The Crisis in Congo - A Primer

The worst humanitarian disaster since WWII remains overshadowed in the media by ones far less severe. Here is everything you need to know.

It was Africa's First World War and it is on the verge of erupting again. Already, an estimated five million people are dead. Another sixty million remain trapped under a corrupt and impotent government that provides no social services to its long-suffering population. All this in a country that possesses one of the world's most fantastic endowments of natural riches - gold, diamonds, copper, and tin, among others.

The conflict, which lasted from 1997 to 2003 and simmers on today, drew the involvement of eight countries. It birthed a dozen armed organizations with such misleading names as the "Congolese Rally for Democracy" and the "Movement for the Liberation of Congo." Congo, formerly called Zaire, today looks much as Europe did 500 years ago. Among the few modern trappings is the rather advanced technology of killing, readily supplied to the combatants by shady arms dealers from Russia and Ukraine.

In the developed West, the individuals who rise to the upper echelons of politics and commerce may not be the best that society has to offer. But they are hardly the worst either. Selfish, manipulative, and narcissistic, perhaps, but most are law-abiding citizens. Society's criminal elements - those who thrive by theft and strong-arming - generally remain on the margins or in prison.

In the countries I've lived in over the past couple of years, the situation is often reversed. Most of those at the top would be in jail if they lived in America, prosecuted for crimes like fraud, bribery, and racketeering. Those who are honest find themselves deliberately sidelined and often imprisoned. Elsewhere in the world too, the kinds of people who hold top positions in politics and business would in the West be incarcerated, though for far more heinous and violent offenses

In Congo, however, it is as if Sing Sing emptied its murderers, armed robbers, and rapists into the gleaming halls of Washington. How could a country come to this point?

The Rwandan genocide

The seeds of the Congolese civil war were set in 1994 in neighboring Rwanda during the genocide of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus by the "Interahamwe," radical bands of militant Hutus. In the precolonial era, the terms "Tutsi" and "Hutu" denoted class distinctions, not ethnic ones; to be a "Tutsi" merely signified having greater wealth than a "Hutu." This changed in the late 19th century with the arrival of the Belgians, who decided the two groups were different races, one superior and the other inferior. The colonial state bestowed power and privilege on the minority Tutsis, who now ruled as an ethnic aristocracy over the Hutu majority.

The end of colonial rule coincided with periodic ethnic violence as members of the two groups jostled for power, culminating in the 1972 genocide of Hutus by Tutsis. In 1994, the Hutu president of Rwanda was assassinated in mysterious circumstances, prompting Hutu leaders to attempt their own final solution against the Tutsis. The Interahamwe embarked on a massacre. Using the medium of radio, extremist demagogues, later prosecuted for war crimes, called on their Hutu brethren to rape, machete, and burn their Tutsi neighbors to death.

The carnage ended later that year with the seizure of power by a Tutsi rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) led by Paul Kagame. The Interahamwe were forced to flee into neighboring Zaire along with thousands of Hutu refugees. Yet Kagame and the RPF would not rest until the organizers of the genocide were killed. Zaire's fate had thus been sealed.

Congo/Zaire under Mobutu

Even before the Europeans arrived, the region that would later become Congo had a rich history of exploitation by the powerful. However, King Leopold II of Belgium raised the bar. Author Michela Wrong, a former Financial Times correspondent, aptly describes him as "the only European king to ever personally own an African colony."

Among the tasks he neglected while extracting Congo's riches and repressing its inhabitants was building a functioning state bureaucracy. The feeble government that Belgium bequeathed the country's post-independence rulers in 1960 was wholly unable to fulfill the administrative functions that we in the West take for granted - the collection of taxes, the provision of basic public services, and monopolizing control over the use of force within its borders.

The Belgians left Congo during the height of the Cold War at a time when dozens of countries throughout Africa and Asia were gaining independence from their colonial masters. America, looking to prevent the Soviet Union from winning influence with the new states, was searching out regional allies. Congo, a mineral-rich country the size of Western Europe, was seen as a key pawn in this struggle.

Standing in the way of the US was the democratically elected, left-wing prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, who looked to the Soviets for support. To resolve this problem, the CIA in 1961 backed a coup by the military chief, a man named Joseph-Désiré Mobutu. Lumumba, with America's blessing, was jailed and executed.

Mobutu went on to become one of the most infamous dictators the world has known, notorious less for his brutality, which he dished out generously, than for his sheer venality and astonishing corruption. As part of his "authenticity" campaign designed to bring the country back to its African roots, in 1971 he renamed the country Zaire. He himself adopted the name Mobutu Sese Seko Nkuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga - more commonly shortened to Mobutu Sese Seko.

While his underlings plundered and decimated Zaire's state institutions, Mobutu was known for packing his family on the Concorde and taking off to Paris for weekend shopping trips. In place of traditional religion, he promoted a doctrine called "Mobutuism," which glorified the visionary thinking of the man himself. The nightly news opened with a depiction of Mobutu's image descending from the heavens.

In an environment where resources were scarce and potential rivals constantly knocking on his door, it was far too dangerous for Mobutu to attempt to rule by relying on Zaire's weak state institutions - the executive, legislature, and bureaucracy. Instead, he put trusted allies and family members in key positions in the army and police. He constantly shuffled ministerial appointments to prevent any one official from building a base of power that could rival his own.

William Reno, one of the most astute Western observers of sub-Saharan Africa, shows how Mobutu systematically maintained personal control over Zaire's economic resources while preventing them from falling into the hands of his opponents. He concluded agreements with multinational mining firms, giving them access to Zaire's immense natural resource deposits in return for billions of dollars in revenue. The vast preponderance of this money was deposited not in the state coffers but rather the foreign bank accounts of Mobutu, his family, and key supporters. By the 1980s Mobutu was personally worth an estimated five billion dollars.

While amassing this wealth, he not only avoided funding Zaire's state agencies but actively undermined them. For the doctors, teachers, and civil servants who staffed these bodies, Reno notes, "could become the nuclei for demands to spend state resources on development...or even mobilize people directly against him." Left to their own devices, the bureaucrats, police officers, and soldiers of Zaire tyrannized the population, extracting any meager tribute that they could from the country's hapless citizens.

Aside from natural resources, Mobutu's other source of funding was the United States government, which during the Cold War granted, either directly or through international institutions like the IMF and World Bank, a total of $8.5 billion to Zaire - or rather, to Mobutu himself.

Had the conflict with the Soviet Union endured, so might have Mobutu. Alas, it did not. With the collapse of the Soviet Union went any incentive America had to continue propping up its African ally. By 1990, US aid to Zaire had dried up entirely. The game was over, though Mobutu managed to stay in power for another seven years. But his sway over Zaire steadily deteriorated, as he could no longer pay off the strongmen he needed to support him.

The civil war
What's more, Mobutu provoked the enmity of his neighbors. He provided money and a territorial base within Zaire to rebel movements from Angola and Uganda, thereby alienating the governments of these countries. Yet his most fateful error was to ally with the Hutu Interahamwe who had organized the Rwandan genocide. Eastern Zaire had a large Tutsi population of its own. When the Interahamwe arrived, local elites saw an opportunity to seize for themselves the landholdings of the local Tutsis and enlisted the Interahamwe's help to do it. Mobutu backed this effort and even stripped the Tutsis of their Zairian citizenship.

For the Tutsi-led government of Rwanda, this was the final straw. President Kagame, in alliance with the Ugandan and Angolan militaries, launched an invasion of eastern Zaire. They chose as their local proxy a washed-out Maoist rebel named Laurent Kabila. Kabila, riding towards the capital, Kinshasa, on the back of the foreign armies, swiftly advanced across Zaire's enormous landscape. The dilapidated Zairian army collapsed; it turned out that thieving generals had sold the bulk of the army's military hardware to the rebels prior to the invasion. "To misquote Churchill," writes Wrong, "never in the field of military history had so much territory been captured by so few with such little effort." An ailing Mobutu was forced to flee to Morocco, where he died four months later.

In addition to the foreign powers, notes Reno, Kabila also enjoyed backing from a slew of multinational mining companies who in early 1997 made substantial payments to him, promising more if he managed to take Kinshasa. Once in control of the capital, Kabila renamed the country The Democratic Republic of Congo.

However, he quickly fell out with his foreign allies, and in 1998 issued an order for all foreign armies to leave the territory of Congo. Rwanda and Uganda had little intention of complying and began advancing once again on Kinshasa, this time to oust Kabila. Their bid would have succeeded were it not for the quick intervention on Kabila's behalf of three other regional powers, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Angola. Three more countries, Chad, Libya and Sudan, followed later. The stage was now set for the much longer and brutal second phase of Congo's civil war.

The foreign states were mostly interested in exploiting Congo's mineral resources. Kabila secured Zimbabwe's support by offering exclusive mining concessions to family members and allies of president Robert Mugabe. Namibia received similar benefits. Angola, meanwhile, wanted to prevent its own rebels from gaining control over Congolese diamonds. It also received lucrative contracts to sell its petroleum products in Congo.

Material motivations figured in even for Rwanda and Uganda. They initially intervened to eliminate existential threats to their own statehood (the Hutu Interahamwe for Rwanda, and the Lord's Resistance Army fighting against the Ugandan government). Yet the two allies soon found themselves battling for control of diamond mines around the town of Kisangani. More recently, in 2007, they came to blows around Lake Albert, which is believed to contain significant oil deposits. That said, Rwanda's primary motivation remains the elimination of the Hutu elements in Congo who were responsible for the 1994 genocide.

The peace accords
In 2001, Laurent Kabila was assassinated and succeeded by his son, Joseph, who immediately set about negotiating a peace agreement with the warring parties. A deal was finally concluded in 2002. It had two main components - for Rwanda, a promise to clamp down on the Hutu genocidaires in eastern Congo and, for the others, lucrative positions in a unified transitional government in Kinshasa. Four vice presidencies were created for the leaders of the main rebel factions, each of whom received $250,000 per month in compensation for what would surely be a job well-done. Others, according to observer Jason Stearns, were granted posts in state companies earning monthly salaries of $20,000. During the next two years, Stearns notes, military officers were found to have embezzled half the payroll of the army and police each month.

The foreign armies that had backed the rebel groups agreed to withdraw their troops from the country. To enforce the peace accords, the United Nations sent in an 18,000-strong peacekeeping contingent. Elections were held in 2006 that saw Joseph Kabila and his party solidify their control.

While peace has returned to most of Congo, large parts remain tense and have occasionally erupted in renewed violence. The main unresolved issue is the continued presence in eastern Congo of organizers of the Rwandan genocide. The Tutsi-led Rwandan government is not likely to cease its interventions until these elements have been liquidated entirely. Yet the Kabila government in Kinshasa has little capacity to comply with Rwanda's demand, whether it wants to or not; its writ in this part of the country is far too feeble.

For this reason, Rwanda continues to support a renegade Tutsi general in eastern Congo named Laurent Nkunda. His Congolese Rally for Democracy has repeatedly sparred with Hutu remnants of the 1994 genocide, who fear annihilation at the hands of their Tutsi rivals. Nkunda's troops have terrorized the local population as well and are responsible for the latest displacement of up to one million people from around the town of Goma. Most of these refugees have been reduced to living in makeshift camps and are on the verge of starvation.

The UN peacekeepers who are supposed to prevent such episodes have proved adept at avoiding confrontations with the rebels. Incompetent, anxious, and wary of suffering any casualties, their conduct resembles that of 18,000 Woody Allens in the heat of battle.

Even in those parts of the country that are mostly peaceful, the primary instruments of Congolese politics remain personal control over economic resources and the use of force. This was illustrated in 2006 when Kabila's presidential guard clashed in the capital with armed contingents loyal to his vice-president, who was forced to flee abroad as a result. Until this fundamental dynamic changes, Congo will continue to be ruled by criminals and thugs instead of that less unsavory type of politician to which we in the West are accustomed. And the suffering of Congo's people will endure.