The Business of War in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Who Benefits?

"This is all money," says a Western mining executive, his hand sweeping over a geological map toward the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He is explaining why, in 1997, he and planeloads of other businessmen were flocking to the impoverished country and vying for the attention of then-rebel leader Laurent Kabila. The executive could just as accurately have said, "This is all war."

In examining the happenings in the DRC and other regions, the question often asked is "why?" Too often, popular media accounts resort to simplistic stories of "ethnic" conflict or small local regional conflicts. In truth however, the happenings in the DRC (as in many other "third world" regions) are part of a brutal resource war, in which local, regional, transnational and international players are heavily involved. A 2001 article in Dollars and Sense called The Business of War in the Democratic Republic Of Congo: Who benefits? by Dena Montague and Frieda Berrigan examined this often underreported relationship. It is reposted here in full.

More below the fold:



The Business of War in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Who Benefits?

by Dena Montague and Frida Berrigan

"This is all money," says a Western mining executive, his hand sweeping over a geological map toward the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He is explaining why, in 1997, he and planeloads of other businessmen were flocking to the impoverished country and vying for the attention of then-rebel leader Laurent Kabila. The executive could just as accurately have said, "This is all war."

The interplay among a seemingly endless supply of mineral resources, the greed of multinational corporations desperate to cash in on that wealth, and the provision of arms and military training to political tyrants has helped to produce the spiral of conflicts that have engulfed the continent – what many regard as "Africa’s First World War."

When Westerners reach for their cell phones or pagers, turn on their computers, propose marriage with diamond rings, or board airplanes, few of them make the connection between their ability to use technology or buy luxury goods and a war raging in the DRC, half a world away. In what has been called the richest patch of earth on the planet, the DRC’s wealth has also been its curse. The DRC holds millions of tons of diamonds, copper, cobalt, zinc, manganese, uranium (the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were built using Congolese uranium), niobium, and tantalum. Tantalum, also referred to as coltan, is a particularly valuable resource – used to make mobile phones, night vision goggles, fiber optics, and capacitors (the component that maintains the electrical charge in computer chips). In fact, a global shortage of coltan caused a wave of parental panic in the United States last Christmas when it resulted in the scarcity of the popular PlayStation 2. The DRC holds 80% of the world’s coltan reserves, more than 60% of the world’s cobalt, and the world’s largest supply of high-grade copper.

These minerals are vital to maintaining U.S. military dominance, economic prosperity, and consumer satisfaction. Because the United States does not have a domestic supply of many essential minerals, the U.S. government identifies sources of strategic minerals, particularly in Third World countries, then encourages U.S. corporations to invest in and facilitate production of the needed materials. Historically, the DRC (formerly Zaire) has been an important source of strategic minerals for the United States. In the mid-1960s, the U.S. government installed the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, which ensured U.S. access to those minerals for more than 30 years.

Today, the United States claims that it has no interest in the DRC other than a peaceful resolution to the current war. Yet U.S. businessmen and politicians are still going to extreme lengths to gain and preserve sole access to the DRC’s mineral resources. And to protect these economic interests, the U.S. government continues to provide millions of dollars in arms and military training to known human rights abusers and undemocratic regimes. Thus, the DRC’s mineral wealth is both an impetus for war and an impediment to stopping it.

Background to the War

Under colonialism, the Western countries perfected a system of divide-and-rule in Central Africa, callously dividing ancestral lands and orchestrating strife between ethnic groups. The current crisis represents a continuation of these insidious practices.

A flash point for the current war is the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which nearly one million people were killed. The U.S. government made every effort to block humanitarian intervention that could have stopped the slaughter of Rwandan Tutsis by the Hutu government, actively lobbying the United Nations to hold off on sending peacekeepers to the region. In the absence of UN forces, Paul Kagame, a U.S.-trained army commander, led the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in a military action that toppled the Hutu regime. After Kagame became Rwanda’s vice president (a very powerful position) and defense minister, the United States sent $75 million in military aid to the new government. Additionally, U.S. Green Berets began to provide "humanitarian training" to Rwandan troops.

In October 1996, Kagame’s RPF joined with members of Yoweri Museveni’s Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) and Laurent Kabila, a Congolese rebel leader, in an invasion of Zaire. In 1997, they succeeded in toppling Mobutu. They also sought to dismantle camps controlled by the Hutu militia responsible for the Rwandan genocide. The coalition, known as the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL), included U.S.-trained troops. Although Rwandan troops who participated in the AFDL invasion committed gross human rights abuses that a UN report labeled "crimes against humanity," the U.S. government continued to provide military support to the Kagame regime.

During the conflict, U.S. corporations treated rebel-controlled Zaireian territory as open for business, even while Mobutu remained the internationally-recognized leader of Zaire. Once the AFDL took control of Katanga (one of the DRC’s richest mineral patches), Western friends and allies began negotiating with Kabila for access to mineral resources.

Under rebel leadership, the method of exploiting these resources fundamentally changed. During Mobutu’s reign, locally-based Congolese strongmen had controlled the distribution of resources on the government’s behalf, effectively limiting the potential for massive mining deals. But after the AFDL invasion, well-connected Western businessmen were able to secure much larger mining interests than in previous years.

For example, in May 1997, American Mineral Fields (AMF) – whose chair is Mike McMurrough, a personal friend of President Clinton – cut a $1 billion mining deal with Kabila. According to Kabila advisors and news reports, the negotiations began immediately after Kabila captured Goma (a city right across the border with Rwanda) in February 1997, and were handled by Kabila’s U.S.-trained finance commissioner. The deal allowed AMF to perform feasibility studies on reactivating the Kipushi mine, a high-grade zinc and copper deposit. The company also landed exclusive exploration rights to an estimated 1.4 million tons of copper and 270,000 tons of cobalt (about ten times the volume of current world cobalt production). While AMF admits that political problems have slowed the pace of its DRC operations, the company continues to develop plans for the Kipushi mine.

Also in 1997, Bechtel, the engineering and construction company, established a strong relationship with Kabila. Bechtel – whose history of collaboration with the CIA is well-documented in Laton McCartney’s 1989 book, Friends in High Places – drew up a master development plan and inventory of the country’s mineral resources free of charge. Bechtel also commissioned and paid for NASA satellite studies of the country for infrared maps of its mineral potential. Bechtel estimates that the DRC’s mineral ores alone are worth $157 billion.

At the same time, Kabila enjoyed the support of Western military interests. Kabila was in frequent contact with Richard Orth, former deputy of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency for Africa. The agency, which operates as an arm of the Pentagon, supplies military intelligence to warfighters and weapons dealers around the world. During the Clinton administration, Orth was appointed U.S. military attaché to Kigali, the Rwandan capital, shortly before Kabila began his march across the DRC. Additionally, former Pentagon officials acted as military advisers to Kabila in Goma, producing a dangerous mix of business, politics and military power.

Renewed War in the East

After Kabila’s rise to power, the desire for mineral wealth helped to escalate conflict between the DRC on the one hand and Rwanda and Uganda on the other. In August 1998, after falling out with Kabila, Kagame of Rwanda and Museveni of Uganda launched a new invasion of the DRC. Both leaders claimed that they entered the DRC to undermine Kabila’s power and protect their borders from rebel groups that threatened to destabilize their countries.

In the name of pursuing peace, Kabila’s former allies have been able to advance their own mineral interests. During the AFDL war, top Rwandan and Ugandan military officials learned first-hand about the lucrative business of mining. Since the 1998 war began, territories controlled by Rwandan- and Ugandan-supported rebel groups have become de facto states where mining companies have openly expressed interest in investing. Rwanda is allied with Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD-Goma), while the Ugandan government has formed a close relationship with leaders of the Congolese Liberation Front (CLF), a Mobutuist rebel movement. The RCD and the CLF now control the entire eastern region of the DRC, the wealthiest in terms of natural resources.

Both Rwanda and Uganda provide arms and training to their respective rebel allies and have set up extensive links to facilitate the exploitation of mineral resources. Along with their rebel allies, the two countries seized raw materials stockpiled in DRC territory and looted money from DRC banks. Rwanda and Uganda also set up colonial-style systems of governance, appointing local authorities to oversee their territories in the DRC. Meanwhile, high-ranking members of the Rwandan and Uganda military (including relatives of Kagame and Museveni) retain significant control over illegal mineral exploitation. Local Congolese, including children, are forced to work in the mines for little or no pay, under guard of Rwandan and Ugandan troops. Rwanda prisoners also participate in mining. To transport weapons to the rebels in the DRC, and to fly resources out of the DRC to Rwanda and Uganda, the authorities rely on private companies owned or controlled by Kagame’s and Museveni’s friends and relatives. They also utilize international connections made during the AFDL war.

The illegal mining has been a huge windfall for Rwanda and Uganda. The two countries have very few mineral reserves of their own. But since they began extracting the DRC’s resources, their mineral exports have increased dramatically. For example, between 1996 and 1997, the volume of Rwanda’s coltan production doubled, bringing the Rwandans and their rebel allies up to $20 million a month in revenue. Also, the volume of Rwanda’s diamond exports rose from about 166 carats in 1998 to some 30,500 in 2000 – a 184-fold increase! From 1997 to 1998, the annual volume of Uganda’s diamond exports jumped from approximately 1,500 carats to about 11,300, or nearly eight-fold; since 1996, Ugandan gold exports have increased tenfold. The final destination for many of these minerals is the United States.

Western corporations and financial institutions have encouraged the exploitation. For example, in 1999, RCD-Goma’s financial arm – known as SONEX – received $5 million in loans from Citibank New York. Additionally, a member of the U.S. Ambassador to the Congo’s honorary council in Bukavu has been promoting deals between U.S. companies and coltan dealers in the eastern region. He is also acting chair of a group of coltan-exporting companies based in Bukavu. (Bukavu is located in RCD-held territory.)

U.S. military aid has contributed significantly to the crisis. During the Cold War, the U.S. government shipped $400 million in arms and training to Mobutu. After Mobutu was overthrown, the Clinton administration transferred its military allegiance to Rwanda and Uganda, although even the U.S. State Department has accused both countries of widespread corruption and human rights abuses. During his historic visit to Africa in 1998, President Clinton praised Presidents Kagame and Musevini as leaders of the "African Renaissance," just a few months before they launched their deadly invasion of the DRC with U.S. weapons and training. The United States is not the only culprit; many other countries, including France, Serbia, North Korea, China, and Belgium, share responsibility. But the U.S. presence has helped to open networks and supply lines, providing an increased number of arms to the region.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have knowingly contributed to the war effort. The international lending institutions praised both Rwanda and Uganda for increasing their gross domestic product (GDP), which resulted from the illegal mining of DRC resources. Although the IMF and World Bank were aware that the rise in GDP coincided with the DRC war, and that it was derived from exports of natural resources that neither country normally produced, they nonetheless touted both nations as economic success stories. Although Uganda in particular has made significant strides in improving access to education and reducing the rate of new AIDS infections, debt relief has also allowed it the space to appropriate more money for its military ventures.

Although rebels control half of the DRC’s territory, deals with the Congolese government itself are still attractive. In January 2000, Chevron – the corporation that named an oil tanker after National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice – announced a three-year, $75 million spending program in the DRC, thus challenging the notion that war discourages foreign investment. In 1999, the company, which has been present in the Congo for 40 years, was producing 17,700 barrels of oil a day. It hopes that, by 2002, production will increase to 21,000 barrels per day. The gamble seems to be paying off. When Joseph Kabila, Laurent Kabila’s son and successor, visited the United States earlier this year, he reassured Chevron officials that stability under his leadership would ensure a safe environment for investment.

Of course, because of war and ongoing political unrest, these deals may not endure. But considering the potential for billions of dollars in profits, many mining corporations believe the investment is worth the risk. As one investor put it, "It is a good moment to come: it is in difficult times that you can get the most advantage."

Prospects for Peace

In August 1999, Uganda, Rwanda, and their rebel allies, among others, signed a cease-fire agreement with the DRC at Lusaka, Zambia. The agreement, which the U.S. government heavily supported, gave the Rwandan- and Ugandan-backed rebels significant power in developing a new Congolese government. It also allowed them to collaborate with the Congolese army in monitoring the withdrawal of foreign troops. If implemented, the Lusaka accord could bring the peace and stability that some Western corporations prefer.

But the demand for mineral resources continues to drive the DRC conflict. In April 2001, a scathing UN report argued that Presidents Kagame and Museveni are "on the verge of becoming the godfathers of the illegal exploitation of natural resources and the continuation of the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo." The two leaders, the report alleged, have turned their armies into "armies of business."

In light of these findings, the UN report calls for sweeping restrictions on Uganda, Rwanda and their Congolese-based rebel allies. These would include: embargoing the import or export of strategic minerals; embargoing the supply of weapons; freezing the financial assets of rebel movements and their leaders; and freezing the assets of companies or individuals who continue to illegally exploit the DRC’s natural resources.

These proposals, however, would obstruct Western corporations’ access to strategic minerals. Not surprisingly, the U.S. State Department has indicated that it is unlikely to recommend sanctions against its African allies. According to East African media reports, U.S. diplomats continue to view Rwanda and Uganda as "strategic allies in the Great Lakes region" and "would not want to upset relations with them at this time." Additionally, UN sources say that James Cunningham, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, has simply asked Uganda to "address in a constructive way" the UN’s findings. The IMF and World Bank have also indicated that their policies toward Rwanda and Uganda will remain unchanged.

Since 1994, close to four million people have perished in Rwanda and the eastern region of Congo. Many of the deaths are due to direct combat and torture by the belligerent parties, but most have been caused by starvation and malnutrition. Health services are practically nonexistent, and even where they do exist, many cannot reach them. Thousands of people hiding in the forest from soldiers have watched their villages burned to the ground and their families tortured. Soldiers have looted their possessions, their crops and their life’s savings. Foreign soldiers have manipulated ethnic tensions and encouraged neighbor killing neighbor. Oblivious to the suffering, many Westerners continue to reap the benefits of the rich Congolese soil.

Despite recent troop withdrawals, the illegal mining and trade continues unabated. The real party fueling the conflict is foreign capital investment by corporations, with the tacit support of their own governments. This war of genocidal proportions cannot end until U.S. and other Western corporations and governments are forced to change their priorities. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other organizations have helped to raise international awareness about the urgency of the situation in the DRC, through campaigns against "blood diamonds," economic exploitation, and the massive humanitarian crisis the country faces.

But the DRC’s future is in the hands of its youth, the next generation, the students and grassroots organizers who are dedicated to establishing peace and stability in their country. It remains to be seen whether the United States will encourage this hopeful spirit of change and democracy, or continue to enable the exploitation and destruction of the most resource-rich country on the African continent.

Read More...

Summary only...

What If You Had a World War- And No One Cared ?

Why do we care about some wars and not about others? Why does Darfur arouse such passion in decent people all over the world, but the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC (the country until a decade or so ago known as Zaire), which has taken the lives of far more people—4 million between 1996 and 2001, according to some informed estimates—for the most part remains what relief workers brutally but not inaccurately call an “orphan conflict”?

Such are the questions asked by French writer Gerard Prunier in his book Africa’s World War: Congo, Rwandan Genocide and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe.

The awful truth is, the current horrors of the Congo are the tailspin of the long shamefully ignored late 1990s war in the region, that drew in numerous factions, countries, international backers (in arms and finances) and resulted in the deaths of some 4 million Congolese. That war itself spun out (in part) of players and actors in the equally neglected genocidal horror in Rwanda, that killed three quarters of a million people. The causational link between these two tragedies is direct and glaring. And the chaos that has resulted from rapacious resource-greedy regional neighbors with silent international partners and a country left debilated by a western backed dictator (Mobutu) and strangling IMF debt (accrued western bribes to Mobutu) have all served to make a deadly cocktail that remains a glaring hole in the heart of a continent and the world. One way or the other, we're all responsible for the Congo, and we'll all pay.

David Rieff at Truthdig examines Prunier's book and tries to answer some of the vexing moral questions these tragedies pose to Africa and the world. Read article here or after the fold.



David Rieff on ‘Africa’s World War’

Posted on Feb 6, 2009
By David Rieff

There is a bitter old joke that asks the question, “Why is Hiroshima so much more remembered than Nagasaki,” to which the reply goes, “Nagasaki had a lousy press agent.” It may not be funny, but, as the history of war over the last half-century demonstrates all too vividly, it is still all too relevant. Why do we care about some wars and not about others? For example, why is it possible, virtually at a moment’s notice, to mobilize tens of thousands of people anywhere from Vienna to Melbourne to demonstrate in support of the suffering people of Gaza, but virtually impossible to mobilize even a small fraction of these numbers in support of the suffering people of Zimbabwe?

Some would say the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a special case, and that opposing Israel’s policies is also a way of opposing American hegemony and thus is bound to have perennial global appeal. But even if this is so, it does not explain the gap in the attention paid to wars in which United States involvement is not crucial. Why does Darfur arouse such passion in decent people all over the world, but the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC (the country until a decade or so ago known as Zaire), which has taken the lives of far more people—4 million between 1996 and 2001, according to some informed estimates—for the most part remains what relief workers brutally but not inaccurately call an “orphan conflict”?

This is one of the morally and historically crucial questions that French writer Gerard Prunier, whose career has ranged from journalism to far more direct engagement in many of the African crises that have concerned him over the past three decades, seeks to answer in a magisterial new book on the bloodbath in the DRC, “Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe.” As he remarks pointedly—and this as someone passionately committed to an outside intervention in Darfur—“during 2005, 1,600 articles were published on the Darfur crisis; only 300 were published on the DRC … even though the Congo situation killed over three times as many people as Darfur.”

Prunier first became known to general readers in the English-speaking world (though he is one of the few French writers whose prose style in English is absolutely on a par with the way he writes in his native tongue) for what seemed at the time the definitive book on the Rwandan genocide of 1994. “The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide” was both a history and an impassioned indictment of French complicity in the mass slaughter of the Rwandan Tutsis. Later, Prunier would reconsider his stance. In “Africa’s World War,” he writes ruefully and unsparingly of the pitfalls of political sympathy and of the ways in which writers’ biographies shape their opinions: “Getting to know the Tutsi exiles [from Rwanda] in Uganda in 1986-1989 was my ‘formative experience,’ later reinforced by visiting the RPF [the Tutsi exile army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front] in Byumba in June 1992.”

There are many reasons why the public debate over issues like Rwanda tends to be so simultaneously superficial and sentimental. It would certainly be much improved, however, were more journalists willing to re-examine their positions in the way that Prunier has done, at great cost to himself. For if siding with the RPF earned him the plaudits of the great and the good in the English-speaking world and in much of Europe as well, his turn against the government of former RPF commander Paul Kagame in Kigali and the myriad human rights violations it committed after overthrowing the genocidal Hutu Power regime has won him only slanderous claims that he has somehow morphed into an apologist for the genocide.

Prunier himself is painfully aware of this, writing despairingly of a simultaneous “lack of interest at the [Western] government level, and the short attention span of the general public” with regard to African crises. Where the crises in Rwanda, Burundi and the DRC are concerned, Prunier observes, the effect was to reduce a situation of major conflict and appalling human suffering “to a comic book atmosphere in which absolute horror alternates with periods of complete disinterest from the non-specialists.” And he is withering about the way in which the Western default position rarely strays from stereotyped categories about Africa. Thus, he observes, “the desperate African struggle for survival is bowdlerized beyond recognition, and at times the participant-observer has the feeling of being caught between a Shakespearian tragedy and a hiccupping computer.”

The explicit goal of “Africa’s World War” is both to set the record straight—or at the very least, as Prunier puts it, to state “the problem correctly”—on the Congolese conflict of the late 1990s and its partial origins in the Rwandan genocide, and to ask a more general question about contemporary Africa: whether that war which engulfed one-third of the African continent marked a watershed in what Prunier himself views as both a moment of general crisis and of epochal transformation in the aftermath of the Cold War, the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the Rwandan genocide, or, instead, was, however terrible, a problem specific to Congolese history that was only to be expected when the U.S.-supported dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko finally came to its inglorious end.

Prunier’s own view is that it was both. “By 1996,” he writes, “the Zairean core of the [African] continent had become a hologram flickering on the brink of its own destruction.” At the same time, however, Prunier is drawn to the analogy between the war in Congo—which involved not just Congolese and Rwandans but military forces of Angola, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Burundi and Namibia—and impacted conflicts from Sudan and Congo-Brazzaville all the way to Libya, and the Thirty Years’ War in Europe in the 17th century. Like that conflict more than 300 years earlier, Prunier suggests, the Congolese war took place because of African leaders’ personal [rather than national—the point is a key one for Prunier] “ambitions, prejudices, and security fears.”

On Prunier’s account, there was no one who more exemplified this than the Rwandan leader Paul Kagame. Though he remarks in passing that “Kigali politics are only slightly more transparent than Pyongyang’s,” Prunier makes an emphatic case for Kagame having sought the destabilization of the DRC both out of legitimate fears of the renewal of the genocide by Hutu Power extremists who had taken refuge in large militarized refugee camps in eastern DRC after Kagame’s forces chased them out of Rwanda in the summer of 1994. These security fears were well known at the time, and in fact were cited by the Rwandans themselves and their many supporters in the United States and Western Europe as the moral imperative behind the Rwandan intervention (Prunier points out how Gen. Kagame came to be seen in the West as leader of “the exemplary victims”).

Prunier does not dismiss this. Despite accusations leveled at him from Kigali and from the Kagame regime’s foreign supporters, he is no genocide “negationist.” But what he does do—and the corrective is an essential one if we are ever to understand what the Congolese war was really about—is restore to its rightful importance the fact that Kagame had been one of a number of African leaders—most notably, Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni and Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere—who had been plotting for some time to orchestrate Mobutu’s overthrow. Prunier is not arguing that the Hutu militias across the border were simply a flag of convenience for Kagame. But in his view, the Tutsi government’s security fears were only part of the rationale even if, as Prunier remarks acidly, Rwanda got its casus belli in 1996 “courtesy of a totally blind Zairian political class.”

“Wars begin where you will but do not end where you please,” Machiavelli instructed the Prince. The Congolese war exemplifies the truth of this adage, and not only for the Rwandans. What Prunier lays out in great detail and with great authority is the extent to which all the belligerents blundered and improvised, while, all the while, it was the Congolese people who paid the price for the ambitions of modern-day princes from a dozen countries. As Prunier puts it, although all wars are terrible, “the Congolese continental conflict was particularly horrible, not only because it caused the deaths of nearly four million human beings but because of the massive suffering it visited on the surviving civilian populations.”

That suffering goes on today, even if the shifting alliances that have marked the Congolese conflict from its inception have led President Kagame to abandon his erstwhile protégé, the Congolese Tutsi militia commander Laurent Nkunda, and instead make common cause with his erstwhile enemy, the central government of the DRC, against both Nkunda and the Hutu Power militiamen still active in the forests of the eastern part of the country.

Prunier is not entirely pessimistic (at least by normally intelligent rather than contemporary American standards). In his view, there is a sound basis for believing that such a violent and general conflict will not soon recur. “The death (and rebirth) of Zaire,” he writes, “is a unique case,” adding that “no other country in Africa, probably not even Nigeria or South Africa, has the potential for creating such a continent wide upheaval.” This is not to say that he minimizes the long-term, continentwide effects of the war, a conflict that he describes as a transforming moment for Africa that marked the continent’s entry into “the modern age.”

This is cold comfort, and no one is more painfully aware of this fact than Prunier himself. He may speak of enormous, inchoate political processes at work across the continent, but he never loses sight of the fact that what he calls the “powerless raw material” is the suffering population of the DRC. One of the most remarkable qualities of this remarkable book is Prunier’s ability to combine cool analysis and scholarly dispassion without losing sight of its horror. He is dismissive of most outside observers and what he calls their “wish for things that are good to hear” even when the subject is a terrible war. For Prunier, the truth is elsewhere, and there is no doubt that he is speaking personally when he writes that “the violence of what has happened in eastern and central Africa has left few of those who looked at it from up close completely intact.”

There can be no finer response from an observer than that, and this moral commitment is what makes “Africa’s World War” much more than simply an authoritative history, as valuable as that would be in and of itself. This is a profound book, and, to use an old-fashioned word, a noble one.

David Rieff is the author of numerous books, including “A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis,” “At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention” and, most recently, “Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir.”

Read More...

Summary only...

The War the World Forgot

In a country the size of Western Europe, a war rages that has lasted eight years and cost four million lives. Rival militias inflict appalling suffering on the civilian population, and what passes for political leadership is powerless to stop it. This is Congo, and the reason for the conflict - control of minerals essential to the electronic gadgetry on which the developed world depends - is what makes our blindness to the horror doubly shaming. This is the story of the deadliest war since Adolf Hitler's armies marched across Europe - a war that has not ended. But is also the story of a trail of blood that leads directly to you: to your remote control, to your mobile phone, to your laptop and to your diamond necklace.

So reads the intro to a 2006 article in The Independent, which provides an informative look at this crisis.

The conflict in the East of Congo has flared up--again. Rebels backed by Rwanda are killing indiscriminately and executing civilians. Refugees are fleeing the fighting, only to end up in camps ravaged by disease. UN peacekeepers stand by, uncertain of what to do. In a sea of what has become both dismal and tragically routine, the only glimmer of hope is that this time it is actually making the news. It is war that has left millions dead, and claims 45,000 lives a month--yet, until quite recently, this horror has gone all but unnoticed on the world stage. The question is, will it remain so? Will it mean the world is finally ready to act?

In a rare bit of hope, the President-elect has actually been attuned to the Congo. In 2006, Barack Obama sponsored a bill to provide relief and promote democracy in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which was signed into law in December 2006. In October of 2007, he wrote Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice personally, "expressing his concerns about the growing number of systematic sexual assaults against women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)." Of course, it will take more than hope to fix the Congo. And it will take more than a President Obama. But perhaps it's a start.

And there's no better time than NOW, for us to try and do something, and get this out as one of the top foreign policy issues of a new administration.

Tell the new Obama administration, the Congo should be a top priority at Change.gov.

The Independent article below the fold.

See also, Friends of the Congo.




Congo's tragedy: the war the world forgot

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/congos-tragedy-the-war-the-world-forgot-476929.html

In a country the size of Western Europe, a war rages that has lasted eight years and cost four million lives. Rival militias inflict appalling suffering on the civilian population, and what passes for political leadership is powerless to stop it. This is Congo, and the reason for the conflict - control of minerals essential to the electronic gadgetry on which the developed world depends - is what makes our blindness to the horror doubly shaming. Johann Hari reports from the killing fields of central Africa

Friday, 5 May 2006

This is the story of the deadliest war since Adolf Hitler's armies marched across Europe - a war that has not ended. But is also the story of a trail of blood that leads directly to you: to your remote control, to your mobile phone, to your laptop and to your diamond necklace. In the TV series Lost, a group of plane crash survivors believe they are stranded alone on a desert island, until one day they discover a dense metal cable leading out into the ocean and the world beyond. The Democratic Republic of Congo is full of those cables, mysterious connections that show how a seemingly isolated tribal war is in reality something very different.


This war has been dismissed as an internal African implosion. In reality it is a battle for coltan, diamonds, cassiterite and gold, destined for sale in London, New York and Paris. It is a battle for the metals that make our technological society vibrate and ring and bling, and it has already claimed four million lives in five years and broken a population the size of Britain's. No, this is not only a story about them. This - the tale of a short journey into the long Congolese war we in the West have fostered, fuelled and funded - is a story about you.

I Rapes Within Rapes

It starts with a ward full of women who have been gang-raped and then shot in the vagina. I am standing in a makeshift ward in the Panzi hospital in Bukavu, the only hospital that is trying to deal with the bushfire of sexual violence in eastern Congo. Most have wrapped themselves deep in their blankets so I can only see their eyes staring blankly at me. Dr Denis Mukwege is speaking. "Around 10 per cent of the gang-rape victims have had this happen to them," he says softly, his big hands tucked into his white coat. "We are trying to reconstruct their vaginas, their anuses, their intestines. It is a long process."

We walk out into the courtyard and he begins to explain - in the national language, French - the secret history of this hospital. "We started with a catastrophe we just couldn't understand," he says softly. One day early in the war, the Unicef medical van he was using was looted. Coincidentally, a few days later, a woman was carried here on her grandmother's back after an eight-hour trek. "I had never seen anything like it. She had been gang-raped and then her legs had been shot to pieces. I operated on her on a table with no equipment, no medicine."

She was only the first. "We suddenly had so many women coming in with post-rape lesions and injuries I could never have imagined. Our minds just couldn't take in what these women had suffered." The competing armies had discovered that rape was an efficient weapon in this war. Even in this small province, South Kivu, the UN estimates that 45,000 women were raped last year alone. "It destroys the morale of the men to rape their women. Crippling their women cripples their society," he explains, shaking his head gently. There were so many militias around that Dr Mukwege had to keep his treatments secret - the women were terrified of being kidnapped again and killed. He became an Oskar Schindler of the Congolese mass rapes.

As we walk down to watch 200 rape victims being taught to sew under a large, dark bridge, he tells me what they can expect now. "When the rapes begin, the husbands and fathers often just scarper and never come back. The women never hear anything from them again. Other times, the men blame the women and shun them. It's very hard for us to persuade the women to leave the hospital, because where are they going to go?"

He introduces me to Aileen, who is 18 but looks much younger. She holds her hands tightly in her lap. Her story is stark, the details sparse. Her village was raided by a militia on 10 October, and "they beheaded people in the central square". Her voice is high-pitched; she is almost squeaking. She was seized and taken back out into the forest by the militia where they kept her for six months. "I was raped every night. The first night my body really ached and hurt because I was a virgin," she says. She would be passed on from one man to the next. It is only as she speaks that I notice the large protruding bump sagging into her lap. The baby is going to be born next month. She says she has spoken to her family, but Dr Mukwege tells me later this is a fantasy. "What," she asks me with wide eyes as we leave, "do you think I should do? Where can I go?"

It is coldly appropriate to start here. The rape of Aileen and the rape of the thousands of women who stagger into the Panzi hospital are, I soon discover, merely part of a larger rape - the rape of Congo.

II The Last of the Belgian Colonialists

Bukavu is a cratered, shattered shack-city in eastern Congo that lies on the edge of Lake Kivu. In the street markets, people trade scraps of food for Congolese notes worth a few pence. In the houses, they stagger along without water or electricity. Wandering through this cacophony, I find a lone white woman, a lingering remnant of the origins of this war. She can reveal how all this began.

As we sit over lunch, Tina Van Malderen says, skimming the menu: "I don't drink water - only wine." Her hair is greying but her smile is warm. "I came to Bukavu as a little girl in 1951 when my father came to work for the Belgian administration," she explains. "It was paradise. There were only Europeans then. No Africans. Black people lived in the surrounding areas. It wasn't like South Africa, they weren't forced. They didn't want to live with us. They came into the town to work. They had their own market." She speaks of the days of the Belgian empire with a soft-focus sepia longing. "I have four sisters, and we would swim in the lake all day. It was like a non-stop holiday."

Her family owned a chain of shops, and the only castle in Congo. She is incredulous when I ask if there was any cruelty towards black people back then. "Absolutely not. We loved our blacks. When they had children, we gave them gifts." Perhaps sensing my scepticism, she adds: "Maybe on the plantations they were a little bit rude to them." The Belgians unified Congo in the first great holocaust of the 20th century, a programme of slavery and tyranny that killed 13 million people. King Leopold II - bragging about his humanitarian goals, of course - seized Congo and turned it into a slave colony geared to extracting rubber, the coltan and cassiterite of its day. The "natives" who failed to gather enough rubber would have their hands chopped off, with the Belgian administrators receiving and carefully counting hundreds of baskets of hands a day.

This system of forced cultivation continued until the Belgians withdrew in 1960, when Patrice Lumumba became the first and only elected leader of Congo. "He was a stupid man," Tina says swiftly. "On the first day of independence, he said we had beaten and humiliated the blacks. He signed his death warrant by doing that."

She's right - he did. Lumumba claimed to be a democratic socialist who wanted to overcome Congo's ethnic divisions. We will never know if he could have fulfilled this dream, because the CIA decided he was a "mad dog" who had to be put down. Before long, one of its agents was driving around Kinshasa with the elected leader's tortured corpse in the boot, and the CIA's man - Mobutu Sese Seko - was in power and in the money. Tina's family sold their castle to the dictator as he renamed the country Zaire. "People always ask if he paid. Of course he paid!" she laughs. Mobutu became another Leopold, using the state to rob and murder the Congolese people.

Tina's family started to worry in the 1970s when he announced a programme of "Zaireanisation" - a Mugabe-style transfer of the resources of foreigners to his cronies. "My mother arrived at work one day and there was a black man come to take possession of everything, including her car. She had to walk home," Tina says, glugging red wine.

"Everything began to fail after that. The food became disgusting. Even our dog didn't want to eat it." This is Tina's first visit home - she still calls it that - since they fled. "I saw the house we lived in. From outside it still looked nice but when I went inside..." she shakes her head. "The black people cannot live properly. If I had to compare Congo, I must say it hasn't changed at all. They are not naked any more, but they are still savages." Tina's countrymen established the nation-state in the Congo, and they designed it to be a vampire-state. The only change over the decades has been the resource snatched for Western consumption - rubber under the Belgians, diamonds under Mobutu, coltan and cassiterite today. "Cheers," Tina says, downing her wine.

III The War for Games Consoles

If you want to glimpse what all this death has been for, you have cross Lake Kivu and drive for four hours, on pocked and broken roller-coaster roads, until you reach a place called Kalehe. Scarring the lush green hills are what seem to be large red scabs that glisten in the sun. The term for these open wounds in the earth is "artisinal mines", but this dry terminology conjures up images of technical digs with machines and lights and helmets. In reality, they are immense holes in the ground, in which men, women and children - lots of children - pick desperately with makeshift hammers or their bare hands at the red earth, hoping to find some coltan or cassiterite to set on the long conveyor belt to your house, or mine. Coltan is a metal that conducts heat unusually brilliantly. It is contained in your mobile, your lap-top, your son's PlayStation - and 80 per cent of the world's supplies sit beneath the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As I crawl down into the mine - its cool, damp darkness is a strange contrast to the raging Congolese sun - the miners laugh. The idea of a muzungu - a white man - in their mine seems to them impossibly comic. But they soon get back to picking away at a roof that looks like it could collapse at any moment. Ingo Mbale, 51, explains how the West's hunger for coltan is fed. "We were enslaved three years ago," he says. "An RCD captain [from one of the militias] arrived and forced us to mine for them at gunpoint. They gave us no money, it was slave labour. There is nothing left in many of these shafts now, they exhausted them. They killed many people. Our gold and coltan and cassiterite went out to the world via Rwanda."

Watching these men, the shape of Congo's recent history becomes clear. There is an official story about the war in Congo, and then there is the reality, uncovered by a trilogy of bomb-blast reports from the UN Panel of Experts on the DRC. The official story is convoluted and hard to follow, because it does not ultimately make sense. But its first chapter is true enough, and goes something like this. In 1996, a Maoist with an eye for money called Laurent-Désiré Kabila grew tired of simply running his little fiefdom in eastern Zaire, where he peddled ivory and gold with a nice sideline in kidnapping Westerners. Kabila decided to depose Mobutu, the omnipresent and omni-incompetent tyrant, and seize power for himself. He cobbled together a ragtag army of child soldiers known as the Kadogo and, with the support of neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda, the edifice of Mobutuism collapsed even before their tinny, tiny advance. Kabila installed himself as another Leopold-alike, banning political parties and bathing in corruption.

But then in 1998 Kabila asked the Rwandans and Ugandans to withdraw their troops from Congo - so long, and thanks for the armies - and the official story begins to drift away from reality. The Rwandans pulled back for a fortnight, but then mounted a massive invasion of Congo, seizing a third of the country. The public reason for this assault sounds reasonable. After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda - a slaughter that made even Auschwitz look slow-paced - tens of thousands of the Hutu Power machete-wielders fled across the border to Congo and set up long-term bases. How could any country rest with its murderers armed and crazed on its borders? "We must prevent the génocidaires from regrouping," said Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president, with the supportive Ugandan military following in tow.

From his palace in Kinshasa, Kabila appealed to his friends for help resisting this Rwandan-Ugandan attack. Zimbabwe, Namibia and Angola obligingly sent armies marching into Congo to fight back, and Africa's First World War began. The armies and militias marauding across Congo then became rebels without a cause, fighting each other because they were there and because pulling out would be a humiliating concession of defeat. In this version, the war in Congo is a mess, started with the best of intentions - the Rwandans' desire to track down génocidaires - only to spiral out of control. It presents the mass slaughter as a giant cock-up, a cosmic mistake. This is strangely reassuring. It is also a lie.

Once the Congo was drenched in death, the UN commissioned a panel of international statesmen to travel the country and uncover the reasons behind the war. They found that the Rwandan government's story hid a much darker truth. The Rwandans had a clear intention, right from the beginning: to seize Congo's massive mineral wealth, to grab the coltan mine I am standing in now and thousands like it, and to sell it on to us, the waiting world, as we quickly flicked the channel away from the news of this war with our coltan-filled remote control. The other countries came in not because they believed in repelling aggression, but because they wanted a piece of the Congolese cake. The country was ravaged by "armies of business", commanded by men who "carefully planned the redrawing of the regional map to redistribute wealth," the UN declared.

The UN experts knew this because the Rwandan troops did not head for the areas where the génocidaires were hiding out. They headed straight for the mines like this one in Kalehe, and they swiftly enslaved the populations to dig for them. They did not clear out the génocidaires - they teamed up with them to rape Congo. Jean-Pierre Ondekane, the chief of the Rwandan forces in Goma, urged his units to maintain good relations "with our Interhamwe [génocidaires] brothers." They set up a Congo Desk that whisked billions out of the country and into Rwandan bank accounts - and they fought to stay and pillage some more. The UN found that a Who's Who of British, American and Belgian companies were involved in the illegal exploitation of Congolese resources. The ones they recommended for further investigation included Anglo-American PLC, Barclays Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and De Beers. The British Government - while boasting of its humanitarian goals in Africa - barely followed up the report, publicly acquitting a few corporations like Anglo-American whose subisidary AngloGold Ashanti has been shown by Human Rights Watch to have developed links with a murderous armed group in the region, and leaving others like De Beers in an "unresolved" category.

Oh, and the reason why this invasion was so profitable? Global demand for coltan was soaring throughout the war because of the massive popularity of coltan-filled Sony PlayStations. While Sony itself does not use Congolese coltan, its sudden need for vast amounts of the metal drove up the price - which intensified the war. As Oona King, one of the few British politicians to notice Congo, explains as we travel together for a few days: "Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms."

As I climb back out into the hard sunshine, the miners turn to me. "Could you send us a hammer? We really need one. The militias took all our equipment."

IV The Tyrant's Jeer

On the long journey in an armoured UN vehicle, the questions seem so obvious, so trite. How could a government led by genocide victims suddenly commit its own epic crime against humanity, for nothing more than money? The answer lies across the border, through the rainforest, towards Kigali. I meet Charles Muligande, the Rwandan foreign minister, on the top floor of the Hotel Des Milles Collines, the real Hotel Rwanda. This is where hundreds of Tutsis hid out the holocaust while their brothers and sons were hacked to pieces on the streets outside.

Muligande has a strange combination of a youthful, unlined face and graying hair (with matching moustache), and he carries with him the unimpeachable moral stature of the victim. The sadness around the eyes, the haltingly recounted story of being driven across the border to Burundi as a child refugee, the relatives slaughtered in the genocide - they are all cruelly present. How can I challenge him? He speaks softly about the trauma counselling that is happening in Rwanda, and the fragile attempts at reconciliation. And then it comes - the chuckle.

I ask him about Congo's future, and he lets out a strange, hard-to-place laugh. "The DRC is a country that for the last 45 years has had pockets outside the control of central government," he says. "Even on the eve of the election, there will by places that are beyond the control of central government. This shouldn't be a cause for concern." And again with the chuckle.

What about the people who pay the price of the instability he waves away so casually? How does he sleep at night, knowing Rwanda has inflicted on its neighbours suffering akin to the horrors he and his family endured? He chuckles harder now, almost coughing. "This is rubbish. If we do a balance sheet, we incurred a lot of losses in fighting that war."

He says it with such airy conviction I have to grope in my mind for the right response. Why then does the UN's report say that Rwanda's pillage was "systematic" and "deliberate"? "That is an invention," he snaps. By the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch? "Yes. It doesn't become true just because it is repeated. If you have such a blind faith in Amnesty International," - he spits the words - "and the UN and Human Rights Watch, there is nothing I can tell you. It is like you are asking me to believe Jesus Christ is not my saviour come to change my soul. It is a faith-based position." No amount of probing will shift him. When he talks about the genocide, he is compassionate, honest, brave. When he talks about his own country's crimes against Congo, he sneers. Their trauma, it seems, is worth nothing. As he speaks, I wonder - does he believe this, or does he, in midnight sweats, think about the children driven from their homes just like a baby Muligande was all those years ago?

The more I probe, the more his face contorts into the tyrant's jeer. I have seen this before, in Iraq and in Israel/Palestine - the furrowed brow and the rote claim that the evil UN and Amnesty have it in for us. Blood? What blood?

V Thomas Hobbes was Right

The victims of the war - of that laugh - are scattered everywhere in eastern Congo. By the roadside the next morning, I find the living remnants of Ramba village, a home to 15,000. They make up a clump of 400 starving people building a makeshift camp by the roadside. Maneno Mutagemba Justin, their chief - a young man with sore, reddish eyes - explains what happened. "The Interahamwe came into our village. They killed and they raped our women. Now they have stolen our houses and told us never to come back." People fled in all directions, losing their husbands or children. Nobody is quite sure how many relatives they have lost forever. "We have no food here, and we left everything behind. We have no pots, no pans, no water." These people live a long drawn-out postscript to Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century philosopher who warned that in the absence of a state, life will be: "Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Yet the most piercing image of pain I see in Congo is not in places like this. It is not in the pygmy village where children with sweet distended bellies sleep with their families in the tea-bushes because they are terrified of being beheaded by the militias. It is not even in the eyes of the man Oona King and I see being casually beaten to death by a mob on the road one moody afternoon, another unrecorded Congolese write-off that we swiftly speed away from. No, it is the women carrying more than their own bodyweight in wood or coal or sand, all day, every day. By every Congolese roadside, there are women with ropes tearing into their foreheads as they bind a massive load on to their backs. With so few horses, so few cars and so few roads, starving women are used here as pack-horses, transporting anything that needs to be moved on their backs for 50p a day. They are given the quaint title of "porters".

Francine Chacopawa is 30 but she looks much older, her faced lined and cratered in a complex topography of pain. Her spine is curved, her skin is rough and broken, her hands calloused. When she laboriously puts down the wood she is carrying, she has a red canyon in her forehead where the rope was, rimmed with sores that weep from the rubbing. "This is the rope that keeps my household alive," she says. It is the war that has reduced her to this state. "Since the war started, you can't farm in peace, and the children are starving, so I prefer to die in this work... My husband cannot get a job, so this is what I have to do. I leave at five o'clock in the morning and get back at seven o'clock at night. I am worried my children are running away to look for food, because we only get to eat once a day. When I get home, my husband gets angry and asks why I have been away so long. We have suffered so much. The children we bring into the world are forced to be porters as well. We are the most unhappy people in the world."

She tells me the pack she is carrying weighs 200lb, and I write this off as understandable hyperbole. Then my translator and the UN driver load her pack on to my back (with great difficulty). I immediately fall to my knees. I stagger up and manage to stumble a few feet before falling over again. I am almost crying in pain; my back aches for weeks. This is Francine's life. She does not even stop on Sundays. "How can I? We must eat," she says. Portering has made her miscarry twice, and Francine says she has seen women die by the side of the road, buckled under their loads. I ask her when she will stop portering. She shrugs, and says nothing. Her eyes say: "When I die." The wood is heaved back on to her back, and she staggers away, the rope rubbing against her sores.

VI The Head of State Without a State

Joseph Kabila is surrounded by crocodiles. We are standing by the back wall of the White House, the slimline presidential palace in Kinshasa, and the rippling, reptile-infested Congo river rings around us. His house looks like a well-kept municipal library in an American town, a world away from the psycho-kitsch of the Mobutu era. The President's eyes have narrowed. "How long have you been here, to think you can write about Congo?" he asks, unsmiling. I say I have been here a fortnight. He nods slightly. "Then that's OK."

Kabila does not like talking to journalists. Indeed, he does not like talking to anyone - he has conspicuously failed to turn up at his own election rallies over the past few months. I have been smuggled in at the end of his meeting with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Great Lakes Region, a collection of decent British politicians who have come to try to erode the worst humanitarian crisis in the world by inches. "I want to see some quick wins [for the Congolese people] from the presidential election," he says, assuming he will win the looming polls - the first in Congo since 1960. He then rattles off a list of improvements he hopes to implement to prove that democracy works - better water supplies, better schooling.

He offers up these platitudes in absent English, his handsome face covered with a light sprinkling of stubble that seems to be greying in the sun. He became President at the age of 29 when his father was pinned down and executed in a failed coup in 2001. At that moment the reluctant son of the Big Man was thrust from a life of army drills and watching martial arts movies to being in a charge of the world's biggest war zone. Neckless and nervous, he says his two minutes' worth of stump speech now and then closes up. He signals to his Versace-suited security guards that it is time for him to leave. My five minutes of questions - more than any other journalist gets - have been greeted with a polite stonewall of banality.

The White House has a feel of unreality. It is a hologram of power, the simulacrum of a functioning country. Kabila is in the surreal position of being head of state without a state, President of the Democratic Vacuum of Congo. He has no levers of power to pull. As I discovered later in my journey, he has no army worthy of the name, he has no police force, he cannot guard his own borders or build his own schools. From the sealed calm of the palace, I look over a wall and see the real Congo walking past - people slumped against walls or busy doing nothing or frantically fending off hunger any way they can. The fantasy of a functioning country dies outside his own brickwork.

Since his father died, Kabila has been trying to glue together a nation from the shattered fragments. In 2002, he negotiated the Lusaka Accords, in which the invading countries promised to remove their armies. The global price of coltan had collapsed, so Rwanda's interest was waning. Besides, the withdrawing countries realised they could suck the mineral marrow from Congo without the costly business of occupation, simply by setting up Congolese militias as their proxies on their way out the door. Kabila tried to out-bribe powerful militia leaders by offering them a place at the heart of government. That's why, of his four vice presidents, three have their own private armies. To watch over this "peace process", the UN sent in 17,000 peacekeepers for a country the size of Western Europe.

At the core of Kabila's project to make Congo into one nation with one government is brassage - the integration of the militias. At squalid camps across the country, the militiamen who have been raping and murdering are invited to hand in their weapons and join the new national army. I head for Camp Saio, a camp outside Bukavu where men with Samuel L Jackson sunglasses and cheekbones that could cut butter are milling and mulling as they wait for "reintegration". Places like this are the key to Congo's future. The country's success stands or falls on whether the militiamen can be coaxed to come here and slowly build a state. Dr Adolphe Tumba, the head of the camp, takes me trudging through the mud on a tour.

In the first room I see, there are nine stinking beds. Men are sitting, rotting plaster covering their wounds. In the corner is a soldier shivering in his bed, his face covered with the lesions that come with the final stages of Aids. He opens his eyes - they recoil, wounded by the light. They close again as he curls wearily into a tight ball. I ask the men what life was like on the front line. "We ate. We had food there," they snap back. I ask again, assuming they misunderstood. "We had food at the front line. It was better. Why did you come here without something for us to eat?" They last ate two days ago. They have not received their $5-a-month wages for 40 days. They are starving.

A UN source warned me: "The people in that camp are going out and rampaging into the nearby villages. They do it for survival. They steal to get by. Yesterday they killed a man, the day before they killed a woman and some kids. It's all done by men in uniform coming out of that camp." Joseph, a 22-year-old, tells me he joined up when he was a teenager because his village was attacked by the Rwandans. "They killed my father, my grandfather and my little sister. So I decided to join Mai-Mai [a Congolese militia]. I can't count how many people I killed. I did it for six years."

His friends gather round, and some of them are more eager to brag about their kill rates. They remind me of kids on some estates I have visited, bragging about their Asbos. Are they telling the truth, or is this teenage display? As they become more and more animated describing their killing sprees, as their eyes become wider and their stories more vivid, our UN escort begins to panic and tells us we must leave. "Quickly!" he calls.

As we drive away, I realise it is not enough that our greed for resources started this war - it is vandalising any chance of bringing it to an end. While these state-building camps can offer only starvation and a sometimes-never $5 wage, Unicef says the militias are offering the same men $60 a month to carry on seizing and raping and killing. They can afford it because they still control most of the coltan, gold and diamond mines, and Western and Chinese companies are still snapping up the sparklers they offer. So long as the militias can continue to use our money to outbid the national government, there will never be a unified state in Congo, and life will continue to be a live-action replay of Thomas Hobbes' bleakest descriptions.

And yet, even the best case scenario - effective brassage, a unified army, a coherent state - carries with it blood-drenched risks. What if once Kabila gets control of the country, he morphs into a Mobutu or a Mugabe? Then all this nation-building will turn out to have been an exercise in capacity-building for a murderer. Who is this man with a neckless, nervous gaze? A rogue source at the British Embassy who has high-level dealings with the regime ponders over dinner: "There are essential two theories about Kabila," he says. "The first is that he is a good man surrounded by shits. The second is that he is one of the shits. Let's assume the first is true - what difference does it make? He is surrounded by Rumsfelds and Cheneys, friends of the father who would kill him if he stepped out of line. There is a large group around him whose finances and even their impunity from charges in the Hague depend on him staying in power. Would they allow him to lose power, or even to share it too much? Really?"

At times, it seems Congo is lost in a fog of moral ambiguity. Everybody agrees the state needs to be unified, and there seems to be only one state on offer - Kabila's - given the near-certainty he will win the election. An aid agency head says: "In this country, all you can ask about a politician is - is this person corrupt and self-seeking and doesn't give a damn about Congo, or is this person corrupt and self-seeking but wants what's best for Congo too? Of course Kabila's circle is corrupt. To have power in this country you must be corrupt. It's a corrupt system." The best hope, it seems, is to drag Congo up from being a broken stateless war zone where millions die to a bog-standard corrupt state. To the starving soldiers of Camp Saio, watching open-mouthed and hungry as we drive away, even this sunken ambition seems optimistic.

VII Spiritual Warfare

The coven of witches is dancing and cackling in the water. They have a hose-pipe and they are spraying each other's naked bodies, squealing and laughing. One of them comes up to me, wearing a worn-out Barney the dinosaur T-shirt, and splashes some water at my face. I am in a children's home, Chez Mama Coco, an hour's drive from Kinshasa, and the place is filled with starved witch-children who have been thrown out by their parents for displaying signs of being under the influence of Satan. Some have been burned and slashed, and some mutilated. One of the workers introduces me to a child - they do not know his name because he has not spoken since he arrived, but they call him Fidel - and tugs down his trousers. Where his penis once was, there is nothing but an angry red scab. "His mother cut it off during the exorcism," he says.

This is another consequence of our war. Herve Cheuzeville, the outgoing Head of Mission for Warchild, explains: "The idea of withcraft has always existed in Congo, but it is new to accuse children of it. It never happened before. It is a result of the terrible traumas of the past six years."

The Combat Spirituel church in Bukavu consists of an immense veranda filled with benches, with a neat white building attached. These churches have been pioneers of Congo's 21st-century witch-hunts, and when I arrive at their Sunday service, they greet me with whoops and hallelujahs. The evangelical preacher at the podium has a kind of Christian Pan's People dancing behind him, and he exclaims: "We salute God by dancing!" The congregation contains over 1,000 people, and they look more like the crowd at a football match than at a dreary Church of England ceremony. They blow whistles, jump up and down, and dance wildly. A man with a miraculous story about how he was cured of Aids through the power of prayer takes to the platform. I am told that if I want to talk witchcraft, however, I need to return late on Thursday, when the purgings and exorcisms happen.

I come back, and Papa Enoch Boonga - the "spiritual co-ordinator" - is waiting for me with a 14-year-old witch. I am led into the little house. The lights are switched off, and Papa Enoch produces a lantern that lights his face and casts a long shadow. In his slow, rhythmic French, he begins to tell me how: "Satan is waging war on the Congolese people. He comes to kill and hate. The answer to Satan's campaign against us is spiritual combat." That is his cue to drag out Clarice. She is a small girl wrapped in a big woollen cardigan. In a low, blank rote, her eyes cast down, she says: "I was taught sorcery when I was 12. My grandmother turned me into a witch by giving me a doughnut to eat."

Enoch looks at me triumphantly. "This is how it works! They give evil food!" He takes over from Clarice's halting speech. "Then the grandmother came at night in spiritual form and said, 'I gave you the doughnut to eat, now you must give me your little sister to eat.' She was so frightened she said, 'OK, OK,' and the next day her little sister fell ill and died. Then her grandmother demanded she break the leg of her mother, so when he mother was out gathering wood, she fell and broke her leg. Now the girl started to feel the power of sorcery and began to transform herself into a dog or a cat."

I keep looking at Clarice in disbelief, but then I realise she thinks I am glaring in condemnation and I look away. As Enoch speaks, the chanting behind us from the main service is getting louder and louder - "Out Satan, out!" hundreds of people cry, clawing at invisible demons in the air. He continues, "Her father is an artisinal miner and he stopped being able to find anything because of her sorcery. They fell into poverty."

I have to interrupt. I ask Clarice, softly: "Do you really think it is your fault your little sister died?" "Yes," she says. Her eyes remain fixed on the floor. "It was actually her parents who realised she was a witch," Enoch says. "They were very worried about their lives going bad, and they went to church and prayed and God told them what the problem was." He says they conducted an exorcism of Clarice, and, yes, it was tough. "When you cast Satan out, you almost destroy the person, but they come back with Jesus Christ in their heart."

As I look into Clarice's downcast eyes, I realise it is not only the physical landscape of Congo that lies in ruins. The psychological landscape has been trashed. The war has left girls like her in a society littered with superstition landmines that will not be cleared away for decades. She limps away, back to a life soaked in self-hate.

VIII - Packing Out the Albert Hall

The last time there was a holocaust in Congo, British and American people reacted with a great national revulsion. Books like Arthur Conan Doyle's The Crime of the Congo topped the bestseller lists, millions petitioned parliament to act, and the Royal Albert Hall was packed out with mass meetings detailing the Congo's long nightmare. A century on, the words and analyses of that great campaign still ring true. Joseph Conrad called it "the vilest scramble for loot that has ever disfigured the human conscience" - words that would make a perfect introduction to the reports of the UN Panel of Experts now.

But today, these four million people have died in the dark, unnoticed and unmourned. The generations living in the West today have said nothing while the country has been reduced to near-Leopoldian levels of desperation by the scramble for loot, conducted on our behalf and for our benefit. The average life-expectancy in Congo is 43 and falling. I did not see any elderly people on my journey; they do not exist. In a country where the war is laughably referred to as "winding down", a World Trade Center-full of people is butchered every two days, and in the lost rural areas I could not reach, bubonic plague has made a triumphant come-back. A health minister says in despair: "I have been told by the UN to prepare a plan for avian flu. I had to write back and say I am powerless to deal with the plague, so what am I supposed to do about chickens?"

This war was launched by nations that sensed - rightly - that our desire for coltan and diamonds and gold far outweighed our concern for the lives of black people. They knew that we would keep on buying, long after the UN had told us time and again that people were dying to provide our mobiles and games consoles and a girl's best friend. Today, we still buy, and the British Government - along with the rest of the democratic world - obstructs any attempt to introduce legally enforceable regulations to stop corporations trading in Congolese blood. They ignore the UN's warnings that: "Without the wealth generated by the illegal exploitation of natural resources arms cannot be bought, hence the conflict cannot be perpetuated," and insist that voluntary regulations - asking corporations to be nice to Africans - is "the most effective route".

In Bukavu, a 29-year-old human rights campaigner called Bertrand Bisimwa summarised his country's situation for me with cruel concision. "Since the 19th century, when the world looks at Congo it sees a pile of riches with some black people inconveniently sitting on top of them. They eradicate the Congolese people so they can possess the mines and resources. They destroy us because we are an inconvenience." As he speaks, I picture the raped women with bullets burying through their intestines and try to weigh them against the piles of blood-soaked electronic goods sitting beneath my Christmas tree with their little chunks of Congolese metal whirring inside. Bertrand smiles and says, "Tell me - who are the savages? Us, or you?"

Read More...

Summary only...

45,000 Die Each Month in Congo- But What Do We Care?

A UN report released this week says that 45,000 people die each month in the Democratic Republic of Congo due to the lingering effects of a war that was supposed to have ended five years ago. It's the most devastating loss of life due to war since WWII. Most of the dead are non-combatants, civilians caught up in the conflict. Half of these who account for the dead are children. But what do we care...



A UN report released this week says that 45,000 people die each month in the Democratic Republic of Congo due to the lingering effects of a war that was supposed to have ended five years ago. It's the most devastating loss of life due to war since WWII. Most of the dead are non-combatants, civilians caught up in the conflict. Half of these who account for the dead are children.

As one news report states:

"Congo's monthly death rate of 2.2 deaths for each 1,000 people — essentially unchanged from the last survey in 2004 — is nearly 60% higher than the average for sub-Saharan Africa, according to the study by IRC and Australia's Burnet Institute, which researches epidemiological disease."

The causes of death? Mostly disease and malnutrition--the aftershocks of a forgotten war, woefully ignored by both Clinton and Bush White Houses, that claimed some 4 million lives. Altogether, in the near decade long conflict that has now settled into a simmering status quo of sporadic violence in lawless regions, the death toll is thought to stand at 5.4 million lives. There are more UN peacekeepers in the Congo, a massive country in sheer size, than anywhere else in the world. But the resources needed to make them effective, on say a scale as done in Afghanistan or Iraq, is non-existent. So the beaten down giant of a fractured nation lurches from one conflict to the next, with the civilian populace caught in the middle, enduring mass displacement, starvation and disease.

Since before there was such a thing as a "blog," I wrote numerous news articles on the war dating back to at least 1998. I watched as what should have been the victorious overthrow of the Western backed dictator Mobutu Sesse Soku turned into chaos and then an utter nightmare, with its seeds ominously linked to the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. I noticed how the mainstream news media failed to focus on the conflict, even as it thretaened to turn into a full continental power struggle, drawing in several nations, with even Libya and South Africa on the brink of joining the melee. When Ted Koppel's Nightline did decide to cover the story, he actually apologised, for not having done it sooner. Some three years after the war had begun, a major American news agency had finally dedicated a weeklong series to the devastating war in Congo. It was so little, so late, but still many were thankful. Unfortunately, that first episode aired on Sept. 10th, 2001. The events of the following Tuesday made certain the woes of the Congo would be buried and forgotten again, as American lives and the Mideast became all consuming.

The war in Congo in fact would end, ironically enough, when the many countries and factions found their sources of Western weapons drying up with the coming "War on Terror." They negotiated their own peace, but left the country in utter shambles. Imagine if after WWII, there had been no Marshall Plan, and the many Axis fighters had splintered into factions that could rape, pillage and plunder at will. Imagine if all the sides in the Yugoslavian conflict had been armed, and left to their own destructive devices. Imagine a broken and fractured Iraq, where every leader with a gun wants his own fiefdom, but a hundred times worse. That only begins to sum up the modern day problems in Congo.

And yet, I haven't seen anyone declare a "War on Poverty" for the Congo. I haven't seen massive debt relief for the DRC accumulated under Mobutu, in the same way Iraq's debt accrued under Saddam Hussein was forgiven. There's little talk of the DRC on the nightly news, or by pundits of the conservative or so-called "liberal" media. People who march against war in US cities aren't marching much for peace in the Congo. Aren't many actors and actresses wearing END CONGO WAR! buttons. There's no major peace plan launched in Annapolis to solve Congo's crises, which in a decade have taken infinitely more lives than over sixty years of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And I haven't heard a single question put to any presidential candidate in either party regarding what ideas they might have to bring some resolution to the Congo's lengthy and disastrous conflict. It's amazing to think that over 5 million human lives could be snuffed out due to war, and hardly seem to make a ripple or sound in this increasingly connected and globalised world I keep hearing about.

Every once in a while the DRC makes it back into the headlines, when there's something so graphic and horrendous it titilates the Western pornographic gaze--be it tales of cannibalism or mass rape in Eastern Congo--and fulfills our racial fascination with "Darkest Africa." But unlike Darfur, for some reason, the Congo never stays long in the press. And as much as I at times grit my teeth at the "Save Africa" ONE crusaders who cry "poor Africa" without ever seeming to see our own neoliberal, weapons sales, post-colonial role in varied crises, a little attention and focus on the DRC might be a good thing. So every once in a while, when something like this report comes out, I type out a blog as a reminder to myself and others.

Because I figure some of us have to care...

More on the Congo:

Africa Action- DRC

Democracy for Congo

Congo: Plunder and Submission

The War on Women

Do Something!

Friends of the Congo

Congo Global Action Network

Standing With Our Sisters- Benefit for Rape Survivors of Eastern Congo

Panzi Hospital of Bukavu

50 Years is Enough

V-Day

Read More...

Summary only...

Democracy for Congo ?

This week the citizens of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) went to the polls to elect a new leader, and government. It is the first democratic election in the large war-torn nation in over 40 years--and possibly one of Africa's most important.


When independence came in 1960 and the highly promising Patrice Lumumba was popularly elected to power, it was supposed to be a rebirth--the end of colonization and the rise of an African powerhouse, mineral rich and with the ability to change the face of a continent. But those high hopes have yielded bitter tragedy in the past 45 years. Today the DRC is a foundering giant, barely kept in order by a few thousand UN troops, ravaged by war and poverty, and exploited for its wealth by its neighbors, both near and far.

The more remote roots of the Congos problems can probably be traced back to the arrival of the Portuguese, their off and on again imbalanced power alliance with the old Kingdom of Congo, its eventual conquering, and the resulting slave trade that not only sent millions of black bodies to the New World, but also caused mayhem, displaced peoples and destroyed cultures. The DRC's time as a colony was even more horrific. Under European rulers like Leopold II of Belgium, the Congos natural resource wealth was plundered; brutality resulted in the death of millions; and ethnic tensions were exacerbated. Independence didnt free the Congo from the curse of its wealth. Its democratically nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba became victim to a US sanctioned and Belgian-planned overthrow/assassination, one of many Cold War casualties for Africa, where claims of "communist containment" were used to carry out economic and strategic policy. In his place came the Western propped-up dictator Mobutu Sese Soko, who remained a key US ally despite his continual rape of his own country.

Mobutu robbed the Congos treasury, placing the money in Swiss banks, and lined his pockets with monetary kickbacks by giving over pro-corporation mining rights to Western companies. He lavishly spent money on such items as high priced French furniture, fancying himself something of a European king. He carried out the bidding of the US, brutally repressing anyone who dissented with his dictatorship, and interfering in his neighbors affairs, sometimes on the side of Americas other African allythe white-minority apartheid government of South Africa. During the more than 35 years of Mobutus rule, the Congos vast wealth was squandered, a massive debt was accrued through Western banks eager to give loans as personal payoffs, and basic social services from roads to schools to hospitals were heavily neglected.

The dictator's end finally came in 1997, much to the happiness of the Congolese, at the hands of a rebel movement that converted or overtook his forces. The ousting of Mobutu, who by then everyone knew had been directly involved in the Western-backed plot that killed Patrice Lumumba, was hailed as the signal of a Renaissance. His palace was ransacked. The rebels were celebrated. The French name Zaire, that Mobutu had given the country, was even changed back to Congo, the Democratic Republic. But things didn't work out as planned.

The rebel leader Laurent Kabila took control of the vast nation with many promises of freedom and prosperity. Yet during his brief reign he outlawed opposition groups and shut down the press, making a host of enemies as he fought for control between factions. With internal corruption and an exploitative Western community, he was unable to implement meaningful reform to the shattered country's infrastructure and did nothing to remove some 60 million Congolese from abject poverty, in a nation literally teeming with resources, but kept shackled by detrimental IMF policies and a massive debt. Worse yet, his blocking of UN probes into reported massacres during his rebellion against Mobutu made him an international pariah. But Kabila's most direct problem, and the beginning of his country's nightmare, turned out to be the friends he kept.

Kabila's toppling of Mobutu was not a singular act or even that of just the people, but came with the backing of nearby Rwanda. The Rwandan army remained in Congo with the claim that they were there to train the newly liberated nation's defense forces. But when asked to leave, the Rwandans not only refused but helped spark rebellion among a faction of the DRC's army. Worse still, the Rwandans brought their own Hutu-Tutsi nightmare with them (the horror the world shamefully watched unfold in 1994 that claimed close to one million lives), citing the need to seek out threats to its own security (namely Hutu militias that operated in DR Congo's lawless frontier). Laurent Kabila soon found himself looking at not only a revolt by a section of his army, but much of the eastern part of his country that was ethnically aligned to Rwanda, all of which could result in a Hutu-Tutsi orgy of genocidal violence.

It didn't take long before others came looking for a feast in the weak, resource-rich giant. Nearby bordering Uganda, claiming worries over security, sent troops into the DRC to support Rwanda's war against the latter nation's former ally. Angola, another of Kabila's one-time allies, soon joined the fray on his side-against both Rwanda and Uganda. Namibia and Zimbabwe in turn allied themselves with Angola and Kabila, sending troops into the melee.

This all resulted in what until then was unheard of in modern Africa, a regional conflict with all the markings of a continental war - threatening to possibly draw even more combatants into the fray from as far off as South Africa and Libya. Cease-fires and treaties were signed, eventually ignored and fighting repeatedly resumed. And though these various nations issued rhetoric about claims of issues of security, their true motives were best seen through actions of their troops who hoisted off key mineral resources back to their respective mother countries. A UN panel noted that the foreign states all deliberately prolonged the conflict to plunder gold, diamonds, timber and coltan--a mineral used in the making of mobile phones--from the Congo, thus highlighting a key shameful reason for the disastrous and costly war: greed.

Laurent Kabila wouldn't survive the mayhem that had erupted around him however, dying from gunshot wounds inflicted by a bodyguard in January of 2001. His son Joseph Kabila, 30 years old and a political novice, would take the reins of power. To the surprise of everyone the younger Kabila embarked on an ambitious plan, declaring that he wanted to end the devastating war. It would take two more years of fighting and the sacrifice of many more lives, yet by December of 2002 a peace deal was signed and foreign troops began to withdraw finally from the Congo.

In the end, anywhere from 3 to 4 million Congolese were killed in what has been dubbed Africas First World War. No conflict in the past fifty years, since World War II, has claimed that many lives. No conflict of such magnitude, of such death, had ever gone on in modern history for five years, with hardly any media coverage. Unlike regions in Western and Central Asia with key oil reserves or Eastern European atrocities of ethnic cleansings that threaten region stability, the DRC's war and the snuffing out of some 3 to 4 million citizens of the global community to this day remains remarkably unreported. In the US, neither Democratic nor Republican administrations gave it much attention. The news media only become interested when sensationalist stories of butchery appeared that helped to foster well-harbored notions of "Darkest Africa. As one Congolese put it either the world turned a blind eye to the massive war, or its victims were emitting silent screams.

So here we are, four years after peace, and elections are finally being held. "Democracy has come to Congo" read news headlines in the country. The UN is hailing the recent turnout at the polls as a success, hoping for optimism. This is an important election after all, even if it doesn't make the news. The ultimate fate and direction of a country with such wealth, that helped spark a regional war that drew in its neighbors, is of monumental importance to not only Africa but the world. But centuries of exploitation, half a decade of war, 3 to 4 million deaths, and the ruin of such a large nation aren't healed overnight.

In parts of Congo, such as the eastern region, a state of lawlessness still exists, even with UN peacekeepers. Numerous bloody conflicts and massacres have taken place in the past four years that have claimed well over 50,000 lives, the leftover remnants of machinations by Rwandan and Ugandan armies, who recruited and armed rival ethnic groups as allies. The driving force for many of these factions was the war itself. What armed and kept them knitted together were often the larger more cohesive Ugandan and Rwandan militaries. With these groups gone, and the greater war seemingly over, these varied factions have been scrambling for control, leaving endless combatants (many of them children or young men) with no occupation, direction or distinct motive, other than the killing, raping and destructive methods the years of bloody fighting has taught them.

The people of Congo also didnt have the best options at the polls. Many on the ballot are ex-rebel leaders who are at best warlords turned politicians. They are running against the favored incumbent, Joseph Kabilawhose key claim to power is that he brokered the peace his father could not. Of course there are more than presidents to be voted on. Beyond the 32 presidential candidates, there are over 9,000 parliamentary candidates to be decided by some 26 million registered voters. At least 50,000 polling stations have been set up across the vast region, supervised by a quarter of a million electoral staff. The very feat of monitoring an election on this scale has proved daunting.

And of course, there are further complications.

The Congo's vast mineral wealth is coveted not just by its local neighbors, but the international community. Mining estimates by foreign companies have placed its accumulated potential wealth in the trillions--more than the economies of the United States and the European Economic Union combined. Thus far, accessing that wealth has been a matter of paying off the right corrupt leaders, who allow it to be carted away for cheap, leaving nothing for the country's citizens. In fact, through forced brokering of the IMF and the World Bank, the younger Kabila has already signed numerous contracts with foreign corporations to mine the Congos wealth. And, troubling to many, he is now their favored contender.

So what does this all mean for the future of the Democratic Republic of Congo? Uncertainty. The results of the election won't be known until September. And the entire process, which includes four more elections through January of 2007, still have be carried out. For now questions linger. Can the election that occurred this week in the DRC be considered democratic, given that those vying for power are already in power? Will the outcome be accepted by the Congolese people or the former ex-leaders? Will diplomacy take the place of war? And can a giant blessed with such wealth navigate the exploitative world of debt, neo-liberalism and globalization the larger Western world has straddled it with?

Time will tell. What is not in dispute is that the DRC is now at a crossroads. We just have to wait and see what path it will take.

For more on the DRC and the recent elections:

Friends of the Congo
http://www.friendsofthecongo.org/

AllAfrica News on DRC
http://allafrica.com/congo_kinshasa/

Africa Action
http://www.africaaction.org/campaign_new/debt.php

Read More...

Summary only...