Africa’s richest country – in promise, anyway – has long been convulsed in a brutal civil conflict that impedes development and forfeits untold thousands of lives annually. Pope Francis has just visited Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s relatively safe capital -- located a distant 977 miles from the locale of the nation’s persistent brutalities and mayhem.
According to Pope Francis, “torn by war…struck by violence like a blow to the stomach,” the Congo seems to be “gasping for breath.” Indeed, the Congo is a thoroughly failed state that cannot keep its 95 million people safe or even begin to introduce more than a tiny elite to the kinds of better lives and livelihoods that are taken for granted in so much of the rest of the world, even in nearby African nations like Zambia and Namibia.
The Pope’s homilies alone, even when combined with deep pastoral care for a country where Roman Catholics are the vast majority of churchgoers, cannot bring this troubled land the size of Western Europe or most of the United States east of the Mississippi River to the cusp of peace. Its government’s enduring inability to project meaningful power from Kinshasa across the rest of its distant domain, plus the entire absence of good governance, means that the so-called Democratic Republic of Congo provides little in the way of security, safety, or rule of law for its constituents, spread as they are from the Atlantic Ocean eastward to the great lakes of eastern Africa and northward to the borders of the Central African Republic.
Nearly 5.5 million Congolese have been displaced by civil conflict, fully 521,000 in 2022 alone. Refugees flee into neighboring nations and, sometimes, attempt to reach Europe. Rape, torture, wanton killings, and explosions are common. A Pentecostal church was attacked recently in North Kivu and a Catholic church and local market were fire-bombed in the regional enter of Beni, also in North Kivu.
The Congo’s major conflicts are in the eastern zone of the country, especially in the North and South Kivu and Ituri provinces that border Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi and press up against Lakes Albert, Edward, Kivu, and Tanganyika. In this contested arena, 120 criminalized rebel groups jostle for local control of resources and extortion opportunities. The Kivus and Ituri are populated by about 17 million civilians, many of whom now crowd into desperate refugee encampments and tent villages in Goma, the major city in the Kivu region.
The Force Publique, the Congolese army, has failed miserably over many years to end the depredations of the various potent and less potent insurgent groups. Based in Goma and Bukavu, another major lacustrine city, is a large 18,000-strong UN peace intervention force (authorized by Chapter 7 of the UN charter). By rights, it should by now have repressed the violent activities of the Kivu warring gangs. But over thirteen years it has engaged the combatants infrequently, intervened too little and too ineffectively, and certainly not curtailed hostilities.
A poorer land would probably be fought over by fewer militants. So would a country that had been ruled reasonably well. But the Congo became independent after decades of neglect and abuse by Belgian colonizers. Very little attention was paid to educating the colony’s inhabitants. Their health needs were also neglected. Instead, the Belgians prospered originally thanks to the Congo’s natural rubber and much later because of its copper, its gold and diamonds, and its vast supplies of other metals. Much too little effort was devoted to agricultural development. The putative nation was huge (the second largest in Africa after Algeria), and composed of roughly 250 disparate ethnic groups and perhaps 700 language entities (although most Congolese speak Lingala, Swahili, and French, as well).
After the Congo unexpectedly and suddenly gained independence in 1960, it became a sometime pawn in the Cold War. The Soviet Union befriended its first elected prime minister. This affinity between Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and Moscow worried the U.S. Eisenhower administration and sent the State Department and the CIA on a successful chase to prevent Lumumba from giving the Soviets copper mining rights and granting them a toehold in the heart of Africa.
The CIA used oodles of American dollars to purchase collaboration from Congolese and to support an early coup against Lumumba by young General Joseph Desire Mobutu (later Mobutu Sese Seko). Lumumba was subsequently assassinated and, in 1965, the U. S. backed what became a dictatorship by Mobutu. His wildly corrupt and cruel rule until 1997 made Mobutu wealthy and his people poor. His long reign also retarded the development of the Congo and is responsible in large part for today’s absence of good governance and delivery of essential services. The dysfunctionality of the entire country, and especially the Kivus, flows directly from the many ways in which Mobutu’s long rule sucked the country dry during and after the Cold War.
Today the U. S, and China compete for access to Congo’s cobalt, essential for electrical vehicle batteries; the Congo holds two-thirds of the world’s cobalt. The Congo also continues to mine copper and cadmium, and to pump petroleum. It exports large amounts of timber and timber products. But fighting in the Kivus is mostly over artisan-mined gold (marketed clandestinely through Uganda and Rwanda) and coltan. The latter is a combination of tantalum, columbite, and niobium, important for the manufacture of cell telephones and other electronic devices. Much of the world’s coltan is found in the Kivus. Under Lake Kivu there is also abundant methane that three American companies are now attempting to extract.
Of the 120 contending rebel groups, the most dangerous are the Allied Democratic Forces, allied loosely to the Islamic State in Eastern Africa, and the March 23 or M23 movement. The second is led and largely composed of Rwandan exiles probably controlled by President Paul Kagame in Rwanda. Originally, M23 was created to pursue Hutu genocidaires who had fled Rwanda after the 1994 genocide. But it has since morphed into a resource-aggrandizing conglomerate.
The losers, as in all resource driven wars, are the local people, suffering as they are in the Congo by ceaseless lawlessness and unprovoked attacks on hapless civilians.
The Congolese army, better officered and less corrupt, might be able to keep order in the Kivus if it were backed firmly from Kinshasa and robustly funded. The UN peace intervention force could do much more, as well. Preventing Kagame from meddling would help. Ultimately, the African Union could mobilize Kenyan and Ugandan troops to stabilize the area. But unless carefully monitored, such an intervention could lead to more plundering by foreign troops. The US and Europe (after peace someday returns to Ukraine) could also attempt to strengthen the ability of the government of Congo now, and after December’s election, to learn how to govern its far reaches. Then the Congo might become less failed as a state and its people prosper.
Belgian officers & their flunkies set the pattern of exploitation of Congo people, executed Lumumba & colonized Haiti.