Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (66 page)

Second, we should give Congolese an opportunity to decide on how to deal with their violent past. A key fallacy of international engagement has been the idea that justice is an impediment to peace in the region. Time and time again, diplomats have actively shied away from creating an international court to prosecute those responsible for the many atrocities committed during the war. One of the most disheartening moments in my research, repeated countless times, was hearing survivors explain that they didn’t have anything to help them address their loss—the killers hadn’t been brought to justice, and often they didn’t even know where their loved ones were buried. The Congo is something of an outlier in this sense: Sierra Leone, Kosovo, East Timor, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia have all had tribunals to deal with the past. Yet in the Congo, where many of the perpetrators are still in power, the victims are left to stew in their frustration.

It is precisely because many former warlords are still in power that diplomats have been wary of launching prosecutions. This has resulted in an army and government replete with criminals who have little deterrent to keep them from resorting to violence again. At the time of this writing, in October 2010, the United Nations released a report summarizing the most egregious war crimes committed in the country between 1993 and 2003 and recommending that a special court be established. This time, donors and the Congolese government must seize the opportunity. This is not to say that we should impose an international tribunal on the Congo; it may not be the best solution. But the Congolese people should be given the chance to know some of the truth of what happened during the war and to hold accountable those responsible. Two hundred and twenty Congolese civil society organizations have written in support of the UN report and have called for a conference to decide on how best to proceed. Such an initiative would be an important signal to the elite, proving that impunity is not the glue of the political system.

In large part, however, our sins have been of omission. We simply do not care enough. Contrary to what some Congolese believe, President Obama does not wake up to a security briefing on the Congo with his morning scone. Generally, we do not care about a strange war fought by black people somewhere in the middle of Africa. This sad hypocrisy is easy to see—NATO sent 50,000 troops from some of the best armies to Kosovo in 1999, a country one-fifth the size of South Kivu. In the Congo, the UN peacekeeping mission plateaued at 20,000 troops, mostly from South Asia, ill-equipped and with little will to carry out risky military operations. In exchange, the Congo has received plentiful humanitarian aid—a short-term solution to a big problem.

This apathy has allowed simplistic notions to dominate policy toward the region. This was most evident in dealing with Uganda and Rwanda. Throughout the conflict, donor aid made up for over half of the budget of Rwanda and over a third of that of Uganda. The largest providers were the European Commission, the United Kingdom, and the United States, governments that felt understandably guilty for not having come to Rwanda’s aid during the genocide.

In addition, both Central African countries had impressive records of development and poverty reduction: over a period of ten years, donor aid helped lift 13 percent of Rwandans and 20 percent of Ugandans out of poverty. Compared with other African countries, such as that of the Congo, at least here donors knew that their aid dollars and pounds were being put to good use.

The donors were, however, myopic. They clearly recognized the relatively positive developments taking place within Rwanda’s borders but were generally indifferent toward the conflict next door. When Rwanda reinvaded the Congo in August 1998, Washington and London protested but did not use their mighty diplomatic and financial leverage on Congo’s neighbors. “We did the right thing with Rwanda,” Sue Hogwood, a former UK ambassador to Rwanda, said. “We needed to help them rebuild after the genocide. We engaged and challenged them over human rights abuses, but they also had genuine security concerns.”
⁵

Rwanda did have security concerns. One of Kagame’s political advisors expressed a typical view to me: “When the United States was attacked on September 11, 2001, you decided to strike back against Afghanistan for harboring the people who carried out the attack. Many innocent civilians died as a result of U.S. military operations. Is that unfortunate? Of course. But how many Americans regret invading Afghanistan? Very few.”
⁶

This point of view does not allow for moral nuances. Once we have established that the
génocidaires
are in the Congo, any means will justify the ends of getting rid of them, even if those means are not strictly related to getting rid of the
génocidaires.
Was the destruction of Kisangani necessary to get rid of them? The killing of tens of thousands of civilians? The pillaging of millions of dollars to finance the war effort?

Policymakers in the region have often only had blunt instruments to deal with complex issues. In the case of the Rwandan refugee crisis, for example, it would have been best to send in an international military force to demilitarize the refugee camps and separate the soldiers from the civilians. That would have required hundreds of millions of dollars, and a risky intervention soon after the UN fiasco in Somalia.
⁷

In the absence of such large-scale engagement, dealing with the refugee problem, especially after Rwanda had invaded, was like doing brain surgery with oven mitts. As several hundred thousand refugees fled across Zaire, the U.S. ambassador to Kigali told his bosses in Washington, “The best way we can help is to stop feeding the killers who will then run away to look for other sustenance, leaving their hostages behind. If we do not, we will be trading the children in Tingi-Tingi against the children who will be killed and orphaned in Rwanda [by the killers when they return].”
⁸
What he didn’t mention is that the only way to stop feeding the killers was to stop feeding the civilians as well.

We cannot do peacemaking on the cheap, with few diplomats and no resources. It will not only fail but also lead to simplistic policies that can do more harm than good.

The Congo war had no one cause, no clear conceptual essence that can be easily distilled in a couple of paragraphs. Like an ancient Greek epic, it is a mess of different narrative strands—some heroic, some venal, all combined in a narrative that is not straightforward but layered, shifting, and incomplete. It is not a war of great mechanical precision but of ragged human edges.

This book is an exhortation to raise the bar and try harder to understand this layered complexity. The Congo’s suffering is intensely human; it has experienced trauma on a massive and prolonged scale, and the victims are our neighbors, our trading partners, our political confreres and rivals. They are not alien; they are not evil; they are not beyond our comprehension. The story of the Congo is dense and complicated. It demands that all involved think hard. This means diving into the nuts and bolts of Congolese politics and working to help the more legitimate and responsible leaders rise to the top. This means better, more aggressive, and smarter peacekeeping and conflict resolution; more foreign aid that is conditional on political reforms and not just on fiscal performance; and more responsible corporate investment and trade with the Congo.

We should not despair. If there is one thing I know after having worked on the Congo for a decade, it is the extreme resilience and energy of the Congolese people. As the eccentric singer Koffi Olomide sings, referring to his country, “This is hell’s system here. The fire is raging, and yet we don’t get burned.” With all of their hardships, one would imagine the Congolese to be less vibrant and more cynical. Yet they are not.

There are no easy solutions for the Congo, no silver bullets to produce accountable government and peace. The ultimate fate of the country rests with the Congolese people themselves. Westerners also have a role to play, in part because of our historical debt to the country, in part because it is the right thing to do. This does not mean imposing a foreign vision on the country or simply sending food and money. It means understanding it and its politics and rhythms on their own terms, and then doing our part in providing an environment conducive to growth and stability.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1
Julie Hollar, “Congo Is Ignored, Not Forgotten,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, May 2009,
www.fair.org/index.php?page=3777
, accessed March 8, 2010.

2
Nicholas Kristof, “Darfur and Congo,”
On the Ground
(blog),
New York Times
, June 20, 2007,
kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/20/darfur-and-congo/
, accessed March 8, 2010, quoted in Hollar, “Congo Is Ignored.”

3
The Congolese colloquially call the Belgians
noko
, or uncles, and like to make fun of their fondness for mayonnaise on their French fries.

4
Achille Flor Ngoye,
Kin-la-joie, Kin-la-folie
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993), 147 (my translation).

5
The country’s name was switched back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1997. When discussing the period 1971 to 1997, I will refer to the country as Zaire.

6
Gauthiers de Villers and Jean-Claude Willame,
Republique democratique du Congo: Chronique politique d’un entre-deux-guerres, octobre 1996–juillet 1998
, Cahiers Africains 35 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 85.

7
His name has been changed to protect his identity.

CHAPTER 1

1
A controversy still surrounds the downing of the plane. Opponents of the current regime and some academics insist that the RPF rebels shot it down, while the RPF and other regional experts maintain that it was extremists within the Habyarimana government.

2
Scott Straus, “How Many Perpetrators Were There in the Rwandan Genocide?”
Journal of Genocide Research
6, no. 1 (2004): 85–98.

3
Kathi L. Austin,
Rearming with Impunity: International Support for the Perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide
, Human Rights Watch, vol. 7, no. 4 (May 1995).

4
Unless otherwise indicated, information about Rwarakabije’s life in this chapter is based on a series of interviews with him in Kigali between 2007 and 2009.

5
Hannah Arendt,
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
(New York: Penguin, 2006), 135.

6
This section draws on a discussion of identity formation in Rwanda in David Newbury,
Kings and Clans: Idjwi Island and the Lake Kivu Rift
(Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1991); as well as Jean-Pierre Chrétien,
The Great Lakes of Africa: Two Thousand Years of History
, trans. Scott Straus (New York: Zone Books, 2003), 171–190, 281–290; and Catherine Newbury,
The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860–1960
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 73–150.

7
Quoted by Chrétien,
The Great Lakes of Africa
, 283.

8
Gérard Prunier,
The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide
(London: Hurst, 1997), 143n27.

9
Philip Verwimp,
An Economic Profile of Peasant Perpetrators of the Genocide: Micro-level Evidence from Rwanda
, HiCN Working Paper 8, Households in Conflict Network, University of Sussex, 2003,
www.hicn.org/papers/perp.pdf
.