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Focus Media (Kigali)

Rwanda: Breaking Up the DR Congo is the Only Solution to the Insanity There

12 November 2008

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opinion

Yet another session of hand-wringing talks about conflicts in the Congo has taken place. This was the one day regional summit in Nairobi last Friday, whose so-called purpose was to address the current fighting in the DR Congo.

Facing off: General Laurent Nkunda and DRC President Joseph Kabila (Internet photos)

In attendance were several regional heads of state-the presidents of Rwanda, DR Congo, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi and Congo Brazzaville. Also talking was UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon. As was Jean Ping, Secretary General of the African Union. As was Jendayi Frazer, US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs.

We cannot list all the notable dignitaries present to wring their hands over the latest impending humanitarian crisis in the Congo. They were very many.

As usual when all one is required to do is talk you will find many parties willing to participate. Think about it: how much money and people's time was wasted on this palaver?

The summit ended with a call for "tougher measures to end the conflict." Wow!

One of the more notable statements was: "the importance of implementing earlier agreements immediately, especially the Nairobi communiqué of November 2007 which called on the DRC to disarm and repatriate rebels of the FDLR".

Presumably the FDLR were quaking in their pants. But I am not betting on that.

Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete went one better. He "strongly called" for the immediate disarmament of the FDLR.

Who exactly was the man talking to? Congolese Joseph Kabila who had an expression of utter boredom the whole time? The UN "peacekeeping force" MONUC which has proved more adept at trading arms with the FDLR for gold and other precious minerals?

Now consider this for a moment. The very important people gathered in Nairobi are fully aware that FDLR-that charming umbrella group of people

(Interahamwe, ex FAR, Magrevi, Ibiswikiri etc etc) whose main aim in life was, and is to massacre anyone whose offence is to have been born a Tutsi-effectively call the shots in eastern Congo.

Those dignitaries jaw jawing in Nairobi know the FDLR long ago took over swathes of eastern Congo with the full knowledge of Kabila, and his father before him and Mobutu Sese Seko before both of them.

They know Kabila knows even if he wanted to he could never disarm the FDLR. The Congolese army basically has always been a motley collection of ill-disciplined, cowardly thugs who turn tail and run at the first sound of gunfire and whose main skill is to rape and loot helpless civilians.

Actually it looks like Kabila knows the only people he can rely on to fight for him in the crunch are the FDLR, so instead of disarming them he does the exact opposite-he makes sure they are armed to the teeth.

Everyone knows these things, but they carry on with their pretense of "holding talks". As usual. They hold talks because in reality that is all they can do.

Congolese themselves have to find a solution to their horrors (and here we are talking about other Congolese, not Kabila and his government who very much are part of the problem).

Problem neighbors

The Congo is a terrible mess. At this newspaper we like to call a spade a spade and there is no other way to candidly describe our giant neighbor to the West.

The country is an irreversible mess and no amount of talking in Nairobi or anywhere else will ever change the fact. The country has always been a mess, with a capital M and-unless Congolese do something wholly new; something breathtakingly revolutionary, creative and daring-it always will be a mess.

One feels for that country's long-suffering citizens; one feels deeply for them. No people should suffer the way Congolese do.

Impoverished Congolese die by the tens of thousands each year from the atrocities of low-intensity rebel conflicts and attendant problems like starvation, lack of medicine, exposure to the elements and so on. The suffering of this Sub-Saharan African country is an ever in-your-face reminder of the region's status as the world's basket case.

Of course there are African countries striving to transcend basket-case status. However one of the big problems with our part of the world is that even those societies trying to steer from insane situations to become well-functioning states tend to have problem neighbors always ready to export their chaos and bring everyone down with them.

A good example is South Africa. This is a country populated mostly by poor people; a country trying to recover from the ravages of Apartheid.

But they have a neighbor, Zimbabwe, whose senile ruler clings to power at all costs with a strangely docile population resorting to flee en masse over the country's borders every day-most notably to South Africa where they bring all their economic problems with them, exacerbating social tensions that can (and do) erupt into full scale riots and general mayhem.

An even better example of a country recovering from horror, from a shambolic mess to a functional society is our own.

But the Congo is just across the border and is willing to host Interahamwe militias, ex FAR and every Hutu extremist whose aim-everyone knows-is to continue with their genocide agenda.

In the Congo these mass murderers have found the ideal base from which to carry on with their agenda.

The "leadership" in Kinshasa (again we are calling a spade a spade, we are not diplomats) is spectacularly incompetent, weak, venal and every other adjective you can think of to describe a government that presides over one of the most failed states in the world.

In the Congo the social contract between a government and its citizens has never existed-beginning with the late 19th century when a rapacious Belgian monarch called King Leopold who, intent on loot and plunder, sent an American adventurer, Henry Morton Stanley to carve up this huge swath of territory on the pretext Leopold wanted to carry out "humanitarian work on behalf of the Africans".

There was little chance that the Congo, an amalgamation of hundreds of African ethnic groups arbitrarily bundled together into a so-called nation by a thieving European monarch was ever going to be a functional country once the colonial masters left-which they did in 1960.

Generally this is not a problem unique to the Congo-most of our states are that only in name, having come into existence at the whims and as a result of the greed of European nations that "scrambled" for Africa in the late 19th century, carving out spheres of colonial influence for plunder and slave labor.

One or two African countries would do a credible job of governing themselves once colonial rule ended.

Botswana for example actually looks like it is about to break ranks with other Sub-Saharan African countries and become a state in the real sense of the term: that is an entity that not only guarantees the rule of law but one that provides its citizens decent (decent being the operative word here) health care, decent schooling, decent roads and other transportation infrastructure like functional railways, and it's a country that puts in place conditions conducive to enterprise et cetera et cetera. They even have a social welfare system over there-the only African country with one.

A few other African societies have had modest levels of success governing themselves.

But the defining events of Africa in the five-decade period since the end of colonial rule have been very much what the Congo has experienced and what makes it the failed, problem state it is for us and everyone else in the region: thieving, incompetent corrupt rule that results into perennial military coups, civil wars, genocide, endless rebel wars, hunger and starvation and TV images of fly infested children and ragged, fleeing people with their miserable belongings on their heads.

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