by JOE TRAPIDO
According to the un’s Human Development Index, the Democratic Republic of Congo is just about the world’s worst place to live. [*] Bad things in Niger, and some very marginal improvements in the drc itself, have recently moved it up from the bottom spot it occupied in 2011, but you get the picture. Not incidental to this dismal ranking was a seven- or eight-year international war in which, according to the Lancet, nearly four million people died. [1] There are reservations to be entered about both of these results: the kind of complex comparisons included in indexes like the undp’s are capricious, with rankings changing according to the relative weight you assign to each of the proxy indicators—life expectancy, education, per capita gdp. The narrow range of the proxies included also conveys a rather stunted idea of what is, at times, the most delightful place. One can imagine that if the Human Development Index had given great pop music, a sense of irony, or antelope stew with sorrel and palm nuts their due, then Congo would have scored rather better. Likewise, it is hard to know what to make of mortality estimates in a region where there has been no census since 1984. Whatever the exact figure, only a small proportion of the deaths during the Second Congo War were caused by direct violence: the majority succumbed to collapses in food production, health systems and wider infrastructure.
…
Stillbirth of a nation
There is no doubt that Western forces played a central role in the botched and bloody processes that followed, from the secession of Katanga to the murder of Patrice Lumumba and elevation of Mobutu, who had been taken up by the Belgians in 1957, and became a key member of the close-knit ‘Binza group’ centred around the cia station chief in Kinshasa, Larry Devlin. [27] To understand Western hostility to Lumumba it is necessary to look at the economic conjuncture the new government confronted at independence. The infant state had inherited a higher debt burden than other colonies in Africa; the tax base was narrower and over-reliant on rent from concessions, while most of the downstream profits generated by Congolese commodities were made in Belgium. [28] The obvious conclusion was that, to be viable, the state would have to get a better deal from the Belgian and British-owned copper and cobalt mines in Katanga. Global copper prices were high and Western leaders were nervous about any suggestion of economic nationalism. [29] The sense of alarm was heightened by the fact that Katanga had supplied the uranium used to destroy Hiroshima. In London and Brussels, hostility to Lumumba was also shot through with far-right and white-supremacist ideology—Janssens lived out his span in Belgium deeply involved with far-right politics, while independent Katanga had its cheerleaders in the Conservative Party’s Monday Club. [30] But it was also wrapped up with an attention to profits: the average return on industrial investments in the Belgian Congo during the years leading up to independence had been 12 per cent. [31]
When the governor of Katanga, Moise Tshombe, took advantage of the Army mutiny to declare the province’s independence in July 1960, his move was strongly backed by the umhk, which immediately loaned the new state 1.25 billion Belgian francs and began to pay its taxes directly to Tshombe. While there was a domestic constituency for independence in the south of the province, above all among the Lunda, it was fiercely opposed in the north, where the Luba-Katanga were in the majority. [32] Flush with umhk money and surrounded by Belgian advisors, the Katanga government recruited a force of white mercenaries who committed a series of atrocities. One of the figures formed by this conjuncture was Laurent Kabila; from the Luba-Katanga group himself, he was one of the young militants in Jeunesse Balubakat, pitted against Tshombe. But though the war had a strongly ethnic character, there were also class and generational aspects to the struggle. Many ‘elders’ within the Luba-Katanga—older men who had been privileged as part of the state, either as Belgian-appointed ‘chiefs’ or as petty functionaries—also supported Tshombe’s separatist party, conakat, as the protégé of white capital. Kabila’s own father was one such elder: he was executed by his son’s militia. [33]
Within twelve weeks of the independence ceremonies, Lumumba had been ousted. Dulles had cabled Devlin ten days before to say his removal was ‘a high priority’. [34] The un troops that Lumumba had naively called in to put down the secession had an American commander. They effectively safeguarded Tshombe’s regime, and allowed Lumumba to be overthrown by Mobutu and Joseph Kasavubu in September 1960, after he had appealed to Moscow—unavailingly—for help. Devlin mentions in his memoirs that he ‘explored the feasibility’ of killing the Congolese leader, acting on a request from Eisenhower, but it seems to have been Belgian forces that did the deed. [35] With Lumumba out of the way, and the cia working closely with the new central government, Washington changed its line on Katanga, now seeing the continuing warfare there as a source of destabilization. In late 1962 Kennedy authorized an all-out assault by the un. This brought Tshombe’s surrender and the reintegration of the province in January 1963. The externally circumscribed limits to Congolese autonomy had been clearly defined.
New Left Review for more