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Child Solidiers (click to enlarge)
The human catastrophe of Eastern Congo is, for visitors,
a bundle of numbness and raw nerves. In September, at the invitation of
a British think-tank, I visited the unstable region to assess the causes
of ongoing violence against civilians. With close to 15,000 peacekeepers
on the ground, a transitional government anticipating national elections
in six months, and well-funded efforts to disarm, demobilize and reintegrate
combatants into civilian life—the “DDR process”—why
are civilians still being killed with such impunity? Scores of interviews
with humanitarian actors, UN staff, and Congolese revealed the usual suspects:
predatory governance, uncontrolled armed groups, endemic impunity, and
the inaccessibility of civilian populations due to ongoing combat.
None of these factors is particularly well understood
by outsiders; this opacity keeps the “heart of darkness” myth
alive. For insiders, Africa remains a Dark Continent by sole virtue of
its ability to generate degrees of suffering that surpass human comprehension.
Unfettered anarchy it is not. Recent African crises have birthed a new
truism: “If it looks like anarchy, then you don’t understand
what you see.” Eastern Congo fits the adage well: “chaos”
and “senseless tragedy” are the inevitable, indelible impressions
etched on any visitor’s memory. But behind the barrage of extreme
scarcity, mute agony, and feverish suspicion is a clear pursuit of economic
interest, a highly dexterous application of disorder as political instrument.
First, a brief nod to context: numerous ceasefires since
1999 and close to 15,000 UN peacekeepers stopped the civil war but failed
to cauterize the bleeding of the eastern provinces where 3.5 million are
estimated to have perished since 1998. Manipulation of ethnicity to dubious
political ends mixed with unregulated mineral extraction, a major source
of funding for the armed violence, continues to fuel the bloody free-for-all.
Rwanda, Congo’s most belligerent neighbor, recently dispatched troops
across the border to deal with ethnic extremists plotting to topple the
Tutsi-led government in Kigali. The Congolese national army, full of bad-boy
bluster and xenophobia, cannot fight its way out of a paper bag.
Kinshasa (click to enlarge)
“Your gun is your salary”
Impunity and grinding poverty are two invariable, unfortunate
features of the Congolese landscape. Their advent long precedes the first
“war of liberation” (1996-97) that resulted in Mobutu’s
ouster by Laurent Kabila, the current president’s late father. Today’s
authorities have diverged little from the Mobutu model. The erosion of
state institutions continues, but the population has not been “abandoned,”
a charge often heard in Mobutu’s era. On the contrary, political
elites and civil servants oscillate with careful precision between willful,
targeted neglect of public services (especially ministries of health and
education) and active predation on civilians and their livelihoods in
order to siphon, divert, and expropriate available wealth and public resources.
As arbitrary and indiscriminate as the constant stream
of violence, extortion, and exaction against the Congolese appears, an
inner logic is evident, one that clearly pits governors against governed.
Politicians repeat Mobutu’s classic instruction to civil servants:
“Population baza bilanga ya bino” (“The population
is your provider”). Similarly, commanders tell combatants, “Your
gun is your salary.” For humanitarians or diplomats concerned by
civilian abuse at the hands of the military, readymade solutions are elusive.
Advocating restraint, punishing offenders, and enforcing
troop discipline all become moot when authorities are unable to provide
soldiers with salaries or benefits. A human rights researcher in Goma,
capital of North Kivu, clarified the futility of military discipline in
absence of regular salary: “Even if you punished every military
in this town by cutting off their right hand, they would still have to
find a way to feed themselves.” Moreover, advocating for more troop
control from relevant authorities can backfire. “We can never say
too loudly that the government has no troop control,” a senior UN
agency representative explained, “because they will use this to
distance themselves from abuses by their troops.” (A commonly heard
disclaimer from Kinshasa ministers: “You know how ill disciplined
our troops are, what do you expect?”)
DRC flag (click to enlarge)
Less law, more lucre
Wherever impunity fuels predatory governance and vice-versa,
public recourse to a functional judiciary ceases to exist as an option
because legal proceedings are deformed to ensure immunity for the highest
bidder. Courts become the marketplace where legal judgments are bought
and sold. The “business” of impunity is in practice extremely
lucrative, and in DR Congo the marriage of lucre to lawlessness knows
no bounds.
Analysis of corruption in public institutions shows that
predatory governance is faultlessly avaricious and rarely negligent—“abandoning
the populace” is a luxury no corrupt regime can afford. Felonious
and parasitic, official extortion of the Congolese citizenry requires
an exceptional degree of proximate control, one belied by the appearance
of political disorder and administrative chaos. Transparency International’s
2004 “Corruption Perceptions Index” ranks DRC the world’s
12th most corrupt country.
Occasionally, executive heads do roll. Last week, President
Kabila fired ten executives of state-owned companies and suspended six
ministers for accepting illegal payments and according themselves exorbitant
salaries (between $8k and $32k a month; the average civil servant makes
$10 a month). But high-level corruption and embezzlement are the least
of the government’s woes: in Congo, the rule of law extends not
more than a few feet beyond the plush offices of the president’s
cabal.
Qualitative overviews of Congolese kleptocracy exist,
far more rare are concrete microanalyses of the institutionalized corruption
and its consequences for human development. An exception is the recent
study by Innovative Resources Management, an American NGO, of illegal
taxation of river traders in Western Congo, where 80% of commercial produce
travels by water. Results showed that 92% of traders’ operating
costs are illegal taxes and fees paid to unauthorized civil servants for
trumped-up or fictional services (“loading rights,” “docking
permission,” etc.). Only 8% of these fees are authorized, even less
ends up in state coffers.
A crippled rural economy and urban food scarcity are
the results. River traders, subject to illegal taxation by unsalaried
civil servants, are forced to raise food prices in Kinshasa to compensate
for the costs of corruption upriver. The Congo River Basin, once the breadbasket
of 10 million kinois, or Kinshasans, is now eerily void of commercial
traffic.
Kivu (click to enlarge)
Unsafe at any speed
On the eastern side of the country, a dysfunctional judiciary
ensures the relativisation of violent civilian abuses. The masses are
deemed dispensable; their subjection to violence, coercion and deprivation
dismissed as collateral damage. “Is this because of 32 years of
Mobutu?” a Red Cross delegate in Goma asked. “Impossible to
know,” he continued, “because the situation is incomprehensible
on all levels. Clearly the absence of state authority, impunity, desperate
poverty, culture of corruption, rampant insecurity and staggering degree
of arms proliferation all combine to create the disaster that is North
Kivu today.”
One aid official I interviewed insisted that civilian
safety was only possible with “top-down solutions”; i.e.,
a complete reform of the military, police, and judiciary. Yet he was not
sanguine about the prospect of ending impunity in Ituri where he worked,
an eastern region rich in mineral resources but beset by ethnic massacres.
Pacification and security for non-combatant civilians cannot happen in
a void; effective national authority and legitimate local institutions
must first become reality. Currently, the official explained, there is
greater interest in keeping local police and judiciary weak and ineffective.
“Too many high-level people are involved in resource extraction.
They realize that mafia rackets are far more lucrative than effective
bureaucracy could ever be.” Security conditions for civilians are
not likely to improve, even with strong popular support for effective
public institutions, because “local politicians will destabilize
and ruin the effort.”
A UN civil servant involved with training local police
likened local officials’ unwillingness to share information or collaborate
transparently to the institutional culture in Romania, his home country.
In Congo as well, he told me, leadership is demonstrated not by public
service or civic commitment but with officious opacity and withholding
knowledge. Essential information systematically fails to circulate within
institutions, reinforcing fear and rumor as the basis of institutional
culture. “This opacity enables the abuse of power,” he said.
“Together they form the royal road of corruption.”
Reporting and monitoring by human rights groups offers
minor resistance to the legal freefall triggered by impunity and corruption
on such a scale. During the wave of massacres that hit Ituri in 2002-03,
UN human rights staff were often first on the scene, as they benefit from
the armed protection of peacekeeping brigades. Accordingly, the UN human
rights section was always first to alert the wider public of massacres
or attacks on villages, and to publish findings in publicly available
reports. Documenting and denouncing crimes against humanity, the UN section
head told me, is a goal in itself as it represents “one step towards
justice.” Indeed, largely on the basis of documentation and evidence
provided by UN investigators, the International Criminal Court launched
its first international investigation of war crimes in Ituri in September
2004. Actual trials and sentencing will require an effective local judiciary,
currently lacking but high on international donor agendas. Somehow throwing
money at Congo’s crisis of impunity seems misguided.
Troops without salaries and doctors without borders
In the Walikale area of North Kivu, aid agencies describe
a vicious circle of vulnerability and predation where armed groups steal
livestock and pillage local plantations. Civil authorities then follow,
picking from the remains and delivering leftovers to their families. Survivors
of these raids tell of hiding knee-deep in the sludge of their pit latrines
(“no one looks in there”). All forms of livestock have disappeared
from rural areas. One agency, World Relief, reported that rural farmers
now request guinea pigs as livestock donations—they are easier to
hide from thieving military and travel well when families flee local fighting.
Cassava fields and banana plantations are regularly emptied by marauding
soldiers but farmers continue their subsistence cultivation, having no
other choice.
Congo’s peace accords are built on an age-old bargain:
rebel leaders are offered the prospect of political office in exchange
for the cessation of hostilities. Adherence to an internationally monitored
transition process, culminating in national elections in June 2005, is
also part of the game. While their political future is no more certain
than when they were warlords, Kabila’s four Vice-Presidents retain
their large support base and significant political autonomy. The path
of peace is an experiment: should it fail, they lose nothing. Should they
win at elections, the journey of transition will have been well worth
it. And the path from armed conflict to democracy will have never been
shorter.
Today my colleagues in Eastern Congo have more pressing
concerns. Rwanda has been threatening to invade since August, after the
massacre of 160 Congolese Tutsi refugees at a camp in Burundi. (That Rwanda
would invade Congo for a massacre in Burundi hints at the complexity of
regional relations.) Later, Rwandan soldiers were sighted, proof that
diplomatic efforts to dissuade them has failed. As I left Bunia, capital
of Ituri, in late September, a friend shared his thoughts on the war with
me. “I just hope the war ends soon, so we can go back to the way
we were before it all started.” Nothing could be more impossible,
I thought, but replied with something about war having brought Congo the
anguish of modernity with none of its freedoms.
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OTR Dispatches - January, 2005