Yet another of those recurrent headlines just surfaced - “Congo Slips Into Chaos Again as Rebels Gain†- and I tried to add up the death toll since I first covered the Congo in 1967. It can approach 10 million, depending on how you count. Then I tried to work out why.
It is too easy to blame an innate heart of darkness or a soul poisoned by King Leopold's colonial cruelty. That leaves out the part about how big powers did - and do - geopolitics.
When Belgium freed Congo in 1960, its leader, Patrice Lumumba, veered left. CIA and Belgian agents helped to kill him. In the mayhem that followed, Washington backed Joseph-Desire Mobutu (Mobutu Sese Seko) and stuck by him almost to the bitter end. The chosen despot, various U.S. diplomats told me over the decades, provided stability.
This all requires a book, not a blog post. But among a half century of uncounted faceless victims, I focus on a single name, Baudouin Kayembe. Each week, his Présence Congolaise reported on what was going wrong. He was my stringer in 1967, but I wished that, instead, he had been president.
Gentle and wise, Baudouin chose words cautiously. But his message was clear. The country was preposterously rich in minerals and good land. With tribal accommodation and less obscene thievery by those in power, it could help a whole continent lift itself a notch above poverty.
Baudouin made so much sense that Mobutu threw him in prison, and soon after he was dead. Mobutu's looting rose into the billions, and foreign mercenaries beat back serial rebellion. Western donors bought his loyalty to counter Soviet incursion elsewhere in Africa. Large European and American companies made large profits.
Eventually, and inevitably, the Mobutu linchpin was unplugged. And then, the complex processes of Rwanda, Uganda, and long-exiled Congo warlords went into the mix.
There is, of course, much more to it. Within artificial borders drawn generations earl ier in Europe, traditionally hostile tribes don't accommodate without disinterested outside help. If there are riches to steal, and no real government, obscene thievery is inevitable.
By coincidence, when that headline appeared, I was reading about how Gertrude Bell drew those lines on a Mesopotamian map to define an Iraq within territory Britain wrested from Turkey after World War I. The French did the same with Syria and Lebanon while everyone quarreled over Palestine. I can almost hear colonial ghosts huddled around yet another bargaining table jibing at each other, “How's that working out for you?â€
And there is South Asia, from old Persia's border with Afghanistan to a Bangladesh that was once East Pakistan. Or Central Asian borders that Moscow drew. And so on.
Perhaps it is asking too much of human nature to imagine things otherwise. But when death tolls soar from wanton slaughter and related suffering, there is much to consider. It is devilishly d ifficult to distribute blame.
