Published 13 Nov 08

Strategic Interests

by J. Peter Pham, Ph.D.
World Defense Review columnist

Renewed Congo Conflict Requires Fresh Approach

After being largely pushed out of the news cycle by crises elsewhere in Africa – including the ongoing violence in the former Somalia and its spillover into piracy in the Gulf of Aden, the genocide and other conflicts in Sudan, Robert Mugabe's relentless grip on Zimbabwe, the low-intensity conflict in Nigeria's hydrocarbon-rich Niger Delta, and the increasing attacks by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb – long-simmering tensions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) recently boiled over, forcing the world to think about the future of the third largest country in Africa where a veritable tinderbox threatens to reignite with a vengeance. And while it received very little attention in the United States presidential campaign, the renewal of the Congolese conflict which, directly and indirectly, has already taken the lives of more than five million people, may well prove to be the first foreign policy challenge on the Africa agenda for the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

At first glance, recent developments do not augur well for the 66 million Congolese and any hopes that they might have nurtured for some respite from the country's seemingly perpetual cycle of violence, much less that they might experience real peace and sustainable development any time soon.

• In late September, the DRC's 83-year-old prime minister, Antoine Gizenga, finally threw in the towel, resigning after two years during which he and his ministers failed to make much headway on any of the multiple military, political, economic, and social challenges which they faced That he failed as a national leader for the second time in his life (in 1960-1961, following the deposition of Patrice Lumumba, Gizenga headed a breakaway nationalist government in Stanleyville, now Kisangani, that was recognized by a number of Eastern bloc and non-aligned countries) came as no surprise. Gizenga's grasp on the reins of government – and reality – was so increasingly so tenuous that, as I reported in this column, his cabinet included a fictitious person in its foreign trade portfolio.
  
  
• Meanwhile, in the eastern regions more than half a continent away from the capital of Kinshasa, notwithstanding a peace agreement announced at the beginning of the year, open warfare had broken out as Tutsi militiamen belonging to the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP, National Congress for the Defense of the People) of General Laurent Nkunda compelled loyalist troops of the Forces armées de la République démocratique du Congo (FARDC, Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo) to retreat from their positions near Lake Kivu, sending hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians fleeing in the process and prompting the French foreign minister, Dr. Bernard Kouchner, to warn of the imminent risk of "huge massacres."
  
  
• As if to confirm the overall apparent hopelessness of the situation, the commander of what is the largest United Nations peacekeeping operation in the world today, the Mission de l'Organisation des Nations-Unies au Congo (MONUC, Mission of the United Nations Organization in the Congo), Spanish Lieutenant General Vicente Diaz de Villegas, resigned at the end of October after less than two months on the job, citing, if press reports are to be credited, lack of confidence in the leadership of DRC President Joseph Kabila and foreboding that the UN mission was headed for failure (the Spanish officer's predecessor, Senegalese Lieutenant General Babacar Gaye, was subsequently recalled to duty to temporarily fill the position for six months).
  
  
• An emergency meeting convened last Friday by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in Nairobi, Kenya, and attended by the presidents of Burundi, the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), the DRC, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania, produced little more than a plaintive call for an immediate ceasefire. Likewise the summit over the weekend in Johannesburg, South Africa, of the leaders of the subregional Southern African Development Community (SADC) did little more than produce a similar declaration.
  
  
• On Tuesday, Angola's deputy foreign minister, Georges Chicoty, announced on the state radio broadcaster, Rádio Nacional de Angola (RNA), would send troops to the DRC to aid the FARDC. Such a move may well provoke other countries to intervene as well – and not necessarily on the same side.
  

While often misunderstood by many in developed countries as just another of Africa's all-too-many civil conflicts, the violence in the DRC has actually long transcended its parochial origins to assume a global profile. During the height of the so-called "Second Congo War" (1998-2003), the armies of nearly a dozen African states – including Angola, Burundi, Chad, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe – were drawn into a fight which my friend Dr. Gérard Prunier describes in the title of his forthcoming definitive study as "Africa's World War." The opportunities presented by the ensuing chaos as well as the allure of Congo's vast mineral wealth – including more than half of the world's cobalt, one-third of its diamonds, and three-quarters of its coltan (a metallic ore essential for the production of capacitors, a key component in electronic devices ranging from mobile phones to laptop computers), as well as valuable deposits of copper, diamonds, gold, uranium, and other commodities – have attracted unscrupulous commercial operators, criminal networks, arms traffickers, and possibly even terrorists and rogue states to the region in the heart of the African continent (see, for example, my report two years ago on a possible Iranian connection). In short, the deteriorating political and security environment in the DRC represents not only an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe, but a significant challenge to international society.

It is a not-insignificant irony that the lamentable misery in which most of the citizens of the DRC find themselves – the country ranks 168th out of 177 countries surveyed in terms of human development according to the most recent report by the UN Development Programme – is directly attributable to the immense natural wealth of the Congo itself. More than a century ago, it was these potential subjects to be exploited and riches to be won led Leopold II of the Belgians to hire Henry Morton Stanley to carve out for him a territory 76 times larger than his kingdom in Europe, an audacious private venture that was eventually sanctioned by the 1885 General Act of Berlin Conference. Although the inhuman depredations in Belgian monarch's demesne were widely condemned as brutal, even in comparison with the cruelties of colonial scramble of the time, and popularized for modern readers by Adam Hochschild's bestseller King Leopold's Ghost, no move was ever made to right the original historical wrong of throwing together in a single unit the size of Western Europe what has proven to be an explosive mixture of peoples with little historical basis for national cohesion.

Quite to the contrary, after the briefest of interludes at the time of independence in 1960, the authoritarian regime of Mobutu Sese Seko was, in some respects, a three-decade-long reprise of Leopold's poorly-named "Congo Free State" insofar that once again the entire country and its resources (including its capacity to use the Cold War to extract billions of dollars in foreign aid from the West) were placed at the disposal of a sole sovereign ruler who bestowed them at his pleasure on favorites. Long before Mobutu fled into exile in 1997 as Laurent-Désiré Kabila's Alliance des forces pour la liberation du Congo-Zaïre (AFDL, Alliance of Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire), backed at the time by Rwanda and Uganda who were angered by Mobutu's sheltering of the Hutu génocidaires, drove westward, the essentially privatized Congolese state had ceased to deliver even the most basic services. A decade later, less than one-sixth of the roads bequeathed to the nascent Congo state by the departing Belgian colonial administration are still serviceable.

Sadly, but not surprisingly, this state of affairs, whereby the challenges of geographic breadth are exacerbated by the temptations of fabulous wealth and the near-total lack of responsive governance, has largely determined the course of events in the DRC. As what had passed for central government essentially withered, various armed groups imbued with a débrouillez-vous ("fend-for-yourself") ethos simply used force to seize control of patches of territory, thus acquiring effective dominion over strategic assets which they then leveraged to acquire the wherewithal to combat opposing factions – all to the detriment of the overall peace of the country and the stability of its neighbors.

Thus, the challenge faced by the Congolese is the one which all post-colonial African states have had to confront in one manner or another since independence. How were they to unite a virtual archipelago of population centers separated from each other by literally hundreds of kilometers of impassable forest in an arrangement that is not only stable, but also accepted by its citizens as legitimate, as well as sufficiently capable of performing the basic functions of statehood: control over national territory; oversight of the natural resources; effective and rational collection of revenue; maintenance of adequate national infrastructure; and capacity to govern and maintain law and order, including respect for basic human rights? While the struggle, whether peaceful or violent, towards independence from colonial rule united some disparate groups in a common cause in some parts of Africa, it was not sufficient in every case to coalesce into a national identity. The newly independent state which emerged from the Belgian Congo was born with congenital centrifugal impulses, which were fanned by outside interests. The survival of the artifice is not so much a testimony to its internal legitimacy – by and large, non-existent – as it is attributable to the effects of the international juridical recognition originally granted to the legal vehicle for King Leopold's colonial rapacity, a status quo which the African Union's predecessor, the Organization of African Unity, tried to set in stone when it stipulated that the received colonial borders constituted a "tangible reality" requiring member governments to solemnly pledge themselves to maintain. Across the continent, and certainly in the Congo, this preservation of arbitrary territorial divisions has benefited illegitimate and, often enough, incompetent rulers, while depriving the masses of the civil and political liberties that ought to have been the fruits of independence, to say nothing of the minimal condition sine qua non for the development of a tolerable standard of living (see my previous column about the destabilizing nature of Africa's colonial borders as well as my Human Rights & Human Welfare essay several years ago on the resulting complications which they pose to legitimizing the continent's states). Certainly absent a structure of government that is viewed as legitimate by its citizens and is responsive to their quotidian concerns, the pattern of localized armed plunder that has characterized the DRC's political economy the past decade or so is like to continue.

Given both the magnitude of the Congo's challenges and the failure of even relatively robust international intervention to arrest the country's relapse to instability and conflict, to say nothing about facilitating sustainable economic and social development, it and its international partners must summon the political courage and intellectual imagination to go beyond merely prescribing the conventional remedies for the malaises of post-conflict states. In other words, while a disarmament program, provided it includes reintegration of former combatants and is actually fully implemented, and a complete set of free and fair national, provincial, and local elections, which the DRC has yet to have, would certainly represent significant progress, these measures alone would not be sufficient to set the country on the path away from the vicious circle of corruption, strife, and conflict that have long ensnared it. Rather, several major policy reconsiderations ought to be entertained in order to break the impasse in the Congo.

First, in view of the questionable legitimacy and, indeed, viability of the DRC as a unitary state, the international community needs to acknowledge that its emphasis on a centralized model of post-conflict reconstitution of the country – a bias which had the effect of sanctioning the unelected incumbency of Joseph Kabila, who became the world's youngest head of state at the age of twenty-nine in January 2001 following the assassination of his father, Laurent-Désiré Kabila – has proven, at best, to have been a sub-optimal choice. And while, to his credit, the younger Kabila has co-opted many of his opponents into the government, especially during the transition phase leading up the 2006 elections, the team he put together included several notorious leaders of armed factions. One of them, Jean-Pierre Bemba, who served as one of the vice-presidents during the transition and was subsequently elected to the Senate after finishing second in the presidential poll, was arrested in Brussels in May 2008 on a warrant from the International Criminal Court which has charged him with five counts of war crimes and three counts of crimes against humanity. In fact, the enthusiasm within the DRC and external funding for elections has noticeably waned since the votes for the presidency and the National Assembly. Elections for provincial, communal, territorial, and municipal level offices have yet to be held, although there is discussion of doing so in 2009. Yet it is precisely these local levels of government where an improvement in accountability to the electorate and overall governance capacity would have the most impact on the lives of ordinary Congolese – and, in certain cases, win them away from the support which many often give to various armed movements which, if truth were told, are closer to them than the denizens of far-off Kinshasa.

Secondly, while it is fashionable to brand the leaders of the various armed groups as "warlords," what is a "warlord" but someone who maintains control over a territory and population through networks of clients, control over arms, and economies that use force to generate resources and maintain power – in other words a proto-state figure? While warlords may attain their power through undemocratic means, the actual exercise of their authority does that place within a political framework, however primitive, and involves appeals to kinship, ethnic, or religious bonds of identity. One does not have to defend every last "warlord" in the DRC to at least recognize the influence which such indigenous leaders exercise and, in many cases, the ethnic or geographic communities which they represent, especially in a complex political landscape like that of the Congo. General Nkunda may be labeled a "rebel" by the Kabila regime in far-off Kinshasa, but he is also the de facto protector of eastern Congo's ethnic Tutsi, who have been attacked by both FARDC troops and irregulars, including some of the same Hutu génocidaires who fled to the region after slaughtering the Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994 (as recently as this week, a MONUC spokesman was acknowledging that government forces were on the rampage, looting and attacking civilians north of Goma, the capital of North Kivu province). While the international community cannot be expected to welcome the prospect of partnership with those implicated in war crimes and other gross violations of human rights, it must nonetheless exert itself to reach beyond the Westernized elites of Kinshasa and other urban centers to engage with traditional elders, chieftains, and, yes, military leaders. In this respect, the Kabila regime's refusal to hold talks with the CNDP for fear of according it any sort of recognition while simultaneously condoning the continuing presence on Congolese territory of the Hutu killers' Forces Démocratiques de la Libération du Rwanda (FDLR, Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda) is utterly unhelpful.

Third, over the long term, the question that needs to be addressed is whether or not the maintenance of the DRC as a singular subject of international law, however decentralized, is a means that is fundamentally at odds with the strategic effect sought by the massive "nation-building" effort presently underway with MONUC, that is, relatively effective political institutions accepted as reasonably legitimate by those governed and presenting no undue threats to regional stability and global security. While the reluctance to redraw borders is understandable, the international community needs to face up to the reality that in some cases, including I would argue, that of the Congo, "nation-breaking" is precisely what is required to escape the cycle of violence at the root of the insecurity being witnessed. The legitimacy or lack thereof of the state is not merely a theoretical discourse, but rather directly impacts the range of governance strategies and economic options that political leaders have to choose from. The leadership of a state that has evolved endogenously and, consequently, represents either the interests of a predominant group or the compromise between competing groups, is generally freed of concerns about consolidation and is likely to adopt policies with longer time horizons. In contrast, rulers in states which lack this quality, like the DRC, find it more "rational" to focus on a shorter horizon, using state resources to establish their hegemony through nepotism, patronage, and other preferential policies. And while the returns from the latter strategy are greater for the ruler in the short term, over time it leads to a vicious cycle of diminishing state capacity that culminates in the weak state sliding into the "failed state" practically calls out for international intervention, whether of the exploitive kind like that of some of the Congo's neighbors during the late 1990s or of the more benign "humanitarian" kind currently being attempted under UN auspices.

Fourth, if the very continued existence of the Congolese state as such is at least open to re-examination, then the role of outside forces like MONUC must be redefined. The upcoming deadline for renewing the UN mission's mandate provides an excellent opportunity to shift its emphasis to privilege the "responsibility to protect" the civilian population and controlling the flow of people and materiel along the borders which the fragile state shares with other countries in its region, rather than trying (half-heartedly) to use force to assert the expansive sovereignty claims of questionably legitimate central "governments" like the one which Kabila fils inherited from his assassinated father. MONUC should be defending citizens, not the Congolese state as such. To this end, alongside a more robust disarmament and demobilization of combatants lest they continue to threaten stability, the peacekeeping mission should concentrate on building up disciplined and locally accountable police forces, rather than creating a national military. Ordinary Congolese citizens need personal security and a functioning legal system more than they need a national army. And, with MONUC deployed, the DRC has no real need for the FARDC. Such a redefined approach to MONUC's mission would not only be more "neutral" with respect to the end state, but would ultimately prove more flexible by giving for the citizens of the DRC the time and political space within which to make their own determinations about their future while at the same time allowing the rest of the world, especially their immediate neighbors, an opportunity to address most of their pressing security concerns.

While the DRC has made considerable progress in recent years, there have also been significant relapses – as the fighting and humanitarian crisis along the shores of Lake Kivu underscore. Quite simply, the Congo may be too immense and its problems so great that, absent the significant transformation in how the international community conceptualizes and approaches those challenges, it is impossible to envisage real peace and stability, much less sustainable development. This is a reality that both the incoming U.S. administration and its international partners will have to eventually acknowledge. Given the incredibly high stakes involved for the peoples of the Congo, their immediate neighbors, the African continent, and, indeed, the entire international community, it would behoove President-elect Obama and his Africa team to come to that conclusion sooner rather than later and to appoint a special envoy, furnished with apposite (and, hopefully, innovative) instructions and authority, to coordinate American efforts to help resolve the conflict.

— J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C., as well as Vice President of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). In addition to the study of terrorism and political violence, his research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, international law, political theory, and ethics, with particular concentrations on the implications for United States foreign policy and African states as well as religion and global politics.

Dr. Pham is the author of over two hundred essays and reviews on a wide variety of subjects in scholarly and opinion journals on both sides of the Atlantic and the author, editor, or translator of over a dozen books. Among his recent publications are Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (Reed Press, 2004), which has been critically acclaimed by Foreign Affairs, Worldview, Wilson Quarterly, American Foreign Policy Interests, and other scholarly publications, and Child Soldiers, Adult Interests: The Global Dimensions of the Sierra Leonean Tragedy (Nova Science Publishers, 2005).

In addition to serving on the boards of several international and national think tanks and journals, Dr. Pham has testified before the U.S. Congress and conducted briefings or consulted for both Congressional and Executive agencies. He is also a frequent contributor to National Review Online's military blog, The Tank.

© 2008 J. Peter Pham

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