Africa
Why hoping for the best brings the worst
Published 09 October 2006
"Congo's been bleeding to death for five centuries," John le Carré has a character declare in his new Africa novel, The Mission Song. "Fucked by the Arab slavers, fucked by their fellow Africans, fucked by the United Nations, the CIA, the Christians, the Belgians, the French, the Brits, the Rwandans, the diamond companies, the gold companies, the mineral companies, half the world's carpetbaggers, their own government in Kinshasa, and any minute now they're going to be fucked by the oil companies. Time they had a break . . ."
Time they had a break, indeed. But as the second round of presidential elections approaches in the Democratic Republic of Congo, it strikes me that le Carré could have added yet one more candidate to his magnificent roll-call of those who have royally screwed the former Zaire: the naive souls who believe in democracy's capacity to heal all wounds.
On 29 October, the DRC goes to the polls in a run-off between President Joseph Kabila and his nearest rival, Jean-Pierre Bemba. The first round was by no means glitch-free, but the foreign donors who spent $420m organising a vote across a country where tarmacked roads are often only a memory none the less pulled off a logistical miracle.
As Peter Cook told the one-legged actor auditioning for the role of Tarzan: "I've got nothing against your right leg. Trouble is, neither have you." Like him, I've got nothing against the international community's role in staging the Congolese elections - but there is simply not enough to stand against that achievement. And the absence of that second limb risks en suring that the $420m, like the billions more that are spent keeping the world's biggest UN peacekeeping force in situ, ends up as money down the drain.
After six years of a civil war that neither the government nor the various rebel groups in the DRC proved capable of winning, it made sense to get the parties around a table. At Sun City in South Africa, the Kinshasa government agreed with rebel warlords to set up a transitional administration, organise elections and let Congo's citizens decide who should run the place. It would be the first time in four decades, after all, anyone had bothered to ask their opinion.
A laudable principle. So why are residents, diplomats and UN officials in Kinshasa "scared witless", as a veteran Congo watcher told me?
This is not hysteria; the ingredients for serious trouble are all in place. A new form of xeno phobia between Lingala-speaking westerners, who regard themselves as "sons of the soil", and Swahili-speaking easterners, rejected as "foreigners", is being stoked by television stations owned by the two candidates. Unpaid soldiers, whose wages are routinely pocketed by their commanders, roam at will. Both men control private armies that opened fire on each other after the first round of voting, leaving 30 dead, and have been importing weapons ahead of the coming showdown.
Whoever loses is certain to denounce the results as rigged. Both Kabila and Bemba, after all, are men who owe their prominence to their readiness to take up arms, so why accept the verdict of the polls? At best, analysts say, there may be a few days of rioting. At worst, we could see pitched battles between Kabila's and Bemba's men, with the youth of Kinshasa joining in on Bemba's side and the violence rippling out to the DRC's provinces, always vulnerable to the siren call of secession.
That so much money and so many good intentions have produced such an alarming mise en scène highlights the weaknesses to which the international community falls prey when chairing peace talks in Africa. The first failing is the tendency, in the impatience to clinch a deal, to gloss over a crucial detail, brushing away warnings in the hope that as a settlement takes hold it will gradually prove irrelevant. Time and again, the opposite occurs: the "detail" grows in importance, eventually destroying all the fine work done around it.
In this case, the detail was the security arrangements hammered out between Kabila and the rebel factions as a precondition for the rebels' move to Kinshasa. After much dispute, the issue was left in limbo. As a result, a city of nearly seven million, miraculously spared serious fighting until now, could well be the scene of a bloody Bemba-Kabila showdown.
The second failing is a preference for sweep-ing acts of media-friendly symbolism over the sort of pains taking technical work that doesn't lend itself to glib headlines. Under Mobutu Sese Seko, Congo became a husk of a state. As its institutions of government were stripped of power, daily life became dominated by the appetites of thousands of out-of-control young men wandering around with guns. Conscious of this, experts have repeatedly urged western donors to dedicate more funds to the integration, training and demobilisation of the DRC's armed forces.
The donors mouthed the right words, but squabbled over who should take the lead. It was so much easier to focus on elections, which didn't involve the tricky sovereignty issues raised by the restructuring of an African army. And, given the glowing accounts the world's press delivered after the first round, it was so much more rewarding.
If all hell breaks loose in the DRC after 29 October - and I desperately hope it does not - it will be tragic evidence of the damage a very human inclination to hope for the best can do.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
