Africa’s Deadliest Conflict: Media Coverage of the Humanitarian Disaster in the Congo and the United Nations Response, 1997–2008

1. The Congo: Understanding the Conflict

The Congo: Understanding the Conflict PART ONE: HISTORICAL CONTEXT Background The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) borders Tanzania, Burundi , Rwanda, Uganda, and the newly minted Republic of South Sudan to the east, Zambia and Angola to the south, the Central African Republic to the north, and the Republic of the Congo to the west; it is currently the third-largest country on the continent. In that it shares borders with nine countries, many of which have serious security issues of their own, it serves as a critical link between eastern and western components of what a decade ago Filip Reyntjens referred to as Africa’s “war zone” (2000: 6). In addition to being a huge country (about the size of Western Europe), it is extraordinarily well endowed with natural resources, especially in its eastern provinces. Its tragedy, apart from the violence that has plagued its entire history as an independent state, is that these resources have never been harnessed in a way to provide much benefit to the majority of its population, estimated in 2010 to be around 71 million. Ironically, it may be argued that had the Congo possessed fewer resources , it might well have enjoyed greater security, stability, and perhaps even prosperity over the years. The fact that it enjoyed none of these, and has suffered in particular from a series of extremely bad political leaderships, presents a puzzle on which the following pages seek to cast some light. 1 1 Africa’s Deadliest Conflict 2 Jason Stearns makes the point that “the lack of responsible politics, is not due to some genetic defect in Congolese DNA, a missing ‘virtue gene,’ or even something about Congolese culture. Instead, it is deeply rooted in the country’s political history” (2011: 215). Robert Edgerton, on the other hand, notes that while no other country in the world can probably match the Congo in terms of the unremitting horrors which have occurred there, it “is hardly the only country in the world to have become known for its troubled history and uncertain future” (2002, XII). There is ample evidence, in any case, that on a world scale the Congo’s deficiencies are almost unsurpassed. On the UN Human Development Index for 2010, for example, the DRC ranked 168th, next to last, only Zimbabwe finishing lower (Human Development Indicators, 2010). The historic continuities of exploitation and misrule in the Congo are consequently worth recalling in brief form as a background to, if not necessarily the sole cause of, the continued violence which has beset the country over the last decade and a half. The details of the Congo’s pre-colonial history are beyond the scope of this study, but for those who might be under the impression that the area was a kind of political and cultural vacuum prior to the appearance of Europeans, it is worth noting that it contained a number of welldeveloped and extensive political and commercial entities which did not in fact differ all that much from contemporary European states. When the Portuguese discovered the mouth of the Congo River in 1482, they came into contact with the Kingdom of the Kongo. The Kingdom governed extensive territories divided into provinces through a wellestablished hierarchical political system (see Leslie, 1993: passim). It was not a system which was entirely peaceful or stable, given the frequent rivalries for power and interregional conflicts, but in that respect it did not differ greatly from its European counterparts either. A second extensive empire was that of the Lunda people. Their territory stretched from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes, including what is today the province of Katanga. They were primarily people of trade, whose commercial reach extended from the cities of Luanda and Benguela on the Atlantic to Dar es Salaam on the Indian Ocean (Bustin, 1975: see map, 19). Europeans were, if nothing else, more technologically advanced than the inhabitants of such African states and thus were able to impose their will on the latter for their own purposes when that was thought necessary . Trade relations established between the Portuguese and the Kingdom of the Kongo in the late fifteenth century, for example, quickly became a matter of purchasing slaves to provide “cheap labor for plantations on nearby Portuguese islands and, subsequently, the Americas” The Congo: Understanding the Conflict 3 (Leslie, 1993: 6). This was a potent source of conflict, as were Portuguese efforts to Christianize the Kongolese...