Despite half a century of independence the former Belgian colony is a place of horror, writes JODY CLARKE
THE NAME has changed, but the problems remain the same 50 years after independence.
When Roger Casement wrote his groundbreaking report on widespread human rights abuses in the Belgian Congo in 1903, the country was known as the Congo Free State. His condemnation of the “wholesale oppression and shocking misgovernment” in what we now call the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is as relevant today.
Unlawful killings, abductions and sexual violence still persist. But whereas Belgian colonists were the chief perpetrators over 100 years ago, the state’s security services and rebel groups are the architects of anarchy today.
Rebel groups in the east and north of the country continue to use rape as a weapon of intimidation while, earlier this month, the prominent human rights activist Floribert Chebeya Bahizire was found dead in suspicious circumstances in the capital, Kinshasa. Police chief John Numbi has been suspended, but the incident remains unexplained.
Meanwhile, the DRC has become a playground for a mottled bag of insurgents from Sudan, Uganda and Rwanda, while the business environment is no better today than when Belgium’s King Leopold ransacked the country’s rubber reserves to beautify Brussels.
All this puts a negative spin on the country’s 50th anniversary of independence today. But half a century after Belgium handed over the keys of state, it is difficult to gloss over the DRC’s troubles.
Corruption is rampant, with outgoing Dutch ambassador Ellen Berends-Vergunst complaining last week of “huge legal uncertainty and massive corruption”, noting Congo has fewer than 100 European businesses today, compared with 6,000 in 1960. The second Congo war, which ended in 2003 after five years of violence had left 5.4 million people dead, still simmers on in the east of the country.
It seems the DRC’s immense natural resources, which include copper, cobalt, and diamonds, have served as a tool of conflict, rather than one of development. Of a population of 67 million people, nearly 80 per cent live on less than $2 a day. Of course, blame for the chronic mismanagement of vast resources can’t be laid solely on the shoulders of the country’s leaders.
Although the powers of state have usually been used as a means of personal enrichment, the world’s international powers have done their best to destabilise the country when it suited them.
The first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was assassinated just 10 weeks after coming to power in 1960, allegedly because he turned to the Soviet Union for assistance in quelling a rebellion in the south of the country. The US is thought to have ordered the murder, but the current Belgian king’s late brother Boudewijn has also been implicated.
After his successor was deposed in a bloodless coup, Joseph Mobutu ruled the country with an iron fist for three decades. He is thought to have siphoned off over $5 billion to Swiss bank accounts between 1965 and 1997, but the West saw him as a powerful ally in the fight against communism in Africa during the cold war.
Even as Mobutu ordered the execution of political rivals and torture of opponents, France’s president François Mitterrand would meet him in Paris, to which he would often fly on a specially chartered Concorde to go on shopping sprees across the city. French troops twice put down rebel insurgencies in the country, on the second occasion in 1978 with US logistical support.
Following the country’s first multiparty election in 46 years in 2006, the DRC’s leaders want to portray an image of a country that can stand on its own feet.
The government has asked for withdrawal of nearly 21,000 UN peacekeepers, as president Joseph Kabila seeks a second term next year. But even as the troops pull out and are replaced by Congolese forces, the east and north are beset by violence.
Charles de Gaulle famously asked how anyone could govern a nation that has 246 different kinds of cheese. Luckily he didn’t have to run a country four times bigger than the Iberian peninsula, with over 200 languages and 300 ethnicities.