Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa," by Jason K. Stearns.
Similar contrasts can be seen in the country’s economy. It has more than doubled in size since 2011, buoyed by mining exports. The Congo is now the largest producer of copper in Africa and the largest provider of cobalt and tantalum in the world—all metals needed for the green energy transition. This prosperity can be seen among the ostentatious wealth of the capital’s elites—glitzy hotels, restaurants, gyms, and spas have popped up across Kinshasa in recent years. There is an Instagram page dedicated to “Cars of Congo,” showing off Ferrari F12berlinettas, McLaren 570Ss, Rolls-Royce Phantom Dropheads, and other luxury models, even though, between all the potholes and traffic jams, there are barely any roads you can drive on in fifth gear. The current president, Felix Tshisekedi, has been seen in public with a Richard Mille watch, which retails at around $130,000; his predecessor, Joseph Kabila, used to wear a Rolex on one wrist and a Patek Philippe on the other.
At the same time, 28 million people—over a quarter of the population—suffer from “acute food insecurity,” an insipid term for when the lack of food begins eating away at your flesh, jeopardizing your survival. The share of people living in poverty—measured at the very low bar of making less than $2.15 a day—has increased in recent years, to 80 percent of the population.
Perhaps most importantly for the narrative arc in this book, conflict has continued. Despite what was for many years the largest peacekeeping mission in the world, and despite billions spent on peace processes and conflict resolution, fighting persists. As I write this, there are 7 million people displaced in the country, twice as many as at the height of the “Great Congo Wars” catalogued in this book. The conflict has also changed. The wars described in these pages involved nine African countries waging pitched battles across the country; the ensuing wars, which began in 2004, have been fractal, messy affairs. Today, for myriad reasons, more than a hundred different armed groups, some of them no more than a few hundred youths in flip-flops and gumboots with AK-47s, are fighting in the eastern Congo.
Then, in 1996, a conflict began that has thus far cost the lives of over five million people.
The Congolese war must be put among the other great human cataclysms of our time: the World Wars, the Great Leap Forward in China, the Rwandan and Cambodian genocides. And yet, despite its epic proportions, the war has received little sustained attention from the rest of the world. The mortality figures are so immense that they become absurd, almost meaningless. From the outside, the war seems to possess no overarching narrative or ideology to explain it, no easy tribal conflict or socialist revolution to use as a peg in a news piece. In Cambodia, there was the despotic Khmer Rouge; in Rwanda one could cast the genocidal Hutu militias as the villains. In the Congo these roles are more difficult to fill. There is no Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin. Instead it is a war of the ordinary person, with many combatants unknown and unnamed, who fight for complex reasons that are difficult to distill in a few sentences—much to the frustration of the international media. How do you cover a war that involves at least twenty different rebel groups and the armies of nine countries, yet does not seem to have a clear cause or objective? How do you put a human face on a figure like “four million” when most of the casualties perish unsensationally, as a result of disease, far away from television cameras?
The conflict is a conceptual mess that eludes simple definition, with many interlocking narrative strands. The New York Times, one of the few American newspapers with extensive foreign coverage, gave Darfur nearly four times the coverage it gave the Congo in 2006, when Congolese were dying of war-related causes at nearly ten times the rate of those in Darfur. Even Nicholas Kristof, the Times columnist who has campaigned vigorously for humanitarian crises around the world, initially used the confusion of the Congo as a justification for reporting on it less—it is less evil because it is less ideologically defined. He writes:
Darfur is a case of genocide, while Congo is a tragedy of war and poverty. . . . Militias slaughter each other, but it’s not about an ethnic group in the government using its military force to kill other groups. And that is what Darfur has been about: An Arab government in Khartoum arming Arab militias to kill members of black African tribes. We all have within us a moral compass, and that is moved partly by the level of human suffering. I grant that the suffering is greater in Congo. But our compass is also moved by human evil, and that is greater in Darfur. There’s no greater crime than genocide, and that is Sudan’s specialty.
Like layers of an onion, the Congo war contains wars within wars. There was not one Congo war, or even two, but at least forty or fifty different, interlocking wars. Local conflicts fed into regional and international conflicts and vice versa. Teasing out origins can be a tail-chasing exercise. In my interviews, I often made the mistake of asking the interviewee to start from the beginning. “The beginning?” A look of bemused condescension would follow—what does this young foreigner know about our beginnings?
It is this legacy of institutional weakness that for many Congolese is almost as depressing as their physical suffering. Since the 1970s until today, the Congolese state has not had an effective army, administration, or judiciary, nor have its leaders been interested in creating strong institutions. Instead, they have seen the state apparatus as a threat, to be kept weak so as to better manipulate it. This has left a bitter Congolese paradox: a state that is everywhere and oppressive but that is defunct and dysfunctional.
The Congo war spun its leaders like a centrifuge; the more ruthless, politically adept ones managed to stay at the center and reinvent themselves through new business deals or political alliances. The lightweights, however, were flung to the fringes of political life.
A Congolese friend once described the curse of Congolese politics as “the reverse Midas effect.”“Anything touched by politics in the Congo turns to shit,” he told me. “It doesn’t matter if the Holy Father himself decides to run for president, he will inevitably come out corrupt, power-hungry, and guilty of breaking all ten of the holy commandments.” His view was extreme, but there is no doubt that there is little trace of responsibility in recent Congolese politics.
The number of deaths is so immense that it becomes incomprehensible and anonymous, and yet the dying was not spectacular. Violence only directly caused 2 percent of the reported deaths. Most often, it was easily treatable diseases, such as malaria, typhoid fever, and diarrhea, that killed. There was, however, a strong correlation between conflict areas and high mortality rates. As fighting broke out, people were displaced to areas where they had no shelter, clean water, or access to health care and succumbed easily to disease. Health staff shuttered up their hospitals and clinics to flee the violence, leaving the sick to fend for themselves. Almost half of the victims were children—the most vulnerable to disease and malnutrition.
A full 60 percent of all children died before their fifth birthday. Step out of a car in many areas of the eastern Congo during the war, and you were often confronted with children suffering from kwashikor, or clinical malnutrition. It was a bizarre sight to see such listless children surrounded by lush hills. Congo is not Niger or Somalia, where famine and malnutrition are closely linked to drought. Here, the rainy season lasts nine months a year in most parts, and the soil is fertile. But the harvests were often stolen by hungry militias, and farmers were unable to access their fields because of the violence.
“The Tutsi tied up the people in the church, hands behind their backs, and then took the priest and the three nuns outside. I could hear the nuns screaming, screaming: ‘Don’t kill our father—please don’t kill him. Take us instead!’ Father Stanislas, the priest, told them to calm down, that the Lord would provide. The soldiers separated them, taking the nuns to the convent next door and the priest to the parish, where they forced him to give them money and his radio. My friend the plumber was hiding in the ceiling and heard all of this. Then they told the priest to kneel down and pray. And shot him in the back of his head.”
The crowd outside the hut where we were sitting erupted into lamentations: “They killed them all!” “They killed our Father!” “He was such a good man!” “His poor father went crazy afterwards—he was all he had!” “Animals!” Patrice looked down at his hands and shook his head. The name of the priest, he told me, was Stanislas Wabulakombe. In their language, it meant “What God wants, he does.”
A key word in the Congolese lexicon of corruption is enveloppe. If you want to buy votes in Parliament to squelch the audit of your state-run company, you pass around envelopes. When you want to obtain a lucrative contract to supply the police with beans and rice, you make sure the officials on the procurement board all get envelopes delivered to their home.
The operative verb is usually “to circulate,” and typically used in the passive voice, as if the envelopes were floating around on their own accord. On a fait circuler des enveloppes (envelopes were circulated around). The enveloppe preserves the dignity of the recipient: You avoid the crude embarrassment of receiving naked cash from your benefactor. After all, who can turn down an anonymous envelope whose contents are unknown?
Writing three years after the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Hobbes had good reason to be pessimistic about the state of nature, which he believed to be one of “war of man against man.” Life in this state was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” In view of this, it was in the common interest to forfeit individual rights to the state—the Leviathan, in Hobbes’s parlance—in return for protection. This was the first notion of a social contract, which justified a government’s rule and made it responsible to its citizens.
But the Congo does not have a Leviathan, a state that can protect its citizens or even impose a monopoly of violence. In contrast with the Thirty Years’ War, which helped produce the European system of nation-states, it is unlikely that the Congo wars will forge a strong state. As these pages have made clear, the story of the Congo wars is one of state weakness and failure, which has made possible the ceaseless proliferation of insurgent groups, still numbering around twenty-nine in late 2010. These armed groups fight brutal insurgencies and counterinsurgencies that, as the United States discovered in Vietnam and Iraq, are not so much about controlling territory as about controlling civilians, who are brutalized in order to obtain resources and as retaliation for attacks by their rivals.
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