Dancing in the Glory of Monsters

I returned to the eastern Congo twice since this book was first published, doing research and following preparations for the critical November 2011 elections. Traveling in the eastern part of the country, I was nagged by two different kinds of regret linked to my book. First, I was afraid that I had undersold the Congo's many virtues, highlighting the tragedy and bloodshed.

The Congo is not just blood and gore. It also has an incandescent, raw energy to it, a dogged hustle that can be seen in street-side hawkers and besuited ministers alike. This charm is not unlike that of America's mythical Wild West, full of gunslingers, Bible-thumpers, prostitutes, street urchins, and rogue businessmen. This is the paradox of the Congo: Despite its tragic past, and probably in part due to the self-reliance and ingenuity resulting from state decay, it is one of the most alive places I know.

This effervescence was on display on my most recent trip to the eastern border town of Bukavu. I was monitoring the elections and stayed with my friend Tshivu, who works as a human rights officer for the United Nations. In the evenings, on our way home through the muddy streets, we would pass a grim group of soldiers on the corner, with AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades on display. Tshivu complained that just the other day they had run about, stopping traffic and threatening a mutiny if they didn't get their salaries and promotions. In the mornings, I was woken up at dawn by preaching and singing from the neighboring Pentecostal church. "If our economy depended on praying—loud squawking," Tshivu moaned, bleary-eyed, "we'd be like South Korea by now."

Congolese approached elections with similar wit. The race for the presidency had been reduced to two candidates. The incumbent president, Joseph Kabila, who had been in power since his father was assassinated in 2001, was running a campaign based on his Cinq Chantiers (Five Construction Sites): electricity and water, infrastructure, jobs, health, and education. His youthful face, with sunken eyes and chiseled features, was plastered all over the town, but his popularity had plummeted in Bukavu because of abuses by the security services and runaway corruption. Every time the electricity went out in town or we bounced down a pothole-ridden road, my Congolese friends quipped: "Voilà: Cinq Chantiers!" Some had even begun calling it Les Cinq Chansons—the five songs, all melody and no substance.

Speaking of songs, there were a lot of them. The Congo is music crazy, and President Kabila had been able to persuade most of the country's superstars to sing his praises. It was sad to see this kind of mercenary opportunism, but if you listened closely to the lyrics in Lingala, you wondered if the musicians were not trying to send an encrypted message. Take Koffi Olomide, the king of the Congolese rumba, famous for flamboyant outfits and racy dancing girls. "If someone gives you a cricket," he began his pro-Kabila campaign song cryptically, "take it! It's better than someone who promises you an elephant but never provides." My friend Serge laughed—"So we should take a shitty little cricket? I think I'll wait on that elephant." Spontaneously, over a bar table full of beer bottles, my friends decided to found their political party: Batu ya nzoku. The elephant people.

The only person who had a chance beating Kabila was Etienne Tshisekedi, a seventy-eight-year-old veteran opposition politician. He was, depending on whom you spoke with, the principled visionary who suffered torture and prison for his beliefs; or a stubborn firebrand who was out of touch with his country. Both of these qualities were on display during his campaign. Seeking medical treatment in South Africa (rumors abounded: was it diabetes? heart trouble?), he proclaimed himself president two weeks before his fellow Congolese had even gone to the polls. "We don't need to wait for the elections," he said. "In a democracy, whoever has the power is the majority of the people. And the people of Congo, in its majority, have chosen and trust Tshisekedi."

It was a strange declaration from a man who had been hauled off to jail numerous times for demanding the right to elect Congo's leaders. Tshisekedi then visited the East and continued his incendiary rhetoric, telling crowds that President Kabila was actually a Rwandan, a Manchurian candidate who had come to exploit them. This xenophobic tripe was supposed to make up for his low popularity in the East, where he isn't well known. In some places, he succeeded—the deep anti-Rwandan sentiment led a minority to latch onto his message. In rallies in border towns, he was greeted by people pointing toward Rwanda—" We will send him back to where he belongs." A Photoshopped picture that made the rounds on computers and cell phones showed Tshisekedi as a husky cop, schlepping a shackled Kabila off to Rwanda. "We want elections, not erections," some of Tshisekedi's rabble-rousers inveighed, poking fun at the Rwandan tendency to switch "l" for "r."

The elections had the Congo's best and worst on display. People stood for hours in long queues; I saw women with infants swaddled in blankets lining up hours before polling stations opened, and old men hobbling in from miles away to cast their votes. Above all, even in their deepest cynicism, Congolese could find humor and hope. But greed was also at work. Politicians distributed cash handouts, and soldiers in some areas warned peasants that it was President Kabila or war.

The reason is simple. One of the main goals of the book is to tackle "Congo reductionism"—the tendency to reduce the conflict to a Kabuki theater of savage warlords, greedy businessmen, and innocent victims. To some, the war can be reduced to Rwandan meddling, to others to Western greed for raw minerals. One potential editor (thankfully, not my final one) urged me to cast the conflict as a result of "globalization." More recently, there has been a push by advocates to see the conflict through the sole prism of sexual violence and conflict minerals.

The Congolese conflict does not fit well in these straitjackets. I do not have a Unified Theory of the Congo War, because it does not exist. The conflict is complex and knotted, with dozens of different protagonists. The long history of state decay in the Congo—or, more accurately, the failure ever to build strong institutions—has meant that actors have proliferated, competing for power and resources in the absence of a strong government. At the height of the war, there were upwards of forty Congolese armed groups in the eastern Congo alone, while nine different African states deployed troops. This complexity has thwarted journalists and diplomats alike, but the book suggests: beware of oversimplification; it will get you into trouble. In this sense, I recommend the opposite of William of Occam's famous razor: We should not always try to simplify for the sake of theoretical clarity. Get into the grime and grit of the story, rub up against its intricacy.

This emphasis on the conflict's complexity provided the philosophical thrust of the book. How should we define responsibility and guilt in the Congo, when the violence is of a very different nature than, for example, the Nazi-led Holocaust? A majority of the Congolese victims died from hunger, starvation, and illness brought about as a side effect of the conflict. There was no industrial architecture of genocide, no master plan to exterminate the country's citizens. I do not say this to minimize the suffering or to excuse the many horrific crimes, some of which are described in these pages. But the kind of guilt may well be different.

An example: the role of international actors. After many dozen interviews with Congolese and Rwandan protagonists of the wars, I found little evidence for direct American military involvement in support of any parties during the wars, although their intelligence agents were certainly active. The Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL) rebellion to overthrow Mobutu (1996–1997)—which has often been rumored to have received U.S. military support—had enough firepower coming from Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Eritrea, and Angola. Nor could I find much support in my interviews for an international corporate conspiracy in support of any of the wars, although many foreign companies did make considerable profits during the war. They were guilty of criminal neglect, perhaps, but in most cases not intent to murder.

American and, in some cases, European policy has been sadly shortsighted on many occasions, in particular in its sympathy for Rwandan interference in the Congo in the name of self-defense. Overall, however, the greatest sins of Western governments have been ones of omission and ignorance, not of direct exploitation. We simply have not cared enough about a crisis that is too complex—and too marginal to geopolitics—to fit into a sound bite. This has led at times to one-dimensional policymaking and the search for simple heroes and villains when the roles are much more complex than that.

The elections are a telling example of the ham-fisted international approach.

From the beginning, the process was steeped in controversy. In January 2011, Joseph Kabila's ruling coalition changed the constitution to get rid of a second-round, runoff vote. This meant that a candidate could win with just 30 percent of the vote, as long as he beat the next man (no women were running). It was a crafty move, and President Kabila figured it would pit his rivals against each other. Sure enough, the fractious opposition was unable to unite, dividing the anti-Kabila vote.

Several months later, Kabila's allies in parliament were able to change the electoral law, allowing them to name a majority of election commissioners. A close ally and spiritual adviser of the president, Daniel Ngoy Mulunda, became the head of the election body. With other allies of the president controlling the Supreme Court, which would deal with electoral disputes, and the Media Council, the incumbent had a clear advantage.

President Kabila's greatest asset, perhaps, lay in his deep pockets. In the run-up to elections, the government sold shares in mining concessions worth around $5.8 billion. The problem is, according to company and government documents since made public, the companies that bought stakes in these mines paid around one-tenth of that price, only to turn around and resell their shares on the international market for the full value, making a fortune. The beneficiaries were all unknown companies based in the British Virgin Islands, some of which had been created just months before the sales took place. Many of the companies were linked to Israeli businessman Dan Gertler, a close associate of President Kabila. Although it is impossible to prove profits from these sales benefited Kabila's campaign, a presidential aide confided to me that similar sales, also involving Gertler, had helped finance their 2006 campaign.