The past weighs on the present

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) carries the tragic label of hosting some of the most complex web of violent conflicts in Africa. But this story of tragedy is not new.

The DRC has been documented as having suffered horribly throughout its history as a nation-state. Various forms of external factors and interests have often been directly to blame.

A case in point is the export of the genocidal enterprise by the authors of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda into the jungles of Congo in the immediate aftermath of the 100 day Rwandan bloodbath.

The French conspiracy which aided the escape of the genocidaires from Rwanda and into the jungles of eastern DRC provides an explanation of how the conflict links the two countries.

For the last 15 years, the lack of political will largely on the part of the DRC political elite presented what one may refer to as the story of continuously missed opportunities in bringing about sustainable peace in the troubled country.

The recent moves comes thus as a surprising gesture by both parties and relief that at long last sustainable peace is on the horizon.

Within the history of the tragedy the victims are always the same: ordinary Congolese. In 1885 Belgium’s King Leopold II set up his private colony, the Congo Free State, the only colony in the world ever claimed by one man.

Though King Leopold never set foot in his private fiefdom, he ruthlessly built up a business enterprise with slave labour which made him vast wealth from the exploitation of rubber and ivory.

Up to ten million Congolese  died, mostly in the two decades before the First World War, when the international demand for rubber was at its height.

In the words of Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost, the monarch was ‘a man as filled with greed and cunning, duplicity and charm, as any of the more complex villains of Shakespeare’.

Courageous activists of the day reported on the atrocities - severed heads and hands chopped, and entire villages massacred - at the hands of the colonial masters.

The British journalist Edmund Morel campaigned on the issue, giving birth to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century.

Bringing the Congo to order

Fast forward to 2008. Even after much of the fighting had died out, the Congolese continued suffering from rape and death. One of the largest threats to Congolese civilians currently is the new Congolese army itself, a mixture of soldiers from the disbanded rebel groups and from the old national army. Forced labour, looting and rape of civilians by soldiers are common place.

Congolese civilians fear the new national army, just as they feared King Leopold’s Force Publique, or Mobutu’s army.

Leopold’s army had a policy of severing the hands of those who refused to collect rubber - and just as they feared Mobutu’s security forces, known for their wide-scale looting and violence.

In 2006, Congolese soldiers murdered and raped, as part of military operations to tackle insurgency groups opposed to the transitional government.

For example, a group of around twenty people hoped they had found safety when they gathered in a church in the village of Nyata, an hour’s drive south of Bunia, after fleeing a battle between the army and a rebel militia.

They were wrong. Dozens of soldiers opened fire from the door and through the windows of the church, despite the shouts from those inside that they were civilians. Seven people were killed, including two babies.

When the firing stopped, a local leader tried to help two elderly injured women. He asked the soldiers why they had killed people inside the church. "This is not our problem. It’s your problem,” the soldiers replied.

The Congolese army is riddled with corruption. Every month analysts contend that the top brass steal an estimated £1.5 million from funds set aside for soldiers’ salaries.

They inflate the numbers of soldiers in the ranks – a phenomenon known as ghost soldiers – in order to pocket more money.

International donors attempting to reform the army have taken to babysitting the cash as it makes its way down to the lowest foot soldier.

This has had some initial success, but even those privates who receive their full salary of £13 per month have barely enough to live on and the incentive to loot and extort remains strong.

It is easy, and justified in part, to blame Congo’s troubles on its leaders, but multinational corporations and international community must also be held accountable for the roles they have played in perpetuating massive violence that was largely unreported in the international press.

With the new dispensation about to take place, Congo again stands at an important crossroads in its history.

Crafting a new dispensation: taking a clean break from the past

With the joint plan having prospects for success within the eastern fringes of the country, logic demands that President Joseph Kabila will have to tackle head-on the underlying issues that destabilise the country.

He must stop illegal exploitation of Congo’s mineral wealth, hold to account individuals responsible for war crimes, and restructure the army so that it protects DRC citizens rather than preying on them.

Perhaps most important, Kabila must guarantee those civil and political rights that will permit new political actors to emerge so that DRC’s next elections may provide a better choice for its people. In other words Kabila must choose a very different path from that of Leopold or that of Mobutu and even that of his father.

The international community is all too eager to wash its hands off the troublesome and expensive process, and move on. As American and European diplomats grumble about the cost of U.N. peacekeeping in Congo, African leadership should call to play the maxim I have talked about previously—the championing of a pure African agenda as a follow on to the Umoja Wetu initiative.

Why? This is because the international community would like to reduce the number of blue helmets as soon as possible. While concerns about costs are understandable, reducing the number of peacekeepers too quickly will hinder the establishment of an effective new civilian administration and risks repeating the mistakes of the past.

In the words of one senior U.N. official referring to the role of U.N. peacekeepers in the Congo in the 1960s, ‘We were here when it was a mess 40 years ago and if we don’t help to fix it now we will be here again in 40 years time’.

For Congolese, the expectations of a new dispensation are as simple as they are ambitious.

Contact: ojiwah@gmail.com