Commentator #1: Kengo worked for Mobutu, whose rule was obviously disastrous, and “sacrificed” the lives of the current generation.  It seems like the current batch of presidential candidates who worked under Mobutu has not yet redeemed themselves.  How will they change the course of history and improve the quality of life of young people today?  Response #1: Brushes off the accusation that the commentator’s youth was sacrificed, pointing out that he clearly got a decent education in the DRC if he was able to continue to study abroad.  Long discussion of the state of education in the DRC.

Commentator #2 chews him out for being the same type of personalistic leader as Mobutu and continuing the same policies.  Unconvincing response #2: he won’t be the same if elected.

Commentator #3: Does he think he’ll actually win, given the “social, political and cultural context” of the country, and without a base?  If not, why is he running?  [RJS: I assume this is a comment on his half-Polish, half-Rwandese heritage.]  Response #3: He’s created a party before, so why not another?  He has a base in Kinshasa, apparently.

Commentator #4: Will people keep changing the constitution for political reasons?  Response #4: He considered it a necessary and legal reform.  Wouldn’t discuss reasons further, because he’s a member of the Senate and must keep the confidentiality of the deliberations, but will give his point of view: it wasn’t wise to reform the constitution just before an election.  Draws a distinction between the legality and the legitimacy of the revision – he felt it was legal but not legitimate.

Commentator #5: Will Congolese abroad be able to vote in the future? Response #5: If the opposition wins, they’ll change the law to allow expats to vote.

Commentator #6: Would he be willing to support Tshisekedi as a unique candidate?  Response #6: Negotiations on this issue are ongoing, and it’s too early to tell which opposition candidate has the largest support.  However, if it turns out not to be him, he’ll support that candidate.  If he’s elected, he’ll bring the other opposition candidates into his government.  [RJS: this is largely the same set of responses given to this question by Medard Mulangala at SAIS last week.  It sounds like "negotiations will be ongoing" about a single opposition candidate up till the day of the election, at this rate...]

I slipped under the wire to see Viva Riva! [NYT review] during its limited run at E Street Cinema in DC last week, out of immense curiosity about the first film to come out of the DRC in several decades. It turned out to be both tightly plotted and disturbing – an eerie portrait of a society where the state monopoly on violence has almost completely broken down, and where the promise of money in sufficient amounts can induce almost anyone to betrayal.  The constellation of gangsters, army officials, sex workers, priests, street children and bystanders who are drawn into interaction with each other around the central character of Riva, an audacious gasoline smuggler, is well-drawn, and watching their various twisting plotlines slowly converge on the same place was one of the central pleasures of the film.  Along the way, there’s some ridiculous sex, quite a lot of alcohol, many reversals of fortune, and some apt commentary on the old “Kin la (pou)belle” saw.  The final scene is pitch perfect, as well.  Check out the trailer here.

I was only able to attend a few minutes of DRC presidential candidate Etienne Tshisekedi’s recent speech at CSIS (as it started late and I had to leave for an evening class), but came away impressed with his analysis of the political situation in the DRC, which seemed articulate and astute.  I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of the speech, to be honest; even given the political imperative to sound optimistic about one’s own candidacy, the level of certainty he displayed about his chances in this recent interview with Colette Braeckman left me wondering a bit about how accurate his understanding of the overall political context was, but he offered a clear picture of the challenges the country is facing.  Please do share your impressions if you attended or were able to watch the whole thing.  If you’d like to learn more about his campaign, I’d suggest checking out the coverage at AllAfrica, Jeune Afrique, or Radio Okapi.

(Note as of 28 July: This post has been edited to remove a comment on Tshisekedi’s age [he's 78] which many commentators found offensive.  I don’t think it’s illegitimate to discuss a candidate’s age and health as well as his political stances, but many readers seem to have interpreted that comment as a suggestion that age is the primary axis along which a candidate should be judged, which wasn’t what I meant to say.  Apologies to those I offended.)

(Note as of 16 August: Comments on this post are now closed, as it’s received a healthy variety of responses.  Thanks to everyone who wrote in – I’d welcome your comments on other posts as well!)

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.

• King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, by Adam Hochschild.  If you’re even remotely interested in the Congo, you will doubtlessly have had this book recommended to you.  This is for an excellent reason.  Hochschild is an engaging writer, and draws a detailed picture of the merciless colonial origins of the DRC.
• In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Zaire, by Michaela Wrong.  I’ve only read excerpts of this book, but it struck me as one of the most readable and comprehensive accounts of the means by which Mobutu impoverished his nation.  (A good fictional take on the type of tactics employed by dictators like Mobutu in order to remain in power is Wizard of the Crow, by Ngugi wa Thiong’o.)
• Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, by Jason Stearns.  Stearns is one of the most knowledgeable people around on the Congo (see his blog for proof of this), and his recent book is thoroughly researched and remarkably clear in its depiction of the complex wars that wracked the DRC from 1996 to 2003.
• From Genocide to Continental War, by Gerard Prunier.  This book covers largely the same territory as Stearns’, but plunges even more unsparingly into the thicket of local politics and important detail.  Buy this if you put down Stearns’ book feeling a bit obsessed with the politics of central Africa and want even more background.
• The Congo wars have received a fair amount of additional literary attention, and I haven’t read all the recent works on the topic yet.  Based on a speech she gave at SAIS recently, I’m looking forward to Severine Autesserre’s The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding very much.  I have not read Rene Lemarchand’s Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa or Filip Reyntjens’ The Great African War: Congo and Regional Geopolitics, 1996 – 2006.  I have read Thomas’ Turner’s The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality, but didn’t find it very analytically useful.

Other recommendations?

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.