The Coming Anarchy?

The Congolese state seems to me be teetering on the edge of collapse, about to forfeit even the appearance of control over the country. Consider: Outbreaks of localized violence in the east are increasing; an inadequately manned UN intervention brigade is on a collision course against a determined, Rwandan-supported rebel movement; Katanga is openly defying orders from the capital while dealing with its own rebellion; and Kabila's power base in Kinshasa is coming unglued. It's possible that Kabila's regime will continue to muddle through, absent an effective challenger. But the state's hold on power appears as fragile as it's been since the 1996-97 war, and I would not be surprised if there were a coup or some sort of temporary state collapse within the next Friedman unit or so.

Bukavu Online reports that 57 Congolese soldiers died fighting the Union des Forces révolutionnaires du Congo (UFRC), in a battle for control of Chisadu, in Walungu, a mere 60 kms from Bukavu on April 24. Civil society groups are warning that the Mouvement pour la restauration de la démocratie au Congo (MRDC), controlled by General autoproclamé Hilaire Kombi, is threatening to take Beni even as the town's mayor appeals for calm. Walikali has become a free-for-all in the mineral trade, says Christophe Rigaud with Afrikarabia, relaying a report from Prince Kihangi Kyamwami of the NGO, Le Bureau d’Etudes, d’observation et de coordination pour le Développement du territoire de Walikale (BEDEWA).

Meanwhile, negotiations in Kampala between the M23 and the Congolese government appear to have broken down, amid demands from the M23 for a blanket amnesty and reincorporation on its own terms into the Congolese army. Civil society groups are warning that M23 is reinforcing its positions in Rutshuru and Beni in preparation for battle against the UN's intervention brigade. And Congo365 wonders if a military confrontation inevitable.

If a confrontation does take place, it may not end well for the UN. Nadine Gordimer is among many South Africans voicing doubts about the wisdom of their country's participation in the brigade. Thirteen South African troops were killed in the Central African Republic in late March, and questions continue to swirl about whether they were there to protect South Africa's national interests or Jacob Zuma's family's personal investments with ousted president Francois Bozize. Major General Patrick Cammaert, a former UN Force Divisional Commander for MONUC in the DRC, raises a host of troubling questions about the brigade in an analysis authored by Fiona Blythe:

“No one has conducted an analysis of why, over the last five years or so, MONUSCO has been unable or unwilling to fulfill its mandate of protecting civilians, and until we have the outcome of this analysis we cannot determine if the solution is an intervention brigade.”

“The issue is not that proactive operations are not already authorized, but that troop contributors are risk averse, and show time and again a lack of political will to employ a full reading of the mandate, leading to accusations that it lacks robustness.” In the end, “the mandate is only as strong as the will of the leadership and the TCCs to implement it.”

“Is one brigade to be responsible for enforcing peace through the use of force and the other not? Is one set of rules of engagement to differ from the other, and if not, why deploy a new brigade with the same rules of engagement and force posture as the existing one?”

Reviewing the litany of potential pitfalls analysts worry may be facing the brigade, Christophe Rigaud concludes with one of his own: If the brigade focuses its energies on M23, the 20 or so other rebel groups operating in the Kivus may paradoxically end with greater room and freedom to maneuver.

And Jason Stearns raises the possibility of a re-internationalization of the Congo wars, this time featuring overt conflict between two African military heavyweights: South Africa  and Rwanda. The humanitarian consequences would be appalling.

Quote of the Day

I have written before about Congo being policy shorthand for "hopeless situation the cognoscenti know we're not going to do anything serious about," but with the clamor growing for us to intervene in Syria, I think it's worth pointing out that we could save far more lives and put far fewer US troops in danger--and at much lower geopolitical risk--if we were to make a determined effort to help the DRC. I do wish someone would buttonhole people like Anne-Marie Slaughter and ask her to seriously answer this question from Obama. (Not, for that matter, that I think he intended the question seriously.) How is it, exactly, that Arab lives have now risen to our level of consciousness--as they did for example when we decided to intervene in Libya--but Congolese lives still don't? Why doesn't the situation in Congo  raise the specter of our moral failure in Rwanda? Why the all-but complete silence from the internationalist humanitarian crowd about the DRC?

In a situation like Syria, I have to ask, can we make a difference in that situation? Would a military intervention have an impact? How would it affect our ability to support troops who are still in Afghanistan? What would be the aftermath of our involvement on the ground? Could it trigger even worse violence or the use of chemical weapons? What offers the best prospect of a stable post-Assad regime? And how do I weigh tens of thousands who've been killed in Syria versus the tens of thousands* who are currently being killed in the Congo?

*And by tens of thousands, he of course means millions.

Had Enough of Enough?

Alex de Waal at the World Peace Foundation takes one hell of a whack at the Enough Project:

Reclaiming Activism
For most of my adult life I introduced myself as an “activist” first and a writer, researcher, or practitioner of humanitarian action or peacemaking second. Then, about seven or eight years ago, I became rather uncomfortable with the word. Not because I had diluted my personal commitment to working in solidarity with suffering and oppressed people, but because a group of people, in whose company I didn’t want to be, were claiming not only to be activists but to define “activism” itself. I am speaking of course about the policy lobbyists in Washington DC, also known as “designer activists,” who took on the role of promoting certain causes related to Africa, and who arrogated to themselves the privilege of defining these problems and identifying and pursuing ostensible solutions. It was no accident that those purported solutions placed the “activists” themselves at the center of the narrative, because many of them were Hollywood actors—or their hangers on—for whom the only possible role is as the protagonist-savior. The actions they promoted all had one thing in common: using more U.S. power around the world.

I was not the only one to find this arrogation of “activism” offensive, demeaning and counter-productive. One of the most refreshing aspects of our recent seminar at the World Peace Foundation was finding out just how much the consensus among national civil society activists from Uganda and Congo, as well as Sudan, has coalesced around the view that the basic narratives and policy prescriptions of the Enough Project and its ilk are not only simplified and simplistic, but actually pernicious. Theirs isn’t activism: it’s insider lobbying within the Washington establishment using celebrity hype as leverage. They are not just a benign variant of advocacy, perhaps somewhat simplified: they are wrong.

The disquiet about Enough's style of activism and agenda-driven policy recommendations seems to me to be reaching a tipping point. The conflict minerals debate, for example, is all-but over among serious Congo researchers: Just about every serious independent researcher and NGO to have studied the issue reached similar conclusions: DF-1502 has done nothing to end the conflicts, harmed the people it was meant to help and helped the people it was meant to harm. The question is: Are Enough's funders listening?

To be clear, I probably have fewer misgivings about Enough's style of advocacy than some other scholars and activists. I don't mind them promoting simplistic narratives or enlisting celebrity spokespeople, for example, just as I don't mind anti-poverty groups that pull on heartstrings or environmental groups featuring polar bears desperately swimming toward ice floes. I don't even mind Prendergast's self-promotional style, or at any rate, not that much. I find it in poor taste, but I appreciate that it's incredibly hard to enlist Americans in causes far from home and about which they have no first-hand experience.  My quarrel with Enough is much simpler: The policy they promoted to help end the conflicts in the Congo--the conflict minerals campaign--caused irremediable damage to the million or so people who depend on the trade for their livelihood, while doing nothing to help end the conflicts. And what's worse: They were warned of the dangers their campaign would cause by knowledgeable, local experts, yet went ahead with it anyway.

The Lake that Probably Won't Kill You (anytime soon)

Looks safe from up here

[UPDATED 5/6 w/ embedded video--see below] One of the most poignant memories I have of the Asian Tsunami is of a Sri Lankan official, in near-tears, trying to explain why his government hadn't anticipated the catastrophe. "We have three thousand years of court chronicles," he said. "There's no history of anything like this ever happening." 

I remembered that episode when I read that the Congolese government had temporarily banned fishing and bathing on Lake Kivu in February out of concern that carbon dioxide eruptions along the shoreline had caused a number of recent drownings. Kivu is one of three lakes in Africa known to experience periodic lake overturns, in which gas that has been dissolved and compressed in the water suddenly erupts from deep inside the lake, with potentially devastating consequences. Two small lakes in the Cameroons famously overturned in the mid-1980s, killing 1,500 people.

Lake Kivu is not only 2,000 times larger than those lakes—it is located in a far more densely populated area, with over three million people living along its shores. When I lived in Bukavu, I was always told the chances of an overturn were virtually nil, but a quick google search led me to an NBC article suggesting that overturns occur with reasonable frequency--on the order of once a millenium or so. Given the number of potential casualties, this seemed often enough to be a matter of concern.

So I wrote a half dozen scientists who have studied the lake to try to find out more about our state of knowledge regarding the lake's dangers.[1] On the whole, they seemed fairly sanguine. Here's what I learned:

1) The lake is currently stable, chemically speaking; the methane is sunk at the bottom of the lake and there’s virtually no chance of it spontaneously welling up However, there is some evidence that methane concentrations in parts of the lake are increasing, and on current trends this could lead to an unstable situation in about a century or so. 

2) The amounts of methane and carbon dioxide bubbling up around the surface of the lake are entirely normal, occur in many lakes, and present zero danger. There was almost certainly no good reason for the government to ban fishing and swimming.

3) Some monitoring of the lake composition and volatility is being done but more could and should be done. For one thing, we don't know whether the methane concentrations are increasing in a steady and predictable fashion. And we’re still a long way from really understanding what might trigger an overturn.

4) The geologic evidence suggests overturns occur on the order of once every few hundred to once every few thousand years (there's a difference of opinion about this). These would have devastated the lake’s biota, but it’s not clear how catastrophic they were beyond the lake's shoreline. What matters is how explosive these overturns were, and the evidence on that question is very hard to read.

5) There’s a real but tiny risk of catastrophe. Given the current chemical stability of the lake, an overturn wouldn’t happen spontaneously, as it did in the Cameroons, but would have to be triggered by a major volcanic or seismic event, such as an eruption from Nyiragongo, near Goma—which would of course be a catastrophe in its own right—or an underwater landslide associated with a major earthquake. Scientists have recently uncovered evidence of volcanic activity at the bottom of the lake in the north basin; this is a matter of an as-yet unquantified concern. That said, the lake experienced both an earthquake and an eruption in the past decade without triggering an overturn, so the dangers should not be exaggerated.

6) On the whole, methane extraction is not only a good investment (the methane in the lake could be worth $20 billion), but probably wise ecologically, in that de-gassing the lake under controlled conditions reduces the already minimal risk of an overturn. One concern: that the de-gassed waters be re-infused into the lake so as not to disturb its delicate surface biochemistry in a way that that harms Kivu’s small fishing industry.

7) Bottom line: Given current conditions, the risks of an overturn are minimal. That said, should a massive volcanic event occur all bets would be off. The problem is that there would be no way to predict whether the eruption would trigger an overturn. Nor, given the short warning time volcanoes provide, would there be any realistic way to get the millions of Kivu-proximate residents to safety, even if the decision were made to evacuate.

Oh, and those rumors about the gas bubbling up and silently asphyxiating unfortunate fisherman out on their canoes? Old sailors’ tales.

[1] In particular, I'd like to thank Anthony Vodacek at the Rochester Institute of Technology;  Thomas C. Johnson, at the University of Minnesota Duluth; Martin Schmid at Eawag Aquatic Research; Alberto Vierra Borges, at  University of Liège Allée; and Jean-Pierre Descy, at the University of Namur, Belgium, who all gave generously of their time. Needless to say, all errors are my own.

5/6: I just came upon this video, which provides an interesting overview of the 
technical and political challenges of extracting the methane from Kivu. 

Is Congo Spiraling out of Control?

Four reads today provide the most dire evidence yet that Congo is spiraling dangerously out of control. None suggests that an implosion is imminent; combined, however, they paint a picture of a government that is failing in every respect: unable to control its territory and in danger of collapsing or being overthrown in Kinshasa.

First, the ICG has an excellent backgrounder on last month's massacre in Lubumbashi. Money quote:

The unexpected occupation of Lubumbashi, the second largest city in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), by 440 Mai-Mai fighters last month is another sign of the central government’s lack of capacity to govern, ensure security or pursue reform. The occupation, which resulted in 35 dead and 53 wounded, serves as a reminder that the country’s crisis is not limited to North Kivu, in eastern Congo, or to warlords.

 Second, Pete Jones has a sobering update on the Mai Mai Morgan operating in Ituri: "For nine months a brutal militia has made repeated attacks on villagers in remote areas of the Ituri rainforest. The Mai Mai Morgan, led by a man named Paul Sadala who likes to call himself Morgan, has created fear and suffering wherever it has attacked..."

Third, Agoravox details a confrontation earlier this week between Monusco forces and M23 rebels. The rebels blocked a UN convoy it suspected of carrying supplies for the proposed intervention brigade. The convoy was released only the arrival of heavily armed Monusco troops prepared to fight. The article also speculates about whether Rwanda and Uganda will continue to support M23 even after the brigade arrives. And it worries that the intervention brigade will be woefully underequipped for the mission en-tasked it.

Fourth,  Christophe Rigaud at Afrikarabia raises some troubling questions about the latest alleged coup attempt against Kabila, the third such in the past two months. Last Thursday, April 11, the government announced it had arrested 13 individuals plotting an attack on the presidential convoy. But the evidence against this latest group of coup plotters is thin, says Rigaud. Many of the alleged plotters are affiliated with veteran opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi; he and other opposition leaders are claiming that this is simply an attempt to discredit them.

There are two possibilities here, neither of them good. The first is that the coup allegations are true. In that case, shadowy figures on the fringes of Congolese political society believe that the regime is weak enough to make a coup attempt feasible. The second is that the charges are trumped up, which means that the government is becoming increasingly paranoid and dysfunctional. It's hard to figure out which option is worse.

WSJ: "Opportunities for illicit gain only increased after passage of DF-1502"

[UPDATED BELOW 4/19]
Some readers might remember that I set out a list of predictions regarding the impact of Dodd-Frank 1502 back in February 2012. I wrote then that while a single correct or incorrect prediction wouldn't prove or disprove my overall assessment of DF-1502, they would constitute a marker for future reference and a baseline of credibility.  My third prediction was this:

3) The volume and value of the gold trade in e. Congo largely would be unaffected by DF-1502, because there's simply no viable way to control it.

Today the Wall Street Journal features a long piece, with reporting from Goma, Mumbai, New York and London, which says that the trade in gold was not only NOT affected by passage of the law, but that "opportunities for illicit gains only increased after the U.S. in 2010 passed a Wall Street overhaul, known as Dodd-Frank."

It's important to remember that the best estimates are that gold is and has been for a long time the most important and valuable of the minerals being artisanally mined in the Kivus. So the fact that the law has had only adverse impacts on the region's dynamics is hardly incidental.

It would also appear to contradict The Enough Project's repeated assertion that the legislation is "making it harder to profit violently and illegally from mineral smuggling."

The complete WSJ piece is available below the fold, for readers who aren't subscribers (or don't have free access to it via Starbucks, as I do.)

[UPDATE 4/19] I see Enough wrote a rebuttal contesting the Journal's reporting. They sidestep the central issue raised by the Journal: that gold is an internationally valued commodity traded in areas utterly unconcerned about conflict minerals and compact enough to make smuggling easy. Instead, they urge that more be done: "As the trade in conflict gold increases, now is the time for the Obama administration to have a major impact." I don't want to get into the details of their arguments--life is just too damn short--but consider this: A person can buy weed a mile from the White House, despite  the hundreds of billions of dollars we as a nation have spent during our 30+ year "War on Drugs." But Enough's contention is that an SEC regulation will prevent Congolese warlords from trading gold with Indian, Lebanese or Chinese merchants in the most ungoverned regions of Central Africa. That doesn't seem terribly credible to me, but give them this: They will never lack for opportunities to declare that "Now is the time to do more."

The Other Casualties of War

Pete Jones has a piece in The Guardian about an attack last June on a village named Epulu in the Okapi Wildlife Reserve. The perpetrators were Mai Mai Morgan; they reportedly killed three people and ate the heart of one of them. They also killed all 14 of reserve's captive Okapi. The reason for their ire? Epulu is a base camp for the wildlife rangers assigned to stop the ongoing slaughter of the forest's remaining elephants.   Some 60 percent of Central Africa's elephants have been killed in the past decade alone, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society, to fuel a growing demand for ivory in east Asian countries.

The slaughter of the Okapi was a devastating blow to the reserve's conservationists. Rosemarie Ruf, one of the zoo's co-founders, says it was a brutal end to a lifetime's work. "Twenty-five years of work is gone," she said. "All that effort, all that money. It's my life which has been.... I don't want to say ruined, but here now I'm standing in front of nothing."

Alarmingly, the article suggests that many of the region's inhabitants are sympathetic to the mai mai aims, if not their means. Some Mbuti are upset that the reserve has cut into their traditional domain:

"The forest is where we find what we need to survive" said one pygmy leader. "[The park authorities] have cut our land, there is now a part we cannot access. It has worsened in the last few years, since the RFO got bigger. We feel like the big non-governmental organizations and the rangers have privileged the animals over the people."

Jon Rosen in Roads and Kingdoms reported on this same attack in November, in the epilog to an otherwise upbeat travel report on life among the pre-agrarian Mbuti. (His numbers are a little different: six people and 15 okapi dead.) Rosen manages to avoid the dangers of exoticizing or sentimentalizing the Mbuti lifestyle, while still making it sound like an slacker's idea of heaven, with lots of drum playing, group hunting, and all-afternoon bong tripping:

With the smoking, drumming, and dancing in full swing, my mind drifted to an article by the geographer Jared Diamond that I’d read – along with Fukuyama’s book – in preparation for our trip. In the piece, titled “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Diamond argues that the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture – long considered a fundamental driver of human progress – was actually a colossal blunder.

What You Need to Know Today

The M23 rebels have penned an open letter to Obama, asking him to scotch the proposed intervention brigade for eastern Congo.

The inquiry into human rights activist Floribert Chebeya's assassination has again been delayed, and the organization he headed, Voix des sans-voix, continues to boycott the proceedings, saying they are a whitewash for the man almost certainly responsible for his death, former police chief John Numbi.

Reuters has a good brief round-up on the DRC's political/economic risks. The key questions, with my best guesses in parentheses:

• - Will M23 rebels return to arms as peace talks in Uganda splutter? (prob not)
• - Will resurgence of pro-separatist violence in Katanga discourage investment? (prob not)
• - Can the economy keep growing on the back of Katanga's copper production despite security fears? (yes, but slowly and fitfully)
• - Can Congo re-establish a loan deal with the IMF? (yes)
• - Will Kabila finally take any steps towards tackling endemic corruption? (no, corruption is not a bug, it's the way the system works)
• - Will a reform to the mining code expected this year damage investor confidence? (no--Ponyo will see to that; but what the mining code says and what it actually takes to do biz in Congo are two different things)
• - Will a plan to get state miner Gecamines back on its feet succeed? (eventually, maybe)

Can't possibly be true: South Africa is planning to invest $20 billion in Inga, says DigitalCongo. Seems too high by an order of magnitude.

On the airstrip under the active volcano Mount Nyiragongo,
an Antonov AN-12 cargo plane prepares to leave Goma.
Guy Tillim, in Vanity Fair

With about a dozen crashes in the past two years, the DRC remains the most dangerous place to be a plane: Radio Okapi reports on a conference held to address airplane safety. Which reminds me to plug this 2007 piece on Congo's aviators by William Langewiesche.

Questions continue to emerge about whether South Africa's recent decisions to participate in peacekeeping operations in CAR and now DRC are driven by the desire of the well-connected elite to protect their investments. More tk on this. 

Quote of the Day

I think it's safe to say that the M23 is not thrilled about the proposed intervention brigade:

Kigali, 2013 04 06
Open Letter to H.E. Barack Obama, President of the United States of America
Your Excellency:
On behalf of Rufari Foundation, I have the honor and privilege to beckon you, and through you, your other UN Security Council peers, to attract your joint attention and diligence on the inescapable necessity, imperative rather, to nullify UN Resolution 2089 prescribing the dispatch of a 3 000-ish strong offensive intervention force into Congo. Failure to do precisely that, Excellency Barack Obama, will entail among other wanton consequences that of turning the entire Great Lakes region of Africa into a mammoth fireball, and the world far adrift will register in no small way adverse consequences thereof.

Quote of the Day II

"We are not scared to go to war," SANDF spokesman Xolani Mabanga told SAfm."If they [M23] declare war against the SA National Defence Force personnel, we are ready to tackle them. We, as the SANDF, will never be deterred by any circumstances to pursue or do what we are asked to do by the government of South Africa."

Take it down a notch, guys. Remember, the point is to not have to resort to force.