Post-Conflict Label Helped Fuel Violence in the Congo

Most Americans don’t know much about wars and violence that took place during the Zaire-DRC Transition period. The news mostly didn’t cover it in the United States, usually because African problems are viewed to be uninteresting to American news viewers. As was pointed out back in 2005 by the Christian Science Monitor, “even a nonlethal car bombing in Iraq or a kidnapping in Afghanistan [got] more Western media coverage in a day than Congo [got] in a typical month of 30,000 dead.”

But media attention isn’t the focus of this update; rather I wanted to draw your attention to that figure and the year in which it was noted. 30,000 dead was a ‘typical month’ in the Congo in 2005. This is a staggering figure, but even more so when you realize that from 2003 through 2008 the United Nations officially labeled the Congo as being a post-conflict nation.

During the first and second Congo Wars, a period basically stretching from November 1996 to July 2003 with a brief reprieve between wars, the United Nations forces actively sought to create peace. They would meet with local military leaders in an attempt to create peace talks and promote an end to the violence. The mission of these forces was more of a Peace Creating Force. But, as soon as the official end of hostilities was declared in July of 2003, the United Nations completely shifted their focus. The Peacekeeping Mission went into full effect, and became a support for the Congolese government with little to no connection to sub-national and regional issues.

Instead of conflicts, the ongoing violence happening in Eastern Congo, including mass murder, mass rape, and constant pillaging and destruction of villages were considered individual crisis.

As Severine Autesserre points out in her book, The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding, regarding the shift from a classification of war to post-conflict:

“This shift halted the few efforts at subnational conflict levels that interveners had previously considered. High level diplomats began considering local conflict as an exclusively internal matter that fell within the expertise of the Transitional Government. As a high-ranking UN official recalled, ‘The structures that had been able to deal with [warring] parties as [legitimate] parties disappeared.’”

UN Peacekeeper in Congo

Dr. Autesserre further discusses the problems this label created, particularly in regards to the actual UN Peace Keepers who came into the country unprepared for any form of conflict. Most of the Peace Keepers and support staff spoke only English and did not understand the local language. They were also uninformed on a lot of the local violence taking place. In one horrifying example, a boy had escaped a village being attacked by rebels that were raping all the women. He ran to the UN outpost to get help. The guard, not knowing any French or Lingala, was able to figure out what this boy wanted and went into the outpost. He came out a few minutes later and gave the boy a package of cookies and sent him away. Every woman in the village was raped.

Now, I remember hiking around valley surrounding Sarajevo with a former partisan defender of the city, and he would tell me story after story of how the UN Peace Keepers would avoid any actual conflict or personal harm. Serbian snipers were trained to never shoot the Peace Keepers with their blue helmets, as it might provoke them, but they had no problem shooting Bosnians within plain sight of these defenders. Ever since then I’ve wondered what exactly is the point of UN Peace Keepers?

Autesserre gives the Congolese view of these ‘peace keepers’:

“The peacekeepers wasted the Congo’s money (or money that international actors had earmarked for the Congo) on large cars, high salaries, and beautiful houses. They failed to fulfill some of their duties, in particular the protection of the population. Overall, the Congolese often saw the UN staff as useless parasites, whom they nicknamed Tourists in a War Zone.”

So, what can we do about this? Well, I’m going to write another post on a bottom-up perspective of peacekeeping, which would focus more on interacting with local militant groups and actually trying to understand what the root cause of a conflict is rather than simply stating it’s for resource control or because of a spill-over from the Rwandan genocide.

Incentives 101: Why Raising a Baby Calf in Kisangani is Unrealistic

What are the incentives for those living in DRC to work towards a better future? History has taught them that there are no incentives, and history is a strong teacher to overcome.

In America, it’s rather common sense that if you save money you will be better off in the future (Well, it was common sense until everyone drank the housing Cool-Aid). If we choose not to consume all of our wages now, then in the future we will be able to consume at a much higher level thanks to interest. Now, this is a nice incentive to save, which is to say: to invest.

Most people don’t understand where ‘investment’ goes. When people in a country save, that money doesn’t simply sit around, but it gets invested in other areas. The money could go into business loans, or new construction, or technological research, or any area where there is profit for the bank to be made. But it’s not only the bank that profits; it’s the people who saved their money as well.

If I save $1000.00 and in a year I get $1100.00 back, that’s great and I’m happy with the return. But if that original $1000.00 was a portion of a loan which was given to Apple Computers to assist with research and development an iPod that holds twice as much music, then not only did I make a $100.00 profit on my investment, but at some point in the future there will be a new device which did not exist before and my money will now buy me twice as much in the way for song-storage-per-dollar. That sounds like a great deal to me, and thus I am doubly incentivized to invest.

Now what about other countries? Well, during the three years I lived in Ukraine there were two runs on the banks. These were small runs, and were quickly relieved by the government, but they were banking runs none-the-less. Why did this happen? Ukrainians remember all too well when all their money became worthless junk during a period of hyperinflation in the early 1990s. Imagine putting $1000.00 into the bank today, and tomorrow the bank gives it back but it’s only has the buying power of $100.00. On top of that, when investing in Ukraine, the banks aren’t reliable enough with their investments and lending practices. So, when you put your $1000.00 in the bank, you might get a tiny return in interest, but the $1000.00 was most likely only loaned out to the government, so it did little to create new goods and services which will benefit your life.

So, what’s this have to do with a baby calf? Well, one component of our project is training soldiers to raise and breed cattle in order to have another reliable source of meat. While Kisangani isn’t exactly good cattle country, there is good grazing land in eastern DRC and cattle training was designed as a pilot program with the hope of expanding the project to those regions in the future.

A few months ago saw the birth of a calf, which was a significant milestone for the base, soldiers, and our project in general. But you have to understand that much of the work of this project is investment in the future and has little reward for those doing the work at this time. Stack onto that the fact that in the DRC the future always seems uncertain and the common mentality is that it’s better to take everything possible now then wait and have more.

Our calf became the sadly-perfect metaphor for this when it was attacked in the middle of the night by a few drunken men (most likely soldiers). These men were drunk and wanted to take some meat, but rather than go after a fully grown cow which could have fed a company of men they choose to attack future gains.

Incentives are a hard thing to demonstrate when there are so many disincentives around every corner.

The calf lived, though I was highly skeptical during the first few days, particularly since I’ve never seen anything with a 12-inch long by 5-inch deep wound in my life.

I’ll skip on posting the gruesome photos and instead just show this one of the calf after being fixed up and recovering in its private tent:

She’s limping around now and has become a symbol for the base and the soldiers and hopefully this incident will make for a better future.

Rape and War, Hand-in-Hand

The Economist has a very good article on the use of rape as a method of war. It’s a sad fact that throughout history customs of ‘taking’ the women of those who have been conquered are ubiquitous. While this seems like something which would have died off as the world became more and more modern, the stark reality is that it has been a constant in every conflict in the past century as well.

As the Economist points out, over 20,000 rapes took place in the Bosnian War. Over 500,000 took place in the Rwandan genocide. And in the DRC, there are villages where every single woman has been raped at least once. It took the United Nations until 2008 to acknowledge that rape as a tool of war, and one that must be punished. That seems like an absurdly long time to recognize something that is in the ‘no duh’ category.

As the charts point out, Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest level of civil conflicts where rapes were perpetrated, but Asia isn’t far behind. The article does point out that it doesn’t need to happen in wars, as illustrated by El Salvador, where the militia got the majority of their intelligence from the people, and keeping strong bonds with the locals was far more important in order gain reliable information.

One fault I would point out deals with the Congo. A specialist points out that if a militia boss has enough control over his men to direct them, then he must have enough control to get them not to rape. This is a western belief that doesn’t touch on the root cause of raping and pillaging in the Congo. Soldiers may be willing to fight, but they are doing so because they know that with victory come the spoils, which is to say food from pillaging and rape. If a commander takes away those things, but cannot at least supply the men with a reliable source of food, then no one will listen to him and soon he’ll have either no men or find himself being ‘replaced.’

Do check out the article here, as it’s very interesting and provides a great background on the issue.

U.S. Delegation Visits Ag Initiative Project

Today we had a delegation from the United States come to visit the Borlaug Institute farms and fisheries on the FARDC Base in Kisangani. The delegation included Assistant Secretary of State Andrew Shapiro, the U.S. Ambassador to D. R. Congo, and the U.S. General in command of AFRICOM. Over the course of the day they also watched marching and live fire demonstrations by the American-Trained FARDC Fast Deploy Battalion.

Overall, Assistant Secretary Shapiro was very impressed by the agricultural initiative, and specifically mentioned that he had never seen or heard of a project like it anywhere else in Africa. In a press conference later in the day he reiterated the need for the army to be able to feed itself in a sustainable manner and not return to living off the land, as was the method under both Mobutu and King Leopold. For 150 years the Congolese army has been taking their food from the people, and breaking this tradition is not an easy thing, but this sort of project is a start.

Our project philosophy is based on one thing: If an army doesn’t get paid, they will still continue to work, but if an army doesn’t get fed, they will rebel.

At this stage, we have 5 hectares of cassava fields planted, a 4 hectare fish pond stocked with tilapia and catfish, and 3-4 hectares for other vegetables. Last week the Ag-Company of the FARDC cleared another 5 hectares of jungle and this week they’ve begun clearing a further 5 hectares. Both of these clearings will be converted into additional fish ponds by the soldiers. Once complete, the total entire farm and fishery will produce enough cassava to feed a company of 1000 soldiers for a year, as well as give them fish multiples days out of the week. It will also produce excess cassava which will be sold in the markets to provide income for growth or other food items.

Next week, I’ll be spending my morning overseeing the clearing of the jungle area. Because of some corruption problems, we need to make sure that the number of civilian workers hired to clear the jungle matches the actual number who are working. There is a tendency for those two numbers to not exactly match and some money ends up in the captain’s pocket. While that is to be expected to a point, we would prefer to minimize our losses to corruption. Having lived in Ukraine for three years, I lost my American belief that all corruption is unacceptable, as it wasn’t too long ago that our own country had some serious problems. We need to understand that there is a way things work in some places. In many countries, if it weren’t for the bribes, it might take years to get a business started because of the government’s laws and bureaucracy. Here, it’s just not feasible to completely eliminate it. But watching over their backs will help to cut it a tad.

First Days in the DRC

These are some examples of my living situation here in Kisangani and not particularly related to the project itself. Tomorrow I’ll finally get over to the base to work on the project.

This is a poor country. Kisangani is one of the largest cities in the country yet it’s devoid of new construction. The buildings are relics from colonial times, many of them crumbling and abandoned to squatters. I live next door to Mobutu’s magnificent river palace; though magnificent can only be applied if you see a photograph from the past. Now, out my bedroom window, I see an ant farm of squatters ever in motion, and hear the sounds of their radios, at all hours.

As is a necessity for all foreigners here, we live in a compound cut off from the world by high walls with barbed wire and rotating guards manning the gates. Inside those walls we have a large house shared by three of us. It’s a nice place, though not without its 3^rd-world problems. The power has been problematic, the internet is almost unusable most of the day as it’s incredibly slow, and there are some problems with the plumbing – at least we have water for our cold showers.

We also have some gardens, including a spice and squash garden which was planted last month but already the basil is usable. There are two parrots living in the yard, though they aren’t very friendly, a pig in the back who was supposed to be roasted but the gang got too attached, so now he’s named Sausage and gets to feast on cassava. There are also a few cats, but they’re on the way out. Beau, our project manager, just finished building his Tiki bar outside of my room, where we’re able to play darts late into the night.

When we travel around town we go everywhere in our black SUV, amazingly dodging the masses of motorcycles and bikes that are weaving through the city. Sometimes we come so close to bikes that they end up diving into bushes to get out of the way, though often the bikers are pushing the limits of the road themselves – usually they don’t know the rules of the road as they’ve simply purchased their license.

My boss also has a boat and likes to spend the evenings fishing — trying to catch the monster fish of the Congo. But weekends are filled with exploring the river, doing some tubing, or heading to beaches. On the river you can see all of the fishermen in their dugout canoes, somehow navigating the strong currents while standing upright in their tiny boats. I swear, if Africans could monetize the skills of standing in a dugout and carrying things on their heads they would be set.

The photos are of my house, including one of our guards and our gardener.

Congo River Trip on NPR

NPR’s Ofeibea Quist-Arcton has a series of stories about her 500 mile journey down the Congo River in the DRC on a river barge. The overall journey starts in Kisangani and heads to Kinshasa.

The story was broadcast in five short (7min) installments on Morning Edition. Here is a link to the article about the series.

This reminds me of this section from “A Bend in the River”:

But at night, if you were on the river, it was another thing. You felt the land taking you back to something that was familiar, something you had known at some time but had forgotten or ignored, but which was always there. You felt the land taking you back to what was there a hundred years ago, to what had been there always.