Date: Sun, 20 Apr 2003 17:42:36 -0700
From: Paul Brians <brians-AT-mail.wsu.edu>
Subject: Adam Hochshild on the Congo in NYT


This appeared in Sunday's New York Times. Remarkable, I thought in 
reminding Americans of their responsibilities. You might also check 
out Peter Maas' piece on the costs of the war in Iraq in the Magazine 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/magazine/20BATTLE.html>.


April 20, 2003

Chaos in Congo Suits Many Parties Just Fine
By ADAM HOCHSCHILD


As in the Sherlock Holmes story about the dog that didn't bark in the 
night, sometimes silence says more than words. About one of the great 
tragedies of today's world, the silence is telling indeed. In Congo, 
according to an International Rescue Committee report released 
earlier this month, at least 3.3 million people have lost their lives 
in four and a half years of civil war. They have perished in combat, 
in massacres of civilians (the most recent occurred on April 3) and, 
most of all, in the disease and famine that strike when millions of 
desperately poor people are forced to flee their homes.

This number does not include the estimated 2.8 million Congolese who 
have H.I.V. or AIDS, some of it spread through mass rapes by 
marauding bands of soldiers. Nor does it encompass the misery of 
having to live for years in refugee camps that turn into fields of 
mud during the rainy season.

The war has been marked by a series of ineffective peace agreements 
among three major factions, one of them the national government in 
Kinshasa, and several smaller groups. And a token force of United 
Nations observers is now on the scene.

But Congo's separation into rival segments continues, and last week 
one faction boycotted talks that are supposed to form a power-sharing 
government. Few Americans, however, seem to care about stopping a 
conflict with a death toll larger than any since World War II. Why?

American interest in Africa is erratic, but there is a larger reason 
that few countries have put much effort into ending this war. Simply, 
Congo's current situation - Balkanized, occupied by rival armies, 
with no functioning central government - suits many people just fine. 
Some are heads of Congo's warring factions, some are political and 
military leaders of neighboring countries, and some are corporations 
dependent on the country's resources. The combination is deadly.

To begin with, the warlords of most of Congo's factions are happy to 
divide up its vast treasure of mineral wealth while spending little 
on public services. The few schools open are mainly run by the Roman 
Catholic Church.

The continuing turmoil also suits the various countries nearby, above 
all Rwanda, Uganda and Zimbabwe, whose troops have long propped up 
one or another side in the conflict. In return, they have received a 
stream of timber, gold, diamonds, copper, cobalt and 
columbium-tantalum, or coltan, a valuable mineral used in cellphones, 
computers and many other electronic devices. At its peak price a few 
years ago, coltan was selling for $350 a pound.

Such riches have made the war self-supporting, with profits to spare. 
Despairing Congolese say they would be better off if they were not so 
rich.

Finally, the Balkanization and war suit the amazing variety of 
corporations - large and small, American, African and European - that 
profit from the river of mineral wealth without having to worry about 
high taxes, and that prefer a cash-in-suitcases economy to a highly 
regulated one.

An exhaustive report to the United Nations Security Council last year 
detailed the dozens of companies now making money from Congo's 
conflict, based everywhere from Ohio to Johannesburg to Antwerp to 
Kazakhstan. As a result, neither the United States nor any other 
nation now seems to have much interest in seeing a strong Congolese 
central government keep profits from the country's patrimony - the 
word the White House uses about Iraq's oil - mostly at home.

When Patrice Lumumba, Congo's first and last democratically chosen 
leader, threatened to do just that after taking office in 1960, the 
Eisenhower administration secretly sought his overthrow and 
assassination. Emboldened, Congolese and Belgians then carried out 
the job.

Congo's current disorder grows directly out of a long, unhappy 
history. Ethnic groups speaking more than 200 different languages 
live in the territory. For centuries, it served as raiding grounds 
for the Atlantic slave trade and the equally deadly slave trade from 
the east coast of Africa to the Islamic world.

When the colonial era began, the land became the privately owned 
colony of King Leopold II of Belgium. His army turned much of the 
male population into forced laborers, working many to death. First 
the laborers gathered ivory - Joseph Conrad gave an unforgettable 
image of this in "Heart of Darkness" - and then a still more 
lucrative crop, wild rubber.

During Leopold's rule and its immediate aftermath, the territory's 
population was slashed roughly in half. Belgian state colonialism 
followed; it was less brutal and more orderly, but still the profits 
flowed overseas.

In 1965, five years after independence, Joseph Mobutu seized power in 
a military coup, encouraged by Washington. He renamed himself Mobutu 
Sese Seko and his country Zaire, and ruled as a dictator for 32 
years, receiving more than $1 billion in American aid and repeatedly 
being welcomed at the White House. Meanwhile he looted the national 
treasury of an estimated $4 billion. Small wonder that his ravaged 
country has been having a hard time ever since. It has not helped 
that in the 1990's the United States supplied more than $100 million 
in arms and military training to six of the seven African countries 
that have been involved in the fighting of the Congo war.

Even in a magical world where great powers always had good 
intentions, no outside intervention - whether by American, European, 
African or United Nations forces - would be likely to solve Congo's 
problems. "Nation building" by outsiders is inherently arrogant and 
risky, and there are few success stories. More than 28,000 NATO-led 
troops are currently keeping the peace in Kosovo; Congo's population 
is more than 25 times as large as Kosovo's, and its land area more 
than 200 times bigger.

THERE are other problems as well. In Africa, loyalty to the extended 
clan or ethnic group is often far stronger than to the nation-state. 
These divisions have allowed Congo's plunderers to profit so much for 
so long. In the immediate future, factional leaders, generals and 
politicians from surrounding countries, and various Western companies 
are likely to continue making money.

What hope is there for an end to Congo's misery? The United States 
made one surprising step forward earlier this month when Congress 
approved American participation in an international agreement not to 
trade in "conflict diamonds" - the gems coming from anarchic, 
war-torn areas like Congo. More than 50 other countries have already 
signed on. The pact will be hard to enforce - but so was the ban on 
the Atlantic slave trade in its early years. And if conflict diamonds 
can be made taboo, why not conflict gold or conflict coltan?

Adam Hochschild is the author of  "King Leopold's Ghost."

Copyright 2003  The New York Times Company |
-- 
Paul Brians, Department of English
Washington State University
Pullman, WA 99164-5020
brians-AT-wsu.edu
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians


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