The Never-Ending Congo Crisis

The Congo has never had a chance. Ever.

The dark heart of Africa has rarely experienced peace. It has lurched from crisis, to catastrophe despite the cheerfulness and good-natured part of most of its' people (listen to Soukous music). You can even argue that the state was founded upon a crisis. The only time this Crisis-State has experienced peace is when it was under the thumb of the most diabolical people to have ever graced this Earth. What an unlucky nation. If you can even attempt to classify it as that much. Like most African countries, it's real-estate with some poor dark skinned people living on it.

The crisis that founded the Congo was purely a European one of course. Considering that Europeans were well on their way to becoming 40% of the World's population by 1900, they had technology to carve up Africa, like what a famous line from that period said "We have the Maxim and they have not". They machine gunned hundreds of tribes across Africa. The major powers decided that tiny Belgium would have the Congo river basin instead of France and Napoleon in 1884-5. The nation that sealed the deal was a rising German Empire which made it legit. Leopold II of Belgium made the Congo his tropical backyard.

However, he wasn't the only one interested in the Congo. The Portuguese have been pushing up from Angola for centuries. The indigenous kingdoms in the Congo like Katanga were always obstacles for Whites. As were the Swahili merchants who came down from Mombasa and Zanzibar to capture slaves and trade for ivory like Tippu Tib. The Congo was a grocery store until the Belgians came in. By the end of the 19th century. All opposition was gone.

Also by that time rubber was boom business. Growers in Malaya (now Malaysia) and Brazil were making money off rubber trees. The Congo Free State had to go about in their own cruel manner. They'd clear land already cultivated by subsistence farmers or villages. Then force the dispossessed people to collect rubber from wild vines instead of tapping trees. The trick about this method is that they would soak their bodies with the latex from the vines, then scrape it off (skin and hair included) to meet their daily quota. Worse than cutting sugar cane in Haiti on any normal day.

They whipped, shot, raped, burned and decapitated limbs when it suited them in the Congo. Not much resistance in a vast rainforest with more than 200 tribes maybe with 100,000 per tribe on average. The Congo started losing people, and fast. I'm sure like conflicts today, most people died of diseases in rainforests where AIDS and the ebola stemmed from, where malarial swamps are the norm. The Congo might've lost 10 million people by 1920's.

Luckily, the celebrities of the day (like Bono and Geldof today) who were writers not threepenny opera actors in some Berlin show started detailing the events which went on in there. The Belgian government took over and Leopold II was no longer the richest man on Earth because of his big real estate in Africa. Even when the Congo Free State became the Belgian Congo, they treated the Africans like big children. They even had curfews for them and tried educated them in the "proper" Christian manner. However, Congolese were still forced to farm commercial products and scrape out uranium from the ground which was used to atomize Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Then 1960 hit and the Congo Crisis happened. The Army mutinied, there was riots in Leopoldville and Katanga - the copper rich southern part of the Congo seceeded. The massive country began showing what it truly is; real estate with people living on it. The Eastern Region, Kasai and even Equateur region tried to leave. Only the UN and the new brutality of the Mobutu regime could keep it in line costing the life of a UN Secretary General and the socialist Patrice Lumumba.

In an attempt to give the country some self-esteem, he changed the name to Zaire and Leopoldville with other cities became Kinshasa. Did I mention that Mobutu became insane due to his power and stole hundreds of billions of dollars from the Congo. They invented a new political term just for him - kleptocracy. An even bigger Crisis was brewing though, it just needed help from next door... in Rwanda.

When the Hutu Interhamwe fled into the deep crevice of morality called the Zaire. They allied with the Congolese army to attack Tutsis in Zaire. The Tutsis with backing back in the homeland invaded Zaire with Ugandan help and the new militia the AFDL led by a Mr Kabila to oust Mobutu. He fled dropping billions as he ran from his basket-case country. This time, hundreds of thousands of people died.

The second time, millions died. In an sickening African version of the Thirty Years War where all the neighbouring countries of the Congo got their trigger fingers busy shooting, looting and raping to grab cobalt here, copper there, young virgins everywhere in the Congo. Some 5 million have died since 1998 while simultaneously creating the greatest refugee crisis on Earth displacing nearly 4 million people. Even since then, the Tutsis have returned to reap revenge on the surviving Hutu militias in the Congo. After all, what international jurisdiction is going to stop them? The Congo is just real-estate with people living on it.

It's safe to assume a make-believe country like the Congo shall never experience peace. It will never enjoy its immense mineral resources which power most cellphones and laptops on Earth. It will never harness the power of the Congo river basin to generate electricity for Middle Africa. This shall never happen. It's always easy to be the naysayer when it comes to the Congo because in the Congo. There's always a crisis going on.