[Peace-discuss] African "world war"

[Ricky Baldwin]

Here's a recent article that may be enlightening.  It
leaves out some things, but I doubt it would ever run
in, say, the News-Gazette.

The Congo Wars began after the Rwandan genocide, when
2 million Hutus fled into the Democratic Republic of
Congo from the rebel army that took over Rwanda. 
Among the refugees, the Interahamwe, Hutu extremists
primarily responsible for the genocide.  Soon they
began attacking Tutsis in the Congo and across in
Rwanda, with the support of the US-backed Congolese
government of Mobutu Sese Seko (see below).  When a
Congolese official ordered all Tutsis out, Rwanda and
Uganda invaded and helped the Kabila and the rebels
(see below also) topple Mobutu.  This was the First
Congo War.

Kabila soon turned out to be corrupt, his supporters
turned on him, and when he tried to kick out the
Rwandans and Ugandans, they turned on him, too.  Nine
African countries eventually became involved, in
addition to other militias and rebel armies.  This
iscalled the Second Congo War, or the "African World
War", but it was practically continuous with the
first.

The Dem Rep of Congo is about the size of W. Europe,
and several million people have been killed in and
around it since 1994.

Since this article ran there has been a fragile
cease-fire and elections, but also heavy fighting, gun
fights outside the voting places and offices where
election results were to be announced, etc.  It is not
at all clear that this conflict, which has seen lulls
before (as after Kabila took power and fighting
subsided for about a year).

I think we should keep talking about this, don't you?

Ricky

The Hamilton Spectator (Ontario, Canada)

May 13, 2006 Saturday 


HEADLINE: The Congo conflict; In a country the size of
Western Europe, a war rages that has lasted eight
years and cost four million lives. 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.

BYLINE: Johann Hari, The Hamilton Spectator

BODY:


Murder, rape, corruption

This is the story of the deadliest war since Adolf
Hitler's armies marched across Europe -- a war that
has not ended. But it 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 the world's other great cities.

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 of 50 million.

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.

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 private
parts, 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 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 run away 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?"

It is coldly appropriate to start here. 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.

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 pennies. 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 nonstop
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." Perhaps sensing my skepticism, 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 program 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 trunk, and the CIA's man -- Mobutu Sese Seko --
was in power and in the money.

The Independent, London

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 program 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, tossing back 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.

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
laptop, your child'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 (Democratic Republic of
Congo).

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-Desire 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 raggedy 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 couple of weeks, 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 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 genocidaires 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 genocidaires -- only to spiral out of
control. It presents the mass slaughter as a giant
screw-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 genocidaires 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 genocidaires -- 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
(genocidaires) 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 a Who's Who of British, American and
Belgian companies 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.

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."

The victims of the war are scattered everywhere in
eastern Congo, and they 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
the women carrying more than their own body weight 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 $1 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.

"The children we bring into the world are forced to be
porters as well. We are the most unhappy people in the
world."

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.

Joseph Kabila is surrounded by crocodiles. We are
standing by the back wall of the White House, the
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 for two weeks. He nods slightly. "Then that's
OK."

He 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.

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 realized 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.

An aid agency head says: "Of course Kabila's circle is
corrupt. To have power in this country you must be
corrupt."

GRAPHIC: Photo: SPECIAL TO THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR ,
Members of Joseph Kabila's personal presidential
police force. This photo was taken over a year ago, no
one knows if this unit is still operational.; Photo:
Associated Press File Photo , Congolese soldiers march
in training exercises in 2004. Of almost 2,000 rapes
investigated by the UN this year, nearly two-thirds
were committed by the army and police.; Photo: Jiro
Ose, Reuters , Congolese children carry water from an
aid depot in eastern Katanga province, where 170,000
people are displaced.; Photo: Joseph Kabila: he can
neither guard his borders nor build schools. The
fantasy of a functioning society dies right outside
his palace.; Photo: Laurent-Desire Kabila grew corrupt
on a national scale after dealing in gold, ivory.;
Photo: Patrice Lumumba: first and only elected leader
of Congo, a 'mad dog' deposed by the CIA.; Photo:
Mobutu Seko: installed by the CIA after Patrice
Lumumba was killed.; Map : democratic republic of the
congo

LOAD-DATE: May 13, 2006 



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