Last month, I finished reading Jason Stearns’ excellent Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, which I first mentioned in this post. Stearns has written very recently on the current situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and his regular blog can be found here. While Stearns applauds the U.S. conflict minerals bill signed into law last year at the end of chapter 19 in his book and still argues that it is important to continue working on the issue, he explains at greater length here why understanding the war in Congo mainly in terms of conflict minerals is badly misleading. I have to admit that my knowledge of the wars in Congo was quite limited before I started his book. I strongly recommend it for anyone who wants a well-informed, accessible introduction to the conflicts that have been raging in central Africa for the better part of the last twenty years.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, is a country that has suffered enormously since the aftermath of the genocide in Rwanda and the Rwandan-led invasion that followed two years later. Many readers will be aware that the massive loss of life in the wars there is the largest in the world since WWII, but beyond that the wars in Congo are not very well understood. Congo’s experience since 1996 is a prime example of the misfortunes that befall a country when it is turned into a proxy battlefield for other nations’ ambitions, and appropriately the authors who have written the most on the wars between 1996 and today have compared it to Germany during the Thirty Years’ War. The significant role of mercenaries, the importance of pillaging as a major activity of armed forces, and the massive death tolls resulting from disease, food shortages, and displacement in addition to atrocities are common features of both. There was no direct U.S. role in all of this, but to the extent that the U.S. was involved in the region after 1994 it was often not very constructive in its engagement.

Stearns reminds us that the coalition of governments that organized alongside Rwanda in 1996-97 to topple Mobutu was the expression of an ideological movement and a new generation of African leaders:

It is easy to forget, now that greed and plunder claim the headlines as the main motives for conflict in the region, that its beginnings were steeped in ideology. The Rwandan-backed invasion was perhaps the heyday of the African Renaissance, riding on the groundswell of the liberation of South Africa from apartheid, and of Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Rwanda from dictatorships. It was an alliance motivated in part by the strategic interests of individual governments, but also by a larger spirit of pan-Africanism….President Museveni recalled: “Progressive African opinion was galvanised.” (p. 55)

This quote struck me as I read it because it sounds so very much like the “Arab Spring” enthusiasm that contributed to the push for war against Libya. Not that different from Gaddafi in some ways, Mobutu was badly isolated internationally and exposed to attack from his neighbors. Mobutu had alienated virtually all of his neighbors by playing host to insurgent groups opposed to the current governments, which set the stage for the alliance arrayed against him. Instead of being a recently “rehabilitated” dictator who had become an embarrassment for the West as Gaddafi was, Mobutu was an old Cold War ally who had ceased to be useful and had become an embarrassment for the West, so there was little interest among his traditional allies to keep backing him.

Unlike the anti-Mobutu coalition in 1996-97, however, the Libyan war has not seen Libya’s neighbors taking part in the conflict, nor have anti-Gaddafi Arab governments contributed much in the way of supporting the war effort with the partial exception of Qatar. Proponents of both campaigns share the same overconfident optimism that the war heralds something new and promising for the specific country and the region as a whole, when instead it simply unleashes destruction. The wars in the Congo are a reminder that it is interventionist policies themselves that ruin country being “liberated” and corrupt the governments that carry them out, and it is makes surprisingly little difference whether the initiative for the intervention comes from states in the region or from far away.

A little earlier in the same chapter, Stearns recounts how Western governments were enthusing over the new African leaders at the time:

Between 1986 and 1994, ideologically inspired rebels ousted repressive regimes in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, and Rwanda. Coded cables sent to European and American capitals from embassies spoke of a new breed of African leaders, apparently different from the corrupt and brutal dictators who had ruled much of Africa since independence. Although they had all begun their careers as socialists, after coming to power they initially endorsed the principles of free markets and liberal democracy and were enthusiastically greeted by western leaders. U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright swooned: “Africa’s best new leaders have brought a new spirit of hope and accomplishment to your countries–and that spirit is sweeping across the continent….” (p. 52)

The wars in the Congo put an end to all of that. As Stearns concluded at the end of chapter 3:

Within several years, the Congo was to become the graveyard for this lofty rhetoric of new African leadership as preached by Mbeki, Albright, and many others. Freedom fighters were downgraded to mere marauding rebels; self-defense looked ever more like an excuse for self-enrichment. Leaders who had denounced the big men of Africa who stayed in power for decades began appearing more and more like the very creatures they had fought against for so many decades. (p. 56)

It is still too soon to know what will come of the war in Libya, but it is possible that the Libyan war marked the beginning of the end of whatever “Arab Spring” there may have been.