The Heart of Africa

The Economist has a great article that says that the seven year war in Congo is over and that the country is at relative peace, for the moment. The potential from here on out could go one way or the other:

Congo is a big place””?bigger, for instance, than all the states that voted for John Kerry in America’s election last November put together. It shares a border with nine other countries, and touches every sub-Saharan region: central, south, east and west. A stable Congo could be Africa’s healthy heart. Arterial roads could be built through it; it has a huge trove of untapped minerals and enough hydroelectric potential to light up half the continent. Conversely, a return to chaos could be a continental heart attack.

There’s also a great summary of how Africa’s “world war” of the past seven years started.

Optimists point out that the country’s current president, 33-year-old Joseph Kabila, is probably its best since independence in 1960. Pessimists retort that that is not saying much. His best-known predecessor, Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled from 1965 until 1997 and renamed the country Zaire, was a ruthless crook who fitted his palace with a nuclear shelter, hired Concorde for shopping trips and so gutted the treasury that inflation between October 1990 and December 1995 totalled 6.3 billion per cent. He lost control because he and his flunkies filched too much. Unpaid soldiers refused to defend the regime against a rebellion led by Laurent Kabila, Joseph’s father, who seized power and restored the country’s old name.

The senior Kabila turned out to be even worse than Mobutu. He was equally brutal and corrupt, but less intelligent. He had people executed while he was drunk and then forgot that he had done so. He ordered diamond dealers to sell their gems to a state-backed monopoly for near-worthless Congolese francs, and then wondered why the country’s largest source of export revenues dried up. He provoked Rwanda, Congo’s aggressive neighbour, by arming and supplying the perpetrators of the 1994 genocide, who were hiding in eastern Congo’s forests. Mobutu had done the same, which was why the Rwandan army helped Kabila topple him. Now Rwanda backed a revolt to topple Kabila, too.

That was how the war started in August 1998. Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia rushed to Kabila’s defence. Uganda sided with the Rwandans, but later fought them. Then it got really confusing. In all, six national armies and dozens of rebel groups and militias joined the fray. All sides plundered Congo’s minerals. When Joseph Conrad spoke of “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience”Â?, he was describing Congo under Belgium’s King Leopold II, but his phrase has not dated.

Here’s to a brighter future.