\u2018The violence in Congo may seem unintelligible but its roots lie in institutional practices introduced under colonialism, which 50 years of independence have only exacerbated,’ writes Mahmood Mamdani. First published by |+| Pambazuka.org<\/link>.nFor the institutions that claim to represent \u2018the international community\u2019 \u2013 the Western press, international NGOs and UN agencies \u2013 the armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been a paradigm of senseless violence. The number of casualties is indeed staggering. In 2001, the New-York-based International Rescue Committee started providing estimates of war-related deaths since the conflict began in 1998: they rose from 1.7 million in 2001 to 5.4 million in January 2008. If correct, these figures account for about 8 per cent of the current population of the country. They were called into question in 2008, however, when two Belgian demographers concluded that the excess death toll between 1998 and 2004 was in the order of 200,000 \u2013 one-twentieth of the IRC\u2019s estimate for the same period, but still a shocking number of victims.<\/p>\n
The violence in Congo may seem unintelligible but its roots lie in institutional practices introduced under colonialism, which 50 years of independence have only exacerbated. At their heart is an institution known as the native authority. Since the colonial period, native authorities have had jurisdiction over \u2018tribal homelands\u2019. As a system of power, the native authority claims to represent age-old ethnic identity. But ethnicity refers to cultural difference, and there is no necessary link between culture and territory. A system of tribal authority, however, asserts a necessary connection between power, culture and territory. Ethnic identity preceded colonial rule, unlike tribal homelands or the native authority. This is why in Congo, as in other areas of \u2018indirect rule\u2019 \u2013 colonies ruled through a devolved system of tribal powers \u2013 ethnic cleansing was the rosy dawn of colonial occupation. The native authority is based on a single politicised identity, the \u2018tribe\u2019, and distinguishes two kinds of ethnic groups: those who are indigenous and those who are not.<\/p>\n
At the outset, only groups officially acknowledged as indigenous were entitled to a native authority, and with it the right to a tribal \u2018homeland\u2019 administered by chiefs appointed from within their own ranks. Not only were non-indigenous groups denied this right; they were required to pay tribute to \u2018indigenous\u2019 chiefs in the native authority where they lived. The colonial system thus rested on a dual system of institutionalised discrimination dressed up as cultural difference: by race in the cities and tribe in the countryside. The native authority system continues today to create suspicion and animosity between two politically defined groups \u2013 one indigenous, the other not \u2013 and to set the scene for violence. What used to be called tribalism \u2013 and is now called ethnic conflict \u2013 is the expression of a structural contradiction between the economics of a market system and the politics of a residual colonial system. Markets move people, and not simply products of labour, across boundaries, but a colonial mechanism such as the native authority disenfranchises anyone who crosses tribal boundaries, as millions of Congolese were obliged to do, in the service of a fluid migrant labour system. This contradiction was at its most acute in the southern province of Katanga and the eastern provinces of Ituri and Kivu. With independence from Belgium in 1960, there was a prophetic round of ethnic cleansing in Katanga and Kasai, repeated on a more dramatic scale in 1992-93, and shortly afterwards in Ituri and Kivu.<\/p>\n
Ethnic cleansing is rarely spontaneous; it requires elite conspiracies and methodical popular organisation. The shaping of the popular dimension in Congo began with administrative coercion and the creation of \u2018tribal homelands\u2019. In Katanga, where the Union Mini\u00e8re du Haut-Katanga \u2013 a partnership formed in 1906 between King Leopold II, the Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 G\u00e9n\u00e9rale de Belgique and British interests \u2013 demanded a flow of cheap labour to exploit the region\u2019s mineral resources, the government obliged with a series of decrees, in 1906, 1910 and 1933, requiring that each \u2018tribe\u2019 be identified, separated and resettled in its own \u2018homeland\u2019, supervised by its own native authority. One district commissioner complained of his duties that some ethnic groups were \u2018totally jumbled\u2019: \u2018It will be very difficult to organise them.\u2019 The separation was accomplished between 1925 and 1930, by means of ethnic cleansing.<\/p>\n
Whether for the mines, the civil service or the army, recruitment was based on tribal identity. In Katanga, labour migration meant that the two main ethnic groups, the Lunda and Luba, became three \u2018tribes\u2019. The Lunda were classified as indigenous to Katanga. But the Luba, who had migrated from neighbouring Kasai, were divided into two groups: those who had moved to Katanga before colonialism became \u2018Luba-Katanga\u2019, classified as \u2018indigenous\u2019, while those who had arrived during the colonial period became \u2018Luba-Kasai\u2019, classified as non-indigenous. All three organised and founded separate political parties. There was also a fourth party, representing Belgian settlers in Katanga. When they confronted the militant Luba trade unions in the mines of Katanga, the Belgians forged an alliance with the indigenous Lunda, and proclaimed a coalition of \u2018civilisers\u2019 and \u2018authentic Katangans\u2019. At independence, with active support from the colonial establishment \u2013 the church, the state and business \u2013 \u2018nativist\u2019 tribal movements mounted separate drives for secession, first in Katanga under Moise Tshombe (11 July 1960) and then in South Kasai (8 August 1960). The Luba, defined as \u2018aliens\u2019, became the first target of ethnic cleansing, in not only Katanga but South Kasai.<\/p>\n
The government of the newly independent Congo responded to the secession in Katanga by sending in troops. Ordered to also put down the South Kasai secession on their way to Katanga, the Congolese National Army went on a rampage, slaughtering civilians. Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, the Congolese political historian, has argued that the prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, committed his \u2018first major political blunder\u2019 when instead of seeking to heal the rift in a \u2018bitter inter-ethnic conflict\u2019 between \u2018indig\u00e8nes\u2019 and \u2018non-indig\u00e8nes\u2019, he chose to side with one group against another. His political enemies held Lumumba responsible for the ensuing political violence; on 5 September 1960 Dag Hammarskj\u00f6ld, the UN secretary general, described it as \u2018genocide\u2019. On the same day, the president, Joseph Kasa-Vubu, dismissed Lumumba.<\/p>\n
Since independence, the crisis has moved eastwards, to Ituri and Kivu, where the cross-border movement of soldiers and refugees has exacerbated domestic tensions. Ituri lies in the north-east of Congo, bordering Uganda. It was the site of lucrative gold deposits, to which the Belgians were drawn as early as 1903. In time, other natural resources, from diamonds to coltan and tropical timber, brought a flood of fortune-seekers to Ituri, making it one of three main European areas in Congo. Colonial pacification in Ituri began in 1916, with a policy of regroupement, whereby the authorities separated the predominantly pastoral Hema from the predominantly agricultural Lendu populations, forcing each into its own homeland (territoire) supervised by its own tribal authority (chefferie). A census tagged every villager as a \u2018native\u2019 of a particular tribal homeland. \u2018Forced relocations,\u2019 Johan Pottier writes, \u2018were the norm.\u2019 Before long, market inequalities began to be expressed in \u2018tribal\u2019 terms, and early access to formal education gave rise to a dominant Hema administrative and business elite, with the Lendu working largely in the mines and plantations.<\/p>\n
In 1966, a law in Congo centralised control of all unoccupied land and mineral rights and brought them under the jurisdiction of the capital, Kinshasa. In 1973, a General Property Law gave state functionaries powers to appropriate \u2018ancestral land\u2019 for private sales. Both laws benefited anyone with good political connections. In Ituri, the Hema elite, very small indeed, was enriched as large numbers of Lendu peasants lost \u2018customary\u2019 land rights overnight. When Ugandan troops occupied Ituri in 1998, they began to collude with this elite, doing away with the legal requirement that villagers whose ancestral land was to be sold officially be given two years\u2019 notice: evictions swiftly followed. In June 1999, a Lendu rebellion broke out, targeting mostly Hema local administrations. By the end of the year up to 7000 people had been killed and more than 150,000 displaced. Each side and its militias accused the other of being \u2018non-originaires\u2019.<\/p>\n
Kivu consists of two districts (\u2018north\u2019 and \u2018south\u2019), situated south of Ituri and bordering on Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. The groups \u2018indigenous\u2019 to Kivu include the Babembe, the Bafulira and the Barira. The non-indigenous population of Kivu is made up not of other Congolese from outside the local native authority, but of Banyarwanda immigrants from what was formerly the kingdom of Ruanda. The Banyarwanda \u2013 Hutu, Tutsi and Batwa migrants and their descendants \u2013 number roughly 40 million, and are mainly resident in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania and Eastern Congo. Those who are settled in any part of Kivu, under the native authority system, cannot accede to customary rights over the land they may have occupied for generations or participate in local government, since they are defined as \u2018non-indigenous\u2019. In 1963, open conflict broke out in Kivu between the Banyarwanda and indigenous interests and soon turned into a wider issue: the Banyarwanda demanded \u2018democracy\u2019 while indigenous groups called for \u2018custom\u2019 to be upheld. The struggle lasted two years; it was sharpened by a short-lived rebellion (1963-64) led by Pierre Mulele, prompted by Mobutu\u2019s seizure of power in the country as a whole: \u2018indigenous\u2019 Congolese in Kivu then rallied to the Mulelists, while the Banyarwanda did what nervous immigrants tend to do, sheltering under the wing of the host country\u2019s army.<\/p>\n
Between the end of the Mulelist rebellion and the genocide in Rwanda thirty years later, a complex process unfolded in Kivu. The more the Banyarwanda were obstructed at a local level, the further afield they looked for alternatives. Disqualified from exercising power locally, they sought elected office at higher provincial and national levels, but this only hardened the resolve of \u2018indigenous\u2019 residents to ensure that they were denied citizenship. In the end, the Banyarwanda \u2013 with the Tutsi component leading the way \u2013 tried to carve a livelihood from employment in the state security apparatus, based in Kinshasa; when that failed, they knocked on the doors of security in Kigali. Three key decisions on citizenship fed the insecurity of the Banyarwanda. The first was Mobutu\u2019s Citizenship Decree of 1972, issued shortly after a massacre of 200,000 Hutus in Burundi. As Hutu refugees streamed into Kivu, the decree extended citizenship to an earlier intake of refugees, who had arrived in 1959-60, in order to distinguish them from the new arrivals. The strategy backfired, however: the indigenous inhabitants believed the decree was signed by Mobutu under the influence of Bisengimana Rwema, his chef de cabinet, himself a 1959 Tutsi refugee. To their minds it was a worrying precedent that threatened to turn Kivu into an open sanctuary for people fleeing Rwanda and Burundi. Visiting eastern Congo as part of a fact-finding mission in 1997, I was told by a prominent civil society leader: \u2018What can\u2019t be accepted is an order whereby every immigrant who comes in is granted citizenship automatically.\u2019<\/p>\n
The second decision was the Nationality Law of 1981, passed by an elected assembly at national level, which restricted citizenship to people who could demonstrate an ancestral connection with Congo at the time of the Berlin Conference in 1885. The \u2018indigenous\u2019 Congolese pushed for this law as an effective counter to the strategy adopted by minorities like the Banyarwanda of trying to penetrate the Mobutist party-state. It was one thing to pass the law, quite another to implement it. Though it remained on the books, the question of citizenship was still unsettled by the time of the 1985 provincial assembly elections. In Kivu, the Banyarwanda were allowed to vote, but not to run for office. They found themselves lumped together for the first time into a single group, regardless of the distinction between refugees and immigrants. Their response was to smash ballot boxes: no provincial assemblies were elected in North or South Kivu.<\/p>\n
The third critical event was the decision of the Sovereign National Conference (CNS), convened in 1991, to uphold the provisions of the 1981 law. Part constitutional conference, part transitional government, the CNS was meant to be the mechanism that took Zaire into the post-Cold War world of multiparty democracy. The impetus for its decision came in part from the growing conflict in the Kivus. In North Kivu it had begun as class unrest, when mainly Hutu landlords began to evict poor Hutu peasants during the 1970s and appropriate their land. In the 1980s one group of poor were pitted against another over who could access \u2018customary\u2019 land. Matters got worse when Mobutu deployed two armed contingents, the \u00e9lite Special Presidential Division (DSP) and the Garde Civile. Both were forced to live off whoever would feed them, the former off prosperous Hutu, the latter off the poor. Each contingent protected the land claims of its respective providers and so helped turn the conflict into a very bloody one. Between 10,000 and 20,000 people were killed, and some 200,000 were forced out of their homes. Such was the state of majority-minority relations in North Kivu before Rwanda erupted. The CNS lasted, with several disruptions, for nearly 18 months. Its decision to reaffirm the 1981 Nationality Law was taken as \u2018indigenous\u2019 delegations from North and South Kivu were pressing for a restrictive definition of citizenship. People were already starting to use the generic term \u2018Banyamulenge\u2019 for all Congolese Tutsi, not just the group living around Mulenge in South Kivu. At this point, with all migrants and their descendants required to prove a century-old connection to Congo in order to qualify for citizenship, the situation of the \u2018Banyamulenge\u2019 was really no different from that of the Tutsi refugees who\u2019d recently arrived in North Kivu. The deeper the crisis, the coarser the stereotypes to which it gave rise, which in turn served only to fuel the crisis. All Banyarwanda began to fear that they would be chased away by \u2018indigenous\u2019 groups and \u2018indigenous\u2019 groups feared they would be killed by the \u2018immigrants\u2019. The proceedings of the CNS were televised throughout urban Congo, inspiring the growth of civic organisations and strengthening the opposition, but as it prepared to deal with two of the most sensitive dossiers on its agenda \u2013 ill-gotten gains and political assassinations \u2013 the conference was abruptly closed in December 1992 and never reconvened. This was a sign of the regime\u2019s continuing strength, and the fragility of the opposition. The key weakness of the opposition was that it failed to move away from nativist definitions of political belonging, which fragmented it again and again, to an inclusive understanding of citizenship, which might have appealed to immigrants who had come to Congo at different periods and united them in a single movement. The failure to meet this challenge had undermined Lumumba\u2019s position in 1961 and now, thirty years later, it allowed Mobutu to play \u2018indig\u00e8ne\u2019 against \u2018non-indig\u00e8ne\u2019 in several parts of the country, ripping the opposition apart at the seams. The worst outcome was in Katanga, home to the two leading opposition parties, the UPDS, led by a Luba from Kasai, and the UFERI, led by a relative of the first secessionist figurehead, Moise Tshombe, with a strong base among the Lunda \u2018natives\u2019 of Katanga. Growing tensions between the two, initially allied as the Union Sacr\u00e9e, prepared the ground for the second post-independence ethnic cleansing in the province, in 1992-93. It was worse than the first; according to Nzongola-Ntalaja, over a million Kasaians were expelled from Katanga. Forced into a narrow column more than 1000 kilometres long on their way into Kasai, they were regularly attacked by armed UFERI militias and many died.
Mobutu had in the meantime decided that the time had come for a new federal approach in Congo: la g\u00e9opolitique, as he called it, was an attempt to elevate \u2018nativism\u2019, hitherto the basis of the native authority, into a principle for reorganising central government. Having already pushed through a resolution that every aspirant to citizenship must demonstrate an ancestral connection with the territory, he declared that new heads of ministerial departments would henceforth represent their \u2018native\u2019 provinces and that recruitment to the ministries would be based on a quota system: la g\u00e9opolitique entrenched indigeneity as a principle and as an institutionalised competition between ethnic groups.<\/p>\n
When a 1995 decree declared all Kinyarwanda-speakers to be foreigners, the momentum of ethnic cleansing shifted to Kivu. On 7 October 1996, the governor of South Kivu ordered all Banyamulenge to leave the country within a week, or they would be interned in camps and eliminated. This was an extreme response to a dramatic situation created by developments in Rwanda. Waves of Tutsi migrants and refugees had settled in South Kivu since the late 19th century, but conflict in the province was triggered by the Rwandan Patriotic Front\u2019s invasion of Rwanda in 1990 from bases in Uganda, which inspired many young Tutsi from Kivu to cross the border and join the RPF. That in turn led Mobutu to send a \u2018mission\u2019 to the province, ostensibly to verify who among the Banyarwanda was \u2018Zairean\u2019 and who was not. Predictably, the exercise disenfranchised more Tutsi, increased the flow of young men into the ranks of the RPF and drove up tensions in the province. The genocide of 1994 had a catastrophic effect on Kivu. As the tables began to turn in Rwanda and the RPF advanced on Kigali, more than two million refugees fled across the border. Their presence heightened the local conflict in eastern Congo and pointed up the pernicious role of the UN and the major foreign powers, France especially. In North and South Kivu, Hutu refugees lived in armed camps that were controlled by the ex-Rwandan army and the Hutu militias (or Interahamwe), who both continued to receive military supplies from the French. The soldiers and militia numbered about 20,000 in Bukavu (South Kivu) and 30,000 to 40,000 in Goma (North Kivu). Many believed there was an agreement between the French and Mobutu that the soldiers would not be disarmed by the Congolese army.<\/p>\n
France had turned a public pledge to rescue Tutsi civilians into a cover-up that would protect the people who bore responsibility for the genocide in Rwanda. Having witnessed the slaughter of the Tutsi without lifting a finger, the UN looked on with the same complacency as refugee camps established near the international borders were turned into venues for arming and training insurgents, whose daily welfare was provided by US-funded NGOs and the UNHCR in the name of humanitarian assistance.<\/p>\n
The existence of the Hutu camps, armed and funded, and home to two million refugees or more, had a devastating effect on civilian life in Kivu. It led to the dollarisation of the economy and price rises (including rents) well beyond the reach of local people. As the Interahamwe unleashed a regime of terror against Congolese Tutsi, another wave of younger men moved across the border to enlist in the RPF. Among them was Laurent Nkunda, the future commander of the notorious Banyamulenge militia (Tutsi), wanted for war crimes in Congo and now detained in Rwanda. The anatomy of political life in Kivu began to resemble that of Rwanda just before the genocide, where every political party had its own militia: in Kivu, every native authority began to acquire one.<\/p>\n
The ethnic situation went from bad to worse after the success of the 1996 rebellion against Mobutu, as Congolese Tutsi saw an opportunity to settle scores with local opponents, and Rwandan Tutsi generalised their hatred of the \u2018g\u00e9nocidaires\u2019, first to all Hutu, then to all Congolese, whom they now regarded as willing hosts to armed Hutu killers. By September 1997, with Mobutu ousted, the rebel leader Laurent Kabila in power and the fighting in Congo officially at an end, disillusion had set in. Activists decried the new regime\u2019s insistence on starting out from scratch and dismissing the principles adopted at the CNS. Kabila and his ministers were behaving like a one-party state in a country whose citizens had already had a taste of democratisation. In Kivu, the colloquial Swahili word for water is mayi and Mayi-Mayi is the name given to all the militias linked to indigenous native authorities. Their ritual use of water to immunise themselves against bullets dates back to similar practices in the early anti-colonial movements in east and central Africa. Mayi-Mayi recruits in Kivu are mainly alienated young men, often school drop-outs.<\/p>\n
The first of the modern-day militias was formed from the \u2018indigenous\u2019 population in North Kivu to protect themselves against the DSP, who\u2019d thrown in their lot with prosperous Hutu. The Hutu developed a counter- militia, known as Les Combattants. In a parallel move, the Tutsi of South Kivu organised their own. By 2000, the Mayi-Mayi was one of five different armed groups in the countryside, along with the UN peace-keeping force (Munoc), the newly organised Congolese army (FARDC), one Tutsi militia and another Hutu militia, the Forces D\u00e9mocratiques de Lib\u00e9ration du Rwanda (FDLR), which contained former Interahamwe fighters.<\/p>\n
In spite of its excesses and atrocities, Mayi-Mayi is seen locally as a self-defence operation carried out by \u2018our children\u2019 or \u2018the people armed\u2019 \u2013 and the same villagers who lament its violence often consider it a \u2018necessary evil\u2019. Often, too, they think of Mayi-Mayi as a resistance to \u2018foreign occupation\u2019. Mayi-Mayi militias joined Laurent Kabila\u2019s 1996 rebellion against Mobutu but later turned against it when it seemed to them to be the spearhead of a Rwandan occupation. At that point, in North Kivu, Mayi-Mayi began co-operating with the FDLR militia, who were targeting armed Tutsi groups. But no matter who the Mayi-Mayi were fighting, it was always in the name of the so-called \u2018indig\u00e8nes\u2019.<\/p>\n
Two conferences have been held to try to halt the conflict in Congo, the first in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1999, the second in Sun City, South Africa, in 2002. The Lusaka agreement required the foreign forces to withdraw and the local militias to disarm under UN auspices. Sun City, by contrast, bore a recognisably South African imprint: opposition groups would participate in the transitional government, the national assembly and the senate, while the militias \u2013 numbering anywhere between 50,000 and 300,000 men \u2013 would be integrated into the new national army along with former rebels, in a process known as \u2018brassage\u2019. That process began in 2004; it consisted of 45-day programmes for former fighters, who were given blue jumpsuits, quartered behind barbed wire and sent out in teams to repair the roads. After this, they were inducted into the army. Those who didn\u2019t make it were supposed to get a subsistence paycheck but rarely received it. The process was put on hold in 2008, when the World Bank withdrew funding, leaving 80,000 former combatants stranded and thousands more who hadn\u2019t even been inducted into the programme.<\/p>\n
Why lump rebels and local militias together when the first were organised along ideological lines as a supra-local army and the second were largely a local phenomenon tied to specific communities? An alternative would have been to restructure the Mayi-Mayi in their neighbourhoods, each accountable to a separate local authority and responsible for policing law and order. But that would have meant doing away with the distinction between \u2018indigenous\u2019 and \u2018migrant\u2019 \u2013 in other words, reforming the native authority system root and branch. Instead, Mayi-Mayi were pulled out of their communities and dispatched to barracks across the country.<\/p>\n
A key rule in the integration process is that a former militiaman can be deployed only in a region other than the one in which he previously fought, but after the 2006 elections, many of these \u2018new\u2019 brigades were deployed in eastern Congo, because of the continuing violence. At that time another 12,000 combatants or more from rebel groups joined the army, swelling its numbers in eastern Congo alone to about 60,000. Unpaid soldiers are uncontrolled soldiers, living off civilians and taking to extortion as a way of life. They are also susceptible to bribes: the Hutu FDLR in Kivu has control over key mineral resources in the region and a network of private trade, and appears to have arrangements with Congolese army personnel. Researchers have reported instances where former Mayi-Mayi soldiers now in the army have refused to fire on Hutus.<\/p>\n
The supreme difficulty in Congo, as I\u2019ve said, is the persistence of the native authority, which, for all the complexities of ethnicity, is still in place as an organising principle. It is now the terrain on which new forms of political authority, flaunted by young men bearing arms, confront older forms steeped in patriarchal tradition. (This same confrontation has also unfolded in Northern Uganda and Sierra Leone, where youth-led rebellions have eroded older kinds of authority.) The descendants of migrant communities, and newer waves of immigrants, have proved as violent as their opponents, but they have also been the first to rethink the boundaries of community and try to reinvent themselves as Congolese citizens. In 1972, when thousands of Hutus were slaughtered in Burundi, Tutsi Banyarwanda distanced themselves from what was happening across the border and vigorously reaffirmed their Congolese identity. The general description \u2018Banyarwanda\u2019 fell away; henceforth they preferred \u2018Banyamulenge\u2019. The reformulation suggests a radical will to shift identity away from ethnic origin to territory.<\/p>\n
Under the two Kabilas, Laurent and his son and successor Joseph, the Mobutist models of citizenship and ethnic identity came under review. Kabila Sr\u2019s draft constitution affirmed that the Berlin Conference date should remain the criterion of citizenship, but in 2005, after his son\u2019s constitutional referendum, citizenship was awarded to all individuals descended from ethnic groups present in the territory on independence in 1960: a major step forward, even if citizenship remained an attribute of ethnic identity. Etienne Tshisekedi, the leader of the Union pour la D\u00e9mocratie et le Progr\u00e8s Social, showed the intrinsic weakness of the opposition in Congo when he denounced the draft constitution as a \u2018sell out\u2019 to foreigners. He was thinking of the Banyarwanda, who had arrived before independence but whose descendants would now be Congolese: he called on his supporters to boycott voter registration in advance of the referendum. Tshisekedi, himself a victim of \u2018indigenous\u2019 chauvinism in Katanga, was incapable of seeing beyond his own narrow political advantage when it came to the future of the country. Faced with the extreme violence that has racked Congo and always threatens to break out again, the \u2018international community\u2019 has tended to fall back on the notion of the failed state. As with organ failure in medicine, \u2018state failure\u2019 provokes calls for radical solutions, including rapid intervention and even emergency transplants. In 2004, after a massacre in a camp on the Congo- Burundi border, Clare Short told the BBC that \u2018if we leave it, there will be endless killing.\u2019 She went on to warn that Africa could soon become a \u2018failed continent\u2019. In Foreign Policy a couple of years ago, two leading academics proposed that \u2018the only way to help Congo is to stop pretending it exists.\u2019 Like external examiners everywhere, all three commentators are intent on outcomes, not processes: they ignore the colonial and post-colonial history of state formation in Congo and can tell us only what it should be, not what it is or how it is evolving.<\/p>\n
That violence in Africa is criminal rather than political is now the conventional wisdom. Groping for a memorable soundbite, the development economist Paul Collier claims that greed, not grievance, is the source of the civil wars on the continent, while human rights groups now include \u2018naming and shaming\u2019 in their response to atrocities. Calls for prosecution and punishment can also be heard: but who will do the punishing in Congo? Will it be failing native authorities in Kivu? The armed militias not yet integrated into the new army? Or that army itself, already home to most of the perpetrators? Or should the international community \u2013 led by the International Criminal Court \u2013 take charge of Congo\u2019s destiny yet again? And who should be punished: the rank-and-file or senior commanders? Will they be Congolese only, or soldiers from the neighbouring armies (Rwanda and Uganda) that have intervened? These questions are highly political. Even the worst perpetrators of violence in Congo must be understood as human actors caught up in a conflict that started with the colonial conquest a century ago. That means shifting the focus from individual acts to the cycle of violence, from atrocities to the issues that drive them. Instead of recognising and facing the real challenge \u2013 to reform the native authority so that local militias can be held politically accountable \u2013 the \u2018international community\u2019 has chosen to induct them into a ballooning, dysfunctional colonial-style army, leaving the native authority to grind along unchanged.<\/p>\n
BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS<\/p>\n
* This article originally appeared in LRB Vol. 33 No. 2 dated 20 January 2011.
* Mahmood Mamdani is the director of the Makerere Institute of Social Research in Kampala, and Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University. He is the author of Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror.<\/p>\n
THE FOLLOWING BOOKS AND ARTICLES WERE CONSULTED IN THE WRITING OF THIS PIECE:<\/p>\n
\u2018Local Violence, National Peace? Postwar \u201cSettlement\u201d in the Eastern DR Congo (2003-6)\u2019 by S\u00e9verine Autesserre (African Studies Review, December 2006).
Lunda under Belgian Rule: The Politics of Ethnicity by Edouard Bustin (Harvard, 1975).
A Working Class in the Making: Belgian Colonial Labour Policy, Private Enterprise and the African Mineworker, 1907-51 by John Higginson (Wisconsin, 1989).
\u2018Re-examining Mortality from the Conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, 1998-2006\u2019 by Francesco Checchi (World Health Organisation Health and Nutrition Tracking Service, www.thehnts.org\/useruploads\/files \/hnts_peer_review_re_examining_mortalityfrom_the_conflict_in_drc_1998_2006.pdf).
The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa by Ren\u00e9 Lemarchand (Pennsylvania, 2009). Zaire: What Destiny? edited by Kankwenda Mbaya (CODESRIA, 1993).
The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People\u2019s History by Georges Nzongola- Ntalaja (Zed Books, 2002).
Black Mineworkers in Central Africa: Industrial Strategies and the Evolution of an African Proletariat in the Copperbelt, 1911-41 by Charles Perrings (Heinemann, 1979).
\u2018Representations of Ethnicity in the Search for Peace: Ituri, Democratic Republic of Congo\u2019 by Johan Pottier (African Affairs, January 2010).
\u2018Demilitarising Militias in the Kivus (Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo)\u2019 by Monica Thakur (African Security Review, January 2008).
\u2018A Reconfiguration of Political Order? The State of the State in North Kivu (DR Congo)\u2019 by Denis Tull (African Affairs, July 2003).
Conflict and Social Transformation in Eastern DR Congo by Koen Vlassenroot and Timothy Raeymaekers (Gent, 2004).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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