Africa's World War

So, as some of you know, I am home to help my mother fundraise for the NGO that she's been in the process of starting for nine months. It's built on a small yoga program in Rwanda, one which is sponsored by another NGO, WE-ACTx, aimed at orphans and genocide victims. The philosophy is to use yoga to do both physical and mental therapy for women who were (savagely) raped during the genocide and their children. It works very, very well. My mother's idea is to globalize it so that the program can reach women similarly affected by sexual violence all over the world. The first place she chose to go is quite possibly the worst place in the world to be a woman: the Congo.

It's a spectacularly brutal conflict, the war in Congo. It's also one that has hitherto received barely a whisper in public discourse over here. A few basic facts should serve to illustrate how absurd that is. Fighting began in 1996. As of today, five and a half million are dead. Tens of thousands of women are raped every year--27,000 in a single province alone in 2006--and then mutilated with bayonets and machetes. Every possible sadism one could imagine is practiced regularly and with impunity: cannibalism is regularly used to torture victims, as when a woman is forced to eat her own children before being raped within an inch of her life.

That is called Africa's World War is apt, because every nation that borders Congo has blood on its hand. The conflict was patently international from the start: it began when some two million Hutus fled Rwanda for Eastern Congo after Tutsi leader Paul Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded from Uganda with the ostensible aim of ending the 1994 genocide. Kagame, using the Hutus as a pretext, armed local ethnic-Tutsi Congolese warlords and set them to work conquering the region for him. He did this for an age-old reason: Congo is resource-rich, Rwanda, small and poor. Congo, at the time known as Zaire and still in the grips of an unabashed kleptocrat, Mobuto Sese Seko, was already wracked by civil conflict. Laurent-Desire Kabila, a former militarist in the service of CIA-assassinated Congolese president Patrice Lumumba, had already begun and insurrection against Mobutu. With Rwandan aid, Kabila forced Mobutu out and had himself declared President in 1997 in Kinshasa.

Kabila was not only aided by the Rwandan Tutsis. His army was largely comprised of Tutsis from the Great Lakes region. These Tutsis despised the Hutus in Eastern Congo far more than Mobutu. When Kabila had gotten what he wanted, they set out to get theirs. Unfortunately, Kablia wasn't playing ball; in '98, he threw the Rwandans out, hoping to solidify his position by appointing new, Congolese advisers. The Tutsis were very unhappy with this change. A group known as the Banyamungle, based in Eastern Congo, immediately rose up against the Kabila regime. Thus the string of massacres that had followed Kabila along the Congo River turned into a veritable Stalingrad-like terror of bloodshed.

The back and forth is too intricate to go into in this post. Suffice it to say that no African nation is not in some way involved in the Congo: first came those nations that bordered it, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Angola; eventually even far-off Chad and Sudan had their claws sunk in. The Congo is perhaps the single most important region in Africa today, if only for all of the attention that African regimes are paying it. And yet we hear nothing, or only scraps and fragments, their paucity suggesting nothing more important there than "the usual African state of affairs." Rwanda will undoubtedly invade (again) very soon. Congo may even spark the next genocide, there, an ironic, if not loathsome, turnabout. Kagame's hold on power in Rwanda relies on the Tutsis' ongoing power-monopoly. Comprising less than 18% of the population, and in what seems an interminable conflict with ethnic-Hutu militias in Eastern Congo, the Rwandan Tutsis are in a position of overreach from which they may not recover. Having distributed the fruits of economic progress with a typical sense of dictatorial largesse--that is, in the style of a pyramid stood on its head--they've struck a wellspring of resentment. The Hutus and the Tutsis have a long and established history of massacring one another. Unfortunately, the numbers are against the Tutsis. If Congo spills into Rwanda, 800,000 may be no more than a footnote to the worst slaughter in African history.

These are things that development simply can't touch, and they show the international system for the paper tiger that it is. With 17,000 UN peacekeepers in Congo, not a single life has been saved or rape prevented. In fact, the peacekeepers are themselves implicated in numerous sexual assaults. What is required in the Congo is what was wasted in Iraq: a swift and powerful military invasion that would break the backs of the largest militias, allowing enough time to disarm and pacify the rest and block gun suppliers from entering the area.

Unfortunately, the rules of international diplomacy work against exactly that sort of strategy. This is a sovereignty issue; unfortunately, sovereignty is massively antiquated, conceptually, in modern warfare. Congo is not a sovereign nation. It is not ruled by anyone. Its borders are not merely porous: they don't really exist. The government in Kinshasa is a fiction. It barely has authority in the west, let alone over the fiefdoms of the east. Besides, it would be an unforgivable mistake to treat Kabila as some sort of bonafide head-of-state, as Mobutu was. Kabila is a thug. You have to be a thug to conquer the Congo.

What to do about Congo? It is fascinating, in an admittedly morbid way, because it pushes the international system to its limits. Where does a place like that--or Somalia, or Afghanistan--fit into our schema of nation-states? Ethnically heterogeneous, ruled, historically, through violence, ambiguous in shape and border (if those concepts have any meaning at all, given local social arrangements), do we nevertheless treat them as a Germany or England? And is it not a lack of innovation in international thought that allows tragedies such as the Congo to repeat themselves indefinitely and at an ungodly cost of human lives and livelihoods? But what, if anything, could replace the rules, or modify them to fit these exceptions?