Congo: war-torn heart of Africa

How is the DRC governed?

Badly, if at all. Two years ago, at a cost of $450m in foreign aid, Congo had its first presidential elections (largely peaceful) for 46 years. The winner was Joseph Kabila, son of Laurent Kabila, a rebel-turned-president who was shot by his own bodyguards in 2001. But Kabila Jr’s government, unwieldy from the start – he has no less than four prime ministers and 50 cabinet ministers – has been enfeebled by the squabbling endemic in a vast country of more than 200 ethnic groups.

And is his country dirt poor?

Potentially it’s one of the wealthiest in Africa, rich in timber (it contains half of Central Africa’s forests) and in virtually every mineral known to man – gold, copper, tin, diamonds, not to mention coltan, the “black gold” which, once refined, is a key ingredient in mobile phones and laptops. The DRC is also thought to hold huge reserves of oil and gas. But ever since 1885, when the Belgian king Leopold II made Congo his personal property and exploited it mercilessly for its rubber and ivory, the allure of those resources has proved a curse, provoking and intensifying conflict. Partly as a result of such conflict, the DRC is now one of Africa’s poorest countries: real GDP per head fell from $380 in 1960 to $115 in 2004.

Did Congo prosper at any time after independence?

No. In 1965, once freed from Belgian control, the country was run into the ground by army colonel Mobutu Sese Seko, a brutal kleptocrat who renamed it Zaire and hoarded its wealth for himself. Yet when, in 1997, he fled a rebel uprising spearheaded by an army from neighbouring Rwanda, Congo descended into a many-sided war, at one point involving the armies of six African nations. Between 1996 and 2002, more than four million people died (more than 90% from disease), making it the worst conflict since the Second World War. Since then the country has become a huge challenge for the UN (whose peacekeeping mission there costs $2bn a year) and a test of the very idea of government.

Has Kabila Jr been any help?

No. Driven by malnutrition and infectious diseases that proliferated after years of war, the Congolese mortality rate remains 57% higher than the average for sub-Saharan Africa, making the whole country, in effect, a humanitarian disaster area. Yet Kabila’s government has not been able (or even appeared willing) to follow an internationally agreed peace plan for the five eastern provinces – North Kivu in particular – which are at the heart of the present fighting and which are the repository of much of Congo’s mineral wealth.

So is this a war over minerals?

In part, undoubtedly, even if its ethnic dimension is more often emphasised. Thus the main rebel leader – Laurent Nkunda (see box), an ethnic Tutsi – is bent on seizing the mineral deposits in the Hutu-held regions of North Kivu. The Hutu rebels for their part, though claiming to be seeking refuge in Congo from a vengeful Tutsi-led regime in Rwanda, have built up their militia by