Among Africa’s troubled countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is one of the deadliest, with conflict almost constant in its eastern reaches. There are ethnic clashes, resource-driven contentions, and battles waged mostly to control the criminalized proceeds of kleptocracy. The national government, in Kinshasa, barely projects power beyond the precincts of the capital. Thus the DRC is a monumentally failed state that teeters on the brink of collapse.
A sad and tragic ceremony last week suggests how much of the DRC’s current weaknesses stem, arguably, from major mistakes made in the first years of independence, in 1960 and 1961. Just as Belgium unexpectedly granted self-rule to its Congo colony in mid-1960, it sponsored an election in which a charismatic, rhetorically-gifted, 34 year old from the inner Congo triumphed over an older sectionalist from the coast, and a sectionalist from the interior.
The winner was Patrice Lumumba, a disciple of Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah who was determined to lift the ex-colony up by its bootstraps and to deliver progress and prosperity to an ex-dependency that had largely been neglected by its European rulers. There were good roads and successful resource extraction enterprises, but schooling for the Congo’s 16 million inhabitants was nugatory. At most, there were a literal handful of university graduates, hardly any indigenous trained lawyers, physicians, accountants, surveyors, and so on. Belgium had long exploited the Congo, but with little apparent altruism.
The Belgian Congo had supplied vital supplies of uranium oxide. Enriched, these raw materials produced the atomic bombs that pulverized Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the Congo gained its independence, the U. S. wanted to safeguard those uranium oxide reserves. Most of all, it hardly wanted the ores of the Shinkolobwe mine to fall into Soviet hands.
Lumumba was a popular figure. He was radical. He spoke to crowds about their rights, and was at times intemperate. But he was also naïve. And, because Washington suspected, inferred, and found believable evidence that he could possibly give access to Shinkolobwe to the Soviets, the U. S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) targeted him.
They had a major ally in Joseph Mobutu, the effective head of the post-independence Congolese army. Mobutu, according to a massive book-length indictment of the CIA in Africa by Susan Willams (White Malice, PublicAffairs, 2021) was quietly in the pay of the CIA. Lumumba mistakenly thought him an ally, and considered him a protégé.
The CIA plotted to remove Lumumba, with apparent approval from President Eisenhower, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and Secretary of State Christian Herter. The CIA station chief in Kinshasa (ex-Léopoldville) planned various kinds of assassinations. Eventually, in early 1961, a Lumumba on the run to escape Mobutu-authorized soldiers was captured and executed by a Belgian-commanded firing squad. It sliced up his body and liquefied it in sulfuric acid. All that was left of Lumumba, the DRC’s first hero, was a gold tooth. The Belgian police commissioner kept it as a “hunting trophy.”
Last week, at Lumumba’s official state funeral in the DRC, Belgium returned all that was left of Lumumba – his gold tooth – to Lumumba’s daughter.
The DRC would not be in such a desperate place today, with hardly any governance, almost constant mayhem in the east, and massive poverty and hunger, if the CIA had not pursued Lumumba, probably helped to engineer his death, and been more realistic about the extent to which he was truly pro-Soviet and a threat to U. S. strategic interests. In his public statements and during a visit to the U. S. in 1960s, Lumumba spoke favorably about America and Americans. He was rabble rouser at home, but mostly against colonial rule. And he was certainly gulled dangerously by Mobutu.
After Lumumba came lackluster local rulers and then the long dictatorship of Mobutu, who subsequently changed his appellation to Mobutu Sese Seko. Mobutu ruled with little popular input from a coup in 1965 to his ouster by a Rwandan-assisted military uprising in 1997. Those three decades drove the DRC (at times called Zaire) into despair. Despite its enviable array of natural resources – cadmium, cobalt, copper, diamonds, iron ore, and uranium – Mobutu and his cronies stole everything they could plunder; Mobutu lived for parts of every year in Switzerland. Yet Mobutu, during the Cold War, was “our” man in Africa, and a reliable anti-Soviet partner.
Lumumba was a man of integrity, with a self-professed desire to liberate and uplift his entire people, not just the inhabitants of this or that region. He was a modernist. Instead, for all of those decades, the people of the DRC (today numbering 95 million in a land the size of the United States east of the Mississippi River) were guided by malevolent Mobutu. Since he was after spoils, not welfare or growth, the peoples of the DRC lost decades of development, education, modernization, and progress.
The result, which we can blame on actions of the misguided CIA as well on the exigencies of the Cold War, is a country that now reports a slim GDP per capita of $557, a modest life expectancy of 65, and a high maternal mortality rate of 473 per 100,000 births. It has periodic epidemics of Ebola. It is also ranked near the very bottom (most venal), or most corrupt, on the annual list compiled by the Corruption Perceptions Index.
Local militias are out of control in today’s DRC. The Allied Democratic Front, part of the Islamic State of Central Africa (an offshoot of ISIS) has a salient in the northern Kivu province, and periodically attacks neighboring Uganda as well as shooting up villages and villagers in the North Kivu province. The M-23 militants are Tutsi originally from nearby Rwanda; they call themselves the Congolese Revolutionary Army and claim territorial hegemony in another section of North Kivu, again harassing villages and villagers.
Another two or three such local groups in North and South Kivu keep that region west of Lake Kivu in constant turmoil. Killings, gang rapes, mutilations, and relentless warfare are everyday occurrences in this poor, rural, beleaguered part of the Congo.
The attraction for the militants, and the driver of conflict, is control over artisanal mining of gold and coltan. The latter is an essential component of cell phones and other kinds of electronic equipment. Refined coltan becomes tantalum, employed in capacitors. The Kivu provinces, with marauders that give little quarter, resembles the worst aspects of America’s nineteenth century wild west.
Distant Kinshasa hardly shows up. The Congolese army does little. MONUSCO, the UN’s very large Stabilization Mission, responsible for Peacekeeping and Peace Enforcement, located nearby, does even less. The two contingents seem powerless against the gang violence in the Kivus. So the insurgents run wild. If Lumumba, not Mobutu, had been allowed to chart the future of the Congo, the results might have been very different. How the U.S. misjudged and Congolese citizens pay the price.
71 - Corruption and Chaos in the Congo, plus the CIA and Lumumba's Death
The rot in DRC started in 1884-5 at the Berlin conference among the European powers to carve up Africa. This resulted not just in the Belgian king's personal fief but also crazy international borders. Tutsi & Hutu are indigenous to both sides of the border. The Chinese are finding out how dangerous it is to invest in the DRC's conflict minerals. Linda Agerbak