Steps towards mineral certification in the DRC
June 28th, 2011 § 3 Comments
The Wilson Center held an interesting event last week on steps towards the development of a certification process for conflict-free minerals in the DRC, with representatives from an admirably broad variety of interest groups participating in the discussion. (This included representatives of the US and Congolese governments, one of the negotiators of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, an industry CSR type, and researchers from the Enough Project.) Undersecretary of State for Economic, Energy & Agricultural Affairs Robert Hormats briefly discussed one of the most substantive steps that I’ve yet heard of towards an actual certification process, namely a USG-funded pilot supply chain of certified minerals. A common concern, however, was that these early moves towards reopening clean supply chains aren’t enough to mitigate for the damage done to the industry (and the incomes of its artisanal miners) by the Dodd-Frank act and the mining ban instituted by the Congolese government last fall. According to Tim Monin, the director of CSR at Advanced Micro Devices, the volume of trade has fallen by more than 90% since this time last year. It’s not clear to me what, if anything, is being done to assist displaced miners until trade picks up again (or until they find alternate employment – always a scarce commodity in the Congo).
Severine Autesserre on the failure of peacekeeping in the DRC
May 8th, 2011 § 1 Comment
As mentioned in an earlier post, Severine Autesserre recently joined Frank Fukuyama at SAIS to discuss state-building in the DRC. (My hat is definitely off to African Studies at SAIS, who have pulled together some fabulous events this term despite being a relatively small department.) Autesserre’s talk largely drew from her recent book on the failure of international peacekeeping in the Congo, and made clear the insight she’s gained from the more than ten years she’s spent living on and off in the DRC.
As scholars like Laura Seay have noted, the continuing conflict in eastern Congo is fundamentally predicated on local factors, like land rights and citizenship, and Autesserre makes a similar argument about the failure of peacekeeping to reconstruct eastern Congo. Whilst a common criticism of forces such as MONUC is that they enforce a hegemonic Western “liberal peace” agenda of free markets, free elections, and human rights, which may not be appropriate for the reconstruction of countries like the DRC, Autesserre points out that most peacekeepers are not in fact neutral enforcers of Western liberalism. Instead, they often act in manners influenced by their own (frequently non-Western) beliefs & backgrounds, and within the constraints of a state that remains durably more interested in extorting its citizens than protecting them. Even if the liberal peace agenda were sufficient to reconstruct the DRC, it has proven quite difficult to carry out on the ground.
Whilst the salience of promoting democracy and human rights may go unquestioned among the top echelons of the UN, Autesserre observes that peacekeepers usually have substantial operational autonomy on the ground. This may lead to correspondingly idiosyncratic interpretations of their mandate. For instance, peacekeepers whom Autesserre interviewed during fieldwork in North Kivu often preferred technical missions such as military training to more open-ended missions to reduce human rights abuses by the FARDC. Some of this hesitance surely has to do with the sheer challenge of promoting better human rights records among the FARDC, but Autesserre also recounted an instance where reports of the recruitment of child soldiers were written off by South Asian peacekeepers, one of whom observed to her that he’d known children who had found discipline and purpose after they were recruited into his own nation’s military.
Many peacekeepers also doubted the overall value of their mandate to support the FARDC, an understandable concern given that civilians often suffer more from its predations than from those of rebel groups. (C.f. this 2009 HRW report on sexual violence in the DRC.) Autesserre notes that “the Congolese state is still a predatory structure,” and shares the worries of some peacekeepers that reconstructing the state may simply amount to a reconstruction of the state’s ability to harass its citizens. Unsurprisingly, many Congolese civil society groups have felt that MONUC was misguided or even malicious in attempting to work with local government bodies to build their capacity. With this in mind, Autesserre closed in calling for fundamental revisions to the normative ideas of state-building that MONUC (and now MONUSCO) have been called to carry out. She shared Fukuyama’s insistence that it’s dangerous to consolidate state power before establishing the rule of law, and proposed sequencing judicial sector and security sector reform before attempts at rebuilding the capacity of the Congolese state.
Elections & Peace Consolidation in the DRC
April 7th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Wrapping up my backdated blogging of DRC events from earlier this year, I attended an interesting speech in January by Ambassador Roger Meece, the UN’s Special Representative for the DRC, at the Wilson Center. As the head of MONUSCO, and a key player in the international effort to support the 2006 elections in the DRC, Meece seemed to take a perhaps overly rosy view of the country’s stability in this public forum, but there were some good points raised regardless.
On the note of the MONUC –> MONUSCO shift, Meece pointed out that stabilization was initially a question of removing foreign armies during the war. The 2006 elections were seen as an exit strategy for MONUC in some quarters, but obviously questions of stability remain pressing. Today, whilst the necessity of economic development for stability is broadly accepted, he feels that peacekeepers remain uncomfortable talking about this. (Of course, economic growth is well outside MONUSCO’s mandate.)
Meece also felt that the 2006 elections are often given short shrift, saying that they “changed governance in the Congo permanently” through both the inculcation of democratic mores and the practical implications of creating new regional assemblies and granting some independence to parliament. That said, he curiously elided the topic of Kabila’s decidedly non-democratic constitutional tinkering, even after I asked him about it directly. (He responded with a reiteration of his belief [or hope] that Kabila is “committed” to the 2011 elections.) However, he also heard that a number of opposition leaders came to MONUSCO whilst he was out of the country and said that a single round of elections was acceptable, which he found quite surprising.
Congo: The UN Mapping Report & the Responsibility to Justice
March 28th, 2011 § 14 Comments
Continuing my quest to catch up on Congo-related conference blogging, I wanted to share some notes from the December 2010 Great Lakes Policy Forum discussion of the UN mapping report. The GLPF’s official summary can be downloaded here, and Laura Seay has her own summary here.
One commentator took on the political economy of the report’s publication, noting that many Congolese found psychological and emotional value in seeing the UN provide proof of crimes they had long known to have occurred. However, the report’s existence also complicates peacebuilding efforts in the region. “There’s blood on almost everyone’s hands,” as almost every government in the region has some members who’ve been guilty of massive human rights abuses at some point. This is clearly visible in Rwanda’s treatment of Laurent Nkunda, who will “probably never go on trial” because he knows too much about the crimes committed by all sides during the wars. In the end, she believes that transitional justice is unlikely to happen unless outside donors put strong pressure on regional governments.
Another commentator provided a bit of historical perspective on both violence and justice in eastern Congo, pointing out that political and social coalitions around justice in the DRC are very weak and fragmented now compared to 5 or 6 years ago. There has been a simultaneous growth in the entrenchment of violence with economic interests, especially trade and mining. Part of this entanglement was due to the desire of foreign armies to “do war on the cheap” by getting locals to do their killing for them, which provided space for “sophisticated entrepreneurs of violence” to use access to weapons to their own commercial ends.
Whilst the report itself only covered the period 1993 – 2003, the ensuing discussion also touched upon more recent developments in both Congo and Rwanda. As one speaker pointed out, there’s been a welcome increase in Western attention to gender-based violence in the eastern DRC of late – but it’s important to avoid reducing issues of justice to the prosecution of rape and war crimes. What the Congo ultimately needs is a “massive institution-building project” on the scale of decades, in order to rebuilt judicial systems that might handle everything from property rights and contracts to war crimes. The international community has also largely elided the issues of land rights and citizenship for Rwandaphone Congolese in the Kivus, which remain at the heart of the ongoing conflict in the region.
That said, the “idea that the Congolese are doomed to fight each other is ridiculous.” There are spaces in the DRC that are relatively well-governed, such as Butembo and Katanga. More attention is needed to the factors that enable better governance in the Congolese context.
Finally, a number of interesting points that didn’t quite fit in elsewhere in the above narrative also came up:
- Rwanda was described as “a boiling cauldron under a surface that looks calm,” with Hutu resentment running high, and ethnic identities remaining highly salient despite official attempts to ban their use.
- The US values stability over all else in the region. Kagame and Mobutu both contributed to stability, as did Museveni, and the US is willing to turn a blind eye to many other abuses because of this.
- Africa more generally is “kind of the neglected stepchild of diplomacy,” with some dedicated diplomats, but others who got dumped there with little previous knowledge of the region.
Did anyone else attend this meeting of the GLPF, or the one that took place on March 24 on human security in the DRC? Would love to hear thoughts if so!
The postbellum lives of child soldiers
March 23rd, 2011 § 1 Comment
Chris Blattman’s fame as a development blogger is such that I think the rest of us development-types sometimes give short shrift to his published research. Thus it was with interest that I read his 2008 article on “Child combatants in northern Uganda: Reintegration myths and realities” (PDF) co-authored with Jeannie Annan. B&A identify a rather surprising natural experiment, arguing that LRA abduction of young men was so widespread as to be essentially random. This allows them to make relatively clean estimates of the impact of child soldiering on comparable groups of young Ugandan men, using a mixed-methods approach with approximately 1000 respondents.
What they find is more complex, and perhaps less dramatic, than many mainstream accounts of child soldiering suggest. Children were most likely to be abducted in early adolescence, as younger boys were inefficient fighters and older boys were more difficult to indoctrinate & posed greater escape risks. 80% of abductees eventually escaped, with most of the remaining 20% presumed dead.
Upon returning home, however, the former abductees were generally not received as the “damaged, uneducated pariahs” that the NYT had assumed them to be (quoted in B&A, p. 1). 94% of interviewed abductees said that their families had accepted them back without censure, and three quarters reported that they were generally treated well by their communities. Only one sixth of former child soldiers reported elevated levels of psychological distress, and on average they were no more likely to behave violently than non-abductees.
Unfortunately, the economic outlook for returned child soldiers was not quite as bright. B&A note that, whilst the average abductee only missed 9 months of education, abduction in early adolescence meant that that missing year of schooling was generally the 6th or 7th grade, when Ugandan students typically learn to read and write. Thus former abductees were “twice as likely to be illiterate” (p. 16) The educational gap also explained nearly two-thirds of the observed earnings shortfall of child soldiers, which found them “half as likely to be engaged in skill- or capita-intensive employment, and [to] have a third lower daily earnings” (p. 16) than non-abducted young men. Interestingly, shortfalls have also been found found in the earnings of American veterans of the Vietnam War. In both cases, “the source of this earnings gap appears to be time away from civilian education and work experience” (p. 22). The authors close with a set of useful recommendations for tailoring ex-combatant reintegration programs to these realities.
Like this:
Gerard Prunier on recent news in the Congo and Rwanda
March 14th, 2011 § 14 Comments
I’ve been lax in sharing the interesting points raised at the lectures I’ve attended on the DRC over the past several months. One of the most wide-ranging was a November 2010 speech by Gerard Prunier on the Congo and Rwanda, which ran the gamut from the DRC’s foreign relations to Rwanda’s waning moral legitimacy in the eyes of the West. Some of the main points:
Congo
- Economically, the DRC is doing much better than it did after the immediate end of the war. However, it’s barely integrated into the world or even regional economies, and very few industries have national reach (except for banking and transport). Funds mostly flow from regional governments to Kinshasa, not the other way. China is now its biggest aid donor.
- The DRC’s interactions with the rest of the world are conducted by the “thin sliver” of government that presents the integrated Congo. “From an economic and administrative point of view, the country doesn’t exist.” However, it’s still very much in existence as a political entity.
- Despite the ongoing war in the east, most of the country is at peace. Only ~20% of Congolese live in the east. That said, the Kabila regime has proven better at diplomacy than at either economic management or state-building & conflict resolution.
- The Kivus are really more connected to Uganda/Rwanda/Burundi than to western Congo. It would have been appropriate to have two settlements to the ’98-’02 war: one for the Kivus, and one for the rest of Congo.
- When this speech occurred, Prunier felt that the government was behaving in an increasingly brutal and arbitrary manner towards its opponents, whilst there was no direct threat to its security to warrant this. (The recent assassination attempt might have changed that calculus.) At the time, however, he pointed out that the CNDP and its offshoot militias in the Kivus were in no position to overthrow the government.
- The increase in state brutality might reflect Kabila’s concerns for his political survival – or it might mean that he’s losing control of his security apparatus. Angola is well-positioned to put pressure on Kabila about this and other issues, but they don’t want to destabilize the DRC.
Rwanda
- Rwanda is among the most opaque countries on the continent, comparable to Ethiopia and Eritrea. One can reproach the Congolese for many things, but at least politically “nothing is hidden, they let it all hang out.”
- There does appear to be fighting in the RPF’s inner circle. There’s been a recent wave of assassination attempts and arrests of regime figures, including a former army chief of staff and the deputy commander of the Rwandese UNAMID force in Darfur.
- Putting Laurent Nkunda on trial is undesirable for Kagame, because Nkunda knows too much about abuses committed by the RPF. Prunier estimates that Kagame has killed 13 people who used to work with Nkunda, and is aiming to kill as many as he can.
- There are rumors that the (Tutsi-affiliated) CNDP is talking to the (Hutu-affiliated) FDLR in eastern Congo, and considering using it as a base to overthrow Kagame, just as the RPF used western Uganda as a base for their attacks on the MRND. Internal ethnic politics are also unsettled, as Tutsis who returned from Congo/Burundi/Tanzania are being marginalized in comparison to Ugandan Tutsis.
- The UN mapping report, with its revelations that the RPF had massacred Hutu refugees in the Congo from ’96-’97, has diminished Rwanda’s moral authority in the eyes of the West. Kagame had benefited tremendously from the developed world’s willingness to turn a blind eye to his authoritarianism out of guilt. Prunier believes that a number of photogenic development initiatives, like the banning of plastic bags and the installation of wifi in public buses in Kigali, are “completely designed for the wazungu.”
I’d welcome thoughts from readers who know the region better than I do.
NB: To address the points raised by several commentators, I don’t think Prunier intended to imply that Rwanda has had no policy achievements of value under Kagame. In many ways (especially health and economic policy), Rwanda is a good example of the benefits that can come of a strong, development-oriented African government. This should be acknowledged along with the continued political repression and lingering grievances of the genocide if one hopes to take a more balanced view of the country.
