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We need to talk about Congo

Several different conflicts, tangled up with the past, mean that the situation in Congo is a complicated one. What should the Church be doing to support this troubled region?

As a plot for a spy thriller, it’s a little over-the-top. Insane dictators, CIA assassinations, shady international business deals and jungle death cults…Unrealistic, right? But this is a true story. You’ve been part of it for years, but you’ve probably never heard of it. It’s no secret, but there are governments, corporations and brutal militias who would rather you didn’t know too much. Their tools are not the hidden transmitters of Daniel Craig, but personal, national and global indifference. And right now the Church is one of the few movements that can defeat them.

This is the story of Africa’s largest country, a place where 92% of the 62 million-strong population call themselves Christian, and where, over little more than a decade, 6 million people have died and countless more men, women and children have been raped.

What is happening in Congo is complicated. It’s not just one conflict, with easy to understand causes, good guys and bad guys. It’s several different conflicts – some new, and some tangled up with Congo’s past.

Most of the recent conflict has taken place in the East of the country, where the Rwandan genocide spilled over into neighbouring Congo, then known as Zaire.

‘It started off quite large-scale where hundreds of people were being killed,’ says Geoff Andrews, country director for Christian relief charity Medair in Congo. ‘In the last 18 months it’s been five here, two there, ten there. Small-scale, but enough to frighten populations so they don’t go back to their homes.’

Hidden holocaust

Some of the most brutal acts, including mutilation, sexual slavery, child soldiers and mass murder, have been committed by the Lord’s Resistance Army. Its infamous leader, Joseph Kony, is a selfstyled ‘messiah’ and paramilitary leader who claims to be indestructible.

The LRA moves around, but mainly operates in the East. Further south, in the mineralrich eastern Congolese provinces, a more complicated but no less brutal situation exists. Remnant groups of a war between eight African countries in the 1990s have split into independent fighting forces, terrorising local populations, funding themselves by selling the metals mined in the area.

We are all tired of hearing stories from conflict zones that make us feel hopeless, even guilty. But while we hear a lot about some humanitarian disasters, the situation in Congo has for decades been ignored. The Church needs to speak out. How can we ignore a region where, on New Year’s Day 2011, 60 women were raped in one village? In July, another report emerged where up to 70 women had been raped. Only a month ago, The Observer published a harrowing story that reported 30% of women and 22% of men had suffered sexual violence from soldiers and militiamen. This is not just ‘another African problem’. With a death toll now estimated at 6 million people, yet little said about it around the world, this is a hidden holocaust.

Africa’s First World War

The stories of mass murder and rape, of entire villages forced from their homes and people enslaved by militias, are numerous and shocking.

‘In Eastern Congo, a lot of the situation stems from break-off groups from militia who have used sexual violence as a weapon of war,’ says Sarah Reilly, spokesperson for We Will Speak Out, a coalition of Christian groups seeking to bring an end to sexual violence. These ‘break-off groups’ came into being during what some call ‘Africa’s First World War’. The comparison is justified. An area of Eastern Congo, half the size of Western Europe, was the battlefield for two opposing alliances, and it cost 3.2 million lives – the worst casualties the world had seen since 1945.

Africa’s war was sparked by the brutal slaughter in 1994 of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis in Rwanda. Millions of Hutus, fearing reprisals, poured across the border into Congo, assisted by a French military operation that was sanctioned by the UN Security Council. They were pursued by Tutsi forces and their Ugandan allies. Congo, which had had nothing to do with the genocide, was now home to millions of refugees, as well as opposing death squads and foreign armies. The UN, which helped settle this massive population, made no plans to remove them. Their presence provided an excuse for Congo’s neighbours to pour troops into a very rich area. Many of the forces that entered Congo in 1994 and again in 1998 have yet to leave the mineral-rich East. ‘War has been imported to Congo by people who want to plunder the wealth of our country,’ says Jeremie Alamazani, a Christian entrepreneur from Congo, now living in the UK.

Too Complex to Deal With?

Between 1998 and 2003, while many of us were dancing to Britney Spears, watching Titanic and enjoying England’s Rugby World Cup victory, much of Africa was at war, and the theatre they chose was Eastern Congo. Namibia, Zimbabwe, Angola and Chad fought alongside Congolese forces who were attempting to get foreign troops off Congolese soil. Ugandan, Rwandan and Burundian forces fought against them.

The temptation is to think of all this in terms of Africa being a terminally messed-up place. Or, worse still, to write off the conflict as something Europeans will never understand or fix. ‘The problem is that people usually think this is another situation where Africans are killing Africans, so they feel they don’t need to get involved,’ says Dedy Bilamba, a Congolese author and activist living in Canada. He is echoed by Kambale Musavuli, spokesperson for Friends of the Congo: ‘If you look at just the last ten years, all you’ll see is Africans wantonly killing each other like savages. That is not the real explanation.’

Find out more about the voices of the Congolese diaspora, and for web resources click here.

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