Anchor Marco Werman talks to Kinshasa-based reporter Michael Kavanagh.

He says the country’s leading opposition figure claims he won the disputed presidential poll and Congolese are girding for violence.

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. The scenario is all to familiar in Africa. An election is held but neither front runner wants to admit defeat. It happened in Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Ivory Coast. Now it’s happening in the Democratic Pubic of Congo. The country’s president, Joseph Kabila, has claimed victory in last month’s election. Official results announced last week back him up. Kabila is rejecting accusations that the vote was rigged in his favor. Several international observers, including the Georgia based Carter Center, have questioned the votes legitimacy. Opposition candidate Etienne Tshisekedi continues to insist that he was the elections real winner. Reporter Michael Kavanagh is based in Kinshasa, the Congolese capital.

Michael Kavanagh: In Kinshasa it’s very tense. Basically the opposition is waiting to see how this process unfolds. They’ve taken the vote to the Supreme Court. They’ve challenged the vote at the supreme court. We’re expecting a decision on the 17th so I think that people are concerned thought that there could be mass protests in the streets if the election doesn’t go the way that the opposition wants.

Werman: Then tension right now has to be heightened in a certain way by the fact that the main opposition party led by Etienne Tshisekedi apparently it sounds like they’re gearing up for something.

Kavanagh: Right, and we’ve known this for awhile. I think the reality of this situation is that Tshisekedi has been an opposition leader for several decades here in Congo and he frankly has been a relatively peaceful one. He hasn’t joined militias, he hasn’t been a rebel, and his supporters for the most part don’t have weapons. So that means that they’re going to need to take to the streets. He keeps talking about the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt and that’s what his followers are prepared to do is go to the streets without weapons knowing that they’re going to face a quite powerful security surface who basically supports the president and thinks that he won the election and feel like this is a major disturbance to public order and a challenge to the government of the country.

Werman: To an extent we saw the same sort of scenario a year ago in Ivory Coast where two powerful leaders dug in their heels over election results and then that resulted in massive violence for four months until the situation got settled. It sounds like you’re concerned about a similar scenario shaping up for Congo. Are others worried about that?

Kavanagh: That is definitely the biggest concern and the worst case scenario that we have. The situation in [?] was a little bit different in that you had two national institutions who basically had come up with two different results for the election. That’s not going to be true here. The Supreme Court supports Kabila just as they electoral has supported Kabila. It means that the international community is much less apt to back Tshisekedi and the opposition in this fight. They’re going to be much less patient with him when his supporters go out into the street.

Werman: Now, incumbent President Joseph Kabila says he won the election fair and square. Tshisekedi says no, so does the European Union Mission, the Atlanta based Carter Center, and the Catholic Church all there who are watching this. They say last months election wasn’t credible. What is the starkest evidence right now of fraud? Is there widespread agreement that fraud happened?

Kavanagh: Yes, these elections looked like the counting was done in a very untransparent manner. There are some very suspicious results from parts of the country where Kabila is popular where they had over 100% turnout and 100% of the voters voting for Kabila. That kind of thing never happens in an election and so these are the sorts of things that observers are worried about. Their votes, thousands, perhaps at one point 6 million votes have gone missing. Again, will that change the results? We just don’t know.

Werman: There had been such hope in recent years that this presidential election in Congo would be key to helping stabilize a country and reduce the violence actually in several theaters of conflict in Congo. Is there now a sense among Congolese that these elections are in fact the wrong direction, maybe they’re even destabilizing further their country?

Kavanagh: I think that is a worry that you hear, especially here in the capital of Kinshasa, they feel like their vote was stolen and they feel like Kabila has lost legitimacy. They feel like this democratic process which was promised to them as the thing that would change Congo and bring development and bring peace, it’s not all that it was supposed to be. Of course, the thing to remember is that Kabila was elected with quite a lot of votes in parts of the country. So it’s not as if this election is under question from the entire population of Congo. I think the question is just does he have enough support to remain legitimate? Will the international still support him? Can he find ways to build bridges to the opposition so that this country which is so rich and yet on the other hand so poor in terms of what the people actually have, can it develop to a point where it’s more stable in the next few years? For the moment, I think the jury is still out.

Werman: We’ll stay on top of it as things unfold. Reporter Michael Kavanagh, based in the Congolese capital Kinshasa. Thanks very much indeed.

Kavanagh: Thanks, Marco.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Eleven men are running for president, including the incumbent, Joseph Kabila, and almost 19,000 candidates are vying for some 500 seats in parliament. The ballot is more than 50 pages long and looks like a tabloid newspaper.

One election official in a polling station in the capital Kinshasa said in this district alone there are just under 1,000 candidates for parliament.

Just getting ballots to the 63,000 polling stations across the country has been a challenge – Congo is practically the size of Western Europe, with extremely poor roads. It’s covered by the second largest tropical rainforest in the world. The country has had to borrow dozens of helicopters from neighboring countries to transport election material. Some were grounded today because it’s the rainy season so, of course, it was raining.

“This is a difficult country to hold elections,” said Anita Vandenbeld, the Congo country director for the National Democratic Institute, which has been working with political parties here.

“It’s a very large country and there are a number of logistical problems. Added to that is the fact that there has been in some ways lack of communication between the political parties from the electoral commission, which if you combine it with the logistical problems, can create suspicion. We saw that with the violence that has occurred.”

The lead-up to the vote has seen hundreds of violent attacks, most by the country’s security forces against opponents of incumbent President Kabila. Over the weekend, at least nine people died and more than 80 were wounded in the capital, Kinshasa when the president’s republican guard fired into the crowds.

On Monday, in the neighborhood where Etienne Tshisekedi, Kabila’s main challenger, lives, people lined up to vote starting at six in the morning. The scene was peaceful, though chaotic for some.

Clothilde Bawota, who is 51, has already stopped at five different voting stations looking for her name on the registration list, but it’s not there.

“What can I do,” she said. “I’m also a citizen and I need to vote.”

For 19-year-old Maryous Ntumba, it’s his first time voting. He said he can barely remember the country’s last elections in 2006, when militias fought deadly street battles in Kinshasa after Kabila won in a runoff.

Maryous hopes it will be different this time.

“History has changed. The world and technology have evolved with science. We don’t want war here in the DRC, like what happened in Libya or Cote d’Ivoire,” Maryous said.

The average Congolese makes less than a dollar a day; the United Nations actually named Congo the least developed country in the world this year. That’s why Maryous said he’s voting for Etienne Tshisekedi. Maryous wants change, and he said wants to help be part of that change; he’s studying for his law degree.

“Because in our country, we have a problem with human rights,” Maryous said. “There are a lot of people who’ve been killed here. This is why I’m studying law, to defend my country.

But scratch below the surface and you quickly see how these elections could lead to more killing.

Maryous said he’s ready to die for his country, if the elections don’t go well.

The tension was evident at another voting station on the other side of Kinshasa. There, supporters of Tshisekedi accused election workers of stuffing ballots. They attacked him, kicking him repeatedly in the head, until police intervened. As the police led the man away, the crowd chanted after him, “100-percent thief!”

This wasn’t the only case of election-related violence today. In Congo’s second city, Lubumbashi, at least nine people were reported killed. And voting stations were burned in the capital of Western Kasai province.

All this doesn’t bode well for December 6th, the day provisional results are slated to be announced.

“I’m worried about violence,” said Glody Mfunkani Diasilua, a 19-year-old from Kinshasa. He’s also voting for the first time today, part of the first generation to grow up in a Congo where voting, not dictatorship, is the norm.

“We don’t want after elections people die,” Glody said. “It’s not good for us, we need peace. This country will be ours. I hope that the future will become better than today.”

I’m in the city of Beni, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, about to head out to the nearby trading hub, Butembo. It’s only 33 miles along a main highway. But in Congo, a drive like this can be long and potentially hazardous. 

Congo is one of the most unstable and least developed countries in the world. One thing that makes the country hard to govern is the decrepit state of its roadways, often called the worst in the world.  

I’ve been to Congo several times before, but for my girlfriend  Lindsay, who’s just arrived  in Congo, this is her first experience  with Congo’s infamous roads.  It’s not uncommon for people to get sick on their first road trip here.  But as we start out, Lindsay isn’t too concerned.

“I think it’s gonna go pretty well,” Lindsay says. But she admits that she’s a little worried. “About the car breaking down. And rebels attacking,” she says with a laugh.

The United Nations base here rates this stretch of road as a yellow zone, which means attacks aren’t likely, but most of the route is within 5 miles of a rebel stronghold.

Another concern is that many of the vehicles on the road are in terrible shape. I’ve seen mechanics here repair cars with twine.  On my first trip down this road, we had to stop three times for repairs.

But the biggest problem is that the highways in Congo are in terrible condition; they’re essentially dirt paths. Downed trees and large rocks sometimes block the way. The roads are so bumpy that I’ve banged my head on the roof as we’re driving. During the rainy season, large trucks can get stuck in potholes for a week.

On this day, Lindsay and I hope to make this 30-mile journey before nightfall.

As we leave the city, we stop to pay a toll.  

It’s hard to believe that much of that money is being reinvested in the highway.

But suddenly, that’s not our main concern, because there’s a man up ahead motioning to us. There’s a problem, my translator, Kabuyaya, says; we have to show our passports.

We’re hauled in to an army checkpoint. The military here is notoriously corrupt, and they’re known for creating new fines on the spot.  For Westerners, these can run into the hundreds of dollars.  
 
But we’re lucky this time. Kabuyaya talks with the soldiers, and they send us on our way, without demanding a bribe.  
 
“I was a teensy bit scared at the beginning,” Lindsay says afterwards, “but I was surprised. That went really well.”

“So far, so good,” I say.

Maybe they let us off without a bribe because our battered car suggests we don’t have that much to give. Still, our car is reliable compared to other vehicles here. On this trip alone, we see two overturned trucks and numerous broken-down cars awaiting parts.

Kabuyaya and I ask the driver of  one of the disabled trucks how long they’ve been here. He says they’ve been stuck here since yesterday.

Bad roads, decrepit vehicles and a lack of concern for safety make overturned trucks a common sight in Congo. (Photo: Dennis Porter)

The Best Road

By this stage of our trip, Lindsay is doing fine, but I’m starting to feel sick from the rattling around. When Kabuyaya tells us this is one of the “best” roads in the region, I lose it.
 
“This is the worst road I have ever driven on anywhere in the world! How is this your best road?”
Kabuyaya responds, “We call it the best road because it seems to attract the attention of the government. It tries to repair bad things that block people to pass through it.”

Sure enough, farther up the road, we see evidence of the government’s attempts to improve things.  There’s a road crew consisting of bare-footed men with shovels, who slowly move piles of dirt into the seemingly endless potholes.

The men say their salary is $30 a month, but often they don’t get paid. Most people in Congo assume that the taxes they pay, and the road tolls they’re charged, are siphoned off before they can ever fund any road improvements. That kind of corruption also affects the schools in Congo, and the foreign aid, and the police.
In some ways, poor roads are a cause of many of Congo’s problems, but they’re also a symptom of the many issues that keep the country under-developed.

Arriving in Butembo

We arrive in Butembo after more than 3 hours — travelling about 10 miles an hour. We didn’t break down, fall off a cliff, or get attacked by rebels. Lindsay feels fine after her first trip on a Congolese highway.

“I survived better than you. You look extremely pale, and for most of the journey you didn’t say anything and looked pretty sick,” she says.
I ask her how this compares to other highways she’s been on.

No comparison, she says. “This is unique. I’ve never quite been on a highway like this. I don’t know if you’d called it a highway. But I guess it is for Congo.”

When a volcano erupts, perhaps the best advice we’ve heard is … turn around and run!

But for today’s Geo Quiz — we’re going in for a closer look:

A volcano began putting on a show about a week ago in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Virunga National Park has a front row seat for the eruptions. So guides there are leading overnight expeditions. They pitch tents near the south slope for tourists to watch lava shooting up 500 feet into the air.

“It’s quite chilly up here because we’re quite high up in the mountains, but the campsite itself is actually warm because of the heat of the lava that radiates all the way almost a mile to where the camp is so yea you can definitely “feel the lava.”

So where can you “feel the lava”?

Try to come up with the name of this volcano in Central Africa if you can. It’s part of the Virunga Mountains that sprawl across the borders of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda.

But rather than asking a volcanologist for a technical analysis of the volcanic smoke and lava.

We called up Cai Tjeeenk Willink, a staffer at Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The answer is Mount Nyamulagira.

Mount Nyamulagira (Photo: Cai Tjeeenk Willink)

And Goma, a dusty border town that has long served as clearing house for the minerals mined in this region, is hurting. Its Belgian colonial buildings are crumbling. Its roads are ripped up and dusty, thanks to government embezzlement of funds that were supposed to go to a Chinese construction company. And in the evenings – frequent blackouts mean residents often have to feel their way in the dark.

A single lantern lights the living room of Jason Luneno Maene. He’s a civil society leader here, who’s running for the National Assembly in next month’s election. Maene says Chinese mineral buyers now have a virtual monopoly here.

“They are paying 20 percent less, maybe even 30 percent less than the old price, because now they are the only buyers,” he says. “The lower price means fewer people are bringing minerals to sell, and a lot of mines have suspended operations. But the Chinese are buying what comes to them. Their warehouses are full, with constant turnover.”

The Chinese buyers are especially interested in tin and in coltan – a metallic ore that contains tantalum. Tantalum stores energy and is resistant to high temperatures, and is used in everything from mobile phones and laptops to jet engines and space vehicles.

Congo’s coltan also contains a bonus metal – uranium. The Democratic Republic of Congo has rich reserves or uranium – it supplied uranium for the nuclear bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But soon after independence in 1960, the government filled the shafts of its main Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga with concrete, and said Congo would save its uranium for future generations.

William Mishiki Buhini, the traditional chief of a huge mineral-rich and conflict-ridden region in Congo called Walikale, says buying Congo’s coltan or tin can give backdoor access to uranium – as long as the buyer has the means to separate it out. China has a tantalum smelter in the province of Ningxia.

Buying Minerals

When Europeans were buying minerals, they wouldn’t accept uranium content of more than two percent, because the radiation was considered too dangerous,” he says. “But the Chinese don’t care. Even if it’s at five percent, they still buy the minerals.”

Mishiki says Chinese purchases of minerals are keeping this region’s mining industry limping along, though at a much lower level of production than before. He says the regional government depends on mining proceeds for more than half of its budget. And while he says he’s all for taking armed groups and the military out of Congo’s mines, he says the pullout of Western buyers has gutted the local economy in the short term.

“Since this Dodd-Frank Act was enacted, there are more people recruited into army groups than before,” Mishiki says. “Because all these guys … who used to depend on the artisanal mining, they are jobless now. They have mines, but they cannot sell. So they have to go where they can survive. And the only place to go, because there are no factories … the only way to survive is to be recruited into the army groups. And then they can go somewhere and try to make money to survive.”

That’s not what advocacy groups like Enough: The Project to End Genocide intended when they ran ads lobbying for the Dodd-Frank legislation, with college kids holding up their cell phones and saying: “I don’t want my cell phone to fuel a war. This is the next blood diamond. I want peace in Congo.” The ad called on electronics companies to clean up their acts, and stop using minerals from mines controlled by armed groups.

Congolese army commanders and illegal armed groups – including Hutus who participated in the 1994 Rwandan genocide – have long controlled East Congo’s mines directly or levied illegal taxes on independent artisinal miners.

Some of the armed groups have terrorized local communities, raped women and forced children, at gunpoint, to do the mining for their profit. When the Dodd-Frank Act first passed last year, says Fidel Bafilemba, Enough’s East Congo consultant, some Congolese army commanders took it as an opportunity to push out artisinal miners and take over some mines themselves. But when they found the market drying up, Congo’s government made the Congolese army pull back. Bafilemba says about 60 percent of the mines are now free of armed groups, and the government is taking further measures.

“All the illegal taxes are going to be cut off,” he says. “And instead of the military controlling the mines, the Congolese government is going to deploy mining police to secure the mines, and also securing the trading routes, so the minerals can come to the trading centers.”

And for the first time, he says, the government will make sure a portion of proceeds from minerals sales goes back to the mining communities, for hospitals, schools and roads. Walikale Chief William Mishiki says it’s about time.

“The people who were digging, the people who were suffering…there’s not even a house with bricks. They live like animals. They make pee in the rivers. There are no environment conditions respected. Because the government is making money, they don’t care. If you compare our country with our neighbor, Rwanda, it’s a shame. Rwanda doesn’t have any resources. But look at the economy of Rwanda. Look at the education system. It’s a matter of proper management. If we could manage this country properly, we wouldn’t need the Chinese.”

Agreements with China

China is not only buying minerals in the troubled Kivu region of East Congo. It also has a $6 billion resources-for-infrastructure agreement with the Congolese government, shaved down from $9 billion after the World Bank and IMF voiced concerns that servicing such a huge debt would be beyond Congo’s reach. Other criticisms included that the terms of the deal are vague and opaque, that it wasn’t clear how the minerals would be priced, and that the deal included an agreement that Congo would repay China first, before repaying any other outstanding debts.

The Chinese government has called this, and other deals in Africa like it – in Angola, for instance – win-win. China gets the minerals and other resources it needs for its rapid development. African countries get infrastructure built by experienced Chinese teams. Mishiki, who has been a government minister and aspires to be president, says it’s not ultimately a great deal for Congo.

“I can say, frankly speaking, that we are the losers,” he says. “But we didn’t have a choice. I support President Kabila, really, in this contract. Because, here in Congo, we have a lot of resources. But we don’t have the capacity to bring these resources out from the ground, to transform them into wealth.

So if I have $1 million in the ground, but I don’t know how to get it out. You tell me, ‘you know what, my friend? I give you $100,000, and I take $1 million.’ I’ll say, ‘ok, please.’ Because if I don’t have the $100,000, I will never get it.”

Mishiki says one way to create wealth in East Congo would be to diversify the economy and make it less dependent on mining. As a start, he says, he has shifted out of the mining business and is instead running a farm in Walikale, growing coffee and other crops and employing some 2,300 people. In a region with some 800,000 people, it’s a start.

So are the Congolese government’s better-late-than-never initiatives to rid East Congo’s mines of armed groups, says Annie Dunneback, a senior campaigner with the advocacy group Global Witness. She just visited Goma and the Kivu region, and praises the government for having issued a directive in September that the mining sector has to adhere to international due diligence standards – checks companies have to perform on their supply chains.

“And when we were in Eastern Congo, we spoke to some of the Chinese companies, who were very clear about the fact that the priority for them was to respect domestic law, and follow any directive that the Congolese government handed down,” Dunneback says. “So companies in the US and Europe have to adhere to new standards. But now these standards are also being replicated on the ground in Congo. So there should eventually be a more even playing field and a sort of harmonization across supply chains.”

For now, the playing field is still a bit bumpy. Dunneback says smuggling to nearby Rwanda did pick up in the months after the Dodd-Frank legislation passed. But then, the Congolese government lowered export tax on minerals – to make people think twice about whether it was worth taking the risk. A Congolese lieutenant was recently given a three-year prison sentence for smuggling. And, this month, the Rwandan government pledged to return to Congo up to 90 tons of smuggled minerals it has confiscated.

“There’s been a big shift on the part of the Congolese government. Eighteen months ago, the government and the military, especially, wouldn’t acknowledge the problem of militarized minerals trade in Eastern Congo. Now, it’s openly acknowledged. We’ve had quite significant reforms, especially in the direction of mineral traceability, that have been spearheaded by the Congolese government.”

Hurdles

There are also still hurdles to clear before the Dodd-Frank legislation takes full effect. The Securities and Exchange Commission has to come up with standards for electronics companies to meet to be in compliance, and the US Chamber of Commerce, one of the biggest conservative lobbying groups in the United States, has threatened to sue the SEC if the standards prove to be too costly or cumbersome.

But Chris Hazen, Asia director of WSP Environment and Energy, a consulting group that works with electronics firms on supply chain issues, says the Dodd-Frank Act might just be a good thing for industry, as well as for miners in the Congo

“There is value to industries, like the electronics industry, to have common standards and processes which eliminate a reputational risk for the industry,” he says. “The risk of reputational damage from coltan mining practices in Central Africa has been known about for some time, And a big unknown was when it might blow up for any given company. Dodd-Frank has helped to create a bit of a wellspring of momentum to help come up with industry-wide solutions.”

Removing the risk includes making sure factories in China aren’t using conflict minerals in electronics destined for the US market. China may be cleaning up on minerals for now – but if Americans really don’t want their gadget habit to fuel conflict in Congo, enforcing a clean supply chain could soon become China’s business, too.

-end-

But the exploitation of those minerals drives much of the violence that plagues the African nation.

In Eastern Congo, the ongoing conflict has included widespread sexual violence.

The details of the attacks are often gruesome: women being brutally raped, beaten and sometimes killed in front of their own children.

We know these horrific details because of people like Chouchou Namegabe.

Namegabe is a Congolese journalist who started a radio talk show in 2001 to air the testimonies of rape survivors

She is also the founder and director of the South Kivu Association of Women Journalists. The group trains Congolese women to report on connection between mass rape and resource extraction.

Now, the issue of mineral extraction and mass rape has reached American College campuses and students want to know what they can do to help the crisis in Congo.

Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Namegabe, who is in the US to deliver keynote address at a conference on the subject at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Read the Transcript
The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins, and this is The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH in Boston. The Democratic Republic of Congo is blessed with mineral riches. But the exploitation of those minerals drives a lot of the violence that plagues the African nation. In Eastern Congo, the ongoing conflict has included widespread sexual violence. Details of the attacks are often gruesome. Women are brutally raped, beaten, and sometimes killed in front of their children. We know these horrific details because of people like Chouchou Namegabe. She’s a Congolese journalist, who in 2001, started a radio talk show to air the testimony of rape survivors. Namegabe is the founder and director of the South Kivu Association of Women Journalists. The group trains Congolese women to report on the connection between mass rape and resource extraction. Namegabe is in the US now to deliver the keynote address on the subject at a conference on the subject at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts. She says the situation for women in Eastern Congo is not improving.

CHOUCHOU NAMEGABE: Every day there are attacks of militias in rural areas. Even now, civilians are copying.

MULLINS: The civilians are copying the militias who are raping.

NAMEGABE: Yes, they are copying.

MULLINS: Why?

NAMEGABE: Because there is impunity. They are not punished.

MULLINS: Now tell us the link between the extraction of minerals in this part of Congo and mass rape, what is the connection?

NAMEGABE: Where there is the mines, there are communities which live there. But it’s not easy for them to exploit it with the presence of the communities. That’s why they use their weapons and sexual violences to intimidate the population to move from places where there are mines. Because they know that the woman is the heart of the community, so they fight on her body, by using rape.

MULLINS: The women, as you say, are the heart of the community. And so when something happens to them, the community disassembles, and people move out?

NAMEGABE: Yes.

MULLINS: Now, you are going to be speaking this weekend. This is the reason that you’re in Massachusetts now, at the Clark University Conference, about the link, even from Eastern Congo and what you’re talking about, to what all of us basically use on a daily basis, and that is a cell phone, a laptop computer. Anything that happens to use some of these minerals in order to function. Why is it so hard for countries, for instance the United States, to get to the heart of this, and make sure that we know exactly where these minerals are coming from? Why is it hard?

NAMEGABE: It’s hard because the mineral resources which are exploited in the eastern part of Congo, they go out through neighbors’ countries. It means that they are not declared that they are coming from the eastern part of Congo. They are going through Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda.

MULLINS: I see, so it looks like the minerals are coming from there, from Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, instead of from Congo.

NAMEGABE: Yeah, instead of Congo. That is why it is difficult.

MULLINS: And then that leaves in the mining areas, it still leaves the militias. Chouchou, you have put the voices of some of these rape victims on the air on your radio program. Let me just ask you why this entire issue, not just the rape of women, but the whole issue around conflict minerals, and the consequences of that, is so much a part of you and what you do. How come?

NAMEGABE: The issue is important for me because it’s touching the right of men, the right of women. And I feel concerned because I’m a woman too. And also I’m a journalist. I saw that I couldn’t do anything. I don’t have guns to fight against it, but I’ve got my microphone, to use it, to fight against the rape and sexual violence. That’s why we give the microphone to victims, to tell their stories. Because somewhere it’s the first way to heal their internal wound, to talk about it, to make it known, to call for actions, because we want it to end. It’s really a big crime.

MULLINS: These things are very difficult to hear, but tell us what your listeners in Congo have heard, some of these testimonies.

NAMEGABE: There is another woman who were kidnapped with her five children. She was brought in the forest, and every day, she was raped in front of her children. And when she was hungry, they killed her child, and they forced her to eat the flesh of her child. Every day, which practices they killed one of her children. And she was forced to eat the flesh of her children. She was asking to be killed, but they refused. They say we can’t give you such a good death.

MULLINS: Can you comprehend why, when these things are done, they are done with the amount of intentional brutality like that, why?

NAMAGABE: We understood that it’s a plan, it’s a tactic. For them it’s a message that they send to the community.

MULLINS: Chouchou Namegabe is a Congolese journalist. She’s been reporting on mass rape in Eastern Congo for more than a decade. She’s going to be speaking this weekend at Clark University, at a conference on gender violence and the extraction of minerals in Eastern Congo. Clark is in Worcester, Massachusetts. Chouchou, thank you.

NAMEGABE: Thank you.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

The war in the Democratic Republic of Congo has officially been over for several years now. But there are still more than a dozen armed groups fighting amongst themselves throughout the eastern part of the country. Many of them use child soldiers.

Sometimes those children join voluntarily – including girls.

Clementine Katungu Kalenjya isn’t what you’d expect of a former child soldier. She’s soft-spoken, shy and she’s constantly laughing, even when she describes her first battle against government soldiers. She was 15 at the time.

“They began to shoot,” Kalenjya said. “We heard shooting down at the roadblock and we were asking whose shooting?”

She said she and other girls were armed only with rocks, but a sorcerer put a magic potion on the rocks so they exploded like grenades.

Kalenjya became a soldier eight years ago, after she was kicked out of school because she couldn’t pay her school fees. With nothing else to do, she and four other girls and set off into the mountains to find the Mai Mai camp.

“I didn’t tell my family, I just left to join the Mai Mai,” she said. “I felt like being a fighter made me important.”

Her father, Jean Mutahinga, said when he came home that afternoon, he found out his daughter had gone.

“I was angry and afraid to hear that my daughter joined that group,” Mutahinga said.

The Mai Mai was set up by the Congolese government to protect against foreign militias.
Dozens of Mai Mai groups dot eastern Congo. They rob, and sometimes kill people. But other armed groups around here, including government soldiers, are often more brutal, so the Mai Mai sometimes have the reluctant support of villagers.

Masika Kasyoko, an elder in Kalenjya’s village of Lukanga, said she’s seen many children join the Mai Mai, often for food.

“Some of the children were hungry,” Kasyoko said, “and when they heard that in Mai Mai they had meat, they had breads, they said ‘oh, that’s where we have to go.’”

Kalenjya said it didn’t take long to realize she’d made a mistake joining the Mai Mai. In her first battle, her friend was shot dead in front of her. Kalenjya said she tried to leave, but Mai Mai leaders said her father would have to give them 10 goats in compensation — about five times her family’s annual income. So Kalenjya was stuck, fighting foreign militias and sometimes government troops.

“We were fighting against the national Congolese army, and Ugandan rebels and Rwandans,” she said. “We were just fighting because it was war. It’s the leaders who understood, but the rest of us, we didn’t know why.”

Kalenjya finally got to go home after the army raided the Mai Mai camp. But some Mai Mai fighters showed up at her hut and demanded her father compensate them for her release.

“They came here with knives and said ‘If you don’t have a goat, there’s going to be a problem. You better get a goat,’“ her father said. “If I gave them one goat, then she could go back to school.”

Kalenjya’s father managed to get them a goat. Then he sent her away for her own protection. She spent half a year in a rehabilitation program for former child soldiers.

“We were sent to a village and trained how to re-enter society,” Kalenjya said. “They told us that if we went to school, they’d help pay for our school fees, or else they’d train us to be a tailor or carpenter.”

In the past few years, things have been improving for the people in Lukanga. Fewer children are joining the ranks of the Mai Mai. But for many of the former child soldiers, life is difficult. Masika Kasyoko said many villagers don’t trust them.

“Men fear them very, very hard,” Kasyoko said. “They say ‘Ah, even if I marry this girl, perhaps in the future, she can kill me’.”

Kalenjya is now 23 and still trying to finish high school. However, she’s run into the same problem that drove her to join the Mai Mai in the first place. Her school funding ran out so she was kicked out of school — again.

“The teachers aren’t paid by the government, so if we don’t pay the fees, they don’t get their salary. That’s why I can’t go to school,” she said.

But Kalenjya said that even if she can’t finish school, she won’t go back to the Mai Mai.

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In her new book The Trouble with the Congo Autesserre analyzes the failures of the international peacebuilding effort there. She argues diplomats and peacekeepers should pay more attention to local causes of violence.  Autesserre makes the case that a lot of violence in rural Congo is about basic matters of survival such as access to land and food. Those issues don’t go away just because leaders in a faraway city sign a peace deal.  Autesserre wants to see peacebuilders reapportion resources so that grassroots conflict resolution gets more attention. And she wants them to get over the idea that violence is somehow “normal”  in Congo.

What I heard a lot when I was doing the research were statements that are not obviously racist but that have an undertone that is really disturbing…I was in North Kivu in 2007, talking with a relatively high-level U.N. peacekeeper, a woman, very well-meaning, very nice. We were talking about the fact that there was massive violence and massive fighting picking up in rural areas and I asked her, “So what do you think it is?”  And she said, “Well I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the normal state of affairs for these provinces.”

Autesserre says that kind of rhetoric underscores for her a prevalent assumption among outsiders that a certain level of violence is normal for the Congo and much higher than what we would consider normal in Europe or America.   She traces the ideas back to a construct inherited from Belgian colonization. “Basically the Belgians in the 19th century constructed this image of the Congolese’s inherent savagery in order to facilitate colonization,”  Autesserre said. “The idea that the Congolese are inherently violent, they’re savages, so we the Belgians, the good guys, we’re going to go and civilize them.”  Autesserre says the idea was widespread in the 19th century and has persisted up until now.

In the public discourse,  in the media, there hasn’t been enough of challenging, of saying, “No, the Congo is not inherently violent; it’s not normal that people are fighting against one another.” And when you read media coverage of the Congo you still see a perpetuation of this discourse, you see a lot of references to Heart of Darkness; very often media analysis will use the word “barbarism.” They will focus on the really weird aspects of Mai-Mai militias, for example, the fact that they are fighting naked. All these things I think perpetuate this picture of the Congo as a place that is very different from our countries, from Europe and the United States, and that is so different that the violent things that happen there may be inherent to the place and we can’t judge the Congo by the standard that we judge other places. So one of the things  I try to do in the book is really to write against that and to deconstruct this image.  — Severine Autesserre

The podcast runs about 35 minutes. The music at the top is from the song Anata O from Congolese artist Lokua Kanza whom we featured in a Global Hit back in June.

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Severine Autesserre’s homepage
The Trouble with the Congo webpage
Congo Coverage on The World

Displaced Congolese (Photo: Michael Kavanagh 2008)

“Congo has been poorly governed for at least the last 40 years,” said Tony Gambino, an independent consultant who has worked for the US government, the United Nations and the World Bank.

He says next year’s elections will be key to stabilizing Congo and reducing the violence there.

“If you think about it, there are only two ways that can happen: it either happens through normal order which is elections or it happens violently,” Gambino said.

Gambino says the international community has a big role to play in laying the groundwork for those elections, including the United States. Congo needs an estimated 300 million dollars from donors to prepare but the Obama Administration has only allocated four or five million dollars for Congo election aid.

“That’s a scandalous level!” Gambino exclaimed.

Cynthia Akuetteh, the US State Dept.’s director for Central Africa, says Gambino’s right that the funding could be higher but she says she has to confront the reality of current budget constraints. And she doesn’t want to take money from other Congo aid projects.

“I don’t think anything we’re doing is fluff,” Akuetteh said.

It sure doesn’t sound like fluff. US aid to Congo runs close to $200 million a year and goes to treating and combating sexual violence, reforming the army and police, development aid, and dealing with diseases like HIV and malaria.

“All of these are also critical,” Akuetteh said.

As always there’s a bigger picture to contend with. But even if money wasn’t an issue, some Congo experts say national elections shouldn’t be the top priority.

“We know from previous research that elections by themselves don’t lead to democracy and to good governance unless specific conditions are in place,” said Severine Autesserre, a former aid worker turned academic who’s written a new book called “The Trouble with the Congo.”

“We need freedom of press, freedom of campaigning, freedom of speech and we don’t have these conditions in the Congo as of now.”

Autesserre thinks the whole international peacebuilding apparatus in Congo focuses too much on top down solutions and not enough on bottom up ones.

Hold national elections by all means she says, but if you want the violence to stop, start devoting far more resources to helping Congolese villagers in rural areas resolve their local conflicts over land and power.

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This story followed Anchor Marco Werman’s conversation with reporter Michael Kavanagh on Friday, Nov. 12, 2010. Kavanagh was at the trial of eight police officers facing accusations of killing human rights activist Floribert Chebaya. Click here to listen.

Jeb Sharp’s Congo coverage on The World:
• The UN’s fight against sexual violence
• Rape as a weapon of war
• Jeb’s award-winning 2008 series on rape in Congo

See also: DR Congo: Celebrating 50 years of chaos

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Lisa Mullins: Innocent civilians often get caught up in the fighting in places such as Iraq, and in many cases it’s women who bear the brunt of it.  But violence against women extends far beyond war zones.  A new agency at the United Nations aims to help promote equality and women’s rights. There are 41 nations represented on the U.N. Economic and Social Council and you may be surprised by some of them: Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Congo.  Iran didn’t make the cut. Phillippe Bolopion is U.N. Advocacy Director for Human Right Watch.  He says some of the countries on this board have questionable records regarding women’s rights.

Phillippe Bolopion: There are undoubtedly shocking levels of violence, including sexual violence against women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  We have also very serious issues with Libya where for example, women can be arbitrarily arrested for having had sex outside of marriage.  And in Saudi Arabia as just one of the most repressive legal systems against women, women cannot make any important decisions in their lives without the authorization of the male member of their families.  So there is no doubt that these countries have very serious problems to address.

Mullins: Well, given all those problems, how did these countries even get on this particular board?

Bolopion: What has allowed some of these countries to be on the board is that you know, they got the votes of other countries.  For Saudi Arabia it’s the simple fact that Saudi Arabia has been able to give some money to the U.N. system and got this seat not because of the election, but because it’s a donor country and there are seats reserved for countries who give money.  And there were a number of seats alloted by region.  And for Asia, and Iran belongs to the Asia group of the U.N., there were 11 candidates for 10 seats, and that’s why Iran lost in the end.

Mullins: Why would a country where women are still stoned to death even want to sit on a board that’s supposed to be advocating on behalf of women?

Bolopion: I would agree that it’s hard not to question the motives of Iran and this.  I mean, they sit on many boards of human agencies.  Sometimes they have a very low key approach.  But our concern was that given the fact that they are really, they have shown time and again that they work against the very objectives that U.N. women was created to promote, that they advocacy was in a way problematic probably even provocative for women around the world because Iran unfortunately has become a symbol of oppression for women.

Mullins: So for Human Rights Watch what does this tell you about how the U.N. is functioning particular for boards that have a specific mandate like this one?

Bolopion: Well, I would say that the U.N. is a states’ organization and the states of the world do not all have a perfect record, especially when it comes to women’s rights or human rights in general.  The U.N. shows the world the way it is not the way it should be.  And in some instances you know, it’s fine to have [inaudible 3:10 on the board of U.N. women.  Some countries were not exemplary in terms of women’s rights, you want them around the table, you want them to engage in these issues, you want them to make some progress.  It’s fine not to be perfect on women’s rights to stand on the board of U.N. women, but you feel so bad that you have become a symbol around the world of repression for women, then you should definitely not be on the board.

Mullins: Right, thank you very much, Phillippe Bolopion, U.N. Advocacy Director for Human Rights Watch.  Thank you very much.

Bolopion: Thank you.

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