Do we discriminate against Congo?
Nov. 27th, 2008 02:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fivemackhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7751981.stm
I think the Great Powers refrain from acting in Congo because the task is near enough to impossible that they don't have the power to act usefully. The Congo wars are unimaginably large; in area covered and in death toll they're equivalent to the western front of World War II, in disorganisation and horror they remind me of the Thirty Years' War in what's now Germany, a time of roving bands on several separate sides raping, massacring, pillaging and destroying.
You hear very little from the war zone. There are three sorts of war reportage that you expect nowadays: embedded reporters with the armies, journalists pre-placed in the regions under attack, and the view from somewhere between 60,000 feet and low Earth orbit presented in PowerPoint slides from the White House press room. None of that's available; armies on foot in jungle don't show up from orbit, to a good approximation nobody has ever reported from Mbuji-Mayi, and the armies don't seem to be carrying reporters with them. You get the pictures of starving refugees, because the only regions safe and accessible enough for Western journalists with cameras are the ones to which the starving refugees have fled.
I don't know what a good outcome would look like; I'm not sure there's ever been a situation in Congo stable enough to go back to. I can imagine a series of Partitions of Congo, Angola tearing bits off in the south, Uganda in the north and Rwanda in the east. I'm reading a history of Prussia at the moment and there's some vague Prussianness to Rwanda, but turning out as well as Prussia in the long run is still scarcely well.
I think the Great Powers refrain from acting in Congo because the task is near enough to impossible that they don't have the power to act usefully. The Congo wars are unimaginably large; in area covered and in death toll they're equivalent to the western front of World War II, in disorganisation and horror they remind me of the Thirty Years' War in what's now Germany, a time of roving bands on several separate sides raping, massacring, pillaging and destroying.
You hear very little from the war zone. There are three sorts of war reportage that you expect nowadays: embedded reporters with the armies, journalists pre-placed in the regions under attack, and the view from somewhere between 60,000 feet and low Earth orbit presented in PowerPoint slides from the White House press room. None of that's available; armies on foot in jungle don't show up from orbit, to a good approximation nobody has ever reported from Mbuji-Mayi, and the armies don't seem to be carrying reporters with them. You get the pictures of starving refugees, because the only regions safe and accessible enough for Western journalists with cameras are the ones to which the starving refugees have fled.
I don't know what a good outcome would look like; I'm not sure there's ever been a situation in Congo stable enough to go back to. I can imagine a series of Partitions of Congo, Angola tearing bits off in the south, Uganda in the north and Rwanda in the east. I'm reading a history of Prussia at the moment and there's some vague Prussianness to Rwanda, but turning out as well as Prussia in the long run is still scarcely well.
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Date: 2008-11-27 09:16 pm (UTC)The ore reaches middlemen along the main road
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The flights land in Goma, the provincial capital, where other middlemen buy and process the ore for export.
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dozens of barrels of tin ore. On each is stenciled the address of Malaysian Smelting Company Berhad, a major tin smelter. Mr. Makabuza said he sold to the company via a minerals broker.
That's three layers of middlemen before you reach a foreign company, and four before you reach a Western company. I really don't think you have CEOs of such companies whispering to their underlings "Buy some Congo cassiterite, cheap!" Instead they say, "That Malaysian smelter has a good deal." They're not deliberately profiteering. They genuinely don't know, and don't care, where the minerals they buy come from. Is this because they don't want to know, or because it's not realistic to expect all commodities to come with certificates of morality and authenticity? Probably a bit of both.