18 11 13 New York Times: Banishing Congo's Ghosts

 

Remarkably, unlike in past
offensives, there have been no reports of mass rapes, pillaging, mutiny or
other displays of rampant lawlessness by the Congolese military (the Forces
Armées de la
République Démocratique du Congo), which has long and
deservedly been known as one of the world’s most undisciplined armed forces.

The Congolese government,
led by President Laurent Kabila, has vowed not to become giddy from the defeat
of the militia, the Rwandan-backed force known as M23, earlier this month.

It says it will now work to
eliminate the complex patchwork of armies that continue to hold sway over broad
swaths of this vast country’s east. A recent government memo appropriately
identified one of these armies — the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda — as a
priority. This militia consists of remnants of the Interahamwe, original
perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Neutralizing it would further delegitimize Rwanda’s nearly
constant meddling on its much larger neighbor’s territory.

How did this all come
about, and what lessons should be derived?

For too long, the
international community accepted high levels of violence and mayhem in the Congo, so long as it did not rebound against
neighboring Rwanda,
where prevention of instability after the genocide became an obvious priority.

After decades of misrule,
war and predation by its neighbors — and a 1996 invasion of what was then Zaire
by Rwanda, which brought down the three-decade-long dictatorship of Mobutu Sese
Seko — some observers had given up on Congo and its population, by 2012, of 65
million. They even argued that the country, once a possession of King Leopold
II of Belgium,
no longer meaningfully exists as a state and that the international community
should stop pretending that it does.

The recent military
developments show the emptiness of this throw-up-your-hands approach. They also
show that keeping a Band-Aid on the festering wounds of the Congo costs
more, in lives, not just money, than taking resolute action.

The passive, old approach
involved nearly 20,000 peacekeepers who never managed to keep a lid on things,
much less really keep any peace. When the M23 sacked Goma, the biggest city in
the east, last year, the Congolese Army ran away and peacekeepers passively
stood by.

Shock and embarrassment
over this performance — in effect, a dismal return on the international
community’s investment — prompted a turnaround. Earlier this year, the United
Nations brought in a tough-minded general from Brazil, Carlos Alberto dos Santos
Cruz, to lead the peacekeepers. Their mandate changed to encourage engagement:
That is, actually going after the bad guys. Meanwhile, motivated and
disciplined combat units from South Africa
and Tanzania
were pushed to the fore.

“Seeing professional troops doing the right
thing day after day has had a really important effect,” Laura E. Seay, an
assistant professor of government at Colby
College who specializes in the Congo, told me.
“If you think of the history of the Congolese military, the opportunities for
this sort of role modeling have been very rare.”

It is worth considering
why, aside from the moral imperative of protecting human life, such efforts are
worthwhile. Africa still suffers mightily from its balkanization at the hands
of Europe’s imperial powers in the 19th
century. The continent’s 54 countries are mostly weak and poor. They have
little leverage in their dealings with powerful outside actors, whether banks,
investors and mining and oil interests, Western-dominated institutions like the
World Bank, or big new players like China. Nor does any have enough
middle-class consumers to create a major economic market.

At a conference in Morocco recently, a top executive for one of the
Big Three American automobile companies told me that even Africa’s richest
country, South Africa,
barely figured in the company’s plans. “Now, if they could somehow make a
single market out of South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and, say,
Namibia, that would get our attention,” he said.

A final consideration is
geography: access to the ocean. A third of Africa’s
countries are landlocked, a feature that silently imposes huge handicaps on
their development. Breaking up the Congo,
which has only a tiny outlet to the Atlantic Ocean,
would merely create more landlocked countries, making it harder to build a viable
economy.

The international community
should build on Congo’s
success in defeating the M23 militia by helping it meet the first condition of
statehood: a government monopoly over the legitimate use of force. (Mr. Kabila
deserves credit for overhauling his military command structure in the east,
resulting in much more professional behavior by his soldiers — and more
effective support for the United Nations peacekeepers.)

Building on this will
require more security improvements: A coherent national army, which Congo has never had, and pressure on neighbors
like Rwanda and Uganda to
respect Congolese sovereignty.

Of course, the ultimate
step toward a coherent Congolese state is the provision of services and the
collection of taxes. Congo
has scant experience with either. Its population subsists in large part on
foreign aid and the delivery of services by a huge patchwork of foreign
charities. However well intentioned, they have become part of the problem:
Under this system, Congolese governments have little incentive to actually
govern.

This pattern can only be
broken if the West begins to demand performance from the corrupt and atrophied
Congolese state itself. This will require as much discipline from donors as it
does from the recipients. Money must gradually be moved away from annual
dollops of life support to longer-term plans for real development, with binding
expectations and benchmarks.

Only
then can the ghosts of Leopold and Mobutu finally be banished.