Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Michael J. Kavanagh, The disaster in Congo is all the more tragic because it was utterly avoidable, Slate, Nov. 14, 2008

Five Million Dead and Counting

There are more than 1 million displaced people in North Kivu, 250,000 of whom have been displaced in the last monthThere are more than 1 million displaced people in North Kivu, 250,000 of whom have been displaced in the last monthIn the North Kivu province of eastern Congo, people are living in ditches along the sides of roads. They’re filling up the floors of churches and schools. Displaced people are surrounding the compounds of bewildered U.N. peacekeepers. Young boys and men are hiding in the forest to avoid being killed or forced into armed groups.
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“There are only girls left in the schools in my village,” one 13-year-old boy told me. The day before, he and three friends had run from rebel soldiers who’d come to kidnap them.

There are now more than 1 million displaced people scattered throughout the province. In the last 10 years of fighting, more than 5 million people have died in the Congolese conflict—mostly civilians who haven’t had access to enough food or health care because of the fighting. And let’s be clear: That’s 5 million and counting.

In many of the displaced communities, only the generosity of neighbors keeps people from starving. The insecurity in the region makes it dangerous for aid groups to provide humanitarian support. Consequently, tens of thousands of average citizens have let strangers stay in their homes or yards and work their fields in exchange for a little food.

But now, many of those host families are displaced, too. One in five Kivutians has left home because of the fighting. People are terrified and starving, and it is an utter disaster that is all the more tragic because it was utterly avoidable.

Earlier this year in Goma, U.N. official Phil Lancaster told me, “As much as the international community can feel responsible for Rwanda, it should feel even more responsible for what happened here in Congo.” Lancaster knows what he’s talking about. As a U.N. soldier, he watched the 1994 genocide happen in Rwanda. And until September, he led the U.N. program that encouraged Rwandan Hutu rebels who’d been living in Congo since the genocide to go home.

War in Congo kills 45,000 people each month, Guardian, January 23, 2008

A decade of fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo is continuing to kill about 45,000 people each month – half of them small children – in the deadliest conflict since the second world war, according to a new survey.

The International Rescue Committee said preventable diseases and starvation aggravated by conflict have claimed 5.4 million lives since the beginning of the second Congo war in 1998, equivalent to the population of Denmark. Although the war officially ended in 2002, malaria, diarrhoea, pneumonia and malnutrition continue to claim thousands of lives.

The study of 14,000 households across Congo between January 2006 and April 2007 found that nearly half of all the deaths were of children under the age of five, who make up only 19% of the population.

“The majority of deaths have been due to infectious diseases, malnutrition and neonatal- and pregnancy-related conditions. Increased rates of disease are likely related to the social and economic disturbances caused by conflict, including disruption of health services, poor food security, deterioration of infrastructure and population displacement. Children … are particularly susceptible to these easily preventable and treatable conditions,” the IRC survey says.

Congo has endured two foreign invasions and protracted civil war since the aftermath of Rwanda’s genocide spilled across the border in 1994 with an influx of more than a million Rwandan Hutu refugees. The years of conflict resulted in millions of people fleeing their homes, sometimes to live for years in forests where many died, and the collapse of what infrastructure still remained after decades of neglect under Mobutu Sese Seko.

Christian Parenti, Congo’s crisis, Congo’s history – International Herald Tribune, December 27, 2007

The horrors of violence in the eastern Congo demand some explanation. Reports from the ground paint a picture of a hell on earth, one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. But too often these reports, providing little context, can leave an implicitly racist aftertaste. The implication seems to be, “Well, these people are just savages.” Some history makes the madness appear slightly more logical, if no less evil.

Several months ago, I visited Goma, a city on the Rwandan border. The surrounding countryside of North Kivu Province is the epicenter of Congo’s violence. In the lush mountains outside the city, UN troops and the national army – such as it is – face an array of competing militias. Among them are General Nkunda’s Tutsi forces, who fight against elements of the old Hutu Interuwama of Rwanda (the FDLR). Nkunda also fights the government’s army: a largely unpaid force of ragged former militiamen and boys. The government and the UN want Nkunda to disband his forces as part of the peace process.

Further north are the Mai Mai, some of whom began as followers of the leftist independence leader Patrice Lumumba, but that was long ago. These days they fight naked, protect themselves against enemy bullets by washing in water, and commit atrocious human rights abuses. Around the time I visited Goma, a band of Mai Mai raided a village and systematically raped scores of women – a crime all too common. The International Crisis Group estimates that throughout the Congo “over 1,000 people continue to die each day from conflict-related causes.”

Many of the militias finance themselves by exporting illegal timber, diamonds, gold and other resources to Rwanda and Uganda. Both countries export these products in amounts that seem to far exceed their own natural supplies. This traffic in “conflict resources” makes the elites of Rwanda and Uganda rich, and helps the general development of both economies.

Michael Gerson – Thorns in the Congo – washingtonpost.com, November 30, 2007

Perhaps 4 million people have died in Congo from violence, hunger and preventable disease during the current conflict. Yet, unlike in Darfur, the cameras of the American media have seldom rolled.

However complex this war, there seems to be one ultimate cause. After the Rwandan genocide of 1994, many of the authors of those atrocities — Hutu soldiers and militia members — fled to eastern Congo behind a shield of French peacekeepers. These forces came to be known as the FDLR, which now counts between 6,000 and 10,000 troops, who are tightly organized, well funded by mining operations within Congo and as heartless as ever.

A Congolese children’s rights advocate estimates that thousands of FDLR troops are child soldiers. “All of their children are combatants,” he told me. And the FDLR’s ideology of mass murder is unchanged. Occupied villages are intimidated with mutilations and systematic rape — sexual violence so terrible the damage is sometimes beyond repair.

In the past, the governments of Congo and neighboring Rwanda have often been part of the problem — supporting one brutal militia or the other when it served their political purposes. But both nations seem to have tired of this game. This month, Congo and Rwanda signed a joint statement promising to oppose the warlords, with the goal of making eastern Congo a peaceful buffer zone instead of a source of instability.

Child by Gary Knight

Woman by Antonin Kratochvil

Exhibit Review: Democratic Republic of the Congo: The Forgotten War | pegasusnews.com

Despite being the bloodiest conflict since World War II, with anywhere from 3.5 to 4 million deaths since the start of fighting in 1996, the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is one of the least known and publicized conflicts in the modern era. Seeing their opportunity to shed light on the atrocities and suffering taking place in the region, five world-renowned photographers from the VII Photo Agency visited DRC with Doctors Without Borders. Ron Haviv, Gary Knight, Antonin Kratochvil, Joachim Ladefoged, and James Nachtwey spent four months between May and August of 2005 documenting their experiences through photography. [I was not able to enlarge the photographs posted above.]