Congo Elections

by hilzoy

I'm a few days late in commenting on this story, but better late than never:

"Incumbent Joseph Kabila was on Wednesday declared the winner of Congo's first presidential elections in more than 40 years, as the crumbling boulevards of the capital remained calm.

The announcement came during a week of rising tensions and as dozens of U.N. tanks patrolled the streets. On Tuesday, supporters of Kabila's rival, Jean-Pierre Bemba, essentially declared their candidate president, accusing the election commission and other countries of an "electoral holdup."

Bemba, a former rebel leader, has wide support in Kinshasa and a personal guard of an estimated 1,000 soldiers who had refused to evacuate to the edges of the city.

By sundown Wednesday, many Congolese were expressing fear that the historic vote would end in a street brawl. Business owners chained their doors early, streets were unusually empty, and some families boarded ferries bound for Brazzaville, in neighboring Congo Republic across the vast Congo River.

But the sort of violence that killed at least 23 people after the first round of voting on July 30, and that people endured during a decade of civil war, did not materialize."

Both the election itself and the fact that it does not seem to have been followed by violence are incredibly important. It's still hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that 3.8 million people died in the last Congo civil war, between 1998 and 2004, and also hard for me to understand why this got so little notice in the press. Here's some quick background:

"The story of Congo's war began in 1994, with the genocide in Rwanda, Congo's tiny neighbour. A government dominated by Rwanda's Hutu tribe tried to exterminate the Tutsis, a prosperous minority. In 100 days, 800,000 Tutsis, and Hutus who refused to co-operate, were murdered. The slaughter stopped when an army of exiled Tutsis invaded from Uganda, and drove the killers into Congo (which was then called Zaire). The new, Tutsi-dominated government in Rwanda was afraid that the genocidaires would regroup and return to finish the job. So when Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire's dictator, gave them succour, Rwanda engineered a rebellion that toppled him.

In his place, the Rwandans installed a guerrilla leader and drunk, Laurent Kabila. They hoped he would do their bidding. Instead, he rearmed the genocidaires. So Rwanda tried to topple him, too. With help from Uganda and Burundi, it nearly succeeded. Kabila was saved by five friendly nations, of which the most effective were Angola and Zimbabwe. Most of the countries that intervened had legitimate interests in Congo. Rebels from most neighbouring states were using Congo's lawless forests as a base from which to launch cross-border raids. The failure of the Kabila government to curb these rebels prompted Rwanda, Uganda and Angola to enter the war. Zimbabwe, which shares no border with Congo, sent troops for different reasons: to satisfy the power-broking pretensions of its president, Robert Mugabe, and his army's appetite for loot.

Before long, the war reached a stalemate and the miscellany of armies settled down to the serious business of plunder. Zimbabwe bagged diamond seams in the south. Angola joined the Congolese government in an oil venture. Rwanda and Uganda began digging for diamonds and coltan (a mineral used in mobile telephones), harvested timber and ivory, and even emptied schools of desks and chairs. Though supposedly allies, Rwandan and Ugandan troops have occasionally clashed over the spoils. But in general, the more all the armies plundered, the less willing they became to fight each other (as opposed to unarmed peasants)."

Then Kabila was assassinated, his (considerably better) son Joseph succeeded him, and in 2004 the various factions signed a peace agreement. In the east, people are still fighting over minerals, the Rwandan Hutus do not particularly want to leave, and that part of the country is not yet really at peace, as this story makes clear. It's about fistulas, a horrible condition in which the walls that separate the anus from the vagina are torn apart, with such delightful consequences as feces perpetually leaking out of one's vagina, which normally cause the women who suffer fistulas to live in social isolation. Fistulas are usually due to difficult childbirth without decent medical care, but not in the Congo:

"Ordinary rapes, even violent ones, do not usually cause fistulas, although it's not medically impossible. Doctors in eastern Congo say they have seen cases that resulted from gang rapes where large numbers of militiamen repeatedly forced themselves on the victim. But more often the damage is caused by the deliberate introduction of objects into the victim's vagina when the rape itself is over. The objects might be sticks or pipes. Or gun barrels. In many cases the attackers shoot the victim in the vagina at point-blank range after they have finished raping her. "Often they'll do this carefully to make sure the woman does not die," says Dr. Denis Mukwege, medical director of Panzi Hospital. "The perpetrators are trying to make the damage as bad as they can, to use it as a kind of weapon of war, a kind of terrorism." Instead of just killing the woman, she goes back to her village permanently and obviously marked. "I think it's a strategy put in place by these groups to disrupt society, to make husbands flee, to terrorize."

The worst perpetrators call themselves the Federation for the Liberation of Rwanda. They were the Hutu militiamen—also known as the Interhamwe—who carried out the 1994 Rwandan genocide. That bloodbath ended when the Interhamwe were forced to retreat across Rwanda's western border into Congo, where they remain to this day, deep in the forests, armed, deadly and with nowhere else they can go. But the tactic of violent rape is used by many of the other armed factions in the area, including the Congolese Army, according to relief workers and United Nations officials. "It has been used as a weapon of war for so long it's become almost a habit," says Ross Mountain, the U.N.'s humanitarian coordinator for the Congo. "All sides are doing it, and the national army is by no means immune from that." "All the armed men rape," says Doctor Mukwege. "When we see a lesion, we can tell who the perpetrator is; there are special methods of each group, types of injuries. The Interahamwe after the rape will introduce objects; a group in Kombo sets fire to the women's buttocks afterwards, or makes them sit on the coals of a fire. There's another group that specializes in raping 11-, 12-, 13-, 14-year-old girls, one that gets them pregnant and aborts them." The youngest victim of fistula from rape his hospital has seen was 12 months old; the oldest, 71."

So it would be an understatement to say that the peace accord has not solved the Congo's problems, and that the election won't solve them either. That said, this is the first Presidential election since the end of hostilities, and it's incredibly important. It's important that the election took place at all, for starters. It's important that it seems to have been reasonably fair. It's important that the winner, Joseph Kabila, won by 58%-42%, since a closer election would have been a lot easier for Jean-Pierre Bemba, who lost, to decide to fight over. And it's really imortant that while Bemba has rejected the results, he has not yet gone to war over them, which looked to be a serious possibility.

Successful elections aren't anything remotely resembling a guarantee that things will improve in the Congo. However, had the elections failed, and the various parties gone back to fighting one another, that would have been close to a guarantee that the country would fall back into full-blown civil war. (In philosophy-speak: a successful election is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the Congo's continuing recovery.) It's really important that now, four days after the results were announced, no one seems to have taken up arms.

Certainly much more important than the cancellation of OJ's odious book and TV appearance; and yet, strange to say, it gets a lot less coverage. Since I don't really want to follow the media on this one, this will be my only notice of the OJ thing, but probably not the last time I'll write about the Congo. I'm hoping for the best, or at least for some measure of peace to people who have lived through enough.

***

UPDATE: Matttbastard notes in comments that there's a good rundown of the latest news from Congo here. In future, updates can be found here.

Comments

[Ugh]

The world is a fine place and worth fighting for. I agree with the second part.

[Ugh]

You know, I read stuff like this and stuff about the ongoing carnage in Iraq and wonder if the world wouldn't be better off if we all just committed mass suicide and let a more compassionate and enlightened species takeover the planet. Like cockroaches.

[hilzoy]

It was the 12 month old with a rape-induced fistula that particularly got to me.

[rilkefan]

Thanks for the reminder/update/surge-of-anger-and-despair, hilzoy.

Ugh, you might enjoy Vonnegut's _Galapagos_.

[lemuel pitkin]

Stories like this make me wonder about the knee-jerk Western response to "make peace" in these situtions. Pretty clearly, the current Rwandan government, though obviously not perfect, are the good guys here. I'm sure they've committed their share of abuses, but I'm also fairly sure that the more military scucess they achieved against the Interahmawe, the betetr the future of the region.

Western solidarity with Africa tends to be limited to the most unambiguous victims. Victims who fight back and win, like the Rwandan Tutsi, are often assumed to be just as bad as their oppressors. I have essentailyl no sympathy with US pretnesions to use miltiary force on behalf of someone else's human rights. But when people use force on behalf their won rights, taht's a different story.

[matttbastard]

A quick update: Bemba is taking his challenge of the results to the Supreme Court; it remains to be seen whether the (relative) peace will hold.

AllAfrica.com posts this UN round-up of local press coverage the challenge has received.

[Ugh]

It was the 12 month old with a rape-induced fistula that particularly got to me.

GAH! When I read the post my mind placed "month" with "year." Not that that's any better, but Jesus.

[matttbastard]

Thanks for the update, Hil. The peace in Kinshasa seems even more unstable today:

Part of Congo's Supreme Court was burnt on Tuesday as judges reviewed electoral fraud complaints filed by supporters of presidential contender Jean-Pierre Bemba.

The session was immediately suspended. It is unclear who started the fire, but police fired shots into the air to disperse Bemba supporters demanding to enter the court building.

[...]

In a communiqué, the UN Mission in the DRC (MONUC), said that "uncontrolled elements" fired on the police who had moved in to disperse 22 people gathered in front of the court. The shooting lasted 45 minutes, forcing the court to suspend the hearing. A police bus and two other vehicles were also burnt.

MONUC troops evacuated four Supreme Court judges, lawyers for Bemba and the Independent Electoral Commission, as well as officials from Bemba's coalition of political parties - the Union pour la nation.

[...]

Meanwhile, tension remains high in the city as the army has surrounded Bemba's home where most of his bodyguards live.

More here and here.

And for those still following Zimbabwe, the life expectancy for women is now 34, the lowest in the world.