Congo
Congo’s seemingly endless civil conflict is heating back up again, with the flashpoint once again being the region around the town of Goma that’s near the Rwandan border. Conflict has been raging on-again, off-again for over a decade but the humanitarian disaster this has caused has attracted relatively little attention since there’s no plausible way to blame it on Arabs or the United Nations or to argue that if only the world would embrace unrestrained American military power the problem could be solved.
On the contrary, the best hope for the country keeps being that UN peacekeeping efforts there will be backed up by a force with a reasonable level of manpower and resources. But the countries with resources available haven’t been interested in ponying much of anything up. At the beginning of October the ENOUGH Project was warning that the peace process was on the verge of collapse as a result of these kind of problems and now it has, of course, collapsed. Note that despite the “humanitarian” rationales mooted for the invasion of Iraq we could have done much more good at much less cost by devoting resources to things like multilateral peacekeeping in Congo.
30 Responses to “Congo”
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November 3rd, 2008 at 9:10 am
Absolutely right.
For more, check out UN Dispatch.
November 3rd, 2008 at 9:24 am
I agree that the UN intervention in Congo likely saves lives and it would be desirable to fully man and fund the mission.
But so long as the mission is focused on preventing violence and its proximate causes, not on the ultimate causes; that there is no expectation of positive growth and opportunities (for example) and tribalism trumping the national good. That any attempt to stop the violence is just a stop-gap measure.
November 3rd, 2008 at 9:51 am
A number of recent articles & commentary have highlighted the DRC’s conflict as largely a result of unresolved militia and ex-army activity from the Rwandan Hutu side of the civil war, and to a lesser extent Burundian and Ugandan rebels and exiles.
November 3rd, 2008 at 9:53 am
Also because there’s no plausible way to blame it on the Zionists or, more generally, the Jews. Or, Mobutu not withstanding, the Yankee imperialists. And “Tutsi” doesn’t really fire up the imaginations of anybody outside the region, the way the Arab hordes or scheming Jews or Crusader imperialists or Red Menace, Yellow Peril etc. etc. did.
November 3rd, 2008 at 10:21 am
We could have done more good than we did in Iraq by funding Millenium Development Goals like providing people with clean water and vaccinating kids. But we wanted to beat up on “bad guys” so we didn’t do that. I’m sure if Bush had gone into Sudan or Congo he could have cocked that up too.
November 3rd, 2008 at 10:26 am
attracted relatively little attention since there’s no plausible way to blame it on Arabs
Americans live in such panty piddling mortal dread of Muslims that we ignore any foreign affairs that have no Islamic angle.
November 3rd, 2008 at 10:55 am
Note that despite the “humanitarian” rationales mooted for the invasion of Iraq we could have done much more good at much less cost by devoting resources to things like multilateral peacekeeping in Congo.
Bogus argument. Will be interesting to see what happens with Iraq and Afghanistan if Obama wins.
Congolese, according to a certain type of logic, just had bad luck to be who they are, living where they are, like Georgians, or Burmese, or Zimbabweans, or the Iraqi Shia or Kurds under Sunni Saddam. Tough titties, sucks to be you, we American Taxpayers have to spend money on American Firemen, not some dusky foreigner.
November 3rd, 2008 at 11:45 am
thank you for writing about this. it’s incredibly underreported, and given the connections to american corporations, it’s something americans should know and care about.
and peter, really cute comment. you seem like a charming individual.
November 3rd, 2008 at 1:15 pm
At the beginning of October the ENOUGH Project was warning that the peace process was on the verge of collapse as a result of these kind of problems and now it has, of course, collapsed.
First, from the ENOUGH article:
“Absent immediate and robust diplomatic pressure on the Congolese government”.
I’d like to know what they mean by this. Specifically, what kind of leverage does the international community have over the DR Congo govt (my answer: not much)
Second, no where in the ENOUGH article does it say there are insufficient resources. Now, this may be the case, but the article does not say that. As an aside, from other news sites, there are approximately 17,000 UN troops in the region, the most of any UN mission in the world.
But what the article does say is, while Nkunda is probably an a**hole, the MONUC has been way too favorable to the DR Congo government, and that the UN looking the other way while the govt sponsors their own militias to counter the CNDP (a la Columbia sponsoring counter-FARC groups) is the primary cause of this itteration of violence.
BTW, you’d probably like Laurent Nkunda. (except his also seems to be a christian evangelical of the Sarah Palin variety). He’s a liberal arts (psychology) student that decided on a career change in his late 20’s. And his group’s website has a blog with some mad english skillz.
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:07 pm
DRC will never work as a viable state. Not really sure how you fix that in a practical real world way but the current band-aiding isn’t even a viable short term solution..
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:38 pm
I though the best hope for the country was that everyone kills each other off and new people move in to repopulate the empty land peacefully and or it gets partitioned by its neighbors.
I am kind of a pessimist on Africa.
November 3rd, 2008 at 6:37 pm
While a military intervention might provide some significant dampening effects, it would be, as others have said, a short-term “success.” After so many years of exploitation, the people of the whole region are subject to a horrific state of immediate starvation prevention, both on the individual scale and on the national. Among so many things, what is needed is immediate violence suppression, infrastructure building, needs fulfillment, education, and individual economic empowerment and investment. The best hope is for Rwanda to step up as a regional leader, but Kagame will have to stop hunting down political opponents first. There’s so much potential there, but it’s sucked out by especially continued sale of resource rights.
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