Congo (89 page)

Each year
Foreign Policy
magazine, along with the Fund for Peace, publishes the Failed States Index, a list of the world’s sixty most defective states. In 2009 Congo was number five, worse than Iraq, and two places up from 2007.
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After a period of slight improvement, Congo seems once again about to descend into chaos and mismanagement. The Doing Business Index for 2010 places Congo in 182nd place in a field of 183 countries: only the Central African Republic scored worse. Anyone hoping to start a business in Congo must count on reserving 149 workdays for administrative purposes. Obtaining a building permit easily takes 322 days. On an average, one pays taxes thirty times a year. The tax on profits equals almost 60 percent—money that never ends up with the common Congolese citizen.
²²

What that common Congolese citizen does end up with is disease. The infant mortality rate is one of the world’s highest: 161 out of every 1,000 children do not live to the age of five. One out of every three children under the age of five is underweight. Life expectancy at birth is forty-six years. Almost 30 percent of the population is illiterate, 50 percent of the children do not attend elementary school, 54 percent of the population has no access to clean drinking water.
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S
O WHY DON
’
T THE PEOPLE RISE UP
? Within an eighteen-month period, a government investigation revealed in 2007, some $1.3 billion disappeared into the pockets of three national financial institutions and six state-owned businesses.
²⁴
A dizzying sum, yet it produced no public outcry. Of the sixty mining contracts with international concerns such as Anvil Mining, De Beers, BHP Billington, AngloGold Kilo, and Tenke Fungureme Mining scrutinized by parliament under Kamerhe’s leadership, not one was shown to be sound.
²⁵
State-owned Gécamines in 2008 contributed only $92 million to the state treasury, rather than the $450 million the government was owed.
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The diamond mines of Bakwanga and the gold mines of Kilo-Moto provided almost no revenues. But public outrage? Belligerence? Fury? Given, there were a few incidental strikes by civil servants and teachers, but the common Congolese makes the best of a bad job and is almost ashamed of the hope he once cherished in the run-up to the elections. “Ca va un peu,” it goes, it goes, he will answer when you ask how things are going.

In November 2008 I talked about this with Alesh, a twenty-three-year-old rapper from Kisangani and one of the most promising figures in Congolese hiphop. Rap is a relatively new genre in Congo, but for Alesh it is a way to break through the lethargy. In his song “Bana Kin” he point an accusing finger at the deadening music scene in Kinshasa: “Your music is rich and shows us the tradition / but ethically speaking offers no contradiction.” Figures like Werrason and J. B. Mpiana had not roused the country from its slumber, even if their commercial ditties may have had some artistic value. Alesh viewed religion in equally nuanced terms: “I’ve got nothing against praying / But for them it was a mosquito net / That kept them tangled, deep in debt / like a spider’s web.” To talk to Alesh was to talk to a new, self-aware generation freed of colonial or postcolonial inferiority complexes. “We have to dare to criticize ourselves; too many dreams die because of a lack of hope,” he told me. In 2008 he recorded “L’élu,” a merciless song in which he reminds the elected representatives of their promises: “You add to the dissension, with all your condescension / you have all these pretentions, but the people long for your detention.”
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W
ERE THE ELECTIONS, THEN
, nothing but a show, after all? A difficult question. For millions of citizens they were of undeniably great symbolic importance. The zeal with which people voted and counted showed that this was more than a pipe dream on the part of the international community. But the elections were more meaningful before and during the actual polling than they were afterward. The ritual was at least as important as the result. It was, after all, an illusion to hope that proper elections would immediately lead to a proper democracy. The West has been experimenting with forms of democratic administration for the last two and a half millennia, but it has been less than a century since it has started putting its faith in universal suffrage through free elections. How then could the West expect that particular method to magically transform a deep-rooted culture of corruption and clientelism into a democratic constitutional state in accordance with the Scandinavian model? And then in a region that, during its precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial eras, had known almost nothing but forms of autocratic rule? How naive would one have to be to suppose that it would all land on its feet after that initial electoral impulse? Democracy must be the objective—it is, after all, the least bad of all forms of government—but in Congo very little emphasis was laid on the vitally necessary steps along the road to a democratic system, or on the pace at which those steps were to be taken. In 1955 Jef Van Bilsen had predicted that thirty years would be needed for the switch from a colony to a sovereign state, but today the situation is in many ways worse than it was then. Free elections should not be the kickoff to a process of national democratization, but the crowning glory to that process—or at least one of the final steps. Peace, security, and education should go before, as well as local elections that can stimulate the formation of a grassroots culture of political accountability. In principle, the local elections should come first, but Kabila disdained and ignored them.

Western political experts often suffer from electoral fundamentalism, in the same way macroeconomists from the IMF and the World Bank not so long ago suffered collectively from market fundamentalism: they believe that meeting the formal requirements of a system is enough to let a thousand flowers bloom in even the most barren desert. Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz, however, has clearly showed that “sequencing” and “pacing” are essential to the introduction of a market economy.
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One does not start cultivating the desert by first sowing the best of seed. The same goes for introducing a democracy.

With its enthusiastic attempt to install democracy once and for all in Congo by means of the formal electoral procedure, the international community has above all sidelined itself. Democracy was the aim, obscurantism the result. For, as the democratically elected president of a once-again sovereign country, Kabila was not about to tolerate any more foreign busybodies—after four years of patronization by the CIAT, he had had enough of that. To put it cynically: America and Europe paid enormous sums to gag themselves diplomatically in Congo. One can, of course, flourish promises of loans and attach to them preconditions for good governance (the new buzzword at the IMF and World Bank in particular, but the European Union is all-too-willing to hop on the same bandwagon), but why would an African head of state respond to such advances when China offers much more money and is far less cantankerous about what’s done with it?

Some political scientists claim, by way of hypothesis, that three or four elections are needed to make things go in the right direction. That one must not despair too soon. That it is normal for a country to sputter a bit after a cold start. Repeated elections can, indeed, generate a pattern of change in which responsibility is taken; leaders may ultimately feel called upon to consider governing well. But it can just as easily become a hollow ritual and one that provides autocratic regimes with a thin veneer of legitimacy. It is much too soon to decide whether such elections actually promote democracy in Congo. It should be noted, however, that in September 2009 Kabila—with an eye to the elections in 2011 and 2016—set up a commission to determine whether the term of presidential office should not be extended from five years to seven and whether the constitutional limit of two mandates should not be scrapped, making him permanently eligible for reelection.
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It should also be noted that in 2009 a number of human rights activists were arrested for their critical stances.
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One of the president’s bosom buddies (who didn’t know that I knew he was a bosom buddy) once told me casually during a lunch shortly before the elections: “As president, Mandela was much too Western; Mugabe and Mobutu, those were real African leaders.”

L
ATE
N
OVEMBER
2008. I was having a meal with two brothers, both young actor-directors, at a little Indian restaurant across the street from the MONUC base in Goma. We were sitting outside under the awning, waiting patiently for our food, when my phone rang. Tomorrow’s trip would have to be canceled, I heard, the driver had run into problems, his battery was dead or his tank was empty, no, no, it was all very complicated, there was no way I could help, he was very sorry and wished me a good evening.

“Ça va?” Sekombi, the older brother, asked when I snapped down the cover of my cell phone.

“No,” I said, “I was all set to meet with Nkunda tomorrow and now I hear that it’s not going to happen.”

I had arranged for a jeep, a driver, fuel, and a guide familiar with the rebel territory. That morning I had purchased my press accreditation at the Ministry of Communication and Media for a measly $250—the most expensive sheet of paper I’d ever bought—I’d had passport photos taken, I had gone by the State Security offices. I had told the MONUC officer in charge about my plans. And, most importantly: I had called the number-two man at Laurent Nkunda’s civil staff. It had not been easy to reach him in rebel territory, where there was almost no cell phone coverage, but the appointment had been made: tomorrow morning at nine he would meet me at the old mission post.

“You want us to drive you?” Sekombi interrupted my lament.

Sekombi and Katya, his younger and more taciturn brother, were solid folk. To run a cultural center for young artists in bullet-riddled, lava-ridden Goma, one had to be made of stern stuff. Their eldest brother, Petna, had set up the center. One month earlier, with rebel leader Nkunda at the city gates and Kabila’s Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC) looting the town, the Katondolo brothers’ cultural center had gone on imperturbably with its idiosyncratic film festival. But to venture into the theater of war with two actors? In that old, beat-up jeep of theirs?

“But do you two have the papers you need to get through?”

To find Nkunda we would have to pass three roadblocks manned by the FARDC, a few kilometers of no-man’s land, and then three roadblocks guarded by Nkunda’s Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP). The rebel barriers would be no problem, I had been assured. Nkunda had his troops under control. But the national army roadblocks could prove to be a nightmare. Passports and press credentials could not always stand up to their frustration.

“No,” Sekombi said, “but we’ve got our hair.”

Excuse me? I almost choked on my
poulet tikka masala
, which had finally appeared on the table after a two-hour wait. I looked at their wispy hairdos. With plenty of goodwill, one could see them as the start of something like dreadlocks.

“We’re Rasta’s. Everybody loves us.
Nous sommes cool
. They’ll let us through.”

I
T WAS ALREADY LIGHT
when we left the city just after six. We had filled the tank and bought a few packs of cigarettes. “Always comes in handy,” said Sekombi, a nonsmoker, as he took a bite of his cookie. The jeep bounced over the dirt road. Its steering wheel was on the right: almost all cars in eastern Congo come from the neighboring countries, which are former British colonies. The silhouette of the two-thousand-meter-high (6,500-foot-high) Nyiragongo volcano with its eternal plume of smoke rose up in the distance. Sekombi was waxing lyrical. “That volcano is our mother, our sister, and our mistress, all in one. When I see that wisp of smoke I’m always reminded of a huge breast that keeps giving milk. Once you’ve drank of it, you always come back.” But sometimes that breast produced a milk black as night: in 2002 the volcano had buried half of Goma beneath a flow of lava. The second floor of some houses became the ground floor that day. The city had asphalted itself in a whirling intoxication. Goma, the black city in a rust-brown landscape, is the only place in Congo where the roads don’t have potholes, but bumps.

A little farther north we came past the first refugee camps, the same camps occupied by Rwandan Hutus back in 1994. Now they provided shelter for the quarter of a million civilians who had fled from Nkunda. A festival campground without the festival, a sorry jumble of canvas and cardboard. In North Kivu someone is always on the run.

Eight kilometers (five miles) later we arrived at the first roadblock. A thin rope with a branch dangling from it had been tied between two oil drums; half a dozen soldiers were hanging about listlessly. Sekombi rolled down the window. “Ya, man!” he laughed to the men in khaki. His brother Katya was sitting quietly in the backseat, but he was now wearing the trademark of the true Rastafarian: a thick knitted cap. “Rastaman!” the soldiers cheered, “wo-woow!” They joked, they shot the breeze, they accepted cigarettes from us and wished us a nice day. “Peace and love!” With those words, Sekombi put an end to the border formalities. Peace and love! To soldiers! During a war! But they untied the rope and waved to us as we pulled away. The same scene was repeated at all the other roadblocks. I had never realized that embryonal dreadlocks and nicotine were all you needed to get to Central Africa’s most feared warlord.

After the brutal taking of Bukavu in 2004, Nkunda had kept his head down for a time. As a trained psychologist he became the pastor of a Pentecostal church in Kivu.
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He only entered the public eye again in 2006. Immediately after the results of the parliamentary elections were announced, he set up the CNDP, the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple.
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The names of Congolese rebel movements are, often enough, gratuitous abbreviations, but Nkunda’s brainchild took the cake: it was not a “congrès” at all, but a militia, it was not “national” but regional, and what was meant by “the defense of the people,” well, you could ask around at the refugee camps about that. Yet still, that last part of the name was probably the most accurate, as long at least as you read it as the defense of “a people,” one particular population group, the group that had been mocked and pestered for the last twenty years and to which Nkunda himself belonged: the Congolese Tutsis. Had a colonial ethnographer in the 1920s wished to photograph an archetypal Tutsi, he would undoubtedly have dragged Nkunda in front of the camera. With his tall, bony frame, his high forehead, and pointy nose, he embodies all the clichés about the Tutsi male. He and Kagame could have been brothers.