DR Congo: we are all implicated in the carnage – we can no longer ignore it

Vava Tampa, The Guardian

Denis Mukwege, the Congolese gynaecologist who treated thousands of rape victims during the war, is tipped to win the Nobel peace prize this week – ahead of Malala Yousafzai. Whatever the decision, his work – and the situation in the country – deserves global recognition.

Some of the horror stories I have heard from women rape victims have truly haunted me. Some of the women, after being raped, had chemicals poured into their inside. Others were shot apart by rifle blasts. One family friend's aunt, Masika Katsuva, was raped with her two daughters and then forced to eat her dead husband's genitals which had been cut off by the rebels.

For the past 15 years, Congo has been the scene of the bloodiest violence since the second world war. The conflict began in 1998 when Laurent Kabila – who, with the support of a loose assembly of regional armies, had forced Mobutu from power 15 months earlier – fell out with his original backers. Rwanda's Paul Kagame and Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, under the pretext of the enemy of my enemy is my friend, had enlisted Mobutu's military to reinvade Congo to topple Kabila. The invasion drew in Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia on Congo's side, while Burundi lined up with Rwanda and Uganda, and set the stage for the tragedy that continues to the present day.

The human cost has been in the millions; and the cost in terms of social and human development is incalculable. More than 5 million perished in the first 10 years of the wars and an estimated 45,000 people continue to die each month.

Yet we rarely hear anything about it. Out of sight, out of mind. Though ironically Congo is actually never too far from us. We carry a piece of it with us every single day. One of the reasons the Congo wars have continued is the scramble for its highly valuable minerals. Congo is a home to some of the largest reserves of gold, tin, timber, diamond, copper, cobalt, tungsten and tantalum – to name but a few – in Africa. The most lucrative of all is columbite-tantalite, better known as coltan: a dull metallic ore that stores electricity and makes our mobile phones vibrate.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo: Where hell is just a local call away

Dan Snow, The Independent

African nation is rich in resources – yet its people know only famine, war and disease. Dan Snow examines why

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is the size of Western Europe, blessed with resources that ought to make its 70 million inhabitants very wealthy.

Yet it sits at the very bottom of the UN Human Development Index and for a generation has reliably been the worst country on earth in which to be born.

We are headed north to try and find out why. We can’t travel by night because the countryside swarms with the lawless; refugees from the sudden implosion in the neighbouring Central African Republic have fled here with machetes and empty bellies. We stay in a guest house which has not had running water or electricity for two years. It’s plantain and scrawny chicken for dinner, a feast by local standards.

The Land Cruiser rumbles off at 4am, its tyres bald, the windscreen wipers non-existent. The 300km journey will take eight hours if we are  lucky. This vast country has fewer than 2,000 miles of paved roads, and the World Bank estimates that 90 per cent of the entire network is impassable. It is so bumpy that I get seasick.
Hordes of kids roar as we pass but we see only children and pregnant women, no old people. The average life expectancy here has collapsed from 60 in 1960 to 48 today. It is late when we reach Gbadolite, the jungle folly of one of Africa’s most infamous leaders, President Mobutu. The town centre is quiet: modern street signs and traffic lights hang limp and corroding above carless streets.

We are here to film Mobutu’s jungle Versailles. We pass an airport with a runway built for Concorde, which Mobutu would hire for his shopping trips. The marble-clad terminal building is derelict; where the French President François Mitterrand once sipped champagne, families live in lean-tos. We eventually reach the palace to which Mobutu retreated as the Congo collapsed and undiagnosed cancer tore at his insides. Its swimming pool is empty but for a puddle of green sludge, his sunken bed a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Fragments of Chinese porcelain vases lie scattered across the cracked floor.

The Horror, The Horror: a review of Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

Jeffrey Gettleman, May 2011
New Republic

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa
By Jason K. Stearns
(PublicAffairs, 380 pp., $28.99)

The history of Congo is the history of mass murder. What is going on today—with rebels, government soldiers, and armed groups from neighboring countries raping and slaughtering Congolese civilians—is a continuation of the ruthlessness that has been embedded in this country for more than a hundred years. It began in the 1880s, when King Leopold II of Belgium turned this abundantly fertile expanse in the center of Africa into his own personal fiefdom, murdering and enslaving the population in order to collect as much ivory and rubber as humanly possible. The whip-wielding Belgian administrators who followed were hardly any better, and an ill-prepared Congo stumbled toward independence in 1960. Then, thanks to American meddling, it produced the most corrupt continent’s most corrupt leader, Mobutu Sese Seko, who guzzled pink champagne and feasted on fresh cakes flown in from Paris while his people wasted away. When he was overthrown in 1997, Congo plunged into a bloodbath that sucked in many of its neighbors. It became—and remains—one of the worst wars in modern history, a truly continental disaster that has killed millions of people.

In Congo’s war, battles between soldiers are incredibly rare. Instead, gratuitous massacres of civilians and flamboyant cruelty are the norm. It is difficult not to be hyperbolic when describing this country—the vastness, the mineral riches, the depravity are all off the charts. I have traveled there more than a dozen times and the stories that I have collected stay with me. I have spoken to men who have been pinned down on their stomachs in cassava fields and gang-raped. I have met a little girl whose lips were sawed off by lunatic rebels; you could see her teeth when her mouth was closed. I have stepped over freshly dug graves, one crumbly mound after another, stretching deep into the jungle, marking where hundreds of people were clubbed to death in a massacre that took weeks to come to light because that particular patch of Congo, like so much of the country, is totally cut off, without phones, roads, or any vestiges of modernity. Last fall I met a very gaunt, whispery woman who said she was in a lot of pain. She had been gang-raped as well. Her name was Anna. She was eighty years old.

Anna lives in a village just up the road from a heavily fortified U.N. peacekeeping base. But that meant little, and points to another alarming problem in Congo: nobody seems to be able to help this place. Hundreds of women were raped right under the U.N.’s nose in a three-day rebel rampage last summer that, again, had no discernible strategic purpose other than the terrorizing of innocent people. Congo is now considered “the rape capital of the world,” with hundreds of thousands of women, children, and grown men having been victimized. The United Nations has invested billions in trying to protect Congolese civilians, but it continues to fail. Hillary Clinton paid a special visit to eastern Congo, the most war-wracked part of the country, in 2009. Obama himself has railed against the mass rapes. Countless European ministers have jetted in and out, vowing to end the impunity. But the killings and the rapes go on.