By Stabroek staff
Stabroek News
September 12, 2009
Three days ago, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights spoke publicly of “war crimes or crimes against humanity [that have become] part of a self-perpetuating pattern of brutality” in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
His remarks came shortly after the publication of two UN reports which claimed that government forces, and rebels such as Laurent Nkunda’s notorious National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) militia, had carried out arbitrary killing, rape and pillage, often among populations they were ostensibly “protecting.”
The costive language of international diplomacy cannot begin to take the full measure of the horrors which have been visited upon the civilian population of the Congo.
After more than a decade of fighting, 5.4 million deaths and the intervention of troops from as many as nine African nations, even the most striking statistics only dimly convey what is taking place.
Four years ago, according to UN estimates, 45,000 women were raped in South Kivu alone; more recently, when Nkunda launched an attack on North Kivu late last year, up to 200,000 people fled from their homes, bringing the total number of civilians displaced by the fighting up to 2 million.
By itself, the savagery of the sexual violence associated with recent phases of the conflict lies beyond anything that Western readers can comprehend.
When the writer Adam Hochschild visited a rape shelter in eastern Congo recently, its supervisor recounted how she had been gang raped, nearly a decade ago, by a local warlord’s troops.
Twelve soldiers invaded her house, brutally attacked her husband – dismembering him while he was still alive – then raped her on top of his mutilated carcass.
Then they turned on her twelve and fifteen-year-old daughters. Hochschild notes that since its opening the shelter has recorded nearly 6,000 rapes, most of them carried out by gangs of soldiers.
The supervisor had dedicated much of her time to saving children born of these rapes since one common condition for a victim’s return to her community is the abortion or disposal of the child.
One reason why the Congo wars have been so under-reported in the Western press is their bewildering complexity.
After the Rwandan genocide in 1994, a general sympathy in the West for the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) gave the Kagame government carte blanche to pursue Hutu genocidaires into what was then Mobutu’s Zaire.
After Mobutu’s ouster, however, Rwanda’s interests became nakedly opportunistic. Eager to control the Congo’s vast mineral wealth, the RPF began what was essentially a resource war in its second invasion of the Congo.
This second war has evolved into a Byzantine mix of national alliances and internecine feuding, but it has never had much to do with Rwandan self-defence, nor that of the Banyamulenge – former Rwandans, mostly Tutsi – who had integrated into the Congo population before the new wars stirred up old hatreds.
An ever-shifting web of loyalties among rebel troops, and the Kabila government’s various allies, has further confused the narrative of the war, to the point at which few non-specialist readers can claim to have a clear understanding of what has often been called, somewhat misleadingly, “Africa’s World War.”
Throughout the carnage, Western companies have been drawn in by the lure of quick profits. Several years ago, a UN report on the illegal exploitation of Congo’s resources listed 85 businesses which had violated OECD guidelines for multinational corporations investing in war zones (21 were Belgian, 12 South African, 10 British, eight American, and five Canadian).
And yet, despite calls for travel bans and other restrictions, the looting of Congo’s national wealth has only grown worse. The amounts of money involved in these deals are astonishing, especially when one considers the decades of plundering which the Congo had already suffered.
In mid-1997, the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL) received a US$50 million down payment from a Canadian-owned mining company, with promises of a further $200 million to be paid over four years, in exchange for the rights to copper and cobalt deposits estimated to be worth $1.5 billion.
Later deals, particularly those in coltan (an ore used by computer and cell-phone manufacturers) were equally lucrative. In 2000, heavy demand for new consumer electronics like the Sony Playstation, drove the price for a pound of tantalum powder from $49 to $275.
The international politics around the Congo wars is, understandably, complex.
France, a stalwart sponsor of the Rwandan genocidaires, and the United States, an equally culpable supporter of the predatory Mobutu, both have dirty hands and mixed motives. The military involvement of such diverse actors as Angola, Chad, Uganda and Zimbabwe has only further complicated the dialogue necessary for a reasonable political settlement.
Even so, it is hard to understand why the international community has decided to prosecute Charles Taylor and Omar Al-Bashir but continues to overlook the well-documented crimes of Paul Kagame and others (despite a recent high-profile appeal from more than 70 scholars and human rights activists).
Fifteen years after the genocide in Rwanda, there is still a general reluctance to take stock of the crimes committed by Tutsi forces, even when these occurred outside the context of their response to the genocide.
When, for example, in August 1997, the UN began to look into claims that Tutsi forces had massacred Hutu civilians, according to one recent account, “a preliminary report identified forty massacre sites” before the Kabila government refused to cooperate with UN investigators.
Until there is a proper accounting of the RPF’s crimes, there is little hope for proper reconciliation, or the forestalling of future vengeance.
Despite all this, there are still grounds for some hope. In January of this year, Rwanda permitted the arrest of the warlord Laurent Nkunda. This was, in large part, due to pressure from international donors – nearly half of the country’s budget comes from foreign aid.
If further pressure is applied in this way, it may not be too late to achieve a lasting settlement.
But if this opportunity is lost, and the international community ignores the signs that the main actors are preparing themselves for another round of bloodletting, then the horrors of the Congo will only get worse.
Related Materials:
Congo’s infinite war
Rwanda: Academic Scholars Call for ICTR to Fulfill Mandate and Prosecute RPF/RPA Members
Rwanda: Tribunal Risks Supporting ‘Victor’s Justice’
Michael Hourigan's Affidavit to ICTR about Habyarimana's assassination
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