[Peace-discuss] African "world war"

Wed Aug 30 21:04:57 CDT 2006

Wow. A remarkably (and suitably) incisive piece. I discovered, though, that the
version below is abridged.

The full original article is at the author's website. Please do take the time to
read it.

http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=863

R

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ricky Baldwin" <baldwinricky at yahoo.com>
To: "peace discuss" <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2006 6:31 PM
Subject: [Peace-discuss] African "world war"

: 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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