To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect's blog
History is mocking the people of Congo. In early November they should have been celebrating a milestone in international human rights, one of the very first occasions that campaigners from around the world united to protest on a mass scale.
Exactly 100 years ago the behaviour of colonial agents of Belgian King Leopold II provoked just that. Then, Congo was "the issue," igniting a publicity firestorm from Europe to the US that drew vast crowds to public debates to condemn the behaviour of Leopold's representatives as they pillaged the Congo river basin for natural rubber. Today, history is repeating itself, with China, not Belgium, leading the exploitation of the country.
In the first years of the last century, celebrities like Mark Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle got involved, alongside characters like Roger Casement, the British diplomat later executed for treason, and George Washington Williams, a black American journalist with more chutzpah than Oprah.
But marking that hopeful centenary seems inappropriate given current events. It's not just that fighting today in north and south Kivu has forced 250,000 to flee. It's also that the transfer of power a century ago was an utterly false dawn. The Congo or, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to use its modern name, has been trapped in a spiral of suffering ever since. Bad enough under Belgian rule, it has worsened steadily since independence in 1960.
An estimated 1,500 souls die each day in the DRC as a result of violence and turmoil. There has not been a single period in post-Saddam Iraq or Taliban-infested Afghanistan with a daily death toll that comes close. Some die fighting. But more die because, in this most failed of failed states, standards of healthcare, water and nutrition have reverted to the middle ages.
Having travelled across this vast country—from one side to the other is the distance from London to Moscow—to research a book, I was stunned by the scale of its decay. My work as a journalist has taken me to undeveloped places. But Congo was so actively undeveloping that the clock seemed to spin backwards.
After the cold war, international relations experts made fixing failed states a new priority, and following 9/11 there was some talk about the need to stop states collapsing, if only to drain the swamp of anti-western, anti-modern resentment. But no one has been able to stop the DRC's slide into failure.
In the Congo there are barely any state institutions worthy of the name. The health system is piecemeal and scarcely reaches beyond the capital, Kinshasa. The road network has collapsed. There are no banks. Posting a letter has been unthinkable for decades.
And the army is an anarchic riot of ill-disciplined brutes. Out in the east, home to many of the country's mineral riches, the army is cobbled together from ex-rebels and self-styled freedom fighters, with only a nodding allegiance to a central command structure. Most joined up for the few dollars a day paid out as part of an international peace process, a response to the conflict that gripped Congo from 1998 to 2003.
Groups who were trying to kill each other until a short while ago today expect to fight alongside each other. It could be laughable, were the stakes not so high for those forced to live a post-apocalyptic, feral existence in areas such as the Kivus, in the east.
Here people learn from bitter experience what happens when "army" units pass through. The villagers can expect to lose everything, including the dignity of girls (who are routinely raped), and the lives of anyone foolish enough to fight back. I would estimate that most refugees sparked by the present crisis have fled not from the rebels, but from the government, the very people meant to be looking after them.
Those who try to explain the current fighting in terms of tribal differences, between the Tutsi-associated Banyamulenge of eastern Congo and some Hutu-linked groups, are missing the point. Yes, the spillover from the Rwandan genocide of 1994 affected this region. But, in a state as failed as the Congo, relatively small tribal frictions can be turned into a national crises. And the current crisis needs to be understood, as it was in King Leopold's day, as a battle over Congo's rich natural resources.
Many tribal groups across the country are resentful of the ruling elite in Kinshasa. These resentments have been exacerbated by jealousies over vast contracts recently signed between China and the government of President Joseph Kabila. Anger has focused on the likelihood of Kabila and his inner circle, from his base in the southern province of Katanga, skimming off vast sums from these opaque deals.
The appetite of China's economy has created tension across Africa, with Chinese businessmen willing to spend vast sums for scarce raw materials. Countries like Zambia or Sierra Leone, long used to relying on aid, have found themselves with unprecedented revenues. Details of the contracts, and lucrative bribes and backhanders, are scant. But the scale became clear when, two years ago, China promised Congo $5bn in exchange for rights to much of its copper, cobalt, tin and other minerals.
This massive cash pot has stirred up the disenfranchised masses in Congo's regions who won't see a penny from Kinshasa as things stand. It has also inspired the Tutsi-influenced rebels of the Kivus, led by General Laurent Nkunda, whose insurgency is designed to force Kabila to share the spoils.
The fact that Rwanda supplies weapons, ammunition, manpower and communications to Nkundu's rebels is one of Africa's worst kept secrets. The west turns a blind eye, seeing Rwanda through the frame of events in 1994, when 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered by Hutu extremists. Against such a background, the now Tutsi-controlled government of Rwanda can do no wrong.
But Rwanda is the Israel of central Africa, a country forged through suffering, with a far superior military to its neighbours and influence across the Great Lakes region. Our outsiders' sense of guilt for 1994 should not stop us from criticising it for fomenting the current violence. Nor should guilt about the results of our colonial scramble for Africa more than a century ago prevent us criticising the Chinese for provoking a new cycle of violence.
To read Ben Simon's response to this article from the frontline in eastern Congo, clickhere
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect's blog
History is mocking the people of Congo. In early November they should have been celebrating a milestone in international human rights, one of the very first occasions that campaigners from around the world united to protest on a mass scale.
Exactly 100 years ago the behaviour of colonial agents of Belgian King Leopold II provoked just that. Then, Congo was "the issue," igniting a publicity firestorm from Europe to the US that drew vast crowds to public debates to condemn the behaviour of Leopold's representatives as they pillaged the Congo river basin for natural rubber. Today, history is repeating itself, with China, not Belgium, leading the exploitation of the country.
In the first years of the last century, celebrities like Mark Twain and Arthur Conan Doyle got involved, alongside characters like Roger Casement, the British diplomat later executed for treason, and George Washington Williams, a black American journalist with more chutzpah than Oprah.
But marking that hopeful centenary seems inappropriate given current events. It's not just that fighting today in north and south Kivu has forced 250,000 to flee. It's also that the transfer of power a century ago was an utterly false dawn. The Congo or, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to use its modern name, has been trapped in a spiral of suffering ever since. Bad enough under Belgian rule, it has worsened steadily since independence in 1960.
An estimated 1,500 souls die each day in the DRC as a result of violence and turmoil. There has not been a single period in post-Saddam Iraq or Taliban-infested Afghanistan with a daily death toll that comes close. Some die fighting. But more die because, in this most failed of failed states, standards of healthcare, water and nutrition have reverted to the middle ages.
Having travelled across this vast country—from one side to the other is the distance from London to Moscow—to research a book, I was stunned by the scale of its decay. My work as a journalist has taken me to undeveloped places. But Congo was so actively undeveloping that the clock seemed to spin backwards.
After the cold war, international relations experts made fixing failed states a new priority, and following 9/11 there was some talk about the need to stop states collapsing, if only to drain the swamp of anti-western, anti-modern resentment. But no one has been able to stop the DRC's slide into failure.
In the Congo there are barely any state institutions worthy of the name. The health system is piecemeal and scarcely reaches beyond the capital, Kinshasa. The road network has collapsed. There are no banks. Posting a letter has been unthinkable for decades.
And the army is an anarchic riot of ill-disciplined brutes. Out in the east, home to many of the country's mineral riches, the army is cobbled together from ex-rebels and self-styled freedom fighters, with only a nodding allegiance to a central command structure. Most joined up for the few dollars a day paid out as part of an international peace process, a response to the conflict that gripped Congo from 1998 to 2003.
Groups who were trying to kill each other until a short while ago today expect to fight alongside each other. It could be laughable, were the stakes not so high for those forced to live a post-apocalyptic, feral existence in areas such as the Kivus, in the east.
Here people learn from bitter experience what happens when "army" units pass through. The villagers can expect to lose everything, including the dignity of girls (who are routinely raped), and the lives of anyone foolish enough to fight back. I would estimate that most refugees sparked by the present crisis have fled not from the rebels, but from the government, the very people meant to be looking after them.
Those who try to explain the current fighting in terms of tribal differences, between the Tutsi-associated Banyamulenge of eastern Congo and some Hutu-linked groups, are missing the point. Yes, the spillover from the Rwandan genocide of 1994 affected this region. But, in a state as failed as the Congo, relatively small tribal frictions can be turned into a national crises. And the current crisis needs to be understood, as it was in King Leopold's day, as a battle over Congo's rich natural resources.
Many tribal groups across the country are resentful of the ruling elite in Kinshasa. These resentments have been exacerbated by jealousies over vast contracts recently signed between China and the government of President Joseph Kabila. Anger has focused on the likelihood of Kabila and his inner circle, from his base in the southern province of Katanga, skimming off vast sums from these opaque deals.
The appetite of China's economy has created tension across Africa, with Chinese businessmen willing to spend vast sums for scarce raw materials. Countries like Zambia or Sierra Leone, long used to relying on aid, have found themselves with unprecedented revenues. Details of the contracts, and lucrative bribes and backhanders, are scant. But the scale became clear when, two years ago, China promised Congo $5bn in exchange for rights to much of its copper, cobalt, tin and other minerals.
This massive cash pot has stirred up the disenfranchised masses in Congo's regions who won't see a penny from Kinshasa as things stand. It has also inspired the Tutsi-influenced rebels of the Kivus, led by General Laurent Nkunda, whose insurgency is designed to force Kabila to share the spoils.
The fact that Rwanda supplies weapons, ammunition, manpower and communications to Nkundu's rebels is one of Africa's worst kept secrets. The west turns a blind eye, seeing Rwanda through the frame of events in 1994, when 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered by Hutu extremists. Against such a background, the now Tutsi-controlled government of Rwanda can do no wrong.
But Rwanda is the Israel of central Africa, a country forged through suffering, with a far superior military to its neighbours and influence across the Great Lakes region. Our outsiders' sense of guilt for 1994 should not stop us from criticising it for fomenting the current violence. Nor should guilt about the results of our colonial scramble for Africa more than a century ago prevent us criticising the Chinese for provoking a new cycle of violence.
To read Ben Simon's response to this article from the frontline in eastern Congo, clickhere
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect's blog
