Killer Communications!
The West Kills for Cell Phones!
Congo's tragedy:
the war the world forgot
In a country the size of Western Europe, a war rages that has lasted eight years and cost four million lives.
Rival militias inflict appalling suffering on the civilian population, and what passes for political leadership is powerless to stop it. This is Congo, and the reason for the conflict - control of minerals essential to the electronic gadgetry on which the developed world depends - is what makes our blindness to the horror doubly shaming.
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05/18/06 "The Independent" 05/05/06 --- -- This is the story of the
deadliest war since Adolf Hitler's armies marched across Europe. It is
a war that has not ended. But is also the story of a trail of blood
that leads directly to you: to your remote control, to your mobile
phone, to your laptop and to your diamond necklace. In the TV series
`Lost', a group of plane crash survivors believe they are stranded
alone on a desert island, until one day they discover a dense metal
cable leading out into the ocean and the world beyond. The Democratic
Republic of Congo is full of those cables, mysterious connections that
show how a seemingly isolated tribal war is in reality something very
different.
This war has been waved aside as an internal African implosion. In
reality it a battle for coltan and diamonds and cassiterite and gold,
destined for sale in London and New York and Paris. It is a battle for
the metals that make our technological society vibrate and ring and
bling, and it has already claimed four million lives in five years and
broken a population the size of Britain's. No, this is not only a
story about them. This – the tale of a short journey into the long
Congolese war we in the West have fostered, fuelled and funded – is a
story about you.
I – Rapes within rapes.
It starts with a ward full of women who have been gang-raped and then
shot in the vagina. I am standing in a makeshift ward in the Panzi
Hospital in Bukavu, the only hospital that is trying to deal with the
bushfire of sexual violence in Eastern Congo. Most have wrapped
themselves deep in their blankets so I can only see their eyes,
staring blankly at me. Dr Denis Mukwege is speaking. "Around ten
percent of the gang-rape victims have had this happen to them," he
says softly, his big hands tucked into his white coat. "We are trying
to reconstruct their vaginas, their anuses, their intestines. It is a
long process."
We walk out into the courtyard and he begins to explain – in the
national language, French – the secret history of this hospital. "We
started with a catastrophe we just couldn't understand," he says
softly. One day early in the war, the UNICEF medical van he was using
was looted. Coincidentally, a few days later, a woman was carried here
on her grandmother's back after an eight-hour trek. "I had never seen
anything like it. She had been gang-raped and then her legs had been
shot to pieces. I operated on her on a table with no equipment, no
medicine."
She was only the first. "We suddenly had so many women coming in with
post-rape lesions and injuries I could never have imagined. Our minds
just couldn't take in what these women had suffered." The competing
armies had discovered that rape was an efficient weapon in this war.
Even in this small province, South Kivu, the UN estimates 45,000 women
were raped last year alone. "It destroys the morale of the men to rape
their women. Crippling their women cripples their society," he
explains, shaking his head gently. There were so many militias around
that Dr Mukwege had to keep his treatments secret – the women were
terrified of being kidnapped again and killed. So he became an Oscar
Schindler of the Congolese mass rapes, treating women undercover for
years, taking the risk he would trigger the fickle rage of the
drugged-up and freaked-out teenager soldiers marauding across the country.
He describes the cases that made him go public in a fast
get-it-over-with voice. One morning he was brought a raped three
year-old by her broken father. "Everything had been shot away. There
was nothing I could do for her," he says. "The father started smashing
his own head against the wall, screaming that he had not been able to
protect his baby daughter. We heard later he committed suicide." That
same day, he saw a seventy-two year old who had been raped in front of
her sons-in-law, the relations considered sacred in Congolese culture.
She said, "Don't cure me. Don't feed me. I can never go back and look
my sons-in-law in the face." Dr Mukwege adds, "So she died here. She
just didn't eat. And I realised I had to speak out."
Yet his public pleas have made little difference. There is barely a
government to appeal to, never mind a police force. There are only the
rapists with AK-47s, and they do not hear his pleas over the
screaming. As we walk down to watch 200 rape victims being taught to
sew under a large, dark bridge, he tells me what they can expect now.
"When the rapes begin, the husbands and fathers often just scarper and
never come back. The women never hear anything from them again. Other
times, the men blame the women and shun them. Rape victims are almost
never integrated back into their previous lives. It's very hard for us
to persuade the women to leave the hospital, because where are they
going to go?"
He introduces me to Aileen, who is eighteen but – like every child in
this country – looks much younger. She holds her hands tightly in her
lap. Her story is stark, the details sparse. Her village was raided by
a militia on the 10th October, and "they beheaded people in the
central square." Her voice is high-pitched; she is almost squeaking.
She was seized and taken back out into the forest by the militia where
they kept her for six months, and "I was raped every night. The first
night my body really ached and hurt because I was a virgin." She would
be passed on from one man to the next. It is only as she speaks that I
notice the large protruding bump sagging into her lap. The baby is
going to be born next month. She says she has spoken to her family,
but Dr Mukwege tells me later this is a dreamy fantasy. "What," she
asks me with wide eyes as we leave, "do you think I should do? Where
can I go?"
It is coldly appropriate to start here. The rape of Aileen and the
rape of the thousands of women who stagger into the Panzi Hospital
are, I soon discover, merely part of a larger rape – the rape of Congo.
II – The last of the Belgian colonialists
Bukavu is a cratered, shattered shack-city in Eastern Congo lying on
the edge of Lake Kivu. In the street-markets, people trade scraps of
food for Congolese notes worth a few pence. On the dirt-tracks they
call roads, hunched-over women carry heavy objects – wood, coal, even
a table – on their backs. In the houses, they stagger along without
water or electricity. And wandering through this cacophony, I find a
lone white woman, a lingering remnant of the origins of all this. She
can tell me – in ways she does not understand – how all this began.
As we sit over lunch, Tina Van Malderen says, skimming the menu, "I
don't drink water – only wine." Her hair is greying but her smile is
warm. "I first came to Bukavu as a little girl in 1951 when my father
came to work for the Belgian administration," she explains. "It was
Paradise. There were only European then. No Africans. Black people
lived in the surrounding areas. It wasn't like South Africa, they
weren't forced. They didn't want to live with us, they wanted to be
with their own. They came into the town to work. They didn't use our
shops, they had their own market." She speaks of the days of Belgian
empire with a soft-focus sepia longing. "I have four sisters, and we
would swim in the lake all day. It was like a non-stop holiday."
Her family owned a chain of shops, and the only castle in Congo. She
is incredulous when I ask if there was any cruelty towards black
people back then. "Absolutely not. We loved our blacks. When they had
children, we gave them gifts." Perhaps sensing my scepticism, she
adds, "Maybe on the plantations they were a little bit rude to them."
The Belgians unified Congo in the first great holocaust of the
twentieth century, a programme of slavery and tyranny that killed 13
million people. King Leopold II – bragging about his humanitarian
goals, of course – seized Congo and turned it into a slave-colony
geared to extracting rubber, the coltan and cassiterite of its day.
The `natives' who failed to gather enough rubber would have their
hands chopped off, with the Belgian administrators receiving and
carefully counting hundreds of baskets of hands a day.
As Tina tells me that when she arrived in the country the people were
"savages, walking about in rags", I think of the Congolese song a
Swedish missionary wrote down in 1894. "We are tired of living under
this tyranny," the `savages' sang. "We cannot endure that our women
and children are taken away/ And dealt with by the white savages./ We
shall make war…/ We know that we shall die, but we want to die./ We
want to die." The concept of Crimes against Humanity was invented by a
journalist who witnessed Leopold's rule first-hand. His system of
forced cultivation continued until the Belgian withdrew in 1960, when
Patrice Lumumba became the first and only elected leader of Congo. "He
was a stupid man," Tina says swiftly. "On the first day of
independence, he said we had beaten and humiliated the blacks. He
signed his death warrant by doing that."
She's right – he did. Lumumba claimed to be a democratic socialist who
wanted to overcome Congo's ethnic divisions. We will never know if he
could have fulfilled this dream, because the CIA decided he was a "mad
dog" who had to be put down. Before long, one of their agents was
driving around Kinshasa with the elected leader's tortured corpse in
the boot looking for a place to dump him, and the CIA's man – Mobutu
Sese Seko – was in power and in the money. Tina's family sold their
castle to the dictator as he renamed the country Zaire. "People always
ask if he paid. Of course he paid!" she laughs. Mobutu became another
Leopold, using the state to rob and murder the Congolese people with a
fat CIA grant. He thought nothing of chartering Concorde to take his
family to Disneyworld, and stole more than the entire gross national
debt. "Go ahead and steal, but don't steal too much," he counselled
the Congolese people, starting a locust-storm of kleoptocracy across
the country.
Tina's family started to worry in the early 1970s when Mobutu
announced a programme of "Zaireanisation" – a Mugabe-style transfer of
the resources of foreigners to his cronies. "My mother arrived at work
one day and there was a black man come to take possession of
everything, including her car. She had to walk home," Tina says,
glugging red wine. "Everything began to fail after that. The food
became disgusting. Even our dog didn't want to eat it." Her father
"died of sadness. He knew he would never get back the Congo he loved,"
and the Van Malderens packed up and headed back to Europe. This is her
first visit home – she still calls it that – in more than twenty
years, and looking out towards the Lake, she says proudly, "I made it."
"I saw the house we lived in. From outside it still looked nice but
when I went inside…" she shakes her head. "The black people cannot
live properly." She is becoming philosophical now. "If I had to
compare Congo, I must say it hasn't changed at all. They are not naked
any more, but they are still savages." Tina's countrymen established
the nation-state in the Congo, and they designed it to be a
vampire-state. The only change over the decades has been the
particular resource snatched for Western consumption – rubber under
the Belgians, diamonds under Mobutu, coltan and cassiterite today.
"Cheers," Tina says, downing her wine.
III The Playstation war.
If you want to glimpse what all this death has been for, you drive
four hours out of the town of Goma, on pocked and broken
roller-coaster roads that melt into mud with the rain, until you reach
a place called Kalehe. Scarring the lush green hills, there are what
seem to be large red scabs that glisten in the sun. The technical term
for these open wounds in the earth is `artisinal mines', but this dry
terminology conjures up images of technical digs with machines and
lights and helmets. In reality, they are immense holes in the ground,
in which men, women and children – lots of children – pick desperately
with makeshift hammers or their bare hands at the red earth, hoping to
find some coltan or cassiterite to set on the long conveyor belt to
your house or mine. Coltan is a metal that conducts heat unusually
brilliantly. It is contained in your mobile, your lap-top, your son's
Playstation – and 80 percent of the world's supplies sit beneath the
Democratic Republic of Congo.
As I crawl down into the mine – its cool, damp darkness is a strange
contrast to the raging Congolese sun – the miners laugh. The idea of a
Muzungu – a white man – in their mine seems to them almost impossibly
comic. But they soon get back to picking away at a roof that looks
like it could collapse at any moment. Ingo Mbale, 51, explains how the
West's hunger for coltan is fed. "We were enslaved three years ago,"
he says. "An RCD captain [from one of the militias] arrived and forced
us to mine for them at gun-point. They gave us no money, it was slave
labour. There is nothing left in many of these shafts now, they
exhausted them. They killed many people. Our gold and coltan and
cassiterite went out to the world via Rwanda." The militia that seized
Kalehe could only continue fighting and killing and raping because
somebody out there in the wider world was prepared to buy this
slave-mined coltan, and somebody else was prepared to sell them guns
and artillery with their freshly-minted cash.
Watching these men, the shape of Congo's recent history becomes clear.
There is an official story about the war in Congo, and then there is
the reality, uncovered by a trilogy of bomb-blast reports from the UN
Panel of Experts on the DRC. The official story is convoluted and hard
to follow, because it does not ultimately make sense. But its first
chapter is true enough, and goes something like this. In 1996, a
Maoist with an eye for money called Laurent-Desire Kabila grew tired
of simply running his little fiefdom in eastern Zaire, where he
peddled ivory and gold with a nice sideline in kidnapping Westerners.
Kabila decided to depose Mobutu, the omnipresent and omni-incompetent
tyrant, and seize power for himself. So he cobbled together a rag-tag
army of child soldiers known as the Kadogo and – with the support of
neighbouring countries Rwanda and Uganda – the edifice of Mobutuism
collapsed even before their tinny, tiny advance. Kabila installed
himself as another Lepopold-alike, banning political parties and
bathing in corruption.
But then in 1998 Kabila asked the Rwandans and Ugandans to withdraw
their troops from Congo – so long, and thanks for the armies – and the
official story begins to drift away from reality. The Rwandans pulled
back for a fortnight, but then mounted a massive invasion of Congo,
seizing a third of the country. The public reason for this assault
sounds reasonable. After the 1994 genocide in Rwanda – a slaughter
than made even Auschwitz look slow-paced – tens of thousands of the
Hutu Power machete-wielders fled across the border to Congo and set up
long-term bases. How could any country rest with its murderers armed
and crazed on its borders? "We must prevent the genocidaires from
regrouping," said Paul Kgame, the Rwandan President, with the
supportive Ugandan military following in tow behind his boys.
From his palace in Kinshasa, Kabila appealed to his friends for help
resisting this Rwandan-Ugandan attack. The dictators of Zimbabwe,
Namibia and Angola obligingly sent armies marching into Congo to fight
back, and Africa's First World War began. The armies and militias
marauding across Congo then became rebels without a cause, fighting
each other because they were there and because pulling out would be a
humiliating concession of defeat. In this version, the war in Congo is
a mess, started with the best of intentions – the Rwandans' desire to
track down genocidaires – only to spiral out of control. It presents
the mass slaughter as a giant cock-up, a cosmic mistake. This is
strangely reassuring. It is also a lie.
Once the Congo was drenched in death, the UN commissioned a panel of
international statesmen to travel the country and uncover the reasons
behind the war. They found that the Rwandan government's story hid a
much darker truth. The Rwandans had one motive, right from the
beginning: to seize Congo's massive mineral wealth, to grab the coltan
mine I am standing in now and thousands like it, and to sell it on to
us, the waiting world, as we quickly flicked the channel away from the
news of this war with our coltan-filled remote control. The other
countries came in not because they believed in repelling aggression,
but because they wanted a piece of the Congolese cake. The country was
ravaged by "armies of business", commanded by men who "carefully
planned the redrawing of the regional map to redistribute wealth," the
UN declared.
The UN experts knew this because the Rwandan troops did not head for
the areas where the genocidaires were hiding out. They headed straight
for the mines like this one in Kalehe, and they swiftly enslaved the
populations to dig for them. They did not clear out the genocidaires –
they teamed up with them to rape Congo. Jean-Pierre Ondekane, the
Chief of the Rwandan forces in Goma, urged his units to maintain good
relations "with our Interhamwe [genocidaire] brothers." They set up a
Congo Desk that whisked billions out of the country and into Rwandan
bank accounts – and they fought to stay and pillage some more. The UN
found that a Who's Who of British, American and Belgian companies
collaborated with this crime. The ones they recommended for further
investigation included Anglo American PLC, Barclay's Bank, Standard
Chartered Bank and De Beers. The British government barely followed up
the report, publicly acquitting a few corporations like Anglo-American
who Human Rights Watch have shown to be "in league with some of the
worst killers in the region", and leaving others like De Beers in an
"unresolved" and unpunished category.
Oh, and the reason why this invasion was so profitable? Global demand
for coltan was soaring throughout the war because of the massive
popularity of coltan-filled Sony Playstations. As Oona King, one of
the few British politicians to notice Congo, explains as we travel
together for a few days, "Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to
die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in
their living rooms."
As I climb back out into the hard sunshine, the miners turn to me.
"Could you send us a hammer? We really need a hammer. The militias
took all our equipment."
IV The tyrant's jeer
On the long journey in an armoured UN vehicle, the questions seem so
obvious, so trite. How could a government led by genocide victims
suddenly commit their own epic crime against humanity, for nothing
more than money? The answer lie across the border, through the
rainforest, towards Kigali. I meet Charles Muligande, the Rwandan
foreign minister, on the top floor of the Hotel Des Milles Collines,
the real Hotel Rwanda. This is where hundreds of Tutsis hid out the
holocaust while their brothers and sons were hacked to pieces on the
streets outside. The café at its top looks out on Kigali in the drizzle.
Muligande has a strange combination of a youthful unlined face and
graying hair (with matching moustache), and he carries with him the
unimpeachable moral status of the victim. The sadness around the eyes,
the haltingly recounted story of being driven across the border to
Burundi as a child refugee, the relatives macheted in the genocide –
they are all cruelly present. How can I challenge him? He speaks
softly about the trauma counselling that is happening in Rwanda, and
the fragile attempts at reconciliation. And then it comes – the chuckle.
I ask him about Congo's future, and he lets out a strange,
hard-to-place laugh. "The DRC is a country that for the last
forty-five years has had pockets outside the control of central
government," he says. "Even on the eve of the election, there will by
places that are beyond the control of central government. This
shouldn't be a cause for concern." And again with the chuckle.
What about the people who pay the price of the instability he waves
away so casually? How does he sleep at night, knowing Rwanda has
inflicted on its neighbours suffering akin to the horrors he and his
family endured? He chuckles harder now, almost coughing. "This is
rubbish. If we do a balance sheet, we incurred a lot of losses in
fighting that war."
He says it with such airy conviction I have to grope in my mind for
the right response. Why then does the UN's report say that Rwanda's
pillage was "systematic" and "deliberate"? "That is an invention," he
snaps. By the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch? "Yes. It
doesn't become true just because it is repeated. If you have such a
blind faith in Amnesty International" – he spits the words – "and the
UN and Human Rights Watch, there is nothing I can tell you. It is like
you are asking me to believe Jesus Christ is not my saviour come to
change my soul. It is a faith-based position." No amount of probing
will shift him. When he talks about the genocide, he is compassionate,
honest, brave. When he talks about his own crimes against Congo, he
sneers. Their trauma, it seems, is worth nothing. As he speaks, I
wonder – does he believe this, or does he, in midnight sweats, think
about the children driven from their homes just like a baby Muligande
was all those years ago?
The more I probe, the more his face contorts into the tyrant's jeer. I
have seen this before, in Iraq and the Occupied Territories – the
furrowed brow and the rote claim that the evil UN and Amnesty have it
in for us. They have fabricated the hundreds of pages of documents
they offer in their reports, it is all lies. Blood? What blood?
V A call from London Electricity
The victims of the war – of that laugh – are scattered everywhere in
Eastern Congo. By the roadside the next morning, I find the living
remnants of Ramba village, a home to 15,000 people. They make up a
clump of four hundred starving people, building a makeshift camp by
the roadside. Maneno Mutagemba Justin, their chief – a young man with
sore, reddish eyes – explains what happened. "The Interahamwe [the
Rwandan genocidaires] came into our village. They killed and they
raped our women. Now they have stolen our houses and told us never to
come back." People fled in all directions, losing their husbands or
children. Nobody is quite sure how many relatives they have lost
forever. "We have no food here, and we left everything behind. We have
no pots, no pans, no water."
These people live a long drawn-out postscript to Thomas Hobbes, the
seventeenth century philosopher who warned that in the absence of a
state, life will be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." I
cannot stop at every chaotic scene like this; I have an appointment
with some pygmies. Besides, my UN escort says cheerfully, "This is a
warzone, so we shouldn't stop like this. Oh, don't worry. They won't
shoot you. Just make you carry their things and rape you a bit." After
another interminable journey passing along dirt-roads and wrecked
villages, we arrive at a long, lush field of tea-bushes that marks the
entrance to the pygmies. The immense forest surrounding us shows me
why Joseph Conrad said Congo reminded him of a time "when vegetation
rioted on the earth and big trees were kings." The pygmy women are
performing an elaborate, joyful dance of greeting.
And here, in their worn village square, are the classic, clichéd
images of Africa. The village children toddle around with distended
bellies that feel like drums filled to bursting, and some of the
gurgling babies covered in mosquito bites will sicken and die from
malaria. They do not seem so clichéd in the flesh. Yet in Congo, these
horrors seem secondary. These pygmies are terrified first, second and
third of dying not of starvation or disease but from a blade to the
neck or a bullet to the chest. Kalereda Dunganga, the village elder,
explains that a nice man called Chad was beheaded here "the day before
yesterday". He had no money or livestock to hand over to the
militiamen, so they killed him. Sometimes it is worse – some
militiamen believe that eating pygmies gives them supernatural powers.
The villagers are so terrified they don't sleep in their houses. They
take their children and sleep in the tea-bushes. As this is explained
to me, my mobile rings. The coltan has come home. It has full
reception here, so close to the Rwandan border. The call is from
London Electricity. As I sit on the floor with people who have never
had electricity, running water or a single tablet of modern medicine,
they remind me I am two weeks late paying my bill. These villagers
live a few seconds and few centuries away from us.
Yet the most piercing image of pain I see in Congo is not here, in the
all-consuming terror of families sleeping in bushes. It is not even in
the eyes of the man Oona and I see being casually, pointlessly beaten
to death by a mob on the road one moody afternoon, another unrecorded
Congolese write-off that we swiftly speed away from. No, it is the
women carrying more than their own body-weight in wood or coal or
sand, all day, every day. By every Congolese roadside, there are women
with ropes tearing into their foreheads as they bind a massive load
onto their backs. With so few horses, so few cars and so few roads,
starving women are used here as pack-horses, transporting anything
that needs to be moved on their backs for fifty pence a day. They are
given the quaint title of `porters'.
Francine Chacopawa is 30 years old but she looks much older, her faced
lined and cratered in a complex topography of grief and pain. Her
spine is curved, her skin is rough and broken, her hands are
calloused. When she laboriously, painfully puts down the wood she is
carrying, she has a red canyon in her forehead where the rope was,
rimmed with sores that weep from the rubbing. "This is the rope that
keeps my household alive," she says. It is the war that has reduced
her to this state. "Since the war started in Congo, you can't farm in
peace, you can't raise animals, and the children are starving, so I
prefer to die in this work… My husband cannot get a job since the
fighting began, so this is what I have to do. I leave at five o'clock
in the morning and get back at seven o'clock at night. I am worried my
children are running away to look for food, because we only get to eat
once a day and they are so hungry. When I get home, my husband gets
angry and asks why I have been away so long. We have suffered so much.
The children we bring into the world are forced to be porters as well.
We are the most unhappy people in the world."
She tells me the pack she is carrying weighs two hundred pounds, and I
write this off as understandable hyperbole. Then my translator and the
UN driver load her pack onto my back (with great difficulty). I
immediately fall to my knees. I stagger up and manage to stumble a few
feet before falling over again. I am almost crying in pain; my back
aches for weeks. This is Francine's life. She does not even stop on
Sundays. "How can I? We must eat," she says. Portering has made her
miscarry twice, and Francine says she has seen women die by the side
of the road, buckled under their loads. I ask her when she will stop
portering. She shrugs, and says nothing. Her eyes say, `When I die.'
The wood is heaved back onto her back, and she staggers away, the rope
rubbing again against her sores.
VI The head of state without a state.
Joseph Kabile is surrounded by crocodiles. Literally. We are standing
by the back wall of the White House, the slimline Presidential Palace
in Kinshasa, looking out on the rippling, reptile-infested Congo
River. His home behind us looks like a well-kept municipal library in
an American town, a world away from the psycho-kitsch of the Mobutu
era. The President's eyes have narrowed. "How long have you been here,
to think you can write about Congo?" he asks, unsmiling. I say I have
been here a fortnight. He nods slightly. "Then that's okay."
Kabile does not like talking to journalists. Indeed, he does not like
talking to anyone – he has conspicuously failed to turn up at his own
election rallies over the past few months. I have been smuggled in at
the end of his meeting with the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the
Great Lakes Region, a collection of decent British politicians who
have come to try to erode the worst humanitarian crisis in the world
by inches. "I want to see some quick wins [for the Congolese people]
from the Presidential election," he says, assuming he will win the
looming polls – the first in Congo since 1960. He then rattles off a
list of improvements he hopes to implement to prove that democracy
works – better water supplies, better schooling.
As he offers up these platitudes in absent English, his handsome face
is covered with a light sprinkling of stubble that seems to be greying
in the sun. He became President at the age of 29 when his father was
pinned down and executed in a failed coup attempt in 2001. At that
moment the reluctant son of the Big Man was thrust from a life of army
drills and watching martial arts and war movies to being in a charge
of the world's biggest war-zone. Neckless and nervous, he says his two
minutes' worth of stump speech now and then closes up. He signals to
his Versace-suited security guards that it is time for him to leave.
My five minutes of questions – more than any other journalist gets –
have been greeted with a polite stonewall of banality.
The White House has an odd feel of unreality. It is a hologram of
power, the simulacra of a functioning country. Kabila is in the
surreal position of being head of state without a state, President of
the Democratic Vacuum of Congo. He has no levers of power to pull. As
I discovered later in my journey, he has no army worthy of the name,
he has no police force, he cannot guard his own borders or build his
own schools. From the sealed calm of the Palace, I look over a wall
and see the real Congo walking past – people slumped against walls or
busy doing nothing or frantically fending off hunger any way they can.
The fantasy of a functioning country dies with his own brickwork.
Since his father died, Kabila has been trying to glue together a
nation from the shattered fragments. In 2002, he negotiated the Lusaka
Accords, in which the invading countries promised to remove their
armies. The global price of coltan had collapsed, so Rwanda's interest
was waning anyway. Besides, the withdrawing countries realised they
could suck the mineral marrow from Congo without the costly business
of occupation, simply by setting up Congolese militias as their
proxies on their way out the door. Kabila tried to out-bribe them by
offering these Congolese militia leaders by offering them a place at
the heart of government. That's why, of his four Vice Presidents,
three have their own private armies, even though they continue to
funnel minerals out to us. To watch over this `peace process', the UN
sent in 17,000 peace-keepers for a country the size of Western Europe.
At the core of Kabila's project to make Congo into one nation with one
government is brassage – the integration of the militias. At squalid
camps across the country, the militiamen who have been raping and
murdering are invited to hand in their weapons and join the new
national army. I head for Camp Saio, the camp outside Bukavu, where
men with Samuel L Jackson sunglasses and cheekbones that could cut
butter are milling and mulling as they wait for `reintegration'.
Places like this are the key to Congo's future. It success stands or
falls on whether the militiamen can be coaxed to come here and slowly
begin to build a state. Dr Adolphe Tumba, the head of the camp, takes
me trudging through the mud on a tour. It doesn't look like an army
camp. Chickens are pecking about, cabbages are growing on the side,
and children are waddling around with their starved little stomachs
jutting out. "In Congo, the militias take their family with them when
they go out to war," Dr Tumba says, "so they end up here too."
In the first room I see, there are nine stinking beds. Men are
sitting, rotting plaster covering their wounds. In the corner, there
is a soldier shivering in his bed, his face covered with the lesions
that come with advanced AIDS. He opens his eyes – they recoil, clearly
wounded by the light. They close again as he curls wearily into a
tight ball. I ask the men what life was like on the front-line. "We
ate. We had food there," they snap back. I ask again, not quite
understanding the answer. "We had food at the front-line. It was
batter. Why didn't you bring us food? Why did you come here without
something for us to eat?" I ask when they last ate. It was two days
ago. They have not received their $5-a-month wages for forty days, and
they are starving.
A UN source warned me, "The people in that camp are going out and
rampaging into the nearby villages. They do it for survival. They
steal to get by. Yesterday they killed a man, the day before they
killed a woman and some kids. It's all done by men in uniform coming
out of that camp." The pygmies I met live dangerously near here. Did
one of these men behead Chad? Joseph, a 22 year old, tells me he
joined up when he was a teenager because his village was attacked by
the Rwandans. "They killed my father, my grandfather and my little
sister. So I decided to join Mai-Mai [a Congolese militia]. I can't
count how many people I killed. I did it for six years."
His friends gather round, and some of them are more eager to brag
about their kill-rates. They remind me of kids on some estates I have
visited, bragging about their ASBOs. Are they telling the truth, or is
this teenage display? As they become more and more animated describing
their killing-sprees, as their eyes become wider and their stories
more vivid, our UN escort begins to panic and tells us we must leave.
"Quickly!" he calls.
As we drive away, I realise it is not enough that our greed for
resources started this war - it is vandalising any chance of bringing
it to an end. While these state-building camps can offer only
starvation and a sometimes-never $5 wage, UNICEF says the militias can
are offering the same men $60-a-month to carry on seizing and raping
and killing. They can afford it because they still control most of the
coltan, gold and diamond mines, and Western and Chinese companies are
still snapping up the sparklers they offer. So long as the militias
can continue to use our money to outbid the national government in
haggling for troops, there will never be a unified state in Congo, and
life will continue to be a live-action replay of Thomas Hobbes'
bleakest descriptions.
And yet, even the best case scenario – effective brassage, a unified
army, a coherent state – carries with it blood-drenched risks. What if
once Kabila gets control of the country, he morphs a Mobutu or a
Mugabe? Then all this nation-building will turn out to have been an
exercise in capacity-building for murderers. Who is this man with a
anxious gaze? A rogue source at the British Embassy who has high-level
dealings with the regime ponders over dinner, "There are essential two
theories about Kabila," he says. "The first is that he is a good man
surrounded by shits. The second is that he is one of the shits. Let's
assume the first is true – what difference does it make? He is
surrounded by Rumsfelds and Cheneys, friends of the father who would
kill him if he stepped out of line. There is a large group around him
whose financial life and even their impunity from charges in the Hague
depends on him staying in power. Would they allow him to lose power,
or even to share it too much? Really?"
At times, it seems Congo is lost in a fog of moral ambiguity.
Everybody agrees the state needs to be unified, and there seems to be
only one state on offer – Kabila's – given the near-certainty he will
win the election. But how savoury is that prospect? Is he personally
corrupt? I decide to seek out one of the few men who might know
definitively – Christophe Lutundula. He is a member of one of the
rarest species on earth, the heroic accountant. Three years ago he was
commissioned by the Congolese parliament to investigate the theft of
the country's resources, and he decided to do something unheard of – a
genuine investigation, running to the very top. He enters the room in
a baggy blue t-shirt, conspicuously free of the bling beloved by
Congolese politicians, with a price on his head. He has received a
string of death threats, but insists "I am not afraid because I have
done my work as I should – honestly."
Yet on the most difficult questions, he is – understandably – cagey.
Is Kabila corrupt? "It's a very sensitive question, obviously." He
pauses. "During the past few years, nobody in the government has
convinced me of their willingness to co-operate… The report was
carried out with great difficulty, because there was very little
co-operation and we didn't have access to all the documents. Not just
here in Congo – even in the UN and in Belgium we were denied access to
many documents." He will say that "the contracts signed by the state
are mostly to the disadvantage of the Congolese people." Perhaps this
is the most he can tell me and live – mouthy critics like the human
rights activist Pascal Kabungulu often end up peppered with bullets in
this city.
I head for Mbuji-Mayi, the diamond capital of the world, to see where
the money is going. The town is a fetid slum, with miners working all
day for companies they know nothing about for a few dollars a week.
Mamady Kouyate, the Guinean head of the UN mission here, says starkly,
"The mines are operated solely in foreign interests. Miba [the
government diamond company] is working exclusively in the interests of
President Kabila and his foreign friends, the Western multinationals.
I cannot name names but whoever is promoted in Miba has to do well
with people in power. When the war started, diamond revenues fuelled
and funded the war. But since the provisional government, I have no
idea where the money goes. It does not stay here."
Later, an aid agency head chastises the naivety of my questioning
about Kabila. "In this country, all you can ask about a politician is
- is this person corrupt and self-seeking and doesn't give a damn
about Congo, or is this person corrupt and self-seeking but wants
what's best for Congo too? Of course Kabila and his circle are
corrupt. If they weren't corrupt and self-seeking, they would have
fallen at the first hurdle. To have power in this country you must be
corrupt. It's a corrupt system." The best hope, it seems, is to drag
Congo up from being a broken stateless warzone where millions die to
being a bog-standard corrupt state. To the starving soldiers of Camp
Saio, even this sunken ambition seems optimistic.
VII Spiritual warfare.
The coven of witches is dancing and cackling in the water. They have a
hose-pipe and they are spraying each other's naked bodies, squealing
and laughing. One of them comes up to me, wearing a worn-out Barney
the dinosaur t-shirt, and splashes some water at my face. I am in a
children's home, Chez Mama Coco, an hour's drive from Kinshasa, and
the place is filled with starved witch-children who have been thrown
out by their parents for displaying signs of being under the influence
of Satan. Some have been burned and slashed, and some have been
mutilated. One of the workers introduces me to a child – they do not
know his name because he has not spoken since he arrived, but they
call him Fidel – and tugs down his trousers. Where his penis once was,
there is nothing but an angry red scab. "His mother cut it off during
the exorcism," he says.
This is another consequence of our war. Herve Cheuzeville, the
outgoing Head of Mission for Warchild, explains: "The idea of
withcraft has always existed in Congo, but it is very new to accuse
children of it. It never happened before the war. It is a result of
the terrible traumas of the past six years." In the past, Congolese
families would cope with starvation-level poverty by looking to their
extended families and wider communities. People would take in orphans
or surplus kids, and share scanty resources. But since the war, all
this has broken down, millions have been disoriented by a sudden shift
from the countryside to the relative safety of the cities, and people
can barely feed their own children. "All these factors have combined
to provide fertile ground for religious movements that say all your
problems are due to Satan possessing a child. People desperately want
a simple explanation, so they project all their stresses onto the
child," he says.
The Combat Spirituel church in Bukavu consists of an immense veranda
filled with benches, with a neat white building attached. These
churches have been pioneers of Congo's twenty-first century
witch-hunts, and when I arrive at their Sunday service, they greet me
with whoops and hallelujahs. The evangelical preacher at the podium
has a kind of Christian Pan's People dancing behind him, and he
exclaims, "We salute God by dancing!" The congregation contains over a
thousand people, and they look more like the crowd at a football match
than at a dreary Church of England ceremony. They blow whistles, jump
up and down, and dance wildly. The pastor insists I come up to tell
the crowd who I am, while the crowd sings and forms an immense
Conga-line. "Glory to Jesus! Jesus is great!" they cry in ecstasy as I
approach the podium. I awkwardly explain I am a journalist. "Praise
be!" they cry.
As I shuffle away from the platform, I am replaced by a man with a
miraculous story about how he was cured of AIDS through the power of
prayer – news that is greeted with more whistles and cheers. I am told
that if I want to talk witchcraft, however, I need to return late on
Thursday, when the purgings and exorcisms happen. On my return, a
woman is letting out hoarse yells about how Satan tried to hijack her
body, and I am taken by the "spiritual warfare co-ordinator", Papa
Enoch Boonga, into the little house to meet a 14 year-old witch.
The lights are switched off, and Papa Enoch produces a lantern that
lights his face and casts a long shadow. In his slow, rhythmic French,
he begins to tell me how "Satan is waging war on the Congolese people.
He comes to kill and hate. The answer to Satan's campaign against us
is spiritual combat." He quotes from the Book of Revelation – chapter
12, verse 7: "And there was war in heaven…. And that old serpent
called the devil was cast out, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole
world, he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out
with him."
"The devil fights differently in different places," he says. "In the
West, he uses nudism and pornography. Here he uses sorcery. Here, if
there's a divorce or people fall out of love, that's because Satan is
working through their child. Let me give you personal testimony from
my own family. My little sister married an American from the peace
corps and went to live over there. She had a child, but when the child
was six my sister got blood poisoning and died. I went to fetch the
girl and took her back to Kinshasa. God showed me in a dream that this
girl had been taken over and destroyed by Satan. So the next day I
went to her and said, `God has shown me who you are. You are in the
shadows.'"
It is impossible to interrupt him. This is a theatrical performance.
"She denied it at first, but after we all prayed for her she admitted
she had been given human flesh to eat by witches. That is how they
make you into one of them. She had travelled using peanut shells as a
plane and killed her mother. She even killed her grandmother back her
in Kinshasa, after flying here secretly, by giving her an invisible
injection that caused angina. So we took the child and said, `It is
not you but Satan who committed these crimes.' We told her to renounce
Satan and his network of witches. She vomited out the human flesh and
now she is not a witch any more."
That is his cue to drag out Clarice, a 14-year-old witch. She is a
small girl wrapped in a big woollen cardigan. In a low, blank rote,
her eyes cast down, she says. "I was taught sorcery when I was twelve
years old. My grandmother turned me into a witch by giving me a donut
to eat." Enoch looks at me triumphantly. "This is how it works! They
give evil food!" He takes over from Clarice's halting speech. "Then
the grandmother came at night in spiritual form and said, `I gave you
the donut to eat, now you must give me your little sister to eat.' She
was so frightened she said, `Okay, okay', and the next day her little
sister fell ill and died. Then her grandmother demanded she break the
leg of her mother, so when he mother was out gathering wood, she fell
and broke her leg. Now the girl started to feel the power of sorcery
and began to transform herself into a dog or a cat."
I keep looking at Clarice in disbelief, but then I realise she thinks
I am glaring in condemnation and I look away. As Enoch speaks, the
chanting behind us from the main service is getting louder and louder
– "Out Satan, out!" hundreds of people cry, clawing at invisible
demons in the air. He continues, "Her father is an artisinal miner and
he stopped being able to find anything because of her sorcery. They
fell into poverty." I have to interrupt. I ask Clarice, softly, do you
really think it is your fault your little sister died? "Yes," she
says. Her eyes remain fixed on the floor. "It was actually her parents
who realised she was a witch," Enoch says. "They were very worried
about their lives going bad, and they went to church and prayed and
God told them what the problem was. People come to us with all sorts
of problems and we help them to understand what is causing them
through days of prayer." He says they conducted an exorcism of
Clarice, and, yes, it was tough. "When you cast Satan out, you almost
destroy the person, but they come back with Jesus Christ in their heart."
It is not only the physical landscape of Congo that lies in ruins. The
psychological landscape has been trashed, its people left half-crazed.
It is not only in the eyes of Clarice and Enoch that I see this. In a
hotel by Lake Kivu, I meet up with Colonel Chimanuka Tchikas, 42, the
former commander of the Mai-Mai. He is a short man with a puckered
face and an outsized military jacket that exaggerates his shortness.
At first glance, his Mai-Mai seem like the most defensible of the
Congolese militias. They rose up from among the Congolese people
spontaneously during the invasions to act as an impromptu defence
force to repel the foreign armies. "We had no army, so we became the
army", Tchikas says. But the Mai-Mai quickly descended into a hoarde
of rapists and civilian-killers, just as guilty of war crimes and
resource-theft as the other sides.
But Tchikas waves this complaint away. "Most people don't know who the
Mai-Mai really are. Our problem is that have had nobody doing our PR.
You will never hear that the Mai-Mai attacked another region. It does
not happen. We are a defence force, not an attack force." Then he
begins to casually confesses to war crimes. "When we captured
soldiers, sometimes we would force them to join our army," he says,
sipping beer. "First we would torture them, then we would put them in
wooden cells." He then notes that "the best soldiers are children.
They have a lot of energy, a lot of courage, and they have faith. They
have not been distracted by life. We never looked at the ages [of
recruits]. We looked at their motivation to join the Mai Mai. If a
child could run, then we would not reject him." A ten year old? "Yes,
if he could run." Younger? "There was no age barrier."
Tchikas explains he is immortal. "Once you join the Mai-Mai and go
through the secret Mai-Mai initiation rituals, then you have special
powers. The enemy cannot kill me. If you shoot a gun at me, even at
point blank range, the bullets will turn into water, or I will turn
into a tree." Literally into a tree? "Yes," he says, as if it is
obvious. But what about all the Mai-Mai who died in the war? "Wherever
people died, it was because they did not follow the Mai-Mai rules.
Don't steal, don't rape, don't kill an innocent, don't go into the
field of battle with malevolent feelings for a comrade. If you do any
of those things you lose your Mai-Mai powers and they can kill you. It
is your own fault. Somebody who was faithful to the rules would never,
never fall. If I raped this woman here –" he jabs a finger at my
translator – "I would lose my powers."
The invasion did not only encourage the Mai-Mai to turn to these
antediluvian ideas. It bred in them a near-genocidal racism against
the "enemies within" – the Congolese tribes who they declare are not
"really" Congolese. Tchikas spits and stutters with rage at the
Congolese minorities who he declares to be secretly, essentially
Rwandan, particularly the Banya-Mlenenge who live near the border.
"Those people who came [to Congo since 1960] must accept they are
strangers in this country." Even if they were born here? "Yes. The
Mai-Mai cannot accept foreigners stealing Congo. The Banya-Mlenge do
not accept Congolese culture. They only accept Rwanda. They
collaborated with the Rwandans when they came." There are real fears
that this renewed and toxic tribalism will spiral into ethnic
cleansing after the elections, or whenever the UN peacekeeping mission
begins to be scaled down.
But Tchikas is through with me. He strides away, jabbering into his
mobile, back to a world where men turn into trees, bullets into water,
and children into witches.
VII – Packing out the Albert Hall.
The last time there was a holocaust in Congo, British and American
people reacted with a great national revulsion. Books like Arthur
Conan Doyle's `The Crime of the Congo' topped the best-seller lists,
millions petitioned parliament to act, and the Royal Albert Hall was
packed out with mass meetings detailing the Congo's long nightmare. A
century on, the words and analyses of that great campaign still ring
true. Joseph Conrad called it "the vilest scramble for loot that has
ever disfigured the human conscience" – words that would make a
perfect introduction to the reports of the UN Panel of Experts now.
But today, these four million people have died in the dark, unnoticed
and unmourned. The generations living in the West today have said
nothing while the country has been reduced to near-Leopoldian levels
of desperation by the scramble for loot, conducted on our behalf and
for our benefit. Average life expectancy in Congo is now 43 and
falling. I did not see any elderly people on my journey; they do not
exist. In a country where the war is laughably referred to as "winding
down", a World Trade Centre-full of people is butchered every two
days, and in the lost rural areas I could not reach, bubonic plague
has made a triumphant come-back. A health minister says in despair, "I
have been told by the UN to prepare a plan for avian flu. I had to
write back and say I am powerless to deal with the plague, so what am
I supposed to do about chickens?"
This war was launched by nations that sensed – rightly – that our
desire for coltan and diamonds and gold far outweighed our concern for
the lives of black people. They knew that we would keep on buying,
long after the UN had told us time and again that people were dying to
provide our mobiles and games consoles and a girl's best friend.
Today, we still buy, and the British government – along with the rest
of the democratic world – obstructs any attempt to introduce legally
enforceable regulations to stop corporations trading in Congolese
blood. They ignore the UN's warnings that "without the wealth
generated by the illegal exploitation of natural resources arms cannot
be bought, hence the conflict cannot be perpetuated" and insist that
voluntary regulations – and asking corporations to be nice to Africans
– is "the most effective route." Conrad warned that "the conquest of
the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a
different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not
a pretty thing when you look into it too much." So we have chosen not
to see.
It is only on my last day in Kinshasa, walking among the burned-out
shells of buildings, that I realise what Congo reminds me of. In the
movies from my 1980s childhood imagining what the world would be like
after a nuclear winter, people were left to wander across a burned
landscape, scavenging for the bare necessities of life. Water was
contaminated. Food was sparse. Death was everywhere and inexplicable.
Children suffered from brain damage en masse because of the
malnutrition. Order was a memory, and the men with the biggest AK-47s
ruled and raped. This is Congo, 2006.
In Bukavu, a 29-year-old human rights campaigner called Bertrand
Bisimwa summarised his country's situation for me with cruel
concision. "Since the nineteenth century, when the world looks at
Congo it sees a pile of riches with some black people inconveniently
sitting on top of them. They eradicate the Congolese people so they
can possess the mines and resources. They destroy us because we are an
inconvenience." As he speaks, I picture the raped women with bullets
burying through their intestines and try to weigh them against the
piles of blood-soaked electronic goods sitting beneath my Christmas
tree with their little chunks of Congolese metal whirring inside.
Bertrand smiles and says, "Tell me – who are the savages? Us, or you?"
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
We can't fix anything unless we know there is a problem...
We can't prevent the carnage above unless we are aware it's happening...
We can't make a difference if we're kept in the dark...
Obviously - the Dogs of Corruption don't care to inform We, The People...
Therefore - WE, The People must inform ourselves...
We should be informed that our purchases can cost the lives of an entire population, enslaved for a product most of us have never heard of, let alone imagine that we use in our everyday lives... can our rejected old products be recycled - can the VALUABLE COMMODITIES be reclaimed and reused and if they can be, why aren't we told why they SHOULD BE?
We, The People have the ultimate right and choice to determine what is and is not acceptable to our futures...
Everytime you lift that cell phone to your ear, think of the woman that may have had her hands chopped off because she couldn't produce enough of the 'superior product' that makes your cell phone 'more effective'...
Each time you flick that TV on with that remote - just check your kids haven't been too beaten up in their days work in the Western World and then spare a thought for the millions who are driven by slavery everyday so you don't have to get up to change the channel on your Television that you couldn't watch if it wasn't for the blood, sweat and death of the People of the Congo...
And while you're thinking about how that can be justified, maybe forward this article to everyone you know and ask if they know whether you can all recycle the some 50 000 000 Cell phones that go to dump sites a year... a few of those 'out of date computers' sitting in the back of the closet... and maybe we could show a little more respect for those remote controls that can be 'replaced if lost'...
http://tinyurl.com/l89m2bin66 - 11. Jun, 00:09
