Princeton Class Hopeful for Congo

PRINCETON, N.J. -- At another moment, Jane Lewis might have looked to her classmates like yet another peeved aid worker.

But when she began her presentation on war-torn Congo at Princeton University last week, her peers were listening. They were, after all, a part of the under-30, post '08-election generation that had sent a fresh Illinois senator to the White House just three weeks earlier. And they had isolated another pressing challenge for the president-elect's new term.

Lewis began by citing the role colonial Belgium played in the Democratic Republic of Congo back in 1885 when it cobbled together a nation of disparate, clashing ethnic communities. She traced the lineage of political feuds the nation has faced ever since -- war and more war; hundreds of thousands who've had to flee despite thriving lands and food; a string of ineffectual, weak rulers; a nascent claim to democracy (the country approved its first such constitution in 2005); a strained dynamic over the region's traditionally French and English-speaking (i.e. American) influences; and even Heart of Darkness author Joseph Conrad -- all a few plausible reasons why the place has been so consistently ignored for such an achingly long period.

There were plenty of possibilities and explanations. But one person can't tell you everything about 60 million people and the annals of history that plague them. However, you may well need to know. It's how Lewis' peers felt, some of whom had been on military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan themselves; they had a sense of what violence looks like and the history mattered. Unlike a previous week's seminar on Afghanistan when many had views of their own and arguments to qualify, this time there were more questions than answers.

The rest took notes. One woman abruptly clicked a window of her computer screen shut. She was frustrated, perturbed.

Outside the seminar room, the university campus felt like many other American towns. Troubles raged, the bailout was on people's minds; one undergraduate incongruously ruminated on whether or not the incomes of Wall Street's attorneys were unfairly capped. Inside the seminar room, the air was tense, searching. The professor wondered why a place that just needed a jumpstart in its engine had been left instead to suffocate and fester.

On the sheltered campus of the venerated New Jersey institution Lewis and her colleagues attend, moral outrage was finally brewing -- that thick air palpable with anger and resentfulness, angling to be articulated. The Democratic Republic of Congo, thousands of miles away from America and mainland Europe, is that country which, despite its dismal history, still yearns for its due. Things are going wrong this month, but perhaps there is finally glimmering hope things will be different... and better.

It was a place where Lewis lived and worked before enrolling in graduate school.

"I saw my boss once," she described in an effort to show how roads had yet to be built in the mineral-rich state and how travel between the country's capital Kinshasa in the west, to a town near Goma in the east, required one to fly through cities in three separate countries. Lewis' former employer, International Rescue Committee, conducted an extensive national survey to assess how many had died between 2006 and 2007, years Lewis had worked there -- and pegged the estimate at no less than 500,000.

The figure wasn't a measure of area violence; it was the toll that poor infrastructure in the aftermath of a war had taken, a glimpse of what could happen to a place without roads or medicine. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, it had seized the lives of the country's most vulnerable residents -- children and babies under the age of five. The survey had polled 80,000 across the country and concluded things were worst on the Rwandan border in the east, which is currently witnessing new waves of fighting, and where people are continuing to flee the area.

The outbreaks of disease and subsequent conflict have become challenging, in the least, for an ignorant and distracted international news media -- it's the chaos that ensues when people need to eat, pregnant moms and babies need medical care; and children and preteens need bottles and bottles of antibiotics and Tylenol.

After being left to fend for themselves (the government has not been able to fortify the east without roads) Congolese took up more arms. Hutu militias from neighboring Rwanda (yes, those who participated in the '94 genocide) began coming across the border, terrorizing Tutsi residents.

Near Goma, where new violence has flared up and where rebel Tutsi leader, Laurent Nkunda, tries to say he is picking things up in the neighborhood (by getting Hutus to return to Rwanda), militias from other "helpful" neighboring countries, paid by the government (and desperate for access to the country's abundant natural resources) have flooded the eastern region. News is they are now fighting indiscriminately, often amongst themselves.

Things improved slightly after 2002 after a truce was signed; a lot of the fighting stopped but skirmishes resurfaced again in recent years.

With a weak central presence of Kinshasa-based government folk on the high hills near the Rwandan border, it's difficult for people to be anything but jittery and testy most of the time. Murderer-survivors from a genocide live in the shadows. To try to dampen fears and anxieties, people have tried escaping temporarily to Uganda or Rwanda or anyplace else that comes to mind and will house them for a while.

And as militias continue exchanging automatic weapons and uniforms (paid for by the materials in our mobile phones, a mineral called coltan), fighters find more to fist over; mostly, they are after food as government forces don't appear to be paying and feeding their soldiers. So loot is the only means. Rape hasn't been infrequent either.

After the harrowing statistics were reiterated (estimates are that between 3.8 and 5.4 million have died by murder and disease since the late nineties) Lewis made her final points brief. "Nobody wants to cover it," she said. A bullet-point on her last Powerpoint slide read, "the (non) CNN factor."

Lewis' pleas to journalists and the world's citizens are far from unique, but in an unexpected turn (as luck would have it) the UN Security Council finally decided to raise UN troop levels in the country the day after her presentation. From 5,000 in the Goma region there will now be 8,000. Some sort of political reconciliation seems to be what aid workers, UN personnel, African and European leaders agree will be the way forward.

UN officials are hopeful, though their presence falls short when it comes to defending millions; perhaps, as one student pointed out, it speaks to how much the institution of the United Nations itself is still struggling to define its role. So far, however, no country has volunteered to put up the additional 3,000 troops.

UN spokesperson Madnodje Mounoubai, speaking from Kinshasa on behalf of the UN described the decision to increase troops as, "very much welcomed because it will bring some relief." Sure hope so. His point, however that it would, "make a big difference in term of our mission of protecting civilians" likely overstates the case just a tad. Many of us I'm sure would likely be satisfied if a few countries encouraged the UN forces (called MONUC) to accept several thousand more, even if some member nations (i.e. China, France, Russia, the UK, and the United States) insist the country can do without. More help was needed. It was a point on which Lewis' classmates all seemed to agree.

For more on the ongoing effects of wars in Congo, visit the International Rescue Committee's web exclusive on the topic and a recent multimedia project on the region completed for Doctors Without Borders. For an engaged animated film about the nation's struggles with democracy, visit the Human Rights Watch website.