How Do You Solve a Problem Like the Congo?

It is often referred to as Africa’s “forgotten war.” Over three and half million Congolese have died in the past decade, the largest loss of civilian life since WWII.

Since 1998, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has been mired in sporadic civil and regional war. The conflict has seen seven neighboring countries involved in cross-border fighting, exacerbating internal political divisions and long-standing tribal wars.

The DRC’s natural wealth — of diamonds, gold, and more — combined with its human poverty has perpetuated the violence; assisted by the far-reaching influences of foreign money, multinational corporations, and the global proliferation of small arms.

But since 2003 the DRC has experienced a fragile peace, even witnessing a historic round of national elections. Now aid agencies warn that the country is once again on the brink of civil war, thanks to a violent renegade general who claims he is the true protector of peace.

As part of its focus on genocide and international conflict, the Seminal examines the history of war in the DRC, the current threat of violence, and the challenges now facing its first democratically elected president, Joseph Kabila.

The History of Violence

Ever since King Leopold II beat out his European rivals for possession of the Congo in 1885, and began brutally exploiting its inhabitants to extract a personal fortune of rubber and ivory, the territory has been the stage of larger battles on the parts of regional and world powers.

In 1960 Belgium granted the Congo its independence and quickly withdrew. However, along with the U.S. it subsequently helped overthrow the newly-elected anti-colonial leader Patrice Lumumba, in favor of future dictator Joseph Mobutu. Lumumba was detained, beaten, and assassinated in the presence of Belgian officers, all while the U.N. debated whether it should protect him.

Mobutu, who renamed the country Zaire and himself Mobutu Sese Seko, abolished Parliament, consolidated power, and spent the next thirty years enjoying generally rosy relations with the U.S. and Europe. Kinshasa was one of the biggest recipients of U.S. foreign aid to sub-Saharan Africa during the Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Bush administrations, despite Mobutu’s reputation for extreme corruption, oppression, self-obsession, and deplorable human rights abuses.

Mobutu’s reign ended, and the modern era of fighting began, in 1994, when the Congo experienced an influx of Hutu refugees from neighboring Rwanda.

These refugees, many of whom were members of the notorious Interhamwe militias that carried out the genocide in Rwanda, fled to neighboring Zaire to avoid retribution at the hands of Tutsis. They organized themselves into rebel groups, and have since been using the Congo as a launching pad for sporadic cross-border raids into Rwanda.

In 1997, a Tutsi government came formally into power in Rwanda, led by President Paul Kagame and backed by a powerful and effective little army. Along with Uganda and Burundi (both of which had Tutsi populations and had suffered spillover effects of the genocide) Rwanda sent troops into the DRC to contain the Hutu threat. It also backed a pro-Tutsi Congolese rebel named Laurent Kabila to overthrow Mobutu, in the hopes of establishing a government in Kinshasa that would cooperate in bringing the Hutus back into Rwanda.

Kabila was successful. But after coming to power, he promptly threw his Rwandan backers out of the country.

With the governments of Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi — the DRC’s neighbors to the east — now turned violently against him, Kabila scrambled to develop allegiances with the Angolan, Zimbabwean, and Namibian leaderships to the south, and to a lesser extent with Chad, Libya, and Sudan. By 1999 violence had erupted throughout the DRC, prompting all major players to sign the UN-backed Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement.

Though a step in the right direction, the Agreement proved unable to prevent regular eruptions of violence, and ultimately it could not save Kabila from assassination. Laurent Kabila was shot to death by a bodyguard in January 2001 in an unsuccessful coup attempt likely backed by Rwanda and Uganda. His supporters replaced him ten days later with his eldest son, Joseph.

A New Peace

Joseph Kabila, it turns out, is a fairly nice and mild-mannered guy. However, at the age of 29 he thus inherited what many refer to as “Africa’s World War” – a conflict that still kills 1,000 Congolese a day.

He was initially installed as a transitional leader, but Joseph Kabila launched right into negotiations to try to end the horrific montage of fighting in his country.

In 2002 he signed separate peace agreements with Rwanda and Uganda, as well as with rival Congolese factions. Rwanda and Uganda agreed to withdraw their troops and as well as their financial support of opposition rebels, while Kinshasa agreed to help roundup and disarm foreign rebels. Rival political factions within the DRC agreed to hold presidential and legislative elections in three years.

A power-sharing Constitution was formally adopted in 2005, and the following year, having clearly grown into his role, Joseph Kabila became the DRC’s first democratically-elected president in an election widely approved by international observers.

Thanks to these efforts, open war in the DRC more or less ended in 2003. Nevertheless, humanitarian organizations report regular violent flare-ups. Rebel groups still control territory throughout the DRC, targeting ethnic groups with raids, massacres, and mass rape.

Much of the current violence also comes at the hands of the army and police. In 2005, in a CNN interview, Kabila was challenged about widespread reports of sexual assaults by his army, which he admitted were unacceptable. It is encouraging to note his response stood in pleasant contrast to many of his African counterparts, who have a habit of denying abuses by their armies: “I’ve spent most of my life in the military,” Kabila told CNN. “This isn’t the way soldiers are supposed to behave.”

So in addition to the “standard” challenges of running a sub-Saharan nation (e.g. extreme poverty, rampant disease, crippling debt, endemic corruption, etc), Kabila now faces the precarious task of permanently diffusing a complex web of ongoing inter-dependent conflicts:

The Rebels

Of most concern is renegade general Laurent Nkunda. The 2002 peace agreements included provisions for incorporating rebel groups into the Congolese national army, but General Nkunda and his men refused. Nkunda is a Congolese Tutsi, and a veteran of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (Kagame’s army that ended the Rwandan genocide). He claims he is needed to protect the Tutsi community from genocide at the hands of Hutu militias, which are notorious for targeting civilians.

But Human Rights Watch reports that Nkunda himself is responsible for widespread human right abuses in the DRC’s North Kivu province:

In addition to killing and abducting scores of civilians, soldiers have engaged in widespread rape and in the looting and destruction of property. All forces used child soldiers and some commanders tried to prevent international child protection agencies from locating and removing children them from their ranks. Since late 2006 the conflict has displaced some 370,000 persons, adding to the burden on humanitarian agencies already trying to assist hundreds of thousands of others displaced by earlier stages of the fighting.

This summer Nkunda broke a ceasefire and began attacking the Congolese army. Donors and aid agencies warn the conflict in North Kivu threatens to unravel the progress made since 2003.

Meanwhile, the governments of Rwanda and Uganda are still fighting their own rebel movements, which continue to use the DRC as a refuge and launching pad for cross-border attacks. They claim the threat these rebels pose to their sovereignty justifies their sending forces into DRC territory; Joseph Kabila disagrees. He has acknowledged the need to expel rebels back to their home countries, however many remain in the DRC, including in his employment.

Internal Opposition

Within the Congo, Joseph Kabila faces considerable political opposition. Due in large part to his own ethnicity and upbringing, his support base is generally the Swahili and English speaking populations in the east. In 2006 he only narrowly beat an opponent popular among the Lingala and French speaking populations in the west. This opponent now looms in exile, after making an alleged coup attempt earlier this year.

Tribal Disputes

These days, the most horrific fighting is the product of the DRC’s international conflicts transposing themselves onto local, long-standing ethnic conflicts. As with the Tutsi-Hutu division, the Belgians propagated ethnic divisions between the Lendu and Hema tribes in the Congo’s northeastern Ituri region, which in recent years as resulted in the DRC’s violent “war within a war.”

Ethnic violence, especially between Tutsis and Hutus, also occurs regularly in the Congo’s resource-rich Katanga province, at the hands of community-based “mai mai” militia. The North Kivu, Ituri, and Katanga provinces are the areas currently of most concern to international peacekeepers and humanitarian organizations.

Resource Conflicts

Finally, the Congo continues to suffer, as it has since the earliest arrival of whites, for its wealth. Diamonds, timber, wildlife, and minerals fund the militias. Both Rwanda and Uganda have been accused of exploiting natural resources in the DRC, which some Congolese claim is the real reason – rather than the containment of rebels – these countries send troops into the Congo.

In 2003 a panel of human rights organizations and the U.N. released a report naming at least 85 multinational corporations, many U.S.-owned, which are knowingly profiteering from illegally-extracted resources from the DRC. Prominent among these resources is coltan, a vital component of most cell phones.

All of this must be addressed in the course of solving the DRC’s ongoing humanitarian crisis.

Aid organizations state that, quite apart from the hundreds of thousands who have died from violence, the majority of the three and a half million deaths in the Congo since 1998 have been from disease and starvation, the indirect products of war. Stopping these circumstantial deaths is arguably the bigger challenge facing the DRC’s new government.

It is worth noting that since 2000 the world’s largest peacekeeping mission, MONUC, has been deployed in the DRC. Originally charged with enforcing the Lusaka Ceasefire, MONUC (currently at over 17,000 armed troops and a $1 billion annual budget) now concentrates most of its efforts on protecting civilians in the Ituri and Kivu provinces. There is no doubt their presence helps. However, there have been allegations of MONUC complacency, and even participation, in the violence in the Congo, given that it has failed to protect hundreds of thousands of Congolese civilians from targeted attacks.

African World War

How then, do you unravel a conflict that has already killed three and half million people? More importantly, how do you let three and half million die in the first place?

Despite the pleas of aid organizations and the condemnation of the international justice community, there remains an air of Western intellectual dismissal toward African wars — as though they are something too tribal, too trivial, or too inevitable to warrant the sort of attention given the “ideological” wars of, say, the Middle East.

But no more or less than other wars, the fighting in the DRC is rational and political. It also has straightforward solutions.

Like most conflicts in Africa the world community fools itself in thinking it is not complicit. The Congo’s long and violent history since the arrival of whites is filled with foreign triggers, whether in the form of colonialism, foreign aid, small arms, or cell phone companies. These interventions have rarely benefited the Congolese.

In light of the role resources and ethnic groups have always played in the DRC conflict, some have suggested the country should just rethink its borders. Indeed, notions of sovereignty and self-determination are very much at the heart of the conflict in the DRC; the product of arbitrary colonial borders, construed ethnic divisions, and limited natural resources. Rwanda, for example, a tiny country with one of the world’s highest population densities, has claimed parts of the DRC are “historically Rwandan,” undoubtedly in the interest of relieving its genocide-provoking shortage of land.

But regardless of whether the current borders have resulted in a “failed state,” it is difficult to convince such a nationalistic population to change its territory. As one advocate of border change admitted:

Even the inhabitants of a state as artificial as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), who have gained virtually nothing since the establishment of [King Leopold's] Congo Free State that could plausibly make them grateful to be Congolese, have nonetheless acquired at least a sense of common national identity, and some commitment to the continued existence of the ramshackle political unit that they inhabit.

Rethinking borders is dangerous. Moreover, history has shown that foreign interference perpetuates, rather than prevents, violence in the Congo. The country is currently experiencing the greatest semblance of peace and democracy in its 200 year history — and this peace is largely homegrown.

In light of this progress, the international community should limit its involvement in the DRC to peacekeeping, non-governmental advising, and responsibly donating. The way to help — to honor those who have died — is to stop more people from dying.

First, rebels like General Nkunda can be stopped from plunging the Congo back into civil war. A revamped, retrained, and well-empowered MONUC deployed throughout the region could halt any further attacks on civilians.

Next, the international community needs to be proactive about preventing circumstantial deaths. Millions of Congolese live in permanent displacement, in refugee camps, and in regions without access to basic nutrition and sanitation. Aid organizations are standing by to help these people, but they need money, and say they can’t do their work as long as there is violence.

Serving justice to the three and half million also means not undermining the peace achieved thus far. Multinational corporations need to be held accountable for their role in extracting, buying, and creating a market for conflict resources.

Though a much larger problem, the U.N. — especially the U.S., ex-Soviet, and Gulf countries — need to be held more accountable for the worldwide proliferation of small arms. They manufactured the millions of weapons that perpetuate war throughout central Africa, and arms-reduction schemes have successfully shown they can buy these weapons back.

These steps would give the DRC a chance to build on its progress.

The International Crisis Group has outlined a set of recommendations for strengthening peace in the DRC, which include strategic peace initiatives in Ituri, North Kivu, and Katanga, national army reform (including provisions for an ombudsman to register complaints of human rights abuses), decentralizing government, freezing all mining and deforestation concessions until a resources watchdog is in place, bringing back exiled opposition leaders, and lots and lots of foreign aid. Like Kagame in Rwanda, a post-conflict nation currently hailed for its effective use of foreign donations and vastly improved infrastructure and social services, Kabila seems like he just might be the man to properly oversee repairs to the DRC, though his cooperation can be carefully “incentivized” by doling out aid in small, earned installments. These are realistic goals.

At some stage, the DRC will have to deal with its past. There has been widespread ethnic cleansing, torture, strategic rape and sexual assault, pillaging, enslavement, child soldiering, and a sadistic array of other fear and intimidation tactics continuously reported from the jungles of the Congo since 1994. Perversely, the DRC violence appears to have been too fragmented, too sporadic, and also too indirect in its causing of human suffering to attract popular use of the term “genocide,” despite a cumulative death toll far exceeding that in Rwanda or Darfur.

In 2004 the transitional government turned over prosecution of war crimes in the DRC to the International Criminal Court, of which it is in a member. To date, two Congolese have been captured and brought before the court, charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. This is insufficient.

More aggressive local action is necessary to establish a sense of justice amongst the Congolese – something along the lines of the South African truth and reconciliation committee or the Rwandan community courts — to publicly diffuse deeply-entrenched resentment.

Without a visible commitment to justice, and with peace and democracy still so precarious in the DRC, there remains little incentive for people not to take long-standing resentment into their own hands.

WHAT'S NEXT?

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