Photogenic Goma

The war in eastern Congo may not be attracting the consideration it deserves from the media and the upper echelon of the international diplomatic community, but that doesn't mean no attention is being paid. In addition to the dozen or so journalists who are posting regularly from the Kivus, several photographers are documenting the conflicts there. Here are a few recently published photos that struck me.

1) This photo by Dominic Narh of Magnum of a young man mourning the death of his father seems to me to strike the right balance in depicting suffering without being overly intrusive. The man's face is largely hidden, protecting his dignity, even as his drawn-in body evokes the universal language of grief. Note the contrast between the bright red of his sweater and the dark shabby clothes of the people passing on the crumbling cement veranda behind him. The fact that some of the pedestrians are half-turned toward him, while others are simply walking past, provides a useful footnote to usual Auden/Breughel observation. But to me what gives this photo its precise measure of rightness is the caption, which provides the name and occasion for the man's grief, lifting it from the universal to the particular.

Mujinga Lokuli Grace (21) mourns after finding the body of his father who was a DRC
government military doctor who was killed the day before as rebels took the city of Goma.
 Dominic Narh. Magnum Photos. 11/18/12

2) The things they left behind. The Congolese army melted into the civilian population as Goma fell, abandoning their uniforms, weapons, and anything else that might give them away to the Rwandans. I'm wondering if these army boots ever had laces, or if the soldier who owned them took the laces for repurposing on civilian shoes. Yes, it's a little Van Gogh-y, but still.

Items left behind by soldiers who fled. Photos taken in the
neighborhoods of Volcans and Mabanga.
Alain Wandimoyi. France 24. 11/22/12

3) This photo by Phil Moore of AFP of Monusco blue helmets manning a protective barrier near Goma appears at first glance to show two soldiers doing their job under dangerous conditions. But something about their relaxed, almost casual demeanor provides a sardonic comment on Monusco's impotence in eastern Congo. By extension, it constitutes a sharp criticism of the international community's continuing indifference to the plight of eastern Congolese.

Uruguyan United Nations peacekeepers man a defensive position on the outskirts
of Goma, in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
Phil Moore. AFP/Getty. 11/20/12

Lifted from the Archives

March 9, 2009

Somewhere The Onion (a satirical news magazine) has a headline that says something like, "Area Asshole Gets his own Blog."

And sometimes, I feel like I'm that asshole. If only I weren't so pessimistic about the latest developments in the Great Lakes! If only I weren't so skeptical of the region's leaders, and believed they actually had their own people's best interests at heart! If only I felt that the new administration was really going to make a difference! If only it weren't staffed by so many former Clintonites! If only I didn't feel the Clintonites had made such a hash of it the first time around! If only I believed in the power of Hollywood stars to change the calculus of nation states! If only I believed that a few, inexpensive measures would make all the difference! 

Instead, I'm always carping about this or that, worrying about the-other-thing, questioning motives, remembering some awkward bit of history, and generally sulking around like the skunk at the picnic. 

So it's nice, every once in a while, to remember I'm not alone.* Howard French, former NYT bureau chief in Africa, chronicled the rise of Kabila and the disastrous Clinton policy of those years. He has an editorial in the Huffington Post about what Obama may mean for Africa, and like me, he retains a bad taste in his mouth from the last Democratic administration:

There is a powerful argument to be made that this disaster [the wars in the Congo], along with the Rwandan genocide that preceded it, is Bill Clinton's most important foreign policy legacy, and an Obama policy toward Africa run by many of the same people and carrying forward Clinton era thinking would be a sign of disdain for the continent and its problems.
The Congo's apocalyptic dissolution began in earnest when Washington gave Rwanda the green light to invade the country, setting off a free for all that sucked in many of the Congo's neighbors.

*And of course, I'm not. While the policy debate in Washington is being led by cheerleaders, the real scholars of the region--and you know who you are--are much less doe-eyed, much more weighed down by the deep intractability of the problems, and much less hopeful about Obama's capacity or political will to bring change to the region.

An Eccentric Little History of Congo

Adam Curtis of the BBC has a strange, entertaining little history of the Congo's early years of independence. He touches on Che Guevara, Mobutu, Mike Hoare, the Sapeurs, and Diane Fossey, and includes several short video clips that I've never seen before. Did you know that Louis Leackey, Fossey's mentor, had an affair with her and tried desperately to convince her to abandon the gorillas to be with him?

My Two Cents

Hope and Change

I'm voting tomorrow for the same guy I voted for four years ago, but with little of the hope and yes--joy--I felt back then. Obama has been a crushing disappointment to me. On Africa, my single issue topic, he has not simply been absent, as several commentators have argued. He has been worse. He has inaugurated a host of militaristic policies in Africa driven by our millenarian wars on drugs and terror. He has welcomed the same tyrannical and bloody kleptocrats to the White House as his predecessors. And while he talked a good game early on about the importance of building civil society and good institutions, he has done nothing to follow up on those words. Nothing.

On the wider stage, he has enshrined a state of more or less constant war against Eastasia--I mean the Muslim world--that normalizes atrocities against the darker-skinned abroad and a permanent abridgment of their our civil liberties at home. He has barely uttered the words "global warming," though he must know that posterity is likely to judge him more harshly for that than any number of sins of commission. On the domestic front he has rescued capitalism for the capitalists (Roosevelt famously rescued it from the capitalists), but done nothing to reverse--or even slow--the entrenchment of our emerging financier-based plutocracy. Dodd-Frank's only real effect will be to enrich a new generation of Wall Street lawyers. He has imprisoned and deported more undocumented people than all previous presidents combined. He has taken every opportunity to invigorate rather than temper the war on drugs. He has pursued quasi-market educational policies based on the lamentably well-philanthrophized notion that testing well is dispositive for learning. He has ignored labor.

His one significant accomplishment is health care: it is impossible to gainsay that, if only because nearly every president since WW II has tried and failed to institute some sort of universal coverage. That it was the worst of the options, that it does little to bend the cost curve, that it came at the cost of bribing off virtually every stakeholder except the sick and those who may someday become sick: Well, perhaps this was the price that needed paying. Or perhaps not: the other options were never tried. In any case, that one achievement isn't nearly enough to make up for him having squandered the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that his election represented. He came in facing the gravest set of problems any president has confronted since Roosevelt; in his biography and rhetoric Obama promised as soaring a set of responses. The achievements he has delivered have been at best Clintonian in their scale and imagination.

But the other guy's worse. And I live in Virginia, where votes count.

Quote of the Day

"The countries in the Great Lakes including Rwanda, Uganda, DRC, Kenya and others have shown a common interest in ending the crisis in the eastern parts of DRC...Although the situation involves complex issues like ethnic identity, transit and DRC's ability, it has been illustrated that no one is willing to support the negative forces operating in Congo and the country's sovereignty will be supported at all times."

                         --US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman

Thierry Michel's Film about the Assassination of Floribert Chebeya

Youtube has the entire film, which is well worth watching.

Allegations Of Rwandan Complicity Go Back a decade

The Rwandan government is vociferously denying that it has anything to do with the M23 rebellion. These are lies, it says, being spread by a group of experts wedded to a poisonous anti-Rwandan agenda. In recent months, however, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the International Crisis Group have all advanced similar claims. Rwanda, they say, is heavily involved in funding, arming, and directing the rebels. Prior UN reports, composed of different groups of experts, have also reached similar conclusions. In fact, Rwanda's history of plundering Congo's resources and committing atrocities on its soil are among the most well-documented human rights violations of our time.

Here are selections from a few of those reports:

 12 April 2001

http://www.un.org/News/dh/latest/drcongo.htm

Illegal exploitation of the mineral and forest resources of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is taking place at an alarming rate. Two phases can be distinguished: mass-scale looting and the systematic and systemic exploitation of natural resources.

Mass-scale looting. During this first phase, stockpiles of minerals, coffee, wood, livestock and money that were available in territories conquered by the armies of Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda were taken, and either transferred to those countries or exported to international markets by their forces and nationals.

Systematic and systemic exploitation. Planning and organization were required for this phase. The systematic exploitation flourished because of the pre-existing structures developed during the conquest of power of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire. These pre-existing structures were improved over time and new networks for channelling extracted resources were put in place. However, the systemic exploitation used the existing systems of control established by Rwanda and Uganda. In both cases, exploitation was often carried out in violation of the sovereignty of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the national legislation and sometimes international law, and it led to illicit activities. Key individual actors including top army commanders and businessmen on the one hand, and government structures on the other, have been the engines of this systematic and systemic exploitation.

The consequence of illegal exploitation has been twofold: (a) massive availability of financial resources for the Rwandan Patriotic Army, and the individual enrichment of top Ugandan military commanders and civilians; 

Wall Street Journal Confirms ad hominen Nature of Akin Gump Attack on Hege

The Wall Street Journal reports that the law firm Akin Gump, hired by the Rwandan government to review the UN Government of Experts report on the rebellions in eastern Congo, did not limit its attack to the substance of the allegations, but instead went after the personal credibility of its chair, Steve Hege:

In its review to be delivered to the U.N. sanctions committee Friday, Akin Gump, the law firm hired by the Rwandan government, takes direct aim at the authors of the U.N. independent report, primarily its coordinator Steve Hege, calling him biased against Rwanda and therefore "unfit to continue in his current position."
It also says the group didn't provide Rwandan officials with sufficient opportunity to address the findings before they were submitted to the U.N., in several updates in recent months as well as the final report to be delivered Friday, nor did it include what the government did submit.
Mr. Hege declined to comment, citing U.N. policy. An earlier addendum from the Group of Experts said, "The Group has made extensive efforts to engage with the Rwandan government regarding its findings, with some limited success." It added that during an official visit in mid-May by the group to Kigali, the Rwandan capital, the government "didn't receive them in any substantive meetings to discuss these issues."

Let me reiterate that I am astonished that a major law firm would stoop to this level. Law firms of Akin Gump's caliber are allergic to publicity and assiduous about protecting their reputation. Nobody wants to be known at their law school reunion as the guy who trashed the personal reputation of a human rights investigator on behalf of a regime guilty of mass murder.

Conflict Gorillas

 Photograph: Eric afforgue/Gamma-
Rapho/Getty Images

The guerrillas are cashing in on the gorillas. According to The Guardian, M23 rebels in eastern Congo are taking groups of tourists on treks to visit the gorillas of Virunga national park and using the proceeds to fund their insurgency. They're only charging $350, which if memory serves is considerably less than the Congolese had been charging lately. (It cost me $300--in 1987).

So say what you will about the M23. They might be guilty of rape, murder, and pillage, but at least they are good conservationists. The government, on the other hand....

The Chumps at Akin Gump

So Rwanda is reported to have hired the law firm Akin Gump to pursue legal action against the UN Group of Experts and its chief, Steve Hege, in particular. I have had my own quarrel with the GoE, as seen here, but this strikes me as an alarming development. A major law firm can land on your back like a load of bricks. What if governments routinely start to hire law firms to attack people who are critical of them? Will the staff at Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International be next? What about journalists? Or university professors? And precisely what line won't those law firms cross in pursuit of their quarry?

Rwandan Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo, speaking yesterday to New York based Metro Newspaper, had tough words for the UN Group of Experts, and in particular its coordinator, Steven Hege.
"We will not take this kind of treatment lying down," Mushikiwabo stated.
The Foreign Minister categorically stated that Hege's long history of opposition towards the Rwandan government is well documented and that the panel has been "hijacked" by his political agenda.
She also revealed that in order to clarify matters once and for all, the government had retained the services of Washington, D.C., law firm Akin Gump to review Mr. Hege's prior writings on Rwanda, which carried out extensive research into Hege's writings and concluded that his placement as chair of the committee was questionable at the very least.

Listen, I'd go to the stake to defend a lawyer's right to defend a client at law, but applying your skills on behalf of a regime alleged to have committed mass murder by attacking the integrity of the people investigating those allegations seems to me to be dirty pool. It's reminiscent of the Scientologists' approach to their critics, and not something I would think a major law firm would want to be associated with. So I gave Akin Gump a call.

 Not surprisingly, the firm refused to answer questions about its work for the Rwandan government, or about much of anything else for that matter. When I spoke to Ben Harris, their director of communication, he told me I should direct all questions about Akin Gump's work to the Rwandan mission at the UN.

Me: "So to be clear, Akin Gump has done some work for Rwanda?"
Gump: "I have no comment for you. Direct your questions to them."
Me: "Has Akin Gump worked for the Rwandan government for long, or was this a one-off event?"
Gump: "I have no comment for you."
Me: "Does Akin Gump represent other, non-democratic leaders in Africa?"
Gump: "Again, you need to direct your questions to the Rwandan mission."
Me: "But this is specifically about Akin Gump. Does it work for other African dictators?"
Gump: "I told you I have no comment. I think you can see where this is going."
Me: "But I'm just wondering, given the prominence with which Akin Gump trumpets its commitment to ethics and integrity, how you square that with--"
Gump: "Goodbye."

 Clearly not one of Akin Gump's proudest moments. I can only hope that the inherent conservatism and code of honor that prevails at most big law firms will prevent this from becoming a trend. Otherwise, we could witnessing a chilling new development for journalists and human rights investigators.