mass rapes by HIV-infected troops, arms hacked
off with machetes, schools and hospitals ravaged, killers jubilantly draping
themselves in the entrails of their victims, 10-year-old solders bearing
AK-47’s and hand grenades.The death
toll in this bewilderingly complex civil war has reached at least 3.3 million
in less than five years, according to the International Rescue Committee.Another 3 million or more people are
refugees, inside the country and out.Few of the dead are soldiers.Most are ordinary men, women, and children.They were deliberately targeted, caught in
crossfire, or unlucky enough to have stumbled onto land mines.Many—forced to flee their homes for forests
and crowded refugee camps that turn into fields of mud in the rainy season—died
of illness and malnutrition.This is the
greatest concentration of war-related deaths anywhere on earth since World War
II.
Africa
is seldom popular with the U.S. media, and the Congo’s civil war as largely dropped out of the
news in recent weeks.But the departure
of journalists for other stories does not mean that the bloodshed has
stopped.Despite a shaky coalition
government at the national level, raids by rival warlords and the killing of
civilians continues, particularly in the provinces of North and South Kivu, and in the Ituri district,
all in the northeastern corner of the country.The recent, temporary reinforcement of the small United Nations military
force in Bunia, capital of Ituri,
has not been substantial enough to stop the fighting that has claimed the lives
of more than 50,000 people in Ituri alone in the last
four years.
Refugee orphans are lined up and told to
wait for food that will never come.
The country has a long and unhappy history.A hundred years ago, it was the privately
owned colony of King Leopold II of Belgium.Joseph Conrad explores that regime’s rapacious lust for ivory in Heart of Darkness.Leopold went on to make an even larger
fortune by turning much of the Congo’s adult male population into a slave labor
force to gather wild rubber.His private
army worked large numbers of men to death, raped and starved their wives (held
hostage to make the men work), shot down 20 years of uprisings, and terrified
hundreds of thousands of people into flight to avoid rubber slavery.Just as today, disease took the greatest
toll, ravaging a traumatized, half-starving people, many of whom hid
unsheltered in the rain forest.The
birth rate dropped dramatically.Using
official Belgian statistics, demographers estimate a loss of population of some
10 million during Leopold’s rule and its immediate aftermath.
In 1908, the Belgian government took over
the colony from Leopold.Gradually the
carnage slowed and stopped.But, as in
much of colonial Africa, forced labor remained, and the chicotte (a
hippopotamus-hide whip), was a principal, legal tool of governing.The Belgians built schools and hospitals, as
well as road, rail, and steamboat networks, but mining profits flowed to Europe and the United States.Te
Belgians controlled Congolese political activity and made virtually no
preparation for independence.This came
abruptly, after popular protests, in 1960.
The Congo’s first—and last—territory-wide free
election that year brought the brilliant, mercurial Patrice Lumumba
to power as prime minister. His demands
that Africa be economically as well as politically
independent of Europe set off alarm bells in Washington and Brussels.The Eisenhower administration swiftly developed plans for his
assassination.With strong U.S. and support, anti-Lumumba
factions killed him in early 1961.The
murder had been the subject of two recent notable works of art: Raoul Peck’s film Lumumba and The
Catastrophist, a novel by the Irish writer Ronan Bennett.
For most of the years since Lumuma’s death, the dictator Mobutu SeseSeko ruled the Congo. He came to power with U.S. support, renamed his country Zaire, and was given more than $1 Billion n U.S. aid, all told, under both Democratic and
Republican presidents.With his marble
palace in the remote northern uncle; his luxury homes dotted around Paris,
Belgium, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, and the Riviera (where 20 minutes’ drive
away, Leopold had spent much of his Congo fortune building villas), Mobutu and
an entourage of members of his small Ngbandi ethnic
group plundered the country[s treasury of an estimated $4 billion.In health, nutrition, life expectancy,
schooling, and income, the Congolese people were far worse off at the end of
his rein than they had been after 80 years of colonialism.Soldiers supported themselves by collecting
tolls at roadblocks, generals sold off jet fighters for profit, and during the Tokyo real estate boom, the country’s ambassador
to Japan sold the embassy and apparently pocketed
the money.Mobutu was overthrown by
Laurent Kabila in 1997 and died a few months later.
Since then, Congo (which lost its article when it regained
its old name), has progressed quickly from anarchy to civil war.One early trigger for the war came in 1994,
when the United
States
and its allies locked any possibility of United Nations intervention to stop
the slaughter of some 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu in Rwanda.When the Hutu regime that carried out his genocide was deposed, its
leaders and roughly a million other Hutu fled next door to Congo.Angry at continuing attacks mounted from there. The army of the new
Rwandan government eventually occupied part of northeastern Congo and carried out something of a counter genocide
in revenge.
Seeing a huge, resource-rich country whose
sclerotic Mobutu regime had collapsed, other nearby African nations quickly
joined in dividing the spoils.(Like Rwanda, several others were also being attacked
by rebels using Congo’s vast and lawless territory as a
base.)At various points, the armies of
seven of them—most importantly Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe—have had troops on Congo’s soil.The Rwandan army stole natural resources worth $250 million in 1999 and
200 alone, according to a U.N. report cited by Newsweek.For the moment the foreign troops have supposedly
gone home, but many of their commanders have lucrative mineral concessions and
an ever-changing web of alliance: with the forces controlling the country[s
nominal national government, with three main rebel groups in the east, with
local warlords and ethnically based militias, and with a wide variety of
foreign corporations.These corporations
have been eagerly buying Congo’s diamonds, gold, timber, copper, cobalt,
and coltan.Easter Congo as more than half the worlds supply of coltan,
which is used in computer chips and cell phones, and has occasionally sold for
as much per ounce, as gold.The
multi-sided war is driven by greed, not ideology; the worst fighting sometimes
shifts location with the rise and fall of commodity prices.
Among the many companies involved are
America Mineral Fields, Inc., formerly head-quartered in President Clinton’s
hometown of Hope, Arkansas, and the Barrick Gold
Corporation of Canada, which until recently listed former President George H.W.
Bush on its international advisory board.Few of these companies, the rebel militias, or Congo’s African neighbors have much interest in
ending the country’s Balkanization.They
benefit far more from a cash-in-suitcases economy than they would from a highly
taxed and regulated one that would tightly control natural resources.
For Congo, the combination of a vast mineral
treasure house and no functioning central government has been
catastrophic.When there is little money
in the public treasury, armies become self-financing networks of miners and
smugglers.When there are few schools or
jobs, they can easily recruit children.When the millions of small arms circulating in Africa can be bought in street bazaars or from
unpaid police, there are guns for all.
For people who care about human rights, Congo presents a new kind of challenge.The problem is not harsh and authoritarian
state; it’s no working state at all.Furthermore, the traditional villains—globalization, the International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, colonialism, neo-colonialism—cannot be blamed
for everything.Yes, colonialism left Congo a terrible heritage of violence and
plunder.But to look around the world
today is to see striking examples, from Ireland to Vietnam, of countries that have successfully
thrown off colonialism’s legacy.
Beyond colonialism, Africa has other historical burdens.One is the heritage of wide-spread indigenous
slavery, which, like the ling centuries of serfdom in Russia, is deeply and disastrously woven into the
social fabric.Another is the abysmal
position of women” women and girls are routinely kidnapped to serve as “wives”
of soldiers who use rape and reportedly HIV transmission as weapons of war;
many women are also subjected to female genital mutilation.And a third burden shared with such places as
Afghanistan and parts of the Caucasus, is a tradition of loyalty to the ruler
of an extended clan or ethnic group, rather than to a nation-state marked by
boundaries on the map.Furthermore, In Africa those boundaries were arbitrarily drawn by
the colonial powers for their own convenience; Congo’s people speak more than 200 languages and
dialects.
Peace won’t come easily in Congo, and a stable, democratic government will
come harder still.Don’t expect any dramatic
moments of transformation, like the fall of the Berlin Wall or the election of
Nelson Mandela.Yet there are ways the
outside world can help.First of all,
the minuscule United Nations peacekeeping force now in the country needs to be
greatly expanded.Enough troops to
provide security for the entire nation, which is as big as the United States east of the Mississippi, is too much to hope for.It has, after all, taken more tan 28,000
soldiers to keep the peace in Kosovo, whose population is one twenty-fifth of Congo’s.But a U.N. force at least that big cold begin to halt the terrible
bloodshed in the northeastern corner of the country, were the most carnage has
taken place, and the United States should be shamed into at least helping to
pay for it.The force’s length of
service should be seen as a matter of years, and its mission drastically
toughened.
We should have no illusions, however, that
enough U.N. troops could restore the economy, stop all plunder, or guild a
sound government.Intervening in Congo is a bit like asking security guards to
patrol a huge bank in mid-robbery.There
is a risk that the guards may end up robbing, or running, the bank--whether at
the level of a sergeant dealing diamonds or a major power contributing troops but
demanding favored treatment for a particular mining company.But the alternatives are worse.Such a force could save lives—millions of
them.
Besides its tiny present size, however,
two things threaten to sap the effectiveness of hat U.N. force. One is that it
is currently led by France.President Bush is still enraged over French opposition to the war on Iraq, and the two countries have long been
quiet rivals for neocolonial influence in central Africa.(Neither power has clean hands” Both long supported the odious
Mobutu.France continued to back him to the last moment,
while the United
States
switched horses to train the Rwandan army that helped to overthrow him and then
remained to loot eastern Congo.)
The problem is that Congo’s immense blood-letting dies not seriously
threaten Western interests because it is unlikely to spill over into other
parts of the world or to stop the export of strategic minerals.Without vested economic interests at stake,
countries contributing peacekeeping troops may not tolerate the
casualties.If they won’t, no force of
any size will work.
Another way the world could help is by
dealing squarely with the fact that anarchic civil wars like those in Congo are fueled by valuable minerals.Recognizing how diamonds have helped drive
the conflicts in Angola, Liberia, and Sierra A-Leone, more than 50 nations
recently agreed to cease trading in “conflict diamonds.”Startlingly, given its scorn for most
international agreements, the United States is among the signatories.It remains to be seen whether the agreement
is followed and violators punished.But,
a recent World Bank study suggested, if conflict
diamonds can be outlawed, why not conflict gold and conflict coltan?Agreements
like this could begin to slash the funding for Congo warlords.Such a pact would be difficult to enforce, but for many years, so was
the ultimately successful ban on the Atlantic slave trade.
Finally, the world must stop arming Africa.The United
States
and France have been among the worst offenders, along
with Israel, Britain, and Russia.During the 1990’s for example, Washington alone gave more than $200 million worth of
equipment and military training to African armies, including six of the seven
with troops in Congo’s civil war.This arms traffic has continued under both Democratic
and Republican administrations; it took a particularly shocking turn at a U.N.
conference I 2001, when the bus administration, closely adhering to positions
of the National Rifle Association, single-handedly blocked a series of measures
to restrict trade in small arms.The
arms traffic to Africa is the modern version of what happened
hundreds of years ago, when American and European ship captains used muskets as
a currency for purchasing slaves from African dealers.It has been disastrous for Africa, then and now.
Is there any hope that any of these changes will happen?As Samantha Power points out in her Pulitzer
prize-winning book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, the
United States has a long tradition of speaking piously while ignoring mass
murder.In 1978, some 120 million U.S.
TV viewers watched the mini-series Holocaust while Pol
Pot, with no interference, carried out the genocide of some 2 million
Cambodians.In 1993, President Clinton
helped dedicate the United StatesHolocaustMuseum, where ElieWeisel pleaded with him in vain to halt the long Bosnian
Serb siege of Sarajevo.In
the next year of two, President Bush may officiate at the ground-breaking ceremony
for another museum, the one of African-American life planned for the Mall in Washington, D.C.Doubtless on that occasion he will decry the terrible crime of
slavery.But will he be able to say that
either the U.S., government or the larger community of
nations did anything meaningful to stop the slaughter in Congo, a slaughter now already more than half
the size of the Holocaust?The answer
depends on how forcefully people who care, here and
around the world, speak out.