The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair

Central Africa seldom commands outside attention. Its torments play second fiddle to Afghanistan and the Middle East. This is understandable – there are no Islamist or nuclear perils here to frighten the West – but still shameful.

Europe and the US bear partial responsibility for Congo’s plight, a legacy of enslavement, looting and meddling dating back centuries.

Michael Deibert’s book is a scrupulously researched reminder of how this corner of the world became so wretched, and of the many actors responsible: Congolese politicians and warlords, predatory neighbours, hypocritical Western governments and a hapless UN.

An American who specialises in development issues in Africa, Latin Americaand the Caribbean, Deibert has written a solid, journalistic account detailing Congo’s tailspin since 1994. Early chapters briskly dispatch the history – Portuguese slavers, Belgian hand-cutters, Mobutu Sese Seko’s decaying rule – leaving the book to focus on what happened after Rwanda’s vengeful Tutsi forces pursued Hutu genocidaires across the border of its giant neighbour.

Drawing on reports from Global Witness and Human Rights Watch, among others, Deibert details how Rwanda’s proxy warlord, Laurent Kabila, swept aside Mobutu’s regime in 1997 and installed himself in the presidential palace in the capital, Kinshasa.

Bill Clinton, shamed by his inaction during Rwanda’s genocide, compensated by turning a blind eye to atrocities committed by forces loyal to Kabila and his Rwandan puppet-master Paul Kagame. That set a trend for Western coddling of Kagame that lasted two decades despite repression in Rwanda and catastrophic tampering in Congo.

After Kabila turned against his patron, Rwanda invaded again. A metastasising conflict drew in Angola, Burundi, Uganda and Zimbabwe, all chasing plunder, and spawned dozens of proxy militias and rebel groups, unleashing rape, pillage and slaughter on civilians.

Deibert sticks to the facts, layering the narrative with details about which group or sub-group committed which killings: the cumulative effect is numbing.

This book is an up-to-date synopsis which should adorn the shelf of policymakers and analysts, although the general reader will yearn for some characters to humanise the statistics. Too bad, too, that we are left guessing the motivations and personalities of players such as Kagame, a PR-savvy manipulator, or Joseph Kabila, the callow princeling turned smooth, ruthless autocrat.

These are surprising omissions as this is, quite rightly, an angry book.