After U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) this week, there is no better time to revisit a question that we posed in March on ForeignPolicy.com. Does the "Congo" - a vast, mineral rich and war torn country -- really exist as such?
"There Is No Congo," we argued; no sovereign Congolese authority exists. The international community should stop pretending that the DRC is ruled from the putative capital, Kinshasa. Instead, why not act pragmatically and work with those in the different parts of Congo who exercise real power? The country's problems are difficult enough without having to address them through the façade of a central authority.
In the months since we wrote, many Congo watchers have responded to our argument. And if Clinton were reading, she would seem to be among those who disagree. The secretary met with Congolese President Joseph Kabila and implored Kinshasa to do a better job of protecting its people. She promised the country $17 million in aid to combat sexual violence in the eastern part of the country. The United States, at least, continues to believe that a real Congolese government does exist and can be dealt with accordingly.
Certainly, no critic disagrees that Congo has been a disaster on the scale that our piece describes. Critiquing our argument, Ali M Malau, an advisor to the NGO Friend of Congo, wrote on AllAfrica.com, "the level of deliquescence in Congo today is almost unprecedented; not acknowledging that reality would be intellectually dubious." Timothy Raeymaekers of the Conflict Research Group blogged, "Even the most enthusiastic embracers of Congo's political transition now agree that the country's conflict reconstruction has been a huge failure." The consensus among our critics seems to support our argument, calling into question whether it is wise to continue doing what the world has done for the last half century: looking to Kinshasa for solutions. After more than four decades of failure, how much longer should the same tragic story go on?
The most common criticism of our argument, especially by Congolese, has been to blame foreigners for the country's failure. Malau, for instance, says, "The current situation is a direct, calculated, and progressively manufactured result of a long-standing operation by Western nations to maintain a weak state in this vast mineral rich swath of land in the heart of Africa and perpetuate the systematic plunder of Congo's resources by various foreign interests, and their proxies in the local elite." The minister of communication for Congo, Lambert Mende Omalanga, writing on Congolite.com, a French-language Web site popular among diaspora Congolese, argued that our call to look at Congo realistically was made "by vultures in search of legitimation of their plunders."
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