November 11, 2008: I recently watched a Congolese man break down while watching footage of children with distended tummies begging for food in the DRC following the recent outbreak of fighting in the country. With ironic nostalgia, the man reflected on life in his home city Kinshasa, noting how in almost every street, for every three blocks, there is a Church.
t is a pattern, he said, that is easily replicated in much of the country. A few years ago, he visited the DRC and remembers participating in an inter-denominational prayer service for peace in the Congo with nearly a hundred thousand other Congolese Christian faithful. That peace remains elusive and like his fellow countrymen, nearly five years later, he is still praying.In a country where people are so proudly Congolese and Christian, he wonders why the DRC remains at war with itself. Many Congolese have turned to the spiritual to understand a conflict they now find abstract and one whose end seems indefinite. It is a conflict no longer seen by the world as tragic but chronic, dismissed casually even as able bodied men and women are turned into paupers unable to fend for themselves. Not for the first time, the DRC is on the brink. Hundreds have died in recent days fleeing the fighting in Eastern Congo where more than 250 thousand people have been displaced in weeks. Nearly a million Congolese are now marooned in refugee camps in North Kivu. A humanitarian crisis is in the making. Food is in short supply and it is reported that many have resorted to wild berries in the bush to stay alive. If disease sets in, Congo will be burying men, women and children in their thousands.
Initiated talks
As the recent conflagration unfolds, it is the UK and the French foreign ministers who have visited the country and initiated talks that many can only hope will lead to a temporary political settlement to the crisis. Last week, regional leaders met in Nairobi together with UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon. The AU was only prompted into action through the actions of the UK and French foreign ministers. The ambivalence with which African leadership is treating the DRC crisis is contemptible.
Not long ago, the DRC conflict sucked in several African countries, which one would assume should have been a lesson to the continent on the possibility of the current fighting snowballing into a crisis far more difficult to contain. The fragility of peace especially in Eastern DRC has been blamed on the failure by the late Laurent Kabila’s government to implement the 1999 Lusaka Accord. The Accord was rejected by Kabila who at the time claimed it did not respect his country’s sovereignty. This was in part farcical considering Kabila did not even have full control of the very country whose sovereignty he was allegedly defending. Tragically though, the failure to implement the Lusaka Accord seems to have given Rwanda and Uganda a carte blanche to organize arbitrary incursions into Eastern DRC. Rwanda has always accused the DRC of harboring former FDLR fighters implicated in the Rwanda genocide. Uganda on its part claims militias threatening its security are based inside the DRC. Meanwhile, Gen Laurent Nkunda, head of the militia currently fighting government forces, claims he is protecting his Tutsi kin from persecution although he has his eyes set on Kinshasa. He has also made a rather dubious claim of fighting against the mining concessions being awarded to China in the region.
No doubt this is an attempt to break free from his provincial construction as an ethnic warlord no different from other militia warlords carving out fiefdoms in the region. Eastern Congo remains a flash point not so much because of the ethnic diversity in the region but because of state failure and Kinshasa’s inability to control the region. The vacuum has allowed warlords to commit atrocities and explain them on ethnicity. The various ethnic groups in the region have intermarried for generations to the extent that supposed "ethnic” differences can only be based around constructed ethnicity because distinct ethnic groups do not exist any more. In any case, ethnic identities are never immutable. With vast mineral resources and no doubt support from outside the country, warlords such as Nkunda are able to exploit the lawlessness, manipulate ethnicity and start their “liberation” wars. As long as there is no state control in Eastern Congo and these warlords as well as neighboring countries are able to exploit the region’s wealth, any peace accord in Congo will not hold.
The region is teeming with other warlords, all waiting for their chance to strike. For them, instability in the East is the very environment they need to perversely rationalize their wars. The state must be strengthened in the DRC and Kabila must be forced to create a truly representative government where all believe they have a stake. Rwanda and Uganda must also be forced to agree to a compromise. The two are party to the instability in Eastern Congo. What the world can’t afford to do is to give these two a free hand in East Congo and to make martyrs of ethnic warlords. But it is also time to address other lingering and obvious questions. These militias do not manufacture their arms. Someone supplies these arms and it is improbable that person is based in Africa. African leaders also need to overcome this psychological barrier that compels them to close their eyes to internal problems until they implode.
The very leaders responsible for these regional conflicts are the same ones daily parroting a continental re-birth. The dysfunctional African state cannot only be blamed on the pathologies of the colonial state, it is also very much a function of a failed postcolonial African leadership. The sooner we accept that, the faster we will move forward.