- If possible, print the article before reading.
- As you read, circle or underline the names of people, organizations and important facts.
- Use your own words to answer the questions in complete sentences.
(by Betsy Pisik, WashingtonTimes.com) BUKAVU, Congo – To understand what is wrong with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, you need only try driving here.
Properly paved roads are scarce, and the few miles of macadam often don’t seem to connect to anything.
Most streets are, at best, hard-packed dirt with swirling dust that cannot stand up to fierce, nearly daily storms. Some roads are cratered with potholes so wide and deep they could almost swallow a Land Cruiser. The puddles are breeding pools for malarial mosquitoes.
One persistent rumor among weary Congolese has local officials canceling paving contracts because their slice of graft is too small.
“My country is broken,” said Hortense Barholere, a Congolese coordinator for the Washington-based Women For Women International. “Without a road, we have no mail. How can you receive a letter when you have no address?”
Despite abundant natural beauty and fertility, armed conflict – and related hunger and disease – have killed an estimated 5 million people here since 1998 – a veritable second Holocaust that the International Rescue Committee says claims 45,000 new victims every month in a country of 67 million people.
In comparison, the highly publicized death toll in the Darfur region of Sudan is thought to be between 200,000 and 500,000.
“By any yardstick, [Congo] has been a humanitarian disaster, and one the world has ignored,” John Holmes, undersecretary-general of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told the U.N. Security Council earlier this year.
Few communities here have the most basic services: electricity, sanitation, potable water, honest police and access to more than rudimentary education.
The army, which in many developing nations is the key national institution, collapsed years ago. Today, its ragtag soldiers and their former rebel adversaries are only very slowly learning how to function as a cohesive force that could eventually defend Congo against foreign incursions and domestic instability.
Congo lacks other key qualities that make a nation: interconnectedness, a government that is able to exert authority consistently in territory beyond the capital, a shared culture that promotes national unity and a common language.
In a state without civil services, law or cohesion, bandits and militias rule with fear and fire. Impunity is widespread for crimes ranging from petty theft to gang rapes.
Law enforcement and the justice system are so weak that only the most unlucky offenders are apprehended, let alone convicted.
“If you look around, including places where society has broken down, you’ve got a generation of boys and men who have grown up without effective state order,” said Tony Gambino, an international consultant and aid specialist who has followed this country since he was a Peace Corps volunteer here 30 years ago.
The United Nations has stationed more than 20,000 troops and civilians in far eastern Congo, in an effort to train the disastrously unprofessional Congolese army and protect scores of tiny, isolated villages.
Known by its French acronym as MONUC, the $1.2 billion a year Congo mission is the largest and most expensive peacekeeping effort in U.N. history.
It is also one of the least effective, according to people who live in the rebel-infested Kivu area, many of whom now live in squalid camps after being driven from their homes.
Sexual violence, killing and displacement are not diminishing. Perpetrators include the Congolese army and insurgent groups.
The government has not paid the army since November, encouraging soldiers to “live off the land,” a common euphemism for stealing food, money and goods from the people they are supposed to protect.
Even when officials are paid, salaries are so low that they promote corruption. A major in the Bukavu police force makes $50 a month, while teachers are said to make about half that. Children are forced into traffic by their parents to beg for money or to sell tissues and match books.
Donor countries are so wary about the Congo’s culture of extortion and double-dealing that they send relief and development money to the United Nations or NGOs, rather than the Kinshasa government. Corruption is so widespread that a functionary in the government’s Ministry of Communications not only demands a $200 bribe for a press card, he writes out a receipt for it.
By any reasonable expectation, Congo should be unfathomably rich. Thick veins of minerals run underneath some of the most fertile soil in Africa. Lush jungles are filled with fruit that could be exported to Europe and beyond.
North Kivu and South Kivu provinces, in Congo’s volatile east, are remarkably verdant, choked with banana and avocado trees, corn and potato plants, peanut vines, sugar cane and tomatoes.
And yet, 3 million Congolese rely on food from the U.N. World Food Program.
The government in Kinshasa has focused on lucrative contracts with Chinese companies to extract oil and minerals. To the extent there are roads in the country, it is because the Chinese are paving them.
Big exports include coltan (columbite-tantalite), a mineral vital for making cell phones and Xboxes, and cassiterite, the base metal in tin cans and tinfoil.
Despite these abundant natural resources, Congo malingers at the rock bottom of the U.N. Development Program’s Human Development Report. The gross domestic product per capita is about $300, or less than a dollar a day.
The Security Council’s panel of Congo specialists, who have been monitoring the effects of a weapons embargo, recently reaffirmed the connections between economic exploitation, trafficking and human rights abuses.
“It is no accident that the majority of the violence in eastern Congo has been carried out in areas rich with minerals,” the panel said. “Conflict minerals remain a key source of financing for some of the most reprehensible armed groups in the world.”
And yet this year, there has been some relatively good news.
Most of the Rwanda-backed National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP) militia that swept murderously through North Kivu in January have either slipped into civilian life or voluntarily remobilized into the Congolese army.
In the spring, President Joseph Kabila forged secret agreements to hold joint operations with Rwanda and Uganda, slightly improving the cooperation of all three armies and governments.
However, the anti-Rwanda Rwandan Liberation Democratic Forces (FDLR) militia and Uganda’s merciless Lord’s Resistance Army are still in Congo’s jungles, regularly swooping down on communities to raid supplies.
An estimated 1.7 million people have been driven from their homes by the fighting. At least a quarter of a million have fled violence in North Kivu in the first six months of 2009, and nongovernmental organizations are anticipating a similar exodus from South Kivu.
Given the unbreachable distance between the Kivus [provinces in eastern Congo] and Kinshasa [the capital], many Congolese identify more closely with their foreign neighbors than with their capital.
One possible solution is the ultimate African taboo: to break up the DRC into more manageably sized pieces, even hiving off some of its outlying areas for neighbors to annex.
Jeffrey Herbst and Greg Mills, writing earlier this year in Foreign Policy magazine, make a passionate case for international aid groups to emphasize regional problem-solving and security, rather than funding elections to choose central governments with no national credibility.
“The very concept of a Congolese state has outlived its usefulness,” they write. “Congo has become a collection of peoples, groups, interests and pillagers who co-exist at best.”
Without a strong central government or professional army, land- or energy-starved neighbors and trade partners have treated Congo’s riches as an all-you-can-eat buffet.
“Congo will not know peace until our neighbors are richer,” said Kalume Bernard Buleri, a Goma-based human rights activist who has worked with MONUC and nongovernmental organizations. “It is like a man eating a fish in front of a starving cat.”
Copyright 2009 News World Communications, Inc. Reprinted with permission of the Washington Times. For educational purposes only. This reprint does not constitute or imply any endorsement or sponsorship of any product, service, company or organization. Visit the website at www.washingtontimes.com.
1. a) What is the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)?
b) List the countries that border the DRC.
c) What is the population of the DRC?
d) Who is the president of the DRC?
2. a) How many people are killed every month in the DRC?
b) Approximately how many people have been killed in the DRC since 1998?
3. What basic services are most communities lacking?
4. Why are most criminals never convicted of their crimes, or even arrested?
5. a) What is MONUC?
b) What is the cost of MONUC per year? (Note: The U.S. contributes over $5 billion each year to the U.N.’s yearly budget – the U.S. pays more than 22% of the U.N.’s overall budget)
c) What do you think about the overall effectiveness of MONUC?
6. How does the government promote corruption among the army and other government offices?
7. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is ranked as one of the poorest countries in the world. Yet it has some of the most fertile soil in Africa, and rich mineral deposits. Read the “Background” information below. Considering the situation in the DRC, and the efforts made by the U.N. thus far to save the country, what do you think needs to happen to turn it around and create permanent improvement? Be specific.
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The history of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) can be confusing, but read over the following a few times and it should make more sense to you:
- The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was a colony of Belgium until it gained independence in 1960.
- DRC was ruled by dictator Mobutu Sese Seko from 1965 until 1997.
- The Mobutu regime was toppled by a rebellion backed by Rwanda and Uganda and fronted by Congolese Laurent Kabila. In August 1998 his regime was itself challenged by a second insurrection again backed by Rwanda and Uganda.
- Troops from Angola, Chad, Namibia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe intervened to support Kabila’s regime. A cease-fire was signed in July 1999 by the DRC, Congolese armed rebel groups, Angola, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe but sporadic fighting continued. Laurent Kabila was assassinated in January 2001 and his son, Joseph Kabila, was named head of state.
- In October 2002, the new president was successful in negotiating the withdrawal of Rwandan forces occupying eastern Congo; two months later, the Pretoria Accord was signed by all remaining warring parties to end the fighting and establish a government of national unity. A transitional government was set up in July 2003. Joseph Kabila as president and four vice presidents represented the former government, former rebel groups, the political opposition, and civil society.
- Kabila was inaugurated president in December 2006. The National Assembly was installed in September 2006. Provincial assemblies were constituted in early 2007, and elected governors and national senators in January 2007.
(from the U.S. State Department website):
- On September 8, 2007, the Governments of the D.R.C. and Uganda reached an agreement … in which they mutually agreed to strengthen efforts to eliminate all “negative forces” (illegal armed groups) operating in and from the two countries.
- On November 9, 2007, the Governments of the D.R.C. and Rwanda (with facilitation by the UN and witness of the United States and the European Union) signed the Nairobi Communiqué, which was designed to put an end to the presence in the D.R.C. of all foreign armed groups. … These groups were to be disarmed, demobilized, and repatriated.
- On January 23, 2008, the Government of the D.R.C. and over 20 armed groups signed a peace accord in Goma, D.R.C., under which the parties agreed on the need for immediate cessation of hostilities, the disengagement of troops, improved adherence to human rights standards, and the creation of UN buffer zones between and among the various factions.
- As of October 1, 2008, none of these agreements had been fully implemented, and the eastern part of the country in particular continues to suffer from the activities of numerous illegal armed groups that operate largely with impunity.
For a map identifying some of the groups fighting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, go to media.washingtontimes.com/media/img/2009/Sep/05/0908_CongoMap.jpg.
Visit the U.N.’s MONUC website for current information on DRC.
Go to worldatlas.com for a map of Africa. (Click on DRC for a more detailed map.)
Read previous articles on the Democratic Republic of the Congo at StudentNewsDaily: Peace Force Stymied by Congo Insurgency, Congo Fighting Mirrors ‘90s War,
and DR Congo Rebels Recruited from Rwanda Army.