[KurtFF8]

New York Times

Here are some excerpts from today's NYT piece I thought were interesting

Congo has become a never-ending nightmare, one of the bloodiest conflicts since World War II, with more than five million dead. It seems incomprehensible that the biggest country in sub-Saharan Africa and on paper one of the richest, teeming with copper, diamonds and gold, vast farmlands of spectacular fertility and enough hydropower to light up the continent, is now one of the poorest, most hopeless nations on earth. Unfortunately, there are no promising solutions within grasp, or even within sight.

I didn’t always feel this way. During my first trip, in July 2006, Congo was brimming with optimism. It was about to hold its first truly democratic elections, and the streets of the capital, Kinshasa, were festooned with campaign banners and pulsating with liquid Lingala music that seemed to automatically sway people’s hips as they waited in line to vote. There was this electricity in the air in a city that usually doesn’t have much electricity. In poor, downtrodden countries accustomed to sordid rule, there is something incredibly empowering about the simple act of scratching an X next to the candidate of your choice and having a reasonable hope that your vote will be counted. That’s how the Congolese felt.

But the euphoria didn’t last — for me or the country. The election returned Mr. Kabila to power and nothing changed. I came back less than a year later and hired a dugout canoe to take me up the mighty Congo River, where I saw 100-foot-tall stalks of bamboo and spiders the size of baseballs. In the middle of the country, I came to appreciate how shambolic the state of Congo’s infrastructure really is. Rusty barges that used to ply the river now lie on the riverbanks with weeds shooting up through their ribs. The national railway, which used to haul away all the coffee and cotton and bananas that this country produces, is all but shuttered....



But for years Tutsi-led Rwanda has tried to carve out a zone of influence in eastern Congo, using ethnic Tutsi militias and Tutsi businessmen inside Congo to do its bidding. Rwanda has a very disciplined, patriotic army that punches above its weight — the Israel of Africa. It was Rwanda’s invasion in 1996 that sent Congo into a tailspin it has yet to recover from.

For years, the United States and Rwanda’s other Western friends turned a blind eye to this meddling. Again, like Israel, Rwanda has succeeded in leveraging the guilt that other countries feel for not intervening in its genocide — in which almost a million people were killed when Hutu militias targeted Tutsis in 1994 — to blunt criticism of itself. But recently the United States and Britain have been presented with such a mountain of allegations about how Rwanda funneled arms into Congo and even directed the recent capture of Goma that they had no choice but to change tack. So the Western powers recently slashed aid to Rwanda because of Congo, sending a simple but forceful message: Get out.

But it’s unfair to blame Rwanda for all of Congo’s ills. Congo’s core is so mushy and rotten from decades of titanic misrule that this country has become a dumping ground for armed groups from all over the place that exploit its porous borders and feed off its ambient chaos. In 2009, I traveled to Congo’s northeast corner, where you can see beautiful aged mansions from the Belgian days beginning their slow, inexorable slide toward the jungle floor. This area, now totally cut off, without cellphone service or functioning roads, has become a refuge for the Lord’s Resistance Army, a psychopathic rebel group originally from Uganda led by Joseph Kony. Nearly every year, its fighters club to death hundreds of people as they raid villages and kidnap children. Again, the Congolese Army, whose soldiers often don’t get paid because of corruption, was nowhere to be found when the rebels stormed in....




Working in Africa, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “It’s all colonialism’s fault.” Clearly, that’s often a dodge, but maybe in Congo the legacy of misrule is too big to overcome. It began in the late 19th century when King Leopold II of Belgium virtually enslaved the population to extract as much ivory and rubber as possible. The next generation of colonists wasn’t much better, whipping the Congolese with strips of hippo hide and making no effort to build up a professional class before they abruptly disappeared in 1960, turning over the keys to a country the size of Western Europe to a handful of college graduates, with rebellions breaking out almost from Day 1. And then came Mr. Mobutu, friend of America and utter disaster for the Congolese.

Congo could learn from Somalia, of all places. There, after two decades of civil war, the green shoots of a functioning government are finally sprouting, a result of grass-roots empowerment, a motivated business community and the steely resolve of African peacekeepers willing to absorb hundreds of casualties — which the United Nations mission in Congo has shown time and again that it is unwilling to do, despite having nearly 20,000 peacekeepers. Those peacekeepers sat riveted in their seats in their armored personnel carriers as the rebels marched into Goma on Nov. 20. Western powers pressured the rebels to leave, and they did less than two weeks later, but only after cleaning out the central bank and all the ammunition dumps and assassinating some enemies.

The rebels are now threatening to come back, and if they do, the government will surely throw in a few poor, underpaid souls to defend the town along that blood-soaked axis from Kibumba to Goma.

And we all know what we’ll find in the bushes the day after.

I find the conclusion and statement on colonialism quite odd. He cites the argument that colonialism is to blame as if it's obviously insufficient (which of course to an extent it is insufficient), and then turns around and points to Western inability to handle the situation!

It's also quite interesting that he points to the role of Rwanda and draws a parallel to Israel here.

Thoughts?

[The Immortal Goon]

A good article. I agree with what you say at the end with him trying to have it both ways. I will, however, probably assign this anyway in one of my classes.

[Far-Right Sage]

Overall an interesting analysis and good read, but I would be hesitant to embrace the opinion of anyone who describes the Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army as "psychopathic". There is a tendency on the part of multiple bodies to lend that organization a faceless and demonic image, which I believe is a bit narrow-minded. Certainly they have been involved with some form of social work and organization with the Acholi people of Uganda and Sudan?

In reference to the Congolese conflict, wasn't the Second Congo War alone at least as bloody as anything we've had since the war? There will not be extensive involvement as there typically isn't in the nations of Sub-Saharan Africa which are not oil-producing, but that is not to say there aren't interests, as the French and Belgians had in Rwanda or the French recently showed their cards on in the Ivory Coast.

That said, now that the Chinese are increasingly investing in areas such as Sudan and engaging in a new, finance-based form of neocolonialism/repetition of the Scramble for Africa, the continent is increasingly going to become a proxy battleground as Sudan and its southern breakaway region already have to some extent. Now that the last major state in opposition to AFRICOM's expansion and the proliferation of U.S. bases in Africa, Libya, has been knocked out of the game, things will only begin to heat up and I could imagine this embroiling the Congolese conflict as well.

Since the M23 took Goma back in November and I assume is still holding it, I wonder if there is already a level of renewed interest on the part of both Washington and Beijing.

[Philior Gordov]

Very good article and the author provides a nice overview when it comes to all the major contributing factors with regard to the conflict!

But for years Tutsi-led Rwanda has tried to carve out a zone of influence in eastern Congo, using ethnic Tutsi militias and Tutsi businessmen inside Congo to do its bidding. Rwanda has a very disciplined, patriotic army that punches above its weight — the Israel of Africa. It was Rwanda’s invasion in 1996 that sent Congo into a tailspin it has yet to recover from.

For years, the United States and Rwanda’s other Western friends turned a blind eye to this meddling. Again, like Israel, Rwanda has succeeded in leveraging the guilt that other countries feel for not intervening in its genocide — in which almost a million people were killed when Hutu militias targeted Tutsis in 1994 — to blunt criticism of itself. But recently the United States and Britain have been presented with such a mountain of allegations about how Rwanda funneled arms into Congo and even directed the recent capture of Goma that they had no choice but to change tack. So the Western powers recently slashed aid to Rwanda because of Congo, sending a simple but forceful message: Get out.

Yes, it's an unfortunate situation from the perspective of the Congolese people who have been forced to deal with the vestiges of conflicts unrelated to them, though I am to a large degree sympathetic to Kagame, as he appears to have really lifted Rwanda out of the ashes (from an economic standpoint) and today the country seems to be characterized by a relatively high degree of political and social stability. I generally do not regard him as a Machiavellian politician. I concur that the peacekeepers' willingness to take casualties is an important part of the equation when it comes to their credibility and ability to strengthen the peace process. However, they are only human and the shocking legacy of Rwanda (specifically the gruesome way in which the ten Belgian soldiers were murdered in 1994) may still be on their minds.

I know it's easier said than done, but I never understood why no regional actors attempted to stop the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the Rwandan Patriotic Front was forced to fight on its own (of course Dallaire and his men deserve a lot of credit, but they were simply too few in numbers and didn't have the right mandate). Couldn't the armies of countries like Uganda (where Kagame had made a number of upper echelon friends), Zaire and/or Tanzania (all larger than the Rwandese one) have intervened in favour of the RPF? Quite a few members of the Rwandan armed forced were not that committed to an extermination campaign and even lost relatives during the genocide. It's unfortunate that Kabila turned against the Tutsis (in 1997), as it seems as if the remnants of the Interahamwe based in the D.R. Congo are likely to continue to pose a military threat.

In reference to the Congolese conflict, wasn't the Second Congo War alone at least as bloody as anything we've had since the war?

That's right, according to most sources more than 5 million people perished as a direct result of the war....