Millions die, Bush is silent

The history of the Congo -- richer in mineral resources than any other country in Africa -- is one of bloody exploitation. Gold, diamonds, rubber and ivory have flowed to Europe and the Americas for a century from the area known first as the Belgian Congo, then as Zaire, under the West-backed regime of Mobutu Sese Seko from 1965 to 1997. The present conflict started in 1998, after Laurent Kabila took power, renaming the country again as the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Rwandan and Ugandan-backed forces have been trying to overthrow the government and control the resources ever since, in a wave of violence that resulted in the assassination of Kabila in January 2001 and the ascension of his son, Joseph. Today, the Congo is essentially split in half -- with Kabila's government ruling the areas around the western town of Kinshasa, and Ugandan- and Rwandan-backed militias fighting in the Eastern area of Ituri.

Uganda and Rwanda are but two actors in the six-year war an International Rescue Committee report describes as involving "seven nations, three main rebel groups and numerous militias fight[ing] over a complex mix of economic, ethnic, state and factional interests."

The situation is so fluid and complex that it can be easy to despair of even understanding all the issues involved, let alone addressing them. There is the conflict in Bunia between the Lendu tribe and the wealthier Hemas, so reminiscent of the Tutsi-Hutu genocide. There is the clash between the government in Kinshasa and militias in the east. And there is the war fought by children; those who are not shot or hacked to death often die in the forest of malnutrition or malaria. The forests are sown with their bones.

It is easier to turn away, and that's what we have done.

In the Congo, diamond fields represent such wealth that they are fought over and died for and the current violence in Ituri is largely their doing. Uganda, whose HIV program Bush will be lauding on his upcoming trip, remains one of the biggest buyers of the diamonds that fuel the ongoing conflict in the Congo. Ugandan forces, which took over the mineral-rich area of Ituri in 1998, officially left the country in May as the main condition of a December 2002 peace plan put together by neighboring countries -- but the power vacuum left in their wake only produced the latest explosion of massacres by local tribal militias in Bunia, and Ugandan proxy warriors remain. Macheted infants and the rape of young girls are commonplace. Though the United Nations sent a small team of Uruguayan peacekeepers to the area in April to facilitate the Ugandan pullout, the results have been dismal. The violence has slowed since the arrival of 1,400 French troops in June but children continue to die of war-induced malnutrition.

Arrangements have been made for a transitional, multi-party government to be formed, but experts predict this, too, will end in disaster. "Split the government into factions?" says Gondola, a professor of African history at Indiana University. "This is really going to create a monster. It will just give the rebels official power." Adds Gourevitch: "To a large extent the problem in Congo is a result of these African neighbors, so the whole 'African-solutions-to-African-problems' thing is more like substituting one African problem for another."

According to Abdul K. Bangura, a Sierra Leonean professor of international relations at American University in Washington, Bush is unlikely to press Uganda on his trip to work toward a peaceful solution. "We have a very strong ally in President [Yoweri] Museveni of Uganda, and we need his support -- especially now that we're fighting terrorism in East Africa," he says. He also believes Rwanda, another ally, is equally unlikely to be pressured by the Bush administration -- even though an estimated third of the Congolese military are believed to be Rwandan soldiers who switched uniforms. Many Africans are questioning the double standards of U.S. foreign policy. "Here we have our own 'boys' doing the worst things in the Congo and we pretty much turn a blind eye, but we have no problem beating up on [dictator Robert] Mugabe and talking about regime change in Zimbabwe."

If the U.S. does not become involved in the humanitarian crisis in the Congo, it's because it's in its national interest to leave the Congo in the fractured state it is -- no matter how vast the slaughter that ensues. Although "conflict diamonds" -- so named because they are gained cheaply through wars in the Congo and elsewhere -- have gained the attention of the American public, the more widely used minerals smuggled out have not.

Coltan, a combination of minerals found in abundance in the Congo, is regularly used in the making of cellphones and laptops and can sell for up to $100 a pound -- ten times what the Congolese who dig it up are paid. But as yet there is no public outrage over "conflict coltan," and Gondola blames the news media and Microsoft for the lack of attention paid. "If there were a democratic government in the Congo, if the country owned all the resources, the price would go up," he says. "Microsoft doesn't want that, Bush doesn't want that. So nothing will change. The bottom line is always money." The humanitarian atrocities in Liberia, Sudan and Zimbabwe are nowhere near the scale of those in the Congo, but those are the wars it appears Bush wants to fight.

But the realpolitik nature of humanitarian crisis is not unusual, according to Gourevitch.

"Humanitarian motives for serious international action tend to be welcome packaging, as it were," he said. "Even in Kosovo, it wasn't a humanitarian war. There were a lot of strategic reasons for us to do it. This was NATO acting in the center of NATO's turf on a problem it'd had for years, and that was then justified by the humanitarian motive, just as the humanitarian motive was then justified as a priority because we were a part of this strategic alliance."

Leaving the Congo to the U.N. to handle has, in effect, been a convenient way of burying the issue. "It's a place where you make a very modest and feeble gesture of concern in the form of sending an inadequately mandated small number of poorly armed troops ... and then you can say 'We've done something,'" adds Gourevitch. "And when it turns out you didn't do enough and trouble comes as it did in Bunia in May, then everybody says 'Well, look, it's these Uruguayans under a U.N. flag, what a disgrace,' and nobody says 'Wait a minute, that was the program approved by Washington, Paris, London.'"

Next Page: Says one aid worker: "Intervention has to come from the outside"

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