DR Congo: what is to be done?
11:32 pm - October 30th 2008
| Tweet | Share on Tumblr |
IT LOOKS as if the world is watching the opening days of the third civil war to devastate the Democratic Republic of Congo in little more than a decade. And just as was the case on the previous two occasions, there do not seem to be any realistic resolutions on offer.
Situations of this complexity somehow seem to defy the capacity of the standard toolbox of concepts employed in international relations analysis. Simplistic socialist appeals to class politics and the organisations of the working class simply have no purchase on the realities on the ground in a part of the world where alignment largely flows from tribal identity. Trade unions and quasi-Maoist currents are known to have existed in the past, but as far as I am aware, do so no longer.
Even for those sections of the left that buy into the framework of humanitarian intervention – something that should surely be acceptable to socialists only in the most extreme circumstances – will be mindful that the DRC already hosts 17,000 UN troops, the largest such deployment anywhere in the world. Yet even two or three times that number of soldiers could not feasibly be expected meaningfully to maintain peace in a country the size of western Europe.
Perhaps the most practical immediate step would be for Britain – in its capacity as the main bilateral donor to neighbouring Rwanda – to make it plain to Kinshasa that its inflammatory if clandestine intervention in support of Rwandan business interests is not acceptable. Other countries with diplomatic leverage in the region should likewise warn off any other governments that might be considering entering the fray. However, what good such efforts will do is another matter.
Yet to spell out how we got to where we are now is considerably easier than coming up with any answers; while in normal circumstances it would be gratuitously offensive to compare a country with a woman who has been the victim of repeated brutal gang rapes, that seems to be about the only fitting simile for the experience of DRC since the Congress of Berlin.
Almost all African nations were, by the end of the nineteenth century, formally speaking colonies of one European power or another. But what was then known as the Congo Free State was unique in being the de jure personal fiefdom of Belgium’s King Leopold II, under whose reign over 10 million Congolese were to perish from disease and exploitation. So horrifying was his rule that international pressure forced the state of Belgium to regularise the situation in 1908.
Five years after independence in 1960 – which itself led to civil war with Belgian intervention to topple Moscow-aligned Patrice Lumumba – the country fell into the clutches of a man called Mobutu Sese Seko. As it turned out, he proved to be no run of the mill African dictator.
Sponsored by the US on account of his impeccable anti-communism, he proceeded to built a viciously repressive regime largely geared almost entirely to his personal enrichment. There have even been claims that the word ‘kleptocracy’ was coined expressly in his honour. By 1984, Mobutu was sitting on a $4bn fortune in his personal Swiss bank account, a huge sum at the time and an amount of the same order as the country’s national debt.
It took the civil war of 1996-97 to force him to flee the country. But peace was not established; in a spillover from the Rwanda genocide, a second outbreak of fighting soon sucked in half a dozen regional powers.
The main attraction was not ideological support for any of the contending forces, but rather the prospect of getting a slice of DRC’s vast natural resources, which include gold, diamonds, copper and coltan, a key raw material for mobile phones of the type you probably have sitting in your pocket. The result was a conflict that claimed 5.4m lives, making it the most bloody since the second world war.
History now looks set to repeat itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as tragedy and the third time live on CNN.
| Tweet | Share on Tumblr |  |
Dave Osler is a regular contributor. He is a British journalist and author, ex-punk and ex-Trot. Also at: Dave's Part
· Other posts by Dave Osler
Story Filed Under: Blog ,Foreign affairs
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
Reader comments
Excuse me? A third civil war? Rubbish. The first civil war never ended.
There are two reasons why this conflict is only now being talked about – firstly it has been internationalised by the flow of people into border crossings and secondly an ambitious general has realised that his personal political agenda will be benefitted by courting the international media.
Killings have continued daily in the Congo basin area at a rate of over 1,000/day for the past 50 years with temporary spikes reaching 10,000/day or more during this period. Those spikes have coincided with political campaigns by military and para-military leaders who have seen an opportunity to stage a coup d’etat in order to rape the country anew for themselves and their supporters.
This state of affairs has been ongoing since before the Belgians took on local practice, and the country remains the heart of darkness from which many of Africa’s problems emanate.
The violence inherent in authoritarian patriarchal tribalism is the cancer of the continent and it is exists in most extreme form in the Congo basin from where it spreads south into Zimbabwe, across the Rift where it affects the Kenyan elections and also to the north. The flow of resources and arms through, into and from this region can be linked to almost every African conflict in the past 200 years and beyond from Rwanda to Angola and Biafra and more.
Until African leaders themselves unify in recognition of this fact and take measures to open the territory up the stability of the continent and their own continued survival will remain under threat – and the killings will continue to corrupt the life and politics of the people.
Shorter Thomas: “it’s all the darkies’ fault; we can’t do anything about it and certainly shouldn’t feel bad about, err, colonising their countries, setting up puppet regimes to fight each other during the Cold War, trading them guns for diamonds and coltan, etc, etc. Let’s have another G&T and lament the white man’s burden”.
Shorter me: fuck, right-wingers are cunts.
John,
that’s not what I wrote.
I said it was a structural failure in which everyone is culpable. I blame the illiberalism of the power structures which operate over there and over here.
Are you trying to tell me that I’m racist if I don’t say it is ok for black generals to commit genocide just because thay may be black?
I call it as I see it and I try to explain why what I’ve seen happened.
Prevention of violence requires unity of resistance to violence, prevention of political failure in Africa requires unity among African leaders to form a concerted front for action.
DR Congo is a story of perpetual failure by everyone on all sides.
Guys, do you know thiis post was posted twice?
Probably because nobody commented on it the first time.
Who is this General Laurent Nkunda?
If the actions follow the normal course he could be the new leader of the country within a couple of years. Does he have a plan to deal with the injustices of the past? Does he have a plan to prevent further injustice in the future?
Will he take over the country and hold it together or will it begin a long and violent fragmentation?
Would we care more if more essential resources were at stake? Would we care more if there were any principles at stake? Would we care more if we felt implicated in a historiacl legacy?
Would we feel more prepared to act if we realised it is in our strategic interests to do so, or are we better off leaving well alone?
Reactions: Twitter, blogs
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
