Global Policy Forum

War Still Shackles Africa's Southern Giant

By Stephanie Nolen

The cathedral rises like a gleaming apparition from the remains of the town of Kasongo. It was built a century ago in the Belgian colonial era, and it stands miraculously unscathed above the city of 50,000, a place where almost everything else has been devoured in the war. Vines grow through the carcasses of the trucks at the rice factory that was once Kasongo's main employer. The roofs and walls of the old stone houses are missing. A dugout log paddled by avaricious boys has replaced the ferry that once shuttled across the nearby Congo River.

In the shadow of the cathedral, Monsignor Simon-Pierre Iyananio surveyed the damage. "The war did not set us back six years," the young priest said of the massive conflict that burned in Congo from 1996 until last year. "It set us back 50." Father Iyananio travels between parishes on a motorbike, and he knows what is out there. Many people live in the forest, naked and feral, having lost everything. Only in the past few months have they begun to emerge from the jungle.

Africa's richest and most benighted country is caught in a perilous middle, somewhere between war and peace. The United Nations Security Council holds emergency meetings on the crisis in Darfur and Prime Minister Paul Martin discusses Ivory Coast at a meeting of the Francophonie, but Congo is on no one's agenda, even as it tries to edge out of a brutal war that continues to dwarf the others. A peace deal signed 18 months ago in South Africa has lasted longer than even the optimists predicted, but it is a uniquely Congolese sort of peace -- an agreement that has warlords sharing power and allows low-level fighting to continue among no less than 20 armed groups all over the vast country's east. Under this deal, young president Joseph Kabila had to share power with four vice-presidents (two of them the leaders of the largest forces in the war) and 40 government ministries were divvied up among the warlords. That ended the worst of the fighting, which claimed about four million lives, the most in any conflict since the Second World War. But the peace deal also calls for national elections to be held in June, 2005.

"There must, must be elections here," Father Iyananio said. "This government has no legitimacy." It is a sentiment expressed all over Congo -- the people will not tolerate the transitional government for a single day past next June. But Father Iyananio is also quick to acknowledge that the idea of Congolese elections is preposterous. The country has no national police force and there is still fighting in large parts of the east. Outside the three main cities, there is no telephone service, no electricity, no transportation links. There are no news media outside the main cities. There has not been a census in decades and there is no voter registration list. A paralyzed parliament has not passed a constitution. Eighteen months into a transitional process, the authority of the central government does not extend more than a few hundred kilometres from the capital, Kinshasa, and priests have been tasked with the job of civic education -- there has not been a vote here in three generations.

A few kilometres from the parish office, regional deputy administrator Matongo Ali scoffed at the idea of countrywide voting. "It's a dream to think of elections here in eight months. We couldn't be ready without a magic wand. We don't even have a road out of this town," he said, adding sternly: "If they try to do this, there could be violence." Mr. Ali is a member of the Rally for Congolese Democracy-Goma, the Rwandan-backed rebel group that seized much of the country during the war. The movement still controls this town. When Mr. Ali speaks of potential electoral violence, it is an ominous harbinger. "The risk is, if they get a result they don't like, that they fight," said a Western diplomat in Kinshasa. "The government really only functions for a very small part of the country, and other places established their own systems in the last five years. Those won't go away quietly."

Congo's transition is supported by a United Nations peacekeeping mission that numbers 10,800 troops in a country the size of Western Europe. By comparison, there are 40,000 peacekeeping troops in the Serbian province of Kosovo. In September, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked for 24,000 more "blue helmets" for Congo, at a cost of $1-billion (U.S.). But the Security Council agreed to send only 5,000. Mr. Annan warned that the mission's mandate "raised expectations that the mission will 'enforce' peace throughout the country. However, there is a wide gap between such expectations and capacity to deliver on them." If anything, that was an understatement. UN troops in Congo keep to their garrison towns. They cannot fly at night. They cannot operate in the jungle, where the militias are based. They are far too few to attempt to control the borders, over which arms and combatants move freely. The bulk of the troops are from Uruguay, Nigeria and India and speak no French.

Off the record, senior officers refer to the UN presence in the east as "a joke." And yet the Security Council couldn't muster up more than a token reinforcement. "There are so many demands on international peacekeeping resources. And Congo is seen as a no-hope story," said the Western diplomat, who represents a key donor country. "If you're going to put your money somewhere, you want it to be somewhere that works. Who would logically throw more money into this place?" The international community, including Canada, has thrown a fair bit, pledging a total of $2.5-billion (U.S.) in aid to the new government. But the kleptocratic spirit that gripped this country in the 32-year reign of Mobutu Sese Seko lives on, and funds for rebuilding are swallowed up in ministries -- a fact some donors accept as the necessary cost to stop the fighting.

"We hear there has been all this aid but we haven't seen any of it -- it goes right into their pockets," Father Iyananio said in Kasongo, where the local doctors and nurses have not been paid in 14 years, no roads have been paved and no schools rebuilt, except those constructed by the church. This accusation is confirmed by the country's chief auditor, Mabi Mulumba. In the first paragraph of his national audit this year, he wrote: "The management of financial accounts and public enterprise is, with a few rare exceptions, riddled with flagrant irregularities. The great majority, more than 88 per cent, of public enterprises . . . [are] mismanaged." "The paradox is that the people in charge are warlords. These people who are ministers, it's the first job they've held in their lives," Mr. Mulumba said in an interview in Kinshasa. "They're not managers -- they're predators."

Despite the blatant thievery, the country managed to post 3-per-cent economic growth last year, after more than a decade of contraction at an annual rate of about 10 per cent. Inflation was 511 per cent three years ago; now it's 8 per cent. The country has boosted its diamond exports to $600-million (U.S.) last year. SNC-Lavalin Inc. is back in the country, looking to restart a massive Congolese dam project that could one day supply power to all of southern Africa. And major mining companies have returned, lured by a country that still has one of the world's richest stores of minerals. Mike Skead, exploration manager for Canada's Banro Corp., explained that it's simply a matter of making sure you get the approval of all the militias when you prospect for gold.

Yet the average person here lives on less than 30 cents a day, and fewer than 30 per cent of Congolese have access to any basic health care. One in five children dies before his or her fifth birthday. In a country of plentiful rain and rich soil, one in three youngsters in the east is malnourished. There are 3.4 million internally displaced people. The quickest way to end the poverty would be to create jobs. But those require roads, and no donors want to build them, because roads are used by militaries -- one industry where there is no shortage. The UN has disarmed a few thousand of an estimated 400,000 fighters, but the jungles are still full of militia fighters. About 100,000 are supposed to become part of the national army, but that hasn't happened, in part because they, like all other state employees, are not paid.

Amid all this, Father Iyananio manages to hold on to a certain optimism. "This country can't go any lower," he said. "We're at the bottom."

This is the second in a four-part series on the Congolese conflict. Next: The Voice of the People

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