Mac-Coleman

2 March 2013 –

I am in the homestretch of this latest work period in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).  I have thirty-three days left and then back home to the United States.  I am sure that this will be my last time in the Congo.  Too far away.  Too many problems.  After being in eighty countries, living in ten, and watching carefully our activities in so many more, I am convinced that the DRC has the most complex set of problems on earth.  More than anywhere the United States has engaged with significant money, military, and meals in my lifetime.  Should we engage here in a significant way to try to make this place “safe for democracy”?  Absolutely not.

In fact, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is not a sovereign nation.  It is not a coalescence of similar groups of peoples who seek unity and a set of common principles upon which to build a working, modern nation.  It is the festering residue of stultifying colonialism forced upon disparate and competing peoples, with none of the accompanying, modernizing effects that may have come from imposed-from-the-outside rule.  Its borders do not represent any cultural divides between cohesive nations; those types of borders still wait to be set with the time-honored use of force.  The history of most all developed nations on earth show that this has been the way that lasting borders have been formed.  Most importantly, the internal ethnic, cultural, and linguistic borders also are ignored, to the peril of all who live here.  The DRC is essentially a land-locked region, one-third the size of the continental United States, with too many competing peoples, languages, and cultures to attain stability.  The leavening effect that could derive from a functioning road, railway and airway system, which would move goods, services, and ideas from one region to another, is nonexistent.  There is more paved roadway in any medium-sized city in the United States than there is in the entire DRC.  Sadly, there is little evidence that a sense of being “Congolese” can be created in this or the next generation--if indeed a DRC in its present form is something that should be striven for (I arranged the entire paragraph just to use the correct participle of that word).  

It is we outsiders, on our safe perches from afar, who demand that the Congo’s present borders be honored as legitimate when nothing legitimate was used to create them in the first place.  These lines on maps do not represent natural and self-determined boundaries among peoples; that process is still working itself out, despite our efforts to stop it.  I contend that we outsiders actually impede eventual peace and stability when we ignore cultural and natural internal borders as we impose outside pressure to “stop the killing.”  It is like the world’s elite are a third-grade teacher who tires of the constant fighting in a corner of her class—a class that was formed by teachers and the administration and not by the students.   The teacher coerces Johnny and Jimmy to get along in class "for their own good", but she is exasperated when Jimmy and Johnny still fight every day at recess.  

What can outside governments do directly in the Congo?  Very little of lasting worth.  What should they do directly?  Very little.   What does “very little” mean in a place like the Congo?  Outside governments should listen carefully, watch clearly, assess coldly, and then offer to help only those leaders and peoples who show concrete commitment and progress toward creating the internal cohesion necessary to a functioning society.  Our efforts would be effective only if they were an add-on to what was already happening.  That would be the only way we would further the U.S.’s strategic interest in central Africa. 

In the meantime, can outside governments do something to stop the killing?  No they can’t stop the killing and then realistically expect anything significant to coalesce in terms of viable, accepted borders.  Jimmy and Johnny will fight until they decide not to.  That said, what will happen to a place like the Congo?  Since the DRC is an imposed artifice to begin with, its peoples must determine their fate and decide if the artifice is worth keeping.  If that means six or seven new, immediately more cohesive countries arise from the conflict, then so be it.  If that means a George Washington rises up and leads everyone to become “Congolese” and toward stability and prosperity, then so be it.  Either way, it is neither our fight, nor our classroom.  

More tomorrow on the imperatives of realistic foreign policy.