Global Policy Forum

By James Traub*

In the last days of 1962, United Nations peacekeepers under the command of Maj. Gen. Dewan Prem Chand of India launched an offensive, rakishly titled Operation Grand Slam, against the secessionist army of Moise Tshombe in the Congolese province of Katanga. Within days, Chand's jet bombers and fighters had smashed the Katangese Air Force, and his men had overrun the rebel strongholds. Tshombe surrendered, and his rebellion, which was among the things that had kept Congo in a state of continual chaos after independence in 1960, largely collapsed. The U.N. remained in Congo for another 18 months. When the troops withdrew, Secretary General U Thant explained that ''the United Nations cannot permanently protect the Congo or any other country from the internal tensions and disturbances created by its own organic growth toward unity and nationhood.''

Forty-one years later, it is safe to say that while Thant may have been brutally honest about the U.N.'s limitations, he was unduly optimistic about Congo's prospects. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, to use its current and sadly self-mocking name, is on life support, attended around the clock by aid organizations, international bankers, diplomats and, above all, by a vast U.N. civilian and military operation costing $1 billion a year. Congo has in many ways retrogressed since 1960: few Congolese have access to roads, electricity, clean water, medical care or almost any other public services; Congo is a state in name only. Of course, the U.N. doesn't fight wars these days, but even if it did, Congo's problems can no longer be solved by jet fighters. The real problem, of course, is that tangle of ''internal tensions and disturbances,'' which in a happier day seemed like a transitory stage of nationhood.

There is a welcome sense of possibility, even of optimism, about much of Africa just now. At the Gleneagles summit of the world's leading economic powers, the G-8, to be held later this week in Scotland, we may well be hearing a great deal about promising African countries like Ghana or Malawi, which need only timely and well-directed help from the West to prosper. It is a persuasive argument, and an urgent one. But it is also true that great swaths of the continent are occupied by countries -- Sudan, Sierra Leone, Burundi and, not least, Congo -- that, left to their own devices, are very likely to eat themselves up, and their neighbors as well. The international community has no choice but to intervene in these places. While we may know how to stand up to warlords and militias, even if the U.N. has trouble mustering the force needed to do the job, we don't really know what it means to ''intervene'' against a political culture that is corrupt, mendacious and self-perpetuating. This is a pathology for which the U.N., and the international community, will be avidly seeking a cure for many years to come.

In early May, I flew to South Kivu, an eastern province of Congo that borders Rwanda, in order to spend time with the Pakistani peacekeepers who patrol the area. South Kivu is one of the most heartbreaking regions of what is surely one of the world's most ill-starred nations. It is a startlingly lovely spot, more Hemingway than Conrad: green hills fading into distant, dark ridges; exceptionally well-fed cows grazing on the upper slopes; fields planted with corn, beans, cassava and bananas. South Kivu has abundant water and timber, gold and diamonds, copper and coltan (the mineral from which cellphone chips are made). And yet for all that -- in part because of all that -- the fundamental conditions of life are pitiful. As I was bouncing up a steep, rutted road, a soldier nudged me in the ribs and said, ''Look, an ambulance.'' And there, momentarily stopped on the side of the road, were four weary men bearing on their shoulders a wooden cradle that held a woman wrapped in a thin blanket. It would be hours before they reached the nearest clinic, which was unlikely to have any medicine.

South Kivu was a victim of the same neglect that almost every part of Congo suffered during the 32-year kleptocracy of Mobutu Sese Seko. But the region has endured an extra measure of suffering owing to its proximity to Rwanda. In 1994, thousands of Rwandan Hutu génocidaires fled across the border before the advancing Tutsi forces, settling in the rural areas of South and North Kivu and living off smuggling, ''taxes'' on local markets, kidnapping and plunder. Starting in late 1966, the Rwandan Army poured over the border and massacred its Hutu adversaries as well as thousands of civilians. After the Hutu threat had been suppressed, the Rwandan Army remained in the Kivus, turning much of eastern Congo into an economic protectorate. And when the Rwandan troops finally left under international pressure, the 10,000 to 15,000 remaining members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or F.D.L.R., as the Hutu militia called themselves, returned to their brutal exactions.

U.N. peacekeepers returned to Congo in 2000. Two years earlier, a savage civil war, which involved Congo's neighbors as well as myriad militia groups, had convulsed the entire Great Lakes region. The Security Council agreed to send 5,500 peacekeepers to enforce a very shaky cease-fire. It was a preposterously small number to clamp a lid on so immense a caldron -- the Kivus alone are three times as big as Sierra Leone, where the U.N. had more than twice the number of troops -- and I recall senior officials at the time grimly predicting that the U.N. Mission in Congo, known as Monuc after its French name, would disappear into the Congolese vastness and maybe take the whole peacekeeping enterprise with it. And their fears were soon validated. Peacekeepers were overwhelmed and humiliated on several occasions, most notoriously in Bunia, the chief city of the northeastern region of Ituri, in 2003. There, a small detachment of Uruguayan guards, who had been sent to protect the U.N. mission in the midst of a savage battle between rival militias, remained inside the U.N. compound while hundreds of civilians were murdered.

In May and June 2004, mutinous government troops affiliated with, and quite possibly aided by, the Rwandan government launched attacks on Bukavu, the capital of South Kivu. The city, like Bunia, was protected by poorly trained and equipped Uruguayan peacekeepers. Ordered to take up blocking positions, the Uruguayans instead surrendered the airport and allowed the rebels to take the city, where they indulged in rape, pillage and murder. The Uruguayans protected the hundreds of citizens who took shelter in their compound but refused to venture outside to halt the mayhem. A scathing report by a unit of the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations blamed the civilian leadership of the mission no less than the peacekeepers themselves. William Lacy Swing, the veteran American diplomat who heads the U.N. mission in Congo, personally threatened to take military action if the rebels attacked the airport. But ultimately nothing was done.

The people of South Kivu loathed the Uruguayans, and thus the U.N. itself. When U.N. vehicles drove around Bukavu, local people glared at them and drew fingers across their throats. ''The Uruguayans didn't come for peacekeeping,'' as one Bukavan told me. ''They came for tourism.'' And that very much included sexual tourism. The Uruguayans were notorious for paying villagers -- including children -- for sex. But in this they were scarcely distinctive; U.N. investigations, which began only in the wake of news reports, found numerous instances of sexual abuse, including child prostitution, rape, the exchange of food for sex and other forms of exploitation, among both peacekeepers and civilian employees in Congo. The mission seemed to be a fiasco at every level.

The fall of Bukavu recalled in miniature the most sickening chapters of U.N. peacekeeping, including the slaughter in Srebrenica; indeed, the whole mission, with its failure to come to grips with a chaotic and brutal environment, felt very much like Bosnia redux. But here there was no NATO to save the U.N. with a bombing campaign. Following a request from Secretary General Kofi Annan, the Security Council agreed last fall to add 5,900 troops, principally in the form of new ''Kivu brigades,'' and to give them a stronger mandate. In the Kivus, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations was able to replace a patchwork of national contingents of varying degrees of competence and enthusiasm with brigades of Indians and Pakistanis, among the most professional armies available to the U.N. Early this year, the Uruguayans gave way to a 3,000-man Pakistani brigade.

The area I was driving up to, Walungu, had been terrorized by the F.D.L.R. with almost complete impunity despite the presence of a Uruguayan contingent. At the local peacekeeping headquarters, an island of immaculate landscaping amid dusty squalor, I was greeted by Gen. Shujaat Ali Khan, the new brigade commander. Shujaat, a bluff, garrulous character with a thick black mustache set in a round, pudgy face, gave the impression that, nationality aside, he would have been quite happy serving 40-odd years ago under Dewan Prem Chand. He bridled at the restrictive rules of engagement that have governed peacekeeping ever since the first Congo venture, which, despite its eventual success, provoked a widespread backlash against war-fighting by the U.N. ''We are not permitted to fly the attack helicopters at night,'' he complained. ''We cannot fly with the doors open and so on.'' He could not just go and shoot bad guys.

Shujaat was prepared to forcibly disarm the F.D.L.R., but the Security Council resolution that governed Monuc would not permit that. He had to leave disarmament to the Congolese government troops in the area, and that would be a very unequal fight. The F.D.L.R. was a highly disciplined army, while the Congolese Army was barely a fighting force. The troops who had initially been assigned to work with the Pakistanis had instead devoted themselves to plunder, frequently in collaboration with the F.D.L.R. Shujaat had reached a deal with the regional commander in which his men would transport all 2,200 soldiers out of the area in exchange for other government troops actually willing to fight. ''Now,'' he said, ''it is as per our desire.''

For all his bluster, Shujaat understood that his job was not to attack the F.D.L.R. troops but to suppress their brigandage so that life could return to something like normal. He appeared to be succeeding. Since the Pakistanis had arrived, the population of a camp in Walungu for ''internally displaced people'' had dwindled from 2,500 to 800. The ultimate goal was to make life so uncomfortable for the Hutu rebels that they would go back home (though it was plain that the hard core of génocidaires would never leave without a fight). Here, too, the situation was improving: At the end of March, in a major breakthrough, the F.D.L.R.'s political arm had pledged to end its armed struggle against the Rwandan government and to return home as long as its members were guaranteed ''political space.'' Paul Kagame, the Rwandan president, had promised them a safe homecoming though not the political space, a commodity almost unknown in Rwanda. Shujaat, a worrier as well as a blunt realist, found the whole enterprise somewhat doubtful. ''These fellows are having an excellent life raping the women and so forth,'' he told me. ''Why should they go back and go to prison?''

Later that afternoon, I drove out with a squad of soldiers in open transports with machine-gun mounts. We stopped at a plateau ringed by steep green hills. Here the men would stay for the next 12 hours: if word of an attack came from any of the government soldiers they had posted in the local villages, they would bounce down the rutted lanes and confront the rebels with gunfire if necessary. Maj. Mohammed Younis, the commanding officer, pointed out the local villages along the ridge lines and said, ''When we first began, in late March, we had three to four incidents every week.'' An F..D.L.R. raiding party would wait until nightfall and then attack a village, stealing food and raping women; they frequently kidnapped villagers, took them back to the forest and threatened to kill them if relatives didn't pay ransoms. But Operation Night Flash, as the Pakistanis called their nocturnal vigil, had at least temporarily closed down the crime wave. Younis said that there hadn't been an incident for close to a week.

As an almost impenetrable fog rolled in, we drove down to the village of Kanyola and stopped in a plaza before the parish church. A group of villagers materialized; one of them stepped forward to say that they had just found the bodies of two victims of a notorious F.D.L.R. kidnapping. Would we like to see them? Several minutes later, an old woman came trudging up the dirt lane from the village, bearing what appeared to be a large child on her back. When she drew closer, we could see that the child was in fact a gray-haired man. The woman, who said she was 65, had the stony mien of the endlessly suffering; only when invited to do so did she rest the corpse on the tailgate of one of our vehicles. The man, she said, was her husband. He and seven others had been kidnapped three weeks earlier. She had paid, he had been released and then he had died from natural causes on the way home; she had stumbled across his corpse. The man standing silently next to her, with a bullet wound in his arm, was her husband's brother, who had avoided capture in the same incident. Having told her tale, she bent over double in order to yank her husband's corpse onto her back, staggered for a moment, righted herself and then stoically bore her burden to the steps of the church.

Nothing else happened that night. Like a modern police force, the Pakistanis seemed to have reduced the crime rate by flooding the bad neighborhoods. And it wasn't only in South Kivu that peacekeepers had taken the fight to the enemy. In the Ituri region, scene of the most humiliating of Monuc's failures to protect civilians, peacekeepers in armored personnel carriers had conducted ''cordon and search'' operations that had led to the disarming of 12,000 of the estimated 15,000 militia members in the area. Violence continued both in Ituri and in South Kivu, but it was no longer apt to lead to another war or to derail the peace process. In the end, that was all peacekeeping could do. The rest was politics. And politics, it turned out, was much the harder part.

Congo's great problem is the same one that plagues so many African countries -- poor governance. But this technocratic term scarcely does justice to the self-perpetuating machine of immiseration that one Congolese leader after another has operated for over a century. King Leopold II of Belgium put the mechanism in motion in the 1880's when he reduced the tribes of the region to so many employees of companies devoted to sucking up Congo's treasures, principally ivory and rubber. The Belgians ultimately bequeathed the country a decent infrastructure, though they left it ludicrously unprepared for self-government. (At independence, none of Congo's 14 million citizens -- zero -- had university degrees in law, medicine or engineering.) Five years after independence, Mobutu toppled Congo's only elected president in a coup and instituted a home-grown version of Leopold's rapacity. Mobutu stole billions over the years, while the roads and hospitals and schools the Belgians had left behind disintegrated into the bush. Unlike the Belgian king, Mobutu lavished Congo's bounty on his collaborators, who frequently left a presidential audience with $5,000 or $10,000 in their pockets. Kabuya Lumuna, a former World Bank consultant who served as Mobutu's spokesman and deputy chief of cabinet in the last years, said: ''Mobutu created an image for the Congolese people that enrichment through the state was normal practice. It is normal for a person to say: 'I have finished my studies. If I can't get a government post, I will live my entire life in poverty.''' If the purpose of the state is to organize plunder, then a functioning civil service -- or for that matter, a private sector -- only makes the job harder. What Congo lacks is thus not only an effective apparatus -- customs officials, tax collectors, policemen -- but also a legitimate notion of politics. Something so deep-seated is almost by definition impossible for outsiders to import, yet a legitimate politics is unlikely to arise on its own, because the rewards of corruption are simply too lavish.

In 1997, Mobutu was overthrown by a guerrilla army originating in Katanga. The commander, Laurent Kabila, proved to be every bit as corrupt and brutal as Mobutu but lacked Mobutu's spirit of regal largess. And he was reckless: having gained the indispensable support of Rwanda as well as Uganda, he then shut them out of power. Kabila's former allies turned against him and were all too happy to support, and control, a Congolese militia force. What began as a war in the east in 1998 swelled into a Hobbesian war of all against all. Militias, pro- and antigovernment, rose up across the country. Angola and Zimbabwe entered on Kabila's side; whatever their strategic calculations, Congo's neighbors knew they could exploit the chaos to bite off their own chunk of the country's precious resources. It was civil war as mass plunder. Millions of peasants were forced to flee their villages, leading to as many as four million deaths, chiefly from malnourishment and disease. Kabila was murdered by one of his own bodyguards in 2001, and the Katangese entourage who had come to power replaced him with one of his sons, Joseph, then 29, a feckless character who had worked as a cabdriver in Tanzania and was considered acceptable to the outside world.

That outside world has not allowed the machinery of misery to simply grind on, as it would have until quite recently. In early 2003, after various truces had been signed and violated and hostilities had finally tapered off, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa coaxed the combatants into forming a new government. Kabila's party, the People's Party for Reconstruction and Democracy, or P.P.R.D., would hold the presidency while vice presidencies and a portion of national and provincial offices would be parceled out among the major opposition forces, including the Congolese Rally for Democracy, or R.C.D., a party from the east essentially controlled by Rwanda; the Mayi-Mayi, an amorphous militia that had fought the R.C.D; and a party from the north organized by a wealthy businessman. The men who had provoked Congo's unspeakable civil war were thus given an opportunity to jockey for a share of its spoils. Through what is widely described as an adroit combination of horse trading and bribery, the P.P.R.D. succeeded in excluding Congo's one legitimate political party, which had formed in opposition to Mobutu, and in including two essentially compliant groups among the ''opposition'' parties.

The most unusual feature of Congo's power-sharing arrangement is that the warlords agreed to make diplomats from the major-donor countries as well as important African neighbors ''co-responsible'' for the transition, which is to say that outsiders would have the power to impede the inevitable attempts to corrupt the process. And just as the tribal militias and the F.D.L.R. in the east keep challenging the peacekeepers and forcing them to take a tougher line, so have the members of the transitional government confronted their diplomatic minders. Political failure has been, in fact, directly responsible for much of the continued violence and disorder. The parties to the power-sharing agreement had pledged to integrate their militias into a new national army. But since none of these parties had any real political base, the militias were their sole guarantee of power. And so army units, whatever their new name, tended to remain loyal to their old masters and prone to fighting one another -- as they had in Bukavu in 2004 -- rather than any supposedly common enemy. And since most of the $8 million a month that international donors gave the government to pay its soldiers disappeared in transit, the troops had few means of survival save predation, which in any case they were quite accustomed to from the civil-war period. William Swing, the American head of the U.N. mission, assured me that the chief figures in the government ''recognize this, and they want to help.'' Others I spoke to took the view that it was precisely such heightened opportunities for graft that had lured the warlords into the government in the first place.

The U.N., which holds a nonvoting position on the international committee supporting the process, exercises substantial influence over Congolese affairs owing to its size, the reach of its mission and its impartial status. And Swing has played a crucial role in reassuring foreign capitals that Congo is on the right track. He is a great believer in ''the process,'' for which the U.N. provides technical expertise and political guidance. ''Of all the peacekeeping transitions in Africa,'' he told me in his big office in the U.N. compound in Kinshasa, ''I don't know of any that's going better than this one.'' Swing is a classically optimistic American abroad, a calm veteran of innumerable African upheavals who has stayed in improbably wonderful trim despite his 70 years. His optimism, however, can feel dangerously like nonchalance. U.N. officials tried to force him out of office after his failure in Bukavu and his sluggish response to the sexual-abuse scandal, but after he mounted a campaign in Washington, the Bush administration pressured told Kofi Annan to keep him. And with a mild public chastisement, he was retained. Peacekeeping officials in New York fear that Swing's upbeat salesmanship sends the worst possible message to the principal actors. ''My feeling,'' says an official who works with Monuc and thus declined to speak for attribution, ''is that we're spending a billion dollars, these people are a bunch of crooks and they're stealing the country blind. We have a responsibility to be pushy.''

The question of pushiness has dogged the U.N. and its partners, who seem to shuffle back and forth over some imaginary line of acceptable intervention. When I arrived in Kinshasa in early May, a major crisis was brewing over the constitution. A committee of foreign and Congolese experts had drafted a constitution and submitted it to Parliament, but legislators -- all of them appointed to their posts by the various warlords -- kept changing the document to transfer more and more power to the office of the president, until the constitution had become a virtual blueprint for dictatorship. I had been told repeatedly that Kabila's party, the P.P.R.D., had bribed legislators to, in effect, surrender their own powers. When I met with Azarias Ruberwa, one of the opposition leaders and easily the most highly regarded of the four vice presidents, he said, ''The corruption in our country has become so pervasive that these legislators were paid $500 to change their votes -- not $5,000, $500.'' Ruberwa was outraged not so much at the sale of votes as at the willingness to subvert the nation for peanuts.

The U.N. was then gearing up for a staggeringly expensive and complex national election process, and the prospect of collaborating in what looked like constitutionally sanctioned Mobutuism appalled a number of officials. ''We could spend several hundred million to elect a dictator,'' said Ross Mountain, Monuc's deputy special representative. ''Normally you can get a dictator cheaper than that.'' But diplomats in Kinshasa made no attempt to block the process. Jean-Marie Guehenno, the head of U.N. peacekeeping, went to the Security Council in late April to alert it to this looming catastrophe, but he was firmly rebuffed. The nearly unanimous view was that the Congolese should be free to write their own constitution; it was a matter of sovereignty. And there it would have rested had not Guehenno, deeply alarmed, immediately spoken to senior diplomatic officials in Europe. A few days later, Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, came to Congo to personally deliver the message that the constitution was unacceptable. Diplomats in Kinshasa bestirred themselves at the 11th hour to drive home the same point. Kabila, who knows that he cannot survive without international support, finally relented, and on May 13 Parliament adopted a new, more democratic Constitution.

The transition process has been agonizingly protracted. As originally envisioned, the election was to be held no later than June 30, but thanks to endless dithering, it probably won't be held before some time next year. Another opposition leader, Mbusa Nyamwisi, insisted that Kabila and his Katangese entourage, who effectively control Congo's public-sector companies and a range of mining operations, want to postpone the election as long as possible in order to keep the cash register ringing -- though the same can be said for the other leading parties, each with its own fiefs. No one can say for sure whether the Congolese people, who have been hearing for years that change is soon to come, will accept yet another promissory note.

Swing told me that he understands ''the general frustration and impatience with the slowness of the transition,'' but said that he felt that the Congolese people will accept the delay in the electoral process as long as they see forward momentum. Swing's optimism may well prove justified, but when I relayed his views over lunch in a Kinshasa restaurant with a group of leading Congolese journalists and representatives of rights groups, I was greeted with hoots of derision. Belhard Mbuyi, a columnist for Soft, a local daily, said that when he had admonished villagers just outside of Kinshasa to be patient and to trust in the electoral process, they turned on him, saying, ''That's what Kabila says; you must be for Kabila.'' It was, he said, all he could do to keep from being beaten to a pulp. ''They've produced so many schedules in the past,'' Mbuyi said, ''and none of them have been kept.'' Mbuyi fears an explosion of anger that no party will have the organization and legitimacy to control.

Even if the summer passes without incident and the Congolese go to the polls in due course, the election may do very little to legitimize the state in the eyes of the people. And the problem is not only Kabila and his party; few of the chief candidates will have any connection to the aspirations of the Congolese people. ''That's why it's not enough to say to the people, 'Elections are coming,''' says a U.N. official based in Kinshasa who declined to be identified. ''We have to say: 'We've heard your message that you can't stand these people who were in the bush for five years of war. They started the war, and now they're looting the money.''' The official says that the only way to prevent the election from deepening popular alienation is to sideline the current government, including Kabila, in favor of figures with greater legitimacy. Such conversations, he said, had not yet begun.

The optimistic view is that elections will bring to the fore a new generation of well-educated and forward-looking politicians. And in fact, I met several opposition leaders who seemed to be essentially free of the Mobutuist taint. But that, alas, cannot be said of Joseph Kabila, the likeliest winner of the election. (I was unable to meet with either Kabila or his senior advisers, who had decamped to Katanga in order to suppress an uprising that included members of Kabila's own elite security force.) Kabila has perpetrated no atrocities; he is plainly not the monster his father was. Congolese, including his own partners in government, tend to view him as an amiable nullity -- ''The presidential space is absent,'' the leader of the Senate said -- but one who is answerable to the same men who surrounded his father after seizing power by brute force and who appear to have disposed of Kabila pere when he became a liability. Vice President Ruberwa, who says that he plans to run for president on a platform of good governance whether anyone pays attention or not, assumes that Kabila will use the vast wealth he has amassed to try to buy the election. ''The danger,'' he said, ''will come if the election is nevertheless seen by the world as legitimate. A thief can always be forced out of office, but if he is legitimized by an election, what can you say?''

Well, you could say, ''That's sovereignty for you.'' The international community cannot force the Congolese people to choose the good guy, any more than they can bomb the bad guys into submission; those days are over. But the only Congolese official I met who talked about sovereignty was an unrepentant servitor to the Mobutu government. The Congolese I talked to want to be saved from themselves, or at least from their desperate predicament. Even those who accuse Monuc of spinelessness or complicity add immediately that of course the U.N. troops mustn't leave. They want more troops, not fewer, and more insistent political engagement. They want to see Kabila brought to heel, even if they aren't sure how.

What, then, is to be done? After all, the doctors of the international community, for all their wealth and know-how, cannot rid Congo of its poisons; this is the work of generations. And one argument we will be hearing from the Bush administration at the Gleneagles G-8 summit meeting is that corrupt countries have to change their own political culture before the world starts pouring in aid. That is true, but rather facile. For just as Monuc has begun demonstrating, at last, that there's plenty of space for action between passivity and warfare, so there is space between anticolonial deference and neocolonial dominion (though Congo presents a pretty strong case for the latter). And it is not just something that we owe to the Congolese. If we believe that in the post-9/11 world we can no longer afford to let failed states fester, then we plainly owe it to ourselves to stop the Congolese political class from preying on its people and to shape the nascent institutions of state in such a way as to give legitimate economic and political activity a decent shot at survival. Is that, in fact, a prescription for some kind of benevolent imperialism? If so, then bring it on.

About the Author: James Traub, a contributing writer for the magazine, is at work on a book about the United Nations.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C íŸ 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.