Conflict in the Congo and the changing nature of violence
For over ten years, an unrelenting war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has created the largest humanitarian crisis since World War II. Over 5.4 million people have died since the conflict began, and millions more have suffered the depredations of the lawless Eastern Kivu region, including the systematic rape and mutilation of hundreds of thousands of women and children.
Though the scale of the brutality evokes World War II, the comparison between the two conflicts ends there. In fact, the differences between the Congo and conventional warfare are striking. While most wars involve clashes between states and armies, the war in the Congo features an absence of state power and sporadic violence between private militias. Deaths do not occur on the battlefield — indeed, only half of a percent have been caused by direct violence — but because of preventable famine and disease. And this war boasts no clear-cut international “alliances”; instead, while each party to the conflict has received foreign aid, the international community as a whole is incapable of quelling the violence and replacing state power.
A New War Order
Political scientist Arnold Wolfers has likened 20th century geopolitics to a clash of billiard balls. Conflicts in such a world involve self-contained, sovereign states shifting position and occasionally hitting up against each other. This metaphor, however, fails to explain the war in the Congo. A better metaphor would be that of a “network,” as violence occurs within a complex web of non-state actors, each with varying regional, ethnic and international ties, all vying for power.
The main actors in the Congolese conflict live in the Eastern Kivu region near the border of Rwanda. Militias include the FDLR, a group of Rwandan Hutus who helped to orchestrate the Rwandan genocide and then fled to the Congo in its aftermath; the CNDP, General Laurent Nkunda and his force of Congolese Tutsis who oppose the FDLR; and the FARDC, the renegade national army. The FARDC is, in theory, controlled by Joseph Kabila, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s democratically elected President, but in practice is the most violent and corrupt force on the ground, responsible for 40 percent of the human rights violations committed.
A Nation With No State
The corruption of Kabila’s national army is symptomatic of a broader state collapse. Political scientists define the “state” as the entity within a country that has a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of power. In the absence of a state, without strong and neutral law enforcers, people in the Congo turn to warlords for protection. “The critical juncture [for the Congo] was the collapse of the Mobutu state,” René Lemarchand, French political scientist and professor at the University of Florida, told the HPR. This occurred in the mid-1990s “and left an institutional void, into which rushed more or less autonomous groups.” These autonomous groups reconstituted the functions of the state, including the maintenance of coercive power, controlling health clinics, and extracting minerals. “You enter a Catch-22,” Lemarchand explained. “The state would need resources to end the war, but it cannot access them so long as they are controlled by regional factions.”
Short on Sovereignty
Going forward, the international community’s mandate to intervene is unclear. A large-scale reorganization of a legitimately constituted army is a violation of sovereignty — but does that concept still apply to such a state? Professor Michael Schatzberg of the University of Wisconsin–Madison told the HPR that the United Nations spent “half of a billion dollars” in orchestrating the election of Joseph Kabila. “Logistically, the election simply would not have happened without an intervention.” Yet deaths continue to proceed at 45,000 a month, a rate undiminished since Kabila took office. This lack of improvement does not surprise Lemarchand: “Elections are fine,” he admits, “but when they’re held in a state where there is no state, you can expect the worst.” “[Further] Western intervention will not do much good, frankly,” added Charles Cogan, professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, speaking with the HPR. At least, not until international forces begin to re-conceptualize intervention so as to better operate in this different sort of conflict. The Congo needs a whole-state overhaul, not pacification, and the international community must tackle the problem innovatively or else bear a share of responsibility for the ever-climbing death toll.