To Help Congo Heal, World Must Have Faith in Grassroots Projects

Recently, Severine Autussere wrote an article in regard to how grassroots organizations are vital to aiding those in Congo.  Severine Autesserre is assistant professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University, and the author of “The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding.”  The article paints the picture of grassroots groups being the largest providers of resources that go directly to those who need it.  We could not agree more.

The Spine Africa Project is an organization based in New Jersey that provides spine surgeries for those injured in the Eastern Congo as a result of civil violence and conflict mining.  Several times per year our small teams of physicians travels to the Panzi Hospital to perform life saving spine surgery for those injured.  Currently, there are no provisions for spine care in the Eastern Congo despite the staggeringly high rate of spinal injuries.  Due to this lack of care the average life expectancy of someone who suffers a spinal injury is less than two years.

Our goal is not only to immediately address these injuries but to educate the local physicians as to how to treat these injuries themselves.  A large part of our organization is focused on the education of the local medical personnel utilizing a combination of both expanded formal education as well as a hands on approach to the surgical cases performed by The Spine Africa Project team.  More information can be found on our website as well as in the video below.

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Severine Autesserre | June 25, 2012

The situation in Congo keeps deteriorating even though its civil war has officially been over for years and the United Nations’ second-largest peacekeeping mission is based there. The international community has failed to help Congo achieve peace and security because it fundamentally misunderstands the causes of the violence. 

Since the end of the transition to peace in late 2006, living conditions in the country (formally the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire) have become the worst in the world, according to the most recent Index of Human Development. 

Average life expectancy at birth is 48 years, and close to 80 percent of the population survives on less than $2 per day. Various armed groups, including the Congolese army, are committing horrific human rights violations, especially in the eastern part of the country. About 200,000 people have fled their homes since late April to escape the fighting and abuses. 

The civil war in Congo was the deadliest conflict since World War II, and it created the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. More than five million people died from 1998 to 2007 as domestic and foreign armed groups fought to control the territory, destabilizing much of Central and Southern Africa. 

Babies and elderly grandmothers were raped. Some two million people — and as many as 80 percent of the inhabitants of Congo’s eastern provinces — fled their homes to escape the violence. 

African and Western diplomats, along with UN officials, actively supervised negotiations to end the war. In 2002, they brokered a peace deal, and in 2006 they organized the first democratic elections in Congo’s history. 

To this day, the peacekeeping mission they set up is the only force capable of protecting the population from the ongoing violence. 

But it has been a case of misguided intervention. One reason is that foreign diplomats, UN peacekeepers and many NGOs tend to view the fighting exclusively as a consequence of national and international tensions — especially power struggles among Congolese and foreign elites — and a spillover from the Rwandan genocide. And they typically consider intervention at the national or regional levels to be their only legitimate responsibility. 

They neglect to address the other main sources of violence: distinctively local conflicts over land, grassroots power, status and resources, like cattle, charcoal, timber, drugs and fees levied at checkpoints.

Most of the violence in Congo is not coordinated on a large scale. It is the product of conflicts among fragmented local militias, each trying to advance its own agenda at the village or district level. Those then percolate and expand. 

Consider tensions between the Congolese of Rwandan descent and the so-called indigenous communities in the eastern provinces of South Kivu and North Kivu. These have roots in a long-standing competition over land and traditional and administrative power that began in the 1930s under Belgian colonial rule. 

The conflict escalated after Congo’s independence in 1960 as each camp recruited allies outside the province. With the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the crisis in the Kivus took on a regional dimension: local actors forged alliances with various Congolese and Rwandan armed groups, to promote their own agendas. 

Rather than address these issues, though, international peacemakers have lately singled out three features of the ongoing conflict: as a primary cause of violence, the illegal exploitation of natural resources by Congolese and foreign armed groups; as a main consequence, sexual abuse against women and girls; as a central solution, reconstructing state authority. 

International programs have thus emphasized three priorities: regulating the trade of minerals, providing care to victims of sexual violence and helping the central government extend its authority. This approach has provided a simple narrative that was easy to sell to audiences and donors in the West. 

It has also backfired. Perversely, attempts to regulate the trade of minerals — like Section 1502 of the US 2010 Dodd-Frank Act and a temporary mining ban imposed by the Congolese government from September 2010 to March 2011 — have enabled armed groups to strengthen their control over mines. 

These measures focused on stopping the illegal trade of minerals but did nothing to destroy the actual power base of armed groups. 

In the absence of any broader political, economic or social reforms, local military leaders have managed to remain the principal power brokers in the rural areas of eastern Congo. In some cases, they have even expanded their mining operations while vulnerable populations lost their livelihoods. 

The international community’s disproportionate attention to sexual violence has also raised the status of sexual abuse in a dangerous way. Some combatants now use it as a bargaining tool by threatening to commit mass rape if they are excluded from negotiations. And state-reconstruction programs have done little more than boost the capacity of the authoritarian central government. 

Addressing the consequences of sexual violence and these other abuses is important, of course, but donors should do more to address their underlying causes. Most important, they should approach the resolution of conflicts in Congo from the bottom up. 

They should assist local groups — official authorities, NGOs and civil-society representatives — with the funding, logistical means and technical capacity necessary to implement narrowly tailored programs. 

As the UN Security Council convenes this week to renew the mandate of its peacekeeping mission in Congo, it should refocus its efforts on supporting grassroots projects directed at resolving local conflicts, especially over land. If the international community continues to address the consequences of the violence in Congo rather than its most important causes, it will only add to the death toll.

Joseph Kony in Congo

Copied from The Enough Project (http://www.enoughproject.org/blogs/enough-101-lords-resistance-army-congo)

 

Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, was formed in northern Uganda in 1987, and in the past 25 years has murdered, kidnapped, and spread terror among civilians in four countries in central Africa, including the Congo. 

Despite currently being pursued by regional forces supported by U.S. military advisors, the LRA now operates in an area covering approximately 115,000 square miles in the Congo, Central African Republic, or CAR, and South Sudan.

The LRA first shifted its base of operations to Garamba National Park, Congo, beginning in 2005. Due to years of civil and regional war and lack of governance, the Congo was primed to serve as a refuge for armed groups. The LRA did not start attacking Congolese people until September 2008, instead preferring to use its base in the Congo to rebuild its strength while launching attacks and raids into CAR and southern Sudan. During this time, the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, known at the time as MONUC, coordinated two forays into the park with the Congolese army, both of which failed to contain the LRA due to major logistical and tactical errors.

LRA leader Joseph Kony had been in peace negotiations with the government of Uganda since2006, but ultimately refused to sign the accords.  When the peace talks fell apart and the LRA began attacks in Congo, a military operation led by Uganda, with the support of the United States, launched in December 2008. 

In retaliation for the Uganda-led operations, the LRA killed more than 865 civilians and abducted at least 160 children from three areas in northern Congo over a period of a few weeks in the infamous “Christmas Massacres” of December 2008 and January 2009. According to Human Rights Watch, “LRA combatants hacked their victims to death with machetes or axes or crushed their skulls with clubs and heavy sticks.”

From September 2008 through mid-January 2009, the LRA killed over 1,033 civilians and abducted at least 476 children in Congo.

In March 2010, Enough documented a series of LRA attacks on Congolese soldiers, “suggesting a level of confidence on the part of LRA fighters that one would not expect from a militia rumored to be dying out.” And in early 2011, the LRA increased attacks on more heavily populated civilian areas, targeting civilians and humanitarian aid agencies.

More recently, after a lull in attacks in the latter half of 2011, the LRA has increased its activity in Orientale province in northeastern Congo. In the first two weeks of February 2012, at least 12 LRA attacks were reported in Congo.

The armies of the four governments, with the assistance of U.S. military advisors, began a new operation against the LRA in late 2011. The mission is based in CAR and South Sudan. However, although there is a battalion of the Congolese army deployed in LRA-affected areas of Congo, it has limited ability to respond rapidly to possible threats to civilians and is conducting only some patrols in the vast area in which the LRA currently operates, according to Enough sources. The Congolese government has refused for the past six months to allow Ugandan troops to operate in its territory to pursue the LRA senior leadership and protect civilians. The Congolese government consistently denies the threat of the LRA on Congolese soil—they do not want Ugandan troops in the Congo, at least in large part due to their exploitation of Congo’s natural resources several years ago, and would prefer U.S. military aid to be given directly to the Congolese army rather than to the Ugandans.

Since 2008, LRA attacks have displaced an estimated 320,000 people in Congo’s Orientale province and 30,000 Congolese refugees have fled to the Central African Republic and South Sudan.

In January 2012, the U.N. and the African Union met with representatives of the countries affected by the LRA and agreed in principle to allow troops to freely cross borders in pursuit of LRA forces. However, in practice the Congolese government continues to block access to the Ugandan army, severely limiting the effectiveness of the mission as the LRA continues to attack civilians in Congo.  See the LRA Crisis Tracker for the most recent updates on LRA violence.

In March 2012, the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, or UNHCR, reported that thousands of people have been displaced due to the recent spike in LRA attacks in Congo. According to a UNHCR spokesperson, “There have been 20 attacks since the beginning of this year. One person was killed and 17 abducted during these incidents.”

UN Authorities Discover at Least 33 Deaths After Congo Elections

Security forces in the Democratic Republic of Congo carried out killings and arbitrary arrests after elections last year, according to a UN report.  The UN Joint Human Rights Office documented the killing of 33 civilians in Kinshasa by members of the army, police and the elite Republican Guard. The country’s justice minister has rejected the report’s findings.

International observers say last November’s disputed elections, won by President Joseph Kabila, were flawed. The report focuses on the period between 26 November and 26 December 2011 in Kinshasa – seen as an opposition stronghold. It says that during this month, at least 33 people were killed – including 22 by gunshot – and at least 83 others were injured, including 61 who were shot. At least 16 people remain unaccounted for, it said.

‘Dumped in river’

It said it had documented the arrest of at least 265 civilians, most of whom had been detained illegally or arbitrarily. Many of these, the report alleges, were detained due to their affiliation with the UDPS opposition party or because they came from the home province of its leader, Etienne Tshisekedi. It blames the bulk of these acts of violence on the Congolese Republican Guard and officers of the National Congolese Police and its specialised units. Witnesses are quoted as saying some of the bodies were dumped in the Congo river, while others were buried in mass graves.

The report calls on the Congolese authorities to conduct independent investigations into all the cases of human rights violations committed in the capital to bring those guilty to justice.  It also recommends that illegal detention facilities in the capital should be immediately shut down.  The November elections were the first Congolese-organised polls since the end of a devastating war in 2003, which left some four million people dead.