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The International Rescue Committee’s Rick Brennan, discusses his findings from a study recently published in the British Medical Journal, Lancet, titled, “Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: A Nationwide Survey.” He speaks about the direct and indirect consequences leading to death in Eastern Congo, changes in mortality rates over time, and the social infrastructure that exists today. Senior Analyst at the International Crisis Group, Jason Stearns provides a political and historical analysis of the current situation. He also talks about the presence of foreign militaries in the region, upcoming elections, and the lack of international response.
TRANSCRIPT:
NARRATOR: Welcome to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Your host is Jerry Fowler, Director of the Museum’s Committee on Conscience.
JERRY FOWLER: Our focus today is on the continuing crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo. To bring us up to date on the situation there, our guests are Rick Brennan and Jason Stearns. Rick Brennan is a physician and the director of the Health Unit at the International Rescue Committee, a non-governmental organization that provides humanitarian assistance, protection and resettlement to refugees and victims of armed conflict. Rick joins us from New York. Jason Stearns lived in Congo for several years and is Senior Analyst at the International Crisis Group, a non-governmental organization that uses field-based analysis and high level advocacy to prevent and resolve deadly conflict. He joins us from Nairobi. Gentlemen, thanks for being on the program.
RICK BRENNAN AND JASON STEARNS: Thank you.
JERRY FOWLER: Rick, let me start with you. You are one of the authors of a study that was recently published in the British Medical Journal, Lancet, titled “Mortality in the Democratic Republic of Congo: A Nationwide Survey.” The conclusion of your study was that Congo remains the world’s deadliest humanitarian crisis. What did you find in your survey?
RICK BRENNAN: This is the fourth survey we have conducted between 2000-2004. The most recent survey shows that mortality rates in Congo have sustained and an unacceptably high level, six years into the conflict. Essentially what we found is even today, two years after the peace accords, 38,000 people continue to die every month unnecessarily from both the direct, but more important, the indirect consequences of the conflict. Essentially, we have found that 3.9 million people now have died over the six years of the conflict between 1990 and 1998, until 2004, making it the deadliest conflict, humanitarian crisis anywhere in the world, since the Second World War.
JERRY FOWLER: You talk about deaths from both direct and indirect consequences. What is that distinction that you are drawing there?
RICK BRENNAN: It is an important distinction. Essentially what we have found was, this ongoing conflict surprisingly only 1.8 percent deaths are actually due to violence. The vast majority of deaths are due to easily preventable and treatable diseases, diseases such as malaria, diarrhea, pneumonia, and malnutrition, and the reason is that ongoing insecurity in the five eastern provinces of Congo have led to disruption of all aspects of everyday life because of the ongoing insecurity from various militias and rebel components of the Congolese army and so on. Farmers cannot till their soil, mothers cannot get their children vaccinated, clinics do not work, and markets do not function. You have all these terrible public health threats that are leading to increased levels of diarrhea, malaria and so on. That is resulting in as I said, 38,000 people dying unnecessarily every month.
JERRY FOWLER: You mention that this totals to about 3.9 million—which is a staggering figure—from 1998 to 2004, and your study was in 2004. Do you have a sense of whether the situation is continuing at the same scope now, 2 years later almost?
RICK BRENNAN: No, after we completed our survey, there was actually an escalation in the violence and insecurity, and I do not think there are many indications that things have improved at all; in fact, between 2002 and 2004, we showed a slight decline in death rates, but it was not what we would call a significant decline. I think that the other really critically important finding from the study was that the death rates were the highest in the areas where insecurity was ongoing, and in places where there had previously been insecurity, and now there were effective peacekeeping efforts on the ground, death rates had dropped dramatically, so our sense is that the way to get on top of the unacceptably high mortality rates is to improve security. The top priority has to be security, security, security.
JERRY FOWLER: With that note, let me turn to Jason and ask you first, can you give us a broad overview of why this is happening in Congo? What is the source of the current insecurity?
JASON STEARNS: It is a complicated history, but to be very reductive, you have two major causes of the Congolese war. The first cause was you had a collapsed state, Zaire, as it was called at the time, and had been run into the ground by Mobutu Sese Seko who was a dictator of Zaire for over three decades, and he had run the state into the ground, to the point where he did not have a functional army, it was really only a state in name by the cell of a state, that provided no services to its people, it was only a predatory state. It really had collapsed.
In 1994, there was genocide in Rwanda, and 1.5 million refugees streamed across the border into the Congo, including many people who had perpetrated the genocide. They then stayed in refugee camps in eastern Congo and they launched attacks against Rwanda from refugee camps in Congo. In 1996, the Rwandan government decided to invade the Congo to dismantle these refugee camps. They did so and used as a front a Congolese rebel organization called the Yell that was led at a later stage by Laurent Kadila, and it was this Rwandan army invasion that triggered the first Congolese War in 1996 through which Kadila came to power. It was pretty much that they invaded the Congo and then the Congolese stayed and the army crumbled in front of them and Kadila came to power. Kadila came to power and pretty soon realized that his situation was untenable. He was a Congolese leader, the head of an organization that was dominated by the Rwandan army, so in 1998 he decided to take the Rwandan army out, and the Rwandan army then reciprocated by reinvading, and this was then the second Congolese War and Kadila could defend himself from the Rwandan army, then called upon neighboring countries to help him; Angola got involved, Zimbabwe got involved, Libya was involved, Chad was involved a little bit at one point, and then each of the countries Rwanda invaded, Uganda and Burundi as well. Fueling all of these interests and all of these invasions was also the interest in the mineral wealth of the Congo that became a substantial factor for all of these armed groups eventually in the Congo. That is really what prompted these two Congolese Wars.
JERRY FOWLER: It has actually been referred to as the First World War in Africa because of the involvement of all of these countries. You referred to the role of natural resources; could you expand on that a little bit more? Congo is quite a wealthy country in terms of natural resources. In what way is that fueling the conflict today?
JASON STEARNS: It is a hugely rich country. It lies on the richest copper vein in Africa, as well as one of the richest gold veins in Africa. To give an example, the uranium that was used for the atom bonds for Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from the Congo. It is one of the countries that is richest in diamonds. All of these things make it a very interesting country. Having said that, because the infrastructure of the Congo had pretty much collapsed, and mining is an infrastructure intensive industry, we are not talking about huge major profits here, and we are not talking about, for the most part, large multinational getting involved. We are talking about small international companies getting involved, and above all, these various armies themselves getting involved. Kabila, at one point, gave pretty much all of the copper and cobalt industry away to Zimbabwe just to pay for their involvement. Rwanda at one point in the eastern Congo was making twice their national budget in the period of six months through the exploitation of the mineral called Colton that is used in cellular phones. The tragedy of the Congo is that there are so many natural resources there, but at the moment, it is a collapsed state. When people actually get involved—even a glass costs twenty dollars, so if you are making a thousand dollars a month, you have enough to arm a militia.
JERRY FOWLER: You said that these various countries got involved in the conflict; are there still foreign militaries present in Congo?
JASON STEARNS: No. I guess I did not finish the story. After the Second Congolese War, there was a peace deal signed and under a lot of international pressure, all of the foreign troops withdrew in 2002 and 2003, and in 2003, all of the former belligerents of the Congolese warring parties entered into a transitional government that is still in power today. It includes the son of Laurent Kabila, with four vice presidents coming from the other major signatories of the peace deal. All of the foreign troops have withdrawn and the main objective of the transitional government is to lead the country to elections that should happen by June 30th of this year.
JERRY FOWLER: I would like to come back to that election in just a minute, but my understanding is that pursuant to this peace agreement, there was the deployment of a United Nations peacekeeping force that I know you worked with for a couple of years. What effect has that had, and then more broadly, what has been the international response to this deadly crisis?
JASON STEARNS: On the one hand, I think without international involvement, we never would have had this peace deal; we never would have had the withdrawal of Rwandan, Zimbabwean, and troops from the Congo. I think that international pressure and the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Congo have been instrumental in reaching this peace agreement, and as Rick pointed out, sometimes when the United Nations peacekeeping mission has actually used its troops robustly, it actually has been able to reduce mortality and to make a huge difference in the everyday lives of people. Unfortunately, there have been many incidents; especially early on in the mission, when the mission was not well organized, and I think sometimes was under weak leadership, that there were notable failures, there were several cases of massacres very close to United Nation’s camps, there was a massacre in a town in 2002 where there were 1000 United Nation’s peacekeeping troops and they had the mandate to protect the local population, and there was a massacre of over 150 civilians within shouting range of their camp. This, along with a scandal of sexual abuse where United Nation’s peacekeeping troops were found guilty of having sexually abused the population they were supposed to protect, gave them a very bad reputation. However, afterward, especially in response to this, they ratcheted up pressure against local militias in the East, and they were able to effectively control and reduce violence in some areas.
JERRY FOWLER: When you say, “some areas,” could you just give me an idea of the size of—we are talking mostly about Eastern Congo—the territory compared to the size of the United Nation’s peacekeeping force?
JASON STEARNS: They say that, all of the Congo is the size of the continental United States, west of the Mississippi. The size of Eastern Congo—I do not have a comparison off the top of my head—but I know that the size of the province of Katanga, for example, is larger than France. You have 17,000 peacekeeping troops, two-thirds of which are deployed in the East of the Congo now, which really is a drop in the bucket in terms of securing the whole population. It really is impossible for them to secure all of the population of the Eastern Congo. We are talking about a population in the East of 30-35 million people at least, and so that is really a drop in the bucket, however, if they are deployed wisely and appropriately in certain areas, they can make a huge difference. Just to come back to what Rick was saying because it is important, the Congo has never really been trench warfare. There has never been a case where you have different armed groups looking across trenches and barbed wire at each other. It has been a case of insurgency and counter-insurgency. We are not talking about very targeted areas, we are talking about a huge swath of landscape, so while there is some work to be done in terms of addressing and demobilizing militia, I think in a broader sense, you have to restore a national army, and you have to restore a state where there was no state before.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me ask Rick about this idea that it is insurgency and counter-insurgency. What was your sense in doing the research, Rick, of the daily life of civilians in Congo? You described earlier and in the survey, a collapse of the social infrastructure; how does that translate into the daily lives of civilians?
RICK BRENNAN: I think it has implications in so many different ways. There is the collapse of basic, social services. As I said previously, basic public health services such as vaccination programs and clinics, just fail to function. Food security is a big issue; families ability to grow their own food, to access markets to buy food, we saw a significant number of malnourished children; in the communities, it makes them much more prone to infectious diseases—diarrhea, pneumonia, and so on, although children under the age of five represent only twenty percent of the population, in fact, they constituted almost half of the deaths throughout the Congo. Again, three-quarters of those deaths were concentrated in the eastern parts of the country. There are enormous implications there for daily life. People are just living from hand to mouth; they are just trying to make out a living because markets are not functioning, there are high levels of unemployment, and as I said, livelihoods in general have been disrupted in a major way.
JERRY FOWLER: The markets do not function because if people try to bring goods to market, they are attacked on the way or the markets themselves are attacked?
RICK BRENNAN: There is certainly that element because of the presence of militias and insecurity, absolutely. Markets are not functioning in many parts of the country. That has implications, obviously, for food security and so on.
JERRY FOWLER: What about international relief efforts? For example, your organization, International Rescue Committee, do they have people that are attempting to provide aid on the ground?
RICK BRENNAN: Absolutely. We operate health programs in a number of areas in the East, in three provinces in the eastern part of the country, and we have been able to show that with provision of access to just very basic health services you can demonstrate dramatic reductions in mortality rates, but those services have to be sustained, and they can only be sustained if, again, there is a stable, secure environment, and if there is adequate financing of the health sector. Everyone has a responsibility here. First of all, again, we have to make sure that there is security, and then, both the government has to put the requisite amount of resources into the social sectors, but the international humanitarian community has responsibilities as well. The levels of humanitarian aid to Congo fall well short of what is required and compare very poorly with a number of humanitarian crises around the world. For example, in 2004, the per capita humanitarian aid going into Congo was about $3.75 or $3.80 per person. You compare that with places like Iraq—in 2003 it was $138—for the Tsunami it was about $135 per person, in the areas of Darfur it was estimated around $70 per person. One of the important principles here is that we believe that international engagement in terms of humanitarian assistance, in terms of supporting the security situation, and in terms of supporting the political process should be in proportion to the humanitarian need. What we believe is that we have demonstrated that the humanitarian need in Congo is greater than any other crisis anywhere in the world, and the international engagement in all of those three areas is completely out of proportion to the level of need.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me put this question to you and then I would also like to get Jason’s view on it. When we talk about providing more security—we have talked a little bit about the United Nations force on the ground and then also alluded to the creation of government security forces, this transitional government—what is the mix of international and local military necessary to provide security that would allow the aid to come in?
RICK BRENNAN: I think Jason is in a much better place to answer that, but clearly there has to be a mix. I think that 70,000 peacekeepers falls again, well short of what is required. Jason has given you a sense of the size of Congo. In Kosovo, which you could drive around in a day, we had 30,000 peacekeepers there; now we have 70,000 in eastern Congo, and Katunga itself is largely the size of France, and MONUC has demonstrated recently that it was not able to respond to the needs in Katunga. I think we need a significant increase in the number of peacekeeping troops there. Again, there has to be emphasis on ensuring that they have the right mandate and the right leadership and the right equipment, but at the same time, having this integration of a national army, and I feel Jason is probably better placed to comment on that.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me ask you, Jason, about security in terms of government forces and international peacekeepers.
JASON STEARNS: I think Rick is absolutely right. We need to get both, more international involvement, but also address the cause of the suffering. You need more international peacekeepers, and unfortunately there is very little from the international community. The Security Council does not really have the will at the moment. It is a matter of budget, a matter of money really. It is a very expensive mission. It costs over a billion dollars a year and a lot of the major donors, especially the United States do not want to put more money into a mission. It is competing as well with United Nations missions in Sudan, and Liberia, in Haiti, in Burundi, and many other places in the world. That is a key thing, and unfortunately it places large obstacles, but I think for the long term, actually almost more important will be to reducing the cause of the violence which is the Congolese army itself. The major causes of the violence are Congolese soldiers. They are in the National Army at the moment. We need to reform the Congolese army, and international donors have been very reluctant to reform the Congolese army fro various reasons; I think above all because it is very unattractive to pour money into an army that most people identify as a huge abuser of human rights, and that is the problem, but it is a vicious circle. If you do not invest money into reforming the National Army, then the National Army will just continue to be a predator. To give you an example of what I mean, these soldiers are not born to be the abusers that they have become. They are reduced to it because they are not paid, because they are not disciplined. It is not an ideological war they are fighting here; it is a war over resources. They are fighting for a salary because an average Congolese soldier is supposed to receive ten dollars a month in pay. Most Congolese soldiers—and having seen them on the ground—do not even receive two dollars a day in pay, set up road blocks—and this is what Rick was talking about—they pillage, they loot, they abuse the local population. The real challenge is for the international community is really to have a sustained engagement in reforming the Congolese Army by deploying more troops there, but also by putting money into reforming the Congolese Army, otherwise in the long term you have a peacekeeping mission there that will leave, and then once it is gone, the situation will just revert to what it was before.
JERRY FOWLER: Jason, as immense as this crisis is, why is it that people do not care more?
JASON STEARNS: I think it is not a very spectacular crisis. It is not a crisis where you have people captured on film, on camera. It is not trench warfare. People die silently, in the jungle because of disease or malnutrition, far away from any cameras or any recording equipment, so the drama is not communicated to the international arena. It is a silent and catastrophe.
The other reason, I think, is because there is nobody to lobby for them. In Sudan, we saw Christian organizations in the United States organizing on that, with very good results. They did a lot of awareness raising in the United States. Who cares about the Congo? What is there to care about in the Congo? It seems to be a mess. There is no international lobbying for anybody in the Congo. There is no international organization or community that is lobbying for the Congo, so I think because there is nobody lobbying for it—outside of people like Rick and myself—it gets lost between the cracks.
RICK BRENNAN: I guess one issue to elaborate was the point that Jason made earlier is this great difficulty of the fact that so much of the violence now is being perpetrated by the Congolese Army, but there is no political will for the western governments to poor money into that because they think it is unpalatable politically at home, very hard to sell to their constituencies back home, but between the devil and the deep blue sea, if you do not do that, you are not going to have true reform of the military there, so you are going to have this ongoing, festering crisis.
We actually met with some British parliamentarians yesterday—in fact with Teddy Clement who is also from the International Crisis Group—on this is one of the issues that did come up, and one of the parliamentarians was saying, “Our government, our voters are not going to buy pouring money into a foreign army,” but it is a catch-22; if you do not do that, you will have the ongoing crisis, and I do not know if we can highlight that a little bit.
JERRY FOWLER: Let me just ask one final question because we are about to run out of time, but you alluded to the fact that elections are coming up shortly; they have been delayed a couple of times already. The first question is will these elections actually happen, but then the more fundamental question is really what is the value of holding elections in a situation where you have this tremendous amount of insecurity?
JASON STEARNS: Elections, I think, will happen. I think, as Rick pointed out, violence has actually increased in the last six months and it is not a coincidence that we are having elections and we have seen violence increase. Many of the people who are currently in power will lose power, and I think that in order to prevent this, to destabilize the situation, they are going to resort to violence to undermine the elections. I think in the short term, elections could actually destabilize the situation, but there really is no option. It is the least of evils to a certain extent because it is a way of getting beyond the current stalemate, and the current government which is basically a power-sharing agreement between warlords, and moving towards a more accountable and representative type of government. I think we are bound to see in the next six months to one year an upsurge in violence and more difficulties, but unfortunately this is the only way to go.
JERRY FOWLER: Rick Brennan and Jason Stearns, thanks for being with us.
RICK BRENNAN: Thank you.
JASON STEARNS: Thank you very much.
JERRY FOWLER: Our guests have been Rick Brennan of the International Rescue Committee and Jason Stearns of the International Crisis Group, and I am Jerry Fowler.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, a podcasting service of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about the Museum’s Committee on Conscience, visit our website at www.committeeonconscience.org.
