Do we discriminate against Congo?

[fivemack]

http://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.

Comments

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

The Great Powers are all too active on the Congo; or perhaps the word is influential in a policy of mutual silence and inaction that allows their citizens - corporate and personal - to bankroll whichever militia can secure resources at a profit. The murderous competition, the chaos and - above all - the lack of a government capable of taking ownership and negotiating terms is handing over Africa's resources to the Great Powers at a knock-down price. Even the bribes come back to us, deposited in our banks and either invested in our companies or spent on our casinos and hotels.

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

I have written at some considerable length about Congo and specifically North Kivu, so this is a subject near to my heart.

This may be hard to believe, but in 1960, Congo was Africa's great hope - it had the continent's finest universities, its only nuclear reactor, enormous national resources, copious hydro power, etc. Of course, even then, there were no roads connecting the east of the country to the west. It's a little misleading to treat eastern Congo and Kinshasa as part of the same country. They are so in name only.

And I agree, intervening in Congo on a scale that would make a difference would require an effort comparable to the occupation of Iraq, and would probably have no better an outcome.

You may be interested in this terrific NYT piece about a mine in eastern Congo, one of the finest pieces of Africa reportage I've ever seen.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Congo's Wealth, Looted by Renegade Troops

Yeah, right, yadda yadda, cut to sympathy-tugging footage of the refugees and starving children in Central Africa's unending zoo of human suffering.

The media coverage never, ever, extends to naming the bastards who bankroll these militias. Someone trades with them, someone does their banking, someone is the buyer and the organiser for the trade. Someone, whisper it quietly, fronts the money when this spring's offensive changes control over a mineral territory, and runs interference to ensure that the diplomatic, legal, and public-relations efforts of the rightful owners come to nothing in our capitals.

You could ring up any major bank in London or Chicago, find an analyst or dealer on the commodities desk who lives and breathes the market in non-ferrous metals, and you'd get a damn' good answer as to who that 'someone' is... Quite possibly involving respected corporations very close to home.

Even the Chinese middlemen, who pop up everywhere these days when there is money to be made from man-made tragedy, are easily traceable in a supply chain leading to Shenzen and to identifiable consumer goods appearing in our shops with familiar Western brand names.

But that would be investigative journalism. And criticism of powerful men with sharp libel lawyers. And, worst of all, negative news about our advertisers.

So turn on the telly, or find some more 'hard-hitting' journalism in the printed media, and hold a freshly-cut onion to your face if you're finding that emotional fatigue at seeing it all over again is making it difficult for you to cry. And try not to think that some of your money, and mine, paid for the scenes we're socially-expected to regard with sympathy.

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

Did you read the whole article? One of the things that I admired about it is that it actually followed where the ore went, to some extent:

The ore reaches middlemen along the main road
...
The flights land in Goma, the provincial capital, where other middlemen buy and process the ore for export.
...
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.