The Congo Wars: geography NOT in the news

Reasons for instability and conflict in DR Congo

The timeline shows that DR Congo has suffered from a long-lasting civil war in which armies from neighbour states have also played a major role. Why is this part of the world so prone to instability and conflict? In a large part, regional instability is attributable to the hasty and poorly thought-out way in which African territory was divided when covetous colonial powers that included Britain, France and Belgium invaded and occupied the continent in the past.

New territorial borders were drawn with scant regard to the existing cultural and linguistic regions that indigenous Africans themselves recognised. Problems were inevitable.

For instance, the ethnic Tutsi people of modern Rwanda are also found in DR Congo. The transnational identity of ethnic groups such as the Tutsi is a root cause of widespread African regional instability and a trigger for many territorial skirmishes. Conflict between Tutsi people and another Rwandan group, the Hutu people, spread into neighbouring DR Congo during the 1990s. Rwandan Tutsi troops have been deployed across the border on numerous occasions in pursuit of Hutu militia groups accused of attacking the ethnic Tutsis who live in eastern Congo.

In summary, key reasons for the enormous scale and bloody nature of the conflict in DR Congo have included:

Colonisation: The Belgians introduced a precedent of oppression of the weak by the strong; some commentators would argue that this mind-set is still echoed today (New Statesman, 29 September 2010). More widely, Belgian rule was simply ruinous for the country. There were only a tiny number of trained graduates living there when it gained independence in 1960 – leaving the country with a highly damaging skills shortage across economic and political spheres of activity.

Ethnic diversity: The state of DR Congo is home to 240 ethnic groups and is severely lacking cultural coherence. In the absence of shared wealth or a strong state, such diversity poses a major challenge to unity and has become a major contributing factor to conflict. Additional factors have further exacerbated this failure to unite. Capital city Kinshasa is a megacity positioned on the extreme western border. Groups living in eastern territories, such as Nord-Kivu, are both spatially and socially distanced from the centre of decision-making and power. 37 years of misrule by President Mobutu also bred much resentment amongst some ethnic groups and exploded into rebellion during the late 1990s.

Resource curse: Neighbouring countries’ armies, including those of Uganda and Rwanda have repeatedly entered DR Congo, ostensibly in support of either government forces or rebel groups. However, once on Congolese soil, there is strong evidence that these armies have in fact been more concerned with staging a resource grab for themselves (notably of diamonds, for instance in the town of Mbuji-Mayi). Rebel groups sometimes forced farmers and their families to leave their agricultural land if valuable resources were suspected to lie beneath – or worse pressed them into forced labour as miners. These are serious charges that the Hague Criminal Court has since levelled at both Rwandan and Ugandan leaders.

Militia groups: In 2009 as many as 400,000 people fled their homes in DR Congo due to attacks from an armed militia group called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The LRA come from Uganda, showing once again that conflict in DR Congo is rooted in a wider, regional, set of issues. Militia groups and crime networks flourish across central Africa - where used Kalashnikov assault rifles can be purchased for as little as $10. The persistence of a "war economy" (where some people keep fighting simply because it has become a way of life that brings them money and resources) is also an important reason for continuing conflict.

Poverty: People living in DR Congo lack resilience due to poverty. When displaced from their land by anticipated or actual conflict, they find it hard to gain access to vital food supplies or medical care. Hunger and treatable illnesses become killers. Estimates suggest that of the 5.4 million who died, only one million died directly from the conflict. The remaining 4.4 million were deaths linked with poverty. Many were caused by preventable or treatable conditions including malaria, diarrhoea, pneumonia and malnutrition. Most of the victims were non-combatants or civilians who died as a result of the breakdown of economic, social and health infrastructures, or from hunger. Some even died from insect and snake bites or attacks by wild animals while hiding from militia groups such as the LRA.

"Colonialism established a system of mineral exploitation that consisted of extracting raw materials for export, with little or no productive investment in the country from which they were extracted, and little or no effort to protect the environment. This system has remained intact since independence as a national curse, in that DR Congo’s enormous wealth attracts numerous outsiders who eventually find local collaborators to help them loot the country’s natural resources. As in Leopold’s day, the national wealth is monopolised by Congo’s rulers and their foreign business partners to the detriment of the mass of the people, who remain among the poorest of the global poor. This is the real scandal of the Congo."

Source: Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja (Professor of African Studies at the University of North Carolina, USA)