The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair by Michael
Deibert – review
Rory Carroll on a valuable, angry account of Congo's difficulties
The Guardian, Thursday 2 January 2014 07.00 EST

A refugee carries her belongings from a boat on Lake Tanganyika near
the town of Baraka, Democratic Republic of Congo. Photograph: Anjan
Sundaram/AP
The cover of Michael Deibert's examination of Congo bears a striking
image of a young woman in flip-flops playing the cello in a bleak,
grubby yard surrounded by a bleak, grubby city. She focuses on the
notes on a sheet music stand, seemingly oblivious to the potholes and
grime and rain-bellied clouds overhead.
The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (African Arguments)
by Michael Deibert
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It is an apt illustration for a book subtitled "Between Hope and
Despair", and invites us to wonder if harmony will finally prevail in
a country eviscerated by two decades of conflict and chaos.
This ought to be one of the great, burning questions of international
diplomacy. The carnage has caused 5.4m deaths, by some estimates, and
the toll continues to climb. Fighting in the east last year spilled
into Rwanda.
Yet central Africa seldom commands outside attention. Its torments
play second fiddle to Afghanistan and the Middle East. This is
understandable – there are no Islamist or nuclear perils here to
frighten the west – but still shameful. Europe and the US bear partial
responsibility for Congo's plight, a legacy of enslavement, looting
and meddling dating back centuries.
Deibert's book is a scrupulously researched reminder of how this
corner of the world became so wretched, and of the multiple actors
responsible: Congolese politicians and warlords, predatory neighbours,
hypocritical western governments and a hapless UN. "Though far from a
paradise before the advent of Europe's colonial adventure there," he
writes, "Congo became a place as deeply scarred and deformed by
colonialism as any in Africa, and the bloodshed that has befallen the
country since then is not the result of some sort of indigenous,
irresistible, immemorial bloodlust on the part of the Congolese, but
rather has been a tool used by individuals and governments to advance
their own political and economic goals."
A vast land stretching from the Atlantic across jungles and savannah
to Lake Tanganyika, touching nine countries, the Democratic Republic
of the Congo (as opposed to the smaller Congo-Brazzaville to the west)
abounds in timber, minerals and precious stones. These riches have
been a curse, drawing parasitic interlopers who ravaged and
impoverished Congo under various names: the Congo Free State, Belgian
Congo, Zaire, DRC.
The depredations have long inspired and appalled chroniclers. Joseph
Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Roger Casement's diaries exposed King
Leopold's vampiric tyranny. More recently Adam Hochschild (King
Leopold's Ghost), Michela Wrong (In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz) and Tim
Butcher (Blood River) have delved into the moral murk and returned
with literary gems.
Mario Vargas Llosa visited Congo to research The Dream of the Celt, a
fictionalised account of Casement's life published in 2012.
Deibert's book eschews literary pretensions. A globetrotting American
freelancer who specialises in development issues in Africa, Latin
America and the Caribbean, he has written a solid, journalistic
account detailing Congo's tailspin since 1994. Early chapters briskly
dispatch the history – Portuguese slavers, Belgian hand-cutters,
Mobutu Sese Seko's decaying rule – leaving the book to focus on what
happened after Rwanda's vengeful Tutsi forces pursued Hutu
genocidaires across the border of its giant neighbour.
Drawing on reports from Global Witness and Human Rights Watch, among
others, Deibert details how Rwanda's proxy warlord, Laurent Kabila,
swept aside Mobutu's ramshackle regime and installed himself in the
presidential palace in Kinshasa.
Bill Clinton, shamed by his inaction during Rwanda's genocide,
compensated by turning a blind eye to atrocities committed by forces
loyal to Kabila and his Rwandan puppet-master Paul Kagame. That set a
trend for western coddling of Kagame that lasted two decades despite
repression in Rwanda and catastrophic tampering in Congo.
As the Guardian's Africa correspondent from 2002 until 2006 I would
interview massacre survivors in Goma and Bukavu, then interview
western diplomats in Kigali and Kinshasa who would nod and sigh and
mumble excuses. A complex situation. Multiple variables. Powder keg.
Better Kagame's iron fist than anarchy.
But it was anarchy. After Kabila turned against his patron, Rwanda
invaded again. A metastasising conflict drew in Angola, Burundi,
Uganda and Zimbabwe, all chasing plunder, and spawned dozens of proxy
local militias and rebel groups, unleashing rape, pillage and
slaughter on civilians.
Deibert makes a few fleeting appearances in the text such as when he
encounters "bones still bleaching in the sun" in Bogoro, five years
after a massacre, or visits the assassinated Kabila's tomb, built by
his son and successor, Joseph Kabila. Mostly the author keeps himself
out of it, a restraint alien to the I-swam-the-crocodile-river school
of Congo reportage, and sticks to the facts, layering the narrative
with details about which group or sub-group committed which killings.
The cumulative effect is numbing. Here is the RCD-N killing and raping
this ethnic group. Now it's the UPC killing and raping that ethnic
group. Then it's the turn of the APC. Then the FRPI, the FNI, the
RCD-G. Even with footnotes it can become bewildering. Which lot are
they again?
Congo's horrors have arguably inspired too much lyrical prose at the
expense of factual accounts giving you straight analysis, and here
lies the value of this book, an up to date synopsis which should adorn
the shelf of policymakers and analysts. But as acronym bleeds into
acronym the general reader will yearn for some storytelling, for some
characters to humanise the statistics and give a flash of Congolese
culture, humour and music. Too bad, too, that we are left guessing the
motivations and personalities of players such as Kagame, a PR-savvy
manipulator, or Joseph Kabila, the callow princeling turned smooth,
ruthless autocrat.
These are surprising omissions as this is, quite rightly, an angry
book. From his writings elsewhere Deibert is in the mould of James
Cameron. Compassion impels his curiosity.
He castigates Clinton ("feckless, narcissistic self-interest") and the
UN's peacekeeping force Monusco ("ludicrously understaffed … at times
more interested in the perpetuation of the mission itself than the
protection of the near-defenceless Congolese people"), not to make
partisan points but because he has seen, first-hand, the tragic
consequences.
The US and some European countries have belatedly recognised Kagame's
duplicity but Deibert offers scant reason for the hope in his book's
title. He doubts the international criminal court's prosecution of a
few warlords at the Hague will deter others. For kleptocrats and
meddlers, Congo, alas, remains open for business.
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