THERE IS NO CONGO
The international community
needs to recognize a simple, albeit brutal fact: The Democratic
Republic of the Congo does not exist. All of the peacekeeping
missions, special envoys, interagency processes, and diplomatic initiatives
that are predicated on the Congo myth — the notion that one sovereign power is
present in this vast country — are doomed to fail. It is time to stop pretending
otherwise.
Much of Congo’s intractability
stems from a vast territory that is sparsely populated but packed with natural
resources. A mostly landlocked expanse at the heart of Africa, Congo comprises
67 million people from more than 200 ethnic groups. The country is bordered by
nine others — among them some of the continent’s weakest states.
A local Kiswahili saying holds,
Congo is a big country — you will eat it until you tire away! And indeed, for
centuries, this is precisely what Congo’s colonial occupiers, its neighbors,
and even some of its people have done: eaten away at Congo’s vast mineral
wealth with little concern for the coherency of the country left behind. Congo has none of the things that make a nation-state:
interconnectedness, a government that is able to exert authority consistently
in territory beyond the capital, a shared culture that promotes national unity,
or a common language. Instead, Congo has become a collection of peoples,
groups, interests, and pillagers who coexist at best.
Congo today is a product of its
troubled history: a century of brutal colonialism, 30 years of Cold War
meddling and misrule under U.S. ally Mobutu SeseSeko, and more than a decade of
war following his ouster in 1997. That conflict, which embroiled much of
southern Africa, brought rebel leader Laurent Kabila, a one-time revolutionary
colleague of Che Guevara, to power. Kabila was assassinated just a few short
years later, leaving his son, Joseph Kabila, in office in Kinshasa, Congo’s
ostensible capital.
The younger Kabila inherited a
broken infrastructure and a tenuous national identity shaped on repression and
patronage rather than governance and the supply of basic services. Despite
winning internationally sponsored elections in 2006, he still struggles to rule over a territory one
quarter of the size of the United States, where a nebulous sense of Congolese
identity — based on French, music, and a shared oppressive history — has not
translated into allegiance to the Congolese state. Innumerable
secessionist attempts, including those instigated by his father, have turned
Congo into ungovernable fiefdoms tenuously linked to the center. Kabila has few
tools at his disposal. There is little in the way of a disciplined army and
police force; they are more used to living off than serving the population.
Like Mobutu before him, Kabila is dependent on patronage to remain in power and
on revenue from aid flows and mining taxes.
Economically, the various
outlying parts of Congo are better integrated with their neighbours than with
the rest of the country. For instance, it is hard for anyone sitting in
Lubumbashi, the capital of mineral-rich Katanga province in the far southeast,
to see Kinshasa as ruling. It is a two-day journey from Lubumbashi to South
Africa’s Johannesburg; the trip from Katanga to Kinshasa — of similar distance
— is seldom attempted, even contemplated. With more in common with its southern Anglophone neighbors than with Kinshasa, no
wonder one Zambian minister privately refers to Katanga as Zambia’s 10th
province. Congo’s neighbors have learned to ignore its sovereignty.
The Congolese government’s
inability to control its territory has resulted in one of the world’s longest
and most violent wars. About 4 million people died between 2000 and 2004 — and
that was merely one episode of the ongoing conflict. War has led to the
predation of the various armies on the civilian populations, the destruction of
what were the country’s transport and agrarian systems, and the collapse of any
semblance of public health. Internationally, Congo has gained notoriety for the
tremendous violence suffered by its civilians and the widespread use of rape as
a method of coercion.
The many combatants in today’s
Congo have little incentive to form a united country; they benefit from the
violent chaos that ensures that so many can pick at the country’s resources.
The international community does not have the will or the resources to
construct a functional Congo. Nor do neighbors
want one Congo, as many find it easier to deal with a plethora of ungoverned
parts over which they can exert influence. Rwanda, Angola, and
Uganda, for example, have all intervened to protect their security interests
over the past decades.
To clean up the mess, the
Central African country has been home to one of the world’s largest
peacekeeping operations. More than 18,400 United Nations peacekeeping troops
and observers are stationed in Congo at an annual cost of $1.24 billion. Yet
recent events demonstrate just how impossible their task has become. Early this year, Rwandan troops entered eastern Congo’s
two Kivu provinces with Kinshasa’s permission to flush out rebel Hutu militias
left over from the Rwandan genocide a decade ago. Despite
achieving some military success, reprisals by the Hutu militias left more than
100 civilians dead.
The Kivu provinces are not the
only restive areas. Trouble has flared sporadically in the Bas-Congo, Ituri,
Katanga, and Kasai provinces of sub-Saharan Africa’s largest state. At January
2008′s peace talks, the government categorized one of the largest rebel groups,
the CNDP, as just one of two dozen armed militias not under government control.
Nationwide elections in 2006, on which the international community spent more
than a billion dollars, did little to mend Congo’s many divisions.
Given the immense human tragedy,
it is time to ask if provinces such as the Kivus and Katanga (which are
themselves the size of other African countries) can ever be improved as long as
they fall under a fictional Congolese state. Although
African states recognize the borders on paper, Congo’s neighbors have often
acted as if no such lines exist. The international community is
the only remaining player devoting large amounts of resources to the idea of
one Congo — with dismal returns.
A solution to Congo’s troubles
is possible with a reimagined approach. The West could
start by making development and order its first priority in the Congolese
territory, rather than focusing on the promotion of the Congolese state. This
simple distinction immediately casts the Congolese problem in a whole new
light. It
would mean, for instance, that foreign governments and aid agencies would deal
with whomever exerted control on the ground rather than continuing to pretend
that Kinshasa is ruling and running the country. Such an approach
might bring into the picture a confusing array of governors, traditional
leaders, warlords, and others rather than the usual panoply of ministers. But
that would finally be a reflection of who is actually running Congo.
Instead of continuing to spend
billions of dollars on putting Congo together, the international community
could regionally address actual security and political problems. For instance, troubles in eastern Congo have as much to
do with continuing Rwandan insecurity than with what the government in Kinshasa
is (or is not capable of) doing. A more
realistic foreign policy toward eastern Congo would assign a high priority to
Rwandan security interests, given that many derive from the wake of the 1994
genocide. Get this right and there might actually be a chance to
reduce the violence that has haunted the Kivus. It would also incentivize the
Rwandans to see Congo as a natural partner in trade and development rather than
a security problem to be managed unilaterally. Joint Congolese-Rwandan
operations early this year are a step in this direction.
Congo
is rightly notorious for being one of the most pathological instances of the
European division of Africa. Perhaps as a
result, Western powers have shied away from anything other than reflexively
trying to get Congo to work within the boundaries that the king of Belgium
helped establish in 1885. Setting aside the scope of human tragedy, there are
real reasons that getting things right in Congo matters now more than ever. The
country is the region’s vortex; when it has failed in the past, its neighbors
have often gone down with it.
The very concept of a Congolese
state has outlived its usefulness. For an international
community that has far too long made wishful thinking the enemy of pragmatism,
acting on reality rather than diplomatic theory would be a good start.
Dated 22nd may 2013
