Even the soil is not kind in the Mugumba refugee camp. It does not have the courtesy of being flat because it is covered by sharp volcanic stones. On this aggressive soil rise the white canvas huts, where the refugees take cover from the rains that alternate with a suffocating sun all the time. Life there consists of standing in endless queues on the mud to receive the portion of water and food that the UN trucks bring them. and in bearing the incursions of militias that rob those dispossesseds, in addition to raping the girls and taking the boys to turn them into murderous soldiers. In that part of the Congo, children learn to fire a Kalashnikov before they learn to brush their teeth.
Whoever writes this article has been in eastern Congoseeing personally the evils caused by the conflict, and has walked the slope on which the refugees of that war suffer.
There is hardly in another corner of the planet a more miserable and unprotected refugee camp than Mugumba. His weathering in rags sums up the tragedy of the province where he is located: North Kivu.
The war grows old in the face of the world’s indifference in the territory between the lakes and the Virunga forest, where poachers have spent years extincting the gorillas orphaned by the murder of primatologist Dian Fossey, on the Rwandan side of border.
did well pope francis in visiting the Congo and reminding the world of the existence of this conflict that never ends because it provides, at bargain prices, minerals that are used in societies that enjoy peace and well-being. The pontiff also did well to reach Juba, the capital of South Sudanwhere after suffering the dictatorship of Omar al Bashir and the destruction and ethnic cleansing of the regimes of the Arab and Muslim north against the Bantu, animist and Christian peoples, independence came and with it the bloody dispute between the southern ethnic groups.
Although cry “hands off Africa” sounds like discursive politicking, it is necessary that an internationally heard voice, such as that of a head of the Catholic Church, denounce the responsibility of many countries in African tragedies. Global indifference is the protagonist in conflicts such as the one suffered by the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Making them visible is not pontifical demagogy. What is questionable is the silence of the other world leaders who have weight on the international stage.
A war lost in history bleeds the Eastern Congo. A feudal conflict between militias that dispute areas where cobalt, diamonds, gold, uranium and coltan are illegally extracted and sold to traffickers who take them to countries whose societies live in the tranquility of development. The Pope referred to that war that opened the door to hunger and diseases that have disappeared in the rest of the world, such as poliomyelitis, cholera and dysentery.
Upon arriving in the DRC, the pontiff denounced economic colonialism and called for an end to the depredation of that country and all of Africa. Pronouncements can be questioned to Francisco and also silences on the world stage, but that a voice heard at the international level has denounced the situation in the Congo, from the very capital of that country as immense as it is mistreated by its own hands and those of others, is an unquestionable success.
In 2010, the publication of “El Sueño del Celta” spread the world’s knowledge about the brutal exploitation of the Congolese by the owner of that land and its people: King Leopold of Belgium. Vargas Llosa’s exceptional novel addresses the story of Roger Casement, the hapless British diplomat who at the dawn of the 20th century denounced the cruel oppression of the natives to extract rubber from what, at that time, was the private property of Leopoldo II. Based on Casement’s denunciations, the State of Belgium took possession of the extensive territory from its king, which came to be called Congo Belgian.
Subsequent independence did not put an end to violence and corruption. Brutality was merciless with the independence leader Patrice Lumumba and with his anti-colonialist movement. And the secessionist conflict in the province of Katanga was one of the many displays of bestiality. Despite his crimes and corruption, Mobutu Sese Seko’s dictatorship was supported by Western powers due to his bloody war against communist guerrillas. Massacres were the rule during the regime that renamed the country Zaire. But the situation did not change when the guerrilla Laurent Kabila came to power, whom Che Guevara described in his failed experience in the Congo as an outlaw who, in addition to leading a leftist guerrilla group, illegally hunted elephants to supply the ivory trade.
After Kabila’s assassination his son Joseph came to power, but the DRC remained a failed state. At that point, the East was already riddled with militias that serve foreign powers that benefit from the illegal exploitation of minerals of high strategic value, such as coltan. Not only extra-continental powers allow, with their mineral purchases, militias bloodthirsty, eternal war in the great lakes region. Also neighboring countries such as Rwanda and Ugandan and Congolese warlords do their business perpetuating the tragic conflict in the North Kivu province.
Due to the atrocities of war, the medieval diseases that decimate its population and the lava that buries it in each eruption of the Nyaragongo volcano, Goma, the capital of North Kivu, is called “the most dangerous city in the world”.
It doesn’t matter if the militiamen are Hutus or Tutsis from Rwanda; It doesn’t matter whether they speak Lingala, or Swahili, or any other Bantu language. The ethnic factor, as well as ideologies, are screens to cover up the unbridled greed that has made rivers of blood flow since the middle of the 20th century. China benefits from the conflictbecause chaos allows you to negotiate with weak and corrupt governments.
The Pope wanted to reach Goma. They made him give up because of the danger that this black hole in the African heart implies. Kinshasa, the capital of the country, is in the West, where there is calm, but it is an adequate point to notify the world that in the Congo there has been a conflict without codes for many decades; the war that grows old before the indifference of the world.
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